Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  It hit him, with the approximate force of a train, that they’d been talking about Eddie for minutes or hours as if catching up, as if they’d see him later. His heart crawled up into his throat. He didn’t need to be here. None of these people had been with Eddie—not Ethan or his nameless, faceless law school friends. None of them had a reason to do whatever had been done to him.

  “Hey,” Ethan said. Fingers tugged at the hem of his jeans, wrapped around his ankle. A thumb massaged tickling, tingling circles on the knob of the bone. He kept staring at the ceiling. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t know he got so close to Halse,” he murmured.

  Ethan let out a nervous chuckle. “It wasn’t a thing, man, don’t like—don’t get upset, okay. I’m not trying to speak ill of the guy. He wasn’t running game on you or something. He never even hit on Riley, and Riley’s fine as fuck, yeah?”

  Responding to that broader implication was impossible in the split second he had before Leah interrupted from behind the couch. “Your host has arrived, and requests thank-yous in the form of kisses.”

  She had a shirt on now, her hair damp and drying in a chlorine-tangle. Andrew wasn’t expecting it when she planted a hand on the seatback and vaulted over onto the couch between them, her knee almost clocking him in the jaw. He yelped and toppled backward. Ethan laughed. She kissed Ethan first, a chaste peck on the mouth, then wriggled to kneel over Andrew’s sprawled form. She, too, was bright-eyed, with the narrowest ring of green iris visible around her pupils.

  “Say no if you want to say no,” she said.

  He found himself murmuring “No” against her plush, sweet-tasting mouth.

  She stopped and sat back on her heels with a small frown. “Is it the girls thing, or just a no?”

  “Just a no,” he said. The skin contact felt all right, but his body wasn’t strung toward her, not the same as—

  “Apologies, but it’s guys for me, as you’re aware,” Ethan said.

  “No worries,” she said. She patted Andrew’s cheek and miraculously got up without kicking either of them again. “Forget it happened!”

  “I’m going to go,” Andrew said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Ethan said. He had a hangdog look on his elegant face. “My mouth got away from me. Sorry again.”

  “Thanks,” Andrew said, and he was more thankful than Ethan knew, for revealing a fault line between Eddie and Halse that he hadn’t been aware of before.

  Sitting in his car, waiting to sober up enough to see the road, he checked his email. His skin buzzed, needy, with the ghost of confident, masculine hands grabbing him at leisure, mind spinning with the assumptions people kept making about him. Amongst the junk emails, Troth had sent him a confirmation for the review meeting tomorrow afternoon—and since it appeared that Halse was connected to the fieldwork too, not only the parties and related mischief, he’d chase that down. Easier than digging at the burgeoning, unsettling quandary of what had changed so much with Eddie that folks kept referring to Andrew, without a pause, as his—boyfriend. Andrew swallowed against his sandpapery case of dry mouth and, methodical with each keystroke, agreed to her proposed time before hitting send.

  14

  Avoiding a roommate was an art form, and Andrew’s creativity had run dry. The front door opened a handful of minutes past three in the afternoon. Andrew, in his briefs and socks, eating applesauce directly from the container in front of the fridge, had the option to either stand his ground or flee to the yard. Neither was appealing, but the dull grey hangover of the molly he’d eaten the night before sapped the remainder of the motivation he needed to dodge Riley.

  “Oh, hey,” the other boy said, stopping short in the small vestibule between the kitchen and living room.

  “I have a meeting with Troth this afternoon,” Andrew said, gesturing aimlessly with the spoon and funneling another bite of fruit paste into his mouth.

  The jar was running low, and the beer had disappeared from the bottom shelf. Aside from two packages of shredded cheese and a gallon of milk, it was a depressingly barren environment, befitting the home of two students.

  “You still pissed at me?” Riley asked.

  “I wasn’t pissed.”

  “Hah, fuck you,” Riley snorted. “You were. But if you’re not, you’re not, I’ll let it go. I’m glad you’re going to class. And I guess I’m glad you’re getting social with my boyfriend, if that helps you sort yourself out.”

  He set off up the stairs and Andrew rapped his knuckles on the fridge, caught off-guard. His phone vibrated on the table. It was Del. Please talk to someone. He furrowed his brow and opened the actual thread. At some point in the night, he’d sent her a series of messages he didn’t remember typing, mostly disorganized and unfinished:

  I don’t know what’s going on

  He wasn’t spending his time where I thought he was hiding it from me and people think we were

  He changed his laptop password. What if he

  Nothing to close the last line, more damning than the rest. He cringed.

  As he read, another message came in: I’m calling you.

  The phone rang a moment later. He set it on the table, leaving it to buzz its way across the smudged glass. Ethan had called Halse protective of his cousin. He wondered with a swoop how Halse had felt about Riley and Eddie’s friendship—the house, the research, the ghost stories—and where protection might come into the argument. The specter had shown him its death stripped of context, which remained to be filled in despite his guilty misgivings. Eddie as he had carried himself through Nashville was an enigma to him, increasingly unknowable. Instead of answering Del, he fired off a fast message to Ethan: How did Halse like Eddie and his cousin being friends?

  The response, fine I guess, wasn’t much of an answer.

  * * *

  Andrew stubbed out his preparatory cigarette three-quarters smoked on the deck railing, shoes in hand and feet warm on the wood. He was due to meet Professor Troth in a half hour at her office. She had emailed him another reminder that morning, which was irksome but reasonable. As he bent to slip on his Converse, gravel crunched at the end of the alley. He glanced up. The gunmetal WRX rolled to a stop, blocking his car into its space. Halse climbed out, leaving the car idling in the middle of the drive.

  He approached with arms swinging at his sides, hands loose, bearing a flat-lipped smile that presaged a storm. Aggression rolled off of his posture. He was hatless and wearing scuffed tan combat boots laced tight at his ankles. Andrew dropped his shoes onto the deck out of reflex. The muscles in his forearms bunched as he closed his fists.

  “Riley texted me some interesting shit this morning, my friend,” Halse said, and this was Halse, not Sam, though Andrew didn’t realize he’d created the distinction.

  “Define interesting,” he responded.

  Halse stopped at the base of the steps, nostrils flaring as he gave Andrew a caustic once-over. His bare toes curled into the deck. The feral part of Andrew paced its cage, alert and uncertain. All the paths he’d found, so far, led to Halse—but knowing that was a far cry from having a plan to confront him about it.

  “To start, that Ed’s phone has been missing this whole time, and you’re all fucked up about not knowing what he was doing with which people, especially me. Which is an accusation I feel like I deserved to hear from your own fucking mouth,” he said. “Put your shoes on. We’re going on a trip.”

  Andrew’s chest collapsed into a painful squeeze, and he blurted out, “Fuck off.”

  Measured, Halse repeated, “I said, put your shoes on.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.

  Squared shoulders and quickening breath recalled their first meeting, and the tension that had begun to bank between them after regular exposure. Andrew stood stock still, neither retreating to the house nor forcing his way down the steps. The series of rambling texts he’d sent Del, the thoughts he had trouble quashing, roared into the substrate of his brain: if someone els
e had hurt Eddie, had kicked off some violence that led to the ugly end the revenant had shown him, Halse was his prime candidate. Getting in a car alone with Halse while he visibly boiled with anger, no one around to notice or care where he disappeared to, seemed stupider than Andrew was willing to be.

  But then Halse said, “Forget your plans. I know where they found him, and we’re going.”

  Rational resistance crumbled in an instant and Andrew bounded down the steps in two strides; Halse held his ground. Nose to nose, glaring into Halse’s auburn-flecked eyes from as close as he’d ever seen them, he snarled, “How do you know that?”

  “Because I asked when it happened, you ungrateful dick, so put your shoes on and get in the damn car.” Halse jammed his arm between their bodies, wrist bone and the blade of his hand shoving into Andrew’s sternum.

  Andrew staggered against the step and used it as an excuse to sit and yank his Converse on. Halse headed off across the path through the yard. Got on like a bonfire, he recalled, yanking his laces tight and double-knotting them. He had a dull pocketknife and the conviction of revenge if their unplanned field trip spiraled out of control, but nothing else. Eddie was a bigger, stronger man than Halse, but there was no telling how their fight might’ve started—who would have thrown the first hit, over which of a handful of possible triggers. Killing a man with a knife took some real intimacy, and while Halse and Eddie had spent a lot more time together while he was stuck up north than he and Halse had put in so far, Andrew figured he could manage if his skin was on the line.

  Just to confirm, he called out, “Are you asking Riley to come with, then?”

  “No, I’m not.” Sam kicked the gate open, wire rattling on wire. “This is our business.”

  As he expected. Andrew’s phone buzzed a gentle appointment reminder as he got up to follow, seating himself in the WRX and clicking his belt into place. He swiped the alarm silent. Halse, jaw set firm, rolled out of the alley onto the main street. The air conditioner whirred over the stifling silence. A yellow rubber duck sticker decorated the gearshift, worn and faded. There was a quality to their coexistence in the small space, sour and ragged, that made it hard to take a full breath. Andrew propped his elbow on the rim of the closed window and put his fingers to his temple.

  “Talk,” Halse said as he took a ramp to the I-40.

  Andrew dug his thumb at the interior corner of his eye, strung high enough to vibrate in his seat. Having a conversation felt impossible, but he said, “I had a meeting.”

  “Do you care?”

  Andrew shut his mouth again. Eddie would’ve been irked with him for his laissez-faire attitude to this program, his research—but not angry, given that he was faced with something larger. He wanted to believe that, if their positions were reversed, Eddie would have already drowned the necessary parties in the ocean of his loss. Instead, Andrew was stumbling blind from one failure to the next, hamstrung by his own destruction, a boy made of clumsy mismatched pieces. Running straight into the mouth of danger, after it found him and invited him along for a ride.

  Halse said dryly, “It’s an hour and a half drive, so it’s going to be real boring if you sit there quiet the whole time.”

  “Hour and a half?” he questioned, turning a fraction toward him against his better judgment. “What the fuck?”

  “They found him out in the woods, edge of a national park I guess,” Sam said.

  He kept a hand and one knee touching the wheel, the other hanging a measure above the gearshift. Traffic passed behind them at a steady clip, going the compulsory twelve miles per hour over the limit. Periodically his fingertips twitched to rub the edge of the peeling sticker.

  When it became apparent that Andrew wouldn’t continue, Halse said, “He had Riley listed as his emergency contact through Vandy. I guess the cops looked that up when some lady out walking her dog or whatever found him. I asked to see where, after they brought him back and called his parents and shit.”

  “Why?” Andrew asked, packing weight into that one word.

  Sam said, shrugging, “Because I needed to know.”

  Sober and strained, the pair lapsed out of conversation. Andrew scrolled on his phone with nerves jangling, typed a brief email to Dr. Troth to apologize for missing their arranged time. Without his hat, Halse was a younger-looking man, still unfinished around the edges of his stubbled jawline and prominent cheekbones. The mantle of his persona hung looser on him than usual. Andrew swallowed a knot of uncertainty, his earlier aggression dissolving from the simple awkwardness of the situation and the lack of continued provocation.

  Sam took his eyes off the road to catch Andrew staring and said, “I’m not stupid. I’m guessing you think something bad happened with him and us. Like we did something to help him along. Riley has buried himself ass-deep in guilt. He didn’t see shit wrong, and I didn’t either. Eddie was acting kind of manic at the end there, but who doesn’t sometimes?”

  The responses that rose to his mouth and died there formed a block of clutter. Andrew grunted and nodded instead of offering an explanation. Halse hadn’t quite hit the nail on the head, but he was too close to the truth of the suspicions knocking around Andrew’s skull. Something bad covered a whole manner of sins.

  “It doesn’t sit right with me that his phone is missing. Odds it’s out there in the woods?” Sam asked.

  The question sounded rhetorical, but Andrew said, “Not strong.”

  “Maybe it landed in someone’s pocket,” Sam said slowly, testing the idea.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said to the man he thought might’ve taken it.

  “You’re crazy,” Halse said. It didn’t sound like a real disagreement.

  After another drag of tense quiet, Sam turned on the radio and spun the dial to loud. Andrew sat gnawing his nails in sequence to pass the drive. He had come with Sam alone, friendless, far from the city, and he hadn’t bothered to so much as text a person his whereabouts. Ethan’s monologue lingered in Andrew’s head: protective of his cousin, disapproving of the gothic obsession that selfsame cousin shared with Eddie, prone to clashing with Eddie bad enough that other people noticed. He recalled the scabs on Halse’s jaw the first time they’d met, and West’s observation about Eddie’s fights. The fact that the pair of them had been running Halse’s business routes together. All the secrets Eddie had hidden from Andrew. He was starting to feel like every one of Eddie’s lies and evasions had something to do with Halse.

  At a turnoff with a national parks sign, Sam spun the wheel and took a hairpin turn faster than he needed to, with a noisy scatter of gravel. He parked at a service road that said NO PARKING. Their doors slammed in the birdcall-split solitude of the wood’s edge. The total absence of other humans was notable in the density of the quiet. His skin crawled. If Halse was the one responsible, despite his performed ignorance—

  “Down here,” Halse said as he set off walking, interrupting Andrew’s uneasy hesitation.

  Andrew followed him onto the hiking path. The trees closed over their heads, undergrowth lush on either side of the packed dirt track. At a sharp curve in the trail, split with a snarled ankle-thick root, Sam grabbed a tree branch for balance and clambered off the path. He waved an unconcerned hand through a dreamcatcher of a spider’s web at face-level. Andrew picked through the underbrush at a more sedate pace. He drank in the gloaming-dimmed forest around him for signs, for some necromantic twinge, and scuffed his feet through the leaf litter in pursuit of more tangible evidence. Then Halse stopped. Andrew halted two feet behind him.

  Halse laid his palm over the trunk of a broad, craggy white oak with its bottom branches curved almost to the ground. The tree was as broad as Sam’s wingspan, Andrew guessed, a monster planted in the middle of a ring of skinnier growth. It had a certain poetic weight. He hated it with a fierce, scouring depth.

  “Cops said here.” Halse moved his hand from the trunk, uncovering a freshly scarred carving, EF. “Under this tree. Might’ve taken weeks to find him, if that dog ha
dn’t helped.”

  Andrew swallowed. “Has Riley seen this?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t bring him out here.”

  Without waiting for a response he turned and paced around the side of the tree to give Andrew some privacy, scuffing his boots through the ground cover, as Andrew had been doing on his approach. He disappeared behind the trunk. Andrew sidled up to the tree with the caution he’d use for a skittish horse. The bark was rough and warm, but inert under his hands where he traced the scarred memorial letters he presumed Halse had left, the only other man to visit Eddie’s resting place. Andrew expected to feel a stab of recognition, the riffling wail of his spectral hanger-on, but there was nothing—the cold knot inside him didn’t even stir in response to the supposed site of Eddie’s death.

  Andrew pressed his palms harder and laid his forehead on the coarse wood, grinding it into his skin. In all his dreams, he’d never seen the tree, this broad spreading creature standing guard over a forest he wasn’t sure the name of. The toes of his shoes touched the base of the roots, his shoulders rounding. The rustling steps on the other side of the trunk ranged farther out.

  This didn’t feel like it could be the place. He felt more death walking down any street of Nashville. Any tree in the forest would have the same tug of interest or knowledge—which was to say, none—even though the cops said Eddie’s blood had watered this monster’s roots. Andrew took a knee at the base of the trunk. One hand on the root nearest him, crawling free of the underbrush, and one on the packed earth, he closed his eyes. He had an idea of how to ask, if asking was the right word. It was precisely the depths to which he’d promised himself he’d never stoop, but Eddie had called to him in his desperate times, and he still felt the visceral memory of power lashing out.