“That girl, she ain’t the one,” Clayton had told his younger brother about Bell.
Pete said he never did understand why Clayton was so dead set against two kids in love. Darren didn’t know either, had always been told or assumed it had to do with Clayton’s natural snootiness and wanting to keep his baby brother away from the air of lawlessness that surrounded Bell’s family. But it also wasn’t lost on Darren that around this exact time, Clayton was losing his beloved Naomi to his brother William. Perhaps trying to keep Duke and Bell apart was as much petty as it was principled; perhaps it galled him to see another brother so happy in love. He very nearly forbade his baby brother to see Bell anymore, especially when Duke started talking about marrying her.
That wouldn’t keep him out of Vietnam, Clayton reportedly said.
Clayton had ordered Duke to put school first.
“The country was at war and still trying to live up to the promise of its creed, or however King put it,” Pete said, his voice slowing, his whole posture sinking a little in the chair. He seemed fatigued, Darren thought, worn out from the effort of putting words in a pattern, lining them up in the right order. “The whole country was a mess, and it was… it was…” He searched for the word he wanted and seemed disappointed to only come up with hard. He shook his head. “It was a hard time, Darren, hard to feel a sense of optimism.” Darren leaned against the railing with his arms crossed, feeling a strange echo in the sentiment, in the despair over a country at war with itself. He wondered what those kids marching for civil rights, marching against Vietnam, would have made of the country today. Wondered which wounded the soul more, living in a country that had never kept any of its promises or seeing America’s capacity for good catch wind and fly for a while, only to come crashing back down. He thought to ask Pete but noticed his uncle had started to nod off in his chair. The sight of it tugged at Darren, made him feel protective of the older man. He moved the cigarettes off his leg and nudged Pete gently, waking him and offering him a hand. The older man gripped Darren’s arm so hard it felt like he’d hit bone. His left side was still strong. He used it to get himself upright and together they shuffle-stepped into the small house, where Bell was indeed on the couch, lying on her side, where she had already fallen asleep.
She looked sweet in her pink robe, harmless, just somebody’s aging mother.
Pete must have felt he owed Darren the rest of the story. Bits of it came out in dribs and drabs as Darren walked him to his bedroom, the one closest to the living room: Duke driving to Nacogdoches every chance he could (“Wasn’t trying to keep ’em apart, I promise, son,” he said. “Couldn’t have even if I had tried”); Bell finding out she was pregnant a few weeks after graduation; Duke enrolling at SFA to be closer to her.
This last bit called into question the entire story Pete had told him tonight.
It was a fiction woven from tangled wires in his uncle Pete’s brain.
It couldn’t be true. No Mathews man of that generation had ever attended Stephen F. Austin University. Not when there was Prairie View, not when there was Texas Southern in Houston. If you were going to be the first wave to integrate an institution, let it at least be the University of Texas for your troubles. Duke Mathews had been a PV man, that much Darren was sure of. He was reminded of his mother’s warning: Pete’s mind came and went. He was tired and weak, almost tripping as his slipper snagged on the metal bar batting down the seam in the carpet in the doorway to his room. Darren helped him to his bed. This close, he could see Pete’s eyes more clearly, the red veins and the cataract in his left eye. The sadness in both. “Don’t tell your mama we talked on it. She don’t like to speak about him.” Darren pulled the blankets to cover Pete’s chest then leaned down and laid a soft kiss on his uncle’s forehead, surprising them both. Pete smiled, already drifting off again.
“Just like Duke,” he said, turning on his side.
Darren turned off the bedside lamp and left the room.
In the end, he took the other bedroom, his mother’s.
She had stacked Sera’s things in a corner of the room, a thin sheet of wax paper between each layer, clearing the way for him to lie down, which he did, deciding only then that he would sleep here tonight. He was exhausted, for one. And he hadn’t had a drink all day. It was a fragile peace he held to tightly as he fell into a hard sleep.
He woke early, dry-mouthed and confused. Wrong bed, wrong room, and outside it was dark, the world covered in the blue-black of predawn.
He needed water.
He needed to stand, to test his legs.
He needed to check that this hadn’t all been a dream.
He threw back the layer of quilts he didn’t remember covering himself with last night, swung out of bed in his socks, and found his boots lined up next to the bedpost. This, too, the removal of his boots, he didn’t remember from the night before. And for the first time in weeks, there was no reason to blame drink for a black hole in his memory. Which left open the possibility that his mother had at some point in the night come in and covered him up with quilts, had labored to remove his boots so that he might be more comfortable. He heard no sounds on the other side of the bedroom door, smelled nothing from the kitchen to suggest that anyone else was awake. He glanced at his phone. It was just coming on five in the morning. And he’d missed two calls during the night. Greg and Randie. Greg, a night owl, had told Darren to call back at any time, his voice high and pitched with excitement at the idea that Darren wanted to talk to him. Randie had declined to leave a voicemail, but his heart soared at the idea that she had reached out too. He wanted to call her back, needed to hear her voice. There was so much to tell her: the drive to Nacogdoches, the investigation into the whereabouts of Sera Fuller, the fact that he wasn’t about to let it go, even in the face of a grave reprimand from his former boss. He remembered Wilson’s words about the grand jury debating his fate. This he wanted to tell Randie too. The earlier times that DA Vaughn had attempted to indict him, Darren had laid his head in Randie’s lap, asking her to hold the weight of his prayers, desperate pleas she thought unnecessary because she didn’t know — no one did — just how guilty he was. How he had lied.
He slipped on his boots to go outside.
He didn’t want to make the call inside his mother’s house.
Outside, Lanana Street was dark. The lone streetlamp had done its nightly duty, had clocked out before the sun had officially risen. To the east, the horizon was a deep purple, like the skin of a bitter plum. Darren walked down the concrete steps, heading toward his Chevy, liking the idea of the privacy the cab would give him, the deep quiet.
But something stopped him.
In the early-morning darkness, he noticed a snake of smoke curling out of the tailpipe of a small pickup truck on the street. Darren could just make out the sunny yellow of the Thornhill logo, the company name an almost deep orange in this light. Darren heard the engine humming, as the truck idled, saw the silhouette of a body behind the wheel, someone who had been waiting outside the house for who knew how long. Hadn’t he seen Thornhill police last night? Or had he dreamed that? Either way, he was sure this was a Thornhill vehicle parked fifty feet from his mother’s house. It was some coincidence — a thing he’d been trained to distrust on principle. But this was a truck, not a squad car. Despite the logo, it felt civilian.
Joseph Fuller popped into his mind. His anger.
The way the older man had looked at him disparagingly. Asking if Darren was a cop. A vigilante cop, Darren now heard in Fuller’s question. The one with a public target on his back. He remembered his lawyers’ warning: All it takes is one idiot with a gun.
Even to his own mind, he sounded paranoid. But the truck was real. It was idling right in front of him at such an angle that it was possible the driver hadn’t seen him emerge from the house. Darren ducked back inside to grab his pistol, which had slept beside him on the other side of his mother’s bed. As he slunk back toward the front door, he heard his mother stirring on the couch.
She sat up, still in her pink robe. “Darren?”
He ignored her as he went back out, the Colt held low on his right side so as not to alarm her. But she’d seen the gun. “Darren?” Fear rose her voice to a high pitch. He shushed her and made a motion for her to stay put. “Please, Mama,” he said.
Back outside, he crept down the front walk to the street.
As he stepped off the curb, he angled his body toward the Thornhill truck, moving in a crouched position, just as the interior light in the cab clicked on, sharpening the outline of the person behind the wheel. It was a man, all right, but something was off. In a split second, Darren’s brain was trying to process. The posture, the hair, color or texture, something in his gut told him not to lift his gun. Don’t shoot. He heard the words out loud, coming not from him but the slim Latino kid he’d seen at Thornhill.
The kid raised his arms.
In his right hand, the flag of his surrender was a blue shirt.
13.
SOMEHOW, PETE slept through all this, was still in his room when Darren brought Rey inside. The name was short for Reynaldo, after a father he couldn’t remember, he’d said. Darren stared at him, hit with a wave of fellow feeling, something in the boy’s eyes that was familiar to Darren, reflecting some part of himself. He didn’t know his dad either. But he wouldn’t let that soften his vigilance, his natural suspicion of a kid who’d shown up at the house with a T-shirt he’d been driving around with in his truck. A bloody T-shirt. The truck that wasn’t his, he said. He’d taken it from his stepdad, and, looking at the watch on his left wrist, he said he needed to get it back soon, before Artie’s shift ended. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking since he’d been made to sit in the dining room. Darren kept his .45 on the table, pointed in Rey’s general direction. He had sent his mother into the kitchen for a grocery bag. “Paper,” he said. “It has to be paper.” And another pair of those gloves from last night. He didn’t want to further contaminate the shirt, which was blue and had the Thornhill logo on it. Bell returned from the kitchen with a Brookshire Brothers grocery bag and a face that was a flat, ashen gray. She set it in front of him along with a pair of the black vinyl gloves.
“Darren, what the hell is going on?”
“I heard you’re a Texas Ranger,” Rey said. “That’s what Benny said.”
“Sera’s brother?” Darren remembered the young boy.
Pudgy and anxious, worried about his sister too.
“How did you find me?” he asked the kid.
