The roar and flash of the totally unexpected discharge illuminated our brief flight. Each time I described it back then, each time I recall it since, it is a clip from a film I am watching. I see bodies in gut-sucking flight and the sudden stoppage by the ground. But what is not film but reality is the flicker of the man’s eyes in the stab of muzzle flash, a human face at the instant of receiving the stigmata.
In the blue pulsing after-image I savored the end of the struggle—for two heartbeats. Lana’s screaming yanked me up again. Something as frightening as the hallucination turning to flesh and blood sent me, half-blinded by the muzzle flash, groping for the open camper door.
Her screaming told me there must be a second man.
Only I found Lana crammed into the far corner of the bunk, alone and vocally hysterical.
I tripped the light switch to grab my jacket and pants, discovering a wrenched shoulder as I dressed as fast as I could, to leap down to where, in the paltry light of the camper overhead, I saw the slow motion writhing of the man I’d shot.
Which only poured more adrenaline into my overloaded system, making me shake violently, close to retching and for a second feeling for the shotgun, to make it disappear forever into the night. I jerked to a stop when I found myself explaining to my father that I hadn’t meant to, ‘I didn’t mean to, Dad,’ the mantra of a kid who cut up often and was caught often.
This, I realized, was the first intrusion of Authority, because soon I was rehearsing my ‘didn’t mean to’ monologue to the uniformed men who were going to show up, I would be explaining to them and they, unlike my deceased father, would talk back.
I explained the color of blood in darkness, soaking into sand. I rehearsed, during the vigil I kept through the butt end of the night, not just this monumental blunder—a mistake, officer, a damned mistake—but all the blunders I’d swept under the featureless carpet of my bland life as I knelt beside the once terrible stranger who was terrible now only as evidence of the exigencies of a man’s life, the last rattle in his throat coming in time with the miniscule flexing of one knee.
I retained an indelible image of death from the viewpoint of the murderer: greasy mackinaw of aged blue plaid, perforated and beginning to show blood from the inside out; lower jaw bloody and misshapen, shattered by a load of double-0 buckshot; the smell of a dying body stronger than burnt black powder.
As I told Jake, when it finally came out what I’d done that ended the old me, Lucky Ol’ Robert Gattling, it isn’t so hard to merge the real thing with what has formed your image of murder from media reports and crime novels. If you shoot a man who was close enough he’d just been holding onto the muzzle of the gun, it is not too hard to call it murder and join the ranks of the world’s Cains.
six
Jake-on-tape analyzes the angst:
Before condemning Robert for a constitution all too weak, remember this happened after the University Administration had been under siege for weeks. Titles were forgot, bodies thrown into the breach. Robert was a good siege soldier, shouting down screaming protestors and standing his ground. Not frightened by threats of violence on his body, he could stand nose-to-nose with the best of the opposition and trade words. He was also good as a trustworthy leaker of the Administration’s position, he talked well to reporters (even the hack who would aced him in Nevada) never tried to tell them what to write, talked straight.
And remember the significance to him of the shooting: not that he was stoned per se, but that he did something that kept him from hearing the indigent break in. Otherwise, he believes, he’d have had the shotgun in hand and said something corny but arresting, like, “Freeze, asshole!” as he cocked the gun. He bought the shotgun to scare away persons like the drifter, but never gave the man the opportunity to be scared.
And remember too: he was still, eight years later, so worried about the opprobrium of others that he told me the root cause of his being a janitor in La Morinda instead of a “high-placed official” in Berkeley only after months of knowing me. He told Mary Clare not at all.
If only he could have, as he eventually had to, sat her down and said, ‘I’ve got trouble in mind’ and explained how nothing—not boxing at the Olympic Auditorium nor standing up to hippies in Sproul Plaza and to G-Men in the privacy of his office—prepared him for the shock and the alteration of his world view that came with mortal combat. For absolute truth, nothing tops learning how fragile life is.
Sure, he expected the previous generation to die. He had that scoped out since his mother went prematurely. They would all go, it was a matter of time. But time he had, that’s what youth flaunts, its time.
Then a shotgun in your hand nearly rips a man’s head off, it took but a blink of time and the guy is your age and he’s extremely dead. You watched him die, you died with him, never again to doubt.
Yet nothing, not even grappling with a man you had to believe, for sanity’s sake, might have done you in, could prepare you for the icy realization your ordeal was totally unreal to everyone else, you an assassin, in an age where assassination was the rear-guard skirmish against social change: a Malcolm X, an Evers, a Kennedy, a King, you one of those fiends who did that—what else would people believe of you? You looked in the mirror. No horns growing from your forehead, no syphilitic chancres eating through your cheek, yet you are the smell and sight of death itself, the persons who cross streets to avoid you letting you know your new symbolism.
Penthouse Lady, he might have said, you wouldn’t believe what it was like. Worse than tripping over the ropes climbing into the ring, breaking your nose while doing a pratfall. Because the University President didn’t have to say anything, all he had to do was mention how he knew, and although it gave Robert someone to revile, learning the Berkeley newspaper had done a number on him didn’t help his despair, knowing all seven weeks he’d been in Mexico hearts were hardening against him, people getting used to the notion of Robert Gattling, the man not mellowed out on marijuana, the man turned killer by it.
By the time he returned to Berkeley he was sick to death of himself, but he wanted others to comfort him, see the devastation of his soul: he could be the one to take the whip to his back and flanks, others could bind his wounds and cool his troubled brow.
After I read the article, and even went down to the Bulletin office, to read the file copy of the Reno newspaper article, I visited Berkeley Square, the first bar west of campus, and sought the sympathetic ear of Mac the bartender. I said, sipping a martini, “Don’t take this wrong, Mac, but did you ever kill anyone?” Mac said, “Matter of fact I did—what of it?” “Close at hand?” Mac said, “With a trenching tool in a foxhole, I guess you’d say it was close.”
I said, “How did you learn to cope with it?”
Mac looked at me and shrugged, said, “I tumbled out of the foxhole. I didn’t want to stay in it with a Nazi stiff. Bang! I got hit with a machinegun slug in the elbow, it hurt so bad I passed out. Back in the hospital I could only remember hitting the Kraut like I was watching a newsreel. I guess that’s how I coped.”
Blessed maiming, blessed machinegun bullet, too bad Robert wasn’t wounded by the drifter in the desert, a good cut with a Bowie knife that would have made him a hero.
It just wasn’t part of The Divine Accident that night.
*****
From first reading the article, grasping for a moral apprehension of Robert’s self-imposed exile, I retreated to the safety of my home and Tennessee sippin’ whiskey, glad I had known killing only as a spectator sport: bleak-faced survivors collecting dead and wounded, helicopter blades fanning rice paddies and recollections of other television screens, other deaths, Oswald by Jack Ruby, Bobby Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, the balcony on which Martin Luther King stood when shot by James Earl Ray.
That way I could rationalize my detachment, too deep into necessity and duty—my class’s imperative—to make an ant-like attempt to stop the killing. I felt as bound as our nation was, with the magnets of many contending ide
as keeping us going round and round, like particles in a cyclotron. My country and I were on a rocket-powered, computer-activated merry-go-round and didn’t know how to get off. I clung, oh how I clung.
Robert was flung off by the centrifugal force of accident, had the opportunity to sit in the carnival sawdust and know that the animals were merely wood and paint, the ride, after all, a mechanical contraption. Didn’t matter how high the hi-tech, it was the same old merry-go-round. He had this magnificent opportunity and didn’t take it.
If only he’d known then what I’ve learned since from my advisor, Mr. Death. But that goes for me, too. I had as good a chance to start over as Robert but without any mortal combat—the mere presence of Robert and Mary Clare in the house was one, they changed things so. I didn’t cash it in, I didn’t know about letting go of old things. Though I railed against the belief, I privately held, as Robert did, that being in the right place at the right time (in other words The Divine Accident) was the answer.
It wasn’t. If it were, being in the wrong place at the wrong time would account for every major woe of mankind. They have just discovered a Stone Age tribe living in caves in the Philippines. Is all the rest of their days to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, just because we “discovered” them? Was it the right place and time for them up until then? Paris hasn’t been the right place for the most powerful country in the world to bargain itself out of a losing war with a pint-sized opponent.
It isn’t being in the right place at the right time, it is the art of letting go, letting go of antiquated notions like “big nations always beat up little nations.” Robert liked the idea of The Divine Accident because he knew deep down that he had no control of what constituted right times and places. The dual in the desert destroyed the myth, and nothing worthy has come along to take its place.
Moraga Shangri-La
one
In Moraga I led a dual life: in high anxiety, fearing the mobile, determined phenom named Mary Clare was going to leave me in the dust, but also being pampered silly: my own doctor, nurse and housekeeper and a couple of admiring kids hanging around for whom I didn’t have to take responsibility, just enjoy; the other life as a lover ardent and happy, and leisure, leisure, leisure.
Afternoons Amanda had no surgery, she and I went out to the pool. I would lie on a foam pad while she took the chaise longue, and we’d talk. The kids were brown and noisy, splashing away the last of summer’s vacation, Amanda always seemed to stay a shade of tan like a creamy palomino.
“What do you talk about?” Jake asked me one evening. We were on the patio, sipping summer drinks.
“Are you jealous?” I asked, teasing but also curious.
He chuckled in the dim landscape lighting, and though I couldn’t see his features it seemed a genuine enough response. “No, I’m glad she gets to talk to someone besides me and the kids. I assume you aren’t talking about the properties of Lidocaine or the efficacy of epidural anesthesia. I’d love to know what you do talk about, but not because I’m jealous. Fact is, I’ve rather lost contact with my wife.”
Now I chuckled. “Aren’t Clare and I a topic of conversation?”
“I suppose. She told me you can’t swim, by the way.”
“Isn’t that silly. I almost drowned as a kid and I’ve been water-shy ever since. I faked it in the ocean, body surfing, but I’m like lead otherwise.”
“Let her teach you. She taught the kids in no time flat.”
Amanda would cool off in the pool periodically while we sunned and she was a regular fish in the water. Photos of her hung in the “spare room” I occupied. She was photogenic as well as beautiful, a large print of her in her lifeguard tower, whistle hung from a lanyard about her neck, nose painted with zinc oxide, hair skinned back to a single queue. She could have been a bathing suit model. She had fifteen years on Mary Clare and I noticed the differences, the wrinkles and the effects of her skin losing some of its elasticity. The wrinkles and extra folds only made her more interesting, like a vintage car or the varnish on an old violin.
“What happened?” I asked Jake one day, when he made a noncommittal remark about her.
“What do you mean, what happened?”
I said, “You guys are leading separate lives.”
He said, “Sometimes that’s the best a couple can do. Some think it’s how it’s supposed to be done.”
Towards the end of the summer Dr. Clemens told me it was okay to start taking “aquatic therapy.” “In other words, kiddo, you can let Mandy teach you to swim. But go slow; no diving, no kick turns. —Do you want to know how not get a hard-on while she’s holding you?”
“She’s my friend’s wife, for God’s sake.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t get a hard-on, but it doesn’t mean you won’t.”
“Jesus, Doc, I’ll for sure get one now. Every time she touches me I’ll think about what you just said.”
He winked and said, “Might give her ideas.”
I gave him the look I gave opponents when the referee called us into the center of the ring for last minute instructions.
*****
Meany’s lawyer asked for a trial date in September. Mary Clare couldn’t make definite plans until the trial was over, but she and her probation officer were all for her tackling the Dean of the graduate school at Brandeis. Her approach would be to drive back there before the trial, confront the woman and grovel. One day she and I and Jake put my tool box in the back of my truck and drove to Berkeley to resurrect her powder blue Triumph TR3, which was still sitting in the garage where Meany’d stashed it when he rescued her. It had sat under a tarp for two years untouched. The battery was dead, the tires flat by half, soot, rubber scuffed off the tires of parking cars, and just plain dust had turned the tarp from tan to ash gray.
“Do you think it will get me to Massachusetts?” Clare asked.
“The real question is, will it get you back?” I said.
Jake said, “That engine was originally built for tractors. It’s rugged and simple. Any decent mechanic can fix it.”
I had the garage do the pumping up and flushing out necessary to get the car on the road again. We meanwhile drove up the hill to the Claremont for lunch. On the way we debated whether we needed to drop the oil pan and degunk it.
I looked at Jake, Jake looked at me, Mary Clare looked from one to the other of us and back again.
“Nah,” I said.
“Nah,” Jake said.
“What am I missing?” Clare asked.
Jake said, “He’s not crawling under any car, for starters. Secondly, the English back when this was built used a different system of measuring nuts and bolts, and I’d have to borrow a set of Whitworth wrenches just to get the pan off.”
“And there’s wisdom in letting sleeping dogs lie. Loosening gunk might be like letting loose a blood clot. Plug something up.”
“I’m so glad I have such knowledgeable protectors,” she said, roguishly.
In the lobby Jake suddenly stopped in his tracks. He said to Clare, “Could you give us a couple of minutes alone?”
“I need to visit the ladies’ room,” she said and departed.
“What?” I asked.
“How’d you like a real job?” Jake asked.
“Depends.”
“You know Howie Manheimer?”
I said, “Just enough to play tennis with him weekly for a couple of years. Right here. He’s a member of the tennis club—or used to be.”
“Howie cornered me at the APHA meeting. He’s in a bind; took on a project and hired a project director who’s bombed out. No one’s been fool enough to take it on since—and I would, but I want more to write my novel so I said ‘no’ to that long a commitment. But it’s right up your alley.”
I gave him my skeptical look.
He said, “Look. It’s risky as hell but if you pull it off its rehabilitation, my friend. Resurrection. Clearing your name.”
Clare came back and we went into lunch.
“Are you guys finished telling secrets?”
I explained to her what we’d been talking about. I had to explain also that Howie Manheimer was Deputy Director of the Association of Bay Area Governments, which happened to have its offices in the basement of the Claremont Hotel. I also explained that Howie was an old friend.
“Go for it, lover. What are you waiting for?”
“I think a martini, to cloud my judgment.”
“While you drink one, I’m going downstairs and make sure Howie hasn’t found a sucker yet,” Jake said.
I motioned to the waiter, needing the martini instantly.
*****
Here is Jake’s taped account of his trip downstairs:
In the dining room I excused myself, went downstairs and told Howie Manheimer, “If that job is still open, I know someone who can do it, and he’s available.”
Howie is my age but doesn’t look it. A marathoner with a marathoner’s build, he has curly black hair silvered with white, as if done in a beauty salon, which it isn’t. He wears glasses to correct severe myopia.
“His name’s Robert Gattling.”
“Bob Gattling? We used to play tennis together. Whatever happened to him?”
“Been gathering himself in La Morinda,” I said.
“Everyone’s been wondering when he was going to come out of hiding. He could do this project, if he would. Suppose he would?”
“He’s got some impetus, he’s got a new girl.”
Howie said, “Bob always has a girl.”
“Not like this one.”
“How do I get in touch with him?”
I said, “I’m having lunch with him and his girl upstairs—I’ll send him down.”
“Fantastico. Send her down too.”
“Howie?”
“Yeah?”
“Two things: I already told him the job was risky, so don’t bullshit him. And if you do hire him, give him a little time to get used to a coat and tie job again—okay?”
Upstairs I said, “You want to go down and say hello to Howie while Mary Clare and I swill some wine?”
He hesitated. “He really wants to see me?”
Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine Page 20
