Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  I parked behind Susan’s Acura and let myself in through the front door. Voices and laughter came from the back of the house. Damn, I thought. Susan had told me we would have company. The Lindseys, whoever they were.

  I went through to the kitchen and out to the pool deck. Thomas was sitting at the edge of the pool, his legs hanging in the water. Susan sat at the patio table with a couple in their late twenties. Susan and the man had empty margarita glasses, the woman a mostly full glass of water. He wore loose gray cotton pants, sandals and an untucked blue cotton shirt. His black hair was cut short, he had glasses and had gone a couple of days without shaving. The woman wore a loose, flowery cotton dress and sandals. She was almost pretty, with long, dark, curling hair and a face that was only a little too flat. She looked like she might be a few months pregnant.

  They smiled at me and the man stood to shake my hand. ‘Michael Lindsey,’ he said. ‘And my wife, Hannah.’ His voice sounded of the north.

  We shook hands. ‘William Byrd,’ I said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  He gave me a nod that forgave everything. ‘Susan was explaining the neighborhood to us.’

  Susan said, ‘They’ve moved from Michigan. He teaches political science.’

  He nodded. ‘And Hannah does translations.’

  I asked, ‘Are you pregnant?’

  She exchanged a glance with her husband. ‘Four months,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a great neighborhood to raise kids,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get a drink. Anyone need a refill?’

  Susan and Michael lifted their glasses to me and Hannah said, ‘Susan tells us you always keep a pitcher of margaritas in the refrigerator.’

  ‘Not everyone drinks coffee in the morning,’ I said, and turned to Thomas. ‘D’you want anything?’

  He kicked his legs slowly in the water and shook his head.

  ‘Great neighborhood to raise kids,’ I said again and went for the drinks.

  We grilled salmon on the patio. I said, ‘Mom left Dad when I was six years old and moved to Arizona when I was seven.’

  The Lindseys listened sympathetically.

  ‘I didn’t hear from her until I was thirty, when she started sending Christmas cards. Signature only. No note. I sent her cards too. Signature only. We haven’t moved beyond that. I don’t know if we ever will. I don’t know if I care, though I suspect I do more than I let on to myself.’

  Hannah nodded. She’d given up on her glass of water and was sipping from her husband’s drink. Thomas stared into the air looking stoned, though unless he’d slipped something into his mouth between bites of salmon, he was just bored. Susan had heard my stories before and continued eating as if I weren’t there.

  ‘Dad owned four gas stations. Different brands. Two Exxons, a Shell and an independent. When I graduated from high school he said he didn’t want me to follow him into the business. He had aspirations for me if not himself. I didn’t feel particularly ambitious either but I went to college because I had no good reason not to. Dad died of a heart attack at the beginning of my sophomore year. I stopped going to class and by January I was home again, sole proprietor of four gas stations and the house where I grew up. I dragged Dad’s mattress and bed frame into my room and filled his closet with my clothes. After a year and a half I changed the utility bills to my name. That same year I met Susan and we got married eleven months later.’

  Susan reached for her glass, looked annoyed that it was empty and said, ‘Would you get more drinks?’

  I went to get them but stopped inside the door.

  Susan spoke quietly. ‘None of that’s true. You’ll hear the stories about BB sooner or later and we might as well be the ones to tell them. BB left college at the beginning of his sophomore year but not because his dad died. In September of that year BB went to a football game. They were playing Rollins College and were supposed to win easily. But Rollins surprised them.

  ‘A group of Rollins kids, including three from Honduras, had come to the game in a van and afterward were celebrating at a bar before driving back. Some of the locals took offense and decided to beat up the Hondurans. The other kids from Rollins watched, and so did the rest of the locals. Then BB stepped into the fight. Five men were attacking the kids and he just took them apart. The Hondurans slipped away but BB didn’t stop beating the men until the police pulled him off. One of the men died and another had his neck broken. The police charged BB with homicide but the newspapers and television news publicized the circumstances – one against five, defending the brown-skinned kids – so the District Attorney dropped the case. But that was the end of college.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Michael Lindsey in a way that made me smile.

  His wife said to Susan, ‘You married him knowing this?’

  I stepped outside. ‘It’s why she married me.’

  Susan looked at me. ‘The drinks?’

  ‘Ah, the drinks,’ I said and went to make them. I stood in the air conditioning under the bright kitchen light, my head lightly stirred by the alcohol, and felt the coldness of the house. Thomas carried in his plate and left it on the counter.

  ‘Hey,’ I said softly.

  He frowned at me. ‘Hey,’ he said and headed to his bedroom.

  When I returned with the tray Hannah gazed at me with a mix of curiosity and fear and I thought I knew what that kind of look could mean for me if I wanted it to. ‘Why wouldn’t you tell the truth?’ she said.

  I said, ‘If truth doesn’t get you through the day, what good is it?’

  ‘The truth does get you through the day,’ she said. ‘It gets me through it.’

  ‘Then you’ve got easy truths,’ I said. ‘You want to know mine?’

  She looked uncertain. ‘I do.’

  I took a drink from my glass. ‘OK, the truth is I liked beating those five guys.’

  Susan said, ‘Don’t, BB.’

  I waved her away. ‘It may have started because they were hurting some kids who’d done nothing to them, but it didn’t end that way. I wish it didn’t feel so good but it did. If the police hadn’t stopped me I would’ve killed all five.’

  She nodded as if she heard stories like mine every day but her eyes showed worry.

  Her husband said, ‘So you crossed the line for the wrong reason and you enjoyed it. So what? You saved the kids. The bigger evil would’ve been watching and doing nothing.’

  ‘That’s what some of the newspapers said. The others said you shouldn’t justify vigilantism. Otherwise people will make a habit of it.’

  He showed his palms as if to say that he’d won the point. ‘But you didn’t make a habit of it, did you?’

  ‘Who says I didn’t?’

  He laughed uncomfortably and Susan asked, ‘Who’d like coffee?’

  After the Lindseys went home, I stood outside on the dark patio and listened to the tree frogs trilling and the breeze blowing through the leaves. The backyard dipped from the pool until it reached the edge of a pond. Fifty years before my dad was born this part of the neighborhood had been a brick quarry which the owner flooded after the clay deposit thinned. He’d parceled the land around the quarry and sold it as waterfront property, and now a neighborhood preservation society sold plaques that homeowners could tack next to their front doors, celebrating the historical architecture as if we hadn’t built our houses on the banks of an open pit. As a kid digging in the backyard I’d unearthed clumps of pink-gray clay, cool to the touch, coated with sandy soil which I’d washed away under a garden hose. I’d formed the clay into bowls that I gave to my mother before she went away and once an ashtray that I gave to my dad.

  After my mother left us, but before she moved to Arizona, she’d rented an apartment above a dry-cleaners a half mile from our house. One summer afternoon, too young really to know where I was going, I went from the house without telling my father and found the apartment. She’d arranged my clay bowls in the front window as if beckoning me to her. When I rang the buzzer, she answered the street door wearing a bathro
be and brought me upstairs. A man was in her bedroom – a dark-skinned white man, or a fair-skinned black man, or a Mexican, I don’t know what. Something. I don’t remember. But I remember his dirty sweat, which cut through the smell of dry-cleaning solvent from the store below.

  My mother spoke to me. Words of anger. Words of love. Words that told me I was far from home and should never wander outside alone. Something. I went to the windowsill, picked up a clay bowl and dropped it on the floor. It broke into a dozen pieces. I wanted her to hold me, or to yell or hit me, but, eyes on mine, she crossed her arms over her chest and gave me the plainest, flattest look I’d ever seen, a look that said she didn’t care. I took another bowl and dropped it. The man came into the living room, wearing a towel around his waist, and she told him to go back to the bedroom, but he didn’t. He stood in the doorway and eyed me like I was a curiosity. I picked up another bowl and broke it.

  ‘What the hell,’ the man said and came after me.

  My mother told him to stop but the man ignored her again.

  I swept the other bowls from the windowsill before he reached me, but then he was on top of me, his sweating, stinking arms around me. Why were his arms around me instead of the arms of my mother, the arms that I desired? I grabbed a piece of a broken bowl from the floor and tried to stab him in the eye. The shard went into the skin below his cheekbone and he staggered back, blood on his face, on his chest, on the towel, which now was coming loose from his waist.

  My mother came to me and I felt a wave of relief. I moved toward her, too, unafraid, wanting – needing – the safety of her touch.

  She slapped me across the face. ‘You little bastard!’

  I feel the sting of it now.

  Then she said something that made no sense to me at the time, and though I understood both its general and its particular meaning when I was a teenager, its full meaning still was – and remains – elusive, partly because I was never sure that it was true. She said, ‘You have choices.’

  Susan came out of the house and stood beside me. I put my arm around her waist and said, ‘That was a nice evening.’

  ‘You’re a jerk,’ she said, not unlovingly.

  ‘Come to me tonight?’ I asked. I’d asked her hundreds of times since Thomas was born and she’d never come. I said, ‘I need you.’

  ‘I wish you did,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you need anyone.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Tell me about the woman who died,’ she said.

  I thought about Belinda on the railroad tracks. I thought about her telling me that her family was moving north. I thought about her dead flesh pasted against a clear plastic lawn bag on an empty lot on Blue Avenue. ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  Susan pulled away. ‘Good night, BB.’

  My keys were on the kitchen counter. The light in the sunroom was off and Susan was sleeping or at least quiet. Music played in Thomas’s bedroom and his light remained on, probably would be on all night as he drew the adventures of one of his pornographic superheroes. I grabbed the keys and went to my car.

  A quarter mile from my house a chocolate shop stayed open until eleven p.m. on summer nights, selling ice cream to couples who’d come out of the movie theater next door. I parked outside and bought a half-pound box of chocolate almonds from a counter boy in braces.

  Lee Ann lived in a pink one-story house in a Southside neighborhood of similar houses, most of them in need of a paintjob and new gutters. Her yard was a carpet of low-lying azalea bushes that bloomed like purple and white fire in late winter and looked ragged the rest of the year. I’d known Lee Ann since high school. Over the years she’d worked as a waitress, an interior designer and a life coach, but mostly she’d survived on the dollars and change left on her night table afterward by men like me.

  I parked at the curb in front of her house and walked the path through the ragged azaleas. She answered the door, barefoot, wearing red shorts and a white blouse, looking like she’d been waiting for me. She had tight curly red hair, heavy thighs and small, childish breasts. The living room was dusty, the upholstered furniture worn, a stack of magazines on a credenza, a pile of unopened mail next to it.

  Lee Ann looked at the chocolates as though she’d never seen anything like them before and was unsure what to do with them. ‘You don’t have to do this, BB,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, chocolate’s the greatest gift.’

  She swallowed a yawn. ‘I thought donating a kidney was the greatest gift.’

  ‘You don’t need a kidney.’

  ‘I don’t need chocolates either.’

  ‘Fine.’ I took the box from her, dropped it on the floor, pulled her to me and unbuttoned her blouse.

  ‘I heard about Belinda Mabry,’ she said.

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘OK,’ she said and pressed her mouth to mine.

  After we finished she laid her head on my sweaty chest. So much in her house was old and dusty, but the bed sheets smelled fresh, and lying in her bed was luxurious. She said, ‘If I ever really did need something from you, would you give it to me?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something big.’

  ‘Like a kidney?’

  She nodded against my chest. ‘Something big.’

  I thought about it. ‘No.’

  A little after three a.m. I drove home. Heat lightning flashed in the west and showed a slate-blue sky between thin yellow clouds. I let myself in through the back door. Thomas’s room was dark and he’d turned off the music. Only a kitchen light remained on. I went to the refrigerator and opened the door but decided I’d already had enough or more than enough. I closed my eyes, breathed deep and listened to the refrigerator hum. When I needed sex I got it on the side and always with a deep stain that didn’t fade until I started desiring again but there was nothing to help that. I’d lived with it for fifteen years. I would live with it for another thirty if I needed to.

  But now I would sleep.

  I set the keys on the kitchen counter and saw a note from Susan. It said that Daniel Turner had called from the police station at midnight and he needed to talk right away.

  SEVEN

  Tomorrow, I thought. Or the next day. I climbed the stairs, stripped off my clothes, folded them, stacked them on a chair next to my bed and climbed in.

  I dreamed about clear sheets of plastic – waves of it spread over a hot, bare landscape, thin as film, like trash bags slit down the seams and then stitched together. Naked bodies writhed under the plastic – legs, arms and breasts desperately pressing upward, mouths seeking air. But there was no air, no breath, and they clawed at the plastic in the pain and thrill of orgasmic asphyxiation.

  Who were they?

  Belinda.

  The two prostitutes who’d died like her.

  Lee Ann.

  Others too.

  Women I’d known or not known.

  I watched from above and knew that I could remove the plastic if I chose to, but I chose not to. It was the kind of dream that was more real than waking. The women screamed and the sound rang in my ears like sex.

  I woke to a bright room. The sun had risen while the women gaped at me through the clear plastic with desperate, bulging eyes. Daniel Turner stood at the side of my bed looking like he hadn’t slept and was angry about it. Susan stood at the door.

  ‘Morning, Lieutenant,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you call last night?’

  ‘Get out of my house.’ I said it as politely as I could.

  He sighed. ‘I left a message.’

  ‘I was busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  I glanced at Susan and back at Daniel. ‘Fucking.’

  Susan disappeared from the doorway.

  Daniel frowned. ‘Jesus, BB.’

  ‘What else am I supposed to do at one in the morning?’

  He shook his head. ‘What happened to Bobby Mabry yesterday?’

  ‘What do you mean? I talked to him. You knew I pla
nned to go to Belinda’s house.’

  ‘Then what?’ he asked.

  ‘Then nothing. I told him I was sorry about Belinda.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I left,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t return?’

  ‘Why would I? What’s this about?’

  He looked hard at me. ‘Someone burned the back of his hands. Three spots on each hand. Like with cigarettes. Like stigmata.’

  Charles, I thought. He must’ve gone back.

  ‘What?’ Daniel said.

  ‘Nothing. When did it happen?’

  ‘The call came in at eight-forty-eight.’

  ‘I was here all evening,’ I said. ‘We had company. The Lindseys. New neighbors.’

  He nodded as if he was relieved.

  ‘Bobby said I did it?’ I asked.

  Daniel shook his head, disgusted. ‘He’s not saying. Baptist Hospital cleaned and bandaged the burns, wrote him a prescription for Percodan and let him go. He wouldn’t tell the officer what happened. Said it was an accident, as if he could do that to himself. But Belinda’s son said you and a friend had stopped by in the afternoon.’

  ‘This is true.’

  ‘Care to tell me who you took with you when you went visiting?’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, BB. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing.’

  ‘Fact is I was trying to sleep until you broke down my door.’

  ‘I didn’t break down your door and I don’t plan to. But you know you’ve got to stay away from this.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’ve told me twice.’

  He shook his head again and started toward the door.

  ‘Daniel?’ I said.

  He turned back reluctantly. ‘What?’