Friendswood
Page 3
WHEN HE GOT BACK to the office, he went straight to the bathroom, splashed water on a thin brown paper towel, and swiped at the stain near the hem of his trousers, but it still smelled of urine, maybe even worse than before. Coming out of the bathroom, he walked past the cubicles and tried not to look at the other agent, Stan, who seemed intent on finishing up more paperwork. Hal sat down and just breathed for two minutes. He felt the ache in his heart for whiskey, and said a tired prayer. Help. He checked his voice mail, and there was a message from Darlene to pick up a carton of eggs at the store; a message from the broker about someone’s credit standing; and, then, like an answer to his plea, there was one from Taft Properties: “Hal, old buddy. Any chance you can come by the office on Wednesday?”
The fluorescent overhead lights seemed to stutter and blink, and Stan looked up at him from across their desks, as if he’d heard the message too. Stan, with his round, pie face and grating laugh, would never amount to much as a salesman.
Hal called Avery back, thinking he ought to try to move up the appointment if he could do it casually enough. Avery’s assistant answered the phone.
Hal stammered, fumbling for a way to gracefully change the time. “Say, is Avery around tomorrow?”
“Nope,” said the assistant—her name was Sahara? Shawna? “Wednesday isn’t going to work?”
“No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. Tell Avery I’ll see him then.”
Sahara or Shawna said, “Avery said to bring some business cards with you if you can.”
Stan stood up, his pants loose and pouchy on his chubby frame. He gathered some papers, saluted Hal good-bye, and walked out the door.
“Will do.” This was it. He felt it. He’d prayed good, and he’d prayed right. Avery might just offer him what he wanted.
Hal hung up the phone, feeling the unnatural stillness of the office. He looked up at the bulletin board above his desk, a lost phone number pinned there that had once meant something, and next to it, the picture of Cully, kneeling reverently on one knee in the bright green turf, his football helmet clutched under his arm, his padded shoulders broad and proud over the number 12, his face so full of hope.
WILLA
THE RAIN CAME DOWN, a tattered curtain closing over the world, or sometimes like a million tiny glass doors. One had opened to Willa just before the storm blew in, and she’d seen behind it, an old man in a black cowboy hat calmly sucking on a cigarette as the wind lashed through the trees, his legs cycling in a haze of silver just before he evaporated. He’d appeared only for a couple of seconds, and as usual, she didn’t know what it meant. Sometimes at the edge of her sight line, she saw bright streaks of blood or unscrolling clouds. When she lay in her bed, she’d seen a shotgun hovering near the ceiling darkness, turning and turning again, like a blade in a fan. Outside her window, a sequined dress billowed in the noon sun, then broke apart into rags. Another day, the number 7 pressed up through the mirror, precise and haloed, as if it were cut out of light. She discovered, sitting alone and staring at a pinhead, that she could will a wobbly vision into place, but couldn’t predict what it would be. This extra sight was a weird new ability like double-jointedness, come to her late in the summer, but she didn’t know if it was real.
She hadn’t told anyone, not even Dani. Saturday there was a shed party in the woods, and she might tell her then. Cully would be there with his dogged eyes and secretive mouth, his tallness. That night in the spring, at the stadium near the concession stand, she and Dani had been talking to him, and he jokingly put his arm around Willa, let his hand rest on her shoulder for a few seconds, and when his fingers flicked at the seam of her shirt, it knocked the breath out of her.
Trapped in the house because of the rain, and bored, she stared at the dead plant on the windowsill in her room, until one of the stalks kicked into a leg and started walking out of the pot. The leg grew fur, and then a wing, fleshy at first, and then more transparent, and it flew through the glass of the window. She got up, went to the computer, and looked up hallucination online. She tapped her foot on the floor, her forehead hot as she scrolled down the blue screen. First she read about a Korean mushroom that, if swallowed, made a person see fluorescent-colored birds. Then she discovered tangled maze designs that you were supposed to stare at until your eyes blurred, and out of the blur, a picture emerged of a face or the silhouette of a cat. On a mental health site, the words psychosis and schizophrenia were highlighted red, and her fingers on the keyboard started to tremble. She read the questionnaire: “Do you feel unexplainably sad or afraid? Do people understand you when you speak? Do you ever hear or see things that others can’t?” She wondered if other people saw similar flashes of shape or color, as if the air had hidden wrinkles in it that held things, objects that appeared just for a few seconds when the atmosphere unfolded.
In a spiral notebook, she wrote down a list of the visions that had appeared so far. There had been a little girl, reaching up with both arms for Willa to hold her. There had been a naked man with thick thighs and a beard. There had been a plate of sugar-dusted cookies. An old pot filled with pencils. It seemed that if she could find a shape or a pattern, then she might take hold of their meaning, but written down, they were just words, and had none of the shimmering tenuousness of the visions themselves. The list had made them all seem fake, like moving the pointer on a Ouija board or lifting up a girl with your index finger at a slumber party, saying, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”
Her dad knocked lightly on the door and ducked in his head. “Your mom’s got steak going. About finished with that?”
She pulled the notebook to the edge of her desk. “Yeah.”
His face looked tired, distant, as if he were still thinking of work. “T-bone and potatoes. Go on and put that book away.” He winked and went back down the hall.
What would happen if she showed him the list? Most likely, he’d send her to see Pastor Sparks, who had surprised eyes and a woolly voice. He would say a demon had manifested from the television or the Internet, something she’d been staring at so much, it had found a pathway to her heart.
Just a year ago, she and her dad used to go running on the old golf course in the early morning, light pinking over the brown grass, and only a few people out, maybe an elderly couple drinking coffee on their back patio or a girl practicing herkie jumps in her yard. The sweat would drip off the tip of her dad’s nose and chin, and he’d only talk in short bursts between breaths, but he’d ask what she’d been doing in school, and whether she thought she might like to run a marathon someday, and what she thought of the new houses over on Palm Street. And if they’d still had that habit, she might have told him on one of those mornings about the things she’d seen lately. But sometime last year, his schedule at work changed and he didn’t have time anymore, and she’d noticed he’d also stopped looking directly at her face, as if it somehow embarrassed him.
She went downstairs for dinner, and her little sister, Jana, was wearing a headband with red felt devil horns glued to it. “Ha!” said Willa. “Finally dressing the part.”
Willa’s mother shot her a look, then set down the bowl of mashed potatoes.
“I don’t like that fooling around with Satan, myself,” said her father, and he reached over and lifted the horns off Jana’s head.
Jana covered her bare, blond head with her hands. “It’s just pretend, Dad.”
“Be careful what you joke about,” he said.
There seemed to be a lot of reverence for Satan at their new church, where Pastor Sparks gave prophecies of the Apocalypse in a fierce, cheerful voice—because everyone in that room would be saved, he said—and as he read the verses from Revelation, Willa lost his meaning in the surge of images—locusts like horses with human faces, the Wormwood star falling from the sky to the sea, a ten-headed dragon with horns and diadems. Her father seemed particularly alive to these sermons, as if he wanted certainty in the face of coming danger.
“Those are Jack’s,” said her mother. “She started that up years ago, after he left, don’t you remember?” Lee Knowles had been her mother’s good friend, back when they were still in high school. Willa wanted to know what had caused the falling out. She couldn’t imagine not being best friends with Dani, and she guessed that whatever had happened between Lee and her mother must have been catastrophic. Some insult or betrayal the other one couldn’t forgive. Her mother started talking about meeting Jana’s new third-grade teacher, how they’d all had an unforeseen vacation because of the storm and now it was about time they got back to school. Willa stopped listening and looked out the window at a bee banging itself against the glass, its tiny furred face.
LEE
SHE’D KNOWN SOMETHING WAS WRONG with Banes Field, that spring, 1996, though she couldn’t place it. The light hung at strange angles on the round white tank. The windows of the warehouse had been painted black, and she saw a boy wearing a red baseball hat walk in and out of it several different times—he always carried a wide, purple cylinder thing over his shoulder. It looked like a giant, shiny thermos. And there was a fat, brown-skinned man too—who wore a hard hat and overalls and smoked cigars while he walked. He walked around the field at odd hours, or sometimes cut the weeds in a riding lawn mower. Even the weeds had begun to look odd—they were sparser but also more varied in color and type than she remembered. At night, she heard a strange piercing whistle, and in the morning, there was a bitter stink in the air. Jack would stare out the back window in the kitchen and say, shaking his head, “I wonder what Ms. Banes is going to do with all that.” They worried that she might sell it to a developer, and they’d end up with a parking lot or a shopping center right in their backyard.
One morning Lee had settled down with her coffee in the sitting room after Jack had left for work and Jess had left for school. She was rattled, maybe because of Jess’s struggle with algebra last night, the way she’d moaned over her homework, all those less-than and greater-than marks, like open mouths, the opaque spells of the equations. Lee had given her a glass of soda and worked through the figures with her as best she could, and she hoped Jess would do okay on the test that day. And she’d comforted Jack at breakfast with pancakes because he had to fire someone at work, and he said, “There’s no kind way to do it. There just isn’t.” She turned the pages of the newspaper, the black print running all over the columns. Watery light came down from the high window, the picture on the wall of the owl: alert, looking for something to eat in the watercolor green, looking not to be eaten, the painted tree branch fading out at the edge of the paper. But Jess had earned As in all her other subjects, and Jack would find a way to not be cruel—he always did. In the news were warnings about computer hackers, warnings about fighting in the Middle East. She read an editorial about why kids should say the Pledge of Allegiance in school, why the flag should stand in all the churches, and she felt the chirpiness and aggression of the man’s words right there in the room. She stopped reading, stopped drinking coffee, and studied the shadows on the wall. She wanted to be grateful. After all she’d been through as a kid—her mom’s drunken fits and their sporadic, shameful poverty—she had this nice house, a husband who sang to her, who brought home trinkets he thought she’d like and didn’t nag her. She had a daughter with sweet, curious eyes who liked to tell jokes and tried so hard to be good. And Jess was good, even as a teenager, despite the hollering over the math. Leaves rustled against the window, and gradually, Lee’s nerves had calmed. The room returned to her in its solidity and quaintness, the pale couch, the gold-stemmed lamp, the paisley curtains.
In the afternoon after Jess came home from school, Lee had gone out to check the garden, which was at the edge of Banes Field. The parsley bush was a lush and large bucket, and the azaleas, pink and silly like wadded tutus. Out in the field, there were bare patches of dirt where the weeds had died. A cow wandered over and stood munching grass by the gate. It had brown and white spots, and looked over at her dumbly. She remembered that cow now because it had disappeared when she looked again later, as if it had fled.
About a foot away from the knotted root of a tree, she spotted something black and shiny in the grass that was piled up in a coil, and crosshatched with pink and brown diamonds. She thought it hissed. She moved closer, ready to jump away if it was a copperhead. But when she got near enough, she could see the thing was dead. It was curled there against the first bright spring grass, slick and oily, weird perfect coils. She bent down to look, and then she saw there wasn’t a head. It smelled rank and vaguely of petroleum, and when she put her finger against the slime just at the blackest part, her skin came back red and stinging. She crouched there in the grass, looked to the other side of the yard, and saw the sludge had squirmed up in other places too, near the hammock, and out at the edge of their yard, next to a lone dandelion. As the breeze lifted and rocked the bird feeder hanging above, she felt an uncertain dread. In the other direction near the garden hose, there were three blue-black coils lying there in a triangle, as if by design. They seemed to writhe and sputter in the bright sunlight. She kicked at the black coil beneath her, and stomped on it until it was flat and crushed, then she wiped off the sole of her shoe in the grass. As she watched her movements, she began to understand that the sludge had pushed right up out of the ground, some greasy offal that had sprouted everywhere, as if it had been purposefully planted. She went inside, and locked the door, pressed the mat against the seam at the bottom, as if the stuff might be able to slither its way inside under the doorjambs.
She went into the kitchen, where Jess sat at the kitchen table with her books. “There you are,” Jess said. “You were gone awhile.” The book was opened to diagrams and graphs, and an empty glass sat next to it. Jess bent closer to her work and chewed on her lip, barely looking up from her writing.
“Don’t go outside. Stay in here.” Lee went to the sink and stood washing her trembling hands. “There’s some bad stuff out there.”
When Jack spoke to the Turners to see if they’d seen the same sludge in their yard, Sy said, “Yeah, it’s some runoff from the oil refinery, but I checked with the city—the EPA says it’s such a small concentration of stuff, it can’t hurt anything.”
Now, years later, almost no one remembered or cared, but the sludge came up out of the ground for months. It appeared under downstairs windows, lay along the seams of sidewalks, and a few of Lee’s neighbors mistook it for dog shit. Sometimes it looked like worms or a mass of crushed coffee beans. People who touched it got rashes or sores on their skin. All over Rosemont, the sludge wriggled into rose gardens, around the bases of birdbaths, and lay in piles under hammocks. People worried, but were reassured that the EPA had tested the soil and declared it safe. Then one day, the sludge appeared, thick and oozing and with a streak of fluorescent green, under the swing set of the school playground. A mother found her little boy playing with the black coils, petroleum and dirt in war paint across his face.
WHEN LEE LOOKED NOW at the photos she’d taken of the escaped container, she was disappointed. The pictures were dim and indistinct because it had been dusk. You could see the rectangular outline in the mud and the big pink stain—but without anything around it to put to scale, it was hard to see how big the thing was or how clearly it was plastic, not wood or metal. She watched the photos slide out from the printer, each time hoping the next image would be more clear.
Outside the kitchen window, a cat slinked through the white bowl of porch light, and one of her neighbors, a man who seemed to be constantly out in his backyard, laughed loudly and whistled, and then some tinny pop music rose up from the other direction. The phone rang, and when she went to answer it,
she spilled her cup of water.
It was Jack. Finally.
“What was the name of that dog?” he said.
“You shouldn’t be drinking, you know that?”
“Who said I’m drinking?” But she could hear the growly slur in his words. “I don’t think it makes a goddamn good bit of difference what I put in my glass. But I keep thinking about that dog, the patchy one that followed her home that day and we kept for a while until the owner showed up. Real mangy.” It had been weeks since he’d called.
“Mabel.”
“Mabel, that’s right. I get these things lodged in my brain. She cried like hell when we had to give it back.”
Lee would not let him pull her into that sad place. “Jack, where’s Cindy tonight?”
“I don’t want to talk about her. Why won’t you let me just talk?”
“I always just let you talk, that’s the problem.”
“You know the other thing I was thinking about? That hat with the old Astros insignia.”
“Yeah,” she said. Jess had worn it all the time at the end, even in her bed. They’d all gone to a game that summer, and Jack had bought her everything, the jersey too, the little dog with orange saucer eyes, the small plastic cups with As painted on them.
“She doesn’t want you talking to me anymore, does she?”
“Cindy? No, she sure doesn’t. That’s right.”
When he called, Jess felt close and far away at the same time, as if she were hiding somewhere, tiny, in the pulsing phone waves between them. Lee felt the pressure tightening in her chest and shoulders, the slow, sure, squares of grief building, one on top of the other; she wouldn’t be able to shake it for a while after this. “So why do you call?”
“I can’t not, I guess.” She heard a clinking of glass. “She’s afraid of the terrorists, did I tell you that? She won’t go shopping anymore because she heard somewhere that Dobie Mall was on some watch list.”