The Shooting (12 page)

Lee scoffs. —You're out of your mind.

The Soviet is now saying, —Come, ask question.

—Fine, here's a daggone question for you. How can I be expected to learn anything when you keep giving us the wrong chapter to read?

—Ah! Excellent first inquiry! Here is maybe a data point. The Soviet takes the book from Lee's hand, holds it up to Lee's face. —This, he says, slapping the cover, —what is it saying?

—It says
Applied Principles of Physics.

—And what is edition?

—Edition two.

—Hmm, interesting data so far! Now here is question for
you:
Do you wish to learn obsolete theory of physic or current theory of physic?

—Current, obviously.

—And do you consider obsolete theory worth your time and moneys?

—Of course not.

—Aha!

—So what the hell then? I have an old version of the book or something?

—Perhaps a good focus of future study.

—Why don't you just tell me? Why won't you help me?

The professor raises his voice. —I
am
helping you. What do you think I do? I help you now more than anyone ever help you before.

—What do you know about me?

—I know enough, the professor says, lowering his voice again into a near whisper, gently reaching down and touching Lee's gun
through his clothes. Lee recoils and runs away, out of the lecture hall, clutching the gun on his ribs like he has been stabbed there.

Goes straight to the registrar's office and tells the woman behind the desk, a black woman, not that he notices that, —I wish to inform you that the Russian allegedly teaching my physics course is a vicious, incompetent sociopath. I want him removed from the campus. I want him removed from the country.

She is unmoved, says without looking up from her work, —Sounds like you have Dr. Petrov.

—He disparaged my heritage. He said my past is a prison. Lee means it to resound as a powerful, devastating indictment of the man that sets the office aflame with indignation, triggers an earthquake of justice—but it sounds only like a child whining.

—He would know about prisons, the woman says, —he spent years in a gulag.

—The point is I don't have to put up with someone making me feel badly about myself.

—No? she says. —Why?

He wants to pull out the gun and say,
This is why.
Instead he says, —Because I don't. I don't need any of this. So, you know what? Why don't you just go ahead and drop me.

—Fine, have it your way.

—I will, thank you.

She reaches for some forms. —What would you like to take instead?

—No, I mean drop me completely. Drop me from the school. I quit.

He turns and leaves, shoving past the guy in line behind him, another insufferable snob, another cold, frivolous person.

When he returns to his apartment the family attorneys are already calling, telling him the university is begging him to reconsider. He asks them would he still get his inheritance if he does not reconsider and they say, —Yes, you will, so he says he will not reconsider, he is done reconsidering.

Leaves New York, flies home. They can have New York. May New York sink into a pit. In the cab from the airport going home he
looks for the mountain in the distance but cannot see it through the overcast wintry day. The driver pulls up to a trailer standing alone in the middle of a field along the edge of, well, a pit, and says, —Okay, sir.

Lee says, —What's this? Where are we?

The driver says, —This is the address.

—Where the hell is the mountain? What's this hole?

The driver looks at him as though trying to figure out if he is kidding. —Ha ha, he finally says. —Right.

Lee gets out and knocks on the door of the trailer. His father opens it. —How's the gun, is it safe?

Lee says, —What the hell's going on?

—What do you mean?

—Where's the damned mountain at?

—This is it, his father says, confused, waving his arm around. The trailer is rotten with filthy food, flies. He is drunk. He is very drunk. His face is red and bloated from being drunk all the time. It looks like he has gained eighty pounds in the month Lee has been away. He looks like he will die.

Lee has to look it up to figure it out. Far underground beneath the mountain things shifted suddenly and drastically. They had never seen rock and dirt shift so suddenly and drastically. Because rock and dirt never have and never will. This was not rock and dirt. This was trash. From the tip of the mountain to nearly a mile below the surface of the earth—trash. The mountain was not a mountain and never had been, according to what Lee reads. Someone some time ago had the wicked idea of profiting off his overstuffed landfill by selling it as a God-made mountain to some fool and that fool was Lee Fisher Sr. of the industrial Fisher dynasty of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the article purports. Over time, the decomposition and disintegration of the trash created a vacuum of space. And then, the article claims, one day three weeks ago, in a matter of hours all that trash was sucked down into the sinkhole, the entire house and land with it.

The stink. It all seems to be part of the same worldwide conspiracy against Lee Fisher.

Lee stays a few days in that little trailer with his father, but soon it becomes apparent there is no room for him. And it still irks him that they got the best of him in New York. That he let them get to him.
No,
he thinks.
I ain't done with New York. I got every right to live there. They can't just chase me off. Besides, where else do I have to go?
Late one morning while his father sleeps, Lee puts the gun in his waistband and leaves, returns to New York City.

(Sheeple III)

 

Garrett's roommate, Lee, was okay, but he acted like his worldview was already fully formed at eighteen years old and there was nothing anyone could tell him about anything. Those things made it hard for people at college to know what to make of him or how to interact with him. Plus the way he dressed you would have thought he was always just returning from digging a ditch or something. Until this summer Garrett looked the same way as Lee. It's just how people dress where he and Lee come from. They come from the same county out in the middle of the country. That's probably why the housing people put them together. But at Garrett's high school graduation party in his backyard, one of the rich guys in town, Mr. Hedlund, who owns most of the local Burger Kings and whom his father does some work for, shook Garrett's hand, slipping five hundred dollars into his palm, and told Garrett how damned proud of him he was for getting into that school but that if he showed up in New York looking the way he did, wearing jean shorts and a camouflage T-shirt, he would never stand a chance, they would laugh him right off the island.

Garrett went to the mall, bought all new clothes, the girls who worked there oohing and aahing as a new person began to emerge in the mirror. He went to the fancy salon to splurge fifty dollars on a haircut. When he was through he looked like someone who
deserved his place in that school, who belonged in New York. When he arrived in his dorm room on move-in day, the first thing he did was look at himself in the mirror, to make sure that new person was still there, that he had not faded away on the flight over.

Lee had already moved in; he sat alone on the edge of the bed he had claimed watching Garrett look at himself. Lee had a frayed and faded cap that said
REMINGTON
on it pulled down over his eyes, and he was unshaven and shabby and wore old, baggy jeans and steel-toed boots with mud all over them and an overwashed, ill-fitting old polo shirt that made Garrett wince inside because he knew it was what Lee considered his fancy shirt, the one he wore when he thought he was rising to some sort of occasion. It was clear to Garrett that Lee had none of the advantages he had in life.
There but for the grace of God go I,
thought Garrett.
The grace of God or my father.

Garrett's father. Whenever Garrett and his father stop to get gas it takes up half the day because his father is always getting into conversations with the Latino guys who hang around there looking for day work. It's always driven Garrett crazy, especially in high school when he was already late for his job at the grocery store, but after years of doing this his father has picked up decent conversational Spanish, some astounding chicken recipes, and carpentry techniques he has used to make small repairs on the house that has saved them money on a contractor and let them put away more for Garrett's college—but most important, it has given Garrett the example of how to get along with people, how to
try
to get along with them, the benefits of withholding judgment.

Garrett's family does not have a lot of money. His father paints houses, mows lawns, refurbishes furniture, messes around with murals and music. He used to be some kind of a musician. Almost had a record deal once, before Garrett was born. His mother is a middle school science teacher. The family is always surrounded by people. They host guests for dinner several nights a week at the house, throw frequent parties, lead donation drives for folks around town who have been laid off work or fallen ill or otherwise need support.

Garrett had a happy, stable childhood followed by as emotionally stable an adolescence one can reasonably hope for. He had a productive high school career in which he succeeded academically and socially. He had a beautiful young relationship with the sweet, smart daughter of family friends, had ecstatic firework times with her in the green field on school nights. He earned a spot at his reach school. A significant scholarship supplements the little bit of money his father has been saving since Garrett was born. Student loans fill in the rest. And here he is in New York. He has made it. He already misses Katie deeply, he has missed her since he opened the acceptance letter. He will always miss her. But he can see the good in anything, even the painful things. All things have some kind of good in them, somewhere. All people do. As his father has taught him.

Earlier in the day when Garrett arrived from the airport, he and a very cute Asian girl passed each other in the hallway and she invited him to the orientation activities downstairs. He was inclined not to go, but she smiled at him the way girls had been smiling at him since his new clothes and hair and he said he would see her down there. They continued on, he turned to watch her go, she turned back and caught him watching, she smiled at him, he smiled back. He almost said it out loud: Whoa.
Whoa.
He kidded with Lee about her a couple of times. Katie who?

A few weeks later, Garrett had some people over to his room, including Sam, the girl in the hallway, when Lee barged into the room, very drunk and screaming at them to get off his bed. No one was on his bed. Everybody was on Garrett's side of the room. But Lee was saying he had seen them from outside, through the window, he had seen Sam sitting on his bed. Garrett tried to calm Lee down by inviting him to join them, but that only made Lee angrier. He looked at Sam and called her an illegal immigrant, started ranting about how minorities had made this country fundamentally unfair and unbalanced until Sam got up and left. Lee told her as she opened the door to keep going, to just go on and get the hell out of his country. Garrett was right behind her, protecting her from Lee. They left Lee in his room and went downstairs. They were terrified.

Garrett called campus police. What else was he supposed to do? He told them what happened and how Lee had once insinuated that he had access to a gun, that if he ever needed one he could get one, something Garrett did not think much of at the time but now, after what happened, made him worry—maybe Lee had a gun in the dorm somewhere, maybe even in the room. It triggered an investigation. A campus security officer with a buzz cut came and searched their room while he was out. Found no gun or anything. But Lee was kicked out of student housing, though not out of school.

Garrett and Sam and the other students and their families were appalled that Lee was let off so easily. More drastic action should have been taken. They hired lawyers to convince the administration to remove Lee Fisher from the school entirely, but Lee Fisher's family was one of those New York families with all the money in the world, and they had better lawyers. Garrett and Sam fought the administration on it but got nowhere. Lee remained among them; they had to sit in classrooms with him, at his mercy, and they had to see him on campus and hope today was not the day. He showed up while they all lounged around Washington Square Park, wearing these bizarre giant blue sunglasses and a crazy cowboy hat. He said nothing to them, just sat nearby on a bench grinning at them insanely, staring Sam down, to intimidate her, to terrorize them all. It worked. —I don't think I can be here anymore, Sam said. —Not while he's here too.

She transferred to a very good private school outside Hibbing, Minnesota. When the time came for her to leave, he helped her pack. She had so many things. They were far too heavy for her to carry alone. He carried them all downstairs for her to the awaiting taxi. —What are you going to do once you get there? How are you going to carry all this alone?

—I don't know, she said, looking very sad. —I don't know what I'll do.

When she was gone he could not stand it. He visited her very often in Minnesota—one month he visited her every weekend—and the visits were never long enough and he did not need to see Katie again to know that it was Sam he wanted, Sam he loved. She wanted
him to come join her. He applied for a transfer to her school. It was rejected. He did not care, he moved to Minnesota anyway. New York or the girl is a choice to end all choices, but this was not much of a choice. New York was not the same without her. It was not even New York. He and Sam moved into a mouse-infested apartment and knew nobody in Minnesota, had nobody in Minnesota but each other. That first winter back-to-back blizzards shut down the town. New York did not have winters like this. They fell in love, in the cold and the snow and northern darkness. When the snow melted Sam was pregnant. The baby was born in the fall. They went ice-skating on a lake and the ice beneath Sam broke and she fell in. She got hypothermia, and hospitals there were not New York hospitals and they gave her the wrong medication and she suffered a bad reaction, fell into a coma. When she woke after three weeks she was unable to speak and could not walk or use the bathroom on her own.

Garrett cleaned her and he cleaned their baby. He fed her and he fed the baby. He loved her and he loved their baby. He gave Sam and their baby everything. Everything. More than he even knew he had to give.

They moved back to where she was from so her family could help. Sam wrote on a notepad,
Why did we leave New York?

She did not remember. He had to tell her over and over about Lee Fisher.

He had to tell her about their life since they left New York because of Lee Fisher: a series of doctors and bad news and medical catastrophe and arguments with insurance providers. He had watched the beautiful, outgoing young woman he loved waste away into a silent invalid. But there was also love. There was their baby. He would not trade them. There was nowhere he would rather have been than outside Omaha, with Sam, with their baby.

Sam's mom took a picture of Garrett one Christmas and Garrett was surprised to see that person in that dorm room mirror so many years earlier was long gone, replaced by a 250-pound man with a cheap buzz cut and an overwashed, ill-fitting polo shirt for special occasions. What a man he could have been if he had stayed in New York. What things he could have done, and what money he could
have made. How impressive he could have been. What he could have contributed.

Tell me again why we left New York
, she wrote one night. He told her one more time. Usually once he had told her she did not say much, just looked sad. But tonight—he and she and their child in their bedroom, crammed into her adjustable hospital bed with rubber sheets—once he had told her about Lee Fisher and about her leaving because of him, she wrote on her pad,
I bet you wish we had stayed. None of this would have happened if we had stayed.

—Are you kidding? he said. —Think they live this good in New York?

She laughed, though they both knew he was not joking. When they were kids she would put her head back and laugh loudly with a big open mouth and it always sounded like music to Garrett. Now her laughter was only in her eyes. You had to know her to see when she was laughing. You had to love her to hear it.

The next day she died in his arms. She was twenty-nine years old. She lives forever in their child's eyes, which laugh tonight somewhere outside Omaha.