“Next time I come,” he said, “I’ll bring this book my dad liked. To Kill a Mockingbird.Ever heard of it?”
I smiled, told him I had.
“I think you’d like it. I’ll read it to you, okay?”
I still wasn’t sure I wanted a repeat of this evening, but before I could respond, he said, “Let me tell you something, Leo. Something I hate more than anything in the whole world. I hate liars. Like people who tell you they love you, but you know they don’t. You know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“So don’t ever lie to me, okay?”
I felt like a fraud. I was a fraud. He didn’t know it, but I was already lying to him. “Okay,” I said.
“You really promise?”
“I do. I promise.”
When he left, he put a hand on my shoulder, and then, suddenly, he hugged me. “You’re okay, man. I’ll be in touch.”
The next day, I couldn’t seem to get him out of my thoughts. I’d been right to think he was a danger to me, but now that our evening together was over and the worst had passed, I started looking forward to seeing him again.
Dinner with Cary on Thursday night was something less than splendid. I told her about being mugged outside my apartment, and that the kid who’d knocked me down had bruised one of my ribs. Thankfully, it wasn’t broken, just sore. But my daughter was so consumed by all of the wedding minutia that the story barely registered. After trying on a dozen tuxedos, and at least that many vests, she finally decided what looked best on me and we ordered it. When she dropped me back at the apartment, she gave me a peck on the cheek. I wanted more.
Over the next seven months, I got to know Ryan very well. We spent at least a couple of nights together every week—sometimes more. My vision stayed pretty much the same, but I was getting better at hiding it, so I don’t think Ryan ever caught on. Sometimes we’d go out to dinner, but most often we stayed in. Ryan loved books, and I loved him for it. We read To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn,Animal Farm, Lonesome Dove,and The Catcher in the Rye.
I figured it was best we get to that last book together before he read it himself. It had been a problem for so many kids that I wanted to talk about it with him. As with most boys his age, Ryan agreed that the world was filled with phonies. And it was at that point that he really opened up for the first time, told me about his life, how he hated his mother. He went on and on about how she would say she loved him, then shove him out the door. I don’t think he’d ever talked to anyone about any of this before, and the act of sharing his feelings, his pain, brought us even closer.
By March, I felt as if he’d become a second son. I had such high hopes for him. He’d been bringing his homework over for months. I’d help him with it if I could. Or, if he didn’t need my input, he’d sit in the living room working on it while I listened to the TV. It wasn’t like we were doing something together all the time. He seemed content just to be with me. And his grades improved. We started talking about college. When he’d leave for the night, he’d hug me. It made me realize how starved I was for affection—for the physical touch of another human being.
One afternoon in late May, I woke from an afternoon nap to find that my vision had suddenly worsened. The world was covered in an even thicker haze. By evening, I had developed a bad case of nervous energy. I hadn’t seen Ryan all week and that was bothering me too. I listened to the news and all of David Letterman and I still wasn’t tired. I got the idea in my head that I should buy a frozen pizza for the next time Ryan and I had dinner together. Chuck’s Market stayed open until midnight, so I put on my coat, grabbed my big flashlight and cane, and headed out the door. I think part of the reason I went out was to prove that I could still do it—still be independent, still make it across the park, no matter what was happening to my sight.
Chuck was behind the front counter when I entered. “Busy night?” I asked.
“No,” he said, stuffing his newspaper under the counter. “Slow. Bad business today. Bad economy. Make me worry.”
I headed to the frozen food section. Adjusting my thick glasses, I squinted at the pictures on the box covers. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at, but I thought one was sausage, another pepperoni. There was an odd one that looked like it had mushrooms and something green on top. I figured the green stuff would put off a teenager. As I was dithering over which to take, I heard the door jingle open and then shut. A second later, I heard Chuck cry out: “You leave store! Go away, get out!”
I turned and saw two indistinct forms hovering by the front counter.
“The money!” said a young voice. “Now. Quick!”
My mouth opened. It was Ryan’s voice.
“No money,” insisted Chuck. “You go or I—”
Everything moved so fast after that, and my vision was so cloudy, that I can’t tell you for sure what happened. I think Chuck must have reached under the counter, or at least looked like he was about to. The kid who’d come in with Ryan fired a gun and Chuck dropped down out of sight.
I heard Ryan swear. Then scream, “You freak! Why’d you do that?”
“Get the money!”
The kid with the gun burst back through the store, looking to see if anyone had witnessed the shooting. I backed into the shadows next to the freezer and ripped off my glasses. As I pushed them into my pocket, I realized I had my dark glasses with me. I quickly put them on. If the shooter thought I was blind, maybe he’d leave without killing me. My entire body was quaking as I watched him swing around the end of a row of canned goods, the gun held stiffly out in front of him.
“Not much here,” called Ryan. “Maybe two hundred.”
“Shit,” said his buddy. And then he saw me.
“Come outta there!” he shouted.
I didn’t move.
Ryan rushed to the back. When he saw me, he knocked his partner’s hand down.
“Fuck, man! Why’d you do that?”
Ryan whispered, “He’s blind, for chrissake. Leave him alone. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
The kid hesitated.
Ryan grabbed his arm. “Come on!”
The kid with the gun stared at me for another millisecond, then took off.
I guess I’m not much of a hero. I fell to my knees, shaking so hard I wet my pants. It took a long time to pull myself together. Minutes. Maybe longer. I finally struggled to my feet and raced to the front counter. Chuck was lying on his back with a big bloody hole in the center of his chest. I knelt down and felt for a pulse at his neck. If there was one, I couldn’t find it. I grabbed the phone and punched in 911.
A woman’s voice answered, “Emergency operator.”
I told her where I was, that a man had been shot—the owner of the market. I think I may have been crying.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
“Are the assailants gone? You said there were two?”
I glanced outside, but all I could think of was Ryan, the trouble he was in. Why had he been so stupid? I was hemorrhaging internally for a kid I wasn’t sure I even knew.
For my son.
“Sir, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“A squad car is on the way. Did you see the assailants?”
“What?”
“You called them kids.”
“I did?” The air shimmered around me. My instinct screamed at me to protect him, but was that right or wrong?
“Can you describe them? Did you…” She paused.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
“Sir? Are you there? Sir?”
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
BY BRAD ZELLAR
Columbia Heights (Minneapolis)
For years, every time I drive up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights I’d start feeling like I had the barrel of a gun jabbed in the small of my back. If I hung around the place long enough, I knew damn well I’d eventually have that gun between my teeth, and every night when I went to be
d I’d lie awake with the taste of iron and oil in my mouth. I grew up out there in the Heights, and my old neighborhood was the bit I’d never been able to spit.
Whenever I made that trip over the last couple decades I’d always had better things to do, and this particular occasion was no different.
I have to think hard here about chronology, because some things from that day are still a little muddled in my mind. This, though, would have been a Saturday. Francis Greer, ringleader of the neighborhood cabal of my youth, and my brother-in-law of several years, had been released from prison a day earlier, and I had every reason to suspect that, while an unwanted guest in my home, Greer had stolen two tickets to a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I had no particular enthusiasm for this musical (which, I suppose I should mention, starred Donny Osmond), but I had bought the tickets as a gift for my wife, and she had been eager, even excited, to attend. This particular incident might seem relatively minor, and it was probably small pota toes as far as Greer was concerned. There was a long history, however, and the theft of the tickets was one more violation of an old trust and an even older loyalty.
I was seething that morning, and I’d had a spat with my wife Janice over the incident. Her natural inclination was to take her brother’s side in our frequent disagreements regarding his behavior. Janice had gone to work pissed off, Greer was unaccounted for, and I had a day to kill. I’d driven out to the Heights to poke around on the off chance that I’d run into Greer, and to pay a visit to my mother. She wasn’t home—my best guess was that she’d caught the free shuttle to the casino with some of her neighborhood cronies—and pulling up to the curb in front of her house had only served to bring back all sorts of bad memories. So that, at any rate, was how that day had started.
I’ve always known damn well that when you’re lost, the first thing you should do is turn back around, but even the most conventional wisdom is useless to man who is constitutionally incapable of adopting it. I’ve always been a plunger. I just keep going, allowing myself to be carried along and blindly hoping that I’m going to eventually end up right back where I started. And oddly enough, that’s exactly the way it always seems to work out for me, even though right back where I started is precisely the place I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from.
A little useful background: From a very early age Francis Greer had presided over a sort of neighborhood academy of lawlessness, to which I was something of a helpless conscript. There were a bunch of us out there in the Heights, boys of around the same age who had grown up together. We were—thanks, I suppose, to the accident of geography and the influence of environment—an uncommonly tight group all the way through high school. Francis was a persuasive character, with a certain transparently criminal charisma. All through our childhood and adolescence he progressively upped the ante on our illegal exploits until there was no longer any pretending that we were just playing around.
Alone among this group of characters, I should have known better. I was from the good side of Central Avenue; the other four primary members of our little gang were from the other side. Two of them, Slim Chung and his younger brother Randy, lived in the trailer park in Hilltop with their mother Dolores, who was in a wheelchair. Greer lived with Janice and his parents in an apartment building adjacent to the trailer parks. Gilbert Borocha, the patsy of our group, came from a big family and shared a room with a couple siblings in a little house a few blocks south toward downtown, off the avenue, right at the edge of a railroad switching yard.
I recognized from a very early age that my life was substantially different from those of my friends. I grew up in a modest split-level home in a 1950s development. My father was an unambitious small-fry lawyer with his own storefront practice on Central. Every day he wore a suit and carried a briefcase to work, and he drank as much as he worked. Whenever I asked him what he did for a living, he’d say, “It’s not important,” and I never had any doubt that he believed this to the very core of whatever was left of his heart. He’d been a junior associate in a big firm downtown, but after years of being passed over for a partner position he’d apparently gotten the message and bolted for his nickel-and-dime private practice.
My mother is a decent woman, a privately pious housewife, and once upon a time she could actually muster a passable imitation of cheerfulness, at least in comparison with the mothers of my friends. She was tight with my older sister, who was my only sibling. Growing up, I always had whatever I needed, and got most of what I wanted. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I had no excuses.
By the time I went off to the University of Minnesota, every one of my neighborhood pals had acquired juvenile criminal records of varying lengths. Somehow—and to this day I consider this the one miracle I may be given in this life—I managed to avoid the sort of serious trouble that would make such a mess of the lives of my friends. I had—as my mother would say—scrapes with the authorities, and my fair share of close calls, but I always exercised a certain prudence that was, I fully realize, essentially rooted in cowardice. The other members of my little gang were nothing if not imprudent, and after a certain age my primary role in their criminal enterprise became one of the consulting accomplice before and after the fact. I was the smart one, the confidante, the kid who always had to be in at a decent hour.
That didn’t, of course, save me from the clutches of my chums, or, eventually, their predations. There was that old history between us, and for a very long time, perhaps naturally, I retained a soft spot for the people I knew as children. I also lived in a pretty serious state of denial for years; I was basically naïve, and didn’t want to know the details of what Greer and the others were doing. To fully understand the extent of their crimes would have forced me to acknowledge the uneasy truth I had spent most of my life resisting. And the sad fact of the matter was that I had never been very successful at making friends once I left that old neighborhood behind.
At any rate, at one point, when I was married and living in a modest neighborhood in South Minneapolis, the Chung brothers and Gilbert Borocha showed up at my house with what I assumed were stolen tools and lumber, and began to cobble together a version of a serviceable flophouse in my garage. This project—carried out by some combination of my old friends, generally whichever ones weren’t incarcerated or roaming aimlessly around the country committing crimes that would eventually land them back in prison—went on for almost two years, and over time these accommodations became quite elaborate. A presumably stolen portable outhouse appeared in my backyard, stashed behind my garage, and remained there for more than a year. From this little clubhouse off the alley, my friends were free to come and go as they pleased. Perhaps needless to say, this arrangement was difficult to square with my wife and neighbors. I’ll admit it also made me somewhat nervous, but none of my friends ever seemed to stay for any extended period of time, and they never—so far as I was aware, at any rate—caused trouble in the neighborhood.
Then one morning six years ago, I woke to the hysterical racket of crows, and from my kitchen window saw Randy Chung crucified to the picnic table in my backyard. He’d been stripped to his appalling bikini briefs and shot once through the head, apparently (this was determined later) in my garage and sometime before he was nailed to the table. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it’s difficult for a respectable man’s reputation to survive that sort of scandal. Anybody who has ever made the mistake of keeping questionable company, and allows himself to become however tangentially embroiled in such an ugly incident—which was, of course, all over the local news—learns only too well that though a man can be officially exonerated, he can never again be perceived as truly innocent.
Two characters with whom I was entirely unfamiliar were eventually arrested and convicted for Randy Chung’s murder, and the motive was allegedly some grievance over a drug deal gone bad. I felt terrible about the whole thing, of course. Randy was a simpleton, a quiet guy with a sweet disposition who had sp
ent his entire life tagging around with his older brother Slim. What happened to him was horrifying, and literally beyond the range of my comprehension. And from a purely selfish standpoint, the real shame of it was that at the time I was in the midst of one of my phases as a respectable man, of which there have been several, each of them in their own way reasonably satisfying and successful.
I had never, unfortunately, been able to sustain any of them for long. In the aftermath of Randy Chung’s death, my wife filed for divorce and our house was put on the market and sold.
The older I got the harder it was for me to understand why it was I had such a hard time playing the part of the solid citizen. Because—honest to God—it’s always been easy enough for me to slip into that role. I’ve held three different teaching positions at junior colleges in and around the Twin Cities. For a time I successfully sold advertising for a Christian radio station. Characteristic for me, I’d taken the job out of desperation and found the work easy and, to some extent, satisfying.
Before my present marriage I’d been married twice, both times to wonderful, attractive, and modestly successful women, each of whom to this day maintains a life of the utmost respectability. I also had a teenaged son, made insolent, his mother assured me, by my erratic presence in his life. He was now playing in a band, Lounge Abraham, which, based on the tape I had received in the mail, was a very loud and angry proposition. The last time he came to visit I was stunned to see that he had acquired a tattoo on his arm—he is sixteen years old, which seems to me entirely too young for that sort of thing—that read, “Death to the Great Satin.” I was, of course, quick to point out what I felt was an inexcusable misspelling, only to learn that this was apparently an ironic tattoo, an allusion to a handmade T-shirt worn by some infamous psychopath who had shot up a California schoolyard with an assault rifle some years ago.
I couldn’t pretend to understand my life, but I can tell you that I’ve always had legitimate money in the bank. I’ve never missed a car payment, and I’ve now owned three different homes, and would have turned a tidy profit on the first two if it weren’t for complications related to my failed marriages. That said, crash landings and forced reinvention had long been my stock in trade. I can’t tell you how easy it is to burn down your entire life and build a new one from the ground up. The hard part, of course, is to keep the damn thing standing. I’d always felt the key, though, was to do the demolition work yourself, or at least to never let go of the illusion that your self-destruction was purely your own work. It was a point of pride; I never wanted to give someone else the credit for ruining my life. I’d be the first guy to admit that I’d made plenty of bad decisions, but they were my decisions, even when my arm was being twisted so far behind my back that I was practically on my knees.
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