Edge (14 page)

“Hang in there, Steve,” croaked an older man's voice, and the prisoner looked up from the doorway and smiled. Smiled and shook his head.

I expected the judge or someone in a uniform to order silence in the court, but no one did. Two square, gray people, a man and a woman stood at the rear of the courtroom, the woman holding a small black book, one of those zipper Bibles you can seal against the rain when you're done reading. The man looked like his son, but gray, his strength melted to fat. The mother turned away before I could study her, a woman in a hurry to escape.

Sometimes as a child I would lie awake listening to my mother talking on the phone. When she was quiet, I would try to imagine what the other person was saying, hoping to time the imaginary conversation so it would end just as my mother couldn't restrain herself any more and bubbled over with, “That's what I'm telling you,” or “See what I mean?”

I tried out another mental game at the hospital. I tried pretending that the patients were all right; it was the staff that needed help. Patients humored these warped, psycho people, pretending to be feeble so the nurses could get the therapy they needed, connecting IVs, plumping pillows.

“What an exciting day!” said the woman in white medical blouse, white pants, and white shoes. Her clothes were whiter than the uniforms of any of the nurses, who tended to wear gray blues and soft-soled, off-white shoes. This woman was as white as an aspirin, red lipstick, a chipped tooth.
PERLA BEACH
, said her badge.
PHYSICAL THERAPY
.

We were in the corridor carrying magazines,
Scientific American, Car and Driver
, glossy, colored periodicals we thought my dad would enjoy. “We just got back from the arraignment,” my mother said, meaning she was in no mood for excitement.

“We've made so much progress,” said Perla Beach. “There is some real cause for celebration, Mrs. Madison.”

“Is there,” my mother asked, flat, no inflection. You would never guess that Mom gave classes in the power of enthusiasm, sure to increase sales by thirty percent.

I left them, hurrying into my father's room.

He shifted his eyes in my direction, his face wrinkling into a mask of happiness.

Having rushed panting into the room, I found myself trapped by medical apparatus, tubes, cables, bumping a bag of what looked like black blood hanging beside my dad's bed. I found one of my mother's books on a side table. A bookmark, a clean, white cafeteria napkin, was folded over only a few pages into the novel.

“I don't think it would do me any good, hearing about a hound of hell from the middle of the moors,” I said. “I mean, if I was sick.”

Sick. What a frail, fake word to describe his condition. The breathing machine made its sound, air pumping in, pumping out, measured. The blue tube led to his throat, his trachea, and he needed a shave.

My jokey patter failed me. I took the book into my hands, one of those hardbacks embossed with fake gold to make it look more expensive. Where was Mom? I thought. Out there dueling with the therapist when she should be in here.

I opened the book.
Chapter II
, I read silently.
The Curse of the Baskervilles
.

That night I took a drive.

Sometimes nothing else helps, not music, not a long walk, not even the various antacids Dr. Wiegand recommends for Mom.

I picked up Bea at Deena's Diner, and she sat beside me as I drove, rubbing hand lotion into her skin, squirting it out of a tube. “If I don't I'll get iguana skin,” she said.

I felt that Bea was hoping for a return to our personal Good Old Days, when we had spent the twilight together, gliding Frisbees until it was too dark and then holding each other, Bea's heart beating so fast it was like some living creature trapped inside her body.

I was grateful to have her as a friend, but I couldn't let myself experience any more emotion than I already was. “That might be interesting,” I was saying. “Reptile Woman. Miss Gila Hands. Put you in one of those magazines, along with the world's biggest breasts.”

My Honda was in good shape inside and out, the dark carpeting vacuumed with the wheezy Chevron One Stop Carwash vacuum cleaner, the armrests and the dash all wiped and polished. I had been driving the car for a couple of days after I got it back from the police when it seemed I could feel strange fingerprints on the steering wheel, unknown smudges on the floor mats. I purged the vehicle of this presence, wiped it down and cleaned it out.

I was down-shifting toward Taco Bell on Jackson Street in Oakland, when I saw Earl kicking a trash can into the street. I had not seen Earl since the night of the tear gas, and I couldn't help feeling a throb of friendship toward him. Good old Earl, the Lovable Barbarian.

I was about to roll down the window and say some kind of empty nothing, the sort of thing guys say to each other,
How's it going
or
What's happening
, phrases that sound like questions but are not. Two or three companions cheered Earl on, clapping, yelling.

He jumped on the trash can, log-rolling it, slipping off. He kicked the green metal so hard the top flew off and the bin rolled over and over, all the way across the broad street. The top was a peaked contraption with a swinging door on each side. People like putting their taco wrappers into a little swinging door, never seeing the trash again. The top of the bin sat upright, looking particularly truncated and useless in the middle of the street.

Earl was at the curb, punishing the bin with his feet. He began driving it back toward the opposite curb, Taco Bell wrappers and drink containers and unnamable junk tumbling and flowing as the bin made its progress.

One moment I was slowing down, running over some of this coughed-up litter without wanting to. Then I was out of the car, seizing Earl, dragging him to the Taco Bell and slamming him against the wall. Bea's cry was lost in the night air.

The building shook, the posters taped to the windows shivering, jumbo flautas, half-price Pepsi, the glass trembling as I slammed Earl hard again and again. He was trying to say something, and that infuriated me all the more, his mouth parting and getting ready and saying something I could not make out.

His friends were grappling with me, weak claws, feeble blows. One of them knew me, some guy from high school calling out, “Leave him alone, Zachary—what's the matter with you?”

The look in Earl's eyes stopped me. Fear, of course, once the surprise was jolted out of them. And then something else. Something sickening. His eyes slipped out of focus. They didn't see me anymore.

I was hurting him.

T
WENTY-FIVE

When the police took me to jail that hot day just before my junior year, I believed I was not going to see ordinary life for a long time. I was locked into a police car, both cops ignoring me, except once. We had to stop suddenly for a cardboard box rolling across Broadway. The police unit braked hard, and the driver looked back and said, “You okay?”

The police station in Oakland is like a post office, fluorescent lights, folders, desks covered with paper, nothing happening. You notice mostly what isn't there, no background music, no potted plants, the tack heads on the bulletin board red and white plastic lined up along one side, most of the bulletin board empty except for the faces of missing people.

The only other person they had arrested was the one I had spat on and thrown through the window. He wouldn't meet my eyes. He wouldn't look directly at the cop asking him to spell his name.

The fingerprint room was a surprisingly small chamber, signs warning not to smoke. There were moments of surprising courtesy, a moistened paper towel to wipe the ink off my fingers, being told there would be a restroom when we were on our way to the holding cells “if we could just hold our water.” That was the phrase the cop-clerk used, but it didn't strike me as quaint or comical. Everyone in that room down through the decades had been aware of his bladder, a sac that can only hold so much.

The personnel acted polite in a leathery, impersonal way, calling me Mr. Madison, maybe the first time I had ever been addressed that way. Before I could be showered or deloused or raped a beefy woman was holding open the door, calling my name. At the end of a hall my mother was standing with her arms crossed, wearing too much makeup. I walked along beside her, sure there was some kind of mistake. We were in her car before I could ask, and then I couldn't talk when I first tried.

“They dropped the charges,” she said, sounding like a gangster's mom, used to this.

She didn't start the car. We sat there staring ahead at a blank wall, green cinder block.

“The owner of the tropical fish store,” she said, “called up to tell what he saw, you taking on half the East Bay. He laughed about it. Can you imagine a business owner having a sense of humor about a broken window? He said if you're going to get into another fight, he wants to be in the front row.”

I kept my mouth shut. I'd like to meet this man, whoever he was, thinking this was funny.

“What I want to know is why couldn't you wait?” she said. “Why couldn't you wait until you're eighteen and out of school before you decide to tear big chunks out of people. Because then you won't be my problem, Zachary. You'll be on your own.”

I had to shut up and listen to this. It was music compared with what could have been happening that moment. Still, it hurt.

“It was the property damage that made them arrest you. You could stand and bash each other in the face all day and all night and it wouldn't matter. You break a window and they send in the Eighty-Second Airborne.”

“I could have really hurt him,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment. “I called the owner and said we would pay for the window. He told me he was glad you showed up, said the kids were a nuisance, blocking the sidewalk, keeping away customers.”

I was in that mood I get into sometimes: I will never say another word again. I folded my arms, a family gesture, closed up and ready for the rest of my life.

She said, “You hungry?”

That was when my working life started, carrying bags of cement for a place that sold gravel and sand, paying back my mother for the window by putting in two or three hours after school. And then I worked for a nursery, stacking wooden pallets against a wall, chasing the raccoons away from the storage shed in the evenings, their brilliant eyes looking out from among the fuchsias. By the time I quit school I was ready to work full-time, hungry for it, wanting to put in long hours and forget.

After our drive down Jackson Street to the neighborhood of Taco Bell, Bea made us some instant onion soup, stirring it and pouring it into big stars-and-stripes mugs, dishwasher and microwave safe. Her mother was in San Jose with free tickets to a horse show featuring the Budweiser team from television and a team of mustangs descended from the wild horses of Nevada. My mom was spending the evening staying beyond visiting hours at the hospital. It was good to be in a house that was quiet but not empty.

“What do you think Earl is going to do with his life?” said Bea.

“What will any of us do?” I asked. I had meant to just hit the conversational ball back across the net.

“Do you think he'll get serious in another couple of years or stay the way he is?”

I couldn't think about Earl without picturing him almost losing consciousness, almost breaking the Taco Bell wall with his head. She must have read my thoughts. “Earl wasn't hurt,” said Bea.

“He was,” I said. “But Earl doesn't let a little brain hemorrhage slow him down.”

We had all parted as friends, pals who were glad to get away from each other, picking up the trash in the street, laughing shakily, hey, we ought to have fun like this more often.

“And he was making a terrible mess,” she said, “all over the road.”

To me a “road” is out in the country, two-lane highways through hills and fields. Jackson was a street. Something must have shown in my eyes because Bea brightened, coming over to put her arm around my neck, holding my head to her slim hip. On a few other nights like this I had helped Bea undress, all the way down to her little boy's body, except for the bird's nest of fluff between her legs, and her petite breasts, pixie breasts, and I could hardly breathe I was so happy.

Tonight I was just glad to sit there in the kitchen with her, one of those times when the neighborhood is quiet and the one room you are in is like a space station, solitary but peaceful, all the experiments finished for the day.

“I almost forgot!” she said, scrambling to the back door, down the back steps.

The kitchen door threw a carpet of light, illuminating a pink garden hose and a snail in full sail. Beyond was all darkness, Bea out there somewhere, talking in her raspy whisper, scolding tenderly.

She bore something into the light, carrying it like an infant. “You hold him!” she said.

“Do I have to?”

“You're afraid!” she laughed.

I took into my arms the largest rabbit I had ever seen, big eared, black and white, and kicking, scratching my belly through my shirt. But then calming as Bea made kissing noises at it. I put it down, glad to have it off my hands.

The mammoth rabbit snuffled its mobile nose around the kitchen, taking no notice of our pant legs and shoes the way a dog would, browsing along the table legs and the wire from the toaster.

“I saved Carl's life,” said Bea.

My mother had bought a yellow parakeet once, called him Pecker. When, as a boy, I asked why we couldn't have a dog, she would respond with stories of animals named Snout and Fuzz and Squats who ended up getting run over, in each case, “right in the middle of Ensenada Street.” She kept the parakeet in the kitchen, until he escaped out the back door when she was cleaning his cage for the first time.

“Carl was drowning?” I asked. “Trapped in a fire?”