I had just nodded. "Thanks, Larry. That means a lot," I said. I felt bad for him.
"You want to crank out some stories so we don't start the morning drive-time with dead air?"
"Sure," I said. "I'll crank something out."
We fucked up a few times. One time, the anchors got the wrong tapes and played the sound bite of the mayor talking about jazz instead of the story about Dick Cheney's heart condition. Later in the morning show, I'd written "President Clinton" instead of "President Bush," and neither Larry nor the anchor caught the mistake. These things seemed like big deals to me, but they really freaked Larry out.
Around ten o'clock, Roger Rhodes came into the newsroom, tapped me on the shoulder as I was typing and said, "My office. Pronto."
I thought he was about to give me the boot or chew me out for the mistakes on the newscast that morning. I followed him down the hall to his office. He had a little putting green all set up and he was using his putter to hit an imaginary golf ball.
"Sit down," he said, swinging at the invisible ball.
I sat.
"You're about to get two promotions in one month," he said.
"I am?"
"Let me finish. We had to let some people go, and we have some openings, including one for a new reporter. And your name has come up. You know, get out of the newsroom a little, stretch your legs..."
"Did you let Gunderson go?"
"She took early retirement," he said. "A few of the old-timers did."
"Did they have a choice?" I said.
"Look, I'm offering you a raise to twelve bucks an hour. I'm going to make you a reporter. You're young, you're single, you're good-looking and outgoing, and you're the kind of man who can work long hours out in the field and make a good name for this station."
"What about Larry?"
"Larry's a pussy. Larry needs to sit at the news desk. He'll be fine."
"Where's Gunderson?" I said.
"You know how many kids would kill for this job?"
"I know," I said.
"We take care of our employees here. We're CBS News. That's big time. A few people need a little nudging out of the nest. You, Michael, you have the chance to step into the spotlight. We'll have you out and about, getting tape, doing interviews. Heck, you can even file a few stories and get some real on-air experience."
"That all sounds good," I said.
"Don't thank me," he said. "You'll be in the prime-time world now. You'll need to put on a tie."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks so much. This is a good thing."
"It is," he said. "You'll do great. You don't golf, do you?"
I didn't. I had never held a club, except for one time in a fight, when I'd swung a putter at somebody's head and missed. It seemed like a hundred years ago.
"Sure," I said. "A little."
"We should get on the course someday, then," Roger Rhodes said. "I'll bore you with some stories about when I was a green reporter."
Later, Larry came out of Roger's office and told me that he was stuck with mornings. He had been moved to Gunderson's old post.
"My wife will hate this new schedule," Larry said. "She needs me around in the morning to help with the twins."
"It's too bad," I said. "About Gunderson."
"I know," he said. "Good for you, though. I heard you got a fucking promotion."
I tried to find Gunderson's home phone number, but there were hundreds of Gundersons in the phone book, none of them named Gina.
I stopped of at my mother's house after work. I told her about the promotion. I wanted somebody, at least, to be happy about it.
"Well, that's amazing, Mikey," she said. "My little reporter."
"You know," Mack said, "most people are getting laid off right now, and you're getting a promotion. That's impressive."
"You have no reason to be depressed," my mother said. "See?"
***
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 2001, Gina Gunderson killed herself. I didn't find out about it until five days after it happened. The funeral was evidently a brief, private affair, and nobody from the radio station was wanted in attendance.
We found out about her death in a short memo from Roger Rhodes that didn't mention the suicide, just informed us of a random death, as if she'd gone in her sleep. It was Larry Miller who tracked down one of Gunderson's daughters and got the real story: she'd been running the car with the garage door closed. The car radio was tuned to our ridiculous all-news station when they found her. I wondered if the daughter had added that detail out of bitterness and anger, or if it really was the case, if Gunderson, in her last moments, was remembering her work and the way she'd lost it. It probably was true, I decided, and so did Larry Miller. We had trouble getting any work done that day, or that week. The newscasts were bland and perfunctory. Another memo listed an address where we could send donations to a scholarship fund the station was establishing to aid journalism students at Wayne State University, Gunderson's alma mater. Who had extra money to send to a scholarship fund? The memo ended with this line: "We are deeply sorry that Ms. Gunderson did not live to enjoy the full blessings of her much-deserved and long-awaited retirement."
ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, Ella and Rusty and Lucky the Dog moved into my house. It had been my idea, and it took some real convincing. I pointed out what an unsafe and inappropriate environment the trailer park was for a young boy. I noted that Ella struggled to make her monthly payments, and would never save up enough money to move to a better place, no matter how many Hump Day Honey contests she won. I reminded her that the three-bedroom ranch had been given to me and that I lived there all alone. I said my brother's old room would be perfect for Rusty. I said that my room seemed to want two people in there at night. In my dreams, I said, I was always alone in vast open spaces.
When I told this to Ella, she said, "What do you think that means?"
And I said, "It means I need you there at night."
Ella didn't have that much stuff she wanted to keep, so Nick and Tom and I spent one Saturday morning carrying most of her old, beat-up furniture to the curb. Within minutes, somebody from another trailer made off with the couch or recliner or wobbly kitchen table we'd just dumped. Ella had been able to get $20,000 for the trailer and the lot, a little less than she and her husband had paid for it eight years ago, but she didn't care. It was as if she'd hit the lottery. She planned to pay off her credit cards and her student loan, and she'd dragged me to the mall to buy all sorts of new shit—toilet brushes and wastebaskets and curtains—for the house in Maple Rock.
We loaded the boxes of Ella's remaining belongings into the back of Nick's new truck and moved them to my house. It took three trips to get everything over there, but it was only a two-mile run. One of the trips was nothing but boxes and boxes of books. Another trip was for Rusty's bedroom furniture and toys, and one trip for Ella's clothes, kitchen stuff, and photo albums. By the end of the day, Ella's trailer was empty. To thank Nick and Tom for their help, Ella and I cooked up a big pot of chili and my two best friends and my girlfriend and her son sat around my table sharing a meal. My mom and Mack dropped by a little later.
My mother said, "It's nice to know that this house has a family living in it again."
After everybody had left and Rusty had gone to sleep in his new bedroom, Ella and I did our best to wash dishes, but we were so exhausted that we undressed and tumbled into bed without brushing our teeth or washing our faces. We did not make love, but in the morning, when I woke her up, she rolled over and said, "This is good."
10. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Reprise)
IT WAS LESS THAN two years later when the moon finally called our names, and we found ourselves gathered in a familiar parking lot, staring at a familiar sky. The moon was flat and full above us, a silver nickel tossed into the night. We stood in silence for a long time underneath it, as if we were waiting for it to fall. We had not planned to gather here in this way, and it was apparent that we had nothing to say to each other, and no explana
tion for how we'd arrived there together. We looked down at each other only briefly, and made minimal eye contact, slump-shouldered, heads down, submissive as dogs. For the most part, we were sober and in sound mind. Some of us had not spoken to each other in weeks or months; in some cases, we had not seen each other for years. The air was hot, with the occasional gritty breeze that passes for pleasant in Maple Rock. Worried men, I think, have trouble sleeping on such brief, sad August nights. There we were, in the parking lot of what used to be the Black Lantern, some two dozen of us answering a mystical ringing that had sounded unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
A FEW HOURS EARLIER, I had been driving around in the news truck, on the overnight beat. It was two in the morning. Three kids had been shot in a drive-by on the southwest side of Detroit, and I was standing on the patchy lawn across the street with all the other journalists, holding my notebook. Even though the sun was long gone from the sky, it was hot and I was sweating. I had a tape recorder slung over my shoulder, and the attached microphone shoved into the back pocket of my jeans. I was waiting for somebody to come around and give me the details and a sound bite, so that I could get out of there and go home to Ella. I could already picture her, asleep on the couch in one of my old tank tops and her underwear, three fans pointed on her, trying to stay cool. Rusty would be asleep upstairs in his bedroom, with the racing-car wallpaper I'd put up for him last weekend. Our newborn daughter, Nina, would be asleep in her crib, in an infant's deep-breathing slumber.
I often thought such long thoughts while driving around in the news truck that summer; I often imagined what my house was like with Ella and Rusty and the baby in it, what they were doing and thinking while I was working late, what Ella was wearing, if she would be awake when I came home.
I imagined that there might be some leftovers from dinner, and I would heat them in the microwave. Ella might get up and sit across the table, with lovely sleepy eyes and matted hair, and I would tell her about my night, about three wounded kids and all the reporters lined up at one end of the street, wanting and not wanting the story at the same time. That all might make it worth it, I thought, somebody—somebody beautiful—waiting for me at the end of the long night shift.
One of the sergeants came over. The reporters gathered in a semicircle around him. The cameras rolled, and we all held our microphones out as far as we could, as if the sergeant was some kind of god and we were his worshipers.
"One of the children has died," the sergeant said. "The other two have been airlifted to the University of Michigan Hospital and are in surgery."
We reporters called out our speculative, pleading questions.
"We have a suspect in custody," he said. "We believe the shooter knew the victims. He was the father of two of the children. The third was his stepchild."
And then, as if the sergeant needed to say something editorial about the whole, pitiful night, he added, "This is a great tragedy."
We begged for the names. Give us the names and ages of these victims! Let us tell the story to our readers and listeners and viewers in all its graphic, lurid horror, we said.
"Out of respect for the families involved, we can give out no further information at this time," the sergeant said.
He walked away, stopping and bending like a jackknife to get under the line of yellow police tape that surrounded the house.
I waited around a little while longer, until I saw some kids trying to break into the news truck. I chased them away and left the scene.
I went back to the station, put up my tapes and my scripts for the morning drive-time newscasts, for poor Larry to arrange and make sense of, and all the while I was picturing the startled listeners—those much-coveted a.m. drive-time commuters waking up to hear the brutal, sad news of children gunned down, right here, right in their own world.
ELLA WASN'T ON THE couch when I got home. She was already upstairs asleep. Lucky the Dog was curled up on his bed, keeping warm. He looked at me, let out a moaning yawn, and tucked his nose down again between his paws.
Hanging my windbreaker in the front closet, I could hear the wave machine that we'd just bought for Rusty's room. Rusty was maybe the only eight-year-old insomniac on record. It wasn't just monsters under his bed and all the standard stuff that keeps kids awake at night—bogeymen, fear of sudden death, a noise in the wall, a light in the window. He would sit in bed awake, looking out the window, eyes frozen and wide with worry. So we bought the lull and crash of an electronic sea to accompany him to sleep, and it seemed to be working fairly well. He'd slept through a couple of nights in a row.
I dropped a metal hanger on the tile floor, then scrambled to pick up the jacket and put it away. Afraid of waking Rusty from his fragile dreams, I left the closet door open. I didn't want the squeaking tracks of the door to rouse him.
And then, suddenly—yes, that's the only way I can describe it: suddenly—my careful quietness irritated me. Maybe I was still reeling from my shift, crazed from breathing the stale and sticky air of urban crime scenes, but I found myself filled with anger. In the kitchen, when I opened the oven door to find some leftover pizza warmed to a hard half circle, I shut the door with a satisfying, metallic thud. A few minutes later, I was eating the old pizza in front of a not-so-softly-tuned television and drinking my second beer when I heard Rusty call for Ella across the hall. Then Nina began squalling from her crib. I pressed the mute button on the remote control.
I heard Ella groan and get out of bed, the squeaking of the tired mattress, the slap of her slippers. "Michael," she called from the bedroom. "Is that you? Are you home?"
I went to the edge of the staircase and peered up into the dark hallway. Then I went back to the foyer, opened the front door, and left the house.
WHERE DO YOU GO at three in the morning, when you are a grown man and you can't sleep and the walls of your house seem so close and confining that, as hard as you try to want to, you cannot go up the stairs and get into bed with your wife—cannot, irrationally and without explanation, go up the steps and hold your own crying baby?
I didn't know, so I just started walking.
Even at that late hour, the air was still and thick. Mosquitoes landed on my exposed neck as I walked. My shirt was already damp from working all night, and it stuck to my back. It had been a few years since I walked around this neighborhood in the middle of the night. And I had not snuck out of the house to do it since I was much younger, living in the basement of the house where now I lived with my family.
Maybe it was the windless, humid air, but the neighborhood felt heavier and more tired than I remembered it. I was still holding a bottle of beer, and I pressed it against my forehead. I looked around. The houses that had once seemed so sturdy and solid looked weak and worn out. The lawns were patchy with crabgrass and weeds, driveways sagging and broken. Grit and trash lined the sides of the streets, and in the heat, the night smelled vaguely of garbage and burning tires.
I lived in a dump.
I walked up Warren Avenue, following the nearly empty street and its flashing yellow lights past the darkened neon signs and marquees for pizza shops, party stores, and check-cashing places. Some of the signs were in Arabic as well as English now, and here and there, gang tags and anti-Bush slogans marked the brick walls alongside the stores.
I came to the parking lot that used to belong to the Black Lantern and now belonged to Uncle Al's, the falafel joint that had replaced our neighborhood bar. A few old-timers, Ukrainians and Poles and Greeks, still met there every afternoon for coffee as if nothing had changed.
For the first time that night I looked at the moon as I walked, and this is when I felt my feet leave the earth: I started walking a few inches off of the ground, as if I were following some invisible staircase.
Within a few seconds, I was six or seven inches off the ground, and then, as quickly as it happened, I stumbled on nothing, some invisible obstacle in the air, and landed hard on the ground, rolling my left ankle.
I sat on the a
sphalt for a minute, my ankle starting to pulse and the palms of my hands raw and smarting from my landing.
As I tried to get to my feet in the darkness, still dazed, I saw a shadow of a man approaching. He was large, with wild curly hair. It was dark, but he appeared to be shirtless.
Ever since I have become a father, I have been somewhat afraid of the night. In the darkness, whether I am walking through my own neighborhood or driving down a stretch of rural highway, or even peering out my own front window into the darkened yard, I have had the sense that something, someone, is out there in the shadows, prowling and stalking, waiting. In the night, when I can't sleep, my heart tends to race and I imagine the worst scenarios, people coming to harm my family, breaking down the doors and overpowering me, hurting my wife and children. This is one reason I agreed to the night shift at the radio station. I was having trouble sleeping anyway, and thought some months spent awake and working in the darkest hours of the twenty-four might help me overcome my fear.
The man stopped in front of me and looked down. It was Nick.
He was wearing a pair of running shoes and blue jeans and nothing else. He said, "Mikey, what the fuck are you doing on the ground?"
THAT NIGHT, NICK HAD been up late in his garage, as had become his habit that summer. He was drinking beer and listening to Springsteen's Nebraska album—best fucking album of all time, he said—when he went to change the spark plugs in his truck. It occurred to him as he worked his wrench that he hated the old pickup truck in front of him. It looked ridiculous, he said. He couldn't stand to look at it anymore, with its rusty extended cab, jacked-up all-terrain tires, and ladder rack, the sign that said KOZAK'S SUN & SNOW. All that he had intended to do was change the spark plugs, he said, but the idea of doing any more maintenance on the old engine suddenly infuriated him. He wanted a new truck, but of course, he and Sunny had just had their second child and money was tight. Plus, he said, the economy was shitty and people had started mowing their own lawns and he figured that they'd be clearing their own driveways that winter. Money, he said, was just not available to him.
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