After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  The morning haze had burned off by the time he stepped out into the drive. The sky was a clear, depthless blue, the blue of childhood adventures, picnics, outings to Bear Mountain and the Island, the blue of good times, and he was thinking of his first wife, Sarah, thinking of Cap d’Antibes, Isla Mujeres, Molokai. They traveled in those days, on the beaten path and off it. There was no end to what he wanted to see: the Taj Mahal, the snow monkeys of Hokkaido, prayer wheels spinning idly on the naked slopes above Lhasa. They went everywhere. Saw it all. But that turned sour too, like everything else. He took a minute to duck behind a bank of Bougainvillea and empty his bladder—there was no place to pee on the beach, unless you did it surreptitiously in the flat water beyond the breakers, and since he’d hit forty he couldn’t seem to go more than an hour at a time without feeling that nagging pressure in his lower abdomen. And was that cool? No, no part of it was even remotely cool—it was called getting old.

  There was a discolored place on the floor of the garage where Kim’s car had been, a kind of permanent shadow, but he didn’t dwell on it. He decided to take the sports car—a mint Austin-Healey 3000 he’d bought from a guy in the movie business with a garage full of them—because it made him feel good, and feeling good had been in short supply lately. The top was down, so he took a moment to rub a palmful of sunblock into the soft flesh under his eyes—no reason to wind up looking like one of the unwrapped mummies nodding over their white wine and appetizers in every café and trattoria in town. Then he adjusted his sunglasses, turned his cap backwards, and shot down the street with a modulated roar.

  He’d nearly got to the beach—had actually turned into the broad, palm-lined boulevard that fronted it—before he remembered the three kids from yesterday. What if they showed up again? What if they were already there? The thought made him brake inappropriately, and the next thing he knew some jerk in a 4x4 with the frame jacked up eight feet off the ground was giving him the horn—and the finger. Normally, he would have had a fit—it was a New York thing, turf wars, attitude—but he was so put out he just pulled over meekly and let the jerk go by.

  But then he told himself he wasn’t about to be chased off his own beach by anybody, especially not some punk-ass kids who wouldn’t know one end of hip from the other. He found a spot to park right across from the steps down to the beach and pulled his things out of the trunk with a quick angry jerk of his arm—if he could run, if he could only run, he’d chase them down till their stinking weed-choked little punk lungs gave out, even if it took miles. The shits. The little shits. He was breathing hard, sweating under the band of the cap.

  Then he was on the concrete steps, the Pacific opening up before him in an endless array of waves, that cool, fathomless smell on the air, the white crescent of the beach, blankets and umbrellas spread out across the sand as far as he could see in either direction. There was something about the scene that always lightened his mood, no matter how sorry for himself he was feeling. That was one thing he could never understand about Kim. Kim didn’t like the beach. Too much sun. Bad for the skin. And the sand—the sand was just another kind of grit, and she always bitched when she found a white spill of it on the carpet in the hall. But she liked it when he came home to her all aflame because he’d just watched a hundred women strip down to the essentials and rub themselves all over with the sweetest unguents and emollients an eight-ounce tube could hold. She liked that, all right.

  He was halfway down the steps, studying a pair of girls descending ahead of him, when he heard the high, frenzied barking of the dog. There they were, the three of them, in their boxcar shorts and thatch haircuts, laughing and jiving, throwing the stick as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, not to them, anyway. Edison froze, right there, six steps down. It was as if he were paralyzed, as if he’d suffered a stroke as he reached for the iron rail and set one gimpy leg down in front of the other. An older couple, trainwrecks of the flesh, brushed past him, then a young mother trailing kids and plastic buckets. He could not move. The dog barked. There was a shout from down the beach. The stick flew.

  And then, patting down his pockets as if he’d forgotten something, he swung slowly round and limped up the steps. For a long moment he sat in the car, fiddling with the tuner until he found a rap station, and he cranked it as loud as it would go, though he hated the music, hated it. Finally he slammed the car in gear and took off with a lurch, the thunderous bass and hammering lyrics thrusting a dagger into the corpse of the afternoon, over and over, all the way down the street.

  He thought of the bar—of lunch at the bar and a cocktail to pull the codeine up out of whatever hole it was hiding in—but he didn’t have the heart for it. He was Edison Banks. He’d had his own band. He’d created Savage Street. He didn’t eat lunch at one-thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t eat lunch alone, either—or drink anything, even wine, before five o’clock. That was what the rest of them did, all his hopeless washed-out diamond-encrusted neighbors: they ate lunch. And then they had a couple of cocktails and bought flowers from the flower girl in the short skirt before picking up their prescriptions at the drugstore, and by then it was cocktail hour and they drank cocktails and ate dinner. Or ordered it, anyway.

  He burned up the tires for the next half hour, taking the turns like a suicide—or a teenager, a thatch-headed, flat-stomached, stick-throwing teenager—and then the engine started to overheat and he switched off the radio and crawled back home like one of the living dead in their ancient Jags and Benzes. A nap, that was what he was thinking, elevate the knee, wrap the frozen peas round it, and doze over a book by the pool—where at least it was private. He winced when he climbed out of the car and put some weight on his right leg, but the peas and another codeine tab would take care of that, and he came up the back walk feeling nothing. He was digging for his keys, the sun pushing down like a weight on his shoulders while a pair of hummingbirds stitched the air with iridescent feints and dodges and the palms along the walk nodded in the faintest stirrings of a breeze, when he saw that the back door was open

  And that was odd, because he was sure he’d shut and locked it when he left. Kim might have been clueless about security, leaving her handbag on the front seat of the car where anybody could see it, running out of the house with her makeup half on and never thinking twice about the door gaping behind her, but he was a rock. He never forgot anything, even when his brain was fuzzed with the little white pills the doctor kept feeding him. He wouldn’t have left the door open. He couldn’t have. His next thought was for the maid—she must not have left yet. But then he glanced over his shoulder, down the slope and past the fence to the spot out on the public road where she always parked her dirt-brown Corolla. It wasn’t there.

  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 gon
e 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.

  One afternoon, a day or two after the first rain of the winter has converted the dry creek bed out back into a sluice of braided, sepia-colored ripples and long, trailing ropes of eucalyptus bark, my widow is startled by a persistent thumping from the far end of the house. She is, as always, in the kitchen, peering into a steaming pot of chicken-vegetable soup, the only thing she ingests these days, aside from the odd slab of indifferently grilled flank steak and coffee so acidic it’s taken the glaze off the ceramic cup our son made her when he was in the sixth grade. The doorbell, which in my day chimed a carillon from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” is long since defunct, and so my widow takes a while to register the notion that someone is knocking at the front door. The front door, is, after all, a good sixty paces from the kitchen, out the kitchen door and down the long L-shaped hall that leads to the entryway and the grand room beyond it, now a refuge for cats. Still, that is unmistakably the sound of knocking, and you can see the alertness come into her eyes—it could be the postman, she’s thinking, who just the other day (or was it the other week?) brought her a letter from our son, who lives and works in Calcutta, dispensing cornmeal mush and clean bandages to the mendicants there. “I’m coming!” my widow calls in her creaking, octave-challenged voice, and she sets down the stirring spoon amidst the debris of what once was the kitchen counter, wipes her hands on her flannel nightgown, and moves slowly but resolutely down the hall to answer the door.

  Standing on the brick doorstep, plainly visible through the ancient flowing glass of the front door, is a young woman in shorts, leggings and some sort of athletic jersey, with stringy black hair, terrible posture, and what appears to be a fur muff tucked under one arm. As my widow gets closer and the indefinite become
s concrete, she sees that the young woman’s eyes are heavily made up, and that the muff has become a kitten of indeterminate breed—black, with a white chest and two white socks. Curious, and pursing her lips in the way she used to when she was a young woman herself, my widow swings open the door and stands there blinking and mute, awaiting an explanation.

  “Oh, hi,” the young woman says, squeezing the words through an automatic smile, “sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering …” Unaccountably, the young woman trails off, and my widow, whose hearing was compromised by the Velvet Underground and Nico during a period of exuberance in the last century, watches her lips for movement. The young woman studies my widow’s face a moment, then decides to change tack. “I’m your neighbor, Megan Capaldi?” she says finally. “Remember me? From the school-lunch drive last year?”

  My widow, dressed in an old flannel shirt over the faded and faintly greasy flannel nightgown, does not, in fact, remember her. She remains noncommittal. Behind her, from the depths of the house, a faint mewling arises.

  “I heard that you were a real cat person, and I just thought—well, my daughter April’s cat had kittens, and we’re looking for good homes for them, with people who really care, and this one—we call her Sniggers—is the last one left.”

  My widow is smiling, her face transformed into a girl’s, the striations over her lip pulling back to reveal a shining and perfect set of old lady’s teeth—the originals, beautifully preserved. “Yes,” she says, “yes,” before the question has been asked, already reaching out for the kitten with her regal old hands. She holds it to her a moment, then looks up myopically into the young woman’s face. “Thanks for thinking of me,” she says.