Glass House

by Chris Wiltz

  “Nothin happened yet?” Burgess asked.

  “Nothin!” Jared yelled, overly excited. “No sheriff, no deputies, nothin. Dexter's been on the radio callin it a parade of protest, and the TV station's been there too. Ain't like that sheriff to miss a photo opportunity.”

  Burgess went up to see the work, then came down to talk to the carpenter, an older man everybody called Mr. Robert. Jared and the two men working with him began cleaning up so they could get to the Convent to meet the parade. Thea came down from the third floor where she'd been trying to decide what pieces of furniture to reupholster and put downstairs. Bobby came in with house supplies, a case of Abita and some bags of Zapp's chips. He was heading to the kitchen when Jared began shouting from upstairs, “Burgess, they comin! I can see em from the window—they headed this way!”

  Jared and the other two men came flying down, their feet clattering on the wooden stairway, their hands squeaking on the banister, out to the front porch. Mr. Robert's helper went after them, then came Burgess and Thea, Bobby and Janine, Delzora bringing up the rear. The only one who hadn't rushed outside was Mr. Robert.

  They could see the line of cars coming down Convent Street. They pressed against the porch railing as if they were behind police barricades at a Mardi Gras parade, craning for a view. They heard the sounds of Mardi Gras parades too, the dull thuds of big brass drums and the music, but it was coming from the cars’ radios turned up so loud they could be heard two blocks away and felt deep down in the chest.

  Thea looked around and saw that Mr. Robert hadn't come outside. She went back into the house. He was still in the library, his head with its tight salt-and-pepper curls bent over his work.

  “Don't you want to come outside with us, Mr. Robert?” she asked.

  He looked up quickly, as if she had surprised him. “Oh no,” he said, his voice old and gravelly, “I don’ mess aroun with that stuff,” and he went back to measuring a piece of wood.

  Thea stood there a few seconds longer, admiring what she could already see was going to be a beautiful library. My library will be the equal of anything in Sandy's house, Thea thought, and wondered at this competitiveness, so firmly in place within her, that before this moment she had not known was there. She watched Mr. Robert. He worked slowly and steadily, handling each piece of wood sensuously, stroking away the dust, fitting it perfectly.

  “It's going to be the most beautiful library anyone's ever seen, Mr. Robert.” This time he did not look up, but he smiled and nodded once. “And they'll all want you to build one for them.”

  He measured and marked one plank, put it down, and picked up another. “I won't never build another like this one,” he said. He glanced up to see her smile before he made another mark.

  Thea turned to go back to the porch. Through the open door she could see Bobby handing beer around, passing the bags of chips. As Thea started out, Delzora came in muttering under her breath, passing Thea as if she were not there. She almost passed Mr. Robert too, but she stopped abruptly and said in a tone that would have been hostile except for what she was saying, “Mr. Robert, you want some tea?”

  The old carpenter set down the piece of wood he was holding. “Yes ma'am,” he said, “some tea would be mighty fine,” and he followed Delzora into the kitchen.

  Thea returned to the porch. She stood back from the others and watched Janine and Burgess together at the railing, closely together, the sides of their bodies sealed like Siamese twins. Their closeness separated them from the rest of those at the railing. Now their bodies moved apart, but only so their heads could come together as they whispered and laughed. They faced each other, quite apart from everything that was going on around them. They weren't laughing anymore; Janine smiled, a smile with the serenity and inner certainty of the Mona Lisa. Burgess touched her stomach, just his fingertips on her slight roundness, lightly, reverently, then his arm went up around her shoulders and they turned away, their attention back to the street.

  The moment that Burgess’ fingertips reached Janine's body, Thea knew that Janine was pregnant. This knowledge traveled clear through her, a sudden sexual pain burning her insides, intensified by the loud music coming from the cars. It was not a pain to double you over, but a pain to make you want to move, to ease the pain by moving, to run, to dance in a frenzy. She could not move.

  Bobby turned, as if only now missing her, and saw her standing there, planted there on the porch. He came to her, mercifully saying nothing. He touched her hair, then circled his arm around her back and she moved into his embrace, easing the pain by touching as much of the side of his body as she could with hers, sealing herself against it.

  And so they were standing as the Cadillac pulled up even with the house, the music shaking the very foundations, rattling the glass of the tall windows facing the porch. Jared and the other guys crowded the space at the top of the steps, but stayed there instead of going down the walkway.

  Dexter stopped and got out of the car. He had on his leather outfit, pants and vest, and in the spirit of rebellion, he'd worn the vest without a shirt on underneath. He elevated himself on the edge of the car's floor next to the driver's seat and fanned his bare arm at the cars behind him to get them to turn down their radios. Once they did he yelled, “Hey, Burgess, I come to pick up your mama!”

  This was greeted with a great deal of hooting and laughing, and Burgess yelled back, “My mama goes with me.”

  Dexter raised a triumphant fist high and shouted, “The Solar Club!” He got back in the car. As soon as he did, the volume of the music climbed to its former pitch.

  All the loud music, the excitement, had driven Roux nearly to a frenzy on the back porch. She also heard the sirens before the people did. She clawed at the door and yelped and whined and barked until Delzora couldn't stand it anymore and finally let her in. Roux tore through the house, through the open front door, nearly knocking Jared and another man down the steps. She flew down the walkway and out the gate to the street. The cars were moving again and she ran alongside them, jumping and barking and threatening, mostly to catch herself under their wheels.

  They heard the sirens now, coming up through the loud music, creating, along with confusion, a concussion on their eardrums and on the windows behind them. No one noticed the crack across the upper pane of one of the living room windows. Bobby put his hands over his ears and went after Roux, and as he did the line of cars came to a stop, but stopping from the rear to the front, leaving wide gaps between the cars. Next to them came a line of police cars, some of them pulling into the wider gaps. The assault of noise stopped, but gradually, an extra warning wail from a siren here and there, the radios losing volume as one after another was turned off, Dexter's last, one last moment of knowing no fear. Uniformed officers soon had all the occupants of the cars on the street, cuffed and waiting to be picked up by police vans.

  Bobby had grabbed Roux by the collar, and seeing a friend of Lyle's, a cop called B.T., get out of one of the police cars at the front of the parade, walked over to him.

  “What gives, B.T.?”

  “Parading without a permit,” B.T. said, putting one foot up on the car bumper and crossing his forearms over his knee. The position reminded Bobby of Lyle; he wondered if they taught it at the police academy.

  “You got to be kidding. How come they didn't arrest them in Jefferson Parish?”

  “Beats me.”

  “What an asshole.” Bobby meant the sheriff of Jefferson.

  B.T. knew who he meant. “Just got a big mouth,” he told Bobby. He looked down the street, surveying the action as the police vans started picking people up. “Should've just done it and kept his mouth shut.”

  “Jesus, B.T. . . .” But suddenly they were both distracted by a skirmish at the nearest police van. In the middle of it was Dexter. Bobby recognized him, his blue leather pants and vest being hard to miss.

  Dexter was struggling against the two policemen who held him and tried to push him into the van. His leather vest wa
s ripped down the back. “You takin my car,” Dexter yelled. “I ain't never gon see it again.”

  One of the policemen whacked Dexter across the middle with his sap. Dexter doubled over and vomited, part of it hitting the policeman's shoes. The officer cursed and shoved Dexter into the van head first.

  Roux was straining against Bobby's hand as if she wanted to bolt in the direction of the skirmish. Bobby pulled her back, saying to B.T., “That's the kid who picks up my girlfriend's maid every day. Can't you get them to cut him some slack?”

  B.T. stood up and turned in Dexter's direction, as if to go to him, then nodded toward Roux. “You better get your dog on home before there's any more trouble.”

  He sounded just like Lyle when Lyle was using his cop's voice. Disgusted, Bobby walked off; B.T. did too, but he went over to the Cadillac and began rifling through the glove compartment looking for the registration papers.

  Bobby walked Roux back to Thea's. As soon as he got her in the gate, he let her go, pushing her ahead, telling her to go on.

  Thea saw Jared getting out of Roux's way, putting Burgess and Janine between himself and the dog. She called to Roux and took her by the collar. “What is it, Bobby? Tell us.”

  Bobby, coming up the steps, said with anger and disgust, “Oh, they're arresting them for parading without a permit. Looks like they're impounding the cars too.”

  But he was the only one who was angry. The rest of them were let down, and their silent acceptance made anger seem the healthier, better response by far. They were defeated—surrender without a fight.

  The group began to break up, Mr. Robert's helper going back inside, Jared and the other painter leaving. But as Jared started down the steps, Roux lurched out of Thea's hand and rushed to him. He lost his footing, tripping down two steps before catching himself on the side rail. Roux took advantage of this short fall to put herself right in Jared's face, so he could smell her dog's breath, feel its warmth on his skin.

  Bobby grabbed Roux roughly, reprimanding her, and brought her into the house. Jared pulled himself up. He was shaking. “That's it,” he said, “I ain't workin no place with no dog.” With that, he struck off down the brick walkway.

  “Jared,” Thea called after him, and when he did not respond, she turned back toward Burgess, putting her hand up, lightly touching Burgess’ sleeve. “Burgess,” she said, “don't let him leave like that.”

  Burgess shook his head, refusing, so Thea moved to go after Jared, but Burgess caught her and held her at the crook of her arm as he'd done the night she'd tried to go after Sonny Johnson. “Let him go,” he told her, pulling her back the same way he had that night and letting his hand rest there inside her elbow. “Won't do no good to go after him now.”

  Janine's eyes were riveted to his black flesh on Thea's white flesh, to a touch that, without having to think, she could tell had some familiarity in it. She felt the skin along her cheekbones burn. Her long curved nails bit into the palms of her hands. Burgess’ hand slid from around Thea's arm. But not before Thea saw the look in the other woman's eyes.

  She could not get it out of her mind, even after everyone but Bobby had left. Janine's jealousy had done something for her that no man could have achieved nearly so quickly or so easily: for the first time in many months Thea felt strong sexually; she no longer felt like a sexual victim, as Michael had made her feel, nor was there any of the hopeless longing she'd felt since Michael was no longer around to sleep with her. She was strong and she was driven, and here was Bobby coming toward her, his hips looking narrow inside his baggy khakis, walking in a way she'd never seen before was so sexy. She took him by the hand and led him up the stairs and pushed him back on her bed. She released his belt and opened up his pants quicker than he could have done it himself.

  “At last,” Bobby said, and closing his eyes, he put himself in her hands.

  22

  There was some satisfaction in knowing things were going to go to shit, then watching it happen.

  This thought came to Burgess after he woke in the middle of the night and lay for a while listening. He thought he'd heard gunfire, but maybe he'd dreamed it because he heard no more now and Janine slept undisturbed beside him. Of course, these days, ever since she'd gotten pregnant, Janine slept like the dead.

  No, it wasn't one of his bad dreams because there it was again, a short burst of automatic-weapon fire. It was far away, the other side of the Convent, where there were still a lot of abandoned buildings, where he'd heard Ferdie was holed up, come back to the Convent, young blood claiming his territory.

  Shit was happening all right: they had the Cadillac too, and that meant they were one step closer to him.

  Burgess walked in on Bobby Buchanan late the next afternoon at the apartment house and found him sprawled out on the floor of the front room. He was eating a Hubig pie and drinking a Diet Coke.

  “Funny you should catch me trying hard not to work,” Bobby said around a mouthful of pie.

  “Yeah, hard work not workin, ain it.”

  Bobby got up. “Now, now, my man, let me show you exactly what has been accomplished here.”

  He started in the living room, pointing out the freshly painted walls, the polished floor, the new light fixture, though it was hanging a bit crooked, not screwed properly into the plaster. “I have to throw the I Ching and consult my astrologer before I get up on that ladder again,” Bobby said.

  “I send over a Voodoo woman I know,” Burgess told him. “She keep you floating right up there next to the ceiling till the work's done.”

  “Thanks, bro. I assume she'll stick around while I put a new light in there too.” He showed Burgess into the dining room and pointed at the hole above them. “Used to be a fancy chandelier there, nice piece. Wish I'd had the sense to take it out first.”

  “Stripped the place, did they?”

  “Down to the plumbing,” Bobby said.

  He took Burgess through the two bedrooms, their heels on the floorboards echoing through the apartment, then into the bathroom, where he'd put in a new vanity, ornate but cheap because he didn't expect it to last long. Nothing ever did. “I guess they dropped the sink,” Bobby said, telling Burgess that he'd found it on the floor cracked in half, all the pipes gone. “Plumbing's a bitch,” he added.

  Burgess looked around the bathroom with its claw-footed bathtub, the fancy sink cabinet and tiny tiles, the grout in between them stained black in the middle of the floor. It was a big bathroom, much larger than the one in the Convent. Janine would like that. He opened the medicine cabinet. “Brand new,” Bobby said.

  Burgess snapped the glass door closed. “How much rent you askin?” he wanted to know, and when Bobby told him, he said, “I'll take it. When will it be ready?”

  “Wait a minute, that wasn't even the hard sell,” Bobby said. “You haven't seen the kitchen yet—you might change your mind. It's going to take time and a strong stomach to get it done.”

  “How ‘bout you let me off the deposit and the first month's rent and I send over a man to help you do it,” Burgess said. He'd send Jared.

  “Sight unseen? You got yourself a deal, my man.”

  They shook on it there in the bathroom, then Bobby led Burgess into the kitchen. Most of the linoleum was pulled up, exposing floorboards slick with grime around the hole where Bobby had fallen, the piece of cardboard laid over it. Bobby lifted the cardboard so Burgess could see that the hole went clear through to the ground. He told Burgess that the plumbing, all of it, even under the house, had been ripped out, not a pipe left, and showed him the holes in the walls where cabinets had hung. Over the rest of the walls, rutted like streaks of fingerpaint, were brown smears, undeniably fecal in appearance.

  “It could be shit,” Bobby said, “but I prefer to think of it as the last battleground of the red bean wars.”

  Burgess was busy eying up the work to be done and seemed not to hear him. “We do this and be in here in ‘bout a week,” he calculated, then he said, “You ain seen shi
t if you ain never seen the Convent.”

  Bobby had never seen the Convent up close, not any more of it than the edge running along Convent Street. First Burgess took him through the front part, the part they'd done over, pointing out places of special interest: Janine's apartment, the building he'd lived in as a child, the vegetable garden with some collard greens about ready to harvest. He told Bobby how his mama had grown herbs and vegetables, and flowers too, out on her balcony all those years ago and shared them with the neighbors, her thumb was so green. “That's what give me the idea for the garden,” he said.

  They drove slowly along the streets of the Convent in the red pickup truck, its windows down, both of them enjoying the coolness of the early evening. The putt-putting muffler announced Burgess as if he were the ice-cream man making rounds in his musical truck through a suburban neighborhood at twilight. The kids who were still outside waved, and Burgess leaned out of his window and called to them, “You all get on inside now.”

  The streets in the Convent were fairly wide but scarred with potholes that Burgess avoided as best he could. The red-brick buildings were set back from the streets and grouped around large yard spaces. A maze of cracked sidewalks connected them. But as Burgess drove deeper into the project, Bobby saw the big green spaces give way to large tracts of desolate, putty-colored dirt; out of this loose, lifeless-looking surface, up close to the buildings themselves, grew clumps of dry brown weeds, like hair sprouting from a corpse's head.

  Many of the buildings in this part of the Convent were in ruins, with windows boarded up, some of them blackened all around as if they'd been scorched. The balconies of some buildings were gone; holes gaped in the roofs. The desolate earth and the strangely scorched buildings reminded Bobby of pictures he'd seen of European cities after the war: the entire area looked as if it had been bombed.

  “We didn't get a chance to get back here and fix up these buildings,” Burgess said. “Don’ guess we ever will now.” He switched on the headlights of the truck, and as he turned a corner the lights shone for a moment on broken glass that lay like a lustrous, opalized covering of frost over the ground. The illustration was jarring in the midst of all this devastation and ruin, nothing to break the monotony of row after row of what could have been burned-out bunkers in a war zone. “War zone” was what Lyle had called the neighborhood where the apartment house was; it was also a phrase Bobby had seen used in the newspaper to describe the projects, not just the Convent but all of the projects citywide. It came to him now, though, not as some tossed-out descriptive phrase or a term of disgust and hostility, but because the reality was right here in front of him in all its ugliness, with all the horror of its implications.