Page 118 of The Bright Lands
Straight past the burned-out Chevy sedan, a Texas flag bolted over its back window frame. “They’ve moved it since last time,” KT said blandly as the Chevy slipped past them. The other boys, Jamal included, were too anxious to say a word.
Earlier, Jamal had become convinced that KT was leading them nowhere, that he planned to drive them until Whiskey’s truck ran out of gas and then abandon them in the wilderness. Jamal had pulled his phone from his pocket to text Officer Clark, who was following them in her own truck—Jamal had been certain to get her number before heading out—but had discovered he had no service. He’d opened the compass on his phone and felt his throat tighten. He’d watched the compass’s red needle spin wildly, hunting in vain for north.
“He should never have brought me there,” KT said in the front passenger seat. “He should have known I couldn’t handle that place.”
Whiskey tightened his pale knuckles on the wheel and said, “Couldn’t handle what, bro?”
“I heard they had party favors. I heard everyone who went out there got special treatment in town. He kept saying, D kept saying, it ain’t meant for boys like you but I said, shit, I’m open-minded, ain’t I? I like to let loose, don’t I?” KT shuddered. “I didn’t know what that place would do to me. I didn’t know whatletting gowould do to me.”
T-Bay, seated beside Jamal in the back, twisted and twisted his fingers in his lap.
“I wasn’t made for it, he was right. But shit, maybe only them Old Boys is made for it. Pretty soon I was Mr. Boone’s favorite. In his special trailer. I was the one always had to teach him his lessons. Some nights he wanted the paddle, some nights he wanted the whip, some nights—” KT stared at his right hand for a long time. He said, “Coach is easier, he just sucks you off, but Mr. Boone, he needs his lessons, oh yes, sir. Did you know someone can make you hate yourself even whenyou’rethe one puttingtheirdick in a cage? It’s fucking funny. I’d have never believed it. Go right. I said right.”
“Dear Jesus,” T-Bay said. They had reached an old wooden roadhouse, the road it had once serviced long since dissolved by time. A sign painted in wobbly white letters reading BURGERS GRITS NO COLOREDS hung on what remained of its door. The building’s windows had long since been busted out and boarded over. A lone gas pump sat in the dirt, its nozzle bobbing at its side like a busted arm.
“Oh, but Dylan, washeever popular. All the boys wanted a piece ofDylan. And when the Old Boys’ Hand showed up in town again, fuck me running, you should have seen those two lovebirds strutting around the Bright Lands like they was celebrities, Dylan always touching his hair and Mr. Deputy following him like a fucking dog. They was fucking shameless!‘Let’s go camping out west, sweetheart, let’s go fishing.’Never a thought paid to your buddy KT, huh, Dylan? Your Bison buddy who didn’t have no college recruiters to come get him out of here? Who had a girl who wanted you to make her money, money, always more money so you can run away together?Iwas the one locked in Mr. Boone’s special trailer every fucking Friday night because if KT don’t show up you can bet Boone and his fucking deputies would take your mom away come Monday morning. You didn’t have Garrett and Jason hounding you to sell your product together, didn’t have a friend up in Dallas with an idea how you could make some coin off other sirs doing the special things that Mr. Boone taught you, did you, D? I just got so tired, Reynolds. I got sotired.”
KT turned back to stare at Jamal. Jamal had forgotten how to breathe.
“I remembered what they done to Joel Whitley with those dirty pictures and I thought, hell, maybe Dylan could get him some rough treatment for once in his life. I just wanted D to know what it was like foronegoddamn night. To know what it felt like to have your brothers look at you like you was the scum of the earth, to be so ashamed you would cut yourself open to stop it. Is that so wrong?” KT’s mouth had twisted into a pout. “How was I supposed to know the deputy would see my ad once I put Dylan’s face on it? How was I supposed to know he’d drag Dylan into the special trailer?It was Dylan’s fault.Last year, back when I threatened to tell people about the pictures I found on his phone if he wouldn’t take me, he should have known I was bluffing. He should have warned me it wasn’t just a party.”
Something new had appeared on the horizon.
No, not quite new. Jamal had seen it all week.
A pale dome of light, quivering wrong against the night.
T-Bay said, “What the fuck is that?”
“The best years of my life.” KT sobbed like he’d choked on a nail.
CLARK
Clark saw the light too, recognized it though she’d never seen it before.“Those queer lights.”Maybe her father had been trying to tell her something after all.
She took a deep breath. If she wasn’t much mistaken her nose caught a smell of rot on the breeze. She pulled up beside Whiskey’s idling truck, shouted through the open window, “You boys stay here for now.”
It sounded to her ear like the right thing to say, the dutiful thing to say—and she had put enough weight on her conscience by bringing these terrified kids out here in the first place—but dear God did Clark not want to do this alone. With every strange new sight on this desolate plain, with every mile spent drifting farther from civilization, she had felt a cold dread growing in her mind. Whatever monster had been haunting this town’s dreams, whatever force had stalked Bentley’s beds all week, she knew it awaited her now. Right over there, on the other side of the fence her mother had always warned her about.
She checked the chamber of her father’s old revolver, though she wondered if it would do her much good against the thing awaiting her under those lights. She holstered the revolver on her left hip, pulled her 9 millimeter service pistol from the holster on her right, socked a round into the chamber.
She rolled up the hem of her jeans to leave Joel’s hunting knife exposed on her ankle where she could grab it easy. She popped free the safety strap of the knife’s sheath.
She took a long breath. Every inch of her skin was alight with prickling heat.
“If you hear trouble, you turn back and run,” Clark said to the boys, and she rolled up her window and drove.
LUKE
Luke stepped from the dim silver Airstream and blinked at the brilliant lights. Two boys were pissing into an empty Igloo cooler outside the red trailer across the circle. They nodded to him and looked away. Luke wiped some lube from his crotch, glanced back inside the silver Airstream and, when no one tried to stop him, he walked away.
Before a cop had caught him fucking a random trick from Rockdale (“Tyson,” the boy had called himself, though the student ID in his cupholder had carried a different name) in a Chili’s parking lot back in July, Luke had been convinced that he and Tyson were destined to be boyfriends. His heartbreak when the boy had evaporated afterward had hurt Luke far more than any of the predictable grief he’d caught from his father. Later, when Luke had realized there was a reason Wesley Mores seemed to understand him so well, Luke had felt a brief spark of hope, a silly spell of adoration, but when he’d finally succeeded in getting alone with Wesley last Friday night he had been disillusioned again.
Wesley had pushed Luke’s lips away from his mouth and down to his lap, had accepted head with the same grimace Luke saw on the faces of the boys here tonight in the Bright Lands. They all scowled and forced their eyes closed and pretended that they didn’t need this.
It was pathetic, really. Luke had no heart for it.
Instead, he wandered. He hurried past that squat black camper trailer in which he’d seen Joel Whitley earlier—that trailer spooked him bad—and ambled up the creaky steps of the tall triple-wide. He stopped at the porch. Nailed to the triple-wide’s door frame was a sign: PLEASURE THIS PRETTY BEAUTY: $50 LICK PUSSY $100—
