He shut the door behind him, thinking he’d have to talk to her about that, about walking off and leaving the place wide open — there was no excuse for it, even if she was distraught about the fate of the elephants or her sister’s latest lumpectomy. In the kitchen, he fought the childproof cap of the prescription bottle and chased down a pill with a glass of cranberry juice. He’d just pulled open the freezer to reach for the peas when a sound from above made him catch his breath. It was a furtive sound, the soft friction of wood on wood — as of a dresser drawer, antique oak, slightly balky, sliding open. He didn’t breathe again until he heard the faint squeal of the drawer going back in, and the answering echo of the next one falling open.
Edison kept three guns in the house, identical Smith & Wesson 9mm stainless steel pistols, two of which had never been fired, and he went now for the one he kept in a cubicle in the pantry, behind the old telephone books. He held it in his hand a long while, listening, then made sure it was loaded, flicked off the safety, and started up the stairs. It was very quiet. Shadows collided on the walls above him, and the air was thick with motes of dust and the lazy circling attentions of the flies at the upstairs window. He was in his own house, among familiar things, but everything seemed distorted and unfamiliar, because he’d never before gone up these stairs with a gun in his hand — and yet he didn’t feel nervous or tense, or not particularly. He felt like a hunter in an air-conditioned forest.
When he crept into the bedroom — the master bedroom, the place where he’d slept alone in the big antique bed for the past three weeks — there was a man there, his back to the door, his arms and shoulders busy with the work at hand. A phrase came into Edison’s head: rifling the drawers. And then another one, one he’d heard on TV a thousand times — used himself in too many episodes of Savage Street to count: Freeze. And that’s what he said now, in a kind of bark, and he couldn’t help appending an epithet to it, for maximum effect. “Freeze, motherfucker,” that’s what he said. “Freeze, motherfucker!”
That was when Lyle, dressed in the same pale European-cut suit he’d been wearing the night before, turned around, his hands at his sides. “Hey, man,” he said, all the sunshine in the world distilled in his voice, no worries, no problems, and how do you spell California? “I just stopped by to see you, take you up on your invitation, you know? Cool house. I really dig your antiques — you the collector, or is it your wife?”
Edison had a gun in his hand. A gun he’d fired just once, at the indoor firing range, twelve bucks an hour, no target big enough for him to nail — or maybe it wasn’t this gun at all. Maybe it was the one under the sink in the master bath or the one behind the drapes in the front hall. The gun was cold. It was heavy. He didn’t know what to do with it now that he was holding it there in his hand like some party favor.
“Hey, come on, man, put that thing away, all right? You’re scaring me.” Lyle was wearing two-tone shoes and a hand-painted tie, very cool. He swept the hair back from his brow with a hand that betrayed him — a hand that was shaking. “I mean I knocked and all, but nobody answered, right? So I came in to wait for you, so we could maybe spin some sides — isn’t that what you say, ‘spin some sides’?”
It came to him then that Lyle was exactly like the kid on the beach, the kid grown up, all mockery and hate, all attitude. “You’re the guy,” Edison said. “You’re the guy, aren’t you?”
And there it was, the curled lip, the dead blue vacancy of the eyes. “What guy? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man — I mean, I come over, at your invitation, to, to—”
“The jewelry thief. ‘The discerning burglar.’ You’re him, aren’t you?” The knowledge went right through him, hot knowledge, knowledge like the burning needle his mother would use to probe his flesh when he came in screaming with a splinter embedded in his finger. “Let me see your pockets. Pull out your pockets.”
“Spin some sides,” Lyle said, but the phrase was bitter now, nasal and venomous. “Isn’t that what you hepcats say, you hipsters and thin white dukes? Too cool, right?” And he pulled a necklace out of his pocket, one of the things Kim, in her haste, had left behind. He held it out for a moment, a gentle silken dangle of thin hammered gold with a cluster of jewels, and let it drop to the carpet. “Let me tell you something, Edison—your show sucked. Even back then it was a joke — me and my buds’d get stoned and laugh at it, you know that? And your band — your pathetic band — was even worse.”
Outside, beyond Lyle, beyond the blinds and the curtains, the sun was spread over everything like the richest cream, and the window that framed it all was like nothing so much as an outsized TV screen. Edison felt something in him die, droop down and die like some wilted plant, and he wondered if it was the codeine or what it was. It came almost as a surprise to him to glance down and see that he was still holding on to the gun.
Lyle leaned back against the dresser and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a quick flick of his lighter. “So what are you going to do, shoot me?” he said. “Because it’s my word against yours. I mean, where’s your witness? Where’s the stolen property? You invited me over, right? ‘Anytime, man,’ isn’t that what you said? And here I am, an honored guest, and maybe we had an argument and you got a little crazy — old guys are like that, aren’t they? Don’t they go a little crazy every once in a while?” He exhaled a blue veil of smoke. “Or shit, I mean I was just up here checking out my listings, I thought this was going to be an open house, and I wander in, innocent, totally innocent, and suddenly there’s this guy with a gun … and who is it? It’s you.”
“That’s right,” Edison said, “it’s me. Edison Banks. And who the fuck are you? What did you ever write? How many albums did you record? Huh?”
Lyle put the cigarette to his lips, and Edison watched the coal go red with the rush of oxygen. He had nothing to say, but his look — it was the look of the kid on the beach all over again. Exactly. Exactly that. But this time there would be no footrace, because Edison had already caught up.
My Widow
CAT PERSON
My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantelpiece, their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you’ll pardon the expression. She sleeps with these cats, my widow does, or at least as many of them as the antique bed, with its questionable sheets and cat-greased quilt, can accommodate, and all night and into the burgeoning sun-dappled hours of the early morning, there is a ceaseless movement of limb and tongue and the lazy twitching of feline tails. In addition to the cats, my widow once had a pair of vocal and energetic little dogs, of a breed whose name I could never remember, but both have long since run off or been crushed to marrow out on the busy street that winds up from the village and past the rear gate of the house. She had a ferret too, for a while, though ferrets are illegal in the state of California. It didn’t last long. After throttling and partially dismembering a litter of week-old kittens, the animal secreted itself in the crawl space under the house, where it took sick and died. Even now, its mummified corpse subsides gradually into the immemorial dust beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, just under the place where the refrigerator rests, going quietly about its work.