Heat and Light, page 18
The memory returns to him now. “How do you know that guy? Brando.” Even saying the name annoys him. “Is that really his name?”
“His last name is Brandon. He works on one of the drill crews. They’re in here all the time.”
“And he’s from—Texas?”
“He was stationed at Fort Hood.” Worship in her voice, a kind of dumb reverence, Gia having a patriotic moment, apparently. Probably there have been others, Gia saluting the flag while lying on her back. “Any more questions, Devlin?”
“Nah, that’s all I got. Actually, I have to run.” It is literally true: he feels a sudden, powerful urge to flee.
She looks genuinely disappointed. “Promise I’ll see you again. I’m here every night, practically.” She lowers her voice and leans close to his ear. “Come back, okay?”
Leaving, he feels the whole crowd watching him, whether or not it’s true: twenty pairs of jealous male eyes boring into his back. Everybody wants her, still and always. For him this has always been her appeal.
Outside dusk is falling. One by one the streetlights come on, lit like birthday candles.
He still has no house key.
Parked on the street is Gia’s battered hatchback—same sheepskin seat covers, same pine tree–shaped air freshener dangling above the dash. In the rear compartment, a set of jumper cables lies on the floor.
DICK DEVLIN TURNS SEVENTY-SIX THAT SUNDAY. To celebrate, Rich hosts a birthday barbecue on his deck. In prior years the birthday barbecue was a raucous affair, burgers and beer drinking and illegal fireworks, a mob of kids playing baseball in the yard. Now—his mother dead, his sisters and cousins moved out of state—the Devlins fit easily at a single table, a depressing thought.
He is scraping the grill with a wire brush when his cell phone rings.
“Tell Shelby to count on one extra,” says his father. “Your brother’s home.”
The revelation stops him cold. “You’re joking.” There is more, much more he could say, but the words don’t come.
“It’s been a long time, Richard. He’s overdue for a visit.”
“Fine,” says Rich. “What the hell does he eat?”
“He brought some of those tofu hot dogs. They’re not bad, actually.”
“You’re joking,” Rich says again.
The doorbell rings precisely at noon, Dick and, lurking behind him like a sulky teenager, Darren with his package of tofu hot dogs. He looks okay, a little skinny: concave chest, his pale arms slender as a girl’s. For this summer barbecue he wears black jeans and a black T-shirt.
“Welcome,” Rich says in his best host’s voice.
Darren gives him a limp handshake.
“Darren!” Shelby cries, hugging him.
“Let me get you a beer,” Rich says.
Darren passes a hand over his shiny head—smooth as an egg, small and perfectly formed. The head makes him seem an alien creature, an ambassador from some future time when men will no longer need hair—a ghostly scientist or philosopher, delicate and curiously evolved. “Do you have seltzer?”
“We have Sprite.”
“Sprite is fine.”
They stand around awkwardly while Shelby fusses with the food. Potato salad, baked beans, a pineapple upside-down cake made from his mother’s recipe that somehow doesn’t taste quite the same.
Darren accepts a can of pop and looks around, blinking. “Wow, I had no idea. I thought you were living in the farmhouse.”
“We were. The place was falling down.”
“You couldn’t renovate?”
“We looked into it.” It’s more explanation than he owes Darren. “In the end it was cheaper to start from scratch.”
Shelby interrupts. “We didn’t exactly start from scratch. It’s a modular home. It comes in two parts, and they just bolt it together. You’ve seen them on the highway. You know, OVERSIZE LOAD.”
Rich thinks, Please shut up.
“Oh. Right,” Darren says.
But Shelby, having warmed up, will not stop talking. “We tried living in the farmhouse. I tried. But I have terrible allergies.”
“Oh. Okay.” Darren nods vigorously.
Shelby seems to take this as encouragement. She rattles off a list that’s longer each time Rich hears it: dust mites, tree nuts, three kinds of pollen, cat dander, shellfish. “And maybe wheat gluten. Though technically that’s an intolerance, not an allergy. With the farmhouse, the main issue was mold.”
Rich excuses himself and goes out to the deck to fire up the grill. The morning sun has faded, the wind shifted. In the air is a smell of rain.
Through the open window he hears voices, Shelby’s mostly. He closes his eyes and makes the words recede. It’s a trick he learned in the navy, a way of shutting out language—a particular switch in his brain that, when activated, makes all words sound like Persian or Arabic or whatever they spoke over there. For his dad to know about Shelby’s neuroses is embarrassing enough. Dick, to his credit, has never said a critical word about her, though he must wonder what sort of whackjob his son married. Rich has begun to wonder the same thing. He believed, once, that love would cure her: marriage, children, a normal life. Instead her weird hang-ups have multiplied. To have Darren know this is intolerable.
A door opens behind him, the family traipsing out to the deck. Rich watches their faces as they look out over the yard.
“What the hell is that?” says Dick.
Tact is not a Devlin trait.
“An access road,” Rich says.
“You should see what’s over the hill,” says Shelby, who has not, herself, seen it. I can’t bear to look, she told Rich, and as far as he knows, she still hasn’t. Home all day with the kids, she’s never once climbed the hill to see what’s happening in her own back yard.
“Come on,” says Dick, charging down the stairs. “Let’s have a look.”
They cross the yard together, Dick, Rich, and Braden leading the way, followed by Darren, Shelby, and Olivia. They climb the rise and look down. Five acres of pasture have been razed and flattened, spread with gravel and marked off with chain-link fence. A dozen vehicles are parked there, at random angles: two trailers, an earth mover, a dumper, pickup trucks.
“Jesus Christ,” says Darren.
“It’s something,” says Dick, with characteristic understatement. “Too bad about the trees.”
The scale of the operation is shocking, but not surprising. Rich knew what he was in for, having seen what was done at Wally Fetterson’s down the road. The real surprise is the feebleness of his own memory. He can scarcely picture the farm the way it was. The row of hybrid poplars Pap had planted as a windbreak; the mature plums and cherries that even last summer had born fruit. The rolling pasture was as familiar as his own body. As a boy he zoomed across it on the back of Pap’s snowmobile, anticipating each rise and furrow. Spray of fresh powder, cold stardust burning his cheeks.
“Gia said you signed a lease,” says Darren. “But I had no idea.”
“Gia has a big mouth.” And she’ll put it anywhere, Rich does not add.
“When do they start drilling?”
“Who knows? They don’t tell us anything. I’m starved,” Rich says abruptly. “Let’s go eat some burgers.” He turns back toward the house, knowing the others will follow. A moment later, they do.
On the deck they gather around the table. Rich takes the platter Shelby hands him and lays out hamburgers and buns and the tofu hot dogs, which stick like wet pink styrofoam to the hot grill.
A faint rumble in the distance. “Is that thunder?” says Darren.
“Oh no!” says Shelby. “What a disaster.”
“It’ll blow over,” Rich says.
He loads the burgers onto paper plates and hands them to Olivia, who enjoys setting the table. She watches Darren in mute fascination. She is shy around strangers, and Darren, her only uncle, falls definitively into that category.
“How many of these, um, items can I serve you?” Rich asks him.
“One is fine.”
“I cooked two.”
“Two, then.”
“Can I have one?” says Braden.
Rich laughs. “Trust me, buddy. You’re not going to like it.”
A tofu hot dog rolls through the slats in the grill.
“Soldier down,” says Rich. “I lost one of your dogs, man.”
“That’s all right. I never eat more than one.”
Rich eyes Darren’s shoulders, the knobs of bone poking through his T-shirt, and thinks, Maybe you should.
“You’re not eating anything?” Darren asks Olivia.
“No,” she says. “Unfortunately.” It’s one of the first words she ever learned, after Mommy and Daddy and cookie. It had seemed comical then, all those syllables from the mouth of a two-year-old.
“She isn’t feeling well,” says Shelby.
“Can I go watch TV?” Olivia says.
Darren seems tense, fidgety. His tofu hot dog eaten, he reaches for his cigarettes.
“You’re smoking?” says Shelby.
“A loyal R.J. Reynolds customer since 1998.”
“But it’s so bad for you!”
There is a long, painful silence in which nobody points out—because how could you?—Darren’s lifelong indifference to such matters. That tobacco is, or has been, the least of his sins.
He returns the pack to his pocket. “That’s okay, I can wait.”
“Thank you.” Shelby flashes him a look of such warm gratitude that Rich nearly drops his spatula. Why is it so easy for other people to get on her good side?
“Your brother’s got some vacation time coming,” says Dick.
“Eight weeks,” Darren says.
“Eight weeks?” Two months of vacation is, to Rich, unfathomable. For ten years he’s sucked up all the overtime he can get.
“You should take a trip,” says Shelby. “A cruise or something.” In her eyes, a Caribbean cruise is the height of luxury. She’s been bugging Rich about it for years.
Darren reaches again for his cigarettes, then remembers himself. “Maybe. I haven’t taken a day off in four years. So, you know, I could use a break.”
Rich thinks, A break from what? You barely work in the first place. From his sister Kate—the only Devlin who talks to Darren with any frequency—he has a vague idea of what goes on at a rehab clinic: the hand-holding, the sob stories, the handing out of methadone.
By the time the burgers are eaten, the sky has clouded over. Rich gathers up empty beer cans, paper plates smeared with mustard and ketchup. Inside, Olivia lies on the living room couch staring listlessly at cartoons. He gives her hair a playful swipe.
“What’s the matter, kitten? You barely touched your burger.”
“I don’t feel good,” Olivia says.
In the kitchen Shelby is scooping Jell-O into a bowl. “For Olivia,” she says.
“She didn’t finish her dinner, she gets dessert?” Rich is interrupted by a terrific thrumming from outside. “What the hell is that?”
He hurries out to the deck. An immense truck, larger than any he’s ever seen, is climbing the access road, or trying to. The thing moves at the speed of a cruise ship, enveloped in a cloud of diesel fumes.
“What the hell is that?” his father barks.
“The drill rig,” Rich shouts. “A piece of it, anyway.”
Darren covers his ears. “On a Sunday afternoon?”
In stunned silence they watch the hulking machine inch up the ridge. That it moves at all is a straight-up miracle. It’s as though an aircraft carrier has run aground in Rich’s back yard.
“It’s so loud,” Darren shouts. “Maybe we should go inside.”
“You go ahead,” says Rich. “I’ll talk to them.”
He jogs down the stairs and follows the access road up to the ridge, breathing diesel fumes, easily passing the mighty engine. “Hey!” he shouts, waving his arms.
The driver seems not to hear him, which is no wonder. He can’t even hear himself.
From the top of the ridge he spots another vehicle parked at the edge of the gravel lot, a white Dodge Ram pickup with a sign—STREAM SOLUTIONS—on its driver-side door. A guy wearing ear protectors leans against its hood, watching the slow progress of the rig. Rich recognizes him immediately, the sawed-off muscleman he sees, far too often, at the Commercial. A name, Herc, is written in cursive over his heart.
“What the hell is going on?” Rich shouts.
Herc removes his headphones.
Rich repeats, “What the hell is going on?”
“Just what it looks like. We’re moving in the rig.”
“On Sunday? I’m having a barbecue with my family.” The engine noise makes Rich’s whole body vibrate. They’re standing two feet apart, and yet he has to shout to be heard. “You guys were here all day yesterday. You can’t give us a break today?”
“That wadn’t us. That was the construction crew.” Herc moves to replace his headset. “Don’t worry, we’ll stay out of your way.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Herc shrugs. “Sorry, man. I can’t help you.”
“It can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“The schedule says we drill you this week. Devlin H1. You’re Mr. Devlin?”
Rich nods.
“Mr. Devlin, I’m sorry for the inconvenience. But the show must go on.”
OUTSIDE, A CRACK OF THUNDER. Rain hits hard and sudden, a sound like gunfire. Periodic gusts rattle the windowpanes. A horizontal rain batters the aluminum door.
The brothers are standing in the garage so that Darren can smoke. Outside, the engine noise continues. Darren is grateful for the noise, which at least fills the conversational void. He’s been hoping all day to get Rich alone—why exactly, he can’t now remember. To explain himself? To be forgiven or, at least, to acknowledge his unforgivability? To apologize for his entire life?
They have squared off in opposite corners of the garage, crowded with Rich’s possessions, some of which Darren can identify: a lawn tractor, a snowblower, and what might possibly be a table saw. Items Rich must consider ordinary, the kinds of things men own.
Darren tries to make conversation. “It’s weird to see the farm again. Not what I expected. I thought you’d have cows and stuff.” Wasn’t that the whole point, the actual reason Rich had bought him out? Instead his brother lives in a tract house the size of a trailer, and Pap’s sixty acres sit unused.
“Soon,” Rich says tersely. “Once the gas money starts coming in.”
“Right.” Darren butts one cigarette and lights another. “Explain it to me again, because I’m missing something. Your kids are going to play next to a gas well. You’re fine with this.”
“Do you always smoke this much?”
Outside, a crack of thunder.
“Also: since when do you worry about my kids, or anybody’s kids? You are kids.” Rich jams his hands into his pockets, his balled fists the size of grapefruits. “Jesus Christ, they aren’t orchids. When I was a kid—”
“Yeah, I know. You played in the strippins.” It’s a word Darren hasn’t thought of in years. In the sixties and seventies, Saxon County was a hotbed of strip mining. Rich Devlin and his friends ran wild in the ruined landscape, riding bikes and motorcycles through gaping man-made canyons, treacherous slopes of loose black dirt. By the time Darren came along, the land had been clumsily backfilled, covered over with grass; but the old strippins was still talked about, tales that took on mythic dimensions. It is the essence of a Bakerton childhood: the foregone conclusion that every worthwhile thing has already happened. The town is all aftermath.
“That place, man. I used to come home black with coal dirt.” Rich runs a hand through his hair, still conspicuously thick and wavy. “Mom wouldn’t let me in the house. I had to clean up in the basement,” he adds, as if Darren might have forgotten this detail. As if it hadn’t filled his young self with envy: of the four Devlin kids, only Rich had access to the dank basement shower their father used when he came home from the mines.
The hair, honestly, is a little galling. His brother is over forty. Shouldn’t he at least have some gray?
“And that’s a good thing,” says Darren. “That’s a thing that should be replicated.”
“Can’t be replicated. There will never be anything like it. That’s not the point.”
“Which is.”
“Which is: it didn’t kill us. Kids aren’t that fragile. What are you going to do, lock them in the house?”
It might or might not have been an oblique dig at Darren’s childhood. Which, in point of fact, took place entirely in front of the television.
“Shelby thinks they’re made of glass. I refuse to be that kind of parent.”
“Yeah, about that.” Darren drops his butt into an empty Sprite can. “What’s the matter with Olivia?”
“Stomach, supposedly. Tomorrow, who knows?” Rich crushes a beer can and pops open a fresh one. “It’s always something. I think she’s just imitating her mother, you want to know the truth. My wife is a fucking hypochondriac.”
Wait, what? Rich Devlin admitting some sort of vulnerability, some aspect of his life not perfectly under control?
Darren lights another cigarette. His brother’s marriage to Shelby has always confounded him. In school she’d been two years behind Darren, quiet, mousy, conspicuously Christian. In a normal-size high school, he’d never have noticed her at all. When his mother told him, a few years later, that Rich was engaged to Shelby Vance, he wondered if she’d made a mistake.
