I flushed and Jonathon grabbed his brother’s elbow to pull him away, but David stood his ground.
Alex touched my back. “Mr. Wells—”
I said, “Wait a minute, Alex. David, you’re right, we should have done a better job and we have put some changes in place—”
“Too late for Jonathon, you hear what I’m saying?”
“David, would you please—” began Jonathon.
“Jonathon could have gone to any church he wanted to. My parents never wanted him to come out here to your rich white—”
Jonathon swung his brother around. “This is not—”
Alex stepped in between us and said, “Mr. Wells, I have to talk to you now and no, I can’t wait a minute. I’m trying to do the right thing here but if you don’t come with me right this second, I’m doing it on my own.”
The three of us stared at Alex, who stared back and then strode off.
I said, “Excuse me, please.” The boy had his car keys in hand and was out the door before I caught up to him. “Alex, what the heck?”
“Jo isn’t here. She’s on her way to that trailer park.”
“What?”
He didn’t slow down. “Jo’s headed to Phoebe’s trailer.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go get her.” He unlocked the huge, red Ford F-150 truck his grandfather had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. It was a big truck made bigger to accommodate the thirty-five-inch Toyo all-terrain tires beneath it.
“Wait a minute, Alex—”
“She’s got at least fifteen minutes on me and I’m not waiting. You want to go, get in the truck.”
“I’ll drive,” I said.
“You don’t know how to get there,” he said, and swung himself up into the cab.
I held my keys up and jingled them. “You could give me directions, Alex. I can take directions.”
He shut his door in my face and powered down his window. He looked down at me from the ridiculous height that truck was jacked up to. “Can you?” he asked. “Then get into the truck.”
I didn’t know where the trailer park was. I couldn’t even remember the name of the place. Out by Hobby was all I knew. I climbed into Alex’s jacked-up truck and buckled my seat belt. I was mad but he had me. There was no way I was going to let this boy take care of a situation that called for a man.
The truck had a new addition: a gun rack in the back window, complete with a glossy Remington 1100, an automatic shotgun
“You allowed to carry that thing?”
“I am. This is Texas.”
I sighed. Cold dead fingers and all that.
“I’ve got to make a call,” I said and punched in Brick’s number.
He answered right away. “Bear?”
“You’re going to have to do the eulogy, Brick, I’ve got an emergency.” I checked my seat. Alex was not driving to impress his girlfriend’s dad tonight. He was driving to get from point A to point B in the shortest time possible.
“What?”
“You heard me, Brick.”
“Wait. Me? Oh, no. Ask Jason. I can’t do it.”
“I didn’t ask Jason, I asked you. And I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. This is a job, Brick. Sometimes that job means you fill in for someone else. Today you’re filling in for me. You’re going to have about twenty minutes, so go someplace quiet, collect yourself, say a prayer and jot down a few notes. Talk from the heart. You’ll do fine.”
“What’s wrong? Why can’t you do it? Didn’t they ask you? I’ve never done a eulogy. I don’t know any dead people.”
Alex didn’t bother with the driveway. His monster tires bounced off the curb and onto the frontage road.
“You knew Phoebe. Do your best. That’s all I was going to do.”
“Oh, Bear, I can’t do this, I—”
“Cowboy up, Brick.” I closed the phone call. “What the heck is going on?” I said to Alex.
He didn’t let up on the gas pedal. “I’m going to be dead for telling you this,” he said, “but if anything happens to my Jo, I die anyway.”
See, this was the kind of talk Annie Laurie and I object to. His Jo. I tried Jo’s phone. No answer. “She’s not your Jo, Alex. She’s mine. I know my daughter better than you ever will.”
Alex cut in front of an eighteen-wheeler and entered the freeway a quarter inch ahead of its bumper. The driver gave us a taste of his air horn. I used a word I haven’t used since college.
“Really? Know about the tattoo?”
I didn’t reply. There was no tattoo. The girls know how I feel about tattoos.
“Don’t crack up over it, Mr. Wells. It’s the size of my thumbnail. A gray-and-white bird. A phoebe.”
“Oh yeah? Where is it?” There was no tattoo.
“On the nape of her neck. She got it Monday. After school. You know that place across the block from her dance class?”
I had noticed the small storefront when it moved in and thought it didn’t have a chance of surviving in the suburbs.
Alex glanced over when I didn’t say anything. “Don’t worry about it. Her hair covers it. She’s going to tell you. I made her promise she would.”
Alex had made my daughter promise to tell me. To let me in on the news. To allow me to be a part of her life. My daughter. My Jo.
“All right, fine. I don’t know anything. You want to tell me what’s going on?” Or do you want to keep on lording it over me? I added silently.
“You told Jo that Phoebe killed herself by overdosing on Dilaudid.”
“So? Oh, my gosh, look out for that Mini!” I saw a white-faced passenger stare out at us as Alex whipped to the side of the slow-moving toy car.
“So, Jo doesn’t think Phoebe killed herself. Either she can’t, or she won’t, believe it. She wanted to go to that trailer to look for . . . to see if she can find out anything and she asked me to take her. I said we didn’t want to miss the service. Jo said there was more than one way to honor a person’s death and she was honoring Phoebe in her own way. I said I’d take her tomorrow, it wasn’t safe at night. We had a fight and she stomped off.”
“Well, dang it, Alex, she’s not at the trailer then, she doesn’t have any way to get there.” I didn’t add “Duh,” but I thought it. It’s not like the greater Houston area is known for its public transportation system. Every Texan over sixteen has a car. It’s practically the law.
“Cara took her.”
“Cara didn’t take her—whoa!” Alex took the entrance ramp to the Sam Houston Tollway at a speed the engineers had not planned for. I began again. “Cara can’t drive, either.”
“Yes, she can. Better than—”
“Cara’s fifteen, too!”
Alex squeezed between a van and a tow truck and I swallowed my teeth.
“She can’t drive legally, but her dad started teaching her when she was five, out at their ranch. She can drive.” He threw me a look. “Cara’s parents are at the memorial service for Phoebe. She took her dad’s Jeep.” Alex blew through the first EZ TAG station.
“The one with no top or doors?”
“That’s the only one he has.”
See, that’s not a vehicle, that’s a grown-man’s toy. That’s not the car you stick a newbie driver in. Annie Laurie and I had given Merrie a 1993 Volvo sedan. It won’t go very fast and it’s armored like a tank. That’s a good car. I felt sick. I sent Annie a text so she could feel sick, too.
“Where is this place?”
“Telephone Road between Almeda-Genoa and Hobby Airport.”
That would be a half-hour drive, easy, if you never hit a red light and everybody else in the city was driving somewhere else, leaving the roads wide open for you.
Telephone Road is a broad, flat ribbon of a road lined with strip centers with check-cashing stores
, liquor and convenience stores and the kind of resale shop that stacks worn and battered baby furniture on the sidewalk outside its doors. There are a number of charmless apartment complexes promising the first’s month’s rent free. Telephone Road is the kind of place where men congregate in parking lots and on corners to do their drinking and talking and fighting. It’s not a place you want your fifteen-year-old daughter and her fifteen-year-old friend to be out after dark in an open-top, doorless Jeep that can’t be locked.
I had a vision of the girls stopped at a red light. Oh my gosh.
“Let me drive,” I said.
“No.”
“Well, can you go any faster?”
Alex pressed his foot down and the red monster roared. Up ahead, cars were parting for us.
“Jo isn’t answering her phone,” I said after trying for the twentieth time to call her.
“I know it.” He didn’t add, “Duh,” but it was clear he thought it.
“So how do you know what she’s doing?”
“Because Cara posted it on Facebook.”
Well, sure she did. Because if you’re fifteen years old, it doesn’t occur to you to go or do anything without letting the whole world know it—just on the outside chance that someone might be interested.
I shut up. We were making too big a deal of this, me and Alex. It couldn’t be that bad. I was overreacting. Lots of girls live on Telephone Road . . . lots of girls who know where it’s safe to be and where it isn’t; lots of girls who aren’t driving their daddy’s forty-thousand-dollar modified Jeep Wrangler, sans top and doors, in a glossy burnt orange, Go Texas!
“How do I get on Facebook?”
“Aw, Mr. Wells, don’t go there, okay?”
Alex took the Telephone Road exit. He didn’t even slow when he turned left and pulled between crumbling brick columns that held up a sign reading VAN MANOR.
I yelled, “Alex!” and he slammed on his brakes before he hit a scruffy puppy blinded by his lights. The puppy wobbled off the road and Alex crept forward through the narrow, unlit alleys, trailer homes and RVs on either side. Alex slowed to a stop.
I saw the orange Jeep parked next to a green-and-white mobile home. The Jeep was empty. I had my hand on the door handle when a girl’s face slapped up against my window. I yelled.
It was Cara, her eyes saucer-big. She fumbled at the door handle and in spite of her, I got the door open. Cara fell into my arms and grabbed my head. She put her mouth to my ear.
“Mr. Wells, Jo’s inside but someone’s there and he was yelling and he’s got a gun and I called nine-one-one and I didn’t know what to do and Jo was crying!” The last three words were a soft wail in my ear.
“Cara, get in the truck with Alex and lock the doors. Stay there. Lie down on the floor. Don’t either of you dare move until the police tell you it’s okay.”
Wanderley would have told me to wait for the police, too. I set Cara aside and moved toward the trailer. There were no lights on. Behind me, I heard the squeak of a screen door opening. I turned and saw the large form of a woman. A soft voice said, “That’s Mr. DeWitt’s trailer.”
My blood was roaring in my ears. I didn’t see a doorbell. I knocked on the trailer door. Nothing.
I knocked again and said, “Hello? This is Walker Wells, I’m going to come in and get my daughter and then we’ll leave, okay?” I tried the handle. Locked.
The soft voice said, “He’s gonna be drunk.”
The trailer had an open window next to the front door. From inside I heard a whimper. It was Jo’s whimper. I put my shoulder against the door and shoved until I heard the latch pop and the door fell open. I stepped inside. As I did, from behind me I heard the slap of a Remington 1100’s bolt slamming home. That, I knew, would be Alex’s Remington. Alex, who had not stayed on the truck floor with the doors locked. I didn’t have time to think about Alex, except to say a quick prayer that he wouldn’t go all Texas Ranger on me.
The trailer was dark and stank of cheap liquor and unwashed body.
My daughter was sitting in front of a small kitchen table, her back to me. Leaning against the kitchen sink was the dark shape of a man pointing a rifle at her.
Might have been a shotgun. It was dark. I didn’t care. I didn’t want it pointed at my kid.
I stepped forward and Mitch DeWitt said, “You stop right there.”
I did. I was close enough to put my hand on Jo’s neck. Her warm fingers reached up and twined around my thumb. Mitch gestured toward Jo with the rifle.
“That girl, right there”—the muzzle of the gun wavered between Jo’s forehead and her breastbone—“broke into my house.” He spoke carefully, overenunciating each word. “To rob me.”
“She shouldn’t have done that, sir. I apologize for her behavior. You’ll get a written note of apology.” I got a good grip on the neck of her jacket.
Jo said, “No, he—” I put some pressure on her and she shut up.
I put my other hand under her arm, her bones small and fine under my big hand, even through her jacket, and pulled her up. “I’m going to take her home and ground her. I promise you, she’ll be punished, okay?” In one move, I yanked Jo the rest of the way out of the booth and over its back. She stumbled to her feet. I grabbed the back of her jacket and thrust her behind me, but held on because Jo does not obey and she did not yet understand, as I did, that she could die. We could both die.
From a distance there was the howl of a siren.
Mitch was slow, but not that slow. He lifted his rifle to my face.
“I will just tell you what. You broke into my house, too,” Mitch said. And behind him the window exploded.
Jo screamed and I threw myself at the gun. I had to wrestle him for the gun. He was a drunk old man and he stank of body odor and decayed teeth and alcohol. But he was strong and desperate and he didn’t fight fair. I had to have at least twenty pounds on the guy, but I wasn’t making them count. I wasn’t trying to hurt Mitch—all I was trying to do was get that gun away from him. But Mitch, now, he was trying to do me serious bodily damage.
I heard the snap of teeth near my ear—the guy had tried to Tysonize me. DeWitt was sitting on my belly with his arms stretched out over my head, trying to free the stock of the rifle from underneath a kitchen drawer that had come open, trapping it. I got an arm free, drew it back and punched him in the stomach, hard. There was a gasp of fetid air near my face and he grabbed his stomach. I rocked forward enough to tumble him over backward but before I could get my legs out from under him, he twisted over and reached into the drawer. He drew out a kitchen knife, the kind you can get for a dollar at the discount stores. Maybe you can’t make radish roses with a knife like that but it would work just fine for the job he had in mind. My right hand was patting the floor behind me, trying to lay hold of that gun. With my left hand, I grabbed for his wrist and got the blade. I felt a searing pain and then suddenly Mitch DeWitt was off me.
Alex had the stock of his shotgun in both hands—he’d put it under Mitch’s chin and pulled him clear. Thank God in Heaven I had managed to keep hold of the knife, or Alex might have fared worse than I did. I pulled DeWitt’s gun out from under the drawer, scraping the skin off my knuckles on the metal runners that supported the drawer bottom. DeWitt finally struck home with a kick and Alex loosed his grip. DeWitt twisted free, elbowed Alex in the face, and ran out the door, screaming for help, into the twirling red and blue lights of a police car.
• • •
At least the way it all played out this time, I didn’t get shot.
Not by the drunk guy and not by the cops, either, who were pointing their guns indiscriminately until they could figure out what was going on, which took some time.
I staggered out of the trailer after Alex, holding Mitch DeWitt’s gun. The cops didn’t like that. They ordered me to the ground and cuffed my hands behind my back. I lifted
my head and saw Alex, also belly down and handcuffed, but before I could say anything to him a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt pushed my face into the gravel drive.
“Jo!” I hollered. “You okay?”
“She won’t let me go!” Jo’s voice.
“Honey, do not struggle with the police, that’s a bad idea, okay? Don’t do it. You hear me? Listen, tell Cara to call your mom and Uncle Chester, okay?”
Someone standing over me said, “No talking.”
“She’s not a cop, Dad!” Jo wailed.
“This is Lacey Corinda, sir,” said the same soft voice that had spoken to me earlier from next door, “and I was keeping your child from running right back into that trailer full of guns and badness. But I’m going to turn her loose now.”
I turned my head toward Lacey, trying to get a look. “No! Listen, don’t let her go. Could you call my wife—”
A broad face bent down to me and said, “Sir, don’t talk any more. I’m asking you nicely this time. This time, hear?”
A crowd had gathered. This was a better show than anything Thursday night television had to offer. I heard the distinctive click of cell phone cameras. I put my face back in the ground, visions of YouTube dancing behind my eyes.
Mitch DeWitt was helped into a squad car, protesting all the while that he was the victim here, of home invasion and assault. He didn’t get cuffed and if he hadn’t been as drunk as a grackle in mulberry season, I’m not sure he would even have been put in a squad car.
I was arrested.
What was I being arrested for? I wanted to know.
Had I broken in the trailer’s front door? Uh-hunh? That would do to start, the officer told me. He’d get around to the gun and the assault and battery later. He pushed my head down and shoved me into a black-and-white.
Jo and Cara were not being arrested, thank you God for that, but they would be taken to the station for questioning and safekeeping.
Alex was arrested, too. I was going to be in a lot of trouble with Annie Laurie.
Safe from Harm (9781101619629) Page 22
