Lockdown

by Laurie R. King

  Library; teachers’ lounge; computer lab; music center: all the school’s rooms were shut and motionless but for the vibrations of terror, the clamor of the siren overriding the whimpers of frightened adolescents.

  All the school’s rooms, that is, except B18, and across the quad from it, the cafeteria.

  12:48

  Gordon

  The world stopped. The Atcheson boy looked up, white-faced, a pietà with Nick and another boy standing behind, while Mina, little Yasmina…

  She lay in the boy’s arms, paint-blackened eyes going wide at the realization of pain—and memory slapped at Gordon, hard and vivid: looking down at the face of another small and bloody woman, dying in his arms. Phrases rattled through his useless brain: Mina’s been shot, shot, minasbeenshot and my god where was linda but minasbeen shot—

  The breath Gordon took was like the jolt of a defibrillator. The world started again—with the blaring awareness that only wooden doors and a folded table stood in the way of the bullets. “Go!” he yelled at the boys, bending to scoop Mina up. “Go go go!”

  She was so tiny (Jasmin oh god Jasmin hold on) and ridiculously light, crooning in pain against his chest now as he wondered (impossible, surely?) if he’d brought (could it be?) this evil upon innocence, setting a revenge-driven corporate heel onto children.

  Halfway across the endless room, his mind began to elbow aside panic and deliver cold analysis: line of fire was door to stage—so a single shooter (so far) at the far end of B Wing. Steel door on Tío’s office: accept the trap, or risk breaking cover? Mendez? Even if she’s already down, there’ll be a SWAT team here in minutes.

  (Linda?!) He pushed away that thought, too, and barked out orders.

  “Everybody in the janitor’s room. Clear a space for Mina, find some blankets. Tío, you have a first-aid kit? Somebody call 911, tell them the shooter’s on the west side of B Wing, at the upper end. You—” The PT—where was he? Still near the back doors. “Don’t open those! There could be a second shooter. You have medical training?”

  The man let go of the handles. “Do you—”

  Shots hit the quad-side door again, slapping the folded table into the room a few inches every time. The children squealed and pushed inside the office, making it hard to deliver Mina onto the heap of old blankets. She cried out as Gordon laid her down, grabbing his hand. He bent to kiss her forehead, then shifted to make room for the reluctant PT.

  “I’m not going, Mina, but let the man take a look. You’ll be fine.”

  Her eyes held his as he gently pulled free, retreating as far as the door. The little room was packed, even with four of them still outside. Until the shooter moved, Nick and Brendan were safe where they were, just outside the door. Gordon looked at Tío—then looked more closely. “You’re bleeding.”

  The old man glanced down at his ragged left sleeve, stained with blood. “It is nothing. We must get the children to safety.”

  “Have the PT strap it when he’s finished with Mina. And the kids should be safe enough—the walls are concrete and your door’s steel. We’ll close ourselves inside if the shooter moves.”

  Tío had other ideas. “The storage shed, across the drive—”

  The therapist, who had found a pair of scissors in the first-aid kit, spoke up. “We can’t reach the shed. The doors are locked.”

  Tío frowned at the obvious. “I have keys.”

  “From the outside—something’s blocking all the back doors. None of them open more than a few inches.”

  Above the shots, over the wailing alarm, Gordon heard the breath leave Tío’s lungs. The old man swayed, his phlegmatic brown face rigid with horror. “Ay, Madre.”

  TWO YEARS AGO

  Tío: his story

  Ellos me llaman «Paleta Man»…

  They call me “Paleta Man,” here in my new country.

  Paleta is ice cream, but in San Felipe, the Ice Cream Man has a tall truck covered with bright pictures and signs saying WATCH FOR CHILDREN, with a loudspeaker that plays the same notes over and over, exciting the children and driving their parents mad.

  I do not own a truck with loud music. Trucks cost much money, even the old ones, and I am a poor man.

  Pero yo soy contento: but I am content. I own a small cart with three wheels and a handle to push it by, with thick insulated sides and a pair of harmonious bells. The children listen for me, and when I turn the corner of their street and play my bells, they run out with their coins to stand looking at my own pictures. They point or they tell me what they want and I reach in and then close the top quickly, taking their money and wishing them a good day. They are polite children, most of them, as the children of poor people tend to be, so they thank me and I walk on, leaving them to their young pleasures of sweet ice. I have been other things in my life, but here, now, I am the paleta man. I sell small measures of happiness in a way that allows me to be out in the open air, and gives me gentle exercise, and keeps me in contact with friendly children. Why would I not be content?

  True, it is not much of a job for a man. Certainly it is a job beneath a man who has been to university, who was the headmaster of a village school, in the peaceful days before the soldiers came.

  In a better time, another age, I would still be living in that village, writing on the chalkboard and teaching the children history and government and the rules of grammar. I would have a wife, her hair gone gray, who would greet me when I came home and sit with me before the fire in the evenings. I would have grandchildren, perhaps, to read to and to teach. Instead, the war began, and our village was very near to where the revolt boiled up out of discontent and hunger. Before we thought to worry, there were rebels in the streets, then soldiers. Between the rope sandals of the one and the leather boots of the other, our quiet village was trampled to death.

  I was away when my village died, on a mathematics training course. The lecture hall began to buzz with rumor, and I left the city to hitchhike on trucks and motor scooters, and to run in my formal shoes until I reached my village to find smoke and uniforms and television cameras. The tents of the Red Cross were filled with cries.

  And my school, my beloved school, center of the village’s hopes and dreams? Those men chose the school as the place to end hope. They gathered our children inside. They chained the doors. They smashed the windows and propped their guns on the sills. The child who survived said the men laughed at their shrieks.

  My son was still warm when I found him in the Red Cross tent, but he was not breathing.

  My wife also died. Not then, but fourteen days later, when she went to the river with her pockets full of stones. I will say no more about her death, because when I do she haunts my dreams, and I am ready to forget. As if that were possible. As if my schoolteacher’s hands could forget what they did to the man who ordered the death of my village, once I caught up with him. Blood is so very hot; it shocks the skin when it spills, and the hands never lose that memory. Never.

  I am no longer a schoolmaster, no longer a father and husband taking his revenge. My hands are twisted with age as they push their paleta cart up and down the streets of San Felipe where once, I would have been merely one of a dozen kinds of deliverymen. Now only I walk there. Even the newspaper comes from the metal skin of a vehicle.

  Because I walk through my barrio and do not steer a truck down its streets, my knowledge of the area is close. Intimate. I hear arguments and drug deals and lovemaking. I see corruption and violence and beauty. I know that a husband has found a job when his children buy real ice creams instead of cheap frozen water. I hear when the teenaged son of a family gets arrested, or when a girl gets in trouble. I know which house is occupied by illegal immigrants and which spreads the plague of the darker drugs. People tell me which coyote can be trusted not to abandon his charges in the desert, and I see where a local dealer stores his pills and packets, for fear the police knock down his front door.

  One morning, a year or two ago, I heard a gunshot. A large man ran from th
e back of a shop, pausing to drop something behind a garbage can before he fled in his powerful car. When I went to see, I found a thick roll of $100 bills, six tiny packets of white powder, and a gun. Before I could direct the police toward it (which I have done, once or twice, when I came across wrongdoings), I heard that the man had crashed his car and died. So I kept what I found, lest a child come across it.

  Yes, these things and more I know, because I walk the streets and people talk to me, in the neighborhood between the shops of Main Street and the industrial lots behind it.

  My own home lies among the fields outside of town, a small trailer whose front supports an enormous rose bush with flowers of palest yellow that become rose hips of dark red—very like the one my young wife planted at our front door in my village in the hills. At the back is an arbor of grape and chayote squash, with a fenced-in garden of tomato and nopal, chilis and marigolds. It makes for a long, dusty walk to town, but it is worth the effort, to be able to spend summer evenings sitting under my arbor with a book from the library, breathing the smell of roses and listening to the silence.

  Most of the people who live where I sell my paletas have neither silence nor roses. Trains rumble close to the houses, refrigerated trucks wait with their engines running, wandering dogs are hit by speeding teenagers.

  It was just such a thing that got me started on the other side of my work as a paleta man: a dog that was struck, and lay suffering loudly.

  I was two streets away when I heard the shriek of the tires and the loud gulping howl of the dog, and I knew at once what it was. The noise did not stop. When I turned the corner past the sweet-smelling panaderia and saw the faces of the mothers hurrying their frightened children away from the sound, I knew that it would be up to me to stop the torment.

  I knew the dog, of course. Any man who walks the streets discovers which dogs must be watched and which are trustworthy, and this old bitch was a sweet-tempered creature with dry yellow fur. Her boy loved her, and always shared his ice cream with her. But the boy was at school, his parents at work, and the dog lay in the gutter with her hind quarters scarlet with blood.

  It was not as if my hands had not done such jobs before. I had been killing chickens for the table since I was a child, and I had put a dog out of its misery before. No need to feel the heat of spilled blood on my hands here, and it would be a mercy—to the creature and to the neighborhood.

  I reached into my paleta cart and took out one of the old dog’s favorite ice-cream bars. I squatted near her and made something of a show out of unwrapping the bar. She kept howling, but she was also watching my hands. When the treat was free of its paper, I took it by its stick and held it out. After a moment the terrible noise faltered, and her mouth came down greedily on the cold, creamy bar.

  As she slobbered her way through it, I stretched out my hand—carefully, since a mortally wounded animal is an unpredictable thing—and stroked her head. Now was the time for gentle hands to remove her from pain.

  Except that close up, I could see that the injury was not to her spinal column, but to her leg.

  The break was bad. It might even require surgery. And the family was poor. I sat on my heels for a moment, thinking, then looked up at the others—mostly women, but also two young men brought from their houses by the noise. I rejected the one with the bloodshot eyes, and spoke to the other.

  “I will go and fetch the veterinarian, if you would keep distracting her with ice creams. There are four, so make them last.”

  One of the women shook her head. “That doctor won’t cross the street unless you hand him money first.”

  I got to my feet, wincing at the crack from my old knees. “He will come.”

  I warned the boy to keep his hands clear from danger, and made my way to the animal clinic, three blocks away. The waiting room had several people there with various creatures, but I politely pushed toward the back, and was soon in a room with the doctor. I explained what I needed. He said, “And who will pay me for that?”

  I had intended to offer him money. I did, after all, have a roll of $100 bills. But as I looked into his eyes, I also remembered what I knew about his business, and I decided that there was a better use for that money. So instead, I smiled, and I said that he would do this for the neighborhood, free of charge. Either that or the police would learn who had been making illegal sales of a drug called ketamine.

  The man’s bluster froze. He looked at the open door, then turned to the cabinet and took out his traveling bag.

  The dog wore a plaster cast for some weeks, and limps still. The boy now attends the local college, where his tuition is paid by the occasional envelope of $100 bills. The two still happily share ice creams, when they get the chance.

  The incident with the dog occurred during my third season behind the paleta cart, but after that day I became everyone’s Tío, their helpful uncle. The women refused to let their children buy from the noisy truck when it ventured into my territory, driving him off with their closed purses. They found small jobs for me—repairing a spitting light switch, putting a strong new lock on a door to keep out an angry boyfriend, opening a bedroom window sealed dangerously shut by the paint of years. Once or twice I assisted residents with their newly arrived family members, when la Migra came sniffing about. People paid me when they could, gave me vegetables from their gardens, but mostly they bought my paletas, even if the ice cream was a little soft.

  I see that I have gone on long with my tale, and yet only now is the story of Tamara Miller beginning. But I do not apologize, because without knowing about the cart and the dog and the little jobs old Tío Jaime the Paleta Man was sometimes called on to perform, my involvement in one woman’s problems would surely seem the stuff of an old man’s imagination.

  But now you know that I am Tío, friend to the barrio.

  So I knew how the husband of a young woman named Tamara Miller would beat her on two Fridays every month. He would receive his pay, he would cash it at the cashing service next door to the bar on Main Street, he would go into the bar. After some hours, he would go home and hit her. The next day she would not come out of her house. Two or three days later, she would emerge to buy from me one of the ice-cream cups I sell to be eaten with a small flat wooden spoon—a little reward, I think, for surviving another round with her husband’s fists, and a tiny gesture of revenge, that his money should be spent on her luxury.

  On those days I wanted to refuse her money—but I did not, for fear that she would no longer come out to buy this taste of sweetness for herself. In this matter, her small pride was more important than my own.

  She was a nice woman, was Tamara Miller, pretty in that pale way some Anglos have when their hair is too dark to be called blond and too light to be brown. She was tiny, shorter even than my wife, whose head used to rest beneath my chin when I wrapped my arms around her and held her close. Señora Miller’s house was the cleanest place in a neighborhood of clean houses—which could not have been easy, since it stood at the end of the busy road with its back on a field, from both of which the dust rose in clouds at every wind. She had a nice garden, too, vegetables and flowers, and when she bought her little cup of chocolate ice cream and peeled off the top to eat it slowly, sometimes we would stand and pass a few words about what she was growing. Two or three times I brought her cuttings from my own garden, so that next to her front door there grew a small rose of palest yellow. I looked at it every time I went past her gate, greeting it as a friend.

  Tamara Miller had no real neighbors. On one side of her house lay the yards of a plumbing supply business, on the other rose up the high, blank wall of a warehouse. Across the street was a printer’s, and behind her back fence stretched fields. It was a busy place during the day, but everything shut down in the evenings. After dusk the street was deserted.

  One morning, three days after the first Friday in the month of May, I sold Tamara Miller a cup of ice cream. She had trouble holding the flat wooden spoon because one of her fingers was i
n a splint. I said nothing and went about my business, but a short time later I stood with my elbow on the fence of another woman who lived not far from the Miller house.

  Señora Rodriguez was a retired cannery worker whose children had grown and whose fingers had itched for grandchildren. She had spent most of her life organizing people, from her husband to the union, and I knew well that nothing would give her greater pleasure than organizing Tamara Miller. I leaned against the fence watching her grandchildren revel in the sugary pleasures she had bought them.

  “Do you know Tamara Miller?” I asked her. “In the house near the plumbing supply?”

  “Sure. She’s very stuck-up.”

  Actually, what she said was that the Miller girl acted like she had a stick up a part of her body. I said, “It’s not the stick up there that troubles her, it’s the fist she gets in her face.”

  “She’s not the only one around here,” said Señora Rodriguez. She sounded as if she was throwing the problem away, but in truth I knew that she was one of those that women in trouble turned to, and she could be as fierce as a tiger in how she helped them. We often act in ways that conceal our true feelings, especially when those feelings are strong.

  “That is true,” I said, trying to sound like I was apologizing for all the wrongdoing by all the men who ever lived. “But she is also very young, and without a family. It is too bad she cannot find some way of reaching out for friendship. Maybe she could take a cooking class down at the adult school, if her husband would let her. She was asking me the other day about how to make chiles rellenos. What do I know? Ah well, I must be going. My ice creams will melt in this sun.”