WHERE WE LIVE

I WENT BACK to The Code a couple of months after I’d been kicked out. I was still out of work and almost out of money. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the place was almost empty. I was thinking about robbing it, but I couldn’t see a waitress or bartender anywhere, although someone was laughing in the kitchen. I sat at the bar and dropped some of my last quarters into the electronic poker game there.

The only other person in The Code was Wyman. He was sitting at a table in the back corner, talking into his cell phone, but when he saw me he hung up and came over. He sat on the stool beside me, his eyes fixed on the television screen above the bar. There was a football game on, but I couldn’t tell who was playing. “I don’t have anything to sell you today,” Wyman said. “I’m all cleaned out, and my supplier’s gone out of town.” This was Wyman’s business: he sat at that table in the corner nine-to-five and sold drugs to the regulars and anyone else who could afford it. He used to work in the movie business as an extra or something, but I think he was making more money this way.

“That’s all right,” I said, “because I’m broke anyway.”

He thought that over for a moment. “Well, you want to make some money then?”

“I just came in here to have a drink and play this game,” I told him. But I’d already lost and I didn’t have any more quarters.

Wyman nodded and lit a cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter. He kept flicking it open and shut while he watched the football game. “I need some help with a break and enter,” he said.

I looked around the bar again, but I still couldn’t see the waitress. I thought about going behind the counter to pour myself a beer. “I didn’t know you were a burglar,” I said.

He shook his head. “It’s not like that. The stuff I’m taking is mine. But I have to break into the place to get it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s my supplier’s place.” He leaned closer, glancing around the empty bar. “She’s out of town, but all my stuff is there. I’m going to clean her out while she’s gone.”

“What’s in this for me?” I asked.

“I’ll give you two hundred dollars,” he said.

“You want me to help rip off a dealer for two hundred dollars?” I laughed. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to actually do anything,” he said. “I just want somebody to go with me.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Call it moral support.”

I looked at him closer. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his upper lip was covered in little beads of sweat. “Who exactly is your dealer, Wyman?” I asked.

“My ex-wife,” he said.

I stared at him. “You were married?”

WE WALKED DOWN the street to the coffee shop where Wyman had parked his minivan. Overhead, the clouds were racing past like the entire sky was some sort of time-lapse movie. There wasn’t even a breeze down here.

The minivan’s seats were covered with boxes and garbage bags full of clothing. Wyman had to pile them in the back to make room for me. “What’s all this?” I asked, sorting through some shirts that couldn’t ever have been in style.

“Jesse’s been cleaning the apartment,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s making me get rid of all the clothes other women bought me. My closet’s empty. It’s like I’m eighteen all over again.”

I looked at all the boxes and bags. “I’ve never had this many clothes in my life.”

“I just can’t bear to give them to Goodwill or someplace like that,” he went on. “I mean, can you imagine some fucking stranger wearing my clothes?”

We drove to a subdivision in the north end of the city, a quiet and clean place that looked as if it had been abandoned and sterilized at daybreak. All the lawns were yellow. Wyman parked in front of one of the houses, in an empty driveway with dead grass sticking up through the cracks. There wasn’t a single person in sight. I waited for Wyman to tell me what to do, but he didn’t say anything or get out. He just kept turning in his seat to look at the other houses surrounding us.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he finally said, turning off the minivan’s engine and lighting a cigarette.

“Me neither,” I said. “But this was your idea, remember?”

We sat there a moment longer, the clouds still racing past overhead, and then Wyman said, “All right then.” We got out and went to the back of the van. Wyman emptied out a couple of the boxes, tossing the clothes over the back seat, and handed them to me. “Here,” he said. “Take these to the side door.”

“How big of a stash does she have?” I asked, looking into the empty boxes. They were bleach boxes, at least two feet deep and reinforced with extra glue.

Wyman crawled into the back of the van for more boxes. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

I went around the side of the house, to an old wooden door with a stained glass window. A mat on the step actually had the word Welcome painted on it, but you had to look close to see it under the dirt. All the blinds were drawn in the windows of the neighbouring house, so I figured no one was home there. I put one of the boxes over my fist and was drawing it back to punch through the stained glass when Wyman walked around the corner.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I thought we were breaking into the place,” I said.

“Not like that,” he said. He dropped the boxes he was carrying and took a gold card out of his wallet. I stepped aside as he inserted it between the door and frame. There was a soft click, and then he pushed the door open.

I looked around one more time before entering the house. In one of the neighbour’s windows, a black-and-white cat had crawled in between the blinds and the glass. It sat on the windowsill, watching us with unblinking blue eyes. We went inside.

We were in a kitchen that was all wooden counters and shiny steel pots hanging from the walls. A skylight ran its entire length, giving the room a white glow. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere.

“Looks expensive,” I said.

“Take off your shoes,” he said, bending down to untie his own. “I don’t want to be leaving dirt and shit all over the place. That’s how they always track people down in the cop shows.”

I kicked off my shoes. “What about hair fibers and that sort of thing?” I asked.

“They only do that for murders. As long as we don’t kill anyone, we’ll be fine.”

I followed Wyman down the hall, into the living room. There was an Ikea couch and chair, a big-screen Sony television, a Toshiba stereo system, and some wooden bookshelves holding nothing but videotapes and CDs. The walls were covered with framed photographs, but when I looked closer, I saw the photos were the ones that had come with the frames.

“Where is she anyway?” I asked.

“Who?” Wyman said. He put the empty boxes on top of the Sony and started looking through the bookshelves.

“Your ex-wife.”

“She’s not here,” he said. He began pulling videotapes off a bookshelf and dropping them into the boxes.

“I can see that,” I said. I went over and looked at the tapes he was collecting. They bore handwritten labels such as Wedding Day and Disney World. “I thought we were here to steal some drugs,” I said.

“You go right ahead,” he said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

I wasn’t really sure where to look first, so I went upstairs. There were only three rooms up here: two bedrooms and a bathroom smelling faintly of bleach. I went through all the cupboards in the bathroom, but all I found was some toilet paper and tampons. The room was so clean I wasn’t sure if it had ever been used.

The smaller bedroom was completely empty, nothing but vacuum cleaner marks on the carpet. I tried the master bedroom next. It was sparsely furnished, just a carefully made futon bed, a black dresser and two bedside tables holding chrome lamps with white shades. The walls were completely bare, something I’d never seen in a bedroom before. There were only a half-dozen dresses hanging in the closet, so I went through the dresser drawers. At first I was neat, gently pushing the clothes aside to look underneath them, and then I remembered this was a robbery. I dumped all the drawers out on the bed. I didn’t find any drugs but I did find three hundred-dollar bills tucked inside a yellow sweater. I put them in my pocket and went back downstairs.

Wyman was sitting on the couch, pulling the insides out of a video tape. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I was going to record over them,” he said, “but there’s too many. We’d be here all day.”

“I thought you were stealing them,” I said, indicating the tapes in the boxes.

“Just the ones I’m in,” he said.

I went into the kitchen and tossed the contents of the cupboards onto the floor, but I couldn’t find drugs anywhere. I was thirsty by the time I was done, so I grabbed a Heineken from the fridge and wandered back into the living room. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she knew you were coming or something.”

Wyman was still ripping the insides out of the videos. He was covered in ribbons of the stuff now, and he’d somehow managed to cut one of his fingers, so little drops of blood were dropping onto the carpet.

I didn’t know what to do, so I finished the beer in a couple of long swallows, then took the boxes he’d filled and went outside. There was a bit of a wind now, but other than that everything was the same. The cat was still in the window, watching. The day seemed like it would never end. I sat in the passenger seat of the van and put the boxes at my feet, then waited. I didn’t want to go back into the house. It took Wyman nearly an hour to come out with the rest of the boxes. He opened the back of the van and shoved them in, tossing the loose clothes out on the lawn to make room.

When Wyman got back in, I asked him, “When do I get my money?”

He just looked at me for a moment, and then he started the minivan. We drove away from there slowly, the wind pushing his old clothes across the dried-out lawn behind us.

WHEN WE GOT TO Wyman’s apartment, his girlfriend, Jesse, was stretched out on their leather couch, watching Letterman on the television. She was wearing a translucent silk nightgown and drinking something from a blue martini glass. The television was a big-screen Sony just like the one in Wyman’s ex-wife’s house. I decided not to say anything about that.

“What are you doing home already?” Jesse asked when we walked in, but Wyman didn’t answer her. Instead, he walked through the living room and down the hall, disappearing into one of the bedrooms.

I put my box down in the entranceway and watched the television for a moment. “I didn’t know Letterman was on in the afternoon,” I said.

“It’s a tape,” Jesse said. She stood up and came over to look in my box. This close to her, I could see the little flowers she’d painted on her toenails and the Superman tattoo on her ankle. I’d asked her about the tattoo once, when we were dancing together at a warehouse party, but all she told me was that it had cost her an acting gig in a beer commercial. Wyman later told me she’d never auditioned for any beer commercial.

“What is this?” she asked, pulling out a tape with the label Honeymoon.

“I don’t know,” I said, but she wasn’t listening to me now.

“No,” she said. “These are not coming in here. Not where we live.” She tossed the tape out onto the front walk and kicked the box after it. “You hear me, Wyman?” she called down the hall.

When he didn’t come out of the bedroom, she asked me, “How could you let him do this?”

“I tried to stop him,” I said in a low voice, “but I think there’s something wrong with him.”

“Jesus, there’s no getting anything past you, is there?” she said. She started to laugh.

Wyman still hadn’t come out of the bedroom. Outside, the wind had picked up, and now it looked like the clouds were falling right out of the sky on top of us.

“Wyman said he was going to give me some money,” I told Jesse.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She pushed me out onto the step and kept repeating the word for the entire time it took her to close the door and lock it. “No no no no no no no no no no.”

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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