Heat and Light (18 page)

The beer sits at Darren's elbow, sweating slightly, doing what beers do. He stares idly at the TV screen. A dark-eyed woman,
vaguely ethnic, smiles encouragingly at the camera.
Are you a homeschool family? Get your kids hooked on phonics!

Even after they changed the locks, his mother had tried to help him, behind Dick's back when necessary. Every few months she sent care packages of clothes and food, until Darren moved without telling her.

For most Americans—he knows this—Afghanistan represents something other than an abundant supply of cheap heroin.

A moment later Gia returns. “Hey, sorry about that. His battery died the other night. I told him to keep them for a day or two, just in case.” She lowers her voice. “What kind of shit-for-brains drives around without jumper cables?”

“I don't have jumper cables.”

“Exactly my point.”

Darren eyes her suspiciously. She is an accomplished liar, historically; but this story has the ring of truth. He remembers a time, years ago, when she changed a tire for him, teasing him all the while:
Devlin, you are such a girl.

She had never been his girlfriend. In high school they hadn't spoken; he was simply aware of her, as boys were. They met properly a week after graduation, while working for KeystoneCorps—a state-funded program that provided summer jobs for underemployed youth, which in Bakerton was pretty much everyone. The assignments were predictable, transparently sexist: the boys worked on road crews, the girls as cleaners or kitchen slaves. The few college-bound males were placed with the girls. Darren and Gia were both sent to Saxon Manor, the county nursing home, a grim holding pen for the indigent old.

They worked in the laundry, a stifling basement room loud with dryers. At orientation they learned to operate the huge machines. They learned which solutions removed blood or feces or Jell-O—the residents ate vast quantities of Jell-O—from soiled sheets. At each set of instructions, Gia's shoulders shook violently. In Darren's frac
tured state—he'd smoked a joint on the way to work—her laughter was contagious. By the end of the morning his side ached.

In the way of small towns, he knew of her family. For three generations, Bakerton's dead Catholics had been embalmed at Bernardi's. Gia drove to work each morning in her father's cast-off hearse. In the rear parking lot at Saxon Manor, Darren rolled them an elegant joint, fitted with its own cardboard filter—the only way in which he'd ever been good with his hands. At seventeen he was a shy virgin. Getting her high seemed the only way he could possibly impress her, his one chance to tell her something she didn't already know.

Some nights they took the hearse to the Star-Light Drive-In. Around them, in parents' automobiles, young couples kissed and groped. Darren and Gia did not touch. They laughed at the third-run horror films, they drank and smoked. She had a boyfriend, a few years older—the lead singer for The Vipers, a local heavy metal act. Darren remembered him clearly from the high school corridor, the cocky swagger, the bleach-blond mullet straight out of a music video. The Vipers were on the road that summer, playing bar gigs on the Jersey Shore. One day after work, Darren and Gia rolled up to her parents' house to find a VW bus parked at the curb. The boyfriend was waiting on the porch, his hair recognizable at fifty paces. Gia bolted from the car, squealing with delight. Darren waited in the driveway with the engine idling, feeling slightly sick, as the two nearly swallowed each other.

The memory returns to him now. “How do you know that guy? Brando.” Even saying the name annoys him. “Is that really his name?”

“His last name is Brandon. He works on one of the drill crews. They're in here all the time.”

“And he's from—Texas?”

“He was stationed at Fort Hood.” Worship in her voice, a kind of dumb reverence, Gia having a patriotic moment, apparently.
Probably there have been others, Gia saluting the flag while lying on her back. “Any more questions, Devlin?”

“Nah, that's all I got. Actually, I have to run.” It is literally true: he feels a sudden, powerful urge to flee.

She looks genuinely disappointed. “Promise I'll see you again. I'm here every night, practically.” She lowers her voice and leans close to his ear. “Come back, okay?”

Leaving, he feels the whole crowd watching him, whether or not it's true: twenty pairs of jealous male eyes boring into his back. Everybody wants her, still and always. For him this has always been her appeal.

Outside dusk is falling. One by one the streetlights come on, lit like birthday candles.

He still has no house key.

Parked on the street is Gia's battered hatchback—same sheepskin seat covers, same pine tree–shaped air freshener dangling above the dash. In the rear compartment, a set of jumper cables lies on the floor.

DICK DEVLIN TURNS SEVENTY-SIX THAT SUNDAY.
To celebrate, Rich hosts a birthday barbecue on his deck. In prior years the birthday barbecue was a raucous affair, burgers and beer drinking and illegal fireworks, a mob of kids playing baseball in the yard. Now—his mother dead, his sisters and cousins moved out of state—the Devlins fit easily at a single table, a depressing thought.

He is scraping the grill with a wire brush when his cell phone rings.

“Tell Shelby to count on one extra,” says his father. “Your brother's home.”

The revelation stops him cold. “You're joking.” There is more, much more he could say, but the words don't come.

“It's been a long time, Richard. He's overdue for a visit.”

“Fine,” says Rich. “What the hell does he eat?”

“He brought some of those tofu hot dogs. They're not bad, actually.”

“You're joking,” Rich says again.

The doorbell rings precisely at noon, Dick and, lurking behind him like a sulky teenager, Darren with his package of tofu hot dogs. He looks okay, a little skinny: concave chest, his pale arms slender as a girl's. For this summer barbecue he wears black jeans and a black T-shirt.

“Welcome,” Rich says in his best host's voice.

Darren gives him a limp handshake.

“Darren!” Shelby cries, hugging him.

“Let me get you a beer,” Rich says.

Darren passes a hand over his shiny head—smooth as an egg, small and perfectly formed. The head makes him seem an alien creature, an ambassador from some future time when men will no longer need hair—a ghostly scientist or philosopher, delicate and curiously evolved. “Do you have seltzer?”

“We have Sprite.”

“Sprite is fine.”

They stand around awkwardly while Shelby fusses with the food. Potato salad, baked beans, a pineapple upside-down cake made from his mother's recipe that somehow doesn't taste quite the same.

Darren accepts a can of pop and looks around, blinking. “Wow, I had no idea. I thought you were living in the farmhouse.”

“We were. The place was falling down.”

“You couldn't renovate?”

“We looked into it.” It's more explanation than he owes Darren. “In the end it was cheaper to start from scratch.”

Shelby interrupts. “We didn't
exactly
start from scratch. It's a modular home. It comes in two parts, and they just bolt it together. You've seen them on the highway. You know, OVERSIZE LOAD.”

Rich thinks, Please shut up.

“Oh. Right,” Darren says.

But Shelby, having warmed up, will not stop talking. “We tried living in the farmhouse.
I
tried. But I have terrible allergies.”

“Oh. Okay.” Darren nods vigorously.

Shelby seems to take this as encouragement. She rattles off a list that's longer each time Rich hears it: dust mites, tree nuts, three kinds of pollen, cat dander, shellfish. “And maybe wheat gluten. Though technically that's an intolerance, not an allergy. With the farmhouse, the main issue was mold.”

Rich excuses himself and goes out to the deck to fire up the grill. The morning sun has faded, the wind shifted. In the air is a smell of rain.

Through the open window he hears voices, Shelby's mostly. He closes his eyes and makes the words recede. It's a trick he learned in the navy, a way of shutting out language—a particular switch in his brain that, when activated, makes all words sound like Persian or Arabic or whatever they spoke over there. For his dad to know about Shelby's neuroses is embarrassing enough. Dick, to his credit, has never said a critical word about her, though he must wonder what sort of whackjob his son married. Rich has begun to wonder the same thing. He believed, once, that love would cure her: marriage, children, a normal life. Instead her weird hang-ups have multiplied. To have Darren know this is intolerable.

A door opens behind him, the family traipsing out to the deck. Rich watches their faces as they look out over the yard.

“What the hell is that?” says Dick.

Tact is not a Devlin trait.

“An access road,” Rich says.

“You should see what's over the hill,” says Shelby, who has not, herself, seen it
. I can't bear to look,
she told Rich, and as far as he knows, she still hasn't. Home all day with the kids, she's never once climbed the hill to see what's happening in her own back yard.

“Come on,” says Dick, charging down the stairs. “Let's have a look.”

They cross the yard together, Dick, Rich, and Braden leading the way, followed by Darren, Shelby, and Olivia. They climb the rise and look down. Five acres of pasture have been razed and flattened, spread with gravel and marked off with chain-link fence. A dozen vehicles are parked there, at random angles: two trailers, an earth mover, a dumper, pickup trucks.

“Jesus Christ,” says Darren.

“It's something,” says Dick, with characteristic understatement. “Too bad about the trees.”

The scale of the operation is shocking, but not surprising. Rich knew what he was in for, having seen what was done at Wally Fetterson's down the road. The real surprise is the feebleness of his own memory. He can scarcely picture the farm the way it was. The row of hybrid poplars Pap had planted as a windbreak; the mature plums and cherries that even last summer had born fruit. The rolling pasture was as familiar as his own body. As a boy he zoomed across it on the back of Pap's snowmobile, anticipating each rise and furrow. Spray of fresh powder, cold stardust burning his cheeks.

“Gia said you signed a lease,” says Darren. “But I had no idea.”

“Gia has a big mouth.”
And she'll put it anywhere,
Rich does not add.

“When do they start drilling?”

“Who knows? They don't tell us anything. I'm starved,” Rich says abruptly. “Let's go eat some burgers.” He turns back toward the house, knowing the others will follow. A moment later, they do.

On the deck they gather around the table. Rich takes the platter Shelby hands him and lays out hamburgers and buns and the tofu hot dogs, which stick like wet pink styrofoam to the hot grill.

A faint rumble in the distance. “Is that thunder?” says Darren.

“Oh no!” says Shelby. “What a disaster.”

“It'll blow over,” Rich says.

He loads the burgers onto paper plates and hands them to Olivia, who enjoys setting the table. She watches Darren in mute
fascination. She is shy around strangers, and Darren, her only uncle, falls definitively into that category.

“How many of these, um, items can I serve you?” Rich asks him.

“One is fine.”

“I cooked two.”

“Two, then.”

“Can I have one?” says Braden.

Rich laughs. “Trust me, buddy. You're not going to like it.”

A tofu hot dog rolls through the slats in the grill.

“Soldier down,” says Rich. “I lost one of your dogs, man.”

“That's all right. I never eat more than one.”

Rich eyes Darren's shoulders, the knobs of bone poking through his T-shirt, and thinks, Maybe you should.

“You're not eating anything?” Darren asks Olivia.

“No,” she says. “Unfortunately.” It's one of the first words she ever learned, after
Mommy
and
Daddy
and
cookie.
It had seemed comical then, all those syllables from the mouth of a two-year-old.

“She isn't feeling well,” says Shelby.

“Can I go watch TV?” Olivia says.

Darren seems tense, fidgety. His tofu hot dog eaten, he reaches for his cigarettes.

“You're
smoking
?” says Shelby.

“A loyal R.J. Reynolds customer since 1998.”

“But it's so bad for you!”

There is a long, painful silence in which nobody points out—because how could you?—Darren's lifelong indifference to such matters. That tobacco is, or has been, the least of his sins.

He returns the pack to his pocket. “That's okay, I can wait.”

“Thank you.” Shelby flashes him a look of such warm gratitude that Rich nearly drops his spatula. Why is it so easy for other people to get on her good side?

“Your brother's got some vacation time coming,” says Dick.

“Eight weeks,” Darren says.

“Eight
weeks
?” Two months of vacation is, to Rich, unfathomable. For ten years he's sucked up all the overtime he can get.

“You should take a trip,” says Shelby. “A cruise or something.” In her eyes, a Caribbean cruise is the height of luxury. She's been bugging Rich about it for years.

Darren reaches again for his cigarettes, then remembers himself. “Maybe. I haven't taken a day off in four years. So, you know, I could use a break.”

Rich thinks, A break from what? You barely work in the first place. From his sister Kate—the only Devlin who talks to Darren with any frequency—he has a vague idea of what goes on at a rehab clinic: the hand-holding, the sob stories, the handing out of methadone.

By the time the burgers are eaten, the sky has clouded over. Rich gathers up empty beer cans, paper plates smeared with mustard and ketchup. Inside, Olivia lies on the living room couch staring listlessly at cartoons. He gives her hair a playful swipe.