Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  She wanted to be drawn in, but it was too late. “Of course they did. How could they not? To tell the truth, I don’t know how much energy I’ve got left for this anymore.”

  “The new benzene levels are actually through the roof. Even worse than the ones you found. But that’s not even what I came to tell you. I found some new combinations of oil solvents. Let me give you an example. Have you ever mixed cleaning products? Like Ajax and bleach? It makes this whole other gas. Worse than either one. Well, same thing here. There’s likely a lot of other chemical combinations down there, you know. The agencies don’t like this because there’s no science. There’s no way to keep everything stable and just have one variable. Data doesn’t work too well when everything is changing all at once.”

  He gazed at her with a childish earnestness, as if he expected her to shout about this with him. He reminded her of the ones who believed in a Jesus about to come—he still believed a lot of people were bound to care. She sighed. “What do you mean by all this, really? You know it’s old news to me.”

  “I may have found a combination in Banes Field that, in high enough concentrations, will harm people pretty fast. It’s not that high now, in the soil I tested—but who knows? There might be very high concentrations somewhere else around that property. One shovel in the wrong place.”

  Okay, he had a point, but she resisted it, felt so tired, a headache coming on. She was impatient suddenly for him to leave.

  “You know better than anyone that those chemicals may be buried, but that doesn’t mean they don’t migrate,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t get pushed up when it rains.” He was right. She felt a hammering on the inside of her forehead.

  “Well, you have to do something about it, Councilman.”

  “I can’t. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “What good will that do? What the hell have I done that’s made any difference? Aren’t you the one who was elected to handle this sort of thing?”

  He fiddled with his glass on the table, turned it with his thumb. “I’ve got an agreement with Garbit. Anything I say, I’ve got a multimillion-dollar corporation coming after me. I signed my life away.”

  So that was why he worked at the library now: he’d done something wrong at some point—they had something on him. And it was urgent, what needed to be done, even without these new findings, but she’d lost her ability to think about it anymore, to make any plans. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Petition. Get the city to pay for the right kind of incinerator—one that will burn this stuff safely. They want to build houses, so get them to buy the incinerator. That’s the only way to eradicate the compounds.”

  She didn’t fool herself. The blank, bland faces at the last city council meeting had not been moved. Instead, it seemed she herself might go blank. A hot sweat gathered under her arms. She was done. Anyway, Taft Properties would try to stop anything else she might do.

  “We have to find someone else,” she said. “I’ve got a legal situation of my own, to tell you the truth.”

  He pushed the papers toward her, with their crazy, dangerous numbers.

  “But will you just look at this?”

  “Avery Taft threatened to sue me.”

  He sighed, forked his fingers into his hair.

  “I’m retired,” she said. “I can’t do it. Why don’t you try the EPA? Get them to do their job.”

  “I already reported it to them. Took a chance on that one, but I figured they’d protect me.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said they would investigate.”

  “So why can’t they?”

  “Avery Taft is already building. They’ve approved the land for use. They don’t want to admit they made a mistake.” Atwater’s shoulders hunched around his skinny frame. “I never wanted to get into any funny business. I wanted just a clean straight shot. That’s how I live. You know, this isn’t for me.” He sat back in the chair, and the wood creaked. “Will you think about it at least?”

  “I’m always thinking about it. It doesn’t help.”

  SHE WENT TO THE REFRIGERATOR for a lemon, and she noticed the calendar. The number seven in the square seemed to stand up and bend as it foundered in her vision, darker than the other numbers, set against emptier white space, sacred and obscene. She went to the wall and flipped up the calendar page to March, covering the photograph of a dew-dropped yellow rose. She looked at the square day with the seven there, a Friday this year. It was always hardest as the day of the anniversary marched closer, and she dreaded how she’d have to mark it, usually lying on the couch with a bottle—staring at the walls or at the TV until the day was obliterated. Last year she’d killed her laptop when she spilled whiskey all over the keyboard and woke up to acrid smoke leaking thinly from the hidden battery.

  She’d just finished eating a sandwich by the window, watching between the curtains, the small gray birds hopping in the grass like leaden rocks with eyes and legs and wings, and above them, the white blossoms already beginning to explode from the branches on the tree, and then Jack called. He hardly ever called when it was daylight.

  “Listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I got cancer,” he said, “of the lung.”

  The cold of the air conditioner pressed against her cheek. “How do you know?”

  “Went to the doctor. Cindy cried her ass off when he said it, so I’m pretty sure he meant it. He wasn’t just running off at the mouth.”

  “You should get another opinion.”

  “I did. He’s it.”

  A sound like ten old metal fans came on in the silence between them. “Well, I can’t have you dying on me,” she said.

  “I might not be able to help it.” Beside her, the curtains seemed to have turned from fabric into wood. She thought of the snakes of chemical sludge, how she’d first seen them, had known even then that they could crawl inside her life and coil up there. “Listen, I want to say some things to you,” he said.

  She couldn’t keep talking. “Not now, okay?” The ceiling seemed to be steadily lowering itself. An opaqueness in the windows. “Later? You need to let yourself get better first.” She had to get off the phone.

  He sighed. “Alright then.”

  She hung up. His “alright” echoed, small, in her ear.

  She stood up at the window, looking at bark and green, and she paced through the living room to the front door, opened it, wanted to go somewhere. There was the dogwood tree, the white flowers shivering in the breeze. There wasn’t anyplace to go. There wasn’t anyplace in the world she could go.

  A half an hour later, she called him back. “Okay, tell me what he said.”

  He had a tumor in the right lung. Chemotherapy for eight weeks, followed by radiation. Three rounds.

  “You’ll get through it,” she said. “Is Cindy being good to you?”

  “She baked me a pie.” The scratch and lilt of his voice. If she could see his face, see that it still had color.

  “You need me to come up there and do something? Will you let me know?”

  She looked at the dirty pot on the stove and felt a crick in her throat. The worn tile floor beneath her had been his family’s, walked on by his father and mother and him for decades.

  “Sure will. Doctor sat down and told me all these stories today—people recovering at wild odds, people going on to run marathons. That’ll be me, running to the finish line in little tight shorts.” He chuckled.

  “Well, how do you feel today?”

  “I feel good really. I ate brisket and then I drank a beer and walked about a mile. It felt good.”

  “You do know how to enjoy yourself. That can’t hurt.”

  He might still recover. They might still talk like this.

  “This councilman just came to me with more terrifying s
tuff about Banes Field.”

  “You’ve got to quit that.”

  “I want to quit, I do. I’m tired. It’s just, if something else happens, how can I not be responsible?”

  “Lee, we couldn’t have known. No one knew what in the hell might happen.”

  “Except Rue Banes.”

  “Not even her. How could she have? And then still gone on with it? Hiring all those teenagers?”

  One of them, a grown man now, prophesied the Armageddon in the Safeway parking lot. Of the others she knew about (there had been several), one was dead from a car accident, and there was Stewart, who pumped gas, his face eager and worn. “But you couldn’t have known and all the pan-banging you’ve done doesn’t change that. I mean—”

  “Next month is the day again,” she said.

  “Goddamnit. I saw that. Look,” he said. “Cindy’s calling me. I’ll call back soon.”

  She went outside in the backyard and stood among the trees, so much taller now than they’d been when they first arrived at that old house, and made a new room for their sick daughter. But the yard had not changed. She wouldn’t let it, with its pines and the large, pink stone in the middle, the metal bench painted gray. It had always calmed her to look out at the bird feeder dangling, the burnished texture of bark, the sameness. But now it agitated her.

  She would help him as best she could. She’d done this before. Jack might be tired and nauseous, but there were remedies for it, little tricks she’d known about when she’d gone to the treatments with Jess. When she was looking for the pamphlets on managing chemo, she lost her eyeglasses.

  She went to the phone station, paperback books shelved above, a notepad stuck to the wall below, phone books pillared neatly on the desk. No files. They weren’t in the file cabinet either, and in the dimness, her vision seemed foggier than ever. She checked the table under the coat rack in the entryway. Back in the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator to get the pitcher of cold water and in the widening fan of white light, something fell to her feet. She bent to pick up the case—her glasses. Then, in the jumbled drawer beneath the kitchen counter, she finally found the documents from the Samuels research that she’d been meaning to file away, along with the cancer file, and the Getting Through Chemotherapy pamphlet. She checked to see if she could find the last email from the Texas Green League guy, to tell him he could keep her on the Listserve, but she was essentially done, and she opened something from an address she at first thought she recognized: Burns@scn.com:

  THE MAN CHRIST JESUS ARRIVES IN HARTLING, TEXAS IN MARCH. THE WORLD IS TALKING ABOUT THE ARRIVAL OF THE MAN CHRIST JESUS ON MARCH 7; COME AND MEET THE MAN MAKING NEWS HEADLINES IN EACH COUNTRY HE VISITS AND LISTEN TO HIS MESSAGE WHICH CONFIRMS HIM AS THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DR. DIEGO EMMANUEL DE JESUS THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN MAN, AND SEE WHY HIS FOLLOWERS ALREADY KNOW IT IS THE YEAR OF THE SECOND COMING.

  Below this, there was a fluorescent painting of Jesus in a white robe, cut to show bronzed muscles. Where was Hartling, Texas, anyway? This handsome, pissed-off Jesus looked strong and nimble, and he was coming on the right day, the seventh. If she wasn’t going to cause trouble anymore, maybe he would.

  THE NEXT DAY she met Rush at the diner off the highway. They sat at a table next to a photograph of Minnie Pearl in her hat with the price tag dangling. Years ago, Lee had groaned at all those jokes her mother had watched on the black-and-white TV. And Minnie Pearl’s smile looked manically efficient, exactly the same. She’d told Rush the news about Jack quickly, in a hurry to get it out, and Rush was quiet for a minute. “I’ll be thinking of him then, hoping,” she said, but now they were talking about her daughters, about Sam, who’d been calling her again, despite her rejections. Then Rush said, “Tom wants to see about reserving one of those houses in Pleasant Forest for us. We need more room.”

  Lee watched Rush’s face for laughter or a blink that would call her bluff. “There’s no way you’re serious.”

  “The prices are good. We want to put in a pool.”

  “You know why the prices are good. That’s no bargain. You told Tom what I found, right? The benzene rates? The container of toxins just popping up like nothing? And there’s more now too. Councilman Atwater found something really dangerous, if he’s right.”

  Rush smoothed her hair. “You know I love you.” The waitress whisked by them. There was a tattoo on her arm of a dove diving into a rainbow. “You know I believe you found those things. But, look, by this time, isn’t all the land around here polluted? I mean, what isn’t? We’ve got oil fields right next door to us.” She tapped the spoon at her saucer.

  “It’s not the same, and you know it.” It was Tom bullying Rush into this, had to be. “I can’t let you do this to your kids.”

  “Well, I am fighting it. I don’t particularly like the look of it over there off Veemer Road anyway. But I guess Avery Taft offered him a pretty good deal. Former classmate and all.”

  The cup of coffee in front of Lee suddenly smelled acidic. “I can’t believe you. Really?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything, and nothing’s for sure, but I didn’t want you to find out another way.”

  “Jack has cancer.”

  “You told me that, sweetie. As soon as you got here. I’m so sorry.”

  “It started at Rosemont. That’s why he’s got it.”

  “But didn’t he smoke? I don’t mean to be cruel.” A table of old men next to them burst into laughter, and one of them held up a crumpled cowboy hat. Another held up an unlit cigar. “But y’all haven’t lived in Rosemont for ten years.”

  “You know that doesn’t mean it didn’t start there, with that first exposure.”

  Rush turned and started rummaging in her purse.

  “I think I’m feeling dizzy,” Lee said. The old men looked over at her with rheumy eyes, the one with a Moses beard was nodding, as if he agreed with her, but he couldn’t have heard what she’d said.

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” said Rush, pulling out a tissue to blow her nose. “Look, Avery’s offering because he feels guilty. I didn’t tell you, but we had a thing. It was short-lived, but it was a thing.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “It was before he started building over there, and we just started having lunch, and, you know, nothing really happened but it sort of did. I couldn’t help it—it was a bad time for me, and he was real charming.”

  “Are you kidding me? He doesn’t feel guilty. He wants you nearby. He wants you to owe him something.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t mean anything. It’s over between us. It’s just that no one’s been that nice to me for a long time. But really, nothing much happened there.”

  “You keep saying that.” The floor felt insubstantial as she got up from the table. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

  The Moses beard whistled through his teeth—and she thought she heard him say as she left the diner, “Isn’t it a shame?”

  She drove down the road and passed Taft’s giant face again on the billboard. She gave him the finger. How could Rush have stood it, even for a minute? Driving past the gray blocks of strip mall, the long fields of weedy grass and hurricane fence, Lee tried to picture her own failure, and couldn’t, and she focused on the shreds of clouds in the sky ahead, like ripped-apart bandages.

  At the bank, the lady in line behind her with her squashed nose and pig eyes would not leave her alone. “Do you know Jesus as your savior? I just have to ask because you look a mite unhappy.”

  “I’m not interested,” said Lee, the way she hung up on telemarketers.

  “Well then, you must not know him because he’s interesting alright. Jesus is real interesting. Did you know he came to save you from your sins?”

  God, she hated the ignorant arrogance of them, their promises of immortality, and there were more now in town than ever, as if someone had bussed th
em in. She thought of the fluorescent, hunky Jesus supposedly about to arrive in Hartling, Texas. At least he looked like an outlaw, someone who wouldn’t abide excuses.

  She turned to the woman. “I think what I believe is private. Try someone else.” She felt her eyes tearing up, her hands clenched. Jack is sick. And the line wasn’t moving, so the woman went on. “Yes, he did. He sure did. Jesus wants you to be happy, to wipe that frown off your face.”

  Lee turned her back, but the woman kept on talking. Jack is sick. The banker finally lifted his head from his desk, and it was her turn.

  WILLA

  HER FATHER WORKED LATE almost every night, leaving Willa, Jana, and their mother alone for dinner. Jana clowned, but no matter how silly her costumes, their mother wouldn’t laugh, and Willa couldn’t make herself pretend to. Willa sensed that the rift between her parents had to do with her, but she didn’t know exactly why, and she was afraid to ask her mother about it. Once, her mother came into the kitchen while Willa was cleaning up and said, “Your father’s only willing to wait so long before you come back to church. You’re going to have to face it, one way or another, sometime soon, honey.” Her mother’s chin had a sudden wooden appearance, puppet lines along either side of her mouth.

  “No, not yet.” There were crumbs on the kitchen table, a huge black fly landed on the center seam in the wood. “Can you ask Dad to give me more time?”

  “I’ll ask.” Her mother nodded. “That boy will get his punishment, I know that. It’s coming, if it hasn’t already.”

  As Willa got undressed for bed, she looked at her body in the mirror, the pale shadows under her breasts, curved against her hip bones, and cupped next to her clavicles big and small commas of shadows. Her face and body were bonier now, but she didn’t mind it. In the length of the mirror, for the first time in months, she could see she was not ugly, that her breasts were still full and small, her hips narrow and studded with a single small mole on the right, her shoulders square and even. In the mirror behind her, there was a skittering movement. She pulled her nightgown on over her head, and sat down at her desk.