Friendswood (36 page)

The past ten years had been speeding to this point in time, to the
tenuous assembly of bombs to the shattering of wood and cement, to the flames, the dread, and the angry, injured, bloody face of the boy. He would tell his father and mother what happened, and then what? She poured a glass of bourbon and drank it, sitting on the floor by her bed. Even here, in the dark, things seemed to be moving that she couldn't see. Outside the house, so much she could not control. Her body trembled. She'd held on for so long, but she could no longer bear Jess's death. Back in Banes Field, in the grass and the flames, it had broken her apart, and she knew now that she'd wanted it to break her.

H
AL MOWED THE LAWN;
he showed a house on Pine Hurst to a young couple; he watched TV with Darlene; he didn't drink. He'd felt that something needed to be said for days, but he didn't know what to say or to whom. Then the call came from the hospital. When he and Darlene met Cully in the emergency room, his son's face all cut up, blood on his shirt, his sprained arm in a sling, Hal put his arms around him and said he was sorry. That was the message God had been trying to get out of him.

The boy seemed still dazed, but he told them everything, propped up on pillows in the small bed where they kept him until they finished the tests. Cully had heard something, seen the explosion while on his rounds, and it had knocked him out for a while. He'd seen a group of men leaving the site, running to the hurricane fence with backpacks, three or four men wearing hoods and caps. Somehow he'd got himself to the road and a woman picked him up and drove him to the hospital.

“She just left you there?” Darlene said, her arm around his shoulder. “My God, she didn't even call us?”

Cully shrugged, smiled a little. “I told her I'd called you already. She could see I was basically okay.”

“Well, thank God she found you.” Darlene wiped at the blood on his shirt.

Hal felt his voice turn thick in his throat. “I'm sorry I even sent you there to Avery.”

“Dad, I'm okay.”

“Well, you're certainly not going back,” Darlene said.

“No, I don't guess I will,” Cully said. “Do you think they'll let me out of here yet?”

On the way home, in the car, they heard a late round of sirens, and saw the smoke rising from the direction of Banes Field, a shimmering gray screen unscrolling upward. There would be hell to pay for someone.

Cully had been too much in shock to talk about the lady who had picked him up on the side of the road. She'd waited to see if he was okay before she left, but unbelievably, she left the hospital without calling anyone. She was on a nightshift, he'd said, she'd had to go. What kind of woman was that? Surely not a mother. Still, if she hadn't found Cully he might have lain there, bleeding, for hours. Hal didn't like to think of it.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
there was a rotten, burned smell in the air, even as far away as Hal's house. Avery called. “I'm not saying Cully knew who did it.”

“Hold on right there.” Hal suddenly had all this extra saliva in his mouth, and he spit into his coffee cup.

“I'd just like to talk to him, hear what he might have seen.” Avery said he didn't get how anyone could sleep through that racket, and Hal said, “He didn't. He was on his rounds like he was supposed to be. And then he was knocked out.”

Avery wasn't even logical. It made Hal want to kill him.

“Well, alright,” said Avery. “I don't want to place any blame on the boy, for sure. But the inspectors might need to ask Cully some questions.”

“Well, I've had about enough of that,” Hal said. “He told you last night. He saw three or four of them running away—he told you. It was the middle of the night, goddamnit. He's a seventeen-year-old boy,” said Hal, and he hung up.

He hadn't spoken to Avery again since, though Avery had called several times. He let Cully give reports to the police, and the inspectors would just have to look at those. Hal was done with Avery, and now that the gases had come up from the soil, Hal didn't want to sell homes over there anyway. The smell alone closer to the building site was implacable, bitter and cheesy, and the truth was Avery was in deep trouble. Just yesterday,
The Friendswood Dispatch
ran a story heavy on quotes from José, who, once he was away and safe at his new bank job, went straight to whoever would listen with his story—he'd seen black tars and pools of green brackish oil near the construction—it had given him breathing problems. “I reported everything to Avery Taft, and he said those were all normal things at a building site. He told me to just take a day off and get better.” José said he'd been asked to hire a crew to bury a huge plastic box—they were told it was debris from Rosemont—but later, he'd learned, it was really a container of poisonous chemicals. José had written a log; he had photographs. For a while, Avery was going to have a hard time selling anything. Maybe even the houses on the clean land. Hal almost felt sorry for him, and he'd included him in his prayers.

H
AL INTENDED TO BE
CONTRITE
and sober from here on out. He stirred the chili powder into the steaming pot of tomato sauce, meat, and whole beans. He'd been forgiven. Lately, Darlene watched him warily, as if he might collapse, and Cully stuck nearby, washing his truck watching the game on TV, though there was a new sharpness in him that Hal supposed had to do with maturing. He spooned up a bit of the chili and tasted it. It needed salt and more onions, and he'd need to let it simmer for a few hours before it was really good.

He went to the chopping board, took the half onion and their best knife, and went at it. He put a piece of bread in his mouth to keep his eyes from watering, but he felt the sting in his nose. Cully was changed since
his injuries, more homebound, more liable to make conversation, and thank God he'd just had some cuts that needed stitches, a sprained arm, and a mild concussion.

The onions were tiny, clear and pale now, and he swiped them into his palm and dropped them into the pot, wiped his fragrant hand on the dishrag. After he'd scared the hell out of himself that night at Casa Texas, after he'd lost himself in drink, right there in front of Cully, he'd slept on the couch in the living room, Darlene not wanting him in their bed. He'd woken up the next morning and prayed. He couldn't ask for prosperity because he didn't deserve it. But he asked for one more chance. Just one more chance. And he asked to believe. He'd been sitting near the window with his hands clasped and his eyes closed, and into the prayer, he heard kids outside playing tag—“Get me! Get me!”—and the jetting stream of a sprinkler. He opened his eyes, and outside the window, the tree swayed, a squirrel hopped down a branch, its tail a fat gray brush; and he looked at the creature's flat eyes, and the squirrel looked back at him, both of them alike: creatures. Over the salty fatigue and feverishness of his hangover, he'd felt uncovered and boundless, and (unbelievably) good. He hadn't had a drink since that moment.

T
HE DAY AF
TER THE EXPLOSIONS,
the students at San Amaro College nearby started to get rashes, and some of them had coughs and went to the emergency room. Hal was pretty sure it was a few of them who'd set off the bombs, but it didn't seem to matter anymore. The college would have to be shut down for at least a month, and the college president had called for an investigation into Taft Properties, to find out when and if Avery Taft had known that the land he was building on still contained dangerous oil residues.

The story had made the local Houston TV news. People who'd once lived in Rosemont came out of the woodwork and stepped up to be
interviewed. “My husband died of bladder cancer a year after we moved away.” “My wife has struggled with liver problems for these past ten years, and it started when we lived over there.” “I had a baby, and she died.” Some people worried that Taft's building so close to Rosemont tainted the Friendswood housing stock too—though Banes Field was way over at the edge of town. But that worry would all blow over in a few months, Hal knew.

Lee Knowles was curiously silent and absent from the reporting, and he wondered about that. Darlene asked him if he thought she might have had anything to do with the bombs, and he considered it for a moment, picturing her stern, blue-eyed face. “No. She's a lady. She had a lot of fire in her, maybe, but I don't see her buying ammunition.”

“She could have hired those guys Cully saw.”

“Yeah, but she seemed pretty beaten down the last time I talked to her. And, believe you me, Avery would have sent his police dogs over there—if they had any inkling, we'd know by now. But I'll tell you what, the way she liked to go on about things, I would have thought she'd be telling everyone, ‘I told you so' by now,” said Hal.

“If she had anything to do with hurting my boy—” Darlene shook her head.

“Look, it's over now.” Hal put his arm around her.

Her voice was small and choked against his armpit. “He could have died.”

“But he didn't.” Hal patted her back. “We're all still here.”

T
HE HOME WAS NICER
than he remembered, wooden pillars, wide shutters. It was an authentic old Texas country house, and they hadn't changed it to look different on the outside, even if the inside contained those small dormlike rooms with chrome railings everywhere. The
railings bothered him. As if they predicted that someone was always about to fall.

She was wearing a blue dress, her hair made neat for them into a bun at the back. She didn't look frowsy and loose faced like the women who sat around her in the visiting area, and she was one of the only ones not in a wheelchair.