“Okay, I’ll do that,” the man said. He did.
“What are you doing here?” Eleanor said.
“My job.”
“You a robber?”
“No. I’m a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City Police Department.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I can prove it by showing you my ID,” Detective Larsen said. “But in order to do that, ma’am, I’ll have to take it out of my pocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that as reaching for a gun. So let’s talk about this for just a second and see if we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocket without giving you the wrong idea.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at the sky and coming out from behind her cover. “Only a cop would talk like that.”
“Well, let me show you my ID anyway,” Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached around into his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhanded it twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from his sides while she opened it up and looked at it.
“Okay,” she said, tossing it back. “Sorry if I spooked you.”
“Normally I’d be real pissed,” he admitted. “But under the circumstances, ma’am, it’s all right. You Eleanor Richmond?”
Larsen’s face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor’s eyes were filling up with tears. She didn’t even know why, yet. “I got the feeling something real bad happened,” she said.
“You’re right. But it’s going to be okay, considering.”
“What happened?”
“Your son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He’s going to be all right.”
“Car crash?”
“No, ma’am. He was shot.”
“Shot!?”
“Yes, ma’am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, in downtown Denver. But he’s going to be okay. He was very lucky.”
Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had gone away. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity overwhelmed everything else.
This was terrible. She should have been freaking out and panicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person who had just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating blue sky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt the complete abandon of a person in free fall.
“My son was shot and you’re saying he’s lucky?”
“Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I’ve seen a lot of people shot. I ought to know.”
“Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don’t even know about it?”
“Not as far as we can tell.”
“Then why did they shoot him?”
“He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it.”
“They shot him over a pay phone?”
“As far as we can tell.”
“What, my son wouldn’t let them use it?”
“Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn’t give it up as quickly as they wanted him to. They didn’t want to wait. So they shot him.”
She frowned. “Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?”
Detective Larsen shrugged. “There’s a lot of people like that nowadays.”
“Well, why are our presidential candidates running around having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado, with no values?”
Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered. “Presidential politics aren’t my specialty, ma’am.”
“Well, maybe they ought to be.”
A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice, brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, but circumstances put her here a couple of times a day.
Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, at Denver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south of the state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of town included the hospital, various schools, and museums—all of the municipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shopping district, which had been badly in need of some really devastating urban renewal for quite some time.
Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of the Boulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on the bulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near Speer Boulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who had come up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. This being the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and far between, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time taking The Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even more humiliating.
She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financial sense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she had once been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to take The Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Along with all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big old mainline churches, several of which had gotten together and started up a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live through the Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started to attract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of the house picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen’s kids for a couple of hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the barter economy.
Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she would go out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmon had learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and not complain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how he really felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, much better than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in the back for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shock and the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a little bit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had been shot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name for yourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as he didn’t take it too far.
Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat on the bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a large brick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags. Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.
All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots, converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with license plates from outlying counties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. This was not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at the outskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she was getting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other one of these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.
Everybody knew that Earl Strong’s real name was Erwin Dudley Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.
Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name. But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to get away with murder.
He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong. To change your name, and then use the name’s double meaning as part of a campaign slogan . . . it was a little much. As if he were nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.
Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the man was that she had known of him
from way back and she had never taken him seriously.
The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang, it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on the front door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on the inside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer would arrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole day waiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4:54 P.M. and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his official cable TV installer’s ID card so that it was the only thing she could see through the peephole when she looked out.
She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, just from that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.
She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered the badge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface of the moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jaw dropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for several seconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people to let the black people know that they didn’t belong there. To remind them, just in case they’d somehow forgotten, that they were on the wrong continent.
“Can I help you?” Eleanor said.
“Is the lady of the house in?” he said.
“I am the owner. I am the lady of the house,” she said.
Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strang blinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. But he never said anything. It almost wouldn’t have been so bad if he had said, “Shit, I never thought I’d see a black person out here.” But he didn’t do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, “Yes, hello, I’m here to install your cable TV.”
In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in and out of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful to stare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral vision so that she would know that he was there. Each time, she felt herself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him, and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye met his, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.
He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all the way through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanted a cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raised Eleanor’s hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion of Erwin Dudley Strang’s ego was bound up in this tool, and that penetrating the walls of total strangers’ homes was the really swell part of the job as far as he was concerned.
And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit too hard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended up shoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole through the wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head in astonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds’ new house, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and there was not a thing he could do about it.
He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As a result they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps in the siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon ended up spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall and reattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding popped back together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected to ground the cable system properly, which put the whole family at risk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to a cold-water pipe down in the basement.
All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang’s statement, which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cable company property and they were not allowed to mess with it in any way.
“It’s all hooked up,” he said, at some point when he had arbitrarily decided that he was finished. “Now, if you’ll show me your TV, I’ll hook it up for you.”
The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There was not a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the whole development. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through every room in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was asking to see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forced innocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailed the teacher with a spitball.
She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he was saying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playing some kind of game. She had no idea what it was.
“It’s not here. We haven’t moved in yet,” she finally said. Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.
“Well, then I can’t show you how to hook it up.”
“It’s cable-ready,” she said. “All we have to do is screw the cable into the back and turn it on.”
“And plug it into the power outlet,” he corrected her, just a hint of a smirk on his face.
“Yes, and plug it in. Good point,” she said.
“Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands here might be different from the bands there.”
She had been expecting something like this. Telling Erwin Dudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount to making fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. He would have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.
“From the bands where?” she asked.
His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of a curve ball. “Wherever y’all came from,” he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the “y’all.”
“If you don’t know where we came from, how do you know that the bands are different?”
“Well, you came from back East, didn’t you? From one of them big cities?”
“No. We were at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center for a couple of years. Before that we lived in Germany.”
“Oooh, Germany,” he said. Then, moving so suddenly that he made Eleanor startle, he stood up straight, clicked the heels of his work boots together, and jutted his right arm out in a Nazi salute. “Sieg Heil!” he hollered. He dropped his arm and a smile spread across his face as he watched Eleanor’s reaction. “Lot of those kind of people there? You know, National Socialists?”
“You mean Nazis?”
“Well, that’s kind of a slang term, but yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“Never saw one there,” Eleanor said. “If you’re finished, you can leave now.”
Strang raised his eyebrows fastidiously. “Well, technically speaking, I’m not finished with the installation until I have hooked up the TV set and gotten it running to the satisfaction of the owner.”
“My husband is an engineer. He’ll get it running. If we’re not satisfied, we’ll call the cable company.”
“But before I leave, I have to get your signature on this document,” Strang said, holding up an aluminum clipboard, “which states that the installation is complete and you are satisfied with the quality of service.”
“I’ll sign anything, at this point.”
“You sure?” Strang said, wiggling the clipboard just out of Eleanor’s reach.
“Positive.”
“We could test it right now if you could get a TV set.”
“For the eight hundredth time, I do not have a TV.”
“I’ll bet you could get one, though.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Strang looked out the windows of the living room, down the block. “Must be some other houses around here that have TVs. I’ll bet you could figure out a way to get your hands on someone else’s TV set, if you really wanted it.”
She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes, shook her head in amazement.
He continued, “Course now that y’all are out here in the nice part of town, I’ll bet you don’t do that kind of thing no more. But I’ll bet you still got the skills. Y’all are just a little rusty.”
“I’m going to call the cable TV company and they are going to fire your ass,” she said.
“They can’t,” he said. “I don’t work for them. I’m an independent contractor. Just a small-time entrepreneurial businessman struggling to make my way.”
“Then I’ll make sure they never hire you again.”
“Your word against mine,” he said, “and even if they believe you, there’s plenty of other cable systems out here in Colorful Colorado that keep my services in high demand.”
She knew it was crazy for her to be arguing this with him. She should just throw him out of the house. But her parents had raised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could not get over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason. “Why shouldn’t they believe me?” she said. “Why would I bother to call in such a complaint? It’s not something I would do for fun.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he said.
“What!?”
“I seen the way you been looking at me,” he said. “If you want a taste, why don’t you just ask for it?”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, “get out of my house. Get out now. Just get out.”
“Upstairs bedroom has some nice carpet in it. Almost as good as a bed.”
Then she astonished herself by kicking him in the nuts. Hard. A direct hit. His mouth formed into an O shape, his eyes got big, he stuck his arms down between his thighs, sank to the living room floor, and lay down on his side, sucking in quick, short breaths through his puckered lips.
She went right out to her car, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and started the engine.
After a few minutes, Strang came out, walking in little tiny baby steps, climbed gingerly into his van, and after sitting there in the front seat for a few ominous minutes, backed out of the driveway and went away.