by Rene Steinke
Wood planks lay in giant bonfires, but the sky was still black, unflinched. There was a metallic smell in the smoke. The wing flap in her chest was sinking fast now, something dead in her. The large eave of the second house fell from the top of the pile.
She crept back to survey the damage, so she would know what they would find in the morning, and when she got close, the flickering light caught on a face in the grass. She wasn’t sure. A paleness, a shape. She walked closer, shone her red beam down on the body of a young man, his mouth in a grimace. He had wide, muscled shoulders, and his arm was bleeding through his plaid shirt, but he started to stand up, leaning on the other arm, his face so bloody she couldn’t see his eyes. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” He was in shock. A roll of copper wire lay overturned next to him, gleaming in the shrub.
Somehow she remembered the questions she should ask. “What day is it?”
He stared at her. She was still wearing her mask, and she felt the nakedness of her eyes. “Saturday.” He slurred his s.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” She made a peace sign. The flames might spread toward them.
“Two.”
“What is your name?”
“Cully Holbrook.”
Through the fires all around, out of the past, the name crept back to her. It couldn’t be. There had to be a million of them.
“You aren’t Hal’s son?”
He rubbed at his bleeding face. “You know him?”
The boy’s eyes rolled back in his head, then returned. He could have died. He might still. “Don’t try to move.”
He was already standing up, stumbling. She went to grab his arms so he’d lean on her, and this way, he could walk. They made their way slowly, chased by the heat in the air. “I’m okay,” he kept saying, his face covered in blood.
He was moving, stumbling, but she was relieved that he could walk if he leaned on her. She walked with his weight on her.
After what seemed like a long time, they got to the fence. He said, “Here.” He took out keys, and handed them to her, and she unlocked the gate. Somehow she got him to her car, though he was taller than she was, and heavy, and still in shock. She wondered if he would even remember her voice or what he’d seen other than her mask.
She started the engine and drove quietly and quickly down the back road. What felt like a hard packet of salt pounded outside of her chest.
The boy sat with his head resting against the window in the car, and blood ran down the side of his face from a cut at his temple. “Don’t go to sleep,” she told him, afraid he might go into a coma. “Stay awake.” As she turned the car, his head knocked against the window. “Stay awake. Stay awake.” She started singing the song her dad had sung on longer car trips to keep himself from drifting off.
The night highway was nearly empty, which seemed unbelievably kind, given the shakiness of her driving. She could barely see the lines or read the signs. She took the Pearland exit and went down a road of strip malls toward the hospital. She would say they’d been in an accident. She would say they’d witnessed an explosion. None of that mattered really. He was breathing heavily, but the blood was mostly on his face and his arm. She didn’t see any bone, though he held his arm at an impossible angle, twisted away from him, as if to pull it off. She hoped there wasn’t some secret injury from the impact—something ruptured or torn.
She nearly hit a car passing in the wrong lane, and the honking roused him. “Huh?”
She took off her mask, her face cool and light, and the mobility of her chin felt strange. “I’ll get you to the emergency room soon. Just a few more minutes. Can you talk?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you see?”
“Kind of.” He slumped farther down in his seat, and she thought she heard him crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault,” he said. “God! I saw this coming. This is my fucking punishment!”
“What are you saying?” She just wanted to keep him awake.
The hospital, unstately and brown, was easy to miss, but she spotted the lit red sign for the ER, and swerved the car into the turnaround. She had not been back since Jess’s last high fever, two weeks before she’d died.
She parked, pulled the socks off her shoes, got out, and opened the passenger side door to help him.
When he stood up, she saw the deep gashes under his eye as he looked at her for the first time. He nodded as he began to walk, surprisingly stately as he headed for the door. She followed, and he turned to her. “I got it.” He flicked his hand at her shoulder. “You can go.”
“I need to make sure you’re alright.”
He seemed too weak and stunned to protest. She helped him inside the violently white room, accompanied him to the desk and signed him in. “He’s been in an accident. He needs to be seen,” she said.
The woman at the desk was unsurprised, frowsy haired, in floral scrubs. Her large, pale eyes were heavily made-up, black insect wings blinking slowly. “I guess bring him on over here, and let’s have a look.”
Lee started to go with him through the swinging doors to the back, and he shook her off. “I said I got it!”
“I need to make sure.”
“No, lady. You don’t get it.” His eyes widened, and they were clear in the midst of all the dried blood. “Just get out of here. I don’t want you here with me. It was supposed to happen like this.”
The lights seemed hot, and a drunk was snoring loudly on one of the waiting room chairs. “I mean it!” Just as the door swung open, he shoved her away. “I fucking hated him too. I’m alright.” He turned away from her, said to the short and moon-faced nurse, “Where do I go?”
Lee walked past the desk, past the wan, hollow-cheeked mother who hovered over her crying toddler boy, smoothing his sweaty hair, past the purple-faced drunk who sat staring at the road sign in his lap. She walked out the glass door and got into her waiting car.
She drove by habit down 2351, the road unrelenting, black and straight, and she hardly noticed where she was until she came to Main Street. The sobs were caught in her throat and wouldn’t escape. She’d done what she had to do, and now there was nothing but to wait for what was to come.
She passed easily through the empty intersection, past the Kroger parking lot, dark except for its sign like a cereal box logo, past the store with a neon sign the shape of a cowboy boot, past the bank, where the black letters on lit-up white said GO MUSTANGS! Though football season was long over, there were silhouettes of blue horses on stakes planted in the yards of businesses and homes. She counted five before she came to the Quaker church, two more when she passed the library, five more as she passed the junior high school, and as she rounded the corner where the tiny, white flimsy house stood, she saw the horse’s blue, galloping legs, frozen in wood, and felt she was running along with it.
At home, she called the hospital, pretending to be Cully’s aunt, and asked how he was. He hadn’t been admitted, and when she called again at 5:00 a.m., he still was not a patient, and she guessed that meant he’d gone home. Okay. That was it.
The past ten years had been speeding to this point in time, to the tenuous assembly of bombs to the shattering of wood and cement, to the flames, the dread, and the angry, injured, bloody face of the boy. He would tell his father and mother what happened, and then what? She poured a glass of bourbon and drank it, sitting on the floor by her bed. Even here, in the dark, things seemed to be moving that she couldn’t see. Outside the house, so much she could not control. Her body trembled. She’d held on for so long, but she could no longer bear Jess’s death. Back in Banes Field, in the grass and the flames, it had broken her apart, and she knew now that she’d wanted it to break her.
HAL
HAL MOWED THE LAWN; he showed a house on Pine Hurst to a young couple; he watched TV with Darlen
e; he didn’t drink. He’d felt that something needed to be said for days, but he didn’t know what to say or to whom. Then the call came from the hospital. When he and Darlene met Cully in the emergency room, his son’s face all cut up, blood on his shirt, his sprained arm in a sling, Hal put his arms around him and said he was sorry. That was the message God had been trying to get out of him.
The boy seemed still dazed, but he told them everything, propped up on pillows in the small bed where they kept him until they finished the tests. Cully had heard something, seen the explosion while on his rounds, and it had knocked him out for a while. He’d seen a group of men leaving the site, running to the hurricane fence with backpacks, three or four men wearing hoods and caps. Somehow he’d got himself to the road and a woman picked him up and drove him to the hospital.
“She just left you there?” Darlene said, her arm around his shoulder. “My God, she didn’t even call us?”
Cully shrugged, smiled a little. “I told her I’d called you already. She could see I was basically okay.”
“Well, thank God she found you.” Darlene wiped at the blood on his shirt.
Hal felt his voice turn thick in his throat. “I’m sorry I even sent you there to Avery.”
“Dad, I’m okay.”
“Well, you’re certainly not going back,” Darlene said.
“No, I don’t guess I will,” Cully said. “Do you think they’ll let me out of here yet?”
On the way home, in the car, they heard a late round of sirens, and saw the smoke rising from the direction of Banes Field, a shimmering gray screen unscrolling upward. There would be hell to pay for someone.
Cully had been too much in shock to talk about the lady who had picked him up on the side of the road. She’d waited to see if he was okay before she left, but unbelievably, she left the hospital without calling anyone. She was on a nightshift, he’d said, she’d had to go. What kind of woman was that? Surely not a mother. Still, if she hadn’t found Cully he might have lain there, bleeding, for hours. Hal didn’t like to think of it.
THE NEXT DAY, there was a rotten, burned smell in the air, even as far away as Hal’s house. Avery called. “I’m not saying Cully knew who did it.”
“Hold on right there.” Hal suddenly had all this extra saliva in his mouth, and he spit into his coffee cup.
“I’d just like to talk to him, hear what he might have seen.” Avery said he didn’t get how anyone could sleep through that racket, and Hal said, “He didn’t. He was on his rounds like he was supposed to be. And then he was knocked out.”
Avery wasn’t even logical. It made Hal want to kill him.
“Well, alright,” said Avery. “I don’t want to place any blame on the boy, for sure. But the inspectors might need to ask Cully some questions.”
“Well, I’ve had about enough of that,” Hal said. “He told you last night. He saw three or four of them running away—he told you. It was the middle of the night, goddamnit. He’s a seventeen-year-old boy,” said Hal, and he hung up.
He hadn’t spoken to Avery again since, though Avery had called several times. He let Cully give reports to the police, and the inspectors would just have to look at those. Hal was done with Avery, and now that the gases had come up from the soil, Hal didn’t want to sell homes over there anyway. The smell alone closer to the building site was implacable, bitter and cheesy, and the truth was Avery was in deep trouble. Just yesterday, The Friendswood Dispatch ran a story heavy on quotes from José, who, once he was away and safe at his new bank job, went straight to whoever would listen with his story—he’d seen black tars and pools of green brackish oil near the construction—it had given him breathing problems. “I reported everything to Avery Taft, and he said those were all normal things at a building site. He told me to just take a day off and get better.” José said he’d been asked to hire a crew to bury a huge plastic box—they were told it was debris from Rosemont—but later, he’d learned, it was really a container of poisonous chemicals. José had written a log; he had photographs. For a while, Avery was going to have a hard time selling anything. Maybe even the houses on the clean land. Hal almost felt sorry for him, and he’d included him in his prayers.
HAL INTENDED TO BE CONTRITE and sober from here on out. He stirred the chili powder into the steaming pot of tomato sauce, meat, and whole beans. He’d been forgiven. Lately, Darlene watched him warily, as if he might collapse, and Cully stuck nearby, washing his truck watching the game on TV, though there was a new sharpness in him that Hal supposed had to do with maturing. He spooned up a bit of the chili and tasted it. It needed salt and more onions, and he’d need to let it simmer for a few hours before it was really good.
He went to the chopping board, took the half onion and their best knife, and went at it. He put a piece of bread in his mouth to keep his eyes from watering, but he felt the sting in his nose. Cully was changed since his injuries, more homebound, more liable to make conversation, and thank God he’d just had some cuts that needed stitches, a sprained arm, and a mild concussion.
The onions were tiny, clear and pale now, and he swiped them into his palm and dropped them into the pot, wiped his fragrant hand on the dishrag. After he’d scared the hell out of himself that night at Casa Texas, after he’d lost himself in drink, right there in front of Cully, he’d slept on the couch in the living room, Darlene not wanting him in their bed. He’d woken up the next morning and prayed. He couldn’t ask for prosperity because he didn’t deserve it. But he asked for one more chance. Just one more chance. And he asked to believe. He’d been sitting near the window with his hands clasped and his eyes closed, and into the prayer, he heard kids outside playing tag—“Get me! Get me!”—and the jetting stream of a sprinkler. He opened his eyes, and outside the window, the tree swayed, a squirrel hopped down a branch, its tail a fat gray brush; and he looked at the creature’s flat eyes, and the squirrel looked back at him, both of them alike: creatures. Over the salty fatigue and feverishness of his hangover, he’d felt uncovered and boundless, and (unbelievably) good. He hadn’t had a drink since that moment.
THE DAY AFTER THE EXPLOSIONS, the students at San Amaro College nearby started to get rashes, and some of them had coughs and went to the emergency room. Hal was pretty sure it was a few of them who’d set off the bombs, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The college would have to be shut down for at least a month, and the college president had called for an investigation into Taft Properties, to find out when and if Avery Taft had known that the land he was building on still contained dangerous oil residues.
The story had made the local Houston TV news. People who’d once lived in Rosemont came out of the woodwork and stepped up to be interviewed. “My husband died of bladder cancer a year after we moved away.” “My wife has struggled with liver problems for these past ten years, and it started when we lived over there.” “I had a baby, and she died.” Some people worried that Taft’s building so close to Rosemont tainted the Friendswood housing stock too—though Banes Field was way over at the edge of town. But that worry would all blow over in a few months, Hal knew.
Lee Knowles was curiously silent and absent from the reporting, and he wondered about that. Darlene asked him if he thought she might have had anything to do with the bombs, and he considered it for a moment, picturing her stern, blue-eyed face. “No. She’s a lady. She had a lot of fire in her, maybe, but I don’t see her buying ammunition.”
“She could have hired those guys Cully saw.”
“Yeah, but she seemed pretty beaten down the last time I talked to her. And, believe you me, Avery would have sent his police dogs over there—if they had any inkling, we’d know by now. But I’ll tell you what, the way she liked to go on about things, I would have thought she’d be telling everyone, ‘I told you so’ by now,” said Hal.
“If she had anything to do with hurting my boy—” Darlene shook her head.
“Look
, it’s over now.” Hal put his arm around her.
Her voice was small and choked against his armpit. “He could have died.”
“But he didn’t.” Hal patted her back. “We’re all still here.”
THE HOME WAS NICER than he remembered, wooden pillars, wide shutters. It was an authentic old Texas country house, and they hadn’t changed it to look different on the outside, even if the inside contained those small dormlike rooms with chrome railings everywhere. The railings bothered him. As if they predicted that someone was always about to fall.
She was wearing a blue dress, her hair made neat for them into a bun at the back. She didn’t look frowsy and loose faced like the women who sat around her in the visiting area, and she was one of the only ones not in a wheelchair.
“Hal,” she said, holding her hand up to him. “And my grandson.” Hal hugged her, and then Cully hugged her. They sat across from her on worn upholstered chairs. It seemed the droop on the side of her face was slightly righting itself.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “Oh, I’ve got Scrabble here and the knitting club, and once in a while some professor comes over and tries to teach us something. I’ve learned all about the planets and the history of Texas, for sure. I can tell you all about it, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston. It’s like they want me to get my college degree now, in the old folks’ home, so I can finally make something of myself!”
“Grandma, all that learnin’!” Cully rubbed at the knees of his jeans, hooked his feet behind the legs of his chair. Hal loved his son. He could not have come here without him. Why not? Why was it so hard for him to come here for an hour or two and sit with his own mother?