“So you committed a felony,” he said. “You burned down somebody’s house. You could have set fire to the whole neighborhood.”
“There was no one else around. The neighborhood is flooded out.”
“So you committed a felony,” he said again.
“Yeah.”
“Did you give the DMORT people your name?”
“No.”
“Okay, and did anyone see you there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But now Cora’s gone.”
“Yeah.”
“And the cops are looking for her.”
Del closed her eyes again. “If I only knew where she was. If I could just reach her, tell her to stay away. Nobody will come looking. They think she’s jumped off a bridge or something.” She pulled Cora’s phone out of her pocket, pulled out the SIM card, and put it down the garbage disposal. On the other end of the line, Zack was quiet.
“Are you okay, Del?”
Nobody had asked her that, she realized, since she’d arrived. She had to think about her answer as you might take an inventory of your pain after an accident, to see if any bones were broken.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry to scare you, but you need to know that if they do decide to bring it, shit may go down.”
She nodded.
“You might be okay. From the news, it doesn’t sound like they’re too concerned right now about tracking down individual bad actors. Are you sure the house went up?”
“Bad actors,” she repeated.
“Did you see the house actually catch on fire, Del?”
“Yeah. I went back afterwards to look for Cora. The fire trucks were there.”
“Fuck, Del. You went back?”
The tears jumped into her eyes, and she had to swallow to keep him from hearing her cry.
“I’m sorry,” he said, talking in his lawyer voice again. “Del, I’m sorry, truly. Like I said, it may not come to anything. The police have their plates full and the insurance adjustors sure as hell do. You just sit tight. Keep your head down. I’ll try to get there as soon as I can.”
“That’s okay, Zack. Really. Stay where you are.”
“I don’t think it’s really your prerogative to tell me what to do.”
He laughed once, bitterly, and she listened for a while to the noises the house made, the ticking of its clocks, the creaking of its boards. Zack’s chair squeaked lightly as he swiveled.
“I’ve got a trial going on right now, but when it’s over, I’m coming back down.”
She stayed quiet. She could almost smell him, his sharp blue smell of deodorant and Tide.
“And meanwhile answer your fucking phone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alright then?”
She nodded. “Alright.”
The line went dead, but she listened for a little while longer, as if, with the phone against her ear, she might be there with him on top of Manhattan, watching the sun slant across the river, and they could see ahead of them for miles and miles.
VINCENT HAD BEEN watching the cars pass from the portico, where he was sitting in an uncommonly comfortable rocking chair. Esplanade Avenue, think of that. Drinking a glass of good ice tea on Esplanade Avenue. Inside, they were talking, Sylvia yammering away, he imagined, but he was content to rock and wait.
Cars passed, Sunday driving, their tires peeling—woosh, woosh—off the pavement. He listened for the sound of distant hooves and hoped the vegetable man would pass, the horse cart with its music of iron and leather, the voice calling Sooweet potatoes. CoLARDS. CreOLE tamatas. He had a wild hankering for a sweet potato pie. Not Sylvia’s, though hers were good, creamy, just enough of that spice. He wanted a pocket pie from Moe’s. He could taste it—a crackle of icing sugar, the crust crumbling into the thick filling. He got out of his chair—damn knees acting up—and went down the steps. No need to tell the ladies good-bye; he’d be back before they finished chatting, and with a nice surprise.
He passed under the oak trees, jingling the change in his pocket. He had plenty money, if a pie was still a nickel. Could maybe even stick around ’til Sheep’s opened and get him a stuffed crab. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of those pies. He knew they’d gone for one not long after Joe was born. He’d smeared a little of the russet cream across the baby’s lips before Sylvia could swat away his hand.
He couldn’t recall, but it seemed to have been a while since Joe had been so little. Even the trees had gotten older. They seemed sickly, their leaves turning brown. Just across Rampart, they stretched up their arms like mourners over an empty lot, but when they’d torn that building down he couldn’t say. Up ahead was the gray rise of the damned interstate highway they’d built over top of Claiborne Avenue. Already, the houses closer to it were in a bad way, alligator vine pulling them plank from plank. He wasn’t going anywhere near that highway, though he realized that was exactly what he’d been planning to do: thinking to walk down Claiborne, catch the streetcar, when anybody knew the tracks had been pulled out of the ground in 1953. Shaking his head, he turned up a side street where the trees were replaced by telephone poles—a line of them like Greek crosses. He worried where to put his feet.
Once he was deep into the neighborhood, the day went quiet, almost too quiet, like something had sucked the sound out of the air. There were no Sunday drivers, and the parked cars were scarce and sad looking, dirt on their windows. It was a fine day, but all the porch swings and rockers he saw were empty, and as he put one foot in front of the other, he realized that one thing contributing to the quiet was the softness of his own footfalls. A crust of earth maybe an inch thick covered the sidewalk and spread into the grass of people’s front lawns. He shook his head to loosen his cogs. He looked up at the sky—bright blue.
Moe’s was on Claiborne, a corner shop with little bells that bashed against the glass door, and when the pies were coming out hot, there’d be a line it seemed like had the whole neighborhood waiting in it. Outside on the neutral ground under the oaks, there’d be men in suits bringing their pink tongues up to catch a flake of sugar from their moustaches, a lady in a church hat dabbing a handkerchief at her painted lips, beribboned children running around hollering and their minders watching out the bottoms of their eyes like let them play because sure there would be time enough for solemnity.
Yes, it did feel like he was carrying a whole barrow full of rocks around in his stomach, and he couldn’t be sure of why. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and sweat worked in itching rivulets through the little hair he had left. Maybe he was dreaming. Only in dreams and graveyards were things so quiet. Marching on he saw somebody had painted crosses on the houses. One house, painted pink, even had written on it what passed for an epitaph: Dead dog under porch. He could smell the death too, but he couldn’t hear his feet touching down on pavement. He must be dreaming, he reckoned, except he didn’t feel like he was dreaming.
Here came St. Bernard, and he turned, watching his feet for something to go strange, but the shadow just lengthened, his laces flopped against the sides of his shoes. All was as it should be until he looked up: a highway roaring above where Claiborne should be. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to eat. Had they? They had. They had built it here, despite who all had gone down to city hall and pleaded with the women there who just shook their heads. He himself had had his hat in his hands, but it had been like talking into the wind—you could just about see your words whipping away. Boh Brothers had come with their wrecking machines, and the oak trees’ roots had clawed the air. He kept walking. That day he’d been to Moe’s in that great crowd, hadn’t the dark-skinned shopgirl cried, while outside the wrecking machines lifted pieces of steel into the sky?
Here he was come to the edge of the freeway. Here was the gray roadway running above and a blue sign, marking the surface road—N. Claiborne. N for Not. Not Claiborne. Claiborne dug up. The neutral ground turned to cement. The oak trees bulldozed. To his right—he c
ould barely bring himself—Moe’s stood shuttered. Plywood boards on the windows, on the door, where the spray-paint cross said 9/12, RATS, 2 DB, D-MOR meaning something but not signifying, and as he stood looking up at the cars running over the interstate over the concrete over the killed grass and the gone trees, he realized that he was a long way from home.
THEY SAT ON the lower gallery of their house together, looking at the fallen magnolia, because that’s what Tess wanted. He had promised himself that he would stop bending to her, but he’d still let the branch spring back up against the kitchen ceiling when she asked him to, laid down his saw at her say-so. She thought Cora was going to just wander back into the yard, maybe scratch at the door to be let in. But Let’s just sit for a minute, she said, and so he sat. The leaves shuddered as a breeze moved through.
“Tell me,” he said.
She shook her bent head—a knob of bone above the boatneck collar, two impastos of white running almost to her shoulders. “I called again just before I left. Her phone’s going straight to voice mail, and the cops have nothing on her license plate. They think we should print posters, hang them on all the telephone posts in Christendom.”
“Like a lost dog,” he said.
She looked up, as if she could still see the magnolia where it used to stand, the cones studded with ruby seeds like a twelfth-century mace, but there was only sky there, crisscrossed with distant power lines.
“They’re going to call with even the tiniest hint of anything, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.” She slapped her thighs and went back to looking at the empty piece of sky.
“Her car,” he said. “It’s technically registered to you. If we called it theft, would that—”
“No. Are you kidding?” She licked her lips. The light glinted off her varnished skin. “We’re going to keep mum to the police about a fire she most certainly set, but you want to have her—if they can find her—arrested for auto theft? You must be out of your fucking mind.”
“I shouldn’t have assumed, last night—”
“You didn’t assume. I invited you.”
He tried laying his hand on her thigh, but her quads tightened. She was hard, as if she were encased in a smooth shell, like a pecan. He wanted to squeeze her in his fist against a stone until she cracked. Instead, he took his hand back into his own lap.
The yard was desolate. Oak leaves were strewn across it, and the grass had died in the places where water stood, but the roses were blooming. Hard little blossoms had opened among what leaves remained on the canes, as if the bushes were determined to bear one last crop of fruit before dying. It had been nearly two months now since they’d left, and he suddenly remembered the herbs that he had pushed under the porch where they’d be safe. He got up, bent down, and pulled loose the section of lattice. Powdery gray sticks and limp leaves flopped over the terra-cotta.
He clutched the porch and laid his head on the backs of his hands, his stomach tightening like a fist. She didn’t ask him what was wrong. He stood up and walked halfway across the grass. She just stared at the place where the tree was not, and he wanted to bear down on her, the stone biting into the meat of his hand.
“Tess, you need to talk to me. If we’re going to get through this, if we have any hope—”
She grimaced so he knew he had done it—and if you didn’t peel it properly, the pecan, blades of bitter pith would slice between your teeth.
“If you want to talk to me, that is,” he tried, backing off, but it was too late. “If that’s what you need.”
“I slept with Augie Randsell,” she said.
He walked away from her, but before he’d even reached the fence, the words caught up with him. He crouched, as if to inspect the grass, and tried to smile. Jamming his knees into his belly to smooth out the sudden pain in his gut, he slotted a piece of split-end grass between his fingers and looked at the brown and sandy grains of the soil. It had to be an ulcer, something. It wasn’t like a person could actually feel his heart break.
“I’m sorry, Joe. I am,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I can’t seem to avoid it. And I don’t think I’m going to be able to avoid it going forward, even if I do everything right from here on out.”
He had expected this all along, he supposed. From the very first moment, when he’d noticed her sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Marty Hopkins’s living room in SoHo: a displaced Uptown girl unclasping her gold bracelet and hiding it in her pocket. He had never had a secure grip on her, whoever she was. She had only ever given him coats to hold, furs and skins. Sheep’s clothing.
“I never could. Unless I tried, tried, tried. And I’ve got to say, I’m exhausted from it. The whole weight of everything has always been on me, and—”
He looked up from the grass to see her hand, scissored at the base of her throat. He was a harness, she was saying, a millstone. She had always been the provider, according to her; even when he’d had successes, it was her “connections” (she’d never dare say race) and her money—her daddy’s money—they lived off. He should have rejected it out of hand, that day she’d put the bank book in front of him—a quarter of a million dollars, just lying there, not worked for, not even by Millard, but harvested from other people’s sweat and dying, while Millard sat at the top of the Plaza Tower in the air-conditioning. It was obscene, and he had felt dirty, looking up from the number scribbled in the vinyl book at her, standing across the kitchen table, her robe gapping. Gold digger, he called himself, but that was a word for women. You can do your work, she’d said, and he’d listened to her, Yes, ma’am’ed her like a fucking houseboy. He told himself the money had nothing to do with anything. Told himself he’d married her because she smelled like jasmine. Told himself he loved her because she was the kind of person—she’d been the kind of person then—who leaned over, her robe wide and breasts hanging like ripe figs in the lacy neck of her slip, and said he could quit his mind-numbing job. He’d believed it, even: believed love was her sun-buttered body on the floor of his hot attic room, her finger tracing the lines of his sculptures, her face in the auditorium when he graduated art school and no one in his family had come. He’d believed the money was their money, the house their house, had greeted his father at the front door with a Baccarat tumbler in his hand. Set yourself up right, boy, his father had said, and he’d believed that too, despite the snarl in his father’s voice. He’d believed it though he himself had brushed the passbook from the table and bent Tess over it and pushed her robe up and screwed her like he had something to prove.
She was still talking, and he wondered if she would get around to asking for forgiveness. Whether she’d blame it on her stress, whether she would say it was some sort of accident, as if, had the fence rail collapsed at Sol’s party on Sunday, he might have wound up with his dick inside Monica Selvaggio. Tess was too smart to claim this was some new thing, that it meant nothing. He’d seen them through the window of that McDonald’s on the evacuation route, she and Augie sitting at an orange table in the overwhelming lights. When she’d begun to choke on a piece of crouton, he hadn’t been able to reach her, so quick was Augie’s attentive leap, and when Augie brought her water with his alcoholic tremor, her hand had covered his on the paper cup. They had looked into each other’s eyes as if they’d forgotten Joe was out there, guarding his sleeping father in the dark parking lot. You could be sure that they hadn’t seen him watching through the window, blinded as they were by their own reflections in the glass.
Joe put his head between his knees, into the dirt-salt stink of his blue jeans—it had to be some sort of stress-related ulcer. Maybe they’d been fucking since Madge died, and Augie had been snubbing them this whole time in order to avoid having to face him in public. Maybe it had been going on for years, and they’d only been waiting to tell him until there wasn’t anything left to lose. But did it really matter when they’d started fucking? She had always blushed at the sight of Augie, a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged haircut blushing when a middle-aged
man laid a hand on her crêpey arm. If she was walking towards the door, still in her apron fifteen minutes after the party started, and if it was Augie and Madge, Augie double fisting bottles of “claret” from his “cellar,” Madge in one of her sweaters, Tess’s face would light up like Rudolph’s red fucking nose.
He vaguely heard the words his wife was saying: “—capable of surprising myself. I don’t have to be president of the damned universe. I know you think I do, but I don’t. It’s not interesting. It’s not pleasurable. And I think I deserve some pleasure in my life. Even now. Even still. We don’t have all that much time left, Joe.”
Joe knew he had been settled for—she didn’t need to say it. Dr. Eshleman, Augie would greet her. Mrs. Boisdoré to you, Mr. Randsell. It made him livid. She thought Augie was her better—certainly his better, because of the money, the name, the skin (though she’d never dare say it), the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season—but Augie was not even her equal. Still, Tess had only left her clan for Joe’s because Augie had chosen Madge instead of her. She had wanted Augie from the first, and Joe knew it. He’d seen it the first time he’d seen them together, known it maybe even before then, since that night he’d picked her up from the Proteus ball, just before the rain. As he’d stood beside the door to the Municipal Auditorium, holding the umbrella like some chauffeur ready to escort her safely into his father’s car, he’d seen her come tripping from the far end of the long, plain, lamplit corridor, looking back again and again as she clutched her half-fallen mink against her shoulder. She had never stopped looking back.
DEL QUIT PICKING at the grout between the tiles on the Dobies’ kitchen counter and finally put her hands on the keyboard. Cora, I hope—she typed, deleted, typed again, and waited for the words to come. She had been staring at the cursor for so long that her heart had synchronized with it. She deleted her sister’s name, retyped it.
She reached into her pocket and fingered the sharp edge of Cora’s phone, then clicked back to her inbox: a flyer from Bloomingdale’s, an invitation to a loft party in Williamsburg, a note from Zack, saying his trial would probably last another week or two, but that she should call him anytime. She searched for the last e-mail Cora had sent her when they were all still in Houston, but she only got as far as My Adela before she had to go get herself a beer. She could hear her sister’s voice as clearly as if she was in the room.
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