Coronado - Dennis Lehane [26]
“Ma’am.” I lift an imaginary Stetson off my head.
The way she’s doing that balancing act atop the overturned fridge just kills me for some reason. There’s four strange boys standing in her house, and the house looks like them boys rolled a grenade through it, but she’s up there doing her ballerina act and somehow taking control of the situation by acting like there ain’t really much of a situation to speak of. She just sucks the breath from my chest, I’ll tell you what.
She looks out past my shoulder at the living room and whispers, “Dang. You all fucked this place up.”
Terry stutters. He says, “We didn’t mean to, miss.”
She hops off the fridge, lands beside me, but keeps her eyes on Terry. “Didn’t mean to? Boy, I’d hate to see what you could do, you had a mind to.”
Terry laughs and drops his eyes.
“Any liquor left?” She moves into the living room and I follow.
“Sure.”
“I’d like me a tequila,” she says, moving toward the bar, about the only thing left standing. “And then we can all go to work on the upstairs. What you say?”
SOMETIMES, AFTER THE sun’s gone down and Daddy’s been sitting out back all day drinking Lone Stars and adding some sour mash to the mix too, he’ll end up looking at his shitty house and sloping back porch and hard Texas dirt and he’ll cry without a sound. He’ll sit there, not moving or shaking or nothing, just sit rock-still, his face leaking.
Says to me once, he says, “I’d known this was what it was all about, boy, know what I’d a done?”
I’m maybe ten. I say, “No, Daddy.”
He takes a long pull on a can, tosses it aside, and belches. “Died earlier.”
WE’RE UP IN Mr. and Mrs. Biddet’s bedroom, taking a butcher knife to the big, fluffy, four-poster bed, just me and Lurlene. Terry and the Lewis brothers are in Lyle’s room and by the sounds of it, they’re tearing that place down to the fucking studs. For some reason, I’m not as mad at Lyle as I was when we came here, hell, as I was the whole winter and spring. I’m still mad, though. Madder than ever maybe. But it’s something besides Lyle I’m mad at, something I can’t put a name to. Something out there that hulks over the flat land like a dinosaur shadow, something bigger than Lyle and bigger than Texas, maybe. Something huge.
Lurlene’s done tore hell out of all four pillows, and it hits me as the room fills with feathers, a blizzard of them swirling between me and Lurlene, sticking to her hair and eyelashes, me spitting them off my tongue—it hits me and I say it:
“How do we know when they’re coming back?”
Lurlene laughs at me and blows at some swirling feathers and arches her back to catch some of the blizzard on her throat.
“They’re gone down to Corpus, boy. Hell,” she says, drawing it out the same way she drew out shit, teasing the word, “they won’t be back till late Monday. They go every weekend come summer. Them and their precious Lyle.”
“Gone down to Corpus,” I say.
“Gone down to Corpus!” She shrieks and hits me with what’s left of a pillow, the down spilling into my shirt.
Then she drops to all fours and crawls across the bed to me and says, “You think this is a rich house, boy?”
I nod, my throat drying up, her green eyes so soft and close.
“This ain’t nothing,” she says. “How’d you like to go to a house four times this size? Do four times the damage?”
Seems like I forget how to speak for a minute. Lurlene and her green eyes and too-thin face and body have slid into me somehow, under the flesh, under the bone. I’m about certain I’ve never seen any creature so beautiful as this girl with the butcher knife in her hand and that crazed laugh in her pupils. You can see hope living in her—anxious, lunatic hope, but pure and kind too, wanting only to be met halfway.
She says, “Huh, boy? You want to?”
I nod again. Ain’t doing much with myself anyway, and suddenly, I’m pretty sure I’ll follow Lurlene anywhere she says. Bust up anything she wants. The whole goddamn world if she asks me nice.
ABOUT FIVE YEARS back, we break down on Route 39, just me and my mother, and