Parked on the curb of Hollis Avenue at the north edge of town, Joel wolfed down a burger and waited in front of the empty lot where Bentley First Baptist and its inescapable eye of a steeple had once stood. Yet again, he felt a touch of envy at whoever had burned the place down. After the way the congregation there had treated his family—well. His mother was right. He couldn’t help but see these weeds and this charred oak tree and the Evers Realty sign as anything but an improvement.
Ready, wrote BBison50k.
With the church gone there was little left open on Hollis Avenue but the dingy storefront that was Bentley First Baptist’s temporary home; a faded painting of a cross hung in its window. Even through the store’s closed doors, Joel could hear the music of the church’s Wednesday night youth service. He wondered what Wesley Mores would say were Joel to wander inside tonight with a Bible in hand.
Joel steered his convertible around the store to a smaller parking lot behind the building and idled in the shadow of a tree turning inky in the sunset. The clock on his radio read 7:27 p.m. Right on time. Ready, he wrote.
He flipped on the radio. It was tuned to static. He listened for a time, remembering the night he’d arrived and the way he’d been certain—almost certain—that he’d heard a voice slithering out of his speakers the moment he first caught sight of Bentley on the horizon.
imissedyou
Dumb dreams. Bad dreams.
i fucking hate football
it’s like i hear this town talking when i sleep.
The back door of the building cracked open. Joel switched off the radio.
The girl strode briskly to the car, a little too confident. She climbed into shotgun and lowered herself until she was practically flat on her back.
Bethany Tanner said to him, “Do you remember how to get to the dam?”
When he turned onto the industrial road southwest of town, she risked a glimpse out the rear window and flinched when a car zoomed past.
“I’m starting to worry I shouldn’t be seen with you,” Joel said.
“What? Why? Take a left.”
“You mean onto the road buried in weeds?”
“Trust me.”
The car bucked over a stone in the overgrown road. Joel shot the girl a look.
“It’s just through there,” she said, rising up again to point.
A line of cedar trees, their crowns all weighted down with streamers of poison oak, stretched ahead of them. A single black bird watched their approach from a low branch, almost invisible in the long shadows of the sunset. Its tiny head cocked one way, then the other.
Joel steered them toward a rough path and flipped on the headlights.
“My dad tracks my mileage,” Bethany said flatly. “He’d know if I came here in my own car.”
“I remember hearing some scary stories about your father.” Russ Tanner, Joel recalled, was big, red-faced, loudly rich, somehow connected to Mr. Evers, who was president of the Chamber of Commerce. Powerful. Angry.
“You don’t have to worry about me. Jasmine’s covering. My dad thinks I’m sleeping at her place.”
Joel eased the convertible down the path. He considered reminding Bethany that Dylan and his friends had tried the same sort of story last weekend with mixed results, but he decided against it. Branches snapped beneath the tires. Something whispered as it ran along the doors.
“Nobody comes out here anymore since the cops started patrolling it,” Bethany said.
“Nobody except the cops.”
“The cops don’t bother Dylan. They don’t bother me.”
“Who was that kid? The one at the diner?”
“If I started naming everyone at school who owed me a favor, we’d never have time to talk.”
“You said you had something to show me.”
She bit her lip. “You’re friends with the lady officer, right?”
“You mean Clark?” Joel wasn’t sure what he and Clark were to each other. “We’re cordial.”
“Do you think you could tell her something for me? But, like, quietly? So nobody would know it but her?”
“I could try. Is that what you brought me here to see?”
The trees ended at a tall chain fence enclosing the town’s abandoned dam. The dam had once housed a power plant, up until fracking in North Texas had undercut the energy market with natural gas and made hydropower a luxury only the rich, liberal cities could afford. Joel knew: he’d written a report recommending his company’s clients divest from water. He’d never once considered how such an opinion might have affected his hometown.
Bethany climbed from the car without answering him.
She strode through the undergrowth and stopped at a weathered green ribbon (identical to the one she wore in her hair) tethered to a post. She pushed gently against the links of the fence. They had been snipped sometime before.
“You came to get Dylan out of this town, didn’t you?” she said.
They slipped through the hole in the fence and started up the steps of the dam.
“How’d you guess?”
“I’m a very perceptive person.”
Joel wasn’t sure what to say to that.
A narrow walkway ran for nearly a half mile across the middle of the dam, a long plummet into the water only prevented by a single narrow handrail to either side. Joel spotted two rusted lawn chairs in the distance, a red plastic ice chest, a scattering of cigarette packs and glass.
“You’re awfully trusting,” he told her. “Not a lot of girls would come out here alone with a stranger.”
“Dylan always said you were alright.”
“Dylan told me he hated football.”
Bethany turned. “Are you sure you were talking to the right Dylan?”
She settled into one of the chairs, folded one bronzed leg atop the other.
“Did you ever give Dylan a golden watch?” Joel said, settling into the seat beside her.
Bethany scoffed. She raised a bright silver bracelet to the failing light. “Dylan gave me gifts.”
“With what money?”
“With the money you sent him. What else?”
Joel looked over the railing. God, he wished he had sent Dylan money. He couldn’t shake the feeling (though he prayed it was just guilt) that much of this could have been averted with a few real contributions to his brother’s savings account.
The chairs afforded them a striking view of the winding river, the barren countryside, the upper rim of the trembling sulfur sun. Litter surrounded their feet—twisted burn papers, the faded blue foil of a condom wrapper. Joel was struck, suddenly, with a vivid image of his brother seated here, in this very chair, sucking on a blunt as he reached a finger toward the perfect silky arc of this girl’s thigh. The thought filled Joel with a strange, sad sort of envy. What had his brother gotten himself into?
And then Joel caught sight of the lines cut into the concrete beside his chair—three grooves, worn smooth in the stone, spelling 50K—and a sudden sob caught in his throat. He stared at the etchings, at the rusted screwdriver left under the chair that had no doubt been used to carve them.
50K. An old private joke. Dylan had sat here, fidgety and bored, and he had thought of Joel.
He was never coming back.
“That’s what I wanted to show you,” Bethany said, nodding at the etching. “What does it mean? He’d never tell me.”
Joel stared at it till his eyes burned. “I’ll have to get back to you.”
“You want a cigarette?”
Joel shook his head. Bethany raised the top of the red cooler and withdrew a pack of Camels, sealed inside a Ziploc bag. Joel felt his mind coming back to him.
He studied Bethany’s face in the flare of her lighter and was struck again by the firm line of her cheekbones, the elegant point of her nose. She took an expert drag of the cigarette and breathed out smoke in a long sigh.
“Dad broke my mom’s jaw over a jar of mayonnaise. It’s why she left. Mayonnaise.” Bethany’s nails clacked on the arms of her chair. “Have you ever heard of the Southern Heritage Preservation League?”
“I’ve always been dubious about my heritage.”
“They’re racist as fuck. All the places he sends money to are. All the men here treat my dad like he’s just the bestest goddamn old boy in town, but he’d join the Klan if they had a club here.” She tapped ash between her feet. “Maybe those guys wouldn’t care.”
Joel ran some odds in his head. He had a pretty good idea what this was about.
“Was Jamal Reynolds at your house on Friday night?”
She let out a harsh laugh. “You want to know what’s funny? What’s so stupid about this whole fucking situation? Jamal and I didn’t even do anything. We planned everything out so fucking careful for a month and then when I finally get him into the house that night we stopped messing around after five seconds. It was too weird.”
“You want me to tell the police that Jamal’s innocent?”
“Dylan always said you were smart.” Bethany spat tobacco over the railing. Her father, she explained, had been out of town on business last weekend. Before the game, the boys had stashed Jamal’s Explorer in a stand of trees north of town—“I know the ones,” Joel said—so afterward everyone would say he and KT left together for the coast when, in fact, KT dropped him off and Jamal took the back roads to Bethany’s house, meeting her at the corner of her road so he could follow her Lexus through the property’s gate.
“It wasn’t even supposed to be a big thing,” Bethany said. But of course, once they’d realized the chemistry was off, Jamal couldn’t leave and risk being seen around town—he was supposed to be in Galveston until Sunday. So he and Bethany had idled away the weekend awkwardly, often not seeing one another for hours on end inside Bethany’s enormous home. Jamal had gotten paranoid, became convinced one of the Tanners’ ranch hands could see him from the backyard. Bethany had told Jamal not to be silly. The hand whose job it was to watch her was away that weekend—she’d made sure of it.
Sunday evening came and neither Bethany nor Jamal had heard from KT or Dylan. They weren’t sure when the others would be home but they couldn’t tolerate their confinement any longer. When it got late, Bethany had texted her father to tell him she’d been ill all weekend but was feeling well enough to go and get some food. She did this because Mr. Tanner received an alert on his phone every time the gate on the property was opened. Bethany knew from experience that if her father wasn’t kept abreast of her plans he would keep an eye on her through his security app.
“And then yesterday I fucked up,” Bethany said. The pitch of her voice crept higher and higher. “I haven’t been sleeping right and when I do—Listen, yesterday, it was like my mind just stopped for a second. I’d made up a whole story about having Jasmine and Alisha over for the weekend but I was so damn tired that when the lady cop asked me what I did after the game I forgot everything, the whole story. I panicked. I said I was alone. It was the first thing I could think of.”
Joel swallowed.
“I can’t have the cops asking my dad for the security footage from the gate’s cameras that night.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. His eyes had started to ache, though whether from grief or exhaustion he wasn’t sure. After five nights without rest, he was beginning to forget what real sleep felt like.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Stars appeared.
“Don’t get the wrong idea—I’m not the sort of girl who’s about saving it until marriage, okay?” Bethany spoke sternly, as if to correct some snide comment Joel hadn’t made. “Dylan got that shit out of me when we were kids. It’s why I broke up with Luke Evers, you know. He was a real church boy back then.”
Joel thought of Luke’s photo buried in his brother’s desk, the argument he’d witnessed between the two boys on Friday night at the game. “How did Luke feel about your decision to leave him?”
“He never liked Dylan after that. Who would? But before you ask, no, I don’t think Luke could have killed Dylan. His mom’s almost as bad as my dad. Everyone knows Luke has to go straight home after games.”
“And where’s KT Staler gone to?”
“Somewhere there’s drugs. He’s trash. His trouble started with his mom and worked its way down. I always told Dylan hanging around that boy would get him in trouble and here we are. I’m a very prescient person, you know.” She pronounced it present.
“You’re saying Dylan died because he was wrapped up in drugs?” Joel thought again of the two thousand dollars his brother had been caught counting in his room, of the gold watch and silver bracelet, of the unmarked bottle of painkillers.
“Dylan? No—KT was the drug addict. Families like his are a menace to society.” Bethany lit another cigarette, the flame shaking in her hands. “My dad will kill me if this gets out, you know, really he will. He’d kill Jamal and me and fuck, maybe kill you, just for knowing.”
Joel would like to see him try. “Where did KT and Dylan go last Friday night?”
“They left like always.”
“And went where?”
“Dylan went to the coast,” Bethany said, sounding just a little too certain.
“But why did Dylan have to leave so often? Bethany, from where I’m sitting he looks like a guy leaving town to scratch an itch. Like a guy with a habit. You have to see that.”
“I had total trust in Dylan. We were very honest with each other.” Joel heard a rustling sound as Bethany adjusted her hair in the dark. There was something nervous in the sound. The girl added vaguely, “We were made for each other. Mostly.”
Joel took a cigarette from the baggie. Lighting it, he felt a sudden lightness in his chest. Somewhere, somehow, they had just moved in a strange new direction.
Bethany was saying, “Of course all I could think about when I was with Jamal was how I’d rather have just been with Dylan, like we were in the old days. Which is of course exactly what he told me not to do. We would sneak into the house sometimes, Dylan and I, even when Dad was there, and—”
“What Jamal told you not to do?”
“No—Dylan. The whole fucking mess was Dylan’s idea in the first place.” She sucked her cigarette till the filter smoldered. “Dylan always used to say the point of being this young is to fuck up and get away with it. So when he said, ‘How ’bout you and Jamal give things a shot,’ I thought fuck it. Jamal’s hot. He’s nice. He’s been single ever since that Shanice girl moved away. Why not?”
“But Dylan wasn’t with you last weekend. That wasn’t the idea—the three of you together?”
“I just told you Dylan was at the coast,” Bethany snapped. “Dylan set things up between Jamal and me because he felt guilty we weren’t fucking anymore.”
“You and Dylan had stopped sleeping together?”
“Of course we had. I mean, we tried to keep it up for a while. I tried. But you can’t fix it, can you? You can kick and scream and say it isn’t fair or you can live with it, right? That’s what the women around here have always done. It’s a goddamn way of life for these bitches—acting like you can’t see what’s right in front of your goddamn face.”
Joel blinked at the night, at the shallow river puddled with stars.
“Bethany,” he said. “What did you accept?”
“You mean—but Dylan said you must have known. Dylan always said you must have known about him because he always knew about you.”