Friday night, the dreams began. As the storm finally burst, as the windows rattled with thunder, Joel lay in his old bed, his heart racing, his legs tangled in his bedclothes. He was running from something—something rotten, something old—that was chasing him through the hungry open country outside of town. He could it feel it, feel it right there behind him, snatching for his ankles, nicking the skin with a long cool nail. Getting closer. Closer.
When he awoke the next morning his mind was as cold and blank as a slab of marble. He was all but poached in sweat, one hand lost beneath his pillow, and when he checked his phone, he saw that he had slept for ten hours and was somehow more exhausted than when he’d gone to bed.
Joel struggled to recall his dream. A few vague impressions flickered, fast fading: a great black hole in the ground, a thudding in the earth. An ungodly stench.
And coursing through it all, his brother’s voice, calling to him from somewhere deep in the dream, shouting something that sounded a lot like run Joel run Joel RUN.
Dylan. Joel sat up in bed, unlocked his phone. No calls. No messages.
Where the fuck was his brother?
Joel chewed a Xanax, cranked out a few sit-ups, but the awful anxiety that had squeezed itself around his heart refused to relent. He felt queasy, light-headed, terrified for no good reason. If he didn’t move he’d be throwing up soon.
One thing at a time, Whitley. Shirt, pants, socks, sneakers, coffee. Breathe.
On his way to the front of the house, Joel stopped at his brother’s room and pressed his ear against the door. He listened to the way the silence inside seemed to throb like a swollen heart—
imissedyou.
—and pulled away. He tasted dirt on his tongue.
His mother was eating at the breakfast table, her elbows propped over a plate of toast, her phone in her face.
“Has Dylan called?” Joel said, fighting a tremor in his fingers.
“He mostly texts.”
Joel went to the kitchen for coffee. The mugs had moved.
“So he hasn’t texted?”
“Why would he text?”
“Because he’s been out all night. Because he’s seventeen.”
“Meaning he’s asleep.”
Joel slid the coffee’s carafe back into the machine. “I couldn’t take five steps at his age without you calling me.”
“I learned a lot of lessons from you.”
Joel heard the pat of soft footsteps from the hallway and looked up to see Darren, his mother’s boyfriend, in a tank top stained all over with mustard. Joel had met Darren only twice, on the family’s Christmas trips to the city. Like Paulette, he’d gotten older, though unlike her he’d grown narrow shouldered, paunchy, spry.
“Your mother told me you’d filled out.” Darren rapped his knuckles on Joel’s chest. “You must be beating off the boys up there with a stick.”
“I mostly use my hands.”
Darren laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes. He’d always been alright with Joel.
“Some of us are eating,” said Paulette.
“Dylan hasn’t texted you, has he?” Joel said.
Darren headed for the refrigerator. “Dylan? Text me?”
“Joel’s afraid the boy’s dead in a pit somewhere,” Paulette said.
Joel’s coffee paused on its way to his lips. “What did you say?”
He caught the way her eyes narrowed, the way she looked away. Paulette delayed her answer with a bite of toast.
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.”
The man smiled blandly, shifted himself from one large haunch to the other on the Whitley family’s sofa. He had introduced himself a few minutes before as Investigator Grady Mayfield. He’d brought muscled Deputy Browder with him, the younger man reeking of body spray and chewing tobacco.
The two officers read the message that had arrived from Dylan, traded almost imperceptible shrugs.
The message was time-stamped 10:53 a.m. this morning.
joel im sorry but i cant stay in bentley right now theres something i gotta get away from somthing u cant fix dont worry im fine i will call when things r settled love u talk 2 u soon.
“He sounds bothered by something.” Mayfield accepted a sweaty glass of iced tea from Paulette. Browder settled himself against the door frame and pinched his reddened eyes. “Which is a good thing.”
“A good thing?”
“It means he’ll calm down. Where else is he going to go but home? You folks don’t have any other family, do you?”
“He’s not bothered,” Joel said. Mayfield and Browder exchanged looks again. Joel tried to calm himself: sounding like a hysterical queen wouldn’t do his case any good. He cleared his throat, deepened his voice like he was back in a boardroom. “I know how my brother texts when he’s upset. He gets worked up but he punctuates.”
Mayfield sighed through his nose. “Are you saying that someone else texted you from your brother’s phone?”
“But Dylan’s never been happier,” Paulette said before Joel could reply, picking at a fingernail. “Boys, they just need to stretch their legs sometimes.”
Browder flipped open his notebook. Mayfield said, “Ma’am, can you give me the address of the place in Galveston where your son is staying for the weekend?”
There was a pause. “The address?”
“Yes, ma’am. Where they’re staying with...”
Browder said, “KT Staler’s brother.”
“Thank you. With Mr. Staler’s brother. That is where you said he was staying, yes?”
“Oh. Yes. Well—” She broke off for a moment. “It’s just I never asked for the address, Investigator. I never saw any need for one. It’s not like I was the one driving down there.”
Joel gaped at her. Even once he’d bought his first cell phone, when he was Dylan’s age, he’d never been allowed to step out the front door without telling his mother exactly where he would be, who with, the exact minute he would be home. All those precautions had done little good, of course (as Joel suspected these men from the sheriff’s department knew very well), but he still couldn’t believe that this was the sort of lesson his mother had learned from Joel’s youth: to give a teenage boy unfettered run of the entire state of Texas.
“Of course.” Mayfield smiled. “Then you’ll have the phone number for Mr. Staler’s brother? And a name?”
“Frank,” she said.
“Floyd,” Darren corrected her gently.
“Floyd. But he has a different last name, not Staler. He’s a half brother.” Paulette fumbled at her pockets for her phone before she caught sight of it on the edge of the wooden coffee table. “His number is—I know I had it, just a moment—”
While they waited, Mayfield turned to Joel. “I couldn’t help but notice you got some real mud on the tires of that convertible out there. I assume that’s yours?”
Joel considered his answer. “A rental.”
“Well, she’s pretty. What kept you out in that storm last night?”
Mayfield had a hard, sun-browned face, a flat nose, a tiny mouth. Joel caught the way his smile tightened, the concentration it betrayed. This investigator was only acting aloof, half-bored. There was a mind at work inside him.
Do not underestimate this man.
“I was enjoying the chance to drive. Living in the city you come to miss it.”
“She can’t handle nice in the rain.”
“The weather must have gotten worse by the time I made it home. The car handled fine.”
“And when was that, exactly?”
“I have it.” Paulette flashed the screen of her phone at Mayfield. “The number. The Staler boy’s number.”
“Wonderful.” Mayfield’s smile was frigid.
Paulette read the number off her phone, went back and read it over again. “Floyd’s a very nice young man,” she said. “He works in construction.”
“I’m glad someone from that family’s made good,” Mayfield said. “Your son hasn’t had any problems with KT, has he?”
“Problems?”
“Excuse me,” Joel said. “You’ve written that number down wrong.”
He nodded at the notebook in Deputy Browder’s hand.
Investigator Mayfield raised an eyebrow to Joel. “Is that right?”
“Look for yourself. The last digits. He’s got them backward.”
Browder handed Mayfield the pad. He didn’t bother to suppress a scowl. “We’re gonna have fun with you in town, ain’t we?”
Mayfield cleared his throat. He set his glass on a table coaster, produced a pen and corrected the number himself. The investigator stood and smiled. Joel and his family rose after him. In the commotion, Joel noticed, Mayfield slid Browder’s notebook into his own pocket.
“We’ll get in touch with this Staler boy in the afternoon, see if we can’t get Dylan on the horn for a few minutes. He might still be there, you know, at the coast. Or if he’s gotten it in mind to run off, maybe he’s told his friends where he’s headed. Either way, y’all let us know if you hear from him in the meantime, yes?” Mayfield extended his hand to Paulette, to Darren. “I’ll bet you a nickel he’ll be walking through that door the moment we’re walking out.”
—run Joel run Joel RUN—
“Don’t you want to see his room?” Joel said.
“No sense disturbing the boy’s privacy till there’s a call to.” Mayfield ambled his way to the house’s little parquet foyer. “Just by the by—when was it you said that you got in last night?”
Joel didn’t hesitate. “Eleven o’clock. Maybe a minute past.”
“Is that right?”
“Of course it is. I heard that car pull in right after the night news.” Paulette’s arms were barred across her chest, her chin jutted out, every inch of her suddenly ready for a fight.
The investigator said nothing more. He glanced between mother and son before letting himself out the door. The smell of Browder’s cheap body spray choked the air when he was gone.
“That department always will have it out for you,” Paulette told Joel with a scowl. He noticed she wouldn’t meet his eye.