Men in the Making (16 page)

I climb down from the truck and duck under the tape, following my wife as she pans the flashlight beam from one side of the road to the other. All around us there's the clatter of falling branches and the hissing of the breeze and the frogs speaking up from the trees. The road falls off on each side into ditches littered with weeds and debris, and I begin to wonder just how the hell you can drive a man into these woods and drag him from your truck, how you can cave his head in with the heel of your boot and then hold him down, your knee on the back of his neck, while your buddies hitch chains to his ankles. I'm wondering how you can stand over him—no matter what damn color he is, no matter what you believe—smoking a cigarette until he comes to and you see the fear widening in his eyes. I'm trying to imagine how it might have played out, how it all might have looked, but what I see instead are Stu Slyder's bloodshot eyes, and now I'm wondering just what the hell I'd been thinking back at the bar.

Up ahead, Glenda stops and squats over a red ring painted onto the hard-cooked dirt. "Dear God," she says, shining the light up the road. "Look at them all."

And there, by God, they are: dozens of them, some big enough to outline a trash can lid, others so small you could cover them with a coffee cup, and no pattern or order to them whatsoever. We walk up the road and Glenda bounces the light around from red circle to red circle, and the moon stays back behind the clouds, and the forest seems rightfully alive and loud. And they just go on forever. I'm thinking you could pull me apart however you pleased, and no matter how you tried you'd never end up with enough pieces to fill these rings. I'm thinking there's a lesson in that, a lesson I might could stand to learn, something about how there's always more to you than what you might think, but then Glenda bends down and traces a finger around one of the red circles and it's all I can do to stand there and watch her.

"He could whistle like you wouldn't believe," she says, "a not-a-care-in-the-world kind of whistle, the same way Daddy used to." She looks back at me with an arm outstretched, and when I go to her there's nothing left but to get down on my knees there beside her in the dirt and watch while she flattens out her hand and rubs this circle of paint into the earth. "Just whistling like that," she says, wiping her hand on my jeans, "ought to be enough to keep you alive."

On the walk back, Glenda turns the flashlight off. I freeze and look around long enough to see that I can't see a thing, so I bring her in tight, and I hold her there in the darkness, and when she leans her head back from me I get ready to walk. But then her lips are on me, and they're open, and my mouth is all of a sudden so full of her that it's like I'm being kissed all at once by everyone in my life who ever loved me in the least.

 

Back at the truck, Glenda throws a quilt down in the bed and we undress each other there in the dark before climbing in. It's habit, something I'm so accustomed to that I don't question it until we're wrapped up together with the quilt over our heads, until she pulls one of my legs up between her own and I can feel her there, the soft and swollen wetness of her. Her breath pushes hot against my chest and my tooth is screaming, a sharp pain that burrows down through the meat of my gums and into my jaw, and I want like hell here to tell Glenda that we don't have to do this, that we can just lie here awhile and go to the house, that I understand what just happened out on this road. Truth is, though, that I can't put it into words, not just yet, and all I know is that her skin is so soft it pains me to even think about letting her go, and her breathing is steady and slow, the breath of the deeply dreaming, and I'm thinking she might sleep through the night for the first time all week. Still I can sense that she's waiting, waiting for me to say something, so I tell her the first thing that comes to my muddied mind. "Garrett and me," I tell her. "We saw a couple dogs today. Up on Route 96. Doing it missionary."

She rolls back, pulling me up onto her. She presses her mouth against my cheek and I can feel her smiling there in the dark. She whispers, "You did not," and slips me inside.

I close my eyes, swallowing hard as I push myself into her. "Did too," I say, and then we're wrapped up in warmth, wrapped up in each other and in the sounds of the forest around us, the wind and the trees and the insects almost mechanically loud, like they've been working all night to find the right riff, and with a little work I hear them not as a whole but as single instruments, the same way you can when you focus in to find the bass line as you step onto the dance floor, so your feet know whether to polka or two-step or waltz. Except something's not right. Here I am, a man making slow love to his wife in the back of a pickup truck not half a mile from where another man was just this week murdered, and the forest has something too deep to its melody, something too low-down and rumbling. Despite the quilt over our heads, it's all of a sudden a slightly brighter night, and I'm sure, right up until the voice bounces around in the trees, that the moon's found its way out of the clouds.

But then it comes, my name called out like it's a question all in itself, and for the second time tonight I'm thinking about how Tricky caught us in the shower, only this time I'm not remembering it so fondly. This time I'm feeling again the hot flush of my ears and the nervous twitching in Glenda's hips, the way time stops for just a sliver of a second when two grown people who love each other freeze in the middle of their most private moment and hope like hell they're both hearing things. It's settling into me the way grit can settle into a man's skin that headlights don't feel the same as moonlight, and then I hear it again.

"Hey, bud," Garrett says. "You in there?"

I duck out from the covers, throwing the quilt over Glenda, and when she pokes her head out her pigtails are frazzled with static. She looks like a schoolgirl who's been caught by her daddy doing back-seat, midnight things, and I feel something warm and altogether newly formed ballooning wide in my chest. "Nice timing," I say, and Garrett comes over, his truck's headlights throwing his long shadow over us as he walks our way scratching a toothpick around in his sideburns.

"Hell, you two," he says, "ain't enough
ever
enough?"

Glenda smiles without showing teeth, and I can tell she's not embarrassed. I can tell she's flattered, flattered to be young and wild and lovely enough yet to make even the likes of Garrett shake his head with envy.

Now the moon really does come skulking out from the clouds, and when my tooth throbs I realize I'm smiling. Glenda's toes are curling around in my leg hairs, telling a little joke of their own, and when I look over, her lips are pressed into a girlish grin and it's clear that she's more than happy to let me do the talking.

When I look back at Garrett he's shuffling his boots in the dirt. His eyes shift quick from Glenda to the ground.

"Out looking for more dogs to gawk at?" I ask.

"I wish," he says.

"What, then? They looking for me back in town?"

"They are," he says, and then he turns to Glenda. "They already came by our place. Sandy said you had some wild idea about coming out here and having a look."

"She's got lots of wild ideas," I tell him, but Garrett just rolls his eyes and keeps talking. Old Stu's hot, he's saying, wanting to press charges, wanting some payback. "I dropped Sandy at the police station on the way. She thinks maybe she can talk Sheriff Duecker into cutting you some slack, but all the same I wanted to warn you. You'd be in a fast river of shit if they found you out here."

"They bothered Tricky and them yet?"

"I doubt it. They tore off toward the highway when we ditched the bar. They're probably bellied up to another game of forty-two down in Kirbyville by now."

"Well, hell," I tell him, standing up in the bed of the truck. "I better get on into town then and turn myself in before they get back. Last thing Tricky needs is to come home to cops at his door and people talking all over town about his son-in-law the fugitive."

Glenda leans back against the cab and shakes her head. Her eyes water and sparkle in such a way that I know she's trying hard not to laugh. "I don't guess they'll need to frisk you," she says, and I look down at myself, a man with flecks of sawdust in his chest hair, a man wearing nothing but moonlight and pale skin and not-so-white socks. A man I don't yet fully recognize.

"I hate to do it, Glenda," Garrett says, "but I'm going to turn my back now so you can get dressed." And then he does. He turns and walks away and waits with his back turned, leaning on the door of his truck while Glenda fishes around in the quilts and hands me my jeans. I stand there awhile before putting them on, and I wink at my wife, and I look out into the forest where the crickets and frogs are still carrying on.

"You gonna bail me out?" I ask, and Glenda grins as I step into my pants. She stands, letting the quilt fall away from her. "I believe I will," she says, and I nod and smile and buckle my belt, and her skin is shining so bright and warm it's a wonder I don't melt.

—F
OR
M
ELANIE
R
AE

I
F IN THE
last ten years you've lived within a hundred miles of Houston along the southwest corridor of Highway 59, and in that time you've had a breast removed, or both, or you've had a hysterectomy or a lumpectomy or a swollen purple mole dug from your skin, then this is true: Whatever your surgeon cut out of you spent some time with Dean Covin in his car.

They put the breasts in quart-sized plastic containers with snap-on lids, the kind of cheap Tupperware Dean hopes they don't reuse. A uterus warrants a half-gallon bucket. Ovaries and tumors bob and float in pint-sized containers filled with gray liquid preservative. On a busy day—say, a Friday, like today—between his two insulated totes, Dean will have bits and pieces of forty people sloshing around on the back seat by the time he makes it from Victoria to Deer Park, where he rolls slow into the neighborhood, pulling into the driveway of the house his injuries have purchased for him.

Once parked, he cracks the window so he'll be able to hear the dispatcher, Luanne, bantering with the other drivers on the radio. He leaves the engine running, the totes on the seat, the a/c blasting to keep the car cool while he grabs a can of beans from the pantry and sits spooning them into his mouth on the front porch. Today, as always in August, the sun is blazing, and Dean's ears are humming with the overhead heat. He sweats and blinks and thinks back to the day he slipped on a ladder and tumbled fifteen feet to the floor of a Gulf Coast drilling rig's void tanks, to the moment he awoke in the spotlight of sun that came with God through the portal above, to the hum in his ears and the twitching in his extremities. Now he watches these loud and lanky neighborhood kids, children enjoying their summer break from school, jumping bicycles over a makeshift ramp in the street, sliding on plastic garbage bags over sprinkler-slicked lawns of St. Augustine.

If you live on this street, if your husband is working the day shift at the Exxon or Phillips plant across the highway, if you keep the television volume muted so you can hear if the evacuation sirens start screaming, then you've told your kids to steer clear of Dean Covin. There's something not right about him. Wears that brace on his wrist to squeeze off the shakes. When he's mowing his lawn, that eye, the one that rolls untethered in its socket, seems always to follow you from carport to porch when you carry your groceries inside. And his face, it jolts sometimes with a tic, like he's got electricity pulsing through him for no reason at all. Leave him be, you've said. Ain't a reason on earth for you to pester a man like that.

For the most part the children listen, but there's always one.

Dean Covin stands, drops the plastic spoon into the empty can, drops the can into the garbage by the garage, and gets back in his car, a two-year-old Chrysler with six-digit mileage from his daily route, a blue car with enough clear-coat shine to trigger suspecting looks in this pickup-truck neighborhood. But what's it matter? Dean thinks. The car's got enough room up front so he can hit the cruise control and stretch his bad leg on the longer straightaways of 59. That alone's worth a crossways look or two. He checks in on the radio, lets Luanne know he's back on the road. "Ninety-six," he says.

"Ninety-six, go ahead."

"I'm ten-seven from the house, Luanne. Should make the lab in half an hour."

"Ten-four, Ninety-six. Try not to get lost."

That Luanne, Dean thinks. Now there's a woman. Black hot-dipped jeans and a red-lipped smile. Sense of humor, too. Oh, what he wouldn't give. He turns the radio down and checks the rearview. Behind him, a kid he knows gets up to speed on his bike, aims it at the ramp in the street, then bails off at the last minute, rolling on the concrete and hopping to his feet as the bike launches itself aloft unmanned before it crashes and slides, spitting sparks, on its side. The other kids stand silently street-side, as if Jesus himself has descended to perform a BMX miracle. A tiny, scraped-kneed girl with red pigtails makes a break for her porch across the street and disappears inside.

This boy, John Dalton, pumps his fist in the air. "Shit, yeah!" he screams. "Nice." Then he spits in the street, leaves his bike in a heap, and struts up the drive toward Dean Covin's car, working a plug of bubblegum around in his mouth the way a big league pitcher might. This kid walks bowlegged, wears an old orange Astros cap backward on his burr-cut head. He spits a good deal, Dean's noticed, like at eleven years old he's already tasted something he can't quite wash clean from his mouth. Yes, he's a sour little guy, sneering and squinting all the time. Still, he's the only one on the block who will return so much as a look from Dean, and as the boy sidles up to the car Dean rolls his window down and the hum in his ears begins to recede, pulling itself back into him until it's barely distinguishable from the idling engine.

"What you got in the coolers today?" John Dalton says, leaning into the car. "Anything nasty?"