The Turner House (23 page)

“Nah, Mama. I haven't seen that one.”

“Well, it starts out with a couple men in all black, they got masks on so you can't even see if they black or white, but either way they lookin like thugs. They run up in somebody's house at night, but—and this where I
always
get surprised—they not looking for the jewelry, or the china, Lucky Boy. They lookin for papers! They go straight to the office and start rummagin through papers. And then a white man come on the screen in a suit and says, ‘Nowadays'”—Viola did a deep-voiced impression—“‘your identity could be the most valuable thing in your home.' He's not a bad-lookin white man, either, which is how I remember.”

She smiled again. Her glossy eyes twinkled.

“Here,” he said. He stood up, opened the drawer, and took out the plastic bag full of documents. “Let me make the copies first, then I'll come back and explain how the fingerprint works, cause it's not like you think.”

He was actually impressed. His mother, who had always been sharp, still had her wits about her. This had been the case three years earlier, when he lived on Yarrow for a short time after retiring from the navy, but she'd had two strokes since then. He'd mistaken her physical degeneration for an intellectual one as well. Fucking infomercials, he thought. He couldn't imagine spending so much time watching television that he began to take the infomercials seriously.

He made copies of her social security card and birth certificate on Cha-Cha's printer-scanner-fax-copier. The living room was a mess. A stack of printouts sat on the loveseat, a cold cup of coffee sat on the floor. He did not look at the papers; whatever Cha-Cha and Tina had found interesting enough to print out from the Internet would surely not interest him. He once again thought of his teenage self, standing in the entryway and wanting to belong here. Now Cha-Cha and Tina's lives seemed terribly boring, as did their son Chucky's, as would Todd's once he left the service. He went back into his mother's bedroom.

He put the originals back in her dresser drawer and sat on the bed again, this time closer to Viola. She smelled like strong soap and baby powder. There were various small yellow plastic buckets stacked on the nightstand. Troy couldn't imagine their purpose. He wondered if she used a bedpan or just wore Depends.

“So the fingerprint isn't public unless you want it to be,” he said. “You gotta opt in to making it part of the public database, and the way it works is that so many other people have opted in that
that's
how you get a match. But I wouldn't make your fingerprint public cause then, you're right, somebody could steal it and maybe steal your identity.”

Viola nodded.

“Mmm-hmm. Now I understand. You say you need the thumb, right?”

She stuck out her hand. She clearly saw his explanation for the bullshit that it was, but she loved him, and it seemed as if his lying had tickled her, provided a bit of entertainment. He pressed her thumb onto the ink pad, onto the piece of folded-up paper, and then used a sheet from the box of baby wipes on her nightstand to wipe the ink away.

They sat there not saying anything for a while, Viola looking Troy up and down again.

“You know, Lucky Boy, I'm in a lotta pain,” she said. “Folks think I like to exaggerate, but I'm not. All in my arms and my chest it hurts, like I said. Especially right now cause I ain't had enough pills this morning. And on top of that Cha-Cha got me feelin down. You know what you could do for me?”

“What you need, Mama?”

“Take me for a ride, like how you used to drive me around the east side. You got your truck? You just gotta lift me up into the seat, we don't gotta bring the wheelchair. Just ride me around for a little while.”

He felt he could not spend another minute with her today. It was impossible. He stood up, collected his papers, and kissed her on the forehead.

“Next time, Mama. I gotta go.”

B
ACK ON THE
east side, Mrs. Gardenhire listened to the TV but did not look at it. Meerkats and large African lizards scampered across the 46-inch screen.

“Mama, why not face the TV instead of the door?” David asked. “It's got a great picture.”

“Picture's
too
clear is the problem. Makes me feel like the animals is here in the room.”

“Well, I thought you said the old one hurt your eyes.”

“That's what I thought was hurting them,” Mrs. Gardenhire said. “But now that you brought this new one, I figured out they just plain hurt.”

She faced the doorway where David stood, but her focus was on the TV in the far corner. She tilted her head toward it, and when the creatures sounded like they were in peril—a lion stalked onto the scene, say—she shot a peripheral glance at the screen until the danger receded.

David's brother Greg had pawned their mother's old 32-inch flat panel two months earlier. It was a move too stereotypical to be heartbreaking for David—a drug addict stealing his mother's TV—but it did anger him. Mrs. Gardenhire, queen of second and third and thirtieth chances, waited three weeks before telling David the TV was gone. Three whole weeks without her animal shows. David bought her a brand-new 46-inch LED flat screen and vowed to stop by more often.

“Where's Greg at?” he asked.

David leaned against the front door's frame. He planned to stay in the front room the duration of this visit, as he did most visits if he could help it. The house was crammed with pictures he'd rather not see. Of Greg when he still looked related to David, before his long-term relationship with heroin aged him a good twenty years. Of their dead father, Gregory Sr. Of David's ex-wife. His mother wouldn't look at the television head-on, but she cherished frequent glances into the past. David did not.

Mrs. Gardenhire shifted her weight in her armchair.

“What's today? Tuesday? If it's Tuesday, then I ain't seen him since last Thursday.”

“It's Tuesday,” David said.

“Well, he ain't came around since Thursday, then. I gave him fifteen dollars to weed my annuals, and he took off,” she said. “He ain't weeded nothin before he left, either.”

Mrs. Gardenhire had a twitch in her shoulder that made it bounce up and down involuntarily. A delicate movement like a bird preening its feathers. David fought a familiar urge to put his hand on the shoulder to calm it down. His mother didn't like attention called to her condition.

“I'll take care of the annuals right now, Mama. You just stop giving Greg your money.”

A genuine two-shouldered shrug from Mrs. Gardenhire, followed by a sigh.

Outside, David took off his T-shirt and left it folded on the porch. He knew nothing about weeding but figured anything that wasn't pretty should be yanked up. He'd bought the lot next to his mother's house as a sort of garden annex several years before. Then he purchased several other properties on the east side, places where people had once worked hard, hazardous jobs to pay their mortgages, all for less than five thousand dollars. He owned property in a more desirable neighborhood downriver, but he liked to tell people that one day the east side houses would make him rich. Truth was, landlording his east side properties was more time-consuming than he'd expected, and he planned to purchase empty lots moving forward.

Words like
ghetto, dilapidated
, and
run-down
were inadequate to describe this portion of the city, David thought. An apt descriptor eluded him, but Kyle, a geeky kid on his installation team, had come the closest.

“This isn't postindustrial, post-white-flight, or post-automobile-boom,” Kyle had said. “It's like, post-zombie-fucking-apocalypse. This is like after the zombies have turned everyone they could find, and then they burn down the buildings to run out the last survivors—right into their clutches and shit.”

They'd been sitting on the back bumper of David's van drinking a beer; Kyle had just turned twenty-one.

“Okay, I can see zombie apocalypse,” David said, although comic books had been his brother Greg's thing, not his. “But what about the houses still standing?”

“Simple. Just-turned zombies are still sort of human in the brain, you know? They're prone to human sentimentality in the beginning. So the houses they lived in, they naturally don't go as hard on them. Maybe they do a rudimentary prowl of the rooms, but they can't bring themselves to burn them down. So if their families are in the basement hiding in airtight saunas or whatever, they get passed over.”

The airtight saunas had thrown David for a loop, but the zombie-apocalypse part stayed with him. He liked how unabashedly nerdy Kyle was, and wondered if he'd had to fight to keep himself that way coming up over in Brightmoor, or if things were different now.

In his basketball shorts and sneakers David could have been anyone. He could have been the David from twenty years before, and he could still have belonged to this block, barren as it was. He was not like Troy, who held on to a notion of still fitting in the neighborhood. David knew that if it weren't for his mother and his few tenants, he'd have no reason to visit the east side. But he was not from anywhere else, either. Not San Diego, where he'd kept an apartment for ten years for the sporadic periods when he wasn't on a ship. He didn't belong to where he lived now, near the river; no one was really
from
that fledgling neighborhood. He'd looked into more established “hip” neighborhoods in Midtown, but they weren't for him. He was too smart to pretend he was alright with being a token in a city with such a large black population, with walking into new restaurants where the all-white patrons looked at him with suspicion, as if his very presence suggested that they weren't as close to “revitalizing” the area as they'd hoped.

Mr. McNair rattled the garden's gate. Short pants, Redwings cap, and polo shirt. David let the old man in.

“Betsy got you out here gardening?” Mr. McNair asked.

“Nothing too skilled, just some weeding,” David said.

It bothered him that Mr. McNair always called his mother by her first name. McNair never called Troy's mother by her first name, nor Mrs. Breedlove from up the street. True, David's mother was some fifteen years younger than the other two women, but it still seemed improper.

“Weedin? Boy, looks like you just yanked up some good stuff,” McNair said. “Let me see.”

Mr. McNair took the bunch of curling leaves from David's hand and sniffed them. Then he laughed and slid them into his shirt pocket.

“These is basil, David. Good basil. I'll just take em and you can blame me if Betsy comes lookin.”

Embarrassed, David stood up and went to the porch for his shirt. When he returned to the garden Mr. McNair was patting his shirt pocket and looking at David oddly, as if trying to decide whether David had committed some crime he'd heard about. The ropy veins in McNair's neck bulged.

“What's going on, Mr. McNair? Something bothering you?”

This could be more bad news about Greg, David thought. In the winter McNair had caught Greg stealing aluminum siding off of Mrs. Breedlove's house. Ever since Viola Turner moved away, Mrs. Breedlove had been his mother's only remaining friend. The news about Greg's theft humiliated her so much that for weeks she'd begged off of Mrs. Breedlove's invitations to come play pinochle. Or maybe it was not about Greg. Maybe it was finally time for McNair to confess that he was more than a friend to David's mother. Maybe he would make an honest woman out of her, old as they both were.

“You talk to Troy Turner lately?” McNair asked.

David chuckled out of relief.

“I seen Troy Turner a couple weeks ago. Why?”

“Somethin's goin on over there on Yarrow,” McNair said. He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the street.

“What do you mean? Something like what?”

“Well, somethin like
somebody.
Somebody's been in and out of there for a few weeks.” Mr. McNair lowered himself onto a log in the shade of the house.

“Used to be, right after Mrs. Turner moved out, folks would stop by all the time,” he added. “But nowadays Cha-Cha only comes by when I call to have him check something out. So something ain't right.”

“They're coming in and out with a key?” David asked.

“Looks like. They got a key to the gate, the back garage, and the house.”

So what's the problem? David wondered. The sun shone from high in the sky, and he was ready to get back home and into the shower. An hour or two of silence would do him good right now, he thought.

“What do you want me to do, Mr. McNair? It sounds legal.”

“Hell, I don't know about legal or illegal. All I know is it's strange. I wouldn't think so if it was Troy or somebody.” Mr. McNair paused, leaned in closer. “But it's little Lelah, David. What business she got sneakin in and out of there like some junkie thief?”

David did not wince. Both of them knew these last few words were too much. The old man opened his mouth to apologize, but David raised a hand to say it was okay.

Lelah could have been scheming on the house too, trying to figure out a way to short-sell or otherwise profit from it. The thought saddened him. That house wasn't worth more than three thousand dollars if it was worth a dollar. Troy might have had his reasons, but a family of adults fighting over a scrap of worthless land was too depressing. Lelah who collected her brothers' postcards in a scrapbook in high school. Lelah who had told David he wasn't “worldly” enough for her, even though neither of them had ever traveled outside Michigan. Lelah who looked the same, her extra weight having settled in all the right places.

“I think it's nothing to be worried about,” David said. He wiped his hands on the front of his shirt and ushered McNair to the gate. “If they got a key and there's nothing left to steal inside, then I say leave it alone.”