And the ice cream was melting.
He reached for the bowl, the teaspoon with a rose imprinted on the handle cradling the scoop of ice cream. He carved out a bite, let it melt on his tongue. The sugar was its own kind of rush. The cold and creaminess of it reminded him of country summers as a boy. Darren looked at his mother, and he nodded.
Part Three
11.
HE HADN’T so much agreed to stay at his mother’s house as he’d been unable to get off the couch, the reality of the conversation with Wilson still vibrating through him over an hour later. His disgust over Darren’s meddling, which hurt Darren but didn’t stop him from finally calling his friend Greg. He might not have been with the FBI anymore, but maybe Greg still had friends in the Bureau. Maybe he could help Darren break into Sera’s phone. But what had truly poured lead in Darren’s blood, unable to move from his mother’s couch, was Wilson’s news that a grand jury had his case, cells in his brain waking one by one to the news of how close he might be to prison.
The timing of it was gnawing at him.
His mother sat on the other end of the velour couch, which was a burnt-umber color with large pink and orange roses sewn into the fabric. It too spoke of a home decor barely touched since the seventies. The cushions on his side of the couch, a favored spot he guessed, were worn down so much that he sank into the furniture and sat at least an inch shorter than his mother, knees scrunched and poking up like two pogo sticks. The edge of the too-big-for-this-room coffee table was pressing against his shins. He felt his mother’s eyes on him from across the couch. She had changed at some point into a housedress and slippers. He had never seen her in a pastel color of any sort, had never thought of her as a woman who would ever let lace grace her collar. But here she was, wrapped in a confection of quilted fabric and dewdrop buttons. She had her legs tucked up under her, and she was facing him. Darren heard running water and assumed Pete was washing up for the night. This was an early-to-bed household.
“Sometimes it helps to talk,” Bell said. “It’s the silence, sitting up alone, that gets you, gets your mind to racing and worrying, that makes you hope the hammer of a beer or six will calm it all down. Talking to somebody can put a shape on all the wild thoughts and feelings, a shape you can hold in your hand. Tames it some. When I decided drinking wasn’t doing nothing for me no more, Petey and I used to stay up hours and talk.”
Darren felt a flush of heat run up his sides.
He’d let his guard down, gone soft in her presence.
“Why did you give the gun to the DA?”
And were you in San Jacinto County three days ago to testify in front of a grand jury?
Bell swung her legs out from under her and sat up straighter. “I told you, son, I didn’t know that gun was used in a crime, had anything to do with the killing of that man that was in the Klan —”
“Aryan Brotherhood. Ronnie Malvo was in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.”
“See, I didn’t know a thing about it.” She kicked off a house shoe to scratch the sole of one foot with the toe of the other. “I found it when I was seeing to the house in Camilla that time, like you had asked me to. But, Darren, I ain’t know it was wrapped up in this other thing. How could I? I took it for safekeeping, trusting myself rather than anybody else getting they hands on it. I was just trying to keep it… keep you safe.”
“By giving it to the district attorney?”
“Wiped clean, son. You keep missing that bit. That gun is totally useless to them.” Her voice had inched up an octave, and she was talking faster, as if she were sweeping up her words almost as soon as she dropped them, leaving no trail for him to find his way out of this. He thought he heard the low growl of a wolf in a pink housecoat. “You forget, me and Petey been around rough characters in our family. I know how to disappear a gun or render it a piece of junk for any case they trying to build. Our brothers, couple of great-uncles on my side, even my mama, all knew more than a few ways to set fire to the best-laid plans of men in authority.” Reminding him that he came from a line of hustlers on his mother’s side, men and women who were master blacksmiths, bending laws and rules and the truth to a shape that suited their ends.
“It’s how we survived,” she said, patting his leg. It was so tempting to believe that his mother had done all this to protect him. But he also felt the danger behind the temptation, felt afraid of making the mistake of trusting her again.
“Wasn’t it, Petey?” she said as his uncle walked into the room.
He was wearing an ancient HILL LUMBER CO. T-shirt and gray sweatpants that were stained in a few places, all on his left, working side. He smelled of toothpaste and freshly rolled deodorant, and he walked slowly from the hallway, wiping at his mouth with the back of his good hand and shuffling his bad leg behind him. He didn’t seem to understand what all he’d walked into, but he took in the pinched expression on Darren’s face and gave him a shaky smile. He said, “Aw, Bell, I don’t think it was half as bad as all that, and even if it was, we here now, living good, paying our bills.”
“One of us, at least,” his mother said sharply.
It felt cold to Darren, a little mean.
This, he thought. This was the Bell Callis he recognized.
He stood suddenly, banging his shins into the coffee table. He had to get out of there, had to get away from the feeling that he had somehow fallen prey to his mother once again, but in ways he didn’t yet understand. He felt angry and unsafe, at least unsure of his own read on things, whether he could take any of what was in front of him at face value, most especially where his mother was concerned. He stepped around the coffee table, edging past newspapers and shopping bags filled with just the right shoe from half a dozen pairs, and passed a coatrack, where his mother’s CHEERY CLEAN MAIDS smocks hung limply. He let himself out the door and onto the front porch.
He wanted to call Randie, was desperate to hear her voice.
He had his cell phone out, was two rings in, when down the street, a darkened car caught his attention. In the dim light, he couldn’t be sure, but hell if it didn’t look like a police squad car the same bright blue as the ones driven by Thornhill cops. Darren stepped into the road to get a closer look at the exact moment that the car peeled away from the curb and flicked on its headlights. They blinded Darren and streaked his vision with jagged, white lines as the car came within a foot of his kneecaps, then swerved suddenly and went around him, speeding off down Lanana Street, its taillights blooming red on his chest, which rose and fell with… not panic, exactly. Because he seemed to understand at once that if he had truly seen what he thought he had — a Thornhill police officer keeping tabs on him — then panic was too impulsive a reaction, a luxury he didn’t have. If Thornhill police were watching him, he needed to be careful. They had already reported him to the Rangers; it was only so long before all of this got to DA Frank Vaughn in San Jacinto County, news that Darren was again acting outside the law. If that was a Thornhill police vehicle, he reminded himself. Tired as he was, he suddenly wasn’t so sure, still felt like the world was playing tricks on him. Because why would Thornhill be tailing him all the way to Nacogdoches? He looked down and saw that he’d let the call to Randie ring through to voicemail. That she hadn’t answered his call made anything he wanted to say to her moot.
He hung up and walked back to the house.
From the porch, he could see the storied Zion Hill Baptist Church, the blackness of its scalloped windows strangely inviting. To keep from drinking, maybe he could spend the night in there. Just him and the ghost of Christ. He heard the screen door creak open. The step-shuffle gait told him it was his uncle Pete. Uncle. The idea of it still felt new. “Your mama in there making up the bed for you,” Pete said. “Moving that gal’s things to the side. Bell said she ain’t mind sleeping on the couch for the night.”
There was a question at the back of his throat.
Darren hadn’t said yet whether he was staying or going.
“Just getting a little air,” Darren said, committing to nothing.
“She get a little bite in her sometimes, been knowing that since she was a kid, but tell you what, you done lit her up for a lifetime coming here like you done.” Pete shot Darren a lopsided smile before shuffling over to the chair where he’d been getting his hair cut earlier. It had a metal frame, and the seat was a dark yellow vinyl with green and turquoise paisleys on it. It felt familiar, but he hadn’t seen its match anywhere inside the house. Darren wondered absent-mindedly where it might have come from. The light that hung when Pete’s buddy Butch was cutting his hair was gone now, and Darren could see his uncle only by the lone streetlamp on this block of Lanana.
Pete pulled out a pack of cigarettes identical to the ones Darren’s mother smoked. “And before you say anything,” Pete said, “Bell done tried to get me to quit, even though she steady smoking herself. But I figure what difference it make now?” He rested the cigarettes on his bad leg, which gave off no twitch and lay so still, it acted almost as a narrow tray. “I’m coming on seventy now, and I can’t work or cook or fuck no more, ain’t got enough money for all the doctors in the world to put me back together again, and I don’t want all this on Bell,” he said, suggesting he was maybe courting another stroke, a bigger one this time. “I want to do what I want with whatever time I have left.” His was a matter-of-fact understanding of the limits of what this world would do for him. With his good hand, he flicked a lighter he’d fished out of his pocket. Something in the hot glow off the flame brought forth a memory for Darren. He suddenly remembered where he’d seen a chair just like this one. At his mother’s trailer, one just like it used to sit next to the trailer’s steps. He’d sat on it as a boy, his bike leaned up against the side of her home, while he listened to his mother talk, sad story times that often involved long stretches of silence, of staring off into the pine trees that surrounded her rented trailer, of painstakingly cataloging her many regrets. He looked back at Pete, the cherry of his cigarette glowing brighter when he inhaled.
Darren nodded toward the chair he sat on.
“Bell had one just like it at her place back in Camilla,” he said.
“They was my mama’s. Your grandmother. I took ’em with me when we first moved up here back in ’72, when we didn’t even have a bed to sleep on. Mama said, ‘At least you two gon’ have a place to sit. At least I done that much for you.’ She was sad to see me and your mama come up here without a pot to piss in, sad to see her only girl go.” Pete took another drag, coughing a little at the back of the inhale.
Darren puzzled over the fact that Pete had said we.
He remembered something his mother said earlier that had made little sense to him at the time. “Mama said something about finishing high school in Nacogdoches?”
The math of this proposition didn’t add up right. His mother had him when she was sixteen. By her “last year” in school, did she mean the year she dropped out?
Not at all, Pete told Darren.
