The Burgess Boys (21 page)

Abdikarim stayed and swept his café when the men finally left. His cell phone vibrated, and he felt his face opening in pleasure at the sound of his daughter’s lively voice, calling from Nashville. It’s good, very good, she said, having seen on television the gathering in Roosevelt Park. She talked of her sons playing soccer, how they spoke almost flawless English now, and his heart seemed an engine that both raced and stalled. Flawless English meant they could disappear as full Americans, but it gave them a sturdiness too. “They stay out of trouble?” he asked, and she said they did. The oldest boy had started high school and his grades were brilliant. His teachers were surprised. “I’ll send a copy of his report card,” his daughter said. “And tomorrow I will text you pictures for your telephone. They’re very handsome, my sons, you’ll be proud.” For a long time after, Abdikarim sat. Finally he walked home through the dark, and when he lay down he saw the people in the park, wearing their winter coats, their fleece vests, open-faced, looking pleasantly right at him. When he woke in the night he was confused. There was a tugging on his mind, familiar from long ago. When he woke again he realized he had dreamed of his firstborn son, Baashi, who had been a serious child. Only a few times in the boy’s short life had it been necessary for Abdikarim to strike him in order to teach lessons of respect. In the dream Baashi had looked at his father with bewildered eyes.

Bob and Jim had endured one more evening at Susan’s house. She’d microwaved frozen lasagna, while Zach ate hot dogs from a fork as though eating popsicles, and the dog slept without moving on her dog-hairy bed. Jim had shaken his head once at Bob to indicate they would not tell Susan right now what they had learned about Zach and his father; Jim took a phone call from Charlie Tibbetts in the other room, and when he returned to the kitchen and sat back down he said, “Okay. Word on the street is people liked me, good feelings about seeing me up there, all that.” He picked up his fork, moved some food on his plate. “Everyone’s happy. Freedom from white guilt makes everyone happy.” He nodded toward Zach. “Your ill-conceived behavior will sink back into being exactly what it is, a Class E misdemeanor, and by the time Charlie takes it to trial, months will’ve passed, he can get all sorts of postponements and that’s good. People won’t want to go stirring this up. It’s a
happy
time now, and they’ll want to keep it that way.”

Susan blew out a breath. “Let’s hope.”

“I’m thinking this twat Diane Dodge in the AG’s office will stop pushing for the civil rights violation, and even if she does push, Dick Hartley has to agree to it, and he won’t. I could see that today. He’s a big old stupid thing, and people were happy to see me, and he’s not going to rock that boat. Which sounds grandiose, I know.”

“Little bit,” Bob said, pouring wine into a coffee cup.

“I don’t want to go to jail.” Zach mumbled the words.

“You won’t.” Jim pushed back his plate. “Get your coat if you’re staying with us tonight. Bob and I have a long ride in the morning.”

Back in the hotel room, Jim said to Zach, “What happened to you in that cell while you were waiting for the bail commissioner?”

Zach, who had looked more normal to Bob as the weekend went by, gazed at Jim with a slightly stunned look. “What happened is … I, you know, sat.”

“Tell me,” Jim said.

“It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, the cell, and all white and metal. Even what I sat on was metal, and these guards were nearby and kept looking over at me. I asked them once, ‘Where’s my mother?’ And they said, ‘Outside, waiting.’ They wouldn’t talk to me after that. I mean, I didn’t try.”

“But you were scared?”

Zach nodded. He looked scared again.

“Were they mean to you? Threaten you?”

Zach shrugged. “I was just scared. I was really, really scared. I didn’t even know there was a place like that here.”

“It’s called a jail. They’re everywhere. Was anyone else in there with you?”

“Some man’s voice kept screaming swearwords. I mean, like crazy. But I couldn’t see him. And the guards would shout at him, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ ”

“Did they hurt him?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?” In Jim’s voice was the fierce timbre of protection that Bob had heard when they walked away from the rally earlier and the punk kid called Bob a fat idiot. He saw in Zach’s face the surprise, the small instinctive motion of yearning as he absorbed it: This man would kill on his behalf. Jim, Bob realized, was the father everyone wanted.

Bob stood up and walked in a big circle around the room. What he felt seemed unbearable, and he did not know what he felt. After a few moments he stopped walking and said to Zach, “Your Uncle Jim will take care of you. That’s what he does.”

Zach looked from one uncle to the other. “But you take care of me, too, Uncle Bob,” he finally said.

“Ah, Zach, you’re a mensch. You really are.” Bob reached over and rubbed the kid’s head. “All I did was come up and get your mother mad at me.”

“Mom gets mad a lot, don’t take it personal. Anyways, when they let me go from that jail cell and I saw you standing there with Mom, I was, like, totally the happiest ever. What’s a mensch?”

“A good guy.”

Jim said, “You were so happy to see Bob you got your grinning face plastered all over the papers.”

“Jesus, Jim. It’s over.”

“Can we watch TV?” Zach asked.

Jim tossed Zach the remote control. “You’re going to have to get a job. So I want you to be thinking about what that will be. And then you’re going to take some courses, study hard, do well, and enroll in Central Maine Community College here. Work toward something. That’s how it’s done. You belong to society, you give to society.”

Zach looked down, and Bob said, “There’s time to find a job, get straightened out. Right now, make yourself comfortable. You’re in a hotel so pretend it’s vacation. Pretend there’s a beach outside and not the smelly river that’s actually there.”

“The river doesn’t smell anymore, you retard.” Jim was hanging up his coat. “They cleaned it up. You didn’t notice? You’re so seventies. Jesus.”

“If you’re so up-to-date,” Bob answered, “you’d know the word ‘retard’ isn’t used anymore. Susan used it too, when I first came up here. Man. I feel like I’m the only one of us who left grade school, moved into the twenty-first century.”

“Gag me,” Jim said.

Zach fell asleep watching TV, and the soft sound of his snoring came through the open door to the other room, where Jim and Bob now sat on opposite beds. “Let Susan enjoy her relief that this is over. We can tell her later what her son was up to. I told Charlie Tibbetts about it, and it doesn’t matter anyway, his defense is that Zach didn’t commit a crime,” Jim said. “The law says he would have to know the room was a mosque, and that pork was offensive to Muslims.”

“I don’t know if that’s gonna fly. If Zach didn’t know it was offensive to Muslims, then why didn’t he toss a chicken’s head?”

“Which is why you aren’t his defense lawyer. Or anyone’s defense lawyer.” Jim stood up, put his keys and phone on the bureau. “Because when he went out to visit a friend who had a slaughterhouse, they only
had
the heads of pigs. They didn’t
have
other heads. Would you leave this to Charlie? Jesus, Bob. You wear me out. No wonder you shit your pants every time you went to court. Of course you switched to appeals. So you could digest your baby food.”

Bob sat back, looked for the wine bottle. “What’s your problem?” he said quietly. “You did such a good job today.” There was a small amount of wine left, and he poured it into a glass.

“My problem is you. You’re my problem. Why don’t you just let Charlie Tibbetts worry about this?” Jim said. “I got him, you know. You didn’t. So leave it alone.”

“No one said he wasn’t good. I was just trying to understand the defense.” A silence sat in the room that felt so momentarily present and pulsating Bob didn’t dare disturb it by raising his glass.

“I don’t want to come up here again,” Jim finally said. He sat back down on the bed, looking at the rug.

“Then don’t.” Now Bob drank, and in a moment he added, “You know, an hour ago I thought you were the greatest guy in the world. But man, you are difficult. I saw Pam recently and she wondered if the Packer trial had turned you into a prick or if you were always a prick.”

Jim glanced up. “Pam wondered that?” His mouth moved in a small smile. “Pamela. The restless and the rich.” He suddenly grinned at Bob, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands hanging down. “It’s funny how people turn out, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have predicted Pam would be someone always going after what she doesn’t have. But when you think about it, it’s been there all along. They say people are always telling you who they are. And I guess she was. She didn’t like her childhood, so she took yours. Then she got to New York and looked around and saw people had kids and she’d better get some too, and while she was at it she’d better get some money as well, because New York has a lot of that too.”

Bob shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Pam always wanted kids. We always wanted kids. I thought you liked Pam.”

“I do like Pam. I used to think it was funny how she loved looking at those parasites under a microscope, and then one day I realized she’s kind of a parasite herself. Not in a bad way.”

“Not in a bad way?”

Jim waved a hand dismissively. “Well, think about it. Yeah—not in a bad way. But she started practically living with us when you were both still kids. She needed a home so she fed on ours. She needed a nice husband so she fed on you. Then she needed a daddy to have some kids with and so she’s over there on Park Avenue feeding off that. She gets what she needs, is what I’m saying. Not everyone does.”

“Jim. Jesus. What are you talking about? You married someone rich yourself.”

Jim ignored this. “Did she happen to tell you about her little meeting with me after you guys called it quits?”

“Cut it out, Jim.”

Jim shrugged. “There’s lots of stuff I know about Pam I bet you don’t know.”

“I said cut it out.”

“She was drunk. She drinks too much. You both do. But nothing happened, don’t worry. I bumped into her in Midtown after work, oh this was years ago, we went to the Harvard Club for a drink. I thought, well, she’s been in the family for years, I owe her that. And after a few drinks, during which she made some rather poor choices in her confessional judgment, she mentioned how attractive she’d always found me. Kind of coming on to me, which I thought was not very classy.”

“Oh,
shut
up!” Bob, trying to stand, found his chair falling backward with his large body in it. The sound of it seemed very loud, and he felt the wine spill on his neck, and it was this sensation that was strangely clear to him: liquid running over the side of his neck while he moved one leg in the air. A light went on.

Zach’s voice came from the doorway. “You guys, what’s happening?”

“Nothing, kiddo.” Bob’s heart was beating hard.

“We were roughhousing, like when we were kids.” Jim held out his hand and helped Bob up. “Just fooling around with my brother. Nothing like a brother.”

“I heard someone shout,” Zach said.

“You were dreaming,” Jim answered, putting his hand on Zach’s shoulders and steering him back into the other room. “That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.”

The next morning Jim was talkative as they drove away from Shirley Falls. “See that?” he asked. They were about to get on the highway. Bob looked to where Jim pointed and saw a prefab building and a large parking lot with yellow buses. “Catholic churches are emptying out, have been for years, and these fundy churches are big-time. They go around in those buses scooping up any old person who can’t get to church. They love their Jesus, they do.”

Bob did not answer. He was trying to figure out how drunk he’d been last night. He had not felt drunk, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. Maybe what he thought he’d heard was not what he’d heard. Also, he kept picturing Susan this morning, standing on the porch waving as they pulled away, but Zach had bent his head down and gone back inside, and Bob kept picturing that too.