Edge

by Michael Cadnum

  “The witness was telling the truth,” Bea said.

  “I think he was,” said the detective. “I have no doubt. But you see how weak he is going to be as a foundation for an entire case.”

  I could feel the weight of his attention, but I made no sound.

  “That’s why they have preliminary hearings,” he continued, “to see what kind of disaster you might be facing if the case goes to court.”

  “Mr. Van Kastern saw the crime take place,” Bea said.

  “I know it. The DA knows it,” said the detective. “Everybody knows McNorr was the shooter. But our case is like the house built upon the sand.”

  “You told me he wouldn’t see the light of day for a long time,” I said in a quiet voice.

  “I said we could hope. I had a sense of this case from the beginning, what kind of problems we contemplated,” said the detective after studying his empty sugar packet, a little color picture of a Hawaiian beach.

  “Maybe you can go out and interview more witnesses,” said Bea. “Maybe find some evidence.”

  “I feel it, too,” he said. “I feel that kind of anger all the time. But I go on living. On the other hand, it’s not my dad sitting there in a wheelchair.”

  I sat very still. Maybe, I thought, after a very long time, I might reach out one hand and pluck one of those C & H sugar packets out of the container.

  “You don’t look at me when I talk to you, Zachary,” said the detective. “You know that?”

  I kept quiet.

  “You can look at my face once or twice. I used to be like you when I was your age. You-don’t believe that, do you? That I look at you and see myself?”

  The waiter leaned in from the shadows, a soft voice asking us if we needed more time.

  “More time,” said the detective emphatically.

  When the waiter vanished, Detective Unruh leaned in my direction. “I want you to talk to a counselor.”

  I unlocked the car.

  I used to wonder what it would be like to be one of those men who never talk. It used to seem that little boys jabbered all the time and cried when they scraped a knee, while a certain type of man never complained.

  “People go into prison,” she was saying, “and come out and do it all over again.”

  I drove. The Bay Bridge traffic was skittish, a traffic jam broken up at last, everyone trying to reach the speed limit without getting killed. A large plastic garbage bag bounded along in the middle lane. One more bounce, and a semi loaded with scaffolding flattened it. I glanced in the rearview; it was gone, and I couldn’t even see what was left of it.

  “Mom was buying a new chicken-wire cage for Carl,” she said. “He was too big for the other one.”

  I was glad to be driving, very carefully, like when I took my Department of Motor Vehicles test, a man with a clipboard in the passenger seat saying not hello but “Before we do anything, we have to do what?”

  “Carl definitely needs a big cage,” I said. I drove like someone in a training video, Traffic Safety and You. I signaled before I changed lanes; I kept a safe following distance between my Honda and the other cars all the way across the Bay Bridge.

  “I argued against keeping him in an enclosure at all, but we have some cats in the neighborhood. You know how they are,” she said, as though following an inner command: whatever you do don’t shut up. “It’s not their fault. But we have to be practical.”

  “No cat is going to be able to handle Carl Jung,” I said.

  I swing the car over to the curb, a sprinkler playing water over her front lawn. It was late afternoon, country music twanging along inside the house. Detective Unruh wanted me to talk to a social worker, someone who specialized in victims and their families.

  “You better come in,” Bea said.

  I must have shaken my head.

  I could see the argument she was about to make. “Mom was going to make chili. Not the kind that is so hot you have hiccups for an hour. A sweet, New Mexico-type chili she got out of a magazine.”

  Before you do anything, the right answer was, what you do is buckle up. You could drive perfectly and if you didn’t do it with your seat belt on, you would fail the test.

  We both heard it—a masculine laugh from inside the house, one of Rhonda’s men.

  The bean plants were gone, nothing but brown twine and bare poles where green plants used to thrive. I used a pitchfork, working the garden. I got on my hands and knees and broke the ground with a tool like a steel claw, three prongs. When I surprised an earthworm, I was careful. It isn’t true that slicing a worm in half makes two living worms.

  Mom brought home some lemon chicken and bok choy with black mushrooms. We ate with wooden chopsticks, the kind that come stuck together. You snap them apart, and it never works quite right; they are always a little jagged and splintery where they had been joined.

  She said, “Daniel drew a picture of a man with fire coming out of his head.”

  For a person who tells people how to organize an office, Mom spends a lot of time alone. Dad was the one who made friends easily, men and women wandering in and out of his life. He had hiking partners and bird-watching friends and pals who liked to shoot holes in a National Rifle Association slow fire pistol target.

  Mom called her contact at the Tribune. McNorr was still in jail.

  The next day Chief and I delivered a spa shell and a filter system to a condo in Albany and drove the old spa and rusted motor to a scrap dealer in West Oakland, a block away from the Nabisco plant, the smell of toasted wheat in the air.

  When I got home that afternoon the phone was ringing. Normally I wouldn’t have answered it.

  It was Mom. She said, “They let him go.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  I already knew the name McNorr was not listed in the Pacific Bell White Pages.

  Day by day I had been getting ready for this, flipping through the phone book, calling information.

  The phone in the kitchen kept ringing, the answering machine picking up after the third ring, but I could hear what people were saying, if there was anything they could do. I tore up the junk mail, taking a liberty, figuring Mom wouldn’t mind. Then, with the Macy’s bill in my hand, I had an excuse to step into her office.

  Mom’s home office tends to flow out into the dining room. She keeps multiple listing books and tax records tucked into boxes, but she prefers to spread out. A desk calendar featuring architecture of Julia Morgan perched beside an electric pencil sharpener. Mom likes a number three pencil, very sharp.

  It was my way of making a deal with Fate: if I can’t do it, I shouldn’t.

  I slipped off the dust cover and let it parachute to the carpet. The tough plastic cover kept the computer’s shape perched on the floor, covering nothing. The old IBM took awhile to boot up, making the usual clicks and chuckles, getting ready. When I was on-line, connected to the main computer at the title company, I entered owners/Oak, just to see if the computer’s internal watchdog was asleep.

  When it said Enter passcode I knew the first part would be easy, my mother’s Social Security number. I have a memory for data like phone numbers and scientific names, and I was quick, tapping out the nine digits. But then I needed a three-letter or three-digit code. Guesswork.

  I tried my mother’s maiden name, shortened to Gan or Gnt, and each time the computer was prompt in telling me Please reenter.

  Maybe the McNorr family didn’t own their house, I told myself. Maybe the computer was programmed to deny all access after the third attempt.

  I could hear Dad’s voice clearly in my imagination, my dad coming home early when I was home after school, first grade and already reading faster than all the others. I remembered how he sounded, singsong, telling us he was home, calling out Mom’s name.

  I tried again, two-fingering the nine numbers, and then, after the dot, not Flo. I entered Ren, short for Renny.

  Often I could read her mood by what she put on when she came home. A bathrobe meant she was ready to re
lax, drink one of her cocktails, a whiskey sour, an old-fashioned, watching trash on television. If she put on denims and her Green Bay Packers T-shirt she was going to wax floors or paint walls. When she came home that night, she put on a dress, like someone getting ready to go to a party, something dark and flowing, a dress I did not recognize.

  “Something your father talked me into buying,” she said. “When we were first married and couldn’t afford it.”

  “It looks nice,” I said, careful to keep my tone steady, no feeling in my voice but casual courtesy. She needed a compliment, and that’s what I would give her. But the luster had gone from her hair, and she looked frail, even her hands, chapped and thin.

  “It was never in fashion,” she said, “and it was never out of fashion. I almost never wore it.”

  “You rented a video?” I asked, noticing the cassette in her hand. Mom was patient with computers and could go toe-to-toe with an accountant, argue depreciation schedules and deferred payments until she got her way every time. But she was always jamming cassettes in backward and pushing the wrong button on the remote, calling my name when the screen was all dancing fuzz.

  I took the cassette from her hands.

  I sat in my room, on the bed, telling myself I couldn’t really hear it.

  The sound of his voice pulled me into the living room.

  “What we imagine might be taking place on a distant planet,” my father said. “The sort of being we dream might be thriving in a distant galaxy is living right beneath our feet.”

  He knelt on one knee, smiling up into the camera. “Right here,” he said. “On our Earth.” Was it makeup? I wondered. Had he really looked so tanned, so strong? He was like an actor hired to impersonate my dad, someone too handsome, not at all the normal human being who paced up and down the living room, trying to memorize the lines he had written for himself.

  “These accidents of nature have lasted five hundred million years nearly unchanged. These remarkable invertebrates are citizens of prehistory.” This was no actor. This was Dad, the enthusiasm in his voice, his joy in sharing what he knew. “When we spy a common little black ant, the imposingly named Monomorium minimum, stealing sugar from the kitchen sink, we are looking down upon one of the triumphs of the animal world, an animal so old and so perfectly adapted to its life that it has not changed since the extinction of trilobites.”

  People wanted to watch cheetahs run down gazelles, the PBS executives said. Viewers loved wolves, and bears, and sharks. “Scarabs,” one assistant producer had suggested in a fax from LA. “The dung beetles of ancient Egypt. People love mummies and pharaohs. Work up that angle—the mythic sacred creatures of the Nile.”

  Dad laughed off the failure of the PBS pilot of Prehistoric Future—or at least pretended to. The book it was based on was translated into six languages. You could see his faith on the screen, the way he scrambled up a cliff, the Steadicam following, so he could show the viewer a crevice in the sandstone where wasps were hibernating. “They are cold-blooded creatures, and even our mild winters make them slow down to a crawl,” he said, his shadow falling over the stones.

  “When they wake,” he said, “they will not have to learn or experiment. They will not have to be told. They will know exactly what to do.”

  When it was over we sat for a while.

  She got up, turned off the television, and looked around at the living room, appraisingly, like someone house-sitting for a neighbor and tired of it, ready to go home.

  “I told Sofia I would stay with her tonight,” she said. She made an expression of ironic fatigue. Mom used to call her Sofa, saying it was the perfect name for someone so good to lie on.

  But I knew that Mom’s kindness to Sofia had little to do with Mom’s gradual acceptance of Dad’s second wife. It was a way of helping Dad, a way of working against her own feelings to do something right, even though it meant she was searching the medicine cabinet for antacid, painkillers, settling for a packet of Alka Seltzer so old the tablets barely fizzed.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I told myself I was just going for a drive, no particular destination.

  I found the street without any trouble—Olive Street, where it meets Foothill Boulevard and runs east toward the 580 freeway and the big quarry gash, a landmark you can see even at night in the Oakland Hills, soil and stone ripped to bedrock.

  The houses in that neighborhood have metal grills over windows, double doors, filigrees of iron it would be hell to cut through. Dogs bark. Men on street corners watch passing cars.

  But at last I reached a quieter part of town, not far from the freeway. I had trouble locating the addresses. Some of the houses had metal numbers attached beside the front door, or glittering on the mailbox, but some did not.

  I felt conspicuous in the early evening, out of place. I coasted very slowly, nearly stalling. An out-of-date Ford rusted on the front lawn, on blocks, a white Galaxy. A pickup truck, hood up, occupied the driveway, the garage door open only enough to allow a person to leave and enter. The interior of the garage was dark.

  Geraniums flowered up under the picture window, and the curtains were open. The lawn was black in this poor light, a hedge on either side of the house, and a big shrub, something that was not thriving, snaking stems and broad shiny leaves.

  No people. The front window—what Mom would have called a “picture window”—was empty; the wall across the room pool-bottom blue. A car approached, headlights in my rearview mirror. The approaching car’s sound system thumped, bass notes all the way through my body. I jacked the Honda into gear and cautioned myself to keep under the speed limit, twenty-five, maybe thirty miles an hour.

  I passed the house again and began to wonder if they had all gone out to celebrate, leaving the lights blazing, fooling the would-be burglar. Once again I drove around the block.

  This time I let the Honda kiss the side of the curb, stopping, holding my breath. The curtains swayed and began to close in little jerks. The curtains stuck. A figure edged into the narrow space between the curtains, an arm reaching up to adjust one of the hooks that attached the drapery, the person standing on tiptoe, muttering with the effort. I knew how he felt, having to fuss with such a mundane annoyance on a night like this.

  A light flooded the garage, the door open only enough for me to see a shadow moving around on the concrete floor, a can of Budweiser glittering beside the pickup truck.

  I drove, letting the car find its way.

  Deena’s Diner was crowded with cheerful, hungry people. The special was lettered on a white plastic squeak board, the kind Dr. Monrovia had used to illustrate my dad’s injuries. Bea was handing out plates of Caesar salad, plates of vegetarian enchiladas, the two specials for tonight. She gave me a dazed, weary smile, and I could see how satisfied Bea was with her life. She loved this shuffling of orders, the hectic, blackjack dealer side to being a waitress. She liked all of it.

  Maybe I had been hoping for some event to deflect my intentions, someone to say just the right thing, some random comment to stop me. But I wouldn’t try to talk to her. I waggled my fingers and mouthed, I can’t stay.

  I stopped by a corner grocery on Piedmont Avenue and bought a carton of bean dip and a jumbo bag of Doritos. Just before I gave the cashier the money I hurried back and got a can of tuna off the shelf.

  I ate standing up at home, over the kitchen sink, scooping up the bean dip and then eating the tuna out of the can with a fork.

  I washed my hands, wiped my mouth and chin with a paper towel. I called Chief’s number, and Harriet answered.

  “Tell Chief I won’t be in tomorrow,” I said.

  “Bernie is so upset,” she said, a voice that sounded like a singing voice, a contralto, round voice, even though she was only chatting on a phone. She liked the sound of her voice and depended on it to keep her listener right where she wanted him. “We both are. We look around at the world we live in and just don’t know.”

  Bernie.

  I forgot to tell her how
much I enjoyed her sandwiches. It wasn’t quite true, but I wanted to say something polite. I hung up too soon.

  The spade was in the shed with the dregs of the lawn nutrient, the nearly empty sack tangled up in the blade of the spade. I stuffed the large paper fertilizer bag back into the shed and then listened to the neighborhood, the televisions, the muted conversations, the background hush of far-away traffic.

  The lime tree drops leaves all year round. Once a week or so it lets one fall, tinted with yellow. Mom called up a nursery and they told her this was how a citrus lets go of used-up leaves, little by little, not all at once like the birch or the ginkgo.

  I dug into the ground with the spade, the steel chiming and grating against the tiny bits of gravel and concrete in the soil. I took care, not quite sure, digging with my fingers, wondering exactly where.

  Deeper than I expected, I remarked to myself. Maybe not here at all.

  I was thirsty, even a little queasy. Okay, it isn’t here. Brilliant, another great moment in the History of the Mind. I felt giddy, an audience inside me, a theater with no applause, no laugh track, flat silence.

  The plastic bag did not make the rustling sound I expected. One moment I was spading dirt. The next minute the steel met steel, a dark sound, too loud. I fell to my knees and worked with my fingers again, uncovering the weight.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I filled in the hole, pressed the dirt with my shoe, and put the spade back into the shed. I closed the shed door and slipped the latch over the loop where a padlock was supposed to fit if we had one.

  Details were all that mattered. How I made my way across the lawn, careful not to step on any snails, how I wiped my shoes on a stepping stone, scraping off the dirt—each specific detail had an effect on what I was going to do.

  I had seen his father at the window, reaching up to hook the drapes so they would close. I made up a story, what they were doing now. Watching videos, Steven in the garage, drinking too much beer to be much of a mechanic, but loving it, back at home. The initial flush of freedom was probably already fading, little things starting to bother, Mom’s sulks, Dad’s stupid choice of television reruns. Mom keeping her mouth shut, her son barely escaping the law again, Dad more philosophical, figuring cops make mistakes.