Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  HAL

  AVERY TAFT’S OFFICE was hot and airless, and through the window, the sky looked pewter, solid as a plate. “Well, that’s funny,” Avery said, “because I heard again from the lady at the EPA—Atwater and your neighbor are at it again apparently, sending over new soil readings.”

  Hal’s nose and forehead started to ache. “Well, I sure am surprised to hear that. I must have sat with Lee for an hour in her living room.”

  “I’m going to see what more my lawyer can do now, I guess.”

  Hal couldn’t let it go. His heart quivered like a goddamn bird’s, singing prosperity, prosperity. “I was glad to be of help with the sale. I sure would like a chance to work with you again.”

  “There’s not much I can give right now, except to my lawyer. At this point.” There was an unfamiliar grit of aggression in his voice. “I never promised you a thing,” Avery said. “Did I?”

  “No, you sure didn’t. I grant you that.” The room went dark for a second, then flashed back to the hard, white lights.

  On the drive home, Hal felt fat and tired, passing a slow-moving metallic green car driven by a gnome in a green hat, and he sped up to meet the bridge ahead, where the trees hung over the creek. Goddamn Avery Taft. Hal was mostly annoyed that he hadn’t known from the beginning that he wouldn’t get the exclusive, pissed that he hadn’t got right enough with God to deserve it, pissed that Taft had beat him yet again, though Taft had been puny and hapless on the football field, and Hal had been the good one, the really good one, and none of that mattered anymore, though it should have, because what had made him good he still had inside of him. He knew it. Darlene knew it. God knew it. But Avery Taft didn’t, that bastard, and he’d cut him off.

  Now Cully seemed to feel he had something to prove by going to that trailer every Saturday night. Well, alright. But he was still his father.

  He passed the old fig plant, the construction crowding up the highway over near Bayside, and he saw a picture of a girl on a vodka billboard that looked like her, so he couldn’t stop thinking of Justine, the twenty-five-year-old administrative assistant they’d had at the office a couple of years before. She hadn’t been exactly beautiful, but there was an assuredness in the way she moved, a grace in her fingers when she wrote something down or handed him a check, that brought to mind visions of her touching him. There was something around her mouth too, that resembled Darlene, but Darlene in a younger, thinner state, a reality apart from her kitchen gear and nail polish smells. He had a hard time not blushing when he was around Justine because, in his mind, he’d done all kinds of things to her, and she to him, daydreams he had to hide, but he felt them glowing through his face when he looked at her, as if his skin had turned to a TV screen showing it all to her as porn.

  He tried to concentrate on his hatred and resentment of Avery, but all he could think about was Justine. Where was she now? Did she still want his advice on selling property? She had gone off to Plano to work for one of her father’s friends, as he recalled. He thought he had her cell phone number somewhere. It seemed that her smooth skin could calm him, make him feel the possibility again. He could imagine a whole new life with her if he closed one eye.

  He said a prayer. I’ve got the devil in me. Help me here, Lord. Where has your prosperity gone? Why am I so misbegotten? Why have you not held up your end of the bargain? His son out for the season, his wife annoying him, his business in shambles. He looked up through the windshield at the clouds, clotted and dull, listless up there near heaven.

  Then there was Dawn splashing into his mind soon after, naked in a blue pool. Recently he’d been so ashamed to think of her, so sorry for Darlene, but now, as he drove in his car with the coffee stain on the seat, the crack in the plastic dashboard, as the trees streaked past, he felt as if he’d deserved that affair, every minute of his hands on her skin, every time she let him come inside of her. And hadn’t he returned to Darlene, loving her even more?

  When he was driving down near the boat sheds, he called Darlene on his cell. “There’s a possum tearing up the backyard,” she yelled. “You need to come take care of it.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  There was no getting away from her—she was in one of her hopping rages, when her voice went flat and shrill like a tiny metal train track. “You get on home. There’s glass and plastic all over the place, and I hate those things—he bared his teeth, Hal. He’s liable to bite me.”

  He started driving home to her on 2351, but the car seemed to take over without him, as if it were a live thing, a mechanical horse with its own will and purpose, and it took the exit headed to Pasadena. If he was going to drink again, he was going to do it spectacularly.

  He ended up at the Ranch House Bar, a place he’d frequented in years past. It was an old-fashioned cowpoke place with a neon sign the shape of a lasso, a gold thread of lights circling the rope around the “Ranch House” letters, and plate glass windows behind which the dark bar hid a jukebox with lights shaped like strawberries. When he walked in, he recognized the bartender, whose name was Sid, though his sideburns were long now, and his gray hair had an old-fashioned curled lock in the front.

  “Hey, there.” Sid’s small blue eyes reflected nothing.

  “Remember me?”

  “I can’t say I do, but welcome back.” Behind him, the rows of bottles like jewels with labels.

  “Give me a bourbon.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, swinging around to grab a bottle.

  To Hal’s left was an enormous woman with black hairs on her chin, and to his right a dapper young man in a purple snap shirt with sunburned cheeks. He was talking to a skinny old guy with a chin that spooned under his face. “I can’t believe you don’t remember me, Sid,” said Hal, trying to get a smile out of him.

  “Sorry, y’all come in here pretty frequently, it seems like.”

  The fat lady snorted into her drink.

  “I guess so. I guess so,” said Hal, pulling the glass toward him. The flashing lights and darkness were either a kind of paradise or a kind of oblivion. He still had time to be afraid of it, to push away his drink and walk out of there. Sure, God wants the best for us, Pastor Sparks was always saying, but he gave us free will. We are not automatons. He tried to think of a prayer, but his mind went blank and fuzzy—just like the television when cable went out.

  The first sip tasted hard and metallic and fortifying in a way even as it hurt his throat. “Well, I did that,” he called out to Sid. “I might as well keep going.”

  George Jones crooned on the jukebox. An older couple wearing matching polyester Western suits was dancing the two-step in front of it.

  Sid plunged glasses into the sink behind the bar, his forearms disappearing, and the fat lady said, “One more, Bubba.”

  “You see,” said the young guy beside him. “She always understood me. That was what was so great about her. I never had to explain.”

  The boy’s candor struck him like a hammer, and he thought of Dawn. That was why he’d loved her. That was why she’d been so hard to give up. She’d understood him in a way Darlene never had.

  “She would just look at me, and she knew when I needed her, knew when to take off her clothes.” His lips were slack and wet, but the light in his eyes spilled into Hal. He finished his drink and took out his cell phone and went out to the little cement walkway to call her. Maybe she’d even talk him out of having another whiskey. Because she always understood what he was going through. She’d know what to say to get him back. He stood on the cement with his legs a little apart to steady himself. Traffic whizzed by on the road, a quick cacophony of rap music out an open window as he listened to the phone ringing.

  “Hello?” Her sweet, low-pitched voice.

  “It’s me.”

  He heard something in the background, a small motor. “What do you want?”

  “I just want to talk, baby.”
>
  “Okay, talk.”

  “This real bad thing happened with Cully.” He told her everything, the behemoths crushing his son out on the field, the Indian-given exclusive at Taft Properties, the cigarettes out by the lawn hose, and even Cully’s confession about the girl and how he’d counseled Cully not to tell anyone.

  “Are you a monster? Hal, I don’t talk to you for a year and a half, and you’re calling me to tell me this? My God, do you hear yourself? Did you ever, ever think about that little girl?” Cars sped past, the wind and exhaust of them in his face.

  “She’s hardly little.” He went back to how he pictured her, brassiere straps sliding out from her tank top, that black and blue stuff all over her eyes as if she’d been prettily hit—and wondered idly why he’d never bothered to look up her face in the church directory.

  “She’s a person, Hal, a girl person. That must be hard for you to imagine.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “Goddamn you.”

  Her cursing stung him. She had never cursed at him before. “I called you, a ‘girl person,’ because I thought you would understand what I’m going through here. I’m at a bar. A bar on this woeful highway.” A semi truck hurtled in his direction, horn blaring, but he was far away, well on the road’s shoulder, gum wrappers and an old condom mixed in with the gravel around his feet.

  She hung up.

  He looked at the pale sky, the smell of car exhaust everywhere, the rectangular grays of the Houston skyline in the distance. He’d reached the end, and God wasn’t there.

  WILLA

  WILLA SPENT SO MUCH TIME in her room, she almost didn’t see it anymore—the furniture, the arrangement of three windows, her figurines on the shelf—all blacked out by familiarity. Dog had started losing his fur, at first just in mangy patches, and then nearly all of it, so the pink skin was bare and wrinkled, and he looked like a large piglet. One of Dog’s faces was Junior’s face again, watching her, the eyes red and turned down, full of pity and pain. All the other eyes on Dog’s body overflowed with water, leaking into the few spots of black fur, which stood up in pointed tufts. Dog had made it clear, not unkindly, that she should die. The question was how? She saw herself crossing the street, hit in the shoulder by a speeding delivery truck, spun up and around, hitting her head on the concrete. She imagined falling into the creek with an injured arm, drowning while the rain poured down overhead. She might contract a flu that wouldn’t leave her, a high fever and sepsis, so that her organs shut down one by one, every last one of the doctor’s attempts to save her, failing.

  She’d heard her parents talking that night about how Lee Knowles’s daughter had died, just six months after her diagnosis. They’d thought at first it was just a bad sore throat. She’d died when she was only sixteen, the age Willa would be in June. When you got cancer, she’d heard, your complexion got very clear and white, no more acne, no more scars, just pure, luminous skin, and then it started to look transparent, as if its purpose was to let people see through it to your soul. What scared Willa was the way people lost their hair—it made their faces look so bare and vulnerable, no matter their age, like babies. Jess had lost all of her long dark curls, and she’d had to go around like those other people Willa had seen, wearing their helmets of baldness. Any worry about being pretty would have seemed a long way off to her then, across an ocean, across a continent. What must it have been like for her to know she only had so much time, to have to pretend that she was getting better when everyone knew she was not, and to feel, as close as the pillow beneath her head and the just-washed sheets against her bare legs, that she was going to die? She imagined Jess, alone in her room, eating ice cream and listening to music, reading notes from her friends who missed her at school. She would chew the bits of chocolate in the ice cream, try to focus on some gift her mother had given her a long time ago—a stuffed animal with button eyes. The toy could take her far back into the past, and maybe that distance she covered in memory could comfort her, because if she couldn’t move forward in time, she could always move backward.

  Willa tried to interpret the Dickinson poem.

  On every shoulder that she met—

  Then both her Hands of Haze

  Put up—to hide her parting Grace

  From our unfitted eyes.

  My loss, by sickness—Was it Loss?

  She was trying to write her analysis of the poem when she first heard her dad come home and the TV downstairs switched on.

  Or that Ethereal Gain

  One earns by measuring the Grave—

  Then—measuring the Sun—

  Jana ran into her room, wearing a rainbow-striped T-shirt and a purple satin tutu. “Where’s my brush? I know you took it!”

  “I did not take your brush.”

  “Yes, you did.” Jana lifted the pillow off Willa’s bed and looked under it. She had a wild horn cowlick on her forehead. Jana went to the dresser, scanned her hand over the surface. “You always take my things.”

  “I do not.”

  Outside, there was the crunching sound of a car’s tires over stones in the driveway. “Who’s that?” Jana said, running to the window. “Wow! It’s the police. Are we in trouble?”

  Willa went to the window behind her, and saw a man and a woman in uniform get out of the squad car. “Their lights aren’t on.” Willa felt a violent sadness fall from her chest to her stomach, a heavier gravity. The doorbell rang.

  Jana ran downstairs. She would want to watch the action, whatever it was. Willa decided to stay upstairs until they made her come down.

  “What does she want?” said Lamb, in that creepy voice he didn’t always use.

  “The stars will rain like hail,” said Dog.

  A minute later, her mother knocked softly at her door. “Willa, honey, you need to come down. We’re all in the living room. I’ve sent Jana to her bedroom.” She paused. “You come on down when you’re ready.”

  Willa looked at herself in the mirror, at the yellow smudges beneath her eyes, the blank roundness of her cheeks, the faint red marks around her nostrils. She smoothed her hair, pressed the pads of her fingers against her cheekbones until she felt their familiar shape. She did not look like herself.

  When she came downstairs, she saw her parents in the bright green living room, her father gripping the arms of his easy chair, sitting very straight, her mother holding her hands in a little cage in front of her. The police, in their dark uniforms, sat awkwardly across from them.

  “Come on in,” said the woman officer, rubbing at her black pants. “We just need to talk a little bit. Would that be okay?”

  Her father’s knuckles looked huge against the armrests, his face smaller somehow, drawn up. “The question is whether we make a report.”

  “It’s awkward,” said the policeman. “My name is Robert Gracia, by the way.” His smile was gapped, with very white square teeth against his brown skin. “But someone filed a report. They said they were at a party where someone put a pill into your drink, and that’s a crime.”

  “If you decide to tell us what you remember,” said the woman gently, “we can go forward.”

  Willa sat down on the couch next to her mother, but kept her eyes on the policeman’s large face. “We don’t want this out,” said her father. “It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to us.”

  Her poor dad. He didn’t know how many people already knew. Willa heard her voice like she was listening to someone speak on the radio. “I don’t remember it, but it wasn’t my fault, I can tell you that. I was just supposed to go out to lunch with a friend.”

  The man took out a pad of paper. “Who was that?”

  Willa glanced at her mother, and her mother nodded. “Cully.”

  The man wrote something down. “Cully who?”

  “Stop talking to them,” said her father. “They can’t help us. That’s all you have to say. An
y more than that’s not going to do us any good.”

  “Actually, we can try—” said the woman.

  “Really? That’s interesting,” he said. “Because you know what will happen to this family if you try? Our daughter will be dragged through it again, and in the end, it will just be her word against theirs. What’s the try in that?”

  “Mr. Lambert, if your daughter was the victim of a crime—” said the man.

  “She told you already she doesn’t remember—tell me what good that will do her?” He was moving his chin in a strange way, as if it wasn’t quite connected to his face.

  Her mother’s face was very red, her teeth clenched. “We just want to protect our girl. That’s what we want.”

  Willa felt a strange pain in her knees, as if they’d been twisted in order to pull them up from her bones. She should never have been so vain as to believe Cully Holbrook liked her. It seemed inconceivable now that it had ever mattered. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  The female officer looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Willa.”

  The policeman looked panicked, and half stood from his seat. “Well, without a report there’s not much more we can do. I just want y’all to understand that.”

  “I’ll go back upstairs,” said Willa, in the same disjointed voice she’d used before.

  “Has she seen a counselor?” she heard the woman officer say.

  “Yes, she’s seen the pastor of our church,” said Willa’s mother. “It’s really helped.”

  “Is there anything else you want to report?” said the man. “Just understand. We have to follow up. It’s our obligation. We have to make you . . .”

  And Willa closed the door to her room, so that all she could hear were muffled noises. When the police finally left, it was just beginning to get dark. When her dad came up to call her to dinner, she told him she wasn’t hungry, and he left her alone to the star-patterned quilt, the book splayed open on the pillow.