Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (59 page)

He was going uphill again, to the
left, feet pounding. Dogs barked and more people shouted, marking his
passage.

On the other side of Prospect was
another small wooded area. The sniper sprinted toward it. The porch
light of the house next to it shone on him; briefly I made out jeans, a
dark windbreaker, and a baseball
cap. Then he disappeared into the misty shadows.

I put on speed, throat aching
with each breath, pain stabbing at my right side. When I reached the
little grove, the odors of eucalypti and conifers clogged my nostrils.
I skirted the trees, following the sound of his footsteps.

Beyond the grove lay a bricked
parking area full of cars, then one of the little ladder streets that
scale Bernal Heights—a wide set of steps, bisected by a waist-high iron
railing, that descended to Coleridge Street. The sniper was running
down it, his baseball cap flying off and longish gray hair blowing
free. If I lost him here, he would be only a block from crowded Mission
Street, where buses ran at all hours.

I started down the steps, yelling
hoarsely at him, threatening to fire. He looked over his shoulder.
Turned and raised his gun.

I squeezed off a shot. It went
wild, but the man stumbled, smacked into the iron railing. Dropped his
gun. It clattered on the steps, bounced into the bordering vegetation.
He righted himself, glanced over there, turned and fled.

I shouted again. He kept going,
leaped over the last few steps, and thumped onto the sidewalk. The
impact jarred him; he went down on one knee.

I stopped, bracing myself.
Brought my gun up in both hands and fired again.

The shot knocked him the rest of
the way to the pavement. He landed face down, then tried to crawl
forward. I jumped off the steps and grabbed one of his arms. Pinned it
behind his back. Sat on him.

All up and down the street dogs
barked and people peered from their windows or front porches. Voices
babbled. I glanced along the block, panting, and realized we'd made a
rough circle, were on the other side of the park that fronted All
Souls. I couldn't see the house clearly through the trees, but they
were backlit by the red and blue pulsars of the police cars. The mutter
and
squawk of their radios was plainly audible.

Beneath me, the man struggled. I
yanked upward on his arm and he lay still. A woman was staring at us
from the yard of the nearest house; she seemed incapable of speech.

I shouted at her, "Go down to
Coso, tell the cops I've got the sniper!"

Without a word, she took off at a
run.

The man under me struggled again.
I brought my gun up, jammed it into the soft spot at the base of his
skull. "Lie still, damn you!"

He went limp, acquiescent.

My rage was spent now. I felt
only a letdown, as if I had run a hard race and then found that the
other contestants had never left the starting line. That, and a dull
curiosity ...

I jammed the gun harder against
the man's skull. Took my other hand off his arms and grasped his
longish, thinning hair. Yanked his head up so I could see his face.

It was ordinary, as faces go.
Fine-boned, with regular features and a bushy, untrimmed mustache. His
blue eyes rolled in panic as they met mine; his mouth writhed in an
unspoken plea. After staring at him for a moment I let go of his hair,
and his forehead smacked onto the pavement. Shudders of pain and terror
racked his body.

Then I noticed the people who had
gathered around me. They were silent, watching me guardedly; in the
eyes of some I saw accusation. It was as if I, not the sniper, were the
person to be feared.

I turned my gaze toward the end
of the street, where the pulsars of the squad cars stained the night
red and blue. Let the people think what they might; I simply didn't
care.

All that mattered to me now was
whether or not Hank was still alive.

Anne-Marie and I sat in the
fluorescent glare of the nearly empty waiting room at San Francisco
General's trauma center. Her face was pale and tense; her fingers
twitched convulsively as they clutched at my hand. Hank was in surgery,
had been for quite some time. The bullet had entered the right side of
his chest; the doctor had told us there was no way of assessing the
internal damage until they did an exploratory.

Greg had driven me here from All
Souls, taking my statement on tape in the car. Ostensibly his purpose
in coming was to interview the sniper, John Weldon—upon whom I had
inflicted only a shoulder wound—but I knew that his major concern was
for Hank. Reporters had arrived at the same time we did; Greg had given
them a brief statement, but I'd refused to talk with them at all. Now
they were gone, and Greg and Hank were both somewhere beyond a pair of
swinging doors that gave admittance to the hospital proper. Anne-Marie
and I waited alone.

By now I felt mostly numb. My
guilt at failing to protect Hank had dulled; nobody—not the folks at
All Souls, Greg, Anne-Marie herself—blamed me.
Even my dread at what the outcome of his surgery might be was curiously
deadened. In spite of the people around us and the occasional arrival
of other victims of crime or accident, it was as if we were trapped in
an emotional vacuum, deprived of all but the slightest of sensory
stimuli.

At around three-fifteen Greg came
through the swinging doors. He didn't look much better than Anne-Marie;
his impassive cop's facade had cracked, leaving his face ashen, his
eyes worried. He sat down next to me and took the hand Anne-Marie
wasn't holding, then put his arm around me so he could pat her on the
shoulder.

"Any word?"

I shook my head.

"Chest wounds—sometimes they look
worse than they are."

"He's been in there a long time."

Anne-Marie's fingers tightened
again, and I realized what I'd said wasn't helping her any. "I'm sure
he's going to be okay, though," I added. "It's just that there was so
much blood, and Hank—well, unconscious isn't a state you associate with
him." Oh, God, I was only making it worse!
Shut up!
I told
myself.

Anne-Marie said, "Stop worrying
about me, Shar. I know it's bad, but I can handle it. You've got every
right to be shaken up. You love Hank, too."

We fell silent then. Behind us a
baby began to cry. Its screams rose to a crescendo that made me want to
scream, too. Finally the mother took it outside.

I realized Greg hadn't mentioned
the sniper. "Were you able to talk to him?"

He didn't have to ask who I
meant. "Briefly. He was conscious and lucid; you shot him high up in
the shoulder, no serious damage done. From what he admitted to me, it
was pretty much as you theorized, and what he wouldn't tell me I'd
already gotten from Letterman." Greg had received the information on
John Weldon
only minutes before he'd caught the call about Hank's shooting.

Odd that I felt so little
curiosity about the man I'd pursued and wounded. It took an effort to
say, "Tell me about him."

"He's a superpatriot. Was an army
CID officer in 'Nam. Apparently he developed a James Bond complex,
spied on people he considered subversive or disloyal. From what he
admitted to me, he became obsessed—'justifiably concerned' is how he
put it—with the 'peacenik' group that hung out at the Rouge et Noir.
Followed them, documented what he considered their transgressions."

"But he wasn't doing that
officially?"

"No. When he tried to pass the
information along to his superior officers, he was told to stick to his
job. That only made him more fanatical, and eventually they decided to
transfer him stateside. He was discharged in seventy-two, and shortly
afterward he suffered the first of several breakdowns. Since then he's
spent most of his life in V.A. hospitals, but six months ago he seemed
to be cured, and was released on the condition that he continue with
outpatient counseling at Letterman. From there it happened just about
the way you thought it might have."

For a while I didn't speak,
staring down at the checkerboard pattern of the linoleum. Anne-Marie's
hand was limp; for all I knew she might not have been listening to
Greg's description of the man who had shot her husband.

Finally I said, "We're only now
beginning to fully realize what that war did to us. It destroyed a lot
more people than those who died in Asia. And it didn't
discriminate—dove, hawk, civilian, military, American, Vietnamese. All
of us were wounded one way or another—"

Suddenly Anne-Marie's fingers
clenched mine. I looked at her and saw she was staring at a surgeon in
blood-spattered scrubs who had come through the doors and was
conferring with the nurse at the desk. She motioned toward us, and he
started over, but Anne-Marie stood and hurried to him. They spoke
briefly, then she turned to
Greg and me, her face, if anything, more drawn.

"He's out of surgery," she said.
"They're going to let me see him."

I asked, "Will he be—"

"They don't know yet. It could be
hours. Why don't you and Greg go home, get some rest."

"No, we'll—"

"Please, Shar. After I see him, I
think I want to be alone for a while."

I nodded, feeling unreasonably
shut out and rejected. Anne-Marie followed the surgeon out of the
waiting room.

She does blame me,
I
thought.

After a bit Greg asked, "You
okay?"

I made a motion with my hand that
was meant to indicate yes. What it said was "only marginally."

"Come on." He stood, tugging at
my other hand. "I'll drive you home."

"No, to All Souls. My car's still
there."

He pulled me from the chair, put
both hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes for a long moment.
Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded and led
me out to his unmarked car.

Whenever I am very upset, I head
for water. In fact, the one and only time I ran away from home, I
packed a small wicker basket with my stuffed kangaroo, some Uncle
Scrooge comic books, and three peanut-butter sandwiches and took the
bus—transferring twice—to a beach my family frequented. My father found
me there hours later and drove me home.

So at four-thirty that
morning—driven by depression and a fear of finding reporters camped on
my doorstep—I went to Point Lobos and sat in the foggy pre-dawn on the
edge of the ruins of the old Sutro Baths, staring to sea at the hazy
outlines of the Seal Rocks.
 

The area out there between Land's
End and Ocean Beach is normally infested with tour buses and RVs—which
in my opinion take up far more than their fair share of God's earth—but
at that hour on a foggy, drizzly morning it was deserted except for a
few early joggers, dog walkers, and me. I could smell the sea odors,
hear the sea lions; foghorns up by the Gate answered their cries.
Sitting on the wet foundations of what was once an aquatic playground
on the edge of the Pacific, unheedful of the chill and dampness of the
seat of my pants, I gave some thought to the way that things should be,
and the way that they are.

People
should
lead
productive lives, pursuing—if never catching—the myth of happiness.
They should not be made to feel so powerless and victimized that in
turn they attempt to become the powerful, the victimizers. They should
not die senselessly—either on the battlefield or the city streets. And
they should not be driven so insane that they either become an attacker
or self-destruct.

Of course I knew that the way
things
are
is an entirely different matter. All of those
should-nots happen, over and over again. As a people we profess to hold
lofty ideals— equality, peace, stop the killing, save the whales—but
given what I'd seen in my career, I'd begun to wonder how many of us
truly believe them. Or believe in their feasibility, the human animal
being what it is ...

The sky was lighter now, but the
fog showed no signs of lifting. I could make out the rocks where the
sea lions raised their heads and bellowed, but not the line of the
horizon. Although it promised to be a gray Friday, I kept sitting
there, waiting for some hopeful sign. After a while, when none was
forthcoming, I got up and took myself home for a couple hours of sleep.

My sleep was restless and when I
woke around nine, I felt even more depressed—
a
victim both of
the persistent fog and the dreadful events of the night before. Unlike
last Saturday morning, the dream I'd
had before waking came back immediately, with disturbing clarity.

I'd been seated among a crowd in
a large auditorium, and on the stage a distinguished man in scholar's
robes was giving out diplomas. Perry Hilderly stepped up to the podium,
dressed not in the traditional cap and gown, but in a glittering suit
of gilt armor. The man presented his piece of parchment, praising
Perry's intelligence. Then Perry faced the crowd and held the diploma
aloft; the parchment was tattered around its edges. Instantly I knew it
had been gnawed by rats.

As I recalled the dream, my flesh
rippled unpleasantly, and I drew my quilts higher against the chill in
the room and within myself. I ought to check my paperback on dreams to
figure out what this one was all about. But did I really want to know?