The 17

by Clint Kelly

  He snapped the phone closed and tossed it into the birdcage mess in the middle of the living-room carpet. The gun trained on me, he walked over and kicked the apartment door closed and threw the deadbolt. It was the sound of my coffin lid slamming shut.

  “You best say your prayers, Carter. Just do it silently.”

  God, please, a canister of tear gas? None materialized.

  Randy returned to the curtains. “Well, well. Seems we rate the SWAT team. Can the feds be far behind?” Within five minutes, his full focus was on the armed circus on Broad Street. While the gun was no longer trained on me, the trigger finger looked decidedly itchy.

  Sail away.

  I reached behind me and felt for the pirate ship. I hesitated, not knowing what was on the other side of my plan. Committed, my hand closed upon the bow and I slowly brought the ship down on the inside of the couch arm out of Randy’s line of sight. While he absorbed more of the details of his impending takedown, I waited.

  Full speed ahead.

  Fighting nausea, I counted to ten, hit the button on the poop deck, and launched myself at Randy. Startled and confused by the sudden booming of cannons, he forgot that the gun had dropped and now pointed down at his feet. I hit him full force with all of Jake’s cinnamon rolls I’d ever eaten. He flew backward and got off one more round that must have gone through the floor before our combined weight of nearly four hundred pounds crashed through the front window.

  Fully expecting to hurtle to the ground and a lifetime of at least partial paralysis, imagine my delight to feel the metal grating of the fire escape bite into my back. The downside was that Randy had also been spared. In wrestling for control of the gun, a couple more windows, one on the third floor, met their end and I all but lost my hearing and my lunch.

  Gun control was decided when I smashed Randy’s head into the top railing and the gun flipped out of sight. He returned the favor by trying to throw me over the railing to complete my plunge to the ground. The match ended when a SWAT team member stuck the muzzle of his automatic weapon through the shattered apartment window into our faces and said, “Which one of you is Randall Anderson?”

  I was too busy collapsing in shock to be flattered. A gunfight in which no one dies is a good gunfight. Still, it takes a lot out of you.

  17

  A monastery might be the best place for me, Ruthie. You’re there to hear voices and your brother monks don’t think twice about it.

  More precisely, you’re there to hear the voice of God. The first year of your novitiate, you filter out all the other voices that clamor for your attention. These include, but are not limited to, the television, politicians, religious scolds, the call of Jake’s cinnamon rolls, Madison Avenue, Rush Limbaugh, and Dr. Oz.

  I’d wash out in that first year, I know it. Not because of plain food, vows of silence, or hard beds. I’d wash out, Ruthie, because I fear yours is one of the voices they’d say must go. They’d say I was a little cuckoo for having kept a conversation going with you past your expiration date. Not healthy. I’d lead some poor postulant down the wayward way by teaching him the many voices of Sammy Saggy Pants or convincing him to wear a red clown nose to matins. Worse, I’d end up punching the father superior in the eye for casting aspersions upon Barry Manilow.

  What I guess most attracts me to the cloister is their de-emphasis on gunplay.

  You saw me lose it tonight when I washed up the dinner dishes. It was nice having Greta and Jess over for cheese-and-mushroom omelets. I didn’t think you would mind my letting Greta use your pink china plate with the white floral pattern. She’s pretty busted up over Randy, and the three of us needed to do something as normal as eat a meal together and watch Jeopardy! (welcomed in finer monasteries everywhere).

  We had rocky-road ice cream for dessert and played some Aggravation.

  Greta said Jess could perform in the wedding tomorrow, then spent twenty minutes trying to talk her out of it, that under the circumstances we would not blame her for backing out. Jess said she wanted to dance, then was silent and long-faced the rest of the evening. Occasionally, I would catch her studying us a little accusingly as if pondering where we summoned the energy and the words to talk about anything. She had lost a potential dad, never mind that he was not up to the task. It was her mother’s wedding bells that Jess anticipated the most.

  I owed her a pirate ship. The one used to bring Randy down did not make it to port.

  When Jess grew bored with us, she went into the living room to look at my coffee-table books on Ireland and the Galapagos Islands. Greta and I stayed at the kitchen table, sipping Seattle’s Best Coffee.

  “I wasn’t honest with you.” Greta lowered her voice and paused, lips to cup, a firm grip with both hands. “Randy’s work record was spotty, and as you can see, he doesn’t handle unemployment well at all. He said I should quit school, work two jobs, and should put Jessie with relatives so we can start our marriage unencumbered. The harder I refused to give up my dream or my daughter, the harder he hit. With every hit, a little piece of the love we had broke off and floated away—”

  She sat, chin down, unable to make eye contact. “I didn’t want you to think I was some lame single mom on public assistance living with a loser guy who beats me daily, truth or not. So I didn’t tell you about my Jess. I figured it would come out with you running into her at Safari. I’d never met anyone like you. Then when I saw you on the news and in the paper, I knew you were more than some man who rides the bus and hears voices. Maybe you’re an angel or at least one of those clairvoyants with all the premonitions. I wanted to avoid you even more then because I didn’t want you seeing right through me. I only wanted you to know what I wanted you to think, and that wasn’t possible with you all supernaturally wired.”

  Now I was the one who couldn’t make eye contact. She reached out and patted my hand, her words halting and hard found. “I’m sorry, James. You didn’t deserve to—to be treated like some kind of alien.”

  I glanced at her with a half smile. “You and Jessie have thrown me off my game as much as the messages. She is one great kid and thinks you are a fairy princess who with every step leaves gold behind.”

  “Not when it’s time to clean her room, she doesn’t.” Greta kept one hand in her lap and fussed with the unused knife and fork with the other. She glanced at the living room, where her daughter was absorbed in a pictorial world of living dragons and Blue-footed Boobies. “Jessie was an adoption gone wrong. A Christian couple got her from an agency in Haiti. She wasn’t with them six months before the husband filed for divorce. Irreconcilable differences. What’s more irreconcilable than two adults ripping their home and their child’s life apart?

  “I was an administrative assistant for state children’s aid when I met Jessie while refereeing a foster-care fraud case. She was in that foster home and every time I visited, clung to me like static electricity. One day she fixed me with those big brown eyes and said, ‘Please give me a chance. If I stay here, I have no chance.’ A little Haitian orphan girl reaching out to me in proper English, so grown up. Amazing. It was like she wormed her way into my soul on the spot and no way was she leaving.”

  I ran a hand through my hair, sad for Greta, even more for Jess. “I had no idea she was carrying all this around with her.”

  Greta’s sudden silence was underscored by Jess’s sudden laugh at some strange beast she’d likely never seen before.

  “Randy hurt you, Greta. You couldn’t build a life with an abuser.”

  She nodded. “But he was good to me in the beginning, James. When we met, he was driving delivery for the blood bank where I donated. His smile lit up a room and he had a heart for saving lives. The temporary delivery job went away, but by then we were playing house so I could get Jessie for my own. When the construction jobs started drying up, so did Randy. He became bitter and defensive, started drinking more, getting down on himself. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I found out his dad and mom divorced when he was little because
her husband knocked her around. Like father, like son.”

  The pain in her eyes made me hurt for her. I almost said, “You’ll find someone else,” stopping myself in time. She didn’t need me slinging platitudes. What I could do was be her and Jessie’s friend.

  Later, after they left, I dried my white china plate with the pink floral pattern and turned to the cupboard to place it on top of yours, Ruth Anne. Same stacking order as we had always done. It was then I lost it, the plate spinning out of my hands to shatter in the sink, my legs going to mush and dropping me to the floor.

  The doctor wants me to slow down, lower the stress level. How can I when God’s got me on assignment? You know I’ve tried to get out of it. It simply caught up with me, I guess. Don’t you get on my case, Ruth Anne.

  I lay there on the floor a long while. Thinking. Rethinking the whole thing of listening for God. I repeated Philippians 4:13 over and over but His divine strength did not come, only weeping. Mine. I’m pretty sure I may have gnashed my teeth a time or two. I prayed, a good thing to do when you’ve been floored. Prayers for Richie and Shirl. For Doomie and Stella. For Bill and “Roxie.” For Greta and Jess. For James and Ruthie. For all those who run from God, when ironically, it is into His very arms we long to run. For a world so broken that guns and bombs, rejection and vengeance, are people’s answer to the love they’ve been denied.

  “Forgive me, Father,” I cried. “You have been relentless in Your pursuit of me. I have tried to tell You Your business. You have come for me by allowing me to be for others what they need, when they need it. You gave Ruthie to me for thirty good years. Am I to squander the ones remaining by hiding from You? As Your man Peter said, ‘To whom would we turn,’ if not to You?”

  Later, I awakened, stiff on my bed of kitchen linoleum. Knowing that all who seek God hear from Him to varying degrees of audibility.

  Just off my left cheek was the sprung mousetrap I’d always meant to reset. The refrigerator hummed. The sink faucet dripped. The stove clock changed to 3:20 AM and I felt enormous calm.

  It was as when, Ruthie, you used to hold me in the night. There on the hard, unyielding floor, I wadded my sweatshirt beneath my head, your sweet arms tightened about me, and I slept one of the most refreshing sleeps of my life.

  18

  Today began with a disappearance.

  After night showers, the morning dawned bright and fair. By breakfast, the asphalt streets were close to dry, and the crowd at Westlake Plaza grew with every passing minute. Stella and Doomie had their witnesses and then some. The little podium and modest sound system where the giddy couple were to exchange their I-dos were surrounded by a babble of every tongue and nation. The Russians, Spanish, French, Italians, and Japanese were at my left and right, each staking claim to the immediate area for optimal ceremonial viewing. Far enough away from the fountain to lend a hint of the exotic without drowning out the critical rhetoric, yet close enough to the open court area to gain a good view of the wedding singers, musicians, and, for all I knew, court jesters who comprised the order of events.

  It was the first wedding I’d attended where seating was festival style.

  The word on the street had spread wildfire strong and there promised to be a throng. It was more than free cake and something to do. It was a bright sign of hope that Stella and Greg found love on a bus in the Ride Free Zone. They were now twice as likely to get off the streets for good. At street level, everyone’s boat floated a little higher on that news.

  Through contacts down at the mission, Doomie was offered a job washing the windows of downtown businesses at minimum wage and Stella was asked to be a public liaison for the merchants of Pike Place Market. Some might assume she was a glorified greeter, but the volunteer position came with a blue smock, an employee badge with her name and photo ID, and discount coupons good at several merchants. She’d already put a set of curtains on layaway at one of them. While I was hanging out at Devil’s Punchbowl on the Oregon coast with Richie and Shirl, Stella and Doomie moved from their cardboard shelter beneath the James Street overpass to a tiny furnished dormer room in the King Street Housing Authority. Shared bathroom, cafeteria privileges, and a fifth-floor view of the rail yards.

  The inexplicable love between them made people see them differently. Treat them differently. Soon the Littletons would vote and read the newspaper and buy bacon and engage in civil society perhaps for the first time since God said, “Let Us make this man and woman in Our image.” They were a family.

  I again checked my watch but how that would cause Jessie to materialize was one for the Sphinx. She was MIA and that was all there was to it. Duke squeezed every drop of Jamaican jerk out of his steel drums in a briny extended rendition of “Under the Sea” from Disney’s Little Mermaid. He even threw in some over-the-shoulder juggling of his drumsticks straight out of Japanese tapenade-style cooking. Still, no Little Haitian.

  Fear nibbled at my thoughts.

  I borrowed the reverend’s cellphone and called Greta’s apartment. She answered on the first ring. “You’ve got to get a cellphone. When I got up this morning to check on Jessie, her bed was empty and cold. I’ve checked with the neighbors. Nothing. She was happy when she went to bed last night and very excited about her dance today. I’m about to call the police. James, if anything has happened to her…”

  “Now calm down, Greta. Don’t bring the police in yet. She’s got a good head on her, so let’s think logically. You get dressed and search the areas around the apartment building. Is there anywhere nearby she liked to go?”

  Greta didn’t think long. “The dog park at Third and Bell. She loves that place. Mutts galore. Whenever we go past there, I have to tear her away.”

  “There you go,” I said. “You check out the dog park and I’ll wander the crowd. She may have lost track of the time or been distracted by the sights. It’s a carnival down here.”

  Indeed, there were at least a half-dozen buskers wowing the crowd with jump-rope routines, unicycle demonstrations, slow-motion performance art, and a live parrot on a string. If people grew tired of the wedding vows, there were Day-Glo yo-yo tricks and a chimney sweep balancing on a broom. It was sure to be less sacred ceremony, more medieval street fair.

  Duke switched from under the sea to up in the sky with Kermit the Frog’s favorite, “Rainbow Connection.”

  I walked quickly around the perimeter of the plaza, scanning the noisy gathering for a pint-sized hip-hop artist in backwards baseball cap. I half expected—wanted—to hear my name shouted and see a blur of little arms and legs churning in my direction.

  Nothing.

  What if she’d run from the trauma in her life? She’d had so much abandonment for a seven-year-old—first her birth parents, then her dad-in-waiting. What if she thought Greta would pull out on her too? What if she was lost or stuck or—What if in her wanderings someone snatched her right off the street and had her trapped right now and was…was …My heart started its telltale tripping out when I hit on Greta’s words. “The dog park…She loves that place…I have to tear her away…”

  If anything happens to that precious child…What? Abraham the patriarch must have said the same thing about Isaac. God was going to do what God was going to do.

  I ran. Away from the dog park. Away from the pretty mother in the leopard-print coat who had found me in the middle of my fight with God. Away from Bill’s bullet-torn corpse and make-belief wife. Away from Chase and his homespun wisdom. Away from the fact that you, my Ruthie, will never come back, no matter how much I wish it. Away from my stalled life and spinning wheels and reluctant faith and selfish rebellion.

  Away from the altar of the Maker’s love. Where would I go? To whom would I turn?

  My heart banged and wheezed more like a crazy metal contraption than a sublime machine of flesh and blood. I willed it to give out, to dump me like the bag of rags I was. It would not. It did not. And in the end, I was resigned that it could not. Not right then. Not because I demanded it. It could
not because the One who had set the whole glorious thing in motion was not about to take it offline on my say-so.

  Out of breath, lungs squeaky as a set of perforated bellows, I lumbered to a halt on the sidewalk out front of the Gospel Mission. I grabbed my knees and waited for the tempest to subside. Feet shuffled past, some turning into the mission. Two men shucked and jived one another over whether lunch would be bread and tuna, or tuna and bread. I was too winded to look up.

  “It’s Jeffrey’s shift today,” said one. “He opens the tuna can, gives it a couple of waves over the bread, slaps the bread together, then saves the tuna for casserole some other night.”

  “You blowin’ wind,” said the other. “Jeff-o told me he’s pulled fresh albacore tuna outta the freezer and them sandwiches gonna be a mile high with it.”

  His companion gave a hyena’s laugh. “Sounds to me like as much ol’ Jeff’s a mile high and tuna’s the code for surplus peanut butter.”

  To much hooting and back clapping, the skeptics entered the mission. Again, Greta’s words came flooding back. “The dog park…She loves that place…I have to tear her away…” As if on cue, I heard a distant hungry hound barking insistently through the open mission door.

  Miss Francis always kept one or two unclaimed dogs in the kennel at the back of the mission in hopes of forging a new bond between child and beast with love to give.

  I hurried inside and across the vast dining area where setup for lunch was underway. Down the hall beside the kitchen, turn right past the potato bin and walk-in freezer, left at the loading trolleys for moving supplies, through the archway and across the breezeway separating the kennels from the main building, left at the receiving dock, and right into the kennel proper.