Jake said, “Isn’t that too damned bad. Look: he’s got enough money to buy a duck hunting club up on the Delta and retire—write his memoirs, get to know his kids better. What do you think he deserves for almost killing you, a pat on the back?”
“If he’d just leave Mary Clare and me alone.”
“Jesus, Gattling.” He parallel parked on the street.
“The DA doesn’t validate?”
Jake said, “He had to wait a year to get an assigned space. This isn’t the big city. It isn’t even La Morinda.”
As we walked up the steps, Jake with a hand under my elbow, he said, “if you’d killed some guy in the ring and never fought again, I could understand that. But you act like you’re reluctant to climb back into the ring of life. Snap out of it.”
“I’m working on it,” I said as we walked into the DA’s outer office.
A woman too pixie-ish to fit my stereotype of a prosecutor came up to us and introduced herself as Deirdre Heck, Assistant DA. She led us back to the office of District Attorney Ted Walleke, which was the same name as one of my high school classmates, but it wasn’t he. Right from the start it was clear that in Ted Walleke’s cosmology there was no sympathy for Meany. To him the gravity of the crimes against me was compounded by Meany’s being free on bail from the first when he committed the second.
“Now with his bullet wound and his money he’s free on bail once more.” Walleke, forty-some, wiry and bespectacled, almost seemed angry. “They of course want a trial while his arm’s still in a sling. And they will try to make it out that you and Ms. Morrison were trying to shoe horn him out of a scandalous love triangle the quickest way: ka-pow.”
Jake said, “I would assume you will try to keep Ms. Morrison out of it.”
“I can try,” Walleke said. “I’ll only call her if I have to, but don’t be surprised if she ends up on his witness list and gets a public skewering. —And how about you, Mr. Gattling, what are the skeletons in your closet?”
I said, “I suspect, from your tone, you already know that.”
“You two are a regular Bonny and Clyde, trigger-happy lovers, opportunist and conniving mistress to a kind old sugar daddy who was driven to attack you out of grief at losing his love.”
Miss Heck’s eyes grew large, like a child being read a fairy tale. She said, “Since Ms. Morrison has already pled out, won’t it be hard to make that stick?”
“If we need her to testify,” Walleke asked, “will she?”
“She’ll testify,” I said. “She decided that when she pulled the trigger.”
We talked for half an hour. As with anything to do with the penal code, the scenarios were many and varied. Meany hadn’t hired Melvin Belli, he’d hired a woman nearly as noted for taking high-profile cases, hair like a rock star and famous for emotional outbursts that tipped the scales of justice.
There were more trips. After one, Jake and I walked down the street until the smell of hamburgers and onions frying ambushed us. We turned into a brick-faced tavern with a neon Oly sign in the semicircular window, a sprinkle of regulars at the bar, a juke box playing country music.
On serving us, the bartender quipped (I still had the vestige of a bandage over my head wound) “Looks like somebody cracked you one with a whiskey bottle.” His hoary old face dissolved into a million wrinkles.
He surely didn’t know who I was so I just smiled and said, “Something like that.”
We ordered hamburgers and took our drinks to a table.
“You suppose his name has anything to do with it?” Jake asked.
“Aside from Vatche Meany not scanning very well, what could be wrong with it?”
“No, I’m talking about Meany—do you suppose it made him mean?”
“Maybe. I think it’s more his size,” I said. “He’s used to people jumping when he growls, probably likes it. Meryl Destrier’s the only person who seems indifferent to his snarliness.”
“Meryl’s all bluff. She’s the one who uses her size to intimidate you. Meany’s real, like Napoleon or Rasputin.”
Jake had been doodling on a bar napkin as we talked. I picked it up when he finished. It was a caricature of Meany as a pirate, complete with hook and peg leg, and an eye patch under his granny glasses. “Or a Blackbeard,” Jake said.
“That’s damned good. You ever think of being a cartoonist?”
He said, “I drew cartoons for the high school newspaper.”
“Why didn’t you stick with it?”
“I wanted to draw like Albrecht Dürer but it kept coming out like The Katzenjammer Kids.”
I said, “You were waiting for that cubic centimeter of opportunity, something worthy of your talents. That’s how Meany did it. Wouldn’t settle for being a rancher in a place where ranching was a losing cause.”
“Like Napoleon. Napoleon was just a captain of artillery until the Revolution gave him an opportunity to use his evil genius.”
“You think Napoleon was a Meany?” I asked.
The hamburgers came, sloppy and greasy, the onions browned around the edges—fantastic burgers. We drank cold beers with them and strolled, heavy and indolent with noon heat, back to Jake’s car, passing jurors, lawyers and civil servants.
I said, “You see? That guy’s burgers are as good as Tommy’s in LA. He’s not in the right place at the right time.”
“Robert, there’s more to winning the game of life than being born under the right star. There are accidents that work, yes, but the only one that counts in the end is when what you love most gives back enough rewards to keep you loving it.”
four
Perhaps more than any other, these words from Jake’s tapes haunt me:
Oh Robert of the skewed ideas, I sit now, days, nursing enlightenment the way a wary drinker nurses a manhattan. I dip the maraschino cherry of reflection into the glass and suck a cocktail of insight from it. “Let go,” I want to tell you, that’s all there is to it. Your ordeal, Robert—all of it, from the Nevada desert on—is the Universe insisting you let go. You’ve had not one but many cubic centimeters of opportunity and yet you’ve clung as badly as Meany.
That’s what I learned from Death as I lay on the garage floor, gunshots echoing in my ear, blood pooling in my chest. “Let go” was the only message in the growing awareness of mortality. Only I never learned how to make anyone understand that. I didn’t think to ask Death how.
And Death never volunteers anything.
I barely understand now, but I accept. I have let go of the need to know. I was in a hurry then, and now I have no time. I get on with it, even if it is only sitting in my patio, bundled against the slightest chill, listening to my children splashing in the pool, watching my wife, Amanda, come and go, angry at me for what she is certain was a senseless brush with death, handcuffed to me in a truce that’s lasted half a lifetime.
If I’d known then what I know now, back when I took Robert on those carefully engineered trips to Martinez, I wouldn’t have needed, finally, to visit the Berkeley public library in search of The Truth. Now I know it wasn’t truth I was after but titillation, like a grown man unfurling the centerfold in a girlie magazine and gazing for the umpteenth time at the female anatomy.
Yup, everything’s still there, still looks pretty good.
I didn’t find out anything like the truth—that is, Robert’s perception of what went on, which is as close as I can come to the truth, since I can’t interview the dead man—until the day before yesterday, yet until shot I was sure I knew what made Robert Gattling tick.
You don’t get wisdom chasing it. Like true art, it is a leisure pursuit.
This is what I know as of now, for what it’s worth:
Robert killed a man in a lonely arroyo not far (in Nevada terms) from Reno. The dead man wasn’t a local, he was an itinerant, no known address or occupation. The Reno paper gave the story six paragraphs on page three. Robert and Lana Gattling, on their way to Mexico for a honeymoon, stuck around past their announced depar
ture while the authorized government agencies put the drifter’s body away in a legal manner.
A Berkeley Bulletin reporter, breakfasting cheap in a casino coffee shop, read the six paragraphs and hit on a neat way to deduct the cost of his vacation from his income taxes. He decided to take home with him an expanded version of the story about the secret life of a minor Berkeley celebrity.
What he did that his Reno counterpart didn’t feel obliged to do was interview the persons who’d partied with the Gattlings that afternoon. He discovered a fact he thought changed the complexion of the story. He learned that a great deal of pot had been smoked before the party broke up, and a couple of grams of primo bud had been left with the newlyweds.
With that fact he wrote a story he hoped would advance his career but instead shattered Robert’s.
Consider this guy’s audience. If they read the Bulletin at all, the Woodstock graduates went “Oh yeah?” while the rest of the population, the Woodstock kids’ parents, the Little-Old-Ladies-in-Tennis-Shoes, as Herb Caen dubbed them, the academicians, would recall Reefer Madness and Robert Mitchum doing time for smoking marijuana, knowing it was per se sinful and just possibly un-American.
But a University VP sharing pot with casino dealers and change girls, then killing a man? Evilness in the first degree.
For those who were cajoled into spilling the beans to the Bulletin reporter, it was as innocent as the outing they went on, a picnic on the desert, the occasion to try out a sawed-off shotgun. The gun was the product of a Reno mentality, a casino conception. If Robert and Lana had outfitted for Mexico in Berkeley they wouldn’t have known anyone with a sawed-off shotgun to sell, nor bought the idea Mexico was where men still checked pistoles on entering a restaurant or cantina and bandidos harassed gringos in remote places. Robert and Lana wanted to stay off the tourist routes and her casino friends convinced Robert, a woman that sexy with him, he needed extra protection. The camper had plenty of places to stash a sawed-off shotgun, and a croupier friend of Lana’s who collected guns felt duty-bound to arm them—if not against bandidos y ladrones, then against rattlesnakes and rabid coyotes. He talked up his collector’s item with Lana until, at least, she didn’t shiver at the idea. He not only sold it way below what he’d have asked of another collector, he was the one who suggested they make a party of trying it out.
*****
One warm fall day, a week before Lana and I were to leave for Mexico, we caravanned out of Carson City with two other couples, into the sparsely vegetated, eroded tag end of the Great Basin. The wind hid, the sun strutted. Midday we were in shirtsleeves. After barbequed pot luck and plenty of beer, we lined up three empties on a ledge of silt left by the last flash flood, and the seller brought out the gun.
Twenty inches of lethality, it was a cut down tournament grade side-by-side, silver inlay and curly-grained walnut butt and fore grip, smooth and shiny as a bay horse. As someone who’d never fired anything more powerful than a .22, it raised my pulse rate just thinking about a gun this big going off in my hands. I had no notion how to hold it. I knew, if I were ever to use it, I wouldn’t much care about the right way to hold it, because I’d be in dire trouble anyway.
In the autumn-carved shadows of a Nevada arroyo afternoon, no civilization intruding, three men stood like boys about to test fire a Christmas BB gun, trying to look cool and nonchalant, shooing the women back even though the desert silt would surely eat the pellets and none could ricochet in any direction. Taking a macho stance, I pushed the selector over to one side, pulled back the hammer and said, “Everybody ready?”
Someone said, “Go ahead —shoot!”
My hackles stood up as I pulled the trigger, gun braced against the top of my thigh. It roared and a section of silt wall shattered above the near can. My thigh hurt and fine dust, from a hunk of earth the size of a garbage can lid, settled around the picnic site.
One woman said, “My gosh.” Men laughed the way they will at something they don’t care to admit is awesome. I cocked the other hammer, moved the gun up, clamped between my elbow and my side, pushed the selector over and fired. The ledge beneath disintegrated as the can flew skyward; the laughs this time exultant, the giggles relieved. We all went over to inspect the damage.
It was still the era of steel beer cans. This one had stayed in one piece, though it looked as if someone had put it in a vice and attacked it randomly with an odd-shaped church key.
I broke open the gun, ejecting the shell casings and handed it to another man, already knowing from the metallic taste in my mouth, I would be a damned fool to take it to Mexico.
After the sun dipped below the shoulder of the arroyo, we policed the area, bagging the shell casings and torn cans, along with the picnic debris. Heat left the earth as a wind came up. We built up the fire, adding split wood to the coals, made a pot of coffee and lay about in the soft sand. Somebody broke out marijuana and rolled a joint. Lana had never tried it before, so they were into a second joint before everyone had coached her on proper smoking technique. Then the coffee was gone, the beer and most of the light. Chill air urged them to leave. The other couples backed up the arroyo to the highway and left Lana and me to try out our other new purchase, our traveling home.
As they left, the man who’d produced the marijuana gave me a baggie with a glob of resinous little leaves at the bottom.
“I couldn’t,” I said.
“It’s a going away present,” he said.
“It’s a few days before we go.”
He said, “I might not have any left in a few days,” and guffawed the way some do when on a marijuana high.
five
Crackling flames hid night’s indigenous sounds as Lana and I sat watching the fire die, faces too hot, backs too cold. Lana said she hadn’t felt the marijuana yet. So I rolled her another joint and she smoked that by herself and made the same complaint. I’d smoked as much as I dared, drinking beer, but I’m not a good judge of others’ tolerance for cannabis, so I rolled her yet another joint and said, ‘This is all, you goof.” She smoked it down, staring into the fire and blinking like an owl, complaining of a scorched throat and pinched lungs.
Then she tried to stand up. I offered her a hand but she couldn’t quite find it. When she finally grasped it, she let it slip and sat down again, laughing, and laughing at her own laughing. I hauled her up by the armpits and kept her vertical while I kicked sand and pea gravel over the coals. I helped her into the camper and undressed her. I had to boost her into the cab-over bunk.
I quickly undressed, shivering in the unheated camper, in a hurry to jump under the sleeping bags. Yet—I will never understand why—I took two more shells out of the box on the counter and loaded the shotgun. Maybe to hear one last time the precise click as I broke open the breach, the hollow slurp of shells sliding into the barrels, the snap of the gun returned to the ready. I laid it atop the refrigerator.
As I climbed into the bunk beside Lana she said, “Is there room to make love up here?”
I said, “There better be, this is going to be it for a few weeks.”
“Well?”
“You’re in no shape,” I said.
“No? I thought pot was supposed to make you sexy.”
I said, “Some say it makes them enjoy sex more, but you have to have enough coordination left to do the deed.”
“Oh,” she piped and rolled over, passing out immediately.
I lay on my back, trying to snatch control back from the beer and dope. Control was a reminder of the civilization just down the road, like the far off barking of a farm dog on a moonless night.
I never found control before sleep found me.
Later I swear someone woke me, calling my name. I open my eyes. I’d rolled over on my side, facing the back door. I saw a human shape between me and the window in the camper’s door. All the indicators of fear went off at once.
An hallucination, I reckoned. If it was, though, I was more out of control than ever in my life. And if it wasn’t
. . .
I slipped a foot out from under the sleeping bags and hooked it over the edge of the bunk. Using the side of the bunk as a fulcrum, I launched myself into the space between me and “it,” shedding sleeping bags as I did.
Just before I touched living flesh, “it” took up the shotgun, not like he recognized it as such in advance, just a club his hand lighted on in the darkness. Before he could swing it, I drove him into the camper door, holding throat and coat sleeve. Riding a surge of adrenaline, I pinned the man, taking up his collar and jamming a forearm into this throat. His head smacked the door frame, not hard enough to knock him out but hard enough I could let go of the sleeve and grab the end of the shotgun he hadn’t grasped, which turned out to be the butt.
I have no recollection of the hammer going back. Under police examination and sterner self-examination, I never remembered touching the hammer, so it may have been a drawer pull or other protrusion, it wasn’t as if the gun stayed neatly in the space between us.
Besides, it’s moot: in my running apology for The Divine Accident, I assert there is no such thing as counting odds, saying that in ten such adrenaline-drenched contests between men frightened and struggling in the dark in a ten foot camper, one would result in a cocked shotgun, or two or three. If it hadn’t happened that way it would have happened another, the man might have pulled out his substantial sheath knife instead of grabbing the shotgun, as he’d already used it to spring the door open. Then he might have made a substantial hole in my chest, letting in enough air to suffocate me, or catching the heart or aorta and exsanguinating me.
What wasn’t likely, whether or not you endorse The Divine Accident, was what the Berkeley Bulletin reporter, writing his juicy little exposé, concluded: clear-headed I would have let the intruder disengage and run away. You’d have to have been there to conclude that, and the only survivor didn’t.
But then, even that article was part of The Divine Accident.
As was the slight bow in the aluminum door frame caused by the forced entry, which in turn caused the door itself, when slammed by the intruder’s body one too many times, suddenly to spring open and spill us out into the desert night.