“Yeah?”
“I just want things to change.”
The colonel pounded on the door. It sounded like he was using his fist. “You must to allow us food immediately!”
Lester leaped over to the doorway. “You’ll eat when you call the goddamn county!”
“Yes.” The colonel’s voice was low and dulled behind the closed door but I heard his next words clearly: “I will do as you say. We will sell.”
Lester looked back at me and smiled so wide his mustache went up in a straight black line above his teeth. But I could hardly move. I just sat there not knowing what I’d just won. I put my hand over my lips, and he walked over and squatted on the floor at my feet. “How’s that for a change?” He shook his head. “When I found out what you’d done, I felt stood up. Isn’t that strange? What does that say about me?”
I didn’t know what that said about him but I knew I felt closer to him when he said it. I reached over and took his hand, rubbing my finger over the ridge of his knuckles, down over his wedding band. “I don’t think I would have done any of this sober, Les. If that helps you.”
“It does.”
The colonel knocked again, this time softly.
“I’m going to have to keep the heat on them until they go, Kathy. Maybe you should leave until then.”
“I’m staying here.”
“Promise?” Les was looking into my face, his dark eyes so warm and full of need I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss him or move away.
He kissed me and one of his mustache whiskers went up my nose. I watched him leave the room, pulling out his pistol as he went. I looked around for my clothes, but they weren’t anywhere. So I got up, stood in the doorway, and watched Lester set a crowbar against the wall, push open the door, and step back with his gun at his side. At his feet on the rug were two neckties, and he told the Behranis to go into the kitchen. As they came out I pulled the robe together at my throat. I felt like stepping back into the bedroom and closing the door, but I knew they’d already seen me. Lester walked backwards in front of them, stepping into the doorway beside me to let them by. The colonel went first, then his wife and son, the colonel looking straight ahead as he passed me, his chin high, like he was marching in a military parade. His shirt was wrinkled and there was a dab of shaving cream just beneath his jawbone. I was impressed by this, the fact he took the time to shave. And looking at him in that moment, Lester standing beside me with his gun at his side, I was glad things were turning out this way, that this hot-tempered shithead was almost Middle Eastern history for me. But then his wife glanced at me without turning her head, and I knew she was scared of Lester and was trying to see where I stood in all this. I looked down at the floor in time to see their teenage son’s big brown feet.
Les nudged my shoulder and nodded for me to go use the bathroom if I needed to, then he followed the boy into the kitchen and I shut myself in my old bathroom, locked the door, and peed as quietly as I could. The room smelled like toothpaste and the colonel’s shaving cream. My clothes were on the towel shelf across from me folded in a neat pile against the walclass="underline" my shorts, my client’s daughter’s turquoise T-shirt from Fisherman’s Wharf, a corner of her panties and my bra under both. My Reeboks were set on the floor side by side. On the back of the sink was the empty prescription bottle. I didn’t remember ever holding it in my own hand. But looking at it, I wasn’t filled with the remorse and dread I’d felt before. Or even the dark rush I’d try again. I felt thankful, like the contents of that empty brown bottle had turned things around for me like nothing else could have. While I washed my face and hands with hot water and soap I pictured myself cleaning and returning the girl’s T-shirt and underwear later this week. Today was Wednesday—yes, Wednesday—my Colma River morning, when I was supposed to clean her house anyway, but I’d have to call her father at his office and postpone a day or two because I was moving. I was moving back into my house.
I took a fresh towel and pat-dried my face, breathed in the clean smell of the thick terry cloth. I still wanted to disappear, but not completely. My mouth tasted horrible. I squeezed an inch of toothpaste onto my forefinger and used that, rinsing six or seven times. Then I drank from the faucet. On the towel shelf was the colonel’s shaving kit but nothing of his wife’s. No brush or comb, not even a compact. I bent over, letting my hair fall over my head. Then I snapped back up and ran my fingers over my scalp, straightening whatever I found, though I only dared to check myself in the mirror for a second.
I slipped out of Mrs. Behrani’s robe and started to get dressed. I was a little dizzy from trying to fix my hair and I could hear the clink of silverware out in the kitchen, Lester’s voice saying something about a phone book. He was talking louder and faster than he usually did, more jumpy. I knew he’d been up all night, that he was doing something now that could really go wrong if anyone found out about it, something he never would’ve done if not for me. But then I remembered his story about planting coke in the wife beater’s bathroom, and I felt a little better as I pulled the T-shirt over my head and caught the faint scent of vomit and gun oil. Me and Lester.
I smelled toast. My stomach had never been so empty and flat. A hunger pain turned over behind my ribs. My body felt light, almost pure, but not my head. It was like I had cotton not in my ears, but in my thoughts. A cigarette and some tea, that’s all I needed. I folded the towel and put it back on the shelf. I heard silverware tink once against a plate out in the kitchen. The colonel cleared his throat, then spoke into the telephone. There was a pulsing in my hand and fingers and I opened the door enough to hear him give his full name and my address to somebody on the other end. I stuck my head out the door and looked down the hall, saw their son sitting at the counter hunched over a bowl of cereal. I could see his mother’s hands buttering a piece of toast as carefully as if it were something living. The colonel stood against the back wall near two or three pots of flowers holding the receiver with two hands. I didn’t see Lester anywhere, but I pictured him standing in the living room with his gun, and as I left my bathroom, running my fingers back through my hair, I hoped he wasn’t pointing it at anyone.
I HAVE FOLLOWED BURDON’S ORDERS AND COMPLETED THE TELEPHONEcall and I sit upon a stool at the counter with my wife and son and drink black tea that is bitter for the samovar has been lighted all the evening long. Burdon and his gendeh sit upon the sofa at our backs, eating our bread, drinking our tea. Through the kitchen’s window, beneath the steps of the new widow’s walk, the sky is as clear and blue as when flying at high altitudes in air with no clouds. From the woodlands across the street come the morning songs of birds, and far away, perhaps down in the village, a dog barks. It would not serve Burdon’s purpose to shoot us in the back as we sit, but I have the feeling my backside is not clothed, nor has even the protection of flesh over bone. Nadereh has eaten very little of the toast before her, and she drinks her tea without sugar in her mouth. This she does rarely and I assume it is to avoid the slurping sound it sometimes makes, the pull of air between the sugar and teeth. All the morning long she has been silent, the same quiet bird who clutched our infant son in the middle of the night as our bullet-proofed limousine drove through the alleys of the capital city. Once again she has surrendered the burden of action to me, and I am grateful and resentful as well.
My son has finished eating, and he sits and waits for what is to happen next. Again this morning, as we took our turn at the sink washing, I told him to do nothing but what Mr. Burdon instructs.
“Yes, Bawbaw,” he said, his eyes upon mine, and in them was a dark, hopeful light that is now a heavy timber across my back for I have no real plan of any kind. I hear Burdon upon the sofa, whispering to Kathy Nicolo. As I spoke on the telephone with the same tax bureaucrat as before, Burdon sat upon our sofa’s edge, his weapon placed on the cushion beside him, and the voice of the bureaucrat became nearly boyish, unable to conceal his relief at my news of selling back to the county this bungalow. For a brief moment, I felt a measure of his relief, a desire to simply follow his instructions, travel to Redwood City to sign the proper documents releasing a check in my name. Simply do as I am ordered and leave. But ordered by whom?This thin policeman sick and weak with love? And leave to what place? A hotel that will begin to eat our small nest of money even before we find a new home? One we would surely not be able to buy and sell at three times our investment? I drink my bitter tea, the whispering voices of our captors at my back. Many days, when I toiled as a garbage soldier under the hot sun or in the cool wet fog with the old Vietnamese, the fat and lazy Panamanians, the pig Mendez, the Chinese who smoked cigarettes as if it was air they had imported from their home country, as we fanned out along the roadside with our harpoons and bright yellow plastic bags, I sometimes believed I was being punished for the comfortable life I led as a high officer among beggars. But this belief came only on the worst of days, when my fatigue seemed to come from my own blood. Most days, however, I believed I was being tested by my God and that if I possessed a true desire to escape that life I must have patience and continue to endure until my opportunity revealed itself; this armed couple in our home is nothing more than a test within a test, something that comes when the prize is quite close at hand. Again, I must simply bow my head, and wait.