House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  I waited, but no one came out of the house. I waited some more, and I suppose I closed my eyes once, but that was a mistake, a night ship rolling in the surf. When I opened them again there was the sound of birds from the woods across the street, a gentle conversation.

  Then, as if this was an idea I just wanted to try out to see how it fit, I pressed the end of the barrel to my breastbone, my eyes closed, the ship beginning to break up, my thumb against the trigger, everything coming to a fine dark point in my head.

  I HAVE WRAPPED ONE TABLE LEG IN TAPE AND BEGIN WRAPPING THE other, its glue falling in droplets to the newspaper. My fingers are sticking, and the pain in my neck now rises up through the back of my head. I know I must lie down and rest, but I must first finish securing the table leg or it will set wrongly. From Nadi’s locked room comes once again the music of Googoosh, this too-sweet sugar, the music of romantics ignorant of any history but their own. But at this moment, I find it more comforting than silence, better than the marching of my thoughts that do not end, those tired directives from myself to continue with the strategy I know is best for my family.

  I think of my Soraya, so zeebah, of such beauty her name is no longer Behrani but Farahsat. I feel a pinch in my heart at the memory of her shame of us, of me, of the dinner we held for her and her quiet husband and his family. My head aches. It feels squeezed as if between two stones. My knees and back are stiff and tired. I feel so very poor, so old. But I will not be misunderstood by my own blood; I must telephone Soraya and arrange a time for us to meet, to eat lunch or dinner together, father and daughter only. Perhaps we will stroll along Fisherman’s Wharf with the touring people in the city, her slender arm hooked inside my own, as I tell to her, as I tell to her what? What do I say to my daughter? Please do not look down upon me because I no longer have a powerful position in our society? I am not to blame our society no longer exists? It is not my fault we are in America now where only money is respected? Please daughter, make an attempt to forget how we once lived, put it behind you, and do not shame us by talking of it as if we are nothing at all now without recalling what we once were? We are your mother and father. Do not forget this.

  I wash my hands at Nadi’s kitchen sink, splash cold water upon my face, and I know I am a liar, for these words in my head are as hollow as a crippled man’s wooden leg: I do not believe them myself; this small bungalow is not even the size of our outbuilding in which Bahman parked our automobile in the capital city. Perhaps Soraya was right to belittle it with her nervous recounting of who we really were, who her father was. But I must rest now; I am not yet beaten. Perhaps I must lower my price to secure a buyer more quickly. If I only double my investment with a sale, that will still be one hundred thousand dollars in our pockets. Surely, in this country, that kind of seed can yield a tree.

  Outdoors the day is gray and there is fog hanging in the dark trees of the woodland across the street. The front lock remains engaged, and I am not certain Esmail has carried his key with him—he never carries anything in his pockets—but I cannot leave the door free for him; I will simply have to awaken to his knocking. I leave the long wrecking iron in the corner beside the door, and I am turning for my office when I see what my eyes do not believe they are seeing: behind my Buick Regal is the red automobile of the beggar Kathy Nicolo. I did not hear her arrive. She must have done so while I was washing at the kitchen sink. She sits inside her car, her eyes closed, her head resting on the neck support of her seat, her chin tilted upward, her throat long and white. Her black hair is tangled, and some of it rests upon her cheek, and I am feeling strangely because I did not hear her arrive and because at this moment she looks so very much like my long-dead cousin Jasmeen that for a moment I do not know where I am or what is the day, or how it is I came to be here. Is she sleeping? Is she this illogical?

  But I feel little as I step outside into the cool gray air, only fatigue and confusion and a deep feeling in my heart that perhaps what I see before me is a dream. The woman Kathy Nicolo has not moved, her head still rests upon the seat and her eyes are shut, but as I draw closer she begins to weep silently, turning her face from side to side, her mouth open in words that do not come. Then she grimaces, her eyes squeezing closed and her shoulders curving forward. Her body becomes loose, her shoulders fall back, and she continues to cry, shaking her head and moving her mouth as if she were attempting to persuade someone yet unseen to do something quite urgent. She appears younger to me as she weeps, with not many more years than my Soraya, and I feel a tenderness as I move closer, a momentary regret at having treated her before so roughly, for having pushed her into her auto as if she were a man. However, I must tell her firmly that she must leave. Once more she makes a face, and the feeling I am in a dream increases for I see both of her hands upon a large automatic pistol, its barrel pushed to her heart, one of her thumbs pressing against its trigger which is evidently locked by its safety mechanism. Then I feel a witness to my own hand as it reaches inside the open window and twists the weapon from her grasp. She opens her eyes. They are reddened and she blinks them as if coming out of a deep sleep, but then she regards me and the pistol and she cries openly, her hair falling across her eyes and mouth. I press the release button, remove the fully loaded magazine from its grip, then pull back the sliding mechanism for any bullet in the chamber. There is none. My hands tremble as I deposit the ammunition clip into my pants pocket, as I push the pistol into the waistband of my trousers, and open the door to help this Kathy Nicolo from her automobile. The interior smells of benzine and she of liquor and cigarette smoke. She pushes my hands away and cries more loudly, but there is little strength in her and I lead her from the car, guiding her to the door, for she is drunk, mast, and once inside, standing unsteadily in the living-room area, my arm upon her elbow, she begins to speak through her crying, her hair hanging before her face. She speaks of not caring about this house any longer, simply not caring about anything. She talks loudly, the fashion in which the very drunk do, and I wish for Nadereh to come from the music behind her closed door and witness this, see this very nice intoxicated girl who was attempting to shoot herself in front of our home. My legs have become soft and I need Nadi’s help, but I am fearful to leave this Kathy Nicolo even for a moment by herself. She cries more quietly now, swaying upon her feet like a marionette. I lead her slowly into my son’s room, sit her upon his bed, and lay her down, stooping to lift her bare legs upon the mattress as well. To me she turns her face, wet with her crying, and she says, “I just—can’t we just—” She weeps. But soon her chin lowers and she appears to relax deeper into my son’s pillow.

  “Nicky?”

  “Nakhreh,” I answer in Farsi. Then in English: “You must sleep now. You must rest.” I place Esmail’s chair in front of the bed and sit. The pistol is uncomfortably tight against me and I pull it free, hold it in my hands. I smell the lubricant on its surface and I think of Tehran. Where does a young woman acquire a weapon such as this? She appears to be sleeping and I consider for a moment removing her Reebok shoes, but I do not. I watch the young woman sleep, watch her mouth open slightly as she does. Beneath her brightly colored Fisherman’s Wharf T-shirt her breasts barely rise and fall, and I regard the pistol in my hands, see Jasmeen falling to the ground, her long hair untamed, her hand pressed between her breasts, her white gown growing as red as saffron.

  THE WOMAN KATHY Nicolo remained sleeping throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. I at first considered to tell Nadi directly, but my wife’s door was still shut to me, Googoosh singing her away from her headaches and into a melancholy sleep. And no immediate good would come from her knowing our present situation. The panic of the weak never helps the strong. I poured for myself tea from the samovar in the kitchen and sat at the counter bar with the unloaded pistol and I once again began to weigh the alternative courses of action before me.

  I could of course telephone to the police and pursue criminal charges against Kathy Nicolo, charges for trespassing on my fam
ily’s property with a dangerous weapon. But upon opening the telephone book to the page listing the number of the Corona police, I found I was unable to make the necessary call for it was clear to me this woman was only intent on harming herself, and in my mind I saw repeatedly her crying face as she attempted—with great ignorance of side arms—to fire a large bullet into her breast. I put another cube of sugar into my mouth, took a drink from my hot Persian tea, and listened for a time to the muffled cassette music coming from Nadi’s room. Yes, it was weakly romantic, but it put me in mind of my boyhood home in Rasht, of wrestling under the sun in the dusty road with my fat cousin Kamfar, his sister Jasmeen watching us from behind the wall of stones before my father’s house, only the top half of her small face exposed, her large eyes smiling. I thought of Pourat’s nephew Bijan, who would speak with impunity of severing the limbs of children while I drank vodka beside him, convincing myself that my refusal to dip into the mastvakhiar with him was a sufficient moral stand for a man of my station to make. But on those evenings, I would drink enough for three men and for days afterwards would carry out my daily duties in a joyless manner, treating junior officers in a lowly fashion, and giving orders whose sole design was to show my inferiors who was truly in charge.

  Three times I walked silently down the corridor to make an inspection of this Kathy Nicolo. Each time I saw she had not moved her position, but continued sleeping as still as a small child, her face turned in my direction, her eyes closed, a portion of her hair lying across her lips which were partly opened. My son’s room smelled of her now, of old liquor from the mouth, and for an instant I felt disgust rise in me. But then, perhaps like a bubble of air from deep water that dissipates once it reaches the surface, I felt no more disgust, only pity for this Kathy Nicolo, pity and a newfound pull in my heart to treat her well. In my country, there is an old belief that if a bird flies into your home it is an angel who has come to guide you and you must look at its presence as a blessing from God. Once, when Soraya was still a young girl and we were spending the summer at our bungalow on the Caspian Sea, she discovered at the base of a cypress tree a small young bird whose wings had been broken and she brought it to us. Nadereh made for its wing a wooden splint and they together nursed the bird with sugar water and bits of bread and by summer’s end they took it from its cage to our porch overlooking the sea. Soraya parted her fingers and the bird flew up and away into the woodlands. For two days our daughter cried, though at the end she told to us she was very happy a broken angel had come to bless our home.

  I return to the kitchen and drink more tea. The bungalow has grown quiet. No more Googoosh, only the silence of two sleeping women. The gray fog outdoors has not lifted, and I turn on the kitchen’s overhead light. It shines upon the silver samovar on the opposite counter, upon the clean and dry plates in Nadi’s dishrack. I feel strangely content, and I am put in mind of that afternoon with the Iraqi in his shop near the Highway Department depot when we played backgammon near the window, our silence a mutual acceptance to let the blood between our two countries flow under the bridge away from us. For days afterward, working as a garbage soldier on the highway with the old Vietnamese Tran and the Panamanians, I felt a lightness and goodness in me, and even Mendez, with the long scar upon his arm and the smell of old wine in his sweat, even he could not pull hatred from me as he called me old man in his mother tongue, as he dropped his empty water cup upon the ground for Tran to retrieve.

  And this feeling is within me once more. Who can say how many more desperate and drunken moments would have passed before this Kathy Nicolo found the safety mechanism and then succeeded in shooting her heart very still? Yes, pride is weak vanity, but I do feel a sense of joy at having saved life. And yes, the woman is intoxicated but nonetheless I am encouraged by her words of not caring any longer for this house. Perhaps, after waking from her sleep, after eating a fine meal prepared by Nadi, Kathy Nicolo will be willing to put that in writing, will be sufficiently able to acknowledge who her real enemy has become, and she will begin acting accordingly.

  But now I must rouse Nadereh to prepare an evening meal. I must enter her darkened room with its scent of facial cream and cotton bedding, and I must sit and tell to her of the sad drunken bird I found outside our door, of the beggar angel asleep in our son’s room.

  PART II

  IT WAS DARK NOW, AND LESTER HAD BEEN SITTING ON THE FISH camp’s porch for over two hours. The fog was thick in the trees, and it made the black woods around the cabin appear to be under a milky water. He could still smell the maple he’d cut, split, and stacked, and twice he heard a car go by on the asphalt along the Purisima and he waited for the engine to gear down, for the swing of the headlights through the trees, but they didn’t come, and so he waited.

  He was hungry, thirsty too, but he stayed in the cane chair near the screen door and didn’t move. He kept seeing Bethany’s face, the way she looked this afternoon standing at the kitchen table in her school dress. She had just come home, and already she was waiting to hear from him what was happening to them, to their family, standing there bravely waiting for the words to come out of his mouth. But then the phone rang and Carol answered it, her nose stopped up. In a tired tone she said it was for him and she left the receiver on the counter and went to Bethany, turned, and walked her gently from the room. Lester watched them go through the foyer and up the stairs before he moved to the phone. It was Lieutenant Alvarez, Internal Affairs. Lester knew him, but not well, because he was IA and because he was a short and humorless ex-marine who ran six miles every morning before work, whose on-duty appearance and professional record were as spotless as the tie he wore even during the summer months when the sheriff didn’t require it. Other deputies felt automatically uncomfortable around him, but this was not what Lester felt as he picked up the phone, his daughter upstairs about to break; he felt interrupted to an almost cruel degree, and he answered as if he didn’t know who was on the other end. “What?”

  The lieutenant identified himself in that calculated emotionless tone of his, pausing to give Lester a chance to get his protocol in order, but Lester stayed quiet and Alvarez had just a trace of heat in his voice as he asked Lester to dispatch himself immediately to Redwood City for a talk. Lester let out a long breath and could feel his heart beating in it. “Can it wait till I’m back on duty, sir?”

  “No, Deputy. It cannot.” The lieutenant said he would be in his office and hung up directly, but Lester had no plans to drive directly to the Hall of Justice to be interrogated by that prick about what could only be his after-hours visit to the Iranian colonel. And as he hung up he considered denying everything, just lying about it all. He wasn’t up to facing any more truths right now, not after a day that began early this morning with him walking into the house hungover, his hair still wet from the Purisima riverbed, Kathy’s smell still on his skin. Carol had been in the kitchen pouring water into the coffeemaker at the counter, and she had kept her back to him, said in a wary voice she wasn’t expecting him. Lester apologized for not calling first and he sat at his chair at the table and watched his wife wash the kids’ breakfast dishes. Her frosted hair was tied and pinned in a knot at the back of her head, and she wore khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top. Her upper arms looked fleshy, always had, though that had never bothered Lester and whenever she’d complain about them, he’d tell her she was fine just the way she was. And he meant it. She was.

  When the coffee was done she poured herself some and sat down, leaving Lester to get up and pour his own. He stirred milk into his cup and asked if Nate was upstairs and she said no, she’d just dropped him off at her sister’s in Hillsborough. “I have to go into the city today.”

  Lester knew what that meant. He sat back down, and in the next few hours watched his wife become four completely different people. For the first hour or so she was detached, speaking as coolly and rationally as the lawyer she was going to Frisco to see. She sat erect in her chair, and she spoke of their nine-year marriage as a con
tract they were both bound to because they had children now and it had to be honored. “What is a vow after all, Lester? What is a vow?” He told her he couldn’t answer that, he didn’t know what a vow was anymore. But by late morning all her rigid composure fell away and she began screaming that he was a weak, self-serving son of a bitch and so’s the fucking whore you’re sleeping with! And she threw her coffee mug at him, but it missed and hit the wall and didn’t break. He picked it up, but didn’t know quite where to begin, so he said very little as she paced back and forth, yelled until she finally crumpled, crying into her hands, and that one Lester could no longer harden himself to and he went to her and held her and even cried with her, but he was feeling more relieved than anything else: the truth was out. Just hold on. Just ride out the storm. Then, inexplicably, the day was half gone. Where had it gone? It was already early afternoon, time for Bethany to come home from school, and when she came walking tentatively into the house, walking almost on her toes, Lester watched Carol become the mother she was, wiping the tears from her face, she put on a smile and squatted with her arms outstretched to hold her daughter. Lester felt a distant but great admiration for her then, the same kind he had had for her ever since he first saw her in an ethics course in college, when she stood and openly called the professor a fool for insinuating a secular society was inherently more tolerant, and therefore more democratic, than a religious one, her eyes bright with conviction, her back straight, all ten fingertips resting on her desk so they wouldn’t shake.