Birds of Bad Omen

Tag: family

  • The Invisible House

    I woke up to a low metallic buzz that was interrupted every few seconds by words that I couldn’t make out.

    It was just after 5 a.m. on Valentine’s Day.

    Our two dogs, who sleep on rugs in our bedroom, were already up, yelping and pawing at the patio door. I imagined three or four men in our backyard preparing to invade the house, so contemptuous of its occupants that they didn’t bother to whisper.

    I grabbed a baseball bat that I kept in a corner in the living room in preparation for this catastrophe. For a long time I’d believed it was inevitable that men would break into our house, humiliate us, torture us and then kill us. That fear had its roots in a scene in a police procedural I’d watched years and years ago with Cristina in which a serial killer played by Tim Curry murdered the husband, raped the wife, and then murdered her, all in their bedroom.

    I slowly opened the patio door and then stood at the top of the steps. The dogs bolted for opposite corners of the yard and then raced to the middle. Clearly nobody was in the backyard.

    I noticed a halo of white light just over the top of the privacy fence, the section closest to the side street. Then another burst of words, but this time I could make them out: “Come out with your hands up.”

    I was surprised that police actually said that. Did they say it because, when they were growing up, that’s what cops on TV shows said? Or did a TV writer decades ago hear a cop say it and then used the phrase in a script and it caught on?

    I called the dogs back in, returned the bat to its corner, and went to the side street where I now realized a drama involving the police, a bullhorn, searchlights and at least one criminal was playing out.

    A black Dodge Charger was parked at a slant in the middle of the street. Its headlights were pointed at a gold F-250 truck that was half in a yard, half on the street. I couldn’t see the person in the truck’s cab. A tall man with reddish-brown hair and a vest with “HSI” on the back stood to the right of the car facing the pickup, which was maybe a hundred feet away. Another car blocked the street on the other side of the truck.

    Homeland Security Investigations. The person in the truck was probably undocumented.

    I remembered seeing the gold truck in the driveway of the house. Or maybe not. I didn’t know if I was editing a memory, flat-out making one up, or remembering accurately. Which made it the same muddle as many of my memories.

    The two-story house was built with tan brick and was bigger than the others on the block. It ate up more of the lot and sat closer to the street, like it wanted to show the other houses how to be a house. A wrought-iron balcony faced the street. An old couple used to live there with their grandchildren, one of whom – a girl who was 13 or 14 – had practiced pirouettes on the balcony. The couple sold the property years ago, and I realized I’d stopped seeing the house. It displayed few signs of life. I never saw anybody doing anything on the balcony, and the blinds were always closed. When its new owners had completed the task of making the property anonymous, maybe they’d turned it into a stash house for illegal immigrants. Or maybe drugs, cash, and gun. Or maybe all of that.

    It seemed unlikely that it was just an immigrant family living there, unlucky enough to come to the attention of Homeland Security.

    I went back inside to tell Cristina what I’d seen. The HSI agent hadn’t noticed me.

    A helicopter arrived and monotonously beat the air over the street for the next few minutes.   

    From the bedroom we heard a loud thud, or maybe it was a muffled explosion. We stopped talking so we could hear what came next, but we didn’t hear anything else.

    Driving to work a few hours later, I saw the front door had been knocked out. Two men wearing HSI vests and a woman in a plaid shirt with no vest were chatting on lawn chairs in the driveway.

    By the time I got home from work, they’d replaced the door with a sheet of plywood and installed a Ring security camera in the middle of it. The F-250, with a big dent in the passenger side door, sat in the driveway. It was gone within a few days.

    The plywood was still standing in for a door a few months later.

    Most mornings when I walked the dogs past the house before sunrise, I looked at the Ring camera’s cool white-blue glow and wondered how distinguishable I was on the recording and who was watching me and if the person was making notes about me. Amazon packages of all sizes crowded the front porch most days. A black Subaru BRZ was parked in the short driveway, but I never saw its owner – or anybody for that matter.

    The garage door was usually halfway open, with an avalanche of junk spilling onto the drive. One or two small electric lamps illuminated sections of the piles. Once I noticed a naked Ken doll in the lamp light, wide-eyed like he’d been caught trying to escape.

    The downstairs blinds were drawn and the upstairs windows were covered with dingy blankets. Some mornings one of the blankets was pulled aside a little and I could see into the room, which was large and had a high ceiling. The yellowish walls, at least the parts I could see, were bare and streaked with grime.

    The house always looked like it was being cleared out and prepared for its next phase, but the task was never completed. Every morning, something about the house’s appearance was different. Storm windows were gone one morning and back the next. A pile of clothes was on the ground under an open window one morning and gone the next.

    I thought maybe the house wouldn’t settle until I stopped paying attention to it, and that if I did that, it would melt back into the neighborhood, and we’d stop seeing it. And if that happened, hooded, shackled people would be delivered there in the middle of the night, tortured and some of them murdered in rooms that had been sound-proofed and covered in plastic sheeting. The neighborhood would choke on their ghosts.

    But then I started wondering why I thought that. I realized I was mixing up books I’d read, like 1984, Darkness at Noon, and The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, with movies and television shows about psychopaths and drug cartels. The idea that the house might have a clean room for murder came to me directly from Dexter, the television series about a fastidious serial killer who kills other serial killers.

    I got confused and gradually stopped paying attention to the house. And it started behaving normally — the storm windows stayed put and the piles of junks disappeared. It melted back into the neighborhood.

    It had a regular front door, painted dark gray.

    One morning some months after the house’s conversion, as I was bagging up dog shit in its front yard, I found a human ear in the grass, just like in Blue Velvet.

  • Settling Up

    He had a hard time with debt. It started when he was four or five and realized that he was accruing debts he could never repay. He believed his parents would hold the notes for the rest of his life. (He could imagine himself dying but not his parents.) Just tracking all the money they spent on his food, clothing, school supplies, sports equipment and fees, zoo admission, movie tickets, and the rest of it would’ve been impossible. He hated the control Dirk and Alice exerted over his life because he was poor and dependent. They told him when to go to bed and when to clean his room, and what could he do? He owed them. He came to understand that his parents schemed to make him subservient and keep him that way. It was a system. As he learned more about slavery and other economic injustices, he saw his parents as worse than the worst pawn shop owners and company town bosses.

    Despite the futility of his situation, he swore to them that he’d someday settle the debt. Dirk and Alice told him not to be crazy, that he didn’t owe them a thing, not a cent. They said that if it helped him, he could think of their expenditures as investments. He would take the enrichment they’d given him into adulthood, become a responsible man with a good job, and eventually take care of them in their old age. At other times, they said he could think about what they spent on him as charitable contributions, like the annually renewing contributions they gave to the public radio station. They also pointed out that there were tax advantages to having him as their child. But he wasn’t stupid, far from it. He saw right away that the investment thing was nothing more than a clever repackaging of the entanglements that set the constricted boundaries of his life. Same thing with thinking about his parents as his own private philanthropists. He was their ward, and he owed them in ways that were hard to understand — even though he hadn’t asked for any of it. And he knew that their earned income credit would never come close to what they were spending on him. His mind boiled.

    He gave them half of his allowance, which was itself a touchy subject because he couldn’t choose the chores for which he would be paid or negotiate the pay rate. Even at that, Dirk and Alice thwarted him by secretly putting the money into a savings account that they gave him access to when he turned 18.

    During his college years, one of his roommates told him late one night that someone who achieves a perfect credit score can kill people with no legal ramifications. They got a special dispensation from the government. He immediately fell in love with the idea and set about organizing his life to achieve a score of 850 as soon as he could.

    But that required him to take on and maintain debts of various kinds and sizes — because you couldn’t handle debt perfectly without actually taking it in your hands. So he overrode the part of him that despised debt. Within a few years of graduating with a degree in computer engineering, he owned a car, a house, and boat, and he was routinely paying off and building balances on eight credit cards, always careful to keep his overall usage rate under ten percent. Once he had this system of credits and debits down, it was only a matter of repetition. But as his score approached 850, his progress slowed dramatically. It was down to time. The credit-rating agencies had to decide at which point he’d responsibly handled credit long enough. They decided on a little more than five years.

    On the morning he checked Credit Karma and found that he’d finally attained a perfect score, he called his boss to say he was taking a personal day and pulled a box that contained a Glock and bullets from under his bed. He’d bought the gun with cash from his first real-job paycheck after college.

    He parked up the street from his parents’ house and hid in the tall bushes next to the driveway. When his father came home for lunch, he followed him into the kitchen where his mother was waiting. He shot them both in the centers of their foreheads. He was an excellent shot. He’d gone target shooting hundreds of times.

    An hour later, a small crowd of neighbors watched from the end of the driveway as he casually pulled up his credit score on his phone and showed it to the two officers standing in front of him. They frowned and slowly shook their heads — not because there was no such dispensation, but because it was never intended for people like him.

  • On Inauguration Day

    Cristina is about to get on an airplane, and I’m worried. We’re being left alone with the airlines, which are untrustworthy. I’m afraid their planes are going to run out of fuel mid-flight because the pilots never have enough money for a full tank and it’s so easy to lose track when it’s always near empty. I’m afraid pilots will put off oil changes and that their planes’ engines will seize up after takeoff. I’m afraid engine warning signs will go off and the pilots will ignore them, and whatever problems they’re warning of will spread until the planes are on fire on the shoulders of runways and the passengers stand a few dozen yards away wrapped up in silvery blankets and looking dazed, and the pilots and co-pilots are a little to the side of the crowd looking sheepish and avoiding eye contact with the cops who are trying to find out what happened before the fire broke out. I’m afraid that planes will start landing at random times and random airports and the pilots will pretend those were always the times and places they were supposed to arrive at. I’m afraid airports are going to be like that truck stop in flat, muddy eastern Arkansas where Cristina went into the women’s restroom and listened from a stall as a woman with a tired voice said to her companion that they had to keep trying to suck off this truck driver because she had to get to Fayetteville. It was the meth – he couldn’t cum because there was no water left in his body. But she had to get to Fayetteville, so please. In this scenario, the airlines are the truck driver and some of us are the woman and others are her friend.