The dream. Joel’s gut, that vaunted intuition of his, spoke clear and cold in his ear. Did she have the same dream?
“Ditch,” she said. “Dead in a ditch. And he’s not. What does it matter?”
Joel set his mug in the sink, his fingers going cold. Why was he so afraid this morning?
“I’m going for a run,” he announced.
“You can leave the door unlocked.” Paulette didn’t look up from her phone.
“Love you,” Darren called.
It was cold outside. The trees shushed one another, shook their boughs free of last night’s rain. Joel tapped his Apple Watch. No messages. A cold bead of water fell from the eaves of the porch and shimmied down his neck.
He took off jogging.
Don’t be afraid until you need to be afraid, he told himself (not that it did him much good.) As he rounded the corner of Gillis Street and ran on the road’s shoulder—why did nobody in Texas believe in sidewalks?—Joel realized it wasn’t just his dream that had set him on edge this morning. Joel had been afraid since before bed, since he’d driven around Bentley after the game and tried to assure himself that his brother’s odd behavior last night was normal.
As he ran, Joel couldn’t help but feel watched. He thought of those black eyes—those hungry empty eyes—in the stuffed bison he’d seen on the way into town. The thought made Joel’s stomach twist. Sometimes he didn’t want to know why one memory echoed with another.
Last night, in the rain, Joel had driven past the old storefronts on South Street, past the auto shop with the little Everest of stacked tires in its parking lot, past the dark splotch of the Milam Municipal Park on the west side of town. Such a runty little place, that park—a few trees, a parking circle, an overgrown gully—but they’re never auspicious, are they, the places where your life is detonated?
An undignified site for an undignified arrest. An arrest which, depending on how you measured it, had been either the beginning or the end of Joel’s problems.
It had certainly given the folks at Bentley First Baptist plenty to talk about, back then (though those folks were seldom at a loss for gossip.) Even with its steeple gone from the sky, Joel almost hadn’t believed his mother when she’d told him last night that the church was gone. But, sure enough, he’d found a vacant lot lashed with rain on Hollis Avenue at the exact site where that old pile of red bricks and abrogation had once reigned.
That vacant lot had made Joel giddy in a way that he doubted was entirely healthy. Back in his day, the church’s brilliant white cross had loomed over every soul in Bentley like the eye of fucking Sauron. He wondered if it had been arson that had brought it down. He wondered why it had never occurred to him to burn it down himself.
Joel jogged harder.
When they’d been boys, it had always been Joel’s responsibility to escort Dylan to school, to ferry his younger brother around on errands in the back of his old Civic like some rare (but uninteresting) breed of dog. For his part, Dylan had always seemed self-sufficient, enclosed, preternaturally competent—the thorough opposite of Joel in every way—and in the decade since his departure, Joel had never once experienced a moment’s guilt for leaving his brother in their mother’s care. Rearing the boy could hardly have taken much effort.
But last night, driving over these cracked streets, Joel realized you didn’t have to be gay to feel trapped in this town. How could a kid Dylan’s age look at a place with half its businesses chained shut, at a community where your every mistake was a topic of conversation, and not yearn to escape? In a way, Joel couldn’t blame Dylan for taking a little trip to the coast to get away from it all. Joel only wondered how he could bear to return.
it’s like i hear this town talking when i sleep.
Last night, not long after Joel had driven past the old site of the church, a massive chunk of nothing, a deeper night, had loomed up at him to the east, like he’d driven right to the edge of the earth. He’d run up against the Flats, of course, the endless miles of uninhabited countryside that brooded on the other side of the narrow highway. Shadows had formed and melted out there in the storm. Empty, hopelessly empty.
Joel had spent the past week being coy with Dylan about his exact motives for coming home, but for good reason. In Joel’s experience, the sort of money he planned to put on the table this weekend was best discussed in person. And it would be quite a sum: full tuition, an apartment, a car—whatever it took to finally be a brother to this boy that Joel, for all his intuition, had never once imagined might need him.
But at the sight of the Flats last night, at the sight of this chancre sore of a town, Joel had pulled out his phone, his palms sweating so badly he struggled to hold it. Don’t worry, he’d written to Dylan, idling on the empty street. I’m getting you out of this shit hole.
He’d hit Send.
The road beneath the car had trembled, though Joel had heard no thunder.
A stoplight spilled blood over his windshield in the rain. He’d watched as his message was marked as Read by Dylan’s phone.
A moment later Joel saw three little dots fill and empty on his screen, fill and empty, as Dylan typed a response.
Then the dots disappeared. No message came.
Now, twelve hours later, Joel’s jog brought him to Spruce Boulevard, one of the three old thoroughfares that ran laterally across town, and he could see clear through to the Flats. Nothing moved out there. Not even a bird passed over those wastes. The Flats were just as empty this morning as they had been last night, just as hungry—
Joel felt a shiver creep up his arms. Hungry? Where had that come from?
He tapped his watch again. He wondered (hoped, to his surprise) if he would hear from Officer Clark today. It would be a welcome distraction. He thought of the indignant stare she’d fixed on him last night, those startling green eyes she’d shared with her brother Troy. An erstwhile Bison running back, a jittery has-been, missing and presumed dead, Troy Clark was the man Joel had sworn to himself he would never allow Dylan to become.
Joel remembered Troy’s eyes resting on his face in the light of a fetid summer afternoon. Joel remembered Troy nodding toward his truck’s glove compartment and saying, “Pass me those pills in there.”
Joel took a long breath. Silence blanketed Bentley.
He felt a faint pulse on his wrist.
1 New Message, his watch informed him. From Dylan.
Joel read the message. Read it again. His stomach began to burn.
He turned toward home and ran.
* * *
“My brother isn’t illiterate,” Joel told the large man in the rumpled blazer and jeans who had arrived from the sheriff’s department. “He knows how to use an apostrophe.”