You pay in advance in most gas stations in Oakland, and Mrs. Newport gave me several wrinkled bills without paying much attention, as though money didn’t matter.
Money has a dark, vegetable odor, not like the overpowering, breath-punishing smell of Chevron unleaded. I couldn’t help feeling impatient with how slowly everything moved. Gasoline flows into a big empty tank with a noise that can be calming, a river falling softly over a dam. Some of the fuel spattered onto the pavement, and the gas gun would not hook back where it belonged. Mrs. Newport stayed in the front seat, hanging her arm down the side, dancing her short nubby chewed-off fingernails against the car door.
“Did they say what shape it was in?” she shouted over the music, KSAN turned up so loud screwheads vibrated throughout the car, music impossible to distinguish, a bellowing country-western voice.
“They close in eight minutes,” I said, hanging on. I wanted to ask Mrs. Newport how she felt about Bea’s new haircut, but not right now. Sometimes I could see through Rhonda Newport’s shiny manner and see another person. A bright metal hair clip she must have forgotten about dangled over one ear as she drove.
She turned knobs, got the radio to shut up. “Where’d they find it?”
My mom was running a meeting in her office, the One Two Threes of Escrow, a must for new staff. Bea was in her exercise class, a martial arts and dance class combined. We were speeding along in a van I had never ridden in before, a vehicle with calico curtains and a little kitchen stove in the back. We were moving at thirty miles an hour over the limit along Lakeshore, the lake calm and empty, little black charred places in the street, like cigarette burns, last night’s flares.
Mrs. Newport had that come-as-you-are look of someone interrupted in the middle of Saturday afternoon, an oversized man’s shirt unbuttoned halfway down, lipstick stabbed on too fast, too bright. It struck me that maybe she was one of those women who didn’t mind getting pulled over for speeding, a chance to flirt her way out of a ticket.
I pointed to the side of my head, over my ear.
“What?” she asked.
I pointed again, widening my eyes a little. She plucked the hair clip from her hair and tossed it onto the dash, where it landed in a beanbag ashtray.
Cars were jammed under the freeway, parked derelicts, abandoned heaps, the sounds of traffic overhead. It was not the rushing, windy symphony of highway traffic from down there. Trucks hit the seams of the roadway above with a metallic bang that echoed in this dark, dusty refuge for unclaimed autos.
The woman in the office had given me a form, the words Press hard you are making five copies prominent at the top of the page. A man in a navy-blue OPD jacket and the gray, comfy overalls of a parking attendant led us along past the rows of cars, yellow crayon on the windshields, dates, last names, and symbols that meant nothing to me, police algebra.
“All rightie,” said the parking lot cop. “All rightie, all rightie,” a little unmusical song to himself.
“I picked up a twenty-dollar tip today,” I said.
I felt immediately foolish, bragging about my exploits in the trucking business with Mrs. Newport. She consulted for the marketing division of Pacific Bell, selling people extra phone lines for their computers and their fax machines, speaker phones and phones that allowed you to do banking, how much money you were down to flashing on and off on the screen.
“Twenty dollars, my heavens,” said Rhonda Newport, looking away from me, kicking a chrome bumper, a little tap with her snakeskin cowboy boot.
But it had been an interesting day, the tarp blowing half off on Highway 29, Chief’s knots failing, not mine. Then, after we sweated all the way up to a big hole in a lawn and waited there, holding the big, blue spa shell, a man who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, but tanned and wearing a bikini brief, asked us to stand like that while he took our picture.
“A dark blue Honda,” said the parking lot cop.
“This empty space in the dash,” said the parking cop. “That mean they took something out, or was that always there?”
A hole, a red wire, a yellow wire. “They took my CD player,” I said.
“That’s a shame,” said Mrs. Newport.
“It was a terrible stereo,” I said. “A Pioneer FM/CD combo that only got about half the stations, Radio Shack speakers.” My dad had bought the car from the stepson of a friend, and gave it to me one Christmas, “just to give you a start,” he had said.
“Look, they left the speakers right where they were,” I was saying, my voice dazed with the wonder of it. The gray speakers were composed of matching metal grills covered with a gray, fuzzy fabric, one speaker in each door. I felt embarrassed. For a moment I was hot with gratitude, almost tearful. My car had come back to me. Through the windshield I could read the scraggly backwards writing, my last name and today’s date.
But I knew the engine would not start. That would be too much to ask. I almost wished there was some way I could contact the thieves, to thank them for leaving my car almost entirely intact. I fitted the key into the ignition.
EIGHT
I had to sign one more form, with a pen attached to the clipboard by a beaded chain. I pressed so firmly the clipboard nearly tumbled from my hands, and I had to rest it on the roof of the Honda while I finished Madison.
“You may now,” announced the parking cop cheerfully, tearing perforated paper into separate sheets, “at this time, take possession of your vehicle.”
I thanked him. He handed me the last sheet, my signature so dim I could hardly see it. Something somewhere made an insistent chirping sound, a happy electronic noise almost lost in the banging and sighing of traffic overhead. Rhonda Newport pawed through her purse, a wispy white tissue tumbling to the ground.
She held a telephone to her ear, briefly. “It’s for you.”
The traffic at the Bay Bridge toll plaza tends to back up. Brake lights everywhere, nothing moving. Rhonda was right: I wouldn’t have been able to drive, feeling the way I did. No, that wasn’t quite the case. I could have driven to San Francisco alone, fighting traffic in my Honda, but it wouldn’t be right to let me do it by myself, not now. People owe some things to each other.
I had to admire the way Rhonda whipped the van from one lane to another, leaning on the horn. A dotted arrow on a Caltrans truck was directing traffic to merge to the left.
“It’s not as bad as they think it is,” I said. Or maybe I didn’t actually say the words. Maybe I just kept repeating them over and over in my head.
The horn had a solemn, muted quality, sounding from somewhere down below our feet. I hated the way it sounded, too soft. “UC Medical Center,” said Rhonda, talking mostly to herself. “I think I know how to get there.”
“You think,” I heard myself say, unable to keep from sounding like my mother.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
In surgery for hours.
It was a long sundown, no fog tonight, city lights just now coming on. Rhonda held her arm out the window like a wide receiver giving a straight-arm, holding off traffic while she maneuvered into another lane.
The hair clip vibrated with the engine, a dry, buzzing sound from the beanbag ashtray. My mother’s news had to be all exaggeration, something we would think about a few weeks from now, a minor incident that got blown out of all proportion. I folded my arms, feeling cold, with no sense of time passing. We had always been here on the bridge, stuck, going nowhere.
I should turn on some quiet music, the kind the dentist plays, soothing, music that gets you thinking the world isn’t real. I didn’t touch the radio. I just sat there, trying not to think.
It was a phrase I had heard on the news. The words had never had any special, personal meaning for me. Condition critical.
“You can’t park there,” said a very stout, tall man with a zipper jacket and a glittering badge, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA POLICE. “This is emergency vehicles only.”
My legs were stiff, the shrubbery unreal, people in quiet conver
sation, searching their pockets for keys. How wonderfully normal it all was, a newspaper machine beside a green bin decorated with a picture, a stick figure, dotted lines showing the path of his litter into a receptacle. It was probably over already, good news. Mom didn’t bother to call—she wanted to tell me in person.
The man looked me up and down, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses, black plastic frames. “We have visitor parking in lot B across the street.”
Rhonda was there beside me, then, putting her keys into her purse, and some of the telephone company executive was in her voice when she said, “I’ll move the car in just a minute. We have an emergency.”
The man with the badge seemed to grow taller. His whole world was full of people with emergencies.
Rhonda added, like it was easy to say, an afterthought that might help explain, just a little detail, “His father’s been shot.”
My mother didn’t even glance at Rhonda, stepping right up to me and giving me a hug. It was a real hug, a rib-crusher.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice sounding pretty calm, although higher than usual.
My mom said, hearing what I was really saying, not just my words, “I don’t believe it either.”
“Are they still …” My voice did one of its fade-outs. I couldn’t even complete a question: still operating?
“They wouldn’t tell us, Zachary. You know that. We’re just the ex-family.” Sometimes my mother’s argumentative manner drove me crazy. But now I found it familiar, the two of us sharing the same paranoia. It was just a tradition with her, sounding relaxed and pissed-off at the same time.
“Did it happen downtown?” said Rhonda.
I winced inwardly. You had to use irony with my mother, sarcasm, adopt my mother’s tone. My Mom gave Rhonda a look now, her face dead. “No,” she said. Then, deciding to communicate to me, if not to Rhonda, she added, “Nineteenth Street. In an ordinary neighborhood, not far from Golden Gate Park. He stopped at a red light.”
“In broad daylight,” said Rhonda.
Again, Rhonda’s style was all wrong, her eyes full of feeling. “Right after late lunch at his favorite restaurant,” said my mom.
John’s Grill, I thought. Dad liked the mashed potatoes there; he was one of those guys who never gain much weight. Right about the time Chief had been showing the man in the bikini bathing suit how to focus his Leica so he could take our picture delivering his brand-new spa.
“A car-jacking,” said Rhonda, plainly trying to fit words we had all heard on the news into what was happening.
“Robbery,” said my mom, with a flip of her hand—what difference did it make. “There’s a police detective in there now, along with—” She didn’t want to say the name of Dad’s new wife just now. She gave a little shrug. “You know everything I do.”
“Did they catch whoever did it?” asked Rhonda, her voice breathy, not meaning any harm, but doing it anyway, forcing my mom to say things she wasn’t ready to. Maybe Rhonda was doing it deliberately, now, forcing the answers like a newspaper reporter. She had a copy of every one of my dad’s books.
“No,” said my mom. “They didn’t catch who did it. His car went through the intersection and ran into something.”
“It’s terrible, Florence,” said Rhonda. My mother wasn’t crazy about being named after a city in Italy. She preferred the pet names my dad used to call her. My mother acts like a person cheated by life, carrying on with humor but not expecting much. She thanked Rhonda in a tone that surprised me, gentle, dignified.
“But he’s going to be all right,” I said.
Mom took my hand. Her fingers were very cold. My parents had never suffered the heavy-artillery sort of divorce you hear about all the time. She was always in a hurry to get to a bank before it closed, and Dad was always off to the Yucatan or Honolulu. When he fell in love with a younger woman, Mom reacted by cutting costs at the office she managed, installing new computers, firing half the staff, and winning a seat on the Governor’s Economic Task Force. I think she always imagined Dad would remarry for a third time, to her, his first wife, my mom. Maybe I even hoped it was possible in some wistful cul-de-sac of my mind. Dad had always been upbeat with Mom and me, but that was how he dealt with everything, quick to get his way.
She walked me down to look out a window, the glass cross-hatched with wire mesh so no one could break in, or out.
“How did your test go today?” she asked.
I didn’t respond. She wouldn’t let go of my hand.
“Zachary,” she said. “The police detective is in the operating room in case your father says something.” She liked saying police detective, two words, taking solace in the way it sounded, like there were authorities in charge.
NINE
“Please do call me,” said Rhonda.
She was looking at my mother, but she was talking to me, not a trace of Texas in her voice.
“If there’s any news,” my mother said, and if you didn’t know her, you would think she had not a single negative feeling in the world toward Rhonda Newport, watching as she clip-clopped toward the elevator.
Half an hour later my mom got tired of pacing, running her fingers through her tumble of red hair, and got on the phone. It was a pay phone down the hall, and I could not hear what she was saying but I could hear her voice, a lot of talk over a period of some twenty minutes. She flicked her address book like a fan, looking up at the ceiling, white tiles with tiny holes.
She marched back into the waiting room to report, “We can move him if we’re not happy,” she said. “Stanford, anyplace, if we aren’t satisfied with the medical treatment here. There’s someplace he’s going to track down for me, where they grow nerves in a petri dish, somewhere in L.A.”
This was vintage Mom, one of the things my dad couldn’t stand—when in doubt do something, something smart, something stupid, it didn’t matter.
She didn’t look at me. “I called Billy Brookhurst. I had to track him down, he was all over the place.” Billy Brookhurst was a white-haired lawyer, wrinkled and blind in one eye, a handicap that made him seem more shrewd than any of us. He looked at reality through an unusual pair of glasses, one lens blank white.
“It’s up to Dad and Sofia,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
An hour later my mother came back to report, “Sofia is in intensive care with him. She’s tripping over tubes.” She generally called Sofia something disparaging, even crude.
I expected some change in the light, in the color of the walls, at this news, but the floor and the ceiling stayed as they were, bright, fluorescent light off every surface.
“I want to see him,” I said.
My mother had new, fine lines round her eyes. The waiting room was empty except for the two of us, the old magazines, the potted serpent plant—an imitation living room. She said, “One visitor at a time,” giving the words a spin, invisible quotation marks.
“Where is Intensive Care?” I asked, unable to control my voice.
She shook her head.
I couldn’t talk.
“Zachary,” said my mother, putting her lips close to my ear and speaking in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Zachary,” she began again. She liked my name, loved saying it.
She held my head to her shoulder, a fine, feminine tweed, heather brown, something wintry she had thrown on against the cool of San Francisco summer. “I hate hospitals, too,” she said.
“The surgery was successful,” said the doctor. “The initial trauma is repaired as far as possible for now, and I think we can all breathe a temporary sigh of relief at this point.”
“You extracted the bullet,” said my mother.
“This was a through-and-through wound,” said the surgeon, without stopping to choose the words, ready for the next question.
He looked like he could have been my dad’s brother, a little younger than my father, but with the same high forehead, one of those people so intelligent they look handsome even when they are bone tired. My mother
is not tall, and when she is insistent, she stands right in front of a person and looks up.
“Of course, I have to caution you,” he said, trying to buy time with a little extra conversation, avoiding questions about sutures and disinfectant.
I could tell what my mother was thinking: Why of course?
The doctor said, “He is not, for example, breathing on his own.”
For example.
“When you have major damage like this we have to be willing to give everything a little time,” said the doctor. “He’s not conscious yet,” he added.
“Where, exactly, was he shot?” I heard myself ask in a kind voice, gentle, being nice to this man. I felt that I had to be especially sweet-tempered toward this surgeon and avoid hurting his feelings in any way, as though I had some power over him.
“In the neck,” said Dr. Monrovia, shaking his head a little as he said it, hating having to report such a thing. He touched his forefinger to a place below his ear, just above his collar.
“The perpetrator,” said my mother, gathering her strength to say this, “put a gun up to him at an intersection. And—” She couldn’t say shot him.
I had a bad taste in my mouth, like after I’ve run to catch a bus and missed it, and kept running, all the way to the next stop—an attempt that almost never works. As slow as they look, buses are faster than people.
“The bullet shattered one of the cervical vertebrae—one of the bones of the neck,” he said.
We waited, but it wasn’t like any of the pauses in normal life, while a video starts or a movie begins, or while a lecturer finds the right place in the notes.
He put his hand to the back of his head, rubbing his skull, perhaps without being aware of what he was doing. “The transverse process, the spinous process—parts of the vertebra—are badly fragmented.”
The scientific-sounding words would have been a comfort to my dad, but to me at that moment they sounded shocking, obscene. At the same time, they meant that he was in the hands of science, like hearing that a traveler is delayed in a foreign city, a famous, faraway place.
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