House of Sand and Fog (37 page)

“Sir?
Hold on there.”

Once again I am running. Outdoors the sun is upon my head and face. The air smells of engine exhaust, of cooking meat from a vendor’s cart, transportation and hot meals continuing as if this moment were any other. My eyes burn. I breathe with difficulty and stop running. I look once behind me but there is no guard. Across the khiaboon, in front of the tax office, many officers and men in suits talk behind the yellow tape of the Sheriff’s Department. Men and women stare, talking amongst themselves, watching as one of the men stoops to investigate Esmail’s blood. Who are these people to witness this? To invade my heart like soldiers with dirt upon their boots? I step into the khiaboon, but no cars sound their horns and I move quietly to the other side, to the rear of the crowd, searching for the men who shot my son, and I regard one of them standing in the shadow of the tax building, speaking with two men dressed in badly tailored suits. He is a young deputy. Round white face. His hands are upon his hips and he looks down at his shoes. One of the detectives speaks and the young man looks only at his shoes. He shakes his head. His lips move as if he might talk. He continues to shake his head. At his side his hand trembles and I would like to see him dead upon the ground but I have no desire to harm him. Only Burdon, our captor and his beggar whore, who is with Nadi still, and I feel suddenly my wife is in danger.

The highway is bright. I drive very fast, the white lines of the road becoming one. My drawn breath seems to reach only my skin. My fingers shake. I wipe the khoon from my eye and feel beside me the empty seat where sat my son, my abdomen heaving with crying I do not hear. The day’s work was only beginning and the air was cool, the third day of Ramadan, and when I ate breakfast with Nadi before dawn she told me it was soon, and at dusk my driver Bahman was smiling, and before I entered the auto he spoke the news, that I had a son, Captain Massoud Amir Behrani is father of a son.

I do not see clearly and this does not matter. I drive into the fog of the hills towards Corona. I wipe my eye and nose upon my sleeve. The air here smells of the ocean, of rotted weed in the sand, of sea salt and garbage. My hands steer the automobile up the hill past the bungalows on the left which are small but newly painted, their stoops and sidewalks swept clean, the grasses of their lawn cut very short. This is an ugly street, zesht, and now I see our widow’s walk rising from our roof, a foolish thing. My foot and leg are only the wood of a dead tree, and the engine responds with sound, carrying me and all I have done and not done to the drive. At the window, there is the parting of the drapes before they fall still and I slip from my automobile like black oil. I move to the front door of my home and for a moment my limbs are heavy as iron but then I am only empty clothes, the front door opening with a force that surprises me for I do not remember touching it. There is the startled hand of Kathy Nicolo as she raises it to her mouth. Between us is a sea of carpet from the house of my mother but now I am across it and I believe there is sound coming from the beggar whore’s mouth but I cannot be certain for my limbs are again iron and my hands are fixed to her neck and throat. I seem to watch her face from a place higher, this struggling statue of a man and woman, her flesh warm and soft, the tendons of her neck I begin to break each at a time. Her hair has fallen over half her face, her eyelids fluttering, her sound quite ugly, a wet ripping, her tongue pink. Her fingers grasp my wrists and her nails pierce what was once my flesh. There is blood, but not enough, and I lift her from the floor, her feet kicking and dragging beneath her. I shake her once, twice, again, and again, her head jerking backwards and forwards. There is no end to my strength or how long I shake her, then her hand slips from my wrists and the bungalow grows silent.

There is only my breathing, the crash of khoon between my ears. I lower Kathy Nicolo to my mother’s carpet. Her hair falls away, and her face is the purple-red color of saffron, her mouth open, a furrow between her closed eyes as if she were in the midst of dreaming badly. My hands release her and I sit upon her for a moment and I am once again in my flesh. In my chest is my thrusting heart, my palms are wet against my legs, and now I wait for the sound of Esmail’s skateboard in the drive, the kick of it into his hands as he steps upon the stoop and enters his home. He has been away all the day long, on a journey he had not expected, and now I have called him home. I stay seated upon the dead woman’s chest and I wait for my son, but I hear nothing.

Nadi. Where is my Nadi?

I rise and find her upon her bed, in her darkened room. Her small face is at rest. Her forehead is free of wrinkles and I see upon the lamp table her headache medication. I sit in the chair Lester V. Burdon carried here. I remember clearly how he watched over his gendeh, how he regarded her as if she were a precious stone. And now she will be a stone shot through him, and I pray his love for her was even greater than I witnessed. In the shadowed darkness of this room, Nadi’s face has lost thirty years of living; the migraine has passed and she is in the deep sleep that comes to those relieved of their pain. It is a small face, with the soft skin of a girl. Her lips are dark, her jaw no longer set tightly with judgment, her closed eyes incapable of becoming narrow with fear and regret. Is it possible that from this rest she will rise to hear of her lost son? Is it in this small and pitiful bungalow she will know the final end of what we once were? And once again, while Bahman and my wife and children wait in the Mercedes, its trunk full of luggage for a week or weekend at the Caspian Sea, I am inside our empty home for something I had forgotten, my briefcase or perhaps a favorite pair of shoes, a last-minute call to Mehrabad, all these things that must occur before we can take our safar together, our long happy journey, these last-moment details that can be trusted only to a father and husband, my hands over Nadi’s nose and mouth and eyes, this discipline to stand firmly in the face of her struggling, her grasping and twisting and kicking. My eyes fill and she blurs beneath me but I tell to myself it is only a small suffering she must endure before she is free to join our son, before she is free to return to the flowers of Isfahan and the mosques of Qom and the fine hotels of the old Tehran, before she is free to give money to the beggars in the bazaar, before she is free to claim her destiny—my wife’s arms fall to her sides, and she is silent. I remove my hands from her face. Her brow is arched, as if she were on the moment of receiving a long-awaited answer, and her mouth now is open and I kiss her lips. Her tongue is warm. I kiss her nose and cheeks and closed eyes.
Sleep, Nadereh. Rest for your safar. Rest.

The bungalow is quiet as a desert. I pass my son’s room. No breath enters me and I must discipline myself to continue moving forward, to walk into my office, remove my clothes, and slide open the door. Take down my uniform which in this country I have never worn. Pull it from its clear plastic covering from a dry-cleaning shop in Bahrain, the fabric heavier than I recalled, the smell of its cedarwood hanger. The trousers fit perfectly at my hips, and the shirt is of soft cotton but needs pressing. I stand with no mirror and tie the cravat into the full windsor knot I then always wore. Inside the jacket pocket are gold cufflinks and a tie fastener, an engraved lion of the Pahlavi dynasty. I fold my shirtsleeves back one time and secure each with a cufflink, my family name carved in each one. To Nadereh’s room I walk. I take from the bureau drawer my formal socks, black silk with small dark green diamonds sewn deep inside the leg. Nadereh lies behind me upon the bed, but it is no longer her; it is only a dress or overcoat she has forgotten to pack for our safar.

In my office I unwrap my uniform shoes, black and shiny and free of dust. I tie them securely with a double knot, then rise and slip into my jacket, each shoulder heavy with red-and-gold epaulet, my breast pocket covered with the ribbons, emblems, and badges of my service.

I secure the middle buttons and I stand at full attention, Genob Sarhang Behrani, Honorable Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani.

I pull paper from its box upon my desk, and in the kitchen I stand at the bar counter and begin to write in my mother language:

An automobile passes on its way down the hill and I must hurry for I recall the lieutenant’s orders as I left for the hospital, his request for a patrol car to be sent here. For the shooting of a boy they are efficient; for the rescuing of a woman held hostage they are late.

I take the second paper and write in English that I, Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani, leave to my daughter this bungalow and all of its contents as well as my automobile and all monies remaining in our accounts. I print my full name upon the document, then sign it.

This should be sufficient, but now I am troubled by the words “all of its contents,” for I cannot leave the body of this gendeh and killer to my daughter, who I am quite certain will sell this bungalow as soon as she is able. I take up the pen and write again in Farsi at the bottom of my letter:

I place both papers upon the refrigerator door, securing them with a magnet beside the honeymoon photograph of my daughter and son-in-law. They stand in the sunlight. They appear quite happy. I kiss my finger and press it to Soraya’s heart.

I am too warm in my uniform. I feel the sweat at my forehead and neck and beneath my peerhan. There is very little time remaining. I stoop upon my mother’s carpet, position my hand beneath Kathy Nicolo’s arms, then lift and drag her into the kitchen area across the floor and outdoors onto the rear grasses. She is quite heavy, her hair loose upon my arms. I drag her through the tall hedge trees to her automobile. The air has grown cooler, but my eyes burn with sweat, and I lay her upon the earth beside the bungalow and open the rear door of her auto. There is the tired smell of cigarettes, and the seat fabric is still warm from the sun that is no longer. I look down upon her. Her mouth is open, one hand twisted beneath her. I think of Jasmeen, my dear cousin. I lift the whore and pull her onto the seat and bend her knees to shut the door and I think of what I will tell to Jasmeen, that I loved her always, that Kamfar and I wept for her. And I will embrace Pourat. I will kiss both his eyes and tell to him how I have missed him.

There is very little time. Inside the bungalow, I pull from the cabinet beneath the sink the roll of tape we used for our moving boxes. In my office I retrieve the plastic covering of my uniform. Then I enter the darkness of my wife’s room, my heart once again thrusting inside my chest. My face and neck release sweat, and my uniform is fitted too tightly at the upper back; it is all the work here I have done, it is all those days in the heat and dust and fog, a garbage soldier working with men who before would have bowed their heads if I passed by. I sit upon the bed. I pull sufficient tape free of its roll, the sound like the cracking of ice over a frozen lake, what I felt beneath my feet as a boy with my father in the north mountains. I hold with both hands the tape and lean to kiss Nadi once more. Her lips are still warm but I feel if I do not hurry she will have left me behind. I apply one end of the tape to my knee, and my fingers shake as they did when I first undressed my wife on the night of our wedding, our new home silent as it is now.

I take the plastic covering and place it over my head and face. But there is a small hole near my mouth and I must double the layer and now I see only a vague dimness as I take the tape and secure it firmly around my throat and neck. My breath draws in the plastic immediately and I expel it with my tongue. I lie down beside my Nadi. I reach for her hand but cannot at first find it and my heart leaps against my chest, then I find it, small and cool, soft with expensive creams, and I am for the moment calmed. I close my eyes and mouth and breathe deeply through the nose, but the plastic quickly fills it and I again open my mouth to complete the breath but the plastic is there as well and I force it away with my tongue, drawing in more air, all that I will need, I tell to myself, holding it in, my chest weakened by its fullness. I feel Nadi’s shoulder pressed to mine and I regret not having played music on her new player. I have a sharp desire to hear it, the poetry of Dashtestani, the ney and domback, the beckoning music of home. I release my breath, its sound a wind in my ears, the plastic slipping from my nose and mouth but then returning with the insistence of the sea, covering all the sand prints left behind, filling all the holes and channels. I attempt to force the plastic out once more, just once more, but the ocean is rising with the moon, its pressure growing in my chest, my heart and lungs beginning to burst beneath the weight of an unseen hand, my body struggling as it sinks into the bed. The plastic becomes iron against my face, and my arms float weightlessly as I attempt to pull free the tape but my fingers do not function correctly, fluttering uselessly against my throat and chin. I no longer have legs, and there is a terrible sound in my ears, the deafening pitch of low-flying F-16s, my chest beginning to fracture, my abdomen heaving, heaving—something beginning to open and release, a warmth filling me, vodka and fire, the hot wind of a desert sky, the earth falling away beneath me.

L
ESTER’S CELL WAS A STAINLESS-STEEL SINK AND TOILET, A STEEL WRITING
desk, and two iron bunks recessed into the wall. Above each mattress was a small rectangular window, its bulletproof glass fogged so that all Lester could see was daylight, and the floor was eight feet wide and twelve feet long, the ceiling thirty feet above him, three iron girders painted as white as everything else. Lester sat at the edge of the bottom bunk, both hands resting on his knees. His eyelids were heavy and burned slightly, and his mouth hung partly open with fatigue. He was too warm wearing both jail-issue shirts and he lay back on his bunk, staring at the myriad of holes in the steel bed-frame above him. At the Hall of Justice, he had sat without his shirt in a hardback chair and heard himself tell the truth about everything, his voice low and subdued as he kept seeing the boy spin, his arms hanging loose as rope as he let go of the gun and landed on his side, one arm stretched out, almost pointing, the way toddlers do to something they recognize but can’t name.

Someone had handed him a glass of water and Lester drank it down all at once. In the small room were two deputies, two detectives, and Lieutenant Alvarez standing with his back to the bright window, his face in shadow. The detectives were asking Lester about the Behrani family, their imprisonment overnight, Lester pointing his service pistol at them, moving the son and father against their will to Redwood City. They asked him about Kathy. Was she at the Corona address right now, holding Mrs. Behrani against her will? And Lester’s voice sounded almost normal. “No, she’s waiting for us to get back, that’s all.” Lester looked down at his hands, imagined Mrs. Behrani hearing her son had been shot. He imagined hearing his own son had been shot, how he would immediately picture the worst, little Nate’s smooth face contorted and pale as too much blood left his body too fast. “Is the boy all right?”

One of the detectives said he was in surgery, and Lester turned his wedding ring twice on his finger. He’d washed his hands but there was still dried blood in the tiny cracks of his palms. He thought of Kathy, her red Bonneville in the backyard when a patrol car got there. He looked up. “I’d like to call my wife.”

Lieutenant Alvarez was writing something on a pad of paper, and he stepped forward as quickly as if someone had just insulted him. “You’ll get your two calls at intake, Burdon.”

Lester had felt an impulse to look away, but didn’t. Alvarez shook his head like even this, this eye contact, was way out of line, and he told two deputies to arrest him and take him across the street to the new holding facility, a short walk usually, but now it was long, Lester as handcuffed and bare-chested as a wino, a deputy at each arm, his face down. Inside they uncuffed him and Lester gave them what they wanted, his wallet, car keys, and wedding ring. One of the arresting deputies told him to hold his arms out and he gave Lester a pat search, his hands heavy and careful. The intake officer had broad shoulders, short red hair, and a small white scar on his chin. He sat behind glass and put Lester’s keys and ring in a manila envelope, counted the cash in his wallet, then had Lester sign a form in two places, Lester thinking of Kathy being there when a patrol car pulled up, everything going as completely wrong as it could. He heard himself ask to make a call, but again, his voice was subdued, muffled somehow. The intake officer looked right at Lester but didn’t answer him, just dropped his personal possessions into a box Lester couldn’t see.

The deputies disappeared and one from the holding facility took their place, a short Chicano with a neck as wide as his jaw. He escorted Lester to a part of the procedure he’d never had to stay around for, to a fluorescent-lit room with no windows, a Filipino woman there in a white lab coat. She was small and dark and pretty, her hair held back with a red-and-purple pelican barrette, and Lester wished he at least had his shirt on. She wore white protective gloves. She wiped alcohol on the inside of Lester’s forearm, then pressed a round TB skin pop into it, pulling it away just as quickly. She told him to sit down and she leaned against a counter covered with jars of cotton swabs, held a clipboard, and asked the Chicano jailhouse deputy Lester’s name.

“Lester Veector Burdone.” The deputy’s accent was East Palo Alto barrio. Now the pretty nurse was asking Lester questions of his medical history, his body since he was a boy, his sexual relations since he was a man. Had he ever tested positive for HIV? She looked at him then, directly in the face, and it left Lester feeling he had something to lie about when he didn’t. He answered no and then he was in the photo and fingerprints room standing against a wall in front of the Edicon machine, the technician telling him to look straight ahead at the blinking green light, Lester feeling he was being x-rayed, that this computer graphic of his face, this jailhouse mugshot, was really him, the true Lester.

The Chicano deputy called him over to the Identex and began rolling Lester’s fingertips one by one onto the computer pad. It felt strange to have each finger guided like that, like someone was helping him to dress or feed himself, and as the Chicano officer finished, then escorted Lester down a bright corridor, Lester felt something was about to begin that wouldn’t end for a long time. He knew the schedule for bail; he knew there wouldn’t be any for kidnapping. That meant he’d be here until a hearing. And that could take months. Sometimes over a year. He felt queasy, his mouth suddenly full of tacky saliva. He thought of Carol, saw her in the kitchen dicing onions at a counter. He imagined the kids, both of them drawing with crayons on the floor of Bethany’s room, and again he saw the colonel’s son drop heavily to the sidewalk, blood pulsing from two wounds, and he felt afraid.

The deputy led him around a corner and opened a door for him. It was a small room with a desk and telephone, its white cinder-block walls freshly painted.

“Two calls on the county, Burdone. Five minutes.”

The door was reinforced glass, and the Chicano officer stood on the other side, his arms folded, glancing in at Lester every few seconds. Lester picked up the receiver but didn’t know the colonel’s number. He dialed information, hoping that wouldn’t count as one of his two calls, then he was ringing the Behrani residence, a brand-new listing. His throat felt thick and dry. The phone began to ring and he remembered Kathy as he’d left her, standing in the hallway of her stolen house in shorts and a Fisherman’s Wharf T-shirt, her hair slightly unkempt around her face he’d kissed before leaving. By tonight, he’d imagined the two of them driving north in a rented car, maybe giddy for having just gotten away by a hair. Now he just wanted to hear her voice, a bit husky and unsure of itself. He just wanted to hear her say his name. But the phone kept ringing and no one was picking it up. A patrol car might have gotten there already, but he didn’t think so. Maybe Kathy and the colonel’s wife weren’t in the house, but outside. He pictured them sitting up on that new widow’s walk, waiting.

The deputy tapped on the glass and pointed at his watch. Lester let the phone ring four more times, then hung up. He hadn’t expected Kathy not to answer and now he felt as cut off from things as he could imagine. For a second, it was as if she had never existed and wasn’t real at all; what they had started together was an illusion, just a lovely rug thrown over a hole in the floor and now the rug was gone and Lester was falling into something that had been there all along and she had only come into his life to lead him to it. Cold spread through his bowels and his face grew hot. He glanced at the deputy’s dark profile, thought of Behrani screaming in Farsi inside the patrol car, the veins coming out in his forehead and neck. Maybe he’d called his wife from the hospital and Kathy had taken a chance with the Bonneville and driven there.
That’s just what she would do.
Lester dialed information again and was going to ask for the hospital’s main number when the deputy walked in and pressed the hang-up button.

“Two
calls.”

“Two were information. I didn’t know the numbers.”

The deputy took the receiver, hung it up, and motioned for Lester to step back into the corridor. Lester felt a tightening heat deep in his middle and he wanted to hit the deputy in the mouth.

“Let’s go, Burdone.”

“It’s Burdon. Deputy Sheriff Burdon.”

The Chicano smiled, blinking his eyes as lazily as a lizard’s. “You’ll want to keep that to yourself around here, FTO. Now
move.”

Lester walked with the deputy back down the corridor, his breathing shallow, the cinder-block walls a glossed eggshell white, not a blemish anywhere, no scuff marks or chipped holes from a leg iron, no graffiti, no dried spit and blood. A brand-new facility. He began to feel that edge again, all of his tissues clear and ready, his stomach a low fire.

Then he was in a small room with four or five others. Arrestees. All waiting for dressdown. The deputy told Lester to have a seat among a single row of steel chairs welded into two walls, facing each other. The Chicano handed Lester’s paperwork to a desk deputy, then left without a word. Across from Lester sat a long black kid, his skin the color of flan, his short hair freshly cut, his initials or his girlfriend’s shaved into his head. He wore a tank top, oversized jeans, and white Converse All-Stars untied. He kept picking at his nails, three gold rings on the fingers of his right hand, two on the left.

The others were young too, an Asian and a white kid who seemed to know each other, the white kid whispering to the Asian about a dead boy named Beef, the Asian leaning his head back against the wall, his eyes half closed in a waking nap, a small blue serpent etched beneath the corner of his left eye like a tear. Lester glanced at the man beside him. He was sitting sideways in his chair, his wide back hunched to the others, his hair dark and matted, and when he saw Lester he looked away quickly and Lester did too, a gush of heat letting go inside him. The man was Filipino, a small-deal bookmaker out of Daly City, and Lester couldn’t remember how or when their paths had crossed. For a moment he kept his face down, but then he thought he might appear weak so he raised his chin up again and sat back straight in the chair, his heartbeats lost somewhere inside his tongue.

The door opened and a jailhouse deputy called in the bookie, a name Lester didn’t know, and he smelled him as he passed by: piss and sweat and cigarette smoke in old denim. The door shut behind him and now the Asian kid was looking right at Lester, his eyes dark slits, his head still against the wall, his arms crossed in front of his chest. The white kid stopped talking and looked too, taking in Lester from his running shoes and bare chest to his face.

“You looking for something?” Lester said.

The white kid shrugged and glanced at his friend. The Asian stared at Lester a few seconds longer, then smiled and turned his head away slightly, closing his eyes and leaving the smile on his face. The other kid looked at Lester one more time, then at a spot on the wall just to his right, and Lester glanced at the desk deputy, a lean man in his fifties eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, reading the
San Francisco Chronicle.
The Asian looked asleep, his eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him, but his lips were still fixed in that smile he’d given Lester, and Lester didn’t like seeing it now; it was as if the kid had looked and seen the trajectory of Lester’s entire life and was now gratified it had all come down to this.

The door opened again and the white kid stood but the dressdown deputy called in Lester, pronouncing his name perfectly, and soon the clothes Lester had yanked from his suitcase this morning at the fish camp were gone and he was pulling on orange jailhouse skivvies, orange canvas pants, an orange T-shirt, and a canvas button-down shirt with
COUNTY JAIL
embossed in black letters on the back. For his feet he wore orange socks under orange rubber shower sandals, and they clicked softly against each heel as he walked with a new deputy down a brightly lit corridor to Central Holding. The deputy was short and smelled of Old Spice cologne. It was what Lester’s father used to wear, and the deputy was chewing gum as they walked, reading through Lester’s paperwork. “An
FTO?
What
happened,
man?” He lowered the jacket to his side and picked up his pace. He didn’t look at Lester, just kept his eyes straight ahead waiting for an answer, without judgment, it seemed, like they were two old friends running together, talking out a problem. Lester’s legs felt heavy and stiff and he began to breathe harder, the jailhouse sandals slapping his heels like a reproach.

They reached a wide steel door at the end of the hall and the deputy pulled from his pocket an ID card attached with a clear plastic cord to his belt. He inserted the card into a slit in the wall, then opened the door for Lester, and they stepped into a cavernous room with three tiers of closed door cells, the fluorescent-lit ceiling over a hundred feet above. In the center of the floor was a rounded desk with two officers on duty, and in the corner of the second tier was a one-way-mirrored control booth. The air smelled of fresh paint and new air-conditioning, and Lester could hear the buzz of half a dozen radios in the cells above. Each cell door had a small window in its center and in one on the second tier was a man’s face, a strand of white hair hanging over his eyes. Lester followed the deputy to the desk where one officer was on the phone and the other was checking off names on a headcount sheet. The escort deputy dropped Lester’s paperwork on the desk. “When’s the last time you guys had an FTO in Protective?”