The Shooting (38 page)

10

SELF-PROTECTION

After the sleepless night, they leave their home and close their door behind them, most likely for good. Outside the rear freight entrance the morning air is cool. Autumn is coming, until now his favorite time of year. A black SUV idles at the curb. Behind it is a yellow cab. The back windows of the yellow cab roll down and there sits Howard, looking at them but saying nothing. The windows of the SUV are deeply tinted and they cannot see the driver. Its lights flash. He and his wife go to it. But when they get to it they keep going past and open the door of the yellow cab and get in. As Howard slides over to make room, he asks if they misunderstood him yesterday. When they tell him no, they understood him perfectly, he asks if they are out of their minds then.

—No, he tells Howard. —We're not.

—This is unbelievable, Howard says. —You have the choice of walking into a meat grinder or protecting yourself, and you're choosing the meat grinder.

He puts a hand on Howard's shoulder. —Have you learned nothing? There is only one way to protect yourself. Only one way.

His wife says, —We do not care if America disagrees, we know the truth. We are Americans.

As they ride to the courthouse, Howard sputters and calls Jenny and talks to her in a low, urgent voice. He cannot hear what
Howard says to her. He does not care. Also with them is another attorney, experienced in immigration law, who will represent them in court but has seconded Howard's opinion that there is nothing to be done for them and they should expect deportation. He does not catch this man's name, he does not care what this man says.

When they arrive and step out of the cab, they are at once lost in the morning, taken up by the other cabs and the buses and the men and women and even people who are neither men nor women all hustling with coffee and headphones toward clerk jobs and lawyer jobs and halal meat cart jobs and executive jobs and security guard jobs; the tourist families from Real America holding great big maps, born here white and Christian, heirs to the myth and still completely lost. No one notices him and her. No one recognizes them. There is nothing to indicate this is the scene where the story that consumed a large handful of the public's attention over a few days this summer will now conclude. He thinks,
They do not care for conclusions, only beginnings. Not for realities, only possibilities.
The streets and sidewalks are clear of the protestors and supporters on either side who so recently clogged them. There are no TV crews now, no helicopters, no riot police. No one yelling
USA
at them. No
60 Minutes
or Michael Bloomberg. No Wayne LaPierre, no Jenny Sanders. There are only him and her. Once again.

They stand at the base of the stairs looking up at the courthouse entrance, where cops and attorneys and scared, sad brown people hold the door for one another.

—I love you, he tells her.

—I love you, she says.

—It's not too late for Iceland.

She takes his hand, thinking about it. —No, she says at last. —Let's get on with it.

They climb the steps. His knees are trembling. There is buzzing through his chest and shoulders. His heart kicks. Off in the distance a voice calls out to them, cutting through the noise of the city, and they stop.

She is turning to try to see where it is coming from. —It's him.

Is it possible? Has Clayton found a way back? Of course it is. They will see now the stream of pedestrians parting and Clayton emerging in triumph with his arms out and stance wide, grinning devilishly at the trick he has pulled on nature and government, defying death and saving them yet again.
Ha HA! I'm back! Matter of fact, I was here the whole time! Now they gotta let you stay!

But it is not Clayton, of course it is not, for Clayton is gone—it is his friend Elana Larson, one of the building's residents whose cats he and Clayton took care of while she was away being treated for cancer. It is Elana for whom the pedestrians part, Elana who emerges in triumph, jogging across the street toward them, calling at them and waving to get their attention. With her are his friends the Mendelsohns, who helped Clayton the last time he sleepwalked, and his friend Max, whose smoking made Clayton meet Stacey, and there are also his friends Chris and Art and the former tenants Janet and Dilbert.

—You didn't think we forgot about you, did you? Elana Larson is saying as she climbs the stairs, out of breath, still weak from her illness. As he and his wife hug her and the others and thank them for coming, another voice calls out: it is his friend Lucien, running down Centre Street, squeezing past pedestrians and dodging bumpers of short-stopping taxis, his gray pompadour wobbling like jelly. Behind him are more friends: Hector and Walter, the super from one of the other buildings on the block who is from Jamaica and lets him borrow materials and tools and vice versa and with whom he now and again on summer nights smokes a joint on the roof after hard days of work; Manuel the dry cleaner, who gave him his American suit and whose life he saved fifteen years ago; Kenny's mother, who reads and comments on every essay about international politics his wife writes and posts online, and her little girl, Gabriella; Frank the UPS guy, who referred him to his dentist, Dina, who is a very good dentist and person and now also his friend and is also here; Veronica who owns the good Italian restaurant and who is here too with her chef, Robert, and busboy Xiang; Sonny and Ben, the Hassids from the synagogue across the street, with whom he plays basketball; and there is Delilah from the flower shop, who wears a burqa and
every spring saves him the first lilacs, and her little boy, Ahmed, and her husband, Al, who gives him books about art to read and whose warped floorboards he helped replace; and there is the accountant Destiny, whose office is in the building three doors down, with whom he talks cricket on rainy days at the coffee shop and whom he introduced to her now-husband, Tyler, the owner of the coffee shop, who is also here. His boss, Dave, is here too, the one who gave him the job and whom he thought was his friend, but he did not come to the memorial service and has not even sent condolences about Clayton even though Dave was the first person he showed Clayton's ultrasound image to.

—Am I fired? he asks Dave.

—What? says Dave. —No, the owner's lawyers told me not to talk to you, but know what? Fuck them. I'm here for you.

Kenny and Raul and Stacey are here too, wearing hoodies and Air Jordan sneakers just like Clayton. The kids from Clayton's church camp are here too, as are his teachers from school and what must be the entire student body. Raul is big and menacing as he barks, waving his thick arms for emphasis, —We ain't
neva
gon stop shouting his name and y'all's name, we ain't
neva
gon stop. They can get rid of y'all but they can't make y'all go away. Cuz we ain't gon
let
them. We gon be out here making sure y'all remembered. Clayton gon live forever. Forever!

His wife is in tears as she puts her arms around Clayton's friends and their friends and so is he. His heart feels like it has filled with all the heat and light there is. The fear that was coursing through his body like venom is now gone. He says to his wife, —No one can hurt us now.

She kisses him and says, —If we have to go, then this is how I want to go.

He puts his arm around her, smells her hair. They walk through the door, into the courthouse, led by friends in front and flanked by friends on the left and friends on the right and followed by friends at the rear, on all sides protected by the only thing that really works.

11

THE INHERITANCE

He is back at Rikers dreading word of the grand jury's decision. What is there to make him sit around and wait for? They will indict him on the gun. Of course they will. It is cut and dry. They will indict him, and if he does not plead guilty, then he will go to trial where he will lose and he will stay here in Rikers for years. He lies on his cot staring up at the ceiling. He tries to sleep, tries counting up to one hundred, then back down to zero. The others know the grand jury is deliberating and are making bets on the outcome.
—You nervous?
they keep asking him, enjoying his discomfort.
—You scared?
He does not answer them. He counts up to five hundred, then back down to zero, up to seven hundred, back down. His mind wanders—his son, what he is doing right now, if he is safe. He listens to his own breath go in and out. Examines his fingernails, which are very long, they were overdue for trimming before that night. How has his son been eating, how has he been sleeping? But thinking of him lying in some strange crib somewhere he does not know, confused, alone, makes Lee want to die, so instead he tries to remember every team in the National Football League. Then he does the same for Major League Baseball, then the NBA. But then he is still thinking of him, so he counts to one thousand, then back down to zero. Which does nothing, he is still thinking of him.

A gang of COs comes storming down the hall to his cell led by Hurricane, a three-hundred-pound psychopath. —Fisher! Step out!

Hurricane looks like he is going to break every bone in Lee's face.

—
Oh shit!
his cellmates taunt. —
You guilty! You guilty! Bwa ha ha ha!

Lee sits up, feeling grateful that, one way or the other, at least the wait is over. Hurricane does not look him in the eye as he steps out into the hall. Normally the man cannot stop talking, he taunts and humiliates like he's on an automatic setting. But now he is very grim, sucking his teeth. —Come here, he says. Lee stands still. —Take a step toward me. When Lee still does not move, Hurricane reaches out to Lee's collar and pulls him close, saying, —
Come here
,
inmate.
Then Hurricane shoves him back against the wall, Lee's head cracking against it, and pats him down, more so punching Lee's body. —Lower your drawers, says Hurricane, breathing heavily, sweat appearing on his big, wrinkled forehead. When Lee hesitates Hurricane yanks them down himself.

Lee's cellmates are all looking on, as are the prisoners in every cell up and down the hall. —
Bwa ha ha ha! He guilty
,
he guilty! He going away! He going to death row!

Hurricane pulls the waistband of Lee's underwear out away from the rest of his body and looks inside, reaches in, grips Lee's testicles and squeezes. Lee cries out and tries to squirm away, but two other COs pin him against the wall with their hands. —Fifteen years old, Hurricane says into his ear. —My
son
fifteen. Hurricane squeezes harder. —You think you beat it, but it ain't over. Someone's gonna wanna put a bullet in your head and it might even be me. You might be getting out of here now but you ain't never leaving, you understand me? You gonna be locked up and you always gonna be locked up. Always.

—Bwa ha ha ha ha!

Hurricane lets go and tells Lee to pull up his damned drawers. When Lee has pulled them up, Hurricane twists Lee's arms behind his back and cuffs him and forces him down the hall. Icy pain is shooting all through his body from the bottom of his belly. He realizes what Hurricane said.

—Wait, did you just say—

—Shut the fuck up.

He goes with them down the hall. Inside somewhere deep he knows is profound relief and confused elation—they say,
You are getting out, soon you will see him, soon, soon
—but he does not dare trust them, he does not dare believe them yet. The COs shove him along through the TV area, where they wait for the next gate to open. Joseph is there with other prisoners watching
Judge Judy.
One of them goes, —Yo, where they taking Pills?

All the others turn to look except Joseph, who mutters, —Where you think? All he did was kill a black kid. He said he's sorry, won't do it again, they say the kid probably deserved it anyway. And now he going home.

The others are staring at Lee, believing what Joseph's saying. Resignation and rage, heartbreak and hatred—a storm behind each face. The way they look at him is worse than anything they could do to him.

One of them says, —What about me? I want to go home too. When do I get to go home?

Another says, —When you get rich.

Joseph says, —You want to get rich like he rich, you got to sell people dog meat.

—Dog meat? Like, dog food?

—Nuh-uh, I mean dogs
for
food. That's what he did.

They have been talking about it in the media. The television comedian John Oliver discovered who the ancestor was who originally made the Fisher family fortune and has been having great fun ridiculing Lee for it. Back during the Civil War, Lee's great-great-great-great-grandfather was a newly arrived, impoverished, unskilled German immigrant who fought for the North in the Second Battle of Bull Run, where he was wounded and had his leg amputated. While recovering in the hospital in Washington, he heard how the South was being decimated by the North's blockades; there were no imports, so food was very scarce. They were starving down there. Confederate soldiers retreating from battle were so desperate for food, they were eating horses, boots. Stories of cannibalism were not uncommon. Once he was able to
hobble out of the hospital, he bribed and lied his way down to Mexico, where he knew from earlier travels the streets were filled with all these wild, nasty little dogs spreading disease and generally getting in everyone's way. The Mexicans did not know what to do with them or how to get rid of them, but he did. He contracted his dog removal services to the local officials there, then exported the vermin out and up into the States, building and protecting a formidable supply line, and he followed the remainder of the Civil War in a team of wagons stuffed with his livestock, setting up shop outside the battlefields on the Confederate side. When the rebels came crawling their way out of hell, starving, gaunt, desperate, he was there to feed them at whatever price he felt like demanding. And he became rich for it. Then after the war, he used that money to buy southern land and lease cotton plantations and became richer. The man was born an illiterate, simple laborer in the German countryside and died an American in Manhattan in the mansion he built up the street from Andrew Carnegie's.

Lee is processed out of Rikers Island. He insists they give him back the underwear and FUBU T-shirt he had on when they brought him in so he can get out of this jumpsuit, but the COs in processing must be confused as usual, because they hold up for him what they say are the clothes he was wearing, but it's just another, identical jumpsuit. —This what they got for you, they say, consulting some document. Hurricane loves it.
Ha ha ha.
Fucking with him. They are fucking with him. Sticking it to him one last time while they still can. One last shot at Lee Fisher. What choice does he have? He removes one jumpsuit, puts on another. And this is what he is wearing now, going home again.

A black Town Car is waiting for him outside the gate. Protestors are there. The car takes Lee to Washington Heights. Lawyers and officials facilitate the handoff. The woman seems nice enough, but then again of course she would. The first thing Lee notices is how much his son has grown. It has only been a week but he seems to be half a foot longer and ten pounds heavier. It feels very good to hold him again. Lee immediately searches the baby for bruises or scratches or any other signs of abuse.

—What's this, he says, —what's wrong with his eye?

The woman says, —His eye? Nothing.

He has her look more closely. —See? It's all red and infected. He shows it to the lawyers and officials.

The woman says, —It looks clean and white to me.

—Healthy eye, the lawyers and officials agree.

—Unbelievable, he says, —how could you let this happen?

—I let nothing happen, the woman says.

The lawyers and officials say if he has concerns he'll have to take the baby to a doctor for an official examination, and the woman keeps saying she let nothing happen, but Lee waves her off and signs what forms he needs to sign and takes his son to the Town Car, straps him in his seat.

—Hospital emergency room, he mutters to the driver.

The ride seems to take hours. Lee peers into his son's eye, everything inside him cold and sludgy. He will lose it. His beautiful eye, gone. At the hospital the doctor also says nothing is wrong with the eye, but Lee demands antibiotics anyway, and the doctor gives him a prescription, albeit for very mild ones, that Lee fills right away. He gives them to his son in the car, brushing back his hair from his forehead as they begin to heal him.

There are protestors outside his building—bullhorns, drums. Shirtless, skinny young men wander around yelling, unwashed young women wave signs and upside-down American flags. People have scarves over their faces, they wear Repeal the Second Amendment shirts, they hold banners with Clayton's face on them and chant,
—Not one more! Not one more!
Cops are there in riot gear, they are already making arrests: two cops drag a kid down the street. Gun rights activists scream in the faces of the repealists, cops break up fights. Reporters chase it all around; in fact most of the protestors themselves hold cameras.

But it is not spectacle or theater, at least not anymore. Lee remembers Occupy Wall Street—this is not Occupy Wall Street. Whimsy is not present here. Neither is hope. There is only desperation, fear. And whatever it began as, it is spinning out of control. And Lee sees why: there in the midst of it all like a general is Jenny Sanders, a bullhorn
in her hand and a mob of media hovering tightly to her wake. Lee's windows are tinted, the protestors cannot see it is him inside, but they slap on his car anyway, yelling, and one jumps on the hood and slides off. Jenny Sanders is staring through the window, right at him. Can she see? Does she know it's him?

The driver is scared, asks what he should do. Lee doesn't know, tells him to just keep driving past the building. Then, by impulse, he tells the driver to take them out of New York, get them out of the city. They take the Holland Tunnel and emerge in New Jersey, and Lee still does not know where to go, so he has the driver find a car rental place and the driver leaves them there and they get a car, the biggest they have, a Suburban. He drives west until the concrete chips away into grass and the smog-gray sky dissipates into blue and the hordes of desperate, fearful people—all those prisoners of Manhattan—fade away and it is quiet and you can hear birds again and there is space and room for once to think and breathe.

Now what? He spends the night in a motel somewhere in Ohio, his son sleeping in the bed next to him and a chair jammed up under the doorknob. He turns on the news, is watching live coverage, when what happens to Jenny Sanders happens to Jenny Sanders. Involuntarily he cries out, —Holy shit! Clamps a hand over his mouth as the news anchors get hysterical. His son wakes up screaming and does not stop, and there is nothing Lee can do to calm him down, the bottle does not work, nor does shushing him or changing him, for hours the baby screams gutturally, agonizingly, and Lee can only look on. Late into the night the baby exhausts himself and falls asleep, and Lee drinks the motel room coffee and stays up, stunned and shocked, peeking through the blinds into the parking lot at the footsteps and whispers he keeps hearing out there.

In the morning he does not know what to do, so they keep moving, drive aimlessly south, and end up in South Carolina, where they go into a convention center in which there is a gun show. He has pulled into the parking lots of a few along the way, wrestling with getting out and going inside and getting one. But in South Carolina he goes in and they recognize him and want pictures with him. They are
selling Lee Fisher action figures, they ask him to sign some. They've bought one of his paintings off eBay, it hangs on the wall of a booth. Confused, he stands there with them for pictures, but then he gets ahold of himself and declines to sign the action figures, declines to take one, and leaves without a gun, saying he's no hero, he just did what he had to do.

He continues driving. He drives in silence out of Georgia, into Alabama, then Mississippi, then Tennessee, his just another car on the interstate, no radio, unable to stomach hearing them lie about him and make her out to be some kind of hero, preferring instead to listen to his son coo in the backseat, to his son's breath as he sleeps.

They see signs for Graceland. He tells his son about Elvis Presley as he follows the signs and there it is, there is Graceland. He finds the parking lot, but the attendant recognizes him and wants to talk about what happened, and Lee changes his mind and backs out, he drives away, not watching the mansion recede in his rearview mirror.

In a Super 8 motel that night in Arkansas, his son speaks for the first time. He says, —Dada. The only person for Lee to tell is the housekeeper.

The next morning, a Sunday, he heads toward the address he has had for a long, long time but has never been to. Lee drives all day and through the night, crossing nearly the entire width of Kansas, passing Dodge City, telling his son about Wyatt Earp and the American West, all that holy lore. Late in the morning in Colorado, he arrives outside a high concrete fence on wooded property miles from anyone or anything. Lee wonders,
Is the man even alive?
Maybe he'll find him in his recliner, long dead, forgotten by everyone who once loved him. He will be decayed, half eaten by rats. The TV will still be on and turned to the news, his mummified face peeled back in eternal disgust with the state of his country. Lee pulls up to the big gate and pushes the button on the intercom. No one answers. He pushes it again. It takes a long time, revving up Lee's pulse as he keeps pressing the button, but eventually a voice answers that sounds tired, reedy but
alive.