The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  Matt Drinnan was out of step with the times. Having lost everything before everybody else did, he was now on the road to recovery and had come up with his own stimulus plan. And while it required bipartisan support, it wasn’t subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion since it took place entirely in secret. His weekday afternoons all ended at a bar in North Reading with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Since that first day when she’d laid his hand back on top of hers, they hadn’t touched even once. They made ample eye contact, but otherwise all they did was drink and talk. And if the talk ran out, though that seldom happened, silence sufficed.

  Much of the conversation was trivial. One day she told him that she’d looked his last name up. “It originally meant ‘blackthorn,’ ” she informed him, “and it’s often changed to ‘Thornton.’ One of your ancestors was the poet who first referred to Ireland as the ‘Emerald Isle.’ So you see? You’ve got poetry in your blood. No wonder you wanted to be a writer.”

  He voiced curiosity about her life in academia. When he was a student at Tufts, he told her, the English professors always seemed to be at war with one another. An Americanist he became friendly with said it was “because never before was so little at stake.”

  She laughed, then remarked that there sometimes was quite a bit at stake. After the O. J. Simpson trial, she said, the chair of the philosophy department at her former university went to a conference in Los Angeles. In the cab back to the airport, the driver asked if he’d like to detour through Brentwood and see O.J.’s house. “So he says why not. An amateur photographer, he takes his Nikon everywhere and figures he’ll get a nice picture of a place in the news. The taxi pulls up front, and while our philosopher’s got his camera aimed at the house, out comes guess who?”

  “O.J.?”

  She nodded. “He ambles over and starts chatting them up and eventually asks, ‘Want a picture with me?’ So the department chair has the taxi driver snap his photo with the most reviled man in America, both of them with huge grins on their faces, and when he gets back home he has a nice glossy eight-by-ten printed up that happens to be framed and sitting on his desk the day he calls a lecturer in to tell her that her contract isn’t being renewed. She sued him for creating a threatening environment in the workplace.”

  “Did she win?”

  “We never let it go to court and settled for around four hundred thousand.”

  “You thought she had a valid case?”

  “I wasn’t willing to bet she didn’t. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.”

  As the afternoons and the martinis multiplied, the talk took a serious turn. He once asked her if she’d ever missed having children, and she said, “I don’t know that I could answer that question honestly.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I might well have lied to myself about it for such a long time that I don’t even know the truth anymore. Maybe we should leave it for later. Why don’t you tell me about your girls?”

  “They couldn’t be more different from each other,” he said. “Angie’s got Carla’s complexion and hair color, and she also runs her mouth a mile a minute. And you know what else? She’s the world’s worst arachnophobe. I’d hear a shriek, and by the time I got to their bedroom she’d be up on the windowsill, pointing at some little bug you couldn’t spot with a microscope. Lexa, on the other hand, is blond and fair-skinned, the kind of girl who’ll sit for two or three hours with a book and never make a sound. Her favorite writer’s Larry McMurtry. How she got hooked on him, I don’t know. She’s never set foot in the state of Texas, but she’s nuts about those Lonesome Dove novels. Before the divorce, I promised to take her to Archer City one day and see if he might be hanging around his bookstore so she could ask for his autograph. That’ll never happen now.”

  “Why not?”

  He sipped his martini. “I get them twice a month and only on weekends.”

  “Wouldn’t your wife let you take them on a trip?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like I’m kind of fading away as their father, given Nowicki and all. It’s a little scary.”

  “Isn’t that a good reason for you to work up the courage to ask about having more time with them?”

  “Maybe I should,” he said. “After all, I worked up enough to track you down in Andover.”

  “Did it really take that much, Matt?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it really did.”

  “Well, that makes me feel important.” She brushed a loose strand off her forehead, and he saw that she’d just had a manicure. “It also calls to mind June Lockhart.”

  “Who?”

  “She played Timmy’s mom on the Lassie series. Later on she hosted the Miss USA pageant—until they fired her for taking up with a younger man.”

  “But you haven’t taken up with me. We’re just having a few drinks.”

  “No, but people notice our age difference.”

  “What people?”

  She motioned toward the bar. “Our waitress. And anybody else who comes in here.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  A little extra color appeared in her cheeks. “I can’t actually say that it does.”

  Clearly she’d cut her own losses, settling for less than she’d sought in every respect, becoming an administrator rather than the professor and literary critic she’d set out to be and leaving a top-tier university for a third-rate state college because she had no other choices. She’d lost the man she loved and married another one for something less than love. Matt knew as much even though she never said so.

  What he didn’t yet know, and wondered if he’d ever find out, was whether what was happening to him was also happening to her.

  one morning in mid-october Cal woke late. He’d again spent the night on the third floor after drinking too much whiskey, falling asleep around three on the daybed in his music room. The bed wasn’t quite long enough for him, so he’d slept on his side with his legs drawn up, and when he swung them off the mattress he felt a twinge in his lower back. Because of that, he sat there a little longer than he otherwise might have and absorbed details he would’ve missed if he’d bounced right up.

  The air in the room, he noticed, felt bracingly crisp like it never had in California, where autumn brought tule fog that seeped inside your house and into your bones. And then there was the tree in the neighbors’ backyard. It was a maple, but not a silver maple like he was used to. The leaves on this one had turned a rich, winey red and were toothy around the edges. He tried to remember if it had looked like that yesterday, and he was certain it hadn’t.

  He finally stood and moved toward the window. As the boundaries of his vision expanded, so did the range of colors. Red, orange, yellow, gold, pumpkin spice, tobacco sunburst. He’d never seen so many different hues outside a Renoir. Yet his neighbors were all climbing into their cars and trucks and heading off to work as if nothing miraculous had happened and this were just another ordinary day. He laid his hands against the chilly pane, then let his forehead rest there, too, until his breath began to cloud the glass and fade the impression that while he slept the world had caught fire.

  Of the many different tasks involved in constructing or maintaining a home, the ones he liked least all involved electricity. He’d witnessed a horrible accident as a young man when he was working for a company in Modesto.

  They were building a new house for one of the bigwigs at Gallo. Though he was trying to steer clear of personal entanglements, spending most of his free time alone in a rented room where he taught himself to play guitar and mandolin, he’d recently become friends with a guy named Ernesto, who’d moved to the valley from Salinas. Somehow, maybe because he found his own jokes funny and always broke up when delivering a punch line, Ernesto had managed to make Cal laugh a few times, which lifted him out of the dark hole he’d fallen into. On Friday nights they began going out for a few beers and chile rellenos, and Cal was beginning to think of unburdening himself. “I made a real bad mistake a couple years ago,” he
imagined saying, at which time—he was sure—Ernesto would lean closer and say, “Tell me about it, amigo.”

  That never happened because one day at the construction site his friend told a joke that amused him so much he slapped the side of a crane just as the beam swung around and made contact with a pole where several power lines converged, each conducting twenty thousand volts. Ernesto’s mouth opened wide like he intended to laugh once more, but nothing came out and nothing ever would. When he dropped to the hardpan, everyone thought he was playing a trick. And then they smelled his scorched flesh.

  After that, Cal tried to avoid messing with wiring. The old knob-and-tube stuff in the house on Essex had long since been replaced, but he’d already found several problems. Instead of connecting the case grounds to water pipes in the basement, somebody had left several of them dangling in the air, and in the breaker box neutral wires and ground wires had been paired together under the same screws. Just the other day, the kitchen’s recessed lights began to flicker. It didn’t matter how low or high you set the dimmer switches, the result was the same. Somebody had fucked something up somewhere, and it was becoming harder to ignore, so after he ate his bowl of oatmeal and drank enough coffee to clear his head he set out to identify what and where it was.

  He went down into the basement, grabbed an aluminum stepladder and the sack of 120-volt floodlights he’d bought yesterday at the hardware store and went back to the kitchen. If the lights were wired in series across the load, something as simple as a loose filament in one bulb could account for the annoying fluttering. He mounted the ladder, removed each of the old bulbs, replaced it with a new one, then climbed back down and walked over to the wall switch. He flipped it on, and the lights shined perfectly. He looked at his watch, waited two full minutes and was reaching for the switch when the lights flickered again. He stood there timing them. The fluttering came at odd intervals: thirty-five seconds, three and a half minutes, twenty seconds. “Shit,” he said.

  He returned to the basement and grabbed a screwdriver. Some fool had probably interrupted a neutral wire and put the switch in neutral; that could cause the ground-fault interrupter to cycle on and off, depending on how much voltage was hitting the bulbs.

  In the kitchen, he turned the lights off and removed the wall plate. The switch was wired normally, so he flipped the lights on, laid the metal plate on the windowsill and went downstairs again. The breaker box was in the corner, but he forgot to duck and smashed his head into the aluminum ductwork. It was quite a lick, and after he put a hand to his forehead it came away bloody.

  He pulled the box open and turned off every breaker on the main panel except the one feeding the kitchen lights. Then he took the stairs two at a time and stood in the kitchen staring at the ceiling for ten minutes. The lights failed to flicker. So he went back down and turned on all the breakers again, but by the time he got back to the kitchen they were flickering once more.

  He spent the next few hours running up and down the basement stairs, turning off one breaker at a time before standing in the kitchen and gazing at the ceiling, trying to identify which one might have a pulsating load that drew peak current at the same rate as the blinking lights. After the final breaker failed to yield an answer, he slammed the box shut.

  When he got upstairs again, he was shaking. Lunchtime had come and gone, and he knew he ought to eat something, maybe drink a beer to settle down, and then start looking for other solutions. The source of the problem might not even be inside the house. If he was dealing with the power in general, he’d have to call NSTAR.

  Rather than making himself a sandwich, he decided to go out and buy one, just to get a change of scenery. There was a convenience store about half a mile away, on East Border Road, so he put Suzy on her leash, threw on his fleece jacket and went outside.

  A breeze off the ocean was sweeping up the hill through Cedar Park, and as he walked along with Suzy they were showered by falling leaves. The day was bright, with a little bite in the air. Until now he’d never really known what autumn meant. One year when he was growing up it hit ninety-four degrees in Bakersfield on Thanksgiving Day. The leaves there went from green to brown overnight. Something about that had never seemed quite right. It was like you were being cheated of two seasons, since it started getting hot again in March.

  The convenience store’s parking lot was empty except for a white SUV. When they got to the door, he told Suzy to sit, then pushed it open and stepped inside.

  If he’d been the kind of guy who paid a lot of attention to cars, he might have noticed that the SUV was identical to the BMW owned by his neighbor, whom he’d waved at once or twice but avoided conversation with since he’d bailed out on his dinner invitation. If he’d noticed that, he probably wouldn’t have gone inside. He had plenty of stuff at home to make a sandwich with, and just getting out of the house had been the point. He would’ve walked back up the hill and fixed himself something to eat. And then what was about to happen wouldn’t have, though he later guessed that maybe something worse could have.

  Vico was standing with his back against a floor-to-ceiling refrigeration case filled with soft drinks, Gatorade and bottled water. Hugging a big sack of Cape Cod potato chips, he was sweating badly. That didn’t make much sense because the day was cool and he was wearing only a light sweater. His eyes looked abnormally large, and the left one was twitching.

  To Cal’s right, behind the counter, were two other men. One was about twenty-five, with light brown skin that made Cal think he might be Pakistani. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and had his hand in the cash drawer.

  At first Cal didn’t see the third guy, who was crouching behind the display case containing the sandwiches and prepackaged cartons of potato salad, coleslaw and marinated peppers. Now he stood up, waved either a .38 or a 9 millimeter at Cal and said, “Move your ass over there beside Robert De Niro.” He was in his midfifties, short and gray-haired, and had on a long-sleeved gray work shirt. Even his face looked gray, covered as it was in stubble.

  Cal had never been threatened before by a weapon more lethal than a stone or a crowbar. Both could kill you if the person wielding them knew what he was doing, but the odds were much lower. This was something different, in a year filled with new experiences, and he felt himself coalescing around a center whose existence he’d begun to question. “Where?” he said.

  “Whatta ya mean ‘where’?”

  “I don’t see Robert De Niro.”

  “I’m speaking about the wop of the day,” the gunman said, nodding at Vico. Three weeks earlier, he’d been released from the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord after serving five and a half years for armed robbery. He’d done time in Massachusetts and New York State, too. “Get over there next to the guy looks like he aims to fuck that bag of chips.”

  “All right,” Cal said. He had fifteen dollars, an ATM card and a Visa in his wallet. There was nothing on his person he couldn’t afford to part with, which was kind of a shame. He’d left home without his cell phone. He didn’t even have on his watch, a stainless-steel Rolex Explorer that Kristin had bought him for his forty-fifth birthday. It cost close to four thousand dollars, and had it been on his wrist the burglar might’ve noticed it and come close enough to take it off him. If he’d just had something a thief badly wanted, he would’ve been in a much better position. It went without saying that if you set off to rob a convenience store, you couldn’t expect to come away with a Rolex. It also went without saying that the guy with the gun would probably rather get the money and run without pulling the trigger, though it was by no means certain he wouldn’t kill somebody if he needed to.

  The man stepped out from behind the case, his eyes scanning the parking lot, the gun in his right hand acting as a director’s baton as he waved Cal along toward his neighbor. Suddenly there was a loud crash, followed by thunderous barking. Cal turned to see Suzy hurling herself at the glass door, slobber flying from her tongue.

  “Make that fucking dog shut up.”r />
  Cal, Vico would later tell reporters from the Boston Globe and the Cedar Park Independent, seemed strangely calm when he addressed the burglar, whose name was Andrew Saucer. “He looks at the guy and says, ‘I’m not sure I can make her shut up. She didn’t do real well at obedience training.’ And that’s when the fellow goes apeshit.”

  Neither paper printed the expression “apeshit” in its account. From Cal’s perspective, it wasn’t accurate anyhow. “Apeshit” meant you completely lost your wits, forgot about consequences and acted without reason, whereas Saucer was behaving pretty rationally, despite holding a gun in his hand and trying to rob a convenience store in the middle of the day while an eighty-pound black Lab flung herself at the door and barked so loudly people could hear her several blocks away. If he’d truly gone apeshit, things might have worked out better for him, or maybe not, you could never really predict. You did what you did, and things happened as they happened.

  “You son of a bitch,” Andrew Saucer said. “If you don’t stop her from barking, I’m gonna shoot you and your fucking dog.”

  “The only way I might be able to stop her,” Cal said, “is if you let me go out and take her home. I think she’s formed a low opinion of you.”

  “You arrogant fuck,” Saucer said, his gun hand starting to tremble. “You think I’m playing around?”

  On the far side of the parking lot, next to East Border Road, a couple of schoolkids were walking by. Both of them stopped to look at Suzy, who continued to bark and throw herself against the door.