Condit took his talker back out and said, “HOPE THAT SCHOOL HAS GOOD INSURANCE ON YOU.”
“Is that a threat?” I asked.
“SOMETIMES IT’S HARD TO KEEP UP WITH YOUR MORTGAGE IF YOU AIN’T WORKING.”
“Why wouldn’t I be working? Wait a minute, how do you know where I work?”
“COULD GET HURT. NEVER KNOW. ACCIDENTS HAPPEN. QUACK QUACK.”
Right then Annie reappeared with somebody from the store. Condit scooped up his basket and disappeared through a break in the aisle where the paint mixing center was. “What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing. He’s just bothered.”
Annie turned to the fella in the orange apron. “He’s an older man in a blue jumpsuit.”
“How old?” the guy asked.
“I don’t know, maybe sixty-five,” Annie said.
The store guy looked at me with a screwy look in his face. “Sixty-five? Does he work out?” Annie glared at him so fiercely that he apologized and said, “Someone will escort him out of the store. After that, I’m sorry. You’re on your own.”
We made a couple more stops and went home. I kept my eyes on the rearview the whole time and did not see anything suspicious. While we were unloading the car, Annie’s realtor called. “Hi,” she said, “I hope everything’s going okay with you guys. Sorry I couldn’t do anything for you. You still looking? ’Cause I think I found a couple of really cute properties that might fit your budget. A house just listed in a really cute part of town. Quiet street full of cute little homes. It’s right next to the cutest little Cape Cod that just sold to a really cute couple. Isn’t that the strangest coincidence?”
“Yeah, it is,” I told her, then Evangeline told me the address, and I told her we were not interested.
“Who was that?” Annie asked.
“The realtor. The house next to ours just went on the market. Looks like it’s in our budget.”
Annie rolled her eyes and said, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever dealt with.”
WHEN THE DATE FOR US to take possession came, we got the keys from the title company and went down to the house, but they did not work. I immediately knew what had happened. “That jerk from the Home Zone,” I said. “He changed the locks.”
“He what?” Annie said.
“He changed the locks,” I said, and then stepped back from the door.
“Well, what do we do now?” Annie asked.
Just then, one of the neighbors came over from the house next door. It was the one for sale. She was a nice woman in her early fifties holding a miniature schnauzer. “That man is crazy,” she said, the dog clawing its way up the front of her sweatshirt. “He’s been terrorizing us for months. Making threats. He’s been building something in there, too. We can’t stand it. We bought a condo up in San Luis Obispo, so we can get away from this toilet bowl of a neighborhood. We’ve had enough of that no-account and his episodes.” Then she set the dog down and instructed it to go potty. When it did not, she picked the dog back up and returned to her house.
Annie looked over at me and very calmly said, “Let’s give Roger a call,” which was strange because Annie has always thought of Roger as a kind of troglodyte, and not only because he was a coach. I asked her if she was sure and she said, “If anyone knows anything about kicking people off a property, it’s got to be Roger.”
“No.”
“Okay, then. I will.”
“Fine,” I said. As I was dialing I thought I saw something moving on the roof, and then Roger picked up.
“Where are you, man? You loving your new house?”
“Sort of.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Key doesn’t work.”
“How does a key not work?”
After a bunch of back-and-forth, Roger said he would be right down. Annie returned to the car and stood alongside it. One minute later, she went over to the neighbor’s house and took one of the real estate flyers from the sign in the front yard. Then I saw something moving again up on the roof. I told Annie to get in the car. She refused to budge, but I made her. I did not see that movement again, but we sat in there for about five minutes until Roger showed up.
“That was fast,” I said.
“I was scouting properties down in Buena Vista. So, it looks like you’ve got a barnacle.”
“A what?” Annie said.
“A barnacle. You know, some guy you have to scrape off the boat.”
Annie shook her head, even though I am certain she understood what he meant.
“Let’s work up a little recon on the situation,” Roger said as he leaned through his truck window and brought out a pair of binoculars. “Annie, maybe you should wait in the car, what with the baby and all.”
“How about I go wait at my parents’ house in Kansas City?” Annie said, but she got in the car anyway and locked the doors.
Roger scanned the place with his binoculars, spitting out bits of a report as he did. “No movement. Some evidence of fortification on the ground floor. Mostly. Looks like he hasn’t moved out. You got a barnacle for sure.”
I asked Roger for the binoculars and he told me where to look and what to look for. In one of the windows to the front room I could see the dull glint of plastic sheeting. It could have been anything, really, but my heart kind of sank.
“It doesn’t look like he’s there,” Roger said. “Let take a closer look.”
I told him I had seen something on the roof, and Roger said I was probably just imagining things or that maybe it was a bird or something. I agreed, mostly because I was hoping it was not Condit on the roof, that this wrinkle was not, in fact, an all-out warping of reality.
We approached the house cautiously, and when we got to the front door Roger asked for the keys. I tossed them to him and he tried them and they did not work. Roger tossed them back and began knocking about in the shrubs. “Come look at this,” he said, and I went over. A trip wire ran along the ground about six inches from the foundation.
We followed it around the house and were surprised when the wire just came back to itself. “I don’t think this is connected to anything,” Roger said. “Watch out.” He knelt and tugged the wire sharply once or twice, then stood and watched the front door. After a minute or so he said, “See what I said,” and we gathered ourselves back on the front walk.
“Okay, Stevie, you got a problem. This guy is trying to make you think he’s not going anywhere, which means that he’s probably not planning on going anywhere.”
“But how do we get him to leave?” I asked.
“Well, you need to start filling out some forms. The cops won’t come without the right paperwork.”
I told Roger thanks and then went up to the car and broke the news to Annie, who cupped her head in an open palm and breathed deeply for a couple of minutes before agreeing to leave. I had to fill out a thing called an unlawful detainer, which was a highly detailed complaint full of checkboxes, and when I was nearly finished with it I realized that it was the wrong form, that I had to complete a summons and then the cops could serve Condit and evict him. At that point everything got hazy. I filled out everything I needed to, spent way too much time on the phone and at city hall.
We found out through channels that Condit was no longer residing in the house (SWAT team, tear gas), and that he was also not in police custody.
THE NEXT STEP FOR US was to wait for the authorities to process the crime scene and clear us to allow our insurance people to come in and size up the situation. They said we shattered some kind of claims record. The adjuster joked that the place was broken in, so the probability of this kind of thing happening again was next to nothing.
Annie was furious. She blamed me for the mess. Actually, she blamed my mother, and my brother, Michael, and the mental health system. “We’ve bought a house we can’t even live in. The former owner is at large. We don’t know if he’s booby-trapped the house or what.” I told her the police didn’t think the house
was booby-trapped, and she just left the room. When they finally called to let us know we were cleared to enter the premises, Annie was the first to go. The cops had found a set of keys that fit the new locks, so we got in just fine. And we were completely unprepared for what we found in there.
Given the situation with Condit, you would think the house would have been a wreck: furniture heaped in front of doorways, carpet torn away from the corners, trapdoors in the bedroom, plywood over the street-facing windows, strange uretic odors omnipresent. I kept imagining something like the Iraqi bunkers they showed on television during the war, but instead we opened the door and found an impeccably arranged home, impossibly, impeccably arranged. Annie gasped. It was something to behold, really lovely.
“It’s all still here,” she said. “He wasn’t even intending to move, was he?”
“What are we going to do with it all?” I asked.
We continued through the house like people do in science fiction movies when their ship hatch opens and they step onto the surface of a planet for the first time. All his family photos were still hanging in clusters throughout the house: parents, brothers, sisters, children. Above a recliner in the living room Condit’s military honors hung. He had an Armed Forces Expeditionary medal, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Legion of Merit medal, and about thirty-five other awards, medals, and commendations.
At the center of the cluster was a framed copy of his discharge papers. He had left the military with honor. Upstairs was a sewing room, which was a little dusty but otherwise seemed like it had been untouched in years. Around the door to this room was a rim of thin wood strips nailed into the frame. In places, clear plastic serrations jutted past the strips as if the door had been covered once and someone had hacked their way through. I could go on about everything we found in that house. A list of the items we discovered would fill up a small town phone book. Condit’s whole life was in there, a story you could read if you were patient enough.
He had been in Vietnam, married and widowed, he had three boys whom he did not see regularly (the pictures of them were all at least ten years old), and he was one of four kids, a brother and two sisters. The brother, it seems, was Dr. Science, the guy who does that nutty kids’ science program on public television. There was a photo of Condit and Dr. Science and his sisters standing together with Big Bird from Sesame Street, a professional courtesy from the bird, I guess.
While I was milling around the house, wondering what we would do with everything, Annie found a phone book and ordered a thirty-yard dumpster. Right after that, she called the local Vets Administration to pick up Condit’s military things. They said they had a thrift operation that could use any donation, and Annie said they could take it all.
After a week or so, Annie had arranged for nearly everything to be carried away or donated. We cleaned the entire house (checking for booby traps) and then moved in ourselves.
It was nice at first, living in this wonderful house, making decisions about rooms and where to put things, amending our choices and then amending them again. In an apartment, you feel hard-pressed to commit to an arrangement. No one leisurely moves into or out of an apartment. The purpose is to establish yourself quickly. You can rearrange an apartment, but not radically. There is usually one way things can go, maybe two. If you want radical change, you move. This is probably why I was reluctant to commit to a house. You linger in a home and take root. After years in a house, you can rise, head downstairs, and notice that a small table in the middle of the hallway should be moved to the far end, so the sunlight can climb the legs after it breaks through the window. When you are a renter, you are buying nonattachment. When you own, you are grafted in. Leaving always tears off a little something.
JUST AS WE WERE BEGINNING to feel settled, Condit began making appearances. At first he would just sit across the street in his car, smoking these mammoth cigars, one arm hanging out the window like he was dragging Main Street with a couple of his buddies. I would pull the drapes or close up the blinds and pretend nothing happened. I did not want to alarm Annie—better for me, I thought, to keep my eye on things.
During our prep hour, I told Roger about Condit, and he just shook his head. “Trying to strong-arm you, huh?” he said, then sighed. He actually sighed. “These people are no better than those Feed Our Babies commercials. They take a fundamentally good thing like having compassion for your fellow men and turn it into blackmail.” Roger recapped a bottle of cran-apple juice he was carrying and then surveyed the cafeteria, squinting at the mass of blue sweaters and over-coiffed hair. “I’ve looked into this,” he said.
“Looked into what?”
“These charity frauds. Those Feed Our Babies extortionists are based out of Oyster Bay on Long Island. Did you know that it costs something like one hundred and twenty percent of the national average to live in Long Island? I don’t think you’re going to find any bloated bellies in that slum.”
“Isn’t that where what’s her name with the ‘Ain’t Life Sweet’ lives?”
“Barbara Stein?”
“Yeah, the stupid Southern living show my wife watches.”
“She ain’t from the South,” Roger said. “You see, you get showered with all the commercials that are supposed to make you feel bad for working hard and taking care of yourself, and what do they do but set up shop in an overpriced suburb of New York City where they shoot a richy-pants television show about deep-frying game hens. Makes me want to mow those people down with an SUV. You should just tell that Condit fella to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, I kept Roger posted on Condit’s strange behavior. Annie had noticed him, and because our encounters with him had already drained her vitality, she deteriorated rapidly. She started keeping the curtains drawn, the doors and windows locked. I sort of figured things would taper off after a while once Condit got with the program and realized we were not just going to turn over the house to him and keep making payments on his behalf out of the goodness of our hearts.
Over time it got worse.
One night I was up late reading and heard scratching in the yard and a dull clank. I went to the window and parted the curtains and in the backyard I saw Condit throw down a shovel and lift the body of an animal to his chest, which he spirited off into the night.
The next morning a dog collar enwreathed our front doorknob with a note attached to it written in blunt pencil on one of those old manila parcel tags. It said, DIG WHEREVER THE HELL YOU WANT TO. And in the backyard, next to some hollyhock, there was a hole about three feet deep. My shovel was stuck down in the bottom of it.
After that I began finding the parcel tags all over the house, attached to the mailbox and the shutters and the exterior light fixtures and trees and the handle of the lawnmower, on the hose rack and the license plate rim of the car. Only one of them would appear each day, each one with a cryptic message written, it seemed, with the same blunt pencil.
It began with A COWARD HAS NO SCAR. The next read, BETTER REPAIR THE GUTTER THAN THE WHOLE HOUSE. I wisely chose to hide the bulk of these from Annie, who was by then barely able to function. By the time Condit had written, IF THERE WERE ONLY SNAILS AND TORTOISE, NO HUNTER WOULD EVER FIRE HIS GUN, and THE PRICE OF LIBERTY IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE, I began to seriously consider moving. At that point we had no life. Whatever creature comforts we gained as homeowners were overshadowed by Condit’s menacing. The cops just blew us off, said they could not take him in since we had no proof it was him. Annie asked them if calling out the SWAT team wasn’t normally enough to land somebody in jail.
They said, “That’s over. We have to move on.” They told us to get a picture of him on the property. We could use it to file a restraining order. I asked them if they thought a man who would tag a house with proverbs would be worried about obeying a court order. The cop said, “One hundred percent of the people we deal with don’t worry about the law, sir, but we can’t arrest them before they commit a crime. It’s not sci
ence fiction.”
Roger said that after 9/11 they can do whatever they please and we will thank them for it. Then he said that maybe the cops cannot arrest you for thinking about socking a guy, but God has said his piece on the matter. “That’s why there’s a separation of church and state, right, Stevie?” Roger said, slapping me on the back. “So it looks like, in no uncertain terms, you’ve got an itch you can’t scratch.” I nodded. “You want me to scratch it for you? I know some guys who worked in Vegas who knew a guy called Scissors—”
“What are you saying?” I blurted.
“Calm down. I’m not saying anything.”
“We can’t have Condit killed,” I said.
“Why not?” Roger said. “Just send the guy to sleep with the fishes.” Roger chuckled at his own joke. When I did not laugh, he repeated the line.
“Listen, Roger. I just need this guy to stop. I gotta get my life back.”
“All we need to do, Steve, is scare the guy. It’s simple deterrence, nothing more or less than the stunts he’s been pulling on you and Annie since you moved in. He isn’t trying to hurt you. He’s trying to run you off like in those Scooby-Doo cartoons. We just need to scare him back.”
“Fine, Roger,” I said. “You wear the sheet.”
“Okay, you’re upset. I can see that. What I’m saying is you’re going to have to fight fire with fire.”
THE TROUBLE WITH ROGER IS that most of the time he is right. He is right so often that when he is wrong, you still think he is right, which makes him think he is right all the time, which creates this perpetual-motion-machine/irresistible-force-meeting-an-immovable-object that pulverizes everything.
I went home with Roger’s comments about scaring Condit away seared into my mind. The more I wanted to dismiss the idea, the more merit it seemed to have. Condit was not the kind of guy to fret over restraining orders—that much was clear. The cops had already told us there was nothing they could do unless we could prove that he had been on the premises, and you could tell in their faces that they believed they had more important things to do, like getting into high-speed car chases and Tasering people. But the long and short of it was that while Roger was thinking of this like Scooby-Doo, I kept feeling like it was Cape Fear.
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