Текст книги "House of Sand and Fog"

Автор книги: Andre Dubus

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Later, Frank led everyone out of the house to the driveway and the shiny red Bonneville. There was a wide white ribbon running from the front bumper over the roof and into the trunk. And somebody had taped to the driver’s window a huge card both families had signed, though I knew the car was from Frank, a low-mileage sales bonus he usually took for himself but this year gave to us. One of the uncles videotaped us climbing inside, then backing out for a test drive. We didn’t want a big American car, though; we were planning to buy something small. But on the drive west we kept it on cruise control the whole way and steered with two fingers. When we weren’t talking, we stretched out and played cassettes till one of us needed to crawl into the backseat and lie on the maroon upholstery with a pillow and blanket and go to sleep.

I got up off the motel bed and washed my face with cold water and soap in the bathroom. I had cried more in the last eight months than in the rest of my life and I had to stop it because it seemed like the more I cried the less I did to change things, or to even avoid the shit coming at me. My new lawyer couldn’t quite understand that, why I threw away all that mail from the county tax office without opening it. I liked her right away, I think because she wasn’t wearing any shoes, just round glasses, a white blouse, and gray slacks over bare feet. She poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down a chair away from me with her legal pad and pencil. She asked me to tell her everything, which I did, including that I already went to the county tax office in Redwood City and signed a statement saying we’d never run a business from our house, so why the five-hundred-thirty-dollar business tax?

“Five hundred dollars? They evicted you from your house for that?”

“You got it.” I lit a cigarette, enjoying my lawyer’s shock at this. She asked where my husband and I were staying, and I looked down at the table, at a worm of a cigarette burn. “He’s not in the picture anymore.” I reached for a seashell ashtray. “I’m booked in a motel in San Bruno.”

She paused a second and made a straight line with her lips like she was sorry to hear that. Then she asked me a bunch of questions about my inherited ownership. Was there a devise in my father’s will? Was it completely paid for? Who was the bank? Do you have a copy of your signed statement to the county tax office? That’s what she wanted more than anything, and I said I could get one to her, though I had no idea where it was. After all her questions she stood and took off her glasses and smiled. “First thing we have to do is keep them from selling your home. Then we get it back. And they can pay your motel bill, too.” She checked the form I’d filled out to make sure she had my room number, then she shook my hand and said not to worry, call her tomorrow late afternoon.

I turned on the TV and sat at the foot of the bed, but still there was only sound, a commercial for a diet drink. I heard a woman laugh out in the parking lot, and I wondered if this truck stop was like some back East: cold beer and live music in the bar, hot steak and eggs in the diner, hookers for the rooms upstairs. I sat there and listened to the beginning of some TV show about cops and DAs and the streets of New York City. Outside my window was the twangy beat of another country band playing next door, and for the fortieth time since last January I looked at the telephone and tried not to call someone back home.

For a long time my mother would call every Sunday afternoon to catch us up on things, but really to see how wewere. The first few Sundays after Nick left, when I answered the phone and heard her voice, I had to hold my hand to my mouth sometimes to keep from crying. But then I’d start lying about how well he was doing at his new job. I told her how his office was on the seventeenth floor of an earthquake-proof building overlooking San Francisco, and that he was making good money and would probably get promoted in no time. This used to be true.

Sometimes she would want to talk to him and I’d say he was taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him up, or else he was working (she never liked hearing that, not on a Sunday), or he was playing basketball with some guys from his office. She seemed to like hearing that the most, that Nick was out making friends and doing something healthy.

“What about you, K? Have you made new friends, too?”

“Yeah,” I’d say. “I get together with some of the wives and we shop and, you know, do things like that.” There’d be silence on her end. “And there’s one girl, Ma. She’s my age and kind of overweight. She lives nearby and we go jogging together four nights a week.”

That helped, a lie about making friends and taking care of myself. As soon as she seemed satisfied with my news, she’d go on about Frank and my nephews, their house, her thinning hair, the gambling trip to Atlantic City her two sisters were planning. But behind all this talk was the question she‘d never ask: have you been going to those recovery groups out there, K? And that was one lie I couldn’t pull off, anyway. So instead she would finish her calls by asking me the other true question stuck inside her like something she could only ease out by hearing me finally give the right answer:

“When do you think you two will have children, K?”

And for once in our calls I could tell the truth: “As soon as I can talk Nick into it, Mom.” Which was true when Nicky still lived with me. Saying this long after he’d been gone though, my voice sounded hollow.

ONLY THREE YEARS ago we were both into our second week at the program, and we had the same double dose—coke and alcohol—but the day before in Group, Nick had owned up to a third, porno. A lot of us couldn’t accept this as a real addiction, but Larry told us to pipe down and “hear” Nick. That wasn’t hard for me to do because even then, Nick’s body still coming off the ten-day binge of lines and beer and Southern Comfort that got him into an emergency room then the program, his fingers always trembling while he smoked, I couldn’t not look at him, at those hard blue eyes, at his thick black hair and pale face with pimple scars on the cheeks. His arms and legs were skinny, and he had a belly that showed more when he sat down, but all I ever wanted to do from the start was to feel my whole wasted body up against Nicky Lazaro’s.

Whenever he talked he threw me because his voice was so deep and didn’t go with his boy-look, and also, he spoke well, like he was educated or else read a lot of books. He said it was always worse when he was trying to stay straight, that instead of drinking or doing lines he’d be doing dirty movies. Sometimes he even called in sick at work and he’d rent a half-dozen hard-core tapes and spend hours and hours with them.

“Hours?”I said, and I started to laugh, though I felt pretty disgusted. Larry cut me off and said how “inappropriate” remarks like that were in Group. I looked at Nick. He was studying the burning cigarette in his hand like he wasn’t part of this conversation at all. Then he glanced at me, his eyes dark and a little shiny, and my cheeks got hot and I had to look away.

On visitors’ day, while I was waiting for my brother and his wife, I kept watching Nick on the other side of the room sitting straight across from his parents, who reminded me of my own, though Dad was dead and Ma couldn’t face seeing me anymore. Sometimes he’d glance in my direction and I’d look away. All around us were visiting families in plastic chairs around fold-out tables, some of them hardly looking into each other’s eyes, others loud, telling stories and jokes like they were relieved everything had only come to this, a Get Well helium balloon floating in the haze of cigarette smoke above them.

But I felt grateful just to be sitting there. In the two weeks I’d been at the program, the lining inside my nostrils had already stopped bleeding, I hadn’t drunk anything stronger than coffee, and the only stranger I would wake up to was me. But more than that, I had already stopped wanting what I’d been craving off and on since I was fifteen, for Death to come take me the way the wind does a dried leaf out on its limb.

 

Q UITE EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, AS I LIE SLEEPING UPON THE CARPETnear the open sliding screen, my son touches my shoulder and wakes me to a glass of hot tea and four cubes of sugar. Outdoors, in the trees below us, a bird calls, but the sky is gray and the air through the screen is cool.

“Bawbaw-jahn. Man goh khordam. I am sorry.”

My son is already dressed in shorts and T-shirt, his hair dry, but combed. I sit up and take the tea and drink it without sugar. I look through the screen at the small concrete terrace outside, and I hear my Esmail sit upon the carpet beside me.

“I know you work very hard, Bawbaw. All the days and almost all the nights of the week.”

I look at my son, at his brown eyes that on a woman would be beautiful, and in Farsi I thank him for his apology and for the tea, and I tell to him he must begin preparing his room for moving.

Today, on the freeway crew of garbage soldiers, we work the southbound lanes of Route 101 where it runs along the tall evergreen trees of the Golden Gate Recreational Area. I wear my new blue hat all the day long but of course the morning fog never lifts and I wish for a light sweater. At the lunch break I eat quickly beside Tran, then rise to speak with Torez as he sits behind the wheel of his truck, the door open very wide, as he studies one of those odd crossword grids in the newspaper. I stand there a moment until it becomes clear to me I am standing at attention. I discipline myself to relax my shoulders and speak.

“After today I will no longer be working here, Mr. Torez.”

He completes writing a word with his pencil, then he looks up and says: “You tell the office, Coronel?”

“No.”

“So why tell me, man?” He regards his newspaper. “You know another word for hurricane?”

I return to Tran and my tea and I have a wish to tell the Vietnamese goodbye, but when I point to my chest then to the road, he smiles and nods his head as if I were telling to him a very old and humorous story.

And now it is evening at the convenience store and my legs are heavy, my eyes are beginning to water from fatigue, but I am filled with cheer as I work my very last shift. Rico, the young man working beside me, has always possessed the habit of chewing gum which on other evenings bothered me a great deal—that nasty sound it makes in the mouth—but tonight this is not the case; none of the usual irritants have their power over me, not the bright fluorescent lighting over all the shelves of overpriced boxed and canned food; not the university students who enter with their stupid smiles after drinking too much beer to purchase chocolate bars and cigarettes; not even when people hand to me a gasoline credit card and I have to use the cumbersome machine beneath the magazine display rack; and even those kaseef and dirty magazines of naked women on their covers, which I have always despised having to touch or sell, even they cannot upset me as they have so many times before. Because this I know of life’s difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.

But many nights after many long days in America, I have forgotten God and thought only of my troubles, of the manner of jobs I was forced to work here, jobs I would not have assigned a soldier under me back in my old life. Here I have worked in a tomato cannery, an auto wash, a furniture warehouse, a parking lot, two gasoline stations, and finally the highway department and this convenience store. Yes, I have earned enough to slow our spending, but each check cashed felt to me like one less bone and muscle in my back, those a man needs in order to stand straight.

My young colleague and I close the store promptly at one in the morning. We lock the evening’s receipts into the small safe in the rear office, and we post our inventory sheet for the day gentleman before removing our paychecks from the coin drawer of the register. We lock the doors and walk beneath the light over the gasoline pumps to our vehicles, and to the young man I only say, “Good night, Rico,” nothing more, and as I drive my Buick Regal down San Pablo Avenue beneath the streetlights so early in the morning, my body feels sewn into the car seat with tiredness, but I nod five times to the east and thank God, my mouth beginning to tremble, for the freedom He has granted me once again, for the return of the dignity I was beginning to believe I would never recover.

 

F RIDAY WAS THE BEST AND WORST DAY SO FAR. IT WAS BEST BECAUSEI worked it straight through, cleaning my normal residential plus the reservoir house job and the pediatric office I’d skipped the day before. There was a fog bank pushing in from the beaches and on another day it could’ve sent me over the edge, the way it covers the town in gray, but Friday I just tuned it out and cleaned with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

My customers leave me a key in their mailbox or under a rock on their lawn, which means no one is ever there except for a dog or cat, and I can work alone and fast, chewing gum and listening to the Walkman I keep clipped to my shorts; Nick’s old tapes mostly, loud fast rock that keeps me moving at a good pace and keeps me from thinking too much. When I woke up early Friday morning at the El Rancho, I made up my mind I was going to stop wallowing in my problem and start concentrating on the solution instead. I had to turn it over to Connie Walsh. She wasmy lawyer. By the time I was dressed, I’d convinced myself I’d hear something positive by the end of the day about getting my house back. So instead of booking my room through the weekend, I went down to the office and paid another thirty-one dollars for Friday night only.

I got back to the motel just before the end-of-the-work-week traffic heated up on the freeways. My arms, legs, and lower back were tired out, and my sweat had dried three times on my skin, but before I took a shower I called Legal Aid and Gary had me wait on the line almost five minutes before Connie Walsh picked it up: “I’m sorry, Kathy, but evidently the county has already sold your house.”

I stood still and took short, dry breaths. “What? How?”

“The auction date’s been set for months, Kathy; that was in the mail you’ve been throwing away.” I pictured my mother’s round face, her eyes dark and flat-looking. I heard my brother Frank, who told me and Nick the house was ours as far as he was concerned; he might want his half in twenty years, but hey K, One Day at a Time, right? Then I felt the tears come, my stomach twisting up. “Those mother fuckers.”

“Can you get that to me Monday morning, Kathy?”

“What?”

“Your copy of the tax statement. Hopefully I’ll have their paperwork by then, and we can go from there, all right?”

Connie Walsh was quiet on the other end. I wiped my nose and asked her what she was planning to do.

“Just what I said, Kathy. We’ll demand they rescind the sale or we file a lawsuit against the county.” She said not to worry too much, then reminded me to get that paperwork to her Monday morning.

I spent the first part of the night in the steel storage shed across the street looking for the signed tax statement from the county. But it was already too dark to see much, and I didn’t have a flashlight, so I drove to a convenience store on the other side of the freeway to get one. The streets were fogged in and the air was wet and too cool for shorts. Back in the shed I found one of Nick’s old sweatshirts and pulled it on. It was black-and-white with the logo of a band he used to play bass for years ago. It was clean so didn’t smell like him, but I could still picture him in it, lying on the couch while he read a paperback with the TV or radio on, sometimes both. That was always how he read.

After over an hour going through my boxes and bags, my neck stiff from holding the butt of the flashlight between my chin and chest so I could use both hands, I almost gave up when I remembered my trunk. I pulled two full trash bags off it, then lifted the heavy wooden lid. Inside were things I hadn’t even looked at since moving west: old clothes and shoes, towels and blankets, a dozen rock albums from high school—mainly the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers, but no paperwork.

“Hello?”

I screamed and swung around and dropped the flashlight. A man picked it up and shined it in his face. It was shadowed and I stepped back, but then recognized the crooked mustache. Deputy Sheriff Burdon smiled, then handed me the flashlight, and I took a breath and let it out. “Shit, don’t dothat.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well you did.”I put the pictures back in the trunk, then stepped out of the shed and padlocked it, squeezing the flashlight between my ribs and elbow. My heart was still beating fast, and it was completely dark now. Fog hovered in the lot and street. In the light from the security lamps over the sheds I could see Lester Burdon was wearing jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker.

“Did you get hold of Legal Aid?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I turned off the flashlight and began to walk across the lot. My bare legs felt cold, my nipples were hard against my shirt, I didn’t know how I felt about him being here. “You working under-cover or something?”

“Excuse me?” He looked down at his sneakers. “Oh, no, I’m off. I just—I drive by this way. I thought I’d check in on you, see how you’re holding up.”

He sounded like he meant it, and he seemed even softer than the day before when he’d led those men in kicking me out of my house. When we got to his car, a Toyota station wagon parked at the edge of the lot near the chain-link fence, I kind of hoped he’d keep talking; Connie Walsh was the first person I’d had a real conversation with in over eight months, and that was more of an interrogation than a talk. I wanted one, even with a sheriff’s deputy in the fog. He was looking across the street past the motel to all the tractor trailers parked behind the truck stop. I could hear the bass drum of the country band through the walls, cars moving over the freeway bridge down the block. He looked back at me, his face all somber. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, or something?”

“That’d be all right.” I told him I had to put on something warmer first. He waited in his car in the motel lot and I changed into the same clothes I’d worn to Legal Aid. I rubbed deodorant under my arms and ran some eyeliner under my bottom lashes.

We both agreed the truck stop would be too loud, so we ended up at a Carl Jr.’s a mile past the freeway on the outskirts of San Bruno. The place was brightly lit and smelled like fried chicken and potatoes. I hadn’t eaten and my stomach felt hollow, but I didn’t want to order food and change the offer of drinking coffee together into something else. We sat at a table by the window. Deputy Burdon had taken off his jacket and was wearing a striped golf shirt. His arms were tan, and the gold of his wedding band stood out bright against his skin. His mustache was as crooked as it had been the day before, his dark eyes a little moist. I had to be looking at the most serious man I’d ever met.

Our coffee came. I added Sweet’n Low to mine but he sipped his black, his eyes on me. On the ride over he’d asked me if Legal Aid had a lawyer for me yet and I told him yeah, then Connie Walsh’s news about the county already auctioning off the house. Now he looked down at the tabletop and shook his head. “Boy, they don’t fool around, do they?”

“It’s not hard to rescind these things, though, is it? That’s my lawyer’s plan.” I felt shaky at his reaction. I lifted my coffee cup, but then put it back down; I felt a little sick to my stomach. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of my mouth.

“I really don’t know much about that, Mrs. Lazaro.”

“Kathy. Nicolo’s my maiden name.”

“It suits you.” His eyes stayed on mine a second, then he glanced out the window. I wanted to ask if he had any kids; I wanted to know that, but I didn’t ask and took a drag of my cigarette.

“Anyway, we never should have been charged a tax at all, and I only own half the house in the first place. My lawyer’s confident, though, so I’m trying not to harp on the negative.”

“Your husband hold the rest?”

“My brother. He doesn’t know about any of this yet. No one does.”

The waitress came by and topped off our coffee. Lester Burdon smiled at her, but sadly, I thought, like he knew something about her that wasn’t good. His face changed when he saw me studying him and he sipped his coffee.

“Do you have any kids, Mr. Burdon?”

“Two.” He put his cup down and folded his elbows on the table. His eyes were on mine again, but this time he didn’t look away and neither did I. I wasn’t used to being looked at so closely, to being seen.

“My husband left me eight months ago. No one back home knows that either.”

“You always keep so many secrets?”

“Just when I have to.”

He kept his brown eyes on me, and I looked away to stub out my cigarette.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.” He nodded once, the way cops do.

IT WAS A short and strange ride back to the motel. Neither of us talked and the fog still moved slowly through the streets. The lights over the diesel pumps at the truck stop looked misted at the edges, so did the blue and red neon beer signs in the bar window, and across the lot the tall yellow letters of the El Rancho Motel over the office, all dulled and spread out a little.

He pulled into the lot and I put my hand on the door handle. “I want to go back to my house, but I’d have to break a window just to get in there.”

He touched four fingers to my knee, lifting them just as quick, but they left a warmth in my leg that loosened something in me all the way to my diaphragm.

“Do you mind if I give you some professional advice?”

“I guess not.”

“Keep your head and do it all through your lawyer, Kathy. If I were you, I wouldn’t even drive up there until the keys were back in my hand.”

He looked dark-eyed and somber again and I didn’t want to get out of his car, but I didn’t want to stay either. “Thanks for stopping by.”

He looked at me with his handsome face and crooked mustache and I got out and closed the door, watching his little station wagon turn up the foggy street, its taillights vanishing in no time.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY all the coast towns were fogged in. I spent the weekend in my room smoking and reading magazines, watching my own color TV I’d pulled from the storage shed. When I got hungry I went out for fast food. Late Sunday night I drove under the freeway to go buy cigarettes and a Snickers Bar and when I got back, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw Lester Burdon’s car pull away from the curb across the street, its small foreign engine straining to shift gears.