Bell smoked and ate cherry sours.
“I’m sorry,” he said about her losing the job.
He knew she needed it. She waved him off with the cigarette in her hand. Still, he saw a dimness in her eyes, felt tension creep into her posture, a distant sadness.
They passed the next twenty minutes or so in silence. Bell sitting up a few times to take a closer look at some of the young men going in or out of the Pi Xi compound.
After a while, Bell turned on the radio. Aretha Franklin was singing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” a favorite of Darren’s, but still he reached over and snapped it off. They needed all their senses sharp. Bell turned it back on, the volume so low it was more a memory than a song. The car was messy: a pile of laundry, including a sheet dotted with watercolor stains, was spilling from the back seat onto the armrest between them. It turned out that all those paintings of Zion Hill Baptist Church inside Pete’s house were Bell’s, a hobby she’d picked up. A little music and a set of paints, she said, and a night could pass without a drink. The church, its divine grace, held a special place in her heart. “The day I found out I was pregnant, I went in there and prayed.”
Darren heard a catch in her voice, a rare display of raw emotion.
Her throat was thick with it. “And again after your father died. I went back to Zion Hill and sat in a rear pew by myself, and I tried to think what it would mean for the little thing I was carrying in me. If Duke was really gone, what then? And hard as it is to say, if I’m telling the truth on it, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I wanted a clean break. I didn’t think I could take a reminder of Duke pulling at me for the rest of my life, needing me, my body, tugging at it. I didn’t think I could take it without him.”
Darren turned as best as he could in the front seat, his long legs straining.
He stared at his mother, who looked both abashed and relieved, as if she’d burped up something sudden and sour and now her stomach could settle itself.
The thing was out.
Darren knew, though, didn’t he?
Wasn’t this the pain he’d carried his whole life?
“You didn’t want me.”
It was no longer a question but a statement of fact.
Bell turned to her son, burrowed her dark eyes into his. “Darren…”
She just as quickly looked away, unable to hold the stark intimacy.
She stared out the windshield and then suddenly sat up straighter.
“It’s him, Darren.” She pointed in the direction of the front door where the kid from the Facebook profile was indeed walking up to the Pi Xi house. Brendan.
She agreed to let Darren take the lead as they approached the front door of the fraternity. He was still unsure that this would bear any fruit, was still not wholly convinced that the kid would talk to them, let alone tell them anything that would be a direct line to finding Sera Fuller. This thought had barely settled in his mind when the door of the frat opened and a young man in khaki shorts and flip-flops and no shirt emerged, nipples hairy and pink as a piglet. Darren wondered how he’d known to stop them at the threshold. He then remembered the window on the top floor, his feeling that they were being watched. The young man, a kid, really, said, “You guys can’t just come up here like this.” Something in the slope of his shoulders was off, the right one sitting lower than the left. It was then that Darren saw the gun, a Glock as big as the kid’s forearm. It hung down at his side, explaining why one half of his body dragged toward the ground, why he had the loping appearance of a baby Bigfoot, a monster who didn’t know his own strength, who hadn’t yet grown into the power of his body.
Bell called out her son’s name, a ragged, terrified whisper.
Darren raised a hand in surrender just as the young man raised the Glock and pointed it at Darren’s head.
All it takes is one idiot with a gun.
An evergreen statement in Texas, apparently.
Darren felt a rush of adrenaline at the same time as a bone-deep weariness that nearly sank him. How had this day started with him nearly killing one nineteen-year-old and arrived at him now maybe seconds away from being shot by another one with a nine-millimeter? It was madness, he thought, this loose gunplay — even as his palms itched for the Colt .45 at his side. Until he remembered he was without a badge, here without permission or an invitation. They were within their rights, by state law, to kill him if they felt afraid. Darren raised both arms then and nodded at his mother to do the same.
The kid took a step toward them. He had a blocky face, puffy with drink, a condition Darren recognized. The boy had either been drinking late into the night or was still drunk right now. He narrowed his eyes at them and said, “What are you, like, her parents or something?” His speech was thick as paste. “That Rho Beta chick.”
A voice bellowed from inside the fraternity house. “Jackson!” It was a warning from Brendan, who was now standing behind his frat brother in the doorway. “Dude, they could be her lawyers or something.”
Darren, maybe. Bell was still in her Cheery Clean Maids smock.
Both of them arms up in front of a drunk child, an armed drunk child.
He would give anything to rewind this day, the past year while he was at it.
“Well, they can’t just come up here like this,” the kid with the gun, Jackson, said.
His neck flushed a deep pink color. He was angry, full of raw indignation.
Darren could feel his mother’s body shaking beside him. The scene had now drawn a couple of other frat boys. They stood just inside the Pi Xi house, behind Brendan, whose hands, Darren noticed, were swollen and covered in bruises, like two overripe plums on the end of his arms. There were bruises on his biceps too. And was that a scabbed-over cut on the side of his temple? Jackson said, “Fuck if we’re getting kicked off campus over some shit that did not fucking happen, dude.”
“I didn’t do anything to that girl,” Brendan said to Darren. “Nothing.”
“The whole thing was a goof.” Jackson had spit in the corners of his mouth. “Leaving the house, that was her idea, by the way. She drug us out in the middle of a fucking national forest, wanted to show us something in the fucking woods. I mean, she was in on the whole thing. And nothing happened anyway. We were just fucking around,” he said, jerking his head in Brendan’s direction. Darren made a quick decision.
“Run,” he whispered to his mother.
Then, in one swift move, he grabbed Jackson’s wrist, the one above the hand that held the Glock, whipped his arm behind his back, and headbutted the boy. He heard a pop like the sound of two billiard balls colliding. The boy stumbled and fell on the front steps. Darren disarmed him as Jackson sank to his knees, holding his head.
Once the gun was in Darren’s hand, it took over, blotting out reason.
He aimed it at the young men, adrenaline tearing through every muscle in his body. His own head was throbbing. He wondered absently if he’d broken skin. The fraternity brothers gathered on the steps around Jackson, who was moaning in pain. One of them whipped out a cell phone, and Darren was ashamed to admit his first thought was fear that they would film him, when it was just as likely, more dangerous even, that they were calling the sheriff’s department. He remembered Wilson’s warning not to do anything stupid while a grand jury was deciding his fate.
Too late, he thought as he backed away from the front door, still leveling the nine-millimeter at the young men. He no longer wanted it in his hands, but he was afraid to give it back to them, boys who were in high school a few years ago. Just as he was afraid, if cops were on their way, to be in possession of a stolen weapon. Without a badge, could he convince law enforcement that he was harmless? Across the lot, Bell had the car running. Darren moved toward it quickly, hopping into the passenger side. They fled the scene, flying down the tree-lined road, the mud-dappled car bumping over potholes and pockets of rain. Darren carefully ejected the magazine clip from the handgun and then threw them both out of the car window and into the piney woods.
17.
