Coronado - Dennis Lehane [25]
That’s what gets us going, I think. We go back into that too-white house and the Lewis brothers have at the vents, and I push over a vase in the dining room, and Terry breaks all the knobs off the TV and pours his beer all over the couch and we go on smashing and tearing things for a while, drunk from the liquor, but drunk with something else too, a kind of hysteria, I think, a need to keep from crying.
IF WE’D WON that last game of the season, we would have gone on to the divisional playoffs against Lubbock Vo-Tech. Only way college scouts see you if you grow up in a tiny shithole like ours is if you make it to the divisionals. And that’s where we were heading, no question, until Lyle Biddet’s hands turned to Styrofoam. He coughed up the ball twice—once on the fucking one—and North Park converted both of Biddet’s gifts into touchdowns, left us standing numb and cold under a black Texas sky, fans heading home, the lights shutting off.
My guidance counselor asks me a week later what I plan to make out of my life, what I’m fixing to do with it, what I plan to apply myself to, and all I’m thinking is: I want to apply my hands to Lyle Biddet’s throat, keep squeezing till they cramp up.
Lyle, you see, never needed the divisional game. He was going to college no matter what. SMU, I hear. Nice school.
WE’VE OBLITERATED MOST of the first floor by the time the girl walks in. The hi-fi is in the swimming pool along with two shredded leather armchairs. The fridge is doors-open and tits-down on the kitchen floor. Potted plants are unpotted, the toilet’s spilling into the hall, and don’t even ask what the Lewis brothers added to the chocolate rug pattern.
So we’re standing there, kind of spent all of a sudden, amazed as we look around a bit and see how much shit we managed to fuck up in forty minutes and with no one ever giving the order. That was the weirdest thing—how it just happened. It just sprung up, like it had a mind of its own, and that mind went apeshit and angry all over the Biddets’ house.
And then the side door off the kitchen opens and she walks in. Her dirty blond hair is combed straight down but with two matching strands braided and hanging over her small ears. She’s got white boots going up to her knees, and above that she’s wearing one of those plaid schoolgirl skirts they wear in the private, Jesus schools, except hers has got red finger-paint splattered on it and someone’s drawn a peace symbol over the left thigh. Her T-shirt is tight and I can just make out a pair of hard little nipples pressing up against the tie-dye.
I’ve seen her a couple times before, when she was younger—Lyle’s little sister, a year behind us. She’d gone to East Lake her first year, but then we heard rumors of trouble, a boyfriend in his twenties, a suicide attempt, some said, and the next year she didn’t come back, got shipped to someplace outside of Dallas, supposedly, locked up with the nuns.
She stops by the overturned fridge, looking down at it for a second like she isn’t sure it belongs there, and then she looks up and sees us. She doesn’t scream. For a second, I see something catch in her face. A word enters her eyes, and I know exactly what the word is: rape.
I see her throat move as she swallows, and then she says, “You all done fucking up my momma’s house? Or you just getting started?”
She’s looking at me when she says it, and I can hear Terry and the Lewis brothers breathing real shallow-like behind me.
She ain’t mad or nothing. I can see that. She ain’t appalled that we destroyed her house. In fact, as she holds her eyes on mine, I can see she’s maybe thought about doing this herself once or twice, maybe came back here for that very reason.
I say, “You’re Lurlene, right?”
She steps up on the back of the fridge, arms out for balance, just one toe up there, her other leg out in the air. She nods, looking down at the heating coils. “And you’re Mister Quarterback man, ain’t you? East Lake BMOC, all that shit?” She’s looking at the fridge below her, a small smile creeping up her thin face, and she draws shit out