The Shooting (16 page)

—I won't get rid of them, she explains. —I'm building a business, I'm nesting.

—What do you mean? he says.

—Lee, she says, coming toward him, smiling, hands on her belly, —obviously I'm pregnant.

Lee is outraged that she has known this but not told him.

—You should have noticed, she says. —I thought you're the kind of man who pays attention to what's going on around him.

—I
am
that kind of man, but
Christ.

—It's a beautiful thing, Lee. There is no greater love than the one you're about to know.

For days he thinks about it. A family. Lee Fisher, a daddy. A man raising a child and loving a wife, doing his best to support his family.
The responsibility of it. The respectability. It would give him something in common with other people. He would be an excellent father. He has wonderful virtues to pass on to a child. It would be a beautiful family. Yes, this is what men do: they have families. He will have a family and he will protect his family. It will be his duty. He will be needed. He will have a place and a point at last. He cannot be happier. There is nothing more than Laura and their baby.

She will give birth in the penthouse: the bathtub, candlelight, and silence and space and control. Just the two of them. Like a frontier family. They do not need harmful, inhuman hospitals. Where they come from, they birth their own.

—Hospitals give your baby autism and allergies, Laura says, —and those doctors get off on it, you know, looking at women with their legs spread all day.

An hour into the delivery her tough facade evaporates and she screams and cries and begs for a hospital and doctors and drugs, but they agreed beforehand that no matter what she said or did she wanted to deliver her child without drugs, so Lee keeps her in that tub. All those black-red plumes of blood and brown-gray plumes—Lee almost loses consciousness several times.

The baby is born safely. A boy. A son. He is perfect. Lee kisses him and wraps him in soft fuzzy blankets and will never put him down. Lee hands Laura her baby to hold. She does not want to hold him. Nor does she want to look at him. She keeps her eyes closed and head turned away, face covered in one hand.

—Laura, Lee says, —it's your baby, it's your son.

But she will not turn her head to look at him. She climbs out of the tub and plods out of the bathroom and locks herself in one of the spare bedrooms, the one with all the junk she has hauled back from the garbage, and refuses to come out or open the door, not even to use the restroom or eat. The care of the newborn falls to Lee and he is very dutiful, waking to prepare every bottle, change every diaper. Lee gives every bath—twice, three times a day he bathes his son.

One afternoon while the baby naps, Lee searches for Laura's name online. He has done so before and, as then, no meaningful results come back. In her dresser beneath her underwear and socks he finds
a health insurance prescription card with her picture on it but the name Caroline. Knocks on her door.

—Go away! she yells.

—Caroline? he says.

He has the gun in his hand. Silence from inside. Then her footsteps come across the floor. The door opens a crack in which she places some strange, dark, exhausted, and small face—shriveled mess of tangled hair and acne and glowing bloodshot eyes—that he has to strain to recognize as hers.

—Is that you? Are you Caroline?

—It's me, she groans.

—Who are you?

She sighs and says as though defeated, —Just wait one minute and I'll tell you. She eases the door shut and he hears it lock and he waits several hours but she does not come out.

Eight hours later she emerges, somehow cleaned up and fresh, strong and bounding and loud. She wears the hiking boots and heavy wool socks and T-shirt she wore when they first met. She is Laura again.

—Hello, young man! she bellows, strutting into the kitchen and reaching out her arms to the baby, who is feeding in Lee's arms.

—He's eating, Lee says, —please let him eat.

She says, —That's okay, and plucks the bottle from the baby's mouth and sets it down, lifts the now crying baby from Lee's arms, swings him around, kissing him and kissing him. —Look at these muscles, she cries. —Strong man!

Lee watches from the table: his terrified son, his son's insane mother. Now what is he supposed to do?

—Are you feeling better? he says to her.

—Much! Postpartum is no joke. Being cooped up here in this city sure doesn't help. But see? No meds, no bellyaching, no whining about my problems to some shrink. Right? You take it, you deal with it. You deal with life. She is addressing the baby now. —You roll with the punches. It makes you strong. That's the kind of people we are. Right, Dad? She looks to Lee, waits for him to agree.

—That's right, he says. She hands the baby back to him. Both he and the baby are relieved to resume the feeding. He asks her, —Do you want breakfast?

—No thanks, I ate.

—What the hell did you eat in that room? Computer parts?

—Don't forget, Lee, she says, retying her boots to tighten them, hiking up her socks, —you're talking to a survivalist. I can survive anywhere, on anything. I need nothing and no one. She stands up.

Lee says, —Where are you going?

—For a walk. Need to get the blood circulating again and start reconstructing my muscle mass.

—Please no more printers or anything.

—That's a potential fortune we're sitting on in that room, Lee. That's our son's inheritance.

—I already have a fortune. He already has an inheritance.

—You never know what will happen. The world economy is just a shell game. The bottom can drop out overnight, any night. And when it does your fortune will vanish right along with it and you won't have a pot to piss in. That equipment in there will be good as gold. Can you believe how wasteful people are? Just walk a couple of blocks in this town and you see all the good stuff we just throw away. We'll throw away anything. One of these days I'll probably find a human out there in the trash. A kid, some child they decided they didn't want and just threw away.

She gets her phone, opening the maps app, and then goes to the door, opens it, looks back at Lee and their son. —What a beautiful sight, she says. She closes the door.

Laura goes up to Central Park, Lee later learns. Fifty blocks on foot. She removes her belt from her khaki shorts and hangs herself from a tree in the broad daylight. A jogger finds her.

One of his drivers takes him and his son to the gun range. The gun range is in Pennsylvania. There is a gun range in Manhattan, but like everything else in Manhattan it is overpriced and overcrowded and overregulated and crawling with cops. The range in Pennsylvania is located in an isolated corner unit of a business park. From the
outside it looks like it could be a dentist's office. Lee's driver waits while he goes inside, baby hanging from his chest, gun in a carrying case. As he approaches the entrance a tall, strong, bearded man is leaving. His flushed face drips with sweat. A semiautomatic pistol is holstered on his hip and earmuffs hang around his neck. He still wears his protective eyewear. It is fogged with perspiration. His smile is a postcoital smile. He swats Lee on the shoulder as he passes, like they know each other, like they're old friends. It sends shivers up Lee's spine. He opens the door. Already he can hear the shooting.
KOOM! KOOM!
He feels a little kick—he always gets a little kick.

Inside, more of his people—safe, responsible gun owners. It's like a bowling alley, but instead of knocking down pins and guzzling pitchers of beer, everyone is present-minded and focused on the world around them, considerate first and foremost of everyone else's well-being.
A gun range is maintenance of the democracy
, Lee thinks.
Ordinary Real Americans executing their most essential right. This
, he thinks happily,
is what makes us exceptional. This is how one is an American. We are doing it right.

The firing takes place in a soundproofed gallery in back. There are windows through which you can watch from the waiting area where they also sell firearms and firearms accessories and knives and double-breasted heavy-duty shooting shirts.
KOOM! KOOM!
It is so visceral and exciting, like the drums at a rock concert. He smells the gunpowder and he is on the musty green hills of Gettysburg in the early morning. He is charging a position at Bull Run, picture of his mother pinned to his breast beneath his uniform. He is at the Battle of the Bulge with his fellow marines, his brothers, having killed for one another today, having survived today's battle to fight tomorrow's.

KOOM! KOOM! KOOM!

The shooters are men, women, girls, boys, college kids, couples on dates, black and white, skinny, fat, rich, poor, all cultural backgrounds and every apparent tax bracket and personal style. Lee is more accepting of people who are different from him here. No one is staring down at his or her phone. No one is jostling anyone else, no one is cutting in line or arguing, no one is cheating, no one
is lying, no one is daydreaming. This is the way we once were, here at the gun range. It feels new only because modern life has become so vicious, our values so deranged. This, Lee feels, is the way things should be. The way we should be. When is the last time Lee looked around a room filled with people—his fellow countrymen—and felt not grim alienation and disdain and distrust, but deep affection and appreciation?

He enters the shooting gallery. It is hot and concrete and loud. He has his earmuffs and eyewear on, his son wears little baby versions. Lee sits him on the high chair the staff leaves out for him against the wall out of the way of flying shells, one of the perks of his platinum club membership.

The universe wants to take it all from him. It took his mother and it took his father and it took his home and it took Maureen and it took Laura and one day it will try to take his son as well. He knows it will. At the doctor's office for checkups, the pediatrician tapping the door and stepping inside, studying the test results over the top of his glasses—Lee knows he is in fact preparing to deliver the terrible news of a rare, fatal genetic condition. Crossing the street pushing the stroller, every car waiting at a red light is driven by a drunk, or an immigrant so desperate he's become heartless, or a lost and incompetent out-of-towner whose foot, as Lee and his son pass across his bumper, will slip off the brake and onto the gas and speed forward to crush the stroller, rip it from Lee's hands, and drag the baby's little body down the street until nothing remains but streaks of white and red. —Didn't see him, the driver will explain to the judge, and the judge will exonerate him, he will walk out of jail and get back behind the wheel of his vehicle and drive home, stopping first at the car wash to clean off the skin, the bones. And sidewalks—anything or anyone at any time might fall from a high window or roof and land atop the stroller, crushing his son to death. An air-conditioning unit or a human body. Passing a construction site—nothing but construction work in New York City!—a worker's circular saw will break and the blade will spin loose and go shooting dozens of feet through the air and sever his son's head. There will be a car bomb. A stray bullet. Collapsing
scaffolding. Lee gushes with sweat always, face red and chest tight, hands sweaty and knuckles white around the stroller handle, making no eye contact with anyone lest they want to take from him what they have not already.

But not here. Here is safe. They all are.

He unzips the gun case and takes out the gun. It is the only thing that gives Lee and his son half a chance.

He pushes the button to call in the target holder, sticks a bull's-eye sticker onto a three-by-five card, clips it to the target holder, and sends it back out twelve feet. He assumes proper shooting position. Inhales, exhales, pulls the trigger. Bull's-eye.
That's it, Lee,
his father says.
That's it.
He inhales, exhales, pulls the trigger.
Outstanding, Lee.
He empties the cylinder and, feeling pride at his acumen, confidence at his capability, he reloads. Inhales, exhales, pulls. His mother is watching.
Oh, babu.
His
KOOM
s sing out among the others, harmonizing with them, accepted as one of them, like children in the park chasing a puppy, running toward trees.

He is smiling, shooting. His face hurts, it has been so long since he smiled this big.

Here it is. This is it.

At last.

He is in bed in the middle of the night one night—maybe a Tuesday, maybe a Wednesday; it could be any night—when he wakes to a noise out in his living room. He sits up, listens. There it is again. What could it be? Nothing probably—he locked the door. All those deadbolts and chains. Of course he locked the door. Didn't he lock the door? After getting his son down, he spent his evening the same way he spends every evening since Laura died: drinking a six-pack and watching Netflix, but instantly he feels completely sober and he cannot remember locking the door. And he hears the noise again. He knows exactly what to do, he has practiced it a thousand times, imagined it a million times. He reaches for the gun. It is already loaded, always is. He goes to the bedroom's doorway, right hand on the grip with forefinger extended across the trigger guard, left hand cupping the right.

—Is someone there? he calls out into the dark apartment.

No answer. Finger moves to the trigger and he goes down the hall, toward the threat. He passes his movie theater, his game room, his recording studio, his gym, his conference room, the gun pointed ahead, trying to steady his shaking hands and to keep focused and to breathe but in fact doing none of these things, he has not breathed in thirty seconds, his chest burns. Passes his son's room, looks in on him; he is asleep on his back. Continues on. His knees shake. He is the only hope. He is Boo Radley, protector of children.

—You better get the fuck out of here, he shouts in the black void ahead. —Do you hear me? You better get out right now.