Breaking and Entering

Fiction and photos by Sharon Mollerus

Tom was hanging by one arm from the bar in the express bus when a benign shock buzzed his beltline. He stood suspended over a blue-haired girl wired to a walkman and shoulder to shoulder against a security guard with a raspy cough. Tucking the County Recorder under his arm, he slid his prescriptionless glasses up with a thumb and glanced, chin to chest, at the pager's glowing digits. Not Maggie. He punched the office number on the cell phone as he shifted his weight with the scream of the brakes.

"He didn't show up at all? OK, meet me there in five with the file." The bus swerved to evade a man sprinting through the intersection, waving his arm to force a stop. The guard pitched forward and down into the wave trough of commuters. Tom slid into the girl with hair the color of the "Reserved for Handicapped" sign above her seat, his knee brushing against a bare shin.

"Sorry," Tom said, looking down from the surge of riders. The girl bobbed her head without a glance up, either with forbearance or the mesmeric vibrations carried on a black string into her tiny half-heart ear.

The trembling poplars between curb and speckled cement swished warnings, brushing thin branches along the bus as if to slow its decline. Crisp yellow cordate leaves dropped and fluttered behind the black fumes. At the bottom of the route, Tom sprung off the corded rubber steps, landing smoothly on the zigzag brick plaza in tasseled loafers.

On the steps of the courthouse, he pulled a russet jacket over his broad torso and straightened the scarlet tie with white polka-dots hanging down his shirt like a patient's diseased tongue. Inside the column-ringed rotunda, Tom held the portfolio above his puffy chestnut hair and slipped ahead of the crowd and through a metal detector slung between two fluted pillars. He took the center of the spacious marble steps of a spiraling staircase, while others leaned into snaky wooden rails.

"Good thing you showed up. The judge is ready to turn Jack back into a file clerk." Suzanne stood by the century-worn doors of a second floor courtroom, rocking between uneven orthopedic shoes. She wore a sleeveless buff turtleneck tucked into her black miniskirt, and her waist was cinched with a studded belt.

"Breaking and entering?" Tom asked, flipping through the pleadings and yellow-lined scrawling in the manila file. Suzanne looked at Tom over the arcs of olive sunglasses. Her eyes were ringed in prune eyeliner and her fine albinic hair grazed the files in her arms.

"Yes, motion for continuance due to illness. And Jack had some trouble getting a hold of Mr. Pierce, who has no known address."

"My address is 75 Washington Street ." The meager griseous man in a grapefruit yellow knit hat and midnight pea coat spoke from the wooden bench behind Suzanne where he lay with his toes pointed straight up.

"St. Benedict's church," she told Tom, without turning around. "It's condemned."

Pierce smiled up at the blouseless lady Prosperity, swimming with bronzy stars and baby angels in the dome.

"Hello, Mr. Pierce. How are you today?" Tom reached down to shake his hand, while the man kept them locked over a convex stomach.

"Bad," he said, out of a mouthful of acrid ocher teeth.

"You have a medical condition?"

"Chronic alcoholic pancreatitis, and there's nothing to do about it," he answered. His smirk puckered into a scowl as he sucked in two tablets from a spiraling roll of foil.

"No pills or surgery?"

"I won't let Jerome do a resection."

"Why not?"

"And the medicine doesn't help. I want to get the trial over with and just go to jail."

"Let's go in." Pierce sat up, winced, and put his cap in the back pocket of his baggy brown corduroys, the wales worn to a tawny sheen at the knees and seat. The two took creaky fold-down wooden chairs shaped like sugar scoops at the back of the oak paneled room. A gaunt man with baggy eyes and iron-colored hair in a ponytail stood with his hands splayed open at his sides and pled guilty to breaking parole and possession of meth. The guard clipped his hands behind him into handcuffs, linking the circles around his bony wrists.

"What happened to Mr. Crawford this morning?" the judge asked Tom. He was slumped into his large chair, his head a shiny freckled orb with smoky wisps of hair circling large flaps of ears.

"He's sick, your honor."

"Me, I never missed a day. He'll get sanctions next time. You want a continuance now with the trial two weeks away?" The judge's doughy cheeks shook with the soft-spoken words.

"I have a statement from Dr. Jerome, his treating physician, about Mr. Pierce's terminal condition."

"May I say something?" Pierce asked, his question ascending to a puling peak. "I want to dismiss my attorney and change my plea to guilty." His eyelashes were bowed against the flaxen cast of his face, and his voice rolled around the inner dome like a wheeling penny winding to a flat rest.

"Your honor, Mr. Pierce," Tom said, stretching his palm up over a mosaic floor of blue-gray wedges.

"You'll have to make a substitution of attorney first,” the judge said. “Go and straighten this out.”

"Wait, Mr. Pierce. Why did you do that?" Tom called after the old man who hobbled down the staircase. His voice hissed through the rotunda, like warm raindrops tamping dry dirt.

Tom sprinted the few blocks from the courthouse to the fifth-story office of John Crawford & Associates, taking by twos the greasy cherry carpeted stairs of the rehabilitated red-light hotel. One scorching Indian summer afternoon, to escape his airless office, the solicitor scaled the narrow ladder rungs on the eighth floor to the hinged attic opening and stood halfway in with his flashlight. A huge ceiling fan grabbed up and lobbed ashen dust dollops against the gable windows. Tom looked around beams draped in daedal webs. He climbed in and stepped gingerly over the warped planks and around dusty file boxes, records of lawsuits long decided and exacted, and he peered into the dark corners as if he might really find the lair of the portly bank robber in satin spats and his gray-eyed murderess, twilight specters of the sultry corridors they sucked the breath from.

"Heard from Jack?" he asked Suzanne at the front desk. She handed him a stack of files and three loose pink telephone messages from Maggie: 9:15am , 9:25am , 9:50am .

“Jack’s wife said he's sick and to go ahead and take the Pierce deposition this afternoon."

Tom rang his home, but their answering machine must still be on the fritz. His office window, squat and thick as a gas station kiosk, peeped over the shared alley between the old hotel and its tenement neighbor. The curtainless window opposite was crowded with hopeful houseplants, and the fire escape wound skyward, iron rails chasing each other like serpents up the staff of Hermes.

Tom started at the top of the pile, opening files with the mushroom-colored receiver pressed to his left ear. He doodled curly- and straight-haired kids hitting baseballs over the lines of his yellow pad.

"Hey, good thing it was just you and the tree. And don't forget the meetings--they'll want to see that."

"Dr. Jerome on two," Suzanne called out from beyond the door. "Pierce case." Tom jabbed the tiny lighted cube.

"No, doctor, we didn't know he was going to do that." The first kid on the bench already had his bottom off the wood slat seat, getting up to take a turn at the penciled bat.

"I'll be at the deposition today. Maybe you could talk to Mr. Pierce about letting us offer a defense." A small boy sat at the end farthest from the plate, his round visor nearly touching the pressed dirt between pigeon-toed sneakers.

"They found a pick lock set on him, but he won’t do jail in his condition, unless he really wants it." He screened the boys in with a diamond-link fence and added idle wooden bats reclining at the carbon-shaded edge of the pit.

Tom carried his coffee cup past Suzanne's desk to the closet-sized utility room. Hot water gushed into the gray mug with crimson brush script: "Lawyers do it on contingency." He spilled in a spoonful of desiccated coffee and two packets of synthetic sweetener.

"The good doctor offered him a place to live, but he prefers the church porch," Tom said to Suzanne as he swigged his tepid coffee, laying a thick auburn forearm along the top of a black file cabinet.

"What’s he got to do with that bum?" she asked. She turned her back on him and dipped into the file cabinet, her pasty freckled legs stretched like a wood stork foraging in a silty slough.

"They were colleagues. Pierce was a surgeon too until he got hepatitis and couldn’t cut anymore. Then he abused his prescriptions, and they took away his license. His wife left him when they lost their house. "

Tom brought a power bar and orange juice back to his airless office and sat with his legs draped across the metal desk with a forest green pad. The back of the cracked-vinyl chair broke through the catch, sending him horizontal. He pulled himself up, got out and knelt beside it, tightening the loose bolt with his fingers. As he ate, a pigeon paced the window begging the quotidian portion of its forebears; the frame had been painted shut years ago. Tom dialed the house again, sending out repeated sullen rings, circles of hollow sound.

“I’m off to the deposition,” he said, as he gathered his files and walked out of the office. He left the brick building and walked three blocks, weaving diagonally up a grid of steep streets, jaywalking through the intersections. Office workers gnawed their lunches before surging back into somber structures after an errand, window shopping, or a breathless tryst pinched into a three-quarter hour. Seagulls flapped through the streets in pursuit, salvaging hearty sandwich crumbs and whole oily chips spilled from silvery crinkly bags.

Tom pushed through the knobless glass doors of opposing counsel's office and waited inside a wholly transparent conference room overlooking the bay. The sailboats beyond the wall-wide window glistened like diamonds under the meridian sun. Long ago, his grandfather would take him out there in the silver rowboat, and the boy’s raw sienna lifejacket with wide white laces lashed taut clad him nearly to his knees. The old man's crew-cut shone argent, and the curly gray hairs of his forearms were flattened with spray. They paddled to the tiny tree-covered island in the bay while rhythmic swells washed over them, shaping a boat-bottom pool sloshing midway up the boy's sunny yellow boots.

A heavy navy-suited court reporter with a golden curled perm and square glasses wheeled in her black cases. The secretary placed a silver tray with tube-shaped tumblers and a polished long-lipped pitcher in the center of the walnut conference table. With a polite scuffle of chairs, all were seated.

"Mr. Larson, what did you observe when you came to work at the dealership the morning of February 6th?" The witness was a tanned surfer with hair frosted in sunlight and dye, a gingerbread man.

"There were lights on in the back offices. I found this old guy, Pierce, half-drenched and mopping the kitchen floor with a green sweater. I skidded it was so wet. And I smelled the fumes. He had painted half the yellow kitchen white, like he ran out of the paint.”

"Did you say anything to him?"

"I asked him what the hell he was doing. He said he would be finished when he finished. I called 911 and then the owner, Alex." Ben poured himself a glass of water, and stray droplets bubbled over the varnish.

"What happened next?"

"Alex arrived with his gun out. I told him that wasn't necessary, and then I went toward the front door to wait for the police. I didn't realize they were related."

"Related?"

"Well, connected. Alex is married to Colleen, Pierce's ex-wife. Pierce told him, ‘I don't particularly care if you shoot me.’"

"Alex was holding the gun on Pierce?"

"I couldn't see them. Alex said, `It doesn't matter what you clean-up or paint here, you can't give her back her house.’ When the squad car came there was some confusion over who was the owner and who was the trespasser but it got straightened out."

"Did you report anything stolen?"

"The cash register had $85 over my close. I told the police, but they were only able to report a deficit and told me to check again. I did."

"First break-in?"

"Once before, I was told, about a decade ago, when someone vandalized the office, left shit um human excrement on the floor, graffiti on the walls and took some money. Alex always thought it was Pierce--now he's sure of it."

Tom spent the rest of the afternoon at his desk, working through his stack of files and shooting rubber bands at the pigeons who stared at him unfazed from their side of the window. After Suzanne left, Tom dialed the house again. He took the bus home and stopped at the market for steaks and nubbly potatoes.

Tom stumbled at the break in the sidewalk in front of his sand-bitten stucco house. Stubborn viney weeds sprouted through a gap in the pavement. Either Maggie or the neighbor's one-eyed orange cat had triggered the motion-detector side yard lamp, and moths crumpled against the bulb. The illuminated circle revealed lost paint chips from the wall lifted off by salty sea fogs.

"Maggie, you home?" Tom called down the lightless hallway. He sorted mail and cooked, with the countertop TV tuned to a crime show. He opened his briefcase and scrawled red ink over neatly typed pages and dictated letters into the slender black recorder, his voice carrying over the TV’s droning monologue.

After the news, Tom put on his running suit and loped up and down the rolling hills of dense block houses through dimly lit streets, his triple white stripes shining down the sides of him. He turned his back on downtown and the twitching lights and ran past a corner bar and dimmed storefronts with chirping signs announcing "Free Checking" and "Cheap Alterations." The Chinese take-out shop was closed, but sounds of metallic scrubbing, brisk sweeping and the swishing of water thrown over bushes gathered around the open side door. The trolley clacked alongside him, its lighted windows flashing like camera bulbs, the red-eyed late riders reading books or staring out of windows that only opened halfway. Some miniature toughs in zipped black jackets, their skulls outlined under their hoods, tumbled over each other and out to the street, wrangling like a flock of ravens. One had a chain of silver links wound three times around his hips.

Tom ran to the briny border of the city, where the streets stopped, buried under the sandbar. He bent over the cement barrier between sand and street, his hands clasped, gazing over the granular edge of the ocean, past sopping seaweed sprawled over inky sand to the lapping cream-capped midnight waves.

At home, he stood over Maggie who slept in a green silk gown emitting whispers of breath. He scratched both sides of his head. His wastefully ample hair was another grievance to her, her own weedy blonde strands sliding around her small head like slippery Easter basket grass.

In the early morning, he lifted his face into the flashing spray of the guest bathroom shower, so as not to wake her. He donned the gray suit with a blue paisley tie and took the bus to the main street which severed the city into high-rise commerce and squat alley industry. Past auto body and pawn shops, dandelions sprouted around chunks of a cement ruin in an empty lot. Tom stepped over the yellow tape onto the porch of the old brick church with a blackened bell tower and boarded windows where two residents slept amidst their mounds of clothing and bags of aluminum cans.

"I'm looking for Mr. Pierce," he said, standing above them. He thought the uric odor would not bind into his suit fibers.

"They took him out already," a woman said from under a pea green blanket.

"Who took him?"

"The ambulance. They said he died."

"We didn't do nothing," the man said, his lean filthy face watching from over the top of his zippered vinyl sleeping bag. He was using a jean jacket for a pillow and a snap had creased a dark dimple into his cheek.

"What happened to him?" Tom asked.

"He was sick," the woman said. Her eyes were crusted and watery. "Do you know Colleen?"

"His ex-wife?"

"He wanted to leave her a good word."

“I’ll let her know.”

Tom pulled two fives out of his wallet and tossed one over each blanket. The bills were slapped up by a low wind and swept off the porch. By the time he chased them down, they were already pasted to the curb with gutter water among the black and yellow speckled leaves.

2005