Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  LEE

  SHE WOKE UP ON FRIDAY, got out of bed, and went to the window, where she looked down at her street, at the neighbor’s station wagon, its windshield strung with fallen Spanish moss, and the green yard bisected by the winding stone path. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat out in the yard, listening to Patsy Cline, that full, double-sided voice, the words sorrowful, but matter-of-fact, her neighbor Mike Bergen over in his yard, sweeping leaves off the black bed of the trampoline.

  She remembered the time Jess had found Lee’s old aqua prom dress and put it on. She was still little then, and the loose satin crumpled against her tiny frame, as she walked around the house saying, “I’m the mother queen,” and when she got to the top story, she opened one of the windows and shouted it out toward Banes Field. “I am a queen!” And Lee let her scream for ten minutes before she felt she had to say, “Hush, you’re bothering the neighbors.”

  Later, in her kitchen, she poured a gallon of bleach into a pot over the potassium chloride and turned on the stove, her nose stinging from the sharp odor. After a few moments, she held the tong of the hydrometer in the liquid and watched the red light move to “full charge.” She put the pot in the refrigerator, so that the crystals would form, and she sat in front of the TV, not really watching the news footage passing over empty fields, a politician’s simian face, then the camera cut to a woman in a sequined minidress with the face of a panther.

  When the alarm clock went off, she opened the refrigerator and saw that the crystals had formed at the bottom, small white teeth, glinting unevenly. She used a spoon to scoop the Vaseline from two large tubs into another glass pot. Then she dropped the shavings of old candles into the goo, and melted the two together. When the Vaseline and wax had cooled, she added the gasoline and kneaded the mess with the crystals. She pushed the substance, slimy and white, into two empty plastic boxes.

  “Place in a cool, dry place,” the instructions said. She put the two small waxy packets near the cooler in the garage, knowing she wouldn’t be able to relax as long as they were there. What was she doing?

  Her thoughts stuttered and grated on her, wheels on a track that somehow couldn’t get traction in the right direction. She was doing what she had to do. All night, she drank water, paced in front of the windows, rehearsed. The gloves, the socks over the shoes, the way through the gate, the string of fuse to the wax rectangles. The instructions scattered in her head, then rearranged themselves, and she had to pick up each one again and hold it. At some point, she heard a bang in the garage, but then, the house was still there, everything was still there, and when she went out the door to look at them, the wax packets sat there calmly. They probably wouldn’t even work. It seemed too easy that she could make these things and they would work the way they were supposed to. After all these years, why should they?

  CULLY

  CULLY LAY in the curtained bed in the tiny back room of the trailer, on top of a worn musty blanket, knees drawn up, phone pressed to his ear. “I wish I could go, but I have this shit job,” he told Brad, who wanted him to go to some dive bar with him in Alvin where they didn’t card.

  “Can’t you blow it off? What are you, the security guard? It’s not like anything’s going to happen if you leave.”

  José had warned him off guys like Brad, who tried to use meanness as a masquerade for manliness. José had called earlier from his rented U-Haul truck to say good-bye to him, his terrible hacking cough like a motor trying to start in his throat. “Now, you stay away from the crazies,” he said. He was on his way to a job in El Paso.

  “Alright, then, Cully son, I’ll get Lawbourne to go with me. You have fun out there with your dirt.” Brad hung up.

  He was trying to escape without their noticing, but Cully didn’t want to hang out with Brad and Bishop anymore. In the trailer, he could drink beer all night if he wanted to. He could watch TV and eat potato chips and get paid for it. He’d got bored by Brad’s bullying; and the time he’d taken one of the pills Bishop offered, he’d felt like his head had lifted off his body, spinning like a pumpkin, somewhere apart from him. It wasn’t anything personal really. But with them, there would be more accidental fuckups like the one with Willa Lambert, which still clawed at him, the way her face looked when she’d passed out in that bed. He still had no idea what exactly Bishop put in her drink. And there was no one to tell that to.

  Cully went to the miniature kitchen, which he got a kick out of—the tiny stove, a refrigerator the size of a doghouse. He made himself a turkey sandwich on whole wheat and put on his music. It was a CD he’d found at a garage sale, and he’d never heard of the band, but he’d liked the cover art, a gun growing out of a skull. “My prophecy is spelled in bones, / The world breaks apart, and blades make it whole.”

  His dad wanted him to pray more, but fuck that, he didn’t get from prayer whatever his dad did. He wished he did. He wished there were a remedy for the damp pain he got in the pit of his stomach ever since that day with Willa. He’d been so drunk he’d blacked out, and his consciousness had only flickered on again when he was already fucking Willa, who was asleep, and he’d pulled out right away, his dick wilting in the open air. He’d had sex with two other girls previously, but they’d been willing, very willing. He hadn’t needed to trick Willa and hadn’t intended to; he hadn’t even been quite sure how he’d got there (only later Bishop told him how, powered by whiskey, he’d lured her upstairs to watch TV, how he had his hands all over her on the way up the stairs, but Cully didn’t remember any of it, and as Bishop retold the story, it felt eerily as if he had been a puppet master, moving people along for his entertainment).

  He’d thought at first that if he could only work hard enough, he’d start playing football the way he used to. If he pushed it, ran enough miles, maybe carried the ball everywhere, he’d stop feeling bad. But the blackness had infected his game. And now he didn’t give a shit about football.

  Somehow, it killed him that she slept with her mouth open, her long black eyelashes pressed to her cheek. “Your pain calls birth an affliction, and the number is marked on your brow.”

  The sandwich was salty and satisfying. He took a Lone Star beer out of the minifridge and sat at the long, sliding window, looking out. There was a sight line from just outside the trailer all the way to the warehouse on this side. On the other, he could barely make out the skeletal outlines of the houses. He didn’t care anymore about doing a good job, either, keeping watch. Once Avery had come over to the trailer on a Saturday night and brought Cully a plateful of brisket and pickles. “Thought you might be hungry.” He was grinning and strutting as he approached the trailer. He ate with Cully at the miniature table and rubbed his chin. “Don’t ever take it for granted, what you have, son. You just don’t know when it could be gone. Don’t ever think it’ll be yours forever.”

  Goddamn easy things to say when you were richer than God. Cully didn’t feel like drawing him out, letting the man give him more of his fake wise advice, like a Texan Yoda. “Yes, sir.”

  “You work hard for things and then you might get them, but you don’t ever take it for granted. That’s my secret, if you want to know.” Avery winked. “Look at what happened back in September with the hurricane. Those people who lost their homes.”

  But if they’d appreciated their homes, they’d still have lost them in the end, so what did it matter? “Yes, sir,” Cully said.

  Avery’s face was serious, but there was bluster in his mouth, as if he might burst out laughing any minute. “I knew there was something real smart in you and now you’ve confirmed it.” He stood up. “You’re a good man,” he said, and he slapped Cully on the back as he left. As if that sealed it. The guy was an asshole.

  Nothing ever happened out there, but Avery Taft believed someone had sabotaged the bulldozer months ago, and Cully had been there when Avery ripped José a new one. “Under your watch!” Avery shook his finger at this man—easily fifteen ye
ars his senior and more honorable than Avery ever would be. A veteran. A man who told stories that held lessons, a man who stopped by every Saturday night to give Cully one of his wife’s cinnamon cakes and some coffee. Avery had walked away in his tight jeans and his too perfect shiny boots. He always held his head back and snorted before he spoke, and he held his eyes either in narrow, suspicious slits or in lazy, heavy-lidded boredom. Cully had tried to tell his mom about it once, started in on his imitation of Avery’s drawl, but she waved her arm at him and said, “Hold it right there, mister. You respect people. That man gave you a job. He may be your father’s partner one day.” It was sick, it was so obvious that Avery believed he knew better than anyone else—and that was why Cully stole the copper wire and pipes from him.

  After the bulldozer incident, one night when José brought the cinnamon cake and coffee, Cully mentioned that it would be easy enough to “lose” one of the spools, and José said, shaking his head, laughing, “No, man. Some guy tried to get me to do that a couple years back. Has a warehouse in Texas City—sourcing from all these constructions sites.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Cully said.

  “Yes, you are. You’re a good kid.”

  “The way he talks to you? Don’t you deserve something for putting up with it?”

  “No, no. Not my way.”

  “You’re too honest, that’s why.”

  The cinnamon cake was still hot, moist in his mouth. José wore a battered sailor’s cap, pulled it low over his eyes. There was a jagged pink scar on his cheek that made him look like a badass, though he wasn’t at all.

  José clicked his tongue. “But I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you where the warehouse was.”

  The place was over in Texas City next to a way station. Cully drove the wire and pipes over in his truck and sold it to a guy with a red Mohawk in a dirty corduroy jacket. He’d smelled for some reason, like bananas. The guy gave him a stack of strangely crumpled hundred-dollar bills that didn’t seem real but were. Though José protested, Cully gave him half.

  Cully turned on the TV and watched a little bit of a preseason baseball game. Soon it would be time to go on his rounds. He watched the white ball arc against the green, the left fielder moving back to the fence, catching it in the pocket of his glove. The fans were stomping in the bleachers. A man had painted his face green and wore an alligator-jaw hat.

  He finished his beer, turned off the TV, took his flashlight, and went out. The land seemed more like country in the dark, not as gnarly as it looked in daylight. They’d have to do landscaping to make it look livable, even decent. He walked over the rutted dirt, headed toward the warehouse, with its single overhead light, crickets humming in and out. He slapped a mosquito off his arm.

  The moon was a crescent tonight, hanging like a hook. He’d picked up the CD at a neighbor’s garage sale for twenty-five cents, the plastic cover all scratched and smudged, and he’d listened to this: “What is evil but good pained by its own hunger and thirst? Truth finds bread even in the desert, even in desert.” He’d known better than to take Willa to the Lawbournes’ house. He’d known by the way she looked at him that she hadn’t done much before with any other guy, and he’d liked that, her perfect trusting face, how its look made him feel a power over her—as if he were fire or a gun. After it all happened, he wanted to apologize, but he didn’t know how—she was different, smeared, blurrier. And anyway, it would have always already happened to her. One of those things.

  He circled the building site, made his way up to the slope toward the hurricane fence. José always liked to go around this way, by the gully. He was almost back to the trailer when he saw, way off, near the first shell of house, a ghostly funnel of light, which went out as soon as he saw it. He heard, maybe, branches breaking, and started to walk in that direction.

  LEE

  IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT when she left the house, a square of blue light across the street two houses down; a car coming back late pulled into a driveway at the corner; and she stepped behind the trees, the heavy canvas bag strapped to her shoulder. She felt elongated in her spine, and full of nerves, as if more of them were growing just under her skin.

  At this hour, the traffic was light. A semi truck lumbered and groaned, passing in the next lane, and the speed of it shook the frame of her car, the bright headlights briefly lit up the interior, then darkened. Ahead, the gray and looming overpass looked nearly ancient, monumental, its plain thick arch over the flat landscape. She concentrated on the highway lights until she turned off at the exit.

  At the gravel road, she parked at a tilt in a shallow ditch. An accident or sabotage. Let people wonder. In her black ski mask, black shirt, black pants, black socks over her flat shoes, she was a moving part of darkness. Her steps made crunching sounds on the gravel, the taste of old coffee in her mouth, and the wool tight against her face.

  When she came to the entrance in the fence, she saw it was locked more tightly than usual, and there wasn’t even wiggle room for her frame. She’d have to climb it. She leveraged her foot up on the locked chain and pulled herself up, clutching the crowned wires. At the top she pushed her leg over, felt the metal prongs scrape against her torso and chest, swung herself over and let go, landing with a loud thump that rang painfully in the soles of her feet. Through the eyeholes in the mask, she felt the hot breeze.

  She headed in the direction of the trailer she’d seen the last time, past the large trees and toward the warehouse, though she could barely see the outlines in the dark. She wouldn’t hurt anyone. She didn’t have that in her. The trailer seemed far enough away from the skeletons of houses, but still. She walked toward it, and didn’t see any lights.

  When she got to the trailer, she walked around its perimeter, dry grass shushing around her sock-covered shoes. She knocked on the door. She knocked again and yelled, “Hello in there!”

  The sound of her voice seemed to turn around and yell back at her. No one there.

  The darkness softened, turned felted and warm, all the ugliness hidden under the bowl of star-flecked sky, the slopes of trees in the distance. This was just where Jess had ridden that black horse, that day Jack was afraid and Jess had shown off for the neighbors, so agile and capable.

  She could still turn and go back. She could try again to let this all go, to let people take their chances, as they seemed to want to do. But something like breath hovered around her, a new coolness that had not been there earlier. The day Jess died, as Lee pressed ice against the soles of her daughter’s feet, she’d felt Jess’s body shrink away from her, Jess’s face turned to the pillow, as she murmured in her sleep. Watching her, Lee felt the part of her daughter that wasn’t flesh, what was beyond Jess’s tiny, wasted legs and her altered, bony face—this invisibleness more real and alive than anything else. She’d even reached out her hand to it. Now that same cool pressure came up, insistent against the wool of her mask.

  Using her red-beamed flashlight occasionally to find her footing, Lee navigated in the dark to the house skeletons, just over the ridge. She stopped near a lone tree, propped her canvas bag at her feet, wiped the sweat from her neck. Ahead of her, she could just make out the spine of the bulldozer, the etched outlines of the house frames.

  She picked up her bag and kept walking, her vision on these targets. Nothing moved in them. They just enlarged themselves, became more detailed so she could make out the cage of boards, the cement floor, the giant coil of copper wire. She made her way to the first shell. The house would have been huge, the framework for ten or eleven rooms set into the outline of it, the sketch of it in wood. Just under the rectangle frame for the front door, she reverently arranged the waxy square, whispered under her breath, “Do it right.” She stood to run the fuse through the thick bush until she stood five yards away at the end of it, holding the cord like a leash, then setting it down against an angle of old branches. She walked through a small clearing to the other house
frame, taller, narrower, a head of wood eaving the top. She skimmed along the edge of the foundation to a spot with a stubborn impression in the cement, cradled the waxy square there, on the side closest to the other house. She strung the fuse through dry dirt, lit the end, and went to light the other fuse. Maybe the fuses were too long, and one or the other wouldn’t work. She waited until the last string was confidently burning, then turned and ran far, almost to the trees. She crouched near a wild-leaved plant.

  She tasted the wool in her mouth, the sweat under her mask. She stared out at the dark, where the frames were no longer visible. The leaves rubbed against her pants, smelling like turpentine. Something small and alive moved in the grass nearby, a bird, maybe, or a rabbit. From all around came the few sounds in the silence, the far-off whoosh of traffic, the rustle of leaves and weeds in the breeze, a bird or a bat flapping wings overhead. There were black bursts of cancer inside Jack’s lungs. She pictured them in the dark. When she listened for a second, she could hear the gallop of blood in her veins, the wrinkle of her shirt sleeves. She carried Jess with her everywhere, even here, worked to keep her alive by staying alive herself, heart thumping now under her bra, stars blinking just under her skin. All of Jess’s faces, her gestures, things she’d said, still alive inside of her. The dark space loomed between her and the house frames. She could just make out or imagine the tiny lights of the burning fuses.

  Then the ground fell up to the air, and she crashed onto her back. She quickly sat up again, saw pieces of wood and rocks fountained over the flames. Golden hair unfurled into the sky. Quills of smoke pushed up confettied debris, then faded to fainter and fainter exploded gray feathers. She didn’t know how long it took to settle.