Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  “That’s okay,” said Willa. She went to a chair and took out a book.

  It turned out that Sue, the nurse, had to leave early. “I want to get out of here at a decent hour,” she said to Lee. “Will you take the last appointments back to the rooms?”

  “Sure.” Lee picked up the phone and talked to a drug rep and made an appointment for Doc to meet with him. She called an insurance company to ask why they hadn’t covered a lab test.

  At 5:15, Willa was the last patient, and Lee led her back to the examining room. Willa hitched herself up on the paper-covered table and rolled up her sleeve. “My mom wants the doctor to look at this.” She held out the inside of her forearm, which was raw and dark red, with dry flaking skin along the edges. It looked almost as if it had been burned.

  “Oh dear.” Lee studied the mark. She wrote “laceration or rash?” in the chart. “I’m sorry he’s late, Willa.”

  “The thing is,” she started. “I mean, that’s okay—I know I told you a while back at that Christmas party? I’ve been writing there on my arm in my sleep—I think. But my mom doesn’t know that. I mean sometimes I sort of remember the words I wrote and sometimes I’m surprised.”

  “You’re scrubbing it off?” said Lee.

  “Yeah.”

  “I understand.” With everything that had happened to Willa, Char could only address the rash. Of course. Because you could rub a cream on it, clean it up.

  “I don’t want her to know about the writing.” Willa sat with an expectant look, her young complexion perfect and pale under the harsh fluorescent lights, only a tiny red dot on one cheek, more visible because of the surrounding perfection. Her legs in dark jeans wrinkled the white paper on the examining table. How many times had Lee sat like this with Jess in a doctor’s office? The huge silence, and the tiny, bright room. The chrome and glass sterile instruments lined up on the counter nearby. Lee found herself staring at the girl’s graceful small hands, the red chipped fingernail polish. “What could it be?” asked Willa. “I mean, did I do this to myself?”

  “We’ll have to let the doctor take a look. It might be a simple allergic reaction, you know. Something with the ink. Or the soap you use?”

  “Maybe. I’ve been getting headaches and stomachaches too. Might also be from the allergy.”

  Lee had laid warm washcloths on Jess’s forehead for the pain. She’d rubbed ice on the soles of Jess’s burning feet, wanting to exchange her own body for her daughter’s. There should have been a way to do that. All that technology and they couldn’t substitute a mother’s body for her child’s—it seemed ludicrous. One time the pain was so bad Jess asked her to lie down beside her in bed so she could squeeze Lee’s arm. Jess’s grip had been so tense that it left a bruise.

  “Is it really that awful looking?” asked Willa.

  Lee realized she’d been biting down on her lip. “No, sweetheart. Probably he just needs to give you a prescription.” Willa’s face seemed to absorb all of the light in the room, air conditioner humming in the silence. She wanted to be kind to the girl beyond what would have been reasonable. She wanted to mother her. Doc’s sneakers squeaked down the hallway, and then he breezed in with his white coat and string tie, whistling. “Hello, there, ladies.”

  THAT NIGHT, as she went about making dinner, she kept thinking about Willa, how so little had been done for her, how curious it was that she’d been writing on herself, recording maybe what no one would say. And it was worrisome that she had the headaches with the rash. How many brain tumors had she recorded in Jess’s high school class alone? Three. But then again, Lee imagined cancer everywhere now, even in those who were perfectly healthy.

  As she chopped the zucchini, her anger stoked up again. The girl had not been protected. She had not been heard. As she rummaged in the back of the cabinet for the cheese grater, she came upon an old dish and pulled it out, sticky and covered in dust. It would need to be washed. It was a plate that Jess had painted decades ago, a funneling storm of colors beneath the glaze that had once been meant to be, what? a house? a tree? Holding the dish, she felt more tenderness than anger, and as she stared down at the swirling blues and purples, she thought of Char in all this, how she hated mess.

  Back in high school, she kept in her car a container for candy and a small box for emergencies that contained tissues, aspirin, Windex. She’d hated not being able to explain why her parents split, worried about the gossip, and Char had finally told her friends: “Some people just don’t match.” It had been a good enough lie when they were girls, to cover up her mom’s affair. But what happened to Char’s girl—there was no way to order it or to hide it.

  Lee ate dinner, listening to talk radio, and as she was cleaning up, washing the dishes, the heavy garlic press slipped out of her soapy hand and fell into the water, and she heard it crash on the plate. She fished around in the water, and the sharp edge cut her finger. Stunned, she held up the broken, jagged piece of ceramic as a small stream of blood dripped down her soapy hand. The piece was blue-black, ugly, and she pressed against it, weeping, not because of the cut, but for the pain inflicted upon them all. She couldn’t let go of it.

  SHE DROVE PAST THE STRIP MALL made up of fake wood houses, past the Texas Rug Company and the Children of God church built in an old Kmart, and it seemed to her she’d been timid all this time, that her talking and complaining, even her one small act of sabotage, all of it had done nothing. Of course it hadn’t made a difference. She passed the fireworks stand in Alvin. There was a neon sign of a busty woman, kicking up her legs, and next to it, a sign that said RED DAHLIA, SHOT PALM, AERIAL BARGE. How much could her best friend, Rush, have been listening? She didn’t know how Rush could stand five minutes with Avery Taft, the perfect smarminess of his manner, the way he wore his jeans with a crease down the middle of each leg, the way he squinted his eyes so no one could see what he was thinking. It made Lee wonder how well she really knew Rush, how well she even knew herself.

  She pulled over on the gravel shoulder, parked, put a scarf over her hair, tied it in the back, and put on her white plastic sunglasses, though it was cloudy. She’d read that you could get almost anything here—that the guy who owned the place had a delusion that he was some kind of soldier. She’d entered a movie and become the character she wanted to follow.

  A small explosive, maybe, a baby one. She knew men who’d used some equivalent of dynamite to clear out an old shed or a patch of trees.

  The stand was a crude wooden overhang with slanted tables full of neatly stacked tubes and boxes. A young guy with a buzz cut in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off stood behind the goods next to a metal box.

  “Are you Allen?” she asked.

  He pointed with his thumb at the shed nearby. “He’s over in there.”

  She’d walked over the pink gravel and into the film, where she’d be the actress, speak lines that had come to her as if she’d heard them before in a dream.

  When she got to the shed in the back, there was a deep groove down the middle of the door. It looked like someone had tried to break through it with a metal pole, but hadn’t quite. After she knocked, she heard him say, “Just a sec,” but it took a few minutes for him to open the door.

  “Are you Allen?” she said. “Someone from the Ammo Chat sent me.”

  “Ammo Chat?” he said, as if he’d never heard the name.

  “Yeah. I’ve got a proposition.”

  He wore a yellow bandana on his head, a dingy white T-shirt. “Come on in.” She was surprised at his friendliness. When he smiled at her, she saw that his top two teeth pointed toward each other in a V.

  “I heard I could get more here than just what you got out on the for-sale tables.”

  “Someone on Ammo Chat said that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You might do better at the gun and ammo place down the road. You got ID and everything, right?”


  She looked down at her scuffed-up boots. He was trying to see how much money he could get from her. “Not really.” There was a handmade contraption for holding a beer that hung from the ceiling, a reclining chair attached by wires to some kind of mechanical instrument in a gray box.

  “Well, then, that is a problem.” He turned to walk toward a table where there was a huge aquarium. It was filled with large, fluorescent pink rocks and strewn with dirty pieces of chicken or pork, and she could just see the sharp end of a reptilian tail in the corner, where the thing had burrowed itself.

  “I need to blow up a shed in the back. We’re making room for a pool. Can you help me out with that?”

  He appeared to be about her age, with gray, wiry hair to his shoulders and a fat, boyish face. “Well, normally, you’d need a permit for that. There are folks you can hire, you know . . . who know what they’re doing.”

  “I’ve looked into that,” she said. “But it’s so expensive. Isn’t there something else we could do? I kind of wanted to do it myself, surprise my husband, to tell you the truth. He says he won’t build a pool because it’ll be so costly just getting rid of the shed. I’d like to show him, you know? Just have him come home, and it be gone.” Against a corner wall, a pile of neatly folded dirty rags, and on another table, vials of bright blue liquid aligned next to a large plastic bucket.

  “These aren’t toys. You could hurt yourself.”

  “Really, are they any worse than those cherry ultrabombs y’all sell?”

  “Maybe you could send your husband over, and I could show him.”

  On her way to the shed, she’d glimpsed a battered-looking ATM over next to the stand. “I’ve got five hundred,” she said. The reptilian tail curled up.

  Allen sighed and shook his head. “You sure you want to do this?” He scratched at his chest, and she could see the mat of hair beneath his thin T-shirt, a big purple scar there like a misshapen watch.

  “How much will that ATM machine let me take out?” She knew it was weak not to bargain, but she didn’t care.

  He shrugged. “I don’t have anything for you.” She went out of the shed to the machine. She had to submit five different requests in order to get three hundred more dollars. She was surprised she could get that much.

  When she came back and held out the money, he was friendlier. “What’s your name?” he said, tilting his head.

  “Debbie.”

  “Will you take off your glasses? I want to see your eyes, you got such a pretty smile.”

  She wiggled her glasses up and down as she backed away from him.

  “You really want to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me half of that money, and I’ll tell you how. But you got to get your husband to help. Go look up how to do it on the Internet. Try AmmoArm dot com. The plastic one. You either have it all at home or you can get it. Follow the directions to the letter. The temperatures have to be exact.”

  She handed him the bills. “You really won’t sell me one?”

  “Really. I don’t have anything, and if I did, you know these days, that could get me in a lot of trouble. I mean, you’re not an Arab or anything, and I don’t think you’re a crackpot, but still. I’ve got to protect my business.”

  He wouldn’t have cared about his business if she’d been a man. “Alright then?” He led her out back, behind a ten-foot-tall cement barricade that went along the highway. It was loud because of the traffic, and he had to shout at her, even though he stood just a few feet away. “Awesome! Pack your fuse at six yards. I can sell you that part.” He handed her a tennis ball–sized spool of thick cord. “You should smile more. You’ve got a nice one.”

  He rubbed at the side of his neck, and she noticed grease or dirt in the wrinkles there. “Just plan it out,” he said. “And get ready to run.”

  DEX

  ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, his elbow bandaged, he’d been rehearsing what he’d say to them, even writing down an occasional word on one of his notebooks: PILLS, LOUD MUSIC, UPSTAIRS. After school, as soon as the bell rang, before he could change his mind, he got into his truck and drove to the station. He parked in the back, afraid his mother or one of her friends might see his truck there and worry.

  The entrance area was messy and busy, a lady at a desk on the phone, policemen walking in and out, signing papers, ignoring him standing there. Finally, the lady at the desk asked him what he wanted. “I want to report something,” he said.

  She clicked her tongue. “You’re going to have to give me more than that, son.”

  “Okay. I know about a crime against a girl.” He couldn’t say the word, especially not to this lady, with her broad nose and her dull green eyes. “Can I please talk to an officer?”

  She softened slightly, raked her fingers into her long black hair, and picked up the phone to talk to someone named Rob. Dex pushed his hands deep into his jeans pockets, felt for the change and folded bills in there. She hung up the phone. “Okay, let me take you back.”

  She led him into a large, loud room, where a radio blared and men shouted over it. Short partitions separated the desks. At the back, there was another door, and this was where she was taking him. The placard outside it said ROB GRACIA. She opened the door for him and said, “There you go.”

  The man sitting there motioned him inside. He had brown skin, a blocky frame, his hair so neat it looked almost fake. “What can I do for you? You said you witnessed a crime? What kind of crime?” His voice was kinder than Dex imagined it would be.

  Dex doubted that he himself had used the proper words. He thought of Willa’s face, felt Bishop’s cheek against his knuckles. His smirk pasted there right up until the last minute.

  “So a girl I know was at a party. This guy put a pill in her drink.” A bulletin board behind Mr. Gracia was covered with xeroxed notices, handwritten notes, and two grim mug shots of a man and a woman. Dex’s eye fell to a note that said “Call Dave” in red marker.

  “Where was this party?” He pulled out a pen and legal pad.

  “Lawbournes, Seventy-one Calling Creek.”

  “Who was this guy with the pills?”

  “Bishop Geitner.”

  Mr. Gracia nodded, but his face didn’t show any emotion, and this made Dex more nervous. He’d expected somehow to be encouraged, to be guided along in his narration, and he saw how that was all wrong. Mr. Gracia seemed not to care whether he told him the whole story or not.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I was there. There were a lot of guys there, and everyone at the school knows about it, pretty much, but the girl didn’t report it. Willa Lambert.” He wanted to see more reaction in the guy’s face, for God’s sake, but he seemed to be willing it to stay still. He seemed more like a paper pusher than someone who would carry a gun.

  “How do you know her?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  There was a snapshot of lightning pinned to the bulletin board, and a yellow ribbon that said THIRD. Dex felt more and more wrong in that space the more he talked, but something pushed him along, some force of motion that had been gathering, the way speed gathered in the pedals of his bike.

  “How many people were there?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen?”

  He would have thought Mr. Gracia might be shocked by this, but his face was passive, and he scratched his nose. “And where were the parents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were you drinking?”

  “I had half a beer.” Mr. Gracia raised an eyebrow, but didn’t look up from his pad.

  “What about the others?”

  “Bourbon, beer, Red Bull.”

  Dex said he wished he’d come earlier, but he hadn’t known what to do. As much as he disliked Cully, it might not have been his fault—Wi
lla had probably liked him, and it was Bishop who put the pill in her drink. Maybe Cully hadn’t known? But Bishop, Trace, and Brad—they’d planned it.

  He finished saying what he knew, and the awfulness of it still physically pained him, burned his stomach.

  “Okay, now, my question for you, Dex, is why hasn’t the girl come forward?”

  “She’s ashamed.”

  “Her parents know?”

  “I think so.”

  Mr. Gracia nodded. “So, there’s not much that we can do on our end if the girl doesn’t report it herself.”

  “She doesn’t remember it.”

  Mr. Gracia sighed and shook his head. “What was she doing over there?”

  “She didn’t know. She didn’t know what they were . . .” He thought of his mother’s chubby, disappointed face, and Layla, with her blue pom-poms. He thought of Diana, that woman he’d danced with the other night, who’d wept on his shirt and wouldn’t say why. Willa, he realized, would probably never be his girlfriend.

  “Okay, then,” Dex said, wanting to be done, afraid to say more.

  “You kids.” Mr. Gracia pinched the end of his nose, pulled at it, then shook his head. “You don’t even know what you’re doing half the time, do you?”

  A man opened the door. He was shaking his index finger at Mr. Gracia, and said loudly, “I have one word for you: Dannon!”

  Mr. Gracia looked up and grinned, held up his open hand. “Told you so, brother!” It was some kind of victory. After the man closed the door again, Mr. Gracia’s smile faded. “Alright then. Dex, are we finished here?”