by Rene Steinke
“Huh.” She liked it when he complained about Cindy, made her seem silly and too weak to handle him, though she knew his grousing would never amount to anything. And tonight, even his phone call, that pleasant scratch in his voice, his laugh, even all this couldn’t knock down the grief stacking up in her chest, block by block. “Do you want to know what I saw yesterday just outside of Banes Field? I’m pretty sure it was one of those containers of chemicals risen up out of the ground.”
“Now, why the hell are you still going over there?” There was a washing sound on the phone.
“I don’t need to answer that. Look, if this doesn’t stop that construction permit, I don’t know what will.”
He sighed. “Well, don’t expect them to throw you a party.”
“You could act more happy for me.”
“Let’s see what comes of it first. I wish you wouldn’t do that stuff anymore. I wish you’d just—”
“You’re not in charge anymore, remember?”
“Jesus, Lee. You’re right, I’m not.” He paused, and she imagined he was taking a long swallow of something—Jack Daniel’s or beer. “Can I tell you why I called? I watched this old movie last night—you know, a Western—and the saloon girl reminded me of you. She just showed up for a few minutes, but she had this way of slamming down a drink.”
“I don’t do that.” He was so sentimental sometimes, she wondered if it was calculated. When they were together, he’d had a way of using his sweetness to get her to agree. Or if he was angry, he’d walk fast over his limp, which only exaggerated it.
“You would do that,” he said, “given a glass of beer.”
They talked awhile longer, reminisced and bantered as they were prone to, and then Jack’s voice turned slow and thick, and he said, “I believe I’m going to go lie down for a while and watch the game.”
“You do that,” she said, but he hung up before she thought he heard her.
She’d expected to get a call from Mayor Wallen by 4:00 at the latest, but she just kept working, thinking he might call before 6:00.
The room felt heavy with light. The bed was Jess’s old bed, with the purple-checked bedspread, and her bureau, still scratched up, pale rings from damp glasses on the surface. Whenever Lee met someone new, a friend of a friend or a new person at work, she always told them as soon as she could that she’d had a daughter who’d died of a blood disease, so that Jess’s death wouldn’t come up again by accident in casual conversation. She needed to control the number of facts she told, or else she might fall apart at some inopportune time.
Against the wall, she kept the boxes, files, and reference books and a small table where she worked, just under the school picture. In the photograph, Jess tilted her head—as if she were suspicious of the photographer—was she laughing at herself or hiding or thinking about how she’d look to some boy? She wore a light blue sweater, which disappeared into the fake sky background. With her daughter’s eyes looking out over her work, Lee could sometimes muster the feeling as she gathered figures and shuffled through papers, that she was still taking care of a child.
She turned on the TV and inserted the old video into the VCR that she’d kept just for this purpose. Whenever she found a new shred of evidence, she watched the video, though it pained her, and at this point she’d studied the footage a hundred times. The screen flickered on, and there was Rue Banes—alive again—in her pantsuit and frilly high-necked blouse, sitting straight and birdlike on a hard chair, a paneled wall in the background. Her face was wrinkled and powdered, with a long jaw and a large nose, but her mouth was girlish. She grinned as she neared the ends of her answers. Again and again, Lee needed to study the old woman’s expression, to see if there was any trace of guilt there.
“It goes like this. Back in the fifties, I was offered a deal. I had this little company that had been my dad’s, and Garbit Company wanted me to take the waste from them and refine it into new products. My company and I were promised technical support. I was promised a profit. I made some money, sure, but after a year or so, I was on my own. I had no idea of what some of those chemicals did, but Garbit knew, sure.”
The question she was asked next was muffled on the tape, but she nodded, placed her hand patriotically on the lapel of her red jacket. “No, I did not. I had my man dig a pit, and we poured the waste in there. Every year, the agencies came out and tested the soil, and except for one or two times, the levels came out clean.” The tape flickered, and her head came back at a different angle, looking huge and heavy on her thin neck.
She spoke as if her old self belonged to some employee she couldn’t take responsibility for. It was hard to believe she hadn’t known the chemicals she’d dumped were toxic, or that she’d forgotten what she’d buried when she sold the nearby land. “Once or twice the smell got bad, and when I told Garbit, they sent out a small plane that sprayed a perfuming agent to cover it.” Not once did she say “I regret,” but there was an occasional flicker in her eyes, or in the awkward angle of her lipsticked mouth, and this made Lee pity her. This was why she watched—how could this woman with small, crinkled eyes and a friendly, straight-talking voice have caused so much suffering?—it wasn’t clear whether or not she knew it. “Look, Good Lord, I had no idea. If I’d known, I’d have found something else to do.” Lee had heard that her foreman used to hire teenagers after it rained, to dump chemicals into Tubb Gully and Crystal Creek, one to do the dumping and one to watch. Stewart, one of the ones who’d done the dumping years ago, had developed unexplained brain damage. Lee still saw him at the service station where he pumped gas, his shoulders hunched as if they could barely stand the weight of his large hands. “And the truth is, I’m sorry,” Rue Banes went on. “But these bureaucrats at the government agencies? They don’t understand oil. They don’t know the business. They just love their chemistry.”
Lee remembered how the McHughs had tried to have a pool installed in their backyard, but they couldn’t make the excavation stable because the dirt contained so much oil, which also leaked up through the cracks in the cement of their driveway. When the EPA came out to do tests, though, they took a sample closer to the house, which was procedure, and the soil came up nearly clean, so no one knew what to believe.
Back then, Lee had been out walking one day when she met her neighbor Michelle Smalls, crying because there was a woman on Cherry Street who’d just given birth to a stillborn baby, a boy with his heart attached to the outside of his body. “On his back, if you can believe it. That family!”
“Somebody needs to find out what’s in that crap they’re finding around here,” Lee said. She’d had no idea then of the violence already slamming within Jess’s blood.
“I know sad things happen like this all the time. They do,” said Michelle. “But still.”
On the tape, a man sat next to Rue Banes, but Lee could only see his arm and leg, a gray suit. And in the background sound, there was a commotion of more people entering the room of the filming. “Ms. Banes,” a man’s voice said.
Rue Banes suddenly stopped smiling, looked up imperiously over the camera at something else. “You see, I am not the only one,” she said. “I cannot be the only one responsible for this.”
The video flickered off.
Just before six o’clock, Lee called Mayor Wallen again, but he’d left for the day. She imagined him calculating how to have the container safely removed, how to excavate the field again, and who would pay for it all. She heard the voices of neighbor children bouncing on the trampoline next door, car doors slamming, the whinny of screen doors. Outside the window, the warm, blue last light of the sun fell upon the grass.
Jess’s desk was cluttered with papers—torn-out newspaper articles and reports on benzene in the water table and names and phone numbers of all those bodiless voices she talked to at the agencies, two old snapshots of the sludge coiled up near a tree. In the file cabinet, Professor Samuels
’s studies were arranged in the top drawer, and in the middle drawer, the cancer count records she’d culled from the local hospitals were arranged by year. In the bottom drawer, a file on each chemical they’d identified in Banes Field: vinyl chloride, benzene, fluorene, copper, toluene, styrene, and forty or so others. The chemicals needed to be evacuated, packaged, and sent out to the desert or else burned up safely in an incinerator (and it had to be an expensive one that wouldn’t pollute the air). People’s eyes glazed over, reading the data, but when she could get someone’s attention at an agency, or on the city council, she felt the ground steady beneath her. At the very least, Avery Taft shouldn’t be building near that field. The land should stand empty.
She sat at the desk, making notes on a yellow legal pad. She dropped her pen on the rag rug, and when she reached down to get it, there was a dark hair caught in the red weave. Who knew how long it had been there? She tugged it free. Long and curved. It might have been Jess’s—probably was. She laid the hair on one of the papers on the desk, ran her finger down the line of it.
DEX
THEY LIVED IN A TRAILER parked in a field adjacent to the Baptist church. With the old folks’ home on the corner, ambulances wailed down their street every other day. They kept the grass neat, and Dex’s mother tended a garden; and except for the occasional visit from the elderly preacher, who wanted them to attend a service, the Baptists mostly left them alone.
Dex’s mother sat at the card table with a stack of bills, writing checks with one hand, eating potato chips out of a bowl with the other.
“Hey, Mom.”
She looked up, her full face sweet and worried. “Want something to eat?”
Dex flopped back on the couch. “No, thanks.” He was tired from assisting at practice—he’d had to haul the equipment off the field, dragging several tractor tires and rolling the bulky pass caddies through the grass while the players ran laps around him on the track.
“I’m beat too,” she said. “Ms. Redmond had me typing this endless brief. Has all these special formats.” Behind her, on the little shelf, there was a hula girl with a red lei whose grass-skirted hips swayed when you lifted up the figurine. Lately, it seemed so pathetic to him. And there was a tiny painted landscape, a waterfall and a pink beach, two people the size of flies making their way into the surf. In block letters, it read HAWAII, 1990. These were souvenirs from the trip his parents had taken just before he was born, and they had always stood on that little shelf.
“I’m thinking of asking your dad to get you a new truck. That old Ford worries me—the door’s all rusted out.”
“It runs fine.”
“Well, today’s fine isn’t tomorrow’s fine. School’s about to start, and you’ll need something you can depend on.” She pushed away the potato chips and fixed him with a serious look, her chin doubling.
His dad never said why he’d left, only told Dex, “She’s a good person, and you respect that. Always.” When they were still married, as soon as his dad got home from work, he showered and slapped on cologne from the black bottle before he even kissed her, and whenever she was mad, he would follow her around the house calling her “Leah!” or trying to get her to laugh. She hadn’t been fat three years ago, when he took off for the oil rig, his face smileless and dim in the cab of his truck, the bed rickety with stacked boxes.
She rubbed the side of her mouth with her finger. “Your dad can afford it. You know that every month when he sends his check, he sends me a little note too.” She reminded him of this often, as if it had more meaning than it did. “He’s been asking what he can do for you—he’s been asking if we need anything more.”
His dad was so secretive now. He lived in that house in Port Arthur, with the adobe brick and gray shutters Dex had seen in the photo he’d emailed. There was a swimming pool in the subdivision, and jungle-themed putt-putt golf nearby. He kept telling Dex this detail every time they talked on the phone, laughing about the waterfall at the end of the ninth hole, and how the ball spit up out of the elephant’s trunk at the end, even though Dex had outgrown that kind of fun a long time ago. His dad worked down at the coast on the Shell oil rigs—was gone for a month at a time. He worked with a guy named Tipper who sang “like a sick dog.” His dad ate barbecue wherever he could find it, would drive for hours through flat fields and tiny towns to some secret smoky pit behind a gas station, where you could walk close to the fire pit, because he just had to see if the meat really was as tender as everyone said it was. Oil work and barbecue. What else did Dex really know about him now? Sometimes he sent chain emails with jokes he thought Dex would like—they were attached to pictures like a dog driving a car or an opened can of beans with a mouth drawn on it, a tongue hanging off the lip.
“Well, if Dad wants to get me a truck, far be it for me to stand in the way.” He wouldn’t mind a black one, with four doors instead of two.
“Alright then,” she said.
She got up and turned on the radio behind her to the country station and sang along to the tune. “I’m already in love with the tomorrow of you.”
His friends thought his mother was hilarious. When they came over, she’d pass around bowls of pretzels and M&M’s. She ran a private joke with each of them, how Weeks needed fancy shoes to go with his hair, how Lawbourne was a salesman but she wasn’t buying. But at this point, Dex doubted any man would love his mother again. That would be left to Dex and his sister now.
“You with your gray hair, you with the lines at your eyes.” She put the bowl in the sink, her hair dark and glossy under the light, her hips pillowed beneath the loose brown dress.
“Your sister’s a great girl,” said his mom.
He knew she wanted him to assure her again that, no, they weren’t raised in a barn—and so he tried to be funny. “Uh-oh. Where’s this going?”
“She’s like an Energizer bunny, and she’s smart.” On the wall behind her, there was a framed picture of his sister, Layla, in a cheerleading uniform, holding up her pom-poms like small heads of blue hair. His mother took a bite of a marshmallow cookie. “I want you to look out for her next year.”
“What makes you think she’ll let me?”
“Oh, don’t give me that. You need to find out who her friends are, and I’ve told you I think it’s a shame that you kids don’t date anymore, but whatever, same rules I had—she can’t go anywhere where there’s boys and no parent. If she doesn’t like that, tough.”
“Layla, does she even like boys?” If only she would laugh.
His mother puffed out her cheeks and sighed, then took another bite of the cookie.
“Hey, Mom?” he said.
She looked at him, chewing. The doctor had diagnosed her with diabetes last month.
“You shouldn’t be eating that.”
She swallowed and smiled a closed-mouth smile. “Oh, I know. New diet starts tomorrow.” She got up and left the kitchen area, her hair piled up in a nest at the back of her head, her legs moving lazily and unevenly, some slight imbalance in her he hadn’t noticed before.
DEX KNEW HE HAD an inside self that was still unfamiliar to him, a shadowy thing he glimpsed while driving straight on the highway. Each time after one of his dad’s visits, when his dad got in the car to leave, Dex heard the whisper of it, and kissing Sue Williams, he’d felt it. Dex had taken her to the homecoming dance; bought her a big, fat fake mum corsage that hung off her shoulder like a small, beribboned white cat. He knew the truth, that he was skinny and unsmooth, prone to getting shit from the football players, just as liable to get laughed at as liked. Only a girl like Sue could have changed that, taught him the language he needed to talk to that trapped stranger inside himself.
Then one week after the dance, Dex was walking down the crowded hallway to the cafeteria when he spotted her, laughing and swinging her hair, sitting on the lap of Greg Hycliff. She’d nightmarishly become a different person, one who happ
ened to be covered in Sue’s skin and clothes. He began to shake, and a pain pricked at his neck. Before she saw him, he turned around and walked the other way.
It took him a long time to think about a girl again. Willa Lambert sat on his right side in English. Dark hair, pale skin, pink lips—pretty if you studied her long enough, but if you didn’t, her face might wash by. She was quiet, tall and narrow-shouldered, and the way she glided when she walked made him notice her breasts, set high and small.
Once they’d been assigned to work together on the imagery in The Great Gatsby. The other students were cutting up, but she flipped through the book studiously and told him to look for mirrors and eyes. From the side, he could see through the gap between buttons on her shirt, the top of her bra and a delicate gold cross on a chain, so thin it seemed at first like a line of light on her skin.
She said, “See, that’s the set of eyes on the billboard that looks down on all of them. What do you think it means? Is it supposed to be their conscience?”
“I don’t know, God?”
She shook her head, her skin reddening. “God doesn’t smirk on a billboard.”
She hung around with the other church kids who went on trips together and came back with T-shirts that said JESUS RULES. But she was also friends with Dani Banks, who had black hair, large breasts, and smoked and drank and did not go to church.
“Don’t you think Nick is an idiot?”
“No,” she said slowly. And she gave him a pitying look. Her eyes were pretty, long-lashed and bright when they settled on him. She had this barking laugh that didn’t match her delicate mouth—he liked that too. The next day, she asked to be his partner again, and he felt the envelope opening again to the inside self.
For a few weeks he hovered around her after class, making jokes about their teacher or teasing her about her sparkly shoes. Then one morning he walked past her at her locker and said hello, and she stood there, with her shoulders squared, staring into her locker, not even turning her head, her face shadowed by the blue door. “Hello,” he said. “Willa, HEL-LO!” Making an ass of himself so people stared. And still she didn’t turn around. He figured she was upset and needed some quiet—his sister Layla got like that sometimes too, but it was still irritating as hell.
