By René Steinke

It was sunny again for the first time in days, and light mirrored off all the wet surfaces. Post-storm, people drove slowly, though traffic was sparse. Here and there fallen branches and toppled road signs lay on either side of the road, but things were getting back to normal. She drove past the empty elementary school, past the ball fields, where a set of bleachers had collapsed. Up ahead, the Mexican restaurant looked intact, but a telephone pole had blown down in front of it, the wire crossed over the white face of the building. A fire engine sirened at the corner, swerved its long red body to the left, and she turned in its wake down Sunrise Drive, past the car dealer’s mansion, and past the high school, where a man stood at the pole, stringing up the flag again. She came to the stoplight, and turned onto the business strip.

At the peaked roof of the Methodist church, the cross tilted like a weather vane. donations here read the hand-lettered sign. She parked in the driveway, took the old quilts and blankets out of her trunk, and walked into the wet grass. A bedraggled man sat at a card table, next to a hodgepodge of furniture and stacks of canned goods. The man’s face was jowly and flushed, and though she didn’t know his name, she recognized him from Rosemont. He’d been a friend of her old neighbor, Sy Turner.

“Here you go,” she said, setting down the blankets.

“I sure do thank you.” He was flipping through the pages of a Bible without looking down, a fidgeting gesture like shuffling a deck of cards.

“I got a family or two could use those about right now.”

“Which neighborhood?”

“Empire Estates.” He shook his head. “Right up against the creek. It’ll be a long time before some of them get to live over there again.”

“Well.” She was afraid he might start reciting Scripture. “Glad to help.” It had been ten years since they’d had to abandon Rosemont; she wasn’t surprised he didn’t remember her, but she didn’t want to remind him either. “You need any furniture?”

“We got folks that need everything.” He opened the Bible, closed his eyes a moment, and pointed at a spot on the page. “Here you go.” He read, “ ‘Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but of God.’ Romans thirteen. That’s yours for the day.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Chosen just for you, no extra charge.”

She got back in the car and drove to the other side of town, marking the damage, the Welcome to Friendswood sign blown down, the roof vanished from the German bakery, gray water flooding the low-lying parking lot of the bank. During the two days of storm, her TV still had reception, so she’d been able to follow the news—the hysterical, windy frames of rain and destruction— and when that exhausted her, she read the old paperbacks she’d had on the shelf, a few sayings of Emerson, and then a biography of Loretta Lynn that took all of her concentration as the wind lashed through the trees. She’d stared at the dark glass in the windowpanes, not fearful—because what could touch her now?—but waiting, as the body of the world thrashed around her.

Inside McCall Hardware, it was crowded, and the line at the register was long, people holding boxes of nails, aluminum siding, hammers, and sump pumps. On a low shelf next to a stack of orange gardening gloves, she found a good hand shovel with a pointed tip, and went to pay. In line in front of her, there was Doc, fit and buoyant, his face cheerfully smudged with a day’s growth of beard. “Glad to see you all in one piece.”

“Told you I was.” He’d called her seven times during the storm, worried about her alone in her house.

“Well, now I can believe it,” he said. When Jack left her, Doc had offered her the job at the office and became her protector, though he had his own wife and son. “You know a worm is the only animal that can’t fall down.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not a worm. But I’m alright. I just lost the shed out back.”

“Alright then. Us? We’ve got to pull up carpeting.” He held up a flat, razored tool. “When we got up this morning, there were all these dead little frogs in the living room, but that’s about it. We’re lucky.”

The man at the counter started shouting at someone behind them. “You looking for a dehumidifier? We’re all out. Try a box fan. Got more of those than you can shake a stick at.”

“Listen,” Doc said. “Take the week off. We’re going to have a heap of cancellations anyway.”

She’d actually been looking forward to work, to the escape from the swirl of her own thoughts. “Are you sure?”

Doc’s eyes had melancholy circles under them. “Absolutely.” He patted her shoulder, went to pay at the counter, and waved good-bye. She was glad he didn’t ask about the shovel.

So close to the coast, they were used to hurricanes, but this had been one of the worst. Where Crystal Creek had run over the road, she was afraid the highway might be shut down, but it was open again, at least as far as the exit. She turned onto the dirt road, her car pitching over craters, and saw that the big oak tree had snapped in half, the naked interior of the trunk left jagged and pale, its leafy branches sprawled out along the ground. Before the Rosemont houses had been torn down, there were men monitoring the site all the time, and even for a year or two after that. Now it was just Lee, the unofficial guardian, filling up empty, sterilized jelly jars with dirt.

As she got closer, Tubb Gully was swollen all the way to the road’s shoulder, and brown water lapped at the wheels of her car. Farther on, even a half mile from Banes Field, rotting wooden signs with weathered paint were posted along the chain-link fence: contaminants danger and no trespassing.

She’d already trespassed a dozen times in broad daylight. The last time she’d been chased off the property by a speeding white truck. Taft Properties—and the city—didn’t want her taking soil samples from Banes Field, but Professor Samuels said that after so many days of rain and the rise in the water table, there was a good chance the soil would show a tip in the toxin readings, and that was reason enough to try.

The fifty-eight acres were divided by Tubb Gully, weeds and the old equipment on one side, overgrown woods on the other, where, along with the batting cage and dugouts of a Little League field, there were still a few abandoned homes left standing. Lee kept to this unwooded side of Tubb Gully, closer to where they’d buried the chemicals years ago in a number of truck-sized vinyl containers, no better than giant Tupperware, really.

When she came to the hole in the locked gate, she parked the car. She grabbed the new shovel, the canvas bag with the camera, glass jars, and a map of Banes Field. She got out of the car and went to the gate, which was chained, but only loosely. She squeezed her frame through the opening where the end of the fence bent back, her breasts and hips just grazing the rusted metal as she pushed through. Inside, the field was muddy, the weeds pounded flat. The white tank stood about a half mile away, surrounded by freestanding pistons and pipes.

That day years ago, when she’d first seen the oily sludge come up out of the grass, she’d thought it was a snake. She’d rushed inside the house, found Jess doing homework at the table. “Don’t go outside,” she’d said.

“Stay here.”

Today the ground was so soft that her boots weighed down with mud, and she had to slow her pace. Clouds rushed overhead. Closer to the warehouse, there was a thin gasoline smell, and the mud had an oily, purple sheen.

The dull exterior of the warehouse was spray-painted tex in orange and jay loves ruby in black, the walkway along the edge glittering with broken green glass. Nothing was inside, but they’d left it standing, some secret business still fuming, and the white truck that chased her the last time had seemed to come from the back of the building. She stopped at the tank, a rusted cylinder thirty yards around, patched in places with green mold. A squirrel ran up the ladder on one side. A few black birds perched at the curve of the top, looking out.

Somewhere nearby, a dog was barking. She went on, pulling her feet up high to get through deeper mud, her boots and the hems of her jeans caked in it. Finally, she came to the slope where the weeds grew up to her shoulders. She pressed through the stalks and leaves to another chain-link fence, this one cut open. As she made her way through the loose wire tines, they tore a hole in her shirt. She jumped down the incline.

About a hundred more yards through dandelions and spear weeds, the remnants of old Rosemont splayed across the land and into the trees, all the ruins of her old neighborhood, knitted into the foliage. Bits of cement lay across the weeds and brush beneath orphaned telephone poles and lampposts.

She followed the rain gutter that had once run alongside Crest Street. A dingy fire hydrant squatted in a patch of yellow wildflowers, a streetlight hooked over a wild-haired bush, and farther on, ten yards of old asphalt ran through the weeds. She spotted the shell of an ancient air conditioner with a bird’s nest on top of it, and a rusted metal rectangle on the ground that claimed no parking beyond this point. She stepped off the asphalt back into the mud.

A decade ago, just before they’d razed most of the houses—a leftover sign sat in Fred Borden’s yard: for sale, 2‑2‑2, with 45 plus known toxic chemicals at no extra charge. A security guard trolled the empty streets in a golf cart, windows mostly boarded up, doors padlocked shut.

Now, at the edge of the woods where Autumn Street would have been, a square steel frame clung to cement, what was left of someone’s house, and an ancient garage freezer tilted against a tree, its door swung open. This used to be her block.

On one of her early visits back here, inside a piece of door and marking the crumbled remains of her own house, she’d found the clover brass knocker. What else was left: a stump of brick chimney attached to a slab of concrete, three small stone steps that had once led to the front door. But nearly each time she came back, she found a different artifact in the ruins—an old beer bottle, a plastic lawn elf, a chair.

She stepped up through the red thorns and down again into the weeds of the entryway, past the living room of grass and cinder block, and then she stood in her kitchen, where yellow weeds with sticky flowers clung to her jeans. She looked out where there used to be a window. The air had a kind of empty commotion. Over where the laundry room had been, she noticed a few birds, grayer than the old pipe where they’d landed, pecking at the cement. She felt the old upstairs ghosted above her, the bed where she’d slept with Jack, and Jess’s bedroom, with its window overlooking the street.

In front of her, the oak tree she’d planted for Jess when she was a baby was strangely still alive, perfectly shaped like one you’d see drawn in bright colors in a children’s book, its leaves lush and healthy. Jess as a toddler used to walk around its base, saying, “Hear those birds?”

She’d let Jess and her friends run all over that field, even as far as the warehouse when they were older. Cows would sometimes wander over—the grass yellow and dry in summer and winter, only green in the spring— where Jess found odd bits of pipe, fluorescent-colored scraps of rubber, tiny pink pebbles the size of coarsely grained salt, which she brought home with her in her pockets.

Jess would say, “I’m heading out, Mom,” and she’d run, barefoot, through the door. That ugly field had seemed benign for so many years, fooling everyone with its open space and common weeds, its sorry-looking stooped trees.

She hadn’t eaten since morning and felt weak, but the sun was lowering over the trees now, and there wasn’t much time. As she made her way to the other side of Banes Field, the ground slid beneath her steps. The dog was still barking, though it didn’t seem to have come any closer. She went through the first gate and down the slope that led to the land Taft Properties had bought.

It was now marked out for construction with small wooden survey stakes topped with orange plastic flags. They stood out against the brown grass like bright artificial goldfish. Unbelievable. He didn’t even have a permit yet, and the land had already been surveyed. Taft claimed that this area didn’t have the same limitations as the land beneath Rosemont, but even Lee knew that soil fifty feet underground had subterranean movement. The chemicals could still leach to the surface over here.

She pulled out the jars and the shovel from her bag, bent down, cleared a section of weeds away, dug a shallow hole, and filled the jar with soil. Twenty feet in the other direction, she bent down, dug a hole about eight inches deep, and filled another jar. The mud was deeper in parts of this section, and some of the survey stakes had toppled. She went on working, all around her the wet, dead grass, the chaotic bushes, the past pressing down from the sky.

There was a voice she heard in her head, sometimes with Jack’s intonations, sometimes with Jess’s. “Time to leave.” She wanted to get a sample near a bald spot in the middle of the gray weeds. A wasp droned close to her, and she flung her hand to hit it away, but it got close to her face, buzzed against her cheek, then looped and stitched back. Wincing, she flicked her hand again and stumbled. The wasp flew off.

Then she saw the thing about twenty yards away, as big as the bed of a pickup truck. The gray corner angled up from the mud beneath a sick-looking sapling. Was it some lost bit of cement? She went closer, her boots smacking in the muck as the dull shape clarified itself. One flat side of it had wrestled up into the air, the other side still sunk into the ground. A giant, filthy, gray vinyl box. The top of it was charred with a bright pink and brown stain, and a crack jiggered its way down the middle, where a copper liquid leaked out in a thin, jagged stream. Her heart punched in her chest. Back in January, Professor Samuels had said this could happen, though it had seemed so unlikely then. “You get enough rain, it shifts the water table—it can pop a container right up.”

And there it was. For years, the container had been safe down there, but now the land had excreted it, the way coffins sometimes came back up in a flood. Her head filled with pressure. In the distance, the pine trees seemed to lean forward. She smelled something acidic and bitter, benzene fumes or worse, and covered her nose and mouth with one hand as she took the camera from her bag with the other. The light was already going, but she’d get the picture somehow. She pressed the button to open the lens.

This was the thing she’d been waiting for, but didn’t know how to name, the thing that would redeem her. Over the woods, the sun, a bright orange candy set on fire, dangled. She snapped the photographs. The dog barked again. She took twenty-two pictures of the upturned container. Then she ran.

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René Steinke is the author of the novels The Fires and Holy Skirts, which was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award,  She is the Director of the MFA program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Reprinted from Friendswood by René Steinke by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, Copyright © 2014 by René Steinke.