For more than a month they have lived here. A month is the longest they have ever gone before getting caught—the owners walking in on them watching television, taking a shower, knifing mustard across bread. Then they run-they have learned to be fast—and eventually find another house.
They look for a subdivision with brickwork driveways and three-car gaiages, with columns flanking the front doors and maple saplings struggling to grow in the front yards. They find a four- or five-stoiy house with no dog toys or playground equipment in its backyard. They discover an unlocked window or a sliding glass door. In a guest room in the fai comer of the walkout basement, they drop their backpacks. They wait.
The first few days, they spend a lot of time listening to the footsteps thumping overhead, the muttered conversations overheard through the heating ducts and thinly insulated walls. They take note of the owners’ patterns. If there are no children and no pets, that usually means the couple spends their days, sometimes their nights, working, these doctors and lawyers and engineers. What little time they do spend at home, they spend in their room.
After the shower hisses, the door slams, the Lexus growls to life, the garage door rumbles closed, the house is empty and will typically remain so until evening comes.
So the two of them—the boy and the girl, brother and sister, homeless for more than two years after mnning away several times over from foster care—they steal the clothes from the edges of the closet, the backs of drawers. They pawn the jewelry and cameras and DVDs. They slip money—just a few bills, not enough for anyone to notice unless
they were really looking—from wallets and purses. They walk on the sides of their feet so that they don’t leave tracks in the white carpet. They hide from the maid when she comes on Mondays and Thursdays. But mostly they just hang out, watch television, raid the fridge for treats.
One morning, they are in a master bedroom with a vaulted ceiling, a four-poster king-size bed, and two walk-in closets, each of them biggei than any bedroom they’ve ever called their own. An archway leads into the bathroom, where the toilet rises up on a pedestal, where the counters are marble and the shower is surrounded by glass bricks and the tub is a deep cauldron with two dozen jets.
She, the sister, rummages through the closet and climbs into a suit seven sizes too big, while he, the brother, pulls on a black cocktail diess that won’t zip up his broad back. A flat screen television hangs on the wall. They punch through the channels, finally settling on VH1— a Best of the 80s countdown—and leap from one side of the bed to the other, playing air guitar, yowling along with the big hair bands.
They are laughing, hitting each other with pillows, when the screen goes dark, when the music falls away. They stand in a mess of sheets, breathing heavily A man is watching them. His face is a severe shade of red. He has small eyes and a small, pinched mouth. He is as tall as a doorway. They recognize him from the photo albums shelved in the living room, from the wedding photo hanging in the hallway.
The brother and sister look at each other— neither of them knowing what to do. He is blocking the door. And the nearest window drops twenty feet into a thorny hedge, a broken leg.
“Who are you,” the man says, not yelling, not yet, “and what are you doing in my house?”
In another stoiy, they might have told him their names. They might have told him about their father running off, their mother drinking heavily—the social workers with their tired eyes and sleepy-sounding voices, the cat piss-stinking foster homes decorated with crosses and strangely colored paintings of Jesus petting sheep. And the man might have listened. His eyes might have softened. His posture might have relaxed. He might have even smiled briefly when they told him about the week they spent living in a Super Wal-Mart.
And when they finally said, “We’re sorry. We’ll leave now,” he would have yelled, “No!” his amis outstretched to block their way. “No,” he would say, his voice softer this time. “Stay. Please.” And the brother and
sister would shrug at each other when he motioned them downstairs, when he led them to the kitchen, where they would make sandwiches and pour tall glasses of milk and eat together in the breakfast nook that overlooked the green expanse of lawn that ran into a pond with a concrete swan vomiting an arc of green water in the middle of it.
When they were finished eating their sandwiches, when they licked their lips and settled back in their chairs, he would look out the window and quietly ask them if they would like to stay. They would say, no, they couldn’t, they had to move on, and he would say, stay, really, I mean it—and they would know that he meant it, that he wasn’t going to trick them and call the police, that maybe the house felt a little too big for him, that maybe he needed them as much as they needed him, and they would all smile and finish their glasses of milk.
But that is another stoiy
4.
Mr. Peterson has taken a job in Seattle with a software company. As part of the hiring bonus, if the house doesn’t sell within the next two
months, the company will offer him x amount of money and assume the title.
The Petersons tiy. Some of the neighbors will admit to that—that they do tiy. They install new countertops, new carpeting, new sinks and faucets. They brush paint on the walls. They remove all of their family photos and hide all of their toys so that the house could belong to anyone, so that the couples who follow high-heeled, lipsticked realtors through the rooms, up and down the stairs, their fingers lingering on the railings and doorknobs, can imagine the house as their own.
They list the home for $599,000—a fair price, eveiyone agrees. A price that will reflect well on the neighborhood. But the months pass without an offer. And the Peterson’s garage fills steadily with cardboard boxes sealed with tape. And then one day the Beldns trucks pull up to the curb and the movers—the sweating, thick-waisted men with mustaches—leap out to haul away all of the furniture and books and wedding china. They leave the house vacant of everything except the window treatments, the dimples the couches crushed into the carpet.
Now the original realtor sign comes down and another one goes up listing the house at $399,000. The neighborhood, red-faced and narroweyed, hates the Petersons for this. Over the past few years they have
watched property values climb—doubling, tripling, and they have counted on that equity—they believe in their houses as investments more than as places to live. So they scowl at the empty house as if it is to blame. They call the realtor—they call the Petersons—to express their outrage. They encourage their dogs—their yellow labs and golden retrievers and Siberian huskies—to shit in the front yard. Someone spray-paints fuck you in black swirling letters across the gaiage dooi, but the next day it is painted over. Someone rips the realty sign from the front yard and shoves it into a nearby stbrm drain, but the next day it is up again—and within a week it is topped by a-red banner that reads SALE PENDING.
In this neighborhood, a subdivision called Swan Ridge, no one can paint their houses anything but earth tones. Nor can they plant vegetables or store play equipment in their front yards. They cannot park RVs and boats in their driveways for more than twenty-four hours. And when you live in a neighborhood like this, there are certain expectations of you. There are rules you must abide by, and now the rules have been broken.
So they wait until it is night. The streetlamps buzz to life. The garage doors rumble open. People collect red three-gallon jugs of gasoline and carry them sloshingly down the block and gather in the driveway of the house, the empty house. There are twenty people altogether, mostly members of the neighborhood association. Others watch from their front porches. The moon is out and its reflection glows in the living room window like a spectral eye. The siding is vinyl and the porchboards are made of recycled plastic and nobody knows how well these will bum. They want inside—they want the house to bum from the belly up.
They try to kick open the front door, but it is deadbolted and no one can make it splinter inward like the cop shows on TV. So they circle the house and tiy the windows and find one of them unlocked and rip off the screen and boost a middle-aged woman named Susan Pearl through it so that she can unlock the front door and allow them to rush inside, to splash gasoline along the walls, to soak pools of it into the carpet, waterfall it down the stairs. Their eyes tear over. The fumes make them dizzy. They cough and laugh at once.
They make a trail of gasoline—gasoline they would have otherwise used to power their riding lawnmowers across lawns of Kentucky blue grass—they make a trail of gasoline down the porch, along the brickwork path, to the driveway, where Susan sparks her pink rhinestone
Zippo and lights a menthol cigarette and takes a deep drag off it and flicks it in a sparking arc.
Her lipstick has made a red collar around the filter that matches the led ember at its tip. It spins through the air and bounces off the cement and comes to a stop in a pool of gas that ignites with a huff. A tongue of blue and orange flame licks its way speedily toward the house.
It isn’t long before the windows explode and the flames rise through them and the siding around them blackens and buckles and melts and runs like tears. Sparks swirl up into the night, lost among the stars. The roof vanishes in a snapping crown of flame. The street appears sunlit. The heat is tremendous. Everyone staggers out of the driveway, into the street, with shadows playing across their faces, making them appear as strangers to each other.
There is a knock at the door. At first Brent doesn’t hear it because of the TV—the game show that doesn’t require talent, only luck, the contestants choosing among the fifty beautiful women who stand on stage holding silver briefcases full of money. Brent is yelling when he first hear s the knock, throwing up his arms and condemning the greed of the man who could have gone home with 100,000 grand but decided to keep playing. The idiocy,” Brent says. “The fucking idiocy people are capable of.” And then the knock.
Bient punches the mute button and rises from the couch to open the door, wondering vaguely who it might be, maybe the Jehovah’s witnesses he saw prowling the neighborhood earlier? Or maybe Papa Johns—had he ordered a pizza? He had, hadn’t he? It is so hard to remember anything anymore, eveiy day bleeding into the next, a weekday the same as a weekend, night no different than day, ever since he lost his job.
Under the yellow cone thrown by his porch light stand two men. They wear black boots and black jeans and black T-shirts. Their hair is buzzed down to their scalps like a wire brush. Their shoulders are rounded with muscle. Behind them stands a cop—black windbreaker with a yellow star on the breast. A woman, he realizes, only when she speaks, when she hands him a piece of paper, a repossession notice, she explains.
He looks at the paper, but doesn’t really read it. The men shoulder their way past Brent, while the woman tells him they are here to re
trieve the 55-inch HD plasma he bought on an installment plan at Best Buy. He was $1,000 into his $3,000 payment plan when he lost his job as a financial consultant at Wells Fargo. He has not, as he advised so many others to do, nested away his money. For the first three months he lived off his severance pay. He sent out queries for jobs that did not exist. He has not applied for unemployment. He has not asked his parents for help, has not even told them about losing his job. He has not written a check in six months, doesn’t answer the phone when the creditors call, will not listen to the messages'that go from stem to snarling.
The woman remains on the porch as the men approach Brent s television, which rests on a two-tiered glass console with black metal legs. One of them hits the power button and shoves the remote in his pocket. Then they rip the wires from the wall and wrap them around their fists like tangles of hair. They station themselves at either side of the television and say, “Ready?”—and lift it without any trouble. It ought to weigh more, Brent thinks, considering how much it cost. He is folding the repossession paper in half and then in half again, and then again, making a square he can fit in his pocket. He does not feel much of anything. These past few days he has spent mostly on the couch, his mind empty except for simple needs, the next diet soda he will drink, the next program he will watch.
Their invasion of his condo does not bother him, not particularly, even though they act like the television is theirs, like their employer is a parent and they are its vengeful children. He is too tired to care. It isn’t until one of the men bumps into him and says, “Move, loser,” that something sparks inside him, something electric, as he remembers the weight of his manager’s hand on his shoulder—the sad smiles of his co-workers when, in a daze, he packed up his desk—the Wal-Mart bag he found on his front porch the next day, big-bellied with the things he left behind, his Trailblazers coffee mug, his calculator from college, the M. C. Escher calendar.
On the coffee table sits a half-empty bottle of Budweiser. The glass is warm in his hand when he picks it up. The men are not looking at him. They are looking at the open doorway, taking baby steps toward it, taking care not to trip over a magazine rack, to knock against the edge of the coffee table. And the cop is already gone, walking toward the black sedan parked in the street.
Brent doesn’t say anything when he approaches the men, doesn’t scream a wild animal scream. He simply snaps his arm—the bottle
spiraling through the air, the beer twisting and fizzing from it—into the gray and watchful eye of the television.