Some Kinds of Love: Stories

Tuesdays at the Center for Excellence

164J Tuesdays at the Center for Excellence How did the burglar enter? That moot question addled Cruett’s mind as the gray figure slunk across his bedroom in blue moonlight. It had been such a quiet, fine March night, the clocks soon to spring forward and devour an hour’s extra languishing. And Cruett was drowsily relishing this hour when his warped bedroom door huffed, scraped the carpet, then swept open. In the doorway the burglar wavered, a monster in a dream. But real—he smelled mightily of bleach. The figure lifted from the dresser Cruett’s small television. Rising, its cord toppled a picture frame, which clattered. The thief glanced at Cruett, who faked sleeping. Co-workers and what established residents remained in his embattled neighborhood told of burglars who tortured those they robbed, beat them, terrorized them. When methamphetamine and crack cocaine reached Jackson, Mississippi, thieves began tearing through households, rampaging like berserkers, hoping to find victims instead of empty homes and easy loot. This burglar stood still. His arms were thick. His belly lifted his shirt above his black pants, and Cruett felt sure he saw white skin there. This surprised him. When, in terror at the neighborhood ’s decline, he imagined this happening, he never thought of any thief but a black. tuesdays at the center for excellence K165 His heart pounded so hard he worried the thief could hear it snapping and squirting down in his throat. He closed his mouth. Holding the television the thief remained as motionless and patient as an obese cat. Finally Cruett could take no more. “It is not even color,” he said firmly. A long silence; then the thief sighed. Rustling slickly—it must have been a jogging suit he was wearing—the thief bent to place the television on the floor. His jacket was much too short, its sleeves hardly coming to his wrists. From the jacket the thief pulled a flask and a handkerchief . The smell of bleach doubled. “This neighborhood has history, and protective covenants,” Cruett heard himself blathering, “and here you come into my home, boozing . . .” The thief tipped the flask against his handkerchief, secured the flask, and lunged at the bed. Before Cruett could sit up, the thief cupped a hand at the back of Cruett’s neck, and pressed the kerchief hard against Cruett’s nose and mouth. It was then he recognized the smell—not bleach but ether. He awoke in his boxers in the mid-morning sun, seated sorely on the cast iron lawn furniture dotting his backyard. He was clammy with dew. The comforter from his bed had fallen to the cobblestone of the patio. A nearly sixty-year-old man in the backyard in his bedclothes. What a sight, he thought, clutching the comforter to him and reeling. Above him, on a gutter, a mockingbird fluted a jumble of birdsong stolen probably from some long extinct avian. Inside the house at each spot where a toaster should have been, a television, a VCR, a phone, a microwave, his gaze met a hole and he gasped. He stumbled to his bedroom, where the black-and-white television, too, was gone. He righted the picture frame. Its glass was whole, but the picture of his former lover had fallen askew. Trembling, he could not manage straightening the snapshot of dapper Inns Jameson. 166J tuesdays at the center for excellence In a daze, he put on and took off three full changes of clothes before donning his thickest winter wool suitcoat and slacks, a stiff bow tie, and starched shirt. With his car doors locked, he drove to work. There he told the director of the Center for Excellence what had happened, shut his office door, and began calling the authorities. JK Below the office windows, young men in rumpled slacks and half-knotted ties hurried toward their cars, hustling through the island of hardwoods beneath which sod was browning and dying. A year ago the commissioner of the Thrash Education, Research & Development Center asked that all the pines be removed to leave only hickory, oak, and ash. When the graceful , age-old trees fell Cruett mourned. Now he stood in Inns Jameson’s office, where he thought he might gain some consolation . They were both at Jameson’s grand windows watching the lunchtime rush. “The villain took everything but my clothes and...