by Chris Wiltz
Sandy could not sit still any longer. She got up and wandered about the house, going from room to room, looking at all the details, all the things she had spent so much time thinking about and picking out and putting all together. The house was the one thing in her life that remained unchanged, and she loved it, never tiring of looking at it and being in it. She walked around, trying to recapture her feeling of calm again, seeking comfort from the house. She went outside through the French doors in the dining room into the chill of the night. She walked to the edge of the swimming pool and listened to the water gurgling out of the stone frog's mouth into the three-tiered lily pad fountain set into the foliage at the other end of the pool. She loved hearing the sound of the water and looking at the variety of plant life, the drama of the hidden lights around the black pool. She loved it and never got tired of it because it contained her life, the life she had been so pleased with, but the life that was changed forever now. She stared into the black water, watching her reflection undulate on its calm but ceaselessly moving surface. The restlessness of her reflection began to unnerve her. She wanted it to be still, as if then life would be able to go on the same as always, but it continued to fold upon itself, break up, tear away at the edges until she turned from the pool, unable to look at it any more.
She looked up. Through the glass doors she looked into the house, its beauty and serenity belying the ugliness and anxiety that existed there, obscured by the false image of quality and richness. She felt betrayed by the deception and by the separation she was beginning to sense, as if those doors had closed and she was to be left outside forever, cursed to gaze longingly at what she wanted but could not have.
29
When Dexter woke up it was dark. He was disoriented for a few moments because when he'd gone to sleep the sun had been streaming in through the bedroom window, making a bright warm patch of light over his legs. The warmth had helped lull him to sleep. He had no idea how long he'd been out or if it was still the same day on which he'd gone to sleep. He twisted around to look at the clock. He'd been asleep for more than seven hours, the only sleep he'd had in two days.
He stretched out his arm to Sherree's side of the bed. Even though she was gone, he could not yet bring himself to lie there, to take up the whole bed. He lay where he always lay, close to the edge of the bed, because Sherree had not liked to be touched while she was sleeping. To sleep in his arms, she had said, made her feel trapped.
Dexter moved his hand up and down on the sheet, rubbing the place where she had slept. Things she'd said kept playing in his mind, things that had mostly annoyed him when she was alive, and now, unaccountably, made him feel the stunning size of his loss. She was gone; she would never lie next to him again. Before this he had been in a state of disbelief: now he believed it with a nausea at the pit of his stomach that burned upward, a rising bile full of helplessness and anger.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, his head in his hands, the heels of his palms kneading the skin on his forehead. The bile retreated and he got up, finding his clothes where he'd laid them out on the floor next to the bed, and he began to dress in the dark. The leather creaked and groaned and seemed to protest its use. The sound of the big silver zipper on the jacket was more like a rip than a closing.
When Dexter finished dressing he left the room and walked through the dark hallway, past the bathroom and into the kitchen, where he finally turned on a light. He washed his face and rinsed his mouth at the kitchen sink. He still couldn't bear to go into the bathroom though some of the neighborhood women had come and cleaned it up for him. He had even peed into an old coffee can. He hadn't gone back there during the day and he never turned on any lights in that part of the apartment because he couldn't stand to see the bullet holes in the walls or the splintered door-jambs. He had only ventured into the bedroom—after two days—when he realized he would never be able to get any sleep on the old uncomfortable sofa in the living room.
Dexter removed the chair he'd stuck under the doorknob to keep the broken front door shut, and left the apartment. He didn't care if anyone came into the place while he was gone, though he knew no one would unless it was the police. As for coming back, he didn't plan to until past daybreak, when he could see if anyone was in there with a gun turned on him.
He got into the Cadillac and drove over to the Solar Club. He thought he'd have a couple of drinks there then get some of the guys to go downtown with him to the strip joint where Sherree used to work. Dexter could not contain his grief any longer: he needed to share it, to spread it around at places where Sherree had been known.
He parked the Cadillac right outside the front door of the Solar Club. It was an illegal space, too close to a fire hydrant, but he didn't care, he wouldn't be there long.
There weren't many people on the street. The temperature was dropping again, the air so cold and still it was as if everything was frozen in place. The bare skin under his jacket tightened with goose bumps. He hurried into the close, fetid warmth of the Solar Club. The air in here was blue with smoke, dense with the sound of a blues band playing in a corner of the big room.
The usual large Friday night crowd was there. He began to move through the crush of bodies, his own body warming from the friction of getting past elbows and shoulders, bellies and backsides. Someone called out his name and everyone realized he was there. He became the center of the crush. Over the music he heard several voices saying, “Drinks on me, Dexter.” There were back claps and embraces and sounds of sympathy: waves of brotherly love carried him toward the bar. He'd done right to get himself out; his burden already seemed lighter.
He was floating on the warmth and the voices and the music, his body buoyed, his head in the smoke, his feet hardly touching the floor. All around the room colored Christmas-tree lights winked off and on and their colors thickened the atmosphere. He felt a rush of heat up his neck and he was looking forward to some ice-cold beer sliding down his throat. The heat reached his jawbone and exploded in his head with a loud whoosh that seemed to turn the club into a vacuum. The band stopped playing and there was a brief moment of almost dead silence before the crowd surged, a panic of elbows in ribs and feet on feet, pushing and shoving and trying to get out of the room. Dexter found his progress toward the bar reversed. He was now being carried back to the front door. Above the yells and groans and hoarse cries he could hear the crackling and spitting and wind of fire. He tried to run and would have landed on the floor had there been any room to fall. He fell up against the person in front of him, whose head jerked back and caught Dexter in the mouth. The sweetly bitter taste of blood covered his tongue.
He lurched and stumbled, and when he caught his feet up on the threshold of the door he saw that the Cadillac was in flames, singeing the outstretched limbs of an oak tree, fouling the air with a gasoline smell. There was another explosion, flames leaping higher, and the crowd on the sidewalk fell back to the outside walls of the Solar Club, pushing Dexter inside again. He began to struggle, pulling at people, blindsiding them, thrusting them out of his way until he was on the street and as close to the Cadillac as he dared get. He stood there trying to figure out what to do, eying the fire hydrant, his whole body poised for action until he figured out there was nothing he could do, and that's when he noticed the fire-blackened gasoline can behind the front wheel of the car. He looked from one side to the other, as if he expected to see the face of the culprit leering out of the crowd at him. But Dexter knew that he, or they, would not be there. They would have run back into the bowels of the Convent already, back to their own ruined piece of turf after leaving not him, but Burgess, their message.
The flames shooting up from the car kindled all of Dexter's frustration, all of the helplessness and rage that had been suffocated by grief over the past days. A storm of fire broke out in him, leaping from his mouth. “Fuckin nightmare!’‘ he shouted, his hands balled into fists, his arms rigid at his sides. He turned to the crowd behind him. “This is a fuc
kin nightmare!" he cried. “My life's a fuckin nightmare!”
He could hear voices all around him. They were voices of assent, the word nightmare rippling across the blur of faces in front of him. He could no longer pick out individuals; he could not put voices and faces together. He saw them all as one.
“Nightmare!" he shouted again and he heard its echo coming from the mass before him. He shouted again and again, waiting to hear his shout repeated, until his voice and theirs rose into a chant of “Nightmare, nightmare.”
He pushed around them, moving perilously close to the burning car, the flames reaching out to take him but repelled by his leather suit. The chant continued and followed him as he walked down Convent Street toward the river. He kicked at cans and bottles that littered his way, but there was not enough satisfaction in their careening off to the side. He picked them up and began to throw them, and the crowd followed his lead. Glass shattered on the sidewalk and the street; cans landed on front porches and bounced off car windows.
It still was not enough. Dexter began to pick up stones and pieces of brick. He stuffed his pockets with them until the leather was stretched with hard points of rock and metal. When the leather would not stretch to take more he picked up the bottles he saw until his hands were full too. The crowd stopped and stuffed their pockets as he did. They did this all the way to St. Charles Avenue, where he and the faceless mass behind him stopped traffic as they crossed.
Across St. Charles their chanting vandalized the atmosphere of quiet, it swelled under the canopy of oaks. Hedges protecting manicured lawns were broken under their feet, and branches were stripped of their leaves by so many passing bodies.
Dexter threw the first stone. The sound of breaking glass instantly turned into a scream, the unnatural, high-pitched whoop-whooping of a burglar alarm. The crowd abruptly stopped its chanting as it moved, a frenzied, roiling mass emptying its pockets into the windows of the giant, once-formidable houses now screaming in dissonant pitches and asynchronous rhythms from their sharp-edged wounds.
Sound filled the inside of Dexter's head as helium fills a balloon. It seemed to lift him off the ground and whisk him along, for he could no longer feel his feet hitting the concrete sidewalk. His head pounded each time his feet hit the ground, but that they were his feet could not penetrate the cocoon of noise around him, the constant blast against his eardrums, eradicating everything else, all feeling, all understanding, so that he could not distinguish the shrieks of the alarms from the wail of police sirens; he did not notice the crowd splintering off behind him. Someone grabbed at him but he slid through the grasp. He was unstoppable in his weightlessness, impregnable in his cocoon. He was carried along until recognition stopped him and his feet were on the brick walkway in front of those fancy glass doors he watched Burgess’ mother go in and come out of every day, and with the recognition came the idea that Burgess wasn't watching out for what was going wrong in his own backyard because he was messing around with those white people too much.
Dexter's pockets were empty. He cut across the lawn and squatted down to remove one of the bricks from the zigzagged border in front of the azalea bushes. He stood and hurled the brick at the leaded glass. The lead stopped it from going all the way through and it thudded on the wood floor of the porch. He stopped and picked up another. He threw the bricks until all the tiny glass panes were broken and the lead was dented and pitted and wrecked out of shape. He threw a brick through each of the long uncovered windows. He was aiming for a gas lamp when a voice over a bullhorn broke through his anger and he turned to see a line of guns pointed at him.
30
Mr. Robert finished nailing plywood across the front of Thea's house and left for the day. With its plywood patches the house was graceless, awkwardly large. Shutters hung at odd angles to the boarded windows; Mr. Robert had removed some of them altogether. A few rusty mailboxes tacked to the side of the door and the house could have passed for a deserted tenement: danger, no trespassing.
Thea paid Mr. Robert for the week and watched the old carpenter walk up Convent Street toward St. Charles. Despair and a gray, wintry sky covered the neighborhood. The big houses were boarded up, their lawns were trampled and muddy. The street was littered under the canopy of oaks. It was dark and dank and dirty. In less than a quarter of an hour the landscape had been dreadfully altered. Thea went back inside reluctantly, the gloom here more depressing than the ugliness outside, with no light coming in through the long windows or being cut into cheery patterns by the leaded glass doors. The glass could be replaced, new doors milled, but what, she wondered, could replace her feeling of violation, of the unfairness of it all. She could understand Burgess’ friend's rage but she could not understand why he had picked on her house and personally attacked it; her.
She went down the hallway, stopping when she reached the door to the library. It was nearly finished; Mr. Robert had started varnishing the wood. She looked at its beauty coldly. The pleasure she had felt viewing it only yesterday seemed to have gone through the broken windows last night. It was the same with the rest of the house: the comfort she had begun to feel as its owner was gone, replaced with the old ambivalence, though the ambivalence was grounded not in whether she could make the house hers instead of Aunt Althea's, but in whether she wanted the house at all if it could be ruined for her so quickly, so easily. These big grand houses, they became so all-consuming, so all-important. They demanded constant attention and more money than anyone ought to spend on more space than anyone needed. And yet the city would be a lesser place without them, and Thea happened to be one of the people with the time and money to spend to keep one. Perhaps, she thought, one needed to be born to it, groomed for it, like Sandy. For Sandy it was a birthright; she had no ambivalence; for her it was not a frivolous way to spend time.
Thea went to the back of the house where Zora was ironing, her Saturday chore. She had told Zora she didn't have to come anymore on Saturdays, but Zora had said she preferred to. For Thea, moving back to New Orleans had meant adding too many contradictions to her life, and for the moment, all of them were summed up in this woman who stood at the ironing board, ironing the sheets Thea slept on at night, as if anyone needed to sleep on ironed sheets, though of course, crawling in between them after a long day was a sensation of unmatched luxury and comfort.
The doorbell rang and Zora, through habit, put the iron upright to go answer it. Thea waved her back saying she would get it. She went to the front and turned on the hall light, but it only accentuated the gloom in the side rooms. She switched on the chandelier. Whoever was at the door began to pound on the plywood covering it. There was such a flimsy sound to the wood, such an urgency by the pounder, that Thea felt a stab of fear in her stomach. She did not like that she had to open the door to someone she could not see, though of course, if she could see, she could be seen.
“Who is it?” she called, turning her head to the side so her ear was up close to the plywood.
“Lyle.”
Thea jerked back, startled, he sounded so close to her, nothing but half an inch of plywood between them. She opened the door. “Bobby's not here, Lyle. He's gone to check on his mother.” She remained in the doorway, not inviting him in.
“That's okay,” Lyle said, “I'll catch him later.” He moved toward her, coming in anyway, so that she had to either stand there and block his way or let him in. She let him in.
The fear was still there: no relief that it was a familiar face, one wearing its usual scowl, his eyes like old dull varnish staring at her from underneath it. So why was she still afraid, as if she were opening the door to someone who might harm her, yet deliberately standing aside, letting him in? She closed the door after him, shutting them both inside.
“I see you had a rough time of it last night,” he said, his eyes darting off to the side to the violation that had been done to the house. Thea nodded. “It's a damn shame,” he said, “the way we all have to live boarded up in our houses one way or another.” This was
not social chitchat for Lyle. He said it angrily, but in his flickering eyes the anger was betrayed by fear. This was not the old Lyle talking, the one who made her stomach clench with apprehension because she didn't take his advice when he told her to get a security system, yet her stomach was clenched. She took a small, involuntary step backward. He closed the distance between them with a small step of his own. Now he looked at her so intensely that she had to force herself not to move away from him again. “I think you may be in some danger,” he said to her. “That's why I'm here—I'm afraid for you.” And indeed, Thea could see he was afraid, so afraid he was frightening. Just what Zora had said that day about Jared. Lyle was so afraid that his fear was reaching out to her, infecting her.
She couldn't help it; she stepped back again. “Why, Lyle?” she asked him, trying to speak levelly, not let her voice give away her fear.
“It's Burgess Monroe,” he said, his voice lowered. “Is he here?” His eyes flicked away again.
“No.”
“Monroe's the one who's been running all the drugs through the Convent.”
“I think you've got that wrong, Lyle.”
“No I don't. It was the Cadillac, all along I knew it was the Cadillac, and when Sandy said you told her Monroe owned it, I went straight down to the precinct. But I don't think they're going to move on it.” He laughed nervously. “They've got enough problems down there right now, all that civil rights violations crap. They said they'll send a car around as often as they can.”
“I see,” said Thea; she saw that they meant to keep their distance from Lyle.
“It's not good enough. The one who did this to your house"— he nodded in the direction of the boarded-up windows—"he works for Monroe.”
“I know that.”