As he turns into the neighborhoods, he has a powerful sense of intruding: the blocks are tiny, without markers or sidewalks — the grass is thick with garbage — beer cans, used diapers. Children play in the street so twice he has to back out and go up a different block. He drives slowly, trying to see things yet not appear to be looking. A woman in a turban speaks to another woman in a tight caftan; a man climbs over a chain-link fence into a neighbor’s yard; groups of people talking, sipping drinks, sit under rickety constructions covered in plastic tarps and canvas. There are taped car windows and houses boarded up with planks of wood, overturned shopping carts, yards of bare dirt, a flock of chickens scrabbling in a plot. He rolls through block after block. No one appears to notice him even though his car is so big there are sections where it seems wider than the street. He can’t help thinking of how, when he bought this SUV — a white Mercedes-Benz G55—Stanley referred to it as his whitey-mobile. He’s about to flee the area when he spots a billboard in another rubble field between rows of small wooden houses: Future Home of Les Temps Perdu Condos Dev. by P.I.&B.
Like everything else in the neighborhood, the sign looks provisional and decayed, as if it’s been battered by the elements for a long time. He pulls up to the site and lowers his window. Beneath the bright yellow lettering, he can make out the pentimento of another earlier sign: Future Site of À La Mode Hotel. A thin column of despair rises within his chest. The problem isn’t merely that the building will disrupt the neighborhood, he sees now. The problem is also that, in some sense, the neighborhood is undisruptible and unsavable. They bought the property from the Aguardiente Group, who apparently did little more than conjure up a name for their project. Brian frowns, running his fingers over the steering wheel. He’d heard rumors that the group itself had run into the usual tax and finance problems, dissolving after scarcely a handful of projects. It was easy to forget that so many of these groups were mere cabals, forming and disintegrating seemingly at whim.
There’s no shoulder on the road and nowhere to park, so Brian drives the SUV directly into the lot, snapping twigs and crushing a swath of thorny green weeds. His company now owns the imaginary building in this field, and possession being nine-tenths of the law, he will inspect the empty space he’s traded his honor in for. He climbs out of the car and counts off a hundred or so paces, stopping just before the field dead-ends in a chain-link fence and the back of a row of shedlike houses made of plywood. It’s warm and the air swims a bit. On a kind of despairing impulse, he hikes up his chinos and squats in the weeds, then shifts to a cross-legged sit. The ground is sandy and covered in odd plants pushing straight up like fingers, and a bed of ground leaves, pods, shreds of plastic, cigar butts, and other unidentifiable, partially decomposed garbage. It’s not an uncomfortable place to sit. In fact, as he reclines on one hand, he becomes aware of a softness in the air, a familiar scent of lighter fluid and grilling meat. Across the lot, on the other side of the street, he notices an immense woman in a dress of some stretched, shiny fabric, sitting on the concrete step in front of her house, staring at him. Her eyes look like punched-out holes, her fat arms rest on her knees. He waves at her and she doesn’t quite wave back, but he detects an incline to her head. He thinks of his mother, her silent final months in bed, face shining with tears, watching her sons with a look of ancient disappointment.
There is sweet music from an invisible source: swaying reggae chime. He begins to imagine that the place is not all that bad, that there is, in fact, a pleasant sort of ramshackle quality about the neighborhood that he actually enjoys. He lets himself toy with an idea: if his investment in the Steele Building pays out, he will quit his job. They’ll give Stanley what he needs and most of the rest will go to charity. They could keep just enough to buy a little house right here (this condominium — he senses vividly — will never get built), become the kooky white couple — greeted at first with suspicion, until — with Avis’s baking — they manage to win the hearts of the neighbors… Or perhaps it’s not him and Avis? Now he sees himself standing on a glass balcony overlooking the ocean: a younger woman wafts out; she is draped in silk, her hair like gossamer…
He is interrupted in these musings by a shout and looks up to see three lanky black men headed toward him from the opposite corner of the field. They wear tank tops and denim shorts halfway down their hips, revealing four or more inches of boxer shorts. All three of them are built like the figures on top of trophies, their arms sinewy with tight, round muscles, skin gleaming as if freshly oiled. “Yo, man!” the one in front calls. “What you doing out here? You lost or something. You gotta be lost.” He wears a pair of aviator-style sunglasses on his forehead. “Guy’s tripping,” another one, in a red T-shirt, solid black tattoos engraved into his bicep, says. “He look lost.”
Brian blinks at them. He thinks he should be frightened, but it seems he can’t summon the energy for fear. How little it takes to make one’s life jump its tracks. The phrase put out to pasture floats through his mind and he laughs. “Some pasture, huh?”
The men glance at each other. The man in red says, “Yo.”
“How long you been sitting out there in the sun, man?” Sunglasses says. “Why don’t we get you in your nice big car now and get you on your way?”
Brian points to the billboard. “You see that sign over there? That’s me.”
Sunglasses and the man in red walk to the sign while a third one in an olive drab tank top and a shaved head stays behind, watching Brian with his hands on his hips.
“That’s me,” Brian says again.
“Yes, sir,” Shaved Head says gravely.
The two men study the sign, frowning, and Brian wonders then if they can read and, if not, if he’s just insulted them. Sunglasses walks back with Red Shirt trailing by a few steps. “So you Pib?”
“Pib? Ah — PI&B. Yes. I work for them. They bought this property and they’re planning to build here. Actually, probably they’re just going to pretend to build and then sell before anything goes up.”
Sunglasses tilts his head back and crosses his arms high over his chest, tucking his hands under his armpits. He gives Brian a long, dissecting stare. “Sorry to say it, but you don’t really look like you work for nobody.”
Rattled, Brian searches in his pockets, but he left his wallet in the garage with his new hammer and batteries. He extricates his cell phone and says, “Wait.” When Javier picks up on the first ring, he feels a cascade of relief. “Hey, Javy! Buddy! Listen, I need a favor. I’m up here at the Topaz site and I need you to confirm for some people that I work for PI&B.”
Sunglasses rolls his eyes. “Man, what does that prove? Just proves you got some homeboy who’s crazy as you.”
Javier, on the other end, says, “What? Who said that? Where are you?”