Текст книги "House of Sand and Fog"

Автор книги: Andre Dubus

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

 

S AN BRUNO WAS UNDER THE SUN, BUT THE STREETS OF CORONA AREin a fog from the beach, a cool mist whose presence has convinced me to nap as soon as I return to the bungalow. I did not rest well last evening upon the sofa, and I of course was up with the morning birds to wake Esmail for his new newspaper route, so I felt sleep coming for me even as I purchased necessary items at the hardware store; glue for Nadi’s table, three new property for sale signs on wooden stakes, and a long iron wrecking bar. It is a useful tool to own and I believe because of this fact I was able to purchase it without thinking of it as a weapon.

At the base of Bisgrove Street, I halt the auto in front of the utility post I attached my notice to last evening and I use the wrecking bar to drive into the ground one of my new signs. I tell to myself I must return to draw an arrow upon it, one that points up the hill towards the bungalow, but this I will do after resting. Simply the effort of swinging the iron over my head has fatigued me further, and as I drive up the hill I am hoping—for this moment—that my wife is still in her room with her melancholy music and her self-pity, that Esmail has taken the BART train to visit his skateboarding friends in Berkeley, that I may lie upon the carpet in my office to sleep until I am rested. But Nadereh is not in her bedroom. She is outdoors, standing upon the step speaking with a woman whose back is to the road. The woman wears short pants and the bright blue T-shirt of a tourist, but I recognize her red automobile parked beside the woodland and I accelerate and swing my Buick loudly into the driveway. Both women turn their eyes to me, their faces masks, as if I have caught them openly discussing a precious secret. I stop the car so abruptly it rocks once forwards and backwards but my feet are already upon the ground as I approach my wife and this gendeh, this whore. Nadi says loudly, “Nakon,Behrani, don’t.”But I have put both hands upon Kathy Nicolo, squeezing her arms, pushing her back across the lawn, her face heavy with cheap cosmetics, her lips parted to speak. She attempts to pull away, and my voice comes through my teeth: “Do you think you can frighten me? Do you think you can frighten me with that stupid deputy?Coming here and telling lies?”I shake her, the hair falling into her face. We are nearly in the street and Nadi screams behind me to leave the girl alone, velashkon!But I shake the woman again, squeezing her bare arms with all my strength, pushing her backward. “Who do you think I am? Tell me that. Am I stupid? Do you think I am stupid?”

The woman is crying quietly, as if she cannot get enough air to breathe, her brown hair across her face. I want to break her, I want to push her against her automobile. Nadi’s screaming grows louder, and I hear her running into the street behind me, but I do not stop. I pull open the car door, and push the crying gendeh onto the driver’s seat. She bumps the back of her head upon the roof, and just after she pulls inside her bare leg I slam shut the door and lean into the window, my face only one or two centimeters from hers. I am breathing with difficulty. “In my country, you would not be worthy to raise your eyes to me. You are nothing. Nothing.”

Nadi begins screaming at my back, screaming in Farsi that I am a beast, leave her alone, velashkon!But my wife’s yelling is no louder than the blood in my head. I order the whore to ignite her engine and never return. “And you tell to your friend his superior officers know everything. You tell to him that.” I grasp the whore’s chin and force her to view me directly. There is fear in the moisture of her eyes, and Nadi begins to hit my back with her small fists but they are no more than the flap of a bird’s wings. “You tell to him that. This is our home. Ourhome.”

The gendeh pulls her head away, engages the gearshift, and speeds her auto to the top of the hill. She maneuvers around, and I push Nadi back as the woman passes closely by. She is looking directly ahead, both hands upon the steering wheel, a strand of her long hair sticking upon her face. My wife has become quiet. I hear only her breathing, and mine as well.

 

M Y UPPER ARMS WERE BRUISED, THE BACK OF MY HEAD STUNG, ANDI was so angry I started to cry, and I kept on in ragged spurts all the way through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge, through Sausalito and Marin City, past signs for Mill Valley, Corte Madera, and Larkspur. At Route 580, up in the hills, I could see the sandstone walls of San Quentin prison, just the beginning of a guard tower, and I cut east onto the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. San Pablo Bay lay stretched out under me in the sun. There were dozens of white sails, and the glare hurt my eyes. I wiped the stolen eyeliner off my cheeks, avoided looking in the mirror, and the bridge seemed to go on for miles.

In El Cerrito I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a box of tissues. I wanted bottled water too but didn’t see any with the soft drinks, and I didn’t want to ask, so I bought an ice cream sandwich. I knew I looked bad, but the Asian woman behind the counter was nice enough not to keep her eyes on my face. On the way back to the Bonneville I passed a pay phone bolted into the side of the building and before I knew it I was calling my brother Frank collect at his car dealership in Revere. It was almost one here, four o’clock there. Frank’s partner Rudy Capolupo answered, his voice always low and wheezy, like he was being forced to talk with someone stepping on his throat. He asked the operator to repeat my name twice, then he paused and accepted the charges.

“Sorry to call collect, Rudy.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll take it out of Frank’s wallet at lunch. Hey, how’s sunny California anyways? I might retire out there, you know. Marina Del Rey. You been down there yet?” Without waiting for my answer, he said: “Hold on, sweets, your brother will want to talk to you.”

It took a while for Frank to come to the phone. My hands shook as I opened the ice cream sandwich and took a bite. But I could hardly taste it and when it got to my empty stomach it was too cold and almost hurt. A bright purple jacked-up Chevy Malibu pulled up to the 7-Eleven. Three Chicano boys were inside. The driver went into the store, but the other two, both in flannel shirts buttoned up to their necks, one in a tight hair net, gave me the look from head to toe. I wanted to ask them what they thought they were staring at. Did they want their teeth kicked down their throat? But then Frank’s voice came on the line, and I turned my back to the boys and slouched over the phone.

“K?Is that you?” He sounded so much like himself, his voice deep and peppy, the Saugus accent stronger than ever, that I started crying even before I could talk. I dropped my ice cream, covered my mouth, and twisted the receiver away from my face.

“Kath?”

“Wait.” I pulled out a tissue and blew my nose, then got a fresh one, wiped under my eyes, and took a deep, shaky breath. “It’s me, Franky. I’m sorry.”

He said it was okay, no problem, but his voice wasn’t peppy anymore.

“What’s wrong, K? Is everything all right? Nick all right?”

I ran my finger over a number scratched into the phone. I began to turn from side to side.

“Kath?”

“Nick’s gone, Frank.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“He left.”

My brother was quiet a second. I pictured him standing in his office in a monogrammed dress shirt, Hugo Boss pants, Johnston & Murphy shoes, a bright pastel tie, his hand on his hip.

“When, K?” Now his voice sounded testy, and I heard everything in it: my whole life, his opinion of it, his opinion of my marriage, which he really thought was doomed from the beginning. And now I knew Nick hadn’t gone back home either, or else Frank would’ve heard.

“A while ago.”

“Did he take the Pontiac?”

“No he didn’t take the Pontiac.Christ, is that all you careabout, Frank? The fucking caryou gave us?”

“Hey, calm down, it was just a question.” My brother blew his breath out into the phone. I could picture him shaking his head and I wished I hadn’t called.

He was quiet a few seconds, then said: “Is this why you haven’t been calling Ma, K?”

His tone was gentle now, but why did he have to ask me this? “Yeah, that’s why. Frank, listen. I just—” The tears came with no warning. I saw again the colonel’s raging face as he pushed me across the yard, his breath bad, like meat left out in the sun, his eyes wide and brown, the whites yellowed as he spit his words at me and pushed me farther and farther away from my house, mine and Frank’s. “Frank?”

“K?”

“Yeah?”

“You still, you know, dope-free?”

“Please don’t talk to me like this, Frank.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a fuckup.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Lookit, just come home. The hell with Lazaro. Come back East, K.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?

“I have a business.”

“Cleaning?”

“Yeah.” I blew my nose. He was quiet again, just long enough for me to imagine him rolling his eyes to himself.

“You can do that anywhere, K. Listen, Ma and the aunts are flying out there Labor Day weekend. They want to stay at the house anyway, so why don’t you let ’em help you pack? If you want, I’ll even fly out with them and drive back with you. Jeannie won’t mind. How’s that sound? You and me driving coast-to-coast together? By the time we get back to Mass., you’ll be ready to start out with a brand-new sheet.” He was about to say more, but then I heard Rudy grunt from a few feet away that Frank was going to blow a sale if he didn’t get back out on the floor. “Kath, I gotta go. Think about it. I’ll call you later.”

I wasn’t even mad anymore; I didn’t feel anything really, just dried up and hollow, like I’d run out of something important. “Frank?”

“Yeah?”

I was past telling him about the house, past asking for any real help from him, but I could ask him this: “You can’t call me, I’m going on a trip. I planned it a long time ago and I’m having some friends watch the house while I’m gone. Could you tell Ma that? Apologize for me? Tell her if I’d known earlier, I—”

“Okay, Kath, anything to help. Look, I gotta go. Chin up, hon. Call me.”

I held on to the receiver until the dial tone came and listened to it awhile before I hung up. That old dark feeling started to open up inside me, like I was in the basement of a house I couldn’t escape. I knew my brother would tell Jeannie about me and Nick, that she would tell my mother and then everyone would know the truth, that Kathy Nicolo hasn’t changed; two steps forward and four steps back, and I knew as soon as I heard my brother’s voice I couldn’t tell him about Dad’s house anyway. Not Frank, always looking out for himself first, keeping his clothes clean and his hair parted straight, only at his best when your problems don’t have anything to do with him at all, when he can sit back in his expensive clothes at the lunch he’s buying you and give cool, practical advice, show how much he believes in you by giving you and your new husband a brand-new Bonneville to drive west.

As I walked around to my car door, the purple Malibu was backing away from the curb. One of the Chicano boys leaned his face out the window, looked at my crotch, and slowly licked his upper lip. I acted like I didn’t see him, but when I got inside the Bonneville I locked the door, started the engine, and waited for them to drive on to San Pablo. Then I lit a cigarette and drove south. The day had gotten brighter, but cooler, and I could smell rusted freighter. On the Eastshore Freeway I passed the huge parking lot of the Golden Gate Fields Race Track, and there was the long span of Oakland Bay Bridge a few miles ahead, the hazy green of Yerba Buena Island at its halfway point, a gray ship there, a place Nick and I had pointed out to each other on maps when we first got here. I thought about driving south to Millbrae, just cruise around the housing complex near the mall till I found Lester’s car parked in front of his family’s house. But then what? Sit there and wait for his kids to come home from school? Watch Les and his wife step outside to greet them? I remembered what the colonel had said about Les, that his superior officers know everything. I wondered if I should try and contact him, warn him, but I didn’t know how I could do that without somehow making things worse, having his wife answer the phone or the door if I ever found his house in the first place.

I had the slow-blood sick feeling you get with a hangover that plans to last all day, that, and hunger pains, my stomach all tight with everything. I drove to the Mission District, parked on a street lined with palm trees, and walked two blocks in the sunshine past adobe apartment buildings to the Café Amaro and Connie Walsh’s office above. Gary stood behind his desk on the phone. He was wearing a black-and-white Les MisérablesT-shirt tucked into his jeans, his belly hanging slightly over his braided belt. The conference-room door was open, and there was no one else in the waiting area. I had a feeling Connie Walsh wasn’t in either. Her receptionist hung up and put his hands on his hips. “Well look who the kitty dragged in.”

I didn’t know if I wanted to kick a hole in the wall or curl up in a ball in my chair. I asked if Connie was here and he said no, she wasn’t, she’s at court. “But she’s tried to get ahold of you at your motel. She needs to know if she should begin proceedings against the county for you. My God, what happened to your arms?”

I lifted my elbow and looked at my right upper arm, then my left. They were already darkening to a light shade of purple. I looked back up at Gary, at his warm green eyes, the real caring in his face. “Look, I’m not at a motel, I can’t afforda motel, and I don’t want to sue the county, all right? I just want my fucking house back.” I moved to his desk, took a pencil from a coffee mug, and started writing my PO box number on one of the pink memo pads next to his phone. “If Connie can come up with something new she can write to me. Otherwise, there’s nothing else to talk about.”

I walked back down the dark stairwell to the café, and I should’ve felt guilty about talking like that to my lawyer’s secretary, but it had felt good to let go at someone, anyone.I stood in the café, not knowing if I wanted to eat something or not, but on the sound system was that meditative New Age music, this very steady rising and falling of computerized notes that had all the rhythm of the respirator beside my father’s hospital bed just before he died.

In Millbrae, I took the exit off the Camino Real and bypassed the mall’s parking lot, all those cars baking in the sun, and I cruised through the housing developments with names like Hunter’s Arch, Palomino Meadows, and Eureka Fields as slowly as a cop or a child molester, hating California houses, so flat and one-story, stucco and wood, so many pink or peach. Most of them had a short driveway leading to a carport, a basketball hoop nailed just under its green fiberglass roof. Inside on the smooth-looking concrete were beach balls, and plastic bats, and dog-chewed Frisbees. As I continued driving slowly by, I tried to remember the ages of Lester’s kids, but I couldn’t. Some of the houses were shaded by eucalyptus trees, their thin gray bark peeling like a molting insect’s. Other homes were completely exposed with small flower gardens on each side of their front doors. I passed one stucco house the color of a banana and saw a tanned blond woman in shorts and a tank top lying out in the sun in a lawn chair. Her legs glistened with baby oil and her nails were painted bright pink. There was a Toyota in the driveway, heat flashing through my stomach, but I could see it wasn’t Lester’s, and I kept driving, wondering more than ever now what his wife looked like, what they were saying to each other right now. Were they making love one last time, the way people sometimes did at the end? And wasit the end? I wasn’t so sure, and I was surprised at how resentful I felt. I wondered again if I should try and warn him he might be in trouble at work, but that’s not why I’d be calling him, and I knew it.

I lit a cigarette and continued driving slowly down one quiet winding street to the next, looking out at all this family life from behind Nicky Lazaro’s aviator sunglasses, my stomach as tight and hot as stretched rubber about to break.

I GUESS I’D planned to get through the rest of the afternoon with a double feature at the Cineplex, but once I got inside the terra-cotta-tiled mall, standing in line with other people who could afford to see a movie in the middle of a weekday—kids out of school for the summer, retired old ladies straining to read the marquee—I stepped away, shaking my head like a crazy woman, the kind you see in the city talking to the air, feeding invisible birds.

My stomach hurt. In front of the theater was a granite wishing fountain and a pool full of pocket change. On the other side was a Mexican restaurant from a chain you only see on the West Coast, and I went in and sat at a blue-tiled table at the window, heard myself order a guacamole salad and a drink, a strawberry margarita. I could’ve asked for a virgin, but I didn’t.

My order came right away, but the sight of the avocado cream spooned over lettuce made me feel queasy and I pushed it away and drank from the margarita, which was cold and sweet. Over the restaurant’s stereo speakers came a fast salsa beat behind six or seven guitars. I could already feel the tequila in the blood of my face. I ordered another, my sluggishness from last night’s beer replaced by a liquid lightness, and I smoked a cigarette and sipped my cool strawberry heat. I watched people go by in the main corridor of the mall, but I wasn’t really seeing them, just their movement, their endless stroll to buy things. A man caught my eye, thin and blond, holding his little girl’s hand while a baby slept in a sling across his chest. They walked right by the window, the girl trailing her fingers across the glass, her young father smiling at something she was saying. But they didn’t look in and I drew deep on my cigarette and put it out before all the smoke had even filled me with what I knew, that Lester would not leave his family, he would stay with his wife, stay in his own desperation to spare his kids any. This was suddenly so clear to me I wondered if I’d really known it all along; Les wasn’t the kind to turn his back on what was expected of him just because he was unhappy. Every two or three years he might have a week-long fling with someone like me, a street woman he’d meet through his job, but that was as close as he’d get to chucking the whole thing. I knew this. He might not yet. But I did. He might come back tonight, but if he did, he’d be full of family pain and resolve. He’d take me out for a memorable dinner date, or maybe cook me something, then make love to me like a man taking in oxygen before he goes on a long underwater trip. He’d pack his car and in the morning be gone, only to find out at work that his time with me would cost him even more than he thought.

My waitress came, asked if my salad was all right, and I said, no, it wasn’t: “It’s too green.”She was young, short and chunky with shoulder-length blond hair. And she looked like she was about to explain to me that guacamole has avocados in it which are green, but I cut her off and asked for another drink, thinking as she left with my salad that she’sgreen, she’s new to the world and it’s going to eat her. It eats everyone. I thought I was going to cry. I refused to. With my third margarita, she brought the check, a sign, I knew, for me not to bother ordering another one. I didn’t like getting the message like that. I sipped my drink, as iced and fruity as the first two, licking the rim, turning the glass till all the salt was gone, swallowing it, telling myself I wouldn’t be at the fish camp when he did come. The music stopped. I could hear the tink of someone’s silverware, the opening of the kitchen door. My face felt as soft as a clay doll’s. I wanted one more drink, but I knew it was no use to try and get another, that mall restaurants have three-drink ceilings for their customers because they think drunk people shoplift more or don’t shop enough or scare away real customers. Knowing this didn’t take away what I felt as I left my child waitress a good tip and stepped out into the main mall, looking for another restaurant, feeling watched, monitored.

The place was loud with voices, the ring of cash registers, different kinds of music coming from each shop—like it’s all a test to see how much you can take—teenage girls talking and giggling in twos and threes, their hair high, their nails flashing. I passed some in front of a CD shop and one of them glanced at me, then turned back to the huddle of her friends.

I stopped and stood still, my face warm. Other shoppers walked around me as I watched these girls, waited for any of them to look at me again, try and say something cute or even make a face. They were all copies of each other: they wore jeans three sizes too big, pastel Gap T-shirts tucked in loose or tight—to either show off their breasts or hide them—tacky leather pocketbooks over one shoulder, loose bracelets jangling on their wrists, their makeup too heavy. They all chewed gum, talking at once, oblivious to the thirty-six-year-old woman watching them, wanting, for a day anyway—no, for just this minute—to be them again, though I never had been in the first place. Not really. Not a girl with girlfriends. Now, twenty years later, I could be their mother. But I wasn’t anyone’s mother, or wife. I wasn’t a real girlfriend to anybody, or a friend; I was barely a sister, and whenever I thought of myself as a daughter my body felt too small and filthy to live in.

At the far end of the mall I wandered into an upscale pizzeria, sat in the back, and ordered a glass of white wine because they sold only that and beer. The lunch rush was over and just a few tables were taken up. The ceilings were low and the walls were covered with fake antiques: mirrors set in leather ox yokes, green-glass kerosene lamps, yellowed newsprint photos of strongmen, and wood carvings of Indians. It was quiet back here, dim and cool, no music, just the sound of the busboy still clearing the table. I smoked my cigarette, drank from my wine, and pretended to study the menu. When the waiter came for my order I smiled up at him, careful not to smile too hard, and tried to say very clearly, concentrating on not mumbling my words, “I don’t see anything I want. I’ll have another chardonnay, please.”

He took my order and menu without a word. I must’ve just sat there a little while because when he came back with my second glass of wine and a basket of sliced Italian bread I went to put out my last cigarette and saw it was a long ash on a filter between my fingers. I took a tight, ladylike sip of my new wine. I started to butter the bread I knew I wouldn’t eat. My head and face felt blended, one the other, this second evaporating into my skull and hair and today might as well be yesterday when I was a girl, nine or ten, and every Saturday my father would take me with him on his rounds to deliver linens to restaurants and butcher shops and nursing homes up and down old Route 1, me in the passenger seat of his brown van, him smoking a Garcia y Vega cigar, the radio tuned to a baseball game or to a station playing music from when he was younger, but to me he had always been old, a small quiet man with thick glasses and thin lips, his hands always busy, and mine too, the two of us pressing clean linens on the electric roller we had in the basement, me on a stool at the feed end of the rollers, Dad sitting at the catch end because he could fold faster and better than me and he’d taught me how to use the knee lever that would open the hot rollers so I could slide in the first tablecloth or apron or napkin, but after doing that he didn’t want me to use the lever again, didn’t want to have to slow down to set in each piece of linen, taught me instead to take the corners of the next piece and with my thumbs and forefingers hold it to the corners of the last piece being pulled slowly through so one rolled straight into the other and we worked “like Henry Ford,” and I kept burning my fingertips as I fed one piece of linen in after the next, but he seemed so content sitting on the other end of the roller from me, quiet but maybe proud he had such a useful daughter, that I never told him about my fingers because they seemed beside the point to me, and they always felt better when he’d buy me a cold Coke at one of the restaurants after and I’d put my fingers into the ice.

My wine was almost gone. My head and body were pulsing, and I lit a cigarette, held the lighted match close to my face, studied its flame, the blue and green sulfur colors at the base as it spread down the cardboard shaft. I watched it reach my fingertips, bumping up against flesh that wouldn’t burn, and I didn’t feel much and dropped it smoking onto the table, saw myself dropping one in the dry shrubs around my father’s house, the flames rising up to the windows. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. I saw my house burning to the ground, the flames eating everything inside, the Persian carpets and fancy furniture, the pictures of the bearded horsemen on the wall, the colonel and the Shah, even their family portrait, the fire so hot the glass would blacken and shatter and the beautiful daughter would curl up into a fine ash. But then I thought of Mrs. Bahroony, the weeping little Arab woman and her love of the Italian people, her ability to be at the same party as Sophia Loren; I didn’t want to hurt her,just everything she owned. I would have to find a way to get her out of the house before I burned it, the son too. A diversion maybe. A fire in the front yard. The bands in my stomach vibrated with this thought and I felt tickled by it, ready to laugh.

Soon, I was walking through all that bright noise into Sears, down the clean wide aisles past brand-new power tools and fishing gear, lawn mowers and lounge chairs, air filters and finally gasoline cans. I seemed to watch them from a distance, like I’d just been dropped off somewhere to run an errand for someone and I forgot what it was. There was a stack of them, five-gallon and made of tin, painted bright red with yellow stripes. They were beautiful in a way, and I thought how nice it must be for other people’s husbands to buy these, to fill them with gas for their lawn mowers on a Saturday morning. I thought of Lester’s house at Eureka Fields, the one I never found. Did he cut it himself? Was that part of his family life? Next to the gas cans were shelves of charcoal lighter and bags of charcoal. Should I buy some for the hibachi in the trunk? But after tonight, if even then, I knew the fish camp would be a memory, and so then what would I do? Spend months parking my car in rest areas, barbecuing my supper, looking for a safe place to sleep till Connie had settled the lawsuit with the county? Months? I picked up a gas can. It was light in my hand, only a reminder of what heavy could be.

The kid behind the counter asked if I needed a funnel.

“Nope,” I said, no longer caring if I sounded loaded or not. “Just a book of matches.”

And he smiled, this skinny-necked nineteen-year-old, like he knew firsthand the sort of problems solutions like this required, and out in the parking lot I carried my new gas can and saw the weather had changed to one of those West Coast fogs moving in from the beach, the sky gray, the air cooler, smelling like wet metal, though the cars were dry and the trunk lid of my Bonneville was still hot from sitting in the sun. I felt it against my palm as I steadied myself to unlock it, my gas can at my feet like a loyal dog, my face feeling strange, stuck in a smile that came from deep inside me. I was having a hard time sliding the key in. Cars were coming and going throughout the parking lot. I could hear the squeak of shopping-cart wheels over asphalt, somebody’s child crying far away. The trunk lock clicked, I stooped for the can, and there in my trunk next to Nick’s hibachi was Lester’s coiled black leather belt, the fine checks in the grip of his gun, the worn black of its holster, and it was like being eleven again, walking into my brother’s room for a pencil or pen, pulling open drawers and finding a color magazine of women sucking off men, when all the tiny currents open in you and they feel like evil and opportunity all at once, temptation and salvation, the cause and the cure, touch it, pick it up, take it away with you.

And so I did.

In one fluid motion I put the gas can in and pulled the coiled leather snake out, kept it tucked under my arm as I unlocked my door, rested it on the seat beside me, what Lester left behind before we went into the truck-stop bar for our last dance, his sheriffness, his sword, like a gift he’d willed me, a piece of him to carry and remember him by. I thought of us making love on the banks of the Purisima, him pulling out of me and coming all over my stomach, hedging his bets. I thought how a man’s dried come smells like dead shrimp, how I’d never even shot a gun before, just held one, a small one my first husband owned for about a month when the white snake wriggled through us and in the fluorescent light of the bathroom he had me hold it loaded, point it at my reflection in the mirror.

I drove north on the Camino Real, the King’s Highway. I reached over and rested my hand on the gun, felt its steel indifference. I kept my fingers on it as I drove the two miles to San Bruno, passing ugly housing developments on each side of the freeway, their hot top lanes broken up by an occasional grove of eucalyptus trees that looked olive in the gray light of the beach fog. I pushed in the Tom Petty cassette and turned him up almost all the way, turned into a mini-mall, placing the gun and holster on the floor, locking the Bonneville and walking into a package store next to a hair salon. I bought three Bacardi nips and two Diet Cokes, a pack of spearmint gum. Back in the car, I didn’t remember who had sold me these things—a man? A woman? I parked in the far corner of the lot near a row of manzanita brush, dumped half of one soda out the window, poured in two of the nips, sipped pure Caribbean heat, smoking, listening to Tom Petty on the cassette player but keeping it low, not wanting to draw any attention to myself, feeling like a cop in a parked cruiser, looking out the window at cars, people going in and out of stores. I was waiting for something to happen.