Zero to the Bone
Page 31
Sometimes, when I lie in bed at night, waiting for sleep to fall over me and wash away the smells and sounds of incarceration, I try to figure out what was going through Pop’s mind that day, why he’d taken heroic measures when more ordinary ones would have served us all better. When the forensics team rifled his pockets, just before tucking him into a body bag, they found a handwritten note in the back pocket of his grease-stained jeans, claiming responsibility for kidnapping Spectrum from his office. He knew the salient details because I’d told him, and he used the information to claim the act as his own. Just before sleep pulls me down, his face in the darkness is the last thing I see.
I didn’t expect to escape unscathed, not when events began to spin so wildly from my control. It’s not going to hurt me to serve out my sentence. I’ve put a few photographs on the wall to help me pass the time: my mother standing at the kitchen sink, giving herself a home permanent; a candid I took of Cassie mugging at the beach; one of my dog staring at the camera as though it might be food; and the Instamatic snap I claimed from the family album, the one of me riding Pop’s shoulders, my face shining while he stares at the camera with a look of supreme paternal tolerance. It’s the look I want to remember him by.
California is a three-strikes state; if the D.A. presses charges and the court convicts me on both the assault and kidnapping counts, that’s my three strikes, I’m going down for life. But still, I count my blessings. The Rott recovered from the attack and lives with Frank. It helps me to think of them together, two big, sloppy guys with inexhaustible appetites for junk food. The bullet left some scars, but the baby is all right, and that matters more than my discomfort and scarification. Maybe this is the best place for me, at least for the next nine months or so. The women institutionalized here have been convicted on charges ranging from prostitution to first-degree murder. Since they learned of my pregnancy they have been caring sisters; even those who might normally challenge my right to breathe nod to me in careful recognition. In an institution raging with race warfare, I’m a civilian. We joke that the child will be born with one thousand aunties. If it’s a boy, he’ll be in heaven. If it’s a girl, she’ll conquer the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The novelist’s ability to convincingly render the most arcane subjects is often due to the guidance of persons truly knowledgeable about things novelists only pretend to know. The experts whose advice guided me in the preparation of this manuscript include priests, parole agents, lawyers, filmmakers, and photographers. Special thanks go to Kate Buker, a prosecutor working in Madison, Wisconsin; to Allen Plone, who always seems to know the answer to everything I ask; and to Craig Paulenich, whose collection of poems, Blood Will Tell, provided inspiration.
This manuscript was edited by Amanda Murray at Simon & Schuster, who again proved an ideal reader.
I owe a debt of hospitality to the inhabitants of the city of Prague and the Catalan village of Sant Pol de Mar, Spain, where this book was written. Dekuji Vám, prátelé. Gràcies, amics.
ABOUT THEAUTHOR
A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and UCLA, ROBERT M. EVERSZ pounded the pavements of Hollywood for a decade before fleeing to Europe to write his five novels about Nina Zero and the American obsession with celebrity culture: Shooting Elvis, Killing Paparazzi, Burning Garbo, Digging James Dean, and Zero to the Bone. One of the leading literary voices in Prague, the setting for his novel Gypsy Hearts, he helped found the Prague Summer Writers’ Workshop, now the Prague Summer Program, where he currently serves on the faculty. His novels are widely translated and have appeared on critical best-of-year lists from Oslo’s Aftenposten to The Washington Post.