Dennis Lehane - Coronado

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 we’re standing there in the white heat with the dirt, dying of thirst for a hundred flat miles in every direction and Daddy’s piece-of-shit truck gone gasping into a coma beside us, and my mother puts a hand over her eyebrows to scan the emptiness and she looks like any fight left in her just up and died with the truck. She looks like she can remember a time before she got where she is now, and all those different who-she-could-have-beens fork out like trails before us, branching off and branching off into all that Texas dust until there’s so many of them they just have to fade away to nothing or else she’ll go blind trying to keep count.

Her voice is dry and torn when she speaks, and it takes a couple breaths to get the words out:

“Remember, Sonny, times like these — remember that somewhere there’s someone worse off than you. You’re always richer than someone.” She tries for a smile as she looks over at me. “Right?”

Poorer, i’m thinking as we get back in the Cougar and follow Lurlene’s directions to this other house. You’re always poorer than someone. And that poor is a high fence keeping you out of all the places other people can go. Only places you get to go are the shitty ones nobody else wants to visit.

Always poorer, I’m thinking, and then we reach this house Lurlene’s directing us to, and I’m suddenly thinking, Maybe not.

Because whoever owns this house may not be poorer than anyone. Whoever owns this house may be the richest person in the world.

The front lawn is bigger than East Lake’s football field. The house behind it is sprawling and beige with a red tile roof and it seems to spread itself from end to end like a god.

We come up to a tall, wrought-iron gate stretched between two beige brick columns that match the house. The gate is a good twenty feet high, and even with all the tequila-and-beer courage I got from the Biddets’, I can tell you I feel nothing but relief when I see that gate and realize we ain’t getting in. I see it in Terry’s face too, even though he says, “So now what do we do?”

Lurlene’s sitting on the console between us, hunched forward, skinny arms wrapped around her knees. She takes a last swig from a bottle of Cuervo and hands it to Terry. I’m ready for her to say, “Drive through it.” I’m ready for her to say anything. I might not like it. But I’m ready.

All she says, though, is, “Could I get by, kind sir?” and slithers over my lap and out the door.

She saunters up to the gate in her white boots and tarnished schoolgirl skirt and behind me, Vaughn Lewis says, “I’m fucked up.”

“Me too,” his brother says.

I look at Terry. He shrugs, but I can see the booze swimming in him, making his eyelids thicken and squiggle.

Lurlene finds this box sticking out of the column on our left. There’s numbers on it, and her fingers dance over them and then she’s heading back to the car as the gate begins to open, just starts sliding back into the bushes behind the column on our right. Lurlene hops in and sits in my lap, tosses an arm around my neck and looks out through the windshield as the gate goes all the way back.

She tells Terry, “Time to put it in ‘drive.’”

There’s a picture of my parents taken just before they got married. It’s 1949 and my daddy’s wearing his uniform. It’s all neat and sharply creased, and his hair is short and slicked back, and he has all his teeth. He’s beaming this white, white smile, holding my mother so tight with one arm that she looks about to bust in half. She’s smiling too, though, and it’s a real smile. She was happy then. Happier than I’ve ever seen her. She’s young. They’re both young. They look younger than me. Behind them is a chain-link fence with a sign on it that says FORT BENNING, GA. My mother’s dress is white with a pattern of what looks like black swallows on it, those swallows soaring across her body.

And, man, she’s happy. She’s happy, and my daddy has all his teeth and all his fingers.

Lurlene gets us in the house the same way she got us through the gate. Her fingers dart across these numbers on a gizmo beside the front door and then we’re inside.

We walk around for a while. Ain’t none of us, except Lurlene maybe, ever seen a house this big. Ain’t sure any of us knew there was a house this big. The front hall has two staircases that meet at a curve up top. It’s got a chandelier the size of a fucking Cadillac and all these vases that’re taller than any of us, including Terry, and the walls leading up the staircases are lined with paintings in gold, frilly frames.