Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

“Keep an eye out?” Nick says. He grabs Metzger’s thick shoulder and motions to his own home. “Tonight. While I’m gone.”

“Find any bodies yet?” Metzger says, and laughs.

Nick starts the Subaru. He plugs in his iPod, cycles through tracks until he finds the song he wants.

“Bring me something. A flat-screen. Some golf clubs.”

Nick laughs.

Metzger is unmoved by the heavy bass from T.I. spitting lyrics to “Ready for Whatever.”

“Knives. Good knives. I need some steak knives.”

He’s standing over Nick with a thick arm draped on the roof of the car. Heat radiates from his heavy face, a rash on his left cheek. His hair is thinning and slicked back with sweat. The first time they met, Metzger felt compelled to inform Nick that he’s lived in his three-bedroom house for twelve years, longer than anyone on the block. Before the street was even paved, before the nine identical strips of asphalt and houses were thrown up, before everyone came scrambling in like the little ticks they are to suck the soil dry. There’s not enough water, he said, and his yellowing middle-aged eyes were glazed over. Welcome to the neighborhood. Nick promised they weren’t staying.

“Wanna bet?” He laughed and left.

Metzger’s dog and his wife both died in that house. Metzger had the dog stuffed, and it stands at the foot of the stairs by the front door. He also kept his wife’s body in their bed for four days before calling anyone. And that’s when Nick sees it: Whatever crawls along his shoulder is thick. Metzger brushes at it without looking, and Nick nods absently, waiting. Metzger finally sees it, pinches it, and holds it up in the light from his flashlight. It’s a cicada and it’s buzzing, trying to free itself. Metzger balls it up in his fist, turns, and hurls it into the blackness. He finds a brown shell on the lawn. “They’re everywhere. Look through it.” He holds it up and Nick sees the vertebrae, the eye sockets. “That split on the back, see it, that sliver, that’s where the little shits slither out.” He laughs and crushes the shell in his palm, dusts himself off. “Going to Kostya’s thing?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Metzger’s shaking his head. “Neighborhood barbecue with this bunch. Now, that’s some shit I want to see.”

Nick grins, close to pulling away.

“I’m an OG!” Metzger yells, laughing, inexplicably using black Southern California slang.

Nick laughs out loud, pulls away, and then says to himself, “And I’m the new breed.”

He rolls past the dark and deserted house next door to Metzger’s: The family of four who inhabited it disappeared in the night four weeks ago, leaving behind most of their possessions. They were the first family to drop on Carousel Court. They slipped away before they were locked out or chased out. There would be more. Nick hopes one will be the man next door, suspects it might be the Mormons. He knows Phoebe wanted it to be their own house, to come home one night from ten hours in the car to find a U-Haul backed into the driveway, Nick and Kostya filling it. It wouldn’t matter where they were going, just that they were leaving. Nick knows it’s just as likely that Phoebe will come home to find the locks changed, a conspicuous Day-Glo orange notice on the door from the county sheriff’s department to match the young neighbor’s. It’s a matter of time, months or weeks, he doesn’t know. It requires only one or two late payments these days. It isn’t whether or not it will happen but what he can do that no one else has already thought of or tried, some way to bow out gracefully, his marriage and balls intact.

• •

Traffic is light on the wide streets leading out of Serenos. At a red light, Nick removes a worn black-leather pouch from the glove compartment, drops into it his multi-tool with the three-inch blade and a pair of heavy-duty pliers, and removes the pepper spray and a box cutter. He spent an hour last night on the back patio by the pool sipping Heinekens, a white towel at his feet, his tools aligned just so. With one of Jackson’s old cloth wipes and a small tin of Red Devil oil, he cleaned each of them. He heard nothing when he cleaned his tools: not the young neighbor playing his music too loud; not the plaintive wails of dogs (or were they coyotes?) from the barren hillsides; not the dry brush in the wind. A crowbar, bolt cutters, a multi-tool, and a short blade. He was some kind of benevolent failure. Or madman. He was a thirty-two-year-old college-educated father drowning his family in debt but energized by a simple prospect: proving to Phoebe that he alone, not a New York banker or some handsome young physician, was the winning play still.

Phoebe can barely hear the music coming from next door over the incessant chorus of cicadas as she walks around the house with Jackson held to her chest, turning on all the lights. Nick left for work an hour ago, his third night this week. The last two words from him as she closed and locked the door behind him and set the ADT were “Lights on.”

She carries Jackson and his clean laundry upstairs to his room. A CD of international children’s songs plays from his Bose box. Jackson fills a Tonka truck with Matchbox cars while Phoebe hums along to his songs. She folds his size-2T shirts and shorts and places them neatly in his blue three-drawer dresser. The blinds are closed and the ceiling fan turns slowly as she arranges his books neatly on the shelf. She straightens a framed illustration from Where the Wild Things Are that hangs over his crib. She turns on the light and dims it. The room is bathed in orange light and peaceful as she sits on the plush beige carpeting with Jackson. Downstairs, the refrigerator hums, churns: a fresh batch of ice cubes. The LG stainless steel behemoth is restocked with organic raspberries, blueberries, kiwi, mangoes, and strawberries. Thick slices of bruschetta brushed with olive oil. She’ll eat both, one side rubbed with a cut garlic clove while it’s still hot, the way JW showed her once when he took her to a long lunch three months after she was hired at twenty-four, a perk and a leg up that she surely hadn’t earned yet.

All good? comes the text from Nick.

Fine

Is he sleeping?

Just now

You should see this place — insane

She doesn’t respond. She has nothing to say about whatever he encounters on the other side of the door, all these rotting five-bedroom corpses and their Bermuda grass, yellow from neglect.

• •

Before Nick left the house, he had her by the jaw. Something he’s done since their first weeks together, when he held it in bed, perched over her. “There’s something about you,” he’d say. It had a calming effect on her until recently, because now they’re thirty-two with a son and debt and tumbling down the face of something they never anticipated and the gesture sends all the wrong signals, draws attention to his limitations. Like a grandfather doing the same lame magic trick for the grandchild, who is a teenager now and bored, because that’s all he’s got. Tonight, when Nick was lacing up his boots, giving her instructions, she knew he was feeling guilty about leaving them alone again.

“Kostya and Marina are home.” The neighbors, who might be considered friends, were also in their early thirties, with two sons and a daughter, all somehow named after pickup trucks, Titan, Tundra, and she always forgot the third. “Call them, obviously…” Nick trailed off. “If anything happens.” His back to her, he sat on the stairs in the clean marble foyer. His voice echoed when he called out: “It’s Loma Linda. Maybe an hour from here.”

But Phoebe didn’t hear Nick because Jackson was awake again and wailing. He hadn’t slept through the night all summer, since they arrived in June. He knew something Nick and Phoebe only suspected. His fitfulness was an alarm they’d heed if they could. Phoebe was at the top of the double-ascending Couture by Sutton buttercream-carpeted spiral staircase. She was headed to their son’s powder-blue bedroom with its crown molding and accents of textured glow-in-the-dark galaxies of stars and moons. She turned and studied Nick, who had climbed back up the stairs, looking shorter than his six-foot frame when set against the sixteen-foot ceilings.