House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  At the far end of the mall I wandered into an upscale pizzeria, sat in the back, and ordered a glass of white wine because they sold only that and beer. The lunch rush was over and just a few tables were taken up. The ceilings were low and the walls were covered with fake antiques: mirrors set in leather ox yokes, green-glass kerosene lamps, yellowed newsprint photos of strongmen, and wood carvings of Indians. It was quiet back here, dim and cool, no music, just the sound of the busboy still clearing the table. I smoked my cigarette, drank from my wine, and pretended to study the menu. When the waiter came for my order I smiled up at him, careful not to smile too hard, and tried to say very clearly, concentrating on not mumbling my words, “I don’t see anything I want. I’ll have another chardonnay, please.”

  He took my order and menu without a word. I must’ve just sat there a little while because when he came back with my second glass of wine and a basket of sliced Italian bread I went to put out my last cigarette and saw it was a long ash on a filter between my fingers. I took a tight, ladylike sip of my new wine. I started to butter the bread I knew I wouldn’t eat. My head and face felt blended, one the other, this second evaporating into my skull and hair and today might as well be yesterday when I was a girl, nine or ten, and every Saturday my father would take me with him on his rounds to deliver linens to restaurants and butcher shops and nursing homes up and down old Route 1, me in the passenger seat of his brown van, him smoking a Garcia y Vega cigar, the radio tuned to a baseball game or to a station playing music from when he was younger, but to me he had always been old, a small quiet man with thick glasses and thin lips, his hands always busy, and mine too, the two of us pressing clean linens on the electric roller we had in the basement, me on a stool at the feed end of the rollers, Dad sitting at the catch end because he could fold faster and better than me and he’d taught me how to use the knee lever that would open the hot rollers so I could slide in the first tablecloth or apron or napkin, but after doing that he didn’t want me to use the lever again, didn’t want to have to slow down to set in each piece of linen, taught me instead to take the corners of the next piece and with my thumbs and forefingers hold it to the corners of the last piece being pulled slowly through so one rolled straight into the other and we worked “like Henry Ford,” and I kept burning my fingertips as I fed one piece of linen in after the next, but he seemed so content sitting on the other end of the roller from me, quiet but maybe proud he had such a useful daughter, that I never told him about my fingers because they seemed beside the point to me, and they always felt better when he’d buy me a cold Coke at one of the restaurants after and I’d put my fingers into the ice.

  My wine was almost gone. My head and body were pulsing, and I lit a cigarette, held the lighted match close to my face, studied its flame, the blue and green sulfur colors at the base as it spread down the cardboard shaft. I watched it reach my fingertips, bumping up against flesh that wouldn’t burn, and I didn’t feel much and dropped it smoking onto the table, saw myself dropping one in the dry shrubs around my father’s house, the flames rising up to the windows. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. I saw my house burning to the ground, the flames eating everything inside, the Persian carpets and fancy furniture, the pictures of the bearded horsemen on the wall, the colonel and the Shah, even their family portrait, the fire so hot the glass would blacken and shatter and the beautiful daughter would curl up into a fine ash. But then I thought of Mrs. Bahroony, the weeping little Arab woman and her love of the Italian people, her ability to be at the same party as Sophia Loren; I didn’t want to hurt her, just everything she owned. I would have to find a way to get her out of the house before I burned it, the son too. A diversion maybe. A fire in the front yard. The bands in my stomach vibrated with this thought and I felt tickled by it, ready to laugh.

  Soon, I was walking through all that bright noise into Sears, down the clean wide aisles past brand-new power tools and fishing gear, lawn mowers and lounge chairs, air filters and finally gasoline cans. I seemed to watch them from a distance, like I’d just been dropped off somewhere to run an errand for someone and I forgot what it was. There was a stack of them, five-gallon and made of tin, painted bright red with yellow stripes. They were beautiful in a way, and I thought how nice it must be for other people’s husbands to buy these, to fill them with gas for their lawn mowers on a Saturday morning. I thought of Lester’s house at Eureka Fields, the one I never found. Did he cut it himself? Was that part of his family life? Next to the gas cans were shelves of charcoal lighter and bags of charcoal. Should I buy some for the hibachi in the trunk? But after tonight, if even then, I knew the fish camp would be a memory, and so then what would I do? Spend months parking my car in rest areas, barbecuing my supper, looking for a safe place to sleep till Connie had settled the lawsuit with the county? Months? I picked up a gas can. It was light in my hand, only a reminder of what heavy could be.

  The kid behind the counter asked if I needed a funnel.

  “Nope,” I said, no longer caring if I sounded loaded or not. “Just a book of matches.”

  And he smiled, this skinny-necked nineteen-year-old, like he knew firsthand the sort of problems solutions like this required, and out in the parking lot I carried my new gas can and saw the weather had changed to one of those West Coast fogs moving in from the beach, the sky gray, the air cooler, smelling like wet metal, though the cars were dry and the trunk lid of my Bonneville was still hot from sitting in the sun. I felt it against my palm as I steadied myself to unlock it, my gas can at my feet like a loyal dog, my face feeling strange, stuck in a smile that came from deep inside me. I was having a hard time sliding the key in. Cars were coming and going throughout the parking lot. I could hear the squeak of shopping-cart wheels over asphalt, somebody’s child crying far away. The trunk lock clicked, I stooped for the can, and there in my trunk next to Nick’s hibachi was Lester’s coiled black leather belt, the fine checks in the grip of his gun, the worn black of its holster, and it was like being eleven again, walking into my brother’s room for a pencil or pen, pulling open drawers and finding a color magazine of women sucking off men, when all the tiny currents open in you and they feel like evil and opportunity all at once, temptation and salvation, the cause and the cure, touch it, pick it up, take it away with you.

  And so I did.

  In one fluid motion I put the gas can in and pulled the coiled leather snake out, kept it tucked under my arm as I unlocked my door, rested it on the seat beside me, what Lester left behind before we went into the truck-stop bar for our last dance, his sheriffness, his sword, like a gift he’d willed me, a piece of him to carry and remember him by. I thought of us making love on the banks of the Purisima, him pulling out of me and coming all over my stomach, hedging his bets. I thought how a man’s dried come smells like dead shrimp, how I’d never even shot a gun before, just held one, a small one my first husband owned for about a month when the white snake wriggled through us and in the fluorescent light of the bathroom he had me hold it loaded, point it at my reflection in the mirror.

  I drove north on the Camino Real, the King’s Highway. I reached over and rested my hand on the gun, felt its steel indifference. I kept my fingers on it as I drove the two miles to San Bruno, passing ugly housing developments on each side of the freeway, their hot top lanes broken up by an occasional grove of eucalyptus trees that looked olive in the gray light of the beach fog. I pushed in the Tom Petty cassette and turned him up almost all the way, turned into a mini-mall, placing the gun and holster on the floor, locking the Bonneville and walking into a package store next to a hair salon. I bought three Bacardi nips and two Diet Cokes, a pack of spearmint gum. Back in the car, I didn’t remember who had sold me these things—a man? A woman? I parked in the far corner of the lot near a row of manzanita brush, dumped half of one soda out the window, poured in two of the nips, sipped pure Caribbean heat, smoking, listening to Tom Petty on the cassette player but keeping it low, not wanting to draw any attention to myself, feeling like a
cop in a parked cruiser, looking out the window at cars, people going in and out of stores. I was waiting for something to happen.

  Through the brush to my right was a self-serve gas station. I started the car, took a huge drink of my Diet Rum, but the bubbles were too much and I coughed and started to gag and had to lean out the window but nothing came. I smoked two cigarettes before I noticed the music had stopped. I flipped over the tape, turned up the volume, and drove around to one of the pump islands of the gas station. I freed my gas can from the trunk and pressed the pump button promising I would pay inside and I started to fill the can, my cassette player loud through my open windows—louder than I had thought it was. Lester’s gun was still on the floor where anyone could see it, but there was no one around, just a woman in the pay booth reading something, her glasses pinching the end of her nose, her chin fat, Tom Petty singing, “Break down, it’s all right,” his voice as high and over the edge as everything I felt, what the rational would call an enemy voice, I knew, but to me the sound of him was good company, a warm drunk hand on my back, encouragement for what I had to do, the inevitability of it even. But the woman kept looking up from whatever she was reading, watching me with her head tilted back slightly so she could see me better through her glasses, so she could purse her lips at me like my own mother, already concluding just who I was and what I was up to before I even did. The pump clicked off, gasoline foaming up out of the can at my feet, the fumes so strong it was all I could smell or taste. I leaned into the car, Petty’s singing a smear of sound, and I pulled a few bills from my pocketbook, but I didn’t know if it was enough and I didn’t stop to count, the music so loud the cigarette butts vibrated in the ashtray and all I could smell was gas and I didn’t want to leave Lester’s gun exposed in the car so I unsnapped it from its holster and slid it out, black with a square barrel, lighter than I thought it would be.

  I stuffed it into my pocketbook I hardly ever carried, hooked the strap over my shoulder, and walked under the bay to the lady in the glass booth. I could see my reflection in the window glass, my lips parted like I was sleeping, my face as still as a nun’s before she prays. The lady’s glasses were halfway down her nose, pinching the flesh, and she had her fingers on the short microphone in front of her, saying something, but it was just nagging static to me, nothing I could hear over my cassette player blasting from the Bonneville, Petty pleading Break down, it’s all right, it’s all right, the pay drawer sliding out and me dropping in my money, my left hand still in my pocketbook, resting on the hard checkered grip of Lester’s gun. The woman unfolded and counted the bills, three dollars. She shook her head, the drawer pushed out empty, and she sat there looking at me, waiting, her head tilted slightly, her face in a squint, her eyes narrowed like she couldn’t bear me or the noise coming from my car another second. She shook her head again, quickly. She put her lips to the microphone, but then I stepped back, felt myself pulling out the gun, saw myself pointing it at her through the glass, her hands jerking up in front of her as she sucked her lips in as if she were holding her breath, her pinched nostrils trying to flare, her eyes filling up behind the glasses. I watched her, surprised, I suppose, at how suddenly things had changed between the two of us. I wanted to tell her it’s all right; it’s all right. Her lips were trembling and her fingers were straightening into a church steeple. I lowered my arm, but her eyes weren’t on me, they were on the gun, so I stuffed it into my pocketbook and walked back to my car, a pickup truck pulling into the opposite bay as I got in behind the wheel, turned the music down and drove slowly back onto the street, my entire body as thin and light as the fog moving in around us, my trunk lid open, my full gas can still at the pumps.

  I KNEEL UPON NEWSPAPERS APPLYING GLUE TO THE BROKEN LEGS OF Nadereh’s mother’s table. It has been a very tiring afternoon; I have yet to nap, or take tea, and there persists an ache in my head between my eyes and ears, a sharp pulling in my neck. After the gendeh Kathy Nicolo drove away weeping, and my wife and I were back inside the bungalow, Nadi pushed into my hand a note written by this woman who is content to rob us of our future. Nadereh stood upon the carpet, her eyes shining with anger and distrust of me, and I saw there was no keeping the truth of all this from her any longer.

  “Yes,” I said in Farsi, placing the woman’s note upon the counter. “These are our circumstances. What of it?”

  Nadereh was quiet a moment, her eyes upon me but her face unchanged, her head leaning downwards to the side as if attempting to hear again what I had said. Then in Farsi she cursed me, calling me a thief, a dog, and a man with no father. She became ugly, zesht, her eyes turning small, the flesh between them deeply creased. But my own fury had been spent forcing this Nicolo woman from our home and I felt quite fatigued, empty of any emotion of any sort. Enough of these emotions.

  I moved aside the broken table and sat upon the sofa, my hands heavy and loose in my lap, and I felt quite far away as I waited for Nadereh to finish insulting me and my judgment, my capabilities, my lack of forthrightness with her. All of these things I let pass over me like training jets with no ammunition, for I could see she was close to the tears of fear that have ruled her since the fall of our society. And yes, soon enough she was weeping, exposing to me her ignorant belief we would now be deported from this country for stealing the young woman’s home.

  “Did she say this, Nadi?” I asked of my wife as calmly as one would a child who has just fallen and struck her chin on a stone. But she did not answer me. She continued to curse me for ever being a genob sarhang, a high officer in a position of prominence that has secured all of our names upon the death list so we can never return home. From her I have heard all these things before, ever since our escape to Bahrain and Europe and now California, and I of course should have known, on this day when my wife telephoned her sister in Tehran, that she might show me continued disrespect all over again. But for perhaps the very first time, as I sat as heavy as sand upon the sofa while she continued to be as hysterical as a drunk gypsy, I wanted no more to do with this woman. I could not bear another moment. And I allowed myself to contemplate living the remainder of my days and nights without her. I would rent a small room on a quiet street, in a quiet city, and I would live as a holy man, owning only a single mattress, a simple samovar, and a few necessary items of clothing. I would rise before the sun and pray to the east. I would fast not only for the month of Ramadan, but every week as well. I would free myself of all constraints. I would become as light as dust.

  But I could not listen to Nadereh very much longer; she began to call me tagohtee, selfish, and this I could not bear to hear. I stood and inquired who she thought I was working so hard for. “Me? I do nothing for myself, heechee, nothing.”

  For a very long while we argued like city cab drivers, neither giving way to the other, my wife insisting the young woman was very nice.

  “‘Very nice’? She has sent an armed man to threaten us, Nadereh. Sang nan doz, do not throw these silly stones.” Again and again I attempted to explain for her I knew nothing of all this at the time of the sale, and now it is the problem of someone else, not our own. “God has given to us this bungalow, Nadi. We will have no other opportunity to make such money.” I attempted to explain the young woman Nicolo had an even greater opportunity to enrich herself because an entire county had acted against her. But to this Nadi would not listen. She has always been a superstitious woman, especially when dealing with people less fortunate than ourselves; in Tehran, at the bazaars and shops, she would bring extra money, handfuls of tomans, to give to any beggar that asked, the crippled and blind, those with burned faces and missing arms or hands, the victims of SAVAK. And if there was no beggar in the crowd, she would not leave her shopping until she had found one to give our money. And it is evident to me now this Kathy Nicolo has become a beggar for Nadi, one we must somehow appease, or be cursed.

  And then my wife cursed me, barricading herself once more in her room.

  I DROVE WEST FOR CORONA. AT THE WIDE
DRY TURNOFF FOR A HOUSING complex, I stopped, slammed my trunk shut, and started driving again, thinking I only had so much time before the police came looking for my Bonneville, for the armed woman in it. My feet and legs and chest were a flock of drunk birds and I sipped my Diet Rum and smoked and drove, obeying all the traffic lights on Hillside Boulevard, my window down, smelling the Pacific Ocean now, the air cool and wet, the sky gray, Tom Petty turned so low he was more like a small voice in my head which felt wide open in the back, birds flying in and out of me.

  In downtown Corona the fog was so thick I couldn’t see the water or even the sand at the beach. The one-story shops and stores stood out in the gray, and as I passed the drugstore I saw a Corona police cruiser parked around the corner, a young cop sitting inside reading something, and I felt so thin and light I thought the birds would carry me away, Lester’s gun on the seat beside me; I looked straight ahead and drove past the policeman, keeping my head still, checking the rearview mirror, but there was no one behind me and I drove through the blinking yellow light up the hill of Bisgrove Street. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or what I would do next or even how the last few minutes of this day had come to happen, but as I crested the hill I could see the colonel’s white Buick in my driveway, my lawn trimmed neatly, the widow’s walk drawing attention to itself with the new garden furniture on it, the large white umbrella opened to the gray sky. Where else could I go but home?

  I pulled the car into the driveway behind the colonel’s, turned off the engine and radio, and just sat behind the wheel. My chin kept dropping to my chest, my hair in my face, my veins an alcoholic vapor ready to burn. Nothing but tequila, wine, and rum feeding me into a lava river, a huge molten mother rolling over me, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the small white house in front of me didn’t even look like my home; it looked so white and square and orderly, the shrubs under the windows thick and green and well trimmed. I thought again of Lester, his crooked mustache and sad, brown eyes. I wanted to kiss him again, and hold him, but it felt like needing to see my father again too and Dad was dead and his little retirement house was gone and a whimper seemed to come up and out my mouth, and I felt sorry I’d scared that woman as much as I did. I felt the black gun on the seat beside me, a sleeping snake that woke up, now a silent prankster egging me on, and I reached over and lifted it, sniffing its small black hole, but all I could smell was the gas on my fingers. Then it was back in my lap. I could see it through the hair in front of my face.