I could picture Steven Ray McNorr’s hands, fumbling for a Phillips screwdriver, prying open another beer, his fingerprints dark smudges on the King of Beers.
I cradled the gun in both hands, the barrel pointed toward the floor, away from my body. As I entered the kitchen, Rhonda Newport was being processed by the answering machine. “I bet your family has a civil suit,” she said. “Sue the shooter for gross bodily harm.” Her voice paused, trailing upward, questioningly.
If I was home, she was saying without coming out and asking, pick up the phone. “Zachary, believe me I know.” She didn’t have to say what she knew. Rhonda knew her way around the buttes and gullies of life, even the ones she had made up herself. I let her talk a little more, enjoying the way she sounded, ice tinkling in one of her poodle highball glasses. She hung up.
The Vaseline was so thick the cross hatching of the walnut grip and SW trademark were obscured, the weapon ugly with petroleum jelly. I used sheets of paper towel, sitting in my bedroom, gently wiping the barrel, the trigger guard, afraid I would drop the thing or grab it the wrong way. I wiped my hands on the paper towels, using up what looked like half the roll.
No signs of rust. Still loaded, I prompted myself, as though working my way down a checklist. Scared at my own nerve, I gave the cylinder a turn. It clicked, clicked again, and stopped turning.
My nerves jittered at every murmur of the house—the fridge, the floorboards breathing tiny, subsonic sounds. The walls had a silence so solid it was a sound itself, a background presence, the hush of a canyon.
I put the gun on the breadboard. I thrust the Safeway bag into the trash under the sink with the wads of paper towel. I washed my hands. I couldn’t get the water to run very hot, but I used plenty of dish soap at the sink. Even then some of the lubricant remained. I let the sink half fill, running soapy water through my hands, until they were clean at last, not a trace of Vaseline.
A car breathed by in the street. The kitchen faucet dripped, once. The gun looked so dark and outlandish here in the kitchen I could hardly bear to put my hand on it. When I placed it carefully in the middle of my bed it pressed down on the mattress. I hurried into the bathroom and peed. I checked the mirror, my normal look, maybe a little flushed. There was no way you could tell.
I put on a Gortex jacket, a bulky blue garment with several pockets, a jacket fit for a trek through a blizzard. Mom had bought it last Christmas, just before our visit to Squaw Valley, where Mom liked to talk shop on the ski lifts, interest rates and boardroom gossip at seven thousand feet.
The gun settled into the pouch in front, and the pocket’s tab fastened shut, the miracle of Velcro. The jacket felt too warm. I zipped it up, zipped it back down. Its bulk almost offset the pull of the gun, and I was all the way to the car before I thought: speed limit. Traffic cop. Step out of the car, please.
I opened the trunk and folded the jacket over the spare tire. The gun clunked against the tire iron even through the fabric of the jacket, and I folded the garment gently into the corner.
I don’t believe in reincarnation, but sometimes it is a theory that explains everything. I must have practiced all of this before, rehearsed it well, in another life. I took 580, the freeway light traffic all the way. The car was running fine, and I had two-thirds of a tank of gas. Then I made a miscue and took the Fruitvale Avenue off ramp, having to drive all the way down to Foothill Boulevard again.
That feeling of being in no hurry was gone. Keeping the speed limit was an effort of will. The ordinary act of driving, stop signs, clutch, gearshift, was slow, way too slow, the car rolling along with something wrong with it, the tires out-of-round, the parking brake stuck.
My hands slipped on the steering wheel, the porch lights and bedroom windows I drove past lurid, mockingly normal. I could still turn back. It was a gift I had saved up, and now presented myself. Good news—I could go straight back home and take a shower.
How could I act like I had done this before—this exact series of actions, parking the car a few houses down, making sure my headlights were off, opening the trunk to tug on the bulky jacket. I even knew to press the gun against my body, determining its position in the pocket, loosening the Velcro but not reaching in, leaving the actual walnut-and-steel untouched a little while longer.
The only physical sensation I paid any attention to was thirst. I ached to dash up one of these gravel-and-juniper front lawns and drink from a garden hose. A dog barked, one of those yammery little dogs no one pays any attention to. A woman opened a front door across the street, arguing cheerfully with someone inside, shutting the door again after pouring out what remained of a pitcher of water.
The garage door was still open just enough for an angle of light to spill out on either side. The car was parked in the driveway, beyond the light.
The beer can was gone, a new moon of condensation where it had been. The truck’s hood was down. The door on the driver’s side was open, a new beer can standing right about where someone would plant his foot climbing out of the cab. I could tell by the beads of moisture the can was three-quarters full.
Even then I was giving events a chance. It might be someone else in the vehicle, the dad or a friend, or even the mom, enjoying her hobby, replacing the alternator in the family truck.
I could not take another step. A human being nearby made a grunt, effort or muffled violence, sex. My insides shrank, my hand reaching for the outline of the gun. The sounds came from the pickup.
Someone was inside the truck, the soles of his feet jerking and straightening as he worked under the dash. An oblong of light searched the interior. I slipped into the shadow beside the garage and put one hand on the sharp stucco edge of the building.
He half fell out of the pickup, knocking over the beer. He didn’t notice the spreading pool of fizz, the yeasty fragrance. He peered at a glittering object the size of a cigarette butt in his fingers. He held the flashlight, examining a fuse from under the dash.
The light from the flashlight exaggerated his features, his eyebrows lurid black, stage makeup. But I knew that square build, that square head.
The Velcro did not release at first, clinging, a harsh, sandpaper rasp. I tugged a little harder, peeling the flap just as he looked down at his feet. The flashlight illuminated the dishwater mess of spilled beer.
THIRTY-FOUR
I stepped on the accelerator so hard the car shimmied in place, no forward momentum, tires squealing.
Red lights didn’t stop me. Stop signs meant nothing. I was in fourth gear over eighty miles an hour on Foothill Boulevard before I was aware of any other traffic. A yellow Cadillac Seville with a row of holes in it where the chrome strip had come off swerved over to me, two grinning guys saying without words if I wanted a contest I was in the right place.
I cut across the four lanes of city street and into a neighborhood, switching back and forth for several blocks, and the three hundred horsepower Cadillac attempted to follow in a half-joking, half-menacing way, blundering behind me until I careened around the back of a strip mall, Dumpsters and bales of flattened cardboard.
I wasn’t sure where I was, parked cars crammed along the curb, broken glass on the pavement. A Doberman on a chain ran along with the car until his leash yanked him. I slowed way down, feathering the brake. Two police cars were in conference, back to front, the drivers nearly touching elbows.
I kept driving, past the Oakland/Alameda County Coliseum, a street sweeper gliding along in the distance, its headlight illuminating the empty parking spaces.
The Oakland Airport is at the end of a plain of dry grass and ditches, reeds and sleeping mallards. I ran the car off the road, over the shoulder, broken glass and trash crackling. I wrenched open the door, and ran up an embankment. The rumble of a jet receded into the sky as the night air hit me.
I took a step back, swept the gun behind me, and threw it. I didn’t just toss it or skim it across the water. I sent it with all the strength in my body. I could see the light from the runway
glinting, spinning.
I didn’t hear the splash.
I got on the freeway heading north and rolled down the window. I was sweating, wet with it, breathing hard. I wrestled out of the heavy jacket and shucked it over the back where it made noises as I drove, collapsing its empty arms and body further down into the dark.
A restaurant commanded the freeway with its sign, TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY, a place Chief and I had passed but never visited. I found the off ramp, parked at the edge of the lot, and found myself outside the coffee shop. Newspaper machines sold USA Today, the Sacramento Bee. The night air was unfamiliar, heat and farm smells, manure, and something else, irrigation, water among orchards.
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED. Three people were ahead of me, shuffling along to a side table where they had a good view of Highway 80. Someone turned a chewing face in my direction. I was still cold. It was a mistake to come in here, all these eyes, and these weathered faces.
Half the coffee shop must be looking at me by now. I found an empty place at the counter. My wallet was jammed with crumpled money. The currency was stuck and would not respond to my spastic attempts to pull it out.
“Coffee, hon?” said the waitress.
I nodded, please.
She poured the Farmer Brother’s brew fast, a method I admire, throwing the coffee into the mug all at once. But I rarely drink coffee, thinking of it as a drink for people so addicted the caffeine has little effect. She set a glass crammed with ice on the counter, and I drank until the ice made a noise when I sucked it.
“Are you okay?” asked the waitress. Concerned—interested, even. But there was a hint of criticism, too.
“Do you have Cobb salad?” I asked.
I could have gone to the men’s room but I didn’t want to see my face. I left before my order arrived, leaving money beside the knife and fork.
THIRTY-FIVE
They polish the floors of a hospital with a machine that glides. The operator clings to a handle like a power lawn mower, the newly buffed floor shining. He sets out little signs, WARNING, WET FLOOR, a swath of light where the machine has passed.
Maybe I expected someone to stop me, so early in the morning. Maybe I expected the institution to be closed, forgetting that it never shut down, open twenty-four hours a day. Visiting hours, I was thinking. Come back later. People would look at me and know there was something wrong.
But they ignored me, the woman with the clipboard, the bald man on the phone. I passed by like someone who wasn’t there.
Maybe I took a wrong turn, distracted by a Pepsi machine, thirsty again, no coins in my pocket. I was lost in a room of weight machines. Over by the window was a big yellow spa, Olympic size, a brand I had never seen before.
“I took it easy on the garlic,” she was saying. “Perla said it might cause gas.”
The door was open but I knocked anyway. The sound turned Sofia into a statue, Woman with Spoon. She was holding a Tupperware bowl on her lap, and a long stainless steel spoon was dripping onto the floor. Dad had a napkin on his front, sitting in his wheelchair fully dressed, the same pants I had picked out for the hearing.
“Zachary, Florence is frantic,” Sofia said at last. It was rare for Sofia to refer to my mother by name, not your mother or she.
I had interrupted something between husband and wife. I considered leaving. Maybe the weird sensation I was experiencing was hunger.
“She got home around midnight and you were nowhere,” Sofia was saying.
I made a show of calm, finding a chair, the metal legs stuttering against the floor tile. I didn’t sit down yet, my knees feeling stiff and unreliable. “Minestrone for breakfast?” I asked. My words came out hoarse, leathery.
“Call your mother,” said Dad.
A drop of soup had stained the baby blue napkin tied around his neck. I located a chair in the corner under a pile of professional journals, some of the mail he was getting around to at last.
“Don’t bother sitting down,” he stage whispered. “Go call Flo,” he said, the respirator forcing him to pace his words. “And tell her you’re all right.”
Sofia looked away, blushing a little, maybe embarrassed to be suddenly a part of a family fight.
“You make it with ham hocks,” I said. I knew how I sounded. I was buying time, making conversation. “Cook it two or three days. I had it once, remember? That time Dad and I came back from the Marin headlands cold and wet. We had captured a rare butterfly, the Muir hairstreak, in a grove of giant cypress. I thought your soup was the best stuff I had ever tasted.”
She smiled at the compliment but didn’t put much energy into it, her mind on other things. “I didn’t bring the right spoon,” she said. “This one keeps dribbling.”
His pants needed to be ironed. The room had a stale, medicine smell, a smell like plastic, a TV fresh from the store.
“You’re not,” he said, waiting to get in rhythm with the breath machine, “going to sit there like that.”
My dad had no right talking to me like this, especially in front of Sofia. In a minute or two, I told myself, I would get a paper towel and wipe the drops of minestrone off the floor.
Dad gets this expression on his face, a silent shout. This was my dad’s usual style, Mr. Agreeable until he gets impatient. Sometimes you hope people will evolve, and they don’t.
I left the room, and this time people saw me, lowering a clipboard to say something, looking up from the waxing machine. It didn’t matter. I was leaving. Outside I hurried across the parking lot, like a man I read about once who had caught himself on fire and couldn’t stop power-walking out of town as fast as he could, keeping a few steps ahead of the pain.
But I did stop, finally, and watched a sea gull pecking at a squashed wrapper on the sidewalk, spearing it, taking it away. If I make a video someday it will be about flies and vultures, how we shouldn’t hate them. A man wiped his windshield with a towel, tilting his head to catch the angle of light off the glass. Cars started up, exhaust feathering into the cool morning.
Until I die I will remember: I stepped out of the shadow while Steven Ray McNorr unzipped his pants and peed, a long, steaming arc into the hedge beside the driveway.
He never saw me. He took his time, shook himself off and tucked himself back into his pants. It took a while, the zipper snagging. Then he slammed the truck door. He had trouble finding the right key, while I watched with the .38 in my hand.
And couldn’t use it.
THIRTY-SIX
“They are going to be here in forty-eight minutes,” Mom said. She was already dressed in something flowing and red, her thinking being that shades of scarlet were going to be her color from now on. She had begun using dye on her hair.
“They can see me the way I really am,” I said. I was on my knees, pulling weeds. Wet soaked into my pants from the moist soil, and something about the smell of lawn was satisfying.
“Try, Zachary. Please.”
With the arrival of the winter rains, the nutrients my mother had been scattering for months began to take effect, and everything that was a part of the lawn grew abundantly, including the weeds. Front lawn, back lawn, I was on my knees filling a cardboard box with crabgrass, devil’s grass, dandelions, and cockleburs. Then I had to rake the clawed places in the lawn, and when I was done I saw all those unnamable weeds in the seams of the sidewalk and dug them out with the point of a screwdriver.
“I don’t want him to see it like this,” I said.
“You aren’t even pulling weeds at this point, Zachary. You’re scraping moss.”
Bea had loaned me one of her books, three hundred pages on the theory of personality. I was beginning to feel that maybe I was a classic introvert in a world that would not shut up. I had promised Bea that she could meet my dad.
Dad was able to read, despite my earlier fears. I sent him Email almost every day, using a new computer Mom scrounged from her office. Dad was fitted with an attachment for his glasses, an infra-red point he used to direct a keyboar
d on a computer screen. He was beginning to write about the creature he had always loved. “Ten percent of the earth’s biomass consists of the nation of ants,” his first chapter began. I could tell this was going to be one of his best books. He could only work on it for an hour or two a day before he got too tired.
“Finish up, go in, and wash your hands,” my mother was saying. “I mean, just a suggestion. And put on some pants that don’t have what looks like green snot on the knees.”
Now that my father was out of danger, Perry’s messages tended to be about glaciers, wolves, and how the mother grizzly’s milk is twenty-five percent fat. Over Easter he was coming to the Bay Area with his dad, arranging to sell their old house. We were planning a hike to see the tule elk herd at Point Reyes.
“I didn’t want to wear heels,” she said, trying to be patient with me, and wanting me to hear the effort in her voice and appreciate it. “But these flats are too Little-Bo-Peep. Don’t you think?”
It was my dad’s first visit since it happened. It was his first visit anywhere, aside from a few hours watching television at home with Daniel. He had shaken off two bouts of pneumonia during the last four months, and was on a new antibiotic. Sofia was trying out their new van with a hydraulic lift. I had bought a sheet of half-inch-thick all-weather plywood and put it down over the front steps as a ramp for his chair. Mom and I had spent the morning rearranging furniture and working wrinkles out of the carpet.
When I swept off the sidewalk, I saw that there was really nothing more for me to do. I wondered what it was going to be like to have him here. I wondered how painful it would be for him, the stairway, the back garden. Sometimes I woke at night and couldn’t sleep thinking about him, straight through until dawn.
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