The Constant Heart (10 page)

Now the TVs showed some strong hands, the fingers of them curved over the keyboard of a laptop computer. They weren't real hands, but ones that had been drawn by a commercial artist. They looked very competent, like the hands of a surgeon or a baseball player. A catcher, maybe. Across the top a sign on the screen said, “Why not start the future?” The hands started typing on a keyboard, all of them looking firm and reassuring, although the colors varied from TV to TV. Some looked like they had been dipped in pink paint. At least the guy with the gun hadn't locked us in. The string dangled from the key that he had left in the lock.

Outside, the parking lot only had a few cars in it, the dust
on them obvious in the midday light. Sara and I went along the front of the store and to the side of the building to the Dumpster. Big and green, full, with a cloud of flies rising into the air when I approached. They made a rainbow-like color in the air. Next to the Dumpster a guy with a tattoo and a shaved head drank a can of beer out of a bag. As soon as we put the magazine in he got up and dug through the trash. It didn't take him long to find the magazine, which he opened and read as he sat down again. As we went along the wall, back toward the front of the store, I heard him stop turning the pages.

“Thanks,” said the clerk.

The brown paper towels from the bathroom were soaked through, and the blood on my fingers, when I pressed down, was a sort of purple color. Sara got some more towels, and we both pressed down now.

“I don't really like that stuff,” the clerk said.

“It's all right if you do,” said Sara.

“You don't have to say that,” he said. “I don't want you to think I really like it.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” said Sara.

“It doesn't have to be a secret, does it, if I don't like it.”

We sat there for a while with the half-muted TVs. It kept coming out though, that funny-colored stuff that didn't look like blood in a movie. It looked more like the middle of a steak that isn't cooked and is sort of blue.

The clerk said he was thirsty. In the bathroom some Dixie cups were in a dispenser, and I took one down and filled it up. The clerk sucked at the lip of the cup, saying, “I've never been so thirsty. Why do you think that is?”

The cops and the ambulance didn't arrive. That wasn't like the movies either. We could have played a game of hangman or something. And then I thought, Shit, you are getting close to panic if you are thinking bullshit like that. Sara put her hand on the clerk's head. Then she whispered to me, “He's sort of clammy and cold.”

“That's just shock,” I said.

“Am I going into shock?” said the clerk.

“Maybe a little,” I said.

“Where are they?” said the clerk. “All I do is work and pay taxes and now where's the ambulance?”

A drop of sweat fell from his nose, as though he had been working out.

“Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” said the clerk. “He has to shoot me. What the fuck for?”

The second hand on the clock on the wall dragged along, like it was under water. Sara pushed more paper towels against the guy's leg and then I took a turn.

“Jake, we've got to do something . . . ,” said Sara.

“Like what? Take him in my car and then we're in traffic and the ambulance shows up here?”

“So we've just got to wait?” she said. “Like we're trapped?”

“It's going to be all right,” I said.

Sara leaned closer.

“Say that to me, too, Jake,” she said.

“It's going to be all right,” I said. She bit her lip. The tears made little crescents along her eyelids, and then she wiped them away with the back of her hand and sniffled. I gave her my handkerchief.

“You always were the kind who had a clean handkerchief,” she said.

The clerk leaned against the wall. The TVs, which were visible just beyond the office door, not all of them, just a sliver, now showed a science show about the oceans, and enormous waves rose, curled, with wind blowing mist off the top, like smoke, and the soundtrack was like a trash compacter that crushed metal, even hard metal, down to nothing. The clerk seemed to try to bring up a glob from his throat, but he just couldn't do it, and the noise was at once sad and familiar, like the sound made by those joke pads, a whoopee cushion that makes a farting
razz
when someone sits on it. The clerk's head tapped the wall and then slumped over so that his hair made a greasy mark, about three inches long, that had the shape of a new moon, although a black one. I guess he used some kind of greasy mousse, but it only made him look like he was wearing a wig. The kind an undertaker used.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“What do you think?” she said.

I put my ear to his chest but it was silent and his neck didn't throb. So I went into the bathroom and washed my hands, once and then again, and Sara did, too, our slippery fingers touching each other as we washed. Then we used those towels and came back to the office where the guy wasn't gray, but sort of a blue-white.

The ambulance came, the cops, and two TV vans, too, their little dishes on top appearing, for a moment, like they were going to track a missile or shoot one down. A woman with blond hair and some makeup that looked like plastic skin asked Sara, “Were you scared? Tell us how you felt?”

“Naw,” said Sara.

And then the woman from the TV station turned to me and said, “Of course, you were scared, weren't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Plenty.”

“There you have it,” said the interviewer. “A difference in perspective . . . Did anything else happen? Aside from just standing around?”

The man with the beer in the bag walked by the TV van with the pornographic magazine in hand, his gait a little unsteady, his beard like sand on his face in the sunlight.

“Get a load of this,” he said to the interviewer from the TV station.

“Ah,” said the interviewer. “Ah. Maybe some other time.” We had to wait around while the EMT guys in their fresh, white uniforms wheeled out the gurney with that shape under a green bag. The cops took our addresses and listened to what happened. Once, and then again, and once more. They said we might have to look at some pictures of people who had been arrested before. They'd call. The clerk's wife showed up, moving like a sleepwalker, her voice sort of drugged, too, as the words came out. “He's dead? He's dead?”

The cops wanted us to go to the hospital to get checked out, but Sara just shook her head and then helped me put my TV into my car. Then she went around and got into the front seat, on the passenger side, and said, “Let's have a drink. OK?”

 

 

THE BAR WAS long and dark and had models of ships along the shelf above the liquor and mirrors behind the bottles,
ocean liners with little lights inside. A jukebox with old songs, like the Ramones.

We sat in a booth with dark wood, stained by years of cigarette smoke and I guess the worry that people brought in here, as though fear does something to the surroundings. I've noticed it in the halls of courtrooms, like the one where my parents got divorced. Sara and I both had a slug of cold vodka and sat there while our pictures came on the TV, the two of us standing there, Sara's eyes moving from me to the street, as though waiting for someone to pick her up. I stood with my hands in my pockets and seemed to be staring at the woman reporter's hair. Was it real? I guess that's what was on my mind: what was real and what was fear. Had we almost gotten shot or was this just an inconvenience?

Sara sat opposite me, her eyes on the glass in her fingers, although sometimes she looked up.

“And you just went off to Berkeley, that's where it was, right, and never tried to find out what happened to me? Never looked me up, huh? Just damaged goods, I guess.”

“It wasn't like that,” I said.

“Well, Jake, why don't you tell me how it was.”

“I wrote to you,” I said. “My letters came back.”

“They bounced me around, you know. From center to center. Then I had to do more time. Disciplinary problems. Well, let me tell you, they had that right.”

“I wrote more than once. Same thing. They came back. I called, too. Confidential information about where you were. Who was I going to contact?”

“That's sweet of you Jake,” she said, but with that tone that was pure Sara. Was she serious, sneering, or was her heart
breaking? Maybe, for all I knew, all three were involved. It left a kind of buzz that made me lean toward her. “And then, I bet, some of those California girls started in on you. Huh?”

I lifted my glass. The bartender poured two more.

“Why, Jake, you're blushing. Isn't that the sweetest thing?”

She took the next shot as she had the first one. Bang.

“And when you came back here . . . ? Did you look for me then? It's been a while, right?”

“I didn't forget,” I said.

“Well, that's a real consolation, Jake,” she said.

“I thought you were gone,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you something,” she said. “I went some places, but I didn't get away. Not really.”

She lifted her glass.

“And I hear you're an astronomer. Like official. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A Nobel Prize winner tried to give me some trouble when I had to defend what I had written.”

“A Nobel Prize winner, no shit?” said Sara.

“It must have been those pictures we looked at in the library,” I said. “That got me through.”

“You mean I helped you?” she said.

“Say,” said the bartender. “Is that you two on TV?”

“Yes,” I said.

He brought over the two shots.

“On the house. Jesus. The way things are these days. You can't even go out to buy a TV.”

Sara still took the cold vodka in the Russian style. Bang. Then she went back to staring at me.

“As though I didn't have enough trouble, you've got to
come back into my life, too. Bad luck isn't spread out evenly. It comes in clusters. Like a cluster fuck. Right?”

“I guess,” I said. Clusters of stars. The distortion in gravity I knew was there. But how could you explain it?

“I don't think there's any guessing here,” she said.

“So what's wrong?” I said.

“You really want to know?” she said. She looked down again. Then she wiped her face with the handkerchief. She rolled a shoulder, bit her lip.

“Yeah, well,” she said. “At least it's something new.”

“So what's the trouble?” I said.

She began to sweat and her fingers fluttered like moths around a light. The only thing that stopped them is when she held the shot glass, although she cried again, too, and used my handkerchief. Then she shrugged, a gesture of such resignation as to scare me, but it only lasted a minute and showed how she was on a high wire between panic and despair.

It took a while, but she went through it, right from the beginning, slowing down now and then, and then, when she was finished, she said, “Well, what do you think my chances are, Mr. Ph.D.? Huh? Would you bet on me? The truth now.”

“It's hard to say,” I said.

“Now that's the understatement of the year. Jesus. I'm running out of time, too. You know, sometimes you can figure things out, but that takes time. And that's something I haven't got.”

She took another drink. Bang.

“What do you do when you're in trouble or scared?” she said.

“I go fishing with my father,” I said.

“Well, sometime I'll go with you,” she said. “If I last that long. Write down your address and phone number. Mr. Ph.D. Astronomer. And where do you meet to go fishing? At your father's house? Does he still live in the same place?”

“Yes,” I said.

Then she got up and walked out, into the sunshine.

 

 

MY FATHER HAD seen my picture on TV, and after I dumped the Samsung in my living room, I picked up my fishing things and drove to his house, where he already had his waders, fly rod, vest, and our sleeping bags in his car. A basic 4Runner from work. It looked institutional, that is, the color of the walls of a cheap hospital, a sort of jaundiced yellow, but it didn't look like a cop would drive it. Responsibility without authority.

“Hey, Jake,” he said.

We drove along the strip with a bunch of AutoZones, McDonald's, BP gas stations, and dollar stores, and a Radio Shack, too. In the distance, in the haze of the late afternoon, you could see the those green foothills, which looked liked enormous creatures with ridges on their backs, and they were lying side by side. Between them, of course, is where the rivers flowed, like silver in a foundry. Or sometimes the water spread into a pool, where the sky and the bank and sometimes even the flowers were reflected. Still, from here, the hills were just green and wrinkled, a little misty, ominous, and filled with promise.

Halfway there we pulled into the parking lot of a place called the Palm, which usually had nude dancers, but it was Monday and the place was closed, so we just sat there in the parking lot for a while.

The Palm was a long, cream-colored box, the wall that faced the parking lot covered with stucco. A hand-painted sign, in red letters on what looked like a bed sheet, said AMATEUR NIGHT THIS WEEK. It was inexpertly hung with a couple of pieces of rope from the roof of the building.

My father reached into the glove compartment and took out a box of Junior Mints.

“Here,” he said.

My fingers were shaking a little, but I picked one up and put it in my mouth. Sweet, cold. I started sweating, the film of it on my forehead.