Bear is Broken

by Lachlan Smith

  The only trial materials that seemed to offer any possibilities were the redacted excerpts from the police officers’ personnel files that Teddy had received in discovery, containing information on allegations of misconduct and violations of department rules. There was dirt on Espinoza, who, as it turned out, had been involved in a shooting eight years previously under similar circumstances, raiding a drug house in Hunters Point. That time Espinoza had emerged unscathed and the suspect had died. Teddy had succeeded in getting evidence of that shooting admitted at trial, through a bystander witness Car had brought back to town from L.A., a former addict who’d been too scared or cynical to come forward at the time of the original internal investigation.

  I remembered overhearing some officers in the hallway during a recess, clearly talking with the intention of being overheard, tossing around the rumor that Car had flown down to L.A. and offered ten thousand bucks to this woman if she’d tell the story Teddy wanted her to tell. The rumor took on a life of its own, and the DA cross-examined the junkie on it, but Teddy’s witness denied every word and made the DA look like a fool. It didn’t end there. After the verdict the DA’s office filed a state bar complaint against my brother, accusing him of suborning perjury. They had no proof, of course. I figured the file on that complaint and the press clippings must be in these cabinets. One of Tanya’s duties was to comb the papers and clip any article mentioning Teddy or his clients. It wasn’t vanity on Teddy’s part, exactly. However good or bad the coverage was, he needed to know what the papers were saying about him, what potential jurors might have heard.

  None of this seemed to me a likely motive for attempted murder. I fingered back through the file. At the very end was a Redweld with a yellow smiley face on its tab and a label in Teddy’s hand that read “Death Threats.”

  It was hefty. There was a log for phone calls, with summaries by each entry, and a manila envelope for threats received by mail. There was also an envelope containing all the police reports Teddy had filed, one for each threat he’d received. They were what surprised me. Teddy didn’t even call the police when he got mugged outside his office.

  I paged through photocopies of letters and notes. He must have given the originals to the police. Most simply suggested in various unpleasant ways that the world would be a better place without Teddy and his clients in it, yet there was one that made my skin crawl. It resembled a treasure map, with blowups around the center drawing showing details too small to include there. Everything in Teddy’s life was on it.

  On the right side was a miniature sketch of Teddy’s unfinished house in Contra Costa County, and then a blowup insert with a diagram of the rooms showing the closets, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, and even the bed. The writer had labeled which side of the bed was Teddy’s and which was Jeanie’s. Beside the house were pictures of their cars, including make, model, year, license number, and VIN. From the house a line ran across the bay to a cartoon version of San Francisco and the office Teddy and Jeanie had shared, where I was sitting now. Another inset showed an accurate rendering of the floor plan.

  There was nothing else, no explicit threat, but there didn’t need to be. I made a copy of this one. I thought it might interest Detective Anderson, though somehow I didn’t believe that the person who made it was responsible for Teddy’s lying there at SFGH. Suddenly I felt I had to get out of the office, out of San Francisco, if only for a night. It was as if I were trapped, suffocated by a city that until now had always seemed an extension of myself.

  I slipped the last two beers into my coat pockets, locked the door, and went down to the street, where I walked quickly, my head down, dodging drunks; the sidewalk was thick with voices and bodies in the block between Mission and Market. I went down the piss-reeking steps of the Civic Center BART and paced the yellow line, impatient to be on a train.

  That time of night there were no direct trains to Orinda. I changed at MacArthur in Oakland. As I waited on the platform I watched the fog pushing up around the spires and boxes of San Francisco in the distance. The air was crisp. The Mormon temple perched on the hillside above me like a spaceship bathed in light, ready to abandon this world on a moment’s notice. Cars and trucks clattered over joints in the concrete on the freeway beneath the tracks.

  In Orinda I had to walk up and down the station parking lot before I found Teddy’s car, a white VW Rabbit with the stereo ripped out and a “nothing to steal” sign in the window. I’d taken the spare keys from the office, and soon I was maneuvering the unreliable little car with its squeaky brakes and stripped gears up Moraga Way toward the unincorporated community of Canyon, a network of dirt roads and footpaths in a steep valley between Moraga and Oakland, separated from Oakland’s Skyline Boulevard by a swath of water-district land.

  In Moraga I turned right on Canyon Road, and within half a mile I left behind all signs of civilization. I was driving through a forest of oaks and madrone that soon dropped down into the redwoods. Through the open windows the clean scent of their bark and needles filled the car. The undergrowth was all ferns, and the headlights penetrated deeply into the woods.

  Pinehurst Road runs up the valley floor through a remnant of the redwood forest that once towered above the bay. It was one of my favorite biking roads in the Bay Area, with killer hills in both directions. San Leandro Creek runs on one side of the road, then crosses beneath it. A mile from the junction of Canyon and Pinehurst Roads are a post office and a K–8 school under the trees. The residents maintain their own roads and water system and take pride in composting, recycling, and solar power. They feed their kids organic produce and Niman Ranch beef and teach them Zen meditation.

  This is where Teddy and Jeanie once tried to make a life together.

  I drove across the WPA bridge above the creek into the school’s gravel parking lot. Pulling over to the farthest, most shadowy corner of the lot, I put the Rabbit temporarily out of its pain. I didn’t know why Teddy refused to buy a real car. Jeanie used to drive a Lexus while they were married. I cracked one of the remaining beers. I’d meant to get out and walk along the road, clear my head, but instead I let the seat back as far as it would go, about forty-five degrees, and lay there taking small sips of beer as the night sounds of the forest reasserted themselves. The outside world and all its cares and problems drifted further and further away.

  I fell asleep with the beer propped between my legs and immediately slipped into a dream, in which it turned out that Caroline was still alive, that we’d been mistaken all these years. She had just been standing very still, pretending to be a statue. Look, I said to my father, turning him physically to face her, she’s alive, she’s breathing, feel her breath. Lawrence was in despair, and I was trying to convince him what he’d done was not irrevocable after all, that there was still time to make amends, there was always time. The past was gone, washed away, and we were prepared to forgive him. At first he didn’t want to see that she was alive. Look, we kept telling him. Look at her.

  Never had I dreamed of Caroline so vividly as I did that night, dozing in Teddy’s car under the redwoods. I used to dream about her, but her face would always be turned away, or it would become another face when I tried to hold it in my gaze, so that it seemed she was running away from me. Now she held still. Now, sixteen years after her death, I was able to see her as she’d been when she was alive, the way her brown hair faded to downy wisps behind her ears, the softness of her skin, the smell of her, which I’d forgotten and which was like rediscovering a lost self, a younger self, me as I had been before my childhood was uprooted by her absence, me as I might have been if she’d lived.

  The roar of a motorcycle hitting ninety on Pinehurst awakened me. My face felt cold in the night breeze. The beer had not spilled, and I swallowed the rest. I hadn’t been asleep long. A few minutes, maybe.

  I lay there staring at the ceiling of the car, getting myself together. Then I straightened the seat, started the engine
, and pulled out of the parking lot.

  I drove slowly, because the turnoff was easy to miss, just a rough gravel road heading up a steep grade through the trees, not much more than a fire trail, the entrance blind from this direction. You had to look for a reflector stuck to a tree. I put the Rabbit in low gear and drove up, ignoring private road, no trespassing signs. My destination was about a mile up, past a geodesic dome and a ramshackle structure with bay windows that resembled a crouching grasshopper.

  Teddy’s house was set back among the trees with a view through the redwoods, just high enough that on cloudy nights you could make out Oakland’s orange glow. I left the key in the ignition the way Teddy always did and walked down the footpath toward the house. A motion light came on, but even without it my steps would have been guided by the sound of plastic sheeting flapping in the breeze. The redwood needles made a soft carpet underfoot, and the scent of them filled my lungs as my feet stirred them up.

  Teddy was an idiot about this house: I will say that now, so that no one thinks I was blindly on his side. It had been his idea to live up here, which meant a good ninety minutes of commuting each way. The school down on Pinehurst was what finally persuaded Jeanie; that and the steep dirt roads, the communal saunas, the yards cluttered with arcane salvage, and the neighbors who looked after one another. I believe that Teddy even promised that they would eventually move their office to Walnut Creek. A false promise if I ever heard one. He’d insisted on tearing the house down and rebuilding. A necessity, I suppose, given that the former owner had used it primarily as a set for his avant garde films. His first big mistake was to insist that they live there during remodeling. His second was to stop construction each time the cash flow dropped at their two-person, husband-and-wife firm.

  For three years Jeanie toughed it out. I have to give her credit. In the end, though, it wasn’t having to live in that gutted shell of a house that made her leave. That was just a symptom of deeper problems in their marriage, as well as in Teddy’s heart. I don’t know exactly what it was that drove the final wedge between them, but at bottom I suppose it had to be the way my brother was, because of what our father had done.

  After Jeanie left, he kept the work on the house going to the point where rain couldn’t get in and he had the basic necessities of life: a furnished bedroom, a functional kitchen, a back deck where he could sit late at night and think. The rest of the place remained half finished, plywood on the floors and drywall on the walls, plastic sheeting over the eaves. To reach the front door you had to clamber up onto the waist-high porch. He never got around to installing steps. He’d gone with the lowest bidder and the cheapest materials, cutting corners wherever he could. If I built a house, I would build it to last, I told myself, and if I found the right girl, I was going to hang on to her. I had Teddy to thank for showing me how not to live.

  As I gained the porch I heard the phone ringing, echoing as sounds can only echo in a large, unfurnished, uncarpeted structure. I unlocked the front door, heading for a nook in the living room where my brother had set up a cheap IKEA corner desk. The instant I got to the phone it stopped ringing, and the answering machine clicked on even though the caller had hung up. The tape must have been full, because the machine clicked off as soon as Teddy’s message played.

  Was it possible the police hadn’t driven here yet? I wondered. I remembered Anderson’s promise to run down every lead, to bring the killer to justice if only to spite Teddy. Thirty-six hours had passed since the shooting, and it seemed odd that I was the first person to set foot here. Again I remembered what Car had said about the cops being involved. How many times would Anderson’s name come up in Teddy’s files?

  I picked up the phone and hit *69, but a recorded message informed me that the number was blocked. I replaced the handset and turned away, but at once it started ringing again. When I answered, a woman’s voice said in a rush, “Teddy, thank God.” She sounded desperate, on the edge of tears. “I knew it wasn’t true,” she said to someone on her end.

  “This is Teddy’s brother, Leo,” I told her. “Teddy’s in the hospital.”

  She gave a gasping cry and slammed down the phone.

  I sat there, flipped on the light, and opened my other beer. Teddy had a lot of girls—on the sly when he was married and in the open now that he was not. I hit the play button and waited while it rewound.

  “Teddy, I—look, just call me.” A different voice, this one with an Asian accent. Then another time: “Teddy, it’s Martha. It’s Monday evening, and I’m here with Chris. Call us right away.” Then she rang again. And again. The repetition of her pleas was mesmerizing as the messages grew more and more tense. There was also a call about a dentist appointment Teddy had missed and another from a contractor saying that he had a crew ready to start work on Monday, and all Teddy had to do was fax over the papers. Had he finally decided to finish work on the house?

  All the messages had been left before the shooting. I was sure that Martha’s voice belonged to the woman who’d held the gun on me at the Seward.

  I sat for a while drinking beer and turning over the objects on Teddy’s desk, little more than a temporary workspace a person might set up in a borrowed room. I hadn’t been here since Jeanie and Teddy still shared the house. Even though I’d known more or less what to expect, its emptiness was shocking. When Teddy and Jeanie were together here there were books and music and art on the walls. I could see that it would be a real house someday. Now that illusion was gone.

  I realized how little of what other people thought of as life my brother had set aside for himself. Our family had shattered when Teddy was twenty-two and I was ten. If he’d turned unremittingly to work, it must have been partly because of his responsibility for me.

  It wasn’t just work, however, and it wasn’t my fault. There was a quality of self-indulgence in his asceticism, a neurotic’s pleasure in yielding to neurosis, an aversion to feeling at home. The house, which more than any other place should have been a home, showed how completely this aversion had thwarted every satisfaction and reward that work is supposed to bring.

  Documents were scattered across the desk, copies of police reports and transcripts of preliminary hearings, all of them from open cases, none of which I had yet had the chance to review. The drawers held the same assortment of alligator clips, burned-out tape recorders, and half-used tablets that had filled his desk drawers in the city. The rest of the room was empty except for a couch and an armchair—both shrouded in plastic—a stepladder and drop cloth, and a roller immobilized in solidified latex. Two of the walls had been painted, and two were plain drywall.

  I wandered into the kitchen, which wasn’t much more welcoming. It was finished, at least. On the stove was a pan with scum around the rim. The cupboards held bottles of tomato sauce and an assortment of dishes. The freezer was jammed with packets of frozen ravioli and Costco hamburger patties, with a few ancient-looking bags of vege­tables. In the fridge I found a half-full case of light beer. I threw out my empty and opened one.

  Martha, I wondered. Martha and Chris. I’m here with Chris. Where?

  I went back to the master bedroom. Its sliding glass doors gave out onto the deck. Here, at least, Teddy had made a modest effort, I suppose because this room and the deck were the only parts of the house that the girls he brought home had leisure to examine. Or perhaps of all the rooms, Jeanie had taken the least from this one when she left. On the deck stood a pair of Adirondack chairs. The slope dropped off steeply, and the broad lower branches of a young redwood brushed the deck railing and carpeted the boards with needles. One of the chairs had a bare space around it, with an ashtray, empty beer cans, and a few crusted plates, but the rest of the deck and the other chair were covered with a thin layer of needles. It was clear that Teddy never went to stand by the railing, never did anything but sit, eat, drink, and smoke his dope.

  I stood listening to the night birds�
� calls and to the creaking of the tree trunks all around me. In the forest I saw no lights. A tinge of wood smoke rose to my nostrils. In that moment I thought I understood what it was that my brother had loved about this place and, conversely, why he kept that room at the Seward.

  I was startled by a noise from the house behind me, the click of the front door latch as somebody eased it closed.

  I turned back inside and went quickly to the bedside table, expecting exactly what I found when I opened the drawer: Teddy’s other gun, the twin of the one in his office, and a pack of condoms. I slid the drawer closed, leaving the contents in place. No way was I going to shoot anyone.

  I pressed my shoulder against the wall just inside the bedroom. I’d left on all the lights, so the intruder had to realize he wasn’t alone. We were each waiting for the other to reveal himself.

  Finally a woman’s voice startlingly near called out breathlessly, tremulously, sounding a note beyond hope: “Ted?”

  “Jeanie!” I called back at once, my voice cracking as I sucked a great gulp of air. “It’s Leo.”

  From the living room came a volley of choked sobs that stopped abruptly.

  I came out. Jeanie stood three feet away with a huge barbecue knife in her hand, her face wet. I didn’t doubt that she would have used the knife if she’d had to, and used it well.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, lowering the knife to her side and giving me a hard punch in the chest with her free hand.

  I stepped back with the punch, thinking I could have asked her the same thing, then moved close again. She gave a little gasp of dismay and embraced me, the knife clattering to the floor. “Oh, honey,” I said, my breath catching with the intensity of our shared grief and my sheer wonder at holding Jeanie again.

  The history of that wonder is easy enough to tell. I had self-­consciously fallen in love with Jeanie shortly after she became my brother’s girlfriend and moved in with us when I was fifteen. We kissed once shortly before I moved out of the Potrero apartment for college. That night we were all drunk because Teddy and Jeanie had just lost their first big felony trial. He’d said something crude, I don’t remember what, and she walked out. When he wouldn’t go after her, I did. I caught her within a block, and she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me deeply. In a few weeks she and Teddy patched things up. She never told him about the kiss.