by Rene Steinke
Later in the afternoon, she was emailing with Dani, who was in the school library, supposedly doing research for her paper on the Constitution. She’d gone to see Cherry Bomb at a club called Sevens in Houston, Dani wrote. There was a singer who wore a red choker like a slit of blood and two cute guys on guitar. Willa knew she was trying to cheer her up. “Strange-trend alert: Ellen Almodóvar and Pam Riggins dressed up like pirates at school today, eye patch on one eye, full mascara and blue eye shadow on the other. Then I saw three girls I didn’t know wearing the same thing. There’s a rumor that they are stealing people’s wallets. One girl got sent home because she wouldn’t take off her eye patch, and she couldn’t read the overhead screen in calculus. I gotta know, are people always this weird? And, excuse me? There are felons in my classes with me. And you’re at home. What’s fair about that?” Dani wrote. “I heard Ms. Carpenter call Cully ‘trash’ in the hallway. She actually said it to someone else, but loud enough for him to hear it. He just kept walking.”
Willa glanced away from the screen, thinking what to write back. In the corner of the room emerged a shadow the size of a large dog. The wet fur appeared first, two huge paws, then eyes scattered across the body and limbs, eyes she’d seen before but couldn’t place. The face was so much like her dog, Junior’s, when she’d held him as the vet injected the needle—she recognized that hurt, relieved look just before he’d died. But this beast’s head sprouted a tangled, mangy lion’s mane, crawling with worms, and ears that flapped like skin-covered books. The voice seemed to be inside of her, as if she’d already heard it, even before the noise of it hit her eardrum. “What does she want?”
The beast defecated on the floor, and the shit ran bloody all the way under her dresser. The eyes began to look less like eyes and more like weeping sores, and she was crying. She stared beyond the beast at the chair, the wall. Finally, its shape blurred, first hovering like hundreds of colored dots and then dissolving as if the dots had been rinsed away with water. She had to find out what the beasts meant, what message they carried.
PASTOR SPARKS’S OFFICE was in the back of the church, next to the sanctuary, a large auditorium. The walls were filled with photographs and notes like pages of a scrapbook. There was a photograph of him preaching next to an American flag, with “The 700 Club” printed beneath it. She’d watched his televised testimony a couple of times. Standing on that TV stage, he’d looked smaller and thinner than he did at the pulpit, as if fame had shrunk him, and he paced back and forth in his brown suit, punching the air, preaching how he’d been saved. She still remembered parts of it well, how he’d grown up in a fancy, formal Presbyterian church where everyone was quiet and no one would know the Holy Spirit if it bit them in the face; his mother had told him he was stupid and after that he stuttered whenever he talked. There was something in me, just mean and ugly. I couldn’t shake it. Sunday morning came, and I was in a ditch of despair. He’d almost died twice, and the bullets were still in him somewhere. I was working the late shift. And one day, this guy comes through the door, blasting a gun.
Willa’s father had made the appointment for her. “Pastor will set you straight,” he said.
His eyes shone, even in this small office light—there was a fierceness in them that had sometimes moved her during church services. “Well, Willa, what can I do for you? Why has the Lord brought you here?” He had a strange accent, a Northerner turned Texan.
She was confused because she hadn’t expected to have to explain herself. “Well, my dad thought—”
“I want to know what you think.” In church, she’d watched his face up close, projected large on the screen that hung over the altar, the tired, red lines wound under his skin, especially near his nose, just above his gray mustache. She’d heard him preach lots of times, had shaken his hand after the service, but had never before had a conversation with him alone.
She studied the beige carpeting, very clean, thick weave. “Something happened to me, but I don’t remember it.”
“You don’t remember.”
“No.” She looked out the window. Outside, a pudgy man calmly rode a John Deere mower across the church’s lawn; on either side of the vehicle spouted furious wings of grass blades.
“Wow. Now, Willa, were you drinking?”
Her parents had made the full report to him of everything they knew. But she wanted to show him that she was a good person. “I don’t like the taste of it.”
“Is that so?” Before he was saved: I tell you, I held a dirty knife right against my wrist. “Don’t keep having a taste for it, thinking it’s bound to be better the next time.” He shook his head. “Your folks sure are worried about you,” he said. “You know that? Your mother is so worried.” It was the same voice he used from the pulpit, emphatic, as if he were speaking to a thousand people and not just to one. He told her about a woman he’d known back when he was young, someone who had the world at her feet, beautiful, smart, poised. He looked at Willa and said, “You’ve got a lot in your favor, you know that?” Then he went on to say how the girl had started to drink, and she’d started to go with one young man and another. And she ended up a “lush” without a church or a home. “She lost everything,” he said. “Just chasing boys who said she was pretty.”
“It’s not like that. I mean. It’s just . . .” She didn’t know how to fix the misunderstanding. “The whole thing still doesn’t seem real.”
“But you know it was real, right, Willa?”
She nodded. From the hallway, there was a smell of coffee and cookies baking in the church kitchen.
“Willa, have you ever thought that might be a blessing that you lost your memory? Even in our darkest times, God wants to save us from that pain. That memory loss might just be a gift.” His voice went softer and higher. “You sure you weren’t drinking anything that day, Willa?”
In the trash, there was a cup with a bright, twisted cartoon face imprinted on it, smiling through the waste bin’s metal bars. “I just want it not to have happened,” she said.
“Of course you do. Of course you do. I tell you what, I’m sure you’re not the only one either.” He paused. “I’m sure there’s another person who wishes none of that business ever got started. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Willa?” He smiled at her skeptically. It would have been a relief to tell him how Cully had put his arm around her, how he’d implied that other girls would be there soon.
“Let me ask you something, are you angry?” He seemed to shift his tongue around in his mouth. “Are you angry at Jesus for letting this happen?”
Her arms felt suddenly too bare, goose-bumped in the air-conditioning. “Because you know you had free will to go to that house, didn’t you? God gives us free will because he loves us—he doesn’t want us to be robots.”
Fifteen years earlier, in an instant, everything had changed for Pastor Sparks. As he told the story, God streamed straight into his blood, and he ran out into the street screaming, “I’m alive! I’m alive!” Willa always remembered that. She wanted to know what he’d told Cully Holbrook, or what he’d like to say to the other two, who didn’t attend their church. Did he think they were angry at Jesus too, and that’s why they’d done it?
“I’m not trying to be a robot.”
“Well of course you’re not,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle. “You just keep praying, and Jesus will tell you something. Wait for that. It always comes.”
The snow globe at the edge of his desk resembled a giant, empty eye with tiny hidden things clotted at the bottom of it. It was becoming clear to her now why she was here, how adversity might have come to her for a purpose, to make her a messenger, and it suddenly seemed urgent to tell him. “Can I ask you something?” Willa said.
“You can ask me anything.”
“In your sermons you’re preaching that these are the end-times.”
“Certainly seems that way.” He nodded to
a photograph of the soldiers on the wall. “See that? The troops are bringing Jesus to the Holy Land. Even some of those Arabs can still be saved. That’s what the message is.” Around his eyes, there was a new, open expression.
“I think I might be seeing signs—you know, of the end of days.”
His upright posture sagged. “Phew. I think I need you to tell me what you mean by that.”
“I think I saw the Beasts that are in Scripture. The ones before the Rapture.”
He rubbed at his temples and bunched up his lips. “You saw them where?”
“A few places, in my room mostly.”
“In your room. Now, Willa, don’t you think if Jesus was coming back this very minute, that he wouldn’t be keeping the signs secret, just showing them to a teenage girl?”
It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d accuse her of arrogance. “But Joan of Arc, right? She had visions from God when she was only twelve.”
“Joan of Arc. Was she even real? Well, that’s what the Catholics say, sure, but with all due respect, you know what I think, right? I don’t believe in saints that way. You know why? I don’t believe you have to be special to know what God wants for you. Let’s be honest. Catholics don’t know Jesus the way we do. We don’t pray to statues, we pray to the man himself. Believe me, when the end-times are coming, we’ll know. We’ll all know, and it won’t be any secret.”
“But I did see something.”
His mouth looked stricken. “Look, Willa. You just need to pray and look inside of yourself. Look inside of yourself and find out what it was that made you go to that party. What kind of life do you want, Willa? Do you want to be with Jesus or do you want to go it alone? Because I’m telling you, what it sounds to me like—it sounds to me like demons are giving you those signs, and if you’ll look closely, you’ll see that. Where are those demons coming from?”
Just outside the door, there was the raspy sound of the janitor sweeping in the hallway, the clunk of a bucket.
“Believe me, when the Rapture gets here, it won’t come in little daydreams—there will be no mistaking it. God wants all good things for you, Willa. I believe that with all my heart. Do you believe it?”
She knew what she was supposed to say. “Yes.”
“Well, then, good.”
She didn’t let herself cry until she got back in the car with her mother, who’d been sitting out in the parking lot, waiting. Willa could smell the cigarettes. “Did that help, sweetheart?”
God was long gone now, hidden somewhere in a cloud.
AT HOME, she knelt on the floor, rested her hands on the bed, the tiny flowers on the quilt, the careful highways of stitching, the crumpled mountain of pillow. Her chest tensed up in the silence. She stared at her clenched hands in the lamplight, the faint hairs on her fingers, the wrinkles of her knuckles. She had the feeling that someone was about to break into the house, shatter the glass of the windows with a hammer. Her heart was about to stop. There was a tumor in her that would soon explode. She listened for roaring winds, for the gallop of horseshoes on concrete streets, for monstrous locusts, or a rubbery kind of stretching silence. In the dark outside, beyond her window, she sensed a swirling preparation, a kind of angelic weather.
A minute later, the room seemed very far away. She was looking in at herself through the window, at a girl sitting on the floor in her nightgown, who seemed to have always been there, body glued to the beige carpet. She was a silhouette of a girl praying, like the one she’d seen in an old-fashioned book, candle lit on the table next to where she knelt. She didn’t know what to pray. She sent up a wordless thing that was like a blinking light, or the true flicker of that candle in the picture.
LEE
SHE MET WITH Councilman Atwater at the coffee shop, glass fishbowls of licorice and bubble gum arranged on the counter. The smell of coffee and churro doughnuts was strong, Porter Wagoner lilting over the speakers. Maisie Rodgers had put her in touch with Atwater, who was new to the city council, because he’d mentioned to her his concern over Banes Field. Lee sat at one of the tiny square tables, and he brought over two coffees in small Styrofoam cups. He put down his cup, sat, and rubbed his thighs as he looked again at the photos on the tabletop. She’d printed them in high-definition eight by ten prints, so the cracks in the container’s surface were visible, the peculiar pink stains. “It sure looks concerning to me,” he said, wiping his half-bald head with his hand. “And you’re pretty certain they reburied it, huh?”
“Very. That’s why I’m showing you these. Plus, the professor I work with found some high numbers in the soil samples I got when I took these pictures.”
“It could be bad if the leakage started up all over again. But it could be years before anyone noticed, before there were any real side effects.”
Maisie said he’d only been elected by default because no one ran against him. He had a degree in chemical engineering, but for some reason he worked at the public library now, which meant he wasn’t one of the good old boys, even if he had been once.
“My point is,” she said, “we don’t even need the container to come up to show there’s trouble. The soil samples I took have benzene concentrations higher than allowable toxicity levels. Have you ever looked at the cancer registry for this town?”
His demeanor was earnest, but his tentative mouth and bland face made him seem like an unfinished person. He stared at her with pale eyes. “Yeah.” He pressed his lips together. “You’re right. I don’t know if we even need these photos, to tell you the truth. If we can just get someone at the EPA Dallas office . . . or someone at the Texas Commission on the Environment . . .” His voice trailed off.
A tall man wearing an obscenely large silver belt buckle walked up in the line at the counter behind a curly-haired boy and his mother. The man pointed to the stuffed bunny sitting on a shelf in front of a sign that said DO NOT TOUCH. “You see that?” said the man to the boy. “When I see that, I just want to touch the thing.” The boy buried his face in his mother’s loose, flowery blouse. All of them seemed more made of flesh than Atwater.
“Do you know, back, when was it, five years ago, what one of these EPA guys said to me? When there first started to be talk about building near Banes Field again? I said, ‘Look, can you at least give me a list of all the chemicals buried at the Banes site?’ And he said what they always said, ‘We’ve tested the soil, and it’s not a threat to human health.’ ‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘What are the chemicals?’ ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘Well, then, if you don’t know,’ I said, ‘how can you say it’s safe?’ Do you know what he said? ‘Because we don’t know it’s unsafe.’”
Atwater winced. “Sounds about right. They really don’t know what all it might do. I don’t even think all of those compounds have names.”
“Do you know anyone over in Dallas who might listen?”
“Maybe. Honestly, it’s not easy, as you know, with Texas laws. They’re all set up to protect the Goliaths, not the Davids.”
“Can I ask you something? What do you do over at the library?”
“I’m the head librarian. I used to work for Garbit, until I got tired of the whole nine to five. But I have enough funding. Let’s just say I have enough funding to do my own research at this point.” He smiled, and she saw his teeth were chipped. “I’ll look at that new study. Was that with Professor Samuels?”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll call a couple of people.” He paused, brushed his hand again over the bald part of his scalp. “I’ll do what I can.” He smiled again, and it did not fill her with confidence.
Back at the office, she still had a few more minutes to keep the phones manned, so she trolled the Internet for the news.
The local paper ran a story about Taft’s plans for Pleasant Forest, the luxury homes he’d build, the jobs it would create, Taft’s track record for successful subdivisions. At the end of the artic
le, a sliver of a paragraph appeared. “Now that more than ten years have passed and the land is safe again, cleared by the EPA, local officials are eager to see it well used.”
On the Taft Properties website, there was a photograph of the scrub grass with a bulldozer parked on it, and next to that, an animated slide show of the plans for the first three model homes.
Professor Samuels’s wife had sent an email dictated by him, about the other chemicals besides benzene that they’d tested for in Banes Field. There was a 5 percent increase in toluene, and a 7 percent increase in styrene tars and vinyl chloride. It probably wasn’t enough different from the other studies for anyone to care, but Lee went back to the research on priority pollutants and looked at the health effects:
Benzene causes chromosomal aberrations in humans.
Long-term exposure to vinyl chloride is linked to liver cancer, brain cancer, and some cancers of the blood.
Sometimes late at night, she trolled the sites online, asking questions of Google, as if it were a tarot reader or a Ouija board or an advice columnist. “How to stop builder who wants to build on toxic site?” The replies were enigmatic. The story of kids living in an old pesticides factory in Albania. Instructions for building a toxin-free home. The story of a realty company in Florida that built a subdivision right next to a field of buried, unexploded bombs from World War II. She scrolled from one entry to another, sleepless, reading the same information again and again. Though she might start the vigil with a string of hope, by the time she’d followed the strand, she always had the same feeling in the end. She was very, very small, just a pinpoint of energy.
The Ecological Defense Manual still lay on the coffee table, brown and unassuming. She picked it up, went back to reading the instructions. “The best way to disable a bulldozer is to introduce an abrasive (salt, gravel, sand) into the oil system. 1) Locate the oil filler cap, 2) remove the cap and dipstick, 3) pour the abrasive through a plastic funnel.” The reasonableness made it sound as feasible as cooking or sewing, or fixing a chair. For a girl, Jack used to tell her, she was pretty good with tools. And she was reasonable. “The monkey-wrenching kit you’ll need includes fabric gloves, a plastic jug or bottle, a plastic funnel, and a can of spray lubricant to remove any leftover abrasive grit on the surface.” No one else had seemed this helpful lately; or at least it had been a long time anyway since she’d felt any support in her efforts. “In addition, bring a wrench, preferably one wrapped in black electrical tape to eliminate its shininess and to keep it from banging against another item in your bag.”