House of Sand and Fog (24 page)

I
T WAS DARK NOW, AND LESTER HAD BEEN SITTING ON THE FISH
camp’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.

And after getting off the phone with Alvarez, Lester knew he had to at least fake that sort of courage, put on a father’s capable face and with conviction walk upstairs to his daughter’s room and say the right words, though it wouldn’t be the whole truth, not just now anyway, not today.

His wife and daughter were upstairs in Bethany’s room. She was on her bed on her back looking up at the ceiling, her face even more pale now. She was holding her stuffed Peter Rabbit to her stomach with both hands and Carol was sitting on the bed beside her smoothing her hair away from her face. He stepped inside the room, but when the floorboards creaked beneath the rug only Carol glanced up at him, her eyes narrowed, her lips a flat line. In the quiet, his daughter turned her face to him, her eyes as open and unblinking as when she was an infant staring up at him from her crib, completely dependent, yet completely trusting of his every move. And she trusted him now, he could see it in her face, though she was being so still and quiet it was as if she thought if she didn’t say a word or move too suddenly everything would be all right again, everything would go back to the way it was. And Lester stood still too, conscious only of his heart beating, of the air entering and leaving his lungs, and his daughter’s gaze kept him right there, though he wasn’t quite sure just where that was anymore.

Carol’s voice was calm: “Say something, Lester.”

Then his voice came out of him, but it wasn’t his really, more an approximation of his sound, of where he’d come from, and where he was, and where he wanted desperately to be next, though it wasn’t down at the department where his voice told his wife and daughter he had to go for a meeting; it was at the fish camp with Kathy Nicolo, with that deep-eyed, sweet-tasting, tough and funny woman who was now lodged so deeply inside him it had become almost physically painful to continue enduring with Carol what he didn’t share with her anymore, to sleep in the same bed with her, to eat at the same table, sit on the same couch and toilet. “I’ve been called in to work, Bethany hon. I can’t talk now, but everything’s okay, sweetie. You’ll see. Everything’s fine.”

Bethany looked from him to her mother as if she were searching for some verification of what her father had just said. Carol smiled at her, bravely, Lester thought, then she shot him an icy glance and left the room. Lester kissed his daughter on her forehead, and he could smell the clean skin of her scalp. She looked like she wanted to say something, to maybe ask him something, but he had no words for her right now, not yet. “I’ve got to go to work now. Don’t worry about anything, honey pie, everything’s fine.” And he said it in such a sure and solid voice he felt close to believing it himself.

Downstairs, Carol sat at the kitchen table, her arms resting in front of her. She was looking straight at the cabinets, and he wanted to say something comforting to her too, something that might fortify her for what lay ahead, but when he walked into the room she didn’t look at him, just said, “Go, Les. Please. Just go.”

L
ESTER KNEW HE
should have gotten into his Toyota and driven the twelve dutiful miles south to Redwood City and his appointment with Lieutenant Alvarez, but instead he drove west on 92 along the dry bed of the Pilarcitos River past fogged-in fields of artichoke plant and occasional patches of manzanita he could barely see, for things were exceedingly clear to him, the kind of pristine clarity you can only get in the center of something big and reckless and on a path of its own. His heart beat at a high humming echo through his head and veins, and he kept seeing Kathy Nicolo, her lean no-nonsense body, the way she’d cock her head slightly whenever she looked at him, like she wanted to believe what he said but didn’t, not completely, her eyes always giving her away anyway, those small brown eyes that almost glittered with this dark hopeful light. He had never seen eyes like that in a grown person before. They made her otherwise hard features soft—the dips in her cheeks, the lines around her mouth that seemed ingrained more from a grimace than a laugh. And he wanted to be inside her, to let go in the darkest center of her.

At Half Moon Bay he had to use his headlights in the fog and he cut south on the coast highway for the Purisima River and he couldn’t get there fast enough. He was driving well over the speed limit, though he could only see three or four car lengths ahead, and twice he came fast on another car’s tailights and he had to swerve, but still he only slowed once he got to the fish camp’s dirt turnoff road, expecting to see Kathy’s red Bonneville parked beneath the pine branches, but it wasn’t, and so he hurried down the trail and into the cabin. Her suitcase was still up in the loft, propped open against the windows, and he climbed back down the ladder breathing hard, cursing himself for being so needy, for having so little faith.

For the first half hour sitting on the porch, he let himself imagine where she might be and what she might be doing. Maybe she’d gone to the storage shed in San Bruno to get more of her belongings, or she could be at a grocery store buying some fresh ice for the cooler, some charcoal for the hibachi in her trunk. That’s where he’d left his gun belt too, and he shook his head at his increasing lack of judgment. She was breaking the law with that in her car, and he planned to take it from her trunk as soon as she pulled up.

In the last light, he sat there waiting, watching the fog grow thicker in the trees along the trail, and he tried not to but he kept seeing Bethany’s face, the way she stared up at him from the bed, like she couldn’t and wouldn’t move until she heard from him what was happening and when and most of all,
why?
And he understood her stillness because he felt it too. All around him, all the daily and definite parameters of his life—Carol, the department, and even Bethany and Nate—they seemed suspended just out of his field of vision, his range of hearing, even his truest
feeling.
He thought of Carol’s having missed her appointment in Frisco today, picking their son up at his aunt’s in Hillsborough. He imagined how she would buckle their four-year-old into his seat while he asked if Daddy was home. Lester made himself picture this, but he allowed no more feeling to go with it than necessary. He knew Carol would say something comforting, like Daddy’s at work, you’ll see him tomorrow. And he felt sure what he’d told Bethany would hold her over till then too, that everything
would
be all right. She’d see. Later, he would add that divorced kids do fine. Half of all your friends go visit their moms and dads and their new boyfriends and girlfriends and everybody gets along. They even have fun. Maybe that’s what he would try telling her tomorrow, Nate too, but in a different way, a less complicated way. But he was getting way ahead of himself. And Kathy, too. If only she’d drive up and walk into the fogged-in darkness of the clearing.

After the first hour of waiting, Lester began to worry that she might have been in a traffic accident, or was in a store when some kid walked in with a brand-new fifty-dollar handgun he was aching to use, or else she had gone to a movie theater that began to smoke and burn. But these were deputy sheriff demons and he knew it, the Whore Twenty-four, when you never really punch out, twenty-four hours a day you look at your world like you’re out on perpetual patrol, the gold still pinned to your shirt; everybody even slightly out of line you give a double take, every loudmouth in a restaurant, every jackrabbit at a traffic light, every corner full of kids bopping at nothing to do—they all get your attention. You never say anything to them because you’re off-duty and they’re not usually breaking any rules anyway, but you’re always poised for the outlaw: on a run of errands with your son in his car seat beside you, in your day dreams and night dreams too. And in Lester’s dream he was always alone, stuck in his patrol car in a vacant lot in broad daylight, every perp he’d ever arrested standing around his car waiting for him to come out: the child abusers and wife beaters; the rapists and Stop-and-Robbers and drunk drivers; the B&E artists and teenage hookers; the car thieves and arsonists; and the only murderer he ever took in for a booking, a cleancut soft-spoken man in a white starched shirt and black tie who had flagged him down on the main drag of East Palo Alto on a hot, bright Saturday afternoon, his fingers and forearms covered with the dried blood of his wife, mother, and sister-in-law. He had quietly asked Lester to take him into custody, but in Lester’s dream even he was out in the crowd, staring at him in his patrol car, waiting for him. Lester’s doors would be locked, but the car engine would never turn over and when he picked up the radio he got nothing but silence. He’d reach for the pump shotgun in its rack beneath the dash, but it would always be stuck there, welded there, it seemed. He’d unholster his side arm, take the safety off, pull back on the barrel to slide one into the firing chamber, but then children would appear in the crowd, the kids of all the perpetrators, even the abused kids. They’d stand beside their mothers and fathers, their faces blanched and soft-looking, expressionless, and he’d put his gun down on the seat and just wait for help to come. But it never did. Some nights the crowd would push in close to the car, pressing their faces to the glass, the children too, and Lester would try and point his gun only at the adults, but the adult faces would become children’s and the children would turn into their own hard-time parents, and Lester would just start shooting. The glass would pop and explode all around him. The faces would part and tear like thin cardboard, flapping open to the daylight behind them. He’d keep squeezing the trigger, feeling the kick in his hand, smelling the burnt powder in the air. Then the gun would jam and everyone—even those he’d shot—would look at him with great disappointment, not at what he’d done, but at what he couldn’t finish, like it was a true shame this was the only fight he had in him.