The morning had been a wash. The employees at Sparks’s Auto Body had refused to talk to Joel about the discovery of the bloody sock in Jamal’s Ford Explorer. A grungy man with an ugly dash of a scar under one eye had asked him, “You want us to buff them words off your door?” Joel had declined.
He drove to the Varsity Motel, a peeling cinder block horseshoe south of town on the highway, and asked after Jason Ovelle, just as Clark had recommended. The woman behind the counter said she didn’t know a man by that name. Joel slid her two twenties and she told him she hadn’t seen him all week. Joel asked to see Ovelle’s room, hoping to discover some trace of where he might have gone, but the woman said that it had been rented to another party. When Joel pointed out that his was the only car in the parking lot, the lady only shrugged and turned back to her magazine.
On South Street, Joel passed Mrs. Mason, his mother’s friend, walking out of the bank with her terrier in her purse. She did a bad job of hiding her surprise at seeing him. When he asked her how her nephews Garrett and Ranger were doing these days, she invented a hair appointment in Temple and climbed into her car.
He went to the diner. Waiting for a fried sandwich—years of self-deprivation, and all it took was some violent grief to finally forget about his abs—he overheard a man in the booth behind him say, “It all feels a little familiar, don’t it?”
“You mean like it was with the Clark boy?” replied a second man.
“No, like—” The first man lowered his voice; Joel would swear he’d heard him shiver. “I ain’t been right at night. I ain’t felt like this since our school days, since with Broadlock and all.”
“There’s a name that’s bad for your health.”
“But that voice, Phil—you heard it yourself.”
A lady cut in. “This ain’t nothing like back then. This here all starts with the mother. She teaches a boy she can move a man into her home without a lick of ceremony then how’s the boy supposed to know smart from hazardous? I ask you. It’s the breakdown of tradition is what it is.”
Joel refused to be baited. He strode out of the diner as the waitress brought the sandwich to his table.
Now he drove his ruined car up the highway and pulled onto the shoulder at the little stand of trees that sat two miles north of the football field. According to Bethany, it was here that the boys had hidden Jamal’s SUV before the game and dropped him off to retrieve it. Joel saw no reason to doubt her; the plan was so elaborate and superfluous it could only be invented by a group of teenage celebrities who had to make their own entertainment. The trees, just as Joel remembered, sat on the west side of the highway, opposite the eastern copper Flats, and were still packed in so tight together that from the road you’d never guess you could fit a car between them.
Ten years ago, back when he would meet Troy here, he had always seen the First Baptist Church’s steeple in his rearview mirror, watching him from back in town. Now, with the church gone, there was nothing on the horizon but the football field’s tall halogen field lights. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.
Joel wondered if they might not have been the steeples of this town’s true religion all along.
He eased over the shoulder and found the space on the western edge of the trees where, by the luck of nature, two shedding cedars had decided to grow a few extra feet apart from one another.
Joel climbed from the car and found himself back in the small clearing he remembered intimately from when he’d been Dylan’s age. Roughly ten yards long and five wide, the clearing was blanketed with strips of cedar bark, a few cigarette butts. Joel spotted a dark stain in a patch of dirt and realized with a start that this place might be the site of his brother’s murder—it was north of town, after all, in the direction Dylan had been last seen going, and God knew it was plenty private. But when Joel pressed his finger to the dark patch and brought them to his nose he found that the stain was only engine oil. Jamal’s SUV must have had a drip.
The scent brought on an overwhelming stab of nostalgia—Troy had always smelled of grease, sweat, welder’s smoke—and when the moment passed Joel realized he was in danger of losing his balance. He caught hold of a branch and awoke to the sound of his heart racing in his ears. He’d fallen asleep on his feet.
He shook himself, rubbed his face. Chewed an Adderall. Paced the clearing. There was something important here, a vital question his intuition was struggling to ask him. Something to do with the fact that it had been Joel who had once mentioned this secret place to Dylan years ago, and Troy who had shown it to Joel.
If nothing else, Joel supposed he could only hope that Dylan had enjoyed as happy a summer this year as Joel had enjoyed a decade before. Because at this point it seemed clear that those few months Joel had spent with Troy, whatever their consequences, would go down as the happiest of his life. There had been many trips to this very clearing, long sticky hours spent parked in the cab of Troy’s truck or pressed against the shedding trunk of a cedar or standing to discover the fallen bark’s mahogany stains lingering on the knees of their jeans. Things he hadn’t been brave enough to tell Clark last night.
The night of the Bison’s first summer game, the night that he had struck Ranger Mason with the first and only punch he’d ever thrown, Joel had emerged from his toilet stall to see Troy at the urinal. Troy had grown slimmer since Joel had last seen him a year before, wiry with muscle, an unkempt patch of stubble spreading down his neck. He still had the same bony wrists a little too big for his arms, still had his sister’s brilliant emerald eyes, and those eyes had fixed on Joel that night with an attention, an interest, they’d never betrayed before. An attention that was thrilling, but not entirely kind.
Troy had said more to Joel in five minutes in the toilets than he had in the two years they’d spent on the team together. Looking back, Joel realized now that Troy had been appraising him. When Troy asked Joel if things between him and his sister were well, Joel had hesitated, and Troy had seemed relieved.
A week later, a half hour late—he was always late—Troy picked Joel up and they headed to the muddy country northwest of town. Troy’s truck smelled of spearmint gum and cheap body spray and nicotine. Troy filled the silences with clumsy small talk, telling Joel about a 7-Eleven in Rockdale that would sell you beer without asking for ID if you paid twenty percent extra—“You know how to calculate that, right?”—about how Joel should never play football if he could help it (as if Joel, soon to be a senior, hadn’t already missed that train by years), about the importance in a man’s life of one day buying property.
At Troy’s request, Joel had opened the glove box to retrieve a bottle of pills and found them resting atop a handgun. The gun’s small black mouth was aimed straight at Joel’s chest. “Bandits and thieves,” was all Troy would say in explanation, snickering, as he swallowed three tablets dry.
Pills, Joel thought now, recalling all that Clark had told him about Troy’s debt, the bottle of Oxy in Dylan’s room. Pills. Of course.
Troy and Joel had driven, whooping and laughing, through the wet country west of town, until mud had covered their windows and the engine started to smell. Troy parked in the shadow of a spindly tree to let the truck cool down. A tenuous silence settled between them. They looked at each other, at the patch of sky visible through the filthy windshield. An opportunity had presented itself—they both felt it, just as they both felt they were about to squander it if they didn’t move fast.
Troy abandoned subtlety. He grabbed Joel’s hand and pressed it to the hard weight in his lap.
When they were through, Troy had turned on the truck’s wipers and said, “Sorry about that,” as if he had just spilled ketchup on Joel’s shirt (years later, Joel would hear the same words coming from Wesley Mores, spoken in the exact same tone).
Joel, finding nowhere to spit, only swallowed.
He wanted to weep. He had just learned that there was nothing more debasing, more perfectly disappointing, than getting exactly what you wanted: whatever Joel might have imagined in his wildest fantasies, Troy had ultimately tasted as bland as a short, salty finger. What had Joel just spent to discover that? What black mark had he just set permanently against his manhood? Against his soul?
When he felt a faint tremble rise through the ground and quake in his seat, he knew, without question, that it was just the Lord God, turning His eye on him in shock and shame.
Troy felt it too. He went still. He pushed sweat from his forehead and started to drive. He was so jumpy the truck nearly stalled.
The two boys were silent on the way home. Joel was almost too ashamed to breathe. He sometimes forgot, ten years later, just how religious he had once been, how the sight of Bentley First Baptist’s cross had made him so fearful: the God of First Baptist was not a merciful God. Joel nearly barfed up all that Troy had spat inside him.
The guilt and the horror were all so awful Joel would have gladly let that afternoon be the end of it, would have never spoken to Troy again (imagine the shape his future might have taken), if something remarkable hadn’t happened.
Troy seemed to calm when they reached the highway. His jitters faded. And when he moved the truck up from second gear to third to fourth, Troy let his hand fall from the gearshift and come to rest on Joel’s thigh. He kept it there the entire way home.
Their arrangement went on like that all summer. Troy would make plans on some pretense every few weeks to come to town and would drive them somewhere remote or arrange a meeting in secret. When they were through they would study the ground, wipe their chins. And then they would let a thigh rest against a thigh, or an arm rest over a shoulder, and they would return to the real world like wounded soldiers, leaning against each other on the way back to their lonely trenches.
Joel had learned another lesson that summer, in those moments of fulfilled, defiant happiness: that shame and love, while one might breed the other, could never truly be felt at the same time. For a few brief miles on the way back to Bentley, before the disgust and the fear and the cunning set in again, Joel would feel happier with Troy, righter, than he had ever felt in his life.
He doubted now that Troy’s feelings had been anywhere near as ecstatic. Apparently the man had had much larger concerns that summer than some rough head in a stand of trees (Joel supposed a drug habit explained the permanent sheen of sweat that seemed to cover Troy’s copper skin under even the coldest air-conditioning). Troy had certainly abandoned Joel easily enough: in the wake of all that happened in the park, all that had happened with Deputy Grissom and Joel’s arrest, Troy had cut off all contact, had let Joel sink like an anchor cut loose from its tether.
When Joel had heard, two months after his world had imploded, that Troy had gone missing, he hadn’t allowed himself to be worried. He’d forced himself not to care. After that final betrayal, Troy had taught Joel a second lesson that summer. He had taught Joel how to cauterize his heart.
As Joel’s phone began to buzz, the question finally popped into his head: why had Troy not asked Joel to meet him here, in this clearing, that night when Joel was arrested? The two of them had never once gone to the public park together, and for good reason.
Kimbra Lott had texted him.
hey. there’s some things you should know.
I’m listening.
There was a pause.
Luke Evers doesn’t have an alibi for Friday night.
Joel let out a little whistle. A manic grin tightened his face. He began to type a response but Kimbra cut him off.
there’s more.