THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  “Then why is there a dick-shaped water bed in my bedroom? Why are there three hundred copies of You Light Up My Life boxed up in my living room? Why are videotaped suicides now part of my movie library?”

  “If you’ll look at your policy,” Alice said, “you’ll see that all conditions are met. All Homes is required only to replace the damaged items with objects of equal value, not to replace them with identical items.”

  “I have the policy right in front of me, I’ve been reading it all weekend, and that is most definitely not what it says.”

  “Have you read the exception clause?”

  “The exception clause?” He was thrown off balance. “What exception clause?”

  “It’s in the fine print at the back of your policy. Appendix D, subparagraph one-A. And it states very clearly that for all renter’s insurance policies of ten thousand dollars and under, every effort will be made to replace the damaged items, but in the event that replacement items cannot be found or it is unfeasible to obtain them, items of equal value are to be substituted, with All Homes determining the equal value amount. Now, if you had purchased additional coverage, as one of our representatives recently suggested to you, then all of your belongings would have been replaced.”

  Hunt grew suspicious. “How do you know I was pressured into upping my coverage?”

  Alice sighed tiredly. “What I can do, Mr. Jackson, is send you a Disputed Claim form. You can explain what the problem is, spell out your side of the story, then one of our arbitrators will take a second look at the case and make any necessary adjustments. We have a very high customer satisfaction rating, and the last thing we want is for any of our loyal customers to be—”

  “Send the form,” Hunt said.

  She verified his mailing address, started to give him a happy-talk good-bye, and he hung up on her. “Assholes.”

  Beth had been listening in to his side of the conversation. “You didn’t tell them about the repainted walls. They changed a lot of things that are part of the house itself, not just your stuff.”

  “Let the owner figure it out,” he said. “I don’t live there anymore. I live with you.”

  “Yes.” She smiled, kissed him lightly on the lips. “Yes, you do.”

  FIVE

  Everything happened at once and Brian Kutz couldn’t think, couldn’t sort out what was critical and what wasn’t, what needed to be done immediately and what could wait. He acted on instinct, responding to each split-second change.

  The fire alarm didn’t go off.

  That was his sole conscious thought, and his brain repeated it endlessly like a tape loop as he jumped out of bed and ran naked through the smoke to where he knew the bedroom door to be. Only it wasn’t there. He hit a wall—and far sooner than he should have, as though their bed had been moved during the night while they slept—and when he staggered back, there was warmth and wetness flowing down his eye, over his cheek. He’d hit his head hard enough to break the skin. But the smoke was thick and the room was hot—

  The fire alarm didn’t go off.

  —and rather than stop to assess his injuries or gather himself together, he pressed on, moving left, hands against the wall, until his fingers reached the door frame. His eyes were teary, stinging from blood and sweat and smoke, and far off—from the front of the house, he thought—he heard something crash: TV or microwave, computer or stereo.

  The fire alarm didn’t go off.

  In the hallway, too-hot flames ricked his left hand, the one not touching the wall, and his skin burned, blackened, peeled, exposing new underskin to the searing heat, his entire arm erupting in agony, as though it had been rent with a sharp scalpel. He wanted to hear screams from the twins’ bedroom—wanted to know they were still alive—but there was nothing, only the crackle of the flames and more crashing from the front of the house, and then there was an earthquake shift in the floor, a roar from the roof. He sprinted forward through the blinding choking smoke, heedless of the danger, needing to grab his girls and get them out before the whole place collapsed in on them.

  He found a doorway that should have been theirs, but the air was too thick with smoke to tell for sure, and when he started to turn in, his face was met by a blistering blast that made his eyes feel as though they were going to melt and sent him staggering back against the hall wall.

  “Deb!” he cried. “Michelle!”

  “Daddy! Mommy!”

  “Mommy! Daddy!”

  The voices sounded faint against the roar of the fire and the crashing/groaning/cracking of the dying house, but they were ahead of him, toward the front of the home, and he tearfully stumbled forward through the smoky darkness, grateful that they’d had the presence of mind to try to escape. “Get out!” he yelled at them, but his throat was dry and his voice not as loud as he’d intended. He tried to yell it again but dissolved into a fit of coughing.

  They were in the front of the house anyway, in the family room or living room or kitchen, and the worst part of the fire seemed to be back here, toward the rear.

  He only hoped Nanci was following him or had sped past him or had broken the bedroom window and climbed out. He was starting to think more logically now, his brain had shaken off the haze of sleep and the chaos of panic, and he was able to understand what was happening and where he was and what he was supposed to do. He wished he wasn’t naked, wished he had at least put on underwear, wished he had been wearing slippers or shoes, but none of that was really important, and he moved forward as quickly as he could, still keeping his good hand on the wall and not running too fast in case some burning piece of furniture lay in his way.

  He was still coughing, each postcough inhalation bringing with it new smoke and soot, and when he finally made it out of the hallway and through the living room, stumbling onto the front porch, he vomited. It splashed on his feet, spattered on the welcome that, and for a brief second he thought he was going to choke to death—he couldn’t seem to take a breath—but then he was moving away from the house, staggering toward the crowd of gathered neighbors, where old Mrs. Childiss was holding the desperately sobbing twins, and he felt the welcome coolness of fresh air—smoke-free air. He was sobbing himself as he reached the girls and grabbed them, hugged them.

  “Daddy!” Michelle cried.

  “Daddy!” Deb.

  But where was Nanci? He stood, panicked, terrified to the core of his being. He called out his wife’s name, turning around, looking for some sign of her, knowing he shouldn’t frighten the girls this way but too frightened himself to care. “Nanci! Nanci!! Nanci!!!”

  “Watch them,” he told Mrs. Childiss, giving the twins back to her. Screaming his wife’s name, he dashed around the side of the flaming house, through the backyard, then around the opposite side, looking for some sign that she’d escaped, cursing himself for not being quick and alert enough to rescue her when he had the chance.

  The motion-detector light above the kitchen door had been off, but it switched on at the sight of him.

  And he saw the insurance agent.

  Brian stopped in his tracks.

  The man was standing next to the broken kitchen window, through which were billowing plumes of smoke that had been dissipating into the night but were now starting to saturate the air. He was wearing what appeared to be a trench coat and a fedora. Although those accoutrements made him look like a film noir detective, they did not seem out of place, and for the first time, Brian realized that the insurance agent did not seem quite of this era.

  He never had.

  “Tsk, tsk,” the agent was saying, and Brian thought absurdly that he had never heard anyone actually say “Tsk, tsk.” It was one of those phrases you read in books but never heard in real life, and indeed it sounded artificial and mocking in the agent’s mouth.

  Nanci’s burned body lay twitching on the ground at his feet.

  Brian felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. “No,” he managed to get out.

  “Yes.”

 
“This isn’t be—”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “I was going to send it off tomorrow!” he shrieked. “I already wrote the check! It’s by my wallet!”

  “That’s too bad,” the agent said. “That’s a shame.”

  Brian threw himself on the ground next to his wife. She was burned almost beyond recognition, and this close he could see the blood beneath the charred flesh, the twitching movement of muscles that were now visible. No sound came from between what was left of her incinerated lips, and somehow that was the most horrible thing of all. She was dying, in agony, but she could not scream. Her throat was sealed shut. He wanted to hold her, wanted to comfort her, but knew that he could not. He sobbed, screamed. “No!”

  The insurance agent tipped his hat and walked into the front yard, toward the darkness between the arriving fire engines. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

  SIX

  1

  Time passed.

  Hunt had a chance to move up in the county hierarchy, to work in an MIS office rather than on the street, but to everyone’s surprise but his own, he turned it down. Oddly enough, he found that he liked maintenance services. Besides, between Beth’s salary and his own, they were making more than enough to get by. There was no reason for him to change.

  It was almost as though he’d led two separate lives, he thought. His predivorce life and his postdivorce life. Before, he’d had a big suburban house in Southern California and a relatively high-paying tech job with a multinational corporation, and now he lived in his girlfriend’s home and performed manual labor for Pima County.

  But it was nice. It was good. He had never been one of those Thoreau-ian back-to-nature guys, one of those simplifying simpletons craving some nonexistent rural Utopia. Yet he found it refreshing and invigorating to work outside on trees and bushes, to be back in the clean air of the desert after all of those years in metropolitan Los Angeles, where a clear day was one on which the outline of local mountains could be seen through the smog.

  Besides, he actually liked his coworkers.

  That was something he’d noticed almost immediately after Boeing had laid him off: he didn’t care if he ever saw any of his coworkers again. There was no one at work he’d hated, and for the most part he’d gotten along with everyone, but he hadn’t formed any real friendships; there was no one with whom he was genuinely close. It was not something that had really registered before. He’d gone to work each day and he’d always had someone with whom he could spend break, with whom he could eat lunch, and not until he left did he realize his colleagues were acquaintances rather than friends.

  Edward and Jorge were his friends, though. They hung out together, did things on weekends, went to each other’s homes. And what surprised him most—he and Joel both—was that the familiar stereotypes did not apply. Edward was a fan of classical music. Not just a casual fan but a real aficionado. And not just mainstream classical music, but cutting-edge stuff—Monk, Lentz, Reich, Andriessen—a whole bunch of composers Hunt had never heard of and didn’t understand. Jorge read more books than anyone he’d ever known—not just the usual assortment of bestsellers, but obscure literary South American authors who were not yet published in the United States. Ironic as it was, these two tree trimmers were more genuinely intellectual than Hunt or Joel or any of their urban professional peers—not that it was something to which they would ever admit.

  It was a weird world. He’d grown up in a somewhat rarefied environment, the son of a librarian and a junior college instructor, and despite his well-meaning efforts to cultivate a small-D democratic worldview, in his heart of hearts he’d always bought into the notion of class, ascribing certain tastes and characteristics to manual laborers and the uneducated masses that he and his peers did not possess. It had taken this job to disabuse him of such nonsense and make him realize that prejudices and preconceived ideas really were as harmful and inaccurate as they were cracked up to be.

  Tree trimming also continued to surprise him. The county was so big and the vegetation so diverse that they were constantly working in what was to him new territory. Oh, they had a schedule of sorts—specific in-city sites that required regular maintenance—but that schedule was rotated between all of the crews, and at least a couple of times a month, they were out in far-flung locales, down seldom-traveled roads.

  The strangest place he saw had to be The Jail. At least Edward and Jorge called it a jail. The truth was that neither of them really knew what it was. It was located southeast of the city near the remains of an old ghost town, at the bottom of what had once been an old reservoir but was now a bone-dry basin overgrown with desert vegetation and ringed by densely packed mesquite trees. The past year’s drought had made the area a fire hazard, and they were there to prune back the trees; another crew would be coming along later in the week to clear out the worst of the dried brush.

  First, though, Edward and Jorge led him down a steeply sloping gravel path into the basin, where tall thorny thistles grew waist-high around an odd stone structure slightly bigger than an outhouse. It had no windows, and the door, a rusted rectangle of criss-crossing iron bars, was frozen in a half-open position. Inside, the walls were mossy, and the floor was wet and slimy with algae, as though it were atop a spring and the water was bubbling up, refusing to be capped.

  “We can’t figure out why The Jail’s here,” Jorge admitted. “I mean, it’s obviously old, probably as old as that ghost town, but at that time it would’ve been underwater.”

  Edward tried to move the door. “I think they imprisoned people in it when the water was low and left them there to be drowned when the water level rose. Like witches and stuff.”

  Jorge nodded. “Could be. Could be.”

  It was early in the morning but already hot, and they trekked back up the trail to the trucks. But The Jail remained in Hunt’s mind the rest of the day, and for some reason he didn’t tell Beth about it.

  Aside from that, he and Beth were closer than ever, their relationship progressing, moving smoothly forward like that of lovers in a Lifetime movie. They were in love, though neither of them had yet said the words, and while he wasn’t sure why they hadn’t, he intended to rectify that soon. After Eileen, he hadn’t been able to see himself getting involved in another serious relationship, but now he thought that he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life with Beth.

  Outside a club where they went to watch Jimmie Dale Gilmore perform one Friday night, they saw their old buddy, the geeky guy with the purple suit. He was alive and well and in the parking lot, no doubt plying his old trade. Although he saw them, he did not appear to recognize them. Just as well, Hunt thought. The guy was not exactly the type of person with whom they wanted to cultivate even an acquaintanceship.

  He found himself wondering whether the hospital at which they’d dropped off the man had treated him or whether he’d been turned out on the street like some Dickensian pauper due to his lack of insurance. He was here now, so Hunt assumed that the injuries had been taken care of, but in the back of his mind was the thought that if he shouted out a greeting, the man would not look over—because he was deaf in the ear that the hospital had refused to treat.

  Hunt was still fighting with his insurance company over the replacement of his property back at the rental house. As far as the company was concerned, he had been fairly compensated, his furniture and belongings had been exchanged for items of equal value, and on their books the case was closed. But he refused to accept that verdict, and he had appealed to the state insurance commission in an effort to correct this injustice. The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly, however, and he didn’t know when there’d be a ruling—or if it would be in his favor. He was already planning to send his state senator and assemblyman, as well as his U.S. senator and congressman, detailed guidelines that he thought should become law in order to keep such abuses from happening to someone else in the future. His proposed regulations were sensible, logical, and reasonable,
and he couldn’t think of any reason that anyone other than insurance companies would oppose them.

  Theoretically, that meant that his voice should be heard and action should be taken.

  But the insurance companies had professional lobbyists and deep pockets.

  And, deep down, he didn’t really think anything was going to change.

  2

  “Jorge!”

  He didn’t hear his wife yelling until he shut off the lawn mower, but he could tell from the frantic pitch of her voice that she had been calling him for some time.

  “Jorge!”

  If it was so important, why hadn’t she come out to get him?

  Maybe she couldn’t come out.

  That sent him running. He dashed into the house without wiping his feet, tracking mud and grass on the carpet as he called her name. “Ynez? Ynez!” She wasn’t in the living room or family room, he could see that immediately, but he heard her voice from the kitchen, along with a strange sound he couldn’t place, and he hurried in there.

  It was like a scene out of a movie—a comedy, although there was nothing comedic about it. She was standing in front of the dishwasher, trying desperately to stop a steady spray of water that was shooting outward in all directions from the sides of the closed door. Not only was the floor wet and the counter wet and the front of the refrigerator wet, but Ynez was soaked as well, her hair dripping as though she’d just emerged from the shower, her top clinging to her skin like a wet T-shirt.

  “Help me!” she yelled. “Shut off the water! Do something!”

  A mist of cold water sprayed his face and a stream hit his crotch as he moved next to her and desperately started pressing the control buttons on the dishwasher.

  “I already tried that!” she yelled at him. “Go outside and shut the water off!”