Friendswood (30 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
she met Rush at the diner off the highway. They sat at a table next to a photograph of Minnie Pearl in her hat with the price tag dangling. Years ago, Lee had groaned at all those jokes her mother had watched on the black-and-white TV. And Minnie Pearl's smile looked manically efficient, exactly the same. She'd told Rush the news about Jack quickly, in a hurry to get it out, and Rush was quiet for a minute. “I'll be thinking of him then, hoping,” she said, but now they were talking about her daughters, about Sam, who'd been calling her again, despite her rejections. Then Rush said, “Tom wants to see about reserving one of those houses in Pleasant Forest for us. We need more room.”

Lee watched Rush's face for laughter or a blink that would call her bluff. “There's no way you're serious.”

“The prices are good. We want to put in a pool.”

“You know why the prices are good. That's no bargain. You told Tom what I found, right? The benzene rates? The container of toxins just popping up like nothing? And there's more now too. Councilman Atwater found something really dangerous, if he's right.”

Rush smoothed her hair. “You know I love you.” The waitress whisked by them. There was a tattoo on her arm of a dove diving into a rainbow. “You know I believe you found those things. But, look, by this time, isn't all the land around here polluted? I mean, what isn't? We've got oil fields right next door to us.” She tapped the spoon at her saucer.

“It's not the same, and you know it.” It was Tom bullying Rush into this, had to be. “I can't let you do this to your kids.”

“Well, I am fighting it. I don't particularly like the look of it over there off Veemer Road anyway. But I guess Avery Taft offered him a pretty good deal. Former classmate and all.”

The cup of coffee in front of Lee suddenly smelled acidic. “I can't believe you. Really?”

“I didn't want to say anything, and nothing's for sure, but I didn't want you to find out another way.”

“Jack has cancer.”

“You told me that, sweetie. As soon as you got here. I'm so sorry.”

“It started at Rosemont. That's why he's got it.”

“But didn't he smoke? I don't mean to be cruel.” A table of old men next to them burst into laughter, and one of them held up a crumpled cowboy hat. Another held up an unlit cigar. “But y'all haven't lived in Rosemont for ten years.”

“You know that doesn't mean it didn't start there, with that first exposure.”

Rush turned and started rummaging in her purse.

“I think I'm feeling dizzy,” Lee said. The old men looked over at her with rheumy eyes, the one with a Moses beard was nodding, as if he agreed with her, but he couldn't have heard what she'd said.

“Oh, don't be like that,” said Rush, pulling out a tissue to blow her nose. “Look, Avery's offering because he feels guilty. I didn't tell you, but we had a thing. It was short-lived, but it was a thing.”

“You're not serious.”

“It was before he started building over there, and we just started having lunch, and, you know, nothing really happened but it sort of did. I couldn't help it—it was a bad time for me, and he was real charming.”

“Are you kidding me? He doesn't feel guilty. He wants you nearby. He wants you to owe him something.”

“Oh, he doesn't mean anything. It's over between us. It's just that no one's been that nice to me for a long time. But really, nothing much happened there.”

“You keep saying that.” The floor felt insubstantial as she got up from the table. “You've got to listen to me.”

The Moses beard whistled through his teeth—and she thought she heard him say as she left the diner, “Isn't it a shame?”

She drove down the road and passed Taft's giant face again on the
billboard. She gave him the finger. How could Rush have stood it, even for a minute? Driving past the gray blocks of strip mall, the long fields of weedy grass and hurricane fence, Lee tried to picture her own failure, and couldn't, and she focused on the shreds of clouds in the sky ahead, like ripped-apart bandages.

At the bank, the lady in line behind her with her squashed nose and pig eyes would not leave her alone. “Do you know Jesus as your savior? I just have to ask because you look a mite unhappy.”

“I'm not interested,” said Lee, the way she hung up on telemarketers.

“Well then, you must not know him because he's interesting alright. Jesus is real interesting. Did you know he came to save you from your sins?”

God, she hated the ignorant arrogance of them, their promises of immortality, and there were more now in town than ever, as if someone had bussed them in. She thought of the fluorescent, hunky Jesus supposedly about to arrive in Hartling, Texas. At least he looked like an outlaw, someone who wouldn't abide excuses.

She turned to the woman. “I think what I believe is private. Try someone else.” She felt her eyes tearing up, her hands clenched.
Jack is sick.
And the line wasn't moving, so the woman went on. “Yes, he did. He sure did. Jesus wants you to be happy, to wipe that frown off your face.”

Lee turned her back, but the woman kept on talking.
Jack is sick.
The banker finally lifted his head from his desk, and it was her
turn.

H
ER FATHER WORKED
LATE
almost every night, leaving Willa, Jana, and their mother alone for dinner. Jana clowned, but no matter how silly her costumes, their mother wouldn't laugh, and Willa couldn't make herself pretend to. Willa sensed that the rift between her parents had to do with her, but she didn't know exactly why, and she was afraid to ask her mother about it. Once, her mother came into the kitchen while Willa was cleaning up and said, “Your father's only willing to wait so long before you come back to church. You're going to have to face it, one way or another, sometime soon, honey.” Her mother's chin had a sudden wooden appearance, puppet lines along either side of her mouth.

“No, not yet.” There were crumbs on the kitchen table, a huge black fly landed on the center seam in the wood. “Can you ask Dad to give me more time?”

“I'll ask.” Her mother nodded. “That boy will get his punishment, I know that. It's coming, if it hasn't already.”

As Willa got undressed for bed, she looked at her body in the mirror, the pale shadows under her breasts, curved against her hip bones, and cupped next to her clavicles big and small commas of shadows. Her face and body were bonier now, but she didn't mind it. In the length of the mirror, for the first time in months, she could see she was not ugly, that her breasts were still full and small, her hips narrow and studded with a single small mole on the right, her shoulders square and even. In the
mirror behind her, there was a skittering movement. She pulled her nightgown on over her head, and sat down at her desk.

Dog tapped its heads together until she couldn't think, and two of its heads shoved their faces over either side of her desk, so she couldn't look at her notebook. “Why are you here?”

Lamb stood on the forked tail of Dog.

“Often it's good to be washed in a blowing wind,” said Dog.

“You look sad,” said Lamb. “The Lord is writing himself through you.” The words appearing on her arm were hers, but also from somewhere else—she was a vessel for them—and though they belonged to her, they had not exacted any conscious effort—they might be gifts. But it was possible they'd been foretold.

Later, she woke up in the dark to find Lamb alone, lit up at the foot of her bed, its voice whining and revolving like a siren. “What does she want? I know what she wants. What does she want?”

T
HE DOORBELL
RANG,
and Willa opened the door to sunlight and Dani, in torn jeans. “Hey, are you alone? I borrowed a golf cart from my cousin.”

“Yeah, I've got three hours before my mom gets home.”

“Then, come on, Nilla Wafer, let's go.” It was February, but not too cold out, and Willa went to grab a sweatshirt.

The grass was long and weedy, the sand traps filled with rocks and old leaves. The Blue Creek Manor golf course had been out of use for years, and the golf cart paths were overgrown, the hills eroded and unevenly spaced in the land that stretched emptily behind the houses. They drove past a woman wearing a pink bathrobe in her backyard garden, surveying her plants, holding a shovel aimed at the ground. Around the curve was a girl hanging laundry on a clothesline.

“You don't see that much anymore,” said Dani, tapping a cigarette on the steering wheel. “It's kind of pretty, the white sheet blowing like that.”

They drove down the old paths, a cheerful, thin motorized hum as the cart lifted them over the hills, the cement cracked and half-covered with weeds like long hair, the greens dotted with dandelions.

They talked about Mrs. Grand, who'd suddenly started yelling to her students that she wanted them all to suffer for their art, and when one of them said they didn't have any ideas, she said, “Well then go home and set your hand on fire.”

Dani pulled into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. “Got a surprise for you.”

Before she could say anything more, Willa spotted Dex, thin and sheepish, leaning against the bed of his truck. He'd been sweet to work with her on the Camus project and bring flowers, though his shy attentions mostly embarrassed her.

“He wanted to see you, and I told him I'd take you,” Dani whispered. “You're not mad, are you?”

She knew he liked her, and felt flattered and wary about it because she didn't feel that way about him.

“No. Not mad.” He was wearing a jean jacket and a black T-shirt that said
COWBOY
, and the black made his eyes look bluer. She couldn't tell yet if she was glad or not to see him.

Dani sped up the cart and stopped short. “Hop in.”

Dex sat in the back behind Willa, and the golf cart hummed through the parking lot, onto the grass behind the duplexes, and a little farther on, over cracked cement and an old golf cart path. Dex said he had a test tomorrow in earth science.

“I hate that class,” said Dani. “Or maybe I just hate Ms. Shranken.”

“I know. The way she always asks you if you'd rather drive an electric car or a nice Range Rover.”

Willa noticed the jagged top of a can littered in the grass, a greasy-
looking white rubber glove. “They should clean up around here at least. That's pathetic.”

“Can you believe the golf course used to be exclusive?” said Dani. “You actually had to pay? And look at the country club now. Real exclusive.”

It was a frequent subject at dinner between Willa's parents. The owners had closed it down because they wanted to build houses on the land instead, but the homeowners' association protested it, so they just let the golf course grow weedy, let the country club go abandoned, waiting for the authorities to change their minds.

“The freaks hang out there sometimes,” said Dex. “And the Texas Totem.”

Dani looked vaguely to her right, as if deciding whether or not to turn down that path. “Should we check it out?” She stepped on the gas pedal. They went up and down an incline, turned, and the cart careened down a hill. The lightness Willa felt as they went down was as if she'd thrown off something heavy.

They drove over the path that wound past what used to be a putting green and was now just grass and trees. The brick walls of the country club were spray-painted with graffiti—
BUSTER
SUCKS BIG
ONES
;
I LOV
E BRIAN AND WILLY
—a maze of neon pink, winding up to a tree.

“Want to go in?” said Dex. “I hear it's pretty weird. Too creepy?”

“No, let's do it,” Dani said, leading the way through the space where a glass door had once been.

In the room to the right, where there used to be a golf shop, old golf balls lay on the dirty floor like unnatural eggs, fluorescent pink and green and blue golf tees scattered in a way that reminded her of pick-up sticks. The shell of a cash register stood on a square pedestal, a few plastic coat hangers scattered beneath it.

Then her eye caught on a stained, flowered blanket bunched in one of the corners. Somebody slept here. They picked their way over broken
glass and empty beer cans. They looked inside the door to the left. “That used to be the snack bar, I think,” said Willa.

Crippled chairs and folded-up tables were pushed to the walls, and in the center of the room, an old black garbage bag that looked full, the sun streaming through the windows over cigarette stubs and more golf balls strewn on the floor. “Looks like someone's been partying.”

They walked out the back door and down the rocky hill. “It kind of smelled in there,” said Dex. He pointed to the fence in the back. “Let's go check out the pool.”

He climbed over the fence easily and then held out his hand to help her over it, then Dani. The pool had been drained, and the bright blue surface was flecked with weeds and old leaves.

It was like a pure sculpture of sky, nearly the same color, its stunning emptiness useless in a way that made you look at it more closely. They sat at the edge of the deep end, dangled their legs. Across from them, on a wooden bench, someone had spray-painted a row of fluorescent orange lines like little fires. Just beyond, the sun and tree shade dappled the green of the old tennis courts.

“I know it's weird to say, but it's kind of peaceful here.” Dani shook out her hair and swung her feet, as if to take in some luxury.

“They left the ladders,” said Willa. “We could climb down there. But it might not seem as nice.” At the bottom of the chlorine-blue cement, circling one of the drains, a broken strand of red beads and a jade fragment of glass.

“You heard about the painted-over mustang, right?” said Dex. With his loose T-shirt and hairless face, he seemed too skinny and shy to let him get any closer.

“Yeah.” Sometimes, in the way he waited for her to speak, in the way his eyes searched her face, she suspected he was confusing pity with a crush.

“Hey, can you give us a minute?” Dani said to Dex. “No offense.” She winked. “Just girl talk.”

He stood up. “Sure thing.” He walked over to the other side of the pool, crept out on the diving board, pulling his legs and butt along to the end of it.

“So, I've been thinking about everything,” said Dani.

“About what?”

Dani sucked on the end of her cigarette, sighed out the smoke. “You know.” She paused. “You have to go to the police. I think I can figure out how to hypnotize you so you can remember.”

In the red spray-painted side of the pool, she could make out the letters
J
and
M
. Bird poop slung like paint over the exclamation point. “They won't believe me. I waited too long.”

“You could still make a report. At least. Look, who knows? Who might be next? I've been reading up on this, and you could hurt yourself forever if you don't tell someone. You know it happens a lot. It happens more than you think.”

Willa had overheard her parents talking about it the other night, how Trace's mother was dead from breast cancer, and his father wouldn't apologize for him exactly but told her parents he was sorry for “what had befallen everyone.” They'd agreed together, some of the adults, not to report it, noting that Brad's parents were mired in bankruptcy and divorce, and surely that had something to do with it, surely he'd influenced the others. Her dad had checked it out with someone he knew. To tell the police what she remembered would only make her have to feel it all over again, and what evidence was there? She was afraid the beasts would multiply, show up inside her shoes or hovering over people's heads. “I can't think about that,” Willa said. “It's too hard for me.”

Dani pointed to Willa's wrist. “What's this? You ran out of paper?” Dani held Willa's forearm and read the words that had just appeared that morning.
Our unfurnished eyes wait.
“Is that a tattoo?”

Willa pulled away. “You can see that?” She'd thought they were visible only to her, that others could see just the rash.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It's just a line from a poem. I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.” Every few days she woke up with new words scrawled on her forearm or wrist, something she'd made up, or remembered. She'd only just admitted it out loud to Lee Knowles at the Christmas party—sometimes the reason for it seemed logical—she must have been writing in the night, the way some people walked in their sleep.

Willa looked over and saw Dex leaning back on his hands, kicking his legs, his head turned away toward the abandoned, netless tennis courts.

“My parents wouldn't let me get a tattoo anyway. Maybe someday I'll get one.”

“It hurts like a motherf—” said Dani, pulling up her leg to examine the orange and yellow flower on her ankle. “Even this little one, I almost cried. And I thought the guy who did it was going to try to kiss me because he gave me such a discount.” She was smoking a lot now, bringing the cigarette to her mouth as soon as she exhaled. “Okay, you can come back now!” Dani shouted over to Dex. She pushed the packet of American Spirits toward Willa. “Want one?”