by Richard Cox
I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun . . .
No, it wasn’t music. It was his phone ringing, thrumming in his back pocket. He retrieved it and saw Juan Romero was calling.
“This is Adam.”
“Hey, Boss. You awake?”
“Of course I’m awake. What’s up?”
“I think you better come out here.”
“Where? The job?”
“Yeah, the job. Something’s happened.”
“What’s happened? Spit it out, Juan.”
“We’re gonna have to start all over. The framing’s gone.”
“What do you mean it’s gone?”
“Someone torched it, Boss. The studs, the sill plates, all of it’s ruined. We’re gonna have to pry it all up and start again.”
For a moment Adam imagined that even the countertop itself was not steady enough to hold him upright. He imagined the very floor was trembling beneath his feet. And if the earth itself could not be relied upon for stability, what was there to do but tumble?
“Musta been vandals,” Juan added. He seemed amused by what had happened. “I don’t know why anyone would want to burn down a bunch of drywall studs. Do you?”
Adam wasn’t sure how to answer that.
9
At thirty-nine years old Bob Steele could no longer call himself an athlete, or even healthy, which was a shame considering how he had once aspired to greatness. And if there was ever a reason to recall those ancient days of glory, to channel them for something productive, it should have been tonight. Instead, Bob felt as if every cell in his body, from the strands of his thinning hair to the tips of his arthritic toes, was crying out in exhaustion. When he looked into the rearview mirror, yellow eyes stared back. Something was wrong with him, something awful, but he couldn’t say precisely what. The hallucinations—haunting him almost daily now—distorted his consciousness so profoundly that at this point he could hardly tell dreams from reality.
Despair was not uncommon in this forgotten part of the world, but sometimes Bob felt like his particular failures and disappointments had been intentionally inflicted upon him by some outside force. His guiding ambition, for instance—which he had chosen at a very early age—was to live a better life than his asshole father, to succeed where the old man had miserably failed. And yet in almost every way Bob was the one worse off. His football career had proved inferior. His shitty job as a car salesman barely kept Darlene out of the welfare line, which made him a worse husband. And though the elder Steele was an alcoholic who had worked in the brutal Texas heat his entire adult life, he would probably outlive his own son.
“Not sure about that last one,” Todd Willis said from the passenger seat. “The word outlive implies a life, and we both know that isn’t true in your case.”
Through the pickup’s dirt-stained windows, Bob stared warily at the building before him. Lone Star Barbecue was a squat, tan building with a fence-enclosed pit room appended to its western wall. Even now, two hours after the restaurant had closed for the night, smoke drifted out of the pit room like rising cumulus clouds, smelling of brisket and mesquite.
It was in this place, twenty-five years prior, that Bob had learned a strange secret about the world. Back then he had been young and stupid and unable to comprehend the implications of Todd’s revelation. He’d also been distracted, because a few minutes later the five of them had burned the restaurant to the ground. In the intervening years Bob had tried to put that summer behind him, had done his best to live a halfway-decent life, but he could see now his efforts had been doomed from the beginning. This was not a life. The totality of his existence had simply been a prelude to this scene, this night, when he would finally be forced to confront the pages of his past.
For sixteen years Bob had been married to a fat woman who had once been a high school bombshell. Darlene’s guiding ambition had been to bear children, and when it became clear she was medically unable to do so, his wife had retired to the couch, where she immersed herself in soap operas and reality television. This behavior of hers was how Bob rationalized his cheating. Lately it was this redhead receptionist at the dealership, a twenty-three-year-old tart named Sherilyn who had white, freckly skin and an ass that wouldn’t quit. Two hours ago he’d been in her apartment, listening to window screens rattle in their frames, trying to ignore the collection of teddy bears she kept on three white shelves above her bed. But it wasn’t easy to ignore them when prominent streamers of lace were pinned to the shelves like bunting. As Sherilyn tiptoed to the bathroom, Bob half expected the bears to produce miniature brass instruments, strike up “The Star Spangled Banner,” and march off the shelves like lemmings. He didn’t know if he was losing his mind or feeling guilty for cheating on his wife again. Probably both. He hated those fucking bears.
“Those bears are like you,” Todd said to him. “Sitting on their asses, doing nothing, while the world goes on without them.”
Bob turned away from the restaurant and looked into the passenger seat, where Todd Willis sat staring at him.
“You were the hero,” Todd said. “The quarterback who took Old High to the state quarterfinals. Every guy wanted to be in your shoes and every girl wanted to fuck your brains out. When did you give up your dreams for this?”
Bob couldn’t remember when exactly that had happened. At some point he had started in on the meth and nowadays his memories were pretty hazy. But worse than any lost memory was the idea of his mother, somewhere in Heaven, looking down on the mess he’d made of himself. She had lost her life in the tornado and he had actively squandered his own. It was unfairness like this that made Bob hate himself a little more every day.
“Why did you come back here?” he asked Todd.
For a long time the only answer was the memory echo of his own voice, and Bob was afraid he knew why: because he was talking to himself. For the past few days he’d spotted Todd in unlikely places, like at the dealership, or on the street in front of his house, and once in a white Ford Focus on Southwest Parkway. These sightings didn’t sound like much of a problem until you considered Bob hadn’t seen or heard from Todd in twenty-five years. When you considered that detail, it made you wonder where he had come from so suddenly, and why he seemed to be following you around everywhere.
The memory echo repeated itself, again and again, like a recorded loop of music. This made him think of Todd’s childhood penchant for writing songs, how he had carried his Casio keyboard with him everywhere, always tapping out some new and amazing melody for them.
“I’m here to tell the story again,” Todd finally said.
“What do you mean? What story?”
Todd laughed, and the sound of his voice in the truck was eerily flat, no reflections or reverb at all, as if it had been spoken in some kind of endless space. In that moment Bob felt frightened the way childhood nightmares had once frightened him.
“We were The Boys of Summer,” Todd said. “Remember?”
“That was a long time ago, man.”
“You must be an idiot. Or a coward.”
“Big talk for a little kid. You better watch yourself.”
“Is that what you see when you look at me, Bobby? A kid? You’re one crazy redneck, you know that?”
“I am not crazy,” Bob said automatically. But Todd had a point. If this person in his pickup had been a kid twenty-five years ago, how could he still be one?
“If you’re not crazy,” Todd said, “tell me what you plan to do with the five-gallon can of gasoline in the back of your truck? And the box of wooden matches between your legs?”
Bob couldn’t see his truck bed from here, not with the toolbox in the way, but when his right hand felt the seat between his thighs, there indeed was a cardboard box, one with a striking surface on either side. He couldn’t remember having put it there.
“We were The Boys of Summer,” Todd explained, “and now it’s time to continue our story.”
“What story is that?”
Todd gestured out the window, where the restaurant loomed, but Bob suspected he meant something more.
“This town has reached the end of its useful life. What greatness could possibly arise from this place? Any future Nobel prize winners, any bright pupils who might someday become President? No, the only thing you people have to root for are athletes who seem talented compared to each other but not when measured against other, better communities. And you’re the perfect example, Bobby. Everyone wanted you to follow in the footsteps of your legendary old man, but you simply didn’t have the talent.”
“That’s bullshit. Those refs at L.D. Bell called a terrible game. They gave us no chance to win.”
“Bobby, please. By now you must understand the best gift you were born with is your name. The only reason you ever started for Old High was because your dad talked Coach Tyler into it.”
Of all the insults Todd could have hurled at him, this was far and away the worst.
“I wouldn’t blame your dad, though,” Todd added. “He wanted to believe as much as anyone.”
Bob was unwilling to consider that the glory days of his life, however unspectacular, had not even been earned. Fury bubbled up inside him.
“Shut up. You’re lying.”
“Your dad wanted to believe his son was a winner in his own image, instead of a loser who would never measure up.”
Bob lunged at Todd then, his hands reaching quickly for the kid’s throat, but all he came up with was air. By the time he realized what had happened, Todd had somehow climbed out of the truck and was headed for the pit room door. Bob followed him, limping and breathing heavily, but he could not catch up to the kid before he disappeared into the darkness of the pit room.
It was then that the world seemed to undergo some kind of shift, a resampling of reality, because what Bob expected to see when he entered the shadowy pit room was not what he actually saw. What he planned to do was not what he actually did.
A man was standing in front of one of the cylindrical barbecue pits. He was broad across the shoulders and round in the gut. His receding hair was steel colored, his skin bronze and crisscrossed with a network of deep wrinkles. He wore black oven mitts and tight Wranglers held together with a giant silver buckle. Engraved on the buckle were the initials “KS.” Bob appeared to have interrupted him unloading briskets from the pit.
“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded.
“He doesn’t even recognize you,” Todd whispered from the shadows of the pit room. “If that’s not the ultimate insult, I don’t know what is.”
Bob could not comprehend why his dad would be working at this restaurant or how he had put on so much weight in the three weeks since they had last seen each other. Still, there he was standing less than ten feet away.
“I’m only going to ask you once, mister,” his dad said. “Get the fuck off my property. Now.”
Todd’s voice was low. Urging. “I don’t think that’s how a father should talk to his son, do you, Bobby? Especially one who forced his kid to play football when he was never going to excel at it?”
“You’re right,” Bob replied. “He shouldn’t talk to me that way at all.”
“Maybe you should shut him up, then,” Todd said. “Like maybe you ought to make sure tonight, right now, he knows exactly how you feel.”
It was difficult for Bob, despite a lifetime of resentment, to imagine hurting his own father. But it had never been easy to disagree with Todd. As kids, Bob and his friends had been both fascinated and frightened by Todd and his four years of walking sleep, and by the end of that summer it was easy to dismiss the kid as mentally ill, as an infection that had spread to all of them. But now, when Bob thought of those hazy, sweltering months in 1983, he sensed something was wrong. Really wrong. Like what he remembered about that time could not have occurred during that time.
I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun. You got your hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby . . .
He heard this music the way he might hear it in a nightmare: echoing, distant, dissonant. Understanding this music was the key to understanding why his life had turned out the way it had.
“Your life turned out this way because of that man,” Todd reminded him. “What are you waiting for?”
Bob saw his father had reached behind his back to retrieve what turned out to be a large meat fork.
“I asked you to leave,” he said. “Now I’m going to make you.”
Kenny Steele stepped forward, brandishing the fork. But his movements were hesitant, unsure, and Bob saw how even in a compromised state he could easily dominate this confrontation. He closed the distance between them and immediately his father reversed course. This shift in momentum allowed Bob to grab Kenny’s arm, the one holding the fork, and slam it against the brick exterior wall of the restaurant.
“What are you gonna do now, old man?”
Bob pinned his father against the wall with both arms. The elder Steele’s breath smelled of barbecue and fear.
“What do you want?” Kenny cried. “I’ve got money! Just take my wallet and leave.”
“I don’t want your money, you murdering sack of shit.”
Bob brought his knee violently forward. Kenny Steele made a guttural sound and crumpled to the ground.
“You killed my mother, do you realize that? You killed your own wife.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kenny croaked.
“You drove her to Jonathan’s house so you could fight with his dad, and for what? To stop me from playing chess? Which was really smart of you since our house wasn’t even hit by the tornado. And did you, even once in your life, regret what you did? Did you ever say, ‘Hey son, I’m sorry I killed your mom. I sure am an asshole for doing something so stupid.’? No, you didn’t. You were selfish then and you are selfish now and I wish you were dead. I wish I could trade you for Mom. She was a decent woman and you are everything wrong with the world. I fucking hate you.”
Bob was crying now and could barely see through the glistening distortion of tears. His father writhed on the ground. It sounded like he was struggling to breathe. Bob knelt beside him.
“And maybe I wouldn’t have been such an average football player if you had taught me to use my brain a little. Everything doesn’t have to be a big-dick contest, you know?”
From the darkness Todd said, “Why don’t you go ahead and finish him off?”
“Finish him off?”
“You just said you wished he were dead.”
“Well, right, but I can’t actually—”
“Why not? He did it. He killed your mother.”
“But he didn’t intend—”
“And anyway you’ve got nothing to lose. You only have weeks left to live.”
“What do you mean I’m going to die soon?”
“Come on, man. Your eyes are yellow because your liver is fucked. You drink too much and do way too much meth. I would be shocked if you were alive a month from now.”
“Yellow eyes don’t mean I’m going to die.”
“It’s the same thing with your skin. And you’ve been getting sick to your stomach lately, have you not?”
Bob noticed the meat fork was in his right hand. In his trembling right hand, held high above his father’s chest. It was true he had thrown up three times in the past two weeks, that he generally had been feeling like shit for more than a month. Even Sherilyn this afternoon had complained that he smelled weird.
“You’ve got nothing to lose and your father has everything to gain. Are you going to let him be better than you forever? Are you going to keep letting him get away with that?”
On the ground, Kenny Steele’s eyes were becoming lucid again. He looked nervously at the meat fork and then up at Bob.
“Wait,” he said. “You’re one of my son’s friends. The football player.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Bobby said. “I was never any goddamn football player. Not a real one, anyway.”
> “Just do it,” Todd implored. “Just kill him. He doesn’t respect you and you’ll be dead long before any trial.”
“Wait!” his father cried. “You’re Bobby Steele! I know your dad! He comes in here all the time and he loves the brisket po’ boy. Please!”
“What is he talking about?” Bob moaned. He was pointedly not looking at his father’s face, desperate not to see the terror that was surely there. “Why is he saying this shit?”
“He’s desperate,” Todd explained. “He’ll say anything that will get him out of here alive. But if that happens, he’ll call the police. Your dad will win again and you will lose. Like you always do.”
“Please, Bobby,” his dad said. “You and my son grew up together. You’re a good guy. I know you are.”
“He thinks he’s better than you, Bobby. He always will.”
“Please!” Kenny Steele cried.
“Kill him.”
In the end Bob brought down the fork primarily to silence the voices. His right arm (his throwing arm) swung in a wide arc and the twin silver tines sank deep into Kenny’s chest. The old man’s mouth opened involuntarily, but instead of a scream he choked up blood and growled something unintelligible. Bob rocked backward on his heels and sat down with a thump.
Revenge twenty-nine years coming was as strenuous as it was fulfilling. He’d earned a little break.
On the floor next to him, Kenny Steele made gagging sounds and gamely reached for the meat fork lodged in his chest, which did not appear to move. His blue shirt was soaked red. Blood pooled in his mouth and trickled down his cheek.
The barbecue pit was still open. It was a ten-foot cylinder stood on end, six feet or so in diameter, fire at the bottom. Left unattended, with all the doors open, the fire inside had begun to grow. It climbed the perimeter of the cylinder, and watching this reminded Bob of the night twenty-five years ago when they had burned the entire restaurant to the ground.
