Summer Sons(54)
The response, fine I guess, wasn’t much of an answer.
* * *
Andrew stubbed out his preparatory cigarette three-quarters smoked on the deck railing, shoes in hand and feet warm on the wood. He was due to meet Professor Troth in a half hour at her office. She had emailed him another reminder that morning, which was irksome but reasonable. As he bent to slip on his Converse, gravel crunched at the end of the alley. He glanced up. The gunmetal WRX rolled to a stop, blocking his car into its space. Halse climbed out, leaving the car idling in the middle of the drive.
He approached with arms swinging at his sides, hands loose, bearing a flat-lipped smile that presaged a storm. Aggression rolled off of his posture. He was hatless and wearing scuffed tan combat boots laced tight at his ankles. Andrew dropped his shoes onto the deck out of reflex. The muscles in his forearms bunched as he closed his fists.
“Riley texted me some interesting shit this morning, my friend,” Halse said, and this was Halse, not Sam, though Andrew didn’t realize he’d created the distinction.
“Define interesting,” he responded.
Halse stopped at the base of the steps, nostrils flaring as he gave Andrew a caustic once-over. His bare toes curled into the deck. The feral part of Andrew paced its cage, alert and uncertain. All the paths he’d found, so far, led to Halse—but knowing that was a far cry from having a plan to confront him about it.
“To start, that Ed’s phone has been missing this whole time, and you’re all fucked up about not knowing what he was doing with which people, especially me. Which is an accusation I feel like I deserved to hear from your own fucking mouth,” he said. “Put your shoes on. We’re going on a trip.”
Andrew’s chest collapsed into a painful squeeze, and he blurted out, “Fuck off.”
Measured, Halse repeated, “I said, put your shoes on.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.
Squared shoulders and quickening breath recalled their first meeting, and the tension that had begun to bank between them after regular exposure. Andrew stood stock still, neither retreating to the house nor forcing his way down the steps. The series of rambling texts he’d sent Del, the thoughts he had trouble quashing, roared into the substrate of his brain: if someone else had hurt Eddie, had kicked off some violence that led to the ugly end the revenant had shown him, Halse was his prime candidate. Getting in a car alone with Halse while he visibly boiled with anger, no one around to notice or care where he disappeared to, seemed stupider than Andrew was willing to be.
But then Halse said, “Forget your plans. I know where they found him, and we’re going.”
Rational resistance crumbled in an instant and Andrew bounded down the steps in two strides; Halse held his ground. Nose to nose, glaring into Halse’s auburn-flecked eyes from as close as he’d ever seen them, he snarled, “How do you know that?”
“Because I asked when it happened, you ungrateful dick, so put your shoes on and get in the damn car.” Halse jammed his arm between their bodies, wrist bone and the blade of his hand shoving into Andrew’s sternum.
Andrew staggered against the step and used it as an excuse to sit and yank his Converse on. Halse headed off across the path through the yard. Got on like a bonfire, he recalled, yanking his laces tight and double-knotting them. He had a dull pocketknife and the conviction of revenge if their unplanned field trip spiraled out of control, but nothing else. Eddie was a bigger, stronger man than Halse, but there was no telling how their fight might’ve started—who would have thrown the first hit, over which of a handful of possible triggers. Killing a man with a knife took some real intimacy, and while Halse and Eddie had spent a lot more time together while he was stuck up north than he and Halse had put in so far, Andrew figured he could manage if his skin was on the line.
Just to confirm, he called out, “Are you asking Riley to come with, then?”
“No, I’m not.” Sam kicked the gate open, wire rattling on wire. “This is our business.”
As he expected. Andrew’s phone buzzed a gentle appointment reminder as he got up to follow, seating himself in the WRX and clicking his belt into place. He swiped the alarm silent. Halse, jaw set firm, rolled out of the alley onto the main street. The air conditioner whirred over the stifling silence. A yellow rubber duck sticker decorated the gearshift, worn and faded. There was a quality to their coexistence in the small space, sour and ragged, that made it hard to take a full breath. Andrew propped his elbow on the rim of the closed window and put his fingers to his temple.
“Talk,” Halse said as he took a ramp to the I-40.
Andrew dug his thumb at the interior corner of his eye, strung high enough to vibrate in his seat. Having a conversation felt impossible, but he said, “I had a meeting.”
“Do you care?”
Andrew shut his mouth again. Eddie would’ve been irked with him for his laissez-faire attitude to this program, his research—but not angry, given that he was faced with something larger. He wanted to believe that, if their positions were reversed, Eddie would have already drowned the necessary parties in the ocean of his loss. Instead, Andrew was stumbling blind from one failure to the next, hamstrung by his own destruction, a boy made of clumsy mismatched pieces. Running straight into the mouth of danger, after it found him and invited him along for a ride.