The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

“Well,” Marek asks, “what comes next?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Do we do it tomorrow?”

  “No. We’ll hit the building in Mistrzejowice in the morning and then move on to one of the others. Give this guy a little breathing room, let him think he scared us off. For all we know, he’ll reconsider and move out. But if we eventually have to do it, one thing’s going to be different.”

  “What?”

  He mops the sweat off his forehead. He never drinks on the job anymore, but he could stand a drink now. “This time, we’ll let Fabian go get the fucking acid.”

  They leave everything behind but the boom box.

  On the sidewalk, Bogdan asks Marek if he wants to have a beer, but Marek says he promised to take his granddaughter out for ice cream this evening, so he’d better hurry home and clean up. He usually gives that sort of answer when Bogdan invites him for a drink. It’s not that he’s become abstemious, or that he’s trying to distance himself from his friend. It’s just that he has a life and everything that goes with it: a wife, kids, grandkids. A while back he and Inga even acquired a cat, and though he was never an animal lover before, he talks about the creature all the time now and takes great pleasure in the weight it’s gained since they took it in off the street.

  They agree to meet at the building in Mistrzejowice the next morning and tell each other good-bye. On his way home, Bogdan passes the Philharmonic, then crosses the street. He’s trying to decide if he wants to sit in a café in Planty and sip a beer and watch people for a while or if he ought to just buy one and take it home. The problem with the former is that if he orders one, he might order two, and if he orders two, he will almost certainly order four. Whereas if he carries one home to drink, lethargy will usually stop him from going back downstairs and walking to the end of the block to buy more. He’ll just sit on the balcony till the evening cools off, and then he’ll go to bed.

  He’s decided against the café when he sees the woman hurrying toward him with her instrument case. She’s short and dark-haired, nicely shaped, probably in her late forties, though you might think she was younger until you get close enough to observe the well-concealed lines at the corners of her mouth. He’s still some distance away, but he’s noticed this woman before, usually right around this time of day. The fact that she’s always carrying the instrument and is dressed in black, even on a sizzling afternoon, has led him to draw the obvious conclusion that she’s a member of the Krakow Philharmonic. There’s nothing extraordinary about her appearance, yet once or twice after they’ve passed each other, he’s allowed himself to imagine what she might be doing when she’s not heading toward the concert hall to rehearse or perform. For some reason he wouldn’t be able to specify, he suspects she lives alone, and since he’s never gotten a good look at her ring finger and has no contradictory information, that’s the fate he’s assigned her. After performances, he sees her returning to her small apartment, where she puts on a Beethoven quartet and sips wine. It’s always red.

  Today, when she’s within a couple of meters, he almost says hello. What prevents him is not his sense of decorum, which normally precludes such unsolicited greetings. It’s the expression in her eyes. She’s looking straight ahead, almost directly at him, he thinks, though later he will wonder if she wasn’t gazing past him at the Philharmonic.

  He was right the first time: it’s him she’s looking at. An instant earlier her thoughts were elsewhere, wondering what her son’s first day in a foreign school would be like, whether they had made the right decision in sending him away or just shifted their problem onto someone else’s shoulders. That was what was on her mind when she raised her gaze and saw the man with that strange mole split down the middle, as if each of the halves had a will of its own.

  “You know what I can’t remember?” his uncle asks.

  They’re sitting in the breakfast alcove, and he’s just finished his second frosted Pop-Tart. During the last couple of weeks, he’s gone through ten or twelve packages. At home, he never ate anything sweet for breakfast, but the sugar seems to satisfy some baffling new urge. “What?”

  His uncle takes another sip of coffee, then sets his mug down. “The Polish name for Xanax,” he says, speaking English as they always do at the table. “Is it the same, or is it called something else over there?”

  Franek studies the brown stain at the bottom of his empty teacup. He can’t stop himself. He does it whenever someone confronts him at the dining table with evidence of wrongdoing. He only became aware of the telltale gesture after reading his dad’s last novel, in which a sullen young man with latent criminal tendencies did something similar. “Xanax is just Xanax,” he says.

  “Did you enjoy the ones you took from the bottle in my nightstand?”

  If his dad had asked him the same question, his jaws would have locked themselves so tightly that he couldn’t have responded even if he’d wanted to. His uncle has failed to produce that effect, maybe because he’s smiling and it sounds like he actually wants to hear the answer. “I’d rather have some weed,” he admits.

  “Now, that never agreed with me. I haven’t touched it since I was about twenty. It made me horribly paranoid, and looking back, I think it probably also depressed me. Sounds like it affects you differently.” His uncle picks up the last of his toast and pushes it into his mouth. You can see he doesn’t enjoy food very much anymore, that he only eats because he has to.

  “Weed makes me feel a lot lighter,” Franek says.

  “Lighter how?”

  “It’s hard to describe.”

  “Why don’t you try it in Polish?”

  So Richard’s nephew tells him that the lightness first manifests itself as a loss of sensation around the base of his spine, which then spreads upward into his back and shoulders, his neck and his head. He loses feeling in his ears, he says, and his nose too. “And as for my legs, it’s like they don’t have much of anything to do. They’re still there, and I can feel them, but I don’t need them. I know it’s a biochemical-induced illusion, but it seems as if a lot more is possible, that if I chose to I could fly.”

  His scholarly tone might have made Richard laugh but for the suspicion that his nephew has too often been viewed with ironic detachment. “Well,” he says, “I guess I can see why you enjoy it. I will point out, though, that it might be dangerous to think you can fly. Because you can’t.”

  “Yeah, I know. And there is one thing about it I don’t like.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A couple times when I was high . . .” Franek begins, then falters.

  His uncle sees that his cheeks are turning pink. “Go on,” he says. “What happened?”

  “It made me use the bathroom on myself.”

  It’s Monday, one of his mornings to drive. The sky is overcast, and the air smells like smoke. There’s a fire in King’s Canyon, another in Sequoyah.

  Waiting near the car, Sandy waves hello. His nephew mumbles a greeting before climbing in beside him. She parks herself in the middle of the backseat, just as she used to during the years when he drove her and Anna to school. He never expected to have her in his car again, but her parents both work all the way downtown, and when Bob proposed that they carpool, he could think of no good reason to refuse.

  Today, while he drives, he tries to draw them into mutual conversation, but it fails as it did on previous days. Sandy responds at length, her smooth face visible in his rearview mirror. Franek either says nothing at all, or if he does reply, it’s usually no more than a word or two. Within a few minutes Richard gives up and turns on KFCC, where the morning jazz show is in progress, breathy Ben Webster caressing each note of “Danny Boy.”

  The high school on the University of Central California campus is housed in a collection of temporary modules and resembles nothing so much as a trailer park. He lingers just long enough to let them out. Though their eight o’clock classes meet in the same unit, they head for opposite entrances.

  He pl
ans to do a little work and take a shower before his lunch date. Most days, he takes the freeway, but this morning he’s not pressed for time, so he drives back on surface streets. According to the dashboard display, it’s already 88 degrees, with highs above 100 forecast for the remainder of the week. He recalls how badly the Valley heat affected Julia in their early years together. That first fall they experienced hundred-degree temperatures into mid-October, and it was 94 on Thanksgiving Day. They left town almost every weekend, driving over to the Central Coast or up to Yosemite or the Bay Area.

  “Every time I leave Fresno,” she once said on their way back from Carmel, “I fall in love with California. In Fresno, I only love you.”

  He laughed, because that didn’t seem like such a bad state of affairs then, and it doesn’t seem bad now.

  This is what he’s thinking about as he waits at a stoplight behind a black F-150 pickup with a University of Central California Cowboys bumper sticker. On some level he’s aware that in the lane beside him, there’s a silver BMW convertible with the top down, and that the driver, whom he can see out of the corner of his eye, appears to be talking on a Bluetooth device. Perhaps because he’s taking in all of this as well as thinking about his wife and those couple of years before Anna came along to absorb them, he’s oblivious to the sound coming from the speakers in the doors and dash. But gradually his awareness of all other sensory data—the odor of smoke, the bronco-busting UCC mascot depicted on the bumper sticker, the driver beside him in the BMW—subsides. That familiar, velvety voice captures his attention and assumes control of his body. It’s Ella. Somebody told her goodbye and took her heart away, and from now on she’ll be travelin’ light.

  The pickup pulls into the intersection and the BMW blurs past. As horns began to blow, he finally reaches over and, as calmly as he can, given how hard his hand is shaking, he shuts off the music before releasing the brake.

  Chicken Liver’s is about as downscale as downscale gets. It stands on Olive Avenue in the heart of the Tower District, Fresno’s answer to the Haight. There’s a U-shaped counter in the middle of the dingy room and along two walls a series of booths, all of them covered in forest-green vinyl except for the large lime-colored V’s halfway across each backrest. He once interviewed a registered sex offender here. A group of residents was up in arms because he’d moved in nearby.

  “This has become my favorite spot in town,” Maria Cantrell says when he takes his place across from her. “Reminds me of where I come from.”

  “And where was that again?”

  “Pine Bluff, Arkansas.”

  “I thought you said Lake something or other.”

  “Lake Village? I lived there too. We moved around.”

  He lifts the plastic menu from the holder and eyes the lunch specials. Country Fried Steak ’n Gravy. Honey Ham Steak. Fried Chicken Livers. Pot Roast. A tremor runs through his stomach.

  She smiles. “Lighter fare’s on the back.”

  He flips it over and studies it, then sticks it in the holder. “I think I might order the grilled-cheese sandwich. I ate a pretty good-sized breakfast.”

  “You know what I can’t figure out?” she asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “What the V on each of these backrests is supposed to indicate.”

  “V as in Valley—in other words, the San Joaquin.”

  “Oh, of course. And one other thing. Why’d they put the apostrophe in Chicken Liver’s?”

  “You tell me and we’ll both know. Tell them and they will too.”

  The waitress is a hard-looking blonde who wears a green smock and could be anywhere between forty-five and sixty. She calls Maria by name but refers to him as “honey.” After she’s taken their orders and disappeared into the kitchen, Maria says, “Her folks came from eastern Oklahoma, though she was born down in Oildale. Merle Haggard’s her cousin by marriage.”

  “Which marriage? He’s had quite a few.”

  “She didn’t say. I actually had a beer with her a week or two ago. She’s a real nice lady.”

  Sitting across the table from her in the clear light of day, he notices a few things he missed the night of the shootings. The first is the thickness of her eyelids, which might suggest Slavic ancestry, though her last name points in a different direction. The second is her complexion: she uses a fair amount of concealer and probably had some issues with acne when she was younger. The third is that when she was younger might be a little bit farther back than he originally thought.

  “So what can I tell you about the Valley?” he asks.

  “Well, for starters, when will it cool off?”

  “It ought to be fairly comfortable by Christmas.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Sort of. Christmas probably will be nice, unless we’re fog-bound, which is always possible.”

  “This is the tule fog I’ve been hearing about?”

  “Yeah. It’s laced with agricultural pollutants as well as exhaust from cars in the Bay Area that’s drifted down and gotten trapped. There will be some nights in December and January when the stuff’s so thick you can’t see ten feet. And by the way, when you go rushing out to cover a pileup, as you inevitably will, be careful, or you’ll end up part of it.” He tells her February is usually the most pleasant month of the year, that it’s often warm enough for shorts and tee shirts and you don’t yet have the March winds that’ll coat your car in a thick layer of dust or the pollen that will clog your throat and nose in April.

  “I’ve just got one more question,” she says. “Why in God’s name do you stay here?”

  She’s being facetious, but he’s been asked this question before. His father is living alone in Massachusetts, in a house that’s too big for him now, and he recently wondered aloud why somebody with Richard’s credentials couldn’t get a job at the Globe or the Herald or maybe even the New York Times. He suggested that a change of scenery might do his son good. Richard doubts it would, but from his father’s point of view there’s not much holding him here except that he agreed to take his nephew in for some unspecified period of time. He could pick up and go if he wanted to.

  “Well,” he tells Maria Cantrell, “this is where we raised our daughter. It feels as much like home as anyplace I know.”

  In time, he will learn that her frequent recourse to banter, which her accent renders more inane than it might otherwise seem, is her own personal screen saver. When she’s ready to reveal something deeper, she will, often in a manner so direct it jars. “I heard what happened to your family,” she says. “I’d never get over it, and I doubt you will either.”

  His throat feels constricted, like it used to when he was a kid and suffered an allergy attack. “You might be right. Probably are.”

  She locks her fingers together. “I don’t know you well enough to have said what I just did,” she tells him. “I’m very familiar with the taste of my own foot.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  The waitress returns with his grilled-cheese sandwich and Diet Coke, Maria’s Cobb salad and iced tea. For the next couple of minutes they busy themselves eating. Then his lunch companion asks if he’s ever been to the Golden Palomino.

  It’s a North Fresno restaurant and bar. There’s a rearing horse in front of the low-slung building, but the entrance is in the back. He went there once years ago to have a drink with a guy that the FPD detective Joe Garcia told him knew some interesting facts about local chop shops. All the windows were about seven feet from the floor, narrow slits that let in almost no light, and the establishment featured not one but four different bars. The waitresses were barely clothed, even though it was midafternoon. “Yeah, I’ve been there,” he says. “But it was probably ten or twelve years ago. Why?”

  She spears a chunk of boiled egg, puts it in her mouth, and chews it. When she’s finished, she says, “Jacinta Aguilera worked there as a hostess. Did you know that?”

  It’s news to him. The FPD held a second press
conference two days after the shootings and announced that Andres Aguilera had taken the lives of his wife and three children before turning the 9-mm handgun on himself. No foul play was involved.

  He’s been trying to put the event out of his mind, just as he’s tried to banish so many others: instances of domestic abuse, gang killings, multicar pileups. He’s written a lot of fluff lately, something he hasn’t really acknowledged to himself until now. A couple of weeks ago he wrote a piece about a former Fish and Wildlife agent who was training a three-hundred-pound Duroc-Jersey hog to break the world record for pulling Volkswagen Beetles. Fortunately, that one never made it into the paper. “No,” he says, “I didn’t know she worked there. Want to tell me why it’s important?”

  “Maybe it isn’t.”

  “In other words, you think it is.”

  “She called in sick the night she was murdered.” She pokes around in her salad, like she’s looking for something in particular. “Are you a football fan?”

  “Not especially. If the Pats are on, I’ll watch them.”

  “What about UCC?”

  “What about it?”

  “The football team. Ever watch them?”

  “Once or twice. But I’m not crazy about their coach.”

  She lays her fork aside, though at least half of the salad remains. “Why’s that?”

  He’s not sure where she’s going, but the means by which she hopes to get there has become intriguing. Supposedly a social engagement, their lunch has an agenda. He’s got nothing better to do than play along. “I’ll tell you why,” he says, “but first, why don’t you tell me what you know about Nick Major.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know much at all.”

  “‘Much’ is a relative term.”

  “Okay. He grew up in Visalia, played quarterback for San Diego State in the late ’80s, bounced around the NFL for a while without ever starting a game, then held a series of assistant coaching positions at third-tier football schools like Northern Iowa and Montana State before becoming offensive coordinator at New Mexico. After they pulped Central a couple of times, he got hired here as head coach. He beat Oregon last year and Texas the year before that, and everybody thinks he’s going to somehow turn this upstart little state school that doesn’t even play in a major conference into the national champion. He’s got blond hair and a baby face and a trophy wife with big tits, and they have a thirteen-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son.” She crosses her arms and cocks her head. “So why aren’t you crazy about him?”