by Rene Steinke
It made her distrust them, though she herself liked to keep a measure of control when it came to substances. Her mom’s drinking had seen to that. But there were times like now, when her rage seemed worse than alcohol: an ocean of hidden monsters and sharp, torn shipwrecks, and an unpredictable tidewater. If she were to set herself to do one of those things in the manual, she wouldn’t be able to say if it was logic or rage that had moved her.
The music changed to some awful, clinging guitar, and a woman opened the back door, carrying a bunch of blue, helium balloons and a giant crepe-paper-covered baby bottle.
She went back to the computer, sat down and stared numbly at the screen. It looked homemade, this website, a crooked photo of a newspaper article, an inelegant diagram. She followed a link to an ammo site. Who were these people? She scrolled down the comments page, bright blue sentences, elliptical bursts of emotion. “Love the Super-XO.” “The Winchester Western will blast away just about anything.” She stopped at the user name, Overlong, in Alvin, Texas. “Easy enough to fix with a Dyna-igniter.” This guy—he had to be a guy—had a few posts. “If you have trouble detonating from a safe distance, try the Extra booster detonating cord. Go see Allen at Alvin Fireworks. Trust me.” The thrill of his proximity sang through the anonymous screen of Internet. She clicked the link for this Allen, and it went to a cheesy ad for a fireworks stand she’d seen just off the exit of 2351, three girls in camouflage bikinis holding rifles. “We buy BIG!! We’re cheap, and we’re stocked!” She hated free-form fireworks. It scared her that anyone in Texas with a face could walk into a store and buy fireworks and a gun.
She got up from the computer, went to her desk, found her tallies of the cancer rates from the local cancer registry (she got this through Doc), and saw the rate of brain tumors was still five times higher than the national average. Lee wasn’t a scientist, but she was keeping track, and it could be the vinyl chloride, maybe coupled with solvents. No one wanted to hear this. She put down her notebook and walked through the kitchen out the back. The party next door had moved inside. She watched a squirrel on a branch. It made a sound like a piece of wood breaking. The moss was all over that tree now. She could see it even in the dark, a bright green strip of velvet.
SHE DROVE DOWN 2351 in the dark humidity, highway lights like perfect white fish in an aquarium, and hovering over them, the stars bright flecks of algae. Soupy, her mother would have called this weather.
She wore black socks over her shoes to disguise her footprints, black cloth gloves, and a black ski cap, though it was hot. In the trunk, there was a bag of gravel, a small can of oil, a funnel, a flashlight, a ballpoint pen, a pair of pliers, and three kinds of screwdrivers. Everything but the gravel would fit into a small canvas bag that Lee would wear over her chest. A truck was on one side, speeding up, and in the whoosh of its passing, her car shuddered.
Lee took the exit ramp and drove down the feeder road, past the dark gas station, past a stretch of woods, and turned down the dirt road. She parked the car at the edge of the woods, where it might be hidden, and she got out and walked toward the field.
The sky was a voice overhead that she couldn’t understand. She felt separate from her body in a way that quickened her nerves, made her movements feel strong and deliberate. She found her way slowly by flashlight to the area of the construction site, and then she noticed the trailer Taft must have recently parked on the premises. The lights were off inside it, and there wasn’t a car.
She walked up to the trailer from the back, then went around to the side to peer into the first window, seeing nothing but the flat brown shapes of furniture. The other window was curtained off. If anyone answered, she would say she’d had car trouble and needed to use the phone. She knocked, then gently turned the small handle on the door. It was light and swung open easily. She went inside and shone the regular, bright flashlight onto a card table filled with bottles of a strange blue liquid. She turned to the right and saw an open trash can filled with beer bottles. There was an orange-brown couch, a file cabinet; and when she shone her flashlight in the back room, it was empty, just a miniature sink and pantry shelf, a low table between cushioned benches. As she was coming back out, the light caught on a flat female face that startled her. A beat later, she knocked over the stand-up cardboard cutout of a girl in a bathing suit, a flat white smile, made-up eyes. At Lee’s feet lay a large mesh bag full of shovels.
Back out in the dark, the humidity clung to her clothes. She walked past the foundation of one new house, near neatly stacked plumbing fixtures, and she knocked over the piles of pipes, cringed at their clattering. From where she stood, the bulldozer looked like a large, still animal. Approaching it, she felt like she should shush the thing, calm it down. She climbed up into the seat, lay on her stomach, and hung down to reach the oil filter cap. She had to feel her way to the lock. She squirted oil into the seams of the opening, unscrewed the six screws, and used the pliers to pry off the top. It took about fifteen minutes. When the spring came back from the top, it pinched her finger. She pulled out the dipstick, inserted the funnel. She maneuvered the cutoff plastic container of gravel to meet the funnel’s lip and poured the gravel into the hole. It made a soft, crackling sound as it went down. She poured lubricant into the opening to spread the abrasive better. She pushed the dipstick back into the opening, twisted the lid back on. Her hands only began to shake as she pushed the screws back into their holes and she tightened them with the screwdriver. For a few seconds she thought she heard footsteps, but the plodding noise stopped. She lay there, very still, listening. Unless the directions were wrong, or she’d misread them, she’d killed the oil filter system.
Just as she jumped to the ground, she heard something like rocks dropping about ten yards away. She looked over to the trailer, but the lights were still off. She saw a shadow, maybe a dim silhouette gliding back and forth in front of the opening in the fence. But that was wrong, had to be. Anyway, she was mostly invisible. If she’d had a lookout, she could have taken her time.
She trudged through the uneven terrain. The flashlight with the red beam only gave her the dimmest sense of the ground ahead.
Ten yards farther, she spotted a giant roll of copper wire, gleaming. People broke into houses just to steal wire like that, and she guessed whoever usually stayed in the trailer was supposed to keep an eye on it. It seemed to be calling to her suddenly, as if the universe did not want it left there, but without help, she couldn’t take it. And she remembered the manual said, “The prudent monkey-wrencher never acts spontaneously. His every move is planned ahead of time.”
To find her car, she had to walk farther than she remembered down the dirt road, and just when she thought she’d lost it, there it was: next to a little pine tree. Driving home, on the nearly empty highway, her body light, she looked out at the passing headlights, turned past the vacant, darkened gas station, and something pressed against her heart, as if to remind her who she was.
LEE SAT IN THE MORNING HEAT of the window, drinking her coffee. She looked for some sign—in the paper, online—that the bulldozer had actually been disabled, that she’d disrupted Taft’s construction, but all the local news was about Thanksgiving, soup kitchens serving turkey to the poor, what Texas looked like during the time of the pilgrims, a corn festival at the Alamo. Maybe they didn’t even know the bulldozer had been sabotaged—it had to have been sent in to the shop by now. She wanted to go back to make sure she’d done it right, but that would be stupid.
At the grocery store, in the aisle lined by soda bottles, exposed under those lights, she ran into Jack’s old friend Wesley, now the chief of police. She might have swerved her cart and walked away from him, but if he’d seen her, that would seem odd. She thought if someone had spotted her car that night at Banes Field, she might still dispel doubts about herself with aggressive friendliness, by swaying the conversation back to him.
“Hey there, you still playing the sax?”
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br /> His eyes looked puffy, pasty in their folds, as if he hadn’t slept, and he didn’t seem to recognize her at first. “Sure am?” And then he knew her again.
“Still out at that place in Houston?”
“First Saturday every month.”
“I’ll have to get out there sometime,” she said.
He nodded and seemed to be searching her face. “Hardly seems worth it, surely not just to see me play—I stand in the back.”
“I’ve been meaning to, but I don’t make it to Houston much.”
“The traffic.” She felt him looking at her chin, her nose, her eyes.
“You alright these days?”
Maybe her voice had betrayed her, or the way she held her arm against her chest. “Oh, yeah. Right as rain.” She pushed her cart toward the green bottles and cereal box faces in the aisle ahead.
She drove home, and as soon as she stepped out of her car, an SUV pulled in behind her, and her neighbor Hal stepped out of it with a rueful, pious smile. As he came toward her in his blue suit, the polyester weave of it caught a sheen.
“Howdy,” he said. “This’ll just take a minute. You’ve got a minute, don’t you?” She didn’t like his tone.
The manual said, “Keep calm and practice a blank face.”
“I know what you’ve been up to.” He was smiling, shaking his head. “Oh, don’t think I’m not paying attention.”
She smiled, but there was a war drum in her chest. They stood in the shade, and she folded her arms, glanced up at the brown, curling leaves.
“It’s just not going to do you any good,” he said. “So I’m advising you to just hold up right there.”
“Do you always go around with orders like that?”
The Zindlers next door stood over by their mailbox with cups of coffee, Myrna talking behind her cupped hand, and her floppy-haired husband nodding. They would favor Hal’s side, but it might actually be satisfying to be caught, to defend what she’d done.
“Oh, I think you know what I’m talking about. All that tinkering with soil samples. It’s not going to make a bit of difference. Not a bit. And it’s trespassing too, you know that. You can do whatever study you want, but if it’s not sanctioned, it’s not legit. From now on, no one’s getting away with setting foot on that property—it belongs to Avery Taft.”
“I’m sorry. I’m confused. What’s your part here?”
Hal rubbed his cheek. “Well, that’s easy. A little while ago Taft asked me to partner with him.” He turned his head to the side. “I want to see those homes sell. People need jobs around here.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she said.
“Taft’s building is going ahead. It’s approved. It’s good for everyone. You know that, don’t you?” He cleared his throat. “Hell, I’ve even talked with your boss when we were out golfing the other day—he agrees wholeheartedly.”
Either this was a lie, or Doc had been out drinking beer, trying too hard to be gracious. She’d have to ask.
“Well, you’ve stated your opinion there. Thank you,” she said. “Very helpful.”
“You know I admire your conviction, and all the work you’ve done on behalf of the community.” He held up his index finger. “Just hear me out. What we do need people to be in an uproar about is that Robertson Park. Do you know that if we don’t get a spending approval for that park, we’ll lose a good part of that acreage? That park is the center of our city, one of the only places these days where our kids can go and just play.”
“I’m sure there’s others who’ve got that about covered.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. I’d be glad to coordinate something for you.”
“No, thanks.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. “Now, you’re a reasonable lady. I know you are. Do you really believe all this effort’s going to come to more than a hill of beans?” He lifted his hand, then dropped it again. “Well, alright then. So we understand each other?”
“We sure do,” she said, turning to her door. She left him standing there on the driveway, and she went inside her house, lay down on Jess’s bed, and closed her eyes.
DEX
WHEN THE RAIN CAME AGAIN, and just three months after the hurricane, it flooded under the trailer so it looked like a rectangular boat floating on top of a hill, and the vegetable garden drowned; and because it was another of his mother’s fantasies that they would all eat those string beans and tomatoes, he knew she’d ask him to replant them.
The storm pounded the roof like some misbegotten broken engine rattle, and he couldn’t sleep those two nights, afraid as he watched the water rising. He hated his dad then, and there was nothing to do but watch rain in the window. His mom had to be everything; she had to take up so much space to make up for his absence; she had to be larger than was healthy for her. Those days as they waited by the TV, to see if they’d need to leave, a dampness in the couch, a leak dripping onto the stove top, his mother had seemed strangely calm and buoyant, teasing Dex and Layla that they’d all have to get aboard a boat, that she had two kids and two cats and that was enough for their little ark. She seemed supernaturally confident that they would be okay.
It turned out the trailer was perched on high enough ground, and the rain had stopped just before the water would have soaked the rug on the floor. He’d heard that the game room of the Baptist church next door had filled up with water and someone would have to gut it.
Now that the streets were dry again, he looked out the window and noticed that some drunk had knocked over and crumpled the stop sign on the corner, and he knew his mother would be on the phone yelling about it for days. She seemed too big for their home lately, kept bursting through all the careful, invisible walls he’d built around himself. He went to the Xbox to put on War, so he could stare at the soldiers running away from him before he exploded their tank, and he could go far into that rectangular tunnel of battle, and when he hit a convoy in the distance twice, he felt elated and proud, as if he’d just defended his family.
Then she came in the door, breaking through it even though she’d only opened it, hadn’t even slammed the cheap, light thing, as she so often did.
“You didn’t tell me, goddamnit! Dexter William . . .” Her face was tight and young looking. “You lied to me. Where’s your sister? I don’t want her to hear this.”
“She’s out. Mom, I didn’t lie.”
“You sure as hell did. You know how I had to hear you were at that party? From Wanda Betts.”
“I felt bad.”
“Well, I sure as hell would hope you’d feel bad. You’d better swear to me right now you didn’t touch her.” His mom had no idea he’d been going out to see Willa, but he didn’t think telling her now would help.
She threw her bag on the couch, and coins and makeup spilled out on the floor.
“I didn’t know she was there until it was too late to help.”
She shook her head and walked to the kitchen area, slammed open a cabinet. “First, you nearly get suspended for fighting and now this. I can only imagine what your dad would have to say.” The walls of the trailer were squeezing in to make a smaller tunnel, a smaller life, as his dad and the rest of the world grew larger, louder, forgetting about them. “I’m ashamed of you,” she said. “You know how much I hate that?”
He felt a pressure on the top of his head and against his shoulders.
“God, Mom,” he said. “I’m sixteen years old.”
“Goddamn right,” she said. “You’ve got to do better than that.”
AFTER HE DROPPED OFF WEEKS, he didn’t want to go home yet, and he didn’t know where to go. On an impulse, he turned down Farm Road 1 toward Casa Texas. They’d still be serving even though it was late.
The parking lot was crowded and when he got inside, the restaurant was darker than he remembered, and there was a sweet, chlorine
smell, and then the smell of spices. Carlita stood at the hostess stand in a hot- pink, billowy dress.
“How many?” she said. She didn’t remember him.
The tables were filled, and in the back, he heard the loud music, could just make out a few couples dancing.
“Oh, I’m not here to eat. I wondered if I could see Mr. Holgine?”
Her chubby face was shiny and exasperated, her pink lips painted to match her dress. “What about?”
“He offered me a job a while back.”
She shook her head no just barely and said, “He’s real busy tonight, but let me see if we can find him.”
She turned and shouted something at a waiter in tight pants and asked Dex to wait in one of the wooden chairs lined up along the entranceway.
He waited for half an hour, watching the people, the handsy couples, the families with the screaming little kids, the women in heels and low-cut dresses, laughing at one another’s jokes. He started to get hungry from the smell of tortillas, and when he saw the clock over the margarita machine, he realized how late it was.
He went back up to the hostess station. “Did Mr. Holgine say he would see me?”
“We’ve got a full house, see?” She pressed her body back to let a few customers walk past her.
“He’s a friend of my dad’s.” He didn’t want to leave before he had that job.
“Oh, alright.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Let me go check the kitchen.”
A few minutes later, Mr. Holgine came back, looking for him. He wasn’t smiling as he always had in the past. “What’s this about, son?”
“I’m Dex, Mac’s son. You offered me a job a while back?”
His small, dark eyes swept to the left, then to the right. “Yes, my friend! How is he?” He clapped a hand on Dex’s shoulder.
“He’s good. Out on a rig again now.”