John Katzenbach - The Analyst

In the distance, he was aware that the Gulf, with its expanse of vibrant blue waters, and the station, with great gray navy ships lined up, was the axis on which everything revolved. But as he moved farther from the ocean, deeper into disadvantage, the world he traveled in seemed limited, aimless, and as hopeless as an empty bottle.

He found the street where Claire Tyson’s family lived, and shuddered. It was no better, no worse than any of the other blocks, but in that mediocrity, spoke volumes: a place to flee from.

Ricky was looking for number thirteen, which was in the middle of the block. He pulled up and parked outside.

The house itself was much the same as the others in the block. A single-story, small two- or three-bedroom home, with air conditioners hanging from a couple of windows. A slab of concrete served as front porch and a rusty black kettle grill was leaned up against the side. The house was painted a faded pink and had an incongruous thirteen in hand-lettered black near the door. The one was significantly larger than the three, which almost indicated that the person who’d put the address on the wall had changed his mind in midstroke. There was a basketball hoop nailed to the portal of an open-air carport that looked to his unpracticed eye to be six inches to a foot lower than regulation. Regardless, the rim was bent. There was no net. A weathered, faded orange ball rested against a stanchion post. The front yard had a neglected look to it, streaks of dirt sidled up against grass choked with weeds. A large yellow dog, chained to a wall, confined by a steel fence to the tiny, square backyard, started to bark furiously as he walked up the driveway. That morning’s paper had been left near the street, and he picked it up and carried it to the front door. He touched the buzzer and heard the bell sound inside. A baby was crying inside, but quieted almost instantly as a voice responded, “I’m coming, I’m coming…”

The door opened and a young black woman, toddler on her hip stood before him. She did not open the screen door.

“What you want?” she demanded, furious and barely constrained. “You here for the TV? The washer? Maybe the furniture? Maybe the baby’s bottle? What you gonna take this time?” She looked past him, out to the street, her eyes searching for a truck and a crew.

“I’m not here to take anything,” he said.

“You with the electric company?”

“No. I’m not a bill collector and I’m not a repossession man, either.”

“Who you be, then?” she asked. Her voice was still aggressive. Defiant.

“I’m a man with a couple of questions,” he said. Ricky smiled. “And if you have some answers, maybe some money.”

The woman continued to eye him suspiciously, but now with some curiosity as well. “What sort of questions?” she asked.

“Questions about someone who lived here once. A while ago.”

“Don’t know much,” the woman said.

“Family named Tyson,” Ricky said.

The woman nodded. “He be the man got evicted before we move in.”

Ricky took out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. He held it up and the woman opened the screen door. “You a cop?” she asked. “Some sort of detective?”

“I’m not a policeman,” Ricky said. “But I might be some sort of detective.” He stepped inside the house.

He blinked for a moment, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It was stifling in the small entranceway and he followed the woman and the child into the living room. The windows were open in this space, but the built-up heat still made the narrow room seem like a prison cell. There was a chair, a couch, a television, and a red-and-blue playpen, which is where the child was deposited. The walls were empty, save for a picture of the baby, and a single stiffly posed wedding photo of the woman and a young black man in a naval uniform. He would have guessed the ages of the couple as nineteen. Twenty at most. He stole a look at the young woman and thought to himself: nineteen, but aging fast. Ricky looked back at the picture and asked the obvious question: “Is that your husband? Where’s he now?”

“He shipped out,” the woman said. With the anger removed from her voice, it had a lilting sweetness to it. Her accent was unmistakably Southern black, and Ricky guessed deep South. Alabama or Georgia, perhaps Mississippi. Enlisting, he suspected, had been the route out of some rural world, and she’d tagged along, not knowing that she was merely going to replace one sort of harsh poverty for another. “He’s in the Gulf of some Arabia somewhere, on the USS Essex . That’s a destroyer. Got another two months ’fore he gets home.”

“What’s your name?”

“Charlene,” she replied. “Now what’s those questions that’s gonna make me some extra money?”

“Things are tight?”

She laughed, as if this was a joke. “You’d best believe it. Navy pay don’t go too far until your rating get up a bit. We already lost the car and be two months slow on the rent. The furniture, we owe on, too. That be the story for just about everyone in this part of town.”

“Landlord threatening you?” Ricky asked. The woman surprisingly shook her head.

“Landlord be some good guy, I don’t know. When I got the money, I send it to a bank account. But a man at the bank, or maybe a lawyer, he called up and told me not to worry, to pay when I could, said he understood things were hard on military sometimes. My man, Reggie, he just an enlisted sailor. Got to work his way up before he make any real money. But landlord be cool, nobody else be. Electric say they gonna shut off, that’s why can’t run the air conditioners or nothing.”

Ricky moved over and sat on the single chair, and Charlene took up a spot on the couch. “Tell me what you know about the Tyson family. They lived here before you moved in?”

“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about those folks. All I knows about is the old fella. He was here all alone. Why you interested in that old man?”

Ricky removed his wallet and showed the young woman the fake driver’s license with the name Rick Tyson on it. “He’s a distant relative and he may have come into a small amount of money in a will,” Ricky lied. “I was sent by the family to try to locate him.”

“I don’t know he gonna need any money where he be,” Charlene said.

“Where’s that?”

“Over at the VA nursing home on Midway Road. If he’s still breathing.”

“And his wife?”

“She dead. More ’n a couple of years. She had a weak heart, or so’s I heard.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

Charlene shook her head. “Only story I knows is what I was told by the neighbors.”

“Then tell me that story.”

“Old man and old woman live here by themselves…”

“I was told they had a daughter…”

“I heard that, too, but I heard she died, long time ago.”

“Right. Go on.”

“Living on Social Security checks. Maybe some pension money, I don’t know. But not much. Old woman, she got sick with her heart. Got no insurance, just the Medicare. They suddenly got bills. Old woman, she up and dies, leaving the old man with more bills. No insurance. He just an old, nasty man, got no neighbors like him none too much, no friends, no family anyone knows about. What he got same as me, just bills. People who wants their money. Up one day, comes late with the mortgage on the house, finds out that it ain’t the bank he thinks that owns the note anymore, it be someone who bought the note from the bank. He misses that payment, maybe one more, the sheriff’s deputies come with an eviction notice. They put the old guy out onna street. Next I hear, he’s in the VA. I’m not guessing he’s ever gonna get out of there, neither, except maybe feetfirst.”