Gun Love

by Jennifer Clement

  Now I use my hands as if they had no value, my mother said.

  We’ll go to the church in the afternoon. When I get back from school.

  Yes. Before nightfall.

  But nightfall never came because that day never had a night. The sun never stopped burning that day up.

  It was Noelle who told me what had happened.

  Noelle had stepped out for a moment to hang some clothes on the short laundry line tied between a tree and her trailer.

  She’d heard and seen it all.

  The truth is you never know when it’s your last day, Noelle said. You never know.

  She told me that, after I’d left for school, my mother had stepped out of the Mercury and walked out of the visitors’ parking area, through the main gate, and into the trailer park.

  A young man had been sitting on the cracked plastic swing in the recreation area gently rocking back and forth. He had curly hair, blue eyes, and was wearing a thick black wool sweater. He had a gun in his right hand. Eli was standing beside the man and they were talking. Noelle could not hear what they were saying.

  As my mother walked barefoot toward the park’s bathroom, the young man pulled himself out of the swing and moved toward her in a few quick strides.

  Noelle said that Eli called out my mother’s name.

  My mother stopped walking when she saw the gun in the young man’s hand.

  Noelle said the young man and my mother had moved close enough for her to overhear everything that was said.

  Lady, why are you wearing a nightgown? the young man asked.

  I just woke up.

  You run around in your pajamas?

  I live here, my mother said.

  Why aren’t you wearing shoes?

  It’s warm.

  Then he held up the gun and pointed it at my mother.

  You’re going to shoot me, she said.

  Yes.

  I understand this is what’s going to happen, my mother said.

  Yes, he answered. Now I declare new things.

  I knew my mother’s caring was set on fire when he started to shoot.

  My mother knew he had hitchhiked across the United States, from California to Florida, in order to see if love existed in America.

  Inside his body my mother could see electric trains, toy trucks, Halloween candy, and toy guns, and even a BB gun for killing birds.

  She felt the sunburn on his shoulders.

  My mother knew all this young man needed was love. He needed a girl to take his hand and pull him into her bed.

  Love did not exist in America.

  My mother walked straight into the shooting gun like she was walking into a water sprinkler on a hot Florida day in July: wet me wet me shoot me shoot me wet me shoot me.

  PART TWO

  19

  Mr. Don’t Come Back came back.

  As I heard the story, I knew exactly what my mother had been thinking the moment she was shot. What Rose called my mother’s empathy malady was my inheritance. It was passed on to me like her fear of a gas leak from a kitchen oven.

  I heard everything from Noelle when she came to pick me up at school. I’d never seen her outside of the trailer park before except at church.

  On the day of my mother’s death, as I left the school building, Noelle walked toward me in her stiff, tiptoe Barbie-doll walk.

  One cannot walk home alone, Noelle said.

  Why?

  Silence is also judgment, she said. A rabbit can be afraid of the moon. Death visits every house.

  Just tell me, please. Just be clear.

  A kid with a gun killed your mama. I heard everything. I saw everything.

  At first I was quiet.

  Did you hear me? Noelle said. Margot was shot. A kid with a gun killed your mama. Pearl, she’s dead.

  At first I was quiet. And then I was so grateful that my heart beat by itself because I knew I would never be able to make it work if I had to do it. My heart’s independent beats, beats that worked no matter what terrible thing had happened, made me feel tenderness toward my body and my insignificant life.

  As we walked along the highway toward the trailer park, Noelle reached out and took my hand. I was fourteen years old, but I did not have to count how many people had held my hand before this moment. I didn’t need math. Noelle’s hand in mine felt so large compared to my mother’s child-sized hand.

  Many times my mother had said she hoped I would die before she did.

  You won’t be able to survive life without me, my mother explained. It will hurt so bad. There isn’t even a song for it yet. Pearl, I hope you die first.

  My mother was right. I should have died first.

  Eli’s down at the police station, Noelle said.

  What’s Eli got to do with this?

  Nothing. Well, he sold the kid the gun and he was there when it all happened. Well, he didn’t really sell it. It was a trade. That kid gave Eli his silver belt as a trade for the gun. And Eli was even wearing the belt when the cops took him away. It was fancy. It was silver with a gold eagle engraved in the center.

  After Mr. Don’t Come Back left us, my mother had missed him. She felt the absence of her destiny.

  And wherever Eli was, he was holding his head high as if he’d stolen everyone’s good fortune. He was never, ever going to turn his pockets inside out. I knew the song.

  I’m sorry, Noelle said. I wish I’d been your friend and now it’s too late. Who knows where you’re going to live now. It’s afterward when we wish we’d been kind. I wish I’d baked you a cake and taken it to your car or let you use our bathroom to shower. I didn’t think of these things. I should have given you some of my dolls. I didn’t really know that you and Margot mattered.

  I stayed quiet. I listened to my heart. It beat as if every day were the same day.

  I’m sorry, Noelle said again. I saw everything. Your mother tried to stop those bullets with her hands.

  I looked over at Noelle. In the opening of her blouse, in the pocket place between her breasts, lay a dead swallow.

  There was a young woman dressed in a blue suit from Child Protective Services sitting inside the Mercury waiting for me. She was on the passenger side with the door wide open, filling in some forms on her lap. She didn’t even know she was sitting in my bedroom.

  As Noelle and I approached, the woman got out of the car.

  She said, You must be Pearl.

  I nodded.

  I still couldn’t speak. It was as if a superstition had taken over me, which I didn’t even know I had. I thought, If I speak, all this will be true. I knew the words spoken would turn into the truth lived.

  The trailer park was very quiet.

  Most everyone is at the police station giving formal statements as to what they saw or heard, Noelle said. They already talked to me because I was the only person who witnessed it all. Life can surprise you.

  And Eli? Well, he’s not even considered a witness, Noelle said, as if she knew what I’d been thinking. He’s part of the story. He got the kid the gun. What were they doing there hanging out at the swing anyway?

  I wasn’t speaking but I was placing Eli’s name in my pocket like something I was going to chew on later.

  The woman from Child Protective Services walked over to her car, which was parked right behind the Mercury, and took out a large and empty army-green duffel bag from the backseat.

  Go to your car, girl, and pack up your stuff, she said.

  She opened her trunk.

  Put your things in here, she ordered, and got back into her own car behind the wheel.

  Noelle said, I’ll help you.

  I still did not hear any word come out of me.

  Noelle held open the duffel bag while I put in my bags of clothes, dolls, and books
and all of my mother’s plastic supermarket bags filled with her things.

  I also ripped off my drawing of the solar system that we’d stuck on the back of the driver’s seat and put that in too.

  Since my mother always said I was smart, I reached under the driver’s seat and took out the small black gun Eli had given to us.

  I didn’t look at Noelle, but I knew she’d seen the weapon because she said, Hey, Pearl, careful with that. You’d better not take that.

  Noelle had known me all my life, but she didn’t seem to know that “you’d better not” were my three favorite words.

  I pushed Eli’s gun down deep into the duffel bag and then added in my collection of things I’d found in the dump.

  After taking everything out of the car, there was only one thing left for me to get. I pulled the lever that opened the trunk and walked around and looked inside. All the trunk treasures were gone. I looked at the empty space that had once held silverware, Limoges plates, crystal wineglasses, a violin, a music box, the Chinese elephant-tusk boat, and my mother’s silk bags of jewels.

  The only thing left was the long silk box with a yellow ribbon. It didn’t fit in the duffel bag, but I took it anyway.

  I closed the trunk and walked around the car and made sure the windows were rolled up and closed the doors.

  I left the key in the ignition. We’d never turned that key and driven somewhere. We’d been parked for almost fifteen years.

  Are you finished now? the woman called out as she rolled her window down. It’s late. Let’s go. Get in the car.

  Noelle walked me to the passenger side and opened the door.

  You know, Pearl, Noelle said. We all liked your mother even though she was never one of us. I think my mother said that about her once.

  I nodded.

  You will take a long, long trip, Noelle said, and handed me a piece of Trident gum. Here, take this, she said. It’s all I have.

  I put the gum in my mouth and got in the car and closed the door.

  For a second I pressed my palm to the window’s glass inside and Noelle did the same on the outside.

  If April May had been with me she would have said, That Noelle is thinking about Eli, thinking she has a chance now that your mama’s dead. By tomorrow she’ll be baking him some cookies. By tomorrow she’ll be spraying on perfume. She’ll be his shoulder to cry on.

  The woman from Child Protective Services turned the key, and the motor started up. The ice air from the air-conditioning blew into the car as the wintergreen gum filled my mouth with the taste of pinecones.

  I like it very cold in here, so I hope you don’t mind, the woman said.

  She backed the car out of the visitors’ parking area and away from the sign that said WELCOME TO INDIAN WATERS TRAILER PARK. Then she turned the steering wheel to the right and drove onto the highway.

  I thought about swiveling in my seat to look out the back window as we drove away, but I didn’t. There was no one waving goodbye.

  In the car the woman said, I tell this to all the kids that I pick up. Please don’t be calling me every time you fall and scrape your knee or something. I’m your social worker. You’re my case. No, no, I ain’t a lost relative, some aunt or something or Mary Poppins. I’m taking you to your foster family. And listen, only call me if there’s an emergency. Put on your seat belt.

  I didn’t answer. I clipped in my seat belt. I looked out the window. I chewed Noelle’s gum.

  So, you’re wondering if you can see your mother. Every kid I pick up wants to do this because they don’t believe in death so, listen to me clearly, that’s never going to happen. Nobody’s going to let you see her, girl. She’s full of holes. No, I haven’t seen her, not personally, no, but that’s what I heard someone say. One of those cops said your mother’s full of holes.

  I didn’t answer.

  Why are you so quiet? Huh? You deaf? You’re funny-looking and you don’t talk? You don’t even cry for your mama? I’m not seeing any wet tears on your face.

  I didn’t answer.

  Well, if you’re not going to talk, you can read then. Here’s your file. Read it for yourself. Those papers will tell you everything you need to know.

  With one hand on the steering wheel, the woman swiveled and reached into the backseat and passed me a few pages that were stapled inside a yellow file. Then she drove me away from my car-home, the dump, the swing set, and the killed river.

  The CPS social worker turned on the radio and drove me away from my childhood.

  If my mother had been in the backseat, driving with us, she’d have said, You think you get a dose of tragedy and that’s that. You think it can’t get worse and that you’re saved now. But tragedy is not like medicine. You don’t get a dose like a pill or spoonful. Tragedy always kicks in.

  And this time it was not pretend. This time I was really driving away from the trailer park, down the highway in the direction of Sarasota. We took a left up at the first light, then a left, and then a right on the ramp and through the row of palm trees, past the Walmart. My eyes followed the long white line painted on the asphalt in the middle of the highway. That long white line was a river that led from Niagara Falls straight to the Gulf of Mexico.

  My mother would have said, Drive fast. Let’s get a speeding ticket. Leave skid marks.

  My mind was a grammar book full of question marks. Who killed her? Why? How did it happen? Where was I going? Who cared about me? Would I see my mother? Where would I live? Would I ever see April May or Corazón again? Where was Eli? Would they find my mother’s family? Where would I go to school? Whom did I belong to?

  I opened the pages on my lap and read the section in my file that was a Xerox copy of the police report. It had been filed only a few hours ago. My mother had been killed a few minutes after I’d left for school. She’d been dead for seven hours. I’d lived for seven hours thinking I was in her thoughts.

  I read every word in my file.

  The first page contained a policeman’s report: White woman in her late twenties shot twenty times at the entrance to Indian Waters Trailer Park. Attempted to get a pulse on the woman but none was found. No witnesses of the shooting came forward, but shots were heard at 8:15 a.m. Several residents said they heard at least twenty shots fired. Rose Smith and her husband Sergeant Bob Smith said that they didn’t give it much importance because shots were always being heard in the area, as people like shooting at the river for alligators. Rose Smith said the victim was Margot France and that she was homeless living with her daughter, Pearl, in the Mercury parked outside the trailer park. Corazón Luz and her husband Ray Luz, also residents, both said they were not at home at the time. Pastor Rex Wood, also a resident, said he had not heard anything. The shooter was found dead on the ground next to the victim. His driver’s license issued in California said his name was Paul Luke Mathews, sex male, race white, eyes blue. Height 6 ft. Mathews seems to have gone to the trailer park to sell his gun in an anti-violence, gun-buying program run by the local church. Mathews appears to have killed the victim, identified by the neighbors as Margot France, and then killed himself. The scene was secured with crime scene tape.

  My mother was killed twenty times.

  As I read the report, Laura Nyro’s voice singing “Wedding Bell Blues” came in through the car’s speakers. It was one of my mother’s favorite songs.

  The second page of my file had only one sentence. It stated: Victim’s only known relative is a daughter, Pearl France.

  My life was nine words long.

  I closed the file and looked out the window.

  I took Noelle’s chewing gum out of my mouth and reached under the car seat to stick it there. My fingers felt several hard, round bumps of other pieces left behind. This social worker’s car seat was a graveyard of children’s chewing gum.

  The woman turned the music way up.
She wanted to make sure the radio was too loud for a conversation. I’m sure she was sick and tired of talking to leftover kids.

  Laura Nyro’s voice filled up the car and no other sound fit inside.

  As we drove away from the trailer park and away from the Mercury, away from April May and Noelle, it began to drizzle. I felt our puzzled land bow toward me. A break in the clouds lit up the inside of the car. I felt the trees lean, the highways rise, even the noonday Florida sun seemed to draw closer to my orbit.

  As the raindrops spotted the car window I heard my mother’s voice. She filled me up like a song. She said, When a little girl loses her mother, because her mother becomes a stranger’s target practice, even the rain falls with grace.

  20

  The foster home was a large two-story house surrounded by a garden in the suburbs of Sarasota.

  As we approached the house, the social worker turned off the radio and explained that the house belonged to Mr. David Brodsky. He and his wife, who had died a few years ago, had fostered children for decades. Mr. Brodsky took in children who were in an emergency situation until a more permanent solution could be found.

  The system’s broken. Broken, the social worker said. Normally you wouldn’t have kids staying with an old man, we like families, but there’s no one taking in kids. What can you do? Beggars can’t be choosers, right? Am I right?

  She turned off the motor.

  Mr. Brodsky takes in the shoots because they’re the emergency cases. It’s hard to find someone who can take you in fast. There’re two other shoots staying here now. We call you children shoots because your parents were shot.

  The social worker opened the car door and leaned forward and released the lever of the trunk.

  Listen, she said. While you’re here, in the meantime, Child Protective Services and the police will be looking around to see if you have any relatives they can call. They couldn’t find anything in your car that linked you to a family. You sure you don’t know of any kin? An aunt or cousin? Is there someone? There must be someone.

  I shook my head.