House of Sand and Fog: A Novel

by Andre Dubus III

Once again Lester had felt nauseated with shame. He went back inside the house, lay on his bed, and for hours imagined an entirely different scene, him taking Pablo’s hand, crushing it in his own, then punching Muñoz so hard in the face he’d be unconscious for days and wake up in mortal fear of Lester Burdon. Or he imagined himself sidestepping Pablo’s arm only to grab it, jerk it behind his back, and break it. And these pictures in his head were not new. He had them for every boy he ever had to fight at Chula Vista High. Maybe because he was tall and quiet and thin he called more attention to himself than the other anglos at school. But always it was the same—“Burdone maricón! Burdone maricón!”—and Lester would try to avoid the fight as long as possible. First he would deny to himself that that was where this name-calling was really going; he would try to smile off whatever insult was coming his way, and only when he felt the push of hands on his chest would he push back, hoping that would be enough, which it never was, and he would hold up fists he had no faith in only to be knocked to the ground, where he would stay curled up waiting for a teacher or someone to break it up or for the bully to lose interest and disappear. But they rarely did. Even when you arrested them, they showed up in your sleep, determined to unmask you, and show you to be the coward you really were.

  Sometimes Lester would wake Carol and tell her his dream, but this was always a mistake, because it just gave her more ammunition in her nearly seasonal attempts to get him to quit the Sheriff’s Department, a job she had never quite accepted or understood him training himself for in the first place. Not only is it too dangerous, she would tell him, but “my God, you are so above those cowboy simpletons you work for. Any lamebrain with a GED can go to the academy and do what you’re doing!” She’d tell him he wasn’t living up to his potential, he should go back to school and get his master’s in education, and if there weren’t any teaching jobs in California, then she was quite willing to relocate for any job he might get.

  But Carol was wrong, Lester would sometimes remind her, because he was already a teacher, a field training officer for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, one of eight in the entire county, and of those eight, he was the youngest, with only six and a half years on patrol before they gave him the job. They were all assigned fresh recruits from the academy at Gavilan College, and for four weeks at a time—sometimes the six-to-six day shift, sometimes the overnight—he’d sit in the passenger side of his patrol car while his young trainee drove and he would deliberately and methodically begin to unload everything he knew about being a deputy sheriff. And what did he know? He knew if you were taking things personally you were more dangerous. He knew that he had once put a wife abuser away illegally, and that more and more he found himself coming down harder on some arrestees than others. Not the petty criminals—the car thieves and purse snatchers, shoplifters or even drunk drivers—it was the bullies, the wife and child beaters, the suspected rapists, anyone who used his weight to crush another. He kept his record clean but he took pleasure in the arrests, in jerking a wife batterer’s arm far up behind his back while he lay facedown on the floor or sidewalk. He’d squeeze the cuffs on too tight, then pull him by the wrists to his feet. If he cried out, Lester would lean close to his ear and tell him to shut up. When he put him in the patrol car he wouldn’t bother to guide his head and he’d let him bump it on the way in. Sometimes they were big men, usually drunk, and Lester would fear them and squeeze the cuffs so tight they cried out. But other times he’d see a wife or child bruised or bleeding, sometimes burned or unconscious, and Lester’s stomach would fill with a galvanized, almost nauseating heat, a tremor in his hands and arms as he jerked the man to his feet, sometimes running him face first into a door casing on the way out, sometimes kneeling all his weight on the man’s neck as he tightened the cuffs even more.

  But after these arrests, Lester’s rage and adrenaline would fade back and he’d feel spent and physically weak. Then the remorse would come, remorse that with each impassioned arrest he was doing his job less and less justice, and he’d vow not to get sucked in again, to instead perform his duties the way he was trained to. But these vows would fall away like cool ashes the next time he saw the bruised and broken evidence of one more man pushing his poison onto someone smaller and weaker and Lester’s heart would take over again. And then after the booking, when he was back out on patrol, drinking a soda behind the wheel, trying to fill the desert in his mouth, fear would begin to pool at the base of his stomach like a cold underground spring, fear that he was beginning to lose control and it was only a matter of time before one of these perps saw through his uniform and badge and gun, saw that Officer Burdon was an impostor, that he was one of those men who has never been in a fight and come out ahead, that all his swagger was really nothing that couldn’t be stepped on like a bug.

  For a few months at a time, Lester was able to control his temper. He’d keep his eyes and ears off the wounded. He’d make the arrest and slip on the cuffs comfortably, escorting the man—and sometimes a woman—to his patrol car. He’d breathe deeply through his nose, ignore the onlookers, and open the back door. But sometimes the arrestee would struggle a bit getting in, or else yell something to a friend or family member standing nearby, or swear at Lester, and he would slam the door shut, pretending not to notice if his prisoner’s shoulder or leg wasn’t all the way in the car yet. Again, he was letting his emotion control the situation, even the Filipino boy out on the coast; he was young and scared and it would’ve been impossible for Lester not to feel fatherly toward him and do the right and patient thing. But what if the boy had been a grown man? Would Lester have drawn down on him? Shot him?

  And at night, lying beside Carol, he’d dream of the parking lot and all of them waiting for him. One night his own wife and children were out there too, and even figures from his childhood, Pablo Muñoz, standing there holding Charita’s severed head in his hands like it was something of Lester’s he’d left behind.

  By the third or fourth week of training, Lester would feel he knew the young man behind the wheel fairly well. They’d been spending nine to ten hours a day, five days a week, in a car together. Most of them were gym-hardened and in their early twenties, a slight shaving rash on the throat or upper cheek. And as he and his fully armed student drove through their assigned territory, either the wide green estates of Portola Valley or past the tenements and broken blacktop playgrounds of East Palo Alto, the bodegas, the barrooms with painted-over windows, the boarded-up drugstores, Lester passed on some basic tools and practices of the shift: the proper way to write clear traffic collision and crime reports, what to do when you discover a stolen vehicle, how you go about calling in a vehicle ID over the radio and get access to the computer through the dispatcher.

  But a deputy’s training wasn’t all filled with material from the FTO Manual. Lester made a point of asking them questions about their home life, their childhood, why they were going into law enforcement in the first place. One boy, his face still full and soft-looking, said he hadn’t made it through marine boot camp in San Diego, so he decided to try this instead. It was rare for Lester to hear such a naked admission from a trainee. Usually most of them spoke in slogans, the kind of language you see on military recruiting posters on bulletin boards in community colleges: I want to make a difference. I need to make a contribution. I don’t know, I feel the need to serve. And that was all fine, but Lester noticed that eventually, as one hour became the next, one day another, spilling into weeks, more than one trainee would begin to open up a bit about his family, the muscles in his face seeming to stiffen as he mentioned his father or mother, the one who was either gone when he was still very young, or else stayed around the house much longer than was good for anyone. They spoke in vague terms like this, hunched slightly over the wheel, looking out the windshield into the sunlight at all the civilians in cars or on foot, and once again Lester would see himself, someone who wanted not only to clean up everybody else’s act, but to make the world safe again by doing so, to ma
ke it right once and for all.

  LESTER WENT INSIDE the cabin, lit the Coleman gas lantern, then took it out to the clearing and set it on the ground while he gathered an armful of logs for the iron stove. It was too dark now to see the fog in the trees and the clearing anymore, but the air was still heavy with it and he could smell the ocean, that and the almost earth-yielding scent of split hardwood. It wasn’t cool enough to light a fire really, but he wanted it there anyway.

  The gas lantern let off a breathing hiss and gave off a white light that gave Lester no comfort at all, and as he carried an armful of wood inside, he felt a well of self-loathing that comfort was what he craved; his young daughter was at home practically holding her breath, and what he really wanted was for Kathy Nicolo to walk into this one-room cabin lit up by the flames from the stove, a sleeping bag laid out on the floor in front of it, for the two of them to undress without a word, to make love without a word, then lie there, their sweat reflecting the firelight, and just feel what they would be now, the two of them. Kathy and Lester.

  He lit the balled newspaper under the kindling, then got on his hands and knees and blew the flames higher, the newspaper perforated with heat, glowing orange. And he wanted that fireball to be inside him, incinerating those black tentacles. But it wasn’t fear, was it? No, it was doubt. Black doubt. And it wasn’t comfort he wanted from Kathy, it was reassurance, the silent kind that can show itself in the stillness after lovemaking, the kind that lives beyond speech. He didn’t want to hear from Kathy that he was doing the right thing, because honestly, she could never know that. Only he could know that. And he also knew this knowledge would not be complete until he held her again, right now. It was why he didn’t drive straight to Alvarez’s office, and it was why he didn’t take his daughter for a drive or walk and tell her the truth of what was happening. Everything and everyone was stuck in time. It seemed like a month since early this morning when he’d given Kathy a distracted kiss before she backed her car up for him to leave. Where was she?

  He squatted in front of the stove and laid in two split logs, the ash rising up, some clinging lightly to his forearm. He stepped back and watched the wood begin to burn. The fire seemed to at first diminish but then grow, blue-and-green flames flicking like snake tongues up through gaps between both logs, rising up around the smooth bark, lighting up what it would soon devour. The room felt suddenly too small, and Lester went back outside and stood on the porch, his hands in his back pockets. He thought of Alvarez probably writing up a report on his having disobeyed a direct order. That wasn’t good. Men got terminated for that. But they also had sloppy jackets, a code violation here, a write-up there. Despite Lester’s excessive arrests, his jacket was clean, not a coffee ring on it. And every time the Civil Service exam was announced, he’d get a memo from Captain Baldini’s office suggesting he take it, move to the top seven, then complete the Civil Service Board interview for promotion to sergeant. Career enhancement, the captain called it.

  But now there was the colonel incident to contend with. Only a couple of hours ago Lester could have driven into Redwood City and denied it all. His word against some rich Iranian son of a bitch who most likely wasn’t even a U.S. citizen. But now, because he hadn’t shown up, Lester’s integrity and judgment would be called into question and so too would his innocence. Assuming that’s what Alvarez wanted to confront him about in the first place. But Lester felt reasonably certain it could be nothing else. It would have been relatively easy for the colonel to go to Redwood City and file a complaint against a Deputy Sheriff Gonzalez only to find out he did not exist. This would have definitely piqued the curiosity of a prick like Alvarez. He’d probably served the colonel coffee and had him go through the department’s photo ID catalog. And Lester thought again how he should have considered all this before he ever put on his uniform and went to Kathy’s house, once again his emotion overruling his better judgment.

  But he didn’t want to get caught up in a vortex of “should haves.” Regret was Fear’s big sister, the one he believed should never be let in the door. Lester preferred to watch Regret from the safety of an interior window, watch her standing there on the stoop beneath the light waiting patiently, always patiently, to be let in, her long hair prematurely gray, stiff with cold. Sometimes Regret would turn to him and smile at him through the window, beckoning him, her teeth straight and clean and transparent as wet ice. For years now she had been standing at Lester’s door, waiting, and sometimes she wore a wedding gown, a constant reminder that only two or three years into his marriage with Carol, he realized it was her conviction he had proposed to, her way of looking at the world with such an angry and compassionate eye.

  He had assumed, because of her defense of organized religion in their ethics class, that she was some kind of born-again evangelist. But then he’d see her between classes working a political leaflet table on one of the library patios under the sun. Her blond hair was long then, and she usually let it hang freely past her shoulders and down her back. She’d wear shorts, and her legs were thick and tanned and muscular. One afternoon she’d be volunteering at the Palestinians for Self-Rule table, on another day it would be the South African Alliance to End Apartheid, and on another the Coalition Against Intervention and Oppression. She was working that one alone, sitting in the shade of a conifer eating a falafel pita sandwich when Lester walked over and introduced himself. She nodded and said she recognized him from class, which emboldened him because it was a class of a hundred and fifty students. He asked her what kind of intervention and oppression her coalition addressed.

  “Multinational corporate intervention,” she said, chewing slowly.

  “Like what?”

  She looked him up and down, from his cowboy boots to his black Waylon Jennings road tour T-shirt. Then she drank from her bottled mineral water and pushed a pamphlet toward him. He told her he was a sociology major and had too much to read as it was, could she just give him a sentence or two? Months later, she said she was used to getting baited by Young Republicans and frat boys who would just end up cutting her off, calling her anti-American and a slut, but there was something in the way he had asked that made her talk; it was the sincerity in his voice, the lanky, slope-shouldered way he stood in front of her, his deep brown eyes empty of any judgment. And so she began to talk, and talk, unloading three history courses worth of news: the United States Marines being sent into Nicarauga in the early thirties to kill hungry peasants for United Fruit, the CIA killing the elected leader of Iran in 1953 for oil fields for the Rockefellers, the U.S. government supporting the fourteen murderous families who own all the land of El Salvador. She talked and talked, her cheeks flushed red, her voice getting raspy. Lester finally sat on the ground next to the table, listening, feeling he was in the presence of someone he hadn’t seen in a long, long time, someone who was as easily outraged by the unfairness of things as he was. The campus streetlamps began to come on, she began to run out of gas, and he asked her across town to an outdoor hamburger and beer stand overlooking a pink flamingo miniature golf course. They drank two and a half pitchers of beer and ate very little and they talked of their plans after school; she was going to travel to all the battle zones of the world with a camera and notebook and capture the truth of American imperialism, and Lester said he had no idea what he wanted to do, but whatever it was he wanted it to be good, he wanted to do good. And this seemed to touch something in her. She stopped talking and looked at him, her eyes slightly glazed, her lips parted as if she couldn’t quite take in what she had just heard. She looked to him the way he felt, sweetly, almost sadly drunk; and they went back to her dorm room, wedged a chair beneath the knob in case Carol’s roommate came home, and made love on the floor with their shirts still on.

  The following spring they were married a month before commencement and three months before Bethany was born. Lester got a job with a custodial company cleaning restaurants from midnight to dawn, spending the mornings sleeping and the afternoons caring for Bet
hany while Carol took a photography course at the community college. Some days he’d tuck the baby into her carrier and go too, staying in the vocational guidance office to peruse graduate school manuals while Bethany slept or cried and he’d hold her and walk around the small office humming his daughter a tune, glancing at the announcements and posters on the walls. One afternoon a new one caught his eye, a huge color photograph of a young cop, barely thirty, a handsome Latino, standing between a man and woman, one hand pressed gently against the man’s chest, the fingers of the cop’s other hand just barely touching the woman’s wrist. Her red hair was tousled and her eyes were wet from crying. The man’s hands hung at his sides in loose fists, and he was looking down at the ground listening to or enduring what the cop had to say. Beneath this photo was WORLD PEACE BEGINS AT HOME, the phone number of the local police department, and a hotline number for the victims of domestic abuse. And there was something about the young cop’s face—the strong jut of his jaw that seemed to keep the man in line that Lester had seen always on other men, and standing there holding his baby daughter to his chest, it felt like the time had come to finally try and take on that look himself. Soon he was at the academy, then out on patrol as a trainee, and when he became a deputy sheriff they bought the small house in the Eureka Fields complex in Millbrae. Carol got work as a part-time stringer for two local newspapers, and she covered town meetings, dog shows, and land dispute hearings. She was paid twenty-five dollars a story, and even though they weren’t the kind of muckraking exposés she was still interested in, she told Lester she was content to be working at a job that challenged her, yet also gave her the time and flexibility to be a mother and a wife.

  And there was the trouble; once the university life was behind them, once Carol’s intellectual fires and righteous indignation had died down, Lester began to feel something wasn’t quite there between the two of them, something as essential as this: that despite her loving company, her dry wit and erudite conversation, her good south-of-the-border cooking, even the warm timbre of her voice, Lester was no longer drawn to touch her, to hold her, kiss her, taste her, or smell her. And when he did, it never felt quite right. It was as if he was gearing himself to make love with a close relative, someone from his own family. It saddened and nearly disgusted him that this was all that seemed to separate him from Carol. It made him feel shallow and immature, almost scatological. Over the years, out on the street or on patrol, Lester saw women he could imagine loving, and sometimes he would take their image home with him—the bounce of one’s hair, the sway of another’s hips beneath her skirt, or the dark eyes of another that held the promise of something more sensual than intellectual. And while his wife and two small children were downstairs or outside, sometimes he’d lock himself in the bathroom, turn on the faucets, and like a teenage boy masturbate into the sink. And Regret grew only more insistent. She didn’t just wait on his stoop any longer, she began to rap her icy knuckles against the door.