The Burgess Boys (12 page)

So it took its toll. It did.

When Pam balked at adoption—“We’ll end up with our own crazy Annie Day”—he had been troubled. When she balked at insemination from a donor, he was troubled further. The relentlessness of the situation seemed to finally loosen the weave of their marital fabric. And when he met Ted, two years after Pam moved out (two years during which she had often called him in tears about
stupid
dates with
stupid
men), he saw that Pam, with her strong mind and splintering anxieties, had meant what she said: “I just want to start over.”

Pam was twirling a strand of hair around her finger. “So what happened with Sarah? Do you ever see her anymore? Are you guys broken
up
broken up? Or just taking a break?”

“Broken up.” Bob drank his whiskey, looked around. “I guess she’s okay, I don’t hear from her.”

“She never liked me.”

Bob gave a small shrug to indicate she shouldn’t worry about it. In fact Sarah, who in the beginning thought it was so pleasing and civilized that Bob and Pam (and Ted and the boys) all stayed connected—since her own ex-husband was evil—had come to resent Pam tremendously. Even if weeks went by when Bob and Pam didn’t speak, Sarah said, “She picks up the phone whenever she wants to be
really
understood. She rejected you, Bob, for a whole new life. But she still depends on you because she thinks you know her so well.”

“I do know her so well. And she knows me.”

The ultimatum was finally presented. No marriage to Sarah unless Pam was out of the picture for good. The arguments, the talks, the endless distress—but Bob, finally, could not do that.

Helen had said, “Bob, are you crazy? If you love Sarah, stop talking to Pam. Jim, tell him he’s crazy to do this.”

Jim surprisingly would not tell him that. He said, “Pam is Bob’s family, Helen.”

Pam nudged him now with her elbow. “What was it? What happened?”

“Strident,” Bob said, his eyes going over the people pressed up to the bar. “Sarah became strident. It ended, that’s all.”

“I told my friend Toni about you and she’d love to have dinner.” Pam snapped down a business card she had taken from her bag.

Bob squinted, pulled out his glasses. “Did she seriously dot the
i
with a little smiley face? I don’t think so.” He slid the card back to Pam.

“Fair.” She dropped the card back into her bag.

“I have friends always trying to fix me up, don’t worry.”

“Dating’s awful,” Pam said, and Bob shrugged and said it pretty much was.

It was wintry dark by the time they left, Pam stumbling once or twice as they crossed the park to Fifth Avenue; she’d had three glasses of wine. Her shoes were low-heeled and pointy-toed, he noticed. She was skinnier than the last time he’d seen her. “This dinner party I showed up too early for,” she was saying, steadying herself on his arm while she shook something from her shoe. “People at the party started talking about another couple who weren’t there, saying they had no taste. Meaning bad artwork. I think. I’m not sure. It made me really nervous, Bobby. People could be saying I’m socially eager and have no taste.”

He couldn’t help it, his laughter burst out. “Pam. Who cares?”

She looked at him and suddenly laughed deeply, her laugh familiar to him from long ago. “Really. Who the
fucking
fuck cares?”

“Maybe people say Pam Carlson is really smart and used to work with a great parasitologist.”

“Bobby, nobody even knows what a parasitologist is. You should hear them. A what? Oh,
that
. My mother went to India and got a parasite and was sick for two years, that’s what they say. Fuck it.” She stopped walking and looked at him. “Have you ever noticed how Asians just go ahead and bump into you, how they don’t seem to have any sense of personal space? Boy, that pisses me off.”

He took her elbow lightly. “Mention that at your next dinner party. Let me get you a taxi.”

“I’ll walk you to the subway station, oh, okay.” He had already hailed one, and he opened the door now and helped her get in. “Goodbye, Bobby, that was fun.”

“You say hi to all the boys.” He stood in the street and waved as the taxi sped off into traffic, the busyness of neon lights around him. She turned and waved from the back window, and he kept waving until the taxi drove out of sight.

When Bob had returned from Maine, he’d found the apartment below his with its door open, and he’d stopped to look at the place where Adriana and Preppy Boy had lived out their marriage. The landlord was fixing a faucet and he nodded to Bob, but the glimpse Bob had—a space empty of curtains, couches, rugs, whatever it is that people make a life around—struck him with its gone-ness. Dust bunnies had been swept into the center of the living room, and the twilight that showed through the windows was indifferent, stark. The blank walls seemed to say wearily to Bob: Sorry. You thought this was a home. But it was just this, all along.

Tonight as Bob climbed the stairs, he saw that the door of the apartment was again partly open, as though emptiness was not worth concealing or protecting. The landlord was not there, and Bob closed the door quietly, then continued up the stairs. His phone machine was blinking. Susan’s voice said, “Call me,
please
.”

Bob poured wine into a juice glass and settled himself onto his couch.

Gerry O’Hare had surprised everyone—certainly surprised Susan, who felt personally betrayed—by holding a press conference that morning in the City Chambers of Shirley Falls. An FBI agent stood by his side. “Big old fat thing,” Susan said on the phone to Bob. “Standing there all puffed up, loving how important he looks as chief of police.” She had not intended to speak to Bob again—she made this clear at the start of the call, but she couldn’t figure out how to dial Jim’s cell number overseas, didn’t have the name of his hotel—

Bob supplied her with both.

She kept right on. “I wanted to turn the TV off, but I couldn’t, it was like I was frozen. And now it’ll be in the morning papers. You
know
Gerry doesn’t give a doughnut’s damn about the Somalians, but there he stood going blabby blab—‘This is very serious. This will not be tolerated.’ He hopes his response shows the Somalian community they can feel safe and confident. Oh, please. And then one reporter said there’d been incidents of tire slashing and window scratching against the Somalians and what did he have to say about that, and Gerry gets all pompous and says the police can’t respond to anything if the Somalians don’t come forward with their complaints. So you can just
see
that he kind of can’t stand them, he’s just doing this because the whole friggin’ thing’s gone out of control—”

“Susan. Have Zach give Charlie Tibbetts permission to talk to me. I’ll call him tomorrow.” He pictured her, upset in her cold house. It saddened him, but it seemed far away. But he knew very soon it would not feel far away; the murkiness of Susan and Zachary and Shirley Falls would seep into his apartment the way the emptiness below waited to remind him that his neighbors were no more, that nothing lasts forever, there is nothing to be counted on. “It’s going to be all right,” Bob told Susan, before hanging up.

Later, sitting by the window, he saw the young girl across the street moving about her cozy apartment in her underwear, and nearby the couple in their white kitchen were doing the dishes together. He thought of all the people in the world who felt they’d been saved by a city. He was one of them. Whatever darkness leaked its way in, there were always lights on in different windows here, each light like a gentle touch on his shoulder saying, Whatever is happening, Bob Burgess, you are never alone.

2

It was the laugh. The policemen’s casual laugh when they spotted the pig’s head on the rug. Abdikarim could not stop hearing it, seeing it. He would wake in the night picturing the two uniformed men, the short one especially, with his small eyes and unintelligent face, the sound of mirth he made before he straightened up and asked sternly, looking around, “Who speaks English? Somebody better speak English.” As though they had done something wrong. This thought went repeatedly through Abdikarim’s head: But we have done nothing wrong! This is what he murmured now as he sat at a table in his café on the corner of Gratham Street. To have women gaze right at him as they walked by, to have children tugging on the hand of their parent, turning their small heads to stare when they were safely past, to have the thick-armed tattooed men screech their trucks past his café, or high school girls whisper and giggle and cross the street to yell a name—None of these things bothered Abdikarim so much as the memory of the policemen’s laughter did. In the mosque one block away—which was only a dark room, rain-stained and unlovely (but theirs and holy)—he and the others had been treated as mere schoolboys complaining of a bully.

Abdikarim had walked this morning through the dawn’s gray light to his café after morning prayer. The mosque held within it the presence of fear; the smell of the cleaning foam used many times in the last few days seemed itself to be the smell of fear. It had not been easy to pray, and some men hurried through it to stand watch by the door. The
adano
was back at work at Walmart as though nothing had happened—news of this kept going around the village, and there was more trouble than ever with sleep. The police chief’s press conference was baffling too. A reporter had come to the café yesterday. “Why weren’t there any Somalis at the press conference?”

Because no one had told them about it.

Abdikarim wiped down the counter, swept the floor. The sun rose yellow between the buildings across the street. With the fast, only Ahmed Hussein would be in later to eat. He worked nearby in the paper factory and was allowed to drink tea and eat bites of stewed goat meat because of his diabetes. At the back of the café behind stringed beads was a small area where scarves and earrings and spices and teas and nuts and figs and dates were sold. Throughout the day women would come in together and buy what they might need for Maghrib tonight, and Abdikarim went and ran a duster over packages of basmati rice. He arranged the packages so the counter wouldn’t look too barren, then went back to the front of the café and sat in a chair by the window. The phone in his pocket vibrated. “Again?” he asked, for it was his sister calling from Somaliland.

“Yes, again,” she said. “Why are you still there, Abdi? You’re in more danger than here! No one is throwing pigs’ heads here.”

“I can’t put the shop on my back and walk away,” he said with affection.

“The man is out of jail. Zachary Olson— They let him out! How do you know he’s not coming right now to your café?”

Her questions pricked alarm in him. But he said gently, “News travels fast.” He added, “I will think about it.”

For an hour he sat by the window watching Gratham Street. Two Bantu men, their skin as black as winter night sky, walked past the window and did not look in. Abdikarim rose and moved through his store, touching the scarves, the few packages of bedsheets, some towels. Last night there had been another meeting of the elders, and their voices circled around Abdikarim’s head as he made his way to the front of the café.

“He’s not in jail. Where is he? Back at work. Home with his mother.”

“And his father.”

“He has no father.”

“A man was with him when he came out of jail. A big man. The man who tried to run over Ayanna, after he bought a bottle of wine in the morning for breakfast.”

“I heard women talking in the library. They think there’s overreaction to this. They said, ‘It’s rude to throw a pig’s head, yes, but that’s all it is.’ ”

“Forget them, they’ve not run through Mogadishu with machine guns pointed at them.”

“Mogadishu! What about Atlanta? People there would kill us for a dollar.”

“Minister Estaver said Zachary Olson’s not like that. She said he’s a lonely boy—”

“We know what she said.”

A headache arrived now for Abdikarim. He went to the door and stood looking out at the sidewalk and the buildings across the street. He did not know how he could ever get used to living here. There was little color anywhere, except the trees in the park in the fall. The streets were gray and plain and many stores were empty, their big windows blank. He thought of the colorfulness of the Al Barakaat open market, the brilliance of the silks and colorful
guntiino
robes, the smells of gingerroot and garlic and cumin seed.

The thought of returning to Mogadishu was like a stick that poked at him with each heartbeat. It was possible peace had come; earlier this year there had been great hope. There was the Transitional Federal Government, unsteady, but there in Somaliland. In Mogadishu was the Islamic Courts Union, and it was possible they could rule with peace. But there were rumors, and who knew what to believe? Rumors that the United States was urging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, to get rid of the Islamic Courts. It did not seem true, but it also seemed it could be true. Only two weeks ago came reports that Ethiopian troops had seized Burhakaba. But then other reports: No, it was government troops who had come to the town. All of it, and all that came before it, caused a heaviness inside Abdikarim. It was a heaviness that grew with each passing month, so that to go or to stay—he could not make the decision. He saw how some of the young people here managed; they laughed, joked, talked with excitement. His eldest daughter had arrived half-starved and knowing no English, and already when she called him from Nashville these days he heard excitement in her voice. He felt too old for the spring of excitement to return to him again.