Edge

by Michael Cadnum

  The building shook, the posters taped to the windows shivering, jumbo flautas, half-price Pepsi, the glass trembling as I slammed Earl hard again and again. He was trying to say something, and that infuriated me all the more, his mouth parting and getting ready and saying something I could not make out.

  His friends were grappling with me, weak claws, feeble blows. One of them knew me, some guy from high school calling out, “Leave him alone, Zachary—what’s the matter with you?”

  The look in Earl’s eyes stopped me. Fear, of course, once the surprise was jolted out of them. And then something else. Something sickening. His eyes slipped out of focus. They didn’t see me anymore.

  I was hurting him.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When the police took me to jail that hot day just before my junior year, I believed I was not going to see ordinary life for a long time. I was locked into a police car, both cops ignoring me, except once. We had to stop suddenly for a cardboard box rolling across Broadway. The police unit braked hard, and the driver looked back and said, “You okay?”

  The police station in Oakland is like a post office, fluorescent lights, folders, desks covered with paper, nothing happening. You notice mostly what isn’t there, no background music, no potted plants, the tack heads on the bulletin board red and white plastic lined up along one side, most of the bulletin board empty except for the faces of missing people.

  The only other person they had arrested was the one I had spat on and thrown through the window. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He wouldn’t look directly at the cop asking him to spell his name.

  The fingerprint room was a surprisingly small chamber, signs warning not to smoke. There were moments of surprising courtesy, a moistened paper towel to wipe the ink off my fingers, being told there would be a restroom when we were on our way to the holding cells “if we could just hold our water.” That was the phrase the cop-clerk used, but it didn’t strike me as quaint or comical. Everyone in that room down through the decades had been aware of his bladder, a sac that can only hold so much.

  The personnel acted polite in a leathery, impersonal way, calling me Mr. Madison, maybe the first time I had ever been addressed that way. Before I could be showered or deloused or raped a beefy woman was holding open the door, calling my name. At the end of a hall my mother was standing with her arms crossed, wearing too much makeup. I walked along beside her, sure there was some kind of mistake. We were in her car before I could ask, and then I couldn’t talk when I first tried.

  “They dropped the charges,” she said, sounding like a gangster’s mom, used to this.

  She didn’t start the car. We sat there staring ahead at a blank wall, green cinder block.

  “The owner of the tropical fish store,” she said, “called up to tell what he saw, you taking on half the East Bay. He laughed about it. Can you imagine a business owner having a sense of humor about a broken window? He said if you’re going to get into another fight, he wants to be in the front row.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I’d like to meet this man, whoever he was, thinking this was funny.

  “What I want to know is why couldn’t you wait?” she said. “Why couldn’t you wait until you’re eighteen and out of school before you decide to tear big chunks out of people. Because then you won’t be my problem, Zachary. You’ll be on your own.”

  I had to shut up and listen to this. It was music compared with what could have been happening that moment. Still, it hurt.

  “It was the property damage that made them arrest you. You could stand and bash each other in the face all day and all night and it wouldn’t matter. You break a window and they send in the Eighty-Second Airborne.”

  “I could have really hurt him,” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment. “I called the owner and said we would pay for the window. He told me he was glad you showed up, said the kids were a nuisance, blocking the sidewalk, keeping away customers.”

  I was in that mood I get into sometimes: I will never say another word again. I folded my arms, a family gesture, closed up and ready for the rest of my life.

  She said, “You hungry?”

  That was when my working life started, carrying bags of cement for a place that sold gravel and sand, paying back my mother for the window by putting in two or three hours after school. And then I worked for a nursery, stacking wooden pallets against a wall, chasing the raccoons away from the storage shed in the evenings, their brilliant eyes looking out from among the fuchsias. By the time I quit school I was ready to work full-time, hungry for it, wanting to put in long hours and forget.

  After our drive down Jackson Street to the neighborhood of Taco Bell, Bea made us some instant onion soup, stirring it and pouring it into big stars-and-stripes mugs, dishwasher and microwave safe. Her mother was in San Jose with free tickets to a horse show featuring the Budweiser team from television and a team of mustangs descended from the wild horses of Nevada. My mom was spending the evening staying beyond visiting hours at the hospital. It was good to be in a house that was quiet but not empty.

  “What do you think Earl is going to do with his life?” said Bea.

  “What will any of us do?” I asked. I had meant to just hit the conversational ball back across the net.

  “Do you think he’ll get serious in another couple of years or stay the way he is?”

  I couldn’t think about Earl without picturing him almost losing consciousness, almost breaking the Taco Bell wall with his head. She must have read my thoughts. “Earl wasn’t hurt,” said Bea.

  “He was,” I said. “But Earl doesn’t let a little brain hemorrhage slow him down.”

  We had all parted as friends, pals who were glad to get away from each other, picking up the trash in the street, laughing shakily, hey, we ought to have fun like this more often.

  “And he was making a terrible mess,” she said, “all over the road.”

  To me a “road” is out in the country, two-lane highways through hills and fields. Jackson was a street. Something must have shown in my eyes because Bea brightened, coming over to put her arm around my neck, holding my head to her slim hip. On a few other nights like this I had helped Bea undress, all the way down to her little boy’s body, except for the bird’s nest of fluff between her legs, and her petite breasts, pixie breasts, and I could hardly breathe I was so happy.

  Tonight I was just glad to sit there in the kitchen with her, one of those times when the neighborhood is quiet and the one room you are in is like a space station, solitary but peaceful, all the experiments finished for the day.

  “I almost forgot!” she said, scrambling to the back door, down the back steps.

  The kitchen door threw a carpet of light, illuminating a pink garden hose and a snail in full sail. Beyond was all darkness, Bea out there somewhere, talking in her raspy whisper, scolding tenderly.

  She bore something into the light, carrying it like an infant. “You hold him!” she said.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You’re afraid!” she laughed.

  I took into my arms the largest rabbit I had ever seen, big eared, black and white, and kicking, scratching my belly through my shirt. But then calming as Bea made kissing noises at it. I put it down, glad to have it off my hands.

  The mammoth rabbit snuffled its mobile nose around the kitchen, taking no notice of our pant legs and shoes the way a dog would, browsing along the table legs and the wire from the toaster.

  “I saved Carl’s life,” said Bea.

  My mother had bought a yellow parakeet once, called him Pecker. When, as a boy, I asked why we couldn’t have a dog, she would respond with stories of animals named Snout and Fuzz and Squats who ended up getting run over, in each case, “right in the middle of Ensenada Street.” She kept the parakeet in the kitchen, until he escaped out the back door when she was cleaning his cage for the first time.

  “Carl was drowning?” I asked. “Trapped in a fire?”

  “I bought Carl from the Harveys.”<
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  Mr. Harvey was always having trouble with the zoning policies, the laws against livestock inside city limits. He had sued the city supervisors, claming his right to raise and eat whatever he wanted. When a group of South Sea Islanders were arrested for killing, roasting, and eating a horse one Sunday in July, Mr. Harvey was on television talking about religious freedom, even though he had nothing personally to do with the celebration in question.

  She answered my question before I could ask. “Mom goes to the same acupuncturist as Mrs. Harvey.”

  Bea could always surprise me.

  “The Harveys are very nice,” said Bea.

  I felt embarrassed, narrow-minded, ready to laugh at people I didn’t know.

  “Look, he likes you,” said Bea.

  I was swept just then with the warmest gratitude for Bea, thankful to be with her, gazing into the red eyes of the rabbit she held up for me to caress.

  “Why?” I asked, not wanting to break the spell, “did you name him Carl?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Chief drove in the slow lane, the truck sluggish with a jumbo load, quick-setting mortar in ninety-pound sacks, three top-of-the-line spa shells, three sauna installation kits, imported from Finland. We were rolling south, through the Santa Cruz Mountains, past Los Gatos toward Santa Cruz on Highway 17. The four-lane road was not big enough for the traffic it carried, even on this Tuesday morning, about ten-fifty-five, according to Chief’s Timex.

  When we took the Scott’s Valley turnoff, Chief told me to watch for a road off to the left. “It shows up in two point eight miles,” he said. “I watch the odometer, you watch for the secret passageway.”

  Redwoods closed in, brushing the side and top of the truck, a gentle scraping sound. “If we miss it we’re lost forever,” I said.

  “You think it’s funny,” said Chief, like it was really very funny, but also true.

  We caught the road without any trouble, a huge break in the trees. The highway from then on was small, a winding route that followed a creek bed, rising and falling. Chief fought with the wheel, keeping the truck on our side of the road, slowing to let the occasional car pass us in the other direction. Once a lumber truck loomed and Chief had to stand on the brake. The lumber truck driver held a hand out the window of his cab, sorry to cause so much trouble, and Chief waved back.

  Chief levered the truck into reverse, the gears grinding, and back up to a wide place nearly half a mile behind us. Even then the lumber truck had trouble, air brakes gasping, hairy redwood trees so close we could smell them, green life and cinnamon.

  “You don’t ever want to invest in a new truck,” I said. “You want to drive this until it’s ready for the Smithsonian.”

  “She’s just getting broken in,” said Chief.

  The verge of the road was rutted where trucks had strayed off the pavement, and the asphalt was tracked with dried mud and starting to crumble, potholes spreading, burger wrappers in the blackberry vines along the road.

  “Inevitable signs of progress,” Chief said.

  A creek lazed through boulders, the drought that made every summer dry cooking this water down to pools and dried scab, old algae, insects nipping the surface, a species I couldn’t make out from a distance, mosquitoes or gnats. I could imagine my father’s brisk insistence: a gnat is nothing like a mosquito, trying to be good humored about correcting me.

  I spied a black-winged damselfly over a puddle, a tiny, darting needle stitching in and out of shadow. I imagined myself capturing it with the fine-mesh net and bringing the winged insect to his attention, crying, Look.

  I could close my eyes and hear his voice. Whether he kept the insect for his collection or not, he would smile and say, “That’s a real specimen, Zachary.”

  I drove all the way back from the construction site.

  Chief lost a lens out of his glasses. After we both looked around among the boxes of ceramic tile and paper sacks of patching plaster, we gave up the search. I kept praying we wouldn’t meet any oncoming trucks on the narrow road, and we didn’t. By the time we reached stop-and-go traffic at the turn-off for the Oakland airport, I was getting used to the old truck, enjoying the feel, up above the rest of the traffic.

  When I got to the hospital late that afternoon the first thing Perla Beach said to me was, “We have good news.”

  I was a little tired from pumping the clutch all the way from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and I was unable to pick up her unspoken message, the brighter-than-ever way she talked. All I could think was: were her clothes new, or did she use bleach every time she did the wash?

  My father blinked.

  “Zachary,” he said.

  The respirator made its constant, airy noise, oxygen in and out.

  “Detective Unruh said his partner had a relapse,” said my father in a high, squeaky whisper. I put my hand out to a bright metal pole and a plastic bag of clear fluid swayed back and forth.

  My father swallowed, a struggle, and said, “Her pins got infected.” A pause. “But she’ll be okay.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Sofia says the insurance company was very sympathetic. The agent was really helpful. She’s getting a new car,” I said, thinking: I’m chattering again. “It’s just like the other one, only a couple years older. And a different color. Sahara sunrise or Sante Fe something.”

  “Great,” he would whisper, waiting for the machine to breathe out. If you asked him a question while the air was flowing in he had to wait, like someone speaking on a radio from another planet.

  “You don’t mind? About the color?”

  He made no response, his eyes reading my face, intent on what I was not saying.

  I kept talking. “I haven’t ridden in it yet, so I don’t know what kind of shape the upholstery is in. If there’s a problem, I’ll rub mink oil all over it, give it a good treatment.”

  That was the typical kind of thing I talked about, padding out the safe subjects of cars and gardening. My drive back from the Santa Cruz mountains was good for half an hour of one-way talk, how hard it was to change lanes when you were driving a truck, but how much you could see, higher than the rest of the traffic. Sometimes, though, Dad laughed, a silent parting of his lips, his eyes closing, opening, no sound, when I imitated Chief’s walk, like a bantam rooster, or Perla Beach’s expression, crosseyed with enthusiasm.

  Mom read the Sherlock Holmes novel, stopping to comment, “You’re lucky Dr. Watson isn’t your surgeon,” or, “I think Holmes was guilty of criminal negligence—his client nearly got torn to pieces.” Mom had the lean look of a tennis player over the hill but refusing to retire, experiencing life as an endurance contest, popping Excedrin when she thought no one was looking.

  Sofia could talk of Daniel, what new video he had picked out to watch the night before, what bad dreams had awakened him. Sofia didn’t look so sexy these days, puffy and pale, looking like someone who has just gotten up from a restless nap, no matter the time of day.

  My grandparents passed through one warm day, flying up from Florida. My grandmother is a woman so calm and pretty, in a delicate way, it is easy to forget that she is deaf and unable to hear a word. She talked about subjects that required no conversation, her trip to Russia at the height of the Cold War, the weather where she lived, how hard it was to keep a boat in the water in Florida for any length of time, the barnacles ate everything alive.

  My grandfather is a man so handsome he looks like a model, someone constantly showing off what today’s seniors are wearing, golf shirts and pleated twill pants. Only when I took the time to talk to him did I notice how unsteady and unceasing his smile was. They left after only a short visit, their eyes not sure where to look, but sounding upbeat, saying medicine can do wonders.

  Dr. Monrovia grew a beard. At first he had a seedy, derelict appearance that made him look hungry and even dangerous, until you realized it was only Dr. Monrovia, back at last after being marooned on a desert island. Gradually he began to look distinguished. One portion of his
beard was white and the other dark, the white patch crooked, as though he had been eating powdered sugar and needed a napkin.

  Dad was in a new room in a different wing of the hospital. The new ward was quieter, fewer nurses, fewer patients. Wheelchairs waited beside beds, and nurses helped people on crutches out onto a terrace, junipers in big clay urns.

  The doctor said Dad was still in pain, headaches he never complained about to me, “an expression of the damage done.” When I asked, the surgeon explained that there was no lingering injury to his head. “It’s just that he has no sensation in his body, and there is nowhere else for the pain to go.” Medication blitzed the pain, Valium and Demerol, but they left Dad’s eyes drifting, wandering from TV to ceiling to nothing, focused on a zero point.

  That first remark he had made to me was something he had prepared, practicing with Perla Beach’s help. Detective Unruh’s partner’s surgical pins had become slightly infected, the bones not healing as quickly as they should. She was expected to recover, and it might have been a sign of my father’s state of mind that he found another person’s medical problems most worthy of comment.

  Some evenings Bea and I went down to Lake Merritt, but the police were enforcing a curfew. New lights illuminated the oaks and redwood trees around the lake, and the water seemed unusually low, dark stones exposed by the receding tide. Bea’s hair was growing back, and sometimes she looked completely different to me, someone I did not know.

  Some evenings we set up the badminton net in the backyard. Bea and I swatted the birdie back and forth as the twilight held off, not a plastic birdie, but a traditional, feathered specimen, one Mom had bought for a title company picnic at Tilden Park. Sometimes a neighbor’s cat crept in to follow the shuttlecock with his eyes, lunging when the feathered thing bounced close, swatting at it, looking up at us with keen puzzlement each time he rediscovered what it was.