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By Root 2310 0

of having crept and wriggled to the very center of that room all by myself in the middle of the night, pausing roughly halfway between the floor and ceiling in pitch darkness on some sloped cabinet or sleigh bed—and then hearing a cautious scuffle from some remote cubic yard out there, in that three-dimensional maze of Cabriole legs and cartouches that you had to touch to learn the shapes of. And in the dream I knew it was some lonely boy who had hidden away up there with all the furniture years and years ago, and that he wanted to play, to show me whatever old shoe buckles or pocket watches or fountain pens he had found in drawers and coat pockets. I always pictured him skeletal and pale, though of course he’d be careful never to get near enough to the windows to be seen, and I knew he’d speak in a whisper.

I always woke up from that dream while it was still dark outside my window, and so tense that I’d simply lie without moving a muscle until I could see the morning light through my eyelids.

I was in the yard of the Santa Ana house early the next morning, sipping at a can of Coors beer and blinking tears out of my eyes as I tried to focus on the tomato vines through the sun glare on the white garden wall, when I heard a pattering like rain among the leaves. I sat down abruptly in the damp grass to push the low leaves aside.

It was bits of glass falling out of the sky. I touched one shard, and it was as hot as a serving plate. A cracking and thumping started up behind me then, and I fell over backward trying to stand up in a hurry. Red clay roof tiles were shattering violently on the grass and tearing the jasmine branches. The air was sharp with the acid smell of burned, broken stone, and then a hard punch of scorchingly hot air lifted me off my feet and rolled me over the top of the picnic table. I was lying facedown and breathless in the grass when the bass-note boom deafened me and stretched my hair out straight, so that it stood up from my scalp for days; I still have trouble combing it down flat, not that I try frequently.

The yard looked like a battlefield. All the rosebushes were broken off flush with the ground, and the ceramic duck that we’d had forever was broken into a hundred pieces. I was dimly glad that the duck had been able to tour California once in his otherwise uneventful life.

The eastern end of the house, where the kitchen had been, was broken wide open, with tar paper strips standing up along the roof edge like my hair, and beams and plaster chunks lay scattered out across the grass. Everything inside the kitchen was gone, the table and the refrigerator and the pictures on the wall. Propane is heavier than air, and it had filled the kitchen from the floor upward, until it had reached the pilot light on the stove.

The explosion had cracked my ribs and burned my eyebrows off and scorched my throat, and I think I got sick from radon or asbestos that had been in the walls. I took a day-long ride on a bus out here to San Bernardino to recuperate at my uncle’s place, the same rambling old ranch-style house where we lived happily for a year right after we moved from New York, before my mother found the Santa Ana house and began making payments on it.

The ceramic duck might have been the first thing my mother bought for the house. He generally just sat in the yard, but shortly after my sister and I turned seven he was stolen. We didn’t get very excited about that, but we were awestruck when the duck mysteriously showed up on the lawn again, six months later—because propped up against him in the dewy grass was a photo album full of pictures of the ceramic duck in various locations around the state: the duck in front of the flower bank at the entrance to Disneyland, the duck on a cable car seat in San Francisco, the duck sitting between the palm prints of Clark Gable; along with a couple of more mundane shots, like one of the duck just leaning against an avocado tree in somebody’s yard out behind a weather-beaten old house. I think all the stories you hear about world-traveling lawn gnomes these days