“You have to do it anyway,” she said quietly. Then, because she always knew where to hit me, she added, “That’s what they do in books, isn’t it?”
It was what they did in books, yes, but people in books had more inside them than I ever would.
“He’d hurt my mom.”
“You’ve got to tell her to get away, then.” She moved her head closer into my sight so I’d look at her. Her hair smelled of lemon and the long blonde strands hid one side of her face.
I didn’t say anything.
“Scott, this is someone’s life.”
“I know. It’s a bunch of people’s lives. But I think I can save them all if you hear me out.”
She drifted away now.
“No, I’ve got a plan. Here it is: we use the lead against my father. We get all of it we can, all those soldiers from Henry’s shop, and we surround the guy. We let the radioactive waves or whatever get into his head so he goes ape-shit on the witness stand.” It made perfect sense, saying it aloud.
Melanie frowned and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I’d have taken fifty punches to the face from my old man not to have that expression aimed at me. It seemed so final.
I knew I’d lost her. She was one step ahead or behind me, whichever, but we were out of sync, possibly forever. She didn’t believe anymore.
She stood up. “You can’t wait for magic to do the things you’re supposed to do.”
Then she stepped back through the pines and was gone.
I ended up hiding the Lincoln in my father’s pillow, but if it gave him as much as a bad dream, he never showed it.
In February, my father was called to testify on the third day of Henry’s trial. He whistled in the mirror that morning, adjusting the tie of the same silver-gray business suit he’d worn while applying for the small business loan at Osprey Bank and Trust.
“No, sir,” he said to his reflection. “I loaned him the rifle as one hobbyist to another. I thought he’d take out his frustration on the range. I never expected tragedy.”
Jesus, I thought. Was the Lincoln helping him?
“Yes, sir. He seemed a gentle man. Kept to himself. Generous with my son. That’s him sitting over there. He could tell you what a good man Henry usually was.”
Yeah, I would be sitting there. My old man had taken me out of school for the day, probably so there’d be at least two people afraid of him in the courtroom, me and my mom.
“I thank God that law enforcement stopped him,” my father said.
Mom and I looked at each other, not saying anything. She was tired, I could see, tired of his bullshit in the mirror.
As my parents drank the last of their coffee in the kitchen, I unzipped the pillow and took out the Leaning Lincoln. I had a feeling he could come in handy.
Dad drove us to Sarasota, waving people in when they needed to merge, smiling at the waitress at IHOP, tipping her with a twenty. He was confident as we climbed the steps to the courthouse, too, his suit jacket open like a lost Kennedy brother boarding a Lear jet.
Then he saw the metal detector.
About two weeks before Henry’s trial, an angry grandfather pulled a gun at a child support hearing in Pensacola and fired it over the judge’s left shoulder before being tackled by bailiffs. These were the days before metal detectors were common in government buildings, but they sure started popping up afterward. Sarasota County was one of the first.
My old man stopped at the security station, not letting his smile slip. I wonder if he thought it was for him. I hoped so.
He walked up. A deputy held out a plastic bucket. My father unclasped his watch and dropped it inside. Then he emptied his change. Without asking, he stepped through the detector.
It beeped.
Laughing, my father backed up patting his pockets again.
“Your belt, sir,” the deputy said.
“Ah.” My dad unclasped it, rolled it up, and put it in the bucket, too. “If you wanted me to take off my pants, you just had to ask,” he said, winking to a woman behind us in a suit. She turned out to be Henry’s prosecutor.
My father leaned to go through again and with an agility I’d learned from years of magic kits, I slipped the Leaning Lincoln into the pocket of his jacket. It was my last hope. All they’d have to do was analyze it, find out it was the same lead…
The detector cried out again. This time, my father wasn’t smiling as he stepped back. He patted his jacket this time, felt the hard metallic lump, and reached inside.
The Lincoln looked smaller in his hand than it ever had in mine. He stared down at it and then turned to me. His lips grew taut against his teeth. He leaned over a trash can and dropped Lincoln inside. It echoed like a shot against the metal.
If I’d known it was that easy, I would have given it to him months earlier.
This time, the detector let him through. It let Mom and me through, too. I glanced into the can down at the Leaning Lincoln. Whatever curse he’d borne, my father was worse.
The trial went badly for Henry from the start. In the days before my father’s testimony, the prosecutor he’d annoyed at the metal detector called eleven eyewitnesses, plus experts who’d matched the firing pin and ejector of the SKS to marks on spent casings on the scene. A metallurgist compared the unusual low-quality lead of the bullets with samples from Henry’s workshop. The two deputies who’d nabbed him told their stories with a self-satisfied machismo better suited to men who’d bagged John Dillinger than two small-town cops catching a tired old man by accident.
Milona cross-examined as best he could.
Henry sat at the defense table with his hands folded in his lap. Unlike guys in the movies keeping up their poker faces, he looked horrified and ashamed as though he was surprised to be there.
Mom, Dad, and I sat two rows from the front on one of those hard wooden courtroom pews. Mom clutched her purse, flexing and releasing and then flexing again. My old man leaned forward with one elbow on his knee like someone watching a close basketball game.
Milona called my father to the stand after lunch. He stepped up the aisle smiling and buttoning his jacket. He took the oath, and the Bible didn’t burst into flames as I’d hoped and half-expected.
This was it. If there was one thing a courtroom was good for, it was making guilty men squirm, at least on TV. I waited for my dad to crack, for the Leaning Lincoln to have weakened his will, but oh, no.
He answered every question with charm, saying the lines he’d practiced and winging the others. He paused and stammered enough to seem shocked to be there, but not so much that he seemed scared.
There’d been some question about Henry’s “obsession” with firearms, so Milona asked, “Mr. Wrenwood, are you and Mr. Butler ‘gun nuts’?”
My father glanced at the jury. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say that. A gun is a tool. Being a nut for one would be like being a hammer nut or a wrench nut.”
That got a chuckle out of the crowd, the judge included. I watched them all amazed. Why couldn’t they see?
Milona kept him on the stand longer than the other witnesses he called. The questions went deeper, too, circling the exact origin of Henry’s idea to shoot his lawyer and four strangers.
“Did he ever talk about murder?” Milona asked.
“Not in any specific sense, no.”
“What sense, then?”
“You know,” my father said. “The sense of a tired and angry man feeling cornered late in his life. I thought he was blowing off steam, but...”
Milona put his fingers to his brow, considering the next question. He knew, I could tell. Or he suspected. But if he was hoping to crack my old man, he’d need a good one.
“Did you ever talk about murder, Mr. Wrenwood?”
Oh, no. That wasn’t it. How could he not know you couldn’t fight him head-on? Even Lincoln couldn’t.
My father knew this was a time for earnestness more than charm, so his expression went grave.
“No,” he said. “I never
have. And I’ll tell you why. I’m too selfish to kill anybody. I’ve got too much to live for, a wonderful wife and son. I’ve had setbacks like Henry, and I worry he decided to solve them for me from some sense of, I don’t know, heroism or something.”
It was like a speech from a movie. I’m sure he’d practiced it until it sounded perfect. Some of the jury members nodded.
“I wish he hadn’t,” he concluded.
Milona closed his eyes. “No more questions,” he said. It was over.
My father descended from the stand, smiled humbly at the jury, and returned to our pew.
It couldn’t be over.
He took Mom’s shaking hand and patted it. He squeezed my knee like he held the gearshift of the Volkswagen.
It was all over.
There were other witnesses and a sidebar on some issue of the law, but I didn’t notice. My body couldn’t decide between crying and throwing up so it just clenched inward. I was hot and then cold and then hot again.
The Leaning Lincoln hadn’t worked. No matter how hard I’d tried to find it, magic didn’t come through. Which was what Melanie had been trying to tell me.
What sucked the most to me then was the thought that my father had been right: no matter how safe they’d made me feel, those action figures really were nothing but plastic, the movies they were in nothing but film, the books nothing but paper. Whatever I’d thought was a curse was just what it was like to grow up, trading plastic for lead.
The Leaning Lincoln wasn’t bad luck. The Leaning Lincoln was life.
I heard the crack of the wooden hammer but only vaguely perceived people getting up for a recess.
“Thank God,” my father muttered. “I’ve had to piss like a race horse for the last half an hour.”
If there was any magic at all in the world, something would have struck him down right then. It was a terrible thing to pray for, but I did.
“Come on,” I whispered. “You’re going to let him go?”
I wondered who the ‘you’ was. God? The Universe? Anyone else but me?
Standing now, I watched my father’s square shoulders disappear through the courtroom doors with the other people. None of them knew. They didn’t feel it coming off him.
I felt Mom’s touch on my arm.
“I’m ready if you are,” she said, simply.
I wasn’t sure what she meant at first. I must have looked at her like she was crazy.
“To go,” she said.
That’s when I got the first inkling that Mom hadn’t been leaving me behind on all those nights. She was finding a way out. She nodded, watching me realize what she was saying.
So magic or not, I slipped between the adults standing in the aisle, ducked under their arms and dodged their steps, and I pushed open the little oak gate beside the defense table.
Henry heard me first and turned. He smiled when he saw me—at his own trial, can you believe that? I smiled back. He opened his mouth to say something but I forced myself away, forced myself to tap Milona on the shoulder.
“Sir?” I said.
The attorney turned. Seated, he was at my eye level. “What can I do for you?”
“I know something,” I said. “I heard something.”
He considered, looking not at all surprised. “Does your mother know you’re talking to me?”
I looked back. She was sitting straight in the courtroom pew, watching us. Milona tilted his head toward the stand with an unspoken question. She closed her eyes and nodded.
When the gavel fell again and the court was back in session, Milona asked to approach the bench.
So I was the action figure. I testified and saved Henry from the electric chair but not life in prison. That life was short—he died eight years into his sentence—and I never spoke or wrote to him because there was nothing to say. Sorry my father was evil? Thanks for saving us from him as long as you did?
During the rest of Henry’s trial, Milona put us up in a hotel a few towns over, expensed to protect us as witnesses but also to buy us time. He persuaded the prosecutor to have my father picked up on conspiracy, solicitation, firearms charges, anything that would stick even briefly. We had four hours before he made his bail to carry out our suitcases. Mine had the Millenium Falcon jammed inside with my clothes.
But the cops investigated and they kept an eye on him, making him act human long enough for Mom to make the arrangements with the money she’d been hiding to get us back up north and living with my grandparents. It was hard on only her income, and there wasn’t much magic in those years except what we got from frozen dinners together in front of the television. Quiet. Together. Safe.
My dream was for my father to go to prison, for my mother to testify about everything he did and was, for me to tell that courtroom that he was the one worse even than Henry. It turns out, though, that suggesting a murder isn’t quite a crime. Neither—quite—is loaning a rifle to a man who happens to use it for one. My father hid his whole life behind “quite.”
And for the rest of that life, I was his amateur parole officer. We didn’t speak, we didn’t exchange letters or cards—I only checked for his name in the Florida legal databases. He remarried and his new wife died. He remarried again and she died, too. He had a few brushes with the law, including an investigation into the third wife’s car accident, but nothing stuck. If the Leaning Lincoln had affected him at all, I couldn’t tell the difference from his sad declining life.
I did see him at the end. The hospice called me, having looked up my name online. They told me the cancer had spread from the colon, a cancer I hadn’t known or cared about, and if I wanted to see my father, it had to be soon.
Lindsey tried to talk me out of going and it almost wasn’t hard, but in the end, I just wanted to know what he’d say.
I found him in his bed beside a large window facing the woods. His head was all I could see above the sheets and the body beneath them seemed withered to a stalk. I’m sure if I got him to his feet, he’d lean like that Lincoln until he fell.
His sunken eyes locked onto me, and I’ll admit I allowed myself an instant of hope that I’d see something in them that had grown or blunted or tamed with thirty years. I didn’t. They hardened quickly and the thin lips drew tautly into a rueful smile as though to ask what I was hoping to see. What I was hoping to get.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, sitting down beside the bed. I don’t know if he could talk or not, but he didn’t. “I brought you something.”
I set the Leaning Lincoln I’d recovered from that courthouse trash can on the cheap plastic table holding the cups with their straws for his liquid nutrition. My father glanced at the lead figurine with annoyance and then back at me with more.
I wanted to tell him that the Lincoln had been harmless to me and Lindsey and the kids, but he didn’t deserve to know that. I wanted to tell him that there were still little toy people in my home long after he had gone, that there’d always been books and movies and fantasy in our lives, but he didn’t deserve to know that, either. So I didn’t say anything, just kept sitting beside that bed and watching the Lincoln work on my father and my father work on Lincoln, wondering who would win.
In two hours, the Lincoln did.
S1E10: “GUESS WHAT’S COMING TO DINNER?”
Air Date: December 14, 1961
Writer: Barry Weyrich
Director: Dean “Deano” McDonald
Synopsis: Shirley McDougall (Francine Thomasin) and her daughter Penny (Judith Affelt) are preparing dinner while little brother Ralph (Timmy Harwood) sets the table and father Bruce McDougall (Cabe Phillips in the first of his ubiquitous appearances) nervously adjusts his tie in a mirror.
The doorbell rings and Shirley opens it. Standing on the doorstep is a seven-foot tall lizard man in a perfect business suit. He smiles as best he can and holds out a bottle of sludge-like wine which Shirley graciously accepts. Mr. McDougall shakes hands with the visitor (whose name seems to be Mr. Grggit) and motions him to the dinner table where
an awkward meal ensues. Mrs. McDougall serves a casserole dish of writhing grubs that Mr. Grggit eats, regurgitates, and then re-eats while everyone gazes down at their own plates. Politics comes up and everyone agrees with Mr. Grggit’s pronouncements about hard work. Religion comes up and everyone agrees that the Sky Bird is kind and generous.
After the meal is over, Ralph performs a song and Mr. Grggit claps his claws in approval. Mr. Grggit then thanks everyone for the wonderful meal, shakes Mr. McDougall’s hand, and tucks Ralph under his arm. Ralph cries and reaches for his mother, but Mrs. McDougall can only look helplessly on as he takes him away.
After they leave, she holds her husband close and says, “Do you think you’ll keep the job?” and Mr. McDougall replies, “I hope so, dear. I hope so.”
Commentary: Barry Weyrich found his debut on Acres of Perhaps disappointing. In a 1975 interview with Starlog magazine, he said, “There was a whole backstory to Mr. Grggit that they didn’t film. There’d been an invasion and the alien invaders had realized that the way to control the human populace was through capitalism—they became the owners of companies and used our own greed and conformity against us. When I asked Hugh why he didn’t use that stuff, he said, ‘We [Jews] have enough trouble already.’”
NIGHT FEVER
Charlie could’ve been out ten years earlier, you know.
There was this guard at Terminal Island, a college guy named Wayne DeVore, and he tried to “rehabilitate us” with his head full of sociology, asking us about our families and how we got there. He had no business being a guard in a federal prison, but that still doesn’t mean he deserved what happened to him.
DeVore sometimes patrolled the block by himself at night against regulations just to talk music and philosophy with Charlie, and that’s how Billy Hindle got the idea to clock DeVore upside the head with a broken brick to put him to sleep for a couple of hours. It wasn’t exactly a well-executed caper or nothing: Billy swung a little too hard and crushed the man’s skull into something that looked like a wedge of cheese.
Acres of Perhaps Page 8
