Golden States (8 page)

After that, there were no more calls. The evening passed. Mom and Janet watched television, the smoke from their cigarettes drifting along the ceiling. Lizzie finished her homework in fifteen minutes, watched “The Muppets” with Mom and Janet, then danced to her Michael Jackson album until Mom made her go to bed. David passed nervously from his room to the kitchen to the living room and back again. He watched bits of television on the wing. Fonzie was adopting a juvenile delinquent. David went back up to his room and when he came down again the stupid blonde on “Three’s Company” had a date with her boss. David liked TV and welcomed even theworst shows with the same kind of grudging affection he’d have shown to feeble-minded, slightly embarrassing aunts and uncles.

Before “Three’s Company” was over, he wandered back up to his room. He stood at the window, with the silent pool stretched out beneath him. Along the fence Mom’s row of white petunias blackened the bushes behind them the way flames deepened darkness. He listened for the sound of coyotes, but they weren’t out yet. Far away a car horn bleated. As David stared through the windowpane he began to think someone was out there, watching him. He couldn’t fix on any one point. But somewhere, in the thick blackness of the junipers or behind the tree, an intelligence sat outside looking in as surely as David was inside looking out. He peered another minute into the stillness, then went downstairs to the tune of a 7-Up commercial tinkling from the living room. He patrolled the kitchen and the dining room, checking to make sure the windows were locked. He checked the front door too. The living room was trickier. He had to check the window there without arousing suspicion.

“What’s into you tonight?” Mom asked when he came and stood behind the sofa. “You haven’t stayed in one place more than two minutes all evening.”

Sometimes it annoyed him that she kept such close track of his doings. She made him smaller by noticing him all the time. The irritation caught in his throat like a lump of dough. “I’m okay,” he told her.

“There’s something in the air tonight,” Janet said. She was sitting compactly, with her knees hunched up to her chin. “I feel it too. Maybe it’s the full moon.”

“The moon was full two weeks ago,” Mom said. “There can’t be more than a sliver tonight.”

David went to the living-room window and, after a moment’s hesitation, parted the drapes. There was no leering face pressed to the glass.

“What are you up to now?” Mom said.

“I’m looking for the moon,” he told her. The more she irritated him, the more important it seemed that the house be made fast against whatever lurked outside. He checked the latch, and found it fastened.

“If I’d known kids were going to be this jumpy,” Mom said, “I’d have gotten goldfish instead.”

The house wound down for the night. Lizzie was already in bed, and David put on his pajamas and pretended to go to sleep. Mom came upstairs after the news. She gave a dry, papery sigh at the top step, and her footsteps, measured but light, one foot falling a little harder than the other, diminished down toward her room. Janet stayed in the living room with the television, watching Johnny Carson. David could hear the heightened rhythm of laughter and applause. He wondered if she would go swimming. Every now and then he got up and walked to the window in his pajamas. The yard was unchanged. The two redwood lawn chairs sat facing the house. A line of yellow light rimmed his door and he went and stood with his ear to the wood. He could make out a man’s voice on television. The voice droned, paused, exclaimed; for a moment it sounded like a live man downstairs. David cracked his door open. Applause drifted up the stairwell, and a man hollered, remotely, “Thank you, thank you, I love you all.”

He went back to bed and lay on top of the blanket, with his legs straight out and his arms at his sides, palms up, as if to cup sound. The television rattled on. His mind dulled with the effort of listening and after a while he thought thickly that his body had risen a fraction of an inch off the bed. His thoughts were a heavy line he followed up, up into brightness. He saw, vividly, a gypsy pedaling a bicycle on a red dirt road. Then he was asleep.

He woke later, with a start, surprised at having slept. Thelight was gone from around his door. He jumped out of bed and ran to the window, to see if Janet was swimming. He found the pool smooth and empty. Sleep clung to him, and everything was strange. The world had moved an inch or two off center, so that all its qualities were usual but wrong—nearly perfect imitations of themselves. The trees’s splayed roots hugged the edge of the coping like sleeping snakes. The moon, which had risen and was no more than a sliver, just as Mom predicted, skated on the water beside the brighter, aspirin-colored sphere of the streetlight. David watched the scene in dumb wonderment. This was his yard.

He felt more than saw something in the shadows. His attention crept toward the far corner, by the fence, where a small triangular thicket of oleander and birds of paradise bloomed. Something there. He thought first of coyotes. He searched for the spark of an eye or a tooth. For an instant the garden was ordinary, and then his eyes shifted focus and he saw a man standing in the bushes. The man was no more than a shape, shoulders and head. He fell out of focus, turned into oleander with branches that suggested a man, and when he came back into focus there was no doubt. A man, standing outside, watching the house.

David paused, mesmerized. It was a man, it wasn’t, it was. He drew closer to the glass, so close his breathing made a blotch of fog. The man moved. David was out of his own room, down the hall and through Mom’s door in an instant.

The sound of Mom’s breathing filled her room. It
was
the room. David crossed the black floor through the breathing darkness to her shape under the blankets, and jostled her shoulder. She coughed, and when she stirred she sent up a sweet-sour, sleeping smell.

“What?” she said. “What is it?” Her eyes shone in the darkness and she was suddenly terrifying, an undersea creature wrongfully disturbed. David lost his voice.

“Urn—” was all he could manage.

“What is it, honey? Are you sick?”

“There’s a
man
outside,” he said, and his voice squeaked on the word
man.
“A man,” he repeated.

Mom sat up and said, “Where?” All the sleep had gone out of her voice.

He’s standing out by the pool,” David said.

“Is he trying to get in the house?” Mom asked.

“I don’t
know.
” His voice cracked again.

“Where were you when you saw him?” Mom’s voice had descended into the throaty, rolling calm it took on during catastrophes. When Dad pushed David down the stairs, she had picked him up and said in the deep, calm voice, “Take us to the hospital quick,” as if it was something they did every day.

“In my room,” David said. His own voice out of control. “He was
standing
out there
looking
at me.”

“Are you sure?” Mom said.

“
Yes.
”

“Okay. Let’s call the police.”

She got out of bed in her nightgown and followed David to the door. He controlled an impulse to make her go first into the hall. When he stepped out, the stairwell lay ahead of him like a pit, with the phone on the other side. He made it past the stairs to the telephone table, taking speedy little steps, urged on by the cloud of Mom’s warmth and odor. He picked up the receiver and handed it to her. She dialed one digit.

“Operator? The Rosemead police, please.” She paused. “Emergency,” she said, and laid a hand on David’s shoulder to counterbalance the word.

“Hello? This is Beverly Stark at one oh one Buena Vista. We have a prowler.”

David was impressed with her competence. She knew just what to say to the police. He liked the word
prowler
too—a good shrinking word, like a dog’s name.

“Outside,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. Fine. Thank you, sergeant.”

She replaced the receiver. Now they were alone again, back in danger. He wondered if he heard a stealthy scraping from below. He thought of the gun in Mom’s nightstand.

“Just stand right here,” she said to him in a hushed voice. “We won’t wake up the others. We’ll just wait for the police to get here, okay?”

“Okay,” David whispered. He ached to say, “Let’s get the gun,” but couldn’t. The gun was hidden away, unacknowledged; it did not exist and would not exist unless Mom herself summoned it up. She held his shoulders, and he slung his arms loosely around her bony hips. This reminded him of another time, shimmering at the edge of memory, when he and Mom had hidden in the dark together, waiting for help.

The door to Janet’s bedroom opened, and she stood in the black doorway, her legs invisible beneath her white nightgown. She floated like a ghost.

“What’s going on?” she asked in a whisper.

Mom motioned her over, and she came. “David saw somebody out in back,” Mom said in her collected voice. “The police are coming.”

“Oh,” Janet said. She crossed her arms over her chest and Mom lifted one hand off David’s shoulders to touch her shoulder, too.

“Do you think we should wake up Lizzie?” Janet whispered.

“Lord no,” Mom said. “She’d go after him with a baseball bat.”

Janet laughed, a thin whistling laugh that forced itself through her nostrils. She started to speak, when the pulsing red light of a police cruiser bled suddenly through Mom’s open bedroom door.

“Saved,” Janet said. Before Mom or David could move she started down the stairs. David followed her, and Mom came right behind.

David was right behind her when Janet opened the front door and stepped into the dazzling beam of a flashlight. Thelight delineated her body like an x-ray. It held her pinned at the threshold, and flicked off. Her nightgown turned solid again.

“Evening,” a gravelly man’s voice said. “You report a prowler?”

David and Mom squeezed themselves in on either side of Janet in the doorway. A patrolman stood on the front stoop. He had a square, handsome face in which only the mouth moved.

“I guess we did,” Janet said.

“I reported the prowler,” Mom said, working her way in front of Janet, taking charge. “I’m Beverly Stark.” David noticed, as he sometimes did, her habit of announcing her name to people as if she expected them to have heard of her.

“My partner’s in the back,” the patrolman said. Behind his broad body the revolving light of a cruiser stained the front lawn pink and gray and pink again.

“Thank you for coming out,” Mom said. She covered herself with her arms. She was so tiny before the uhiform. David stepped around and stood between Mom and the patrolman.

“I was the one that saw him,” he said.

“Tell me what you saw, please,” the policeman said.

David glanced nervously back at Mom, who nodded. “I saw a man by the pool,” he said. “Over in the bushes by the fence.” In a fit of embarrassment, he spoke these sentences to the policeman’s square, black shoes.

“What was he doing?” the policeman asked.

“He was just standing in the bushes,” David said. “Looking at me.”

“Looking at you?” the policeman said. “How could you tell in the dark if he was looking at you?” The policeman wore a wristwatch big as a silver dollar. The black hairs of his wrist curled up over the metal band.

“Well, I couldn’t, really,” David said. “But he was standing there
looking. ”

“Was he trying to get in the house?”

“Yes, ”
David said, and his voice cracked.

“Was he?” Mom asked. “Are you sure, David?”

“No,” David said. “I don’t know.” He couldn’t imagine how he had worked himself over into the wrong.

The partner returned from the back, walking behind the puddle of light his flashlight cast on the ground. “Negative,” he said. “Nobody’s there.” He was younger than the other, but shared his wide, well-cut face. They might have been brothers.

“Looks like a false alarm,” the first one said. “Nobody saw him but the boy here.”

“It’s not a false alarm just because nobody’s standing back there with an
ax,
for God’s sake,” Janet said. “If David says he saw somebody, he saw somebody.”

“Right,” the partner said. “Anyhow, there’s no one on the premises now.”

“Did you check the windows?” Janet asked with irritation. “The windows haven’t been tampered with,” the partner said. “If you like, we’ll come in and check the house.”

“Please,” Mom said. “We’d all sleep better.”

The three of them hung back to let the police enter. The police brought with them into the house their smell of aftershave, fried food, and leather. They split up, running the beams of their flashlights all over the dark rooms. David followed the partner, who had not been so skeptical about his story. The partner walked briskly through the living room and the kitchen, shining his light here and there, surprising everything with light. There was the milky green glass of the television, there the shiny leaves and grotesque shadow of the rubber plant in its brown plastic pot. In these slashes of light the house looked haunted, a mute witness to murders.

After the police had gone through with their flashlights they turned on the lamps and checked again, upstairs and down, looking into every closet. They opened the door to Lizzie’sroom. She didn’t wake up. David wondered with a chill how often they found somebody hiding in closets, or in little girls’ rooms.

When they finished their circuit they met back at the front door. “Looks like everything’s all right,” the first one said. David stood hating him. He hoped to find a big black man in the hall closet as soon as the police were gone. Then he crossed his fingers and glanced at the ceiling, to cancel the wish.

“Thank you for checking,” Mom said.

“No trouble,” the man said, looking at David as if it had actually been a lot of trouble. “Part of our job.”

Janet squeezed the back of David’s neck, reassuringly. “Keep it safe for democracy, men,” she said.

“We get a call we answer the call, miss,” the partner said. “We don’t pick and choose. You never know when people are really in trouble.”