The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Surrender! Surrender your weapons.

  Mr. Mayweather, the building is surrounded.

  Hoping that no one would notice him, Chandler risked peering out around the van. It seemed unlikely that the gunman would be watching and fire at that moment. But the hairs at the nape of Chandler’s neck stirred.

  Royall always insisted his work at the Devil’s Hole was one hundred percent safe. It only looks dangerous, taking a boat into the Gorge.

  Chandler pushed his glasses against the bridge of his nose, squinting. His heart had begun to accelerate though he knew (he knew!) he wasn’t in any actual danger. And so he was not. The facade of the grim building was unchanged. The door was ajar as before, the doorway empty. No movement there, or behind the shattered window. In the background a police helicopter droned. It seemed that time was suspended, but of course it was not. Police, paramedics, emergency workers, media people were waiting for something to happen, but where was the gunman? He’d set all this in motion, and had retreated with his hostage, barricaded. He wasn’t responding to the deafening bullhorn, and wasn’t answering the telephone. Chandler didn’t want to think that Mayweather and the young woman hostage might both be dead.

  Maybe Mayweather had a knife, he’d killed the woman in relative silence. The police hadn’t heard gunfire. Maybe he’d slashed his own wrists. Mayweather? This building is surrounded. If you hear me—

  You had to feel pity for a man, for whom being employed at Niagara Precision Humidifiers & Electronic Cleaners meant so much. This not-prosperous plant employing less than three hundred people.

  Chandler overheard some of the cops making bets. Whether the guy would walk out alive, or be carried out. Whether he’d kill himself, or they would.

  Chandler had been present at sites where men had died, or been wounded by police fire. Not a pleasant experience. The terrible noise of gunfire, lasting for several seconds, lodged deep in your brain. It was a noise beyond noise, a metaphysical assault. Noise like a machete severing bones. I wish you wouldn’t, but I wish more that you didn’t feel the need. Melinda kissed him, Melinda held him trembling in her arms. She seemed to sense that Chandler wasn’t hers to hold, in quite that way; yet he wanted to be, and she sensed that, too. He hadn’t told her more than she’d needed to know. Of course, she was a nurse, she’d worked in emergency rooms.

  Twice in the past three years, Chandler had been present when men killed themselves. One had used a revolver, in a stand-off with police in a tenement building downtown, on New Year’s Day, and the other had died in a plunge into the roiling American Falls from the tip of Goat Island, before a gathering of stunned onlookers. (This suicide, an eighteen-year-old Niagara University math major with no “known history” of emotional problems, had hung stony-faced over the railing for nearly an hour before letting go. Chandler had been designated to try to reason with him, get him to talk and reconsider, but Chandler had failed, and crept away in defeat. Death in The Falls. Of all deaths it seemed the most vengeful.)

  In fact, most of the time Chandler was involved in emergency situations that came to no dramatic resolutions but simply ended, in stalemate and exhaustion. A drunken man barricaded in his apartment with his youngest child, shouting defiantly, weeping, smashing windows and furniture but putting up no resistance when police break in and take him into custody. A middle-aged flower-child on LSD who threatens to set herself on fire in a public place but, after drawing dozens of onlookers, and dousing herself spectacularly with kerosene, is unable to strike a match, and is led away giggling by police. Unshaven men in undershirts who rush at police officers, yelling obscenities and meaning to fight to the death, but are immediately overpowered, thrown to the pavement and deftly spreadeagled and their wrists handcuffed behind their backs.

  So it went. Chandler had several times arrived too late, the drama was over, everyone was headed home.

  That sinking sensation in the gut. You haven’t made any difference, what a fool you are. What vanity.

  Yet there was the night last July when he’d driven Melinda to the hospital, to give birth. They had not been lovers, only just friends. And Melinda had asked Chandler to stay with her because she was frightened to be alone and he had done so though frightened himself and when she began to have contractions he’d helped her, he’d gone to the hospital with her and remained with her through the seven-hour ordeal. It was the most remarkable experience of his life. He would never forget, he’d made a difference then.

  Mr. Mayweather? Pick up the phone. We need to talk to you, Mr. Mayweather. We need to verify Miss Carpenter’s well-being—

  No response from the gunman.

  Chandler overheard cops talking quietly together, nerved-up and angry. It wasn’t believed that Mayweather had been wounded in the exchange of gunfire, but Chandler wondered if possibly he was. Maybe the gunman and his hostage were both bleeding to death inside the building? “Well-being”—how quaint this sounded, how unexpected in the bullhorn’s deafening volume.

  Mr. Mayweather, we are calling you at this moment and ask that you pick up the phone. We need to know what you want. What your expectations are. Mr. Mayweather? Are you hearing me? This building is surrounded. Release Miss Carpenter at once and you will not be harmed.

  This time, as everyone strained to listen, there was a shouted obscenity from inside the building. The voice was strained, and didn’t carry far.

  Silence followed. (In the near distance, a rumble of freight trains.) There was the expectation that a gunshot might be fired, but nothing happened.

  It was then that Chandler learned the gunman’s first name: “Albert.” Hadn’t he known Albert Mayweather? From school? It was a name Chandler hadn’t heard in years.

  In fact, Chandler had graduated with another Mayweather, a younger brother or cousin of Albert. But he remembered Albert Mayweather, as a young boy might remember an older boy whom he fears and dislikes and yet admires in that unspeakable way of adolescence.

  Mayweathers lived in the Baltic Street area, though none close by the Burnabys. There were many of them, a virtual clan. But Chandler recalled Al distinctly. A strong, stocky boy with a wrestler’s build and dirty-blond hair coarse as rug fibres. He’d been a vocational arts major like so many boys at NFHS. His mood swung between a menacing silence and clownish exuberance. One of those boys whose idea of wit was to crack his knuckles, or fart, loudly. Al wasn’t a team athlete but he played pick-up basketball with his buddies behind the school, cigarette dangling from his thick lips. “Alley-oop,” his buddies called him. “Alley-oop” as if it were a term of endearment. Chandler understood reluctantly that girls, even “good” girls, were sometimes drawn to boys like Al Mayweather. At least initially.

  Strange, and unspeakable: you wanted such boys to like you. To forgive you your high grades, your myopic eyes and faltering step, your stammer in fearful circumstances. You wanted a boy like Al Mayweather to acknowledge your name, a name given a perverse significance by scandal; a criminal name. Burnaby? That’s you?

  Chandler had a vague recollection that someone in Al Mayweather’s family, or in the family of a Mayweather in Chandler’s class, who was one of a number of OxyChemical workers who’d gone on disability young, in their thirties and forties; there was a class action suit against the company in the mid-1970s, much local controversy and anger. Chandler recalled such words as “betrayed”—“lied to”—“workers’ rights”—“work-related illnesses”—in headlines. The multi-million-dollar lawsuit had not ended favorably for the workers, if you knew details. A jury had granted sizable monetary rewards to dying men, or to their surviving families, except these decisions were frequently overturned in appeals court, by which time the media had lost interest.

  Mr. Mayweather? Step into the doorway with your hands raised.

  Do not bring your weapons to the door, Mr. Mayweather.

  Mr. Mayweather, the phone is ringing. Pick up the phone.

  Police had tried to contact Mayweather’s estranged wife, but had
n’t been able to locate her at her home or at work. His children were living with their grandparents in North Tonawanda. Were they all right? Chandler knew that in such cases the gunman might have begun his shooting spree at home.

  Chandler wondered if Mayweather’s father was still living: probably not. None of those men involved in the lawsuit were alive now, probably. Lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer, cancer of the liver, skin cancers. Fast-moving cancers. Metastasizing cancers. That was the point of the lawsuit, a demand for reparation for speeded-up lives, premature deaths.

  “Love Canal” had been evoked, often.

  But not the debased name Burnaby.

  Melinda had said Chandler, please. You are not your father.

  Chandler could count more than twenty police officers at the emergency site. Some were wearing protective gear and all were armed. Elsewhere, on the other side of the factory building, there were more, similarly armed men. Mayweather hadn’t a chance. If he tried to shoot his way out he’d be riddled with bullets instanteously. Chandler wondered, not for the first time in such circumstances, how it can happen that a man finds himself in such a place, one day. A rat backed into a corner. No way out.

  Since high school, Chandler hadn’t given the Mayweathers a thought. He supposed that the families still lived in the Baltic Street area. Now the younger generation had come into adulthood, like Al, and had gone to work in the factories; they’d married, had children, their lives were set. Probably, Al had gone directly from vocational arts at the high school into this job at Niagara Precision. He’d been what is known as a skilled worker, to be distinguished from a non-skilled worker. The highest paid were draftsmen and tool and dye designers, though if a plant wasn’t unionized, as Niagara Precision probably wasn’t, wages wouldn’t be very high. Pension plans, medical coverage, insurance wouldn’t be high. Non-union help could be fired, too. At the whim of the employer.

  Two hours, forty-five minutes since Mayweather entered the building, and began shooting. Since the wounded man was taken to the hospital, not much had happened. Chandler had asked several times if he could speak to Mayweather over the bullhorn, explaining he’d gone to school with Mayweather, but the captain wasn’t convinced this was a good idea yet. Police were still trying to contact the estranged wife, and Mayweather’s brothers. Someone close to Mayweather. Chandler said, “I feel close to Al Mayweather. I think I could get him to pick up the phone.”

  (Was this so? Chandler wasn’t sure. Hearing himself say these words, in a confident, urgent voice, he felt that possibly it was so.)

  Chandler, like the others, was becoming edgy, anxious. The adrenaline rush was beginning to subside. Like low tide, waves retreating and leaving the sand littered with debris. Chandler was concerned that his head would begin to ache. That was his weakness, or one of them—throbbing pain behind his eyes and a rising sense of dismay, despair. Why did he die. My father. Why, like a trapped rat. I loved him! I miss him.

  He’d let Royall down. Royall who’d called him, appealed to him in a way Royall had never spoken to Chandler before.

  Royall, and Juliet. He was their protector. Ariah had begged him, fifteen years ago. Of course he’d promised. Better to betray the dead than the living.

  Chandler thought of Melinda, of whom Ariah didn’t approve; and of Melinda’s baby, about whom Ariah knew very little. He wondered at his mother’s animosity toward a woman she had not met. Because the woman’s baby wouldn’t be Ariah’s grandchild? Maybe that was it. A baby whom Chandler might love, who wasn’t descended from Chandler, and from Ariah.

  Family is all. All there is on earth.

  Television news vans had been arriving since the time of Chandler’s arrival, strung out now along Swann Road. Behind the police line, media people drifted about, frustrated by inaction, and by the need to stay at a distance. These were professionals very different from those already at the scene: media people who saw the emergency as an opportunity, “news” to be exploited. They too were edgy, but expectant, hopeful. Here we are! Now, something exciting can happen. The most intrusive people were those who’d come in the van marked NFWW-TV “YOUR ACTION NEWS” CHANNEL 4. This was the local NBC-affiliate. Among them was a roaming cameraman with a bazooka-shaped instrument on his shoulder, aimed at shifting targets. By quick degrees, as dusk came on, the emergency area was being lighted. These were blinding lights with an eerie bluish cast. You expected to hear the powerful gut-thrumming chords of a rock band. There was now a cinematic sharpness to objects, textures, colors illuminated by the light, where, by the light of the ordinary overcast March afternoon, things had appeared blurred and insignificant.

  A glamorous young woman reporter with NFWW-TV, tightly belted trench coat, crimson mouth and Cleopatra eyes, was trying to cajole police officers and medical workers into speaking into her microphone before the camera, but she wasn’t having much success. Chandler knew, the media’s goal was to acquire as much film footage as possible, to be shrewdly edited, spliced together, distorted for dramatic effect back in the studio. “Mr. Chandler? You’re the ‘Crisis man’? May I speak with you?”—the young woman’s voice wafted to Chandler, who backed off, with a polite smile, “Sorry, I’m not ‘Mister Chandler.’ And no, sorry. I don’t care to talk with you just now, it doesn’t seem appropriate.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t.”

  “Because the gunman is still in there, and the hostage, and—”

  Chandler turned away, hoping to discourage her. She moved on.

  Like the professionals, Chandler had come to dislike the eager media people as intruders, exploiters. They were every cliché that might be said about them, and it was possible to feel some sympathy for them, yet you didn’t trust them, you could not. When he’d first become a volunteer, Chandler had naïvely believed that coverage of such desperate incidents would be helpful, even educational, but he’d since changed his mind. The previous year, Chandler had been interviewed by NFWW-TV for the station’s nightly news and he hadn’t at all liked what he’d seen. To be identified as “Chandler Burnaby,” a science teacher at La Salle Junior High, a “crisis volunteer with a mission,” had seemed appalling to him, like self-advertising. He’d hated his voice, his smile, his nervous mannerisms; the transparency of his vanity, that he’d been successful in his effort, at that time. Worse, Melinda had happened to see him on TV before he’d had a chance to call her, and she’d been upset, more upset than he’d have expected.

  Still, Chandler felt genuinely humble. He dreaded being made much of by the media, then failing publicly, ignominiously. He knew the irony and cheap pathos that could be generated by his being shot to death in the service of “saving” another.

  Especially, aged twenty-seven, he felt humble around the Samaritans. This organization was strongly Christian, a suicide-prevention society that had begun in England decades ago and had affiliates in the United States. Samaritans were both professionals and non-professionals, but all were volunteers; you had to be trained, and the training was rigorous. The Niagara Crisis Hot-Line alone required a five-week orientation course; it wasn’t for bored housewives and retirees looking for something to occupy their idle hours.

  “Mr. Burnaby?”—now the TV woman had Chandler’s surname, and was sounding empowered. Suddenly she was before him bran-dishing her microphone like a scepter, speaking in a hushed, breathlessly reverent voice. “Is it true that you know ‘Albert Mayweather,’ the gunman who has taken Cynthia Carpenter hostage, and shot and critically wounded a foreman here at Niagara Precision—” Chandler, annoyed, blushing, turned aside, gestured for her to get away from him.

  “Cynthia Carpenter.” The hostage, whose full name Chandler hadn’t heard until now.

  He tried to think: did he know any Carpenters?

  Several members of the Carpenter family were at the site, some distance away, in safety. Chandler had noticed an older couple in their fifites or sixties, dazed, stricken. (But no Mayweathers?) Chandler was thi
nking that, face to face, he could reason with the gunman. Al Mayweather whom he’d (almost) known. One of the older boys you steered clear of, if you could. Not that Al Mayweather would have troubled to torment Chandler Burnaby, years younger. Mayweather and his friends noisy in the corridors, on the stairs, in the cafeteria at school. Mayweather, or boys very like him, in the locker room after gym, stripping for showers, braying with laughter, shouting and punching one another in the biceps, penises swinging like blood sausages.

  If Mayweather surrendered now, releasing Cynthia Carpenter unharmed, surely that would mitigate the charges against him. He’d let the pregnant woman go. If the foreman didn’t die, and wasn’t permanently injured…Chandler wondered what Al Mayweather, now thirty years old, was thinking inside the building. That he was trapped? That he was in control? Trapped, yet (for the time being) in control? Chandler couldn’t imagine what a man in such a desperate situation told himself. Or did. As minutes, and then hours, passed. There must be a point when he has to urinate badly. A point when he’s becoming light-headed from not eating, and exhausted. A point when he wishes to Christ he’d never made such a mistake, and brought his life to this.

  Chandler was being asked how well did he know Mayweather in high school, and he said, after a pause, “Not very well. But I think he’d remember me, he’d trust me. Maybe I can get him to negotiate on the phone.”

  Such confidence. Chandler wondered where it derived from.

  It was nearly 6 P.M. when Chandler was given the bullhorn. He steadied his hands to keep them from shaking. A police officer was telling him to speak slowly and clearly and stay out of the range of any possible fire, don’t be misled if Mayweather picks up the phone and talks to you, don’t show your face. Try to get him to answer the phone. The phone that’s been ringing, he won’t pick up. Get him to put the hostage on. We need to know how that girl is.