The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  Art, Liza, and Glenn smiled in a family portrait against a woodland backdrop, Art’s campaign photo. The headline didn’t have the large print of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, but it was eye-catching. Chilling, to put it better. Surreal. Myles could only imagine how it looked to people in Sacajawea County sitting down casually to read their morning paper over ham and eggs. People who had seen Art and his family at church on Sunday.

  The sky was drizzling. Myles was tempted to call Luisah and ask her if he could come by, since she got up by six-thirty each morning to do yoga. He had a change of clothes at her place, and she was only ten minutes away. But what was he going to tell her? That the day after they decided they should cool off for a while, he’d spent the night in a hotel room with another woman? He hadn’t lied to Luisah in all this time, and there was no reason to hurt her more with the truth.

  He had to go home.

  The rainy sky was still pink in the cloud-breaks over the expanse of the river as Myles’s Saturn rounded a curve on State Route Four, driving west toward Sacajawea. He kneaded the cramp in his neck with one hand while steering with the other, and his car crept slightly toward the oncoming lane. The huge grill of an eastbound logging truck appeared around the bend, and the truck shook his car when it passed, too close. The suddenness of the truck’s appearance, and the shower of dust and gravel against his windshield, snapped Myles to full alertness.

  Myles hated the Four. When he first started driving at sixteen, he’d navigated his car around the narrow curves at speeds that made his blood sing, but his reckless days were over. Since he’d been back, he’d hit a dog during his daily commute to Longview. And then, not once but twice, he’d had to replace his windshield because of falling rocks.One chance in a million, said the guy who’d replaced the windshield both times, but Myles didn’t think so. Everyone had a story about the Four involving a deer or a cascade of rocks. The roadside was dotted with makeshift crosses built by the loved ones of accident victims, often tourists whose day on the sand at Long Beach had gone badly awry. There were fences swathing the rocky ridges and warning signs at the curves, but when people remarked on how much he must be enjoying the stress-free life in Sacajawea after living in big, bad Washington, D.C., Myles thought about State Route Four.

  Everything was relative, he always said.

  ENTERING SACAJAWEA COUNTY, the yellow highway sign announced. Myles felt a flood of nerves. He glanced at the passenger seat and saw the newspaper again, Art’s jolly face in full color. “I hate this,” he said to the empty car.

  He knew how Art’s family felt. That was the hardest part of it.

  When he was eight, Myles had seen a news report of his father’s death on TV.Ain’t that Buddy? his cousin Twyla said, pointing, and Myles had seen his father’s angry-looking photograph, an old mug shot, he would learn later. The newscaster’s all-knowing voice said he’d beenkilled in an early-morning robbery . Vernon Richardson,dead after trying to stop a robbery attempt at the Gulf station on Fourteenth between Pike and Pine.Dead on arrival at the hospital. If Twyla had told him not to pay the TV any mind because it was all made up, he would have believed her. But instead, Twyla was on the phone telling someone,Buddy dead. He dead. Yeah, the news say Buddy dead. That was how Myles had learned he was an orphan.

  Of course, the police never meant to surprise him like that, he knew now. Police tried to inform family members before releasing the names of the dead. But since Myles’s mother had died of a heroin overdose two years before, and since his father’s parents were dead, the police had thought there was no one to tell. Nobody knew Vernon Richardson had a niece who called him Buddy, his family nickname, and they damn sure didn’t know a thing about his eight-year-old son, Myles Richardson, who was living with her temporarily even though she could barely afford to feed him. He didn’t exist. So there it had been on the news, his father’s face in a bad photograph from an old arrest, before he’d gotten the job at the gas station, wearing a uniform he washed every day. That had been the first and last time almost anyone in Seattle had heard Vernon Richardson’s name.

  Myles hadn’t talked to his cousin Twyla since he was fifteen, and he wasn’t sure where she was, or how she was doing. He could still retrieve a kaleidoscope of old images, but most of the time, the images seemed hardly related to him, someone else’s memories: His parents’ wild days, when they sold drugs out of their apartment in the Hope Circle Projects, and how he’d raced into the bathroom with his mother once, watching her flush packets of powder down the toilet after the police came knocking, her hands shaking like God himself was at the door. Two white police officers had wrestled his father to the floor and chained his hands behind his back like Kunta Kinte onRoots . But the really awful thing had been his father’s picture on the news, hearing a stranger say he was dead.Buddy dead .

  Myles’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the phone in the cradle above the gearshift, but he couldn’t make out the lighted Caller I.D. display and keep his eyes on the road. He couldn’t reach for the speakerphone button either. Myles had a rule against answering his cell phone on the Four. There were too many twists on the road, too many surprises.

  The phone rang four times and stopped.

  Who would be calling him at ten to seven unless it was an emergency? Candace, the weekday nurse, might have news about Ma, who’d been waking up in the middle of the night lately to demand water or cereal, behaving more like an infant all the time. Or it might have been Roger, the reporter assigned to Art’s story. Roger had won a Pulitzer after Mount St. Helens and was as obsessive about his stories as any of the ambitious workhorses Myles had known at thePost, so he wouldn’t be surprised if Roger was on the job this early.

  But most likely, it was Angie, wanting answers. He wished he had a few to give her, but he didn’t know why he’d been in her room. It was the story of his life: A sweet, stable woman wants to marry him, and he can’t love her. Instead, he’s hovering around a woman he hasn’t known since high school, who’s fresh from a nervous breakdown—and who genuinely believes that a demon possessed not just her mother, but his too. He was older but no wiser, he thought.

  When the phone rang again, Myles’s curiosity gnawed at him. He took a last glance at the road and saw that he was alone in a passing lane now, with a decent stretch before it would narrow again at the curve. He hit the speakerphone button. “This is Myles.”

  The caller was on a mobile, too, judging by the static. The call sounded far away, but he heard strains from an old Teddy Pendergrass song, “Close the Door.” No one spoke on the other end, but Myles heard a small dog barking. All those tiny dogs sound alike, he thought.

  “Speak up, please,” Myles said.

  “Did you get what you wanted?” said the caller, a man.

  “Who is this?”

  “You know who it is.”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have asked,” Myles said. The caller was playing games. He had a deep, FM disc jockey voice, and he sounded as if he might be black, or else he was pretending he was. Probably a crank caller. Someone mad about the article in the paper.

  UNKNOWN CALLER, the phone display said when he checked.

  “Man, lemme tell you, she’s still a hot fuck. A stone freak,” the voice said, losing its clipped quality, turning conversational. “Her band teacher got her when she was thirteen, plucked her early. That’s how freaks are born. She can swallow a cucumber whole. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You remember, Myles. Out in the woods? That thing she did—she squeezed you from theinside? You gasped like you’d seen your mama’s ghost. Yourreal mama, I mean.”

  Myles’s sore neck locked. He would have braked and pulled over if he could have, because he was so angry his vision blurred slightly before refocusing, something that had never happened to him. “Who the hell is this?” Myles said.

  The caller laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry. Was that too personal?”

  “You want to get personal, you vulgar ass? Come talk to me in person.”<
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  “Count on it, Myles. Try not to die before I get there.”

  The voice and static vanished just as the passing lane merged back into a single narrow lane and the road bent, following the river’s whim. Myles regained his concentration in time to whip his car around the curve without veering into the oncoming lane, where any unseen vehicle would have clipped him. His car was the only one beyond the curve on the Four.

  The road was empty except for the deer.

  Under different circumstances, Myles would have admired the animal: It was a mature blacktail buck with a plush, dark coat and antlers the color of fine mahogany. He must have been more than two hundred pounds, a giant prize Pa Fisher would have been willing to give up a chunk of his life savings for if he’d had the chance to take him down with his bow. Myles had seen a blacktail buck this size up-close only once before, when Gunnar Michaelsen bagged one on the slopes of the Cascades the weekend Gunnar and Pa Fisher took him hunting after high school graduation. This could be its twin.

  None of that awe, however, was in Myles’s mind when he saw the deer on State Route Four at the moment he was rounding a curve at fifty miles per hour. His head emptied of everything except the sight of the animal directly in his path, as still as a wildlife monument. The deer’s glossy brown eyes stared at him, strangely untroubled. Myles didn’t have time to reach for his horn, or to do anything except plant his foot on his brake, hard.

  That was the thing about the Four: There was nowhere to go. On the driver’s side, a flimsy barrier provided slim solace against the prospect of tumbling down the ravine into the Columbia River; and the other side was mostly steep rock-faces, promising a hard impact if he drove too far over in the opposite direction. He was boxed in. His best choice would have been to hit the deer and take the damage, but he’d braked instead because of its imposing size. And he’d braked too hard.

  Myles realized his mistake only when he felt the weight of the car drifting, pulling at his steering wheel. The wet road or loose gravel, or both, had thrown him into a skid. He tried to steer and right himself, but there was already too much momentum. Myles lost control of his car.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, as true a prayer as he’d ever uttered. Death felt certain in a way that flushed his body with iced pinpricks, made his face hard as iron.

  Myles shouted a dead man’s shout, pumping the brake and counter-steering, fighting to break the skid. But the car didn’t respond. His tires whined as the road and the deer vanished from his windshield, and instead the rock-face sprang into full view. That passed in a blur, and then he was staring at the road behind him, at the curve he had just passed. His car had turned completely around, still spinning, and the river was coming next. “Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…”

  The car rocked to a stop, jerking Myles’s neck back. The quiet was so complete, Myles wondered for a moment if he was dead. His eyes seemed to have shut down. There was no darkness, no light. Utter stillness held him paralyzed in its spell.

  I’m alive,he thought finally, hardly daring to hope.

  He must be. He was damp with perspiration, his face hot. His heart was a drill in his chest. His hands were hugging the steering wheel as if he would fall to his death if he let go. All he could see through his windshield was the river, but the car had come to a stop before falling over the ravine. The nose of his car had dented the low barrier, giving it little more than a tap.

  When he’d oriented himself, Myles turned over his shoulder to look at the deer. The buck was still planted where he’d been, only now he was six yards from the rear bumper. He hadn’t moved, except to turn his head in Myles’s direction. With the deer’s eyes still watching him, pinpricks washed Myles again.That stupid animal almost just killed me, he thought. Payback.

  Myles sat in his car a moment, facing the calm of the river while his trunk jutted into the oncoming traffic lane. If he’d hit that barrier any harder, he could have tumbled in. He would be under the water this instant, clawing to get out of his car, if he had survived the impact.Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus . Myles knew he needed to move his car, but he wasn’t ready to begin driving again. He wanted some air. His breath was tight in his lungs.

  Myles saw a red light flash in his driver’s side mirror. A sheriff’s unit pulled up behind him, emergency lights on, appearing like an apparition.

  “You all right?” Rob Graybold said at his window.

  Myles nodded, his breathing heavy. “Yeah. I almost hit that buck.”

  “Well, get this car moved quick,” Rob said. “Drive up to that fishing stop up on the left. I need to shoo that buck before someone gets killed. I didn’t even see that giant sonofabitch until you came around the corner. You sure you’re all right?”

  Myles waved yes, nodding. The disorientation was passing. Jesus had shown him mercy this time. Miracles didn’t get any more real than the one he’d just lived through, he thought. His heartbeat slowing, Myles put his car into reverse, away from the water, to turn around. In the distance, he could see an eastbound logging truck in his lane, far enough back but coming at him fast.

  “From now on, I’m taking the ferry,” Myles said, straightening himself in the road.

  Myles drove to the shoulder about sixty yards from where he’d nearly crashed, a strip of gravel large enough for a few drivers to park and fish over the barrier. Turning off his engine set him at ease. Myles had fished here a few times, standing patiently in the shade of the flowering dogwood tree, getting hardly a bite for most of the day and then pulling up a twenty-pound chinook salmon just when he was ready to pack up and go home. One afternoon on his way from work, stopping on a whim right here, he’d caught a salmon as fat as a weasel. That memory calmed Myles, wiping away the maw in his gut.

  Rob’s police lights were still flashing when he came to Myles’s window a few minutes later. “Your day is off to a shitty start,” Rob said.

  “Man, I don’t know where that buck came from.”

  “A crack in the fence, near as I can tell. He ran right for it when I shooed him. I’ve never seen a deer down this far. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Thank you, Jesus almighty.”

  Rob stared out at the water. The morning was windy, so the dark waves crested in dancing white formations across the surface. Already, the pinkish tinge was leaving the sky as it grew brighter beyond the clustered rain-clouds. “Seems to me you must have come around that corner pretty fast, to skid like that. What were you doing? About fifty?”

  Here it comes,Myles thought. Myles was sorry he’d interrupted the sheriff’s morning reflection, because Rob wasn’t likely to be in a good mood. “Yeah. I got a crank call, I was distracted. I shouldn’t have answered my phone.”

  “They need to outlaw those damned phones on the road,” Rob said, still not looking at him. “Someone threatening you, Myles?”

  Try not to die before I get there,the caller had said. Had that been a threat?

  “It’s nothing. It’s personal.” He was sure it must have been Tariq Hill. Tariq’s baritone voice was memorable, and Myles had talked to Tariq at Corey’s funeral, shaking his hand while trying not to peer too closely into the private well of grief in the man’s eyes. Tariq was the only person likely to know so much about Angie, or the details of Myles’s sexual experience with her at The Spot. Now, on top of everything else, he had to contend with the rambling of Angie’s ex, a former football player. The havoc had started already.

  “Folks are pissed at you. Let me know if anything gets out of hand,” Rob said.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Tariq must be a pathetic, troubled man, to make that call. The idea of it made Myles sad. “I guess we’re the two least favorite people in town today, Rob.”

  Rob chuckled sourly. “No offense, but I don’t see us in the same category.”

  Myles should have known that was coming. For whatever reason, Rob had never liked him. Sacajawea County High’s basketball team hadn’t been good, but he and Rob had played themselves to exhau
stion trying to show each other up. That competition had never turned into friendship as it sometimes did, although Myles wished it had. Something had killed that possibility a long time ago. Maybe it was Melanie, Myles thought. She’d had a crush on him for a while in high school, or so it was rumored. Myles still saw glimmers of something quick and bright in Melanie’s eyes when he ran into her in town, and it was possible Rob’s wife mentioned his name a little too often at home.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Rob,” Myles said. “But when my reporter calls today, I sure wish you’d work with him.”

  “He’ll have to take a place in line. I heard from a gal at CNN this morning.”

  “Already?” And Art’s mother had been mortified her son’s unexplained breakdown would be known in severalcounties . Myles hadn’t expected so quick a response from the national media.