Rundown

by Michael Cadnum

  It was like pulling into the driveway of a stranger, watching the iron gates ease open with a push of the button on the dash. The gate closed behind us, and, the engine purred, the tires making that sound I find so comforting, the fine crackle of grit. The garage doors swept open, the headlights bright against the back wall.

  And then Dad left the engine running, the parking brake set, none of us wanting to enter the glamorous soundstage of the house, finding sanctuary in a car with nine hundred miles on the odometer.

  Our lives had always been a series of choices, travel or a bigger apartment, and we had always picked travel, even when Cassandra said she would die if she had to see Rome again. I knew what she meant, hating it when another elegant three-piece suit pinched Cassandra on the butt.

  But even when Cass was at Stanford we scrimped enough to see Italy every summer. Rome is okay, if you can get one of the stringy cats to creep close enough to take anchovy scraps from your fingers, but we always had to go in the summer, when we were off school. It was hot, and motor scooters are everywhere in Rome, women in elegant one-pieces and fanny-pinchers in Armani suits flying from all directions.

  But my parents were happiest together when they were hurrying off to a new restaurant on the Via del’ Orso, coming back with notes in my dad’s neat handwriting, concise but fractured with exclamation points. Mullet roe!! lemon peel!!

  The place was too big.

  Even unlocking the back door, you could hear the echo, ashwood floors and newly painted walls resounding with our footsteps.

  “I can never find the light switch,” said Dad.

  Mother turned hello into a two-note aria, hoping that Cassandra was down from Tahoe. If Cass had been there that night it might have been different. I might have told the truth, bled words all over the place, got it over with. But with just the three of us, and not even Bernice to cluck over me, we were just people, the way a Softball team isn’t a team if they happen together by accident.

  Bernice—Dad always referred to her as Mrs. Heath—did not actually live here, a fact that relieved my mother, but I think disappointed Dad. He wanted to have a servant, especially one like Bernice, who could manage everything from soufflés to hamburgers. How could you call her a servant, Dad reasoned, if she lived six miles away in Alameda?

  Cooking spaghetti is yoga for Dad, necessary for his emotional stability. He took off his bow tie and jacket and tied on an apron. He got a big pot of water simmering, put in a dash of olive oil, while he sipped a short scotch from a cut-glass tumbler Mom gave him for his birthday a couple of years before. He popped the stiff pasta into the water, the spaghetti he buys by the case from a friend with a struggling business in Emeryville.

  Several minutes passed without much discussion. I set out some forks and knives and fresh linen napkins. We shared strained small talk, how well the bread had turned out, and whether the heirloom Franciscan wear was still packed in newspaper in the cellar.

  Mom never does anything in the kitchen, although tonight she got the lamb out of the fridge and started to put it in the oven. She stopped when Dad made one of his wrinkle-nosed don’t do thats. She posed here and there in a dressing gown, century-old Japanese silk, stylized birds peering down over her shoulders.

  Dad cooked up some of his sauce, six sun-ripened tomatoes whipped to sauce in the blender. He shook the colander, draining the spaghetti, and then we ate.

  We only spoke about it later, after supper, our bodies tense with the subject, avoiding it.

  “Tell me one thing, since we’re talking,” said Dad from far away. I was out of his sight, sitting in my favorite chair, a cushioned leather thing in the mostly vacant library. “Jennifer?”

  I called that I could barely hear him. Dinner was done, the dishes in the washer, and the lull was over.

  He found me. “Come out of here,” looking puffy eyed, his fancy clothes replaced by a starched shirt and wool slacks, like someone who intended to sit at a desk all night.

  I didn’t want this conversation.

  “I can’t talk to you in here,” he said.

  Dad had decided on an Asian motif for the living room and had just paid more for a rosewood side table than you’d spend on four years at Yale.

  A pile of three-ring notebooks crowded a side table, menus and colorful photographs of food, platters, chafing dishes, tablecloths, a world of bridal cuisine. Now that we had chosen a caterer, Dad kept changing his mind about the linen, the wine, insisting on a frosting expert from New Orleans, “the world’s best cake man.” Our lives had been an ordeal of more and more arcane decisions, none of the photographers visual enough, none of the florists horticultural enough.

  Cass had said if she had to look at another picture of a cake she’d kill herself.

  Even now Dad had a wine list in his hand, fake parchment and calligraphy. “Tell me what you were doing,” he said, “jogging at night in a deserted place.”

  “It wasn’t night.”

  “I’m not angry,” he said, lifting one hand and letting it fall. When he starts to get mad he backs away from the feeling, like someone stuck with a strange piece of luggage, the kind you aren’t supposed to accept at airports. “But you were taking—”

  Emotion caught up with him, and he waited for it to pass. “You were taking such a risk.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but usually when you say the words some weight is lifted. Nothing lifted, nothing changed. I was afraid he was going to cry.

  “I can’t think about sauternes at a time like this,” he said, flipping the wine list to the carpet. “I’m getting a license for a handgun.”

  My father can’t change a tire. He cuts himself with a can opener. I knew he would shoot his knee off if he bought a gun.

  “That would be crazy,” I said.

  He looked hurt.

  “What good would it do me if, if you were sitting at home with a rocket launcher?”

  “Plus,” he said, “I’m calling Barrow Security.”

  That had been another concern, who would handle parking and gate crashers at the wedding reception. Barrow was run by former Secret Service agents, I had discovered after a long phone call, and was out of even my dad’s league.

  “That’s overreacting,” I said.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “From now on you’ll jog with a bodyguard.”

  Chapter 6

  Mom gave me one of her follow-me looks.

  Dad nodded that he was through with me and gave me a smile, not one of his publicity-photo half smiles. In those, he’s careful not to wrinkle his eyes.

  As we left I looked back and he was sitting with his arms on his chair like someone about to be electrocuted, putting up a brave front.

  “Don’t let Dad buy a gun,” I said, following the rustle of her robe down the hall. Only half the paintings were hung on the walls, but all the full-length mirrors were in place, and I had a glimpse of myself, tanned and athletic, good-looking in an ordinary way, nothing like my mother.

  “A gun?” she asked, holding the door for me like a hostess.

  “And don’t let him hire some guys in dark glasses and jogging outfits.”

  My mother flashes in and out of contact with people. One moment she is caring, full of feeling. And the next she looks around at her surroundings as though she had just materialized from thin air.

  “What kind of gun?” she was saying, as though for a moment she saw my dad with a shiny automatic in his hand and liked the image.

  “Remember how he shot a staple into his hand?” I said. Two staples, with a staple gun. “And the time he cut a tendon in his finger with his Swiss Army knife?” Blood all over, stitches, tetanus shot.

  “I want you to tell me if there’s anything I should know,” my mother said. She had a cup already waiting for me, a family recipe, intended to make you feel better more from holding it than from sipping the stuff. My cup probably had about ninety percent less booze than Mom’s.

  We sat in a sort of assis
tant bedroom, a lieutenant to the main bedroom, which in any case was a showcase room and not where my parents actually slept. For now Mom had given up any resemblance to a fashion model, her eye makeup bruising out down her cheeks and across her temples, her hair claiming a life of its own.

  She got out of her chair, kicked it hard into a new position, and sat down like she wanted to be especially mean to the furniture. Sometimes Mom didn’t have to fire her secretaries—they quit, worn out by her sudden tempers. Her father had been killed in Laos, during the prequel to Vietnam, blown up by a land mine. I had always wondered if this had given my mother a desire to fight back, get her hands on an enemy. Her sudden moods often gave Dad a headache.

  I told her she knew everything.

  With my father you get the feeling that some of what you say might show up in his memory of the day’s events. With my mother you realize that she’ll remember what’s best for you, and for her.

  After a silence, she said, “I don’t care much for that detective. Margate.”

  Mom hated police. Parking tickets made her seethe. She had witnessed a violent crime when she was a high school student, and she believed police did more harm than good, asking dumb, brutal questions. She had gotten one speeding ticket in her life and she went to traffic court with a lawyer. She won the case.

  “I can tell by looking at you this has been a terrible event for you,” Mom said. “And I’m not letting that bitch-cop tell me what therapist you’re supposed to talk to.” Mom uses coarse language way more than Dad, but even so bitch sounded especially harsh.

  “I want to help the police, if I can.” I felt protective toward Detective Margate, doing a tough job, working nights.

  My mother looked at me as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She lifted her hand like it took a massive effort, so she could finish her drink. I began to wonder how much scotch she had chugged into her cup. “Detective Margate is lying,” she said.

  I felt a prickling sensation ripple through my nervous system, triggered by the word lying. It was like the first time you scuba dive in salt water, straight down, lead weights on your hips, and your mask flash-leaks. You forget the simplest lesson, how to move.

  Mom continued, “She says she wants what’s best for you.”

  But you always remember again, after a bad moment. I lifted my eyebrows, a cool, unspoken, “Oh really?”

  “The shrink she wants to send you to is Duncan Pierce.” Mom used to have an office with a waiting room, a practice, depressives and pill junkies.

  I gave a little twitch of my foot: Who’s he?

  “He’s a forensic psychologist,” she said. “He’s skilled at gathering evidence,” she added, “that can be used in a court of law.”

  It’s amazing how long you can sit without moving, a pulse in your wrist, and in a few other body parts, neck, eyelid.

  “I’m worried about your state of mind,” she said. “You should see a real therapist, not some legal vacuum cleaner.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, sounding pert, like someone saying they didn’t want another serving of dessert.

  “Police don’t think the way we do. If you can help them with their case they’ll suck the nerves right out of your body.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said with a dry little laugh.

  “Yes they can, believe me. What happened tonight?”

  “The police were very nice—”

  “I mean with the man who attacked you.”

  “He barely laid a hand on me.”

  I let this fill the room, Mom waiting to hear more. I could see the unspoken thought in her eyes: Thank heavens this hadn’t happened to Cass.

  I said, “If there’s anything I can do to help catch this man—”

  “Before I let a cop psychologist mess with your mind I’ll send you to Dr. Yellin.” Yellin was the author of about twenty books on recovering from trauma. My mother worshiped him.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said.

  She said, “I’ll determine that.”

  Chapter 7

  I made the eleven o’clock news. It was a surprise, and I told myself they must have run out of disasters and scandals to report. My attack was right after footage of a four-alarm fire in the financial district.

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to the TV. My mother kept tapping on my bedroom door, opening it and peering in, cold cream and fatigue giving her a lurid pallor. She asked if I wanted some hibiscus-blossom tea. She wanted to know if I wanted some milk punch, or a nice soak with some of that new bubble bath. Each time I pushed mute and said I was fine.

  I had met the anchorman at a party in San Francisco, Dave Kiefer, a balding, friendly guy, everybody’s uncle. His face usually brightened a little when he read some pleasant news, a poodle stranded in the top of a eucalyptus and rescued by a paramedic. It sombered slightly when he read about a plane crash or ethnic slaughter. His face at the moment was etched with seriousness, making him look old and tired. “Meanwhile, we have a report just coming in on what authorities are saying is another in a series of attacks in the East Bay.”

  A live report filled the screen, a woman with short black hair and a jacket like Detective Margate’s, but better tailored. She stood right in front of the brush beside the path, my path, my blackberry vines, the leaves steel in the TV lights. “Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon was the site of an attempted rape tonight, and authorities suspect that this is another in a series of attacks by the so-called Jogging Rapist.”

  I sat there on my bed and didn’t move, my arms wrapped around my knees.

  My bedroom was a vast plateau, posters rolled up, leaning in a distant corner. One of my old favorites was tacked to the wall, Mustangs, Spirits of the West, wild horses nuzzling each other, but it was the only horse picture I had bothered to put up. The underwater pictures, parrot fish and bright yellow tangs, were still in their shipping tubes.

  The woman reporter referred to me as a sixteen-year-old victim, “in seclusion tonight, with family and friends after a close call, Dave.”

  I called Marta and asked her if she was watching Channel Five. “God, I always watch Channel Five,” she said, her way of telling me she wasn’t. Her bedding made gentle thundering noises as she groped around for the remote, and I told her to never mind.

  “I always watch the same news, or at least I have it on,” said Marta. Her actual name is Martina, but no one calls her that. “I watch it all the time. I found it. It’s an ad.”

  “Turn it off.”

  “I think the batteries are about dead in my remote,” said Marta. “I’m shaking it and it still doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.”

  Cassandra just about destroyed my friendship with Marta by pointing out that Marta wasn’t very bright. I was furious, and hurt. Cass pointed out that Marta repeats the same statement four or five times, using slightly different words, bulking out her conversation so that she seems to be saying more than she is.

  It was just like Cass to needle me about a friend, but then I started to listen to Marta, and it was true. Cass is often cruel, and right. Talking with Marta drove me crazy for a while, until we both took scuba lessons together and her mom started taking us to their bungalow on Monterey Bay on weekends. There aren’t very many rules that can save your life, and one of them is: Dive with a buddy. Marta is one of those people you want to have around.

  I told her what had just been on the news, and added, “That was me.”

  For a while there wasn’t anything coming out of the telephone but things like “Oh, Jennifer” and “My God, Jennifer, are you all right?” meaning what we had all come to mean by all right.

  “It’s hell around here,” I said.

  “Is your dad going crazy?”

  I knew what she meant, and in his own way my father was going through tremendous turmoil. But Marta’s father is artistic director for the East Bay Theater, a foul-mouthed, hotheaded guy who had suffered three heart attacks and now lived on Paxil
and took long vacations at their place on Monterey Bay. When he was upset, people knew it down the block. I had heard Marta say that it was a good thing her dad was a pacifist or he would have killed someone.

  I said that my dad didn’t go crazy; he suffered. My father admired Marta’s parents and said the Emmits were “rarer than radium,” which is Dad-talk for really special. Mr. Emmit thought Dad was brilliant, buying every kind of mustard my dad recommended, even the yellow Chinese powder that tastes like ant poison. My mom thought it was a shame Mrs. Emmit couldn’t lose the weight, but Lynn Emmit was perhaps my mother’s closest friend.

  “How’s your mom behaving?” Marta asked.

  I told her that Mother would have been a better detective than any of the cops.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Marta had been the first to notice that my face had taken on a gaunt, sleep-hungry look in recent weeks. Months of bad sleep were catching up with me.

  I assured her that I would survive.

  “You need some downtime,” said Marta.

  That’s what scuba people call time spent on the sea floor.

  I did take a bath, and soaked in a slurry of salts and essential oils of valerian and poppy.

  Back in my half-acre room I toyed with the tape recorder Dad had given me as a stocking stuffer the Christmas before, “Just like mine.” It was top-of-the line, voice activated. Dad had given up on taking notes, and you could hear him at six in the morning, downstairs on the running machine, panting, “Cut fresh dough into half-inch squares.”

  When I spoke, “Testing one, two,” the red record light came on, stayed on a few moments, and then went out because I wasn’t saying anything.

  Chapter 8

  I got up early, after watching the Discovery Channel until three in the morning, sleepless as usual. You can watch the bower bird knit his wedding decor from parrot feathers and monkey hair, but the documentaries hurry on to the meatier footage we are all supposed to prefer, cheetahs getting full extension, zero to sixty in no time at all, zebras zigzagging all over the veldt.

  You wonder what the wildebeest thinks, a family of leopards chewing on her hindquarters, the grazing creature looking around panting, nowhere to go, still very much alive.