After dinner Mom decided to go on one of her cleaning binges. The way she cleans house makes it more of an Olympic event than a chore, and I joined in. I vacuumed the living room, using the thin plastic nozzle to chase down the all-but-imaginary dust mice under the sofa, while Mom shook out the Persian area rugs and sorted through magazines, one pile for recycling, the other to keep in a banker’s box in her home office.
I like vacuuming. When you suck up a paper clip there is that long, musical journey up the metal tube, a rattling tour of the cloth portion, into the lungs of the Electrolux. I didn’t do anything to spoil the matter-of-fact pleasure we were having, life the way it used to be, and even when she went through the closet for donations to Goodwill I helped her, knowing I could break the spell if I wanted to. I could argue that I wanted to keep the old Dodgers one-size-fits-all cap, or the foldable raincoat, used once long ago.
She huddled in the living room that night, talking into her portable phone, making notes. She wore one of her shiny bathrobes, dark blue silk, and she had washed her hair and wrapped her head up in a kind of turban, an old pink towel, frayed along the edges, that did not match her expensive robe.
I asked if could I get her anything, some warm milk with something in it, and she looked at me without saying anything, holding the little portable phone.
“You can’t stay up all night,” I said.
“They aren’t putting their best person on the case,” she said. “The district attorney’s office. I’ve been trying to reach everybody and God but no one answers their pagers on Sunday night. An assistant DA named something like Dingleberry is in charge of the case. I did find out that the person they arrested is an Oakland resident, twenty years old, and that he has a record. Lives with his parents. They searched the house and did not find the gun, probably some cheap throwaway pistol anyway. A ballistics test won’t be much help because the bullets are deformed and fragmented. You know who told me all that? The Tribune. It turns out when you need to know something you have to call a newspaper. Even the television stations aren’t much help on Sunday. You know all those all-news radio stations. Try to call one up and talk to a reporter.”
“We have to get some sleep.”
She didn’t even slow to take a breath. “At least one felony arrest, attempted robbery with grievous bodily harm, charges dropped. Insufficient evidence. They don’t even take a criminal to trial unless they have an absolutely perfect case.”
She stopped to consider what she was saying. My mom had always signed petitions and donated money on behalf of causes that were liberal, easing immigration laws, urging a more strict police review board. “You would think an assemblyman or state senator would have a staff on the weekends, someone you could call to put some pressure on the DA, but think again.”
She was quiet for a while, and then she said, “One of these days we have to paint the ceiling.”
TWENTY-THREE
The day I was arrested the sunlight was heavy on College Avenue. We were suffering one of those late summer, early fall days that settle in over the Bay Area and dry out every living thing. You get a spark walking across the living room, touching a doorknob. It was one week before school started, my junior year, right after Perry moved north.
Brush fires flickered on television, the Bay filling with smoke from a blaze near Point Reyes. It was a day that changed my life, but I can’t remember where I was going, or why. I was wandering north, pausing every time I reached a shadow, past the upholstery shop, ANTIQUE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN, and the tropical fish store, poster-painted fish in circus colors on the plate glass. Three or four guys with a stunningly beautiful girl lounged all over the place, blocking the sidewalk, making a show of owning the thoroughfare.
I had gotten into fights and collected a few trips to the vice principal’s office, but I still had a hopeful attitude toward school at that point. The truth was that I was wearying of summer and looking forward to a routine, relishing the idea of work.
I could have crossed the street. I bumped into them, shouldering through. One of them said something; I didn’t even hear what it was. I spun on him and gave him my best stare. It’s important to get it right, that mix of contempt and arrogance. And boredom, too. You want to look a little bored so if you have to back down you can act like it’s just too much trouble.
The tallest of them gave me a little, preliminary shove. I took a step toward him, closing in, crowding him, getting way too close inside his personal space. Like I was getting intimate so I could whisper a secret.
He hit me with an elbow, the point of the bone right there on the lower lip. A sudden taste of warm saltwater blossomed in my mouth.
I spat in his face. The three of them were on me, holding on to me while the other hit me, and they beat me up, my face, my ribs, knocked the air out of me, stunned me, almost knocked me down. But then they got tired on that hot day, hard work, staying mad and getting all sweaty. When they slowed down, I picked one of them up and dumped him through the window of the tropical fish store.
Partway. The window spidered into pieces, but only one arm and part of his head punctured the shatterproof glass. When I tried to push him the rest of the way he kicked free, and we all sprawled.
It was the sure-handed humor of the police that really shook me. I was used to the vice principal’s iron expressions, security guards breaking up fights, shouting. The police were almost amused, sure of themselves and calm, and that made it all the worse to be locked into a police unit. It was a cage car, with a grill between the backseat and the driver, the backseat made out of hard plastic, not cushioned at all, so if I was bleeding or puking I wouldn’t leave any permanent stains.
My own trouble with the law was on my mind as my mom and I went to the arraignment of Steven Ray McNorr in room 211 of the San Francisco Superior Court.
To enter the courthouse we had to pass through metal detectors, like at an airport, except that the guards standing around are armed and look more like officers of the law. One of the tall uniformed men asked me to step over to one side for a moment while he passed a magnetic wand over me and up and down between my legs.
We had both put on our best clothes, like when we went to hear my mother’s friend play Bach in an Episcopal church, and I imagined that the brass buttons on my navy blue jacket might have made an alarm go off.
“There you go,” said the man with the wand, and I had that feeling of being free to pass that I get from displaying tickets to a concert after worrying, for a moment, that I had left them at home.
Detective Unruh was in the hall, holding the door for a woman in a dark suit making her way on a pair of crutches. He turned, and when he saw us he smiled.
“My partner,” he said, referring to the woman who had just vanished through the heavy swinging door. “She has to testify in a case involving a family who all started stabbing each other last Thanksgiving. Carving knife into the aunt, fork into the uncle.” He pronounced aunt ahnt; in my family we say the word so it sounds like the name of the little insect. “She should be at home watching soaps. Instead she has to go sit outside a courtroom waiting for her name to be called while her codeine wears off.”
I let the detective catch the look in my eye. “Of course you’re here,” he said. “I would do the same thing. Watch the law at work and let the law see you watching.”
“I thought you warned me not to come,” I said.
“If I ever warn you, you’ll know it,” he said.
Something passed between the detective and my mother, some adult understanding that both of them shared. Her manner toward him was muted, either by fatigue or by this mutual comprehension, when she said, “I’ve heard mixed reports on the assistant DA, Mr. Dingle—”
“Mr. Dingman. He’s a good man to have on your side. We can hope that Steven Ray McNorr will not see the light of day for a long, long time.”
I took a seat in the back row, but my mother marched right up to the front, and I joined her there, comfortable seats, pad
ded arms. The room was smaller than I had expected, and there were fewer people. A man in a sheriff’s uniform wandered around like the room was his, a gun at his hip. The judge leaned over his bench like a man at work in an office, looking over to one side to consult with a woman holding a pile of folders, joking, words I could not hear, shaking his head in disbelief the way people do, Can you believe that? He wore a black robe.
I expected the courtroom to be very unlike courtrooms on television. I had expected real life to be more vivid, much more impressive. Instead it was like the courtrooms of movies, except that when something took place it happened quietly, off-the-record voices, paperwork, pauses while a computer hunted up a name, a date. I watched the judge, eager to learn from his expression what was going to happen. The judge was gray haired, and he wore half-lens glasses.
When a prisoner arrived I had no idea that he was a man about to be charged with a crime, just another person in the room, casually dressed in a pair of orange overalls. Only when he stood with his back to us and waited for the judge to stop talking did I see SF JAIL across his back, his hands cuffed.
But it was another name, not one I recognized. The words were spoken carefully by the clerk, first, middle, and last names. The man was charged with the crime of—but I was already not listening closely, people stopping by to murmur greetings to my mother and me.
Each time a prisoner was allowed into the room I felt wonderment—is it him? It was more than wonder—it was fear. I was afraid that when I saw the man I would not be able to control myself. But I could sense Detective Unruh’s lack of interest, a matter-of-fact boredom that radiated from him like body heat. No one needed to tell me that this was some other human being in trouble, another criminal, another crime.
We sat there most of the morning. The flags on either side of the judge, California’s Bear Flag and the Stars and Stripes, were both wrapped tightly around their poles, never stirring.
At twenty-five minutes past eleven the door opened again and another man was in the room, a uniformed guard on each side. He had dark eyes and dark hair, a square head, a square body. He sidled into the room like someone making his way through a crowd. There was no crowd. He was shackled, hand and foot.
No one had to tell me. Detective Unruh leaned forward behind me and whispered, his breath on my ear, “Here’s our man.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Steven Ray McNorr looked down and then rolled his head up so he faced the ceiling. He waggled his head from side to side, like someone with a crick in his neck, a boxer getting loose. He studied the floor again. It was taffy brown and pitted, years of heels bruising and cratering the surface. I thought, His eyes and mine, looking at the same worn linoleum.
A man in a sand-yellow tweed jacket stood next to him. The tweed was fine knit, a blue dress shirt showing at the cuffs. McNorr’s breath was even, his shoulders rising and falling, under tension but getting used to it after the first few heartbeats. The words “assault with intent to commit murder” were spoken in a disembodied way by someone official.
“My client is ready to enter a plea at this time,” said the man in the sandy jacket.
Plea. What a noble, old-fashioned word. You picture someone on his knees, beseeching, someone aristocratic, heroic, stripped of hope.
“How do you plead?” someone was asking.
McNorr looked straight ahead, not at the judge. His eyes might have been closed, and he might have been smiling or even weeping. But I knew—he had no expression. I could tell by the way he stood there, a man it would be hard to pick up or knock down.
One or two big strides and I could reach out and touch him.
He didn’t even have to take a deep breath or clear his throat. He said, “Not guilty.”
Detective Unruh’s fingers dug into my shoulders. He leaned close to my ear. “Take it easy, Zachary.”
There was nothing wrong with me. But when McNorr was shuffling toward the side door and the judge sat writing, lost in paperwork, I could feel it: my fingers almost cut by the edge of the chair I had been gripping, my body needing air. I had been holding my breath.
“Hang in there, Steve,” croaked an older man’s voice, and the prisoner looked up from the doorway and smiled. Smiled and shook his head.
I expected the judge or someone in a uniform to order silence in the court, but no one did. Two square, gray people, a man and a woman stood at the rear of the courtroom, the woman holding a small black book, one of those zipper Bibles you can seal against the rain when you’re done reading. The man looked like his son, but gray, his strength melted to fat. The mother turned away before I could study her, a woman in a hurry to escape.
Sometimes as a child I would lie awake listening to my mother talking on the phone. When she was quiet, I would try to imagine what the other person was saying, hoping to time the imaginary conversation so it would end just as my mother couldn’t restrain herself any more and bubbled over with, “That’s what I’m telling you,” or “See what I mean?”
I tried out another mental game at the hospital. I tried pretending that the patients were all right; it was the staff that needed help. Patients humored these warped, psycho people, pretending to be feeble so the nurses could get the therapy they needed, connecting IVs, plumping pillows.
“What an exciting day!” said the woman in white medical blouse, white pants, and white shoes. Her clothes were whiter than the uniforms of any of the nurses, who tended to wear gray blues and soft-soled, off-white shoes. This woman was as white as an aspirin, red lipstick, a chipped tooth. PERLA BEACH, said her badge. PHYSICAL THERAPY.
We were in the corridor carrying magazines, Scientific American, Car and Driver, glossy, colored periodicals we thought my dad would enjoy. “We just got back from the arraignment,” my mother said, meaning she was in no mood for excitement.
“We’ve made so much progress,” said Perla Beach. “There is some real cause for celebration, Mrs. Madison.”
“Is there,” my mother asked, flat, no inflection. You would never guess that Mom gave classes in the power of enthusiasm, sure to increase sales by thirty percent.
I left them, hurrying into my father’s room.
He shifted his eyes in my direction, his face wrinkling into a mask of happiness.
Having rushed panting into the room, I found myself trapped by medical apparatus, tubes, cables, bumping a bag of what looked like black blood hanging beside my dad’s bed. I found one of my mother’s books on a side table. A bookmark, a clean, white cafeteria napkin, was folded over only a few pages into the novel.
“I don’t think it would do me any good, hearing about a hound of hell from the middle of the moors,” I said. “I mean, if I was sick.”
Sick. What a frail, fake word to describe his condition. The breathing machine made its sound, air pumping in, pumping out, measured. The blue tube led to his throat, his trachea, and he needed a shave.
My jokey patter failed me. I took the book into my hands, one of those hardbacks embossed with fake gold to make it look more expensive. Where was Mom? I thought. Out there dueling with the therapist when she should be in here.
I opened the book. Chapter II, I read silently. The Curse of the Baskervilles.
That night I took a drive.
Sometimes nothing else helps, not music, not a long walk, not even the various antacids Dr. Wiegand recommends for Mom.
I picked up Bea at Deena’s Diner, and she sat beside me as I drove, rubbing hand lotion into her skin, squirting it out of a tube. “If I don’t I’ll get iguana skin,” she said.
I felt that Bea was hoping for a return to our personal Good Old Days, when we had spent the twilight together, gliding Frisbees until it was too dark and then holding each other, Bea’s heart beating so fast it was like some living creature trapped inside her body.
I was grateful to have her as a friend, but I couldn’t let myself experience any more emotion than I already was. “That might be interesting,” I was saying. “Reptile Woman. Miss Gila
Hands. Put you in one of those magazines, along with the world’s biggest breasts.”
My Honda was in good shape inside and out, the dark carpeting vacuumed with the wheezy Chevron One Stop Carwash vacuum cleaner, the armrests and the dash all wiped and polished. I had been driving the car for a couple of days after I got it back from the police when it seemed I could feel strange fingerprints on the steering wheel, unknown smudges on the floor mats. I purged the vehicle of this presence, wiped it down and cleaned it out.
I was down-shifting toward Taco Bell on Jackson Street in Oakland, when I saw Earl kicking a trash can into the street. I had not seen Earl since the night of the tear gas, and I couldn’t help feeling a throb of friendship toward him. Good old Earl, the Lovable Barbarian.
I was about to roll down the window and say some kind of empty nothing, the sort of thing guys say to each other, How’s it going or What’s happening, phrases that sound like questions but are not. Two or three companions cheered Earl on, clapping, yelling.
He jumped on the trash can, log-rolling it, slipping off. He kicked the green metal so hard the top flew off and the bin rolled over and over, all the way across the broad street. The top was a peaked contraption with a swinging door on each side. People like putting their taco wrappers into a little swinging door, never seeing the trash again. The top of the bin sat upright, looking particularly truncated and useless in the middle of the street.
Earl was at the curb, punishing the bin with his feet. He began driving it back toward the opposite curb, Taco Bell wrappers and drink containers and unnamable junk tumbling and flowing as the bin made its progress.
One moment I was slowing down, running over some of this coughed-up litter without wanting to. Then I was out of the car, seizing Earl, dragging him to the Taco Bell and slamming him against the wall. Bea’s cry was lost in the night air.
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