“Left here,” Homer said, and I turned on Olympic.
Olympic runs out to Tice Valley, into a shrinking rural area. I drove among thinning traffic with the image of Mary Clare pressing against my revved-up heart. (Streetlights at intersections, no pedestrians, cars mostly going faster than the speed limit.) The space between houses grew until we’d passed the last traffic signal, to where Olympic intercepts Tice Valley Road. Homer poked me with the gun and said, “Left again.”
I skirted the eastern boundary of Meany’s Ravenswood, a sprawling development, home to six thousand affluent retirees who saw Meany as their spokesman to a world of radical youngsters. There was a large central building, lighted extravagantly, and many townhouses, duplexes and cottages. Wild ideas invaded my mind. I was sure Homer was planning to take me somewhere remote, shoot me, and drive away in my truck. I drove at the speed limit, did nothing to attract attention—whose attention would I attract out there?—and when we came to Rudgear Road, Homer poked me again and didn’t have to say anything, I turned left.
We crossed over the interstate, and Homer didn’t even have to poke me, I went up the on-ramp and gratefully into the company of other cars. The trip to the next exit, South Main, completed a large circle. The exit appeared all too soon and Homer said, “Get off here and cruise Bobwhite Court. I want to see what’s going on.”
The cul-de-sac was empty except for a tow truck hooking up to Meany’s Cadillac, still sitting in the middle of the street, the emergency vehicles gone, no smoke visible, though the smell of it puckered the soft summer air.
“Park this thing in the regular place,” Homer said.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“You’re driving me to Mexico,” he said.
Homer quieted my strangled protest with still another poke, hitting the now tender place of the previous prods. He said, “Now here’s what we’re going to do, son,” and it was like a set of instructions in a treasure hunt. I found myself repeating what he said but softly as we headed for the parking garage in my old and not particularly quiet truck.
“Those cops still want to talk to me,” I said. “They want to be sure I wasn’t in on it with you.”
Which sounded lame until I turned into the garage and almost ran over Detective Sergeant Jim Rutledge stepping from the shadows.
“Get down,” I hissed. Homer did, I felt the weight of his body against the back of the bench seat. Bracketed by two armed men, I was as terrified as a cottontail in a cage full of ferrets. Linkages in my brain came undone: someone else’s sweaty hands gripped the wheel, the air I sucked in was inflating a ghost’s lungs. I expected at any second to hear a gun’s discharge ushering me into eternity.
I rolled the window down. Sergeant Rutledge adjusted his fedora while he handed me a business card. “You think of anything else, this Homer Smith character comes around again, drop everything and call me.”
“I surely will,” I said.
“And another thing, I don’t know what’s going on between you and Meany, but throwing his keys out there makes me wonder if you have shit for brains. He wanted me to arrest you—I don’t mean tomorrow, tonight—send out a posse to look for you. I told him it wasn’t really a crime, but I gotta tell you, Gattling, you humiliated the man, he will never forget it. You mind telling me why you did it?”
“There just didn’t seem any other way at the time, Sergeant.” I was leaning out the truck window so Rutledge couldn’t lean in.
“What was it about?”
“A woman, actually.”
Rutledge said nothing, stock still, his foot on the running board. Finally he echoed, “A woman?”
“I can’t tell you any more, Sergeant, but I wasn’t crazy when I did it.”
“A woman.” Rutledge spoke the word as if it were new to his vocabulary. “I’ve never seen him like that. He could lose a million bucks, not bat an eyelash, you had him coming unglued there for a while.”
I managed a smile. “I’ll let you go, Sergeant, I got things that can’t wait.”
“Oh I’ll bet. Well, good-night, Gattling, keep away from loonies with bombs—and stay away from Meany till he gets his dander down. A week, minimum, maybe two.”
“Thanks for the tip, sir.”
I stopped when I got to my assigned parking space. I said, “Just take the truck, all right?” I had this image of Mary Clare in my bed, this madman seeing her.
“We’re not going to have this conversation but once. I’m going to stay with you till morning rush hour, then we’re driving to Mexico. Comprendee?”
The final jolt adrenaline when he said that felt more like hemlock. The only thing that kept me grounded was the dull ache that was developing in my right side, where he’d poked me repeatedly. Mary Clare was up there wondering what the hell happened to her incipient lover, I was about to introduce her to a madman.
Of course he’d be as surprised to see her as she would be to see him.
Maybe I could use that. Maybe.
two
At this point in my recital to Jake he interjected, “Had it sunk in by this time you were dealing with a genuine wacko?”
“You mean wackier than selling repeating rifles and blowing up people? I think the psychopathic killer in Homer had lain dormant until he stressed out trying to keep up with whoever the sharpies were who wanted to buy his weapons on the cheap. I was the poor slob attending the psychopath’s birth.”
In the early Seventies building a bomb was no longer such a big deal. Bombs were going off daily across the country: blowing up ROTC facilities, power substations, bus depot lockers. You were anti-establishment, you built a bomb to show you were serious. You were doing it for political reasons. Homer had no political motivation, no one special in mind when he built his bomb, just punishing whoever thought of ripping him off. That explosion moved Homer from the realm of terrorist to that of psychopathic killer.
And the killing would continue. I saw it in my mind: a dirt road south of Campo, south of Tecate. I saw sand stained with my blood.
As I neared my door, brain in overdrive, I remembered something Carl Bollinger, a former colleague, said. Back in my university spokesman days, he worried I might be ambushed by a bad-ass protester who thought he’d drop-kick me into oblivion. He urged me to learn some form of self-defense. When I told him about my days as an amateur boxer at the Olympic Auditorium, Carl said, “Well shit, it doesn’t have to be judo or karate. You punch the guy a few times, he’s lost the only advantage he thought he had, that he was more ready than you to do violence. You know any form of doing violence back, you got the sucker.”
This memory lit a tiny flame of hope in my breast: Homer could be had. Homer suffered from the arrogance of guys who walk around with pistols stuck in their waistbands, never believing an ordinary guy like me would have the temerity to jump him.
So, before we got to my door, I visualized what was going to happen: open the door, hit the light switch, take one step inside and stop. Mary Clare would be sitting up in bed, naked, smoking a cigarette and wondering where her lover was.
I’d seen that arresting sight before; Homer hadn’t. I had a half second of awe to work with.
It more or less went that way. Like a jackrabbit sniffing alfalfa, Homer stopped between me and the door jamb, transfixed. I slammed into him with my left shoulder, pinning him against the jamb while I reached with the other hand and pulled the gun out of his waistband.
“Then what happened?” Jake asked.
“Whap! He hit me. He hit me harder than Jethro Greene did, but I saw it coming, so he didn’t knock me out. Only the gun and I went flying in different directions.”
“Did Homer get it back?”
Homer tried, but I was already on my feet. I pushed him against the wall and hit him with a punch that felt like sinking an axe into green eucalyptus, it sent an electric current from my knuckles to my shoulder. Homer collapsed with a spastic jerk, going fully horizontal before he hit the deck.
; “Then how did you end up in this contraption?” Jake asked, gesturing to my traction apparatus.
“I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I had to grab him by the collar and haul him off the floor so I could hit him again.”
You have no idea the inertia of a fully unconscious man, even a scarecrow like Homer. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor, curled like a fetus, my back hurting way more than my jaw, even more than the ear that had to be sewn back to my scalp after the Jethro Greene fight.
Mary Clare was out of bed the moment she saw me keel over. She snatched up the gun and was coming back to me when Mrs. Clarke stuck her tousled head in the door, to see three bodies, one unmistakably naked female with a gun and two men on the floor, one still as death, the other moaning as if he were on his way there.
Which sent her flying for a telephone, shrieking the whole way, certain the naked woman—surely the cause of the two prostrate men—would make her the next gunshot victim.
While Mary Clare was training the gun on Homer and trying to make sense of my moans, the police dispatcher deciphered Mrs. Clarke’s frantic message. Contrary to my assumption that Sergeant Rutledge was the last cop to leave Bobwhite Court, a cruiser remained parked behind the offices next door and county crime lab technicians had come to help the arson investigator collect physical evidence. The dispatcher had been in contact with Bobwhite Court all evening.
So it took a scant two minutes to get an officer to my place.
If Homer was wacko before, he outdid himself as awareness slowly returned. He rolled over to a four point stance and focused on Mary Clare’s crotch, locking on like a bomb sight, his eyes, my sweetie said, Siamese cat crossed. He was licking his lips and shaking his head slowly, combing out cobwebs, which, when they began to dissolve, invoked a widening grin, not looking up as far as the gun, keeping his eyes at crotch level, beginning to drag a foot under his center of gravity, searching for the will to stand.
“Gimme the gun,” I told Mary Clare.
“And did she?” Jake asked.
“Unfortunately.”
I’d never fired anything like Browning’s .45 automatic. I didn’t know a thumb safety from a grip safety. Mary Clare quickly saw this and snatched it back.
Rearmed, she said, “You get up off your knees, buster, I’m gonna put one right through your eye.”
Jake asked, “Did he believe her?”
“It was like she’d been rehearsing, too. I sure as hell believed her, but I think Homer’s head was too fuzzy.”
Which was moot. A policeman arrived like gangbusters—who no more than Mrs. Clarke had ever seen a naked woman aiming an automatic at two men down on the floor—and he believed her.
He had his gun trained on her and had a split second to decide if she was going to shoot somebody or maybe already had. Mary Clare’s nakedness gave him just enough pause to give her time to lower the gun. She pointed with her finger at me and say, “He took the gun away from him”—pointing at Homer—“and that’s how he got hurt.”
In a flash the policeman was in command of the situation and far less frightened. Mary Clare walked calmly over to the table and set the gun down, then to the bed to pick up my bathrobe.
I would have elaborated on the scene, the efficiency of the cops as more showed up, and so on, when Jake swung his attention away from me to the doorway and I followed his gaze to see—my heart doing a somersault—the amazing, the wonderful not to say bad-assed Mary Clare Morrison, my protector.
three
Ouch.
Ouch is what I say as I listen to certain parts of Jake’s memoir. You must realize how euphoric I might have been if I weren’t semi-whacked on the pain-killer-slash-muscle relaxant cocktail they kept me on, which replaced the morphine they gave me before stretching me on the rack. Because two things had happened—no three. First, I’d subdued a killer, a fantasy the equivalent of throwing a touchdown pass in the Rose Bowl. Second, I’d had my heart captivated by the most luscious knish in the nine Bay Area counties, a woman who seemed totally committed to a union of our souls and bodies. Third, in one potent, rash act, I’d severed my tie with the last authoritarian figure I’d ever let into my life again. (Me, the guy who had once been the mouthpiece of The Authorities.) Had I not had lead in my veins, compliments of a cheery orthopod, I’d have floated off the bed.
*****
This is Jake’s take on the same scene:
I imagined as I went away Mary Clare said, ‘Dearest,’ and Robert said, ‘Darling,’ and the only thing that kept them from running in slo-mo across a summer’s field of wildflowers was the apparatus strapped to Robert’s body and the absence of a Mozart piano sonata in the background.
I could imagine what I liked. I was on the merry-go-round and they’d not yet stepped back on it, and what a jolt it would be when the music started and the stallions and tigers went up and down again, daring them to hop on. For almost a year the largest compass of his life had been forty thousand square feet of building he cleaned, an apartment not much bigger than my office, a gin bottle and an old coot who kept reminding him of the values he used to live by.
She had accounts at all the stores in town that mattered, plus a general purpose credit card for the stores that didn’t so much, she had a trick automobile and a membership at the health club her sugar daddy’s son started and smartly sold off before it started to show a loss, she had her nails lengthened or her hair relaxed whenever painful memories of drugs invaded her bones. She had a man she loved to distraction she still hadn’t bonded with in that wild, passionate, ‘I am the end-all and be-all of my beloved’s life’ kind of mating, they were pretty sure it would be like that but how can you tell? She had lain in his bed and inhaled his scent, felt the impression his body had made on the mattress, and he hadn’t even had that.
So they were almost bashful when I left them. That is the report of the nurses and the principals themselves, in a round-about way. I see that from my convalescent couch, two splendid persons of a sudden shy with each other. He said, ‘Did you happen to bring my razor?’ She said, ‘Oh my gosh, no’ and felt silly and guilty all at once and made a gesture that said she’d make it up when they were in a home of their own, because that was the assumption on both sides, they were going to be mates for . . . maybe . . . life?
They set aside the shyness for a while, idolizing each other, having subdued an armed killer and all. He said it was she, the woman with breasts so glorious even a psychopath was thrown off stride long enough any red-blooded American boy could have laid him out. And she said she’d never had a man do battle for her just because he loved her exactly the way she was.
He said he’d do it again, even knowing it was going to cripple him this way.
And that was how it went, an interlude of antiphonal joy, until she said, “Bobby, what are we going to do?”
*****
You’re right, Jake, that was the wrong thing to say. If she’d said, “Bobby, what am I going to do?” it would at least have given me the chance to sound wise and make suggestions about what she should do, but when she included me in the query I realized I was tied to a hospital bed the way a bull rider is bound to his mount by the bull rope. I had to take the ride and hope that I didn’t end up with something worse than the impinged spinal cord that was the orthopedist’s preliminary diagnosis.
To Mary Clare’s plea for guidance I said, surprising myself, “I could talk to my lawyer, see if, under the circumstances, I could get the property settlement amended, pick up a few thou.”
Clare shook her head, as if annoyed, probably for the same reason I felt guilty bringing that up.
“Where are we going to live?” she asked.
“Where do you want to live?”
She said, “I don’t think that’s the point, Bobby, it’s where we can afford to live.”
And we both sucked air.
I managed to feel a soupçon of panic, flat on my back, my source of income pissed in the extreme (“I’d stay away
from Meany till his dander’s down” the apt advice from his school chum, Sergeant Rutledge). What was in my bank account might buy us a month in a by-the-week motel.
As Jake might have said, “The Er-i-e is arisin’ and the gin is gettin’ low.”
*****
Jake told me later of a conversation he had with Mary Clare, how she perceived herself growing up—after she lost the loving care of her nurse, Lupe. Her father, Zev, who’d done some bad and some dangerous things in his life but eventually became wealthy and respected in San Diego, bought a status symbol that hung in the stairway of their house for as long as Mary Clare could remember. It was a French tapestry, very valuable, which as a little girl she thought just plain ugly, because she couldn’t decipher the images woven into it. But when she got a couple of years older she was able to see in it a woman on the parapet of a castle, looking down at a knight about to attack a dragon. Lupe, when she asked, told her the dragon signified the devil and the knight God’s grace. But Mary Clare saw it differently. The dragon, in the secret chambers of her mind, was Zev. The knight was a hero who would someday open the castle gates. The woman was safe from the dragon as long as she stayed in the castle. If the knight triumphed she could leave the castle, but then she wasn’t the dragon’s prisoner any longer, she’d become the knight’s prisoner.
*****
She and I were linked in struggle, striving to overcome my ghosts and her dragon. A woman with a less affluent upbringing might have found a way to eke out a living for us both until I mended. Mary Clare had worked only one real job before I met her, Student Kitchen Aide as an undergrad at Brandeis—hasher, in other words. She was not about to whip out a résumé and land a job that would support even her, and definitely not in penthouse style.
After an extended silence she finally said, “Do you think he’ll evict you?”
I lifted a hand and dropped it. “Wouldn’t you?”
“He’s not a monster. He won’t if I ask him.”
“Don’t you dare.”
She sat there looking intently at me, worry lines in her forehead. I sensed she couldn’t fathom me, had no notion why I’d given up a career at the university, or what could have happened in my previous life that made me a janitor.