The McLeods’ house looks as it did at 8:30, though someone in the last three hours has removed my FOR RENT sign from in front of the Harrises’, and I pull to a halt there, careful not to stop in front of the McLeods’ and alert them. I climb out into the clammy heat, ditch my windbreaker and hike up onto the dry lawn and take a look around. I check down both sides of the house, behind the hydrangeas and the rose of Sharon bush and up on the tiny porch as if the sign stealers had just uprooted the thing and tossed it, which according to Everick and Wardell is what usually happens. Only it’s not here now.
I step back out to my car, open the trunk for another sign from the several (FOR SALE, OPEN HOUSE, REDUCED, CONTRACT PENDING) that’re stacked there with my box of offer sheets, along with my suitbag and fishing rods, three Frisbees, two ball mitts, baseballs and the fireworks I’ve ordered special from relatives in Florida—all important paraphernalia for my trip with Paul.
I bring the new FOR RENT up onto the lawn, find the two holes the previous sign occupied, waggle the stiff metal legs in until they stop, and with my toe mash some grassy ground around so that everything looks as it did. Then I close up the trunk, wipe the sweat off my arms and brow, using my handkerchief, and walk straight to the McLeods’ front door, where, though I mean to ring the bell, I like a criminal step to the side and peer through the front window into the living room, where it’s murky as twilight. I can make out both McLeod kids huddled on a couch, eyes glued like zombies to the TV (little Winnie is clutching a stuffed bunny in her tiny hands). Neither one of them seems to see me, though suddenly the older one, Nelson, jerks his curly head around and stares at the window as if it were just another TV screen, and I was in the picture.
I wave a little friendly wave and grin. I would like to get this over with and get going to Franks and on to Sally’s.
Nelson continues staring at me out of the dark room’s dreamy light as though he expects me to disappear in a few more seconds. He and his sister are watching Wimbledon, and I suddenly realize that I have no business whatsoever gawking in the window and am actually running a serious risk hothead Larry will blow my head off.
Little Nelson gazes at me until I wave again, step away from the window, move back to the door and ring the bell. Like a shot, his bare feet hit the floor and pound out of the room, heading I hope to get his lazy parents up out of bed. An interior door slams, and far, far away I hear a voice below the a/c hum, a voice I can’t make out, saying what, I’m not sure, though it’s certainly about me. I look out at the street of white, green, blue and pink frame houses with green and red roofs and neat little cemetery-plot yards—some with overgrown tomato plants along the foundation walls, others with sweet-pea vines running up side lattices and porch poles. It could be a neighborhood in the Mississippi Delta, though the local cars at the curb are all snazzy van conversions and late-model Fords and Chevys (Negroes are among the most loyal advocates of “Buy American”).
A large elderly black woman, pushing an aluminum walker over which a yellow tea towel is draped, stumps out the screen door of the house directly across the street. When she sees me on the McLeods’ porch she stops and stares. This is Myrlene Beavers, who waved at me hospitably the first two times I cruised the block, back in 1986, when I was deciding to buy into her neighborhood. Her husband, Tom, has died within the year, and Myrlene—the Harrises tell me by letter—has gone into a decline.
“Who you lookin’ fo’?” Myrlene shouts out at me across the street.
“I’m just looking for Larry, Myrlene,” I shout back and wave amiably. She and Mr. Beavers were both diabetics, and Myrlene is losing the rest of her sight to milky cataracts. “It’s me, Myrlene,” I call out. “It’s Frank Bascombe.”
“Sho’ better not be,” Myrlene says, her steely hair all tufted out in crazy stalks. “I’m tellin’ you right now.” She’s wearing a brightorange Hawaiian-print muumuu, and her ankles are swollen and bound up in bandages. I am aware she may fall slap over dead if she gets excited.
“It’s all right, Myrlene,” I call out. “I’m just visiting Larry. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.”
“I’m callin’ the po-lice,” Mrs. Beavers says, and goes stumping around so she can get back through her front door, the walker scraping the porch boards ahead of her.
“No, don’t call the police,” I shout. I should jog across and let her see it’s me, that I’m not a burglar or a process server, only a rent collector—more or less the way Joe Markham said. Myrlene and I had several cordial conversations when the Harrises were still here—she from her porch, me going to and from my car. But something has happened now.
Though just as I’m about to hustle across and stop her from calling the cops, more bare feet come thundering toward the door, which suddenly quakes with locks and bolts being keyed and thrown, then opens to reveal Nelson in the crack, sandy-curly headed and light tan skin, a little mulatto Jackie Cooper. His face is below the nail latch on the screen, and staring down on him I feel like a giant. He says nothing, just peers up at me with his small, brown, skeptical eyes. He is six, bare-chested and wearing only a pair of purple-and-gold Lakers shorts. A draft of air-conditioned air slips past my face, which again is sweating. “Advantage, Miss Navratilova,” an English woman’s bland voice says, after which spectators applaud. (It’s a replay from yesterday.)
“Nelson, how you doin’?” I say enthusiastically. We have never spoken, and Nelson just stares up at me and blinks as if I were speaking Swahili. “Your folks home today?”
He takes a look over his shoulder, then back at me. “Nelson, why don’t you tell your folks Mr. Bascombe’s at the front door, okay? Tell ‘em I’m just here for the rent, not to murder anybody.” This may be the wrong brand of humor for Nelson.
I would like not to peek in farther. It’s, after all, my house, and I have a right to see in under extraordinary circumstances. But Nelson and Winnie may be home by themselves, and I wouldn’t want to be inside alone with them. I have the sensation from behind me of Myrlene Beavers yelling inside her house: an unidentified white man is trying to break into Larry McLeod’s private home in broad daylight. “Nelson,” I say, sweating through my shirt and feeling unexpectedly trapped, “why don’t you let me lean inside and call your Dad? Okay?” I offer him a big persuasive nod, then pull back the screen door, which surprisingly isn’t latched, and push my face into the cool, swimming air. “Larry,” I say fairly loudly into the dark room. “I’m just here for the rent.” Winnie, clutching her stuffed rabbit, seems asleep. The TV’s showing the deep greens of the All England Club.
Nelson looks straight up at me still (I’m leaning directly over him), then turns and goes and reseats himself on the couch by his sister, whose eyes open slowly, then close.
“Larry!” I call in again. “Are you in here?” Larry’s big pistol is absent from the table, which may mean, of course, he has it in his possession.
I hear what sounds like a drawer opening and shutting in a back room; then a door slams. What would a panel of eight blacks and four whites—a jury of my peers—say if because of wishing to collect my rent I turned out to be a pre-holiday homicide statistic? I’m sure I’d be found at fault.
I step back from the door and turn a wary look over at the Beavers’ house. Myrlene’s orange muumuu is swimming like a mirage behind the screen, where she’s watching me.
“It’s all right, Myrlene,” I say at nothing, which causes the muumuu specter to recede into the shadows.
“What’s the matter?”
I turn quickly, and Betty McLeod is behind the screen, which she is this instant latching. She looks out at me with an unwelcoming frown. She’s wearing a quilted pink housecoat and holding its scalloped collar closed with her skinny papery fingers.
“Nothing’s the
matter”
I say, shaking my head in a way that probably makes me look deranged. “I think Mrs. Beavers just called the cops on me. I’m just trying to collect the rent.” I’d like to look amused about it, but I’m not.
“Larry isn’t here. He’ll be home tonight, so you’ll have to come back.” Betty says this as though I’d been yelling in her face.
“Okay,” I say, and smile mirthlessly. “Just tell him I came by like every other month. And the rent’s due.”
“He’ll pay you,” she says in a sour voice.
“That’s great, then.” Far back in the house, I hear a toilet flushing, water slackly then more vigorously touring the new pipes I had installed less than a year ago and paid a pretty penny for. Larry has no doubt just waked up, had his long morning piss and is holing up in the bathroom until I’m dispensed with.
Betty McLeod blinks at me defiantly as we both listen to the water trickle. She is a sallow, pointy-faced little Grinnell grad, off the farm near Minnetonka, who married Larry while she was doing a social work M.A. at Columbia and he was working himself through trade school at some uptown community college. He’d been a Green Beret and was searching for a way out of the city hell (all this I learned from the Harrises). Betty’s Zion Lutheran parents naturally had a conniption when she and Larry came home their first Christmas with baby Nelson in a bassinet, though they’ve reportedly recovered. But since moving to Haddam, the McLeods have lived an increasingly reclusive life, with Betty staying inside all the time, Larry going off to his night job at the mobile-home factory and the kids being their only outward signs. It’s not so different from many people’s lives.
In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing. The McLeods are also, I’m afraid, the kind of family who could someday go paranoid and barricade themselves in their (my) house, issue confused manifestos, fire shots at the police and eventually torch everything, killing all within. (This, of course, is no reason to evict them.)
“Well,” I say, moving back to the top step as if to leave, “I hope everything’s A-okay around the house.” Betty looks at me reproachfully. Though just then her eyes leave mine, move to the side, and I turn around to see one of our new black-and-white police cruisers stopping behind my car. Two uniformed officers are inside. One—the passenger—is talking into a two-way radio.
“He’s still over there!” Myrlene Beavers bawls from inside her house, totally lost from sight. “That white man! Go on and git him. He’s breakin’ in.”
The policeman who was talking on the radio says something to his partner-driver that makes them both laugh, then he gets out without his hat on and begins to stroll up the walk.
The cop, of course, is an officer I’ve known since I arrived in Haddam—Sergeant Balducci, who is only answering disturbance calls today because of the holiday. He is from a large local family of Sicilian policemen, and he and I have often passed words on street corners or chatted reticently over coffee at the Coffee Spot, though we’ve actually never “met.” I have tried to talk him out of a half-dozen parking tickets (all unsuccessfully), and he once assisted me when I’d locked my keys in my car outside Town Liquors. He has also cited me for three moving violations, come into my house to investigate a burglary years ago when I was married, once stopped me for questioning and patted me down not long after my divorce, when I was given to long midnight rambles on my neighborhood streets, during which I often admonished myself in a loud, desperate voice. In all these dealings he has stayed as abstracted as a tax collector, though always officially polite. (Frankly, I’ve always thought of him as an asshole.)
Sergeant Balducci approaches almost to the bottom of the porch steps without having looked at either Betty McLeod or me. He hitches up on the heavyweight black belt containing all his police gear—Mace canister, radio, cuffs, a ring of keys, blackjack, his big service automatic. He is wearing his iron-creased blue and black HPD uniform with its various quasi-military markings, stripes and insignia, and either he has gained weight around his thick midsection or he’s wearing a flak vest under his shirt.
He looks up at me as if he’d never laid eyes on me before. He is five-ten with a heavy-browed, large-pored face as vacant as the moon, his hair cut in a regimental flattop.
“We got a problem out here, folks?” Sergeant Balducci says, setting one polished police boot on the bottom step.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I say, and for some reason am breathless, as if more’s wrong here than could ever meet the eye. I mean, of course, to look guilt-free. “Mrs. Beavers just got the wrong idea in her head.” I know she’s watching everything like an eagle, her mind apparently departed for elsewhere.
“Is that right?” Sergeant Balducci says and looks at Betty McLeod.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she says inertly, behind her screen.
“We have a reported break-in in progress at this address.” Sergeant Balducci’s voice is his official voice. “Do you live here, ma’am?” He says this to Betty.
Betty nods but adds nothing helpful.
“And did anybody break into your house or attempt to?”
“Not that I know of,” she says.
“What’s
your
business here?” Officer Balducci says to me, gazing around at the yard to see if he can notice anything out of the everyday—a broken pane of glass, a bloody ball-peen hammer, a gun with a silencer.