More deputies were coming, making their way through the crowd in their French-blue uniforms, and the first was Brian Gleason. His eyes caught Lester’s right away and he stopped and looked down at the blood on the sidewalk. Behind him was movement, Behrani struggling with the deputy, trying to pull his arms free, his eyes on Lester: “It is him! Hehas done this! It is him!”The colonel was swinging his elbows back, kicking his feet, and Gleason and another deputy moved in and pulled Behrani’s arms back while the other handcuffed him. The colonel was still straining forward, the veins coming out in his forehead and temple, his eyes on Lester: “I will kill you! I will kill you!”
All three deputies were holding Behrani, and Gleason turned and looked at Lester. The crowd had grown; kids tried to make their way through to stand on their skateboards and look over the shoulders of lawyers and secretaries, of women still in their aerobics class sweats, of shoppers and store owners and salesgirls, all looking at the colonel now, at the boy’s blood on the sidewalk, at the five sheriff’s deputies, and at the man the bald handcuffed foreigner was yelling about, at Lester Burdon, who felt he was in the presence of a moment already dreamed and now real, not an accident, nothing random, but ordered and logical, an inevitable expression of who he really was. His throat was dust, his hands soft and damp, his legs brittle. The deputy was speaking again, asking Lester another question over the colonel’s screaming, but Lester wanted only water, the cold sweet water at the fish camp. “What?”
“Your name,sir. What is your name?”
A patrol car had pulled up, and Gleason and the other two deputies pushed the colonel into the backseat, Behrani screaming only in Farsi now, a deep, guttural slash of vowels and consonants that sounded to Lester like a thousand-year curse on them all, on him, on his children, on their children—he looked down at the sidewalk, so dark and red where it was wet, and he wanted to see Bethany and Nate, to hold them and kiss them.
Gleason shut the patrol-car door and Lester could still hear the colonel’s muffled cries. He turned back to the young fair-skinned deputy, whose face was pale, the twitch still in his lip.
Gleason stepped up, his hands on his hips, and he nodded his head in the direction of the blood on the sidewalk. “What happened?”
People were still standing around. The two young businessmen with their water and coffee were looking right at Lester. So was Gleason, and Lester wanted to rise up out of this like a cloud, to drift over the valley and shore to the Pacific, to dissolve into its huge green expanse like rain.
I FELT RESTLESS. I WAS SWEATING IN THE CAR BUT THE SKY WAS GRAY,and I knew a fog was unrolling itself down in Corona. I could smell the ocean. It was the weather I was used to, the way a normal day looked, and this made me even more antsy; what I really wanted to do was drive my car down the coast highway for hours and not come back until Les got here with the check. But I knew I couldn’t, not in my red Bonneville. We would probably have to leave it here for good anyway, wouldn’t we? And how would we get time to cash that big county check? Tie up the Behranis again? And it was Wednesday. Banks closed early. If Les didn’t get back soon, we would have to wait till tomorrow morning and then keep the family tied up overnight. I felt sick at the thought. And I kept thinking of Lester having to run away with me from his whole life, his kids. I was outside, but I could hardly breathe.
I went back into the house. I heard the low Persian music. The air smelled like tea and flowers. I walked over the carpet and down the hall and I could feel my father like he was standing there in the dim hallway in his beige Nicolo Linen uniform, a smoking Garcia y Vega between his fingers, his eyes big behind his glasses, looking at me like he always did, like I was a rare bird he was still getting used to seeing in his own front yard.
When I stepped into the darkened bedroom, Mrs. Behrani was lying as still as I’d left her. Her hands were crossed over her stomach, and her sleeping face looked pale in the shadow of the room. I wanted to do something for her, though I didn’t know what that could be. On the cassette player a young woman’s voice was reciting what had to be poetry, and there was a backdrop of drums behind her, that, and men letting long open-throated sounds out of themselves. My eyes were used to the dark now and I could see the rise and fall of Mrs. Behrani’s breathing, her hands on her stomach. I remembered the way she looked at the bruises on my arm like it hurt to see them. I remembered her face as she washed my bleeding foot, then laid it on that thick white towel, her eyes full of warmth. I thought about wetting a cloth with cool water, laying it on her forehead, but for all I knew that could make a migraine worse. So instead I went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of ice water, set it near the tape player on her bedside table. The glass tapped against the base of the lamp and she squeezed her eyes as tightly shut as if someone had yelled in her ear. I stood as still as I could. Her face began to soften again and I tiptoed out of the room and went into the kitchen.
The back door was shut, shards of broken glass still in the lower windowpanes. There was a trash container in the corner and I carried it to the door and started to pull the glass out. The big pieces were easy to get free, but for the smaller ones I had to use a butter knife I’d pulled from Mrs. Behrani’s dish rack. I squatted on the floor and dug the broken bits from the frame. Sometimes the knife scraped against the glass and made me shiver. I felt dirty: my skin and hair, my teeth and eyes and tongue, my lungs and stomach and the blood in my veins, still laced with what I took last night. I thought about taking a long hot shower, but then I would have to step back into these stolen clothes and Lester had already been gone close to an hour and I didn’t want to be in the shower when they came back.
But I had to do something. I pushed the trash container back into the corner and stood there. On the refrigerator was taped a color photograph of the Behranis’ daughter and her husband, I guessed, holding hands in front of a luxury hotel, all canopy and marble columns and gold fixtures on glass doors. The sun was on them, and they were dressed in matching polo shirts and baggy shorts. The husband wore glasses and was small, a camera hanging from his wrist by its strap. The Behranis’ daughter was petite and beautiful, her smile posed but toned-down somehow, like she didn’t want to flaunt too much what she knew she had. And looking at her on my refrigerator, I felt old, worn-out, and cheap. I wanted Lester here, but not because I wanted him to hurry up and finish all this; I just needed to see him look down at me with those sweet eyes and that slightly dumb-founded smile under his crooked mustache, like I was the answer to every painful question he’d ever asked himself and he still couldn’t believe I was his. I hoped he still felt that way. I hoped this past night and day hadn’t changed that.
I WANT ONLY MY SON.
They have sat me upon a soft chair in a new office and they ask the same questions they asked me moments ago, and I answer, but I want only to go to my son. They have freed my wrists and a large detective offers to me a wet towel for my hands, but I refuse it. The men regard one another for they fear my son’s blood. I look down upon my red fingers. The skin has tightened as the khoon has dried and I do not want it to dry. I fear washing it from my hands.
I stand. “Please, I must—”
Lieutenant Alvarez enters the room. One of the detectives rises from his seat. “Burdon corroborates the whole deal, Lieutenant.”