Babylon and Other Stories

Local News

The cold is killing in Cranston tonight — a homeless man, thirties, Caucasian, found huddled and frozen inside a Dumpster behind a convenience store. I drive over with Mario to film the EMTs carting him away. He's already in the ambulance by the time we get there, so the footage is just a shot of the Dumpster, rimmed by yellow police tape, and an interview with the clerk who found him.

“Threw in the trash and there he was,” the clerk, a twenty-year-old with a lip piercing, says. “His lips were all blue and stuff.”

The night air slashes my face. I want to ask him if his tongue ever sticks to the piercing when it's freezing cold, but I don't. Two years on the job have taught me to keep to the subject at hand. So instead I thank him, walk over to the cops, and ask the usual questions.

“Any ID?” I say.

When Jeff sees it's me, he turns his back and lets his partner Aurora handle it.

“Nothing so far,” she says. “We're going to ask around at the shelter. I'm thinking he was drunk and fell asleep in there. You keeping warm, Joanne?”

“Not at the moment,” I say.

“You too skinny, that's why.” Aurora, who's forty-five and has grown children, thinks of me maternally. She also thinks that if I just agreed to marry Jeff and started having babies, all our problems would be solved. He's already back at the patrol car, ignoring me.

“Go home and warm up,” she says.

“You take care too, Aurora.”

In front of the camera, I take off my hat, and my ears burn. No matter how cold it is, I still have to take off the hat. Behind the lens, Mario's wearing a sheepskin hat with earflaps, and earmuffs on top of that.

“Police are investigating the death of a homeless man due to bitter cold in Cranston tonight,” I say into the microphone. I wonder why cold is always bitter, never melancholy, never peeved or furious. The cold tonight feels whiny and pissed off — something about dampness in the air, about a lack of sparkle in the frozen brown slush. The cold is upset in the manner of someone who's been unhappily married for twenty years and just can't take it anymore. I talk into the mike about the weather forecast (still cold, getting colder), the crowded conditions at all the shelters, and the need for everybody to drive safely. Cold's a story we've covered a million times before, and I can tell Mario isn't even listening. I put my hat back on and we take the van back to the station. The heat of the vehicle makes me yawn. Then the scanner crackles. I hear the code for a fire, and tell Mario to turn the van around.

“Come on, man, really? It's ten-thirty.”

“News never sleeps,” I tell him, and he rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette, to get back at me, because he knows I hate smoke.

When we get there the fire's climbing up into the night, several stories of flame rising above the building itself. For a state surrounded by water, Rhode Island's terrible with fires. This one's in a dilapidated strip mall in Woonsocket, and it started late at night, which probably means no one was around. Although if no one was around, how did it start in the first place? I step out of the van and prepare to be investigative. The scene that greets me is painted in neon: the orange sizzle of the rising flames, the pulsating lights of the fire trucks, the bright jets of water arcing from the hoses. People from nearby neighborhoods are standing around, watching. A car pulls up, screeching to a stop, and a fat middle-aged man climbs out and runs up to the closest cop.

“What the hell happened?” I can hear him saying.

To my surprise I spot Jeff talking to another officer, their cars parked nose to nose. I go over and stand in front of him, where he can't act like he doesn't see me. “What are you doing here?” I say.

“Happened to be in the neighborhood. Aurora likes the soup at a place around the corner.”

“So what's the deal?”

“Portuguese kale, for two-ninety-five,” he says. And then he adds, because he's never sure I notice when he makes a joke, “That's the soup.”

“Yeah, I got it,” I say. “So what happened, exactly?”

“We're still trying to find out.” He looks at me critically. “Your nose is really red, you know. Watch out you don't get frostbite.”

“I'll work on it,” I say. His nose is red, too, but I don't point this out. I feel it isn't my place anymore. Two weeks ago he said that if we didn't start talking about marriage, he'd walk away; this week he's barely said anything to me at all. “You're wasting my time,” was the last thing he said to me on the subject. I didn't know how to tell him that time is exactly what I don't want to waste. I have plans that go beyond the local news, beyond the here and now. I never pictured myself as a policeman's wife, waiting up for him at three in the morning; in fact I never expected, when we first spent the night together, that it would go any further than that. When I think about my future, it takes place on a stage that's shiny and huge, in New York or L.A., with me on TV at six o'clock bantering with the middle-aged male anchor in the blue power suit. My future isn't in cruising around the Ocean State in the News Ten van all hours of the night. I have to admit, though, that I'll have a hard time forgetting Jeff's warm chest and the little scar above his right eye and the fact that he genuinely seems to like bringing me coffee in bed in the morning. When your real life collides with the one you've been dreaming of, it's hard to know which should win out.

The smell of the fire is dense and vicious — bitter, like the cold — and it singes my nostrils. The air is layered with toxic, plastic-scented fumes. Mario's filming and yawning at the same time. I scan the crowd, scouting for interviews. The fat guy who got out of the car earlier is trying to get into the store, apparently trying to get into the fire, and he's being held back, practically bear-hugged, by a cop I don't know. The fat guy squirms and wriggles like a child in his embrace. I wave at Mario and we go over.

“Sir, is this your store?”

The light of the camera calms him down, and the cop nods at me and lets go. Nobody goes anywhere while they're on film. He mutters in the guy's ear, “Everybody here needs to go stand on the other side of the parking lot, behind the fire trucks, understand?”

Another hose goes on, and the noise of the water and the fire together drowns out our voices. I motion to the guy to follow me back to the other side of the lot, then glance over my shoulder to make sure Mario's not spacing out, which he sometimes does when he feels I've kept him out too long.

“Is this your store?” I say again, pointing the microphone in his face. “What's your name?”

In the glare of the lights his eyes are tiny and black, set back in his face like raisins in a cinnamon roll. He looks bewildered and angry. I'm not sure he speaks English.

“What's your name?” I say again.

“Everything … everything's burning,” he finally says.

“In your store? Do you own the store, sir?”

“I never thought it could burn. All the inventory — how could a store like that burn?”

“What kind of store is it, sir?”

He looks at the fire, then back at me. Some unidentifiable specks of ash float over us, sparks showering around them. “Water beds,” he says. “How could they burn?”

I didn't know people still slept on waterbeds. The fire's burning ferociously, and distant shouts among the firemen sound frantic. Popping and exploding noises are flying along with bits of debris, and I realize these are from waterbeds bursting in the air like pricked balloons. The water from the hoses steams in the frigid air and all the snow around the lot is melting. I tell Mario to film some more of the fire and get back to me in five minutes, then I focus on the water-bed guy, putting a hand on his arm. When I offer my condolences, he opens up.

His name is Luther Hodges. He's been in the water-bed business since the sixties, and has seen his fortunes rise and fall, but he's convinced they're about to rise again. The water bed is making a comeback, he tells me, his little black eyes flashing. His store is called Sleeping With the Fishes, or was.

“Who would do this?” he asks after I've elicited this much information.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” I say. “Do you have any enemies? Any really dissatisfied customers?”

This offends him. “People love their beds,” he says. “I sell a quality product under warranty.”

The cop who was embracing him earlier comes over and says he's ready to ask Luther some questions now.

“Officer, do you have any theories as to how the fire started?” I ask.

“No comment at this time, Joanne.”

“Police authorities,” I say into the microphone, “have no comment at this time on the cause of the fire.”

I crawl into bed after midnight, my clothes reeking of smoke in the hamper, and barely wake up in time to answer the phone at four in the morning. I'm still in the mindset of assuming it's going to be Jeff. But it's Luther Hodges.

“You've got to help me,” he says.

“I'm in bed,” I say, wondering, not for the first time, about the wisdom of a person who works in television having a listed number.

“They think I did it,” he says. “They're gathering evidence, they said. I need someone on my side.”

“Did you do it?”

“Are you crazy? It's my own friggin' store.”

I yawn and sit up. “What kind of insurance policy do you have, Mr. Hodges?”

There's a pause after this in which I almost fall asleep again. “That's what the cops wanted to know, too,” he says. “You know, just because a person has an insurance policy that covers fire doesn't mean he wants his entire life to go up in smoke.”

“I'm hanging up, Mr. Hodges,” I tell him. “I'm a television reporter, and I need my beauty sleep.”

“Just hold on a minute,” he says, but I don't.

I sleep late, wake up, read three papers, watch CNN. My free time's mostly in the morning, and until recently I'd spend it with Jeff. He liked to cook, preferably old-school breakfasts with eggs and sausage and hash browns. After eating we'd go right back to bed. Half an hour later I'd get restless and want to leave the house, but he'd hold me down, his big hands on my shoulders, telling me not to be in such a rush all the time. It was a friendly argument, but an argument nonetheless. With him gone, I find there's all this space in my life, phantom and new, like when you put on your clothes after successfully dieting off five pounds. Except with the pounds you know you're more than likely to fill up the space again.

The phone rings every hour on the hour, and the caller ID says it's Luther Hodges. He leaves these messages that sound offputtingly breathy and excited — less distressed than pornographic. He wants to meet me for a drink and protest his innocence.

“This case will be tried in the court of public opinion,” he says when I finally pick up the phone. “You have a responsibility to garner all the facts.”

“Like what facts?”

“I'm being set up,” he says.

“By whom?”

“I can't tell you over the phone.”

I roll my eyes and agree to meet for a drink that afternoon, letting him pick the place; you can tell a lot about a person from the kind of bar they deem a suitable rendezvous point. He chooses a chain restaurant on 195, a neon-lit catastrophe with a sports-bar theme. When I get there I find him hunkered down in a booth with two hands around a pint of beer. In front of him is an order of fries served in a plastic football helmet.

I sit down opposite him and pull out my notepad. “So, Mr. Hodges. Who do you think set the fire?”

He leans forward over the table, then looks to his left and his right. It's three in the afternoon and the only person around is our waitress, a bored nineteen-year-old in a Patriots jersey. I wonder who he thinks could be listening. Luther Hodges, I decide, watches a lot of thrillers on late-night TV.

“My ex-wife,” he says, “has some very shady acquaintances.”

“I see. And what's your ex-wife's name?”

“Shannon Hodges. She lives in Pawtucket. All her friends are no-good characters.”

I write on the pad, so that he can see, Shannon Hodges. No-good characters. I underline the no-good. People like to feel that their words are being taken seriously. When I was in school, before I had much practice interviewing people, I used to worry about how to get them talking to me. Now that I've been working for a while, I know the real problem is how to shut them up.

“And what would she stand to gain by burning down your store?” I ask. “Is she a beneficiary on the insurance policy?”

“Ha!” Luther Hodges says, his little black eyes sparkling with malice. “The fire's incidental. She doesn't care about the store one way or the other. She never did. All she wants is to set me up. To see me suffering gives her great happiness, and it always has.”

I hear this kind of thing from married couples all the time, and it's another reason I don't like to put all my eggs into a basket labeled Life with Jeff.

“She's very, very clever.” Luther taps on my notepad with his index finger, for emphasis. “You'll have a hard time catching her. She's great at covering her tracks. This case could make your career.”

“There's no need for you to worry about my career, Mr. Hodges.”

“Call me Luther,” he says, “and I'm not worried. I seen you on the news. Lipstick on. Hair blowing. You look like a million bucks even when it's twenty below. I know you're going places.”

“I'll be in touch,” I tell him, and leave enough money to cover my drink.

I check in at the station — nothing pressing there, just another story about plummeting temperatures and rising oil costs — to pick up Mario and then drive out to Pawtucket. The sun's shining and the roads are dry. Shannon Hodges lives in a rundown duplex behind a chain video store. When she comes to the door, though, she doesn't look shady at all. She's wearing office clothes and looks tired but respectable. I can smell something cooking, and the news is on in the background, which always reassures me. She recognizes me right away.

“You're on TV,” she says. “Boy, you're young.”

“Can we come in?”

“Shorter than I thought, too.”

“Can we please come in?”

“Is this about Luther?”

“It's about the fire at his store.”

“I saw it on TV,” she says, and opens the door.

Mario goes into the living room and starts setting up. I ask her if she'll sit on the couch and answer a few questions. The place is dumpy but clean: flowered couch, wicker tables, doilies on everything.

She sits at the corner of the couch and smoothes her skirt. “I only have a few minutes,” she says. “I'm expecting company for dinner.”

“Someone special?” I say.

She narrows her eyes. “Luther and me are divorced.”

“Where were you last night?”

“At work. I'm a manager at a clothes store at the mall. We stay open till ten, it takes till ten-thirty for everybody to cash out, I'm home by eleven. You can check the time cards if you doubt it. Did Luther tell you I set the fire in his stupid store? That son of a bitch.”

I look at her.

“Please don't put me swearing on TV,” she adds.

“Does your ex-husband have a lot of enemies? Who would benefit from this?”

“He doesn't have any enemies I know about,” she says. “But on the other hand, he doesn't have a lot of friends, either.”

“How's his business doing, do you think?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Do you know anybody who sleeps on a water bed?”

“Not personally.”

“My point exactly. For years I told him, Luther, you gotta go high end, and get into ergonomics, those fancy mattresses from Sweden you see advertised in the back of magazines. Did he listen to me? Never.”

After we're done, she walks me and Mario to the door. “I'll definitely be on tonight, right?” she says. “I wanna tell my mom to watch.”

As we leave, a man gets out of a car across the street and starts for Shannon Hodges's door. He's younger than Luther, and taller, so I can figure why Luther would try to pin the fire on his ex-wife. There are simple explanations for most things.

Heading back to the station, I consider calling Jeff to see how he's doing, just to hear his voice. But when I get there, Luther Hodges is waiting for me.

“Mr. Hodges.”

“I told you to call me Luther.”

“What do you want, Mr. Hodges?”

“I got something to show you.”

I check my messages. I thought there might be one from Jeff, but there isn't. Instead there's one from a contact of mine, confirming that Luther Hodges does indeed carry massive amounts of fire insurance. I'm not following any other major story at the moment, and don't have to tape anything for tonight, so I agree to go with him. I'm curious about what he might want to show me. We take my car — I feel trapped if someone else is driving — and he directs me back to the scene of the crime. The water used to fight the fire has frozen into massive, sturdy, ghost-white icicles. Folds of ice droop thickly over the building, and beneath them you can just make out the bones of the charred wreck itself, the contours dark and shadowed. The whole thing is kind of gorgeous, as fragile and decorative and pale as an enormous wedding cake. It could all break apart at any second, is what I'm thinking, looking at it. There's police tape everywhere, but we ignore it. Luther leads me around back, to a cracked window that isn't fully iced over. We peek inside, and I can see the husks of the water beds laid out in the dark like crypts. The icicles creak in the wind, an anxious, spooky sound.

“See that?” Luther says, but I have no idea what he's pointing at. “That's the Queen Elizabeth,” he says, “the cruise ship of water beds. The ultimate deluxe model. I bought two for display purposes. They cost thousands of dollars. If I sold just one I'd be back on track. It was an investment, don't you see? So why would I burn it down?”

Suddenly he's sobbing, this fat little man. Not tearing up, but serious sobs that steal his breath. I take his arm and lead him back to the car. Sitting in the passenger seat, slumped and soft-fleshed, his doughy cheeks aflame with cold, he makes me feel a little teary myself. I pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. Without saying anything, I pull out of the parking lot and drive to the nearest bar I can find. Luther follows me inside, as obedient as a child. We drink one shot and then another. It's a neighborhood place, and the locals eye us in an unfriendly manner. We do our best to ignore them. I can't tell whether I'm being recognized and I don't care. Several drinks later I announce to Luther that I'm driving him home. He starts to cry again, and I sigh.

“You do believe I'm innocent, don't you? It's important to me.”

“Of course I do,” I tell him, although I don't. I think he's sobbing out of regret for his own dumb behavior, not over being wrongfully accused. I think it's only a matter of time before he gets arrested. Which makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing here, exactly, in this bar, with this man, investigating this half-interesting story. What if this is going to be my life from now on? What if, because I haven't chosen marriage and kids with Jeff, this is what I get? It doesn't seem fair.

Just because a person has an insurance policy that covers fire, it doesn't mean she wants her entire life to go up in smoke.

I drive Luther to an apartment building that hasn't seen better days and probably never will. When I pull up in front, he asks if I want to come in. With three or four drinks in me, I decide it might not be a bad idea to wait a while before driving home. But once we get inside he offers me another drink, and I say yes. He pours me a Scotch, neat, in a small glass.

His apartment looks like a motel room, with a bed and a TV in the living room and not much else. There are some dog-eared Reader's Digest books stacked in the corner, which look like church-basement giveaways. In the kitchenette is a small counter with two stools in front of it, and I sit down on one and sip. The Scotch is gone almost before I know it. Luther keeps puttering around the apartment, picking socks up off the floor, putting dishes in the sink, pulling lint off the sleeve of his sweater. And talking the whole time about how the fire's ruined him, how his wife left him once the water bed business started to go downhill, how he kept telling her that water beds would come back in style but how she didn't believe him, how she had no faith and wouldn't take the leap, how she wanted security, for everything to be pinned down.

“Let me ask you a question,” he says while pouring me more Scotch. “Do you think we're living in a classical or a romantic age? I think it's classical. I think there's no big emotions left, no passion. Everyone's concerned with self-preservation. It's about money, it's about safety. You know what I mean?”

I look at the Reader's Digest books. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“I read things,” he says.

“Is that a water bed you've got there?”

He shoots me a look.

“I've never actually been on one,” I say.

He holds out his arm in a gesture of welcome, the bottle of Scotch still in his hand. I lie down on my back, expecting it to swish and sway. Instead it feels basically solid, like any other mattress. Unfortunately I'm encountering other problems: the spins, for example. The water bed and I seem to lift up off the ground together, hurtling through space on a mission to some faraway planet. My palms feel very cold. I keep losing my grip on my glass. Luther Hodges is lying next to me, talking about back muscles and the even distribution of weight. The bed spins and flies, part water, part solid. I'm leaving earth and I'm all alone — no Jeff, no Mario, no camera — and it almost makes me cry, the agony and confusion of it, and I grab Luther by his grimy collar and pull him down closer to me, so that on this mission at least I'll have a warm body along for the ride.

I wake up regretful.

A few hours later I wake again and find I'm still in the apartment. In my dream I'd showered, dressed, and left Luther behind — but apparently never got around to doing it for real. A middle-aged man is lying next to me, smelling of middle-aged sweat. I think I've just violated a bunch of journalistic ethics. I remember what one of my journalism professors used to say: “When you find you're starting to break all the rules I've taught you, you'll know you're finally working in news.”

I get dressed slowly, my stomach several steps behind me. Luther's snoring is soft and buzzing and regular, like a small appliance. He doesn't budge as I leave the place, stepping out into the cold morning. The temperature's the same as it has been, but today the cold doesn't feel bitter. It just feels numb, inevitable. I'm not even surprised when Jeff and Aurora pull up to the curb. Why wouldn't they be here? It's their case.

I walk toward them, all of our three breaths pluming in the air. I can see that Aurora knows right away what has happened, and that Jeff doesn't, because his brain won't admit to it, won't let him see it, even though there are simple explanations for most things. I know that this, as much as my future in news, explains why I couldn't ever marry him. He isn't unobservant; he just can't imagine that someone he loves could be so different from himself.

“He must be asleep,” I tell them. “I couldn't get him to come to the door.”

“Probably passed out,” Jeff says.

“Probably,” I agree.

He looks at me closely, and for a second I think he registers my hangover, my bleary eyes, my skin that Luther Hodges has touched with his doughy little hands. “You're up early,” he says.

“News never sleeps,” I say.

I head home and shower and check messages. There's only one and it's from Jeff, from last night. He's calling to tell me that the homeless man in Cranston has been identified by workers at a downtown shelter. So far as they know, the guy didn't have any family. He gets to the end of the message and then stops talking for a couple of seconds, as if he expects me, impossibly, to say something back. It's the moment of hope that gets me, that pause on the line before he hangs up.