Late in the Standoff Read online

  The two and the three. Pete squinted his concern. Bren stared at me over the rim of her glass.

  After school, if Jack had been bullied, and he was sullen, I’d sit with him in the basement and tell him to freeze! “Now lift your hands,” I’d say. “Otherwise, don’t move. Hold them in their frozen position. See how weird they are?” Fingers oddly curled, thumbs splayed. Hands weren’t supposed to look like this. I don’t remember how this game got started, but it delighted Jack. Years later, thinking about it, I concluded it must have given him a rare sense of control over his body. As I paced around the table, telling Pete, “Excuse me,” “Sorry to take so long,” I recalled Jack’s laughter. Right after I moved to Oregon, I heard he’d died of a heart attack while fixing a wristwatch for a customer in his daddy’s store.

  I buried another ball and left myself a beautiful approach to the five. More powder. More chalk. My cheeks burned. I knew, right then, I should stop. Bren had quit dancing and was slumped on the stool. With her beer bottle she made wet, wide circles on the bar. Give her some pleasure, I thought. Just once. You can afford to let this go.

  But the shot was too good to miss. You’d have to fake it to muff a shot like that, and everyone would know.

  Afterward, I called the eight in the side and put the sucker to bed.

  “Damn, College,” Pete said. He shoved his stick in the rack and walked outside. I headed for the men’s room, clapping powder from my hands. I didn’t look at Bren. “You got any holiday specials?” Shirley yelled at the barman. “We need some Christmas cheer ‘round here.”

  No toilet paper, soap, or towels. No hot water. I wiped the rest of the powder on my pants. Taped to the wall, to cover a hole in the wood, was a National Geographic shot of a bear, like the frames I developed for zoos to use in their television ads. My face in the mirror was red.

  Back in the bar, Bren’s hands shook wildly. She’d spilled Shirley’s whiskey on her dress. “I need to eat,” she told me. “We’d better get home.”

  “You want some Fritos or something?” Shirley asked her.

  “I’m good. Dinner’ll be waiting.”

  “Good old Mom,” Shirley said.

  “Right.”

  “Don’t be a stranger, sugar, okey-dokey?”

  Bren nodded. “Hi to Bobby if you see him.”

  Dust fogged the parking lot. Bren popped her trunk and reached for our mother’s bath towels. She swabbed her dress with one and tossed me another. “For your pants,” she said. “Shit, Mom’ll know exactly where we’ve been.” She threw me the keys. “You’d better drive.”

  “Will you—”

  “Fine, I’ll be fine.”

  As I stepped into the car I watched the lot, wondering where Pete had gone, expecting him to come at me out of the shadows. The sewage plant spat green steam shaped like a head of broccoli. The sun was lost behind the blinking red lights of the broadcasting towers.

  Bren and I didn’t talk. On the radio John Lennon told us to imagine there’s no heaven. I rolled down my window, hoping to draw the heat from my face. A Southern Pacific freight train caught us at Cotton Flat Road. Bells rang, lights flashed. Bren folded her arms. Her hands twitched.

  “Bren—,” I said.

  “Forget it,” she said. It would be five minutes or more before we could cross the tracks. “Merry Christmas, okay? Merry fucking Christmas.”

  “Stop it,” I told her. “Just stop it.”

  “And a Happy—”

  “I’m sorry, all right?” I reached over and took one of her hands. She tried to pull away. The train shook the car. I kept her still until she quit fighting me. For a long time, once the tracks were clear, we didn’t move. We sat there holding hands.

  City Codes

  1

  “It doesn’t pencil out,” said the priest—the lawyer-developer-priest from the Dallas Archdiocese. Father Matt. “We knock one unit off our sixty-unit plan, we’ll lose our profit margin. Not that we’ll profit. We’re strictly nonprofit, of course. But in the next ten years we’ll have to recoup our building costs, our maintenance outlays … otherwise, it’s not feasible for us to proceed. In which case, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell—that’s what you’ll get next door instead of us.” By us he meant God-fearing Good Guys. Nice Neighbors.

  I was thinking, Pizza Hut. Hmm. One squatty story instead of a seventy-five-foot apartment house packed with Catholic college boys leering into my stepdaughter’s bedroom window. I was raised Catholic. I know what those bastards are like.

  I thought, Taco Bell. I could abide that.

  “No, sorry.” Father Matt shook his graying head. As a concerned neighbor, living next to the lot where the Fellowship Commons would rise, I had joined other concerned neighbors in asking Father Matt to reconsider the project’s density. We were sitting around a table at City Hall, after work. The table smelled of coffee, though none appeared to be available. I was late; Haley was waiting for me at the Boys and Girls Club, where she went after school each day. “I can’t accommodate you. It just doesn’t, you know, pencil out.”

  I had a pretty good idea what he could do with his pencil.

  “Why are you sticky?” Haley sat up against her pillow. As I straightened her sheet, she reached to tap my collarbone. She pulled away quickly.

  “My heart-scar isn’t healing so well,” I said. “You know the vitamins you take at breakfast? My doctor says if I cut one in half each night—a Vitamin E gel—and spread the juice on my chest, in six months or so, the scar might vanish.”

  “Pill-guts?”

  “Yep.”

  “What was the matter with your heart?”

  “It was all blocked up.”

  She curled her blankie under her chin. She’d had it since she was two—before I came into her life—and now, six years later, its frayed edges looked like fettuccini. “My daddy?”

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “He says his heart is broken.”

  Oh my. “How often does he tell you this?”

  “Pretty much often.”

  “Haley, you know, sometimes adults—”

  “You were friends with my daddy?”

  “For a while, yes.”

  “If you weren’t having mating with my mommy, you and my daddy would probably still be friends, right?”

  Pizza! Tacos! Prayer! Any damn thing but this! “Maybe.”

  “My favorite game is ‘Mercy,’” she said, and for ten minutes she told me about the fun she had twisting her daddy’s arm until he screamed, in mock pain, “Mercy!” Finally, a yawn. “Terry?”

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “You got pill-guts all over Blankie.”

  “Here, let me rub it off. Lights out now.”

  Downstairs, I locked all the doors. Before heading to bed, I stopped at the bathroom mirror. Bumps and ridges right between my ribs, like a badly sown field of crops. Gone in six months? Well. In another six months, if Good Father Matt had his way, we’d never know that Sarah Levin’s historic home had been next door. I patted myself with a towel.

  In bed, Jean was reading part of the Comalia Land Development Code, downloaded from the Internet: “Section 18A: Neighborhood Compatibility.” She looked up at me. “Are we still going to fight this thing?”

  “Father Matt?”

  “I think we can get him on scale, the solar maps—that baby’ll bury us in shade—and the fact that he’s asking for seventeen different exemptions from the code. Plus he’s got no parking or lighting plan. And the latest city stats show student enrollment dropping.” She waved a sheet of paper. “This building is just a money-maker for the church. It’s not a community service, no matter how they pitch it.” From the beginning of the process—meeting with the neighborhood association, writing testimony for our upcoming appearance before the city planning commission—she’d been galvanized not just by the potential destruction of the Levin place and our loss of privacy (Haley’s bedroom would be the most exposed to the new building) but by the fact that the couple
who’d sold us our house, two years ago, knew this development was in the works, and hadn’t told us. We’d learned this from the neighbors. Some of them suggested we sue the Wards for lack of full disclosure, but we weren’t the suing types, nor could we afford a lawsuit. Besides, we just wanted to be done with the Wards.

  When our real estate agent first showed us the house, Jean and I weren’t married yet. Mr. Ward, a retired Navy man, in his early seventies or thereabouts, followed us closely as we toured each room, asking who we were, what we did (our agent told us, later, he was way out of line). He was tall and fit with a belly mildly rounded, like the curve of an old computer screen. He towered over me but seemed entirely hapless. Days later, I learned from a colleague at the local college, a man who was active in the Catholic community, that Don Ward had been asking about Jean and me at mass. I imagined him shouting, “Living in sin? No sale!” and Jean and I got the jitters.

  As it turned out, sin didn’t interest the state of Texas or Bright Realty, and the deal went through just fine. “God bless you,” Mrs. Ward, a frail, parchment-skinned woman, told us the day we moved in our boxes. Her stuff was already gone—all but the framed, glass-sealed paintings of the Virgin Mary, which hung in every room. The Virgin sleeping, blessing others, weeping, cradling her child. As we worked, Mrs. Ward gingerly removed these scenes from the walls, wrapped them in tissue, and placed them into U-Haul boxes. “God bless you,” she said, passing through the kitchen as I unpacked my margarita glasses with their green, cactus-shaped stems. “God bless you,” she whispered to Jean, slipping by the bathroom as Jean arranged her makeup and toiletries in the cabinet. “That woman creeps me out,” Jean said once Mrs. Ward had gone. I agreed, though the old altar boy in me was touched by her care of the Holy Mother. Jean was Jewish and would have none of it—though she softened when a neighbor told us the Wards had raised nine kids in this house. “Nine? It’s a wonder the woman can walk.”

  This bit of bio, we figured, explained the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room, a space with a shelf, cut among upper and lower cabinets, where plates could be set. The space had been boarded up—scarred, splintery plywood—blocking the kitchen from the dinner table. Removing the plywood, to open things up, was one of our first priorities. “Clearly, the woman was walling herself off from her children,” Jean said. “And from Sailor Boy, too,” I added. For a week or so we felt tenderness for poor Mrs. Ward, who, we surmised, had barely kept her sanity in this house. If the Virgin had helped her survive, then God bless the Virgin.

  Then we discovered what the Wards hadn’t told us. Though Don had no financial interest in the Commons, he was a local Catholic leader and had helped persuade the archdiocese to invest in the real estate. Initially, the rest of the neighbors understood that the church would renovate the Levin place, one of the oldest homes in our town—we’re sixty miles south of Dallas—and one of the few nineteenth-century structures in central Texas designed by a woman (“And a Jew,” Jean noted). The house had been vacant for years but was listed on the Historic Register. The neighborhood was fond of it. “It could be rezoned and fixed up to make a nice coffee shop or cyber-café,” Don Ward told his friends.

  Then Father Matt started waving his pencil.

  I slid into bed next to Jean. “We’re sure the historic designation doesn’t protect the Levin house?”

  She shuffled her papers. “Texas seems to consider property rights a kind of holy writ. If the owner—which, in this case, is the archdiocese now—doesn’t want the place protected, then not even a listing on the register can save it.”

  I tugged the pages from her hands and pulled her close. “You’re sticky,” she said.

  “Sorry. Haley was affectionate tonight. Well, not quite. A brief touch.”

  “She’ll warm up eventually.”

  “You think she thinks she’s betraying her dad if she’s cuddly with me?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she licked two fingers and lightly stroked my nipples. “Still numb?” she asked softly.

  The gesture, and the question, almost made me cry. Before my surgery, eight months ago, Jean had been delighted at how sensitive I was. “I’ve never met a man who got so aroused there!” Post-op, this pleasure had apparently been snatched from us.

  She flattened her palm across my sticky ridges. Mercy! What had I become? “Is there some kind of list I can get my name on, to preserve what’s left of me?” I said.

  “You think Haley’s asleep yet?”

  “Yeah, she was beat.”

  “Then I’ve got your list right here,” Jean said, rolling on top of me.

  What were those people thinking?

  A dozen times a day Jean and I floated this question as we erased the Wards from the house. We opened up the pass-through; pulled up the carpet in the living room, exposing a gorgeous oak floor; took down a gray, accordion-style divider in the entry between the foyer and the den; removed wallpaper, repainted.

  In the front garden the Wards had created a small grotto. A three-foot plaster statue of Mary had been enshrined there; the Wards had taken her with them, leaving the structure empty. On a whim one Saturday morning in mid-February, as we were shopping for trellises at a nursery, Jean bought a stone chicken head, a novelty garden item, and we set it in the grotto. We referred to it as the Chicken Virgin and joked about scrambling eggs for the Last Supper. I felt little guilty stabs, participating in these wisecracks, but I knew it was part of our ritual of claiming ownership. We meant nothing personal against the Wards, I told myself. We held no ill will toward the Catholic church.

  One afternoon, right before leaving to get Haley at the Boys and Girls Club, I was uprooting part of the old garden with a shovel, tilling the soil, when the Wards drove up. Though they’d informed the post office of their new address, a few letters still came for them each week. We’d called and told them this. Now, Don handed me a stack of mailing labels and asked if we’d forward the letters to him. He frowned at my handiwork. I thought Mrs. Ward might cry. “We loved this garden,” Don said.

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead. A mild breeze gave me a chill, now that I’d stopped digging. My chest was numb. “We plan to enjoy it, too.” I wasn’t feeling charitable. That morning, in a meeting at City Hall, Father Matt had threatened the neighborhood again. “This is classic Nimbyism,” he said. “If you continue to protest our development plans, I might be forced, as I’ve said, to sell the lot to commercial interests, and you’ll be dealing with fast food chains.” Then he accused me (as a lost sheep) of acting out of anti-Catholic bias. “Absolutely not!” I exploded, aware that I was overreacting—probably because of my chicken jokes. “This is about neighborhood compatibility, pure and simple. Historic preservation. It’s about who owns our community’s future, about the people who actually live here, not some out-of-town developer who just so happens to have religious affiliations.”

  Father Matt had glared at me. In my mind I heard him say, Your wife’s a Jew, isn’t that right? Like that Manischewitz-soaked old Levin woman? I inhaled slowly and tried to relax. “You talk about fast food as a bad neighbor, but I don’t think it’s neighborly of you, Father, to draw up a plan, not consulting any of the locals, then threatening us when we don’t go along with it.”

  “All right,” he’d said, gathering his papers into a calfskin briefcase. “I’ll see you next week, in front of the planning commission.”

  That morning, letters had appeared in our local paper, arguing both sides of the proposal. Among the project’s supporters, those who accused the neighbors of narrow self-interest, rejecting the Levin house’s historic importance—“it’s just a ratty old shack”—were the Wards. Their letter pointed out that Comalia was a growing college town, in need of more student housing, and that unlike most absentee landlords, the archdiocese would be a thoughtful and conscientious caretaker.

  Now the couple stood beside me, shocked by the stone fowl and my methodical disembowelment of their landscaping. I stabbed the sh
ovel into the dirt. “How’s the new place?” I asked, with a hostile inflection, I admit.

  “Oh fine, just fine,” said Mrs. Ward. She wore a blue head scarf and thick tinted glasses. The flesh on her cheeks looked as thin as the petals of the Siberian iris Jean hoped to plant here someday. “We loved this house but, you know, it was just too much for us to take care of with the kids all gone. The new condo isn’t special or anything, but it’s manageable. Better for us now.”

  Don cleared his throat and glanced next door at the Levin place. The shingles sagged. “Tell me the truth,” he said, straining for a jolly tone. “Won’t it be good to have that old eyesore gone?”

  His wife placed her hand on his arm.

  “Don, do you realize how amazing it is that that house, built in 1880, anticipates Frank Lloyd Wright and the Craftsman movement? What a visionary Sarah Levin was?” I said.

  “Father Matt is really a very good man,” Don answered.

  “I’m sure he is. But in his dealings with us, he’s been less than forthright and cooperative. He doesn’t care about this town,” I said, siphoning energy from this morning’s anger. “Student enrollment is backsliding here. We don’t need more housing.”

  “That’s debatable,” Don said.

  “Father Matt only cares about wheeling and dealing—and hiding his business affairs behind the facade of ‘good works.’”

  Mrs. Ward flinched and tried, once more, to tug her husband’s arm.

  “Well now, you’re quite the revolutionary, aren’t you?” Don said. The old Navy man, I guessed, suspicious of anyone younger than he was.

  “Just putting together testimony, based on the city codes. I’m simply exercising my legal rights as a citizen, Don.” I reached for the shovel. “Like, for example, I had a legal right to know that developers were going to raze the house next door and slap up a four-story behemoth less than twenty yards from my stepdaughter’s bedroom. Don’t you think I had a right to know that?”