by Rene Steinke
Later, her parents sat on the patio furniture in the backyard. Her mother’s face seemed a faded blur through the window, but the movements of her head suggested that she was telling Willa’s father something she wanted him to do. Her parents knew more than they revealed to her and seemed to be planning some new resolution. Her father had not spoken about it to her, but had relayed through her mother the message about not going to the police because it would only be worse for her. It seemed better for him to never look at her directly again for the rest of her life than to have to tell him what she did and did not remember about that afternoon. Her dad rubbed his neck as her mother spoke, and then his hand shot out with his finger pointed, and he shook it at her mother.
That night her mother came with a box to her bedroom door in the afternoon. “Ms. Marlowe sent you something. Isn’t she your English teacher?” She put it on the desk and stood slumped against the doorjamb waiting for Willa to open it. Her mother’s hair hung limp, framing the sadness of her sagging cheeks. “We want you to see your church friends, but I talked to Ms. Ryan, and we can keep you on home study until the end of the school year. That’s the best thing, right? I just have to fill out some forms for homeschooling, not that I’m going to do anything but make sure you do your homework. I told her that, and she said it was okay.”
“Well, that’s good.” Willa slid off the bed and went to her desk.
“They’ll keep sending out a substitute teacher every other week.”
Her mother handed her a pair of scissors and Willa cut through the packing tape, folded back the box flaps and tissue paper. There was a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.
“Oh, what’s that?” Her mother touched her shoulder.
“Poems. We read some of them in school.”
“Oh, look at the gold,” she said, thumbing the gilt on the cover. “But it’s not like it’s Scripture. They make it look like the book is holy or something.” Her mom’s shoulders slumped as she put the book down. “Was she a Christian writer?”
“I think so.”
Her mother opened the book, and Willa wanted to take it from her because she knew she wouldn’t understand and might even find the poetry blasphemous. But her mother just closed it up and put it down again. “Too deep for me, I guess. I never was able to get poetry—the symbolism and all.” Willa took the book and read to herself:
Just Infinities of Nought—
As far as it could see—
So looked the face I looked upon—
So looked itself—on Me—
I offered it no Help—
Because the Cause was Mine—
The Misery a Compact
As hopeless—as divine—
Willa sat at her bedroom window, looking out. A jay pecked at a twig, its tiny black eyes bright and unseeing, and as it fluttered its wings to the next branch, revealed an otherworldly fan of blue. The tree swayed slightly, light patching through the leaves. She tried again to pray, to summon up at least a reach to what wasn’t visible, but she kept thinking of her butt cheeks pressed to the corner of hard wood, the scrambled eggs roiling in her stomach, and a very faint taste of blood in her mouth. She didn’t even try to say words anymore because then the prayer sounded fake and rehearsed, even demonic. She admired how the leaves on different branches fluttered at various syncopations, how the thinner branches swayed and gestured.
The meanings of the poems seemed to move as soon as she thought she’d found them. She read pages and pages of them. She fell asleep with the journal open on her bed, the pen tucked inside it, leaking onto the page.
At some point in the middle of the night, she woke up, glanced between the curtain sheers at the moon, turned off the lamp, and went to sleep. It was a sleep like a tunnel, as if she were going into the deep past, before anyone she knew had been born. In the dream, she saw face after face like fabric screens she was falling through.
She woke up in a patch of sun, eyes wincing at the light. She pushed herself up against the headboard, started to stretch. The muscles in her bare arms felt good as they lengthened, and she tightened the muscles around her knees, pointed her toes. Then she noticed it. On her forearm, there was writing. Cramped and spiked, but unmistakable. Sense flies away from spirit. The purple ages pause.
She rubbed at it, her heart pounding, the skin where the words were written was hairless and healed in the space where there’d once been a small scar.
Her mother opened the door and came in with an armful of laundry. Willa was still staring at her arm. She felt a strange satisfaction and relief seeing the words, as if they’d claimed her, and there was a sweet taste just under her tongue.
“Here’s your fresh shirts,” said her mom, laying them on the dresser. “You need a new nightgown.” Her mother looked at her, straight at her arm, and didn’t seem to see the writing. “You slept late. Hope you’re not fighting off something.”
Willa turned her arm again, held the writing face up to her mother. She still didn’t see it. “Want some oatmeal, honey? Why are you holding your arm like that? Did you hurt it?”
If demons were showing her these signs, then they were demons born from her own head, and why wouldn’t they also come from God? Had the visions come from some rogue part of her brain trying to escape? Because there was something inside her trying to loosen itself lately, in the poems she wrote so quickly, pressed down so hard on the page that her hand hurt. And she didn’t know what the loosening meant, in the same way she didn’t always know what a poem meant—or it was like a jewel that had a different shape and color depending on the angle you turned it.
Something clattered in the hallway, and just for a few seconds, she looked back into her room, and there were both of the beasts, standing side by side, Lamb and Dog, she called them now, to undermine their nastiness. Lamb’s face was streaked with a substance the color of pus, and around its neck, a chain of severed ears. Dog was part lion, with a cantaloupe-sized tumor on the side of its head, and a fluorescent green powder all over its fur, eyes erupting in patches of it. “She’s going in the night like a thief,” said Dog.
“Go,” said Lamb.
Willa turned away from them and looked down at the yard, where yellow dandelions had sprouted up in a dot-to-dot pattern she tried to trace—a boat or a rat. “They’re all laughing at you,” said Dog. Its voice sounded like radio static and coughing. “Saying what they got away with.”
She could feel the pressure of the beasts fade when she looked out the window, but she could still hear Dog. “Maybe you could just go.”
A caterpillar inched timidly across the bottom of the wire screen, and as she watched its slow progression, a breeze went through the trees, a hushing sound. She leaned into that neutral solace. She put her mind there.
HAL
WHEN PRINCIPAL JOHNSON CALLED HAL at work to say Cully had been in a fight at school, he knew this would be the end of football for him, though they were entering the play-offs and Cully, at one time, had been the best wideout on the team. “We can’t have it, Mr. Holbrook.”
“I understand.”
“We can’t have our leaders—our leaders—acting this way. He could have walked away from it, by all accounts. He was not personally provoked.”
“I understand,” said Hal, and saying good-bye to her, he had a vision again of his uncle, passing out tiny American flags on toothpicks to him and other kids on the Fourth of July. “It’s our flag, you remember that,” he said. “No matter what size it is.”
Hal had planted his in a ball of play dough and kept it on his dresser for years. And when his uncle died in old age, his widow was presented with the life-size flag solemnly folded into a tight triangle.
He’d have to tell Darlene about the fight, but he figured it was easier to do by phone. “Cully’s been in a fight at school. He won’t play in Texas City,” and it surprised him how hard it was to say, how much
he got choked up. If only he’d had more money to give as an offering to the church, if he could only show his devotion better.
“Oh, Hal. Maybe it wasn’t his fault.”
“Nope, he willingly joined in. Came in to help his buddy Bishop apparently.”
“Well, he was helping his friend then.”
“Darlene, it was two against one. He must have had a good reason, but you can’t tell Principal Johnson that.”
“Well, we have to fight it now.”
“I know.”
He hadn’t been successful with Lee Knowles—no surprise, but still he had hope. Avery told him she must have gone to Toxic Texas with something because they called him to crow about it. Hal would have to try with her again. He needed to break through his limited mind-set and imagine what God could do for him. He just needed to keep at it.
He drove over to the school and went to the field house to see Coach Salem. In his office there was a photo of a mustang running duct-taped to the cinder block wall. Coach Rowan had occupied that same office twenty-five years earlier, and Hal had always been proud to be beckoned inside it.
Coach Salem, in his silver buzz cut and blue coach’s shirt, smiled at him, his teeth even and perfect. He had the tan, fit appearance of clean living—he was a Quaker like the old guard in town—no drinking or dancing for him.
Hal told him his son had done a stupid thing, but he was a smart boy, and he hoped this wouldn’t impact his game. He just needed to be forgiven.
Coach Salem raised his thick, gray eyebrows and heaved a sigh. “I’ve had him in the weight room all fall, to make up for the one thing. And now this.”
The muscles bared under the coach’s short-sleeved blue shirt were taut, though he must have been past fifty, and they felt like an affront to Hal’s own lump of clay body.
“The truth is, Cully hasn’t been playing great, and I think you know this—he hasn’t been acting like a football player either. He hasn’t respected the position. His body is here, but his heart isn’t. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s better he takes some time to sort things out, get himself together.” His voice was so gravelly it sounded soft-spoken.
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, I am.” He chuckled. “I’ve been real disappointed in him, frankly. Real disappointed.” He slapped his palms on the desk, as if to dismiss Hal. “You played too, didn’t you?”
“I did, class of ’eighty. Hell, he’s a better player than I ever was. Coach, please.”
“Well, if you played, then I’m sure you know I’ve got a team to think about.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not in the touchy-feely business, Mr. Holbrook. I do football. But Cully needs something.” Coach nodded, his face an austere blankness.
Hal left the field house, walked past the electric-blue lockers and the silver-flecked posters of Mustangs. Cully needed something alright. He needed the holy spirit in him. He needed righteousness. He needed faith. And then the football would come back to him.
LEE
WHEN LEE HEARD BACK from Ecological Society for Texas, there it was, the standard answer: “Thank you for sharing with us your recent soil sample readings for Banes Field. We have put the site on consideration for our watch list for the future.” And she put this in the pile of other tepid replies: “We have placed this on our list of sites to watch.”
She was so angry as she drove home from work, she couldn’t think logically but kept saying the word to herself, “Assholes.” She drove fast, the red lights on Friendswood Drive like the tips of scolding fingers, trying to warn her, and on the highway, a car pulling a horse trailer slowed in front of her. Through the window in the back, she saw the brown butt, the long, swiping tail. Horse people always acted so entitled, as if they alone were keeping Texas authentic and that’s why they deserved to block the entire lane. When she tried to pass the trailer she nearly sideswiped a white car she didn’t see.
She had ways of taming her anger these days that might or might not work. She tried taking a shower. She was soaping herself, thinking about her next step, when his face suddenly came to her, handsome Chris Hite, who’d just moved back to town to start a newspaper/website funded by his father (whose own newspaper had gone out of business). Friendswood Dispatch. That was it. She’d seen just one copy, over at the counter of the dry cleaners. And she’d run into Chris Hite at the drugstore, where they’d chatted for ten minutes or more. He’d grown beefier in the arms, fuller in the face, but his smile was still sweet, the lines of his face pleasing. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he’d said. “My God, look at you!”
She got out of the shower, dried off, pulled on her robe, and went to find his number. He had his work voice on when he answered.
“Oh, hey. Well, what can I do for you? You want to subscribe?”
“I want to do that. I also want to give you a story. And I’ve even got the pictures.”
She told him someone needed to investigate Banes Field again. She told him what she’d seen and about the recent readings of the soil samples, and when she’d finished, he was quiet. “I can’t just go at it, you know, attack Taft Properties. Not without more sources.”
“Make it all about me, then. I’ll give you what I’ve got. I’ve got numbers; I’ve got pictures. People need to see it for themselves—I know they’d care if they could just see it.” She watched herself squeezing the pen in her hand as if it were a knife she could stab at something.
He sighed. “You really think there’s something there, huh? Go ahead and send it along, then,” he said blandly. “I’ll take a look. I can’t promise, but for an old friend, I’ll take a look.” She picked up the file from the table and dropped it, photos and papers scattering in the dust and crumbs on the floor. His indifference marked the end of a hope, the end of a certain fair-minded resolve in her, and when she hung up and knelt to gather the documents, what came to her was fierce and chaotic.
SHE FOUND HERSELF drawn back to the Ecological Defense Manual, for the fantasy of what someone might one day do to Taft. She lay on the couch one evening, held the book up in the lamplight, ignoring the loud music from the next-door-neighbor’s party. “When finding where to lay the blame for a corporation’s cold-hearted actions, avoid the lay managers just doing what they’re told.” That might be Hal, or not. “Look for the criminal in the corporation. His or her car can be targeted for slogans naming the crime—at his house, the office, in a parking garage. Don’t fool with the engine, which is risky, but consider slashing the tires.” Avery Taft drove a white Mercedes. She’d seen him pull out of the parking lot at city hall. He probably had at least one other car—a truck or a Jeep, something for hunting. What would she write on his car? I BUILD HOUSES ON TOP OF POISON. BUY A HOUSE FROM ME, MAKE YOUR CHILD SICK. It seemed a cheap, childish thing to do—the slogans. People would take his side if they saw the paint job ruined like that. She gazed for a minute at the clutter of the coffee table, a half-drunk glass of Coke. The couch smelled musty, and when she slapped a cushion, dust wafted up. She’d neglected so many things—the dirty windows, email from friends, and there weren’t any groceries in the refrigerator. “Stay away from complicated disguises, which tend to arouse suspicion, but wearing a fake beard or mustache is a good option.” (Really?) “For instructions on how to best apply facial hair, see books like Werner’s Stage Makeup.” If she wore a wig, maybe, she could convince herself that she was entirely someone else, someone who hadn’t lost so much.
She went to the computer, and on the Internet, she studied the faces of the ones who’d been caught. The woman had long, blond frizzy hair, a rabbit face—she’d planted a bomb at a fur factory, and she’d been arrested two states away for her crime. The man looked like a balding schoolteacher, with his granny glasses and timid chin—he’d camped out in front of a forest and shot darts at the police who tried to physically remove him. Another man had a pudgy boxer’s face—a mouth that curled up on the sides. H
e’d spray-painted over the billboards of oil companies WE KILL PEOPLE, and then he’d manufactured bombs out of milk bottles. They were all proudly ELF, and the adolescence of their anger bothered her. Their acts—no matter how justified—felt like teenage hijinks. The government called them terrorists, but they seemed too immature for that.
She clicked over the words she’d read so many times already and felt anger manifesting itself as physical pain—in the crick of her neck, the base of her spine. If she were to do it. If she were to ruin some part of the building site, the wooden frames. Her eyes ached from staring at the blue-lit words. She twisted a rubber band until it pressed the circulation from her fingertips.
When she got up from the chair, her muscles were so stiff she could barely walk. It would be a destruction of property that didn’t belong to her, a kind of theft, but wasn’t Taft’s a crime too, and more violent than anything she wanted to do?
She went to the window and saw the partygoers out on the porch next door, a woman’s body swaying to the music, a man holding up a large plastic bottle of Coke. They didn’t drink, her neighbors.