by Rene Steinke
Dog tapped its heads together until she couldn’t think, and two of its heads shoved their faces over either side of her desk, so she couldn’t look at her notebook. “Why are you here?”
Lamb stood on the forked tail of Dog.
“Often it’s good to be washed in a blowing wind,” said Dog.
“You look sad,” said Lamb. “The Lord is writing himself through you.” The words appearing on her arm were hers, but also from somewhere else—she was a vessel for them—and though they belonged to her, they had not exacted any conscious effort—they might be gifts. But it was possible they’d been foretold.
Later, she woke up in the dark to find Lamb alone, lit up at the foot of her bed, its voice whining and revolving like a siren. “What does she want? I know what she wants. What does she want?”
THE DOORBELL RANG, and Willa opened the door to sunlight and Dani, in torn jeans. “Hey, are you alone? I borrowed a golf cart from my cousin.”
“Yeah, I’ve got three hours before my mom gets home.”
“Then, come on, Nilla Wafer, let’s go.” It was February, but not too cold out, and Willa went to grab a sweatshirt.
The grass was long and weedy, the sand traps filled with rocks and old leaves. The Blue Creek Manor golf course had been out of use for years, and the golf cart paths were overgrown, the hills eroded and unevenly spaced in the land that stretched emptily behind the houses. They drove past a woman wearing a pink bathrobe in her backyard garden, surveying her plants, holding a shovel aimed at the ground. Around the curve was a girl hanging laundry on a clothesline.
“You don’t see that much anymore,” said Dani, tapping a cigarette on the steering wheel. “It’s kind of pretty, the white sheet blowing like that.”
They drove down the old paths, a cheerful, thin motorized hum as the cart lifted them over the hills, the cement cracked and half-covered with weeds like long hair, the greens dotted with dandelions.
They talked about Mrs. Grand, who’d suddenly started yelling to her students that she wanted them all to suffer for their art, and when one of them said they didn’t have any ideas, she said, “Well then go home and set your hand on fire.”
Dani pulled into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. “Got a surprise for you.”
Before she could say anything more, Willa spotted Dex, thin and sheepish, leaning against the bed of his truck. He’d been sweet to work with her on the Camus project and bring flowers, though his shy attentions mostly embarrassed her.
“He wanted to see you, and I told him I’d take you,” Dani whispered. “You’re not mad, are you?”
She knew he liked her, and felt flattered and wary about it because she didn’t feel that way about him.
“No. Not mad.” He was wearing a jean jacket and a black T-shirt that said COWBOY, and the black made his eyes look bluer. She couldn’t tell yet if she was glad or not to see him.
Dani sped up the cart and stopped short. “Hop in.”
Dex sat in the back behind Willa, and the golf cart hummed through the parking lot, onto the grass behind the duplexes, and a little farther on, over cracked cement and an old golf cart path. Dex said he had a test tomorrow in earth science.
“I hate that class,” said Dani. “Or maybe I just hate Ms. Shranken.”
“I know. The way she always asks you if you’d rather drive an electric car or a nice Range Rover.”
Willa noticed the jagged top of a can littered in the grass, a greasy-looking white rubber glove. “They should clean up around here at least. That’s pathetic.”
“Can you believe the golf course used to be exclusive?” said Dani. “You actually had to pay? And look at the country club now. Real exclusive.”
It was a frequent subject at dinner between Willa’s parents. The owners had closed it down because they wanted to build houses on the land instead, but the homeowners’ association protested it, so they just let the golf course grow weedy, let the country club go abandoned, waiting for the authorities to change their minds.
“The freaks hang out there sometimes,” said Dex. “And the Texas Totem.”
Dani looked vaguely to her right, as if deciding whether or not to turn down that path. “Should we check it out?” She stepped on the gas pedal. They went up and down an incline, turned, and the cart careened down a hill. The lightness Willa felt as they went down was as if she’d thrown off something heavy.
They drove over the path that wound past what used to be a putting green and was now just grass and trees. The brick walls of the country club were spray-painted with graffiti—BUSTER SUCKS BIG ONES; I LOVE BRIAN AND WILLY—a maze of neon pink, winding up to a tree.
“Want to go in?” said Dex. “I hear it’s pretty weird. Too creepy?”
“No, let’s do it,” Dani said, leading the way through the space where a glass door had once been.
In the room to the right, where there used to be a golf shop, old golf balls lay on the dirty floor like unnatural eggs, fluorescent pink and green and blue golf tees scattered in a way that reminded her of pick-up sticks. The shell of a cash register stood on a square pedestal, a few plastic coat hangers scattered beneath it.
Then her eye caught on a stained, flowered blanket bunched in one of the corners. Somebody slept here. They picked their way over broken glass and empty beer cans. They looked inside the door to the left. “That used to be the snack bar, I think,” said Willa.
Crippled chairs and folded-up tables were pushed to the walls, and in the center of the room, an old black garbage bag that looked full, the sun streaming through the windows over cigarette stubs and more golf balls strewn on the floor. “Looks like someone’s been partying.”
They walked out the back door and down the rocky hill. “It kind of smelled in there,” said Dex. He pointed to the fence in the back. “Let’s go check out the pool.”
He climbed over the fence easily and then held out his hand to help her over it, then Dani. The pool had been drained, and the bright blue surface was flecked with weeds and old leaves.
It was like a pure sculpture of sky, nearly the same color, its stunning emptiness useless in a way that made you look at it more closely. They sat at the edge of the deep end, dangled their legs. Across from them, on a wooden bench, someone had spray-painted a row of fluorescent orange lines like little fires. Just beyond, the sun and tree shade dappled the green of the old tennis courts.
“I know it’s weird to say, but it’s kind of peaceful here.” Dani shook out her hair and swung her feet, as if to take in some luxury.
“They left the ladders,” said Willa. “We could climb down there. But it might not seem as nice.” At the bottom of the chlorine-blue cement, circling one of the drains, a broken strand of red beads and a jade fragment of glass.
“You heard about the painted-over mustang, right?” said Dex. With his loose T-shirt and hairless face, he seemed too skinny and shy to let him get any closer.
“Yeah.” Sometimes, in the way he waited for her to speak, in the way his eyes searched her face, she suspected he was confusing pity with a crush.
“Hey, can you give us a minute?” Dani said to Dex. “No offense.” She winked. “Just girl talk.”
He stood up. “Sure thing.” He walked over to the other side of the pool, crept out on the diving board, pulling his legs and butt along to the end of it.
“So, I’ve been thinking about everything,” said Dani.
“About what?”
Dani sucked on the end of her cigarette, sighed out the smoke. “You know.” She paused. “You have to go to the police. I think I can figure out how to hypnotize you so you can remember.”
In the red spray-painted side of the pool, she could make out the letters J and M. Bird poop slung like paint over the exclamation point. “They won’t believe me. I waited too long.”
“You could still make a report. At least.
Look, who knows? Who might be next? I’ve been reading up on this, and you could hurt yourself forever if you don’t tell someone. You know it happens a lot. It happens more than you think.”
Willa had overheard her parents talking about it the other night, how Trace’s mother was dead from breast cancer, and his father wouldn’t apologize for him exactly but told her parents he was sorry for “what had befallen everyone.” They’d agreed together, some of the adults, not to report it, noting that Brad’s parents were mired in bankruptcy and divorce, and surely that had something to do with it, surely he’d influenced the others. Her dad had checked it out with someone he knew. To tell the police what she remembered would only make her have to feel it all over again, and what evidence was there? She was afraid the beasts would multiply, show up inside her shoes or hovering over people’s heads. “I can’t think about that,” Willa said. “It’s too hard for me.”
Dani pointed to Willa’s wrist. “What’s this? You ran out of paper?” Dani held Willa’s forearm and read the words that had just appeared that morning. Our unfurnished eyes wait. “Is that a tattoo?”
Willa pulled away. “You can see that?” She’d thought they were visible only to her, that others could see just the rash.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s just a line from a poem. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.” Every few days she woke up with new words scrawled on her forearm or wrist, something she’d made up, or remembered. She’d only just admitted it out loud to Lee Knowles at the Christmas party—sometimes the reason for it seemed logical—she must have been writing in the night, the way some people walked in their sleep.
Willa looked over and saw Dex leaning back on his hands, kicking his legs, his head turned away toward the abandoned, netless tennis courts.
“My parents wouldn’t let me get a tattoo anyway. Maybe someday I’ll get one.”
“It hurts like a motherf—” said Dani, pulling up her leg to examine the orange and yellow flower on her ankle. “Even this little one, I almost cried. And I thought the guy who did it was going to try to kiss me because he gave me such a discount.” She was smoking a lot now, bringing the cigarette to her mouth as soon as she exhaled. “Okay, you can come back now!” Dani shouted over to Dex. She pushed the packet of American Spirits toward Willa. “Want one?”
Willa was afraid her mother would smell it on her. “Nah.”
The sun prickled in her eyes. Over by the old tennis courts, sharp triangles danced on their corners, and the heat fell hard on her bare arms. Dex told them he’d started work as a busboy at Casa Texas, as he’d quit being the trainer for the football team. “I just realized I hate too many of those bastards.” He exchanged a glance with Dani that Willa couldn’t read.
Dani punched the end of her cigarette into the concrete lip of the pool. “Look, Willa—we have your back. We want you to make those shitheads pay.”
Willa felt something squeezing just next to her heart. It wasn’t her heart, but just next to it.
“I have to tell you something,” Dex said, poking a stick at the small blue cup at the lip of the pool, where there was a tiny dead brown frog floating. He didn’t look up, but kept tapping at the cup. “I was there that day at the Lawbournes’. I swear I didn’t know what they were doing . . .”
She began to shiver—a sensation of ice on her neck and under her arms. She started to get up, but Dani grabbed her hand, so she stood awkwardly there above them, looking down at the glossy tops of their heads.
Dex didn’t turn, but spoke into the pool. “I thought you were there with Cully, so I didn’t say anything.”
Dani looked up at her and squeezed her hand. “Dex could go with you to the police. He remembers things.”
“They put something in your drink,” he said. “I mean, I heard at the end what they were doing, but I didn’t believe it, and then I left. I feel like shit about that. But they put something in your drink. Bishop Geitner had it planned all along. He wanted to prove something.”
Willa’s heart seemed pulled by a string in the direction of the road; she took her hand away from Dani’s, and she started walking.
Dani and Dex got up and followed her. She climbed over the fence, went around the side of the country club where the wall crumbled into a disconnected toilet, past the bushes with red berries and a broken water meter. When she got to the front, the tree branches looked low and drooping, and in the grass she saw a yellow plastic bug-eyed cat, its face smeared with dirt.
Dex ran up behind her. “It’s been killing me to know all this stuff.”
She couldn’t look at him.
“Honey,” said Dani, “I want you to see your way out of this.”
She wished they’d be quiet.
“I’m going home,” Willa said.
“Listen,” said Dex. “You want to know how much I fucking hate them?” She was crying now, but there was a pressure still in her forehead that wouldn’t release. “Last night, I slashed Trace’s tires. I went to his house and cut them with a knife, and I broke the windshield. And I drove to Brad’s house, and I did the same thing to his shitty car, but keyed it along the side. He ran out but he didn’t catch me.” Beside her now, he pushed his shoulders back and clenched his teeth. “I didn’t fucking care. Let them catch me.” He bent to pick up a bottle from the street, threw it down again in a rage, shards of glass flying up beside him.
He bent to pick up another bottle at the curb, and she kept walking.
It’s not going to change anything, she was thinking, winding past the Summers’ house on St. Abbans. She could barely see where she was going. Behind her, she heard glass shatter again on the street.
The road seemed to flick up and fall down again beneath her.
“FUCK FUCK FUCK,” Dani screamed. Willa turned. Dex sprawled near the jagged pieces of glass. He started to get up and cradled his bleeding elbow in his hand, the bright red seeping through. She couldn’t help it. She turned away again and kept walking.
LEE
LEE HAD BEEN DEEP in a dream of bluebonnets and lilacs, moving and proliferating like accelerated film time, over garbage heaps, spilled gasoline, tossed-out celebrity magazines. Because she wasn’t responsible for the growing, it had made her feel almost unbearably happy. And it ran on without her, even as she woke up to the phone ringing.
“Hey, beautiful.”
It took her a few seconds to recognize his voice. “What the hell, Jack? It’s three in the morning.”
“Is it? I’ve lost track.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m just driving around—it calms me down these days. And the best thing is, in the middle of the night, there’s no traffic.”
“What does Cindy think of all this?”
“Oh, I don’t think she has any idea.”
“Surely she notices you’re not in bed.”
“Nope. She takes these pills now. Sometimes with a little wine—and she’s out. Dead to the world.”
A car horn blared in the background.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I haven’t been able to say it, but I think you know, right? They told me three years, but I don’t think they ever really know.”
She felt a fire jump in her chest. “Well.” He could still have decades to go. He could still get better.
“Remember that day she rode the neighbor’s horse? I about killed you when you told me about it, but then you used your womanly wiles, and she was good on it anyway.”
“I didn’t want her to be held back by your fears.”
“I know. I still won’t get on one after the things I’ve seen, but it was strange how it was fine, in the end, watching her. Like something outside me was protecting her.” There were shapes in the dark witnessing this, leaning forward. “I’m glad she got to do that. She loved riding that horse, didn’t she?�
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Lee squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “She did.”
“I want to see you. I want you to come up here.”
“You’re driving around drinking beer, aren’t you?”
“Does it really matter? There’s no one but me out on these roads. Hell, it used to be legal anyway.”
“God, I hope there’s no one out. Will you at least pull over for a little while?”
“Alright.” He sighed. A minute later, it was quieter. “Here I am.” Those days after the funeral, in the house, Lee walked helplessly from room to room, with nothing to do with herself. The doctor had given her pills to calm her. Every time she opened a door and Jess was not there, Lee would have a vision of her tossing a drape of hair over her shoulder, or the way her eyes lowered while she listened to music, how she talked with her hands when she was upset, as if holding out what she said as an offering.
“Jack?” He seemed so drunk he might not be able to hear. There was a way Jess smiled when he played the harmonica, as if she didn’t know whether to laugh at him or just enjoy it. “Jack?”
“Good night, then,” he said.
He hung up. She tried to call him back but he didn’t answer. She thought about calling the police to ask them to go check on him, but she didn’t want him to get arrested for a DUI on top of everything else—she finally decided he was probably telling her the truth—he was sleeping it off right there on the side of the road. That would be just like him.
BACK AT WORK, the phone rang almost immediately. A woman wanting to make an appointment for a mole check, and then a man called because he was losing his hair. “For no reason!” he shouted into the phone. “No reason at all!” Lee had to hold the earpiece away from her head. She looked up at the note pinned to the bulletin board: “Order cotton swabs.” Over the past few weeks, she had been glad for the distraction of faces printed with anxiety, irritation, or boredom, for the job of soothing. Just then, Char and Willa walked into the waiting room, and she was surprised, because she hadn’t noticed Lambert on the books. Char just waved at her as she left, leaving Willa to tell Lee she had a 4:15 appointment. “He’s running a little late, I’m afraid,” said Lee.