Keeper of the Keys

He had screamed.

Moments later his mother, hands full of papers, had torn up to the porch and gathered him into her arms.

“Where were you?” he cried.

“Mailing letters.”

Was this house, on the right side of the street, with a small porch that didn’t look right, the correct place? What about this one?

Finally, he decided he spotted something familiar, that porch. The one he had screamed upon. Yes, here was the place, painted dirty adobe orange now, with yellow trim, closer to the school than he expected. On the right-hand side he could see the bedroom he had slept in as a little boy, its window covered by a flowered curtain. Recognizing the tiny tract house sent a pang of sorrow through him.

So it was real. He had not seen this place since they left it. The model he had built of this house was all wrong-the model made it look significant, too clean. The ordinariness-how could he capture that?

He took a position across the street to observe.

Nothing happened for some time. Heat waves rose, Hollywood-style mirages above the melting asphalt, unreal, strange. An ice cream truck tinkled in the distance. He remembered the tune. From behind a picket fence two houses down, a dog pricked up its ears, observing him. I don’t know what you’re up to, the dog’s eyes seemed to tell him, but I’ll swear you’re in the wrong.

At two-fifteen, two children drifted in single file up the road, much as he had done as a child, hot, unhappy, army privates on maneuvers, heavy backpacks already damaging their spines. Marching up to the house, they climbed the steps to the porch, looked around, collected the key from under a pot next to the front door, and entered the dark house.

Nobody home but the children.

Ray rattled the keys in his pocket. Probably one of them still matched that front door lock. In California, in suburbia, almost nobody changed locks when they moved into a new home. Why not? Well, people hated spending money. People never thought about trust, about fear. They loved buying a house. They loved getting the key to this new, at least to them, house.

The suburbs induced a kind of psychotic lethargy. The blandness, the sameness, made it hard to believe anyone would bother to rob you. In the same way, schools of fish flew around the sharks in their patterns, multitudinous, identical. What were the chances you would get picked for di

These kids, well-trained, had put the key back into its hiding place. Ray watched them place it carefully there.

Hi-ho.

He could take their key, not even bother with his, go inside whenever he wanted. And he did want; he wanted badly to see what he would feel like on the inside. Dead, or alive?

He heard faint crashings and maniacal laughter from the living room. The kids were watching television.

He watched until another dog, this time right next door, came out for a walk, leading its sharp-eyed elderly owner, biting at its chain, not glancing Ray’s way. He retreated down the block to his car, which had probably reached a hundred twenty degrees by this point, furnace-level. Using his shirtsleeve to move the steering wheel, Ray turned the car engine on, drove around the block, let the a/c cool the vehicle, and returned to Bombardier Avenue, this time parking several houses beyond his old house.

Good. The big dog and vigilant owner had retreated back inside.

He approached. Although he didn’t need the key to this house because he knew where they hid it, he had an urgent desire to try his own old key. Would it fit?

Cartoons blared inside. He twiddled key one in the lock, then key two.

Etcetera.

Nothing moved on the street, no other beings stirred. Only the heat shimmered off the sidewalk and parked cars, and the smelly black tar mending cracks in the street melted.

The fourth key worked. A rush hotter than the weather stopped him. Wet and nervous but under the influence of a compulsion he could not control, he turned the key in the lock and pushed gently on the door.

He recalled that this house had no entryway, no gracious hello. It dumped visitors directly into the living room. He opened the door gently, locating the TV by its sound, aware that the two children inside were vulnerable and might get scared.

“Oh, hi!” he said, as if surprised to see them, exulting in his heart at gaining entrance so easily. The old key had worked!

He had the fu

“Hi,” the oldest one, a boy maybe eight years old, said. “Who are you?” They were sprawled on the carpet facing away from him, and now they had both twisted around, their faces so similar with their blinking bug eyes that he resisted an impulse to laugh. He stayed at the door, harmless-looking.

His heart pumped out of control. “Where are your folks?” he asked.

“At work,” the younger one, a towheaded girl, ventured, then turned back to the television. On the screen, a pink character rode around in a vehicle that flew.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have gotten the time wrong. I thought they would be home by now.”

“Nope,” said the boy. “Mom works ’til four.”

“Nearly two more hours,” Ray said. “I’m really early.”

“Yeah.” The boy studied him, as if realizing he should be asking questions. He apparently couldn’t think of what those questions might be. His eyes flicked back toward the TV.

“Hot day,” Ray said, noticing the fan going, but no air-conditioning.

“Yeah,” the boy said again.

“You know, I used to live in this house.”

“You did?” Both children actually cared more about the cartoons. Any interest came out of sheer trained politeness.

“I had the room right off that hall there. On the left.”

“My room,” the boy said.

“And out back, we had a tetherball pole.”

They didn’t know what a tetherball pole was.

“There was a patio with a kind of-um-shade thing over it. Lattice.”

“Plants grow all over it,” the girl volunteered. “What a mess. Leaves all over the place,” she said, obviously quoting her harried parents.

“Mind if I look around?”

They didn’t. Certainly not properly advised about strangers by their parents, they turned their attention back to their cartoon while Ray wandered freely around the house. He made mental notes for his model-this window he had not remembered, that closet in a corner, not along the side.

Not much had changed, sad though, because what had been shiny and new in his childhood had turned shabby. Out back, the wooden lattice over the concrete patio had missing pieces, although, with a heavy, untrimmed wisteria, it actually appeared almost charming. Someone had tried painting the concrete below, but the paint was faded, chipped.

His bedroom, apricot-colored, no longer blue like he remembered it, now held a bunk bed. Apparently the boy had friends over, and an obsession with moving vehicles. Car stickers crawled randomly up and down the walls.

In the kitchen, blue Formica showed cracks from hot pans that should never have been set down on it. His mother used to shout at him if he came near the counters with something hot. He looked under the sink. She used to hide things there. Once she told him she kept twenty dollars in a can down there in case a crazed drug addict came knocking.

Bleach. Cleanser. Sponges in shreds.

But in the master bedroom, he found something that made this entire mad journey worthwhile. He easily discovered the wife’s stash of jewelry fatheadedly hidden at the back of her dresser. She had a few pathetic gold pieces, some mementoes worth nothing-really, if you judged people on such things you had to feel life was sad and paltry. But what caught his eye in that room was the crooked slat in the wide-planked flooring.