Glass Houses Read online

  Alexander cocked his head. “Alcoholic? Or drug addict?”

  “I have no idea,” Chickie said. “He could just be crazy, for all I know. And it might be nothing. Homeless guy wandering through the alleys, comes on a fresh body and ends up covered with blood. He could be out on the street again in another three or four days. Unless they pitch him somewhere to dry him out, and then it’ll take about two weeks.”

  “Still,” Alexander said. “Dennis will take it as an excuse. Watch it happen. And then I think we can nail him.”

  “You can nail him,” Chickie said. “I’m just along as the guy who tells you how crazy you’re being. You could get yourself killed, whether you understand that or not. Even if this guy isn’t the Plate Glass Killer, he might think it was worth his while to get rid of whoever could expose the other thing.”

  “It’s like I told you,” Alexander said. “It’s like a dam has broken somewhere. We’ve normalized so much abnormal behavior—”

  “I don’t think my behavior is abnormal,” Chickie said.

  Alexander waved this away. “Define ‘normal.’ Or don’t, because that’s where we start getting into problems. How about, we’ve normalized so much forbidden behavior. It’s like the walls between ourselves and barbarism were really a set of overlapping layers; and the more we’ve stripped away, the less protection we have from the truly savage.”

  “Nothing I do is truly savage, Alexander. I did things like that once, but it’s been a long time. And part of the reason I did things like that was because everything and everybody around me said that what I was was foul and diseased and wrong. I had to get over that part to start living a normal life. And I do live a normal life.”

  “I know you do.”

  “And that church that you’re so committed to says that what we are is ‘objectively disordered.’ Or maybe it was ‘profoundly objectively disordered.’ I don’t really remember.”

  “You can be profoundly objectively disordered without being foul and diseased and wrong.”

  “I don’t think so,” Chickie said. “I have this conversation with Margaret Mary all the time, but what it comes down to is, I don’t think so. And what you’re doing is going to lead to a very lonely old age—lonely and isolated.”

  “You don’t think that’s how most gay men end up?” Alexander said. “How many aging gay men do you know who’ve been to bed with a thousand people—literally, a thousand people, if not more—and who suddenly find themselves wrinkled and sagging and all on their own? Or, worse, running off to plastic surgeons to fix things.”

  “I also know lots of gay men who’ve been in committed relationships for decades. You do, too,”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this,” Chickie said. “The food ought to be here any minute, and I don’t feel like fighting tonight. What do you do at those meetings of yours, anyway? Is it like AA?”

  Alexander laughed. For Chickie George, everything was like AA. For a while there, while he was coming out of his “Chickie” phase and becoming “Edmund” on a permanent basis, he was going to three different kinds of meetings and not being able to explain why he thought he needed any one of them.

  The waiter brought the salads, two large bowls with enough greenery between them to put in a lawn, and Alexander went back to looking out at the people on the street. He’d meant what he said, to Chickie, about barbarism. He saw it more and more, not in the big things—not in “Islamofascism” or the war in Iraq or the death penalty in Texas—but in the little ones: the three boys who beat a homeless man to death in Florida; the twelve-year-old in Chicago who killed his five-year-old neighbor to see what it felt like; the legions of teenagers on the streets with tattoos and piercing that would have made an African tribesman faint. It was there in the music and the movies and the art. It was there in the entire cultural aesthetic—ghetto and white trash had become the benchmarks of social acceptance. Most of all, though, it was there in the sex, because sex was the most basic thing there was.

  “When was it,” Alexander asked Chickie, “that sex became the only thing about us that really counted?”

  “The only thing about gays?”

  “No,” Alexander said. “The only thing about any of us. When did liberty come to mean getting your rocks off in whatever way you wanted to without interference? And if that’s the rule, if that’s what we’re all after, if being free means that—then why is what Dennis Ledeski does wrong?”

  7

  Tyrell Moss always had the television turned on to CNN in the back of the shop because if he didn’t he had to put up with one of the boys listening to MTV. It was just one of the dozens of things that had not occurred to him when he first made policy for himself and opened up in this neighborhood. He could remember himself very well, sitting in a little hole-in-the-wall chicken place with his last, and only really decent, parole officer, laying it all out on a napkin, step by step and bit by bit. Dickinson that man’s name had been, and Tyrell was pretty sure that Dickinson had never really thought Tyrell was going to get away with it. That was all right. Tyrell hadn’t been sure of it either. Given his history, it was much more likely that he would have ended up dead.

  Now he stared at the television screen without really seeing it. The story he’d been caught by had finished seconds ago. There was a commercial for some kind of headache remedy on the screen. He rubbed his hands together and looked through the narrow doorway into the store proper, almost automatically. Every other shopkeeper in this neighborhood was Korean. Every single person he met who lived in a twelve-block radius complained about it. The Koreans should not have all the stores in the neighborhood. The Koreans should not be taking our money. Now that he was here, though, it didn’t mean they’d cut him any slack.

  Out at the front counter, Charles Jellenmore was standing by the cash register, his algebra textbook propped up against a display of Slim Jims. Tyrell doubted if Charles was studying, but the charade served its purpose, so he didn’t complain. Among those policies he’d decided for himself before he started, one of them had been to be careful of what kind of kid he hired if the kid was on parole. Tyrell knew it from experience. There were two kinds of kids who got into trouble in a neighborhood like this. The good kind were just being stupid. The bad kind were bad to the very bottom of their souls.

  He went out into the store. “Quiet night,” he said.

  Charles shrugged. “Just the rain. You look at that story on the news?”

  “At that one and another one on CNN.”

  “I bet the dude they arrested was white. I just bet it.”

  “They didn’t say,” Tyrell said. “But I’d bet it, too, if you want to know. Serial killers are usually white.”

  Charles stopped pretending to half look at the textbook. “You serious? Usually?”

  “Yep. It’s like every race has its preferred form of crime. We don’t do much of that kind of thing.”

  “I thought with white people the deal would be money,” Charles said. “Embezzlement. You know, those guys on the news, they’ve got private jet planes all fitted out like strip clubs; they’re stealing more of it and not paying their taxes.”

  “That form of crime,” Tyrell said, “is preferred by anybody who gets around enough money. You ought to pay attention to that textbook. If you’re going to stay out of jail, you’re going to have to stay in school. That’s not me; that’s the court.”

  “They only picked you up because you black,” Charles said. “You know it. Dead white girl in an alley, you’re right here, they just figured they were home free. You’re lucky to be back here and not in jail.”

  “I’m going to go get some air,” Tyrell said.

  He walked down the long aisle that held potato chips and candy and went out the plateglass doors to the street, sighing a little as he went. It wasn’t that he thought Charles was entirely wrong. He was not one of those black people who tried to convince himself that racism had disappeared with the Civil Ri
ghts movement. He thought he knew enough about human beings to know that it would never be entirely eradicated. It was just that he thought that dwelling on it, making it the reason and excuse for everything you did and everything that happened to you, was counterproductive. He looked back on the last twenty-five years—five getting the down payment together so that he could get the store; twenty running the store and making it work—and he couldn’t think of a single time when worrying about the jerks in the world would have made one bit of difference to the way things turned out. Part of the trouble with people like Charles was that they had no idea how difficult it was to do something like this. They thought stores and money fell from the sky on some people rather than others. They lived their entire lives in the passive voice. It wasn’t what they did that mattered, but what happened to them. It wasn’t what kind of person they were that mattered, but how they got rolled by the “system.” Tyrell could remember talking about the “system” when he was Charles’s age. He hadn’t had the faintest idea what he’d meant by the term, and he didn’t think Charles did either.

  He stood out in the rain and looked up and down the street. Usually there were people out here: young guys huddled against the sides of buildings, smoking cigarettes; hookers on their way to better places to pick up tricks; women coming out of the AME Church on the corner, clutching pocketbooks as big as roofing tiles across their stomachs. He didn’t think he could ever be the kind of black man who voted Republican. He wanted to vote for a brother for president some day, but he’d rather vote for Barack Obama than Colin Powell. Still, he understood things, he understood things that—well—that he’d never have admitted all those years ago. He supposed that was the truth.

  He heard footsteps coming up behind him and turned to see who was there. He was not afraid. He might be nearly fifty, but he was still in good shape, and he was built like a truck. Even the punks were afraid of him. He’d made very certain of it because he knew it was going to be the only way he would survive.

  The woman coming up to him was slowing down to talk and looking just a little relieved that he was there.

  “If it isn’t Tyrell,” she said. “I was going to stop in and see if you were around.”

  “Hello, Claretta,” Tyrell said. “You want me to walk you home?”

  Claretta looked up and down the block. “Not tonight, I don’t think. Isn’t it wonderful what the rain does? God knew what he was doing when he sent the flood. Water makes it all look clean.”

  “They’re out there, though,” Tyrell said. “They’re sitting in doorways and hiding in vacant buildings. You ever think how odd that is, vacant buildings?”

  “What’s odd about a vacant building?”

  “A building is a piece of property,” Tyrell said. “It costs money to build. If you keep it up and take care of it, you can make money from it. You don’t get it handed to you for free. If I owned one of those buildings, I’d do whatever I had to do to keep it going.”

  “I don’t think anybody owns them,” Claretta said. “I think the city takes them because they don’t have the taxes paid on them, and then nobody cares. I wish they’d knock that one down, though. It’s a nest of vipers.”

  Tyrell thought he was getting wet. Here was the thing he hadn’t expected. They didn’t just hate him the way they hated the Koreans, they hated him more. It was as if he had done something foul and unforgivable when he opened this store. It was as if he had gone over to the enemy. Of course, it wasn’t everybody who felt like that. Claretta didn’t. The churchwomen didn’t. Still, it was more than just the kids who hung out in the abandoned buildings. It was more than just the people whose opinions he didn’t have to consider at all.

  “Do you ever wonder if you know what you’re doing with your life?” he asked Claretta.

  She raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows halfway up her forehead and clucked. “What’s the matter with you tonight?” she asked. “You don’t think they’re going to come and arrest you, do you? The television said they had a man in custody.”

  “They took me out to the alley and had me look at her,” Tyrell said. “White woman. Everybody says girl, but she wasn’t. Everybody says beautiful. Did you ever notice that? When somebody—well, when one of theirs gets murdered, they always call her beautiful.”

  “You want to speak well of the dead,” Claretta said.

  “Yes, you do. But she wasn’t a girl, and she wasn’t beautiful. I could see that in spite of the, well, the distortions caused by the strangling and the cuts. She was a middle-aged woman and a little on the stocky side, and she’d bled all over everything. And her purse was missing. They didn’t know who she was because there wasn’t a wallet or anything with identification anywhere near her. I don’t think the Plate Glass Killer steals things. I think some of the punks came through after she was dead and stripped the body down. Do you know what I did last year?”

  “Made more money than me?” Claretta said.

  “I took a course over at Saint Joe’s. Nights. I got a couple of kids I could trust to take the store Tuesdays and Thursdays from seven to nine, and I took this course in the Adult Education Division. It was a course in the history of philosophy: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant. I can still remember the names. All these guys, hundreds of years, thousands of years, trying to figure out how people work and what makes them good or bad. None of them seems to have come to any conclusion.”

  “People are bad because they want to be bad,” Claretta said gently, “or because they’re angry or upset or something is messing with them.”

  “Maybe. But sometimes I think the whole world is crazy. People don’t make any sense. People spend most of their time doing things that are going to make them miserable and then complain about how miserable they are. People shoot themselves in the foot and then complain that they’ve been shot. I’m not making any sense.”

  “Not much,” Claretta said.

  Tyrell shook his head. “I’d better get back inside and make sure Charles hasn’t retreated to the television set. You have no idea how much I hate hiphop. And what kind of a name is that? Hip-hop.”

  “What kind of a name was doo-wop?”

  “Doo-wop was theirs. We had rhythm and blues. You sure you don’t want me to see you home?”

  “I’ll be fine. They’ve all gone underground. We going to see you in church on Sunday?”

  “Probably.”

  Claretta went on up the street, and Tyrell stood a little longer in the rain, watching her go, just in case. It wasn’t a good idea for anybody to be out alone at night in this neighborhood unless they were armed in one way or the other, and Claretta would never be armed. She didn’t understand guns, and she thought of knives as something that went along with forks. The street was so deserted, it felt like a scene in a movie: the end of the world was upon us, and nobody was left to mark its passage.

  Claretta disappeared into her building, and Tyrell turned back to the store and Charles Jellenmore. The odd thing was, he remembered the name of the woman in the alley, even though he hadn’t heard it until many long days after he’d been arrested and released. It was Faith Anne Fugate, and what made it stick in his head was the fact that it was so close to another name, Caril Ann Fugate, and that was the name of the girl who had been with Charles Starkweather on his killing spree through Nebraska. That had been in 1958, when Tyrell had been two years old. He hadn’t even heard about the case until he was in his twenties and on something of a true-crime reading jag. For all the yelling and screaming people did about it, he knew it was not about race. It wasn’t races that committed crimes, it was the people in them, and the most important thing about those people was not the color of their skins. The most important thing was—what?

  Damned if I know, Tyrell thought, coming back through the potato chips. The woman in the alley had been sad and pitiable. Her coat was that bumpy, nubbly fabric that wasn’t real wool, that so many women had when they had no money to buy the real thing. It was brown and washed out, as
if she’d had it for many years, and not enough sense to choose something that would brighten up her day. Her gray hair had been pulled back on her head. Her glasses had been made of cheap plastic and were much too thick. They’d lain broken in half on the ground near her slashed-to-ribbons face.

  Caril Ann Fugate had been only thirteen when she’d gone murdering with Charles Starkweather. Faith Anne Fugate had been fifty-two on the day she died. Up at the end of the block, boys were lying on the bare wooden floors of an abandoned building, smoking weed and talking about what they were going to do next with their lives, talking pure unadulterated crap that made them feel, for a moment, like conquering heroes.

  Charles Jellenmore was flipping through the textbook, but not really looking at it. Tyrell came up to him and pushed the book away.

  “Go in back and take a break,” he said. “Ten minutes. Then come back in here, and I’ve got some shelving for you to do. How are you ever going to make anything of yourself if you can’t do math?”

  “I’m not going to need to do math,” Charles said. “I’m going to make it on my talent.”

  Tyrell supposed that Charles saw himself as a singer, since he was too short to play basketball, but it all came down to the same thing.

  8

  Elizabeth Woodville heard the phone before her sister, Margaret, did, mostly because she had been waiting to hear the phone ever since the news had come that a suspect was in custody in the Plate Glass Killings. Of course, she’d told Margaret otherwise. She’d told Margaret a lot of things, in the course of living with her, that weren’t exactly true. This was bigger than most though. This was bigger than saying it didn’t matter whose name went first on the mailbox screwed into the bricks next to the front door, or that she didn’t mind Margaret “being frank” when she talked about the relative illustriousness of their marriages. Actually, she didn’t really mind when Margaret talked about their marriages; it just bored her. A lot of things about being a Tyder bored her. They always had, which was why she had elected to go to college in California, and why she had married a man “nobody on earth had heard of,” and why she’d almost turned down Margaret’s invitation to move back home when Michael died.