Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  “You need anything?” Cindy asked. She was wearing too much eye shadow.

  “I’ll just hang around,” I said. I had put on lipstick and fussed with my eyebrows in the locker room mirror, too.

  “You’re going to be okay out here?” Jack was asking, like no one ever leaned against a wall in this particular hallway, unless you were a witness waiting to be called. Maybe I had tried to con myself into believing my father would be arraigned in a different variety of courthouse, not this hectic, lifeless place. At one end of the corridor a string of prisoners linked to each other, handcuff chained to handcuff, trailed into a doorway. I had the sickening thought I might catch sight of my father, shuffling along in an orange jumpsuit. I didn’t want my father to see me here.

  “It won’t take any time at all,” said Jack.

  Two hours later Cindy marched into the hall, sorting through her purse like a cigarette addict. She found a Kleenex and touched it to her face, chin, and cheek. “They arrested half of Oakland over the weekend,” she said. “Plus someone called in a bomb threat last Thursday. The bailiffs are pissed off, and everybody’s way behind.”

  “What does Jack say?”

  “He’s nonstop on his cell phone, doing business. Nothing slows him down.” She said this like it wasn’t a compliment to his character.

  Cindy turned to face me, and her eyes searched my face for a moment. Then her hand reached out and touched me, on the side of my head. “Bonnie, honey, don’t put yourself through this,” she said.

  I explained that I didn’t want Dad to think I was letting him down.

  “Down?” she echoed, latching onto that word like it was the key to my statement. “Nobody has ever said anything about letting people down.”

  Later, during a late lunch, after I gave up on the criminal justice system for a while, I kept thinking about her choice of words, and mine. I sat alone at a counter, a crowd of lawyers and legal secretaries shaking Equal into their coffee. I thought that maybe people in the Midwest used language with a different twist from people in California.

  Either she meant that Dad had every faith in me, no question about it, or she meant that I was the last thing on my father’s mind right now. I chewed my tomato and tuna sandwich, a pickle and a carrot stick in a basket lined with green paper. I sipped ice water. Or maybe she had some other meaning, something she had not quite meant to say.

  I gave up waiting at last, took BART to the Fruitvale station, and rode the bus to my neighborhood, life puttering along, kids with new skateboards, delivery trucks parked along curbs bringing furniture, new glass for broken windows.

  “My dad knows a professional killer, a real hit man, and he’s been arrested five times and never served a day,” said Denise.

  It was time for the yearly assault on water weeds in my mother’s fishpond. Please, Mom had asked, and I was glad to humor her. I had called five times, and there was still no answer at my father’s house, only his happy answering machine.

  I used a short-handled hoe, and Denise used a trowel, and sometimes the white and scarlet carp would chug slowly past our ankles, touching us with a feathery fin. Denise had never done this before, and I had convinced her what fun it was, giving the fish a better view of life.

  Denise wouldn’t shut up about the hired gunman, how he talked at parties, like he didn’t care what happened to him. Sometimes you know a story isn’t true—or is at best an exaggeration—but you don’t feel like arguing.

  “My dad’s an attorney,” I said finally. Meaning: Not a professional killer.

  “He’s a lawyer,” said Denise, with an air of casual dismissal. Sometimes Denise doesn’t know when to stop talking.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, unable to keep quiet.

  Denise straightened her back, maybe not quite in shape for this. She took her time, picking out her words. “How long was your workout today?” she asked.

  “Long enough.”

  “What did you do, three laps and a shower?”

  “I dove off the platform.”

  “Miss P said she guessed you couldn’t come in today.”

  I kept calm. “Her office was locked, and I didn’t leave a note.”

  “She had me doing reverses today, a pike and a somersault.” A pike is when the diver nearly touches her toes, more elegant than a tuck, but less exciting to watch. This drill was not hard, compared with the back three-and-a-half somersault I had long since been able to do. I let Denise see that I didn’t mind, continuing to chop at the bottom weeds. After all, I reasoned, she had to gradually take on the more demanding dives. It was only natural.

  “If you can’t do it, Bonnie, everyone understands,” said Denise.

  I chopped a stalk of water lily clean through.

  “You have to learn not to lie to yourself, Bonnie. It’s a criticism I have to make about your family, how they have trouble coming right out and saying anything.”

  Denise has dark brown hair and dark eyes, and at times like this her features are too close together in the middle of her face. I gripped the short-hoe so hard it hurt my hand.

  “I want to help you, Bonnie. If you’re afraid, live with it,” Denise said. “If your father is a crook, accept it.”

  I told her to leave.

  “I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying right here. I’m being a good friend to you, Bonnie.”

  I told her to use the side gate, don’t bother going through the house.

  That night I sat at my desk with a piece of acid-free paper, one hundred percent cotton, the kind Dad recommends for making permanent drafts of a document. A moth sang off the lampshade, then fluttered inside it, a rhythm like nervous fingers in a waiting room. I fingered the gold-nibbed calligraphy pen Dad had given me for Easter a couple of years before. Audrey ran in her exercise wheel, a quiet whirring whisper.

  J. T. Breen. B. T. Chamberlain. My middle name is Tyne, my mother’s family name. I had been practicing, trying to give my square, compact handwriting the powerful leaps and turns that are evidence of insight and determination.

  I wrote the letter carefully, and when I was done I read it aloud. Sometimes you would swear animals know something. Audrey stopped running, her agate-red eyes toward the sound of my voice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  There’s a peephole in my dad’s front door, a glass pupil about the size of a squirrel’s eye. I suppose the builders thought a burglar might show up on the front step and push the doorbell, hoping to be let in.

  I sensed movement in the interior of the house, and the little glass hole darkened. Peepholes, with their fish-eye lenses, turn even a harmless visitor into a goofy, swollen cartoon. Maybe I should have waited, I thought, imagining my father asleep in a darkened bedroom.

  “He’s in the back,” Cindy said, as soon as she opened the door. Not hello, not good morning. A hairbrush in one hand, her feet planted, like she didn’t want me to come in.

  I hesitated in the dining room, smoothing my hair back under the beret, straightening my skirt, a woolen garment with about thirty pleats. Dad had an assortment of plaid mufflers, tartan neckties, and every time he came back from golf in St. Andrew’s, he brought me a wool sweater or a skirt, good heavy tweed, but not my style.

  My clothes didn’t go with the backpack I set in a corner of the dining room, under a work of art I didn’t recognize, a blue figure dancing. I made sure my backpack was upright. I didn’t want it falling over and crumpling the letter zipped into a side pocket.

  “Can I get you anything?” Cindy was asking. It was mid-morning, approaching lunchtime, but I wasn’t hungry. I looked a question at her, and she made a minute shake of her head: she didn’t want to say. Or maybe she meant: How would you be doing—after a weekend in jail?

  “Jack got him released by supper yesterday,” Cindy said. “Bail was set at two hundred thousand dollars—hardly anything in a case like this. And you know what he told me, the first thing he got home?”

  I played along with her, telling her
no, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a report of jail brutality, and I was wondering how my father had posted such a large amount of cash.

  “He said he was taking me to New Orleans, to eat nothing but gumbo.”

  She said this with pride, but with an undertone of fatigue.

  “Gumbo gives him a stomachache,” I said.

  Dad’s backyard had turned out pretty much as he had envisioned it. A Japanese man named Eiichi, an expert in sand and rock, drops by weekly to pick up the slender fingers of bamboo that have drifted onto the sand, one by one, tucking them into his hand.

  But that’s the trouble: bamboo flutters, ever moving. Even the slightest wind blurs the gentle lines the gardener has combed into the sand. My father’s swimming pool was designed by an award-winning pool visionary. It has a charcoal gray bottom, with hewn slate flagstones at poolside. But the back garden is crowded, a Jacuzzi seething quietly, a sauna like a log cabin. Too much, you think, walking out to find a place out of the sun. Too much to look at. There is a putting green off to one side, the grass razored short and firm, a single hole at one end.

  Dad stood surveying it all, wearing white slacks and leather sandals, the ones he had custom made in Florence. A golf club, a putter, glittered in his hands. His yellow shirt was so new you could see the folds in it, fresh from the package. I expected him to look a lot different, but he tucked in a loose shirttail, adjusted the crease in his pants, quietly impatient, knocking a ball all the way to the cup.

  At one end of the putting green a stone frog is parting his mouth, a little fountain of water playing into a metal bowl. The Santa Rita jail suicide watch means that every fifteen minutes a county officer peers in at each inmate, twenty-four hours a day. My father didn’t look weary so much as pale. Dad didn’t hear me coming, and then just before I reached his side I made a little coughing noise.

  “Champion!” He let the putter fall. But it was one of those moments when you wonder how the hug is going to go, where his chin will fit, where your face will end up, whether to settle for a hug, or maybe to add a kiss as well.

  His voice was very quiet, telling me I looked good. He held me tight, and then held me at arm’s length, taking in the view of my face.

  “Why the sad face, Champ? Look me in the eye.”

  I was looking.

  “I kept thinking of you, all the while, Champion,” he said, feeling in his voice. “It kept me going, I want you to know that. The image of your face in my mind.”

  I hate tears, the way they suddenly decide it’s time for the show, the dancing waters, and nothing can stop them.

  “I know, it’s hard,” he said, “even for a strong person like you. This is hard for all of us. I want you to be patient with me because I have something to say to you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I began, but the words came out strangled. Some things I don’t want to hear.

  He put a shhh finger to his lips. “Listen to me. Are you ready to listen?”

  I couldn’t make a sound.

  “Just nod your head. You can do that, right? Move your noggin a little bit for me? There you go, the amazing human head. Good. Now don’t talk for a second.”

  He had used some of the bay rum I had given him for his last birthday, January 3. He had always hated having a birthday so close to the holidays. It had cheated him out of a lot of bikes and electric trains over the years, he used to joke.

  “Keep this in your mind, at all times, Bonnie. Remember these words, no matter what you hear, no matter what you read.”

  My eyes had stopped leaking. The frog fountain was loud, bright peals of water.

  He said, “I didn’t do any of this.”

  Before I could protest that he didn’t owe me any kind of explanation, he continued, “You can’t be still for ten seconds while I tell you the truth.” He was gentle, but it kept me quiet, standing right where I was.

  He spoke slowly. “What is happening to me, and to my family, is absolutely unjust.”

  He paused, studying my eyes, how the words hit me.

  “I want you to know that,” he said. “You think I don’t have to come out and say it. It embarrasses you, to hear me say I’m innocent?”

  I steadied myself, breath in, breath out.

  “I won’t remain silent about this, Bonnie. Because there are a few true things in life. Only a few. The sun comes up in the morning. It sets in the evening. The earth is round.”

  His parents used to make a living delivering trailers up and down California, working out of an asphalt lot in El Cajon. Trailers of every size and purpose, dwelling places on wheels, on-site offices for construction sites, trailers full of equipment for traveling rodeos. The Chamberlains pulled three hundred thousand miles a year, towing someone’s rolling stock.

  “And one other true thing: and you know what I’m going to say. You know, don’t you.”

  He waited until I gave him a sign with my eyes. He touched the palm of one hand with his forefinger, saying softly, with a deliberate cadence, “I am, in every way, absolutely innocent.”

  “I know,” I said, when I could talk. “I never doubted you.”

  “Doubted me?” he said, seizing on that one word.

  “I never did.”

  One heartbeat, two, three.

  Then he gave me his smile. “Thank you, Champion.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I suited up in the locker room. My tweed skirt filled the locker, ten pounds of Highland wool. I poked the folds of cloth carefully into place and got the door latched after a struggle. They were really going to have to work on that leak in the showers, the dripping water like a percussion instrument.

  I had envisioned all this, played it out in my mind. But now that I was close to committing act one, scene one, my fingertips were cold. Some musicians and stage-fright stricken actors take beta blockers, chemicals that shut down the anxiety centers of the brain.

  I had timed my workout for early afternoon, so Miss P would be there with all the swimmers and divers. I couldn’t suppress all the old doubt. It nagged at me, ugly inner voices warning me, as I pushed open the door from the locker room and caught the familiar waft of chlorine and that strange incandescence a swimming pool casts upward into the space that surrounds it.

  I caught Miss P in an ideal moment, most of the team sitting at attention on the lower levels of the bleachers while Miss P demonstrated posture, how to stand, how to let you arms hang, full of their own weight and the weight of all your tension. You give your arms a shake, and you lose some of that anxiety, letting it run from your forearms, through your fingers, out into the air.

  I kept walking, in no particular hurry, letting them all get a good look.

  Miss P called my name, and Denise looked up from examining her toenails. It would be wrong to say I was unafraid. The old feeling was there, but now I had another feeling, a stronger one, to set against it.

  Denise had lost a little too much weight, maybe clocking too many hours on the rowing machine with her personal trainer. Miss P believed in cross-training, practicing other sports to stay in shape, but I always wondered if Denise threw herself with too much gusto into everything that came along. Her father had been right to fire the tennis pro, the one with curly hair all over his shoulders.

  Denise almost left her place on the bleachers. She nearly called something to me, a smudge of weariness under each eye. The new dives were taking the glow out of her. Her white bathing cap perched on the bleacher beside her, the top of a skull.

  As I passed her I mouthed, “It’s all right.” And I meant it. She stared right back with cautious disbelief, maybe because in her family people resolve their disagreements by giving each other the finger and taking near-miss swipes at each other’s heads.

  “Bonnie!” It was Miss P at her most commanding tone, a chilling sound, magnified by the hollow reverberation of the arena. “Get over here!”

  I climbed the steps of the tower.

  I had told m
y father once about the imaginary line in the platform, where the diver feels her dive should begin. How when the feet touch this place in the cold, sandpapery surface of the platform, the diver feels strangely at home. “Querencia,” Dad called it when I described it. “The place in the bull ring el toro makes his own. Once he finds that place, he’ll kill all comers.”

  I reached the top step and found the place in the platform where my dives begin.

  I got good altitude, and did a back somersault.

  The water is always a surprise the first dive of the day. Warmer than you expect, or—usually—colder. My nostrils burned, and the sterile taste of the water seeped through my lips. I let my breasts and tummy glide along the pool bottom, and then I let my body loft toward the light.

  I broke the surface.

  It had not been a very good dive. Just one somersault. Not the worst dive ever done, but far from my usual, my knees bent, my body at an angle. The splash had been bad, the water still simmering from the impact.

  There were calls of encouragement, and Denise was clapping, but they were extras in my own personal movie, a part of the living wallpaper. They could have been cheering in Gaelic, Miss P, too, although she put her hands on her hips and assumed an aspect of approval: Go ahead, keep going.

  As though I paid them any attention.

  The second time off the tower I managed two somersaults, and I felt the whisper of air around the platform as my head almost kissed. I entered the water with about as much grace as an office chair.

  I pulled myself out of the water, streaming and splashing all the way, and smoothed my hair back away from my eyes, pulling it tight with my hands, so tight my eyes slanted and my eyebrows stretched. I tugged the seat of my suit, and gave my nose a pinch, checking for excess fluid from my sinuses.

  My fellow athletes and the few straggling spectators all froze in place, like a photograph. I mountaineered my way up the platform again, and drove every thought, every doubt, from my mind.