by Jim Shepard
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
THE GUN LOBBY
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
MARS ATTACKS
GLUT YOUR SOUL ON MY ACCURSED UGLINESS
THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
RUNWAY
AJAX IS ALL ABOUT ATTACK
EUSTACE
THE ASSASSINATION OF REINHARD HEYDRICH
REACH FOR THE SKY
ALICIA AND EMMETT WITH THE 17TH LANCERS AT BALACLAVA
THE MORTALITY OF PARENTS
ASTOUNDING STORIES
SPENDING THE NIGHT WITH THE POOR
DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT
Impractical but Exciting Early Machines
The Bathysphere in Its White Coat
Corals and Fish Four Fathoms Down
The Evolution of Human Diving
Cruikshank’s Idea of Life in a Bell
The Evolution of Human Diving
A Diver Can Attract Fish with a Crowbar
All These Instruments Plus Two Men
Each Nut Twisted into Its Numbered Place
A Quarter Mile Down
A Seascape from a Motion Picture Film
The Pallid Sail Fin
The Wing Bolt Shoots like a Shell Across the Deck
The Shrubs of the Sea Are Animals
A Half Mile Down
The Maw of the Saber-Toothed Viperfish
We Emerge Again, with the Grace of Worms
Those Are Real Stars in the Heavens
JOHN ASHCROFT: MORE IMPORTANT THINGS THAN ME
MESSIAH
PIANO STARTS HERE
BATTING AGAINST CASTRO
KRAKATAU
WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
CLIMB ABOARD THE MIGHTY FLEA
About the Author
ALSO BY JIM SHEPARD
Copyright Page
For Karen—again—
Acknowledgments
Without the contributions from the following sources, many of the stories in this book would have existed in a much paltrier form: Mano Ziegler’s Rocket Fighter; William Beebe’s Half Mile Down; Tom Simkin and Richard Fiske’s Krakatau 1883; Mireille Majoor and Ken Marschall’s Inside the Hindenburg; Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why; Jan Weiner’s The Assassina tion of Heydrich; David Winner’s Brilliant Orange; The Congressional Record; and John Ashcroft and Gary Thomas’s Lessons from a Father to His Son. I’m also grateful for the expertise provided by James Wood, David Dethier, and Grant Farred. And I particularly want to cite the invaluable, tireless, and long-term contributions of Steve Wright, Geoff Sanborn, Gary Zebrun, Mike Tanaka, Sandy Leong, Ron Hansen, and—as always—Karen Shepard.
THE GUN LOBBY
My old friend Chick sells guns out of a hamper he keeps in his basement. He sells them at gun fairs and uses the money to buy more guns that he sells at other gun fairs. It’s a living, he says.
I give him some mild grief about the hamper and he puts up with it, like a little rain on a nice day. The hamper’s got straw flowers on it and a little wicker clasp. He could have phased it out by now, certainly, and it hasn’t been close to big enough since what he calls The Early Years, but he keeps it in service. He says, “My reasons cluster in the What Do You Care? category.” As in, when you ask, that’s what you’re told. His attachment to the hamper feels to me like nostalgia. But Chick is a puzzle, and I may be wrong.
Chick says that a sentence about selling whatever you want to whoever you want is in the Bill of Rights and never gets talked about. He says that in our history books, every paragraph and a half, someone’s reaching for a gun.
He gets no arguments from me. I grew up on all those snub-nosed pioneer kids sitting around on their little woven rugs, learning their long division with coal on the backs of shovels while they listened to stories about Daniel Boone’s Old Bess, Bess Boone’s Little Danny, Betsy Ross’s Philadelphia derringer, or Carrie Nation’s homemade zipgun. Sgt. York from the hills of West Virginia, who could peg a squirrel’s retina at nine thousand yards. Slow Tick Billy, last to draw but first to let fly once things were unholstered. We just knew as kids that everybody, tiny tots to tall Texans, sat around dreaming about potting the next Mohawk to cut through the back garden.
As far as Chick’s concerned, guns pay for braces, trips, and pretty soon, colleges. He has two big girls, Amanda and Astra, and two little boys, Emmett and Jasper. Before bed the girls kneel side by side and pass along to God prayers for Mommy and Daddy and their brothers and the gun lobby.
Chick sells Colts, Walthers, Glocks, Uzis, and Ingrams. He services the Colts and Ingrams himself, with one hand on the manual. He dabbles in Kalashnikovs. His big score was a Schmeiser with the original firing pin which he turned around in two days for triple profit. He’s had poison-tipped darts from the Amazon and a box of curved rubber truncheons said to be favored by the Albanian police. He has squirreled away in his little root-cellar-y sub-basement some high-end contraband laser sights, a crate of phased-out NATO flash grenades (with the rounder bodies, before they went to the narrow design), and a drop tank from an F-18. In the sub-sub-basement in a beer cooler he’s stashed an old scorched liquid nitrogen canister wrapped in gummy and tenacious biohazard tape. The kids call the sub-sub-basement Daddy’s secret secret room. He’s mum on what’s inside the canister, which is part of the mystery of Chick.
He also stockpiled some Claymores for a buddy moving them upstate. He gave the buddy thirty-six hours to pick them up. They had to be primed and set to blow, but even so, you don’t want the kids poking around the antipersonnel mines. He kept everything locked up tight, but still, how many parents have said that before?
He sold my wife everything she wanted when she stopped by his basement, without fully consulting me. She went the better-safe-than-sorry route when it came to quantity. He sold her a Glock, an Uzi, an Ingram M-10, and a nifty little Travis Bickle .25 caliber on a sliding brace arrangement that fits around the forearm and allows the wearer to squeeze off a clip even after massive arm trauma. It looked like overkill to me, and now he admits that he may have gone, as he puts it, a gun too far. Stephanie paid in cash—Chick doesn’t take Visa—and I have to assume the total was a stiff piece of change, especially with holsters and ammo thrown in.
Stephanie kept her family name when she married me, so our mailbox says Home of Roger Chanute and Stephanie von Watzdorf. I tell her I’m sorry she’s never been happy here and she tells me she’s always thought the place was fine; it’s me she’s never been happy with.
“Here” is Waterbury, Connecticut, which is right now the main show in terms of the cutaway news, because of the standoff. You can see Stephanie or me, the Hostage, at the windows every so often on TV. We watch ourselves.
The house is always on. My rake’s still in the leaves in the front yard. You can see frost on the ground.
Stephanie’s turned off the heat, to get serious, she says, so she’s usually in her outgrown Brearley blazer. In the mornings we can see our breath. I asked about the heat the first morning, but I’m not going to press it. She goes around the house with a semiautomatic in each hand. She’s originally from Manhattan.
“They’re lining me up right now,” she cackled yesterday when she passed a window. “Some SWAT guy’s shouting into his radio, ‘I could take her now.’”
I reminded her of all the hostage movies we’ve seen that have turned out badly. Dog Day Afternoon. I ran out of titles.
“Rebel Without a Cause,” I added.
“They weren’t hostages,” Stephanie said contemptuously.
“He was waving a gun around,” I told her.
She was sitting at the kitchen table flipping a quarter in one hand like Geo
rge Raft.
“My point was, it was a tragedy that could easily have been averted,” I murmured.
“You’re a pig,” she said. “You respect nothing. You have the integrity of a grease trap.”
I asked her whatever happened to divorce in such situations. Flak-jacketed sharpshooters for the state were peeking out here and there around the cop cars and TV vans. She gave me a look to let me know that the whole standoff could have come to an end right then.
I’m not going to provide a whole Ring trilogy of what she’s been mad at. I will say that she’s right in that I’m not much good when it comes to empathy, my share of the day-to-day work, sobriety, monogamy, fiscal responsibility, or periodontal hygiene. We’d had two trial separations and she’d gotten skinned both times on support. She had her Manhattan lawyers but they had to deal with good old-fashioned Waterbury judges. She didn’t need the money, but, you know. It’s humiliating.
Chick’s been the only one allowed in to negotiate, maybe because he sold her the guns. Maybe because he’s a mystery. She won’t talk to the police directly even on the phone. They drove Kurt and Lucille, her father and mother, all the way up from the East Side and she didn’t bother to come to the line. Lucille’s way of easing into the situation was to open with, “Stephanie, pick up the phone.” This over the bullhorn. I could’ve told her how that was going to go over.
Every so often I ask her what she thinks she’s going to get out of this situation. I can tell it’s not the right question to ask.
Negotiations have been on hold since one of the troopers took a round in the shoulder while passing out coffee. “What was that all about?” I asked her after I ran into the room. She didn’t answer.
Chick, when he came, came unarmed, which was lucky for him. You’d think she’d been frisking people with the business end of an Ingram her whole life. He gave the pantry a glance to see how our food was holding out. Between calls from the police, he talked to us about how the neighborhood was taking it.
When he got the chance he gave me a look as if to say, Sorry, Buddy. I gave him back the I’m-looking-through-you thing. I call it The Stephanie.
For those who think Chick would be a different man had he had some personal connection to what can happen when handguns proliferate, let me report that his uncle in Florida was shot four times in the head with a Saturday night special in a disagreement over a game of gin rummy. Apparently it was the fourth shot that killed him. The guy who shot him was a real mutt. The guy bought the gun that day, drunk, at a gun fair in Orlando. After his purchase, he threw up in the aisle and got thrown out of the mall. A simple background check would have saved the uncle’s life. Chick says a saliva test would have weeded the guy out. And has that changed his mind about guns? “Hey, I didn’t stop eating ham sandwiches after Mama Cass choked to death,” he says.
Nobody’s even tried to negotiate with us for the last day and a half. We’ve been pretty much staying in the kitchen. Every so often I toast a little something in the oven with the door open, to warm up.
Stephanie’s been keeping to herself, across the room. After Chick’s last visit, she magic-markered an orange-and-white target and cut it out and pinned it to her Agnès b. blouse. She hung the blouse in the front window. It’s a weird effect on TV.
The gun lobby’s not really a “lobby,” in the sense of a pleasant little room with chairs and some nice light, or in the sense of a group of concerned citizens trying to get their point of view a hearing. It’s more a lobby the way the Stasi was a lobby. If the gun lobby were a famous athlete, ESPN’s Kenny Mayne would have it shout, like after a three-run jack in the ninth, “I am the lord of all I survey!” Dan Patrick would say, “You can’t stop The Gun Lobby. You can’t even hope to slow it down.”
The gun lobby’s not pernicious or evil or embattled or heroic; it just is. It’s like the Samarian Gorge, or German efficiency, or beans in the soup, or the death of the Sun. What does it mean to “stand up” to the gun lobby? How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
There’re all sorts of things about this country I never liked, and I’m a guy who believes in making a difference. My way of doing that is by not taking part in any political activity whatsoever. When we were courting, Stephanie used to say that it was all of a piece: when there was a problem, if she brought it up, we talked about it—at least for a few minutes—and if she didn’t, we didn’t. I’m a big sins of omission kind of guy, apparently. I just go through life not doing anything to anyone, wreaking havoc left and right.
“Here’re my options with you,” Stephanie would say, lying in bed next to me, her eyes wet. “Either my lifemate-soulmate-husband is too stupid and self-involved to know what he’s doing to me, which isn’t good news, or he does know, and he’s being disingenuous about it. Which is even worse news.”
Then of course I’d catch grief for not having any comeback to that. And what exactly is an acceptable comeback for that?
The truth is, in most of my regrettable recent moves it’s like I’m throwing a sheet over a sawhorse: I’m just trying to give some shape to all the disappointment.
I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidant, and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, reclosing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.
Stephanie’s been pretty hemmed in the last few years, between me—The Lump—her mother, whom she calls Ilsa Koch Without the Charm, and this whole cervical problem that’s allowed us to go to meeting after meeting and watch doctors scratch their heads. Doctors find Stephanie’s condition an interesting puzzle, something meaty to mull over. We see a lot of pursing of lips and nodding while we recite our tale of woe, and then we’re told what it isn’t, and then we all decide to Wait and See how things develop, and then on the way out Stephanie or I pay what the insurance doesn’t cover. It’s not clear whether we can have kids, but they do make it clear that I should have been doing more hand-wringing about it. Instead of screwing around with one of the checkout girls at an auto-parts store.
Add to that Roger’s old friend Chick, handling the entrepreneurial training and emotional counseling. He and Stephanie hit it off, in a cobra-mongoose sort of way, right from the beginning. I used to think they competed to see who could put up with more from me.
“You see that look?” he said to me, right in front of her, after he first met her. “That’s the ‘Now I see where my husband gets it from’ look.”
“Does he seem like a bad influence?” I asked Stephanie after he left.
“In every way possible,” she said.
FOR YEARS CHICK has been disappointed in my politics, my education, my general deportment, and my lack of overall curiosity about the way things work. He’s always seen a residue of potential, though.
The last few years we’ve been like the Collier Brothers. I was over there most nights nine to one. His wife went to bed at nine. He counseled me against involvement with Stephanie, though it was a little late in the day for that. At the same time, he had dry mounted and pinned to his worktable in the sub-sub-basement an infrared photo of her that he’d taken with a nightscope. It looked like a cross between a pinup and a black-light poster. I mentioned it to Stephanie. She didn’t give me a lot of reaction. “The mystery of Chick,” she said to herself every so often when I’d be heading out the door.
A few months ago he dropped by to show off a set of Finnish Puukko knives and invited himself for dinner. Stephanie gave me a look and I let it go by. So she said, “Allrighty, then,” and stretched the fish by poaching it in a can of minestrone soup. Chick waded right in next to her. He started pitching spices into the saucepan and promising to get the dish up on its feet.
“Not that he’ll notice,” he said, indicating me.
“I could blindfold him and feed him an onion, he’d
think it was an apple,” Stephanie said.
They went on like that all through dinner. They commiserated about how my eyelids tended to droop when I was trying to concentrate.
“He lies all the time,” Chick complained to her. “He tells you one thing and he’s thinking another.”
“Did you used to think he was kind?” she asked him. “I used to think he was kind. Or wanted to be kind. Or something.”
“Sometimes I think he’s a good man, and sometimes I’m not so sure,” Chick told her.
“Exactly,” she told him back. “Exactly.”
I played with the knives and sat there. I told them I felt like a guy in a glass booth and they were two Israelis haggling over a verdict.
“That’s perfect,” Stephanie said. “The banality of evil.”
“Oh, man,” Chick said.
“You and Chick hit it off this evening,” I told Stephanie later that night.
“When are you going to talk to me?” she said. “Are you ever going to talk to me?”
“What’re we doing right now?” I wanted to know. But that was it, end of discussion. She whacked her bedside lamp switch and shut down for the night.
She called him once or twice that I knew about and tried to talk to him about me. She even flirted with him once, a month or two after that dinner, when I was keeping to my bed. She went over there and hung out in the sub-sub-basement, with the wife asleep upstairs. She told me the next morning that she got a look at the canister. She still refers to the whole thing as her Low Point.
For a while she drew lines on the inside of her arm with my Gillette. I didn’t say anything. I broke it off with the auto-parts woman.
Like I said before, she’s right. I have the integrity of a four-dollar tent.
Last night I gave it one last shot. I appealed to the Old Us. Remember when I used to listen? I asked. Remember when we respected me a little bit? Remember when there was something worth saving here? Meaning me. She just lay there, her palm spread over the Glock, her eyes wet.
Chick remembered. On the way out after his last negotiation attempt, he said to me, “Hang in there, buddy. Don’t forget Orchard Street.” He was talking about the morning junior year when a woman sat down in the grass in front of us and her grocery bag tipped over. He ran to call the ambulance and I sat with her. She was gray and sweaty and hung on to my shoulder and started telling me about how she met her husband. How it was because he went back for his sweater and how for a while she worried she didn’t deserve to be so happy. Every so often whatever it was would grab her and she’d clench my shirt in her hands. The ambulance went to Orchard Drive instead of Orchard Street, so it was twenty minutes getting there. I laid her down and she kept my shirt in her hands. Chick stayed half a backyard away, watching. I had my hands on both sides of her head. When the ambulance finally came they went about getting her ready to load in. When they tried to separate my shirt from her fist and I saw her face, I said I’d ride with her. She nodded to them over and over again and they figured I was family.
