And, man, she’s happy. She’s happy, and my daddy has all his teeth and all his fingers.
Lurlene gets us in the house the same way she got us through the gate. Her fingers dart across these numbers on a gizmo beside the front door and then we’re inside.
We walk around for a while. Ain’t none of us, except Lurlene maybe, ever seen a house this big. Ain’t sure any of us knew there was a house this big. The front hall has two staircases that meet at a curve up top. It’s got a chandelier the size of a fucking Cadillac and all these vases that’re taller than any of us, including Terry, and the walls leading up the staircases are lined with paintings in gold, frilly frames.
On the second floor, there’s a ballroom, Lord’s sake. And past that, a room with a long bar and a pool table twice as big as the one in the Biddets’ house with these leather sacks for pockets. In the guy’s study there’s a desk you could sleep on and never worry about rolling off. There’s another bar in there and bookcases lining the walls and the ceilings go up a good fifteen feet and there are ladders on rollers for the cases. I go up to that desk and there’s a picture of this guy with his wife and two kids and another of him on a golf course and another of him, Jesus Christ, shaking hands with Lyndon Baines, himself. The King of Texas. Man who walked away from the Big Job and said, Fuck it. I ain’t no president. I’m a Longhorn. You all fight the war on poverty and the war against the yellow folk, I’m going home.
I say to Lurlene, “Who are these folks?”
Lurlene sits up on the corner of the desk. She picks up the picture with the guy and LBJ. She holds it by the corner in one hand, her wrist bending back, and for a second, I think she’s going to throw it across the room.
She puts it back, though. Right where she picked it up from. Exactly. Maybe it’s all the dark oak in there or the red-wine leather chairs, or all those thick book spines staring down at us. Else, maybe it’s just LBJ staring out from that photograph, at us, but I know all of a sudden that we ain’t going to touch this room. Ain’t going to do a damn thing to it. The rest of the house, maybe, but not this room.
Lurlene says, “I go to school with the daughter.”
I look at the pudgy guy with LBJ. “His daughter?”
“She was my friend at Saint Mary’s.” She fingers the hem of her skirt. She looks up at the high ceilings and shrugs. “She ain’t my friend no more, though. She ain’t nothing but shit.”
She hops off the desk and I can see that her eyes are wet, not much, but wet just the same, and a little red. She places her palm on my chest as she passes and gives me a peck on the cheek.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go downstairs. See how much destruction your friends done.”
My graduation, my mother gives me twenty dollars she’s managed to tuck away. She tells me to go have some fun, I been getting too serious.
Daddy gives me his old truck. Same one broke down on my mother and me that time. Says to me: She’s all mine.
I spend a week patching that old bitch together, blow the whole twenty dollars in junkyards on hoses and bushings, a distributor cap.
The afternoon I get it running, I take a few of my father’s Lone Stars and chase a red sky across miles of scrub gone purple with the dusk. I pull over in the middle of all this nothing, and I sit on the hood, and I drink down those beers one after the other until the world’s gone dark around me. And I wonder what the fuck’s going to become of me. I wonder what I’m supposed to do now. Got me a useless truck and a useless high school diploma. I should be like my parents were in that 1949 picture, all smiling and hopeful and shit. But I ain’t. What’s waiting for me out there, out past the dark and the whole of Texas, ain’t nothing I’m looking forward to. And what’s waiting behind me don’t amount to anything neither but what stole those smiles off my parents’ faces.
I lean back on the hood. I look up at the stars. I look up at the black, black sky. It’s so quiet. And I think about what my daddy said about how he would have died earlier had he known what the world was going to bring. And I sort of get that now. I sort of do.
To die. But not by my own hand. And not by some yellow man’s neither. But somehow. In a big blaze that’ll light up the dark sky. Something like that.
Coming down the stairs, me and Lurlene are wondering just what the other boys have been getting up to, imagining a big rich house turned into a squatter’s shack in the fifteen minutes we’ve been gone, but when we turn into the living room past that gigantic entry hall, we find Terry and the Lewis brothers just standing around, fidgeting, and I can tell by the cushions on the three different couches in there that they ain’t even tried to sit down. They just been standing there the whole time, hands in their pockets or wiping against their jeans, and the moment I walk in, Terry says, “We don’t like it here.”
I say, “How come?”
He shrugs, his eyes wide. He’s kind of crouching a bit, shoulders tensed like he expects the ceiling to come crashing down on him. “Don’t know. Just don’t. Ain’t no place to set.”
I look around at all the couches and antique chairs. “Ain’t no place to—?”
“We just don’t like it,” Vaughn Lewis says. “We just don’t like it at all.”
Vaughn too is all tensed up, his eyes darting around, like he expects something with teeth and claws to charge him.
“We’re fixing to go,” Terry tells me.
“I want to look around some more,” I say, though I’m not sure I do.
“Come on,” Lurlene says. “We got some damage to do!”
Terry shakes his head. “Ain’t wanna touch nothing in this here house.”
I look at Vaughn and Morton. They both look ready to dive out the window.
And I can feel it too. Ain’t nothing here but an empty house, but it’s some mean house. Some big, mean, icy house. Too clean, too gleaming, ready to swallow us all.
Terry says, “We gone git, son.” He steps up to me, meets my eyes. “Got to git. Got to.”
I say, “Okay. Git then.”
“You coming?”
I look at Lurlene. The hope in those green eyes has gotten bigger and more desperate.
I say, “No. You boys git along. I’ll catch up.”
“You sure?”
I meet his eyes and nod. “We’ll see you.”
They each give Lurlene a shy nod as they leave, but they can’t get out of there quick enough. Seems half a second after they close the door behind them, I hear the Cougar roar out of there.
“The gate,” I say.
Lurlene shakes her head. “You on the inside, it opens by itself as you approach it. You on the outside…” She shrugs and walks around the living room looking at stuff.
I wander into a den and open up a gun cabinet. I look at all these beautiful shotguns with carvings on the barrels and in the stocks, but I don’t touch them. I go to the next cabinet and look at the handguns. I find one I like. It’s a black Walther with a bone white handle. Fits in my hand real nice. I drop the magazine into my palm, even though I can tell from the weight that it’s loaded. I slide the magazine back in. It’s the first thing in the house I’ve touched, and for a second I see my mother with her hand over her eyes as she looks off across miles of scrub and dead land, and I put that Walther behind my back and walk out of the room.
Me and Lurlene wander the house for the next hour and I don’t think we see but half of it. She shows me the scars on her wrists at one point, tells me it wasn’t but a “cry out.” Still, she says, all that blood on the bathroom tile. Like you never saw, she says. Like you’d never want to.
We find a bedroom that’s got its own TV and a walk-in closet and dolls piled to the ceiling atop this wide dresser. There’s a hi-fi in there and pictures on the walls of Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman and Paul McCartney, and I know we’re in the girl’s room, the one who used to be Lurlene’s friend.