Ain’t much of a plan, I know. Best I could come up with after months of stewing on it, though, which again, ain’t saying much. Only time I was ever much of a planner was on the football field, and that’s over now, over and done, which is pretty much the reason we need to beat up on Lyle, the dumb fuck with the bad hands and all.
Lyle lives in this new suburb called Crescent Shores where there ain’t no body of water, ain’t no shore, ain’t much of anything but all these shiny white houses that all look alike on these shiny white streets that all look alike, which is how come we got lost about six times trying to find his house until one of the Lewis brothers remembered there was a plastic squirrel glued to the roof of the Biddets’ mailbox.
I ring the doorbell a second time. It’s raining, the drops soft and sweaty, and there don’t seem to be anyone around on the whole street. It’s like they all left their white houses at the same time and drove off to the same golf tournament. So I turn the knob to the Biddets’ front door and — I ain’t shitting — it opens. Just like that. I look back over my shoulder at Terry. He sees the open door and his big grin lights up the whole car.
It’s been three weeks since graduation. Fourth of July weekend, 1970. I’m eighteen years old.
My daddy fought in Korea. Only thing he ever says about it is that it was cold. Colder’n an icebox. He lost a finger to the cold. Lost half a thumb. In the summer, when everyone is hiding from the sun in dark rooms and under trees and tin porch awnings, my old man’s lying out in the backyard with a cooler of beer beside him, eyes closed, chin tilted up. One time, my mother looks out the window at him and gives me a small, broken smile. “Damn,” she says, “but he looked fine in a uniform.”
Terry and the Lewis brothers park the Cougar a block over and then come back to the house, streak up the walk and inside, and I shut the door behind them. It’s cool in the house, the air blowing from these vents cut high up in the walls, and for a minute we all walk around looking at the vents, marveling. Morton Lewis says, “I gotta get me a setup like this.”
His brother Vaughn goes, “Shit. We take just one of those vents, it’ll be good enough for our whole place.”
He actually climbs up on the couch, looks like he’s fixing to rip one out of the wall, take it home with him. I can picture him a few hours later with the thing sitting in front of him on the kitchen table, trying to find a place for the batteries.
You put the brains of both Lewis brothers together and you still come up with something dumber than a barrel of roofing tar, but those boys are also tear-ass fast and my-daddy’s-a-mean-drunk crazy off the snap count, kinda boys can turn a starting left tackle into the town gimp, come back to the huddle not even breathing hard.
Terry says, “Nice house,” and walks around the living room looking at everything. “Got a bar too.”
There’s a small swimming pool out back. It’s the shape of a jellyfish and, like I said, none too big, but we have a few drinks from the bar and then we all go out and piss in it.
That’s what gets us going, I think. We go back into that too-white house and the Lewis brothers have at the vents, and I push over a vase in the dining room, and Terry breaks all the knobs off the TV and pours his beer all over the couch and we go on smashing and tearing things for a while, drunk from the liquor, but drunk with something else too, a kind of hysteria, I think, a need to keep from crying.
If we’d won that last game of the season, we would have gone on to the divisional playoffs against Lubbock Vo-Tech. Only way college scouts see you if you grow up in a tiny shithole like ours is if you make it to the divisionals. And that’s where we were heading, no question, until Lyle Biddet’s hands turned to Styrofoam. He coughed up the ball twice — once on the fucking one — and North Park converted both of Biddet’s gifts into touchdowns, left us standing numb and cold under a black Texas sky, fans heading home, the lights shutting off.
My guidance counselor asks me a week later what I plan to make out of my life, what I’m fixing to do with it, what I plan to apply myself to, and all I’m thinking is: I want to apply my hands to Lyle Biddet’s throat, keep squeezing till they cramp up.
Lyle, you see, never needed the divisional game. He was going to college no matter what. SMU, I hear. Nice school.
We’ve obliterated most of the first floor by the time the girl walks in. The hi-fi is in the swimming pool along with two shredded leather armchairs. The fridge is doors-open and tits-down on the kitchen floor. Potted plants are unpotted, the toilet’s spilling into the hall, and don’t even ask what the Lewis brothers added to the chocolate rug pattern.
So we’re standing there, kind of spent all of a sudden, amazed as we look around a bit and see how much shit we managed to fuck up in forty minutes and with no one ever giving the order. That was the weirdest thing — how it just happened. It just sprung up, like it had a mind of its own, and that mind went apeshit and angry all over the Biddets’ house.
And then the side door off the kitchen opens and she walks in. Her dirty blond hair is combed straight down but with two matching strands braided and hanging over her small ears. She’s got white boots going up to her knees, and above that she’s wearing one of those plaid schoolgirl skirts they wear in the private, Jesus schools, except hers has got red finger-paint splattered on it and someone’s drawn a peace symbol over the left thigh. Her T-shirt is tight and I can just make out a pair of hard little nipples pressing up against the tie-dye.
I’ve seen her a couple times before, when she was younger — Lyle’s little sister, a year behind us. She’d gone to East Lake her first year, but then we heard rumors of trouble, a boyfriend in his twenties, a suicide attempt, some said, and the next year she didn’t come back, got shipped to someplace outside of Dallas, supposedly, locked up with the nuns.
She stops by the overturned fridge, looking down at it for a second like she isn’t sure it belongs there, and then she looks up and sees us. She doesn’t scream. For a second, I see something catch in her face. A word enters her eyes, and I know exactly what the word is: rape.
I see her throat move as she swallows, and then she says, “You all done fucking up my momma’s house? Or you just getting started?”
She’s looking at me when she says it, and I can hear Terry and the Lewis brothers breathing real shallow-like behind me.
She ain’t mad or nothing. I can see that. She ain’t appalled that we destroyed her house. In fact, as she holds her eyes on mine, I can see she’s maybe thought about doing this herself once or twice, maybe came back here for that very reason.
I say, “You’re Lurlene, right?”
She steps up on the back of the fridge, arms out for balance, just one toe up there, her other leg out in the air. She nods, looking down at the heating coils. “And you’re Mister Quarterback man, ain’t you? East Lake BMOC, all that shit?” She’s looking at the fridge below her, a small smile creeping up her thin face, and she draws shit out in that Texas woman’s way, makes it sound as wide as a field.
“Ma’am.” I lift an imaginary Stetson off my head.
The way she’s doing that balancing act atop the overturned fridge just kills me for some reason. There’s four strange boys standing in her house, and the house looks like them boys rolled a grenade through it, but she’s up there doing her ballerina act and somehow taking control of the situation by acting like there ain’t really much of a situation to speak of. She just sucks the breath from my chest, I’ll tell you what.