“No. Yes. Well, okay. Sure.” She nodded her head, and Saul dutifully pointed down at the tree trunk where the blood was drying. “Right here then. How awful,” Gordy’s aunt said, reaching into her purse for another cigarette, which she lit up with a despairing shake of the head, followed by a stagy puff.
“He kept coming here,” Saul said. “To this spot. He’d stand here like a sentry.”
“I know that.” She took a long despairing inhale from the cigarette, as if gasping for oxygen.
“He’d be out in the yard, hour after hour, staring at us, you know.”
“Yes, he told me. He said he was over here.” She paused to reflect. “The gun? You asked about the gun? He found it where I had hidden it.”
“Did he ever tell you why he came over here?”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, rubbing her cheek. She made Saul think of a peeled tangerine. “I was just glad he wanted to do something. That he wanted to go somewhere. I couldn’t look after him.”
“He did it off and on for a whole year.”
“Well, it gave him a place to go.”
“A place to go?”
“Yes. I was at work, and he was old enough not to go to school—said he wasn’t learning anything—and I couldn’t think of anything to do with him, so, you know, he came over here. I guess he thought you cared about him and could maybe give him a place to be.”
“We just got used to it,” Saul said. “To him, ” he corrected himself.
“God-damn,” Brenda suddenly erupted, a high keening wail. “I told and told him about guns, like I was in the NRA or something, and I sure damn well trained him to respect them. I just whacked it into him. You saw me trying to knock some sense into him. Made me feel terrible! If you didn’t hit him, he wouldn’t notice. ‘Guns don’t kill people,’ I told him, ‘people kill people.’ This last time I hid that .22 so no one could find it, in a shoe box.” She looked up, and her face took on a sudden fearful radiance. “No one. But then he did.” The on-the-spot Channel Seven Mobile News van was speeding up the driveway, followed by Channel Three’s news van. Maybe there would be a helicopter and skycam shots, and a direct-feed breaking-news story from the crime scene. Finally, the occasion felt like a movie premiere. Brenda touched her hair. The poor woman—what did she think she was doing, trying to get on television? Attract the talent scouts?
“Miss Bagley?” The police investigator, the detective—Saul was having trouble remembering his name, maybe because of the distraction of the weapons, and each time he saw one of them, the cop looked unfamiliar—took her aside for some questions and a statement and an identification. Saul overheard him asking her about a suicide note. They were certainly interested in suicide notes. Well, responsibility, after all. Cause and effect, after all. A villain, a fall guy. Saul suddenly wondered if maybe—just maybe—there might be one, might be a suicide note. Mentioning him. Barely readable, scrawled, but still scratchily specific. The Channel Seven reporter, whom Saul recognized as Traci McMahoney, hurried away from the mobile news van in a rather purposeful beeline toward him, followed by the camera and sound men. Involuntarily, he stood up straight and cleared his throat.
She was extraordinarily pretty, a small-town former beauty queen probably, with blond hair arranged in an expensive feathery style, startlingly blue eyes, and a strange expression of artificial concern. She was the visual antidote to Brenda Bagley. In spite of himself, Saul felt charged up, on the verge of a statement. Also in spite of himself, he gazed at her as she approached him. She had great legs with excellent calf definition. She worked out somewhere. They all did, now. Guiltily, he turned, looking for his wife. About ten feet away, Patsy had Mary Esther in hand, but Patsy was also checking on Saul. Mary Esther was sobbing quietly. Patsy’s bangs were falling down over her sad eyes as she then hefted Mary Esther from one arm to the other. What was she being sad about? Gordy’s death? That Saul had stared helplessly at the Channel Seven reporter? No. Saul had—they both knew it—a tendency to misstate himself in situations involving the stress of public speaking, so he flashed her his brimful-of-confidence expression; she did not seem immediately reassured.
The other news team, the one from Channel Three, had gone over to wait to interview Brenda until after the detective had finished with her, but this one, the Action News Team from Channel Seven, had stayed here. After Traci McMahoney had set herself up so that the house showed in the background, but before the videocam was rolling, she asked Saul if he’d be willing to answer a few questions on-camera. He nodded. She aimed herself at the lens, touched her hair, and then did her intro. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks man, Gordon Himmelman, who lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. The young man had shot himself in the front yard of one of his former teachers, Saul Bernstein. So far there was no explanation as to why he had taken the trouble to bike over to his teacher’s house to shoot himself. No suicide note had yet been found.
Ah, Saul thought. So that settles that.
Traci McMahoney pivoted toward Saul. “You were his teacher.”
“Yes.”
“And in what subject?”
“Language arts.” Saul looked at her and at the microphone, then at the sound guy. He felt something coming on, something wrong. “Last year. Not this academic year. Last academic year. He had dropped out.”
“How were his grades?”
“His grades? It was a . . . remedial class.”
“Oh. In that case, how well did you know the young man?”
“Pretty well. I don’t know. How well does anybody know anyone?”
Traci McMahoney frowned. “Had he threatened you? Had he threatened anyone at school?”
“No. Not exactly. He had written those illegible notes of his. He once called me a shitbird.”
Traci McMahoney moved the microphone away from her mouth. Quietly, confidentially, she said to Saul, “We can’t put words like that on the air.”
“I know,” Saul said. “I was just telling you what he said.” His eyebrow itched. He scratched it. “I thought I had just better tell the truth.”
“Okay,” she said, still conspiratorially, sotto voce. Then, resuming her professional voice, she said, “Had he seemed depressed to you?”
“Depressed? No. That wasn’t like him. At least I don’t think so.”
“What about these notes you mentioned?”
“Oh, the notes? He wrote notes in class about how much he didn’t like school. He once called me a kike, but he didn’t really mean it. I don’t even know where he found that word.”
Traci McMahoney shifted her weight on her great legs, expressing impatience and dissatisfaction. She gave off a scent of some wonderful perfume redolent of the Elysian Fields. It made Saul think of Tahiti, where he had never been. Patsy never wore perfume; she had allergies. Brenda’s perfume, by contrast, smelled like the perfume counter in a drugstore. Saul intuited that the interview was not going well, however, and that the fault was probably his. He would try to do better. He wanted to please Traci McMahoney.
“What were you doing when it happened?” she asked.
“I was standing in front of the bedroom window,” Saul said, “listening to my wife tell me about my mother’s affair with the yard boy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Traci McMahoney said. She dropped the microphone again. “Can we start over? Let’s start over. You don’t need to go into details like that. It’s distracting to the viewers. Let’s start over. And let’s try to stay on-message. This’ll be the second take. This is all on tape anyway. We’ll do some editing. Thank God this isn’t an on-the-air breaking-news report.”
Once again she did an introduction. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman. Boy, man. Which was he? This time they ran through the same questions one after the other, but Saul remembered not to mention his mother and not to say anything about shitbirds or
kikes.
“Had he threatened anyone else?” she asked.
“Gordy? No. Well, I don’t think so.”
“Do you know where he got the gun?”
“From his aunt, I think. I believe she had hidden it, and he found it.”
“Wouldn’t you consider this a tragedy?”
“Sort of,” Saul said.
“Could you expand on that?”
“Well, I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did. He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them, mindlessly. I don’t know if you could call that a tragedy or not. It just happened. It was . . .” Saul struggled to find an adjective. “It was tidal.”
“Wouldn’t you say it’s a tragedy every time a young life is snuffed out?”
“Probably,” Saul said. “Depends on what you mean by ‘tragedy.’” Traci McMahoney frowned again. “If you mean a story of a great man brought low by circumstances related to his character, resulting in events that cause a purging of pity and fear, then no.”
Her frown was growing permanent. “So what you’re saying is, this is another meaningless tragedy, uh, story of violence among our young people.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s meaningless,” Saul told her. “It’s rare for something to be meaningless.”
“Would you care to expand on that?”
“It’s not meaningless if there are guns everywhere. If a weird unhappy kid can get a gun anytime he wants one, then it’s not meaningless. It means that there are too many guns around.”
Traci McMahoney smiled. “Too many guns?”
“This whole country is gun crazy,” Saul said. “From the president on down.”
“Well, you can save that for the Editorial Moment,” Traci McMahoney said, grimacing. “On Sunday night just before sign-off. What about Gordon Himmelman?”
“What about him?”
“Do you feel that you failed him somehow? That the system failed him?”
“Failed him? Me? Who knows? But I doubt it.”
“I mean, do you think you could have stopped him?”
“How?”
“Counseling. More one-on-one. Aggressive intervention. Mentoring.”
“Boys like Gordy Himmelman don’t usually take to counseling. Besides, I wasn’t his parent. He did have this air of abandonment, I’ll say that. He was like the creature set loose by Dr. Frankenstein.” It had come right out of his mouth. He didn’t mean to say it, but he had said it anyway. “You ignore them and they turn into monsters.”
“A monster? No, I won’t follow that up. I could, but I won’t. Is there a chance that this wasn’t a suicide? Could it have been an accident? Why did he come over to your house with a loaded gun?”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Saul said. “He had the gun barrel pointed inside his mouth. Maybe he wanted to impress us.”
There was a long beat during which Traci McMahoney tried to think of a question. “So, in conclusion, why do you think he did it? Do you have an explanation for this terrible trage—,uh, event?”
“Yeah. Too many guns, too much television, not enough reading, a crazy violence-prone culture, and a kid, I mean an okay kid with lousy parenting, probably, or nonparenting, and he needed cognitive help, so you get this dumb bloodfest, this Americana suicide, right? I mean, is there really a big enigma? I don’t see a big enigma here. Maybe the only big enigma is that he didn’t wait to go charging into the school lunch-room next fall spraying bullets. Small favors, and all that. You’ve got to be careful not to sentimentalize when something like this happens.”
“You feel strongly about this,” Traci McMahoney said, in disbelief.
“Yes. I don’t like sentimentality,” Saul said.
“Okay.” She lowered the microphone and nodded at the videocam guy, doing a quick gesture in front of her eyes and a nod indicating a cut. The cameraman lowered the videocam away from his eye before hoisting it backward onto his shoulder, and Saul could see that he was smirking. Then Traci McMahoney turned to Saul once again. “Well, that was mostly unusable. Look,” she said, brilliantly smiling, “I agree with you about a lot of what you said, but you can’t say those things on-camera. That’s editorial-page. That’s not front-page. We’re doing front-page. This is a lead story. You do see the difference.”
“Right.”
“We’re gonna have to do a lot of editing on that. Sorry. You’re kind of a walking outtake.”
“Okay. I was just trying to avoid the usual pieties.”
“The usual pieties. Well, you succeeded. Let me make sure I have this right. You’re Saul Bernstein.” She wrote his name down in a tiny notebook. She licked her lips.
“Yes.”
“Pronounced ‘steen’ or ‘stine’?”
“For TV I don’t care. ‘Steen,’ usually.”
“All right.” She looked up at him, smelling of Tahiti, where he would never go. “You’re very weird.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize. Really. I apologize to you, profusely. Did I say that? Actually, no, in some sense, I didn’t say that. We’re agreed? All right? I didn’t say that.”
“All right,” Saul said.
“Thank you for your interesting comments.” She turned away. “Where’s the aunt?” she asked. “Is the aunt free, yet?” The cameraman pointed toward Saul and Patsy’s front door, where Brenda was waiting for them to interview her. She had a hand mirror out and was hopelessly fixing her seaweed hair. Everybody was working on the hair today. “Let’s go,” Traci McMahoney said, striding away. “Maybe we can get an aunt segment.”
Saul looked up into the sky as Patsy approached him. He recognized what he was doing as one of Gordy’s habits, staring up into the sky as if something of interest were located there. The day was extremely bright, still beautiful, perhaps, though the sun had disappeared, and no clouds were visible. The sky was like a heat radiator full of steam. “How did I do?” he asked her. Mary Esther was fussy and complaining in Patsy’s arms, and Saul could tell from a pissy odor that her diaper needed changing. She handed Emmy to Saul.
“How did you do?” Patsy leaned back. Saul noticed immediately how much more human she was than Traci McMahoney. Less sexy but more human and more beautiful. Her integrity. Her love for him. Look at her eyes! There was genuine feeling there! “How did you do?” Now she leaned forward. “Honey. Listen to me. A boy killed himself in our yard this morning, and now, at eight minutes before five o’clock, you’re asking me how you did? I should hit you. Or something. I don’t mean for that woman and the way that you . . .”
She couldn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment, which was also a future moment, and a past one as well—time had become indelibly confused somehow—Saul felt himself hit or nudged. Looking up at the upstairs window of his house, he saw (and didn’t see) himself, and Patsy, the two of them naked there, with Mary Esther in Patsy’s arms. He—the Saul of the here and now—was standing where Gordy had been, on the spot where the boy had stood. He did not break out into sobs. No, he wasn’t even crying; no cathartic moment presented itself. After all, it had been a small death, and it was not, in any sense, a tragedy, as he had carefully noted. But it was still a death. And something precious to Saul—he couldn’t even say what it was, and he prided himself on his occasional sensitivities—something precious to him felt, what was the word, trashed. And for that, and maybe even for Gordy Himmelman with a bullet hole at the back of his skull and his blood on the tree in the yard, his body carted away under a sheet, for all those things . . . what was the word, those things unloved, a boy who in a single moment hadn’t wanted to live anymore, Saul felt suddenly like an accomplice, even though the expression on his face did not change, and Patsy leaned forward toward him, making an arc over their crying daughter, in common grief.
Ten
After the officers of the law had returned with their notebooks and clipboards to their patrol cars, and after the Action News vans had sped away to the next news site, and
after the two reporters from the Five Oaks News-Chronicle had departed, taking the young staff photographer with the shaved head with them, and after the superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, had called to schedule what he called a “strategy session” with Saul for the following week, maybe Tuesday, Saul and Patsy sat in their living room, wondering what would hit them next. They had taken the phone off the hook. Mary Esther toyed with her Busy Box in the playpen, and when she stood and whined (she could stand on her own now and would soon be in the toddler stage; her first words had already been said), Saul took her up to her bedroom. Patsy could hear him singing to her.
Patsy didn’t want to be alone with Saul for the rest of the evening. She dreaded that prospect.
Hurriedly, she called Harold, Saul’s friend, who said he would be over in a matter of minutes, with his wife, Agatha. After putting the phone down and consulting her address book, Patsy called her friend from the bank, in the loan office, Susan. She and Susan were both loan officers in different branches in town. Susan said yes, of course, she would drop everything. She said she didn’t think she could bring her husband, Wyatt. Wyatt was working on the city budget. Then Patsy called Mad Dog Bettermine and the woman he lived with, Karla, and after they agreed to come, she invited another friend, Julie Dusenberg, an instructor in English at Holbein College whom Saul and Patsy had met at a day-care center in town. Julie was a single mom, and she said she’d be over in a jiffy as long as it was okay with them if she brought her daughter, Kate, with her, and as long as it was okay if she didn’t stay until late. Patsy then called Laurie Welsh. Laurie couldn’t come because of the kids—Hugh was gone, Laurie didn’t say where, though Patsy guessed he was probably out drinking—but asked if there was anything else she could do. She had already heard about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. She wanted to be there for her. Before Patsy could say anything, Laurie said she’d bring some cooked chicken by tomorrow, would she be around at ten in the morning?
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