by Rene Steinke
He made a plate of food for her, and he made a plate for himself, but she seemed to want to read rather than talk. “I can’t believe all this stuff about Avery Taft. Class-action lawsuit coming his way for sure. That man knew what was in the ground, but just went on building anyway. Tried to hide it. Can you imagine . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The smell had lingered for a few days after the Banes Field explosions, and he’d heard Cully had been scraped up pretty bad. A bitter sulfur taste, he’d thought, was caught in his throat during that whole week, but then it went away, and by now, Dex was sick of hearing about it.
“It looks like now they might dig up the field and incinerate what’s there. They’d have to evacuate that side of town for that, but I guess that’s the safe way to do it.”
“Huh.” Whatever they decided, it would take months. There wasn’t anything he or his mom could do about it; the mayor and the city would make all those calls. “We’re far enough away, right?”
“That’s what they say,” she said. “We could probably stay put or not. I’ll be glad when this business is over.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t want to talk anymore.
It was a tranquil night, a time when Dex was usually at work, and he’d missed being able to be out in the warm air, with the cricket sounds and dark. “I’m going to sit outside.”
“Okay.”
He took his food out the door and sat on the cinder block steps that led up to the trailer. The tamales were lukewarm, but maybe even more delicious that way. His dad had said something about a certain spice, what was it? A rare one mostly found in Mexico. He couldn’t remember the name of it.
He heard water running in the kitchen sink inside, a clanking of dishes. The food was warm in his belly, and the street and grass seemed lacquered with moonlight. He sat back to look up at the black sky. The Milky Way wheeled overhead, a neatly arranged arch beyond the leafy trees, all the other stars holed up in the night, not telling yet what they knew.
WILLA
SHE RAN THROUGH the foot-high grass of the old golf course, skimming along the woods, each tree as she passed it a puff of green. She was done with sitting still in her room. She felt speed back in her leg muscles, paced her stride, so she wouldn’t stop too soon, felt her breath opening up in her chest. She passed the ruined bricks at the front of the old country club, the triangular roof protecting the graffiti and absent door that led into the darkness. She passed a white-latticed gazebo and a large garage, full of golf carts with dirty, bright canopies, and she headed out into the long green of the seventh hole, where the outlines of sand traps still fell off to the side.
The sunlight was low, white and crystalline over the houses. Her face was hot and salty, her hair wet with sweat, and she stopped for a moment near a tree to get her bearings. She bent to catch her breath, bowing her head, resting her hands on her knees.
When she looked up again, there, from the lowest branch, the voices like a loud breeze. Dog. Lamb. “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.” Where had Lee Knowles’s strength come from? She had suffered so much, and she still stood upright, able to say words to Willa that meant she wasn’t a slut or stupid or a piece of skin-covered meat. But of course, the beasts already knew these things. On her right forearm, she’d written Measure the sun. She held up this forearm against the beasts.
She gazed through their shapes to the oak tree, saw how it would grow, how the leaves would bud and spread into green hands, the branches rivered into the air. She took a step back, touched her forehead, and felt a warm sting like a sunburn. A gray rabbit hopped through the dandelions, and wings flapped in the branches above her. When she looked back at the beasts, the wind had erased them.
She went on to run another mile. Rounding the corner of her street, she saw her dad outside with the topiary clippers as he worked on the hedge, which he liked to keep square, though it grew round. She stopped running at the driveway, and walked up, pinched at her sweaty shirt to pull it away from her torso.
He stood up from his work. “How far’d you go?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Three miles?”
He looked her in the face as she came toward him, and he was quiet, suppressing a smile. “Good work.” He saluted her. “Better make it four next time,” he joked. He leaned forward again to snap the clippers, and as she passed, he handed her a branch with a very small, blue flower. “It ain’t much,” he said. “But it’s what I’ve got.”
She went inside the house, ran up to the bathroom, took off her damp T-shirt and shorts, and laid them to dry on top of the hamper. Getting into the shower, she let her hands graze the tops of her thighs, which were tight again, the soles of her feet sore and tough against the cool porcelain. She lifted her face to the spray of hot water, soaped her hollowed belly, the swell of her breasts, and ran the washcloth over the words on her forearm, the skin still faintly pink and raw. She’d been taught to take a quick shower, not to hog the bathroom, but today she let herself stand under the water for a long time.
While she was getting dressed, Jana was singing along to a pop song in the other room, probably holding her hairbrush like a microphone, waving her arm overhead and swaying her hips. She was so loud sometimes you could hear her from the other side of the house, but she had a strong, low-pitched voice. Lately, when Willa heard her sister singing, her mother clanking pots in the kitchen, her father’s voice calling out to the neighbors, she hoped that the beasts would leave her soon, and she could hang on to the things in front of her again.
She went down into the living room where her mother lay with her feet up on the couch, reading for Bible class. It was summer, and Willa would have no home study for three months. The days were longer, and she and Dani would drive out to the beach at Galveston, and her mother would become preoccupied by the tomatoes she grew, and Jana would practice her gymnastics in the backyard.
Her mother closed the Bible and sat up. “Why don’t you help me set the table? We’ll eat on the patio.”
Willa took a handful of forks from the drawer and followed her mother outside. As they smoothed the bright white cloth on the table, the blue-tinted air was cooling down. “Now tell me again this thing you’re supposed to do with Dani tomorrow night?”
“It’s a concert at a place called Sevens.”
“In Houston.” Her mother set down a bowl and sighed.
“Yeah.” Willa’s stomach tightened. They might take even this away from her. She was still afraid that in their worry, her parents might take away her whole life.
Her mother walked back toward the screen door, and her voice wafted through the dimness, “You’ll be home by twelve-thirty.”
ON THE WAY TO HOUSTON in Dani’s car, they rode with the windows down and sang along to the radio. All of time seemed to stretch ahead of them on the road, the white lines ticking like seconds, on and on. A strip mall on the right, woods coming up on the left, the sky huge and blue and empty. She wanted to get out and feel that blue above her, like a door always opening.
They parked off Montrose Boulevard near the Texas Tattoo Parlour. At Sevens, there were sixes and nines and threes stenciled in paint along the side wall, and glittering plastic sevens hung from the ceiling. The show itself was a disappointment, three ragged guys onstage who seemed too high to sing. Willa and Dani left early and went walking along the streets downtown, stacked lights of skyscrapers in the distance. They walked past a coffeehouse, filled with faces, weary or cheerful or bored. Cars whizzed past, cartoonishly loud, blowing a hot wind against them. No one recognized her here; no one knew where the Lawbourne house even was. On this sidewalk, her anonymity felt magic.
“Are you hungry?” said Dani. “Let’s get some food. Let’s head over to the Disco Kroger’s.”
In the aisles, they saw the girls in glittery tops and teetering heels, the guys in T-shi
rts with gelled hair, the music blaring at this hour, because, Dani said, the management wanted to lure in the young people. A girl was actually dancing over by the pharmacy. They bought sandwiches, and Dani used her fake ID to get them a bottle of red wine, and they went back through the parking lot and out to the curb to sit on the hood of Dani’s car. Across the street, there was an old house with a porch where some people congregated, smoking, sitting on the rails, talking seriously over the music.
Willa wasn’t afraid anymore of red wine. She took a few sips and listened to the song trilling loud from the speakers in the upstairs windows. The woman’s voice seemed to start on a tiny thread and then flew up around them like a hundred kites. Willa felt the music go through her at one point like an airy sleeve, and within her, the shape of something ugly turned inside out.
Dani struck a match on her jeans to light her cigarette. “I met a girl who lives there,” said Dani, bringing the cigarette to her lips. “She goes to Rice.”
“That’s where I want to go,” said Willa. She’d just decided in that moment. There was a woman sitting on the porch steps, with black hair that looked like she’d cut it herself, and a guy playing a bass, just quietly holding up the neck, plucking the strings, though no one could hear it over the stereo. She pictured herself on that porch; she saw herself older and new.
After they finished eating, they lay down on the warm hood and watched the passing cars.
“You look different tonight,” said Dani.
“My hair is up.”
“No, I mean your face. For so long you looked, I don’t know, kind of wiped away. Now you’ve come back.”
A white convertible passed by, the women wearing silk scarves that trailed behind them, and an old rickety truck followed, the bed filled up with old chairs, clattering. Beyond the streetlights, just above the skyline, a faultless darkness seemed to flow from the world’s center. A motel sign at the end of the street lit up its blue neon letters, but she could just see the edge of it, which said STAY.
LEE
SHE STOPPED JUST ONCE on the way to Denison, at a Stuckey’s to use the bathroom and buy the praline candy that Jack used to love. She lingered in the souvenirs aisle. When they used to stop on their long car trips, the three of them would browse those cluttered shelves. There was a cowboy doll with rope legs, a longhorn steer with a lamp glued to his forehead, shot glasses picturing the shape of Texas centered on a yellow rose. Lee preferred the old-fashioned souvenirs—the bronze lasso, the small replica of the Alamo. In front of the shoe-sized fort, tiny men with guns and knives. She bought that one for Jack.
On the highway, she drove past the billboard with the scolding faces of newscasters, three in a row like the fates, past the sign for the FRIENDLIEST TOWN IN THE WORLD, and past the telephone poles racing beside her. She was listening to an old-time country radio station, Hank Williams’s jokey, yodeled songs.
Before she left, she’d waited for weeks for the phone call, for the police to show up at her door. Wesley White had come to her house in his squad car a few days after the explosion. He was nearly apologetic for having to ask her where she was that night, and then, relieved, when she told him she’d been home, sending out emails, and then he was eager to ask her questions about what she knew about Taft. But she hadn’t assumed that was the end of it. She thought they’d have come for her by now—that the boy would have relented under questions and told them the truth—but somehow the urgency of what to do with Banes Field seemed to have dulled the will to find anyone to blame besides Avery Taft. In the days since that night, even seeing her old Rosemont neighbors on the news (Michelle Smalls grinned at the camera, Maisie Rodgers pointed a finger down at the ground), Lee had not felt much triumph. That all seemed beyond her now. Cully (and this was a mystery in him that she wondered about) had stuck to his story, insisted he’d seen a group of men scatter right after the explosions. He even mentioned a baseball cap, the hood of a sweatshirt.
Lee drove past a sign that said CAN YOU HEAR HIM? GOD IS TELLING YOU SOMETHING, and beyond it, a billboard with a picture of a young Latina smiling slyly with a cigarette in her hand. She passed a long field of slow cows with unseeing, pale heads, and then a train sped beside the highway, the bright rectangles shuddering past. For now, she had this day and the next, and maybe all of them. She checked the dashboard. In forty miles, she would be there.
She turned into the subdivision with the green rectangular sign PINE GLEN, and drove in circles through three cul-de-sacs before she found his street, situated on the edge of things, an open lot in the back of it filled with the trees, the house made of white stone with a large gold star pressed into the brick by the front door. It had been ten years since she had seen him, and she was skinnier now, more drawn in the face, a lot more tired. She stood at the door, hands shaking, her heart running around in her chest.
When he opened the door, the first thing she noticed was his head—all his hair gone except a silvery feather over his right temple. His eyebrows were gone too. He wiped his hand over his tan baldness and grinned.
“Get in here,” he said, and kissed her. His breath smelled like dirt, but she liked it.
He led her through the living room, and into the TV room behind it, where he sat down on a threadbare orange couch.
“I brought you some things.” She put the paper bag and box on the ground and took out the candy, the boxed souvenir, the record player and records.
With his long ears and thin cheeks, Jack looked like a handsome alien. She gave him the candy first, and from his expression, he liked the sight of the gold box, the muscles of his forehead moving where his eyebrows would have been if he still had them.
“Good to see you, babe. I look old, don’t I?” He opened the box of candy, took a bite, and chewing, put the piece back into its wrapper.
She saw how tired he was. “And then I brought you the record player and these old things. Where can I plug it in?”
“Oh, somewhere around here.”
She set up the record player on a card table with a green leathery top that was pushed against the wall. She knelt down and found the outlet behind the table leg, inserted the plug, stood up, put on the record, and then went to sit next to him.
“Old Ernest Tubb,” he said, settling back into the cushions. He patted his chest and lowered his eyes. “Eight more weeks of treatment,” he said. “I guess I can’t eat a thing except candy.”
“I brought you a miniature Alamo,” she said.
He studied the picture on the box. “Remember the Alamo, huh? Keep up the fight.” One by one, he took out the pieces, the fort that was also a sanctuary, the tiny figures. His finger traced the arched line of the roof, and he shook his head, smiling. “She had one of these, didn’t she?” A faint pink streamed into his cheeks. “That trip we took to the hill country and then over to San Antonio.” He rearranged the small, metal figures, took more from the box and set them on the table. “Are you thirsty?” He got up and started to head for the door. “Let me get you some water.”
She might have him with her only for a short while. They didn’t have any plans. “Come over here,” she said. “Come back.”
SATURDAY MORNING, light waving through the curtains into the kitchen, where they’d set up the souvenirs from their trip, the Alamo fort carved out of cheap wood, the metal figures of Jim Bowie and Sam Houston and their men. The brass horse. The barn dyed red, with its tiny cows with suede hides. The Mexican adobe village.
Jack had taken Jess, six years old, out on her bike with the training wheels earlier, and their faces were still flushed and shiny. Now Jess sat between them, moving the pieces from one side of the table to the other with her fat fingers, setting up a city, talking for the soldiers, talking for the cows. “Do you like the city I made?” They were all a family. They were all going to have a party.
Years later, when Jess learned the story of the battle for the Alamo missio
n, the standoff, the cannonball fire, Bowie’s collapse, and the line Travis drew in the dirt to separate out the traitors, she recited the story again to whoever would listen. Each time she told it, it was as if it were new. She used the Alamo model for her history project, and kept it safe on her dresser. All that year, she loved setting the wooden pieces in their places, then taking the scene apart.
The new Alamo sat on the table now in the window light, the tiny flag the size of a Band-Aid, the rough arches and mock-stone walls painted in detail, the little men with their rifles and knives drawn up to strike. There was a pioneer woman too, in a long skirt, with one arm reached up in the air, the other wrapped around the shoulder of her child.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I want to thank my agent, PJ Mark, and my editor, Sarah McGrath. I’d also like to thank Meagan Brown, Sarah Stein, and everyone else at Riverhead Books who helped bring this book to publication.
Early in my conception of this novel, I was inspired by reading Barbara Rossing’s The Rapture Exposed, and I’m indebted to Mark Schwehn for recommending it to me. For conversations that helped me find my way to the story, I’m grateful to all of my old friends in Friendswood, especially Diane Benson, Denise Hearn, and Dannielle Thomas, and also to my East Coast friends, Walter Cummins, Ariel Levy, Meredith Rollins, Darcey Steinke, Karen Wunsch, and Stephanie Paulsell.
For their careful, generous readings of this novel in its many incarnations over the years, I owe immeasurable gratitude to: Jennifer Werner, Minna Proctor, Dannielle Thomas (again), Martha McPhee, Elizabeth Mitchell, Natalie Standiford, Jena Salon, Thomas E. Kennedy, Ira Silverberg, Robert Polito, Craig Marks, and Rita Signorelli Pappas. For space, food, country music, and endless edits, a huge thanks to the Masonville Collective, Rebecca Chace, David Grand, and Ken Buhler.