Page 95 of The Bright Lands
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t feel bad for the man, that game had already ruined him. The busted ankle he had? Nobody likes to remember he got that at the play-offs. If he’d been any use to the team the school wouldn’t have given two shits about his grades, but after that injury—” Ranger snickered his old snicker. “You want to know the sorry part? Jason been allergic all his life to that sticky shit on the back of tape. Glue. What’s the word?”
“Adhesive?”
“Bless you. Adhesive. That shit so much as grazed him, Jason got himself these awful red hives all on his skin. I’d seen it before.”
Ranger drank.
“The cops up in Mexia say it must have been suicide, all the pills he took. But I want to know why he would have taped over his own mouth once he’d swallowed the damn bottle. Because sure enough he had them hives all the way around his cheeks. They let me see his wrists. His ankles. Same thing. Somebody had trussed him up like a pig and tore all the tape off when they was done, Whitley. I’m sure it were an accident.”
Joel said, “There’s been a lot of those lately. Officer Grissom suddenly took up smoking last night and forgot to turn off his oxygen.”
“Hmph.”
“I know that Grissom arrested your brother in July for dealing drugs with KT Staler. The deputy had an accident on his horse a few weeks later. And then last night, after he started talking again, his house burns down. Am I crazy for wondering if these aren’t quite coincidences?”
“I’ll never understand that Grissom. He knew better.”
“Knew better than to arrest one of the golden boys?”
A grackle squawked outside. The drone of cicadas resonated in the small crevices of Joel’s ears. The only decoration Joel saw anywhere in the shack was a long shelf of football trophies that had gone dull with age. One had lost its arm.
“Wesley said you were one of them,” Joel said.
“Mores was fruitier than banana bread.” Ranger spat a glob of snot into a tissue and dropped it to his feet. He watched it fall. “There’s some boys in Pettis County you just don’t touch, Whitley. As you discovered.”
On the television, a reporter on assignment from the city, a woman with better skin than anyone in miles, was interviewing a little cluster of men standing around a portable grill near the football field’s end zone. Despite all the chaos of yesterday, despite the fact that the team’s quarterback had died on Monday and another had been arrested on felony murder charges, the headline at the bottom of the screen read 5 TIPS FOR PERFECT “BISON” BURGERS.
“Everything that happened to me in the park with Grissom—did you have some hand in that? Was that the price I paid for throwing a punch at you?”
“I hated you something awful.” Ranger looked exhausted, like he’d spent a decade kicking through sleepless nights. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why? Why protect these people?” Joel made a show of appraising the filthy kitchen, the bed. “They’ve clearly taken such good care of you.”
A long silence. The TV flickering blue and white.
Ranger’s scarred face took on an eerie sheen when he smiled. He made a noise that could have been a chuckle. “Hell with it—what sort of fucks do I give now? Ten years ago, I had Jason take care of things for me while I was overseas. I knew that Troy was digging himself a hole of debt the size of Mexico with all the tweak he was using and he was eyeing an exit. Jason and me, we knew where to get some money to pay off Troy’s debt—somebody big owed us a fortune, you wouldn’t want to hear why. And to top it all off, I knew a deputy who would justloveto hear a tip about a young boy waiting all alone in a shady park. It worked out well for all parties involved. Present company excluded of course.”
“And the pictures?”
“Whitley, it was all just meanness.” Ranger flipped his mangled hand. “We used to run this town, Jason and me. Not that it’s done me any good.”
Joel rested his beer on the ground. He couldn’t drink any more. “Then what happened to Troy?”
“He left town that Friday, the night you was arrested. That was our deal. God only knows why his girl didn’t report him missing for so long. He was out of work, they was separated, maybe she didn’t know he’d left. Tell me something, Joel. I’ve always wondered—did Troy come to the park that night after all?”
Joel remembered the sound of tires pulling away. “He did. He must have seen Grissom’s cruiser and known it was too late.”
“Troy cared for you, you know. He didn’t want to do any of it, he was crackling on a bad connection from the other side of the world saying, ‘Can’t we come to some other terms?’” Ranger rose, headed for the kitchen. “But I had him by the balls and he knew it. I wanted your head on a silver platter.”
Joel caught something in Ranger’s voice. A small piece clicked into place. “You were jealous of us. You knew we were happy.”
Ranger stopped, his arm inside the rusted fridge.
“He’s dead, irregardless,” Ranger said. “Jason and the others made to pay back the Mexicans but the money was way overdue. Benicio had done took care of your boy already.”
The smell of this cramped, sweaty shack was making Joel nauseous. He hadn’t come here to learn any of this. He would have been happier not knowing.
