“Why not give our black mayor a call?” Melanie said.
“That kind of talk doesn’t help anything,” Otis said.
Melanie was quiet a long time. He heard her mashing out her cigarette, then felt her standing close behind him. “Can you tell if they’re armed?” she asked.
“I can’t see them well in the shadows.” Otis glanced through a side window. “There’s Tom Claggart. I suspect if those fellows want trouble, they’ll find it with Tom.”
“Tom Claggart is a blowhard and an idiot. He’s also a whoremonger,” Melanie said.
Otis turned and stared at his wife.
“Don’t look at me like that. Tom’s wife told me he gave her syphilis. He and his buddies go to cathouses on their hunting trips.”
Otis didn’t want to talk about Tom Claggart. “We can’t be responsible for what vandals do down the street. I’ll go out and yell at them, but the owners of those houses made a choice and that’s the way it is.”
“Don’t provoke them. Where’s your rifle?”
“Our house is well lighted. They can see it’s occupied. They won’t come here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Their kind live under rocks, Melanie. They don’t do well in daylight.”
She was standing even closer to him now, the nicotine in her breath touching his face. Her voice dropped into a whisper. “I’m scared, Otis,” she said. She slipped her arm in his. He could feel the point of her breast against him. He couldn’t remember when she had been so confessional in her need, so dependent upon his strength. “Put the rifle in our bedroom. I know you have it. I saw you with it the other day.”
“I’ll keep it close by. I promise.”
She let out her breath and rested her cheek against his shoulder. In ten seconds’ time the embittered woman he had been living with had disappeared and been replaced by the lovely, intelligent woman he had met on a Bahamian beach, under the stars, years ago.
Otis waited until Melanie and Thelma were setting the dining room table, then removed a pair of binoculars from his desk in the den and focused them on the men who were breaking into homes on the other side of the neutral ground. Tom Claggart tapped on the side window. Otis unlocked the French doors and pulled them open.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The Snoop Dogg fan club is looting the goddamn neighborhood is what,” Tom said.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
Tom Claggart’s shaved head was pinpointed with sweat in the humidity, his muscle shirt streaked with dirt. “We need to take back our fucking neighborhood. You want in or not?”
“What I want is for you not to use that kind of language around my home.”
“Those guys out there file their teeth, Otis. Considering what happened to Thelma, you of all people should know that.”
“If they try to come in my home, I’ll kill them. So far they haven’t tried to do that. Now go back to your family, Tom.”
“My family left.” Tom’s face was flat when he said it, his buckshot eyes round and dead, as though he were announcing a fact he himself had not yet assimilated.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Otis said.
Otis closed the French doors and locked them. As he looked at Tom’s expression through the glass, he felt a deep sense of sorrow for him, the same way he had once felt toward his uneducated, work-exhausted father whose sense of self-worth was so low he had to put on a Klansman’s robes to know who he was.
“Who was that?” Thelma asked.
“A fellow who will never own anything of value,” Otis said.
“What’s that mean?” Thelma asked.
“It means let’s eat,” Otis said, patting her fondly on the back.