Brettonwood

 

Brettonwood

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 12

Tom Bass

The big van’s sunk low on the slick wet road like a ship.

It’s raining and Toby’s driving.

Softball’s been a hoot, hundreds of teenagers swatting at paper-like balls and a rowdy crowd glugging longnecks above the sandy grids of diamonds in one of Houston’s less salubrious municipal parks. Someone tumps over a Porta-cabin behind the bleachers. A poor girl’s emerges, wet with chemicals and sludge. Anything goes at the softball bacchanal.

The van’s loaded with a pile of kids and semi-adults with no idea, reeking like brandy and Irish cream.

Toby’s license is as laminated as his chin. He’s almost there when he realizes it’s the wrong side of the road. He pulls over. What a bummer driving this raucous party in what isn’t even his van. He maneuvers again, bumps a bush, rides a curb with a clunk. Ripples of laughter emanate from its deep guts.

The pigs flag him down, not the first time.

No signal lights to start.

“Everything all right, boy?” The cop’s hands rest on the waist of his tan jodphur’s tucked into black jackboots. His buddy keeps the van covered.

 The night’s decorated with crickets and frogs and the swoop of a passing car.

“You been drinking, boy?”

“No Sir,” Toby says, “I’m just new at it and kind of lost my way.”

“We’re going to Brettonwood!” calls a girl from the back.

“Gatorade?” someone requests.

A passel of laughs.  

“So you’re the designated driver?”

Toby nods.  

“You could’ve turned back there.”

What sounds like a parent speaks up. “Hi Mundy! This is Paul Chip from the golf course, you know Bunny’s husband, and we’d like to get home. We’re pooped.”

Parental supervision clinches it.

They can go.

The van edges along the road, ditchwater and canals, mosquitoes and estuary beyond. The van whispers with conversation and the stirring of ice in the cooler.

Toby stops at the gates to the community. Its metal letters are decorated with flames: Brettonwood.

They slip past. Security knows the score and Mr Chip’s happy to be the responsible entertainer. He’s the big shot anyway.

They pass the club house and tennis courts, the golf opposite.

Toby counts the passengers extruding themselves from the van. He wasn’t far off: twenty-one.

Mr. Chips, thin, with an odd pooch, a wiry mustache and the last one out, says, “Thanks for navigating, son.”

Toby has a problem looking at Mr. Chip. The cement drive looks pretty good and keeps him from smirking. Vanda’s told him every naughty detail about how her dad foot the bill for her breast enhancement.

Sure, Vanda has a promiscuous reputation and a Mercedes cabriolet. That’s why he’s here again avoiding the gaze of Mr. Chip.

Bunny’s inside, a willing chaperone for Vanda’s court of rakish jocks and errant nerds. She’d rather they be fucked up under her wacky supervision. There won’t be any overdoses, guns or babies this way, Bunny reasons, not with such good clean MDMA dusting her marshmallow cookies.

Toby approaches the house, up on stilts and near the shore, but then veers down to the choppy water. The palms are scorched and rattling crispily under the smoggy chemical light of Brettonwood, a subdivision like so many others snuggled along the refinery corridor along the Galveston channel. It’s normal that several service vessels have been pulled from the water not so far from the house, tilted nose down, arrows sliding down a wave. There’s a diving bell, too. And a pair of helicopters held down by wires. A buoy dips and sways precariously out in the bay.

Tanker’s coming.

Toby turns to re-park the van on the street. His surfboard’s survived the trip. The back door opens, cha-chunk.

All the lights are on in the house, illuminated like a watchtower.

It’s suddenly showering and hot.

Vanda’s mom totters inside.

“How was the game, kids?” she asks.

There’s no one in sight and she’s fumbling with a box of ice cream, halfway melted, pools of it soon spreading on the countertop as it’s alternately remembered and forgotten.

Mr. Chip corners Toby in the kitchen when he’s back. It sounds like one of Wyatt’s soliloquies, the same ineluctable fragments—hours, contracts, hotels, logs, purchases, nothing that a kid can know. There’s ice cream in his mustache and he insists on opening and reopening the fridge.

The kids occupy the top of the house. Toby would like to escape, go up and bite Vanda’s expensive chest. But he spoons in some ice, sugar, and flavor, biding his time with the Chips.

Mr. Chip switches the smelly bong water.

Bunny offers Toby a cookie but he declines.

Then he breaks off a half, leaving the rest behind.

Mr. Chip takes one, too.

“Who’d dare test Poseidon VPs?” he says to Bunny, already collapsed on the couch. Ice cream’s everywhere, but who cares, they have a maid.

“Anything else you like, help yourselves.”

They’ve already damaged the liquor cabinet and cases of Bud.

Mr. Chip turns in with a tumbler of bourbon. He wants to sleep before the ecstasy kicks in. He’ll deal with the sugary therapy-like insomnia.

A train hoots like an owl far off in the distance.

Toby paces outside on the deck. His eyes are dilated. He’s elated. His spine’s creaking.

A girl hands him a beer. It’s Vanda.

“Come for a spin?”

“Vanda, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Could be fun,” she says.

“Are you OK?” He’s not the candidate for being in Vanda’s car, wrapped around a pylon.

“Oh, right as rain.” She ducks her head cutely.

They’re getting wet.

The night’s vapor closes around them.

The lagoon’s misty, smelly and heavy like methane.

He embraces Vanda and pushes.

Whose ecstasy is this?

It’s a dirty approximation, past MDMA, near speed, half LSD.  

Vanda’s kissing him again.

Why couldn’t she address the pock-marks unfilled with orange foundation?

She’s kind of nasty.

Led Zeppelin’s playing through the open patio door.

Mr. Chip’s exhaling great clouds of smoke.

“Let’s go inside,” Toby says.

Vanda understands. She takes his hand and leads him past Bunny up to her own bedroom.

“Use a condom,” Bunny says, slurring as they pass.

Vanda keeps on her bra. She peels the straps and cups down around her stomach.

He breaths around them. He’s gentle as if a touch will break their pact with gravity.  

It’s marvelous.

Yeah!

She bites down on him. Her mouth is vulpine and sharp, then soft.

This time he holds it. He sucks in his stomach and she dips her hands into the dimples in his ass.

And comes up and kisses him, laughing. His mustiness is on her breath. It’s weird.

Her tongue’s clicking around in her mouth. Stud?

“Vanda?”

“Uh-huh?”

“I’ll slip on the condom, yeah?”

It smells like bubblegum and oil.

She opens for him and Toby’s in.

It’s dryish then goopy.

They stir together like mice.

He breeds into the plastic.

Her nipples harden when she comes touching herself.

It feels great resting on her.

Some kid walks in unexpected.

“Your butt’s bleeding, dude,” the kid says, not minding.

She’s gored him.

“Thanks,” he replies.

“You wanna smoke some crack?”

“Hey, get out of my room!” Vanda shouts. “Toby, do something!” She throws a sandal at the kid’s goofy face.

Toby rises with as much naked authority as he can muster. His sword’s bent, hard and threatening, with the shield hanging from it. Toby’s ready for more, a Pleasure if he could ever be one.

“Okay, dude!” he says, closing the door hastily.

Toby feels a little foolish naked with Vanda. But he bows at the altar of her chest and that brief, thief-like feeling dwindles.

Surfacing, he asks, “Vanda, do you or your dad have the tanker schedule?”

He has his board and Brettonwood’s near the port.

His butt really is bleeding from where she scratched him.

“Don’t you want to do it again?” she asks, pushing him down into her. It’s a bit rich at first but she’s trimmed and sweet. She taps his shoulders as he tastes her, too hard and too excited.

Her bed’s stained with a patina of boys, Toby, Claude, Jesse, whoever. She’s a trooper.

“Well?”

He passes to the veiny alabaster of her bottom and the two pink white cords of her lips.

She squeals as they bend together. His thumb slips into her. She pushes back.

He slides over her back and sucks a hard breast. He’s heavy and she’s petite.

“Toby, Toby, Toby,” she says. She curls her back like a cat to touch herself.

He pushes her legs further apart. It sounds and smells like sex.

When it’s over, he can’t stop thinking about the surf report.

“Let’s go to the beach,” he suggests midway.

“Sure,” she says.

Vanda’s drinking Amaretto, what she could grab from the cabinet. Toby rushes the van out of Brettonwood, past the canes and ditches. Claude and Jesse are in back with their boards, wetsuits, and lights. They don’t want to get steamrolled by a tanker in the channel.

The beams rake across an opossum smartly faking on the road’s shoulder and they park.

“He’s a mimic all right,” says Toby.

Jesse pokes him with a stick. “He don’t move.”

“Fucker,” says Claude. “Wish I could play dead.”

Toby should touch base with Noemi. His mother’s probably lost herself boozing with her consular friends again. She’s been sad, erratic and louche since Wyatt left. For once, she doesn’t care about Toby’s grades, meals, clothes, friends or finances, what she always insisted on supervising before. Instead the maid has taken over, feeding him tortillas and ironing his t-shirts on the days she’s there.

He doesn’t feel or look any different, but with Wyatt gone, has he taken the reins? After all he feels a hint of remorse and concern for what’s been happening, even if it’s had real benefits like no curfew and unlimited night miles.

Claude has dipped his hand into the creature’s bald pouch.

“Nasty dude,” says Jesse, reviled.

Toby shakes his head, hearing the warm regard of his father’s voice in the oceanic delay of all the gruesome discoveries of adolescence. Oh sure, he’s gung-ho to be an oilman, too, flying around in bugs over the corpse of the earth.

“She’ll bite you, dude,” Vanda says. “Even an opossum has limits.”

“It’s low tide tonight, right?” asks Jesse.

Motivation’s a cinch.

Galveston Bay is murky green like toothpaste. The light’s still and sharp. Dredgers, yatchts and shrimpers compete out on the water. The marina rocks slightly with the wind and waves at the edge of the shipping channel, past the spits of sand and shifting sandbars.

“Boat’s my uncle’s,” says Claude. “He told me about the long wave.”

“A beaut, dude.” Toby pats the boat’s sparkly fiberglass shell. “So we’re off, yeah?”

“Sure, just help me untie.”

Their surfboards vibrate with the tumble of the waves, the craft rushing over the water towards the long wave possibly starting at Seabrook and breaking to Red Bluff. It might peel along the shoals of a newly dredged section of channel along Atkinson Island or swell at Baffle Point and run along the Bolivar Peninsula. It’s chancy. But Claude knows the incongruities and rewards, so he says.

The tankers anchor offshore in chains. Having come from halfway around the world, the ships must wait for their pilot boat. This is the homestretch. On a good run the pilots can manage seventeen knots. Their propellers can suck anything up into the vortex of their screwing, turning chops.

Toby’s lucky to be here. Jesse and Mathis are the pros.

Deeper in the channel are the terminals and refineries around Deer Park and Baytown, the sky dark and ominous like accidents. Liquid chlorine and LPG spheroids speckle the landscape. Clusters of tankers are bunched together like bombs at the terminals, their liquid cargo emptying into the thirsty refineries along this tendril of water that feeds the oil-brained fortunes of Houston and America. This is where Midas turns dinosaur shit into sapien gold.

“The first few times we didn’t get nothin’,” says Claude, the spray and noise of the outboards blowing into his words.

Vanda attempts to light a cigarette in the salty, moist wind.

“Dude, drive! It’s your boat,” says Jesse. He begins to exchange his t-shirt and shorts for a wetsuit.

Toby jumps into his Rip Curl, too.

“Vanda, wanna use my board?” asks Claude.

“Sure,” she says. “Can I use your springsuit too?” She exhales a violet smoke. She smells like wine coolers.

“This is it!” says Jesse.

Now Toby sees the chest-high swell looming in the water and running along the straightaway—the curled back of a serpent surging forward in loops of foam and slush.

They’ve waxed up. Claude needs to lift the boat over and beyond the wave and deposit everyone ahead of the break. It takes some skill but he manages to drop everyone off and get out of the zone.

The three cubs slide onto their boards and dip into the turgid slimy water. Vanda’s encumbered by Claude’s big suit. It’s quiet for a moment, the air booming with gulls and somewhere a squad of bobbing pelicans.

Toby avoids the polystyrene and tar. He thrashes and paddles to get the wave, the little set rolling off the bow of the skyscraper chugging forward beyond his eyes. He leaps forward onto his board. It’s pliant and agreeable in the water. The wave pushes him along, assured and strong.

Unbelievable. Waves when it’s totally flat! He delivers a laugh at the ship, wishing it would yank its horn.

Claude moves into deeper water. He’s in charge of collecting any wipeouts over the shoals. He drifts for a moment and opens up the caps to his field glasses. He dials in the name on the red bow and the white topsides: Aleutian Key. Claude reads it with all the sense of expectant wildness that surfing in Alaska could entail. He’s careful not to drift too near and threaten the ship. By the glint of glass he knows the sea marshal is monitoring its approach and he mimics the actions of any other pleasure craft.

Vanda and Jesse flank him. His legs are already tired. The wax is softening under his toes. He ululates over the face, pumping and pushing for more speed and lip. He curls under to touch it, stable and sure. He hasn’t surfed this much in his life! Too bad Wyatt doesn’t know what kind of fun he’s missed thanks to his own discoveries offshore.

It’s his song, the song in his voice a thin sensitive shell, and he bawls during the refrain with the panache of a Comanche singing his self and all the people that came to make him. He’s singing through the Big Water and calling Toby down, shaking his great fatty hump. The tears falls from his eyes in ecstasy for what he hears, for the song joins him with this strange artificial natural of a wave, imbued by all the freedoms and opportunities, know-how and maturity to be everything that the world was or is.

He digs his fins deeper, cruises with attitude, the fabric of his muscle rippling like the cloak of sea breaking unexpectedly in the channel over the sandbar. Mullet and other fish flash in the wall of water. He’s kinetic, millions of barrels of energy riding the mushy gumbo that’s the entrance to Houston’s ship channel, petrodollars put to sport, a wet road.

For a moment he doesn’t have to concentrate but can smile at Jesse and Vanda, keeping abreast of the supertanker, each slashing in their stylish way, and Claude in the area, shards of water rebounding off the side of the boat, stuttering like a reed over the abused patch of sea, a toxic, soapy, tarred expanse of salt water in which some forms of life just happen to swim. It’s the home of scavengers and bottom feeders in a chemical sludge pushing against plastic sands. And the most desperate of wave hunters congregate here.

His calves burn and his butt is sore. He can give Claude the signal any time.

The air’s heavy with the emissions and smoke just starting to lift. The sun’s gaining.

They’ll all ride that morning, two hours for the tide to turn and the aberration of the long break to keep flowing.

Everyone’s grinning and getting burnt.

Toby watches that he doesn’t drift into the channel while schoonering Claude’s boat. A tanker could come at any moment, the hull welded onto the hazy sky. Flares litter the channel. A siren booms somewhere among the acres of pipes, valves and hot air.

The earth’s a rancid oxidized goopy red. Underfoot is the home of the oil economy. There are splitters, crackers and the plants to make monomers, polymers and aromatics, facilities for diesel, benzene, napthama and gases. An entire chemical universe is just beyond the sands in the scrub, cement docks poured over blocked up creeks, and well-rehearsed lines of tanker trucks loading danger ninety tons a time. The dark steel forest of pipes pushes against the perimeter.

The refineries freak Toby out. He’s grown up with the privileges of lawns and pools, not this dystopia of vinyl, rubber, steel, fluoride, molasses and waste. At the end of this toxic sliver of waterway, ships are turning in the basin, the spoon of acrid water ending right in front of the shining tusks of downtown, lifting the oil to Houston’s chapped lips.

“We’re all just vapor, ” he can remember Wyatt saying. “It’s the same handshake that clinches the deals.”  Toby recalls his father’s office on a weekend when he’s been invited to dork around in the map room, illuminated with what’s hot and what’s got potential. He pauses to stare at the freeway, a grid even on a weekend. The monument pierces the haze across the channel, the obelisk no more than another derrick, but Houston’s port is invisible through the smog.

Poseidon Oil’s facility in Baytown is one of scores of volatile monsters along the channel. An army of men and women lightly protected with hardhats, goggles, aprons, boots, tools, walkie-talkies and computers supervise the refining of crude and condensates into petrochemicals. They have a clinical regard for the mayhem of their manufacture. As far as they’re concerned oil’s even good to eat.

It’s sick, he thinks, that his Wyatt’s not here. He’d probably like the view.

Toby registers the hands waving for him—he’d better collect his charges.

“Hey, the cooler’s empty, what an oversight,” Jesse says when he pulls himself onto the boat.

“No 7-11 out here,” adds Claude.

He’s got a rash on his feet.

Vanda’s scratching too.

“Not funny,” she says. She yanks off her wetsuit, wrapping a towel around her chest, then reaching for her smokes in the rocking boat.

Claude takes over the controls and shouts.

“Chow time!”

The boat punches across the channel.

But Jesse’s wet and strangely incoherent.

“He’ll burn at both ends if you let him,” says Claude. “Get him back on dry land and he’ll be all right. You high, Jesse?”

“It’s the wave, dude.” His speech is seized and dry.

“Lie down,” says Vanda.

Jesse rests at their feet and the boat carves across the bay. They undress him and have him huddle under their clothes. They shrug, they’re mystified.

“The beach’s that-a-way,” Jesse says obtusely.

They laugh; so much for complaints about flat surf.

Later, Toby parks the van along the road. The wheels nudge into the crab grass.

His mom’s Supra is in the driveway.

The backdoor is locked. Maybe she’s sleeping?

“Mom?” he calls. “Mom, I’m home!”

Nothing. Nada.

It’s not the maid’s day either.

No one’s turned down the AC.

Where the fuck is she?

He looks in her room. Outfits are strewn on the carpet and bed. He finds the wrappers of cigarettes, and oddly condoms, thrown across the dresser. The towels are still wet. The hair dryer and distributor are still hot.

He tries her mobile.

It’s turned off. This time of day she’s probably meeting her lawyer, outlining her grievances.

“Fucking bitch,” he says.

He goes to the fridge and extracts the tuna salad. He toasts a few slices of wheat-berry bread. He switches on the television for company.

Noemi won’t tell him what’s up, but it’s not to challenge at all to deduce his mother’s state of mind from the clues.

She’s gone. Wickedly gone. Like Wyatt.

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