Wesley Mores opened the door of his sprawling, lonely house with bourbon on his breath. He gasped at the sight of Joel’s car.
“I think I hit a dog,” Joel said, his voice shaky enough to make Wesley take a step back—the youth minister was quite drunk. Joel let himself in.
“I need to wash my hands.”
“You can use the guest bathroom,” Wesley said, a slur in his voice.
“This is fine, thank you.” Joel was already halfway down the hall to the master suite, the minister hurrying after him. He gave Wesley an exhausted smile and closed the bedroom door in his face.
The little lock in the doorknob turned without a sound. Joel waited a moment, just to be certain Wesley wouldn’t try to break in, and went into the adjoining bathroom. He turned on the tap, left the water running.
Back in the bedroom, Joel saw that Wesley had tidied up the massive oak dresser. It now held only a little dish of loose change, a Bentley Bison class ring—the year 2006 engraved along the top—and a wallet. Joel eased open a drawer: loose boxers. Gym shorts. Undershirts.
Wesley knocked on the door. “Are you alright in there?” He sounded tipsy, anxious.
Joel didn’t bother answering. The door’s knob jiggled.
“Joel?”
He saw a closet, a big TV stand.
“Joel, what are you doing in there?”
His eyes settled on a little nightstand with a big iron keyhole in the drawer. Antique, or trying to look like it. When Joel tugged on the drawer, he felt a latch hold it shut. Barely.
Wesley went quiet in the hall. Joel suspected he’d begun to look for the same thing as him: a tool to pry open a lock.
Joel found his first. He pulled his brother’s knife free from its sheath and wedged the blade into the drawer. He heard Wesley hurrying up the hallway.
“I’m calling the police, Joel.” Pohleessh. Jull.
The drawer began to give. Joel leaned on the blade. “That’s a bad idea, Wesley.”
“You have no right to come into my house like this, Joel, to—”
The drawer came open with a loud snap and a little puff of sawdust. Its contents clattered to the floor: a pocket Bible, a tacky old necklace with a dubious stone in the center, a credit card.
And, tucked in amid the clutter, was a small golden disk hooked to a wide blue ribbon. Joel pulled the medal free. He saw on it just what he thought he would, what he had been too drunk to recognize when he saw it on Sunday night. The letters MVP were embossed on the front.
And written across the back: STATE SEMIFINALS 2016.
Joel smiled. He thought of Clark asking him, “How many queers do we have in Pettis County?”
Standing on the side of the road a few minutes before, the adrenaline finally fading from his head, he’d finally stopped to think about what Luke had told him at the park. “I wasn’t hurting anyone.”
It was a stretch, but it was worth a shot.
Joel opened the bedroom door. Wesley stood on the other side with his phone in his hand, a finger poised over the screen, but at the sight of the medal he slid the phone slowly into his pocket and took a step away as if Joel had made to strike him with it.
“Just what were you and Luke Evers up to on Friday night, Mr. Mores?”
“I don’t like your tone.”
Joel did his best to sound bemused. “You must have shown that kid a hell of a time to deserve a gold medal.”
“He’s not a kid!” The burly man took another stumbling step back, hiccuped. Wesley was not—Joel was relieved to see—the sort of man whose drunkenness dissipated when shit hit the fan. He stumbled again, shook his head, stared at Joel like he wanted his forgiveness, but said only, “I—I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Joel studied the medal. A careful, conspiratorial hesitation. “Do you want to sit down?”
In the living room, Joel dropped his phone casually on the arm of the sofa, went to the drinks cart to pour Wesley a whiskey. The man accepted it without a word.
“I’m trying to help you here, Wes.” Joel sat down close, a hand on Wesley’s massive thigh. He thought of that clumsy stumble Sunday night when the minister had fallen against his chest just for the chance to touch him. How many sad accidents had this man survived on? “The cops know Luke wasn’t home Friday night. They haven’t spoken to him yet.”
“But you have.”
“He told me he was here.”
“Consent in Texas is seventeen.”
“But Luke was still one of your pupils at the church, wasn’t he?”
“He’s a Methodist.”
Joel gave him a muted shrug.
“What’s the point?” Wesley sighed into his glass. “Luke was caught sleeping with some boy over in Rockdale. In a parking lot. A parking lot! His mother—I hope you never meet that woman—she and I’d been friendly since I bought this house. She came to me for help, asked me to give the boy some private guidance. How could I say no?”
The minister raised a toast to the TV.
“Luke was a lot less confused about himself than his mother thought,” Wesley said. And, the minister went on, Luke didn’t waste any time. When things started, Wesley and the boy would meet for lunch at a chain restaurant in Waco, a ninety-minute drive away, and over enchiladas Wesley would try to talk about the Lord, about the value He places on keeping one’s body pure, about all the old promises of retribution for those folks who failed to follow some simple commandments. “He seemed receptive,” Wesley said.
I bet, Joel thought.
Wesley said it was all so quotidian. Things took a turn. Their sessions grew longer, more personal.
Soon Luke was giving the minister little gifts as thank-yous for making so much time for him—a small cross he’d carved at home, a chunk of quartz he’d discovered on a hike with his brother. That was when he’d given Wesley the medal. “He said he remembered how well I played in my day. He said Troy Clark didn’t deserve all the love he got.”
Of course, Luke knew that Wesley was the only person living on this stretch of the Evers family’s subdevelopment. Last Friday, things finally came to a head. Luke had texted Wesley Friday night after the game was over and said he had something he couldn’t wait to ask the minister about.
Joel couldn’t help but say, “And you were shocked when he came over with more than Jesus on his mind?”
Wesley closed his eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like here, Joel.”
“You could leave.”
“Right. Of course. And have you found someone special in the city? Someone to wake up for?”
After a moment, Joel said, “No.”
Wesley gave him a tight-lipped smile: spiteful, and yet with a strange air of relief, like he’d just heard confirmation that he’d made a wise choice back at some difficult time. Joel would never forgive him for that smile. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Did Luke mention the ad on Friday night?” Joel said.
“What ad?”
“The one the players were passing around at halftime.”
“The boy doesn’t have friends. It’s why we got along so well.” Wesley gave a tipsy burp. He rounded on Joel, jabbed a finger in the air, suddenly all anger and self-justification. “What we did was nothing compared to the shit that goes on in this town, you know.”
Just as he had last night at the dam, Joel felt something large looming in the air, waiting to be said.
“What sort of shit, Wesley?”
“You remember.”
“Let’s say I don’t.”
Rage overcame Wesley. He stared at Joel, eyes black and narrow, and said, “You’re as bad as your fucking brother, you know that? You fucking sanctimonious shit. Who do you think burned down my church? Some meth addicts? No, you fucking idiot, it was your brother and those boys, those goddamn footballers who can get away with anything. They’ve been a terror for years because they know the cops won’t touch them.”
Wesley’s voice grew louder. Here was a man, Joel thought, who could fill a pulpit.
“Most of them are happy to rip off someone’s stereo or a wallet but your brother decided he wanted to save the fucking world and torch a church. Dylan only ever showed up at the service to sit next to Bethany Tanner and keep this town thinking he was their damned heart and soul. Luke figured it out easy.”
Wesley paused to give his lip an angry bite.
“When that mother of y’all’s moved a man into her house over the summer there was a little perplexity why those two couldn’t follow basic protocol. There was talk.”
“Dylan burned down a church because people were gossiping about our mother?”
“He didn’t even bother lying when Luke spotted the kerosene cans in his truck.”
Joel let a long silence settle before he said, “What else was Dylan doing? Where did he and KT go on the weekends?”
Wesley gave an indignant little shrug. “How the hell should I know? They never talked to me.”
This sounded genuine to Joel’s ears. He let it go for now. Something Wesley had said a moment before echoed with something Bethany had told him yesterday: “The cops never bothered Dylan.”
“So Dylan was immune to police investigation? Why isn’t Jamal? He’s on the team too, backup or not.”
“It’s not the entire team that’s safe.” Wesley was beginning to sound exhausted. He rose and headed for the drinks cart. With a shaky hand he filled his glass. “There was always a clique. A little band of golden boys no one could touch.”
“Was Troy Clark one of those boys?”
Wesley emptied the glass in one gulp. “Of course he was. He and Ranger Mason, Jason Ovelle, a few others.”
Joel’s stomach turned at the thought of Ranger Mason. Of Ranger’s bloody mouth.
“Is that why Troy Clark was selling drugs around here? Because he knew he was immune from the law?”
“How should I know? I wasn’t one of them.”
“And what about Dylan? Was he one of the untouchable boys today?”
“You have to ask?”
“Who else?”
“Not Luke, I’ll tell you that. Joel, this can’t be hard to figure out. Look at this town. Look at who walks around like they own it.” For the first time since he spotted the medal dangling from Joel’s fingers in the hallway a look of fear came over Wesley’s face. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“One of those untouchables killed my brother, didn’t he? It’s why the whole damn town is trying to cover it up by framing Jamal Reynolds.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“KT Staler got mixed up in trouble over the summer. You said it yourself. But his girlfriend knew nothing about it. There’s no record of anything in the sheriff’s department’s system. Wesley—what did KT do?”
“I can’t talk about that place, Joel.”
“What place?”
Wesley splashed bourbon somewhere in the vicinity of his glass. His face had gone white.
Joel studied the fear in the man’s sunken eyes. The exhaustion.
Joel said, “You’re dreaming about it too.”
Wesley stood so still Joel thought the man had stopped breathing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
KT told me once he was gonna hang out with his White Lands boys.
Joel said softly, “You can’t remember them well, can you? The dreams. They chase you all night and then you wake up shaking and stare at the ceiling and ask yourself, ‘What the hell has got me so scared?’”
i can’t go to the bright lands it’s not the same no more.
The bourbon sloshed in the minister’s glass.
“Wesley,” Joel said. “What are the Bright Lands?”
Mores laughed abruptly, a violent reflex, the second the words were out of Joel’s mouth, knocking his hip into the bar cart and making the bottles titter. Yet when Wesley regained control of himself all he said was, “I don’t know. I was never invited.”
I was never invited.
The memory came rushing up at that: the bad memory, the worst memory. Joel felt a coarse thumb press itself against his asshole. He heard a man say, “Cheer up, son. I weren’t ever—”
As the memory of fat deputy Grissom filled his mind Joel dug his nails into the leather of the couch. If Joel thought about it, if he let himself remember, he was certain he would go falling backward, be lost permanently in the dark folds of the past.
Pulling himself into the present, Joel stared at Wesley and said, “What does the Bright Lands have to do with my brother?”
A little echo of the laugh rose from the other man’s chest. He shook his head. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
Joel felt another question forming, but a moment later Wesley’s attention fell across something on the floor near the kitchen.
The phone, Joel’s gut asked him. Where’s your phone?
“You son of a bitch,” Wesley said.
Joel spotted it a few feet away—he must have knocked it from the sofa’s arm a moment ago. A little red square was blinking on the phone’s screen, the universal sign for RECORDING.
Joel looked up, saw the fury in Wesley’s eyes.
The man’s heavy glass came flying toward Joel’s face.