House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  I MADE SURE I wasn’t at the restaurant first, but when I drove into the parking lot in San Bruno at five past four the sun was in my eyes and I didn’t see his Toyota station wagon or even a cruiser. I waited in my car till a quarter past, then hop-walked into the restaurant, keeping the weight off my wrapped foot, and I scanned the people at the counter, in the booths and sitting at the tables, but he wasn’t there and I didn’t want to be standing near the door when he came, so I made it back to my car and sat behind the wheel another twenty minutes, eyeing everything that drove into the lot. But no Lester. At quarter to five I drove away, though I had no idea where I was going or what I would do once I got there.

  I felt more than disappointed. I drove around San Bruno, past short stucco houses and small dried-up yards, vaguely hoping I’d see Lester’s car and follow him back to our late coffee date. My throat felt thick, my eyes burning a little. I hadn’t felt this lonely in weeks, and I knew it was because I’d gotten my hopes up and I guess I just hadn’t pictured kind Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon standing me up. At a traffic light, a bald man in an open jeep winked at me and my eyes filled and I pulled away without waiting for the light to change.

  I was so sick of being in my car, sick of even the idea of driving around to find a place to stow it and me for the night. But at least it was familiar, though the rest of me was in a storage shed across from the El Rancho Motel. After almost an hour of wasting gas I drove back there, parked the car beside my shed, and sat looking out the windshield at cars going by, thinking how I should really break down and rent another room at the El Rancho across the street, one with a TV that worked, just lie on the bed in front of it and watch hour after hour of whatever trash came on. When I got hungry I’d pick up the phone and have something delivered. I’d write checks I couldn’t afford to write; I wouldn’t go to work; I wouldn’t leave that bed and that room until Connie Walsh called me to move back into my house.

  That’s how I felt. But back into what really? Cleaning people’s houses and offices? Chain-watching movies on the VCR? Waiting for my husband to come back? Lying to my family?

  I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. In the program, they’d tell you at these times in life to HALT. If you’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired—any of these—you should slow down and watch your step. I happened to be all four, I knew it, and the last thing I felt like doing was facing the B.E.A.S.T. in the air and recognizing the enemy voice in my head so I could start accusing it of fucking malice.

  My foot throbbed. I leaned back against the door and propped it on the passenger’s seat. The Arabic woman had done a good job wrapping it up, I had to admit that, but how come I didn’t explain the situation to her when I was back in the house? This is what I was wondering just as a San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department car pulled off the street into the lot, its long radio antenna swaying, Lester Burdon lifting his hand off the steering wheel to wave hello.

  He left his engine running and walked over to my window and I swung my leg off the seat and sat up. There were sweat stains under his arms, and his gold star hung away from his shirt. “I’m sorry about the coffee, Kathy, I got a call on a domestic. Did you wait long?”

  “Just an hour or two.”

  “I am sorry, I—”

  “I’m kidding. Forget it, I drove around.” I hoped I didn’t sound as happy as I felt seeing him now. “Still want coffee?”

  “Yes.” He had both hands on the door, looking right at me with that dark look again, a wanting, I thought, definitely a wanting. I glanced down at my hands on the steering wheel.

  “You mind riding in a patrol car?”

  “Only if you’re not busting me.”

  He smiled and I parked the Bonneville behind the truck stop between two eighteen-wheelers. I hop-walked to Lester’s cruiser and when I slid in and pulled the door shut he asked about my foot, his face hard and soft at the same time. I told him about waking up this morning on Bisgrove Street, about the carpenters and the piece of roof in my yard. Lester started to shake his head and get that long-eyed look for me I didn’t want, so I told him again how Connie Walsh promised to have me back home by the weekend and now I had someone I could celebrate with. I felt a little too naked putting it that way, and Lester didn’t say anything back, just put his cruiser into gear and pulled out of the truck lot heading west.

  I looked at the black radio set into the console, the green and orange scanner lights. There was a shotgun clipped under the dashboard, and I glanced over at Lester behind the wheel. He was shaking his head.

  “Does your lawyer know you’re sleeping in your car?”

  “She thinks I’m with friends. That’s what she wants to think anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s a limit to how much she wants to help, that’s all; she has her limits.”

  He drove onto the Cabrillo Highway and went quiet a minute. “There’s no one you can stay with, Kathy?”

  I shrugged, my face heating up. “You don’t meet a lot of people cleaning houses, I guess.”

  I felt his eyes on me. I squinted out at the bright ocean. My foot ached and I wanted my sunglasses. We passed a few cars and I watched the drivers hold their heads still, glancing down at their speedometers and keeping their eyes on the road, only looking up once we’d pulled away.

  “You ever get used to that?” I said.

  “What?”

  I nodded out the window at the slowing traffic. “People you don’t know being scared of you.”

  “You really think they’re scared?”

  “Scared enough to mind their P’s and Q’s.”

  Lester turned off Cabrillo into the lot of a hot dog and ice cream shack on the beach. There were picnic tables on both sides of it and in back, and five or six teenage boys and girls sat at one near the order window. Their arms, legs, and faces were tanned or sunburned. When they saw Lester get out of the car they looked away like he was the fourteenth cop they’d seen in the past ten minutes, and I liked being on the other end of that look. I could smell cooked hot dogs, the cigarette smoke of the teenagers, somebody’s tanning lotion. The girl working behind the window told Lester they didn’t have coffee so he said two Cokes would be fine, but then he looked over at me to check and I smiled at him.

  In the shadow behind the shack Les carried our drinks while I hopped through the cigarette butts in the sand. We sat at a weathered picnic table, and way ahead of us the Pacific Ocean seemed to be pulling out into low tide, its waves coming in long and small before they finally broke. Out on the water was a blue-gray cloud bank, the kind that usually came in as a fog, and the sky around it was a haze. Lester sat next to me on the bench facing the beach and for a while we just looked out at the water. I drank from my Coke and turned to him enough to take in his profile, his deep-set brown eyes, the small nose and badly trimmed mustache. Again, there was this gentleness to him, this quiet.

  “How did you ever end up in that uniform, Lester?”

  “Les.” He glanced at me and smiled.

  “Les.” I was smiling too, but like a flirt, I thought. Like I wasn’t really interested in the answer to my question.

  “I was planning on being a teacher, actually.”

  “That’s what you look like. I mean, that’s what you seem like to me.” I wanted to light a cigarette, but didn’t want the taste in my mouth, not right now. “So then how come you’re a boy in blue?”

  He shook his head and looked down at the old tabletop, at a plank where someone had carved two breasts with X-shaped nipples. “My wife was pregnant. The academy was cheaper than graduate school, the guaranteed job afterwards. That kind of thing.”

  “You like it?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  He smiled at me, but his eyes had gone soft and he suddenly seemed too tender so I looked straight ahead again, at the cloud bank that had moved closer in just the past few minutes, the haze around it too. The beach sand wasn’t as brig
ht as before, and I caught the smell of seaweed. “Fog’s coming in,” I said. I could feel him still looking at me. I drank from my Coke until the ice slid to my teeth.

  “Kathy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like to ask you something personal, if I could.”

  “All right, get it over with.” I was kidding him again but I couldn’t look at him so kept my eyes on the green water, on the haze it seemed to make.

  “Why is your husband not with you any longer?”

  I watched a low wave ride all the way into the beach, and just before it broke, I felt I was rooting for it, hoping it wouldn’t. “I wanted kids and he didn’t. I don’t know, I think if he really wanted me, he would have wanted them too, you know?”

  Lester put his hand over mine on the table. It was warm and heavy. “He’s a fool.”

  I looked down at his hand. “Have you been watching me, Officer Burdon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “It is?”

  “That you didn’t lie.”

  He took a breath. “I haven’t stopped thinking of you since the eviction, Kathy.” I looked at him now. His voice was quiet, but there was something like boldness in his eyes. My right foot ached but our knees were touching. He lowered his eyes, but then, as if he’d made himself do it, he looked back at me, his brown eyes not bold anymore. He reminded me of me. He squeezed my hand and I suddenly felt so close to him that kissing him didn’t even feel like a forward movement. His mustache was prickly and soft against my upper lip and I let my mouth open and I tasted his sweet Coke. I held his back and he held mine and the kiss went on for a long time, it seemed, until we finally took a breath and pulled apart and the fog was floating in close to the beach and it was getting hard to see the water. I looked at him, at his small straight nose, his lower lip beneath his mustache, his shaved chin. When I got to his eyes that were taking me in so completely, my mouth felt funny so I focused on his gold star badge, his name etched on the tag beneath it, and I wanted to run my fingertips over the letters. The temperature had dropped and I had goose pimples on my arms and legs.

  “Let’s find you a place to stay.” Les stood up and grabbed our empty cups, and as he helped me over the sand to his car, I didn’t say anything. We rode quietly through Corona into San Bruno, where he turned north just before the El Camino Real Highway. Under the gray sky we passed one-story houses with small grass lawns. Behind them was the highway, and I could see the cars and long trucks going south for towns like Hillsborough, I guessed, San Carlos, Menlo Park, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale, towns I’d driven through alone for months now, telling myself I wasn’t looking for Nicky’s gray Honda. Les was quiet behind the wheel and even though we were in his police cruiser, it was so familiar to be sitting on the passenger’s side of a car with a man driving again that I felt sort of up and down all at once. Then we were away from houses and in a neighborhood of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and a shopping center right next to the highway. “So where’re we going, Les?”

  He looked at me, then rested his hand on my knee and turned left, driving past the shopping center to a stretch of motel and travel inns on a grassy hill along the El Camino Real Highway.

  “You want a pool?”

  Without waiting for me to answer he turned into the small parking lot of the Eureka Motor Lodge, a two-story white brick building with a fake-looking terra-cotta roof. Outside the office door were two Coke machines and an ice machine. A carved wooden sign hung over its window: Eureka: I have found it!

  “This neighborhood’s better than the other one, Kathy. I can’t let you sleep in your car.”

  “I’ll have to pay you back.”

  “Shh.” He put his finger close to my lips. I pretended to bite it and he smiled, then went into the office, all uniform, gun, and wedding ring. For a second I asked myself just what I was doing anyway, but then I concentrated on how good a bath would feel, a firm bed with clean sheets.

  The room was in the back, away from the highway, facing the pool. Les helped me in, then excused himself to go to the bathroom. I sat at the foot of a queen-size bed covered with a periwinkle spread. The floor was carpeted and clean. Against the curtained window were two cushioned chairs on each side of a small glass-topped table. In front of me was a color TV on a stand next to a walnut dresser and mirror. I couldn’t see my reflection from where I sat, so I started to stand on my good foot when the toilet flushed, the water ran, and Les walked back into the room drying his hands on a towel he dropped on the dresser.

  “Looks like you’ve done this before,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” He stood where he was, a hurt look on his face, his hands resting on his gun belt.

  “Sorry, it was just a joke.”

  He opened his mouth like he was going to say more, then he squatted at a mini-fridge on the other side of the dresser and pulled out two cans of Michelob, handing me one. It was cold in my hands and I looked down at it in my lap, like I was seeing an old Polaroid of somebody I used to know and for a second didn’t know why I didn’t anymore. Les opened his and drank from it right there, standing over me. But I couldn’t even look up at him. I let the can drop to the floor and I flopped back on the bed and covered my face. What was I doing? My foot hurt, hanging off the bed like that, and I actually wondered if my thighs looked fat from where he stood. I heard him rest his beer can on the dresser, then squat to pick up the other, the leather of his gun belt creaking. The mattress sank with his weight and I lowered my hands and he was looking into my face, leaning on one arm so his shoulder moved up to his ear. He looked almost feminine that way, and for some reason it made me want to kiss him again. He was moving his middle finger over my wrist and forearm, and his eyes didn’t have that boldness in them anymore, but they didn’t look sad either.

  “You have no idea who I am, Lester.”

  “I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  I put my hand on his warm hairy arm and he leaned down and kissed me. His tongue was cool from the beer and I could taste it and that did something to me. I scooted away from him and sat back against the headboard.

  “What, Kathy?”

  I wanted a cigarette, but didn’t know where I’d left them. I crossed my arms in front of me. Les sat at the foot of the bed looking at me like I was about to say something deep. “I haven’t had a drink in almost three years, Lester.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “I know you didn’t, but you don’t know much about me, do you?”

  His lips were parted beneath his mustache and he looked away, stood, then walked over and took his can of beer into the bathroom and I could hear him pouring it down the sink. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to do that, but I didn’t trust my voice not to sound bitchy. The air conditioner in the wall came on, though the room was already too cool, but my foot felt squeezed and hot and I leaned forward and undid the safety pin the Arab woman had put in the Ace bandage. It felt good to unwrap it, and as I pulled it off Les came out of the bathroom and I was afraid my foot would smell a little. It did. Lester squatted and looked at the sole.

  “You should soak it.” There was a new look to his face now; distracted, like he was late for being somewhere else but wasn’t quite sure where that place was, or if it even existed.

  “You didn’t have to dump that beer, Les. It’s not like that.”

  His eyes caught mine. “What’s it like then, Kathy? I’d like to know.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  I believed him, and I didn’t like him standing over my smelly foot like that. I put my hand on the spread. “Come here.” He hesitated a half-second, as if he didn’t know what I had in mind, and truthfully, I don’t think I had anything in mind. I just wanted him to get away from my foot. But when he sat on the bed beside me, then leaned over and kissed my forehead, my cheek, my lips, his hand pressed to my rib cage, the other stroking my hair back, it w
as like I was an empty well and didn’t know it until just now when he uncovered me and it started to rain and I pulled him on me and opened my mouth and I held the sides of his head and kissed him so hard our teeth knocked together; I kissed his cheeks, his eyes, his nose; I licked his mustache and kissed him open-mouthed again. I began to unbutton his shirt and he pulled my T-shirt over my head, then everything slowed down as he touched my breasts. A change came over him, and me too. He looked into my eyes, checking on something one last time, then he sat up and very slowly untied his shoes. He put them aside, unsnapped his pistol from its holster, and laid it on the bedside table. When he pulled his shirttails from his pants, I swung my legs to the other side of the bed, unsnapped my shorts, and pulled them and my underpants off. My fingers were shaking, and I was thirsty, but now the throbbing heat of my punctured foot had moved up between my legs and I lay back on the bed just as Les stepped out of his boxer shorts, his rear small and dark. He turned to face me and I made myself look up at his crooked mustache, at his messed-up hair, his narrow shoulders. I was sixteen all over again, Ma gone shopping, Dad at work, plenty of time before we get caught. I gripped his shoulders, drew my heels up along the backs of his legs, and pulled him forward.

  EARLIER THERE WAS FOG, BUT NOW THE SKY IS THE COLOR OF PEACHES and the sun is low over the ocean I cannot yet see from our home. The najars have for two hours been gone. Before leaving, they cleaned up the area well, covering the new lumber with a large green canvas they weighted with old wood from the roof. I sit upon the front step and view my son using the rake to gather the cut grass in the yard. He wears what is called a tank shirt, and short pants which are quite loose, and I see the long muscles beginning to show in his arms and legs, his shoulders as well. Set over his head are the yellow earphones of his Walkman radio Nadi purchased for him in Japantown. I am certain he is listening to California rock and roll music that to me sounds as pleasant as five F-16s flying over one’s head. In this final light of day his skin is a lovely golden brown and for a moment I find myself thinking of our dead Shah Pahlavi.