The Wrong Man (8 page)

9

M
y
grandfather
’
s
pickup
and
my
grandmother’s clean, neat lower-middleclass Ford Taurus were in the driveway. The neighborhood slept, utterly. I rolled past the house and pulled to the end of the street, rounded the corner, and parked in the alleyway, edging to my right until the side mirror touched the outside of the backyard fence my grandfather had built twenty years before. It was nearly
four a.m.
I could feel the fingers of exhaustion clawing at my mind, trying to get a good grip and pull it down into the quicksand of unconsciousness.

I walked around the front, found the door locked, and, having no other choice, knocked.

Within moments I was facing my grandfather in his robe. He was shrunken, stooped with age and gray, although there were still proud streaks of dark in his hair. His face was a collapsed, creased thing, the skin drooping as if melting, and his eyes had a wet sparkle in the half-light. The doctor had recently told him his heart might stop at any moment but he stood before me like a dangerous man, unblurred from sleep, because, I knew, he didn’t sleep at night.

“Jesus-God, Sam!” he said. “I almost knocked your goddamned head off. What the hell are you doing?”

I saw he had a nine-iron in his right hand as I passed inside.

“Well?” he said. He hadn’t spoken in hours, was probably sitting in front of his computer when I knocked, and his voice was a growl. “Jesus! What the hell happened to your face, Sam?”

“Sorry about this, grandpa. It’s a long, long story. Listen, can I tell it to you tomorrow and sleep on the couch tonight?”

He looked at me for a moment, shook his head and smiled. “Christ. Be my guest.” I could almost read his thoughts. He was imagining I had gone drinking, got in some fistfight and my girlfriend had kicked me out for the night. “There are some blankets in the hall closet, I think. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

And then he walked off. A moment later I heard him talking to my grandmother as he ushered her back into their bedroom. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just Sam. Yes, Sam. He had a fight with his girlfriend or something and is going to sleep on the couch.” And then he went into the bedroom across the hall, where he surfed the web and talked to other ancient, insomniac Republicans all night, and the door latch clicked.

I found a heavy knit blanket, stripped to my underwear and fell onto the couch, passing through the cushions and tumbling down, down, down with the ether of dreams closing around me.

In the morning I found myself flaunting my horrendous circumstances before Grandpa Art and Grandma Anne while not wanting to say the first word about the last few days. Especially to my grandmother.

My grandparents raised me here in Blackmer and they were, for practical purposes, my parents. But as the years had gone forward they had become Old People. My grandmother, especially, had settled into the role of an Old Lady and the chasm between what she saw and what was actually before her seemed to widen each day. Nothing could compel me to lift up the damp rock of my calm demeanor and show her the things crawling inside my mind. But, by a reverse equation, I imagined explaining all this to my grandfather like a man in a confession booth, and getting a no-bullshit, old-world solution handed to me in a couple of quick phrases.

I ate the eggs and toast my grandmother made me, gulped the strong coffee they lived off of, and told her it was nothing. I even made my pummeled face into a smile. I told her just what she and my grandfather had assumed: I had gone out drinking and got into a fight, and Jill had gotten upset and locked me out of the apartment. Ha-ha. Jill and I will come over in a month or two, we’ll all have dinner together and laugh about it.

I was sopping up the juice of the egg yoke with my toast, my grandmother clicking her tongue and shaking her head, when Grandpa Art’s voice drove a cold spike into my chest.

“SAMUEL!” he said. “COME HERE,
NOW
!”

My grandmother looked at me from her post at the sink with something like horror, and I must have had the same expression. That guttural drill sergeant’s bark had always, in my youth, been the harbinger of physical punishment. It was a sound of rage desperate for an outlet. I rose, feeling eleven years old, a foot shorter, and stepped into the living room and winced when I saw him there.
 

Grandpa Art was standing beside the coat rack that was behind the front door. The rack was heaped with his and my grandmother’s jackets and coats, and he had my brown derby jacket in his hand. His gaze pushed at me like a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. The weapons in my jacket pockets stretched the material downward in an obvious fashion. I said, “Shit.”

I had left the garment on the floor next to the couch, stuffed halfway under the end-table when I went to sleep, and then had awakened to my grandmother’s call for breakfast and hadn’t picked the thing up. So Grandpa Art had grabbed it off the floor to put it on the coat rack, felt the unusual weight and then explored inside the pockets.

Something shifted behind the old man’s eyes as he looked at the bruises and scuffs on my face. He seemed to realize the significance of everything—its cumulative effect. When he spoke, the rage had been replaced by quiet insistence and he said, “We better have a talk, son.”

I nodded.

I followed him to what he called his “lion’s den,” which was the garage off the side of the house. He had a miniature refrigerator out there, a TV, a space heater, and every power tool known to man, all organized as if by a secretary.

He walked out the front door ahead of me, carrying my jacket like an exhibit at a murder trial. It was another bright and cloudless morning. He lifted a hand and said hello to an old man in a duck hunting cap who was walking a small white dog up the sidewalk and I remembered that these homes had all been staked out by retirees over the last decade. The popular local term for the neighborhood was the Limber Dick Community. I wondered what would happen when death thinned out the population, then looked at my grandfather’s back and realized how soon I would have at least part of my answer. He was shrinking. Further gone each time I visited. His muscles vanishing, his old clothes, accustomed to the beef and strength of a workingman’s build, drooping.

Grandpa Art had driven diesel rigs for thirty years and he adhered to the classic trucker dress code: the short-sleeved western shirt tucked into battered
Levis
, the work boots on the bottom and gray hair pomaded into a neat little almost-pompadour on top. His face always seemed carefully shaven, except for the thick sideburns that went down past his ever-growing ears. It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species—the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in
Korea
, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals—or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from
Vietnam
, just in time to napalm the
Woodstock
festival.
     

But the man had
lived.
He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and—he hinted—a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations.
 

We entered through the garage’s side door. It was cool out here and had the somehow lifeless and businesslike atmosphere of a shed. My grandfather laid my jacket on the top of his workbench, the weapons giving muted thunks as they hit the metal top. He crouched and grunted and the antique garage door scraped in its tracks and slid up over our heads and the spring air and morning sunshine rushed in.
 

He indicated the swivel stool in front of the workbench and said, “Sit,” and turned to his little refrigerator. He took out a beer and handed it off to me, cracked one for himself, took a long gulp and then stared down at me.

“Now tell me,” he said.

And I did. I began with Rich stealing the pot and filled in every detail up to me running for my life last night. He shook his head the entire time, muttering things like “god-almighty!” and “Jesus-H-fucking-Christ!” and “Tommy? Aw, Sam, no!”

When I finished the story my grandfather was quiet for a long time. He had seated himself across from me, on a stack of ninety-pound bags of concrete mix, and a flush had come to his cheeks. He upended his beer and got another. I had seen this same attitude of distraction dozens of times, whenever he began to visualize a building project.

“Shit!” he kept sputtering. Then he looked up. “I ever tell you about Tommy’s father? He was a tennis teacher, always worried about his hair, always trying to show off his muscles, making a comment to every girl that went by like a goddamn nigger on a streetcorner. He knocked up your Aunt Carrie and left town as fast as he could.” Granpa Art winked. “But not before I made him hurt a little.” He paused, let that soak, cleared his throat. “Point is, Tom Senior was a sneaky, lying, two-faced son of a bitch, and Tommy ain’t any different. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s all genetics. I know it firsthand. He lived with me for a few years and I tried and tried to make a man of him, but it was no use. He wouldn’t go to school. Couldn’t stay out of fights. Was already chasing girls nonstop when he was thirteen. He’s just like his old man and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
 

I had forgotten how Grandpa Art was given to rambling these last couple of years. He could talk for fifteen minutes and not even approach the point he’d started off toward. He would just abandon the subject at hand, notice an interesting side-trail of memory and start down it without any logical segue. He sighed now, lost down one of these trails, and I just watched him, examining the elephant-hide cracks and wrinkles covering his face like a disease, the great stretched bags of flesh making his eyes look grave and sad.

“Anyway,” he continued. “The point is that Tommy is just what he is. He’s no good. But that night, shit, what was it? Nineteen-sixty-three? Sixty-four? Jesus, Sam, I’m
old
!” And he almost began a discussion of his age, but I saw him catch himself. “What was I saying
 
. . . oh yeah, that night I needed
four
buddies!” He folded his thumb against his palm and held up four thick fingers as if I might not catch on. “It took five of us to take on Tommy’s old man, and even then we had one hell of a time knocking that son of a bitch down.” He nodded and stared off, then returned. “So you see what I’m getting at.”

“Tommy’s dad was tough?” I said.

“What I’m saying is, Tommy does have his uses. He’s got some natural gifts. His father was gifted—that guy could have played tennis professionally—but he was no good.
Undisciplined
was what he was. You see, what’s happened here is you
can’t
go to the police.”

I rubbed the back of my neck and filled my lungs.

Grandpa Art thought a moment and said, “You know what a blood feud is?”

“A blood feud?”

“That’s right. Like the Hatfields and McCoys. These Mexican gang kids live their lives looking for a blood feud, and you just handed ’em one! You went to this Owen character’s house, for Christ’s sake. Sam, you’ve bitched this thing up about as bad as you could. And there’s no evidence of anything. That’s what I was saying. You go to the police now and they might talk to this boy and tell him to leave you alone, but he can just send someone else, or he can wait and catch you next month. He’s trying to be the toughest kid in town and he’s gotta save face here. The only way you can get out of it now is to leave town.

“So that’s why you gotta get hold of Tommy,” he said. “Tommy’s a no-good sonofabitch, but he’s not stupid by any stretch. He’s a resourceful shit, actually. He can do things when he sets his mind to it, it’s just that all he ever sets his mind to is doing nothing. And I was saying how tough his father was? Well, Tommy is twice as tough. Men been in prison, they can’t afford to stand around and
talk
about fighting. They take you apart as soon as look at you.” He frowned. “You’re out of your depth here, Sam. It’s like they say, swimming with sharks. But Tommy . . . there’s only one thing makes sense. So get on your little phone there and call him up.”