I return to the kitchen and drink more tea. The bungalow has grown quiet. No more Googoosh, only the silence of two sleeping women. The gray fog outdoors has not lifted, and I turn on the kitchen’s overhead light. It shines upon the silver samovar on the opposite counter, upon the clean and dry plates in Nadi’s dishrack. I feel strangely content, and I am put in mind of that afternoon with the Iraqi in his shop near the Highway Department depot when we played backgammon near the window, our silence a mutual acceptance to let the blood between our two countries flow under the bridge away from us. For days afterward, working as a garbage soldier on the highway with the old Vietnamese Tran and the Panamanians, I felt a lightness and goodness in me, and even Mendez, with the long scar upon his arm and the smell of old wine in his sweat, even he could not pull hatred from me as he called me old man in his mother tongue, as he dropped his empty water cup upon the ground for Tran to retrieve.
And this feeling is within me once more. Who can say how many more desperate and drunken moments would have passed before this Kathy Nicolo found the safety mechanism and then succeeded in shooting her heart very still? Yes, pride is weak vanity, but I do feel a sense of joy at having saved life. And yes, the woman is intoxicated but nonetheless I am encouraged by her words of not caring any longer for this house. Perhaps, after waking from her sleep, after eating a fine meal prepared by Nadi, Kathy Nicolo will be willing to put that in writing, will be sufficiently able to acknowledge who her real enemy has become, and she will begin acting accordingly.
But now I must rouse Nadereh to prepare an evening meal. I must enter her darkened room with its scent of facial cream and cotton bedding, and I must sit and tell to her of the sad drunken bird I found outside our door, of the beggar angel asleep in our son’s room.
PART II
I T WAS DARK NOW, AND LESTER HAD BEEN SITTING ON THE FISHcamp’s porch for over two hours. The fog was thick in the trees, and it made the black woods around the cabin appear to be under a milky water. He could still smell the maple he’d cut, split, and stacked, and twice he heard a car go by on the asphalt along the Purisima and he waited for the engine to gear down, for the swing of the headlights through the trees, but they didn’t come, and so he waited.
He was hungry, thirsty too, but he stayed in the cane chair near the screen door and didn’t move. He kept seeing Bethany’s face, the way she looked this afternoon standing at the kitchen table in her school dress. She had just come home, and already she was waiting to hear from him what was happening to them, to their family, standing there bravely waiting for the words to come out of his mouth. But then the phone rang and Carol answered it, her nose stopped up. In a tired tone she said it was for him and she left the receiver on the counter and went to Bethany, turned, and walked her gently from the room. Lester watched them go through the foyer and up the stairs before he moved to the phone. It was Lieutenant Alvarez, Internal Affairs. Lester knew him, but not well, because he was IA and because he was a short and humorless ex-marine who ran six miles every morning before work, whose on-duty appearance and professional record were as spotless as the tie he wore even during the summer months when the sheriff didn’t require it. Other deputies felt automatically uncomfortable around him, but this was not what Lester felt as he picked up the phone, his daughter upstairs about to break; he felt interrupted to an almost cruel degree, and he answered as if he didn’t know who was on the other end. “What?”
The lieutenant identified himself in that calculated emotionless tone of his, pausing to give Lester a chance to get his protocol in order, but Lester stayed quiet and Alvarez had just a trace of heat in his voice as he asked Lester to dispatch himself immediately to Redwood City for a talk. Lester let out a long breath and could feel his heart beating in it. “Can it wait till I’m back on duty, sir?”
“No, Deputy. It cannot.” The lieutenant said he would be in his office and hung up directly, but Lester had no plans to drive directly to the Hall of Justice to be interrogated by that prick about what could only be his after-hours visit to the Iranian colonel. And as he hung up he considered denying everything, just lying about it all. He wasn’t up to facing any more truths right now, not after a day that began early this morning with him walking into the house hungover, his hair still wet from the Purisima riverbed, Kathy’s smell still on his skin. Carol had been in the kitchen pouring water into the coffeemaker at the counter, and she had kept her back to him, said in a wary voice she wasn’t expecting him. Lester apologized for not calling first and he sat at his chair at the table and watched his wife wash the kids’ breakfast dishes. Her frosted hair was tied and pinned in a knot at the back of her head, and she wore khaki shorts and a white sleeveless top. Her upper arms looked fleshy, always had, though that had never bothered Lester and whenever she’d complain about them, he’d tell her she was fine just the way she was. And he meant it. She was.
When the coffee was done she poured herself some and sat down, leaving Lester to get up and pour his own. He stirred milk into his cup and asked if Nate was upstairs and she said no, she’d just dropped him off at her sister’s in Hillsborough. “I have to go into the city today.”
Lester knew what that meant. He sat back down, and in the next few hours watched his wife become four completely different people. For the first hour or so she was detached, speaking as coolly and rationally as the lawyer she was going to Frisco to see. She sat erect in her chair, and she spoke of their nine-year marriage as a contract they were both bound to because they had children now and it had to be honored. “What is a vow after all, Lester? What is a vow?”He told her he couldn’t answer that, he didn’t know what a vow was anymore. But by late morning all her rigid composure fell away and she began screaming that he was a weak, self-serving son of a bitch and so’s the fucking whore you’re sleeping with! And she threw her coffee mug at him, but it missed and hit the wall and didn’t break. He picked it up, but didn’t know quite where to begin, so he said very little as she paced back and forth, yelled until she finally crumpled, crying into her hands, and that one Lester could no longer harden himself to and he went to her and held her and even cried with her, but he was feeling more relieved than anything else: the truth was out. Just hold on. Just ride out the storm. Then, inexplicably, the day was half gone. Where had it gone? It was already early afternoon, time for Bethany to come home from school, and when she came walking tentatively into the house, walking almost on her toes, Lester watched Carol become the mother she was, wiping the tears from her face, she put on a smile and squatted with her arms outstretched to hold her daughter. Lester felt a distant but great admiration for her then, the same kind he had had for her ever since he first saw her in an ethics course in college, when she stood and openly called the professor a fool for insinuating a secular society was inherently more tolerant, and therefore more democratic, than a religious one, her eyes bright with conviction, her back straight, all ten fingertips resting on her desk so they wouldn’t shake.