Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  “She’s weird,” his friend Weeks told him. “Like someone possessed by the souls of Siamese kittens.” Weeks called her KitKat. “All that makeup like cat’s eyes.” Once in the sixth grade, Weeks told him, she’d barricaded herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. He knew this because it was during homeroom, and he overheard some girls talking about it. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t come out—they just heard a tiny meowing from her in there.”

  “Bullshit,” said Dex.

  “That’s the God’s truth,” said Weeks, who had a small peanut-shaped head and floppy red hair and cheerful pimples like polka dots on his cheeks.

  Dex didn’t tell Weeks that he kind of liked the makeup (the long-lashed part of her eyes), but he suddenly doubted his perception of Willa. Girls were unreliable, like those shape-shifters in the stories they’d read for English—pretty one day, ugly the next—he could picture half the girls in his school turning into trees or a deer or cows. Part of him was disappointed that the cute girl who maybe liked him had been turned into a weirdo, but the other part of him was still hopeful.

  “She seems nice enough to me,” said Dex. He thought he’d felt her lean into him from her desk the last time they’d worked together. “Maybe she just didn’t feel good.”

  Weeks raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. Meowing?”

  It was true that Dex only saw her at school, not at the house parties or in the laundromat parking lot, where people drank beer and swallowed orange and yellow pills they’d stolen from their parents’ medicine cabinets. But that might only mean she was still undiscovered—not in the right crowd, but not necessarily strange.

  Last Tuesday the teacher asked them to exchange their essays, arguments as to whether or not there should be a military draft—they’d both argued against it. He could tell hers was well written, and he didn’t see any grammatical mistakes, but his mind wandered as he read, and he knew that if he didn’t make a suggestion, he’d lose her respect, so he wrote, “This is okay, but it needs more flash.” Willa handed his back to him with a little clucking sound. Her round handwriting said, “Just say what you think.” She’d drawn three stars below the comment.

  HAL

  ON AN INDEX CARD taped to his dashboard, this Bible verse: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” He moved his lips to the words as he read them now, to put them inside his body. On the way to Avery Taft’s office, as he drove past the green fields and the crosses of telephone poles, he felt the prongs of the consonants on his lips and tongue.

  On Sunrise Drive, he could see in the distance the attenuated 7s of the football field lights and the bland brick rectangle of the high school, where he hoped Cully was concentrating on what he was supposed to be learning.

  He passed the Reese house, which he’d sold just below the asking price back in December. With its austere gray brick and stately pillars near the front door, the gold cupola on the top of the roof, it looked like a trophy. He’d sold it to an insurance man who’d been skeptical of the elaborate game room, but Hal had convinced him that a built-in pool table could be therapeutic, and they’d had a long talk about the game. Hal had been praying. He needed more blessings like the Reese house sale, like the other night with Darlene, when her breasts had looked full and white in the lamplight, and she’d said how much she needed him. He’d been trying like hell to free himself from sin.

  When he turned the corner, the sunlight swiped against the windshield, and he parked next to Avery’s white Mercedes in the lot. Taft Property’s office was a model home near the entrance to one of Avery’s subdivisions, a palatial colonial with three stories and two balconies, four large white pilasters from roof to bottom like great, neatly creased scrolls of paper. Not to Hal’s taste, though he admired the effort. Hal straightened his tie in the rearview mirror, brushed the lint and Danish crumbs from his blue pants, and got out of the car.

  Inside, the receptionist, Sahara or Shawna, a cute blonde wearing a suit that looked too old for her, called Avery on the intercom to announce that Hal had arrived. Avery appeared at the top of the staircase, dressed just like his foremen, only a little more expensively, a little more showily. The boots were blue snakeskin, and the dark jeans looked pressed.

  “Howdy, Hal. Come on up,” he said. As Hal made his way, he felt overdressed in his suit and tie, weaker because of it. At the landing, Avery slapped him on the back. “How’ve you been?” His curly dark hair and red lips were deceptively youthful.

  “Good. Good.”

  “So, what are you thinking about this game? Think we can get around that Monster Thompson?”

  “Well, I tell you what, Coach says they’ve been looking alive—looking crisp.”

  “Glad to hear it. I don’t want that thing we got last year. You got to close the deal when you’ve got them down.” When they’d played Brenham last season, they’d let them come back, lost by just one point on a field goal in the last seconds of the game.

  “Well,” said Hal, “that’s for damn sure. Nobody likes to get kicked in the stomach like that.” Avery asked about the lineup—who was in, who was hurting—and Hal told him what he could, bullshitted the rest. As Hal sat now in the wood-paneled office, Avery’s millions seemed to sing through the oaky, shellacked walls.

  The assistant brought them two bottles of water and two glasses, and quietly left.

  “So, how are you, old friend?”

  “Doing great,” said Hal, thinking gifts of the spirit, gifts of the spirit.

  “How many catches does your boy have this season? Ten? Fifteen? Couple hundred yards maybe?”

  “Something like that.”

  Hal didn’t want to have to ask Avery directly—it didn’t seem right. Avery would surely offer him something, on the basis of his record, on the grounds of their old friendship, and then maybe Hal would get him around to the idea of Avery using only him to sell the new homes.

  “Hal, the reason I asked you over here, is you know that old house I own out on Route 2351?”

  “Sure.” Hal’s stomach buckled. That house was a ranch with ugly green shutters and the Texas Tea and Pawn on one side of it, the Jugglers’ Saloon on the other. Was it possible to be destructively hopeful? He’d seen a For Sale sign there for months but hadn’t known it still belonged to Avery—it had once been Avery’s parents’ house. “I’ve had that O’Bresley working on it, and he’s gone nowhere with it. I thought you could give it a try. I’m pulling the listing from them. I’m sentimental about the place, but I don’t have any illusions. Someone should tear it down and build another commercial property there.”

  Avery must have known how difficult the sale would be, but Hal wasn’t going to put it in that light. He was trying to get back on his game now, get a chance to prove himself.

  “I’ll take it on, sure.”

  “I sure would appreciate you. I’ve been thinking for a while that we ought to work together.”

  Now the light seemed to shine brighter in the room, and Hal was thinking of how he might turn this opportunity to just the right angle—it was a thing he used to be able to do in football—take a broken play and turn it into a big gain.

  “How’s all that business with Banes Field going? You going to start building out there soon?”

  “Well, I gotta tell you, we’ve got the financing all lined up. We’ve got the architectural plans. We’ve even got the contractors. And honestly, I’d projected that we’d start sales at the end of next summer. But this thing with the Rosemont–Banes Field site is holding us up. It’s a real pain in my ass.” Despite all his success, there was a laziness in Avery that Hal couldn’t quite put his finger on, a reliance on others’ goodwill.

  “Didn’t I hear something about the EPA clearing it again—for what, five years? Ten?”

  “They did clear it. But believe it or not, there’s still a tree hugge
r after some glory where that’s concerned.” Avery cleared his throat, sat back with his hands clasped behind his head. “Well, glory’s one word for it, I guess. Don’t get me started. Let the government take over what you eat and what you drive, where you live, where you shit. It’s a mess. Do you know what I heard direct from my buddy at NASA? Why the Columbia shuttle exploded? They used a new green fixant for the tiles instead of the old one (which worked perfectly fine) because it contained asbestos. Now, I’m asking you, who cares about asbestos in outer space? Who’s going to breathe it? E.T.? And, bam, the tiles fall off because of some shitty eco-friendly subpar glue.”

  “You know,” said Hal, grasping the rope of this chance, “I believe we’re meant to prosper. If the land’s there, we ought to use it.” He had a strong feeling Avery had not been saved. On the wall, there was a display of old Texas license plates, dented and rusted, the lost codes of numbers making some kind of art, and next to that, a discreet cabinet of crystal decanters and glasses and bottles of bourbon.

  Avery’s lip curled up on one side. “Yeah. That’s what my granddad would say—don’t let opportunity go to waste. Do you know, thanks to the eco-nuts, we haven’t built a new oil refinery in Texas for decades? Can you imagine those old facilities? Safety, my ass.”

  “Well, the Rosemont situation has been taken care of—no question about that—after all the settlements.” He’d wanted an exclusive to the other neighborhood, Pinelands, but this new neighborhood, after it was built, would be a nice follow-up.

  “Look. If you ask me, I don’t think there was a single good reason for all those people to lose their houses in the first place. Was there cancer? Yes. But you know something? Did you notice how people used to just die of it? They didn’t count it up the way they do now. That’s got to make a difference. I’m not convinced there’s any more cancer now than there ever was. In the old days you just went when it was your time.”

  Hal shrugged. “Exactly.” He was foggy on the details of what had happened to the Rosemont neighborhood all those years ago, remembered a few people got sick, and they’d buried the toxins instead of the other options they’d had. That, and some people still believed it was all a hoax.

  “Can I trust you to keep something under your hat?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Avery looked at him, eyes narrowed, as if he were mentally measuring his face. “You want an exclusive, don’t you? It could be effective, I’ve been thinking.”

  “I sure would like that.”

  “The building permit over near Banes Field isn’t even the problem anymore. That’s practically a done deal. The only issue is, I’ve got this lady on my ass. She’s been on me in fact for a couple of years now. I don’t really know what her deal is, but I heard the husband—supposedly a nice guy—left her. Her name’s Lee Knowles. You know her?”

  Hal felt the stirring again in his chest, that hope he felt sometimes in church. “Well, she’s my neighbor. I sure do know her.” Darlene had taught her daughter, maybe, or another one of her kids? That wasn’t luck—that was a blessing.

  “She actually paid a shitload of money for a study of the ground soil. Just to stop me from doing anything out there. What kind of cup of crazy is that? After the EPA said the soil was cleared. I mean, what’s her deal? It’s a fragile sort of situation right now. We’ve got time on our side—no one is thinking of Rosemont anymore. But it’s the sort of thing where if she makes a big enough stink, well, nutty as she is, it could affect the sales of my homes.” He sighed. “I have half a mind to just take the plans, the contractors, the whole shebang, and buy another piece of land somewhere, figure out some way to write off the loss.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Just write it off. I’d like to do something for this town though. Really. People need to work.”

  Hal had been staring at the cross in the windowpane, and now the words came back to him: Beloved, I pray that you may prosper. He was beloved. “You know something, Avery, let me see if I can talk to her. I might be able to make some headway there with my neighbor.”

  Avery raised an eyebrow. “I keep thinking there must be another side to this. Does she own property somewhere?”

  Hal didn’t remember anything about the lady except he’d noticed she was good-looking for someone pushing fifty. And she’d kept her dogwood tree up in the front. “Let me find out for you.”

  This was his way in. Hal had prayed about it, and now he could visualize how it would happen. He’d do this favor for Avery, prove himself worthy of opportunity, and then he’d get the exclusive.

  Avery stood up and walked over to an easel holding a large tablet of paper, and he picked up a marker. “Let me draw it for you.” He scrawled a long black swath across the bottom. “That’s Banes Field, okay? The chemicals, covered up, buried, safe.” He picked up a red marker and drew a blocky cluster along the black line. “That’s where Rosemont was.” He drew arrows. “Now, before they buried the chemicals inside the supersonic plastic, you can see why this area was in trouble, but to my mind, now, even this territory right here is safe. It’s safe, and it’s dirt cheap.” He changed his marker to a green one and drew a giant house hovering just above the red area. “But here, here is where I want Pleasant Forest to be—we’re about a quarter of a mile from where the edge of Rosemont used to be. It’s even safer than that. Hell, that’s why they’re letting me build there. And to tell you the truth, I’ve got my eye on the old Rosemont property too.” He drew a smaller green house over the red. He stepped back and nodded at his illustration, turned around with a bounce in his step. “I don’t know why they didn’t think about it before.”

  “Well, I guess people are scared off by the lawsuit with Tulver Homes and all that.”

  “They had that lawsuit because they never told the buyers about Banes Field. The beauty of this plan is that I’ve got two one-thousand-page binders of evidence from federal agencies clearing Banes Field for human health. All I’ve got to do is show them the binders and have the buyers sign a release.”

  “Should anything happen.”

  “I don’t think it will. But look, you never know when you’re liable to get another eco-nut trying to forge a connection. I’m not even convinced there was a cause and effect back then, when all the chemicals were still wild and free. We live with chemicals, Hal. Our granddads probably took baths in oil.”

  Hal pictured his own grandfathers, the one a grocer, the other a claw-fingered locksmith, and he figured Avery’s had had more luck. “Well, it’s true—oil’s a natural commodity.”

  Avery stood up and ambled around his desk to signal the meeting was over, and Hal looked down at the floor—he felt like he’d forgotten something, his wallet, his briefcase, but no, he’d left all that in the car. Avery shook his hand heartily, then patted his shoulder. “Sure is good to see you, Hal. We should grab a beer sometime.”

  He needed to make some money badly, but he left Avery’s office feeling he should have said a prayer before going in there. He needed to think about how much God wanted to give him.

  Driving past the flags of city hall and the colorful flowering bushes of Robertson Park, Hal thought about what Pastor Sparks had asked him to do at their last meeting, to write down on a card what he hoped to be doing five years from now, to write down how much money he hoped to be making. And they had sat there in the pastor’s office and prayed over it together. God wanted him to have a more abundant life, that was clear. Jesus had kept him from drinking this past year, and the rest would surely follow. He believed that. He really believed in that. “Amen,” he said, laying out the plans in his head.

  What had happened all those years ago at Rosemont? His memory was vague, but he knew he’d read about it in the papers, resented it when the media got involved. The Houston Chronicle wrote it all up, and the place got listed as a Superfund site, a way to cheapen the landscape and a way for the government to
shame all the companies that had inadvertently polluted. He’d still been working at the engineering firm back then, and the talk around the office was about how this was going to take down property values. It was what happened when people let ideas get the best of them, ideas instead of real flesh-and-blood people who needed work. All that hysteria about cancer was mostly misplaced fear about death—and if you came to the Lord, then, maybe you weren’t afraid of it anymore.

  He had almost never seen Lee Knowles leave her house, as he and the family always did, on Sunday morning. In fact, even before now, she’d been one of the people he sometimes thought he should witness to. Now he imagined talking to her calmly about why she should drop the issue with Banes Field, how her once-pretty face would open up to him, and she’d begin to trust him, her big blue eyes softening. He’d knock on her door another day, or she’d come to his, ask him if he could fix a broken lock or faucet, and when he came to her house, he’d ask her casually if she knew Jesus, and she’d look shyly down into her coffee cup and her eyes would well up, and then he’d offer to take her to church. All the goodness wound up in a ball that just kept rolling and rolling in his mind—he’d get the Avery Taft exclusive, and Lee Knowles, in turn, would start witnessing to others instead of protesting the local housing business.

  At dinner that night, Darlene would not eat more than a raw cucumber, and Cully kept looking away from the table to the TV in the den, as if wishing it were turned on to a game. Hal told Darlene about his meeting with Avery, but was careful not to get her hopes up. “I’m going to see what I can do to help him with that sticky situation with the permit.”