The Descent of Man by Kevin Desinger

Author:Kevin Desinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Over the years I had forgotten the house number. The street name was easy because we had always referred to it as the Agate House, but the numbered cross streets weren’t registering. I idled down Agate for three blocks before I found the familiar run of houses, ours second from the end. I sat in my car in the middle of the street with the engine idling. It was three in the morning.

They had painted it since we’d left, gone from a light-gray body and dark-gray trim to a soft yellow body and walnut-brown trim. Supporting the porch roof were two large boxed pillars, the left one bearing the four address numbers in red glaze on white ceramic tile. This and the scalloped shingles covering the pillars were what set this house off from its neighbors. I could imagine the crazy month almost a hundred years earlier when this entire row of houses had gone in, the constant syncopated industry of hammers and saws. Each was distinct from the others simply by variations in the porch pillars.

Marla’s pear trees were twenty feet tall now, and the shrubs around the foundation were full and neatly trimmed. She had done a good job of shaping our first nest. We had been innocent here, just starting to learn who we were as a couple and what path in life we would take together. I couldn’t recall any of the decisions that had led us from the people we’d been in this house to who we were now, but in the years since living here we had come a long way. In some senses we were very much the same people, and in other senses we were horizons beyond those younger selves. It was no surprise to me, then, to find myself stopped in front of the first house in which we had lived together. It was like looking back toward the path I needed to find again after my momentum had carried me through this strange detour.

The attempted theft had pulled me off course, gotten me behaving in unfamiliar ways. I was caught between my world and the world of the Hood brothers, and I wondered what it would be like to be them, to steal cars on a regular basis. The technical aspects—disabling the keyed cylinder or sorting through the color-coded ignition wires—were beyond me. And I also lacked the internal structure—the emotional and ethical twists that allow guys to steal cars without being crippled by guilt. But I wondered what a guy would feel when he was, as Rainey put it, committed to the act.

The car parked beside me was a fairly late import, well kept, worth thousands of dollars. The neighborhood had improved since we had lived here. What would be the first step? Probably trying the door to see if it was locked. It’s a common enough practice in the quieter neighborhoods for people to leave their cars unlocked. I looked up and down the block on both sides of the street.

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