Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  “All right,” I said. “You can watch him. But just until tonight. Have Callie tell him. He likes her.”

  Dru came gliding down the metal stairs of the factory. The dress was lavender and decorated with lace and silver beads and went all the way to the floor so that she had to lift it as she descended. “Does this look like a gown befitting a debutante going to the theater with the doomed president of the United States and my fiancé and stepbrother who years later will go mad and murder me in Germany?”

  “If that’s what you’re going for,” I said. Her shoulders were bare in the style of dresses you see in Civil War movies and around her neck she wore a necklace of blood-red stones that the light shone through like wine.

  “They’re garnets,” she said. “It belonged to my grandmother. Oh, Tom, isn’t this magnificent.” She touched her fingers to the necklace and her expression darkened. “I’m worried about Roy.”

  “Why?”

  “He came here last night and said he wanted to go for a walk. He was out of his head and talking a mile a minute about what Harold was saying about an intersection and about what he called the triumph of art over history.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing Crowder says that sounds cool, but when you think about it it doesn’t make any sense. Then he told me he wanted to switch the blank in Harold’s gun with a real bullet.”

  “Harold agreed to that?”

  “Harold doesn’t know. Roy says this is re-creation, not reality, so he can’t be hurt.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “I’ll go look for him,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s not serious. Maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Here. He gave me these. These are the blanks.” She opened her fist and dropped the two shells in my hand. They were warm from her holding them and looked like regular bullets, except that they were flat at the end. It struck me that if Crowder had given Dru the blanks, then he’d been doing more than thinking about switching them.

  “Maybe we should call the whole thing off,” I said.

  “We can’t,” she said, “Like Harold said, we’re at an intersection.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Harold? Nobody knows. Lurking about. Roy and Harriette are spending the day together. They thought that would be appropriate. Mike’s coming over around six and we’re leaving for the theater. The meeting starts at 7:30. Bea and you are the only ones who have to be there on time. Here, come upstairs and I’ll get you your suit.”

  I didn’t like it. The fabric was a thick corduroy and an ugly brown, to say nothing of the knee pants. “Bea guessed about the size,” Dru said. “Do you want to put it on now? The rest of us are.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got people over.”

  “Who?”

  “Grey and Callie. They just got in last night.”

  She raised her eyebrows at that. “Are they coming to the show?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “They should. We can all go someplace after.”

  I couldn’t tell her I was leaving. Instead, I tried to think about what it was going to be like for us when this was all over, but I didn’t have a clue. All I knew for sure was I didn’t want to wear the brown corduroy suit.

  When I got back to the room, Callie was gone and Grey had gagged Ship and bound him to a chair with masking tape. Ship stared at me with bug eyes and breathed hard through his nose.

  “Holy shit, Grey.”

  “After you left he started yelling, and I couldn’t get him to shut up.”

  “Where’s Callie?”

  “She’s waiting downstairs?”

  “In the truck? It’s freezing out.”

  “I don’t know. She said she couldn’t watch me tape him up.”

  “Let him go.”

  Grey gave me the kind of look of violence that I’d always backed down from when we were kids. “Not until we’re out of here,” he said.

  “Then we’re out of here.” He didn’t stop me as I took a pair of scissors and cut the tape and yanked it off of Ship’s face along with a good bit of his hair. “Cripes,” Ship yelled as soon as his mouth was free.

  “Dennis,” I told him, “you got to shut up, or I’m going to put it back on.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “You got to let me loose. I’ve really got to whiz.”

  I cut him free from the chair and he bolted out the door toward the bathroom before Grey could do anything to stop him.

  “Are you insane?”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Grey said. “He started screaming. You heard him.”

  “It’s time for you to think this through,” I said. “Callie’s in no shape and you’re on the run and tying people up. What we should do is go back home.”

  “No way,” Grey said, “I do that and I get killed.”

  “We’ll tell Spires.”

  “He’ll lock me up, and he’ll probably lock you up too.”

  “Think about it. We’ll tell him what we know. They’d much rather get a guy like Natch than us. If they get him, he can’t touch you if he wanted to. Tell them you just thought you were buying a boat. It wasn’t until you got out on the water that you found out. Who’s he going to believe? You or some pusher?”

  Ship came back from the can, and Grey told him to get lost.

  “I want you to leave,” Ship said. He was as mad as I’d ever seen him, which I guess was understandable. “You should go to the hospital with your girl and see if she’s still okay and then you can’t come back here.” As he was talking, there was the sound of hurried footsteps in the hallway and Callie appeared in the doorway, out of breath. “The cops are here,” she said.

  “You little—” Grey said and made a grab for Ship, but he made it out the door.

  “Okay,” I said, “Go. Take the stairs to the second floor. Turn right and go to the end of the hall. There’s a second set of stairs that go out back.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” Callie asked.

  “They don’t care about me. I’ll stick around and talk to them while you get on the road.”

  Callie looked as though she would cry again. Then we hugged.

  Then Grey and I hugged. “This was fun, wasn’t it,” he said.

  “Sort of,” I said, and they went.

  The police were cordial. There were two, an older officer, Tremble, and his partner, a woman, Officer Parker, who did most the talking, with her elbow resting on the handle of her gun. She asked to see my student ID and said, smiling, “We had a report of a kidnapping,”

  “Huh,” I said, then saw Ship hovering in the hallway.

  “This gentleman said you tied him up.”

  “He’s my roommate,” I said. “He lives here.”

  “Why’s he got tape in his hair?” Officer Tremble asked.

  “We were goofing around.”

  “Was this a hazing incident?” Officer Parker asked.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Hazing is a violation of university policy,” she said.

  “Is it against the law?”

  “Depends on the action,” Tremble said.

  “Ask him where the other ones are,” Ship said. “The guy who sells drugs and his pregnant girlfriend.”

  The officers stood blinking at me.

  “These friends of mine just left,” I said. “But it’s not like he says. She’s pregnant, but he’s no drug dealer.”

  Tremble looked at me as Officer Parker said, “Would you empty your pockets for us?”

  “How come?”

  “If what this gentleman says is correct,” Tremble said.

  I said, “Sure,” because I knew I had nothing to hide. When I turned my pockets inside out the blanks Dru had given me for Harold fell on the floor.

  Tremble collected them. “Tell us about these,” he said.

  “They’re props,” I said, “for a show.”

  “W
hat show?” Parker asked.

  “At the university regents meeting.”

  “You’re just full of surprises,” said Tremble, at which point they took Ship down the hall and talked to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I could see that he was all excited and waving his arms and when they came back, Officer Parker said, “Mr. Zimmermann, at this point we’re going to ask you to come downtown with us, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Are you arresting me?” I asked.

  “No, we’d like to clear up the matter of your friends,” Tremble said.

  “Can I say no?” I asked.

  “You could,” Officer Parker said, still smiling, “But then we probably would have to arrest you.”

  “For what?”

  “Try us,” Tremble said.

  My reception at the police station was something different from what I might have expected from watching the cop shows. I wasn’t handcuffed or put behind bars. I was issued a can of Coke and a key to the washroom connected to a six-inch-long piece of laminated plastic with the city’s logo on it. I told Officers Parker and Tremble about Grey and Callie (leaving out the part about what went on on the boat). I told them the first time Grey came down he had some pot with him, and we’d smoked some of that and Dennis, prude that he is, assumed that anyone who smoked marijuana was a dealer, but the truth was that Grey wasn’t and if they wanted to arrest everyone in the state of Wisconsin who blew the occasional doob they’d have to build more jails.

  They were mostly concerned with Callie and her baby. They asked when she was supposed to have it. I told them as best I knew. They asked if I thought Callie was at risk traveling with Grey. I told them that Grey was the father and that they had been together for five years and that he had never harmed her and wouldn’t. I told them I’d stake my life on that. They asked if I’d ever had any trouble with the law and I told them no (which was true as far as they would see from any records they could look up). They asked me again what the two blanks were for and I told them exactly (leaving out the part about the real bullets). Whatever I told them they seemed to believe or did a good job of pretending. I wouldn’t have worried all that much about my detour to the station, except that all this took more than three hours.

  In between asking me questions, Officer Parker and Officer Tremble came and went, sometimes disappearing for a half hour at a time. I’d see them down the hall, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups and shooting the breeze with the other police. And I got the idea that all the time they had somebody, like me, down for questioning was time that they didn’t have to be driving around their beat, which meant they weren’t in any hurry to let me go.

  With nothing better to do with my time, I worried. I worried first about Callie and her baby and then about Grey and Howard Natchell. I worried about how I was going to get my corduroy James E. Buckingham suit out of Ship’s room. Then, as it got too close to 7:00, I worried about if I’d have time to get over there at all, even if Ship would let me in. And finally I worried about Harold and the loaded derringer he carried in his pocket.

  And then it was 7:30 and I didn’t see either of my officers and I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I put the restroom key on the counter, tossed my Coke can in the trash and headed for the door, reasoning that I wasn’t under arrest and that I could just get over to the show, make sure that nobody did anything stupid and come back and turn myself in again, which would have to score me points as being above the call of the ordinary citizen. I had my hand on the handle of the glass door, an inch from the anonymity of the street, when somebody yelled, “Hold on.”

  I had seen a lot of this officer in the time I spent at the station, carrying stacks of manila folders from one desk to another, making time with Officer Palmer by the fingerprint machine. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  My knees shook. “I thought I was done,” I said.

  He said. “Has anyone signed you out?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Sit there,” he said, pointing at the bench I’d just left.

  I sat and waited for him to come back with Tremble or Parker, who I figured would bawl me out for not asking permission to leave then let me go anyway. For fifteen minutes, I waited for Officer Parker or anybody to return, then thirty minutes, and when still nobody came, I got up and, looking both ways this time to make sure the coast was clear, made a second run for the door.

  It was ten blocks from the station, up past the capitol building and down State Street to the auditorium. I made the distance running flat out in five minutes. Forty-five minutes into the meeting, the lobby was deserted. I heard the shot clear as thunder above the silence of the hall.

  Then there were shouts and screams. I distinctly heard Bea cry out, “Heaven help the republic!” and what I thought was Harold delivering his line from the stage, but couldn’t be sure with all the chaos. I ran the rest of the way up the stairs. As I got to the box, I might’ve paused a second, afraid of what I was going to see. Pushing back the curtain to the box, I first saw Dru, standing and staring in my direction but not seeing me, then Majors, in his blue officer’s uniform, leaning out of the box, screaming, “Doctor, somebody get a doctor.” Harold was gone. He’d fired the shot and jumped over the rail onto the stage, exactly like the script said, leaving Roy, with his head in the lap of Harriette, his wife for this drama, the white makeup on her face, plastered on even thicker for the occasion, now wet with Crowder’s blood.

  26

  GRAVITY

  We drove the back roads all night in Crowder’s Volvo, turning what would have been five hours by Interstate into eight. Dru slept in the passenger seat, still in her gown, curled against the door with her hand on the lever, ready to bail out at the first danger that woke her. The yellow line ticked by like stitches, flowing into solid ribbon at the hills then back to dashes at the crest. It was rearview-mirror driving all the way, looking for headlights coming up on us from behind. We touched backward all the spots I’d stopped at on my way eight months before—the Dells, Lois’s drive-in, and the stretch of County Highway M where I’d bought a bag of peaches off a Mexican and his daughter for a hundred dollars—like it was a celebrity map tour of three days of my life that I’d never told anyone about.

  The Volvo handled like a tin box on steel wheels. Doors rattled and the steering wheel vibrated between my hands. The back seat was piled with odd junk, plastic milk crates overflowing with extension cords and paint brushes, a case of empty beer bottles, coils of copper wire, and a two-foot-long muskie stuffed, lacquered and mounted on a plaque, with a brass tag that read Clement Odegaard, Lake Wingra, April 3, 1974. The interior smelled of mildew and rot. Roy was proud of the state of his vehicle. “It’s organic,” he said. “It heals. It thrives. In spite of us.”

  Dru stirred, shifting in her sleep and pulling her knees up under her dress. I turned the radio lower but not off, thinking that would wake her up, and if she woke up we could talk. The scene in the theater box had been as real as anyone could’ve contrived a tableau to be: Majors in his uniform leaning out over the rail calling for a doctor, Harriette with her hands to her face shrieking, torn in her gestures between pushing Roy’s bleeding head off of her lap and cradling him to her chest. People crowded past me from behind, shouting credentials. “I’m a nurse,” said one, “I’m a doctor. I’m an EMT.” It was touching how ready people were to help. I headed down the stairs in search of Drucilla and found her leaning against the car.

  “Where’s Harold?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t he take the car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Should we wait for the others?”

  “Don’t you think they be down here by now if they wanted to come?”

  At four in the morning I stopped for gas in Butternut.

  As I was pulling up to the pump, I heard the rustle of taffeta. Dru rubbed her eyes. “
Where are we?”

  I told her, knowing the name would mean nothing to her. Just another one-tavern snowmobile town in northern Wisconsin. “Does it remind you of Canada?”

  She looked around, but there was nothing to see but pumps and the yellow light from the station. “No.”

  The kid behind the counter didn’t look up from his textbook, as I slapped down a five for gas and two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Dru sat cross-legged in the seat, holding the cup between her fingers so it didn’t spill on her dress. The coffee was burned and sour-smelling and steam filled the car. I put the car in gear and she said, “Don’t drive just yet.”

  “What do you think happened?” I said.

  She shook her head and dipped her lips toward the rim of the cup.

  “So what should we do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we can go to my house. Then what?”

  “We’ll go to your house—then we’ll see.” She took a sip and her whole face wrinkled, showing the first sign of the disgust I’d been looking for. “God, this is awful,” she said.

  The black sky turned gray with the morning, making the familiar landscape of the peninsula seem unfamiliar. I pointed out landmarks, all of them mundane, the national forest, the Washburn Dog N Suds, the Chevron station. She kept her eyes turned toward the black pane of the passenger window. I thought she was afraid of what the next day would bring.

  As we rounded the bend on Highway 13, where I’d first seen Lake Superior from the back of Uncle Karl’s Ford wagon, I saw a vehicle on the shoulder. I realized it was Grey’s truck.

  “How come we’re stopping?” Dru asked.

  “Some people you have to meet.”

  The surprise Grey and Callie might’ve felt at seeing me was blown away by their surprise at watching Dru tiptoe across the gravel, holding the hem of her gown in her fingertips. Callie sat in the open passenger door with her feet on the ground and Grey stood in front of her, his hands on his hips.

  “Trouble?” I said.

  “No,” Grey said.

  “Yes,” Callie said.