Glass House

by Chris Wiltz

  “Did you know that he did this to your house, to all these houses, because the Cadillac was set on fire last night by some hooligans from the project? They yell civil rights violations, then they do something like this.” He regarded her with that stony policeman look of his. The old Lyle was back. “Do you know how to reach Monroe?”

  “No. He won't be coming here anymore. He told me to start paying the carpenter myself.”

  His eyes darted, this time to the back of the house. “Is his mother here?”

  Thea seemed to have no control over herself. Her eyes darted as his did, in Zora's direction. “No,” she said, and thought there was no way he would believe her.

  But he was nodding, taking her at her word. “I want you to have this,” he said, his composure fully restored. He put his hand in his jacket and produced one of his small, oily-looking guns. “I'm not so sure he won't be back.”

  The sight of the gun pushed Thea backward another step. “I don't want it, Lyle.”

  “I know you don't,” he said, his voice softer now, stroking her. “None of us does.” Talking to her as if she were a child. “I want you to be able to protect yourself if you need to.”

  “Why would Burgess . . .” she began, but her voice caught on his name.

  “Thea, you've gotten yourself too involved with them"—she was a bad child now—"and the sad thing is they sometimes turn on those of us who have been kindest to them.”

  She blurted, in horror, “I haven't been kind to him.”

  “I know you don't think you have,” he said in his avuncular tone.

  She nearly staggered with fury. “The one who did this,” she gestured wildly at the boarded doors, “maybe he saw you here.”

  He wasn't hearing her anger directed at him, her accusation. He shook his head. “He doesn't know me,” he assured her, and he stepped closer. “Here,” he said, holding the gun so she could see. “This is how you remove the safety.” He clicked the safety off. “Then you just aim and shoot.” He smiled.

  Thea backed away from him. She was up against the lower part of the stairway, the banister and wood spindles behind her. She forced herself to be calm. “I don't want it, Lyle. I don't want any guns in this house.”

  “I know, Thea. I know it's because of your parents, but it's an unrealistic view now.” His voice was as oily as the gun. He closed in on her; he was right on her, taking her hand, trying to put the gun in it. “Here, I want you to hold it, feel it.” Thea tried to jerk her hand away but he wouldn't let go, his fingers holding her wrist.

  “Look,” he said. “The safety's back on.” He clicked it on. “See?”

  She closed her hand into a fist so he couldn't put the gun in it. “Back off, Lyle.”

  “Oh come on, Thea,” he was smiling down at her, “it won't hurt you. Watch. The safety's off.” He held it in front of her eyes, clicking it. “Now it's back on.” He pointed the gun at the ceiling and showed her that the trigger would not pull back. “See? There's nothing to be afraid of.”

  But Thea's heart was pounding. “It's easy, Lyle,” she said, and he smiled and nodded. “It's too easy. Your solution's too easy.” His smile started to disintegrate. She opened her hand, his fingers still wrapped around her wrist, and held it out for the gun. “But it makes you feel you aren't helpless,” she said, “is that it?” and his falling smile lifted. He nodded again and put the gun in her hand.

  He let her wrist go. “Feel the weight of it,” he said and moved away from her, off to the side. “Now, hold steady with the other hand and aim.”

  She brought her other hand up and held the gun with both hands. “It makes you think you have the power to do something,” she said, “but it only makes you more afraid.” She aimed the barrel right between his eyes.

  “Not at me,” he said sharply and tried to duck out of the way.

  Thea followed the point between his eyes. “Everything keeps on going the way it is,” she said beading hard down the barrel to the bridge of his nose, “There's no end to the madness.”

  “Stop it, Thea,” he commanded and moved toward her.

  She clicked the safety off. He stopped. “See? The safety's off, Lyle.” He stood dead still in front of her. “Now get out of my house.”

  He swung a hand toward her and tried to smile, the corner of his mouth shaking. “Thea . . .”

  “Out, Lyle,” she said, and when he did not move immediately, she yelled, “Out!” He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he walked quickly to the door, fumbling at it, turning back to look at her, jumping when she yelled, “Out!” at him again and continued yelling, “Out, out, out!” Until he was gone, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps pounding on the porch.

  Thea did not lower the gun right away. She wished she could see him going across the porch and down the steps so she could be sure he had left, that he wasn't creeping back, standing right on the other side of the flimsy plywood, waiting to surprise her.

  Finally, she let the gun down. She rushed to the door and double-bolted it.

  31

  Burgess returned to the Convent, to hiding, to coded whistles, to bodyguards. He began wearing his black felt hat and mirrored aviator sunglasses again. And one more time, black hats became the fashion statement to make in the Convent.

  The police raids stopped because of the ongoing investigation into civil rights violations, and once again the police avoided the Convent as much as they could, answering calls slowly and reluctantly, as they had before the cop killing. But the media remained curious as the front part of the Convent appeared to be a prosperous, tight-knit community while guns and drug wars ruled in the back. The line between the two areas, a street known as Purgatory Alley, was as closely patrolled by the drug dealers as the border between two hostile countries. The residents who were considered safe enough to interview and who agreed to talk continued to deny the Bishop's existence, though they also continued to say that if he did exist, then it must be the Second Coming.

  Burgess saw what he had to do and kept the money coming into the Convent. It was becoming more and more difficult given his cloistered existence. He kept to the confines of the apartment as much as he could. Janine became his eyes, his ears, his legs, as if he were a blind man. And Janine saw what she had to do to keep the programs running and make them self-sufficient. Burgess tried to get Dexter to continue the contracting work, but Dexter appeared to be a lost cause, broken, unable to do much other than sit out in the Convent yard with the rest of the broken men, watching their neighbors and talking big.

  Whenever Burgess had to venture out to conduct business, he chose from a variety of cars so that he would not become identified with any particular vehicle. One evening, a cold clear night in January, Burgess and one of the two men who went everywhere with him left the apartment through the back. They waited at the top of the stairs until the second man pulled up in a car in the back alleyway.

  The car carrying Burgess and his two bodyguards traveled the length of the alley, shells and gravel crunching under the tires, and turned right on one of the Convent streets. As it turned, a car coming from the opposite direction accelerated suddenly. It sped by Burgess’ car, and there was a burst of automatic-weapon fire. The car swerved, the tinted windows were shattered, and the guard in the back fell screaming on his side across the seat. He'd taken a hit in the neck. After that the guards never drove anywhere without Mac-10s across their laps, ready. It didn't do any good if the guns were under the seat.

  A few weeks later, Burgess and one of the men again waited at the top of the stairs for the car to come down the alley. Leaving this way had become their habit. None of them was thinking that perhaps it wasn't good to fall into such habits.

  It was twilight, another cold night, and a soft drizzle was just beginning, the kind of rain that would keep up for hours, steady and relentless.

  Burgess and his man ran in the rain to the car, their collars turned up, their feet splashing in muddy puddles. They put their guns across
their laps, and the driver pulled slowly down the alley, turning into the bordering street. Several yards ahead a small boy, running hard to get out of the rain, dashed across the pavement.

  “Fuckin little Herbie Reginald,” grinned one of the guards. “Look at ‘im scoot.”

  This time the ambush came from the rear. The car, headlights dark, moved up on them fast, and as it accelerated, it skidded on the slick wet street. It fishtailed, then the driver gave it more gas. Tires squealed. On the sidewalk the boy slowed down, turning to see what all the commotion was.

  “The fuck out the way, Herbie,” the guard muttered irritably even as he clambered at his weapon.

  Then the car was upon them, swerving alongside. Muzzle flashes licked at one another from both vehicles. For perhaps five seconds the night roared. There was a lot of sloppy trigger work, marks were missed, a fender was pitted with a line of bullet holes, and one bullet strayed off target to find Herbie Reginald as he stared open-mouthed at what was taking place before him.

  Janine's legs ached. She put Lucilla to bed and when she stood she thought she could feel the veins popping out behind her knees and around her ankles. She would have looked down to see but there was no seeing past her huge belly. She couldn't wait to submerge herself in a warm bath.

  She climbed into the tub awkwardly and lowered herself slowly, so big and heavy and tired it was as if she'd been carrying a fragile mountain around with her all day. Her arms felt heavy as she lifted them to wash her hair. Burgess came into the bathroom and watched her slow, tired movements. He knelt down on the floor next to the bathtub and took the shampoo bottle from her. He washed her hair and put some of the lather on a big sponge and washed her back. He came up around her neck and down her front, over her swollen breasts, her large stomach, her legs, her feet, washing and stroking away the tiredness. When he finished, she leaned back, her eyes closed, to soak there awhile in the fragrant bubbles of the shampoo. Burgess pushed himself up on the rim of the tub and left the tiny, humid, too-warm room.

  He went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. Ever since the death of Herbie Reginald he'd been overcome by bad feelings. A lot of it was grief and guilt, but there was something else too. He couldn't seem to stand being with himself any longer, not alone, not with the thoughts he had, trapped inside his own head. He couldn't have told anyone exactly what he was thinking that made him feel this way. He didn't know what to call it or what to do to make it go away. He couldn't even sleep to escape it, waking many times during the night, his body in a cold sweat, his head aching. If he was still running, it was no longer from anyone, nor out of fear of being caught. He was strangely unafraid, as if the fear had left him and spread like an infectious disease throughout the Convent, as if he could only be free of it once he had given it all away, spread it around, thick and palpable and feeding on itself. No, if he was running, it was from something deep inside himself, some seething turmoil that had nothing to do with the hard choices still to be made—leave or stay; kill or be killed. Yet it was about choice, choices that had already been made, a long time ago when it had been so easy and didn't require so much thinking. He still couldn't think about it. But he could feel it: self-loathing that ate away at him, demanding satiation—or something, he didn't know what.

  Slowly he became aware that the smell of Janine's shampoo was being replaced by the odor of garbage left too long. It was a smell strong enough to move him out of this place of misery and carry him into the kitchen to bundle up the rot and take it outside.

  The guard met him at the back door, his gun coming up, his hand reaching out for the bag.

  “I'll do it,” Burgess told him. The man started to protest. “You can see better from up here,” Burgess said.

  The guard held the gun with both hands and scanned the area as Burgess went down the stairs to the long row of galvanized cans flanking the alley. He opened one after another only to find them full. After the first few he began banging and clattering their lids back on to keep their ripeness out of the air, breaking the silent night with a growing fury until finally he was able to push the contents of one down enough to stuff in his own pungent bag. He slammed the lid over it.

  Once the noise stopped, he heard the guard, halfway down the stairs, frantically, hoarsely calling his name, but Burgess didn't look back. A car was turning into the alley. The guard started calling again, louder now. Burgess, blinded by the headlights, took a step backward toward the stairway. As he did, the car stopped behind the building next door, then pulled into one of the driveways to turn around. It rolled slowly back toward the entrance to the alley. Burgess stepped forward to get a better look at it, and they opened up, firing straight through the back window, glass exploding in a rain of white light. Then tires were spinning on the gravel and the car shot out into the street. They were gone before the guard could get all the way down the stairs to where Burgess had collapsed next to the row of garbage cans, his blood pooling between them, running along the edges of their round bottoms.

  There were many such murders in the housing projects these days. Burgess’ death became just another one, his way out of the world as unheralded as his way in.

  32

  Delzora walked along Convent Street, her body shifting heavily from one foot to the other. It was early in the morning, still pleasant before the sky turned hard and white in the heat of the day. She left the sidewalk and went into the Convent Street Housing Project, her feet in their Chinese canvas shoes kicking up little puffs of dust as she cut across the dry dirt yard toward the vegetable garden. She was on her way to work at Thea's house, but for the past several months her routine most days included this early morning stop at the garden. She found her place in between the rows and took from her bag a small mat. She laid it down on the ground to cushion her knees as she knelt and began her weeding. Her fingers pulled deftly at the weeds that pushed their way up around the newly sprouted tomato plants, the tiny green eggplants, the summer squash. She made small piles of them along the row, moving her mat just ahead of them as she went.

  She wouldn't try to do too much this morning. One of the old women in the project had taken sick and Delzora wanted to look in on her before she went to work. There was not much to be done other than try to make her comfortable; the woman would die soon.

  She had surely come full circle to be here again, even if she still refused to live here, come to keep this vegetable garden alive, to keep vigil over the sick and dying. And to keep watch over the children when Janine needed her. One thing she and Janine saw eye-to-eye on, and that was watching those two young ones as much as they could themselves. Delzora still wondered if everything might have been different had she been able to watch Burgess more herself. She wondered if everything might have been different had Althea Dumondville allowed her to bring him with her to work on Saturdays, or might have been different had she never brought him.

  These days when she found herself wondering about such things, it would always lead to thinking about the child that Thea and Bobby were going to have soon now, a child she would be spending more hours a day with than she would her own grandson. She would try not to let the thought in, but always it would slip by before she could catch it—the kind of life their child would have only a few blocks away from her grandson growing up here, in the Convent, in this place she had tried to escape.

  She rocked back, putting her weight on her heels. Her hands, covered with dirt, rested on the front of her flowered shift. She looked all around her, at the familiar red-brick buildings, their green trim bubbling and peeling, screens that needed mending, the yard nearly all dirt again. A lot had happened to get her back here, yet the sad thing was, nothing much seemed to have changed. The Convent looked the way she always remembered it, as if Burgess had never existed. The city still beat on much as it always had, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the old and the young, the fear and the hate and the drugs, and the kids who were going to g
o bad no matter what.

  Nothing had changed but everything had changed. It had changed during one small pause, like a skipped beat in a piece of music, a brief time when things had been different, when people had been tied together with a common thread of hope instead of drifting off by themselves in despair.

  Delzora didn't believe in despair, but it sometimes crept on her slyly, trying to attach itself to her through her memories: visions of Burgess, a headstrong young boy running across this very yard; or Burgess and Thea out in the gazebo, the girl looking at his scar; or Burgess giving her the greens from this very garden, his wet shirt against his dark skin, the feelings between mother and son angry, unforgiving.

  She looked up at the sky turning brighter and harder, and pushed the despair away. Everything changes but nothing changes. There was nothing to do but keep on doing what had to be done. Delzora moved her mat along the row, pulling at the weeds again and thinking, It's a shame what we all do to each other, a terrible, terrible shame.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Christine Wiltz

  ISBN 978-1-4976-5578-2

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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