Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  “I think you’re paranoid. What did they say?”

  “One said, ‘He was born in Nacogdoches but he tells everyone he’s from Beaumont.’”

  “You do that.”

  “I know! And then the other one said, ‘I don’t know how he could leave her like that, just up and leave after everything.’”

  She didn’t want to say anything to this. She didn’t trust it. She looked up at the ceiling, at the mossy dark. She remembered that trip they took to Mexico, down to Oaxaca. They’d stayed in a hotel that had once been a rope factory, and at the hotel restaurant patio, they ate ceviche, looking out over huge bright pink flowers, like wadded, cheap panties, and palm trees, solemn by comparison. The owners came out and sat with them, bought them drinks, talked to them about Texas, and then they all played a game of pool in the back room. She remembered the man wore a Texas flag pin on the lapel of his elegant suit, and the woman had a cheerful gap between her two square front teeth that showed every time she laughed.

  “She’s in the next room, so I can’t talk long.” He was whispering now. She’d always loved his full-throated loudness on the phone. “But, goddamnit, tell me again why she liked that stinker, the one with the bowling-ball head and blond hair?”

  “You mean Louie King.”

  “Yeah, that one. I could smell him all the way down the block.”

  For that Mexico vacation, they were truly alone for the first time in months, her body leaned toward his in the heat, their bodies shiny with sweat. They sped down the heat of that empty highway in a small car, and he reached over and squeezed her knee, cacti coming up on the horizon like giant green men holding up pistols.

  “All the girls liked him. He played football. He had that handsome face.”

  “You thought he was good lookin’?”

  “Not me. But I know what girls like at that age. He was harmless probably. Not like the other one.”

  “That guy. I almost kicked his teeth out and sewed them to his eyeballs.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I am. Had a good reason to get that way.” Her hand made a fist, and she pressed her nails into her palm.

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  “I don’t want to go into it. You ever see bowling-ball head around town anymore?”

  “Not usually. But by chance, I did run into him the other day.”

  “Where?”

  “Just saw him getting lunch over at Bob’s—he had a suit on, didn’t recognize me.” So many of Jess’s old friends didn’t notice her anymore—they’d forgotten what she looked like, or maybe without Jess, she was invisible to them.

  “Figures. Tell me, why is it that Jess had such bad taste in boys? I mean, look at me.” He laughed and then snorted in his habitual way.

  “You always were modest.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Where’s Cindy?”

  “Oh . . . she’s in the next room. Snoring. You never snored. You kicked. Kicked like I was a football. Now I’m sitting here in this room, and you know what? The walls remind me of football fields.”

  He sounded very tired. She could hear the slur in his voice “How?”

  “I can see the plays on them. Anyway, what have you been doing with yourself down there? How’s that Doc?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Still have that piece on the side?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me.”

  “Probably. You can’t even recognize the wife anymore. Plastic lips. Rubber titties. I’d rather get me a blow-up doll.”

  “Jack.”

  “What? I would. So what do you do all day?”

  She knew what he was asking, but she wasn’t going to let him know whether or not she was seeing anyone.

  “I’ve got some plans for a project. It’s going to keep me occupied, hopefully get me past the seventh.”

  “For another year anyway, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not writing those pissed-off letters again are you? Because, I tell you what, those suckers in the government, the last thing they want to hear is from a pissed-off lady.”

  “No, not that. I told you what I found. And now there’s research that might actually go somewhere.” She wouldn’t go into the details because he didn’t appreciate them. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “You do that.” He started coughing. “Hey.” He couldn’t catch his breath. “I’ll call again next week. If I can.”

  “You mean if you can get away from Cindy?”

  He coughed some more and then was silent. She could hear the electronic waves on the phone like a rhythm of water. Sometimes they had these long silences between them on the phone, and it was strangely comfortable, almost as if they were back in their old living room, one of them just lying on the couch, the other sitting up in the easy chair.

  “Jack.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You take care.”

  THEY’D BEEN SITTING at home that night. Hard to believe it was another lovely, ordinary night of iced tea and television and library books. Jess ran in the house and said, “There’s moving vans parked in every single driveway of South Hill Street.” In the faint lines around Jess’s mouth, Lee could see she was scared. This was just when she had the sore throat that wouldn’t go away.

  “It’s all this hysteria,” said Jack. “Everyone will move back eventually.” They didn’t know it then, but two babies had just been born on the same street, one boy with an arm that ended at the elbow and one girl who had no reproductive organs. On Cherry Street, four people had sudden liver problems, though they didn’t know what was causing the pain under the rib cage and the itchiness in their hands. Other people noticed red-and-blue sores on their necks and forearms. A teenage boy on Hawk Street came down with a high fever and deep cough that would not lift. A week after Jess saw the moving vans, Lee, Jack, and Jess left their home too. They’d told themselves it was just temporary at first, just a precaution, and then little by little, they moved out all the furniture. Lee went back to their house alone one day, to pack up the last of their things, and she saw the garbage truck and the mail truck racing through the streets—only a handful of the houses weren’t empty. Doors and windows were boarded up, stray cats roamed yards overgrown with bright yellow dandelions, and the emptiness felt like a recrimination.

  AT HOME ON SATURDAY, Lee poured the dregs of her coffee into the sink, the grounds catching on the white porcelain like stilled bugs. She ran the water, let it cool her fingers. She’d written to Cass Brown, to see if she had the name of the EPA rep who’d been coming around to see some of the old Rosemont people. Cass wrote back about how well her son had done at UT. “Now he’s thinking of med school, and if he gets in, we can afford it.” She didn’t get to the EPA rep until the bottom of the note. “It was such a quick visit from him, but I finally found his card. Lloyd Steeburn. Here’s his number.” Lee would call this Steeburn as soon as she had her facts, as soon as Professor Samuels gave her the new readings. She wouldn’t talk to him until she was well armed.

  Someone knocked and she went to answer the door in her bare feet, her shirt untucked. It was that neighbor Hal. Flushed and grinning. Behind him, the dogwood tree sagged around the lower branches, and the grass that needed cutting was turning brown.

  “Howdy,” he said. There were dark patches of red, broken blood vessels at his cheekbones that made him look just bruised. “You know I heard about something at work—and I said, well, Ms. Knowles is my neighbor. I should just go on over and talk to her about it.”

  “You live in that gray house,” she said.

  “Sure do. I guess you know my wife, used to go by Miss Dobb?”

  “Oh, Miss Dobb! She was my daughter’s second-grade teacher.”

  “That’s right.”

  She’d thrown a party for
the class when the jar of marbles was full, each marble marking a “good deed,” and Jess, though she’d been devoted to her, had once been punished for stealing marbles and putting them in the jar, unearned.

  “I hear you have some issues with Taft Properties building over there near Banes Field. And, believe you me, I can see why you’d have them. It was a tragedy what happened to Rosemont. All those homes.”

  “I don’t just have some issues. I used to live there.”

  “You know, I heard that too. I’m real sorry about that.” His mouth twisted to the side, and he seemed to be waiting for her to say it was all okay.

  “Say—” He paused, seemed to be testing her. “My wife and me got to talking, and we thought we’d see if maybe you’d like to go to church with us sometime. We belong over there to the Victory Temple. Lots of real friendly people.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, smiling. “I’m a happy heathen.” She grabbed the edge of the door. If he hadn’t been married to Jess’s old second-grade teacher, she would have closed it on him.

  “Any chance you might change your mind? I sure would like to talk, if you ever got the inclination.”

  “No, no inclination.”

  “Alright then, well, the other thing is, I just want to reassure you Avery Taft has done his due diligence in getting that land tested. He sure has. The EPA came out not once but twice.” She wondered which office Steeburn was from, the one in Dallas or the lab in Houston. With Professor Samuels’s signature on the new readings, they might pay attention if the numbers were high enough.

  “Did they? Did Taft Properties send you over here?”

  The smile on Hal’s face seemed to scatter, the features pulling away from one another. “No, no, no, no. I just wanted to save you some trouble. See, we’re going to be selling the houses over there, and I have two thick notebooks of scientific evidence that the soil in Banes Field is now toxin free. Completely safe for human health. You can see it for yourself if you’d like to come by the office sometime?”

  “I appreciate your concern, I do,” she said, summoning sweetness. “But I’m looking out for some new test results. I could show you those when they’re ready.”

  “Ms. Knowles, I don’t mean to be rude.” He scratched his forehead. “You really think you’ve got something better than the EPA?”

  “You know what?” she said. “I’d like to see.”

  “Excuse me?” The two alcoholic red patches on his cheeks darkened into flat, dead berries.

  She noticed the pen in his shirt pocket, the reasonableness of his blue shirt. “I do appreciate your trying, but you know I don’t need to see your binders. That’s about the size of it. Bye, now.”

  She closed the door. She went back into the house and emptied all the cabinets looking for aspirin. An image came to her of Jess, playing in Banes Field, kneeling in the mud, building something out of rocks with another girl. She’d come back bleeding, having scraped her knee—toxins probably getting into her even then.

  On the radio now, the news was blaring about a woman who’d donated her liver to a stranger and saved his life.

  RUSH CAME OVER, and they sat outside on the patio, drinking wine, trees spreading a green lace against the sun. Only a few of the oak trees’ leaves were starting to yellow.

  “This is nice. A little breeze here.” Rush sat back, took small sips from her glass.

  “So, you’ll come out to New Braunfels with us in November, right?”

  “We’ll see. Maybe.”

  “Tom has a lot of friends up there—some of them single.”

  “Can any of them dance at all?”

  “I imagine.”

  Lee envied the way Rush tended calmness like a garden. Part of that equanimity, though, was bought—now and then she disappeared and met an old boyfriend somewhere secret, just platonically. They got drunk on margaritas and flirted, but neither of the spouses knew—and that was how she was able to give the rest of herself to the family and to surly Tom—there was an economy to her mothering of them all.

  “Have you seen Sam?” Lee asked.

  She shook her head, looking into the glass. “I ended it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I could see where it was going. Bound to go. I’ve got my kids. And Tom . . . he’s clueless, sure. And he’ll never change. I’ve given up on that dream. But I built this life and I just decided I’m going to live in it, you know?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “You could get Tom to take you out once in a while.”

  “Hah. Maybe.” She bit at a fingernail. “Marin’s real good at art class—did I tell you? She drew this portrait of me. Line drawing. Even I have to say, it’s the spitting image. But there’s these creases on either side of my mouth. They made me look so depressed. I was telling her how great it was, but the whole time I was thinking, do I really look that bad?”

  “You’re just as beautiful as ever. Even sad.”

  Lee wanted Rush to have her flirtations back, or she wanted Tom to come back to seeing Rush as something other than his burden. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Rush had Bryce. She had those beautiful girls—they put their shiny-haired heads on her shoulder. They held her hand.

  “Well, it’s not like I couldn’t get a boyfriend if I wanted to.” Rush’s hair blew to the side in the breeze, the skin on her chest gently wrinkled, faint red lines rivering to the middle.

  “Well, that’s obvious.”

  “You could too,” she said. “Tell me, I’ve never understood why you don’t go out and get one.”

  “It’s just Jack.”

  Rush flicked her a stern look. “Yeah, you need to move on. What’s the girlfriend—Susie?”

  “Cindy.”

  “Well, he’s moved on. What are you waiting around for?”

  Lee shrugged.

  “I think he was an ass for leaving when he did. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t all there back then either.”

  “Of course you weren’t. You were in shock.”

  There was a day she’d just lain in bed, afraid to move, afraid to open her eyes, something fragile held under her hands at her chest. She could hear outside the huge flowering of the world, all full of itself, birds, wind in trees, traffic on the streets. But it was the thing under her hands that needed solidity, and she pressed against it hard, afraid it might dissolve between her fingers.

  “I can’t even imagine . . .” Rush lowered her eyes. “But I want you to be able to have fun again. Remember how we used to go to the Marles and drink and dance? Remember how we used to take the kids out to Galveston and ride the waves?” Over the radio, Willie Nelson’s mournful crooning.

  “Yeah.” Pleasures like that seemed trivial to her now, but she didn’t want to say that, to make it true. She noticed a pale green fungus growing in the knot of the birch tree, like small torn pieces of paper glued there.

  “Well.”

  “Well.” Lee slapped a mosquito against her thigh, drank down the rest of the wine. “Aren’t we having fun now?”

  HAL

  HAL WALKED HOME after trying to talk sense into Lee Knowles, lay down on the couch in front of the local news on the TV, and fell fast asleep. When he woke up, he pulled the computer onto his lap, got to his email and sent this message to Avery Taft: “Hey good buddy. Made some headway with our greenie neighbor. Will report back soon I hope.”

  Avery called him a little later. “Did she say anything about some pictures of a container?”

  “No, she sure didn’t.”

  “Huh. Here’s where I need you to keep my confidence.” He coughed. “See, one of the containers where they buried the chemicals, it popped up after the hurricane.”

  “Is that so? Well, it seems bound to happen.”

  “It’s nothing, a natural occurrence, but you know someone could make somet
hing of it.”

  “They like to do that, don’t they?”

  “So, right away, as soon as I heard about it, I hired all my Mexicans and their buddies to go out there and dig a hole and rebury it that night, put it back down ten feet where it couldn’t hurt anyone. It was a real tricky situation. But somehow she got out there before I got the thing buried. She has these blurry photos, but she’s mouthing off about it all over town.”

  Hal might have underestimated her, but he’d get her to back down, even so. “Oh, I don’t think she’ll be mouthing off again, Avery. We had a good chat.”

  “I hope you’re right, buddy. Let me know about that old property of mine too.”

  A little later, Darlene came home and then Cully, sullen, as he’d been ever since he’d been suspended. Hal had fought to make sure the boys could still play football after the two weeks’ suspension, and Principal Johnson had agreed, just barely, at the urging, he suspected, of Coach Salem. But still, with Cully at home, Hal was afraid his son might be absorbing all his own failures, and he prayed about it constantly, as he did again, that night, in the dark of their walk-in closet, his head among the tails of his cotton shirts, Darlene clattering downstairs in the kitchen, Cully in his room talking secretively into his phone.

  A little while ago Hal had opened a box in the attic to find his crumpled letter jacket with the tiny football sewed onto the F and trophies with tiny gold quarterbacks, one arm cocked back to pass, the other pushed out to defend. The pose. They perched on cheap marble squares marked with gold plaques for the years 1979, 1980. There was a tangle of blue ribbons for track and sportsmanship, all faded now to purple. And he wouldn’t let the nostalgia grip him, quite, but the feeling was of looking at the relics of someone who’d died. His son still had all of that glory, the bright, athletic blue, unfaded. Why would he squander it?

  He knew that stupid incident at the Lawbournes’ had only happened because Cully was drunk, because his pals were there, because it took discipline and practice to learn to restrain a lust. Thank God Principal Johnson didn’t know the whole story—it would have been the end of the season. Cully had confessed it, that he’d had sex with a drunk girl, and then found her a little later with one of his buddies in the bed. He said no one knew except the ones who’d been upstairs. There always were and always would be girls like that, Hal told him, but it was a man’s job to judge the situation. Darlene didn’t know either, and he told Cully to keep it that way. “Ask God for forgiveness and move on. Do not talk to the girl again, you hear me?”