by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
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“Here.” I handed Alice the picture I’d kept in the truck and walked to the kitchen to start dinner.
“What’s this?”
“It’s us,” I said.
“Where did you get it? Did your mother find it?”
“It’s just been around.”
She smiled and pulled her laptop from her knees, folding it on the couch next to her. She came next to me at the sink, wrapped an arm around my waist, and held the picture in front of us.
“That was back when people liked you,” she said. She squeezed me.
“And when I didn’t talk back,” I answered.
“You’ve always talked back,” she said. She unwrapped herself from me and set the picture on the sill above the sink. We’d been saying the same thing to each other for forever. My grandfather used to say it to my mother and then to me when I got older. He passed before Alice came around but she picked up on it anyway.
“You could trade me in for a model that doesn’t,” I said. She was back on the couch now, laptop opened. I peeled some carrots.
“No,” she said, “I think you’re worth keeping.” She leaned toward her laptop and scrolled through more pictures.
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Rid and I parked in front of the house the next day. Plywood replaced where the front window had been. Police tape crisscrossed the porch. We got out of the truck and the smell of lighter fluid blew across the neighborhood. I heard the kids scream again and though I wanted to keep my thoughts of the boy tucked behind my sun visor, my mind focused on him. He’d be just about ten years old. On the ride home the night before, I thought real hard about walking into the bedroom and waking Alice up. Tell her no. Tell her that ready isn’t a vinyl-sided duplex and plastic wrap. Ready wasn’t ready just because you said it was. I wanted to tell her she was wrong.
But I didn’t. After dinner, Alice joined me in the shower and we stayed in there until the hot water ran out.
“So,” Rid started, “I’ll get the weeds, you tackle the yard. Fifteen minutes. Easy as that.”
“Sure thing,” I answered. I climbed up on the zero-turn and started her up. I wheeled it up and down the front yard, past the porch where the man watched us all those weeks. His bedroll and returnables were gone; his chair tipped over the edge of the porch.
I spun the mower around at the street and let it idle. The yard stretched below me, the straight line of new-mown grass wedged in between an expanse of shag, and for a moment, I swore I could see the grass I had just cut begin to grow again.
TO THE MAN ASLEEP IN OUR DRIVEWAY WHO MIGHT BE NAMED PHIL
Anthony Doerr
WELL, YOU’RE NOT sleeping anymore, thank goodness, though was that even sleep? It seemed a deeper, scarier condition; the kind of state people don’t always wake from.
At least the cops are treating you well. They’re surprisingly patient, aren’t they? Gentle, even, standing with their hands behind their backs, waiting for you to walk the line the male officer has scratched with chalk on the pavement of our cul-de-sac. You shuffle your boots, hang your head. It’s Friday night, ten-thirty p.m., plenty of places for a police officer to be, but no one’s rushing you.
I feel a need to explain myself, Phil, to beg a measure of forgiveness, though I understand you may not want to grant it. It’s just that we don’t often find strangers asleep in our driveway. And, look, we were heading home from one of our kids’ flag football games, a long drive after a long week, and my feet were cold from standing on the sidelines, and my bladder was overcapacity, and when we pulled into our street and saw your ’88 Taurus parked crosswise across the bottom of our driveway, I didn’t know what to think.
Your headlights were off, but your dome light was on, and all I could see inside was the shape of a man sitting very upright in the driver’s seat. Which was weird, I guess, but what was weirder was that your head did not turn to watch our headlights as we pulled up. Nor did it turn when I tapped the horn.
I squeezed my truck around your rear bumper and pulled into our garage, and you did not turn to watch as I did this. My son said, “Who’s here, Dad?” and I said, “Don’t know, buddy,” and sent him into the house in his cleats. Then I approached your car.
To be clear: we live in a dead-end subdivision of late-eighties homes high in the foothills above Boise, Idaho. Our garages are large, our roofs deteriorating. It’s full of kids and dogs and it’s hopelessly Caucasian. On a busy night, maybe one car turns into our street every hour. Our cul-de-sac, in particular, is not easy to find: we have friends with PhDs who can’t find our house even after they’ve had two or three dinners here. In the eleven years we’ve lived in this house, we’ve found bull snakes, mule deer, baby robins, three-inch-long Mormon crickets, and a peregrine falcon in our driveway, but never a rusty ’88 Taurus.
Were you a hearing-impaired traveler with car trouble? One of those meat salesmen who drive door-to-door hawking frozen rib eyes? Why didn’t you get out and say hi, or head to the front door and ring the doorbell? And if what you were doing was sleeping, how in the world were you holding your head so upright?
The rear half of your car looked as if it had been painted with black house paint. Your backseat was stuffed to the roof with bulging trash bags. In the dim glow of the dome light I could see that your hair was stubbly, you were pale skinned, and you were dressed in camouflage. I called “Hello?” but you didn’t move your head one millimeter.
Louder: “Hello?”
Not a twitch.
Which, I admit, spooked me.
So I backed away, closed the garage, telephoned my wife, who was returning from a lacrosse game with our other son, and said, “There’s a guy asleep in our driveway, so when you come home, pull around him and I’ll close the garage behind you,” and she said, “Huh?” and I peed in the downstairs bathroom, feeling both guilty and grateful that our house has three mostly operational toilets, and sent my son upstairs with some postgame Oreos, and tiptoed to the bay window.
Could a man really sleep with his neck plumb straight? Or were you actually awake, enthralled by something I couldn’t see: an owl, a comet, a vision?
When my wife’s car arrived and raked your Taurus with light, your head still did not move, and she squeezed her car past yours and I closed the garage and we asked our other son, still in his lacrosse uniform, to go upstairs and join his brother, and he looked at us like, I’m missing something cool down here, aren’t I?
Then my wife and I stood together in the dark.
I said, “I’m going back out there.”
She said, “No, you’re not.”
But in the Odyssey, I wanted to tell her, pretty much every time Odysseus rolls up to a stranger’s house, his hosts feed him and offer him wine. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth’s biggest crime in murdering the visiting King Duncan might not be murdering him but violating the sacred trust of a guest. In New Zealand in my early twenties, all I’d have to do is show up at a sheep farm and offer to work and they’d give me dinner, a place to put my sleeping bag, and as much beer as I could drink.
That, I wanted to say, is the kind of hospitality we should practice.
But there was a reason my wife didn’t want me to go back into the driveway. I knew because I was worrying over it, too.
Guns.
In Idaho we have the sixth most firearms per capita of any state; you can buy a Baby Glock at Ridley’s supermarket and drop it in the cart next to your cream cheese. You can carry your firearm in your car, you can buy a big, scary semiautomatic without a permit, and the governor just signed a law allowing you to carry a concealed weapon inside city limits anytime you want, permit-free, no questions asked. So even in our driveway, two miles from the state capitol, it’s probably safer to assume unresponsive trespassers in camo have weaponry than to assume they don’t.
My wife suggested you might
have been a guest of our neighbors who was sleeping off some wine before driving home, so we called them and Sue picked up on the second ring, Sue who is always up for anything, and said, “Nope, no guests tonight!” I agreed to meet her in her driveway, and together we approached your Taurus, Phil, so that Sue could take a photo of your license plate, but she had trouble with her phone, and you were so still that I started wondering if maybe you were dead, if you might have chosen our driveway as a place to end your life, but as I drew within arm’s reach of your window, I swear, a cloud closed over the moon, dimming what little light there was, and some trick of the shadows made it seem as if your eyes swiveled in their sockets, that you were staring right at me, and what felt like a gallon of antifreeze poured down my vertebrae and some atavistic part of my brain imagined your trash bags full of body parts, your trunk full of blood, and I hotfooted it for my front door.
Fear. Mistrust. Why was it so close to the surface? Sue followed me in and we stood in the bay window with the lights off and called the nonemergency number for the police, and waited on hold, but the call dropped because reception at our house isn’t good, so Sue called a second time and a dispatcher asked some questions, and the three of us drank tap water in the dark.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, a police cruiser rolled into the cul-de-sac. No sirens, no flashers. It pulled up behind your Taurus and sat for a long time with its spotlight on your rear window. It sat so long I wondered if the police, too, had fallen asleep, if some sleeping enchantment had befallen our cul-de-sac, but then a bunch of lights on the cop car came on, and two policewomen got out of the cruiser and walked to either side of your car, one with a flashlight and the other with a hand on her weapon, and the first one shone her light in your face, and the policewoman on the other side of the car stepped back a little, and all this time you didn’t move. The first policewoman rapped on your window and you didn’t move. She rapped a second time, a third, loud louder loudest, seemingly enough to shatter your window, and still you didn’t move.
Then, just as the officer stepped away, finally thank God you turned your head.
They got you up out of the car, and you were tall and thin and though I couldn’t see clearly through the branches in front of our window, your pants didn’t look like they were in good shape, the hems ragged around what might have been laceless boots, and you sat down in our driveway, right where our sons wrote Welcome Santa! in huge chalk letters one Christmas Eve, and this was when I began to dislike myself.
I thought of all the human beings I’d seen asleep in parks in San Francisco, on benches in Cleveland, on curbs in Nairobi; I thought of Ryszard Kapuściński, who upon arriving in New Delhi for the first time came across a river of people sleeping in the middle of the airport road, and was amazed at how the bus honked its horn to rouse them, and then by how everybody climbed back into the road and fell asleep again as soon as the bus had passed.
Why is it okay to sleep in some places and not okay to sleep in others?
Even with the window cracked I couldn’t hear what the officers were asking you. Soon a second police cruiser arrived, and a male officer got out, and he stood you up, and I heard him say, “Minnesota, huh?” and he seemed to be calling you Phil.
Phil? I’m failing here, failing in some big way I don’t understand. I pay my taxes, read Krugman, read Chomsky, donate to the homeless shelter, drop coats off at the Youth Ranch, regurgitate party lines about the need for more social services, but then a stranger shows up in the driveway and like some Bronze Age villager I close the stockade and bar the gates. Wouldn’t a better version of me have offered you something? A bed, a cup of tea, a pair of wool socks?
Or maybe you didn’t need anything from me, let alone some self-congratulatory attempt at decency; maybe you just needed some quiet, some darkness, and I came along and wrecked that.
The policeman gestures for you to walk his chalk line. You walk the line more slowly than any man has ever walked ten feet. I press my ear to the window screen.
The policeman says: “Done this before?”
You say, “A few times.”
It would take most folks ten seconds to walk that line and walk it back; it takes you three minutes. But you manage it. The officers shine lights in your eyes; Sue and my wife whisper; I can’t hear any of it. Finally the cops hand you something, maybe your ID, and you balance it on both palms as though you’ve received Communion, and carry it to your car very, very slowly.
You turn the ignition several times, and your engine coughs to life, and your Taurus pulls away.
I walk out to the driveway.
“Something’s off there,” says one policewoman.
“Something not right,” says the other.
Down the street you take a wrong turn into the other cul-de-sac, make a U-turn, and vanish up the road.
“Thank you for treating him so respectfully,” I say. “We weren’t sure what to do.”
The policeman says, “You did the right thing.”
The last snow of winter gleams on the ridges above the neighborhood. Our breath shows as we exhale. The officers say good-bye; Sue walks home; my wife puts our boys to sleep. I stand in the darkness and wonder.
If you were in a brand-new Prius, if you were wearing a suit and tie, if your car wasn’t stuffed full of trash bags, would we have called the cops? If we lived in a poorer neighborhood, would the police have come so quickly? If your skin was a different color, Phil, would they have let you drive off into the night?
Something’s off there.
Something not right.
Once, at my wife’s office, they did a team-building exercise where facilitators stood everybody hip to hip along a line. If you were read to as a child, they said, take a step forward. If you had health insurance as a child, take a step forward. If your parents took you to art galleries or plays as a child, take a step forward. If you studied the culture of your ancestors in elementary school, take a step forward. If your family owned the house where you grew up, take a step forward. If English was your first language, take a step forward. If you never had to skip a meal, take a step forward. If you were able to complete college, take a step forward.
You know who gets to decide who’s right and who’s wrong? The people who take the most steps forward.
Out here in the driveway, I’m remembering Saint Augustine. “Since you cannot do good to all,” he wrote, “you are to pay special attention to those who, by accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”
You did the right thing.
Did I?
SOUP KITCHEN
Annie Dillard
ON SOME DAYS a writer can’t write. Some days a painter can’t paint, and a composer can’t compose. These wretched men and women know they are eating the food, burning the fuel, and adding nothing. How can they get through the days? How can they relieve their despair?
They can work in a soup kitchen. They can give blood. No one can hate herself, no one can despise himself, who has fed a hungry stranger or saved a life. That’s a good day’s work.
Howlin’ Wolf
In Parchman Prison
in stripes standing
guitar gripped like a neck
strangled strummed
high strung & hard.
Mostly you moan
see how heavy
your hands hang with-
out women or words
we cannot
quite know. How is this
not hell being made
to make music here where
music only makes time
go slow cloudy
like blue
Depression glass? Under
the hard sun of your smile
we see stripes like those
that once lined the slave’s
unbent back
<
br /> blood & gunk
spit it out
like a song low down
gutbucket
built for comfort
not built for speed.
Gimme the brack
of the body the blue
the bile all
you sing or howl.
If a wolf then lone
then orphan then hangry
enough to enter into town
to take food from the mouths
of low houses a hen
a stray it is never
enough. You don’t need
tell me why
we here you know
better black
as an exclamation point
the men all around
you in stripes
how long their sentences
their dark faces ellipses
everywhere accidental.
The white man
in front proud
or is it prideful
he wears no number
& now exiled under
the earth no one
recalls his name.
Yours a dark wick
waiting we burn
wanting you
to step into song
to again howl
till you sweat through
your shirt & two
white handkerchiefs
as if a revival
preacher waving
