The Burgess Boys (17 page)

“Is it true the Burgess boys are coming up?” his wife called.

Back in the bedroom, pulling on his pajamas, Gerry said, “Yep. Jimmy’s going to speak. Be all right, I think, as long as he’s not too full of himself.”

“Well, I’ll be curious to see,” his wife sighed, picking up her book, settling herself back against the pillows.

7

Jim’s office was in a building in Midtown Manhattan. Security required Bob to hand over his driver’s license at the desk in the lobby, where he stood patiently while a temporary ID was made for him. It took a little time, because Jim’s office had to be notified, and permission had to be given, in order for Bob to proceed. Bob handed the ID to a uniformed man standing by a row of turnstiles, who held it in front of a grid, and blinking red lights turned green. On the fourteenth floor, large panes of a glass wall opened when a young man, unsmiling, pushed a button inside. A young woman arrived to escort Bob to Jim’s office.

“Kind of takes the fun out of dropping by,” Bob said after the young woman had backed away and left him standing in front of two photographs of Helen and the children.

“That’s the point, bozo.” Jim pushed back a paper he was reading, took his glasses off. “How was the dentist? You look a little drooly.”

“I asked for more novocaine. I think because we weren’t allowed any when we were kids.” Bob sat on the edge of the chair by Jim’s desk, his knapsack bulging behind him. “Today the drilling sent shivers right through me, and I thought, Wait, I’m a grown-up. So I asked for more.”

“Amazing.” Jim straightened his tie, stretched his neck.

“It was amazing. If you’re me.”

“And I’m not, praise God. Okay, so it’s two weeks away, let’s get it planned. I’m busy.”

“Susan wants to know if we’re staying with her.”

Jim opened his desk drawer. “I don’t sleep on couches. I especially don’t sleep on dog-hairy couches in a house where the thermostat is set at forty-two and a batty old lady lives upstairs wearing a nightgown all day. But you enjoy yourself. You and Susan are tight these days. I’m sure she has plenty of booze in the house. You’ll be very comfortable.” Jim closed his desk drawer, reached for the sheet of paper he’d been reading. He put his glasses back on.

Bob, looking around the room, said, “I know you know that sarcasm is the weapon of weakness.”

Jim kept his eyes on the paper, then moved them to take in his brother. He said slowly, “Bobby Burgess.” There was a faint smile to his mouth. “King of the profound.”

Bob slid his knapsack off his back. “Are you worse than usual, or have you been a prick this bad all along? Seriously.” He stood up and went to sit on the skinny low couch that ran along the wall of Jim’s office. “You are worse. Has Helen noticed? I think she’s noticed.”

Jim put the pen down. He held the arms of his chair and leaned back, looking out the window. His face lost its hardness. He said, “Helen.” He sighed and sat forward, put his elbows on his desk. “Helen thinks I’m crazy to go up there. To involve myself in this. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and it does make a certain sense.” Jim looked at Bob and said—suddenly earnest—“Look, I’m still known up there, sort of. I’m still liked up there, sort of. I haven’t had anything to do with the state for a long time. So now I come back. And I come back to say, Hey, you guys, here’s a state whose population is getting older and poorer and industry is leaving, has left, for the most part. I’ll say the vibrancy of society depends on newness, and what a fantastic job Shirley Falls has done in welcoming this newness, let’s keep on with it.

“The truth is, Bob, they
need
those immigrants. Maine’s been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point. And the truth also is: That’s sad. Even before Zach got into this mess, I’ve been reading the
Shirley Falls Journal
online every day, and Maine is just dying. It’s on life support. It’s terrible. Kids leave to go to college and never come back, and why should they? There’s nothing there for them. The ones who stay, there’s nothing there for them either. Who’s going to take care of all those old white people? Where are new businesses going to come from?”

Bob sat back on the thin couch. He could hear a fire truck’s siren, and the faint honking of horns on the street far below. He said, “I had no idea you still liked Maine.”

“I hate Maine.”

The fire truck’s siren loudened, eventually faded. Bob looked around the office: a plant with skinny fronds that sprayed up like a small fountain, the oil painting with wiggles of blue and green paint. He looked back at Jim. “You’ve been reading the
Shirley Falls Journal
every day? For how long?”

“A long time. I find the obituaries moving.”

“Jesus, you’re serious.”

“Perfectly. And to answer your question, I’m staying at the new hotel on the river up there. If you’re not staying with Susan, get your own room. I’m not sharing space with an insomniac.”

Bob gazed out at the terrace of a building nearby where trees grew, their leaves still golden, but some branches bare. “We should bring Zach down here,” Bob said. “I wonder if he’s ever seen trees growing on tops of buildings.”

“Do whatever you want with the kid. I wasn’t aware you’d even managed to have a conversation with him.”

“Wait till you see him,” Bob said. “He’s just, like, I don’t know—missing in action or something.”

“I look forward to it,” Jim said. “And that’s sarcasm.”

Bob nodded, folded his hands patiently on his lap.

Jim leaned back in his chair and said, “The biggest Somali community in this country is in Minneapolis. Apparently at the community college there’s a mess in the bathrooms from Muslims washing their feet before prayer. So they’re putting in new foot-washing sinks. Some of the blond folks are fit to be tied, of course, but on the whole, really, Minnesotans are kind of great. Which is why, I imagine, so many Somalis are there. I find it pretty interesting.”

“It is interesting,” Bob agreed. “I’ve talked to Margaret Estaver on the phone a few times. She’s into it.”

“You’ve talked to her?” Jim seemed surprised.

“I like her. She’s comforting, somehow. Anyways, it sounds—”

“Would you stop saying ‘anyways’? You get”—Jim sat forward and waved his hand—“I don’t know, diminished by it. It makes you sound like a hick.”

Bob felt his cheeks grow warm. He waited a long time before he spoke. “Anyway,” he said quietly, looking at his hands, “it sounds like the biggest problem up there is that most of the Somalis in town really don’t speak English. The few that do end up having to be the liaison between the city and their own population, and they aren’t necessarily the elders, who are the guys in their culture who make decisions. Also, there’s a big difference between the ethnic Somalis—who are big-time into which clan you come from—and the Bantus, who’ve just started showing up in Shirley Falls, and they used to be looked down on back in Somalia by the others. So it’s not like they’re all cozy friends up there.”

“Listen to you,” Jim said.

“And I agree,” Bob continued, “Maine does need them. But these immigrants—secondary migrants, by the way, in this case, they’ve come from their first place of arrival, so they’ve lost their initial federal support—they don’t want jobs that include food because they have to steer clear of alcohol and pork and anything with gelatin in it. Probably tobacco too. The woman who sold me cigarettes and a bottle of wine near Susan’s house was Somali, I figured out later—no headscarf, though—and she pushed forward the bag for me to pack them myself, like she’d been asked to touch turds. They can’t get most jobs until they learn some English. A lot of them are illiterate—hey, get this: They never even had a written language of their own until 1972, can you believe it? And if they spent years in the refugee camps, which they have, it was hard, if not impossible, to get any schooling there.”

“Will you stop?” Jim said. “You’re killing me. Sitting there delivering fragmented facts. And it’s not like there were jobs in Shirley Falls to begin with. Usually a migrant population moves because of jobs.”

“I think they moved there to be safe. I’m just telling you this for your speech. Terrible, terrible stuff they’ve been through, whether it kills you or not, you should know it, if you’re going to speak. Terrible stuff in Somalia, and then waiting around in the camps. So, you know, just keep that in mind.”

“What else?”

“You just asked me to stop.”

“Well, now I’m asking you not to stop.” Jim stared at the ceiling for a moment, as though needing to control some vast irritation. “But I hope your sources are accurate. I don’t give speeches anymore, and I don’t relish the idea of falling on my face. Maybe you don’t know that about me, but I’m not a fall-on-your-face kind of guy.”

Bob nodded. “Then you should know a lot of Shirley Falls citizens think the Somalis are given car vouchers—not true. That they’re just sucking up welfare—partly true. And for Somalis it’s rude to look someone right in the eye, so people—and our sister’s a perfect example—think they’re arrogant, or shifty. They barter, and people don’t like that. The locals want them to appear grateful, and they don’t especially appear grateful. There’ve been incidents in the schools, of course. Gym classes have been a problem. The girls don’t want to undress and aren’t supposed to wear gym shorts anyway. They’re working it out, you know. Committees on this and that.”

Jim held up both hands. “Do me a favor and put this in writing. Email me bullets. I’ll think of something ‘healing’ to say. Now go away. I have work to do.”

“What kind of work?” Bob looked around before finally standing up. “You said you were getting sick of this job. When did you say that? Last year? I can’t remember.” He hoisted his knapsack onto his shoulder. “But you said you haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in four years. All these big cases get settled. I can’t think that’s good for you, Jimmy.”

Jim looked carefully at the sheet of paper he’d been holding. “What in the
world
makes you think you know squat about anything?”

Bob was walking toward the door, and he turned back. “I’m just saying what you told me at some point. I think you have courtroom talent. I think you should be using it. But what do I know—”

“Nothing.” Jim dropped his pen onto his desk. “You know nothing about living in a house for grown-ups, instead of a graduate dorm. You know nothing about tuition for private schools, starting at kindergarten and going through college at
least
. Nothing about housekeepers or gardeners, nothing about keeping a wife in— Just nothing, you cretinized bozo. Look, I’m working. Now go.”

Bob hesitated, then held up a hand. “Going,” he said. “Watch me go.”

8

In Shirley Falls the days were short now, the sun never climbing very high in the sky, and when a blanket of clouds sat over the small city it seemed as though twilight began as soon as people finished their lunch, and when darkness came it was a full darkness. Most of the people who lived there had lived there all their lives, and they were used to the darkness this time of year, but that did not mean they liked it. It was spoken of when neighbors met in grocery stores, or on the steps of the post office, often with an added phrase of what was felt about the holiday season to come; some liked the holidays, many did not. Fuel prices were high, and holidays cost money.

About the Somalis, a few townspeople did not speak at all: They were to be borne as one bore bad winters or the price of gasoline or a child who turned out badly. Others were not so silent. One woman wrote a letter that the newspaper published. “I finally figured out what it is I don’t like about the Somalis being here. Their language is different and I don’t like the sound of it. I love the Maine accent. People think of us as saying ‘You cahn’t get they-ah from he-yah.’ That will disappear. It scares me to think how this changes our state.” (Jim forwarded this in an email to Bob with the subject line Racist White Bitch Clings to Native Language.) Others said to each other how nice it was to see the colorful robes of the Somali women in a town as drab and depressed as Shirley Falls had become; there was a little girl in the library the other day, wearing a burkha, cute as the dickens. Honestly.

But among the leaders of the city was a feeling much grander, and it was the feeling of panic. For the last few years there had been the constant struggle to cope—Somali women showing up almost daily at City Hall, unable to speak English, unable to fill out forms for housing, public assistance, or even to tell the birth dates of their children (“born in the season of the sun,” a hard-to-find translator would say, and so one after another of these children had birthdays registered as January 1, the year guessed at). Adult English classes were arranged and at first poorly attended, the women sitting listlessly while their children played in the next room; social workers had struggled to learn the words of Somali (
subax wanaagsan:
“Good morning”;
iska waran:
“How are you?”). There was the scramble to learn who these people were and what they needed, and now, after all that, came the sense of a huge wave spilling over the riverbanks as news reports of the pig’s head incident spread across the state, the country, parts of the world. Suddenly Shirley Falls was being portrayed as a place of intolerance, fear, meanspirited. And that was not true.

The clergy, who had been only partly helpful—and this included Margaret Estaver and Rabbi Goldman, three Catholic priests and a Congregational minister—realized a crisis had now really arrived. They rose to it. They tried. City council members, the city manager, the mayor, and of course the police chief, Gerry O’Hare, all of whom had been working in their various ways, understood also that a serious situation was suddenly at hand. Meetings took place at all hours as the Together for Tolerance rally was planned. There was tension—lots of it. The mayor promised that in two weeks, on a Saturday at the start of November, peace-loving people would fill Roosevelt Park.

And then—what was feared, happened. A white supremacy group called the World Church of the People requested a permit to gather on the same day. Susan was told this by Charlie Tibbetts, and she whispered into the phone, “Dear God, they’ll murder him.” No one was going to murder Zachary, Charlie said (sounding tired), and certainly not the World Church of the People, who thought Zach was a hero. “That’s worse,” Susan cried. Then, “Why does the city have to give them a permit, why can’t they say no?”