Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Good way to get yourself killed there, Andrea,” he admonished me.

  “Chief Bradley. I’m sorry, I—” I started to point to Maledicta, then lowered my arm. “I was distracted.”

  “Yeah, that’s generally how it happens. Did Jimmy find you?”

  “Officer Cahill? Um…”

  “I sent him to look for you. We just got a call from that woman you were asking about.”

  “What woman?”

  “Your landlady. Mrs. Winslow, is it?”

  “Mrs. Winslow called? How is she? Did you tell her I’m OK?”

  “I did,” Chief Bradley said, “but she was determined to come see for herself. She’s on her way to the airport right now.”

  “Oh my God.” I didn’t know whether to be excited or embarrassed. “She’s flying all the way out from Seattle?”

  “Rapid City, actually. I believe.”

  “Rapid City? Why would she be…oh no.”

  “She said she was calling from a motel in the South Dakota Badlands. Apparently she’d gotten word from some doctor that you’d been there—I didn’t really follow that part too clearly. Anyway, she knows you’re here now, and she asked me to make sure you stayed put until she arrived. Now I’m not going to detain you officially, but—”

  “It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “All right then…” The chief looked over his shoulder at a couple of cars that had come up behind him. “Listen, I can’t keep blocking traffic here, but would you want to come back to my house and get some lunch? We could talk some more about me buying that property off you.”

  “Um, actually…” I looked up the street the way Maledicta had gone; she was out of sight now. Then I looked back the other way, and saw Officer Cahill coming out of the diner. He had a fistful of napkins and was still wiping whipped cream off his face.

  “…actually, yes,” I said.

  The patrol car’s front passenger seat was already taken by a big box of fishing tackle, so I climbed in back, sliding down as low as I could in the seat. Chief Bradley observed me curiously but didn’t say anything; he drove on, taking a left at the next corner. This took us right past the bar where Maledicta had gone to have her drink, and I thought about asking the chief to stop so I could try and talk her into coming with us. But I doubted I could convince her, and didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring her to Chief Bradley’s house anyway. Penny, yes; but not Maledicta.

  We turned left at the next corner, too, and then left again, and finally right, coming back onto Main Street on the same block as Winchell’s Diner. I crossed my fingers that Chief Bradley wouldn’t stop to tell Officer Cahill he’d found me. He didn’t, and when I finally sat up to take a look around, we were already past the firehouse and headed out of town.

  “Uh, Chief Bradley,” I said, “where exactly is your house? Don’t you live in Seven Lakes?”

  “Just outside the town limits, actually. I have a couple acres next to Sportsman’s Lake.” That would, I guessed, be the kidney bean–shaped pond where he’d been fishing this morning.

  I thought of Maledicta again, and realized I should at least have stopped to let her know where I was going. “Listen, it just occurred to me, my friend’s still back in town, uh, doing some shopping, and if she finishes and can’t find me, she might get worried.”

  “We won’t be gone long,” Chief Bradley said. “And I can always radio Jimmy and have him let your friend know where you are.”

  “Well, to be honest, Chief Bradley, I’d rather Officer Cahill didn’t know where I was.”

  He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You and Jimmy having a problem of some kind?”

  “Of some kind,” I agreed.

  “He’s still sweet on you, isn’t he?” Chief Bradley shook his head, then said “Men,” as if he wasn’t one himself. “Men are fools for love, Andrea…”

  Chief Bradley’s house had a raised deck that faced Sportsman’s Lake, although it was set back a very long way from the water. The chief pointed this out himself as we were coming up the drive. “I wanted to build right up on the bank, but the problem with that damn pond is that it has a habit of changing size. Those same rains that undercut the foundation at your mother’s place? They nearly flooded me out. It’s one of the reasons I’m in the market for a new property.”

  “Well, but that’s not very practical,” I observed. “If the same rain nearly destroyed my mother’s cottage, wouldn’t you just be trading one property for another with the same problems?”

  He chuckled, as if I’d caught him out at something. “You have a point there, Andrea. I guess I’m not a very practical person.”

  He parked, got out, and came back to open my door for me. I took the hand he offered, but instead of stepping back and helping me to my feet he just stood there, staring at my hand like he was going to kiss it.

  “Chief Bradley?”

  “My Lord, Andrea,” he said, “what did you do to yourself?”

  Oh. He was looking at my knuckles. In the washroom at Winchell’s Diner I’d gotten out most of the splinters and run cold water over my hands until they stopped bleeding, but I hadn’t got around to bandaging them yet—the gauze was still in the Centurion.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. I wasn’t going to explain to him how I’d tried to knock down the house he wanted to buy from me. “It’s all right, really—it looks much worse than it is.”

  “You should get some disinfectant on this, Andrea. You don’t want—”

  “It’s all right,” I repeated. “Could I, could you let me get out now, please?”

  “Of course.” He moved back, and I got out. “Well,” Chief Bradley said, gently shutting the car door as I stepped away, “are you hungry?”

  I wasn’t, and all at once I very much didn’t want to be here. I wanted to run back into town, get Penny, and get as far away from Seven Lakes as possible. But I couldn’t leave yet; Mrs. Winslow was coming.

  “All right,” I said, and forced myself to smile. “Sure. Let’s eat something.”

  Maledicta is just finishing her second vodka when Officer Cahill comes into the bar. She’s expecting Andrew—with no one to drive him, where the fuck else is he going to go?—but then she sees who it really is and breaks into a fresh scowl.

  Fuck. Not this cocksucker again. Maledicta thinks about hiding, but there’s not much chance of that: the bar is small and mostly empty right now, the only occupants besides Maledicta and the bartender being a handful of gray-haired alcoholics, clones of the old geezer from the Pink Mammoth. She could duck into the ladies’ room but decides it’s not worth the bother.

  The bartender and the geezer-clones all raise their hands, greeting the officer the way you do a regular. He starts to high-five them back, then spots Maledicta and does a double-take. This tells Maledicta that the officer hasn’t followed her here; he’s come into the bar on his own to drown his sorrows. That’s one of the problems with a pissant town like this: too few places to get drunk. And of course, even though the officer wasn’t looking for Maledicta, now that he’s found her he’s going to have to interrupt her happy hour. He can’t help himself.

  Sure enough, he walks straight over to her. “Is Sam here?” he asks, demanding and pleading at the same time.

  It’s dangerous to curse out a policeman—even Maledicta understands that—but this guy just pushes all her buttons. “Go fuck yourself,” she tells him.

  He bristles. “Look here,” he says, starting to lean into her, “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “That’s right,” Maledicta cuts him off, “you don’t know who the fuck I am.” She rises up on the barstool until she’s eye to eye with him, right in his face. “You don’t know who I am because all day you’ve been fucking ignoring me, acting like I’m fucking invisible. Fifteen minutes ago you nearly fucking sat on me. So you don’t know who the fuck I am, but you know who I’m not? I’m not the one who fucked things up between you and Sam. You fucking
did that yourself, you stupid cocksucker, and you’d better not even fucking think about giving me a hard time over it!”

  Dead silence in the bar following this. The bartender and the geezer-clones pretend to be statues, although real statues’ ears don’t turn crimson. As for Officer Cahill, his color scheme goes in the opposite direction: his ears, cheeks, and forehead take on a cheesecloth hue as the blood drains out of them.

  Satisfied, Maledicta turns back to the bar and raps her shot glass on the counter to reanimate the bartender. He pours her another vodka, while Officer Cahill struggles to restore circulation to those portions of his brain required for speech. “Listen,” he stammers, “I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry if I…” He hits a block, stops, shuts his eyes for a second, sighs, and goes on: “Can you tell me where Sam is, please?”

  Maledicta holds her shot glass up under her nose, letting the fumes curl the hairs of her nostrils. “Sam’s gone home,” she says.

  “Home? You mean back up to the cottage, or—”

  “Home home,” Maledicta says. She grins in sudden inspiration. “Back to New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico?”

  Maledicta tilts her head back, downs the shot. “Ye-a-h,” she gasps. “Yeah, New Mexico. Santa Fe. That’s where we fucking live. Sam and I, we’ve got our own fucking art gallery there.”

  “So you’re both…artists.”

  “Nah, not me. I mean, I fuck around—performance art, that kind of shit—but Sam’s the real fucking talent. I’m more like the business end of it. She paints, I take care of the fucking money.”

  “And you live together.”

  “Yeah,” she says, then realizes what he’s really asking. “Oh, Christ, not like that! We’re not dykes, for fuck’s sake.”

  “OK,” says Officer Cahill, trying to come off like that wasn’t what he meant at all.

  “We’re fucking friends,” Maledicta emphasizes. “Good friends, best friends, but not—”

  “OK, OK…” He’s clearly relieved, despite his effort to hide it. “So Sam, she’s not involved with anybody right now?”

  Up in the cave mouth, Mouse is making an enormous fuss, shouting that this is wrong, that Maledicta mustn’t do this. But it’s Maledicta’s happy hour, so of course she’s going to do it. “Not involved? Oh, I didn’t say that…the truth is, she’s married…”

  The look on his face when he hears this—it’s fucking priceless! “Married…” The blood starts to drain from his cheeks again. “But you said she lives with you…so you live with Sam and her husband?”

  “Well, it’s a complicated fucking situation…” Just then she has another inspiration. She holds out her shot glass. “Get me another vodka.”

  He just stares, blinking.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to fucking throw it at you,” Maledicta says. “But I came in here to drink and unwind, and if you’re going to make me answer fucking questions then you’re fucking well buying, too.”

  Officer Cahill hesitates. He’s not a complete idiot, and some part of him must suspect that he’s being fucked with. But at the end of the day, unrequited love swings more weight than good sense: he sits down on the stool to Maledicta’s right, and signals the bartender. “Two more vodkas.”

  “And cigarettes,” Maledicta adds. “I need some fucking smokes.”

  “How spicy do you like your chili?” Chief Bradley asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten chili.”

  “Never?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Not too spicy, then,” Chief Bradley said, and went back to banging pots. What was supposed to be a simple, quick lunch was turning into a major cooking operation, at least judging by the noise level.

  The front of Chief Bradley’s house was built on an open plan. Coming off the deck through the sliding glass doors, you entered a high-ceilinged, U-shaped space. The left arm of the U was the kitchen; the right arm, the living room; and connecting them, a dining room with a view. At first I sat at the dining table looking out over the deck towards the distant pond, but as Chief Bradley went on banging pots and it became clear that the chili was going to take a while, I got up and wandered into the living room.

  The room was a mix of sparseness and clutter: there wasn’t much furniture, but the walls were crowded. There was a lot of artwork—mostly paint-by-numbers but also some cross-stitch—and a couple of hanging shelves that held old sports trophies; there were also lots and lots of photographs. One wall in particular was covered with them, as if the contents of two or three photo albums had been hung up for easy viewing. At first glance this photo array seemed totally chaotic, but on closer inspection I saw that the photos were grouped by subject into rough constellations or clusters.

  One cluster featured a young Gordon Bradley and a friend who, it slowly dawned on me, was Andy Gage’s biological father, Silas Gage. It took time for me to recognize him because I’d only ever seen one picture of him before—a wedding portrait that my own father had managed to preserve—and in many of these pictures he was still in his teens: here he and Chief Bradley were posing in front of an old car that looked a lot like Julie Sivik’s Cadillac; here they were in a high school band (Chief Bradley with a trombone, Silas Gage with a saxophone); here they were on a football field, half-covered in mud; here—getting a little older—they were standing at attention with a dozen other men, all in uniform; here they were in uniform again, but clowning now, Chief Bradley covering his ears while Silas Gage aimed a hammer at the nose of an artillery shell.

  And here they were at a wedding, standing beside a woman in a bridal gown whose face I knew well: Althea Gage. That was the last picture in which Silas Gage appeared, but there were a couple of other snapshots of Althea: one with her and Chief Bradley together at a party, and another of her in front of the cottage—still level, then—gesturing at it with obvious pride. That picture made me wish I could borrow the artillery shell from the army photo.

  “Chili’s on simmer,” Chief Bradley said, coming to join me. “Should be ready in about twenty minutes. You thirsty? I know it’s a little early, but…” He held out a bottle of beer.

  “No thank you,” I said. I nodded at the pictures: “I didn’t know that you and…my father, were so close.”

  “Close as brothers, from the day we met. Well…second day, actually.”

  I shook my head, not knowing what he meant.

  “I’m from Peoria, originally,” Chief Bradley explained. “But my momma ran out when I was thirteen, and my dad wasn’t up to raising me on his own, so he sent me up here to live with his sister and her husband.” He indicated some photos of an older couple I’d assumed were his parents. “Coming here, I was the new kid in a small school, and on my first day, your father got it into his head to pick a fight with me—and since I was angry about all kinds of things right then, I was more than happy to oblige him…” He hooked a finger in the corner of his mouth and pulled his lip up, exposing a gap in the line of his molars.

  “My father knocked your tooth out?” I said.

  “Nope,” he replied, letting his mouth snap back into shape. “I knocked one of his teeth out. He knocked one of mine loose, but it didn’t fall out till later.” He chuckled. “Next day, we both came into school wondering whether there was going to be a rematch, but he took one look at me, and I took one look at him, and we both saw…I don’t know, something.” He shrugged, looking mildly embarrassed. “From that moment on, we were the best of friends.”

  “Huh,” I said, not understanding how best friendship would follow from a fistfight. I turned back to the photos and pointed to another group that showed Chief Bradley with a pretty but mostly unsmiling blond woman. “Is this your wife?”

  “It was.” I couldn’t tell if that meant he was widowed or divorced, but then he added: “She left me.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Ellen was a decent woman but the two of us tying the knot was a mistake
. Not the marriage I wanted.” He took a swig of beer. “What about yourself?”

  “Myself?”

  “You’re an attractive young lady. Are you married?”

  I’d begun to get used to him referring to me as “Andrea,” but being called an “attractive young lady” threw me—all the more so because he wasn’t just being kind, but actually seemed to mean it.

  “I-I…no,” I said. “I’m not married.”

  He smiled. “But with prospects, surely.”

  “No, not even that. I mean there was one person who I…but sh—they didn’t feel the same way about me.”

  “That can be hard,” Chief Bradley said. He glanced up at the photo array. Then he asked: “Did you ever get that program I sent you?”

  “What program?”

  “From your mother’s funeral. I know you said you didn’t want it, but I thought you should have it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That was from you?…I mean yes, we got it.” I started to add a perfunctory “thank you,” but just then my mouth went dry. Without thinking, I raised the bottle—the bottle that was, after all and somehow, in my hand—and took a swallow of beer.

  “I’m only sorry you couldn’t attend the ceremony,” Chief Bradley said. “It was sad, but it was beautiful…she was a good woman, your mother…”

  “If you say so,” I muttered. I took another swallow of beer, and another. The bottle was nearly empty by the time I noticed what I was doing—and by then, it was already too late.

  “…so the two kids are living with her husband now, in Seattle,” Maledicta says. “Which is where we were visiting just before we came here.”

  “So Sam and her husband,” says Officer Cahill, “her husband…”

  “Dennis,” Maledicta says, and has to pinch the inside of her wrist to keep from laughing. She’s been doing this almost constantly, but it’s becoming less effective—the more she drinks, the less she can feel the pinches. She’s on her seventh vodka now.

  “Dennis, right—they’re separated?”