The Wrong Man

by Louis, Matthew

  A half hour passed. The gun was still in my hand, although I had uncocked it. Nobody had come by this yard, nobody had looked for me here. My joints were stiff from curling my frame into a ball. My knees ached as my legs unfolded. I dropped the gun into my pocket and boosted myself over the wall. I circled out of the apartment complex, walked two blocks out of the way and entered the dark shopping center from the far end. My car sat by itself, a pale vessel anchored in a black asphalt sea. I had a moment of panic in which I slapped my front pockets, reached in and found my keys still there, and then I broke into a run, made it to my car, and drove off toward the only place I could think of.

  9

  My grandfather’s pickup and my grandmother’s clean, neat lower-middleclass Ford Taurus were in the driveway. The neighborhood slept, utterly. I rolled past the house and pulled to the end of the street, rounded the corner, and parked in the alleyway, edging to my right until the side mirror touched the outside of the backyard fence my grandfather had built twenty years before. It was nearly four a.m. I could feel the fingers of exhaustion clawing at my mind, trying to get a good grip and pull it down into the quicksand of unconsciousness.

  I walked around the front, found the door locked, and, having no other choice, knocked.

  Within moments I was facing my grandfather in his robe. He was shrunken, stooped with age and gray, although there were still proud streaks of dark in his hair. His face was a collapsed, creased thing, the skin drooping as if melting, and his eyes had a wet sparkle in the half-light. The doctor had recently told him his heart might stop at any moment but he stood before me like a dangerous man, unblurred from sleep, because, I knew, he didn’t sleep at night.

  “Jesus-God, Sam!” he said. “I almost knocked your goddamned head off. What the hell are you doing?”

  I saw he had a nine-iron in his right hand as I passed inside.

  “Well?” he said. He hadn’t spoken in hours, was probably sitting in front of his computer when I knocked, and his voice was a growl. “Jesus! What the hell happened to your face, Sam?”

  “Sorry about this, grandpa. It’s a long, long story. Listen, can I tell it to you tomorrow and sleep on the couch tonight?”

  He looked at me for a moment, shook his head and smiled. “Christ. Be my guest.” I could almost read his thoughts. He was imagining I had gone drinking, got in some fistfight and my girlfriend had kicked me out for the night. “There are some blankets in the hall closet, I think. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  And then he walked off. A moment later I heard him talking to my grandmother as he ushered her back into their bedroom. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just Sam. Yes, Sam. He had a fight with his girlfriend or something and is going to sleep on the couch.” And then he went into the bedroom across the hall, where he surfed the web and talked to other ancient, insomniac Republicans all night, and the door latch clicked.

  I found a heavy knit blanket, stripped to my underwear and fell onto the couch, passing through the cushions and tumbling down, down, down with the ether of dreams closing around me.

  In the morning I found myself flaunting my horrendous circumstances before Grandpa Art and Grandma Anne while not wanting to say the first word about the last few days. Especially to my grandmother.

  My grandparents raised me here in Blackmer and they were, for practical purposes, my parents. But as the years had gone forward they had become Old People. My grandmother, especially, had settled into the role of an Old Lady and the chasm between what she saw and what was actually before her seemed to widen each day. Nothing could compel me to lift up the damp rock of my calm demeanor and show her the things crawling inside my mind. But, by a reverse equation, I imagined explaining all this to my grandfather like a man in a confession booth, and getting a no-bullshit, old-world solution handed to me in a couple of quick phrases.

  I ate the eggs and toast my grandmother made me, gulped the strong coffee they lived off of, and told her it was nothing. I even made my pummeled face into a smile. I told her just what she and my grandfather had assumed: I had gone out drinking and got into a fight, and Jill had gotten upset and locked me out of the apartment. Ha-ha. Jill and I will come over in a month or two, we’ll all have dinner together and laugh about it.

  I was sopping up the juice of the egg yoke with my toast, my grandmother clicking her tongue and shaking her head, when Grandpa Art’s voice drove a cold spike into my chest.

  “SAMUEL!” he said. “COME HERE, NOW!”

  My grandmother looked at me from her post at the sink with something like horror, and I must have had the same expression. That guttural drill sergeant’s bark had always, in my youth, been the harbinger of physical punishment. It was a sound of rage desperate for an outlet. I rose, feeling eleven years old, a foot shorter, and stepped into the living room and winced when I saw him there.

  Grandpa Art was standing beside the coat rack that was behind the front door. The rack was heaped with his and my grandmother’s jackets and coats, and he had my brown derby jacket in his hand. His gaze pushed at me like a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. The weapons in my jacket pockets stretched the material downward in an obvious fashion. I said, “Shit.”

  I had left the garment on the floor next to the couch, stuffed halfway under the end-table when I went to sleep, and then had awakened to my grandmother’s call for breakfast and hadn’t picked the thing up. So Grandpa Art had grabbed it off the floor to put it on the coat rack, felt the unusual weight and then explored inside the pockets.

  Something shifted behind the old man’s eyes as he looked at the bruises and scuffs on my face. He seemed to realize the significance of everything—its cumulative effect. When he spoke, the rage had been replaced by quiet insistence and he said, “We better have a talk, son.”

  I nodded.

  I followed him to what he called his “lion’s den,” which was the garage off the side of the house. He had a miniature refrigerator out there, a TV, a space heater, and every power tool known to man, all organized as if by a secretary.

  He walked out the front door ahead of me, carrying my jacket like an exhibit at a murder trial. It was another bright and cloudless morning. He lifted a hand and said hello to an old man in a duck hunting cap who was walking a small white dog up the sidewalk and I remembered that these homes had all been staked out by retirees over the last decade. The popular local term for the neighborhood was the Limber Dick Community. I wondered what would happen when death thinned out the population, then looked at my grandfather’s back and realized how soon I would have at least part of my answer. He was shrinking. Further gone each time I visited. His muscles vanishing, his old clothes, accustomed to the beef and strength of a workingman’s build, drooping.

  Grandpa Art had driven diesel rigs for thirty years and he adhered to the classic trucker dress code: the short-sleeved western shirt tucked into battered Levis, the work boots on the bottom and gray hair pomaded into a neat little almost-pompadour on top. His face always seemed carefully shaven, except for the thick sideburns that went down past his ever-growing ears. It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species—the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in Korea, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals—or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from Vietnam, just in time to napalm the Woodstock festival.

  But the man had lived. He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and—he hinted—a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations.

  We entered through the garage’s side door. It was cool out here and had the s
omehow lifeless and businesslike atmosphere of a shed. My grandfather laid my jacket on the top of his workbench, the weapons giving muted thunks as they hit the metal top. He crouched and grunted and the antique garage door scraped in its tracks and slid up over our heads and the spring air and morning sunshine rushed in.

  He indicated the swivel stool in front of the workbench and said, “Sit,” and turned to his little refrigerator. He took out a beer and handed it off to me, cracked one for himself, took a long gulp and then stared down at me.

  “Now tell me,” he said.

  And I did. I began with Rich stealing the pot and filled in every detail up to me running for my life last night. He shook his head the entire time, muttering things like “god-almighty!” and “Jesus-H-fucking-Christ!” and “Tommy? Aw, Sam, no!”

  When I finished the story my grandfather was quiet for a long time. He had seated himself across from me, on a stack of ninety-pound bags of concrete mix, and a flush had come to his cheeks. He upended his beer and got another. I had seen this same attitude of distraction dozens of times, whenever he began to visualize a building project.

  “Shit!” he kept sputtering. Then he looked up. “I ever tell you about Tommy’s father? He was a tennis teacher, always worried about his hair, always trying to show off his muscles, making a comment to every girl that went by like a goddamn nigger on a streetcorner. He knocked up your Aunt Carrie and left town as fast as he could.” Granpa Art winked. “But not before I made him hurt a little.” He paused, let that soak, cleared his throat. “Point is, Tom Senior was a sneaky, lying, two-faced son of a bitch, and Tommy ain’t any different. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s all genetics. I know it firsthand. He lived with me for a few years and I tried and tried to make a man of him, but it was no use. He wouldn’t go to school. Couldn’t stay out of fights. Was already chasing girls nonstop when he was thirteen. He’s just like his old man and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  I had forgotten how Grandpa Art was given to rambling these last couple of years. He could talk for fifteen minutes and not even approach the point he’d started off toward. He would just abandon the subject at hand, notice an interesting side-trail of memory and start down it without any logical segue. He sighed now, lost down one of these trails, and I just watched him, examining the elephant-hide cracks and wrinkles covering his face like a disease, the great stretched bags of flesh making his eyes look grave and sad.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “The point is that Tommy is just what he is. He’s no good. But that night, shit, what was it? Nineteen-sixty-three? Sixty-four? Jesus, Sam, I’m old!” And he almost began a discussion of his age, but I saw him catch himself. “What was I saying . . . oh yeah, that night I needed four buddies!” He folded his thumb against his palm and held up four thick fingers as if I might not catch on. “It took five of us to take on Tommy’s old man, and even then we had one hell of a time knocking that son of a bitch down.” He nodded and stared off, then returned. “So you see what I’m getting at.”

  “Tommy’s dad was tough?” I said.

  “What I’m saying is, Tommy does have his uses. He’s got some natural gifts. His father was gifted—that guy could have played tennis professionally—but he was no good. Undisciplined was what he was. You see, what’s happened here is you can’t go to the police.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and filled my lungs.

  Grandpa Art thought a moment and said, “You know what a blood feud is?”

  “A blood feud?”

  “That’s right. Like the Hatfields and McCoys. These Mexican gang kids live their lives looking for a blood feud, and you just handed ’em one! You went to this Owen character’s house, for Christ’s sake. Sam, you’ve bitched this thing up about as bad as you could. And there’s no evidence of anything. That’s what I was saying. You go to the police now and they might talk to this boy and tell him to leave you alone, but he can just send someone else, or he can wait and catch you next month. He’s trying to be the toughest kid in town and he’s gotta save face here. The only way you can get out of it now is to leave town.

  “So that’s why you gotta get hold of Tommy,” he said. “Tommy’s a no-good sonofabitch, but he’s not stupid by any stretch. He’s a resourceful shit, actually. He can do things when he sets his mind to it, it’s just that all he ever sets his mind to is doing nothing. And I was saying how tough his father was? Well, Tommy is twice as tough. Men been in prison, they can’t afford to stand around and talk about fighting. They take you apart as soon as look at you.” He frowned. “You’re out of your depth here, Sam. It’s like they say, swimming with sharks. But Tommy . . . there’s only one thing makes sense. So get on your little phone there and call him up.”

  “He’s not going to answer,” I said. “I already asked him for help and he just wiggled out of it.”

  “ ’Course he did. I could have told you he woulda done that. Just call him, will you? Let Grandpa Art talk to him.”

  I picked up my jacket, found the inner pocket and retrieved my cell. I opened it, punched through until I found Tommy’s number and punched CALL. I waited a long time in the silent garage, listening to the mechanical rings, feeling my grandfather’s stare, and just as I was about to give up I heard, “This is Tom.”

  “Tommy!” I said.

  “I’m not by the phone but if you leave a message at the tone I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” I almost laughed at his staid and stiff impersonation of a normal citizen.

  “It’s his answering machine,” I said to Grandpa Art, knowing he would instantly understand “answering machine,” but would scowl at me if I tried to explain it was the message service on his cell phone.

  “Gimme that thing!” the old man snapped. “Tom?” he bellowed, standing up, pressing the device to his ear. “What the fuck are you doing to Sam, shithead? Where are you? You better call me back, you hear me? You’re gonna get Sam out of this, or so help me Jesus I’m gonna see that your ass goes back to prison, and whoever your fat friend is with the guns and knives is gonna hear from the police too!” He winked at me. “You call me back the minute you get this message, you hear? I’m giving you until one o’clock. ONE O’CLOCK! And then I’m calling the cops, and you know goddamned well I will!” He gave his number and said, “You better step up to the plate, Tom!”

  He tossed me the phone and I caught it and closed it, terminating the call.

  Grandpa Art seemed to deflate and he sat down again on the cement bags. The line of light fell across his lower half, washing his withered denim knees in sunshine. His bottom lip sagged from his teeth. He sighed and looked up at me and the moment took on a portentous air. “I’ll just say this, Sam: If it comes down to you or Tommy getting hurt, let it be him. I love him but he’s no good to anyone. You, you’ve got a kid on the way, for Christ’s sake. So don’t get proud and do anything stupid. Anything else stupid, I mean. The regret you feel when you save your own skin, that lasts about five seconds, lemme tell you.” He was looking out the garage opening, at the grill of his pickup. He leaned forward, stood with effort and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I gotta go lay down.”

  He began shuffling away and I felt a chill, thinking that, if such a thing was possible, I was feeling someone walk over his grave.

  10

  I retrieved my car from the alleyway, drove back into town, and parked once again in the lot of the shopping center across the street from my apartments. The shopping center was now alive if not quite busy. I locked my car and started home under the sunshine, seeing myself through the eyes of malignant onlookers I was only imagining. I went up the main walkway of the apartment facility and then up the cement stairs of my building, my hand on the gun in my pocket. I pulled the gun out and cocked it as I reached the landing.

  The door was ajar and I pushed, took a breath and went in with the gun extended. I flashed it to my right but the living room was empty. There was no sign that anyone but me had been here. The blanket I had slept under
the previous two nights was crumpled on the couch from yesterday morning. I flashed the gun to my left and followed it into the little five-foot hallway that opened to the bedroom and the bathroom. I jabbed the gun into each room, but I already knew I would find nothing. Sweat oozed in my armpits, my heart was pumping away like a steam engine. I let the gun sag. I wondered if they had worn gloves even, had guns with silencers so they could just execute me and disappear and deny everything. I wondered if I had imagined last night, but no—the door was ajar. It had all happened. It was disturbing, almost disappointing, that they hadn’t lashed out in any juvenile way, spray painted the walls, taken a shit on the bed. I had been resigned to the worst. They might have even stolen, or at least smashed, the TV as a message. But it was all untouched. They only wanted me. Nice and neat.

  My eyes snapped wide and I hustled down the hall and closed and locked the front door. Jesus, what if someone was watching for me? I went into the kitchen and found my pan-and-coffee-cup door chime and hung it on the knob by its shoe lace, then went back to the bedroom for fresh clothes. I glanced at the clock and felt the icy fingers tracing down my spine. Twelve-fucking-thirty. I was due at work in less than two hours.

  I could call in with any excuse, I knew. I could not call in and just be AWOL for all anyone would ultimately care, but . . .

  At a quarter to two I locked the apartment behind me, checking the doorknob twice, and went down the steps into the afternoon sun. Longing to hide somewhere, to slink off and disappear, to do anything but what I was doing—stumbling down onto the walkway and making my way to my car as if I was a prison guard conducting my own self down the corridor to the gas chamber.