Tag: Homeland Security

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.