Milam Municipal Park was a glorified ditch. There was a strip of road to park your car, some rough-hewn steps cut into limestone, but there was nothing at the bottom of those steps but wild holly and poison oak all running tangled through a gully.
At nine o’clock, well past dark, Joel took four steps down the side of the ditch and refused to take another. The night breeze, warm with the last traces of summer, stirred a heap of dead leaves. This was possibly the last place in Bentley he wanted to be. If you walked all the way to the bottom of those steps you could find the exact location he’d been standing when the photos had been taken ten years ago. This gully could be a landmark in Pettis County.
Clark texted him:
I just want you there in case he tries to run. Stay out of sight.
Joel’s mind was not well. He was so strung out after a week of no sleep he believed—really believed—that he could feel a single thought as it dragged itself sluggishly from one synapse to another. He’d spent a long afternoon spinning his wheels about the escorting ad. He had lost count of the Adderall tablets he’d eaten today. Blood beat against the back of his eyes.
$200/hour. Your place.
He considered telling Clark that if Luke tried to escape from her down these steps, the boy would have nowhere to run once he reached the gully, as Joel’s arrest record could attest. Instead he wrote back, I’m covert af.
AF?
Kimbra texted Joel:
Luke says he’s fifteen minutes away. I told him to please hurry I really need to see him etc etc.
Meeting here at the park had been Clark’s idea but it was Kimbra who had made it possible: the girl had devised (with enthusiasm and few questions) some story to lure Luke here. She was remarkably crafty. She’d told Joel that Evers was so desperate for friends he’d show up anywhere someone promised him a secret.
Joel had yet to tell the girl that KT had been found, safe and dubiously sound. He didn’t want her getting second thoughts.
Clark texted Joel: I’m 10 min away.
Joel glanced at the brambles that overgrew the gully. There was nothing but danger down there.
He typed, Hurry.
He touched his brother’s knife, strapped to his ankle above his jeans. Just to be safe.
I’m a fucking horny Texas Teen who loves to FUCK and SERVICE mature men, the ad read. Could his brother have really written that? Could it explain the Oxy in his room? Had Dylan popped those pills to forget all the things he had let these mature men do to him? Or, instead, had he done all of those things to afford all of those pills?
Had Dylan worn this knife for his safety on his weekend trips to the coast?
Joel hadn’t been able to look at the ad for long. Here was a photo of Dylan in football pads that Joel recognized from Instagram. Here were half a dozen nudes: dimly lit backside, hard penis, ridged stomach. How brazen had Dylan become with his local fame to think he could get away with posting his face on something so salacious? How naive did you have to be to think that nobody in your hometown would find you out, eventually?
I put in two thousand of my own money.
i fucking hate football
dumb dreams. bad dreams.
What dreams, Dylan? What did you need so badly you would sell your body when a brother with a limitless credit card was a phone call away?
it’s like i hear this town talking when i sleep.
Imagine if Dylan had called and told Joel everything. Imagine all that Joel could have shown him in the city, all the pleasures that would have been open to his handsome, masculine brother with his deep voice and easy charm. Dylan now would never walk into a bar and watch the sea of men around him ripple with attention at the sight of his smile. Would never walk down the street and feel a pair of eyes rove his body from his hair to his brilliant new white shoes. Dylan, dying here, had never been allowed to be himself.
God have mercy on whoever denied him that.
Joel wouldn’t.
Hey, Kimbra Lott texted. Joel heard tires approaching through the quiet night. The girl wrote, I just remembered something. Ask Luke about the White Lands. KT said once he was gonna hang out with his White Lands boys but idk what that means and he never would tell.
Headlights washed over the trees of the park. They threw the same shadows Joel had seen ten years before. His body shuddered as a memory—the bad memory, the worst memory—tried to climb his spine. His screen was replaced with the notice of an incoming call. It was Clark.
“Call it off,” she said. Joel heard sirens blaring. “Christ in the shitter, I got a fire. A bad one.”
“Send somebody else to deal with it.”
“There ain’t nobody else. Browder’s got a man over in Rockdale who’s gone crazy waving his gun in the street. Jones’s posted up at the bank all night making sure nobody walks into the goddamn vault because nobody knows where to take the goddamn money and Mayfield just dropped off KT Staler because of course the goddamn kid’s in the clear facing no goddamn charges—this goddamn fire, it’s an officer’s house, Joel, it’s—”
“Luke’s here,” Joel said. “I’ll call you later.”
“Joel—”
He slipped the phone back into his pocket. A heavy truck lumbered to a stop on the road above him. It was, indeed, Luke Evers. He was bigger than Joel remembered from the game (did boys his age use steroids?) with a pillar of a neck and bulbous biceps and legs that looked ready to burst from their jeans. His face was even uglier than Joel had recalled.
“Where’s Kimbra?” Luke asked. “She said she had something for me.”
“Down here. She’s waiting.” Joel gestured to the stairs.
“Where’s her car?” Luke squinted at him. “Where’s your car?”
He wasn’t an idiot, then. Joel smiled. “Where were you on Friday night, Luke?”
The boy froze. “What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t at home—I know that much. Your mother lied to the police—I know that too—but it’s not surprising, is it? Big shots like your family, of course their son’s going to get out of trouble.”
“How the fuck—”
Joel stepped forward. “Did you ever forgive Dylan for stealing your girl?”
“Bethany didn’t give him a choice.”
“How underwater is your family right now? Your parents own half the town, sure, but what’s to own? Everything’s closing. That big new subdevelopment’s empty.”
Luke narrowed his eyes.
“How bad does your family need the football program to keep going strong? Get new families moving in and sending their kids to Bentley High, buying houses, opening stores? How bad would it hurt y’all if my brother decided he hated football after all?”
“Dylan would never quit.” Luke almost laughed. “He needed the attention too much.”
“And what if he wasn’t who this town thought he was?”
Bull’s-eye. Luke all but recoiled from the question.
“Who told you that?”
Joel’s rage mounted.
“Who sent you the ad, Luke?” Joel was frightened by the calm in his own voice. A voice that no longer felt entirely his own. “Who told you the golden boy wasn’t very golden?”
“You watch too much TV, man.”
Liar! his intuition shouted.
“Whoever it is,” he’d promised his mother. “Whatever it takes.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time.” Joel took two long steps forward, bringing the boy within arm’s reach. “Where did you go after the game on Friday?”
“Fuck you, man.” Luke seemed to briefly consider throwing a punch at Joel with one of those big arms—Just try, the animal inside Joel pleaded, just fucking try—but instead the boy only turned away with a shake of his head. “I wasn’t hurting anybody.”
The moment Luke’s back was turned Joel’s vision went black. He felt the rage and the horror and the shame—the shame, always and forever the shame—tighten his heart. And Joel didn’t want to fight it any longer. He let his mind slip free and let the darkness take control and bent down to grab the blade on his ankle and all he could hear was endthis—the blood in his ears whispering pleading demanding—endhimendyouendthis.
He had forgotten to undo the safety strap holding the knife in its sheath. He fumbled with it for a moment, just long enough for Luke to take a step away.
The strap popped free. Joel took hold of the knife’s handle.
And then the back window of the truck lowered and a young boy shouted, “Luke!” and Joel shot to his feet empty-handed and felt his brain stutter and crash and refuse to start up again.
Luke was a brother too. How had he forgotten? Luke was an older brother, just like him.
Evers turned back, shook his head at Joel.
“And I thought Dylan was the crazy one,” he said.
When Luke reached the truck he tousled the young boy’s hair and climbed into the cab and left Joel standing alone in the dark.
With all the amphetamine in his system it took ages for the adrenaline to wear off. Light eventually began to creep through cracks in his vision where a moment before only darkness had been. He marveled at how easily he had surrendered himself to all of the violence and rage and despair that had climbed up from the pit of his mind.
Marveled at the way some of that darkness felt as if it had come from somewhere else. Somewhere not inside him.
Perhaps Clark had been right last night when she’d started talking about her kooky mother. The nightmares Joel had experienced since Dylan’s murder—they didn’t feel like normal dreams. That hadn’t felt like normal rage. And while Margo Clark had seemed utterly bonkers, if she really had been in touch with some force or energy or occult magic, well: who could blame her for coming a little loose at the hinges?
After all, something had just come knocking at Joel’s own head. Something rotten. Something old.
With a twist of guilt he remembered that Clark had been called away to an emergency of her own. He texted her:
Everything ok?
He texted Kimbra:
I’ve learned that KT was brought home this evening. He’d been arrested in Dallas.
Kimbra responded: Oh.
Sorry about that, Joel thought. Add it to the pile of things to feel awful over.
Joel walked until he caught a glint of moonlight on his black convertible parked in the distance, on the highway’s dark shoulder. He toggled his phone over to the escorting ad and found he could still only study it for a few seconds. Looking now at his brother’s grinning face, his shirtless body, Joel saw it in a new light.
Didn’t the ad feel a little absurd, like a bad joke? Indeed, some of the Bison, according to Kimbra, had apparently considered it a prank when they saw it. But Joel wasn’t stupid. There must have been plenty of Bentley boys who did not find it funny, who might even have taken it seriously, considered it evidence of his brother’s deviance. Would it be such a stretch to imagine that the ad could have outed Dylan, however inadvertently? All it might have taken was one person spreading this URL to put the boy in terrible danger.
His brother’s murder might have been a hate crime. The thought was too banal, too appalling, to fathom.
Whether the ad was genuine or not, it raised another question. Why had Dylan never told Joel that he was gay? Surely he must have known that Joel would treat the news with nothing but love and discretion. Dylan had always laughed when Joel described the absurdities of the city’s gay scene, had always taken a good-natured interest in Joel’s trips to bars and beaches, had never betrayed a hint of homophobia.
That old joke—50K—Dylan had carved into the concrete of the dam, had started back when Joel was fresh in Manhattan. One weekend, he had met a lavishly drunk man at a bar in Chelsea who had clung to Joel’s elbow and insisted, endlessly, that he had a “fifty-karat cock.” When Joel had told that story to his brother, Dylan had been aghast and delighted by the phrase in the way only teenage boys can be. It had passed into their limited private lexicon: “Yo, J—you found any more of that fifty-k?”
Maybe there was an answer in that, he realized. Maybe Joel had been so busy bringing word of the modern world to his simple backwoods brother he’d never bothered to learn if there was any news at home.
The dirty ad was featured on the escorting site’s listings for Dallas, Houston and Austin. Joel wondered what kind of offers his dead brother’s digital self was receiving at this very moment. He played with a hypothetical: suppose someone in Bentley had been planning a trip out of town one weekend, and while browsing the pages of the escorting website, looking to set up a little fun while they were in the city, they had happened to find Dylan’s ad. Long odds, Joel’s analytical mind told him, but still—stranger things have happened.
As he approached his car, he felt a spark in his ragged brain. Wasn’t this ad of his brother’s—with all of its lurid pictures—uncannily similar to the photos that had been spread of Joel ten years before? Wasn’t it—
There was someone seated in his convertible.
Joel stopped. He had lowered the convertible’s ruined cloth hood this morning and so had no difficulty seeing the man sitting in the driver’s seat, staring forward out the windshield. Sitting very still.
imissedyou.
The man’s head began to turn, very slowly. Joel saw that it wasn’t a man.
It was a boy. It was his brother.
Dylan stared at him with one eye. The other eye was so badly bruised it had swollen shut.
Dylan opened the car door.
Joel’s brother wore a green Bison jacket and a pair of pants that glistened silver in the moonlight. His bare chest was the same cold white Joel had seen at the morgue. Dylan’s bruised face was drawn into a grimace of pain.
Dylan took one faltering step out of the car. Another. His bloody bare feet sent up a whisper as they kicked the gravel. imissedyou. Joel clenched his fist around his phone, felt the useless knife on his ankle. He willed his legs to run. Every raw synapse in his brain willed his legs to run.
Dylan opened his mouth. His voice came out tight, twisted.
“You have to go.”
Dylan took another step.
“You have to go tonight.”
Joel opened his mouth to scream. No sound came.
“Run, Joel.”
Dylan stopped. He stood a few inches away, giving off an awful stench of rot and mildew and clay. The wound in the boy’s throat was a black pit into which no moonlight penetrated. It stared back at Joel like a reptile’s eye.
“If you don’t go tonight there’s no escape.”
A truck’s horn blared behind Joel. A pair of headlights washed over Dylan and by the time they passed he was gone, his body vanishing in their glare.
The truck roved on down the road. Joel wondered if perhaps its driver had seen nothing more serious than a lone man on the side of the highway losing what was left of his mind.
Except the door of Joel’s car was still open.
A few steps later, he stared down at the exposed driver’s seat. Something dark clung to the leather. He reached out a hand to touch it, bring it to his nose.
It was clay—sour and rotten and old.
Joel knew that smell. He’d awoken to find it caught in his throat every morning this week.