Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “We’ll see what she has to say.”

  “She’s already said it”

  He doesn’t shrug. I’m thinking of passwords. “What about those ragheads?” he says.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” I say.

  “Would you make it painless for them too?”

  “Somebody has to,” I say.

  He squeals like a pig.

  It’s his time. He was once the youngest one himself, now he’s older than all of us. Arthritic, obese, half-deaf, half-blind, can’t hold his water, bleeds from his mouth. He is showing signs of senility. Spends most of his day these days at the foot of the stairs in the living room. You have to step over, go around: it’s his time. One day it will be mine.

  She believes they have a heaven, too; I haven’t thought about it one way or the other. She’s asked me to take him to the vet, I said I would see to it. She asked me to break it to the younger one and I said I would do so after the fact, because the fact is I’m not taking him to the vet.

  Like I said, I keep busy.

  The garage door is unlocked.

  I tell him this is the only way. It isn’t easy—he’s almost dead weight and I’m not the greenest apple on the tree myself. He growls. I don’t know if it hurts or that he just doesn’t recognize me, but that’s why the muzzle—his teeth may be falling out but he’ll use what he has. It’s nothing personal; it’s what happens to love. I’ll be his friend if he can’t be mine.

  Outside, down the ramp I built for him when the stairs started to hurt. Now the ramp hurts. Gravity. Just a few steps across the breezeway but I can’t help thinking about neighbors; the retired librarian, the housewife, noses and narrowed eyes, curtains and blinds. I’d hold my breath but I need it.

  His fur feels and smells like an old rug.

  He balks at the garage door, whines a little. Probably the collie in him wanting to talk it over. The shepherd knows it’s time, let’s do this thing, but collies want to think twice about everything. Maybe he knows something I don’t. I whisper to him, tell him it won’t hurt and to the best of my knowledge that’s the truth. If he suffers the next one won’t have to—the autopsy will tell. He isn’t the first. Sometimes strays wander into our yard for the sake of progress; you do what you can with what you are given. When it’s my time I won’t have it any other way. I’m a small man but I pull my weight. I’d like to be of some use.

  I kick the door shut behind us.

  I’m a Golden Rule kind of guy.

  Taking the younger one to the new place. Not my idea—his are not the first pair of hands I would entrust with a weapon. His mother asked me to. She thinks guns might heal some wounds, might bring us closer together. Thinks it might help make up for the dog; they came into the world at more or less the same time.

  A forty-minute drive on 422. There’s a reservoir there with a causeway running across it and people fish off the causeway, but we aren’t going fishing. You can pull off the shoulder onto the grass within a certain distance of the water and they won’t ticket or tow you. There is a break in the woods. Then there’s an old rail line and you just follow the tracks to the quarry. It’s less than a mile but even with his head in headphones, his mouth makes it last.

  Why can’t we just go fishing? it wants to know. Bets there’s bass in those weeds.

  I don’t know from bass, I tell him, and neither does he. I tell him he wouldn’t have the patience anyway.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to teach me,” he says.

  “I thought you wanted to shoot,” I say.

  “I thought we’d go to one of those target places.”

  I tell him I don’t like those places. “Like a bowling alley with guns.”

  Then he says, “How do I know you’re not just trying to get rid of me?”

  A fair question. I leave it open. We get there.

  “Awesome,” he says. Awesome, they say. I say the Grand Canyon is awesome, the pyramids of Giza. A quarry is a hole in the ground. I don’t know when the last time they pulled any limestone out if it was, but these days people come here mainly to put in lead. We come in from the open end, where the tower of the old kiln still stands, the conveyor to the crusher conveying nothing. The gray-white walls rise in tiers, ledges, pocked with little black holes. There are empty casings all over the place. Weeds. An old Ford Torino rusting on its rims in the middle of the stone floor. People shoot at it or put things on top of it to shoot, and someone took the front seat out and sat it fifty feet from the wreck. Beer cans in its vicinity, a used diaper and the Sunday comics, bleached to black and white. Condoms.

  She wants me to have a talk with him. The only talk he listens to comes from the little box of noise he carries plugged into his head, and it rhymes.

  He murmurs something I pretend I didn’t hear.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  This where you bang my mother? I’ll make him pay for it later. Truth is I brought her here once and all she did was try to clean up.

  I take off my jacket—it’s always warmer in the pit, even well past noon. Show up too early and you’re sunblind. If someone’s already here you can either leave or wait your turn—only one party shoots at a time, there is an etiquette. There is no one here now. He wants to sit on the car seat and I tell him about bugs and disease. I tell him we didn’t come here to sit. I make him pay. I take the Woodsman out of its case. Rimfire, single action—I don’t want him shooting up the place like he’s playing whatever it is they play.

  He doesn’t say it is awesome. He says, “That thing looks older than you.”

  “It is,” I say. “My father gave it to me.” And he has enough sense not to have an answer.

  Of course it isn’t loaded. I light up.

  “Can I have one?” he says, and this time I shake one out of the pack.

  He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Why not just put the gun in your mouth?”

  I let him hold the Colt while I set up some targets on the Ford—cans (all the bottles are broken), a couple of big white stones. I tell him if he points it at me he’ll be hitching a ride back home. He ponders this like a viable option. I come back and show him how to hold a gun.

  “Why can’t it be a Glock?” he says, the same way he wanted to go fishing.

  “I don’t like plastic guns,” I say. “Let’s work on your stance.” Feet sixteen to eighteen inches apart, weak side a foot in front of the other.

  “I don’t have a weak side,” he says.

  “Bend your front knee,” I say.

  “I’m gonna have time to do all this when some banger’s coming at me?”

  “Nobody’s coming at you.”

  “I mean in real life.”

  “What’s this,” I say, “Nintendo?”

  He looks at me like I’m crazy again. “Nintendo’s so over.”

  “They’re all the same to me.”

  “My brother says they’re good practice.”

  “Maybe you took it the wrong way.”

  “You’ve never even shot anyone.”

  “You want me to apologize?”

  “You just strap em down and turn on the juice.”

  “I’ve never seen an execution.” Then I realize this isn’t strictly true.

  “My brother shot someone.”

  “I don’t think he had any choice.”

  “Freakin haji.”

  “That’ll be enough,” I say and I kick his feet apart, pull off his sunglasses. We work on the sight picture.

  “Don’t look at the target,” I say. “Look at the sights. Put them together.”

  “The can is blurry,” he says.

  “It’s supposed to be,” I say. “You focus on the target, you miss.”

  Then I show him how to pull the trigger.

  You might see my ad on the bulletin board at Save-More. You can tear off my number. My rates are reasonable. I don’t cruise or solicit or loiter around taxi stands. I have an ad online but I don’t use my name. I have
a cell phone and a Buick Park Avenue, clean, with low mileage and a lot of leg room. Gran Touring suspension. I will take you to the airport, and pick you up there when you return. Same goes for the bus station, Amtrak, what have you. I drive people like the retired librarian to the grocery store, to church, to doctor’s appointments, the laundromat, and I will stand in baggage claim holding a sign with your uncle’s name on it. You don’t have to tip. I go into neighborhoods where the licensed taxis won’t go, though not without insurance, and I don’t mean State Farm.

  I have a rig under my seat.

  I wouldn’t exactly call it a living, but at my age the prospects are nil to none and I get to meet a lot of people. I got to meet Mr. Dembo. Mr. Dembo is from the Republic of Zimbabwe and he is the darkest man I’ve ever known. Tonight he’s wearing Dockers and a polo shirt, but when I picked him up at the airport he was in uniform: green officer’s cap, brown jacket with braiding and medals and epaulets, striped green trousers. Like someone who should have been traveling in a state car with bodyguards and adjutants, but he was with one other man who wore civilian clothes and gave me the name of a hotel. I suspected they hadn’t torn my number off the board at Giant Eagle. I put their luggage in the trunk. It weighed a ton.

  In the car I asked him what branch of the military he was in.

  “No military,” the man in civilian clothes said. His accent was heavy but I liked it; anything that works that hard has to be honest. “Ministry of Justice. Mr. Dembo is assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of Prison Services, administrative section.” He took a breath. “I am his secretary.”

  I didn’t say Mr. Dembo wore a lot of brass for a guy stationed at a desk. “Business or pleasure?” I said, and Mr. Dembo raised his hand and spoke for himself.

  “I’m afraid pleasure is not in the budget these days,” he said. “Though you might call this a sort of shopping expedition.”

  I didn’t ask what he was shopping for because I never ask more than two questions in a row. I told him my father had also worked in the prison system.

  “I know,” he said. Then he told me what else they knew. How they knew it was no big mystery—I wasn’t exactly in hiding because no one seemed to be looking. That seemed to have changed. So I waited for why.

  He asked me to take the long way around, and he would do the same. I skipped an exit. He mourned for his country in the dusk. Told me about cloud-covered peaks in the eastern highlands where he was born, the great falls, the ancient stone ruins of the south.

  I said it sounded like a nice place to visit.

  “You would be hacked to pieces as soon as you stepped off the plane,” he said, then told me about the ruins of the economy, how there was eighty percent unemployment and eleven thousand percent inflation, how AIDS and cholera had reduced the average life expectancy to thirty-five and left over a million orphans. That his country was in danger of becoming a hub for international terrorism, that crime and civil unrest had risen to unprecedented levels.

  I didn’t ask what had ruined their economy. We passed over switchyards and the road curved into the cloverleaf. The car curved with it. That is a chassis for you.

  “Do you know what necklacing is?” Mr. Dembo asked me.

  I do, but wished I didn’t.

  “Capital punishment,” he said, “has become an unfortunate but increasing necessity.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about necessary evils,” I said. Rule of law and all.

  “To make matters worse, our equipment doesn’t seem capable of meeting the demand.”

  I waited again.

  “Take a simple gallows,” he said. “Apparently there is more to its construction than nailing some wood together and tying a piece of rope to it. We are learning the hard way.” He paused. “There have been some embarrassments.”

  Merging onto 480 is always a competition. Then we were part of it, the long straightaway. They’d just resurfaced the road and it was shiny as glass.

  “You’re telling me,” I said, “there’s no one in your country knows how to properly hang a condemned criminal?”

  “I’m saying I’m in the market for some good old American know-how.” They’d been dealing with an Englishman till he ran afoul of his government.

  “The Chinese just shoot them in the back of the head,” I said. Used to make the family pay for the rifle round.

  “We are not the Chinese,” Mr. Dembo said. “There is the matter of decorum.”

  “Not much dignity in a hanging.”

  “Am I talking to the wrong man?”

  I told him building a proper multiple gallows was not difficult provided you have the space. Nor a chair for that matter, nor lethal injection machine. “But what if I told you,” I said, “that I was working on the most advanced, humane, and efficient form of capital punishment ever devised?”

  He didn’t answer. We were coming to the next interchange. There wasn’t much of the long way left so I gave him the condensed version. Once I pick a lane I like to stick with it.

  He excused himself and spoke with his secretary in their own tongue. When he came back to mine Mr. Dembo said, “Intriguing, but I’m afraid we didn’t come all this way to invest in a science project.”

  “Taking a look won’t cost you anything. And since you’ve come all this way.”

  He excused himself again. Then the secretary to the assistant to the deputy commissioner said, “We will have to speak with Harare. You can be reached at this number?”

  I said I could and they reached me the next morning. “We are under a tight schedule,” I heard the secretary say. “How soon can you arrange a demonstration?”

  “Three days?” I said.

  “Two,” the secretary said, two days ago. “That is the best we can do.”

  It was barely enough. I had to go to a pet store, and they are getting suspicious. (“It is a privilege to love something,” they say, then charge you accordingly.) But I didn’t have time to look, wait for something to stray my way. At least he is out of uniform; we don’t get many visitors as it is, but Idi Amin walking up your driveway is something else again. I’ve swept the floor. Squeezed in a couple of lawn chairs. I keep a coffee pot in the garage and try to be a host, but the secretary doesn’t touch it and Mr. Dembo doesn’t answer. He is looking at the wireless.

  “Looks like a ticket booth,” he says finally.

  Looks like what it was. What they call Art Deco. Mostly glass on top, shiny tin skirting around the bottom half. Scrollwork. Must have stood in front of an Art Deco theater, or maybe in a fairground (next to the carousel, the Whirlwind, the Wheel of Light). Stood in a junkyard when I saw it. The older one helped me bring it home in his pickup, and she took one look and said what in the world.

  I said I would think of something. I thought of the Japanese.

  “The Japanese,” Mr. Dembo says.

  They were working on a secret weapon near the end of the war. A death ray, not a secret anymore.

  “Science fiction,” Mr. Dembo says.

  “History,” I say. Killed a rabbit in a cage at a thousand yards, but it took five minutes and time was not on their side. I have plenty, and I work at close range.

  I have another rabbit, another cage.

  Mr. Dembo’s attention wanders. He has heard some of this before. He glances back in the corner where the washing machines sit in a circle, but the washing machines are covered and they are not why he is here.

  Let’s take a look inside, I say.

  I open the door, show them how I’ve reinforced it, insulated it, how it’s not a ticket booth anymore. It’s the show. I tell them about the waveguide, the magnetron.

  “Microwave,” the secretary says.

  Electromagnetic pulse, I say. Complete disruption of the autonomic nervous system. Won’t leave a mark.

  “Looks like it won’t leave anything,” Mr. Dembo says. “No seat? Where does the condemned sit?”

  There is only a small table. I’ll install a chair when a chair is called fo
r. When there’s someone to strap in.

  I look at him. “You mean you thought?”

  “Let’s get on with it,” Mr. Dembo says.

  Pink eyes, white fur, trembling. The cage is made of wood. Built it myself—no metal goes in. I put it on the table and shut the door. Its nose twitches. Now I hear a melody, rhythm. It is coming from Mr. Dembo’s pocket. He takes out his phone and his phone starts singing.

  I’m not much on music. I like a radio that talks. But whatever misery lives in their land, it is not in their song.

  It stops. Mr. Dembo starts talking. He holds up a finger.

  His secretary asks for a glass of water.

  I don’t want to leave them alone but I am still their host. I tell him I’ll be right back. Shut the door behind me, cross the breezeway in the dark and enter the house and go into the kitchen. Get some ice.

  She calls from the living room. “Did you get my message?”

  “My phone is off,” I say.

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know. Not much.”

  “They look like nice men,” she says. “Are they nice? He didn’t wear his medals.”

  “Probably a good thing,” I say.

  “Will I have to throw the breakers?”

  “I don’t think so.” I run the faucet. “If it happens let me take care of it.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “Did I tell you the dishwasher smells funny?”

  I say I have to get back now.

  When I do they are standing in the back corner of the garage. They’ve swept aside the tarp and the old blankets and are looking at what they’ve uncovered with great curiosity. Mr. Dembo is still holding his phone.

  He looks at me. “You are starting a laundromat?”

  I give the secretary his water and pick up the tarp. “Just keeping busy,” I say. “I like to fix things.”

  “Five, six of them,” he counts. “From the looks of it you are doing more than fixing them.”

  The Maytags, a Whirlpool, three Kenmores. eBay. Portable, compact—the kind made for apartments, for those with limited space. I’ve made some modifications. I expect him next to ask why they’re in a circle, but instead he asks why they are all connected.