Authors: Christopher Hebert
Michael Boni sighed. “Better hope it doesn’t rain.”
§
Constance found the paint at a secondhand building supply store. The cans were half and three-quarters full, with spills on the labels showing what color they were. Mostly white and off-white, but that was okay. They would make the place look clean and bright.
There was more she’d wanted to say about Charles, but not all of it was fit for Michael Boni’s ears. For instance, she remembered being in bed at night, newly wed, with Charles above her, and how sometimes she’d felt as if she could be anyone, that he didn’t see her there. She was just a body. He took what he needed, and all he gave in return was soon flushed away. But she was just a girl then, and the feeling of isolation had seemed like a small price to pay. After all, Charles had saved Constance, freeing her from her mother. In return, how could she not give herself to him completely?
§
The lights were from a junk shop, left in a bin out front, full of stuff free for the taking. Dobbs had spent the last couple of hours trying to hang them, but the fixtures were old and the wires were loose and Dobbs, it had become clear, had no idea what he was doing. Now he and Constance were sitting at the red plastic booth, drinking coffee, gathering strength for a second attempt.
He’d shown up tonight for the first time in almost a week, and now he was strangely quiet, preoccupied.
“You haven’t told me about a single dream,” she said.
“I’ve been busy.”
Constance refilled his cup. “Clementine was telling me something. About some people you’ve been waiting for.”
Dobbs looked away, held up one of the light fixtures, wires dangling like a wind chime. “Are you sure these aren’t broken?”
Constance took the light from him, set it down. “Did I ever tell you about the night Charles was arrested?”
Dobbs squinted at her from somewhere far away. “Who’s Charles?”
It was June, she said, and Clifford had a cold. He’d just turned a year and a half. It was the middle of the night, and Constance was in the kitchen filling a cup of water to settle Clifford’s cough. There was a knock at the door. The next thing she knew, the cops were kicking Charles, curled up on the living room floor. He was handcuffed, wearing nothing but boxers, shouting “I’ll fucking kill you!” between blows.
Constance had never heard Charles make so much noise. She was in her nightgown and Clifford was crying and one of the cops said something about a stolen truck. The cops were all white. There were three squad cars parked out front with flashing lights. They pushed Charles into the back of one of them, and he looked so small as he rode past her, his face turned away from the window.
Constance stood there paralyzed. They’d taken him away before he’d had a chance to tell her what to do.
By the time she got to the station, the charges had expanded to armed robbery, assault, grand larceny, conspiracy. Constance tried to get the desk clerk to explain what was happening, but nothing he said made any sense. There was the clatter of typewriters and the clanging of cells. There was no space left for words. Someone eventually led her to an interrogation room, where Constance sat down, smoothing her skirt. When she looked up, Charles was being handcuffed to the table.
She’d never felt so helpless. As she had so many times before, she tried to meet his gaze, searching for some sort of reassurance. She’d failed so often to see anything there that she was unprepared for what now appeared. In those bright overhead lights, she could see pink in the whites of his eyes.
“What are you looking at!” Charles shouted, and then he was pulled into the hall and back to his cell, and Constance waited for someone to take her away, too.
“He sounds like an asshole,” Dobbs said.
Constance frowned. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“But tell me about these lights,” Dobbs said. A bouquet of loose wires bloomed out of his fist. “How badly do you really need them?”
§
She’d found the scraggly white birch in the back room, growing up through a crack in the slab. That was how she knew this was the perfect location. It helped, too, that the building was only a block from her house and had been abandoned so long, no one would notice or care if she made it her own. The tree was just the right touch, a bit of garden brought indoors.
Constance and Michael Boni were in the kitchen now, the birch hanging overhead. Michael Boni was on his back, his flashlight strobing the stove’s undercarriage. His toolbox was stuffed with screwdrivers and wrenches whose battered edges inspired confidence.
“What seems to be the problem?” she said.
“The problem,” he said, “is I’m a carpenter. I don’t know shit about appliances.”
She poured him a cup of coffee and led him out to the dining room. He stood in the doorway, shaking his head. She’d needed help with the booths, the heavy stuff. But she’d done the rest herself—the paintings, the plants, the knickknacks. It was his first time inside, his
first sight of the tables and chairs and decorations. “Where’d you find all this stuff?”
“Oh, here and there.”
He walked into the center of the room, turning around and around. “When I was a kid, it was a dairy.” He pointed to the far wall. “That’s where they had the ice cream.”
It wasn’t a bad idea.
He came over and joined her at the knotty pine booth, blowing steam from his cup. “You never finished your story.”
“My story?” Constance tried to remember where she’d left off. “Charles,” she began, “he did eight years …”
But from Michael Boni’s expression, Constance could tell she’d lost track of things, that she’d told the piece about prison to Dobbs instead.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The day he got out, I took the day off to go to Jackson to pick him up. I got there just in time to see him get in a car with a woman slathered in eye shadow. I never saw him again.”
Michael Boni had turned back to peer at the vanished ice cream cases. “Sounds like you were better off without him.”
Constance spooned sugar into her cup. “I’m going to tell you a different story,” she said.
After Clifford was born but before Charles was arrested, Constance said, she and her husband almost never went out together. Charles was working only part time then, filling orders at a warehouse. The war was over, and so was the boom. Charles always said they couldn’t afford dinner or dancing, though that didn’t stop him from disappearing almost every night with James and Bobby.
In retrospect, she would’ve liked to think at least a part of her knew they were up to no good. But in truth she was still a child then. A mother, but still a child.
One night a couple of months before he was arrested, Charles came home and announced they had plans for Saturday night. He’d already bought her a new dress, and he gave her money to get her hair and nails done. She didn’t know what the occasion was, what they were celebrating. She was afraid if she asked too many questions, he might change his mind.
The dress he’d bought was blue, a size too big, but Constance pinned it in as best she could. And when Saturday night came, she was so excited, she didn’t even care that James and Bobby showed up at the house with unfamiliar women on their arms. It was a triple date, and James and Bobby wore new suits. Constance had never seen them in anything but jeans. The girls looked young enough still to be in high school, swaying their narrow hips through the doorway.
James and Bobby and their dates took one car, a borrowed Buick. Constance and Charles were alone in theirs. It was their first car, a salt-corroded ’47 Dodge prone to vapor lock. Charles had bought it just two weeks earlier, another display of wealth she’d chosen not to question. As they drove south on Woodward, Charles balanced his hand on Constance’s knee. His fingers were dry, but she didn’t mind. Just to be with him, to be the center of his attention, made her willing to forgive anything.
The Sparrow Room was packed, nothing but elbows all the way from the door to the dance floor, but somehow there was a table waiting just for them. And the drinks that night came in endless rounds, Charles simply wagging a finger whenever they needed more. James and Bobby, across the table in their pin-stripe suits, were as calm as bankers. They’d turned their chairs to watch the band, a jazz quintet. She’d never heard Charles or James or Bobby listen to jazz, but that didn’t matter. Everyone was someone else that night. Charles held her hand, and she could see sparkles of candlelight in his eyes. They were rich and beautiful, every single person in the club. That night was a fairy tale, and Constance was the servant girl transformed into a princess, discovering the world where she’d always belonged.
* * *
“But that was a different time,” Constance said now to Michael Boni, sitting opposite her in the knotty pine booth. “I was a different person.” Someone capable, she thought, of mistaking a blue dress for love.
Michael Boni nodded distractedly, as if he weren’t even listening.
“Let me show you,” she said.
She reached into the pocket of her cardigan, taking out a newspaper clipping. Slowly, careful not to rip it, she unfolded the paper, smoothing it out on the table, directly in front of Michael Boni. There were two pictures side by side on the page, both of them black and white. Michael Boni saw them, but he didn’t yet understand.
The first shot was from more than half a century ago, a picture of a downtown building at night, glossy cars parked on the street out front, long swooping Cadillacs and Lincolns and Packards. There was a crowd on the sidewalk, the men all wearing suits and hats. The building’s marquee was aglow, spelling out
THE SPARROW ROOM
in bright white bulbs.
This was the “before” picture. The “after” was only a day old, a smudgy shot of crumbled walls, a weedy lot circled with police tape. Nothing recognizable, and yet the place felt just as she remembered it.
Pointing at the rubble, Constance said, “This was the corner where the bandstand was. Over there, the bar.”
And here, she said to herself, was the table where she and Charles had held hands, where James and Bobby had given themselves to the music, where Constance had lost the last piece of her innocence.
Now the place was gone. The night before, someone had come along and blown it to pieces, leaving little more than a crater.
“I know about the others, too,” Constance said, staring into Michael Boni’s eyes. “The grocery store, the shoe place. They’re not just buildings, you know. They’re memories. They have meaning.”
“What makes you think I know anything about it?”
“You men,” she said, “you think you’re so mysterious.”
“Think of the gardens,” Michael Boni said. “Think of the possibilities.”
She jabbed at the clipping with her finger. “This isn’t what I want.”
“Who said it’s for you?”
“Buy flowers for her grave,” Constance said. “Say you’re sorry. There are easier ways to make up for having been a shitty grandson.”
Michael Boni folded the scrap of newspaper back into a square and pushed it toward her. “They’re burdens,” he said. “We’re better off without them.”
The first one, a week ago, had been small and quiet as explosions go. The target had been a derelict old building, a former shoe factory. No one seemed to know what had happened. The news reported it as an “accident,” but they were short on details. Dobbs had no TV, no radio, no Internet, but there were trash bins and bus stops where a fat, damp wad of newspaper could still be counted on.
The story he’d happened to spot, buried in the metro section, had barely stood out. By now he’d been here long enough to know old abandoned places were always going up in flames. He was lucky no one had gotten around to torching anything of his.
The night he read the story, after finishing his work at the warehouse, Dobbs had gone to check it out.
Beyond the police tape, the building had still been standing. The only damage was to the wall facing the highway. There was an old advertisement painted onto the brick, an enormous brown loafer:
BRINKLEY’S—COME WALK A MILE IN OUR SHOES!
Over the years,
the paint had aged just like real leather, losing its buff, turning gray. As bricks crumbled, even the sole appeared to have worn low.
Dobbs had wandered through the wreckage for a few minutes, and then he’d climbed the embankment to the highway and stood on the shoulder among the broken bottles and fast food wrappers. He couldn’t help wondering about whoever had set the explosives. Either they had no idea what they were doing, or they had a sense of humor—the hole they’d blown was at the toe. Now the loafer was a hobo’s shoe, worn through with age and left unrepaired, just like the city itself. So prominent was the building, so close to the highway, anyone entering the city from the west couldn’t help but see it and take note. A wry sort of welcome sign.
With the second blast, a few days later, they’d grown more serious. Or more competent. From a single punched hole to complete demolition. The place this time around had once been a grocery store, vacant when it blew. Vacant like every other grocery store in the city, just rows of empty metal shelves and a floor flaked in onion skins.
According to a woman in the neighborhood Dobbs later met at the scene, it had been one of the last of the markets to leave the city, selling off its stock at half price. In the remaining days before the store soaped its windows, the woman said, everyone with a coin to spare had shown up and bought as much and more than they could afford to, knowing it was the last time they’d be able to buy food in their own neighborhood. Afterward they’d pushed their cans and boxes of groceries home in the store’s rickety carts, commandeering every last one: a wagon train of settlers in housedresses and sleeveless undershirts.
Even ten years later, at the time of the explosion, Dobbs was able to stand at the roadside and see parts of the trail they’d blazed, overturned and wheelless shopping carts, scattered like the remains of mules that died along the way.
* * *
Two days after the supermarket was destroyed, the delivery Dobbs had been waiting months for finally arrived. Mike and Tim had given him a four-hour window in which to expect them, and he was at the warehouse, sweeping away the latest accumulation of dust, when the truck pulled up.