JOEL
His brother’s message came late.
The little party which had started in Tulum on Monday had somehow only just ended at Joel’s apartment a few minutes before the text arrived. An international bender. It sounded fun on paper. Joel had goaded the last of his bleary guests out the door and made sure his wallet and cologne were still concealed behind the suits in his closet. He used an app to pay off his drug dealer, used another app to order a housekeeper for the morning, poured himself a tall glass of seltzer and settled into bed next to the empty space where he had hoped, earlier in the weekend, he might now find some company resting. He swallowed two Tylenol. He wondered why nobody ever warned you it was possible to feel this alone before you were thirty.
His phone lit the ceiling a cold blue. Joel was so exhausted he mistook it, initially, for some new breed of ghost.
This place is bullshit, wrote Dylan, his brother.
Joel studied the message for a very long time before responding: Everything ok?
Dylan was eleven years younger than Joel. He was a senior in high school this fall, if Joel’s addled brain was doing the math right, and still lived in Bentley, Texas, a rotten rind of a town which Joel had escaped the moment he could and hoped to never see again. When Joel missed his family, he flew them to Manhattan. Which was most Christmases. Some. Twice.
As he waited for his brother to respond, Joel scrolled up to see the last time they’d spoken: three months before, when Joel, likely drunk, had sent Dylan a picture of a football player tackling a massive rooster mascot. Dylan had responded, wordlessly, with a GIF of two handsome underwear models colliding with one another on a catwalk.
The brothers’ relationship was a muted one.
Joel’s screen slid back down with the arrival of a new message.
lol sorry wrong person.
Joel typed a message, deleted it and tried again. It’s cool. He added after a pause: What’s up?
Joel watched his screen. The status of his message changed from Delivered to Read. Joel waited, waited, but no reply came.
Joel was almost asleep again when his phone lit up for the second time.
actually it’s not ok.
Joel tried to call. It went to voice mail after two rings.
can’t talk rn, his brother wrote. sorry.
Lil D, Joel wrote—an old pet name that felt rusty from disuse—What’s wrong?
dumb dreams. bad dreams. i’m stupid.
This was followed by a GIF of a linebacker shaking his head on the sidelines of a game.
i fucking hate football
Oh.
what’s stupid about hating football?
how else i’m gonna get out of this place?
Joel climbed out of bed. In the kitchen he poured himself another seltzer, debated for a moment and splashed it with vodka.
The way their mother described it, Dylan was the best thing to happen to Bentley’s football program in a decade. He’d made varsity when he was just a freshman and had been the starting quarterback the year after that. The team had flourished under Dylan: they made it all the way to state quarterfinals his first year as quarterback, had made it to semifinals last year and now, according to the breathless calls Joel had received from his mother over the summer, the Bentley Bison had a shot at the state championships for the first time in a generation.
In all of his Instagram photos, Joel’s little brother had never once appeared to be anything but affable and handsome and casually, ruthlessly charming in the way of Southern boys who knew their towns were made for them. Now, sitting on the chilly bar stool in his kitchen, Joel debated how best to approach the idea that Dylan had anything resembling a problem in his life.
He took a long drink.
Tennis worked for me, Joel typed.
can’t, Dylan wrote. they killed it.
The fuck?
to make more money for football.
Fuck.
ya.
Basketball? Baseball?
coach says my numbers are shit.
You mean your grades?
their ok. They’re* lol
Joel smiled at his phone. maybe just scholarships for college then.
not that ok
Oh.
cause football. i can’t ever study.
Why don’t you quit then? You’ve got a year to turn shit around.
hahahahaha that’s funny
What is?
quit football. Joel waited out a long pause. sorry, Dylan finally wrote. i shouldn’t be bothering you.
You’re not bothering me, Joel typed. Dylan talk to me please.
i thought about it a lot really i want to but i can’t quit i can’t
Why not?
Another long pause. u don’t remember what it’s like down here.
Joel left his phone unlocked on the counter. He gathered empty glasses into his sink, tossed out a stuffed ashtray, picked up small baggies that a few hours before had held cocaine and molly and every other palliative he could get his hands on and rolled them into a wet towel to bury in his garbage. He gagged at a sharp whiff of gin uncoiling from somewhere beneath his counter. He did remember what it was like in Bentley, Texas. Or, rather, there was plenty he had made himself forget.
Joel had made a name for himself upon arriving in New York with an economics degree from a nowhere school and a plaque from his tennis scholarship and a smile on his face. He had established himself as an analyst with an itch, an instinct, the ability to look at a pile of data and spot flaws, opportunities, dangerously optimistic projections. That itch had served him very, very well. Just look at this custom kitchen, at the Italian sofa in the living room from a designer whose name brought a pause to even the most jaded of the Hamptons set.
And what was Joel’s itch telling him now?
This is serious.
There’s something wrong with that town.
This is your brother.
i can’t quit football. i just fucking can’t but i can’t keep playing neither if i don’t play i don’t got no college cause who’s gonna pay for it? mom? and if i don’t got no college i’m fucking stuck here and if i stay here i’ll go crazy bro—i can’t sleep i can’t eat i can’t go to the bright lands it’s not the same no more i can’t with this fucking place
Can’t go to the what?
i hate it here. it’s like i hear this town talking when i sleep.
Joel looked at his absurd apartment, at the well-appointed wreckage of his late twenties, and told himself he wasn’t afraid. He googled How much does college cost today and priced plane tickets and pretended he wasn’t scared out of his mind at the thought of what he was about to do.
u there? yo joel u there?
I’m here.
Joel took a hard sip of vodka straight from the bottle. He sent Dylan a screenshot of a ticket confirmation.
He told himself it was time to start being an older brother for once in his life.
Maybe I can help.
JOEL
Five days later his plane pierced the cloud bank and great squares of Texas prairie rose up to swallow him. Watching the flatland take shape out his window, he felt a familiar anxiety wind its fingers around his throat.
His brother was not the first troubled football player to confide in Joel. All week in Manhattan he had thought of nothing but a sticky summer afternoon a decade ago, of a truck cab spiked with the smell of spearmint, of a man with shocking green eyes and a bad neck shaking his head with effort and saying, “Don’t play that game if you can help it, Whitley.” Joel would cut off an arm to ensure Dylan never suffered the same fate as that ruined man.
If Joel could jab a finger in his blighted hometown’s eye, so much the better.
He chewed an Adderall and texted his brother.
An ugly thunderhead was rolling in from the Gulf. When the Enterprise attendant led Joel to the parking lot to collect his rental—a low-slung convertible with a gleaming black hood—the twilit air felt ready to burst. One sniff and Joel knew he was back. There was nothing quite like the smell of Texas in the hours before some fresh calamity.
The open convertible tore away from the encroaching storm with a moan. Joel passed through towns with names like Thrall and Spree and Thorndale and wove around trucks and horse trailers, their drivers and passengers all regarding him (and the pop music blaring from his speakers) with a courteous suspicion.
There were fewer cows than he remembered. Great miles of scrubby flatland unrolled to either side of the highway, punctuated only by a lonely water tower, a totemic bale of hay, a sunken barn with half the country visible through a hole in its side.
BENTLEY: 18 MILES. Joel didn’t smoke and yet he craved a cigarette. He caught a casual crackle of gunfire somewhere in the distance—there was a sound he’d forgotten—and slowed to allow a rusted Chevy to merge ahead of him. Something caught his eye in the truck’s bed. A hulking stuffed bison wobbled on stiff legs, a letterman jacket fastened around its furry shoulders, its black glass eyes catching the last of the sunlight through the grill of a green Bentley football helmet.
It was a challenge not to stare into those eyes. With a queasy flutter in his stomach, a creep of gooseflesh up his arms, Joel suddenly felt he’d seen those eyes before, though he was also certain he’d never seen this stuffed bison in his life. He had the strangest conviction—almost like déjà vu—that those black eyes had watched him on a very bad night a very long time ago. They had watched him then just like they were watching him now: with a hungry, inhuman intelligence, like a lizard waiting for a fly to buzz just a few inches closer.
Jesus, Joel thought. He wasn’t even home and already he was jumping at taxidermy.
Joel caught sight of the first sign of fresh paint since Austin. A billboard that read MY HERD MY GLORY appeared, listing the names and numbers of every player on the team. He strained to spot his brother, though he needn’t have bothered. Just past BENTLEY: 2 MILES his brother’s face rose up from the fields. DYLAN WHITLEY, SENIOR, the sign read. “THE BOY WITH THE MILLION DOLLAR ARM.”
The convertible’s speakers sputtered, the music playing from Joel’s phone cut out. Bentley took shape on the flat horizon. As the truck ahead of him rumbled toward town, a dark light rose in the bison’s dead eyes. Joel jumped. He would have sworn he’d just seen the thing blink.
As if in reply, a cold voice seemed to whisper through the static of the convertible’s speakers:
imissedyou.
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