Night Relics (4 page)

Klein looked out through the french doors into the backyard, where the wind ruffled the surface of the pool. He had built
this house on spec a few years ago, at the end of the road in Trabuco Oaks, where the old Parker ranch had been. When he couldn’t
sell it, he and Lorna had moved into it. Now it was worth upwards of half a million dollars.

Most of that was a result of the last couple of years of heavy real estate inflation, and all of it was leveraged, most of
the equity sunk into the deal he had going out in Trabuco Canyon. When it paid off, though, he’d walk away with double what
he owed.

That’s when he’d tell Lorna about it. He had found over the past few years that you kept most of your dreams and schemes concealed.
Your wife wasn’t your business partner. He unhanded the newspaper that lay on the coffee table and took a look at the headlines,
then dropped it again. Later he’d read the baseball. Somehow he didn’t give a damn about the rest of it.

He heard the rattle of a Volkswagen engine out on the street—his only neighbor, waking up the local dog population. She was
one of the community’s assets, although
sometimes she was too smart for her own good. Her kid was okay, too—all boy. Klein had shown him how to catch a baseball the
right way, holding his glove up instead of upside down, like most kids wanted to do. The kid would get right out in front
of a ground ball, too, and stop it, instead of stepping aside and reaching for it. Klein would have coached Little League
if he’d had a son.

For a moment he daydreamed, picturing a son of his own. Somehow he knew just what the boy would look like. It was strange
how you could miss something that had never existed. Klein was a practical man, and he knew that dreams were just so much
air. And yet when it came to the son he wanted but couldn’t have, the air that filled the empty space was just as solid as
flesh and blood and bone. It was probably crazy, thinking like that, but as long as he knew it was crazy, then he could go
ahead and dream.

He walked into the kitchen and spread low-fat cream cheese across a puffed rice cake. He was up to two hundred sit-ups a day
and eighty laps in the pool. In two weeks he’d be fifty-five years old, but he had never been as fit as he was now. After
checking his watch he looked at the portable phone on the counter, wondering whether the call this morning would be good news,
bad news, or just the usual games.

Klein had a man making inquiries out in Trabuco Canyon, but he was pretty much a dough-head, or pretended to be; you couldn’t
always tell. His name was Bernard Pomeroy—”Just call me Barney.” Although that wasn’t the name he was using at the moment.
He shook hands too much and he wanted to call you by your first name, a lot. There was nothing that sounded more like a car
salesman than first-naming people you didn’t know, and in fact Barney Pomeroy hustled cars at a Mercedes dealership down at
the beach during the week. He worked for Klein on the side. There were other partners, but all of them were silent. Barney
Pomeroy should have been. He was worthless, or worse, in about eighteen ways.

Klein’s business angle out in the canyon wasn’t illegal, strictly speaking, but aspects of it were edgy, and the whole thing
was strictly under the table. There were other reasons, too, that Klein couldn’t just tell Pomeroy to go to hell. Getting
rid of him would be a complicated thing, and Klein didn’t need that kind of complication right now. He had enough without
it. His marriage, his bank account, his nerves, everything was strung tight as a wire.

“¡Imelda! ¡Escuche!”
he said suddenly, looking back out into the living room. The young Mexican maid rubbed at the furniture with a dustrag.
“¿Dónde está la señora?”

“
Está durmiendo
.”

Asleep. Lorna was still asleep. Sometimes it disgusted him how she could spend so much of her life unconscious. And when she
woke up, long about ten, she’d spend two hours putting on her face. Why bother getting up at all? On the other hand, once
she had her face on she was what a man in his business needed—a wife that
looked
right, who knew what to wear and how to wear it. It took Lorna a while to get the engines up to full rev, but then she was
showroom quality.

Last night she had looked dynamite. There wasn’t a man at the party that hadn’t been cadging looks at her. What had Klein
said at the party that had been so funny? He tried to remember exactly how it went; otherwise it didn’t make any sense. A
television had been on, out by the pool. A highbrow historical program on PBS—some sort of documentary about Israel. A little
man with a crazy person’s idea of a haircut had been speaking. “Who the hell’s that?” Klein had asked out loud. “He’s Begin,”
Winters had said, and Klein had nodded seriously, and then said, “Hell, if you looked like that, you’d be beggin’, too.”

The joke had torn everyone up, especially Winters. People couldn’t repeat it enough times to satisfy themselves. It had gone
from room to room like a laugh virus. He had roped in something like six potential front men just on the strength of having
said something that funny. Thinking
about it now, he nearly laughed all over again, and he pictured Winters, a big man with a face like a boiled ham, laughing
so hard that it had left him gasping for breath. Winters was one of his silent partners. He represented a firm called Sloane
Investment Services, which would pretty much own the deed to Klein’s house if his business dealings out in the canyon failed.

He pushed the thought out of his mind, then abruptly remembered Lorna trying to tell her own joke right afterward. She had
been out in the kitchen for an hour or so with Uncle Gin and Aunt Tonic, and that hadn’t helped matters. When everyone was
laughing at Klein’s joke, she had come into the room, and then when someone told her what Klein had said, she had smiled,
but pretty clearly hadn’t understood it. Almost at once she had announced that she had a better one.

Somehow, she had thought it would be a good idea to work through the naked man and the elephant joke, of all the damned stupid
things: “What did the elephant say to the naked man?” the joke went. Then the punch line: “How do you breathe through that
little trunk?” Hah, hah, hah. That’s what it was worth, about three hahs, and that was when you told it right.

Anyway, while everyone except Lorna was still laughing about the Begin joke, she had stood up straight, as if reciting, and
started out: “What did the elephant say to the naked man?” There had been a silence in the room, partly out of embarrassment.
Klein had wanted to kill her. Then, with a loopy grin, she had delivered the punch line, or what she remembered as the punch
line: “How do you breathe through that dick?” she had said.

The silence lasted another five seconds, and then the room just came apart. People were laughing so hard that drinks got sloshed
onto the carpet. One man got chest pains, and they had to lay him out on the couch until he could take his nitro tablet and
boost his heart back up to full power. Klein’s Begin joke was forgotten, although when
he had reminded people of it later, they still thought it was pretty funny.

On the way home, Lorna had wanted to talk about her joke, how successful it had been. “Wasn’t I funny?” she had asked.

“A scream,” he had said, and then he realized that she had no clue that she had screwed up the punch line, that people were
laughing because she had gotten it so stupidly and inconceivably wrong. She had never figured that out. So he had told her,
very patiently, right there in the car….

He elbowed the unpleasant memory into the back of his mind and watched Imelda’s legs as she dusted her way across the room.
She was just about to leave when he signaled her again. She smiled, and he wondered what her smile meant. There was a lot
in a smile, if you knew how to look. Sometimes he wondered if her smile was meant to ridicule him.

“Quita usted el papel de la puerta”
he said, gesturing toward the front of the house where the offensive bumper sticker was still glued to the door.

“
Sí, señor, ¿cuál puerta?
”

“En … el frente. De la entrada.”

Feeling lousy, he broke up the rest of his rice cake with the point of the knife. Lorna drank too much. Unless it was a social
occasion, she didn’t get started until evening, but then she got toasted fast. By seven-thirty she was gone. You might as
well talk to the television set. It had gotten to the point where she’d sleep all night sitting in her chair, oblivious, but
that had scared her badly enough that she’d cut back a little.

He stared out the window toward the tree-shaded hills, suddenly recalling the dream that had awakened him again early that
morning. There was something in the windy morning, in the sagebrush smell of the air, that suggested the dream, and he sat
forward, his heart racing, watching the tree shadows on the grassy hillside. He could almost
swear that one of them hadn’t been a shadow at all, that a woman in a black dress had been walking beneath the trees along
the trail that descended from the ridge. Now there was nothing.

His heart fluttered, and unconsciously he rubbed his chest. The first moments of the dream replayed in his mind—the anticipation,
the windy moonlight, the sudden appearance of the woman—and he watched uneasily as the wind stirred the trees now, their shadows
shifting like the surface of a dark sea.

P
ETER CLIMBED INTO THE
S
UBURBAN, TOSSED THE BAG
with the spud guns onto the backseat, and drove out onto Chapman Avenue again. Just before Amanda and David went off to Hawaii
last week, David promised to send postcards. It was his first plane trip, complete with a ride in the airport limo, and so
he was going to send the first card from the airport. Peter had given him a little packet of stamps. No postcards had come,
from the airport or anywhere else.

It wasn’t like David to neglect to send the card. Like Amanda, he was organized and responsible to a fault, especially for
a ten-year-old. It shouldn’t have taken two days for the card to make it across town.

Regardless of what his marriage had come to, fifteen years of it had made Peter feel necessary, and the feeling was something
he couldn’t lose overnight. He had told Amanda that he would look at the front brakes on her
Honda while she was gone. He couldn’t have her paying a hundred fifty bucks for a brake job, not for something that took thirty
minutes and a twelve-dollar trip to the Pep Boys.

The banners at Selman Chevrolet whipped on their lines, blowing straight out toward the ocean, and a big tumble-weed, freed
at last from whatever lot it had grown up in, rolled across the Tustin Avenue intersection, only to be knocked to pieces by
a pickup truck gunning away east, toward the foothills.

Instead of stopping at the Pep Boys for brake linings, Peter crossed the intersection and turned right on Monterey, pulling
up to the curb outside the house.
The
house now rather than his house. Each day brought new revelations. Just out of habit he was tempted to haul out the lawn
rake and clean up the windblown leaves and papers that choked the flower beds.

Through the open window of the Suburban he could hear the distant growl of a lawnmower, and he could see that the girl down
at the corner house on Maple was washing her car in the driveway. Weekend mornings in the suburb— the smell of bacon and coffee
through an open kitchen window, kids playing on the sidewalk, the hissing of lawn sprinklers. Maybe you had to get away from
it to see it all clearly again.

He climbed out of the car and walked up onto the porch. The blinds were drawn across the front windows. He knocked but he
could tell straight off that the house was empty. They were in Hawaii. They wouldn’t be home for a week. He had known that
but had knocked anyway. It wasn’t his house anymore and he couldn’t just walk in uninvited, even when he knew the house was
empty.

He headed up the driveway into the backyard, found the back door key inside a hollow plastic rock in the flower bed, then
stepped up onto the back porch to let himself in. Amanda’s cat, Tully, appeared out of nowhere and darted up onto the porch,
brushing against his leg and purring loudly. A neighbor was feeding it, but it was used to having
the run of the house. Peter stooped to pet it, then blocked the door with his leg and slipped inside. If he let Tully in he’d
be chasing the cat around the house all morning.

“Relax,” Peter said to it. “You’ve only got a week to go and you’re back in. For me there’s no end in sight.”

He closed the door behind him. The house smelled and sounded empty, nothing but dusty echoes. With no idea what he was looking
for, he wandered from the service porch into the kitchen. A glass pitcher half-full of lime Kool-Aid sat on the kitchen table
alongside two nearly empty glasses, a plate speckled with cookie crumbs and a single broken Oreo, and a dealt-out deck of
playing cards.

Crazy Eights. It was David’s favorite game, and the three of them had played countless hands of it, drinking green Kool-Aid
and eating Oreos, arguing off and on about the wisdom of dunking the Oreos in the Kool-Aid and whether you ought to unscrew
them first and eat the center and then dunk either half separately, so that you seemed to have two cookies instead of one.
Suddenly hungry, he opened the cupboard and searched for the open package of Oreos, but he couldn’t find it.

How could it still be going on without him? Peter was a part of it, part of the ritual. It was Peter who had always made the
Kool-Aid.

Well, now somebody else was making it. He carried the glasses and pitcher to the sink and rinsed them out. He could play out
that part of the ritual anyway. It wasn’t like Amanda to leave dirty dishes on the table—an open invitation to ants.

He went out into the dining room and then into David’s room, which was almost appallingly neat. Books and toys were carefully
arranged on the shelves that Peter had built when David was—what? Two? He sat at the foot of the bed, looking around at the
posters on the wall and at the airplane models and sets of high-tech building blocks. Over one of the headboard bedposts hung
a wooden heart on a string. Peter and David had cut it out on the band saw five
years ago, when David was on his Oz kick. The only sign of disorder in the room was that the closet door stood open, blocking
some of the sunlight that shone through the window.