Given (29 page)

The guard's pen stopped halfway to the sheet of yellow paper attached to his clipboard, as if visitors were an anomaly within the walled city of his orderly world.

“You got a name? Person you're going to call on?”

I gave him the address and his face relaxed, simplified itself. “I know the place,” he said, sounding relieved — he wouldn't have to file an incident report. “Belongs to that lawyer fellow whose clients always get off?” His eyes flicked over to Hooker and me as if to say gates and fencing worked best on a stable property with non-criminal, mature residents, which didn't include people like lawyers who defended social misfits who couldn't keep their noses clean. I felt the urge to defend Vernal's practice, tell the guard “you are only guilty if they can prove it,” but stopped myself, and smiled, insincerely, gesturing with my hands — palms up and open.

The guard told me I could apply for a coded Visitor ID card so I wouldn't have a problem coming and going. I said I didn't foresee any problems and he said “suit yourself, ma'am
.
” He handed me a booklet that I didn't look at but passed to Hooker, the
Visitor's Guide to the Adult Community at Astoria: Your Search for Niceness Ends Here!
that included a street map, the route to our former residence marked in red. The map let us know, in bold lettering, we were not to deviate.

“A lot of elderly people live here,” the guard said, looking down at the hearse, as if he found it distasteful. “You are required to call Safe Arrivals when you reach your designated address.”

I put up the window, and the electronic gates slid open to let us pass. We drove through an opening in a wall topped with broken glass set in concrete, much like the one surrounding the hacienda on Tranquilandia. Jagged glass that could shred a man's hands into lace.

The suburb had an eerie stillness to it, like the air before a dead wind rises. At one time it had been filled with the shouts of children playing street hockey at the end of the cul-de-sacs, and, in summer, their older siblings, lawn tennis on private courts. I missed the squeals of infants as their nannies fussed over them at the shallow ends of swimming pools. I missed the sounds of children growing up in a world where the worst pain they'd experience would be the sting of a parent's rebuke. Now there were no children, anywhere, to miss.

No poor people chill in this hood?
Rainy said, as I cranked the wheel and turned right onto a wide, tree-lined street with no above-ground wiring.

Price of housin keep them out,
Frenchy said. If
she
had been born in a killer-clean hood like this, she said,
— no drive-bys, no crack house on every corner —
she might have had a chance growing up. She might not have ended up getting executed on Death Row for killing her only kid.

Rich people don't need to kill their kids
, Rainy said.
They hire up babysitters, they want to go out drinkin.

God always been down on the poor,
Frenchy said. She figured God must have invented poverty in order to entice poor people into doing mind-numbing jobs no one would think of doing unless they were flat broke first. Money was God's most cruel invention — the only way He could get you out of bed and off to your minimum wage job. For once Rainy didn't contradict.

The competitive Christmas spirit thrived in this well-off suburb, and each outdoor tree outside every child-forsaken home was festooned with lights that went all the way to the ground. We drove past lawns studded with reindeer, penguins, carollers, candy canes and snowmen — many of them inside inflatable globes a-flurry with snowflakes. There was a lone bear holding a dreidel beside a giant menorah flickering neon purple, green and orange — and a lawn that held a cluttered mysticism of its own: Santa with his sleigh and reindeer parked next to an inflatable manger surrounded by camels, donkeys, and a dozen pink flamingos.

Sanity Claus be a fat-ass white muhfo
, Rainy said.

Same as God be,
Frenchy said.
Fat and white.

“This is it,” I announced, “we're home.” Aside from the “For Sale” sign mounted on the decorative stone wall, the word “Sold” imprinted on it, like a brag, the Walled Off and grounds looked the same as when I had left it behind, thirteen years ago. Now all the feelings I'd had of not belonging came lamentably back.

Rainy and Frenchy stared in awe at the house where Vernal and I had tried to live. The twins raised their arms in a gesture of praise and the HE rubbed his blind eyes with his hands.

I parked at the foot of the front steps and opened my door. Toop jumped out ahead of me, as a ball of fur the size of a tea cozy, wearing wrap-around sunglasses, darted from under the evergreen magnolia Vernal had planted to mark the celebration of our first anniversary, a tree that had never bloomed. The fur ball lunged at our tires, and when they failed to fight back, turned his attention to Toop, sniffing the place where his leg had once been.

“He's got an amputee fetish, what can I say?” a familiar voice came, as I started up the steps. When I looked I hardly recognized him, he'd aged that much. He wore his brown hair, now streaked with greyish-white, twisted at the back of his head into a small cluster of unruly curls. As I got closer I could see he had lost a few more teeth since we'd last met.

But it was his nostrils — big enough to be vacuum cleaner attachments — that gave him away. In the early days of my marriage, I-5 had visited our home on a regular basis, packing a pocketful of cocaine and a pistol under his
ruana.
We hadn't been close.

“Place ain't on the market, not now. Sold, in case you can't read.” I-5 wore sunglasses to match his dog's, a white T-shirt with “International Terrorist” and a picture of George Bush on the front and a belt with a silver buckle inlaid with nubs of turquoise. A pager and a cell phone were clipped to the belt; I gathered he was still in the business. I stepped around him to go inside, but he moved to block the way. “This ain't the Vatican. We ain't open to the public,” he said.

“I-5, it's me,” I said, testily. “I used to live here. Remember?” I tapped my forehead to help him remember the place where memories, and names, are stored. His real name, the one that appeared on his numerous arrest warrants, was Primero Segundo III, but no one — no one who retained a full complement of limbs — ever called him that.

The sound of his
nom de guerre
had the desired effect: his face grew more open and he began to take an interest in what I had to say. He removed his glasses, as if looking at me with naked eyes would help him recollect.

“Hey!” he said suddenly, snorting through his throat, the way I remembered him doing — one of the many irritating side effects of being who he was. “Chicken Quito Ecuador! Long time no see!”

Whenever I-5 had come to the house I'd stayed in the kitchen preparing Chicken Quito Ecuador from the
Time Life Cookbook
, a dish Vernal requested but never ate, after inhaling a few lines of I-5's anti-appetizer. As he left the house I-5 always turned to me and said, “Next time I come for dinner I'm going to leave room for more of your Chicken Quito Equador.”

I-5 looked through me, not at me, the way he always did.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Looking after the place. Didn't anyone warn you?”

“Vernal didn't say who, just that he'd found someone.”

I-5 said the
jefe
had offered him a place to stay because he was, at the moment, under house arrest, “Except when I go out to do that community service.”

I told I-5 I would only be staying at the Walled Off until I got the rest of our possessions packed and my mother's affairs straightened out. As I spoke, I saw him draw himself up and puff out his chest a little, looking away from me to the right, over my shoulder. I followed his gaze down the steps, saw Rainy and Frenchy squeezing out with the twins and the HE, who stooped to fill his pockets with gravel from the driveway. Seconds later they were all hovering beside me.

Their presence was not what had precipitated the change in I-5's demeanour. His eyes had come to rest on Hooker, bending over, reaching to catch hold of Toop, who had jumped onto the hood and was licking his stump, as if he had suddenly become awkwardly aware of it.

“They lick themselves it's a sign they're giving in,” I-5 said, as Hooker went around to the back and began unloading the coffin.

“Toop's not giving in,” I said, protectively, “he's just being polite. He doesn't like to kill anything that isn't his own size.”

“That ain't
anything
, that be the Bomb,” I-5 said, as the deranged tea cozy attached himself to Hooker's leg, and began pumping. “I don't let him out much. He's more of an inside dog.”

Hooker swore, shook his leg once, and the Bomb, along with his sunglasses, flew off and landed upside down on the gravel. Toop sighed at the enormity of it all and settled his chin on his paws.

I-5 told me to go ahead inside, and make myself at home.
“Su casa es mi casa, comprehendo?
I'll let the front gate know you're here.” He touched the cell phone on his belt. “I can help your boyfriend with your luggage while I'm at it.”

To his credit Vernal's criminal-element caretaker didn't ask why I travelled with a coffin. Maybe he thought it an accessory that came with the vehicle. I didn't bother informing him that Hooker wasn't my boyfriend, or that Hooker's sister was lying on the front seat, pregnant and trying to kick a full-blown heroin habit. He'd find out himself, soon enough.

I-5 reached the bottom of the steps and began shouting obscenities at his little dog, who danced in circles around his feet. I-5 tried to swat him and the Bomb bolted, yelping, into the garden, his stubby hind legs bumping into his front legs as he ran. Toop slithered off the hood and went limping after him.

Rainy and Frenchy stood on either side of me, watching I-5 help Hooker ease Grace from the hearse.
I make him for a blow-boy,
Rainy said,
way he pimp out that gay ass dog.

He look burned out like a housin project in the hood,
Frenchy said.
In dog years, that boy be dead his own self.

I stepped into the entrance hall where the walls were still covered with photographs from the nineteenth century, drenched in sepia light, portraits of children who had been born but never wakened. Vernal had started bringing them home from the flea market and second-hand stores after our dog died, to become the family we would never have. He called them his heirless heirlooms — dead children whose families had forsaken them, left them to descend through the hands of generations of strangers — he'd hang them wherever he could find a bare space in our house. “I like to think I am giving them another life, just by hanging them here,” he would say, to anyone who asked about their histories.

Home be where you hang yo self, best believe,
Rainy said, as we edged our way further into the house filled with the rich madness of my mother's life, and pushed through to the living room, trying not to knock over the multitude of antique floor lamps with irreplaceable parts missing and stands full of broken umbrellas nestled together like crippled bats. At her age one would be entitled to maintain a cluttered house, crowded with almost a century of assorted and sundry belongings, but my mother had never been content to own
one
of anything, or anything that was in some way not in need of repair. She only seemed to find beauty in broken things.

Rainy and Frenchy came after me with their kids, but Rainy didn't get any further than the big-screen TV inset in the massive stone fireplace. I-5 had the TV tuned to a station that broadcast a log fire burning.

I hadn't grown up with TV — my father had always said television had been invented to convince people the world was not a mysterious place, and wouldn't allow one in the house. When Brutus died Vernal bought the TV and it had become his primary avoidance technique. He would sit, staring at the log fire burning for hours on end, as if there was nothing else left to do, and I would have to tell him, with rough mercy, to turn off the television, read a book, get some work to do.

Hooker came in carrying Grace in his arms. I took him to the sunroom — where I had napped away many an afternoon, waiting for Vernal to come home from work and order in dinner — and cleared a pile of magazines off the loveseat, covering her with a blanket.

I-5 brought Baby-Think-It-Over in the Moses basket and set it on the floor, beside Gracie's head. I moved the cat litter box “so the Bomb doesn't make a mistake in the house,” I-5 said, out of the sunroom into the hallway where Grace wouldn't have to look at it. I-5 led us through the dining room filled with empty packing boxes, into the kitchen. He said Vernal had instructed him to pack up my mother's things, but never called back to say where he wanted the boxes sent. He said he had his own “oddments” stored down in the basement but he had no clue where he'd be moving to himself when “the slants who'd bought the heap” took possession on the first of February.