by Paul Griner
I knew the feeling of trying to love your boy into safety, but I couldn’t resist teasing him after we switched back to our old seats. You played college football, right? I said. Tight end? Receiver?
Look at me. He spread his hands over his girth. Offensive lineman.
Should have been obvious, I realized. The fat girdling his mid-section. Too bad, I said. If we derail, I was thinking maybe you could catch the boys.
You’re a grief artist, aren’t you?
He had such a stern face I thought, Uh-oh. You never knew if someone liked being teased until you did it, and by then it was too late.
He held that face so long I started to apologize, until he grinned and said, Nah, and tapped me with one forearm, hard enough to rock me. Just ragging you.
Right away in the hotel room with its two sets of bunk beds and chunky dark wooden bureaus, the boys started roughhousing.
Lamont and I were unpacking, putting folded shirts in the sticking drawers, and Lamont said, You boys stop that. Someone’s bound to get hurt. He punched the drawer closed with the side of his fist.
The boys didn’t listen and Liam’s head hit the corner of the bed, hard.
I told you boys, Lamont said.
Yes sir, you did, Latrell said.
He said, Yes sir, and, No sir, a lot, and I felt momentarily inadequate, that I’d been lax, until I realized that Latrell hadn’t listened to his father any more than Liam had me. Liam knelt on the rug and rubbed his head over and over. Lamont stepped over him to put his suitcase away. Seeing he wasn’t getting much sympathy, Liam said, I don’t know whether or not I have a concussion, but I can tell you this, I don’t remember much about yesterday.
Don’t worry, Latrell told him. I didn’t hit my head and I can’t remember much of yesterday either.
What do you know? Liam said. You’re just a big hunk of fuck.
Uncle Sam Smackdown
OCTOBER 1, 2015
Nine days before the shooting, the Navy notified the shooter that they’d rejected his application.
Home Visit Checklist, Two Years Before It Happens
OCTOBER 2013
Two days after Venny Bosc’s call, Detective Sawyer sat for ten minutes looking out the rain-speckled window at the trees all black with rain and finished his coffee while he turned the events over in his mind; it was good to shape things. Then he typed up his report, including his visit to the boy’s house. Venny Bosc’s name appeared in the report, it had to, but it would never come out.
Both parents home, both attentive and polite, the schoolteacher mother clearly distraught, the father, a former Air Force officer, short and wiry and contained. On his office wall hung a small, framed medal; the commendation said it was for meritorious service in Niger.
Sawyer had a dim notion where that was. The father straightened the citation’s plain wooden frame with his thumb and said, We moved around a lot when he was younger, but we’ve been here since I got out. Four years now. He’d become a commercial pilot, but left that for the private security business.
No signs of trouble in the house then, which nonetheless troubled Sawyer. More school shooters came from two-parent homes than not, each time there was another one the profiles were updated, but the truth was there wasn’t a profile.
Some were bullied, some were bullies, some were both bullied and bullies. Some had loving parents and others parents who beat them. Churchgoers and atheists, strict or lax, moving a lot or stable, popular or loners or jocks or somewhere in between, no more pattern than rain. Some made detailed plans and some seemed impulsive and some were psychotic, though they did always tell. Sometime, somewhere, somehow, they all let their plans slip.
A cry for help maybe, or the thrill of teasing, the rush of power, you never knew. So many teen boys were awed by violence, they talked about all kinds of things. As a boy, Sawyer had filled his father’s old cologne bottles with gasoline and turpentine, thinking they might make bombs, and tucked them behind berms and lit fuses for them and waited. Maybe this was that, but you had to check.
This boy, once he knew a detective was there, looked sad and scared, not guilty. Not angry. And apologized right away. Freckles and skinny arms and a baggy mustard-colored tee shirt with a famous skateboarder’s face. Sawyer’s own boys had that shirt. So much Axe body spray it was a wonder the walls still had paint.
No TV in his room, unusual in this neighborhood, steroidal houses and multiple late-model cars and nearly all white. Nearly all school shooters were white, so that was something to look out for, but no TV meant that in here, at least, he wasn’t playing violent video games. Yet that wasn’t a clue either, really. Girls played violent video games and they never shot up schools, so what was up with that?
Sawyer asked if there were guns in the house and the parents said no and the boy did too. The irony of a Black man asking about guns in a white household, he never said a thing about it. A joke might lighten the mood, but sometimes a little tension was a useful tool.
You don’t mind if I search your room then? That would be okay?
The slightest hesitation before the boy nodded, it could have been anything.
So Sawyer searched. Under the mattress, in each drawer, his backpack, the closet. Some porn under his sweaters, that was probably what had caused him to hesitate, which surprised Sawyer. Most boys found porn on the internet these days, his sons did. Hell, he did from time to time, but the magazines were old-school. He tried to make sure the parents didn’t see the magazines when he lifted the sweaters; they each sat on one arm of a stuffed chair, still as statues. No guns, no bombs, no fireworks; maybe the other boy was the one supplying them.
Sawyer hadn’t asked about the other boy and didn’t think he would. Doing so might tell this one it was his neighbor Venny Bosc who’d made the call, and besides, this was the boy who’d unnerved her.
From a bedside table drawer Sawyer took a leather-bound journal and read through it page-by-page, long enough to see that nothing in it indicated planning. Frustration, grandiosity mixed with searing self-criticism, anger at being cut from the baseball team. Each of those Sawyer remembered from his own teen years, markers of depression, he knew now, but also markers of standard teen mileposts. Which way would they send him? That, you never knew.
Also, mad love for a girl the boy hadn’t yet had the courage to talk to, Barb Brown. Her daily schedule, the way her brown hair hung halfway down her back, the warmth he felt when she turned her smile on him. Her freckles. The room was so quiet then. The boy and the boy’s parents waiting and watching as he made his slow way through the book, their slow breathing, the crinkling of the turning pages.
It had a lot of pen-and-ink drawings. He studied those too, and took pictures of a few with his phone. Some of them were really good, none violent. Some were of birds or animals, a few he guessed were of the girl and some were of heavily muscled men, perhaps the man this awkward skinny boy hoped to turn into.
You know, he said to the boy, I always wished I could draw. Still do. That ibis you did? And the ones of the rafting trip? He tapped the notebook. You’re good. Keep at it. You have a gift.
He put it back in the drawer and closed the drawer with his fingertips and tapped it, twice. If there were problems, and there were always problems, even the smoothest-looking life had them, you always wanted to point them toward a way out. Ways, if you could. But the drawing would do. Really, I mean that, he said. You could have a career in front of you.
Typing up his visit notes, Sawyer wondered why he’d said that, if it wasn’t too much. What kid believed a detective had a good eye for drawing talent? He laughed at himself. Well, he’d tried. He’d wanted to ask the boy why he used pen and ink to draw instead of pencil, and perhaps he should have, the start of a conversation. Maybe if he had, the kid would come to him some day about whatever was troubling him, but he doubted it. He’d find others to talk to first.
Sawyer put the report in the system just in case, including the bit about the drawing.
If another call ever came in or if the boy got caught stealing or vandalizing a store or a car or a neighbor’s house, it would be another red flag, the slow but steady movement from stray talk to tough talk to criminal behavior. Something to watch for, to raise the alert level, a pattern. But his gut told him that wouldn’t happen here, not with this boy. Though you never knew. He trusted his gut, but sometimes his gut didn’t deliver.
In the Beginning
OCTOBER 10, 2015
Liam lay on his back in the hospital bed in a recovery room, strapped to various beeping machines, one shoulder huge with gauze, much of the rest of him covered in blood. His face, his hair, what was left of his clothes, not his pale chest or hands. The nurse said they’d cleaned him up as best they could but he had numerous facial fractures and they worried about hurting him, so they hadn’t yet cleaned his face. It looked like someone had dumped a vat of purple Kool-Aid on him.
He’d already had one operation and they thought there might be more. I wanted to hold him, but I couldn’t, and even if I could, I wasn’t sure where I could touch him that wouldn’t hurt. Come back! I thought, but was too shy to say aloud. Later, social constraints would disappear for me, but just then they still held.
Why the facial fractures? I asked. The nurse had told me her name, but I’d forgotten it. Or it was another nurse? Time crawled and then sprinted, a slug and a cheetah, and amid all the confusion, faces blurred together. Police milled in the hallway, radios squawking. A man shouted, She’s coming! It’s a mother! Cover her up! It’s a mother!
Was he shot in the face? I asked.
I remembered coming into the kitchen once to find Liam standing before the open fridge wearing his swim goggles and a snorkel.
Oh no, she said. Shoulder. We don’t know about the facial fractures, how they happened.
Orbital bone, palatine bone, cheekbone, nose, jaw. She listed them off matter-of-factly. On the underside of his wrist was a smeared map of the world in fine black ink; I’d drawn it on him that morning. South America and the US had been rubbed off, Canada was half-bloody. He’d been disappointed that we couldn’t play hooky and go apple picking again—to make it a tradition, to do here in his new town what we’d done in our old one—and the drawing had been a small consolation. It looked like a temporary tattoo. Show Latrell, I’d said. He’ll be impressed.
I’d wanted to go apple picking too, had suggested it, but May nixed the idea. Rigidity had returned and Liam wasn’t the only one who was disappointed, though he’d overcome his more easily than I had mine, drawing a flower in the ten minutes after breakfast before leaving for school, a red tulip, May’s favorite. I’d sat and sulked. Did I regret it? Not yet. There was a before and an after, but I still wasn’t fully in the after. I kept thinking I’d find a reset button to end the nightmare.
From the hallway came raised voices and a shriek of agony, and my heart flatlined. It sounded like a hawk, but I knew it was the mother, another parent, getting the final news. I thought, They can’t all die. She shrieked again so loudly it seemed as if her spine was being ripped out. I supposed it was.
Pull harder, I thought, to the hawk-god destroying her. With his bloody beak and sharp claws busy elsewhere, maybe we could slip away unnoticed, though my own spine tingled with superstition and shame.
Can I touch his foot? I asked the nurse.
Yes, she said, typing notes on her iPad. That would be okay. His feet are fine, I’ve taken his toe temperature.
A long time later, I learned about toe temperature gradient, that the nurse was worried he’d die right there before me, but just then, all that vocabulary was still ahead of me.
In the hallway, someone shouted. It’s another mother!
Liam was warm, warm. I was holding too tightly but I wanted to feel his pulse. Later, the police would wonder about the bruise circling his ankle that developed over the next days, but I never told them where it came from, not even after I got to know Nash, the lead detective on the case. Pride and embarrassment, I guess, and the desire to have something with Liam that was just us, that had nothing to do with the criminal case he’d become part of.
Over the woman’s sobs from the hallway, I heard May’s voice. Where is he? she said. Where is he? Let me through!
She’d been to three emergency rooms, part of a group of parents rushing from one hospital to the next, most sent on to another, an odyssey with dozens of Ulysses. Nearly all ended with terrible news.
I’d been working with my phone turned off, but even so I made it to the hospital before her, which filled me with an obscure and shameful sense of power, as if my shock and fear were somehow purer because I came to them first. What was wrong with me? Dread, I supposed, or terror, terror and anger and trepidation and confusion. Latrell was dead, I knew that, though not much else, and I lost my breath from surging grief. A cop had pounded on the door to get me. He had a face, I’m sure, but I don’t think I even saw it.
Kate
Sometimes I dream about her. Meeting her, confronting her, once about living with her. In that one, we had four boys and a rambling country house set amid golden wheat fields rising and falling over the surrounding low rolling hills. She wore a crisp white blouse with a stiff collar and black pants and black flats and a silver cuff on her left wrist that beaded with water as she rinsed the dishes and looked out at the cloud shadows passing over the rippling wheat.
The most recent dream was hyperviolent, a drill being pushed through her ear into her brain. I don’t know who held it, someone else perhaps, or maybe me.
What can I say?
You don’t control your dreams.
Escaping Education’s Death Valley
OCTOBER 2, 2015
At dawn in the hotel room, dim yellow light leaked around the heavy curtains. They looked burgundy in that light, which was better than by day; then, they didn’t appear to have been cleaned since they’d been installed. I pushed them aside to a view of metal roofs and air-conditioning units, ladders to other buildings, black roofs and white roofs, patterns and forms.
We had a full day ahead of us. The Smithsonian and the Newseum and the Spy Museum, the boys were looking forward to that one. I thought the Smithsonian might have things I’d want to sketch but wondered if I’d get time to. Lamont said he wanted to look through their drafting manuals; his medical sales job had an engineering component, and I decided he and May would be good friends. He took a long time to get upright in bed.
Coffee? I asked. May can’t get up without it.
That would be nice. Thanks. Though it probably tastes like mud.
Lucky for me I rarely drink it, I said, pouring in the water.
You a Mormon?
I laughed. No. Hate the taste but love the smell. I pushed the buttons and the machine hummed and gurgled.
When I brought Lamont the mug he was rubbing both his knees, so hard it looked as though he was trying to raise a genie.
Bad today?
Bad every day, he said. His voice wasn’t angry; it was just a fact.
How do you take your coffee?
Just like me, he said. Black as hell.
I laughed and let him drink in silence while the boys used the bathroom. May never liked to talk much before she’d had a cup or two either. I sketched the room and what I remembered of the hotel lobby from the night before, the big old-fashioned crystal chandelier that had once been elegant.
You’re not sketching me, are you? Lamont asked.
No, I said. Though that tiger tattoo is something special.
It arced across his chest. Army, he said, and slapped it twice. Got it after my first parachute jump. Remind me to tell you about the crabs.
Crabs?
He nodded but didn’t go on. From the bathroom came the sound of snapping towels and a howl of pain and the door opened and Latrell emerged grinning through a cloud of steam. He fetched Lamont his pants and Lamont leaned back and pulled them on over his feet and shins and knees and thighs and put his feet on the ground
and arched his pelvis to get them up the last bit. He lifted his feet off the floor and lay still for another minute, the pants unzipped and unbuttoned, before he sat up and put his feet on the ground.
Latrell knelt to put on his socks and shoes. It looked practiced.
Lamont said, Thank you. When you’re done, you need to change that shirt.
Latrell didn’t look up. Nana packed it, he said. Lamont picked up one foot and Latrell worked on his sneaker.
Not that shirt, Lamont said. The undershirt. He put his foot down and wiggled it into the sneaker and lifted his other foot.
Mama packed it.
Because you asked. We talked about it. Sleep in that shirt, but boys don’t wear pink by day.
Yes sir, Latrell said. He tied and retied both sneakers until his father was satisfied they were tight enough.
I thought about Liam’s pink blanket, which he’d brought with him to sleep with, and wondered what Lamont thought of that. Latrell didn’t have a blanket, which had impressed me, and now I guessed his shirt served the same purpose. I thought of saying something, but people got to raise their own kids. Eventually, Lamont got out of bed. It took half an hour, from start to finish.
Is it like that every day? I asked. From football? I said.
Yeah.
The price you paid, I said.
It shocked me. He was a young man. All to be part of a team in the world’s most violent sport, a game I loved.
I know, he said. And I wasn’t even at a major program. I wonder all the time about those guys, what they must be feeling.
Would you do it again, knowing that now? I asked.
In a flash, he said. The army? Those guys I served with? They’ll be my brothers forever. But football? Nothing like it. Eleven boys all working as one. Men. When it goes right, it’s a thing of beauty. Nothing else in life has ever equaled it.