by Rene Steinke
“Going over to the Lawbournes’,” he said, fumbling through the things on a table and picking up a set of jangling keys.
“Uh-uh, mister. No, you are not.”
Bryce was sixteen, but he looked younger, a smatter of light freckles on his nose, his cheeks smooth. “Are you kidding me, Mom? I can’t go out in the middle of the afternoon?”
“That’s right. You’re grounded. You’re not going anywhere.”
Bryce sighed, threw the keys down on the floor, and mumbled audibly, “. . . real pain in the ass!”
“Excuse me?” Rush started to stand.
“I said whatever.” Bryce stomped out to the hallway.
Rush flung up her hand and turned back to Lee. “Sorry. Teenagers! They act ugly and then about a minute later, they want something from you. Don’t you wish they’d just grow up?” She touched Lee’s sleeve. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No,” said Lee. “Don’t worry about it. You’re right.”
Jess had actually been mostly well behaved, except that night during the winter after they moved—just before she started the chemo—when she came home at 3:00 a.m., drunk and stumbling out of a boy’s car. Lee watched from the window as Jess wove her way inside, but instead of going to bed, she went straight out back to her tree in the yard and threw her purse over the flowers there. By the time Lee got outside, Jess was practically asleep. Lee rattled Jess’s shoulder. “Goddamnit. You’re sick. Do you hear me? You can’t do this.”
In the dark, her daughter’s face looked monstrous, fuchsia lipstick smeared, black running beneath her eyes, one cheek strangely twisted up and scraped. “I can do it. That’s the point, Mom.”
And then Lee said the thing she’d regret. “You selfish little bitch. You’re stinking drunk, when I’m breaking my neck trying to take care of you?”
“Then don’t.” Jess wobbled as she stood up.
“You don’t mean that.” Lee helped her inside, and Jess fell over her arm and gagged, but nothing came up. She gagged again, and spit fell from her mouth in a long string. Lee settled her on the couch and put a big black pot on the floor near her head. “Goddamnit, your dad and I love you so much.” She was trying to soften what she’d said before, to take it back, but Jess was already asleep, her mouth gaped open against the silk-upholstered pillow.
Now loud drums pounded from inside Bryce’s room. “Good Lord,” Rush said. “He’s practicing. Why in the hell we ever said yes to that, I don’t know. You wouldn’t believe the mouth on that one.” Lee remembered how their families used to gather, the adults playing cards, their children outside riding small, motorized cars around and around the house, Bryce chasing the older girls.
Rush rose from the couch, went over to the radio, and turned up the volume for the Hank Williams outlaw song. “Let me get you some more bourbon.”
That night, Lee couldn’t fall asleep, wrestled with something she couldn’t quite remember that Professor Samuels had said about the water table. He’d had a mild stroke a couple of months ago, and she hadn’t been able to consult with him for a while, though his wife had written that he was doing okay.
When she finally did fall asleep, she dreamed of Jack and Jess, as she often did. They were floating away in a large boat that was also at times a house, the water turned to land and back to water again. She didn’t recognize the house, but it was unremarkable except for the log crashed into its roof, which occasionally caught on fire. She knew how to keep it from igniting, and how to keep the boat from sinking, but the problem was communicating all this to Jack and Jess, who waved to her from the deck or the rooftop, but couldn’t hear anything she said. Again and again, she wrote down messages and carefully folded them into paper airplanes that she threw in their direction, but they didn’t seem to notice.
DOC HAD OFFERED Lee the job, part-time at his office, years ago. Thinking she was broke but not wanting to embarrass her, he’d said, “I just want to keep an eye on you is all.” He let her do her Banes Field “side work” at the office. His sister had lost her home in Rosemont, and Doc believed in her project, but he never would say it publicly.
That afternoon, while Lee was in the back, confirming the appointment schedule, Ash Bernard came to the reception window. He had no hair, but pink scales covered the entire globe of his scalp, with ridges and continents of lighter pink against the oceans of darker red. His ears stuck out from his head, and because they were oddly clear and untouched by the disease, it seemed that he might only have the sense of hearing. Or she wished that, because though his eyes were nearly swollen shut, she was afraid he might see the shock in her face at how bad it had got.
“Hi, there.” He nodded.
“Ash, how are you?” He carried a box of cigars and wore a blue tie with yellow sailboats.
“Hey, pretty lady.” His voice seemed weirdly upbeat. “I’ve got an appointment. Should be about three o’clock.” His mouth looked like a wound.
“If you could just update these forms for us,” she said, handing him a clipboard through the sliding window. Doc was signaling to her from the back, where Ash couldn’t see—that he was running late.
“I sure will.” Ash reminded Lee of a dapper, friendly snake. “Can you tell me, is it safe to park on the street right there or am I liable to get a ticket?”
“Oh, you’ll be fine,” said Lee.
Ash went to take a seat in the waiting room. He was one of Doc’s regulars, a sad case of acute psoriasis, brought on, she suspected, by women trouble. He didn’t always look that bad, though, and if she just focused on his eyes, she could speak to him naturally.
After Ash went in to see Doc, Sandy Clouter called. Though she’d moved away to Memphis, she kept in close contact with her Rosemont friends and often called Lee with updates. Sandy seemed lonely, now that her kids had gone off to college. She clung to the gossip and to the timbre of her own voice a bit too much. “I wanted to let you know—it’s real sad,” Sandy said. “Nick Busby has kidney failure too. I’m sorry, but that man was juicing carrots and veggies all the time, racing around on his bike. He should be healthy,” said Sandy. “Shouldn’t he?”
Lee told her she’d add his name to the list. There were so many chemicals in Banes Field, the EPA couldn’t even name them all—who really knew what the risks had been?
That day the phone rang surprisingly often—the woman with a sensation that felt like “tiny beads rolling up and down her skin,” the man who had a mole as big as a nickel on the top of his head, the woman who wanted to know what Doc could do about the worry wrinkles between her eyes. In the midst of all this, Professor Samuels’s wife called. “He wanted me to tell you he can still direct John in the lab and get soil samples read.”
“How is he?”
“Oh, he’s getting stronger. Stabilized. His talking’s still slurred, but I can understand him. He wants to get back to work, soon as he can.”
Lee had packed the recent samples in a box and put them in the trunk of her car—eight mismatched jelly jars with cheerful gingham on their metal tops and masking tape labels for their locations. “Tell him to just rest and get better,” she said. “And then I’ve got some photographs to show him.”
At the end of the day, Lee went in the back and restocked the cotton swabs and hand sanitizer. She turned off the lights in the waiting room, gathering up the old encyclopedias and Texas Monthly’s that had been scattered from the reading table.
She was about to leave when she saw the phone’s blinking light in the dark office. It was Mayor Wallen, finally. He said he’d been out to Rosemont, and they’d even sent a few other men out there too—experts—and none of them had found anything.
It was as if he’d reached through the phone and shoved her back in the chair. “Well,” she said. “That’s impossible.”
“Lee, you know what it looks like, don’t you?” She thought of his long horse teeth th
at he’d bare when he laughed, how he’d smelled of sweet tea the last time she’d been in his office. His voice was gentler than usual. “You have to remember there was a lot of cleanup after they demolished the houses, and with the storm, I don’t know, it probably got moved around. I’m fairly certain this was just a case of some debris.”
So many years ago now, that man in Rosemont, Bob Etson, had stood outside his house with a megaphone yelling, “Stop driving down our property values!” He’d stayed put, right up to the end, not believing the “nonsense about chemicals,” and a few years later, he died of liver cancer.
In the beginning, even Lisa McHugh had insisted to Lee that the sludge had been planted by O’Bresley Realtors, who wanted to drive down the value of their homes, so the land could be repurchased and sold for an exorbitant price. “Cal heard it all at work,” she said. “He thinks there’s a spy or two living on these streets, reporting back.” But her voice got flinty and stern as it did when she talked about “the blacks” who’d moved in on Berry Street. “It’s a shame. We’re not going in for all that hype about it being poison. You can’t believe what these folks will say to try to get something from you.” The people at the end of Sawyer Street refused to let their homes be razed; they thought they might one day want to come back.
Apparently, property values trumped everything, still. Lee tried to muffle her anger. “Mayor Wallen, it’s right where they buried the container, according to the cleanup plan. I looked at the document.”
“Huh. But that thing was buried at fifty feet. It wouldn’t come up so easily out of the ground.”
“The rain did it. It pushed it on up.”
“That’s what you think, huh? Well.” She heard something slam in his vicinity. “Be my guest. Go take a look for yourself. There’s nothing out there but empty land waiting to be put to good use.”
SHE PARKED THE CAR near the chain-link fence and put the hazard lights on. As she walked out under the sky, the wind whipped at the brush and weeds. Women worried too much about how they might get mirrored back to the world, how they might be judged. Well, her mirror had cracked. Let them arrest her for trespassing. Twenty minutes later, she located the place, the survey stakes constellated around her. She was sure. But now there was nothing to see but dried mud and flecks of weeds.
She dug for an hour or so, until her biceps felt as if they were being stabbed by small knives, and she couldn’t lift the shovel anymore. The hole was only about a foot deep. She hadn’t hit anything solid yet. The crickets came out and chattered. Her feet felt heavy. Her body ached. And she’d have to excavate the whole field to be sure. Hell, she’d need a bulldozer.
When she looked up, there was the black ring of an old tire, a scatter of stones, patches of brown grass. The air looked dusty now that it was dusk, and it was getting harder to see. Pain revolved around her arms. Her palms were chafed from gripping the wooden handle of the shovel, and there was a cut on her wrist. She stared at the turned dirt, got down on her knees, and reached into the hole, swiping away the dirt at the bottom, feeling around for the flat plane of plastic.
She dug for another hour. She pitched the shovel into the ground, pushed it in deeper with her boot, and lifted up a shovel of dirt, two shovels of dirt, threw it behind her. She didn’t even worry anymore about what the toxic shit might do to her. It was too late for that. Either it got her or it didn’t. When the hole was the size of a small bathtub, she heard Jess’s voice in the sound of the digging, Mom, Mom, Mom.
DEX
AT THE GAME, Dex paced the sidelines. It helped to count steps, to push his hands into his jeans pockets beneath his loose jersey, because he didn’t like to show his nerves. He felt as if the crowd was looking down at him from the bleachers, staring a hole through him, and he had to remind himself that it wasn’t him they were watching, but the green-lit field and Scott Gilt lofting a beautiful pass.
Coach Salem called him over. “Go warm up Teak—I’ll send him in next quarter.”
Dex signaled to Teak, and Teak came over so Dex could check the tape on his knees, and then Dex started him loosening up. It was the third game of the season, and they’d barely won the first two. He tried to watch the game out of one eye while he helped Teak get ready. Last week, he’d had to go and help Louder off the field twice, and ice down and wrap up a sprained knee on the sideline. He was always at the ready for injuries, and it kept him on edge, a tiny alarm clock in his chest that might at any moment go off. There was a totality to these nights too, the huge black sky, the unblinking white lights, the band’s horns and drums, which made the field seem heavy and fraught—the enormity of the past and the infinity of the future about to crash together any moment.
Dex was aware that people thought a student trainer was only the sad shadow of a guy who couldn’t play football himself. But he actually liked riding back from games on the bus with the coaches, overhearing their decisions about drop-in-a-bucket plays and power sweeps and the Gilt Special. Coach Salem had invited him to be a trainer because he’d known Dex’s dad, and Dex liked the bristled sternness of Salem—even if it was hard to read his face.
The Mustangs handily trounced the other team, and it felt like revenge or praise for the hurricane, the scoreboard flashing into higher and higher numbers under HOME, the band blaring, the crowd’s howls and applause almost like a living thing itself, about to take off and stomp down the bleachers and out into the roads.
After the game, it was his job to account for the equipment in the field house, and he needed to tend to Hershel’s newly sprained ankle. Hershel said the whole time, “It’s okay, I got it,” then winced whenever he tried to put weight on it. “Thanks, man,” he said, after finally giving in and letting Dex retape it. He was one of the decent ones, not exactly a friend, but someone whose playing Dex could honestly admire, because off the field, he didn’t talk shit.
Dex sorted the dirty uniforms and checked the lockers. After he’d changed his clothes, the players were already gone, and Coach Salem was turning out the lights, “Come on, son.” He followed Dex out. It was just beginning to get cool at night, but not enough to wear a jacket.
Salem walked Dex to the parking lot, nodded to him before he hitched himself up into his truck. He wasn’t going home to his wife because she was dead. Cancer was the rumor Dex had heard. What did Salem do at night? It was difficult to imagine him watching TV or sleeping. Off the field, he was a mystery.
From habit and because he didn’t want to go home yet, Dex drove over to the laundromat in the dark Stones Throw shopping center parking lot, where he knew some players and other guys would be, drinking hidden beers. When he got there he was disappointed not to see Weeks’s car, but he pulled his truck up behind the others anyway, and took out one of the beers he’d stashed under his seat.
Cully Holbrook sat alone on the hood of his truck holding his mouth that way—as if he knew some secret you wanted to know. “Hey, Dex.” There was a cell phone in his hand.
For some reason Dex had yet to fathom, Cully was always friendly, but that didn’t make Dex like him. “Nice win, huh? You’d think we’d have given them at least one, just to keep things interesting. I swear, I just got bored after a while.”
“Yeah.”
They were quiet for a minute as Dex popped his beer and poured it into an old coffee cup he kept in his truck. The coffee mug read # ONE DAD, and when he found it in the back of the cabinet, he felt he should get rid of it, but instead threw it into the cab of his truck.
“Nice!” said Cully, holding up his beer covered in a brown sack. “Cheers.” Cully bragged as if he needed to cover something up. Dex almost wanted to feel sorry for him.
“Well, here’s to you,” said Cully. “Looks like your truck could use some work.” He nodded at the gash in the side of the bed, where Dex had rammed into a light pole in a parking lot.
“Yeah, someday,” said Dex, shrugging.
�
��My cousin’s shop does good work. Spiton’s in Alvin.”
“Have to keep that in mind.”
“I could get you a deal.”
“Huh.”
Cully was probably waiting for a girl to call him back. For some reason, one of those things another guy couldn’t see—the females liked him—a possum grin on his face, and he was cocky in that way, tall and rangy, looking as if there were something on his tongue that he might or might not spit out.
Dex nodded good-bye, then walked over to the group of guys leaning against one car or another. Only Trace acknowledged him. “Hey, Dex, my man.” A bottle cap pinged on the pavement. Dex leaned against the hood where Trace was. “Hey.”
Through the window of the laundromat, in the fluorescent lights, a slumped-over woman was putting coin after coin into a washing machine. The sign on the window said WASH ’N DRY in letters like soapsuds. Underneath his nervousness, he felt a familiar dull rage in his forehead, and savoring a sip of beer, he wondered why he’d even bothered. Weeks was supposed to show up—maybe he’d be there in a minute.
The talk fell to silence, and Scotty, wide and squat, with a big smile of horsey teeth, started singing a George Jones song. His hand strummed just over his huge belt buckle.
“Go, Scotty,” said Trace. The other guys sniffed, shuffled their feet, pulled away from the cars, then leaned back again, so they wouldn’t have to join in.
Trace kept talking. “So me and Scotty went down to the old golf course right after the hurricane—to that place way out from the houses near where the sixteenth hole used to be—it’s all grown over, the sand trap’s gone, but the hills are still there, little ones, so you can go up fast and fly.” Trace always talked so meticulously about mudding, as if it were his sole occupation, the reason he’d been put on earth. “And, man, it was good. We got just the right lift, right, Scotty?”
