"How are you going to catch these guys then?" I wanted to know.
"We usually don't," he admitted. "Unless you have an idea of who might have done it?" He looked at me.
"If I knew that," I said, "do you think I would have called you?"
"Well, you'll probably want to change your locks," he said. "Sometimes they come back."
"Tell me something I don't know," I told him.
ONE OF THE HOUSES in the neighbourhood we worked was home to a psychic. It was an old Victorian house with a hand-painted sign in the window - Palms Read, Fortunes Told. Lincoln stayed on the porch, smoking a cigarette, while I went inside.
The room I walked into looked like an office. There was a white leather couch under the window and a wooden desk and chairs on the other side of the room. A crystal ball sat on one corner of the desk. There was another door behind the desk but it was closed.
I sat on the couch and waited, but no one came into the room. After a few minutes, I got up and went through the closed door. There was a kitchen on the other side. Rows of dirty glasses sat on one side of the sink, stacks of dirty plates on the other. Pizza boxes covered the table, and a man's voice came from the radio on the counter. "The signs are all there in the Book of Revelations," he said. "There's a purging fire coming, my friends, but those who do the right thing in God's eyes will have nothing to fear." The air smelled of mould in here.
A toilet flushed somewhere nearby, and then a door I hadn't noticed near the kitchen table opened. A woman with grey hair and jowls came out of the bathroom. She wore the kind of dress that only old European women wear. She closed the door behind her and then stopped, looked at me standing in her kitchen.
"I need to ask you some questions," I told her.
We went back into the other room and filled out the enumeration forms. When we finished, Lincoln was smoking another cigarette. I kept sitting there, and the woman asked, "Is there anything else?"
"I'm having some problems at home," I said. "I was hoping you could help me."
She reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a deck of tarot cards. "Problems with your love life? Financial problems?"
"I want to find out who's breaking into my apartment," I said.
She put the cards back in the drawer. "I can't answer that with these," she said.
"What about that?" I asked, pointing at the crystal ball. "Can you see who's breaking into my apartment with that?"
"This?" She picked up the ball and shook it. The inside of it filled with snow. "This is just a prop," she said.
"Well, what can you tell me then?" I asked.
"I read fortunes," she said. "I can tell you what's going to happen to you in the future."
"Like if I'm going to die?" I asked. "That kind of thing?"
"Of course you're going to die," she said. "You don't need me to tell you that."
THE THIRD TIME they broke into my apartment, they took everything, even the furniture. The place was completely empty, not even blinds for the windows. It was like I had never lived there at all. I couldn't even call the police because they'd taken my phone.
There was a pamphlet from the Mormons in my mailbox. Sorry We Missed You. The words were superimposed over a picture of a burning lake with hands sticking up through the flames.
I WENT OVER to Lincoln's place after work one night for a game of poker. There were four of us playing: Lincoln, myself, a man named Wylie, and another, older man named Butler. A fifth man, Sinnet, had called and canceled. "He's having problems with his wife," Lincoln said when he put down the phone. "She said she was going to have an affair if he went out tonight." He laughed, like the idea pleased him.
We were playing at Lincoln's kitchen table. It was low-stakes poker, quarter ante. The highest pot so far had been five dollars, which I had won on a straight. Lincoln had to tell me I'd won, because I still didn't know which hands were higher. I'd come over with twenty dollars and now I had thirty, but most of it was in change. Lincoln had a big jar full of quarters with which he made change for the bills. It looked like the kind of jar they store fetuses and dead animals in.
I was telling everyone about the dead man we'd seen. "He was just lying there," I said, "like he was sleeping. I was going to give him mouth-to-mouth or something, but Lincoln stopped me."
The other two men looked at Lincoln. "The guy was dead," he said, dealing a fresh hand. "There was no point wasting energy on him."
"Well, if he was already dead," Wylie said.
"I still wanted to try and save him, though," I said. "So then I could say to people, well, at least I didn't just stand around and do nothing."
"You would have been sued," Lincoln said.
"Why would someone sue me for that?" I shook my head.
"Why wouldn't they?" Wylie said.
"I thought I was having a heart attack once," Butler said. "It was just some sort of weird palpitations, though. But my wife, she didn't do a damned thing. Just sat there and watched. When it stopped, I said, what the hell are you doing? Were you waiting for me to die?"
"Was she?" Wylie asked.
"I don't know. She told me she was paralyzed with fright." He shook his head. "I was the one who was goddamned well paralyzed with fright."
"Which wife was that?" Wylie asked.
"Does it matter?" Butler said.
"You in or out?" Lincoln asked me.
I looked at my cards. I had a pair of tens, an ace, and a pair of kings. I had no idea if that was good or not. There was ten dollars in the pot.
"I'm in," I said.
"Then add your dollar."
I did, and so did Butler, and now there was twelve dollars in the pot.
"I saw a cyclist get killed once," Wylie said. "Had his head down and rode straight into a bus that was turning. Cracked his head wide open. You could see his brain." He shook his head. "I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of dying stupidly."
"What did his brain look like?" Lincoln asked.
"Just like on television."
"Did he have a helmet on?" I asked.
"Does it sound like he had a helmet on? Besides, the impact broke his neck. He would have been one of those - what's the term for it?" He looked at Butler.
"A quad," Butler said.
"Right."
"But at least he'd be alive," I said.
"I'd sooner have people looking into the inside of my dead head," Wylie said, "than staring at my drooling, twitching face."
"I think I'll call," Butler said.
We all laid our cards on the table. Butler sighed.
"Looks like you win again," Wylie said, leaning over to look at my cards.
"Looks like you need another beer," Butler told me and went over to the fridge. He never got the beer, though. Instead, he stopped by the kitchen window and said, "Your neighbour is on fire." He stayed there, looking out the window.
"What?" Lincoln and I asked at the same time. Wylie was in the middle of lighting a cigarette so he didn't say anything.
"The place across the street," Butler said. "It's on fire." He turned the kitchen sink tap on and let the water run, like that would help.
The rest of us stood up and went over to the window. We looked through our reflections at the house across the street. All the lights were off, but there were flames shooting through the blinds in one of the second-floor windows.
"Is that where the woman you watch lives?" I asked Lincoln. He didn't answer, though, because he was already running for the door. The rest of us followed him.
"What do you mean, the woman he watches?" Butler asked as we went outside.
"It's hard to explain," I told him. "And I'm not really sure I understand it anyway."
I could smell the smoke as soon as I was outside, but I couldn't hear a thing. Fires always made a lot of noise in the movies, but this one was so quiet I could hear someone laughing in one of the houses next door. I followed Lincoln across the street and up the house's steps, to the front door. He had his cell phone out and was calling 911 now. I knocked on the door, then tried the handle when there was no answer. The door was locked.
"What are you doing?" Lincoln asked, putting the phone back into his pocket.
"I was checking to see if anyone was home," I said.
"If anyone was home," he said, "I think they'd be putting out the fire, not coming to see who was at the door."
"Well, we can't just stand around doing nothing again," I said.
"What are you talking about?"
"This is our chance to do something right." I kicked the door just underneath the handle a couple of times, and there was a loud crack as the frame splintered. I pushed the door open and went inside, Lincoln following after me.
We were in a living room with stairs running up one wall. I could hear the fire now, burning somewhere near the top of the stairs, and the air was hazy with smoke. Lincoln turned on the light, and I paused a moment to look around. There was a framed Warhol Marilyn Monroe on one wall, dozens of framed photographs along another.
"Hello?" I called. "Anyone home?"
When no one answered, Lincoln asked, "Now what?"
"Give me a hand with this," I said, going over to the television. I was coughing from the smoke now.
We carried the television outside and set it down on the lawn. Both Butler and Wylie were standing on the sidewalk, watching. Neither one of them moved in our direction. "Help us out here," I said, but they just shook their heads.
"That place is on fire," Butler said. "I'm not going in there."
"It's not safe," Wylie added.
"I'm going for another beer," Butler said. "Anyone else want one?"
"You might as well bring them all," Lincoln said, coming out with the telephone and a handful of CDs.
Thick smoke was starting to flow down the stairs by the time Lincoln and I carried the couch out, and we could hear sirens in the distance. Most of the woman's living room was scattered around the front yard by this point. Wylie and Butler were sitting on the coffee table, drinking the beer they'd brought from Lincoln's place. There was still no one else on the street, but I could see faces looking out at us from the neighbouring houses now that the flames were coming out of all the upstairs windows.
"That's it," Lincoln said, dropping his end of the couch and sitting on it. He couldn't stop coughing, and his skin was black with ash and sweat. "I think I've reached my limit here," he gasped.
I started moving the furniture around the lawn, dragging the couch and chairs into the same arrangement they'd had inside the house. That was when the fire truck arrived. Two firemen wearing oxygen masks and carrying axes walked over and watched me for a moment. "What the hell are you doing?" one of them asked.
"I'm just trying to help," I said.
"Get the hell out of here!" he shouted, waving his axe at me. I went over to stand beside Butler and Wylie, who had moved from the coffee table to the sidewalk when the fire truck pulled up. Lincoln stood up from the couch and then bent over, started vomiting on his feet. Wylie handed me a beer. "They're a little warm," he said. "On account of the fire." I drank half of it down in one swallow, then the three of us watched the firemen drag hoses into the burning house.
By the time we'd finished the beer, the fire was out. The firemen came out of the house and sat on the bumpers of their truck while a cop sealed off the entrance of the house with yellow tape. I went over and sat beside Lincoln on the couch.
"I don't think I'm going to make it into work tomorrow," he said. His chin and the front of his shirt were streaked with a mixture of vomit and soot.
"Well, that's all right," I said. I put my feet up on the coffee table and looked around the yard. "We certainly did a good job here."
"We did," Lincoln agreed.
"Redemptive, even."
"I don't know what that word means."
"She won't even be able to tell the difference when she comes home," I said.
"I'm not so sure about that."
I sat for hours on the couch after the others went back inside to finish the poker game. I was waiting for her to come home, so I could tell her that I was the one who'd brought everything outside and saved it from the fire. I kept on waiting even after Butler and Wylie drove away with a wave at me, and after Lincoln's lights went out. But she didn't come home that night. She never found out what I did.
HOW LONG DOES THIS SORT OF THING USUALLY TAKE? By Peter Darbyshire
AND THIS IS THE STORY of the last time I ever saw Rachel.
I had to take her to the clinic. I was watching television in the living room while I waited for her to get dressed. There was a documentary on, something about a village in Mongolia where all the women wore white T-shirts with Tide logos on them. Boxes of Tide were everywhere, in the baskets they carried, in front of stores, in the doorways of huts. The narrator said they even brushed their teeth with the stuff.
"Think of what that would do to your insides if you swallowed it," I yelled to Rachel in the other room. When she didn't answer, I added, "Why Tide? Why not Arm and Hammer? Or ABC?"
"Maybe they worship Tide," she said, coming out of the bedroom. "Maybe it's like some sort of god to them." She was dressed in sweat pants and a T-shirt, like she was just going out for a jog.
"I don't think so," I said.
"This kind of thing happens all the time," she went on. "Remember that tribe in Africa or New Zealand or wherever it was that worshipped Coke bottles?"
"I think that was a movie," I said, "not real life."
"Oh no," she said, "it's all real-life."
OUTSIDE, IT HAD RAINED all night, and now the air was cold and wet, like the inside of a forest. There were earthworms everywhere, curling themselves into little knots or trying to dig their way into the sidewalk. I stepped over them carefully, but Rachel put her feet down without looking.
I once lived with a Jamaican guy who wouldn't go out in rainstorms because of the worms. "How can you stand it?" he'd asked me one time. "All those maggots coming out of the ground like that?"
"Worms," I'd corrected him. "They're worms, not maggots."