House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  Now I heard muffled voices coming from behind a wall, an ancient language, the colonel’s and then his wife’s, and I sat up in their brass bed in a robe I didn’t remember putting on. I held it closed at my throat though I was sweating and I felt suddenly queasy. The window shade was pulled, but a crack of white sunlight showed on one side of the heavy curtains I never hung. I remembered kiwi fruit sliced in half on a tray of tea, the colonel’s wife on her knees beside me, holding my forehead.

  I swung the blanket and sheet away and sat up for my clothes. But there was just the empty chair. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, smelled tea. My mouth was so dry and it tasted terrible and I didn’t want to step out of this room. I heard the front screen door open and shut, and I got up to close the bedroom door, but Lester walked in from the hallway and looked at me like he wasn’t sure it was really me. Then he hugged me, pulling me to him, his neck wet with sweat. I put my arms around him and felt the gun handle sticking out the back of his pants, remembered my cupped hands under the faucet in the fluorescent light. Lester was hugging me hard, turning from side to side. I couldn’t breathe. I pushed myself away from him and stood there looking at him. His eyes were small and bloodshot, and there was a scratch on his nose, a small cut on his chin, his mustache crooked as ever. He stood so still, his long arms hanging there, that gun hidden behind him; he was every boy I had ever fallen for—lean and dark and over the edge—and I started to cry, covering my mouth and putting my hand out so he wouldn’t step any closer. I sat down on the bed and let it come.

  Lester sat on the edge of the chair in front of me and rested both hands on my knees. They were big, his fingers so long I felt like a little girl, and I didn’t know if this was a good feeling or not. Then he got up and left the room, came back with tissues. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. I couldn’t look at him and I didn’t want him looking at me. My bare feet looked blurred against the carpet, my toenails chipped.

  “Tell me what happened, Kathy.” His voice was thin, exhausted. I could still hear the murmur of the Behranis in another room. “Do they know you just walked into their house?”

  “Their house?” He looked behind him at the door, then down at the carpet. There was a piece of paper there and he picked it up, unfolded it, and handed it to me. I read it, my face turning hot, my stomach cold and hollow.

  “They’re in the bathroom?”

  He nodded.

  I thought of the colonel’s wife bringing me tea and fruit, her lined, beautiful face giving me all her attention. “Shit.”

  “Yep.” He took the note from me, folded it tightly, and stuffed it into his front jeans pocket. “I waited for you at the camp, but when you didn’t show up, I went looking for you and ended up here. I looked through the window and saw my gun on the counter and you weren’t anywhere so I guess I just feared the worst.” He kept his eyes on me a second, then looked away. He told me how he heard me moan, how he kicked in the back door and grabbed his gun, then saw me on the floor, and as he said all this, his voice steady, my head started to feel too heavy for my neck.

  Now Les was using legal language about what he’d done: B&E, Brandishing a Weapon, False Imprisonment, all the real trouble he could be in. He sat in the chair with his elbows on the armrests, his shoulders hunched, his long fingers hanging there. I said: “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

  “Why, Kathy? Why’d you think that?” He leaned forward and rested his hands on my knees.

  “I don’t know.” I looked down at his arms, a long blue vein in the belly of his forearm. I told him about yesterday, when I started thinking for the first time how much he must love his kids and how they must love him, and how bad I felt squeezing myself into that picture. And so I made a sort of vow to myself to try and solve my problems without fucking up anyone else’s life, drove here to talk to the colonel’s wife woman to woman, but her husband came home and forced me into my car, and as I told Les this I felt angry again. I kept my eyes on the veins in Lester’s arm the whole time I spoke. His foot was bouncing slightly, then it stopped.

  “When did you drink, Kathy?”

  I told him, but I couldn’t remember what came first and what came later. I almost didn’t tell him about the woman at the gas station, but then I did and he asked if she got a good look at me, at the plates of my car.

  “I don’t know.”

  We were both quiet. He got up and sat on the bed next to me, put his arm around my back. His body odor was strong and his breath was bad, like old coffee, and this made me feel a little better, the fact his smell wasn’t pure and clean. Then I thought of my own teeth coated with dried stomach acid, and I kept my face down. There was a knocking on the inside of the bathroom door down the hall, the colonel’s muffled voice calling Lester “sir,” asking to be let out so his family could eat.

  “This is crazy, Les.”

  “Crazy?” He was holding me against him, his voice hot in my ear. “What about trying to kill yourself, Kathy? What do we call that?” He let go of me and stood, the pistol handle sticking out his waistband. “Just tell me this: was it drinking too much on a really bad day? Or do you really want to die?”

  The colonel knocked on the bathroom door again. I looked back down at the Persian carpet, at all those dark reds and purples. My throat began to close up. “I just—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just want things to change.”

  The colonel pounded on the door. It sounded like he was using his fist. “You must to allow us food immediately!”

  Lester leaped over to the doorway. “You’ll eat when you call the goddamn county!”

  “Yes.” The colonel’s voice was low and dulled behind the closed door but I heard his next words clearly: “I will do as you say. We will sell.”

  Lester looked back at me and smiled so wide his mustache went up in a straight black line above his teeth. But I could hardly move. I just sat there not knowing what I’d just won. I put my hand over my lips, and he walked over and squatted on the floor at my feet. “How’s that for a change?” He shook his head. “When I found out what you’d done, I felt stood up. Isn’t that strange? What does that say about me?”

  I didn’t know what that said about him but I knew I felt closer to him when he said it. I reached over and took his hand, rubbing my finger over the ridge of his knuckles, down over his wedding band. “I don’t think I would have done any of this sober, Les. If that helps you.”

  “It does.”

  The colonel knocked again, this time softly.

  “I’m going to have to keep the heat on them until they go, Kathy. Maybe you should leave until then.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “Promise?” Les was looking into my face, his dark eyes so warm and full of need I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss him or move away.

  He kissed me and one of his mustache whiskers went up my nose. I watched him leave the room, pulling out his pistol as he went. I looked around for my clothes, but they weren’t anywhere. So I got up, stood in the doorway, and watched Lester set a crowbar against the wall, push open the door, and step back with his gun at his side. At his feet on the rug were two neckties, and he told the Behranis to go into the kitchen. As they came out I pulled the robe together at my throat. I felt like stepping back into the bedroom and closing the door, but I knew they’d already seen me. Lester walked backwards in front of them, stepping into the doorway beside me to let them by. The colonel went first, then his wife and son, the colonel looking straight ahead as he passed me, his chin high, like he was marching in a military parade. His shirt was wrinkled and there was a dab of shaving cream just beneath his jawbone. I was impressed by this, the fact he took the time to shave. And looking at him in that moment, Lester standing beside me with his gun at his side, I was glad things were turning out this way, that this hot-tempered shithead was almost Middle Eastern history for me. But then his wife glanced at me without turning her head, and I knew she was scared of Lester and was trying to see whe
re I stood in all this. I looked down at the floor in time to see their teenage son’s big brown feet.

  Les nudged my shoulder and nodded for me to go use the bathroom if I needed to, then he followed the boy into the kitchen and I shut myself in my old bathroom, locked the door, and peed as quietly as I could. The room smelled like toothpaste and the colonel’s shaving cream. My clothes were on the towel shelf across from me folded in a neat pile against the wall: my shorts, my client’s daughter’s turquoise T-shirt from Fisherman’s Wharf, a corner of her panties and my bra under both. My Reeboks were set on the floor side by side. On the back of the sink was the empty prescription bottle. I didn’t remember ever holding it in my own hand. But looking at it, I wasn’t filled with the remorse and dread I’d felt before. Or even the dark rush I’d try again. I felt thankful, like the contents of that empty brown bottle had turned things around for me like nothing else could have. While I washed my face and hands with hot water and soap I pictured myself cleaning and returning the girl’s T-shirt and underwear later this week. Today was Wednesday—yes, Wednesday—my Colma River morning, when I was supposed to clean her house anyway, but I’d have to call her father at his office and postpone a day or two because I was moving. I was moving back into my house.

  I took a fresh towel and pat-dried my face, breathed in the clean smell of the thick terry cloth. I still wanted to disappear, but not completely. My mouth tasted horrible. I squeezed an inch of toothpaste onto my forefinger and used that, rinsing six or seven times. Then I drank from the faucet. On the towel shelf was the colonel’s shaving kit but nothing of his wife’s. No brush or comb, not even a compact. I bent over, letting my hair fall over my head. Then I snapped back up and ran my fingers over my scalp, straightening whatever I found, though I only dared to check myself in the mirror for a second.

  I slipped out of Mrs. Behrani’s robe and started to get dressed. I was a little dizzy from trying to fix my hair and I could hear the clink of silverware out in the kitchen, Lester’s voice saying something about a phone book. He was talking louder and faster than he usually did, more jumpy. I knew he’d been up all night, that he was doing something now that could really go wrong if anyone found out about it, something he never would’ve done if not for me. But then I remembered his story about planting coke in the wife beater’s bathroom, and I felt a little better as I pulled the T-shirt over my head and caught the faint scent of vomit and gun oil. Me and Lester.

  I smelled toast. My stomach had never been so empty and flat. A hunger pain turned over behind my ribs. My body felt light, almost pure, but not my head. It was like I had cotton not in my ears, but in my thoughts. A cigarette and some tea, that’s all I needed. I folded the towel and put it back on the shelf. I heard silverware tink once against a plate out in the kitchen. The colonel cleared his throat, then spoke into the telephone. There was a pulsing in my hand and fingers and I opened the door enough to hear him give his full name and my address to somebody on the other end. I stuck my head out the door and looked down the hall, saw their son sitting at the counter hunched over a bowl of cereal. I could see his mother’s hands buttering a piece of toast as carefully as if it were something living. The colonel stood against the back wall near two or three pots of flowers holding the receiver with two hands. I didn’t see Lester anywhere, but I pictured him standing in the living room with his gun, and as I left my bathroom, running my fingers back through my hair, I hoped he wasn’t pointing it at anyone.

  I HAVE FOLLOWED BURDON’S ORDERS AND COMPLETED THE TELEPHONE call and I sit upon a stool at the counter with my wife and son and drink black tea that is bitter for the samovar has been lighted all the evening long. Burdon and his gendeh sit upon the sofa at our backs, eating our bread, drinking our tea. Through the kitchen’s window, beneath the steps of the new widow’s walk, the sky is as clear and blue as when flying at high altitudes in air with no clouds. From the woodlands across the street come the morning songs of birds, and far away, perhaps down in the village, a dog barks. It would not serve Burdon’s purpose to shoot us in the back as we sit, but I have the feeling my backside is not clothed, nor has even the protection of flesh over bone. Nadereh has eaten very little of the toast before her, and she drinks her tea without sugar in her mouth. This she does rarely and I assume it is to avoid the slurping sound it sometimes makes, the pull of air between the sugar and teeth. All the morning long she has been silent, the same quiet bird who clutched our infant son in the middle of the night as our bullet-proofed limousine drove through the alleys of the capital city. Once again she has surrendered the burden of action to me, and I am grateful and resentful as well.

  My son has finished eating, and he sits and waits for what is to happen next. Again this morning, as we took our turn at the sink washing, I told him to do nothing but what Mr. Burdon instructs.

  “Yes, Bawbaw,” he said, his eyes upon mine, and in them was a dark, hopeful light that is now a heavy timber across my back for I have no real plan of any kind. I hear Burdon upon the sofa, whispering to Kathy Nicolo. As I spoke on the telephone with the same tax bureaucrat as before, Burdon sat upon our sofa’s edge, his weapon placed on the cushion beside him, and the voice of the bureaucrat became nearly boyish, unable to conceal his relief at my news of selling back to the county this bungalow. For a brief moment, I felt a measure of his relief, a desire to simply follow his instructions, travel to Redwood City to sign the proper documents releasing a check in my name. Simply do as I am ordered and leave. But ordered by whom? This thin policeman sick and weak with love? And leave to what place? A hotel that will begin to eat our small nest of money even before we find a new home? One we would surely not be able to buy and sell at three times our investment? I drink my bitter tea, the whispering voices of our captors at my back. Many days, when I toiled as a garbage soldier under the hot sun or in the cool wet fog with the old Vietnamese, the fat and lazy Panamanians, the pig Mendez, the Chinese who smoked cigarettes as if it was air they had imported from their home country, as we fanned out along the roadside with our harpoons and bright yellow plastic bags, I sometimes believed I was being punished for the comfortable life I led as a high officer among beggars. But this belief came only on the worst of days, when my fatigue seemed to come from my own blood. Most days, however, I believed I was being tested by my God and that if I possessed a true desire to escape that life I must have patience and continue to endure until my opportunity revealed itself; this armed couple in our home is nothing more than a test within a test, something that comes when the prize is quite close at hand. Again, I must simply bow my head, and wait.

  An automobile drives past the bungalow and someone rises from the sofa. There is the soft rustle of the drapery at the window, the footsteps over the carpet to the countertop and the telephone at my left. It is Burdon, the grip of his weapon protruding from the front of his trousers. He regards us all as he presses the receiver’s buttons. He is perhaps twenty years my junior but my veins speed at the thought of grasping the gun from his pants. Have I grown too slow? If I must ask, it is already too late. I breathe quietly, turn away from Mr. Burdon, and look over Nadi at Esmail, who regards me, then Burdon’s weapon, then me once again, his face still, his eyes bright.

  On the telephone Lester V. Burdon identifies himself as a deputy and requests information on any dispatch of a weapon being brandished in San Bruno yesterday, a self-service benzine station off the King’s Highway. He is silent for a long moment, and I do not know if he is watching us or his woman. He speaks again. “Was there a vehicle ID on that?”

  Burdon thanks his colleague and hangs up the telephone. He does not move, and I regard him evenly. His eyes are small and moist with fatigue. It is clear he has not slept, but I do not know if this will be to my advantage or not.

  “You and your son are coming with me. Get cleaned up. We have a lot to do.”

  LESTER ALLOWED THE COLONEL AND THE BOY TO GO INTO THEIR rooms one at a time for fresh clothes, then ordered them into the bathroom toge
ther to change. He stood in the dim hallway and waited, holding the pistol down at his leg, and even though it was on double safety he wished it wasn’t part of the equation at all. But what was the equation? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was they had a perp and vehicle description on Kathy but no plates, and his appointment with Alvarez had gone better than he had honestly expected. Lester had sat in a steel chair in front of the lieutenant’s desk and told him most of the truth of Monday night, that he’d gone to the Corona address on behalf of a friend and simply suggested to Mr. Behrani that he do the right thing and move. He had never made any threats of any kind, was just trying to act as an intermediary in a dispute. “Unfortunately,” he had told the lieutenant, “I made the mistake of leaving my uniform on. I know now that was highly inappropriate.”

  “He says you threatened to have his family deported.”

  Lester smiled and shook his head. “I’m not INS.”

  Maybe Alvarez had had an especially good run this morning, or maybe the sight of Lester’s still-damp hair, nicked face, and wrinkled pants kept bringing the lieutenant back to Lester’s phone message about family troubles. Alvarez sat back in the upholstered chair behind his desk, his elbows on the arms, the tips of all ten fingers touching.

  “Are you and your wife getting counseling?”

  “Yes.” This was a lie Lester hadn’t planned on, but it came out so naturally he had to wonder if he was getting help. The lieutenant looked at him for a long five seconds. Then he sat forward and picked a pen up off his blotter. “You’re an FTO, Deputy. I shouldn’t have to tell you squat about departmental code.”