Jay makes sure to get to the door first. All the noise they’ve been making, someone might have already put in a call. If these are cops at the door now, he wants to do the talking. He turns to his wife before opening the door. “I did this, Bernie. Okay?” He waits for her to agree with him. Her face is completely blank. She stares at him as if he’s a stranger, the true intruder in her home.
Jay opens the door, pulling it just a crack.
The eyeball on the other side is red-veined and rheumy about the insides.It’s Mr. Johnson from downstairs. “Mr. Porter, y’all doin’ all right?” he asks, scratching at his gray beard, trying to peer past Jay and into the apartment. “I heard your wife scream ing. Somethin’ not wrong, is it?”
“Bernie saw a rat is what it was.”
“You get him?”
“No, sir. He made it out the back door.”
“Lord, don’t tell me that. My wife hear about another rat running around, and she’s gon’ keep me up all night about it.” He chuckles, wanting to share a husbandly laugh with Jay. But Jay just stands there, saying no more than he already has. “And you’re sure that’s all it was?” Mr. Johnson asks.
“Yes, sir,” Jay says.
He mumbles a curt good night to his neighbor and quickly shuts the door.
“What in the world, Jay?” his wife says.
“I don’t want that man in our business, B.”
“I’m talking about that mess in the bedroom.”
“I’m sorry, B,” he says, talking too fast. “After I dropped you off at Evelyn’s, I realized I forgot something back here, some thing I needed for the interview. It was a good thing I remem bered too, before I got all the way out to Pasadena. I tore the place up, in a hurry, you know. And I’m sorry.”
He walks past her calmly, into the bedroom, as if he does this sort of thing all the time, tearing up her things, scaring her half to death. He starts picking through the mess in the room. Ber nie stands in the open doorway, leaned against the wood frame, watching him. “What was it?” she asks.
He looks up. “Pardon?”
“What was it you were looking for?”
“A sheet of questions, names my client told me to look into.”
“I don’t remember seeing it,” she says. Then, “Where’d you find it?”
“Hm?” he says, stalling.
“Where did you find it, Jay?”
“That’s the funny part. It was in my car the whole time.”
He smiles. She does not smile back.
“Come on, Bernie. If anybody really broke in here, they would have taken the TV, the radio or something. Your ’frigera tor money’s still there, ain’t it?”
Softly, he adds, “You got no reason to be scared, Bernie.”
“I’m not scared. I’m thinking.” She runs her finger inside the doorjamb, fingering the cheap, pulpy wood. There’s a lot he’s not telling her, and she seems to know it by the look on his face. “I’m sorry about the mess,” he says, putting the dresser drawers back. Bernie watches him for a while, then slowly joins him in the cleanup, repacking her flowered suitcase piece by piece.
About an hour before dawn, he’s still up, sitting on the living room sofa, a tool chest at his feet and a can of beer in his hand, trying to think of how they got inside. He checks the front door and the one in back, where the hinge is still hanging loose from when he pushed his way into the apartment. He wonders if that was the point of entry, if they kicked the door in and then slop pily tried to repair the damage, replacing the hinge. But as he hunches on his knees, refastening the screws on the brass-plated hinge, he considers what little sense that makes. Why would anyone bother? Why tear the place apart, make a show that you’d been there, then take the trouble to cover your tracks?
No, somebody wanted him to know they were here. Which is why he can’t sleep now.
’Cause the more he thinks about it, the more a nagging feel ing starts to sink somewhere in the back of his mind, like dirt and debris settling after a hurricane. At this late hour, the air finally still, he can, at last, see things clearly.
It was not a cop who broke in. He’s almost sure of it now. Jay used to have break-ins all the time. His dorm room, the duplex on Scott Street where he stayed sometimes, even his first apartment after his trial, a one bedroom rattrap in the Bottoms in Third Ward. The feds and local law enforcement often came and went as they pleased, going through his things, bugging the phones. But they never left more than a faint trace: a lamp out of place, a phone book moved a few inches to the left of where it had been, or his papers rearranged in a slightly different order than before. Everything else was exactly the way he’d left it, down to the cigarette butts in the ashtrays and the dirty dishes in the sink. The only firm clues that someone had been in his place were the tiny recording devices he used to pull out of his phone receivers.
He’s already checked the kitchen phone tonight.
In a fit, he took the whole thing off the wall and tore it apart, laying the pieces across the dinette table, studying them under the light. When he didn’t find anything, he tried to put the thing back together and couldn’t, and he got so frustrated that he started to laugh out loud, a dark, bitter sound that led to tears.
You’re not right, his wife had said.
It’s been almost a week since Bernie’s birthday dinner, since he helped a stranger out of the bayou, a woman he doesn’t even know for a fact to be a murderer. No cops have come beating down his door; no one’s even called to ask him any questions. He’s done nothing wrong. And yet here he is, three o’clock in the morning, sitting over his dead phone, what he broke apart with his bare hands.
This is what his life has done to him.
