Late in the Standoff Read online

  The commission’s chair reminded us that “this body’s judgment will be based solely on the Land Development Code and the city’s Comprehensive Plan. We all know there are high emotions on both sides of this issue; we’ve all seen the letters in the paper, but I caution each of you to restrict your testimony to the pertinent clauses of the CP and the LDC. No personal smears, no charges of bias, religious, political, or otherwise. Is that clear?”

  Haley, slipping off her headphones, said, “Yep.” Jean shushed her.

  City staffers presented their report, confirming that the archdiocese was requesting over a dozen exemptions from the code, including smaller parking accommodations, less restrictive lighting requirements, and freedom from providing open space on the lot. The Levin house was noted on the state’s Historic Register and was considered an important example of early Texas architecture. Nevertheless, staff recommended approval of the project, as it matched the CP’s vision for higher inner-core density to avoid outlying sprawl.

  Next, Father Matt. He straightened his white clerical collar, smoothed a hank of loose gray hair so his forehead ashes would be prominent. From his briefcase he pulled a sheaf of notes. He spoke eloquently about the New Urbanism, the city’s need for affordable housing, the church’s desire to help the community. He fended off the commissioners’ questions with the air of someone swatting flies. This was a man used to getting what he wanted. Who could say no to a priest? I imagined twisting his arm until he yelled, “Mercy!” “We will not be asking our tenants’ sexual orientations. Under state law, we’re not allowed to discriminate.” Will you ask them not to ogle my wife’s daughter? “Yes, we’ll have on-site managers to make sure tenants respect the neighborhood …”

  His supporters testified next, most of them emphasizing that church ownership of the property would benefit the area. “They make it sound like a bunch of heathens live there, in need of conversion,” Jean hissed to me. Some groused about a “small group of elite homeowners blocking progress.” A few insisted there was no issue here: property rights were property rights, and no one, including the government, should tell an owner what to do with his land. They complained about having to appear before a city board at all. “Isn’t democracy splendid?” Jean said. Her cheeks reddened. I’d never seen her so agitated.

  Person after person rose to speak, marching up the center aisle to sit at an oak table in front of the commissioners’ dais. Haley slid off her chair and crawled beneath her mother’s feet. She fumbled with her Walkman. Jean told her to sit up, behave. Don and his wife moved slowly to the front; her tiny hand rested on his arm. “Oh great, now we’ll hear from the patriot,” Jean whispered. Don said only, “Father Matt is a good man. He has my support.” His voice shook. Mrs. Ward echoed her husband and gave the commissioners God’s blessing. As she returned to her seat, I had an urge to wash the ashes from the poor woman’s forehead.

  Right before Jean stood, the chair apologized to the opposition. He was going to limit our testimony to three minutes each, not five, as the meeting was dragging on, and otherwise we’d be here till midnight. Groans of “Unfair!” but he rapped his gavel and silenced the room.

  Haley stared beatifically at her mother as Jean assumed her seat up front. Jean’s earrings gleamed in the light of a video camera recording the proceedings. Her voice was firm, just a smidgen of reined-in anger (including, I figured, her fury at Bill). “Thank you for this opportunity to address you,” she began, her cheeks still flushed. “We all agree that inner-core density is desirable, but only when there is a demonstrated public need, which, I’ll argue, there isn’t in this case. The Comprehensive Plan also includes provisions for preserving the historical character of our neighborhoods and for insuring neighborhood compatibility.”

  If poise and persuasion alone could do the trick, and if she’d had a shot at her father’s doctors, she might have preserved the old man, I thought. Absolutely, I wanted her there when my time came. “The applicant’s proposal flagrantly disregards these priorities,” she said. “Specifically, it skirts the codes enforcing compatible scale, step-down rules … and I have some solar maps here …”

  “She’s good,” Haley said, entranced. “Really good, isn’t she?” Absently, her hand strayed onto my leg. A warm ripple moved through me. I glanced down at her fingers and noticed on my shirt, just to the left of my tie, a dark Vitamin E stain. I tried to cover it with my coat, jostling Haley. She took her hand away. I couldn’t hide the mark. Why on this night, I thought, recalling the Passover Seder …

  “The city codes are clear,” Jean concluded.

  I approached the oak table, quivering the way I did on the first day of classes each year as I faced a strange and questioning group. I tried maneuvering my tie with my elbow over the sticky place. No use. Oddly, the table smelled of peppermint tea. I stated my name and address. The city officiais stared down at me. What are they thinking?

  I opened my manila folder. It occurred to me that I’d timed my testimony at exactly five minutes. I didn’t know how to cram it into three. I shuffled the pages. My hands trembled. Glaring video lights. “Thank you … for this …”

  My skin went cold. My chest felt funny. Oh Lord, I thought. Unto dust—

  But it wasn’t a pain or a flame or a squeeze. My nipples! Hell yes! My nipples had raised their little heads! Anxiety, chill … the old nerves stirring! God bless them!

  I grinned, idiotically, at the portly commissioners. They studied my stain. “… this opportunity … to be with you … I mean, speak with you …”

  I sneaked a peek back at Jean, smiling broadly. She looked stricken. Haley, gripping her headphones, glared at me: How could you embarrass me like this?

  “My wife and I … have always wanted a home … in a historic …” I returned to my folder. The pages had fallen out of sequence now and my hands were too shaky to put them in order. In the earlier confusion and our haste to leave the house, had I locked the front door? Had I left our home open to intruders?

  Tucked among my papers was Haley’s sketch of the Levin place. It must have slipped in when the cat brushed my arm. Ham-fisted, I held it high. The page rattled. My throat had gone dry. “My daughter,” I croaked. “My daughter loves this place. Please don’t tear it down.”

  Snickering, behind me. Titters. I turned. The inside of my shirt snagged on a sticky ridge.

  A sea of ashes. Father Matt stopped moving his pencil on a scratchpad. He glanced up and beamed triumphantly. The Wards bowed their heads, respectfully ignoring my distress.

  Jean’s face shifted from dismay, like the day she’d grieved for her father, to pale confusion, settling finally into a sad, soft smile, as if to say, You did your best, it doesn’t matter, it’s okay.

  It’s more than okay, I thought. Wait’ll we get home.

  Haley wagged her head—not in disgust, I realized, but as if we’d shared a joke, then she grinned at me, at her sketch, and gave me a quick thumbs-up. I returned the gesture and waved her drawing so she, and all the room, could see. At least a couple of the commissioners nodded in a friendly way. I heard the chairperson rapping the end of my time, felt my nipples hard against my shirt, and smiled at my fresh-faced gals.

  Anna Lia

  1

  Just after dawn, Houston simmered with humidity and light fallout from a cinder-cone eruption near Tamaulipas, Mexico, several hundred miles south of the Texas-Mexico border. Libbie wasn’t sure of the distance. Dusty with drifting ash, the sky looked grainy and dull as she made her morning commute. “It’s grim out there, folks; gray as fatback gravy,” quipped a DJ on her radio. He warned his listeners not to wash their cars with soap. Something in the ash reacted with the suds and took the paint right off.

  At eight o’clock, Libbie pulled her VW van into a faculty parking lot at the University of Houston. The van was covered with ash, but she didn’t worry about the finish. Long ago, the orange paint had faded to pink and gray. The bumpers were scraped and nicked, and small cracks webbed the winds
hield like a palm reader’s map of someone’s busy future.

  Libbie set the parking brake: an owl-like screech. She checked her briefcase for the English proficiency exams she had to grade this morning. Twenty-six students, most of them Japanese, were hoping to pass the test and be admitted into the university next term. All afternoon, Libbie knew, they’d pace the hallway outside her office, chattering, butchering their l’s and r’s, nervously awaiting their results.

  She got out of the van and opened its sliding side door. On the back seat lay her wedding dress, a white satin gown lightly embroidered with silk. This morning, she’d picked it up from the tailor and spread its sleeves on the seat so she could admire it in the rearview as she made her way to work.

  A few years ago, if her friends had predicted she’d marry again, on the dark side of forty, in a fully traditional Catholic ceremony—after an annulment and all—she’d have laughed out loud. None of it sounded like her. But Hugh’s enthusiasm was infectious (“Let’s both do it right the second time around”). For two months now, as they planned the wedding and reception together, they’d been giddy.

  Libbie folded the gown and slid it into its box under the long back seat so no one would see and steal the dress. Then she inspected her face in the driver’s side mirror. She’d had her hair cut for the wedding and still wasn’t used to its mini-length. Brusquely, she patted a wave back into place. Too much creeping, godawful gray, she thought. Menopause, here I come. She grabbed her briefcase and locked the van.

  The thin Spanish moss that swayed on the campus oaks reminded her of sassy braids, loosely bound—the kind she wore in eighth grade to attract the ninth-grade boys. She smiled. She had hair—and age—on the brain this morning. Squirrels hung in frenzied stillness on the trees’ rough bark.

  By the white stone fountain in front of the administration building, she ran into Carla Lanham, a colleague in the Language and Culture Center. Carla looked as if she hadn’t slept. She strode toward Libbie, squeezing in both fists the elastic waistband of her skirt. Her frosted blond hair marched up her head in soft, trembling spikes.

  She told Libbie, “Cancel your classes.”

  Libbie laughed. A let’s-play-hooky joke: turn the tables on our students and blow them off for a change.

  The air around the fountain was stale from the chemicals in the water that turned it a jazzy, vivid blue. Carla wasn’t smiling.

  Libbie set down her briefcase. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Anna Lia,” Carla said. “There’s been an accident. Danny called me about an hour ago.”

  A cold breath blew down Libbie’s spine. “What happened?” she said. “How bad?”

  “Don’t know. Danny wants us to meet him at the apartment. Call off your classes. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot.”

  Libbie’s legs wouldn’t move. In the harsh sunlight the classroom buildings were dingy and drab. The concrete walls looked pitted, uneven.

  “Go on,” Carla said softly, squeezing Libbie’s fingers.

  Libbie’s limbs tingled. Needles and stings. She ran inside the Roy Cullen Building, across a cobbled path from the fountain, and taped a note to her office door informing her students that their test scores would be ready tomorrow morning. “I regret the delay,” she wrote.

  “Jane, I have an emergency—I’ll be out for a while,” she told the secretary in the LCC office. “Can you post notices on my classroom doors? Thanks.” She checked her watch. The apartment was twenty minutes east of here; Libbie had timed it once when she’d driven Anna Lia home after school.

  She sprinted back outside, several pounds lighter without her briefcase, which she’d left on her desk. By now the parking lot was full, with old-model Hondas and Mitsubishis: no-frills faculty cars. What a shabby profession I’m in, Libbie thought, seeing the cars. Forty-two years old and still living paycheck-to-paycheck.

  She squeezed behind the van’s steering wheel and unlocked the passenger door for Carla, who was standing on the warm asphalt chewing her nails to the quick. The rush-hour traffic was still stacked up on Wheeler; no immediate openings in the nearest lane.

  Carla, jumpy and grim, fiddled with the radio. “I wonder if Roberto knows what’s happened,” she said. Among murky bursts of static she found Roberto’s voice: “—chase away all this gunk in the air with the funkiest music in Houston. You got the Morning Palomino here, the Love Stallion, on 98.6, KKLT, Houston’s hot and throbbing Latin heart.”

  He played a couple of commercials in Spanish then came back on in English. “This one’s for all my Chilean-American friends—Victor Jara and ‘La luna es siempre muy linda.’” An acoustic guitar trilled above a muffled tambourine.

  “Come on come on come on,” Carla said to the passing cars. “Give us a break.” To the scratchy ballad she tapped her fingers on the dash. “Let us in! Jesus, we’ll never get there.”

  Despite the traffic, they’d be at Anna Lia’s apartment, Libbie knew, in twenty minutes.

  Danny had heard the news on his car radio—the five a.m. report—on his way home from Austin. Twice in three days he’d made this trip. He’d got a lot more sack time last summer, when all he did was run the record store in Houston, but the store was losing money, so here he was—Mr. High Mileage, Mr. Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales. Simtex Medical Supplies put him on the road as often as a trucker.

  He made good money now: a five-figure salary on top of commissions. Good health and dental. Christ, he needed it all just to float Anna Lia. She came at a hell of a price. He hated being gone so much, but these days, even when he had a long stretch in town, she didn’t give him much of her time.

  Yesterday evening, after his third straight sales pitch to another midlevel hospital administrator, he’d gotten the hell out of Dodge, hoping to make it all the way back to Houston. He thought maybe he’d surprise Anna Lia early next morning in the record store. But his eyes wouldn’t stay fixed on the curves ahead (the highway’s shoulders were blurred by weeds, paper cups, old hamburger wrappers), so just after ten he’d pulled off the road at a cheap motel in Bastrop.

  On his bed, in the dim, deflating room, he had thought about his job. Big fucking deal if I pocket more now—I’m still blowing gas in the same old sorry dumps. Blue-light bars. Roach motels. Sooner or later, every extra cent he busted his balls for fell into the black hole of Anna Lia’s bank account.

  He remembered his father shouting at his mother for wasting the family’s money. Danny was fifteen when his dad began peddling insurance for the Travelers Group in Kilgore, Waxahatchie, Dallas, and Fort Worth, making weekly runs up 1-35. Before that, he’d worked construction, but his body was stiffening up on him—“I’m turning into goddam peanut brittle”—early arthritis in his left elbow and in the joints of most of his fingers. Each Friday, he straggled back home looking like roadkill and stood helplessly in front of his wife’s latest purchase: an ice cream maker, a footstool, a sewing machine. He swore her extravagance was eating his heart, valve by bloody valve, and maybe he was right. The night he slipped from his chair at the supper table, dead of a heart attack (on his wife’s new carpet) just six weeks after his fifty-seventh birthday, Danny swore he’d never be a middle man, always running errands for others—bosses, clients, a careless mate.

  Yet here he was, exactly as his father knew he’d be someday. “From me, Danny boy, you got a strong back, a kindly disposition, and an average mind, I’m afraid,” the old man told him one night, Danny’s senior year of high school, when they talked about college. “I’ll do what I can to help pay for your school, but promise me, son, you’ll study something useful. Fellows like you and me—strong-backs, eh?—we need all the advantages we can get.”

  At three a.m., unable to sleep (a spasm, like a car seat spring, pronging his poor, strong back), Danny had slipped out of bed, thrown his stuff into his duffel bag, and taken off again. The sky looked wild—like some kid had colored it wrong in her book. He’d stopped for coffee
and eggs at an all-night trucker’s spot. When first light hit the east, he’d switched on his radio. Farm report, cattle report, a report on yesterday’s stock market. A brief account of the volcano and all the ash it had spewed into the air.

  Once, when Danny was nine or ten, he remembered, his father had taken him hunting here, in the woods south of Austin. Neither of them knew how to shoot a gun. His dad had borrowed a friend’s rifle so they could “pick off some quail or something.” Danny still knew shit about guns, but he knew enough to realize, now, how desperate his father had been to try to dazzle him, planning a crazy trip like that. “We never talk—I’m always busy, I know,” the old man had said. But standing in a cold, wet cotton field, just after dawn, squeezing shots into lumpy fog—it was like spitting into oatmeal, Danny recalled—didn’t help. The loud reports, pinging off the trees, made them nervous; they never again tried to get away, just the two of them.

  On Danny’s radio now, a newscaster said something about a blast in southwest Houston. Danny kicked up the volume a notch: a mysterious explosion had “rocked” the Continental Arms Apartments sometime after three o’clock this morning. Witnesses claimed a second-story apartment had been gutted in the blaze, and a woman may have been fatally injured. “At this time, police aren’t releasing details,” the newsman said. “We’ll update you as soon as we can. In sports, the Astros upped their record—”

  Anna Lia, Danny thought. The Continental Arms. Second-story apartment. He didn’t know why, but he knew it was her. Damn. He rubbed his sleeping left leg. Oh damn.

  A shot blared like a bad trumpet in his mind, a wind-tunnel roar keening off trees in a field.

  That fucking weapons freak. What was his name? Nicholas Something. Nicholas Smitts.