Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the House
A house where blood has been spilled never smells the same again.
You can use lye. You can use vinegar and boiling water and two crates of Dutch ammonia that make your eyes run until your cheeks are raw, but when the sun hits the floorboards in July, the iron comes back.
It lives in the grain of the wood.
It lives in the plaster behind the baseboards.
Victor was gone by noon.
I didn't ask where. Damian didn't say. A black Cadillac with tinted glass had backed up to the service entrance while the snow was still falling, three men had carried something heavy wrapped in canvas down the three concrete steps, and the car had left two gray ruts in the drift that the wind filled in before the parish bells struck one.
The men from Cicero didn't come back.
Neither did the Greeks.
Damian spent three days in the study with the doors shut, the phone against his ear, his voice a low, rhythmic murmur that never varied in pitch or volume. Names were mentioned. Numbers were given. Once, around midnight on Thursday, I heard him say: "Tell them the lake is closed until March. If they have containers in Gary, they can use the rail or they can eat the loss."
Bruno didn't leave the breakfast nook.
Dr. Aris had put twenty-four stitches into his shoulder and another nine along his ribs. His right foreleg was wrapped in heavy white linen from the elbow to the dewclaw, stiff as a birch branch. He smelled of iodine and sulfur.
He couldn't stand up.
Every four hours, Sophia would take a plastic bowl of water, kneel beside the blanket, and dip her fingers into it so he could lick the drops from her knuckles.
He wouldn't drink from the bowl. Only from her hands.
On the fifth day, Damian came down the stairs.
He was wearing an old corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows—something his father must have left behind in the closets. His left arm was in a black sling, neat and tight against his chest.
He had a thick manila envelope under his good arm.
He walked into the breakfast nook, looked at the dog, then looked at me.
"The house is sold," he said.
I dropped the box of salt I was holding. It hit the counter and spilled a small white dune across the laminate.
"Sold?"
"A developer from Northbrook," Damian said. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs with his right hand and sat down with a groan that he couldn't quite swallow. "They're going to tear it down. Build eight houses with three-car garages and lawns that look like putting greens."
My heart felt like it had been dropped into a well.
"We have to leave," I said.
It wasn't a question. I had known it was coming. When men like Damian Cruz sell their houses, the people who clean the baseboards don't get transfer orders; they get two weeks' cash in an envelope and an afternoon to clear their lockers.
"Yes," Damian said. "You have to leave."
He pushed the manila envelope across the table.
It was heavy. It didn't slide easily; the paper was thick and slightly greasy from handling.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Your forty-eight dollars," he said.
I looked at him. His face was different. The cold, flat look—the one that had made the men from the Indiana port freeze like rabbits—was gone. In its place was something dry, exhausted, and strangely clean, like the limestone bluffs after a winter gale has scoured off the summer dirt.
"There's eighty thousand dollars in that parcel, Rosa," he said. "In non-sequential twenties and fifties. It's clean enough for a savings bank on 26th Street if you deposit it three thousand at a time."
My breath left me.
"I can't take this," I said.
"You took a six-foot iron poker to Victor’s knee," he said. "The orthopedic surgeon in Cicero told Miller that Victor will walk with a silver-headed stick for the rest of his life. That's worth eighty thousand to me. It saves on ammunition."
"Mr. Cruz—"
"Take the girl," he said, looking at the floor where Bruno lay with his nose on Sophia’s knee. "Go to Milwaukee. Go to Texas. Go wherever it is that people like you go when they want their children to grow up without knowing what a nine-millimeter looks like when the safety comes off."
He stood up.
He didn't look at Bruno.
He turned toward the doorway that led back to the empty, echoing halls of the nineteen rooms he had never used.
"Damian," I said.
It was the first time I had ever spoken his Christian name. It felt strange in my mouth—heavy and sharp, like a silver coin found in the dust.
He stopped.
He didn't turn around, but his shoulders went tight under the corduroy.
May you like
"The dog can't walk," I said.
***
