Shallow Creek (2 page)

Chapter 3

Dinner was a grand affair featuring too much food for too few people.  Brendan wondered if his mother hadn’t bothered asking anyone over, or if she had made the calls and no one cared to show up.  Either way, she’d never admit to either one, so he just chewed his green beans and sliced off another piece of ham.  The woman couldn’t bake to save her life, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t cook up a storm in a hurry.

As the three of them quietly plowed through mountains of food, Brendan realized that this wasn’t even weird. 
Most of the family dinners during his formative years had passed in this laconic manner.  Nothing short of an upcoming high school playoff game could distract his dad from shoveling away his dinner, and his mom was too shallow to engage in any conversation that might’ve actually mattered.  So instead, they would sit in silence, enjoying each other’s physical presence, but not much else.

Unfortunately, the scene didn’t suit Brendan anymore.  Chow was a time to talk and to discuss, to joke and to bullshit. 
With that in mind, he strode into dangerous waters right off the bat.

“How’s Taryn doing?” he asked
before forking a piece of ham into his mouth.  His sister was five years older than him, and he hadn’t really seen much of her in the years before he’d skipped town, never mind the last decade.

His mom pensively looked to his father, who glared at him with his fork frozen halfway to his mouth.  The seconds ticked by and his mom started fidgeting with her food, pushing it around her plate and avoiding Brendan’s
questioning gaze.  His dad broke eye contact and resumed eating as if nothing had transpired.  Well, technically nothing
had
transpired, and that was really the problem.  Brendan watched his mother until she finally looked up with a feeble smile.

“Taryn moved out a few years ago,” she said.

“Karen—”

“She moved in with her boyfriend,” she said, ignoring her husband.  She was visibly unhappy with this living situation, and Brendan knew why.  His parents liked to believe that everyone should stick to what they called traditional values: No beer before twenty-one and no sex before marriage
.  They drilled that mantra into Brendan’s head all through high school, but it hadn’t really helped.  He could’ve probably avoided a lot of trouble if he’d heeded their sage advice.

“So who’s he?  Anyone I know?”

“His name is Serge,” his mother replied evenly.

“Damn WOP,” his dad grunted.

Brendan smiled at his dad’s racism, and not in an approving way.

“So he’s what? 
Eastern European or something?”

“Something like that,” his mom said, a little unsure. 
She’d have a difficult time pointing out Europe on a map, so the eastern side was probably beyond the scope of her radar.  “We don’t see her much.”

After high school, Taryn had developed a habit of sneaking out and shacking up with a couple of different guys after any number of drag-out fights with their parents.  Brendan could only assume a huge
, cataclysmic bust-up had driven her off into the arms of Serge, whoever the hell he was.  Must’ve been a pretty good fight if she’d stayed gone for years, although maybe she’d just grown up and gotten sick of living under the burden of their parents’ narrow view on life.

“The Shallow Creek pie-eating contest is coming up fast,” his mother declared cheerily out of the blue.  Did he have the heart to tell her he didn’t even like— “You should definitely enter, Brendan.”

Before he could say anything, his mother disappeared into the kitchen.  His dad looked up from his empty plate with fire in his eyes.  “Don’t bring up your sister in this house again.”

Brendan stared his dad down, but relented.  This was his
father’s house, not his.  “Yes, sir.”

His dad probed his face for any hint of
sarcasm or deceit, but finding none, snorted gruffly.  Brendan’s mom flew into the dining room a moment later, wielding a large knife and a freshly baked pie.  She squeezed it into the small amount of real estate left on the table and started cutting without another word.  Brendan tried not to wince as her knife revealed syrupy piles of cherries inside the pie shell.  There was only one thing he hated more than pie, and those little red bastards were it.  Of course, Grant loved them, so this shouldn’t have been a surprising revelation.

His mother switched out his
dinner plate with the one covered in everything he hated in the world of cuisine.  When he hadn’t taken a single bite by the time she returned from stacking all the dirty plates in the kitchen, she reprimanded him playfully.  “Come on, hun.  You’ll need the practice if you’re going to win that contest again.”

It took every ounce of his being to smile and not point out that she’d once again confused him with his older brother, but even then, he couldn’t remember Grant winning the whole thing.  His brother wasn’t exactly his favorite person in the world, so it wasn’t hard to believe he’d forgotten such an illustrious achievement as winning the Shallow Creek Pie-Eating Contest.  Hopefully he wouldn’t have a chance to run into Grant and ask him.

The spoon moved painfully slowly, scooping up the red goop that he knew would taste like crap.  He fought to keep the mild smile on his face to appease his mother’s blatant anticipation of the flurry of compliments sure to fly her way.  Brendan noticed a smirk on his dad’s face.

Years of military food had suppressed Brendan’s gag reflex to a certain point, but apparently
it hadn’t quite killed the natural response to inedible objects.  As he chewed the pie and its sugary filling, he resisted the urge to spit it all right back onto the plate.

“Good, right?” his mother asked, grinning like a fox in a hen house.

Mouth still struggling to purge the cherries, Brendan smiled big and swallowed the lot of it whole.  As bad as that was, he realized he had about twelve more shovels worth of the stuff to force down before he could escape this hellish dinner.  His mother’s demeanor took on a whole new look with this validation from her son.  She smiled a lot and caught him up on years’ worth of gossip he couldn’t have cared less about, but he played the role of the good son.  Slowly, but surely, he worked his way through the enormous piece of pie, and then chugged a glass of water upon completion.

Instinctively, his mom started cutting another piece.

“No, Mom,” he blurted out.  When she turned to him with a mixture of surprise and disappointment, he added, “I’d hate to eat it all now when we can save some for later.”

His dad smiled, but not kindly.  His mother insisted she could make more, but Brendan refused politely on the grounds that he
would burst open if he consumed another bite.  She nodded reluctantly and started cleaning up.  Brendan’s dad stood and sauntered back towards the general direction of the television, so Brendan went to help his mom.

“Hun, get out of my kitchen,” she
said when he tried to assist her.

“Just trying to help.”

“Well, I’ve done this long enough that I don’t need any help.”  She swatted him on the backside with a small towel. “Now, get!”

Chapter 4

The ceiling fan whipped around in a blur, creating an ethereal whirlwind in the little illumination granted by starlight coming through the blinds.
  As a kid, the fans provided the only relief from the Texas heat.  In his absence, Brendan’s parents had finally upgraded to central air conditioning, a luxury never considered within the realm of possibility ten years ago.  The A/C wouldn’t run hard in late October, but in this part of the country the temperatures could stay uncomfortable all the way through Thanksgiving.

And
uncomfortable
accurately described the surprise reunion with his parents.

Now Brendan lay in his brother’s old room, staring at a ceiling fan, still seething towards his dad’s tacitur
n reaction to seeing his youngest son for the first time in nine years.  Shit, he’d forgotten how much civilian life could piss him off so quickly.  At every turn there was some stupid little thing ready to pounce and send his blood pressure through the damn roof.  If his dad’s pissy behavior wasn’t enough, when Brendan had suggested taking his stuff to his old room, his mother had hesitated before revealing she’d cleared it out for her antiques.

What the hell?  It’s not like he’d died.  They probably emptied his room before the stink of his old gym clothes had even dissipated.  To make matters worse, the only other free bed in
the house was Grant’s old one.

Brendan shot up and sat on the edge of the bed, staring back at the sheets on the mattress.  Grant had probably screwed Michelle on this bed more than once.

Great.

Brendan ripped the top sheet off the bed and padded
down the stairs and through the living room to the old couch he’d crashed out on many times in high school after watching TV into the wee hours of the morning.  As his eyelids drooped, threatening sleep, a final thought tried to needle him: Grant probably banged Michelle on the couch, too.

Whatever.  This was his couch.

But try as he might, he couldn’t drift off peacefully.  After rolling around unsuccessfully to find a comfortable position on the lumpy sofa, he sat up and rested his chin on his hands.  There wasn’t really much to see in the light of day, so in the dark of night the living room looked stark.  A couch, a recliner, an extra chair, a TV, and a couple of small tables.  Not much, but he supposed there didn’t need to be anything else.  He’d always liked his parents’ house, and other people’s homes looked cluttered with shit by comparison.  His dad’s stubborn interior design preferences probably kept the decorating minimal, and despite all the problems he had with his father, Brendan could definitely agree on that point.  Walls didn’t need to be covered in pictures and paintings; they just had to hold the roof up.

Since sleep wasn’t on the immediate horizon, Brendan reached over and clicked on the lamp sitting on the end table.  As he drew his hand back, his eyes caught sight of a framed picture he hadn’t seen in years.  He picked it up and tried to remember ever seeing this one framed.  Maybe after all that happened in high school, his parents didn’t really have many pictures of their two sons together.

This one featured a third youth with him and Grant: Marcus Armstead.  Six months older than Brendan and two years younger than Grant, the likeable kid had befriended both of the Rhodes brothers.  In this picture, they each wore Coyote football uniforms and held their helmets at their sides.  Brendan smiled.  Man, had they really been that scrawny?

But then the smile faded.  This picture must’ve been taken at the start of his freshman year, when his brother was going into his senior season. 
He carefully put the picture back on the table, facedown.

Despite the futility in searching for sleep
, Brendan reached over and turned off the light before lying back down on the couch.  His breathing slowed down as he forced himself to relax.  He’d slept in harsher conditions before, but all this family stuff really messed with his head.  Instead of getting more pissed off, he tried to focus on something else.

Marcus probably still lived in town.  Brendan hadn’t
really tried to keep in contact with the guy, which was kind of chicken-shit after all Marcus had done while they went to school together.  Hell, Marcus had been more of a brother to him than Grant ever was.

He’d call Marcus in the morning.  Tomorrow was Monday and the guy would probably be at work, doing whatever he did
for work, but Brendan would figure out how to find him.  Shallow Creek wasn’t a big place, so it shouldn’t prove too tough.  Plus, it would give him a reason to get out of the house.

Hell, he’d sign up to clean those famously nasty toilets at the high school gym if it meant he could get out and avoid another piece of that cherry pie.  His stomach growled at the thought as he finally faded to sleep.

Chapter 5

Rudy Johnstone Park.  The local hero had lived philanthropically enough to get a park named after him, but that was about it.  Few people in Shallow Creek could probably tell why the guy was important, despite the small bronze placards all over the park explaining just that.

The
place looking pretty much as Brendan remembered it: a few baseball fields, a couple of play-areas, and a four-hundred-meter running track.  Nothing to write home about, but functional enough.  From Brendan’s perch on a metal bench next to the track, he could see someone had redone its surface fairly recently.  It would be nice to train on a relatively spongy surface, as opposed to the concrete his knees typically protested against.

By this time in the morning, the sun had started to creep slowly across a cloudless sky, keeping the temperature perfect for a run.  Brendan
had risen an hour before the sun, though.  His mom had almost screamed in surprise to find him in kitchen at six in the morning, cooking up some eggs and bacon in her favorite skillet.  She’d bustled him out of the way, gently telling him he was doing it wrong, but she’d seemed happy enough.  His dad had appeared shortly thereafter, passing comment on how Brendan used to never get up before noon as a kid.

A lot had changed since then.

After breakfast he’d looked in his phone and found a number for Marcus Armstead.  Apparently he’d had some selective blindness over the years, always glancing past that entry in his meager phonebook.  With nothing to lose, he’d called the number and caught his old friend on the way out the door, heading for a run at the park.  After the immediate invite was passed along, Brendan had raced through his stuff searching for running shoes and some shorts.  Shortly after, he was here sitting on the bench, waiting for Marcus.

Brendan liked to be early for things.  He
preferred to sit and observe and to gather any extra intel he could before a scheduled event.  Typically he didn’t care if other people were late; that was the status quo these days.  But in this case, Marcus had invited
him
out here, saying he was already on the way.

So where was he?

While he sat and soaked in the sights, two thirty-something women arrived and took to the track at a pretty slow pace.  Normally Brendan would judge people who ran so slowly, but from the looks of things, the relaxed pace was doing wonders for these ladies.  He smiled and nodded to the pair as they passed him, and they returned the favor, albeit a bit hesitantly.  A lone guy sitting on a bench watching the park probably didn’t look so innocent.

Damn it, where was Marcus?

“Hey, Brendan!”

Brendan turned to find Marcus jogging up on him from behind.

“You could’ve told me you were running here, man,” Brendan said as he approached to shake his friend’s hand.

Marcus took his hand, but quickly turned it into a brief brotherly
hug.

“Wife’s car wouldn’t start, and she had to get to the store real quick, so she borrowed my truck.”

The two men walked onto the track before upping the speed to a fast jog.

“Wife, huh?” Brendan asked, spotting the pair of ladies rounding the next curve of the track.

“Yeah.”

“When did that happen?”

“When I got her pregnant,” Marcus replied with a big smile.

Brendan processed this while his legs pass
ed through the initial stages of loosening up.  Shortly they’d settle into a zone where the effort to propel himself at this pace was almost none.

“Was that recently?”

“Nah.  My boy, Jeremiah, is five now.”

“Awesome.
” They swiftly bypassed the only other two occupants of the track.  It was cool that such old buds could get back together and chat without things being all weird.  “Do I know the lucky lady?”

“Maybe,” Marcus said easily, not showing the worse for wear considering he’d already run some distance to get to the park.  “You remember Trudy Reid?  Kind of petite, dark hair.”

“Yeah, I do.  She was a looker in high school.”

“Still is, thankfully.  Could be worse.”

“But could be better?”  The question even took him by surprise.  He hadn’t had a conversation like this in years.  Normally talking to anyone about personal crap was awkward and uncomfortable.

“Eh, you know how it goes,” Marcus said.  After a pause, he added, “Getting pregnant wasn’t exactly part of the plan for either of us, but we got a great kid out of it, so we’ll be fine.”

“Sure, sure.”

Their strides had subconsciously synchronized, Brendan noticed as they ran on in silence.  The rhythm of his breathing melded with that of his feet to create a mind-clearing atmosphere in his head.

“Did you end up going to college?” Brendan asked.

“Nah, man.  I tore up my ACL on a training day and the scouts never looked my way again.”

“Oh, that sucks.  I figured you’d make it as a wide-out.”

“I did, too, but that’s not what life had for me,” Marcus said, sounding very confident in the explanation.  “When I got my legs back under me, I signed up with the Army.  Did my four years and got out.”

By the way Marcus glanced expectantly over at him, Brendan knew his friend had heard he’d served in the Marines.  The guy was probably waiting for some derogatory comments about how Army pukes Ain’t Ready to be Marines Yet, or some equally immature insult.  Brendan hated disappointing people.

“I guess that’s all you could be.”

Marcus shot him a sideways glance before cracking up.

“How can you tell when a leatherneck had alphabet soup for dinner?” Marcus asked.

Brendan rolled his eyes. “Because his lips are still moving.”

The jokes went back and forth, keeping to the lighter side of the potential insults.  When they ran out of ammo, they continued on in silence, passing the two ladies on the track a few more times.

“What did you do in the Army?” Brendan asked Marcus as they cruised past the starting line for the umpteenth time.

“
2
nd
Battalion, 14
th
Infantry Regiment,” Marcus replied proudly.  “That’s ‘light infantry’ to you bullet-catchers,” he added.  “What about you?”

“Force Reconnaissance Company, 1
st
Reconnaissance Battalion.”

“
Force Recon?  That’s some heavy shit, man,” Marcus said.  “Heard you boys did a lot of good out in Sandland.”

“Everyone
does their part.”

“Yeah, sure,
but some do more than others.”

“What do you do for work now?” Brendan asked
, changing the subject.

“I’m a deputy sheriff
.”

“Dale Troy still the sheriff around here?”

“You know it.”  Apparently Marcus didn’t think too highly of his boss.  “You looking for work?”

“Nah, I’m good for now.  Thanks, though.”

“We got an opening.”

The way Marcus said the words implied the previous holder of that position didn’t leave voluntarily.

“Someone die?”

“Yeah, some methed-
out losers shot old Charlie Davies when he found the trailer they were cooking in.  We got one of them since he used a gun with his name engraved along the barrel.  Those guys ain’t usually bright.  He was a stubborn ass, though.  Didn’t give up anyone else, and I know for damn sure he wasn’t working alone.  Not an idiot like that.”

“Lot of drug problems around here now?” Brendan asked.

“Yeah, but mostly that’s the DEA’s problem.  We’re not supposed to intervene.”

Brendan suddenly increased the pace and Marcus kept up, so Brendan pushed harder again, testing his friend.  Marcus pulled ahead on the curve, so Brendan pumped his legs as hard as humanly possible,
barely keeping up now.  They tore down the straight, blowing right past to the two women who’d stopped to stretch.  Brendan didn’t even have time for much more than a passing glance at their butts as they flew by.

The finish line loomed ahead, but Brendan couldn’t even bribe his legs to go any faster as his friend stayed a few steps ahead.  The line shot under his feet and the two men slowed to a casual jog.

“Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children just can’t keep up, huh?” Marcus joked, sweat pouring down his face.

“Yeah, yeah,” Brendan muttered, putting his hands on his knees.
  “Guess I owe you a beer.”

“Sounds good, man.
” Marcus peeked at his watch.  “Oh crap, I’m going to be late for my shift.”  He edged onto the grass and called back, “Call me about that drink, bro.  It’s good to have you back.”

Brendan nodded and waved his friend off. 
He turned back to the track and found himself all alone.  He’d only taken a few strides before someone zipped up behind him.

“Mind if I join you?”

He couldn’t know if his expression betrayed the homicidal self-defense instincts battling for use, but the pretty lady’s smile didn’t falter, so he guessed not.  He recognized her as one of the pair that had shared the track with them before.

“
Sure.  What happened to your friend?”

The lady used her head to motion back towards the parking lot.  “Sarah had to get going, but I felt like going for one more lap.”

“Cool.”

After a few more strides, she piped up again.  “I’m Casey, by the way.”

“Brendan.”

“Nice to meet you, Brendan.
” She had a nice, genuine smile.  She’d pulled her strawberry blonde hair back in a tight ponytail, and it bobbed rhythmically with her steady gait.  Brendan gave her another quick once-over and guessed that this tall, athletic woman was not the reason for the pair’s slow pace earlier.

“You don’t sound like you’re from around here
.”

“I’m not,” she said.  “Indianapolis.”

“Long way from home.”

“Yeah, and I’ve only been here a few weeks,” Casey said.  “I haven’t really met many people yet, so I figured I’d come say hello to you.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t take you long to meet every person in this town.”

She laughed a little, not even remotely out of breath from her run with her friend.  “It’s a really nice place,” she said, eying Brendan.  “I could get used to it here.”

He let that one slide and continued on as they rounded the corner nearest to the parking lot.  They slowed down together, but Brendan assumed Casey would’ve followed him for another lap or two if he’d wanted.  He would’ve been lying if he said he wasn’t at least tempted.  Her gym shorts didn’t leave much of her legs up to the imagination, and his certainly didn’t need much assistance.

They exchanged meaningless small talk on the way to her truck.  At least she had that part right.  No self-respecting resident of Shallow Creek drove anything other than a pickup truck.  Well, maybe some owned a Trans Am as a weekend car.  No one would judge that choice inappropriate.

“This is me,” Casey announced as she opened her door.  “It was nice meeting you.”

“You, too.”

Awkward smiles in an awkward silence lasted for a couple of seconds before Brendan broke it off.  “Have a good day.”

“You, too.
” She climbed into her truck, allowing him one last glance before she shut the door.

Brendan gave a slight wave as she drove off.  As Casey disappeared down the street, he guessed it was about time he hit the road, too. 
Then he remembered that he’d just been beaten in a race by a guy who got out of the Army five years ago.  With no more than a sigh, Brendan turned and jogged back onto the track.