u there? yo joel u there?
I’m here.
Joel took a hard sip of vodka straight from the bottle. He sent Dylan a screenshot of a ticket confirmation.
He told himself it was time to start being an older brother for once in his life.
Maybe I can help.
FRIDAY
HOPE AND HALOGEN
JOEL
Five days later his plane pierced the cloud bank and great squares of Texas prairie rose up to swallow him. Watching the flatland take shape out his window, he felt a familiar anxiety wind its fingers around his throat.
His brother was not the first troubled football player to confide in Joel. All week in Manhattan he had thought of nothing but a sticky summer afternoon a decade ago, of a truck cab spiked with the smell of spearmint, of a man with shocking green eyes and a bad neck shaking his head with effort and saying, “Don’t play that game if you can help it, Whitley.” Joel would cut off an arm to ensure Dylan never suffered the same fate as that ruined man.
If Joel could jab a finger in his blighted hometown’s eye, so much the better.
He chewed an Adderall and texted his brother.
* * *
An ugly thunderhead was rolling in from the Gulf. When the Enterprise attendant led Joel to the parking lot to collect his rental—a low-slung convertible with a gleaming black hood—the twilit air felt ready to burst. One sniff and Joel knew he was back. There was nothing quite like the smell of Texas in the hours before some fresh calamity.
The open convertible tore away from the encroaching storm with a moan. Joel passed through towns with names like Thrall and Spree and Thorndale and wove around trucks and horse trailers, their drivers and passengers all regarding him (and the pop music blaring from his speakers) with a courteous suspicion.
There were fewer cows than he remembered. Great miles of scrubby flatland unrolled to either side of the highway, punctuated only by a lonely water tower, a totemic bale of hay, a sunken barn with half the country visible through a hole in its side.
BENTLEY: 18 MILES. Joel didn’t smoke and yet he craved a cigarette. He caught a casual crackle of gunfire somewhere in the distance—there was a sound he’d forgotten—and slowed to allow a rusted Chevy to merge ahead of him. Something caught his eye in the truck’s bed. A hulking stuffed bison wobbled on stiff legs, a letterman jacket fastened around its furry shoulders, its black glass eyes catching the last of the sunlight through the grill of a green Bentley football helmet.
It was a challenge not to stare into those eyes. With a queasy flutter in his stomach, a creep of gooseflesh up his arms, Joel suddenly felt he’d seen those eyes before, though he was also certain he’d never seen this stuffed bison in his life. He had the strangest conviction—almost like déjà vu—that those black eyes had watched him on a very bad night a very long time ago. They had watched him then just like they were watching him now: with a hungry, inhuman intelligence, like a lizard waiting for a fly to buzz just a few inches closer.
Jesus, Joel thought. He wasn’t even home and already he was jumping at taxidermy.
Joel caught sight of the first sign of fresh paint since Austin. A billboard that read MY HERD MY GLORY appeared, listing the names and numbers of every player on the team. He strained to spot his brother, though he needn’t have bothered. Just past BENTLEY: 2 MILES his brother’s face rose up from the fields. DYLAN WHITLEY, SENIOR, the sign read. “THE BOY WITH THE MILLION DOLLAR ARM.”
The convertible’s speakers sputtered, the music playing from Joel’s phone cut out. Bentley took shape on the flat horizon. As the truck ahead of him rumbled toward town, a dark light rose in the bison’s dead eyes. Joel jumped. He would have sworn he’d just seen the thing blink.
As if in reply, a cold voice seemed to whisper through the static of the convertible’s speakers:
imissedyou.
CLARK
On what she would later consider the last easy night of her life, Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark pulled her cruiser into the football field’s parking lot and spotted two other police cars near the end zone.
Deputy Browder smiled as Clark pulled up. God help him, when Browder smiled he looked too young to drive. Hulking Deputy Jones, his uniform black with sweat, was propped against the end zone’s fence, bellowing something down the field.
Clark’s heart stuttered when she saw the score: 14–13, favoring the Rattichville Cougars, the Bison’s competition that evening, and with only a minute-three remaining in the half.
“We been lucky as the devil tonight,” Browder said.
Jones spat a sunflower seed into the grass. “With them Cougars o-line against us, we need him.”
Dylan Whitley stood at the sidelines: even from downfield the boy was unmistakable. He stood just north of six foot, making him one of the shortest quarterbacks anyone in Bentley could remember, but he was broad-chested and long-legged and possessed the sort of sturdy shoulders a town needed to drape its hopes on. He paced near the water coolers, poker-faced, only the mouth guard that bobbed fitfully between his teeth betraying any hint of anxiety.
Jamal Reynolds, the team’s backup quarterback, stood a few steps behind Dylan in a pristine jersey, murmuring something that made Dylan nod his head and chew his mouth guard harder. Clark struggled to remember the last time she’d seen Jamal play.
Crouched beside Dylan, adjusting a stubborn knot in his laces, was KT Staler, the wiry tight end whose performance on the field fluctuated so wildly he had earned the nickname Mister Powerball—with Staler you either got the jackpot or nothing at all. If Clark wasn’t mistaken, the skinny boy looked like he’d somehow lost even more weight lately.
Luke Evers, the Bison’s running back, stood beside the team’s offensive coordinator, raising an arm with a bicep the size of a honeydew to point at something on the coach’s clipboard. Evers was the sort of strapping boy that Texas athletics bred on a yearly basis. He only seemed to be getting bigger.
Interesting, Clark thought. Luke Evers had grown and KT Staler had shrunk. Clark’s mind, conditioned by three years on the force, began to speculate on reasons for this before she quelled it with a cigarette. She turned her attention back to the field. For an hour, just an hour, she would prefer not to be a cop.
The Bison readied their line to block the second play, the tight Lycra of their pants gleaming as they bent low. T-Bay Baskin, the Bison’s defensive captain, shouted and spat into the grass. The Cougar quarterback caught the snap. For a moment Clark lost sight of the ball as the Rattichville offense pulled a sweep to the left, spotting it again in the hands of the Cougar halfback. The boy was trying to hustle the ball wide, running toward the Bison’s exposed flank and looking for all the world like he was about to make it around.