The house was empty when we got to it. Glen had told me about it over lunch, just after my mother had dropped me off. His mother had served us hot dogs which looked gray and plastic and we ate them in stale buns with neon yellow mustard. He told me he had been in the house before. That the owner had died and his kids were trying to sell it and now it stood empty three streets away on a cul-de-sac.
We had walked over after lunch and my stomach bothered me with the one hot dog I could get down. Glen didn’t have any reaction. He picked a bent cigarette out of his pocket and lit it.
“I found a pack in my dad’s closet,” he said. He took another drag. His thin black mustache hairs, which he refused to shave even though they were sparse and few, folded in with his lips when he sucked on the cigarette.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Don’t be a pussy.” He still held out the cigarette.
“No thanks.”
We walked along in the heat, now a block from the house. The road was so hot I could feel it through my shoes. The roads here were different, I thought. Tan. Not gray.
“We’re going this way,” he said pointing to the right. I followed.
The air was still the whole time. No breeze and all sun and very Texas in summer, except the parts which were all rain, but these always left and the sun would return again hot and unbearable. Today was just the sun. Sun in the pines. Sun on the grass. Sun on the dirt and on the road.
When we approached the house he told me which it was. It was two stories, brick patterned dark and light red. The roof was covered in pine needles and you could just see the shingles underneath. A thin, cracked concrete path led up to it through perfectly green grass studded with black, recessed spray heads. In back, a tall fence squared in a yard. As we circled it, I saw the garage and just beside the garage a single wooden gate to the backyard.
It was a Monday and all the cars were out of their driveways and no one was about. Without the wind the only noise I could hear was the occasional distant rumble of the mail truck making its rounds.
We walked up the driveway. My palms were clammy and I felt as though someone must be watching us.
“The gate’s unlocked,” he said. He thumbed down the gate handle and it swung open.
“Should we really do this?” I asked, walking into the backyard.
“Why not?”
“What are we even going to do?”
“Just look around.”
“For what?”
“What does it matter?”
He closed the gate behind us.
The backyard was overgrown and empty. Just a brick patio with two metal wire chairs and a small metal wire table. No trees. From the patio, a set of sliding glass doors led into the house. Glen slid open the door.
“Why is everything unlocked?” I asked.
“So they can show the house real easy.”
“When do they show it?”
“Whenever. I don’t know.”
“So they could show it today?”
“They could.”
“We should go.”
“Why?”
“In case they come.”
“We’ll hear them a mile away. I’ve done this before,” he said. “If we hear a car, we can look out the window and if its the the lady then we run out the back and around the fence between the trees to the other side of the house and they won’t see us and we’ll just walk on the road like anyone else.”
Inside looked like my house, before all the work last year. It was very yellow and white and every shade between. Thick carpets ran everywhere except the kitchen, which had yellowing linoleum tiles bordered with metal strips. The living room had a tan leather couch set and coffee table, all open in the same room with the kitchen. Beyond them both was the front door. Where the foyer began the ceiling opened up double to reveal a diamond-shaped stained glass window casting red and blue and yellow shards of light across the house. To the right of the front door was a closet, which was opposite a set of carpeted stairs with a flimsy-looking bannister.
Glen peeled off to what looked like the bedroom, but before he got there, the noise of a motor hummed down the street. We both ran to the front door to look out its vertical window slits. The mail man.
Glen went back to the bedroom and I stood there beside the door, leaning against the wall, listening for the slink and clang of the mailbox to be opened and shut. It never came. Just the acceleration of the motor before it faded away again up the street. No one lives here, I thought. Why would there be mail?
I walked up the stairs and ran my hand along the bannister. It was as flimsy as it looked. On the second floor was a hall that stretched to two different rooms with a small bathroom between. Half of the hall was open to the first floor with a bannister of its own where I leaned and looked out at the stained glass. It was ugly, I thought. You couldn’t see through it.
It sounded like Glen was moving furniture downstairs, but I couldn’t imagine why. I peeked in the room to my right. It was an empty bedroom with a small twin bed in the center of the far wall. The bed frame matched the coffee table in the living room. I closed the door and paced back across the hall.
I opened the other door. This room also had a matching, like-new bed in it, but it was off to the side. Where the placement of the bed would have mirrored the first room, there stood an old oak desk and chair in its place which was not like the other furniture. It was worn and its surface was marred. The top had a few deep gashes where the wood within was lighter. I sat on the chair behind the desk. It creaked. Down each side ran three drawers and atop them was a long, thin drawer which spanned the length of the desk.
I pulled a drawer on the right and it slid open, wood on wood. It was empty, smelled of must. I closed it. Then I grabbed the two pulls of the long top drawer and slid it out, pulled it unevenly side-to-side, as it got stuck in places. In the far corner of the drawer the light flickered on the edge of a photograph caught in the space between the wood. I pulled at it and a small piece from the corner ripped off. It was an out-of-focus Polaroid. In it, an old man sat on a couch in the living room below. A different couch. Beside the man sat two girls maybe a couple years younger than me. The picture made me sad.
A door banged downstairs.
“Someone’s here!” Glen shouted.
I dropped the photo on the desk, left the drawer open, and bolted out of the room and down the stairs, anxious to get past the front door. On the first floor, Glen stood by the sliding glass doors in back and waved me over.
“Come on!”
I ran, saw a crumpled, half-smoked cigarette sitting on the kitchen counter. We hopped outside and he closed the back door slowly and quietly and then we ran to the gate. We could see a woman sitting in her car, the engine still running and her window slightly cracked. She smoked a cigarette and sat reading from a small book.
“Slide out and hug the fence so she can’t see,” Glen said.
I did and Glen followed and shut the gate behind us. We moved quickly, flat against the fence, until we rounded the back of the fence. I felt as if I would vomit from the rush of it.
“Come on, it’s not that bad,” Glen said, walking past me. “Let’s go. She could come through the backyard and hear us back here. You never know.”
We walked on, straddled between the woods and the fence. The pine needles crunched under our feet. I ran my hand along the pine trees, feeling the different grooves of the bark. My heart raced.
On the street, we walked away. I glanced back and could see just the trunk of her maroon sedan, the exhaust still going. Glen walked quickly and I tried to keep up with him.
Once we were a couple blocks away, I said: “You forgot your cigarette there.”
“No I didn’t.”
“I saw it. What if they could find you from it?”
“I didn’t forget it. I left it there on purpose.”
“What?”
“I left it on purpose.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was fun.”
“What if they can get your spit from it?”
“Are you retarded? No one’s gonna do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s expensive, that’s why.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. They talk about it on TV all the time like…there’s a backlog or something.”
“A backlog,” I said, more to myself.
“Yeah, a backlog.”
Then I remembered the photograph on the desk and that I had touched it. My fingerprints. A year earlier, someone who worked for the FBI had taken prints from the whole class to show us how fingerprinting worked. Oh my God, I bet he kept them. Jesus, what if they run the photograph for prints.
Back at Glen’s, he was as calm as when we left. We played a game on his Dreamcast and he beat me every round. Around three, the doorbell rang and my mom was there to pick me up.
I sat in the back of the Durango as she leaned over her seat to look out behind us, reversing down the driveway.
“What did you boys get up to, sweetie?” she asked
“Nothing,” I said. “Just video games.”
“I really wish you boys would play outside.”
2024
Am I the only person who could only visualize adolescent Glen from Mad Men in this story?