John raises his head and looks at his mother. He’s embarrassed for himself, for her.
“Look at me, boy.”
John looks at him.
“Don’t be no pussy. Don’t be no trick. Tell me you won’t.”
“All right.”
“Tell me. Say it. Come on, boy, let me hear it.”
“I won’t be a pussy.”
“Say it all.”
“I won’t be a trick.”
“You know what a trick is?”
“I guess so.”
“A trick is a phony and a sissy.”
John chews on his lower lip.
“No son of mine gonna sit down to piss or get on his knees for anyone.”
“Enough,” Nina says.
The face Aleem turns on her isn’t his, but instead the face of something that lies curled eternally at the bottom of the pit of the world, waiting for its hour to devour. Such fury, such malevolence, such thirst for power, such an appetite for violence have never before so keenly whetted his stare and clarified in his features. “You want to keep your teeth, then shut your damn mouth.” He means it. He will badly hurt her.
John issues a thin sound of pure torment. Although the pistol is still pointed at the floor, it swings back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock, as if counting seconds toward a moment never to be forgotten or redeemed.
To the boy, Aleem says, “You my own blood. I can’t but love my own blood. You know how much I love you?”
John continues to make that grievous noise.
“I love you so much, I won’t never let no Christer or no Oprah wannabe take the starch outta you, turn you into a pussy lawn boy or head-duckin’ wage slave. I’ll kill you ’fore I see you brought down from a full man to some pathetic crawlin’ thing that shames me ’fore the world. Thirteen is old enough to make your name, be where it’s at, makin’ the rules ’stead of livin’ by the man’s rules, do a bitch whenever you want one. I’m gettin’ a sweet place ready for you. I’m settin’ it up nice and tight. So you better get yourself ready.”
John says nothing.
“You get yourself ready, boy. You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You hear me?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“What is?”
“Getting out of this place.”
“It’s a shithole, ain’t it?”
“Boring,” says John. “Nothing exciting ever happens here.”
“And nothin’ never will,” Aleem assures him. “Not here.”
“I heard about you.”
“That’s all bullshit.”
“I don’t mean what she said. What I mean is, I heard about you on the street. You are somebody.”
“More than just somebody, son. You’ll see. Time comes, you’ll be somebody. You won’t be John Dozier no more. John Sutter. If you want, we’ll spin up a new first name, somethin’ true street, a name everyone’ll know and someday bow to.”
John turns a defiant look on his mother. She’s afraid that he’s going to overplay it. She prays that he won’t say anything further, not another word. Sensing deception, his father could decide to take him now.
Triumphant, Aleem turns to Nina, regarding her with the icy contempt he has for all women. “You known this day was comin’。 He was only ever yours till he was old enough to be mine.”
Her response is little more than a fierce whisper. “I hate you.”
“That’s good. Hate gives you somethin’ to hold on to, keeps you from fallin’ apart. Never was true love makes the world go round. Hate makes the world go round. Just remember which of us, you or me, is the better hater. Now I know the boy’s mind, I’ll pave his way into the set, get my crew used to the idea, be ready for him in a few days. Don’t even think you can take him and run. There’s nowhere I can’t find you. No law’s gonna help you. It’s the law lets me be what I am. There’s no real law no more. And after you been found, what’ll you do with your life? Won’t be no one wants to hire themselves a blind accountant.”
“He wouldn’t go with me, anyway,” she lies. “There’s too much of you in him. I’ve spent thirteen years trying to counsel it out of him, but it’s in his blood.”
Aleem leaves as he came, by the front door. He uses his key and then rattles the doorknob to be sure the deadbolt is engaged, making the point that he has locked them up in every sense of the word.
CONVENIENT RUINS
Alone in an agency sedan, Durand Calaphas maneuvers through flooded intersections, around tree branches broken off as if by the hand of some enraged giant and cast down on the pavement, contesting with incompetent motorists who are unaccustomed to driving in heavy wind-harried rain or who are compromised by whatever drugs have clouded their minds. He passes through suburbs with romantic names that once fired the American imagination with images of lush palm trees and sunshine and girls like those tanned beauties in the songs sung by the Beach Boys. All changed. Even the heaviest rains can’t wash away the shabbiness. Past boarded-up shops. Past a metastasized encampment of addicts who have cast themselves out of civilization and onto its crumbling ramparts.
Four miles short of his destination, he slows almost to a stop, intrigued by a long-haired and bearded derelict costumed in clothes as ragged and filthy as the tattered ravelings of an ancient mummy’s cerements. The man lies on his back, on the sidewalk, unaware of the storm or embracing it as his preferred way to bathe—or dead.
It is the last of these possibilities that induces Calaphas to pull to a stop at the curb for a closer look. These days, people who once died discreetly are found in parks and other public places, having succumbed to overdoses or violence. His father, Ivor, is a mortician who owns three successful funeral homes, above the largest of which the old man still lives with Durand’s mother. During his childhood and adolescence, Durand had much experience of cadavers, whom Ivor referred to as “our quiet and respected guests.” Durand has been fascinated—if not obsessed—with the dead since he was at least seven years old, when at a quarter to midnight on Halloween, alone with a corpse in the cold-holding chamber adjacent to the embalming room in the basement of the funeral home, an eighty-five-year-old man, felled earlier that evening by a stroke, spoke to him.
The vagrant on the sidewalk abruptly sits up and surveys the rain-swept day with bewilderment, as if his most recent memory is of going to bed in a suite at a four-star hotel. Calaphas at once loses interest in the man and pulls away into traffic.
The late—and apparently resurrected—Michael Mace lives in a town less corrupted than others in the orbit of the city. It’s one of those places referred to as a “bedroom community,” a term meant to define it as a bland, soulless snoozerville by those who think all action, spirit, and wisdom concentrates only in big cities. In fact, it is attractive, reasonably well preserved, with tree-lined streets, and it seems to be governed by those with the courage to defend their way of life against those who insist on change for the sake of change.
The sedan’s navigation system brings Calaphas to an address in mid block, where it looks as if a cognizant tornado with specific intentions touched down to catastrophic effect. However handsome Mace’s residence might have been, it’s now a waste mound of rubbled masonry and collapsed blackened structure, the contents reduced to wrack and ashes.