Page 99 of The Bright Lands
At the bottom of the article was a faded photo of the full Bentley Bison team and cheer squad, circa 1975. The picture was all orange light and seeping green jerseys. Joel pulled the convertible to the side of the road, pinched his screen to zoom in. He identified Corwin from the names at the bottom of the photo: a very tall boy with a brilliant smile that cut through forty years of deteriorating film stock. Gorgeous. Happy. Just like Dylan. Blond, not brown haired, and taller, sure, but possessing the same persuasive glee, an obvious pleasure with his casual power.
Next to him, arm over Corwin’s shoulder, was a young Coach Parter, hair down to his ears, burly even at eighteen. And smiling from Broadlock’s other side was Mr. Harlan Boone, today’s county attorney, already standing (even as a teenager) with the straighter back of a man deigning to submit to public service. The three boys—Boone and Broadlock and Parter—were clearly tight. They held themselves apart from the rest of the team, a trio of golden boys.
Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.
Farther down the line of players Joel spotted “former teammate” Grady Mayfield—a man who had told Clark he“hadn’t had dreams like this”since he was in school—giving the camera a thumbs-up. A few players away stood young Keith“I weren’t ever invited in my day either”Grissom, a scowl on his thin lips, already looking mean and permanently disappointed. Among the cheerleaders standing in the photo’s wings, Joel spotted a luminous girl who could have been the Starsha he’d dated ten years ago (if that Starsha had ever bothered with her hair): MARGO DELBARDO, the citation read. Joel marveled at her. What had happened to Clark’s mother to make her the nervous, limpid woman he’d always known growing up?
Joel’s eye fell across a short, scrawny boy with a wispy mustache standing alone at the end of the Bison’s line, so shy he seemed to shrink in front of the camera. TOBY LOTT, the caption read.
Mr. Lott. The friendly cartoon man who had been the sole source of decency to Joel in the wake of the scandal ten years ago. The only man in town who hadn’t flinched at the sight of Joel upon his return. How had Joel never thought to ask Mr. Lott about any of this?
He loaded Google Maps, intending to call the hardware store, but his service had died again.Fuck it.He was only a few miles from Bentley. Joel tapped out another quick message to Clark, dropped his phone between his legs and sped toward town.
KIMBRA
A steady stream of cars passed her in the highway’s other lane, all of them heading for the field as she drove toward South Street. Her Bisonette singlet pinched her tits like it always did but for once Kimbra didn’t mind. It was hard to believe that after three years on the squad (and after misplacing God knew how many uniforms) this was the last time she would ever be seen so spangly and green.
Because she suspected she wouldn’t have much cause to wear a beaded singlet in Hollywood. She ran a thumb along a seam. Maybe she would become a costume designer, she thought, a stylist, one of those people who hide halfway down the movie credits. She saw them on Instagram. They seemed to make okay money.
God knew she’d need it.
Goodbye, creepy Flats, she thought.Goodbye, vacant lot where the church used to be. Goodbye, Bentley.
Four hours before kickoff and already South Street was deserted. The parking spaces were all empty. Signs hung in the windows of the Egg House, of Mr. Jack’s Steaks: CLOSED FOR GAME. She flinched when the deputy guarding the ruined bank waved at her from the mouth of the busted vault. She prayed he didn’t try to stop her.
She parked in front of the hardware store and looked through the front windows. Crazy. No lights from the back, no movement. Her father really was gone.
And yet even without him here, even with the deputy’s back to her, why did Kimbra feel like she was being watched?
She didn’t want an explanation. She hurried down the alleyway to the back door and punched the code into the beeping alarm, left the door ajar—she wouldn’t be here long. She flipped on the lights, scanned the top shelves of the old paint corner in the stockroom. She spotted Canary Yellow #65, just a little too far back on the shelf for her father to reach it easily. Right where she’d left it.
Kimbra retrieved the squeaky little stepladder and pulled down the can that contained close to twelve thousand dollars in cash.
She popped the lid loose and took a long smell of the fragrant money inside. God almighty, did she love it. After years of growing up just this side of bankrupt—her father may have been winning the battle against Walmart but Bentley had already lost the war with globalization or global warming or whatever had taken all the jobs away—Kimbra loved her money just like this: tucked together into little folds, growing like a green sea creature she fed with her time and her care and her savvy. Loved money not to spend, not to display, but tohave.
The cash had been hard earned. It represented every dollar her father had paid her to work at the store, plus KT’s eight trips to Dallas over the summer, minus the money his mother had stolen in the spring, and minus also the outlay for fresh product. Asking Dylan to hold the cash for a time had been Kimbra’s idea after KT’s mom stole the first couple thousand. When Dylan bugged out because that Darren guy saw him with the cash, thispaint can too had been Kimbra’s idea. The trips to the coast, the invented half brother, Floyd Tillery, even the fake address that KT’s guy in Dallas had given to Officer Clark on Monday: they had all been Kimbra’s ideas. Because she—they—had to get out of this place.
Twelve thousand dollars. Kimbra had wanted to leave town with more, had wanted enough to walk into a car dealership and pull out a stack of bills and buy herself a vehicle that would never break down, that would get them out west with no fear of failure.
Well. She and KT would have to take their chances in her creaking Pontiac. If things got tight on the road to Los Angeles, Kimbra supposed he could do some of the work she had long suspected he’d gotten up to in Dallas.
The girl wasn’t an idiot. Every weekend when KT went on a business trip, he’d left Bentley with the same amount of product, taken it to a guy he said he’d met online—Kimbra didn’t know who, nor did she want to. Then, after hanging in the city for the weekend to keep up the front that he was at the coast, KT would return Sunday evening. The only problem? He always left with the same amount of product, but returned with different sums of cash.
He’d explained this away by saying that sometimes his guy was a little short of money, and then sometimes he was paying him back what he owed, but Kimbra had never quite bought this. When KT had first come to her with his plan he’d sworn—sworn up and down—that he wasn’t actuallydealingdrugs like Garrett, justcarryingthem to someone in the city who wanted a steady, white-skinned supplier who could carry a large amount of product unmolested up the highway.“When was the last time I got pulled over?”KT had told her with a laugh.“You know how special I am to them?”
So if this guy in Dallas was such a big shot, such a sure thing, how come he never had their pre-agreed amount?
Kimbra knew that KT left Bentley with the same amount of product on every trip because she had been the one to unpack it. Every other week a plain brown box arrived at the hardware store with a return address in Seattle. Her father never unpacked any boxes, thank God. If he did, he might have discovered a vacuum-sealed foil bag that weighed a little under two ounces and bore the cryptic words SEALED FOR MY FRESHNESS.
Kimbra had never opened a single pouch. She didn’t want to know what was inside. When KT had come to her in the spring with a half-formed plan he had hatched with Garrett Mason, that had been her one stipulation: she never wanted to see whatever it was they were moving.
So if KT had driven to Dallas with the same amount of product on Fridays and returned with different sums of money on Sundays, Kimbra knew that in between KT hadn’t just been “waiting for his guy to sell our shit,” as he’d told her. No. KT was earning extra on top. The sight of the escorting ad that Whiskey Brazos sent her yesterday had solved a number of suspicions. Kimbra would recognize that dick anywhere.Ah well.
She wasn’t certain how she felt, knowing her man had been turning tricks. She told herself she should be bothered by it, should be worried about STDs and the cops, should be consumed with fear at the knowledge that her man might not be as straight as she’d always assumed, but in all honesty she felt nothing but gratitude. He’d made her more money; it might be the most selfless thing (perhaps theonlyselfless thing) he’d ever done for her. Escorting, to Kimbra’s mind, was crafty, dangerous, stupid and useful: did any four words better summarize the love of her life?
She wondered how it had started, wondered how her man had first discovered he could stomach whatever it was he had done for this money. Even if he was some kind of queer (difficult as that was for her to imagine), wouldn’t it take a special sort of damage for a boy like KT to perform the things promised in that ad she’d sent to Joel Whitley? She couldn’t imagine it was easy on the body or the brain. Had he gotten practice, she wondered, somewhere close to home?
Which led her to another question: if the escorting ad she’d seen was KT’s (again, she would know that dick anywhere), why had KT put Dylan’s face on his own listing? It smacked of some sort of revenge, but what could Dylan have done to deserve it? She wondered if that vengeance had anything to do with the fact KT had been snorting up half of his product all summer. Because thieving mothers or not, there should have beenmuchmore money in this can than twelve grand.
