Page 70 of The Bright Lands
Pills, Joel thought now, recalling all that Clark had told him about Troy’s debt, the bottle of Oxy in Dylan’s room.Pills. Of course.
Troy and Joel had driven, whooping and laughing, through the wet country west of town, until mud had covered their windows and the engine started to smell. Troy parked in the shadow of a spindly tree to let the truck cool down. A tenuous silence settled between them. They looked at each other, at the patch of sky visible through the filthy windshield. An opportunity had presented itself—they both felt it, just as they both felt they were about to squander it if they didn’t move fast.
Troy abandoned subtlety. He grabbed Joel’s hand and pressed it to the hard weight in his lap.
When they were through, Troy had turned on the truck’s wipers and said, “Sorry about that,” as if he had just spilled ketchup on Joel’s shirt (years later, Joel would hear the same words coming from Wesley Mores, spoken in the exact same tone).
Joel, finding nowhere to spit, only swallowed.
He wanted to weep. He had just learned that there was nothing more debasing, more perfectly disappointing, than getting exactly what you wanted: whatever Joel might have imagined in his wildest fantasies, Troy had ultimately tasted as bland as a short, salty finger. What had Joel just spent to discover that? What black mark had he just set permanently against his manhood? Against his soul?
When he felt a faint tremble rise through the ground and quake in his seat, he knew, without question, that it was just the Lord God, turning His eye on him in shock and shame.
Troy felt it too. He went still. He pushed sweat from his forehead and started to drive. He was so jumpy the truck nearly stalled.
The two boys were silent on the way home. Joel was almost too ashamed to breathe. He sometimes forgot, ten years later, just how religious he had once been, how the sight of Bentley First Baptist’s cross had made him so fearful: the God of First Baptist was not a merciful God. Joel nearly barfed up all that Troy had spat inside him.
The guilt and the horror were all so awful Joel would have gladly let that afternoon be the end of it, would have never spoken to Troy again (imagine the shape his future might have taken), if something remarkable hadn’t happened.
Troy seemed to calm when they reached the highway. His jitters faded. And when he moved the truck up from second gear to third to fourth, Troy let his hand fall from the gearshift and come to rest on Joel’s thigh. He kept it there the entire way home.
Their arrangement went on like that all summer. Troy would make plans on some pretense every few weeks to come to town and would drive them somewhere remote or arrange a meeting in secret. When they were through they would study the ground, wipe their chins. And then they would let a thigh rest against a thigh, or an arm rest over a shoulder, and they would return to the real world like wounded soldiers, leaning against each other on the way back to their lonely trenches.
Joel had learned another lesson that summer, in those moments of fulfilled, defiant happiness: that shame and love, while one might breed the other, could never truly be felt at the same time. For a few brief miles on the way back to Bentley, before the disgust and the fear and the cunning set in again, Joel would feel happier with Troy,righter, than he had ever felt in his life.
He doubted now that Troy’s feelings had been anywhere near as ecstatic. Apparently the man had had much larger concerns that summer than some rough head in a stand of trees (Joel supposed a drug habit explained the permanent sheen of sweat that seemed to cover Troy’s copper skin under even the coldest air-conditioning). Troy had certainly abandoned Joel easily enough: in the wake of all that happened in the park, all that had happened with Deputy Grissom and Joel’s arrest, Troy had cut off all contact, had let Joel sink like an anchor cut loose from its tether.
When Joel had heard, two months after his world had imploded, that Troy had gone missing, he hadn’t allowed himself to be worried. He’d forced himself not to care. After that final betrayal, Troy had taught Joel a second lesson that summer. He had taught Joel how to cauterize his heart.
As Joel’s phone began to buzz, the question finally popped into his head: why had Troy not asked Joel to meet himhere, in this clearing, that night when Joel was arrested? The two of them had never once gone to the public park together, and for good reason.
Kimbra Lott had texted him.
hey. there’s some things you should know.
I’m listening.
There was a pause.
Luke Evers doesn’t have an alibi for Friday night.
Joel let out a little whistle. A manic grin tightened his face. He began to type a response but Kimbra cut him off.
there’s more.
CLARK
At 2:04 that afternoon a woman named Patsy Boyd Vaughn, a forty-one-year-old mother of three, made a left onto South Street from the highway going fifty-five miles an hour. She was speeding, though this was hardly unusual in Bentley—South Street was all but abandoned in the midafternoon and was often treated as an extension of the highway. That morning, however, Patsy had complained to her husband that she hadn’t slept well since Friday night.
At 2:04 she was asleep at the wheel, and by 2:05 was lying dead against it.
She lost consciousness somewhere in the middle of the turn. Her foot came to rest on the accelerator. Her restored lime-green Cadillac, a lavish birthday gift from her husband as an apology for an affair, carried on at fifty-five miles an hour and fishtailed into the first building at the intersection of South Street and Highway 77.
Emily Bunner, a bored girl with a husband (still) in Iraq, was the sole teller that afternoon at First Community Bank, and she didn’t look up from her phone until Mrs. Vaughn’s Cadillac came flying through the bank’s front windows. Emily leaped out of the way, though she lost her leg in the subsequent collision. Ironic, folks said later, that Emily’s husband had made it through three tours of IEDs and ISIS unscathed, but it was she who would be the amputee.
Jamal was still in the interview room, speaking to his lawyer. Clark was seated in the sheriff’s department bull pen. Mayfield was seated at the desk across from her, filling out paperwork, treating her just as he had all day: as if she weren’t there at all.
Mayfield’s phone began to ring. Clark’s curiosity was piqued when she heard the way the investigator said, “You’re shitting me? On I-35?”
