by G. M. Ford
Now if you want to see a school board melt into a pile of protoplasm, just threaten litigation. And Phil hadn’t simply threatened; he’d sued the school district on four separate occasions and won all four cases, turning Matthew’s school life into an unfortunate cycle of shifting between special needs classes and being mainstreamed back into the general population at the insistence of his father.
By the time middle school rolled around, it was apparent to everyone but Phil Hardaway that something was seriously amiss about Matthew. His social awkwardness had reached new levels; he had begun to have difficulty sleeping, refused to make eye contact . . . even the way he walked had morphed into an awkward shamble.
The final school district mental health specialist Matthew had seen, prior to seeing Suzanne Bradley, noted in his report that “Young men like Matthew don’t have friends. They don’t make the football team. In most cases, they have learned to cope with that kind of social rejection on some level. But during puberty, when the specter of sexuality adds itself to the emotional pot, life seems to push them toward more serious behavioral difficulties, as they feel increasingly alienated and alone.”
As he’d predicted, things had gotten worse from there. Matthew started having panic attacks in school. On a dozen separate occasions Martha had to rush down to the school to be by her son’s side. At which point somebody or other diagnosed him with autism spectrum disorder, thus beginning yet another set of evaluations at the University Hospital Child Centered program, where he was determined to also have obsessive-compulsive disorder, a fairly common symptom among Asperger’s and autism sufferers.
That same specialist noted that “Matthew is not open to therapy. He very seldom says anything and will not make eye contact. He does not believe he has Asperger’s and does not believe he can be cured by treatment of any kind. He thinks seeing me is a complete waste of time.”
And that was it. Three weeks after the report, Matthew began seeing Suzanne Bradley, whose private practice professional evaluations were privileged communication. If what Martha had said earlier was accurate, somehow or other, Suzanne Bradley had connected with Matthew. A miracle in itself, if you asked me.
What struck me was how the possibility of Matthew becoming violent was never raised by anyone. Not his teachers, nor his legion of therapists . . . Nobody ever considered the possibility that Matthew Hardaway might hurt himself or others. Weird, sure. Crazy, maybe. But not violent.
As a matter of fact, what stuck in my mind was a middle school guidance counselor’s observation that “Matthew is far more likely to be the victim than the victimizer in any sort of confrontational situation. The only person Matthew hates is himself.”
Which was pretty much in line with what Wendy Bohannon had told us and a notion, if accurate, that left us with the same question dangling in the wind: What had turned an introverted self-hater into the kind of screaming fanatic who calls a man a communist and then shoots him in the head in front of a room full of people?
I sat back in the tiny chair, raised my arms above my head, and stretched for all I was worth. Behind me Gabe was purring like a kitten. I shut down the computer and pocketed the thumb drive. Who knows why I opened the center drawer on Matthew’s desk as I waited for the computer to shut down. Habit, perhaps, or maybe I’m just a nosy bastard. What I can tell you, however, is that the sight of that legal pad sent a shiver running down my spine and froze the breath in my lungs.
Hundreds of them. I flipped the pages, all the way to the back. Wall to wall, every page was covered with them, both sides, arrows pointing in all four directions. My hands rose instinctively to my chest. I swallowed a whimper and closed the drawer.
The muted bong of the doorbell pulled me back to earth. And then again . . . four buzzes in a row, real quick, like it was a little kid on the front porch or something.
I got up, sidled over to the bedroom door, and opened it a crack. First thing I heard was Martha’s voice. “This is outside our agreement, Phil. You’re supposed to . . .”
The front door banged shut.
“Anybody come round here asking about Matthew?” Phil Hardaway asked.
“Why would anyone do that?” Martha hedged.
“There’s a couple assholes goin’ round town, trying to stir that whole thing up again. Some guy says he’s a writer.”
“Please leave,” Martha said, her voice beginning to break.
“Be real bad stirring that thing up again,” Phil said.
“Matthew’s gone. He took a life. What could be worse than that?”
“He’s better off where he is,” Phil said.
“I hate it when people say that,” Martha spat. Her voice rose. “Don’t you dare touch me,” she shrieked.
I opened the bedroom door, tiptoed over to the stairs, and started down. Gabe was about three inches behind me as I crept down to the landing.
“That kid was never long for this world,” Phil growled. “You just won’t face it. Your old man wouldn’t neither. The kid was defective. He was—”
“The kid?” Martha said. “This is our son you’re talking about. He’s not just some kid.”
“Every fish you catch ain’t a keeper. You ever think of that? Some of them you just gotta throw back.”
“Get out of my house,” Martha screamed. “I’m calling the police.”
“Those guys come round here, you just tell ’em to take a hike,” Phil said. “Don’t need that whole shit storm startin’ up all over again. You hear me?”
Gabe and I were huddled together on the landing when the boom of the front door slamming shook the whole condo.
Gabe’s head inclined back up the stairs. I followed along.
Suzanne Bradley checked her case notes. “Matthew never said a word the first two sessions. Just sat there staring at the floor, waiting for the hour to be over. I asked him once if there wasn’t anything he could imagine that I could do for him.” She paused for effect. “You know what he said?”
I had a feeling she was gonna tell me, so I buttoned my lip.
“He said, ‘You could not be.’” She looked up. “Those were the first words he ever spoke to me.” She shrugged. “After that, I could hardly get him to shut up.”
“Any idea what triggered his sudden desire to talk? I mean, by that time, he’d stonewalled any number of counselors. He didn’t interact with any of them. Why you?”
She bent an eyebrow in my direction. “If I didn’t know that such a thing was both impossible and illegal, I’d swear you’ve had a look at Matthew’s school records,” she said. I looked away and broke out my Mount Rushmore face.
“Lucky guesses,” I said.
She didn’t believe a word of it. “I think it was partly his age. He was growing up. I think perhaps he had a bit of a crush on me.”
“Completely understandable.” It was out of my mouth without ever coming into contact with my brain. I sorta regretted saying it, but nothing too rueful to be truthful.
She grimaced and went back to her notes. “Did you manage to get in touch with Wendy Bohannon?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “She thought he started to change when he got a job a couple of months before the . . . the incident.”
“Matthew’s opening up to me had more to do with meeting Wendy Bohannon than it did with me. I think she may have been the first girl his age who ever paid any attention to him. I’d never seem him that agitated before.”
I could hear Martha moving around the kitchen. She’d signed the consent form and then announced that she didn’t want to be present when Suzanne and I talked. “Matthew wouldn’t want me to hear any of this,” she said simply.
Gabe stayed upstairs on the theory that the fewer people who saw the two of us together, the better off we’d be, so it was just Suzanne Bradley and me facing over the coffee table.
“What do you think was Matthew’s problem?” I asked finally.
She shrugged. “At one time or another he was diagnosed with just about every
condition anyone could imagine,” she said. “I try not to get too involved in putting labels on patients like Matthew. I try to remember that just because I can’t put a name on it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
We’d been at it for forty minutes before she began checking her watch. I reached down between the seat cushions and pulled out the legal pad I’d found in Matthew’s desk. I dropped it on the table between us. “You have any idea what these are?” I asked, fanning the pages so she could see they were completely covered.
She brought her hand to her throat, gulped, and began to rummage in Matthew’s case folder. I watched as her manicured fingers picked through the pages until she pulled out what appeared to be a page from a steno pad, perforated across the top, about half the size of a standard sheet of paper. She dropped it on top of the legal pad.
Same diagram doodled all over it, with what appeared to be a purple Sharpie. “He did this during our last session,” she said. “He’d never done anything like that before, so I kept it.”
Looking at those arrows turned my blood to ice. Felt like I was breathing muddy water. I started to reach for my chest but caught myself and stopped.
I sat back on the couch. Forced my hands to stay at my sides. “It’s a Crosstar,” I said. “An Aryan Nations symbol. They use it in place of a swastika.”
The room went quiet. Somewhere in the back of the house the furnace clicked on with a rush. I heaved a sigh and closed my eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked, sliding forward on the love seat, leaning over the coffee table, and putting a hand on my shoulder.
I had a sudden vision of those stubborn, solitary leaves out in my orchard on the day Art Fowler had come seeking my help. Sole survivors waving frantically as they fought the onslaught of winter. And then I felt myself come loose from the branch and go veering off into the frozen maelstrom until everything was white and quiet.
And then I started to talk. Like I’d sprung a leak or something. I told her everything. Right from the beginning, from when Art showed up at my door. About the day Martha showed up at Rebecca’s office and I’d ended up getting cut to pieces in that alley off Denny. About getting my shit back together down on the coast and then coming up here to see if I couldn’t make some sense of the whole damn thing and maybe find some peace with myself.
When I’d just about finished talking, I channeled my inner drama queen and pulled my shirt up to my chin. She frowned and then leaned in closer. Instinctively she reached out and used a red fingernail to trace the path of the faint scars remaining on my chest. She rested her palm flat on my chest and looked up at me.
“Scars heal,” she said. “Some of them, anyway.”
“I’m going to have to be able to tell myself I did everything that could be done,” I said. “Otherwise this is never going to be all right with me.”
“Who are you really?” she asked.
“It’s best you don’t know,” I said.
We had one of those phone company pin-drop moments. She reeled her hand back in and slid backward on the cushion.
“Wendy’s right,” she said out of the blue. “Matthew changed over the last month or so of his life. He’d always blamed himself for his condition. I can’t tell you how many times he said things to me like ‘I’m broken,’ ‘I just don’t work right,’ or ‘I’m defective.’ It was always Mathew blaming himself.”
“And then?” I pushed.
“Then . . .” She took a moment to choose her words. “And then . . . it was like all of a sudden he was more of a victim.” She waved a dismissive hand. “That’s really the only way I can think to describe his change in attitude. As if suddenly he wasn’t completely at fault anymore. He wasn’t happening to it anymore. It was happening to him. Almost as if something had pulled him out from under the pile of self-hatred and guilt he’d lived under all his life.”
“Any idea what?”
“No . . . ,” she said, “but imagine how good that must have felt to him. What a sense of freedom he must have experienced.”
“Did he tell you he’d gotten a job?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Doesn’t that seem a little odd?” I pushed. “I mean . . . the kid’s got a job for the first time in his life, right at a time when he’s also found somebody he’s actually comfortable talking to, and he doesn’t say a word about it.”
“Everything about Matthew was odd,” she said.
Couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t bother.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“We’ve about worn out our welcome around here. Before long they’re gonna drum up some reason to arrest us and then lose us in the system for a while, so I’m thinking I’m gonna take a run by the place where Matthew was supposedly working and then get out of town. Regroup . . . After that I really don’t know.”
“If I can help . . . ,” she began.
“I think you want to stay as far away from this as you can get,” I said.
“If I can help,” she said again as she stashed the case file in her briefcase and got to her feet.
I walked her to the door and treated myself to the sight of her fearful symmetry sashaying to her car.
Bickfords Bunker, no apostrophe, sat between a hamburger stand and a car upholstery shop, about a third of the way up the hill on Evergreen Way. GUNS BOUGHT AND SOLD. SCRAP GOLD AND SILVER, the sign over the door announced. A red neon sign in the window read: MILITARIES. A sticker on the front door proclaimed that THIS ESTABLISHMENT PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON.
And that was just the front of the building. Around the north side, where we’d parked, there were enough burglar bars to repel the walking dead. Square black steel bars covered the whole side of the building—both stories. Curtains on the windows said somebody lived upstairs.
At some point, the original structure had been added on to. A little square extension. Maybe twenty by twenty. WAR ROOM in big, black, plastic letters over the heavily barred entryway.
“Big on security,” Gabe grumbled and slid out of the seat.
“Pawnshops generally are,” I said as I pocketed the car keys.
“A better class of people and all that shit.”
Gabe pulled open the back door and grabbed a black leather jacket.
“Cold?” I asked.
“Got a feeling this might not be the most PC crowd in America,” Gabe said. “No sense in making it any harder for them than necessary.”
“You look like Nanook of the North.”
“Yeah, but you can’t tell I’ve got tits.”
Gabe came around the front of the car. “Let’s go.”
A muted buzzer began to sound in the rear of the store as I pulled open the door. The place was jammed. Display counters ran around three sides of the room. Six or eight people were bunched here and there doing business.
Mostly guns, it looked like. Guns and military stuff. Medals, uniforms, antique firearms of all sorts. Helmets, decommissioned hand grenades, swords, bayonets. Gabe and I headed down opposite aisles. Poster of George Patton glaring down at us from high on the back wall, like some angry god.
Eight feet in front of me, a guy in a red-and-black jacket leaned over the counter and stage-whispered into a curtained back room, “Bickford around?”
“He’s up at the camp,” somebody shouted back. Woman’s voice.
“Shit,” Red Coat muttered. “Who wants to be driving way out there to hell and gone.” He opened his mouth to say something else, when he noticed me standing there. He nodded at me and managed a chrome smile before turning back to the counter and whispering something into the empty space.
The curtain suddenly parted, and a woman in a green apron bellied up to the rear of the display case. Stout. Blonde. Familiar. Felt like my heart was gonna beat itself right out of my chest. I turned my back to the counter and pretended to be studying a pair of Civil War cavalry cutlasses.
It was her. The blonde in the car. On that rainy alley off Denny.
I stifled the urge to skewer her with one of the swords I was fondling, took several deep breaths, and continued my retail grazing.
“They’re out in Conway for the whole weekend,” Blondie said. She gave the guy a salacious wink. “Got them a big hootenanny going on,” she said with a smirk.
Up at the front counter, looked like a couple of young guys in baggy shorts were trying to pawn an elaborate cuckoo clock. The aproned clerk kept shaking his head and pointing down at the bird.
The clerk looked up and met my gaze. That’s when I knew where I’d seen him before. On the CCTV video from the night of the city council shooting. He was the guy closest to the door. My chest tightened. Breathing got harder.
I could feel Blondie’s eyes on me as I shuffled past.
“Help you, sir?” she asked.
“Just lookin’ around,” I said.
Her eyes raked the side of my face. I kept my focus on the merchandise and kept moving. Her gaze never left me as I moved down the aisle.
“Do I know you?” she asked to my back.
I felt like I was balancing on a razor blade, expecting her to shout . . . to call me out . . . waiting for her to recognize me. The tension sent me sliding between display cases into the other aisle, where only the muted negotiations from the counters and the general rustle of humanity came to my ears. “Can’t do it, son,” I heard somebody say. “Just can’t do it.”
Gabe was up at the front counter handling what appeared to be an old Ithaca shotgun, like the one my grandfather used to take on his legendary Canadian goose hunts. “Hell of a range,” the clerk was saying. “Thing’s a damn howitzer. That baby’ll knock down satellites.”
Fear had faded. And all of a sudden, I was angry as hell, steaming, trying to keep my rage from spilling out all over the floor. Felt to me like I musta had smoke coming out my ears. I’d waited a long time to settle up with the people who’d attacked me. I nearly couldn’t control my desire to grab her by the lapels, pull her over the counter, and work her until she told me where to find that son of a bitch who’d taken a knife to my chest and then run my legs over with a car. I could feel the blood rushing in my head. Thick . . . like red syrup.
