Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

  “It is that,” Dillon said. “But you’re right. I’ve been pretty good with it. This is the first time today.”

  Caulder nodded as he began placing the groceries on the appropriate shelves and in the refrigerator.

  “Could we talk about the war?” Dillon asked bluntly.

  His father stopped in his tracks but didn’t look. “What for?”

  “I got this paper,” Dillon lied, “and—”

  “I thought we had a commitment to truth in this abbreviated family,” Caulder said. “Thought we weren’t going to bullshit each other.”

  Dillon grimaced. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there’s been a rule in this house since 1971 that I don’t talk about the war. And I have to say I’m pleased it’s a rule that’s seldom, if ever, been broken. All of a sudden you have a paper, and you want to break a family tradition?” He shook his head. “Tell me why you want to talk about it, then I’ll decide.”

  Dillon took a deep breath. “I want to know about killing.”

  Caulder was quiet. Finally he said, “They do a lot of it in war.”

  “I know that. What’s it like?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because it’s important,” Dillon said.

  Caulder didn’t push it. Dillon had always been respectful of his wish to put the Vietnam War behind him, and if he was asking now, there must be a good reason. “It changes a man,” Caulder said, and Dillon sat at the table, resting his chin in his hands.

  “It changes the way you see the world. You’re taught forever that life is sacred, and then it isn’t. And it not only isn’t sacred, it’s cheap.”

  “So how do you justify it?” Dillon asked.

  “You don’t really,” Caulder said. “You just try to stay alive. It’s one thing to kill the enemy—to kill someone up there in front of you that’s trying to get you before you get him—but in Vietnam we killed when we weren’t sure. That’s where the lines got really blurred.” He lowered his head. “If you want to know the truth, that’s why I don’t talk about the war. I don’t know of one infantryman over there who spent any significant time in combat who didn’t try to kill someone he wasn’t sure about. I did.”

  “So how do you live with it? I mean, what do you tell yourself?”

  “You tell yourself it was war.”

  “Does that make it okay?”

  “It gets you by,” Caulder said. “Dillon, they tell you life is sacred, like I said. I’ve heard that all my life, and I’ve tried to pass it on. But it isn’t, necessarily. It’s just life. I think maybe you set the value of your own. By your actions, mostly. You seem to have set yours high; your brother set his low.” He smiled. “If I had set mine higher, I wouldn’t have gone over there.”

  “But do you think war justifies killing?”

  “Killing can be justified only in the mind of the person doing it,” Caulder said. “Justification is a mental process, not a moral imperative.” He sat back. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

  Dillon thought a second, then said, “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “What’re you doing here?” Jennifer asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” T.B. said. “Thought I might ask you.”

  The two stood at the sidewalk in front of Chief Joseph High School. It was twelve noon, first lunch break.

  “What do you mean?” Jen asked. “You came here to find out if something’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been doing a little arithmetic,” T.B. said. “And I brought it over here to have you check it for me. You know, see if I made any mistakes.”

  Jen stared blankly, waiting. She knew better than to play games.

  “Why did you run out of the game the other night?”

  Jen’s heart slipped into overdrive, but she fought it back. “I don’t know. I told you, I just got really disoriented.”

  T.B. nodded. He looked behind her to see a figure approaching on crutches, careful to avoid the icy spots. “Hi, Mr. Martin,” Dillon Hemingway said. “What brings you over here?”

  “Hi, Dillon. How you doing? Doesn’t look like all that well.” He nodded toward the crutches.

  Dillon smiled. “I’ve been better. I’ve been worse. How about Jen, huh? Gonna take us all the way.”

  “If anyone can, she can,” T.B. said, putting an arm on Jen’s shoulder.

  By now Dillon stood beside them. He’d run out of happy things to say and merely smiled.

  “Will you excuse us, Dillon?” T.B. said. “I just need a minute of my daughter’s time, and then she’s all yours.”

  “Oh, sure,” Dillon said, feigning surprise and embarrassment for not being more sensitive. “Sure. See you later, huh? Coming to the game Saturday?”

  “If I don’t have to go out of town.” T.B. waved cordially as Dillon worked his way back up the walk toward school, then turned to Jen. “I don’t know what that was about the other night, but if you’re having any wild ideas about shooting your mouth off again or doing anything foolish or embarrassing, you’d best think twice, young lady.”

  “I’m not having any wild ideas,” Jen said. “I’m not having any ideas at all.”

  “That’s good,” he said, tweaking her cheek. “Remember your sister’s counting on you.”

  T.B. turned and waved to Dillon, who stood in the school entrance. “You take care of that leg, you hear?” he yelled. “Won’t do to have a trainer who can’t take care of himself.” He trotted easily to his car, parked in a towaway zone in front of the school. When he had disappeared around the corner, Jen brushed past Dillon and into the girls’ bathroom. He tried to follow, but the door closed before he could get to it.

  “Talk?” he said fifteen minutes later when she appeared in the doorway, eyes rimmed in red.

  Jennifer merely shook her head. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Help me out to my van. I’ve been slipping on these things all day long. Damn maintenance around here isn’t worth the powder and fuse.”

  “Get in,” Dillon said at the van. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a class.”

  “You gonna tell me you stood out there and talked to that creep a half hour ago and now you’re gonna get something out of class? Get in.”

  “Nothing’s changed, Dillon,” Jennifer said as they drove up Southwest Boulevard away from the school. “No one can touch him. Your doctor friend says I have to be willing to talk. And I am. I would talk.” Through gritted teeth she said, “But somebody would be dead before I could count to ten. He stopped by the school to warn me about Dawn.”

  “Then we’ll do what we planned,” Dillon said. “When the baby’s born, we’ll steal her and head to Canada, with all signs pointing to California. We’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll take Dawn.”

  “Dillon, what kind of life will we have? We’ll be fugitives, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Hey,” Dillon said back, “what kind of life do we have now? What kind of life do you have?”

  Jen was quiet.

  “There’s one more choice,” Dillon said, “if you’re willing to let it happen.”

  “What.”

  “I could kill him.”

  Jen snorted. “How are you going to do that? He’s one of the best-known lawyers in this town. You gonna challenge him to a duel?”

  “Look,” Dillon said, and for the first time he let himself consider the possibility seriously. “No one knows I even have a reason to want him dead. I could kill him with Preston’s gun and throw it in the river. It’s never been registered and no one knows we even have it. The authorities didn’t even check for it when Preston killed himself. It’s a World War II gun. From Germany. There are probably a hundred of them right here in this town. I could get him clear away from your place. Hell, he’s out of town so much I could shoot him in another city.”

  “Dillon are you out of your mind? You could spend the rest of your life
in jail.”

  “Think about it, Jen. Think about it. See, you’re not bothered by the idea of the killing. You’re only thinking about the consequences. If I can convince you there won’t be any, will you think about it?”

  “Of course, killing him wouldn’t bother me a bit. He’s killed everyone in my family ten times over. He keeps killing me after I’m dead, and there’s an unborn baby waiting in line. But I can’t let anyone else get hurt in this, Dillon. Especially you. It would kill me if something happened to you because of me.”

  Dillon could see he wouldn’t get agreement, but he had the response he needed. He turned around and drove back to school.

  CHAPTER 16

  Dear Preston,

  Well, this may be your last letter from me. I can hear you now. “It’s about time! I thought when I got out of high school, I could stop reading forever, and I was sure when I killed myself, I could stop reading forever, but leave it to my goddamn semiliterate brother to make me pay beyond the grave.” Well, you may get your wish. I’ve found some people down here who will listen, and for better or worse, things seem to be washing out.

  T.B.’s reign is over. An ugly piece of history. I’ve thought about it a long time, about whether there was anything in me that could feel remorse or sorrow for anything that happened to that man, but there isn’t. I’m sorry his life was whatever it was to allow him to turn out like he did, but I can’t be sorry for him.

  I finally figured out that all of the legitimate avenues to put an end to what was happening to Jen were blocked. If it had been just a question of her making enough noise to get the child protection authorities involved, I think she would have done it, even though she’d failed before. That Dr. Newcomb guy out at the college carries some weight and he would have backed Jen all the way. In fact, when she finally went out there with me to talk to him, she was even a little bit encouraged. But the bottom line was that it all would have taken too much time, and her stepdad had upped the ante so high we just didn’t have it. I mean, this guy struck like lightning. He knew something was up, that Jen was about to crack one way or the other, and you know what he told her? Jeezuz. He told her that he had never expected to last this long with her family, that he’d expected to have had to take drastic measures long before this, and that it was a testament to her sense of discretion that everyone was alive and well. He told her he could disappear in a heartbeat if he had to and show up within three months on the East Coast with a full-blown successful family law practice. I don’t know whether he could honestly pull that off, or whether he really had destroyed other families before he came into Jen’s life, like he said he had, but she sure believed him. And if I had to bet a month’s pay one way or the other, I sure wouldn’t bet against him. You should have seen this guy, Pres. He followed no rules. None.

  He’s following one now, though.

  I thought of all the ways, Pres. I even further developed the plan to help Jen steal her mother’s baby when it’s born and head up across the border. I was going to become a Canadian Ironman. Actually, I was going to become a Canadian Familyman.

  But I gotta tell you about Dad. God, Pres, we didn’t know him. I’ll always be proud to be the son of a man who can carry so much weight with so much dignity, even though I know it’s not good for his insides. He’s pretty sure that’s one of the reasons Mom left, when you were crippled and on drugs and headed on your crash course with gravity and she couldn’t get him to talk. But he can sure make that Gary Cooper act look good. And he’s got real integrity. I’ve waited a long time to use that word well, and I can use it now for Dad.

  I swore I wasn’t going to tell a bunch of people about Jen because I didn’t want anyone going off to do the “right thing” and getting somebody hurt or killed. So I chose Coach because she always seems so level-headed, and like I said, I even got Jen to go see Dr. Newcomb with me as long as she didn’t have to use her name. But none of that made a difference because Jen was too spooked to take any action. Then one night I was talking with Dad, broke the lifelong family edict banning discussions of the war, and I realized he was the one to tell all along. If anyone can make me understand things, it’s Dad. And I know he’d go to the wall. I think I didn’t know that before because I didn’t ask.

  He listened to my story, didn’t spend a second trying to pick it apart or get me to “go through the proper channels” or any of that bullshit I already knew wouldn’t work. When he’d heard it all, he asked me what I planned to do.

  I said, “I’m not sure, Dad. I might have to kill him.”

  That shocked him some, I think, because he could tell I was serious, but he didn’t show a lot of alarm. He showed common sense. He said, “You should think real carefully about that, Dillon. What you’re talking about will only add to the tragedy.”

  I said that it was the only thing I could think of and that I couldn’t just stand by and watch anymore.

  He said, “How do you think your friend will feel if she has to add one more ruined life to her list, from what you tell me, probably the only life apart from her sister’s that she really cares about?”

  That was close to what I needed to hear, that I’d be causing as much pain as I’d be relieving—Dad really knows me—but I wasn’t convinced there was any other way. He was careful. He didn’t challenge my ability to try something really stupid. He said, “It’s not a question of whether or not you could pull it off, Dillon, it’s whether you’d do more damage than good to yourself or the person you’re trying to help.” Then he asked me not to make any crazy plans without talking to him again.

  I got up to leave, and when I got to the door, he said, “Dillon,” and I turned around. “If you killed him, he’d just be dead. Is that enough?”

  That’s what changed my mind. Dad didn’t appeal to my sense of reason or count on the off chance that I might come to my senses and actually project on what the taking of a life might mean to me later on or what my life in prison might be like. No way. He appealed to my sense of revenge because he knew it was the only sense available. Our daddy’s a three-point shooter, Pres. He has touch.

  If I had thought about all the possible consequences of what I did next, I might not have done it, but I think it’s a blessing—or a curse—of adolescence not to place a whole lot of value on the idea of thought before action. I knew I needed to show T.B. up close and personal, as they say, without including Jen in on the agony of his defeat. That’s not something that can be done aboveboard, when there are as many limitations as were placed on me in this situation, so I took a chapter right out of T.B.’s own life. I figured he’s gotten away with this crap for so long because of the element of unbelievability; no one can imagine a regular, married, employed human being capable of such acts. They just can’t picture it. So I decided to do something so off the wall no one would possibly see it coming until it had already went. I got Coach to get me back in contact with Wayne Wisnett, the news guy she goes out with. I don’t know whether you remember or not, but I did a research paper at the beginning of my sophomore year on those neo-Nazis that live over in Hayden Lake, in north Idaho. Well, this Wisnett was the guy who did the undercover news report on those unconscious bootlicks, and he had helped me out with some of the details for my paper. And I knew he liked me because he did a little feature when I won my age division in my first triathlon about a year later. He told Coach he thought I was “unique.” Anyway, I remembered that when he infiltrated those jerks over in Hayden, he gathered all his visual evidence with a small video camera that uses infrared light or some such hi-tech “Star Wars” bullshit and takes pictures in the dark. It wasn’t easy to convince him and I might have had help from voices in the universe; but for whatever reason, old Wayne took a flyer on me, checked that zillion-dollar piece of machinery out to himself without making me tell him what I was going to do with it and even gave me lessons on how to make it work and how to set the timer, though there’s really not much to it. He did all that right before he told me which tree I’
d find my butt nailed to if it had so much as a scratch on it.

  Things get a little strange with this story from here, and I still don’t know how I feel about having done what I did, but when I picked up Jen and her sister to go over to the second game of the regional basketball tournament, they let me inside because their parents were gone. I used the upstairs bathroom and on my way back got a peek at Jen’s room, where I scouted out the best spots to plant that little hummer. The reason things get strange is that I knew if Jen had an inkling what I was planning, she would have crammed a banana down my throat, then reached down in there to peel it. I didn’t think I’d ever tell her, really, but I had to figure the odds of her finding out on her own were at least fifty-fifty. But desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. And I guess they call for desperate people, too, ’cause I was feeling all of that. Anyway, the next night when I picked them up to go to the final game, I put a piece of one of Dad’s old plastic credit cards in the latch on the way out so it wouldn’t lock, and along about the second quarter of the game I got violently ill and had to leave. I hauled ass back over to Jen’s place and let myself in. Now I ain’t a religious man—you know that, Pres—but I could be persuaded to believe that God was one of the architects of that bedroom because right above the closet, out of anyone’s reach, there was this absolutely useless bookshelf with a piece of drapery hanging over it that somebody must have put there to hide it from view. I rested a little easier when I found about three inches of dust on the surface. Anyway, I propped the camera with a couple of paperback books and parted the curtain just a hair so it stared right down on Jen’s bed, and I set the timer for the next night, when I knew El Creepo would be home.

  I didn’t really think I’d get it on the first try, but when I saw Jen in English class, she looked like death taking a crap, and I was pretty sure I’d scored.

  It was a hell of a lot more trouble getting that thing out of there than it was planting it. Jen almost never let me in the house when her parents were home, and it took me three goddamn days to get to it. Every night when I went to bed, I was sure the phone would ring and we’d get the news that the whole family had been wiped out, and that’s the only time I really wished I hadn’t done it. I was so crazy paranoid by the time I finally got back in there I thought I was going to just drop in my tracks of cardiac surprise.