The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  Swenson recovers as best he can. “You’re sure looking trim. Must’ve been working out.”

  “And trying not to be such a pig at the table. Thanks for agreeing to see me again, Jim.”

  Swenson leads him into the living room, which hasn’t changed much either. He finds the same claw-and-ball-feet andirons before the same small fireplace; several overflowing bookcases, including a couple of shelves’ worth of Wendell Berry; a pie chest that he had referred to in his article, noting that it had once belonged to Swenson’s great-grandmother.

  Two sofas face each other over the coffee table. His host gestures at one and takes a seat on the other. “So what can I tell you?” he asks.

  Pulling out his notepad, Richard says that when he learned about the auction, he was both disturbed and surprised. “The last I heard, things were going really well for you. Mind if I ask what happened?”

  Swenson locks his hands behind his head. “We’re in the third straight year of drought. Priority water rights holders are still getting one hundred percent of their normal allotment. Last year we got thirty. This year we’re getting ten. There’s no more to be had, and even if there was, we wouldn’t be able to afford it. But really, that’s just part of the problem.” He says that he’s had to borrow more and more money to stay in business, and the only reason he didn’t reach this day a lot sooner is his income from painting. “I’m not exactly Thomas Kinkade, but my stuff sells for decent sums. It can probably continue to sustain my wife and me if we live modestly enough, but it can’t sustain this place.”

  “What do you think will happen to it?”

  “The land? It’ll be bought by an agribusiness conglomerate. ConAg, Archer Daniels. One of those.”

  “Am I right thinking this must be costing you a lot of grief?”

  “I wouldn’t say it meets the grief standard. Grief’s what you feel when somebody you love dies.” He says his failure to achieve long-term success doesn’t necessarily portend failure for anybody else, that he still thinks clean farmers with know-how and commitment can make a go of it. “Of course, they’ll need a little luck,” he says. “Nobody can succeed in farming without that.” For a man on the verge of losing everything but his house and vehicle, he remains remarkably upbeat. He says he’ll have a lot more time to paint, that he wants to explore mixed-media techniques, that he’s developed enthusiasm for the works of newer artists like Soraya French and Sera Knight.

  Richard arranges for his photographer to visit the next day. Before he leaves, they stroll through a peach orchard. “I’m not going to deny being sad about having to throw in the towel,” Swenson admits. “But all things considered, I’m pretty fortunate. I’ve still got most of my family and friends, and I’ve still got my painting. For a lot of people in my shoes, the end is just the end. What’s left of their lives turns into a long, dismal slog.” He pulls a plump Elberta off a branch, polishes it on his shirtfront, and hands it to Richard.

  After that, he can’t see going straight home. He drives up into the foothills, stopping on the roadside two or three times for no particular reason. Right now there’s not a lot to look at except some sagebrush and honey mesquite. Whenever he and his family came up here together, Julia noted how dry and brown the landscape appeared, so different from southern Poland.

  By midafternoon, he’s at a quarter tank, so he turns and heads back down. In Fresno, he buys gas and stops at Subway to eat a sandwich. Then it’s time to go home and perform the task he’s been dreading.

  The middle bedroom is his study, which he used to share with Julia, her desk facing the window so she could gaze at her garden, his facing the wall to avoid distraction. He considered turning it into Franek’s bedroom and moving his work space into Anna’s room. But he’s been writing in the same place for nearly twenty years, and it’s one thing that needs to remain unchanged. So he bought eight large plastic containers at Target, brought them home, and stacked them in the basement.

  Now he carries them all into the hallway. He pulls the lid off the first one and opens the door to his daughter’s bedroom.

  He starts by removing the photos from the walls and bookshelves.

  Anna hunkering before a toy refrigerator

  Part of a kitchen set they gave her on her third birthday, when she was in what she would later refer to as “my 1950s housewife phase,” the refrigerator was about three feet high, made of hard plastic, and lacking any source of electricity. She cracked four or five eggs, dumped them into a toy skillet, and left the skillet inside it while they went for a week to Yosemite. When they got back, you could smell rotten eggs from the driveway.

  Anna onstage in Palo Alto at the Young Artist Competition, her face serene as she bows her way through the second movement of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto

  She won the bronze medal.

  Anna cuddled up with his father on the couch in Massachusetts

  She always called him “Dziadek.” Never “Grandfather.”

  Anna wrapped tightly in a blanket, only her wizened face and one tiny fist visible as her mother holds her moments after giving birth

  He doesn’t even look at the last few photos, just removes them and places them in the container.

  Next he goes to work on the books: Agatha Christie, Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren, and, though he once observed that they didn’t jibe with her other choices, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove novels. “Cowboys,” she responded, “are my weakness.” He thought the line was original, but it turns out there’s a book of short stories on her shelf with that sentence for a title. A tidbit to savor when it seemed none were left.

  The process ought to take days, weeks, months, years—a lifetime. Instead, it consumes less than three hours. He carries the containers, one by one, back into the basement. Then he returns to her room, where he puts fresh sheets on the bed for Franek, places a light comforter in a cover and a pair of pillows in their slip cases. By now it’s eight thirty, and he knows he ought to eat but doesn’t feel like preparing anything or going out for dinner, and anyhow he’s not hungry. He crawls into bed with an Alan Furst novel that he’s already read twice and manages thirty or forty pages before falling asleep.

  When his cell rings it’s almost midnight. The name on the screen is that of his best local cop-shop contact, a detective in the Fresno PD named Joe Garcia.

  “Brennan?”

  He can hear out-of-sync sirens in the background. Then he realizes that at least one of them is actually close by, that it sounds like it’s speeding south on Maroa. “Yeah. Hi, Joe.”

  “Listen, you need to hurry down to . . . What’s the fucking address here again?” he hears the detective holler. Then, “Two thirty-six Paschal.”

  “That’s near Calwa Elementary?”

  “Not too far. It’s behind a row of body shops. Which is kind of ironic, now that I think about it.”

  “What’s up, Joe? What you got?”

  Garcia makes a spitting sound. “A slaughterhouse,” he says.

  A boxy little prefab structure with a flat roof, iron bars over the windows and doors, it reminds him of houses he’s seen in the Caribbean. At first, he thinks it’s made of concrete, but Garcia says lath and stucco.

  “No AC?” Richard asks.

  “Just a fucking swamp cooler. But that’s not even working.”

  The detective, who’s about forty and nearly as tall as he is, wipes sweat off his forehead. His shirt is soaked. They’re standing in the street, just outside the taped-off area, surrounded by police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, and a KSFN Action News van as well as thirty or forty neighbors whose toes and necks are being subjected to undue stress. More people are streaming onto the block from both ends. Some are wearing pajamas or nightgowns. One elderly man has ventured out in his boxers.

  “We had to use a plasma cutter to get in,” Garcia tells him. “It was around 120 degrees in there.”

  “Any idea how long ago it happened?”

  “Not that long, and praise Jesus an
d Bill O’Reilly. ’Cause otherwise, in such heat . . .” He shakes his head.

  “How many people are we talking about, Joe?”

  The detective glances across the street and sees something he doesn’t like. Before turning away, he says, “Five, counting the one with the gun. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “We’re talking men? Women? Children?”

  “We’re talking I gotta go,” he says over his shoulder, joining a gaggle of cops and crime-lab techs.

  The woman he apparently left to avoid is tall and slim, a bit north of thirty, if Richard had to guess, with thick, reddish hair that sweeps across the shoulders of her burnt-orange blouse. He’s never really met her, though he saw her a couple of weeks ago out at Corcoran State Prison after the news leaked that numerous inmates, including Charles Manson, had somehow acquired cell phones. She recently joined the staff of the Fresno Sun. Her hiring caught his attention because she used to work for the Worcester Morning Journal, where his former BU classmate is executive editor. He’s read two or three of her pieces, and she knows what she’s doing.

  She puts her hand out. “We haven’t been introduced,” she says, “but I’ve been hoping to meet you. I’m Maria Cantrell.”

  Her palm is damp. On a night like this, whose wouldn’t be? “Richard Brennan,” he says.

  “The legendary Richard Brennan. Alex said to tell you hello.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Ad revenue’s drying up, circulation’s plummeting. You know. But, hey, what’re we gonna do?”

  As soon as she opened her mouth at the Corcoran press conference, he knew she was not a native New Englander. Texas, he would guess. Probably the Hill Country.

  “You don’t sound like you’re from Boston,” he says.

  She laughs. “You don’t either, though I know you are. I grew up in Arkansas.”

  “Did you go to the University of Arkansas? A friend of mine teaches journalism there.”

  “Lake Village High. I never made it to college.”

  He senses she’s waiting for a reaction to this last piece of information. If so, she’ll be disappointed. “Was it my imagination,” he asks, “or was Joe Garcia in a hurry to get away from you?”

  “I interviewed him a few days ago about a cold case.”

  “Something he was involved in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looks like your dredging may have caused a little discomfort.”

  “He actually brought the case to my attention.”

  “Oh. Well, Joe’s his own private press agent. He can be useful, but I’ve got him marked ‘handle with care.’”

  “I told him I’m not seeing any story right now, and he acted pissed. Then the next morning he phoned and invited me out for a drink.”

  “Just so you know, he’s married.”

  She laughs again. “Just so you know, I do know. And I said no.”

  The gurneys begin to roll out the front door. The lumps in the first couple of body bags are far too small.

  “Oh, my God,” she says. “Those are children.”

  The asphalt they’re standing on is sticky. He lifts one foot and then the other, focusing on the suction—the tactile sense of it, the auditory. In another hour or so, when it cools down into the 80s, the surface of the streets will recover their firmness. There will be something solid and dependable to stand on.

  The EMTs load the gurneys into the backs of ambulances, and they pull away from the curb, sirens ominously silent, flashers turned off.

  An FPD spokesman faces the television lights and reads a prepared statement, which essentially says nothing. In the morning they’ll hold a press conference, though when it will be, he doesn’t yet know. Next the DA steps before the lights and says his own bit of nothing, and the crowd begins to straggle away. Richard tells Maria Cantrell good night, and she says that sometime soon she’d love to have coffee with him, let him bring her up to speed on the Central Valley, since Alex told her he knows more about it than anybody else. He says sure, instantly forgetting the promise as well as the person he made it to and moving off to accost as many neighbors as he can before they disappear inside their houses, turn out their lights, and bar their doors.

  Family name: Aguilera. They’d lived there for two years.

  The husband: Andres. In his midthirties. He worked at one of the nearby body shops.

  The wife: nobody knows her first name or where she worked, or if they do, they’re not saying, though everybody agrees she had a job of some sort and was often gone at night.

  Three kids: one girl and two boys. The youngest a toddler, the oldest around seven.

  An old lady came over most evenings, but nobody knows her name either, and descriptions of her differ.

  Driving home, he turns the air on full blast.

  In his study, he slams out twelve inches and e-mails the piece, then strips naked and climbs into the shower, turning it on as hot as he can tolerate, letting it pound his back and shoulders. Then he turns it all the way to cold, which isn’t that cold, and stands there until the heat in his body starts to dissipate. He towels off, puts on a fresh pair of underwear, and steps into the backyard.

  It’s around three a.m., maybe a quarter past. His hands are balled into fists, and he’s seeing that face looking in through the shattered window of the crumpled Mercedes.

  Weak chin. Thin lips. Small eyes. Odd mole. It’s as if nature chose not to waste time on the man’s features, knowing something more essential was missing inside.

  He sits down on the still-warm ground. Then he leans back, his knees raised, and looks at the sky. Despite the haze in the air, he can see a few points of light. Science was never his strong suit. He knows next to nothing about the constellations, can’t recall more than a handful of names. Cassiopeia, Canis Major and Minor, Andromeda, Orion. At random he picks a pair of stars that look fairly close together, and though he knows they must be light years from each other and even farther from him, he stares at them until his hands and legs begin to relax and his pulse starts to slow. Like a patient prepped for surgery, he takes a final breath and falls asleep.

  “Mr. Brennan? Mr. Brennan!”

  At first, he doesn’t know where he is or why Sandy Lyons would be bending over him in her nightgown, her hair down in her eyes. Nor does he know that he’s not wearing anything but his underwear. Once this has all become clear, he masters the impulse to leap off the ground and cover as much of himself as he can. Instead, he slowly rises to a sitting position, holds it for a beat, then plants a hand and pushes himself up.

  “I guess I gave you a fright, didn’t I?” he asks, slapping dirt off his palms like he just slid into second.

  “Well,” she says, “I thought maybe you had a heart attack. You didn’t, did you?”

  “Not in the traditional sense.”

  “Did you maybe drink too much or something?”

  “Not that either.” There used to be a redwood fence between his house and hers, but because she and Anna were such close friends, he and Bob Lyons spent a Saturday afternoon nine or ten years ago sipping beer and knocking it down. He glances across the backyard and sees both Bob’s and Sue’s cars parked in the driveway. Neither has left for work yet and could well be watching while he stands here in his underwear talking to their teenaged daughter. As casually as circumstance allows, he asks, “What time is it, Sandy?”

  “About a quarter after six.”

  “You’re up kind of early, aren’t you?”

  “I went to get a drink of water and saw you through the window.”

  “It’s sure sweet of you to check on me.”

  She looks at his compressor, which rests on a slab near the back door and is droning away. “Is your air conditioner okay?”

  “Yeah, hon, it’s fine. I had to go cover a really disturbing event last night, which I’m sure you can read about in this morning’s Sun, and I just needed to lie down for a while and gaze at the sky. And I guess I got a little too comfortable.”<
br />
  “Isn’t this the day your nephew’s coming?”

  “It sure is.”

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Franek. He may want to go by Frank here, I don’t know.”

  “My mom said you asked if I could talk to him about school. I told her I’d be glad to, though several of the sophomore teachers are new and I never had classes with them.”

  “I appreciate that, Sandy,” he says, “and I know he will as well.”

  “He’s coming for the whole year? Or just the fall semester?”

  “Probably just the fall. We’ll have to wait and see. He’ll actually be arriving right after lunch, and I’ve got a good bit to do before picking him up. So why don’t you and I both go back inside before your folks wake and begin to wonder if I’ve lost my mind?”

  “Okay,” she says.

  She turns and takes a couple of steps toward her back door, then turns again. Before he knows what’s happening, and perhaps before she does, she’s thrown her arms around him, her breath tickling his chest. She lets go of him as quickly as she grabbed him, then slings her hair out of her eyes, walks across the yard, and disappears inside.

  The building stands on Smolensk, not far from the Philharmonic. A five-story monument to Habsburg gloom, it still hasn’t been renovated. The development company bought it six months ago. They’ve already done a couple of jobs here. They know this building well. “Call him,” he tells Marek.

  They’re standing on the opposite side of the street. Marek whips out his mobile and punches in the number. He listens, his facial scars whitening from the tension. After a few seconds, he nods and presses the end-call button. “He’s up there.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  They cross the street, Marek carrying the boom box, Bogdan dragging the heavy burlap sack. It’s midafternoon and sweltering, and he’d love to go someplace cool and drink a beer. He unlocks the front door and, once they’re inside, hands the keys to his partner. “Go turn the power on to the elevator. This stuff’s too heavy for me to lug it up five flights. I’ll call when I get off.”

  “My mobile doesn’t work down there,” Marek reminds him. “You’ll have to bang on the pipes. Do it hard.” He turns and heads for the basement.