Edge (17 page)

“The DA's just going to forget about the whole thing,” said Bea.

The detective put on one of his Lecture Faces, about to say something he had planned ahead of time, probably on the drive over after the hearing broke up. “I wanted to take you two out to lunch so I could have a chance to talk to you seriously,” said the detective. “Because I know how disappointed you are in what happened this morning.”

“The witness was telling the truth,” Bea said.

“I think he was,” said the detective. “I have no doubt. But you see how weak he is going to be as a foundation for an entire case.”

I could feel the weight of his attention, but I made no sound.

“That's why they have preliminary hearings,” he continued, “to see what kind of disaster you might be facing if the case goes to court.”

“Mr. Van Kastern saw the crime take place,” Bea said.

“I know it. The DA knows it,” said the detective. “Everybody knows McNorr was the shooter. But our case is like the house built upon the sand.”

“You told me he wouldn't see the light of day for a long time,” I said in a quiet voice.

“I said we could
hope
. I had a sense of this case from the beginning, what kind of problems we contemplated,” said the detective after studying his empty sugar packet, a little color picture of a Hawaiian beach.

“Maybe you can go out and interview more witnesses,” said Bea. “Maybe find some evidence.”

“I feel it, too,” he said. “I feel that kind of anger all the time. But I go on living. On the other hand, it's not my dad sitting there in a wheelchair.”

I sat very still. Maybe, I thought, after a very long time, I might reach out one hand and pluck one of those C & H sugar packets out of the container.

“You don't look at me when I talk to you, Zachary,” said the detective. “You know that?”

I kept quiet.

“You can look at my face once or twice. I used to be like you when I was your age. You-don't believe that, do you? That I look at you and see myself?”

The waiter leaned in from the shadows, a soft voice asking us if we needed more time.

“More time,” said the detective emphatically.

When the waiter vanished, Detective Unruh leaned in my direction. “I want you to talk to a counselor.”

I unlocked the car.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be one of those men who never talk. It used to seem that little boys jabbered all the time and cried when they scraped a knee, while a certain type of man never complained.

“People go into prison,” she was saying, “and come out and do it all over again.”

I drove. The Bay Bridge traffic was skittish, a traffic jam broken up at last, everyone trying to reach the speed limit without getting killed. A large plastic garbage bag bounded along in the middle lane. One more bounce, and a semi loaded with scaffolding flattened it. I glanced in the rearview; it was gone, and I couldn't even see what was left of it.

“Mom was buying a new chicken-wire cage for Carl,” she said. “He was too big for the other one.”

I was glad to be driving, very carefully, like when I took my Department of Motor Vehicles test, a man with a clipboard in the passenger seat saying not
hello
but “Before we do anything, we have to do what?”

“Carl definitely needs a big cage,” I said. I drove like someone in a training video,
Traffic Safety and You
. I signaled before I changed lanes; I kept a safe following distance between my Honda and the other cars all the way across the Bay Bridge.

“I argued against keeping him in an enclosure at all, but we have some cats in the neighborhood. You know how they are,” she said, as though following an inner command: whatever you do don't shut up. “It's not their fault. But we have to be practical.”

“No cat is going to be able to handle Carl Jung,” I said.

I swing the car over to the curb, a sprinkler playing water over her front lawn. It was late afternoon, country music twanging along inside the house. Detective Unruh wanted me to talk to a social worker, someone who specialized in victims and their families.

“You better come in,” Bea said.

I must have shaken my head.

I could see the argument she was about to make. “Mom was going to make chili. Not the kind that is so hot you have hiccups for an hour. A sweet, New Mexico-type chili she got out of a magazine.”

Before you do anything, the right answer was, what you do is buckle up. You could drive perfectly and if you didn't do it with your seat belt on, you would fail the test.

We both heard it—a masculine laugh from inside the house, one of Rhonda's men.

The bean plants were gone, nothing but brown twine and bare poles where green plants used to thrive. I used a pitchfork, working the garden. I got on my hands and knees and broke the ground with a tool like a steel claw, three prongs. When I surprised an earthworm, I was careful. It isn't true that slicing a worm in half makes two living worms.

Mom brought home some lemon chicken and bok choy with black mushrooms. We ate with wooden chopsticks, the kind that come stuck together. You snap them apart, and it never works quite right; they are always a little jagged and splintery where they had been joined.

She said, “Daniel drew a picture of a man with fire coming out of his head.”

For a person who tells people how to organize an office, Mom spends a lot of time alone. Dad was the one who made friends easily, men and women wandering in and out of his life. He had hiking partners and bird-watching friends and pals who liked to shoot holes in a National Rifle Association slow fire pistol target.

Mom called her contact at the
Tribune
. McNorr was still in jail.

The next day Chief and I delivered a spa shell and a filter system to a condo in Albany and drove the old spa and rusted motor to a scrap dealer in West Oakland, a block away from the Nabisco plant, the smell of toasted wheat in the air.

When I got home that afternoon the phone was ringing. Normally I wouldn't have answered it.

It was Mom. She said, “They let him go.”

T
HIRTY-ONE

I already knew the name McNorr was not listed in the Pacific Bell White Pages.

Day by day I had been getting ready for this, flipping through the phone book, calling information.

The phone in the kitchen kept ringing, the answering machine picking up after the third ring, but I could hear what people were saying, if there was anything they could do. I tore up the junk mail, taking a liberty, figuring Mom wouldn't mind. Then, with the Macy's bill in my hand, I had an excuse to step into her office.

Mom's home office tends to flow out into the dining room. She keeps multiple listing books and tax records tucked into boxes, but she prefers to spread out. A desk calendar featuring architecture of Julia Morgan perched beside an electric pencil sharpener. Mom likes a number three pencil, very sharp.

It was my way of making a deal with Fate: if I can't do it, I shouldn't.

I slipped off the dust cover and let it parachute to the carpet. The tough plastic cover kept the computer's shape perched on the floor, covering nothing. The old IBM took awhile to boot up, making the usual clicks and chuckles, getting ready. When I was on-line, connected to the main computer at the title company, I entered
owners/Oak
, just to see if the computer's internal watchdog was asleep.

When it said
Enter passcode
I knew the first part would be easy, my mother's Social Security number. I have a memory for data like phone numbers and scientific names, and I was quick, tapping out the nine digits. But then I needed a three-letter or three-digit code. Guesswork.

I tried my mother's maiden name, shortened to
Gan
or
Gnt
, and each time the computer was prompt in telling me
Please reenter
.

Maybe the McNorr family didn't own their house, I told myself. Maybe the computer was programmed to deny all access after the third attempt.

I could hear Dad's voice clearly in my imagination, my dad coming home early when I was home after school, first grade and already reading faster than all the others. I remembered how he sounded, singsong, telling us he was home, calling out Mom's name.

I tried again, two-fingering the nine numbers, and then, after the dot, not Flo. I entered Ren, short for Renny.

Often I could read her mood by what she put on when she came home. A bathrobe meant she was ready to relax, drink one of her cocktails, a whiskey sour, an old-fashioned, watching trash on television. If she put on denims and her Green Bay Packers T-shirt she was going to wax floors or paint walls. When she came home that night, she put on a dress, like someone getting ready to go to a party, something dark and flowing, a dress I did not recognize.

“Something your father talked me into buying,” she said. “When we were first married and couldn't afford it.”

“It looks nice,” I said, careful to keep my tone steady, no feeling in my voice but casual courtesy. She needed a compliment, and that's what I would give her. But the luster had gone from her hair, and she looked frail, even her hands, chapped and thin.

“It was never in fashion,” she said, “and it was never out of fashion. I almost never wore it.”

“You rented a video?” I asked, noticing the cassette in her hand. Mom was patient with computers and could go toe-to-toe with an accountant, argue depreciation schedules and deferred payments until she got her way every time. But she was always jamming cassettes in backward and pushing the wrong button on the remote, calling my name when the screen was all dancing fuzz.

I took the cassette from her hands.

I sat in my room, on the bed, telling myself I couldn't really hear it.

The sound of his voice pulled me into the living room.

“What we imagine might be taking place on a distant planet,” my father said. “The sort of being we dream might be thriving in a distant galaxy is living right beneath our feet.”

He knelt on one knee, smiling up into the camera. “Right here,” he said. “On our Earth.” Was it makeup? I wondered. Had he really looked so tanned, so strong? He was like an actor hired to impersonate my dad, someone too handsome, not at all the normal human being who paced up and down the living room, trying to memorize the lines he had written for himself.

“These accidents of nature have lasted five hundred million years nearly unchanged. These remarkable invertebrates are citizens of prehistory.” This was no actor. This was Dad, the enthusiasm in his voice, his joy in sharing what he knew. “When we spy a common little black ant, the imposingly named
Monomorium minimum
, stealing sugar from the kitchen sink, we are looking down upon one of the triumphs of the animal world, an animal so old and so perfectly adapted to its life that it has not changed since the extinction of trilobites.”

People wanted to watch cheetahs run down gazelles, the PBS executives said. Viewers loved wolves, and bears, and sharks. “Scarabs,” one assistant producer had suggested in a fax from LA. “The dung beetles of ancient Egypt. People love mummies and pharaohs. Work up that angle—the mythic sacred creatures of the Nile.”

Dad laughed off the failure of the PBS pilot of
Prehistoric Future
—or at least pretended to. The book it was based on was translated into six languages. You could see his faith on the screen, the way he scrambled up a cliff, the Steadicam following, so he could show the viewer a crevice in the sandstone where wasps were hibernating. “They are cold-blooded creatures, and even our mild winters make them slow down to a crawl,” he said, his shadow falling over the stones.

“When they wake,” he said, “they will not have to learn or experiment. They will not have to be told. They will know exactly what to do.”

When it was over we sat for a while.

She got up, turned off the television, and looked around at the living room, appraisingly, like someone house-sitting for a neighbor and tired of it, ready to go home.

“I told Sofia I would stay with her tonight,” she said. She made an expression of ironic fatigue. Mom used to call her
Sofa
, saying it was the perfect name for someone so good to lie on.

But I knew that Mom's kindness to Sofia had little to do with Mom's gradual acceptance of Dad's second wife. It was a way of helping Dad, a way of working against her own feelings to do something right, even though it meant she was searching the medicine cabinet for antacid, painkillers, settling for a packet of Alka Seltzer so old the tablets barely fizzed.

T
HIRTY-TWO

I told myself I was just going for a drive, no particular destination.

I found the street without any trouble—Olive Street, where it meets Foothill Boulevard and runs east toward the 580 freeway and the big quarry gash, a landmark you can see even at night in the Oakland Hills, soil and stone ripped to bedrock.

The houses in that neighborhood have metal grills over windows, double doors, filigrees of iron it would be hell to cut through. Dogs bark. Men on street corners watch passing cars.

But at last I reached a quieter part of town, not far from the freeway. I had trouble locating the addresses. Some of the houses had metal numbers attached beside the front door, or glittering on the mailbox, but some did not.

I felt conspicuous in the early evening, out of place. I coasted very slowly, nearly stalling. An out-of-date Ford rusted on the front lawn, on blocks, a white Galaxy. A pickup truck, hood up, occupied the driveway, the garage door open only enough to allow a person to leave and enter. The interior of the garage was dark.

Geraniums flowered up under the picture window, and the curtains were open. The lawn was black in this poor light, a hedge on either side of the house, and a big shrub, something that was not thriving, snaking stems and broad shiny leaves.