House of Sand and Fog: A Novel

by Andre Dubus III

  Connie Walsh’s morning clients were two women a little older than me and better dressed. They walked out of the conference room laughing, but when they saw me sitting there with my foot up on a chair that almost blocked their way, their laughter dropped down to smiles as they squeezed by and disappeared down the stairs.

  My lawyer stood in the doorway. “What happened to you?”

  “They’re tearing my fucking house apart.”

  “What?”

  I hopped by her into the meeting room that smelled like clove cigarettes. All the tall windows were open and the room was full of sunlight. I leaned against the table and crossed my arms over my chest to keep my hands from shaking. “They’re remodeling it. What are you going to do about that?”

  “Have a seat, Kathy.”

  “I don’t want to sit down. I want to fucking kill somebody. How come they don’t even know they’re squatting in somebody else’s home? I’m tired of this shit.” I lit a cigarette.

  Connie sat down and called out to Gary to please bring us two cups of coffee. She looked up at me with a patient look on her face. “The courier just brought over the paperwork from the county this morning. I was planning to review it and call you this afternoon.”

  “I don’t want you to call me, I want you to call those Arabs who are cutting up my house.” My voice broke, but I wasn’t going to let whatever was under it break through. Gary came in and left the coffee. My foot felt swollen so I pulled out a chair, sat down, and rested my leg on another.

  “What happened?”

  “My yard is a construction site.”

  “You were there, Kathy?”

  “That’s right.” I emptied a whole packet of Sweet’n Low into my coffee, stirring it while Connie launched into a soft-voiced lecture on why it’s a good idea to stay off the property so she can do her work unencumbered.

  “It’s very important we’re both clear on this,” she said. “Agreed?”

  I looked at her, at the premature gray in her hair, at the serious look in her face, and I was still so mad at how far all this was actually going my throat felt closed up, but I said yes, then drank from my coffee. Connie excused herself to go get the paperwork. Outside, on the flat roof of the Roxie Theater across the street, two pigeons were perched on a brick chimney stack in the sunlight. They stood together looking out over the street below, their beaks jerking front and back, right and left, as they took in the scene.

  My foot hurt. I smoked another cigarette and thought how at least today was my off day with the cleaning and if I was lucky I might be able to put enough weight down tomorrow to work. But on the drive over my right sole ached so much I had to sit almost kitty-cornered and use my left foot on the gas and brake pedals, making me sit as low in the seat as an old lady. I started to stand to go find my lawyer, but then she walked back into the room smiling, carrying a manila folder in front of her.

  “I was right. They sent your signed statement with everything else. Here.”

  I took it from her. It was the original statement both Nicky and I signed in front of the notary. I looked at his signature, each letter of his name written so neatly while mine was a hurried scribble. I used to think he did that so people wouldn’t have to decipher it, so he wouldn’t make things hard for anyone, so he wouldn’t leave behind a mess. I used to think that.

  Connie Walsh said a few things and I looked up and nodded at her like I’d heard.

  “And it’s obvious they decided to put it to rest with that statement, so I’ll fax them a letter today and we’ll follow it up with a phone call before offices close. If they don’t offer to rescind the sale immediately, we’ll sue the county for a bundle. Are you still at the motel?”

  I shook my head no. “I want you to call those people in my house, too. They’re already more at home there than I ever was. That’s not right.”

  My lawyer tapped her pencil in the palm of her hand. “Did you get their names?”

  “I don’t know, Bahroony or Behmini, something like that. They’re Middle Eastern. Please call them up and tell them to put the roof back together and get out.”

  She left the room and I heard her tell Gary to draft a letter for the courier service. The pigeons flew off, and I told myself I should feel good the county had sent the sworn statement that would get me back into my and Frankie’s house, but there were four holes of heat in my foot, a stiffness in my neck from sleeping in the car, a tightness in my throat, and for a second I saw myself emptying most of the storage shed into the Bonneville and driving straight back East, just pull into my mother’s driveway and tell her everything, that I had no friends, I was smoking again, I just scrape by cleaning up after other people, all I do is watch movies I don’t remember, my husband left me, and I lost the house, Ma; it’s gone.

  “Where are you staying, Kathy?” Connie walked in reading some paperwork. She had on her round glasses.

  “Nowhere.”

  “You’re not with friends?” She was giving me eyes that were sincere but holding back too, and I pegged her right away for the kind of person who couldn’t live with herself for not doing the right thing, but also the kind who could never say no, so they really wanted you to lie to them so they wouldn’t have to do the right thing like invite me to stay a week with her.

  “Yeah, I’m with a friend.”

  “You are?”

  They always did that too, pushed your lie till it almost broke. “I want to be back in my house by this weekend, Connie, all right?”

  “I can’t promise you anything, but we’ll do our best.” She smiled and stood and showed me to the door. As I hopped to the stairs, she said not to worry and she hoped my ankle would feel better soon.

  IT’S ALMOST EASIER being down and alone than when you’re up and no one’s there to share the view with you. Not that I was feeling that great as I drove south on Skyline Boulevard through Daly City in the sunshine. Addicts are supposed to be famous for expecting disaster around every corner from good luck, but now I did have my hopes up a little Connie Walsh might have this mess straightened out by the weekend. I needed some distraction.

  I rested my right foot on the hump in the middle of the floor beneath the console. The ache wasn’t as sharp, but now there was a warm throbbing that came with my heartbeats which were faster than normal because I was smoking practically one cigarette after another. I was also thinking of Lester Burdon again, his sad eyes and crooked mustache, his little station wagon driving off into the fog. I knew I’d been thinking of him off and on since then; I kept seeing that dark need in his face as he sat across from me at Carl Jr.’s. Men who have that look usually want to bite into you like you’re a fresh cool plum; and after they’ve bitten, sucked, and chewed they expect your juices to come back and stay sweet. But Lester’s need seemed different than that. There was a gentleness there too, a patience. So maybe it wasn’t really a need at all, but a wanting. Maybe he wanted.

  In Daly City, I pulled into a gas station and hopped to the rest room with my makeup bag and toothbrush, a clean T-shirt and pair of underwear. I cleaned myself up, climbed back into my Bonneville with my wrapped foot, then dug through my pocketbook for Lester Burdon’s card. It had slipped into my checkbook between two blank checks: Lester was something called a field training officer and his office was at the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department in Redwood City. I put the car in gear, used my left foot for the gas, and drove onto the Bayshore Freeway, heading south.

  THE SUN IS WARM UPON MY ARMS AS I PUSH THE BRIGHT RED LAWN cutter that started with one pull of its rope and I smell benzine and that American scent of green grass that is cut in the heat. The engine is loud but still I hear the work of the najars upon the bungalow. The afternoon remains in their first workday, but already they have completed building the frame of the widow’s walk into the roof and I push the cutter from one end of the property to the next and I see them lay new boards of lumber across the structure and drive nails with their steel hammers in the sun.

 
; The tall grass falls away beneath my machine like dead soldiers, and I am grateful for the silly blue hat upon my head, for it keeps the skin there in the shade, and even my forehead and eyes are protected. But I am grateful for so much more than this; after a lunch of chicken, tadiq, and radishes, I gave to Esmail permission to ride his skateboard down to the BART train to go visit his friends until early evening. The young najars had left in their truck to purchase building materials, and I sat at the kitchen counter reviewing the real estate pages of the newspaper when my Nadi paused in her cleaning and kissed me on my cheek. She stood close to me, holding the folded sofreh to her breasts. “Why did you not stay with me last night, Massoud?”

  My wife has fifty years, but she spoke as would a young girl, a new bride. I thought perhaps she was disappointed in me, but then I regarded her smile, the fashion in which she held her chin low, looking up at me with those gavehee eyes, and as she took my hand and led me back down the corridor to her room, my heart was a flat stone moving over water and my breath was held like the boy counting the skips of his good fortune.

  Afterward, as the najars resumed their work above us, Nadi put the blue colah upon my head and laughed as I stepped out into the midday sun. I laughed as well, for except for an occasional television show she barely understands, Nadi has not laughed. Not in the pooldar apartments, she has not. But here is different; here she seems to be living as if she is no longer waiting for life. Here she is free of our own masquerade, our own lies.

  I continue to cut down the tall grass with ease, making straight and orderly lines of the dead green, and I make the decision, yes, we must stay here for the summer season; it will be good for us, a good rest. I will continue to work daily for securing a buyer, but I will enter into the contract that the property will not be available until autumn. This will also give me the necessary time for finding new properties to purchase, for it is clear I must buy only bungalows such as this, homes that are auctioned by county or bank. Perhaps I will discover a pleasant home or apartment we can rent while I continue to buy and sell for a profit.

  These have been my thoughts, and they have been most pleasing thoughts for I feel once again like a man with his hands on the reins of his own beast. The najar tells me the platform overlooking Corona and the sea will be ready in two more days’ time. Soraya and her new husband end their honeymoon trip on Friday and so we must invite them and the groom’s family to our home for a small celebration. I will instruct Nadi to prepare her best chelo kebab, both barg and the tender meat of the kubehdeh. I will purchase champagne and arrange chairs on the widow’s walk, and we will all toast the health of the bride and groom, to our own health, salomahti.

  At the street, I extinguish the engine, leaving the rows of cut grass for Esmail to rake into a bag upon his return. I wipe the sweat from my face. I am unable to cut the grass at the side of the house due to the najar’s ladders, tools, and the new lumber they have stacked neatly upon the ground beside the small section of old roof. As I push the cutter past all of this, a najar calls down to me.

  I raise my face to the two young men, but the sky is bright and even with the new colah upon my head I must further shade my eyes with my hand.

  “Yes sirs, you are doing a superior job.”

  “Thank you,” replies the one with the tattoo of a restaurant upon his shoulder. “Did you get everything settled with that woman?”

  “Excuse me. To what woman are you referring?”

  “The lady who cut her foot. She didn’t talk to you?”

  “If you please, come down here so my neck does not freeze this way.”

  The najar descends the ladder with his leather apron of tools hanging over his short pants. He is not wearing a shirt and I see his back is almost the color of a Bombay Indian. When he reaches the ground he turns to me and wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  “I just wanted to make sure she talked to you. She said she would.”

  “Oh yes, my wife told to me your girlfriend cut her foot. I am sorry to hear this.”

  “Girlfriend? I never saw her before. She came up to the roof this morning all upset because we were doing this job. She said she’s the owner.”

  My hands become heavy and my voice trembles. “What are you talking, young man? I am the owner of this home. I have for it paid cash. Who is this woman?”

  “She looked nutty to me,” the other najar says from the roof, smoking a cigarette. “She’s swimming with one fin. She’s probably down the street telling somebody she owns their house, too.”

  The najar beside me laughs and I smile, but I do not quite believe in this smile and stop. “In my country crazy people are put in hospitals, but here you let them wander as free as sheep.”

  “This is true,” the young najar says, picking up from the ground a paper bag of nails, then climbing back up the ladder to his work. The other one extinguishes his cigarette beneath his foot upon the new boards.

  “Please tell to me if the woman returns, thank you very much.” I continue pushing my grass cutter to the rear lawn that is completely in the shadow of the house. There is only a thin line of sun upon the ground at the base of the tall hedge trees and it is there I stop to pull the cutter’s rope two times before the engine starts. I give it as much benzine as it can drink, and I feel thankful for all the noise it makes.

  FOR ALMOST THIRTY MINUTES I SAT IN THE CAR PARKED ACROSS THE street from the Hall of Justice building in Redwood City. It was eight or nine stories high, and the concrete sidewalk was so white under the sun I had to lower the visor and put on Nick’s old Ray-Bans that were too big for my face. Across the street from the Hall of Justice was an old courthouse building with a huge dome of stained glass, and there were no trees on either side of the main street, just parking meters and shining cars. Every few minutes I got the urge to open the door to go find Lester for a possible lunch date, but then I’d think of that ring on his finger, that sadness in his eyes, and I’d smoke a cigarette, tap my own wedding ring on the wheel, and wonder just what it was I thought I was doing.

  I watched a couple of uniformed deputies walk into the Hall of Justice. One was big like my brother Frank. I thought again how much I’d like to see him, just him and me sitting at a restaurant table in the North End of Boston for lunch somewhere like we used to. He’d be dressed in one of his polo shirts, turquoise or mango orange, and whether I was talking to him about money I owed or somebody I was seeing, he always gave me the same advice which pissed me off, but sometimes made me feel better too.

  “It’s easy, K. On one side of the page you got your Costs and on the other side your Benefits. All you do is mark which one is which, then you weigh one side against the other and you get your decision just like that. That’s all you ever have to do. I live by this.”

  Sometimes it was comforting to be around someone who looked at life like this. And I would’ve told my brother months ago about Nick if I’d known he wouldn’t tell his wife who I knew would tell my mother. “But what if you don’t know the difference between a benefit and a cost?” I would always ask him. “What if you’ve never been very good at telling a plus from a minus?”

  It was lunchtime and small groups of men and women were leaving the building for food. I kept smoking and watched three women in business skirts and blouses sit at a concrete bench not far from my car. They were eating from small plastic yogurt containers. One of them laughed, finished her yogurt, and bit into a cookie. I knew I didn’t want the office life they were living—I knew that—but from where I sat watching them eat and chat in the sunshine, I felt like I’d been apart from groups of normal people and their nice conversations my whole life. On another day I might’ve let myself feel homeless and husbandless and with no friends, but now I felt almost better than them, tougher, like I knew more about life from having really lived it out here on the rim.

  I inhaled the last of my cigarette to the filter and stubbed it out in the ashtray. I was getting ready to leave, forcing myself to think about finding a s
afe place to park my car for tonight’s sleep, when someone tapped on the window glass at my head and I jerked back. Lester Burdon was standing there in the sunshine in his uniform, holding a sheaf of papers. I lowered the window all the way and the heat from outside hit my face. My mouth was dry and I wished I had something for the cigarette breath.

  “This is a surprise.” Lester said, glancing at the empty passenger seat like he was trying to see who brought me here.

  “A good surprise? Or a bad one?”

  He smiled, his crooked mustache straightening a little. “Good. It’s good.”

  “My lawyer thinks she can get me back into my house. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “I’m glad to hear this.”

  “You had lunch yet?”

  “I’m due in court.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the domed courthouse building behind him. “I’m usually out on patrol right now. I’m surprised you found me.”

  “Hey, you found me.” I smiled and started the car but I felt like a woman caught peeing behind a shrub, her butt sticking out. “Well, gotta go.”

  “Wait, I’ll be up near you this afternoon.” He rolled up the papers in his hands, wringing them a little. “Coffee?”

  “Depends on what time,” I hoped I didn’t sound as see-through as I felt.

  “Four o’clock? I’ll swing by your motel?” There was a line of sweat right above his eyebrows.

  I thought of last Sunday night, seeing his car pull away from the El Rancho when I got back from the store. “I’m not there anymore. I’m staying at the Bonneville.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “You’re looking at it, Lester.” I put the car in gear and rolled the window up halfway. “I’ll meet you at the Carl Jr.’s in San Bruno. Have fun in court.” And I pulled into the street without hardly looking, but no one honked at me and there was plenty of road ahead and behind, and I felt my luck might really be changing after all.