“What were you talking about?” Victor’s voice is heavy with accusation.
“The ambulance man and I are worried about you, Victor. You need to get ice on those bruises.”
He touches his face and winces. “Always hurting me, him and Daddy.”
“Yes.”
“Too much hurt.”
“Well, no one will hurt you now.”
“He can.” His voice trembles as he nods his head toward the dad. “He can get out of his body. He walks around. It’s all a big act, him lying there, you know. Him and Frankie would gang up on me, hurt me. Now it’s just him.”
I can barely hear Victor’s low monotone. I’m getting pinpricks on my neck, blood pumps down to my fingers. I ease my right hand gently, so gently, onto the butt of my gun. This has gone on too long. Where is my backup? Just one more unit to go around back and come in from behind and we can Code 4 this call. Without any more bodies.
“Frankie won’t hurt you anymore.”
“No. But, miss lady, he can.” We both look at the dad, lying there watching us, laughing his timeless laugh.
Aw, hell. I feel it coming. Something in his face alters, a quick ripple under the skin, his eyes shift, and I see him make the decision.
Before Victor has completed his quick, almost graceful step backward and grabbed the gun on the floor, my own gun is out of the holster, barrel pointed at Victor’s forehead. I have dropped back to my knees, half hidden by the door frame, which, if I stop to think about it, affords no protection whatsoever.
“Bye-bye, Daddy.” Victor has the gun pointed at the dad.
“VICTOR!” I snap his name like a bullwhip.
“Oh, damn,” Roger mutters behind me.
Victor looks at me, and the gun swings slightly my way. “I’m not gonna hurt you, miss. You’ve been nice to me.”
“DROP THE GUN. NOW!” I use the command voice they taught us in the academy. Deep from the diaphragm.
“I can’t.” He has started to cry again. The gun is shaking, wavering somewhere between me and the dad. “I have to stop it.”
I tighten my index finger on the trigger. “Victor, this isn’t the way. PUT the gun DOWN.”
“Ya got backup pulling in now,” Roger whispers.
“Tell them round back. Hurry.” I only hope the backup isn’t some damn John Wayne rookie who doesn’t know how to read a scene.
“Victor, we got other people coming now, Victor. They aren’t gonna be as patient as me. Come on, Victor.”
“I won’t hurt you, miss. I promise. Just him.”
“VlCTOR. NO.” Squeezing back on the trigger. Do not make me do this, Victor.
“Victor!” A new voice, tiny, frail. From Dad? No. From behind Dad. Oh God, it’s the mother making her debut.
“Mama?” Victor starts to whimper.
“Lady,” I yell. “Get back.”
The small, white-haired woman, hunched over but solid and mobile, quick-steps daintily out into the room, toward Victor, toward the gun.
“Jesus, lady. Get down. VlCTOR, DROP THE DAMN GUN!”
Then my backup, Sergeant Burnnet, my father, rounds the corner through the door at the back of the room, behind and to the right of Victor. He is four or five feet back from Victor, and his gun is drawn, pointing dead on at the back of Victor’s head; he braces himself against the far wall. For less than a second I am out of my body, away from this, watching, disbelieving.
“DROP IT, MOTHERFUCKER!” my father bellows.
“Mama?” Victor’s eyes are startled moons, his mouth slightly opened.
“WAIT,” I yell at my father. He cuts his eyes over at me, then he’s steady back on Victor.
With that flick of dismissal, the realization hits me, leaves me breathless, in a vacuum: my father is a perfect burly target over my sights. The anonymous silhouette figure at the end of the firing range with the bull’s-eye that wins you the prize, your life, solid three hundred. If I moved my gun slightly to the right I would be smack on, in the middle of his forehead, the yellow-gray curls a frame for the perfect kill zone; just a sixteenth of an inch more pressure on the trigger and I could have Victor and my father. I could have my father. He taught me himself, out at the range, to shoot two rounds at a time. Everyone would understand: of course it was an accident, and what a terrible burden for his daughter; but he was rather close, almost in the way, he should have known better.
He is right there, across from me, and it would take less than a heartbeat.
A noise, like a train whistle with too much air, comes from the dad in the hospital bed.
I jump, gun swinging right onto the other dad then back quick as a finger snap on Victor. My father readjusts his stance, gun still steady, his chin tucked into his shoulder, sighting down his arm. Victor swivels, a sluggish wide arc of both arms, and pulls the gun toward the dad again. The mother crosses in front of my line of fire. I snap the gun up, pointing the barrel toward the ceiling.
“Oh, lady,” I moan. I watch my father; he is only half-seconds away from shooting. I have seen that look before.
She marches up to Victor, her neck about even with the gun in his hand. She stands blocking the line of fire between my father and Victor. I’m squeezing back on the trigger, my sights on Victor’s chest.
“Victor, you’re trying my patience. Gimme that gun ’fore you hurt yourself.” The mother holds out her hand, palm up. The other hand holds the saucer from the teacup.
One heartbeat. Two. It’s hot in here. Too hot.
“Get the situation under control, Officer.” My father’s voice is harsh, unforgiving, familiar.
Such a simple decision, really: shoot to kill. I move the gun slightly to the right. I wait for the bullet to leave the chamber. Let the shot surprise you, he’d tell me at the range; steady pressure back on the trigger.
“Victor, listen. Gimme the gun now,” the mama shrills.
Victor’s hand moves slightly, wobbles; his eyes shift.
BAM! BAM!
The gun kicks tight and familiar in my hand; the fresh smell of burnt gunpowder fills the air, bites my eyes and nostrils. I have pulled the gun up at the last moment, giving my father’s life back to him. I want to laugh—this is funny, a weird horrifying funny—but I’m still too stunned. My father’s face is blank, his mouth slightly opened. Sweat beads his upper lip. And a tic I have never seen before, there is a rapid tic under my father’s left eye. It quivers, the flesh folded beneath his eye. It is the only part of him moving.
Victor sags to the floor, unhurt, leaving the gun in the mother’s hand. I am already standing, moving toward her and Victor.
My father looks at me. It is a look I am more accustomed to seeing as a child when I would face myself in the mirror.
“Oh-oh-oh. Bad boy. Bad, bad,” Victor whimpers.
The mother turns to me, and I meet brilliant, piercing bird’s eyes. I take the gun from her outstretched palm. Her hand is trembling, as is her voice. “It weren’t necessary to shoot up my good room, Officer. Victor was coming round to minding me.”
I watch my father locate the two bullet holes in the wall, three inches at most above his head. He looks back at me, then at the wall again. He stumbles getting to his feet.
Two officers come skidding around the corner. I holster my gun and nod toward Victor. “Cuff him. Gently. And Code 4 this, will you? My portable’s down.”
I cross over to the body, Frankie, and check with two fingers for a pulse at the neck. No pulse. “Roger,” I holler. “It’s safe now.”
He sticks his head around the corner, grins, then walks toward the body, his partner behind him.
The adrenaline kick starts to ease, and I feel one knee start shaking rapidly but ever so slightly, not enough for anyone to notice. I expel a deep breath, then turn back to the mother. She stands by the dad. They are both watching me.
“He’s dead, ain’t he?” she asks.
I nod. “I’m sorry.”
“I suppose you gonna take Victor fro
m us, ain’t you?”
One officer has cuffed Victor and they lead him past me, out to a unit. Victor doesn’t look at me; his eyes are on the ground, his face expressionless.
“He’s got to be booked, Mrs. Franconi. But you can get him out tonight if you want. If it was really self-defense, no jury will convict him.”
She nods, twisting her head to look up at me.
I take another deep breath, and my anger curls out into the air between us. Anger at her, at the dad, at myself, at my father. I am conscious of my father watching and listening. And the dad; his eyes have stopped rolling. This close to the old man I smell his death, lingering close by, waiting. He is watching me too. They are all watching me.
I see Victor’s face again, distorted and panicked, and I am weary.
“Tell me, Mrs. Franconi. Did your husband really throw Victor against the wall when he was a child?”
She hisses air through her teeth. Her eyes snap up at me. “Your question’s got no business bein’ asked.”
“I’d say it was extremely relevant to the matter at hand.” I keep my voice tight but soft.
My father walks up behind me, clearing his throat before he speaks. “Mona.” His voice is still gruff and imposing, but with something new in it, something I can’t identify. “A moment?”
I hesitate, then nod, lifting my index finger up to Mrs. Franconi as I turn to face my father. He still holds his gun loosely at his side.
“That was close,” he says.
“Perhaps.” My knee no longer quivers.
“I applaud your restraint with a gun.” He rocks slightly on his heels. Some color is returning to his face; red blotches ripple over his cheeks and forehead.
He wants me to say I won’t try it again; he wants a guarantee, a capitulation. I look at him, the sweat, the blotches, the tic. I meet his eyes, and I let him see it all. I let him see his daughter.
He breaks first. His gaze shifts. “Well—” the gruffness, the newness to his tone still there.
I smile. It spreads into a grin. Unable to stop, I laugh quietly. Reaching out, I barely touch him on the arm.
“You can holster your gun now. I’ve got it here,” I say, then slowly turn my back, take a pen and notepad out of my shirt pocket.
I hear the squeak and whisper of leather. My father’s gun slides back into the holster, and the strap snaps closed.
CLEANING YOUR GUN
You are cleaning your gun. It is an ordinary, early spring afternoon, and you should be at work. Protecting the public. Instead you are here in the kitchen, drinking rum from a plastic cup, suspended without pay. It is not unusual to be sitting in this straight-backed chair with your gun on the table—bristle brush, bore rod, and oily rag nearby—listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the uneven drip of the kitchen sink. Except your husband has taken your daughter and left you. You light another cigarette and savor the familiar smell of gun oil and smoke as you admire the shine, the straight cold lines of the gun, the lethality of something so simple.
You walk around for eight, maybe ten hours a day with that gun bumping and rubbing against your hipbone. There is a permanent bruise on the skin; the area stays sore and discolored. Your gun is a natural extension of your body. It was not always this way. At first, you couldn’t figure out how to hold your right arm down by your side—the gun got in the way. So you tucked both thumbs into the front of the gun belt and rested your forearm on the gun and holster. But you are told this is dangerous: you are unprepared, you can’t draw your gun as quickly. So you try resting your palm on the butt of the gun, but this is awkward, uncomfortable, and threatening to the public. You return to letting your right arm dangle out at an angle over the gun. As you walk, the grip chafes a small, oblong spot on the inside of your forearm the color of grapefruit. This becomes as natural to you as breathing.
You pick up the gun from the kitchen table and let it lie in your hand. The weight is soothing, the gun as familiar as your daughter’s face. You pop open the cylinder and check for the third time that it is indeed loaded. Six little lead circles stare back. Push the ejection pin with your thumb and watch the bullets tumble out and roll out across the kitchen table. Stand them up in a neat row, then close the cylinder with a snap—the sound echoes coldly through the empty kitchen. Do this several times: thumb open, flick wrist, snap closed.
It would feel good to scream right now. But you don’t. You resist the urge. Like you should have last night.
You raise your eyes. Your daughter’s stuffed lion stares back. It sits on a corner of the kitchen counter where you threw it last night, before you hit her. Study the yellow quilted lion with its chewed legs and fraying mane as you begin loading and unloading the gun by touch alone. You have learned many ways to handle this gun. You can break it down and reassemble it with your eyes closed. It is as familiar to you as your husband’s hand—every bump and scratch and groove.
Your father was a cop too. He trained you to use and respect a revolver, a shotgun, a rifle. He let you hold his matching pistols with inlaid Mexican silver and promised that one day they would be yours; never mind your brothers, he said, they don’t have the discipline. You stood watching him at the pistol range and mimicked his every move.
Look at this gal, he’d tell his buddies, she’s a natural.
Just like her old man, they’d throw back in reply.
And you expanded under this strange warmth, wanting it to last forever. When he started drinking, you pulled yourself inward, trying to become invisible as he took on a new smell, one that choked off the usual mix of whiskey, metal, and sweat and became a vague pungent odor, thick and seething.
Your father has a difficult job, your mother would say, usually after he had hit her. She was always slightly out of focus, a blur of cooking, fresh sheets, too-soft hands, a washed-out voice. This is what you knew: she was afraid of loud noises, the night, guns. Sometimes your father. Nothing frightened you more than those occasions when your father said, a slight smile coating the disgust on his tongue, You’re just like your mother.
Once, long before he died, your father took you on a hunting trip up in the Texas hill country during dove season, a rare father-daughter trip. You were seventeen and felt warm and safe watching the fire play across his face, the trickle of water over stone nearby. Your mother is a good woman, he said, so softly it might have been your imagination, a man needs someone to quiet the voices. You think of her broken nose, the shaved eyebrow, her black eyes. You want to love him. You want to believe.
Then he shrugged and reached for a beer, throwing you one. Let’s see how you handle your liquor, he said, his laugh an echoing clarion noise that opened up the sky and pushed back the night. That evening you sat under stars, drinking beer and cleaning your gun, thinking maybe things would be different from now on.
You move out of your father’s house for good when you are nineteen and suggest your mother does the same. She doesn’t. Two years later you join the police department; your father pins the badge onto your uniform shirt at graduation. Just like your old man, his buddies say. You can barely meet his gaze. Five years after that he stops a fugitive on a traffic violation and dies from the blast of a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun. They say he never felt a thing, but in your dreams he lies on the pockmarked cement, conscious of the blood streaming from his chest, unable to act, unable to save himself. The irony of it does not escape you.
Your mother said soon after, Perhaps now you’ll quit that job, give up this strange fascination with guns. She buys you a bulletproof vest when your daughter is born. You always wear the vest. You have learned many things from your father.
You are still loading and unloading your gun by touch alone. A cigarette dangles from your lips, burning your eyes. You hold your head at a funny, half-canted angle to avoid the smoke.
You wish your daughter were here right now, as she usually is when you sit cleaning your gun. She would talk: half-formed words, slurred, jumbled baby talk. Her voice would r
ise in a lilting song—perhaps the alphabet song, or “I’m a Little Teapot.” You would sing along with her, if she were here. You would talk about the birds outside the window, and she might begin the “what dis” game. Momma, what dis? And you would answer her: That’s a chair, that’s the stove, this is my nose, those are your hands, that is Momma’s gun. After each item, she would ask over and over, maybe four or five times, What?
If she were here right now for you to hold, to inhale her warm baby-shampoo odor, maybe you would lock up your gun and the two of you would share a bowl of ice cream. You would laugh and giggle, play tickle and tag. And if you had to go to work, if you weren’t on a thirty-day suspension for roughing up a prisoner, maybe you would call in sick and spend the time rocking her back and forth. Momma’s girl, you would croon, you are Momma’s special girl. If she were here, if last night had not happened, perhaps that’s what you would be doing now.
Instead, you are cleaning your gun.
You walk a fine line between the reality of yourself and the reality of the streets—back and forth, in and out, a shadow dance along the fringe. You are afraid, terrified at times, a terror that wells up from your soul. Your childhood bogeyman awaits you in the quiet hum of a brilliant summer day or in the freezing rain on a darkened stretch of interstate. You will never know when, where. In the suffocating darkness within a vast warehouse, your gun clenched tightly to your side, your heart racing upward to a dry mouth, your inner voice trembles forth: Momma, I don’t like being here. And suddenly, that is where you would give anything to be—in her lap, her hands—dusty with flour—clasping your head tight against her chest, her honeysuckle perfume enveloping you. But only for an instant. The larger part of you always takes over, and you push past the fear, triumphant at having won again.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 9
