The Indestructible Man Page 13

  I tried it myself once—lying on top of my bedspread, eyes closed tightly, willing myself back to our trip to Florida when I was eight. I concentrated as hard as I could on the sand, the heat, the sound of waves rushing over the beach. It didn’t work, and after a few minutes I gave up, grunting and pounding on the mattress. When my tantrum was finished, she looked in and told me it would happen if I just kept trying.

  2:58 a.m.

  At three o’clock on a Friday morning, I am in a slow-moving line in the all-night grocery, between an elderly woman in a pink shawl and a retired policeman, holding a basket full of pistachio ice cream, pound cake, and double-stuffed Oreos, which Glynnis demanded after jostling me awake. She is seven months pregnant and has strange cravings; though school starts at eight and I have not slept much lately, I go whenever she needs something.

  I look at my watch several times, wondering why the cashier, a twenty-year-old with greasy hair and dark circles under his eyes, needs to run a price-check on every third item. The old woman peeks into my basket. “You’ve only got a couple of things,” she says. “Why don’t you go ahead of me?”

  “I couldn’t,” I say.

  “My cart’s full,” she says. “Go on.”

  I thank her, pay for Glynnis’s snacks, and head for my car. As I cross the parking lot a man climbs out of a powder-blue pickup in the space across from mine. He is about thirty-five, with sandy blond hair and mustache, so thin I can see his ribs under his red tank-top. There is a large bulge in the front of his pants, too high to write him off as well-hung. His eyes dart from side to side as he walks toward the automatic doors. On my way to the car I brush past him; he nods and says “howdy” as we pass. At 3:05 I climb into my car and drive off.

  As I pull out of the parking lot, the man draws a .38-caliber handgun from his pants and holds it in the cashier’s face, demanding the money from the register and the safe behind the service desk. At 3:10 the cashier fumbles and drops the cash onto the floor. The retired policeman tries to grab the gun, but he is not fast enough. The man panics and shoots him in the chest. The cashier reaches for the phone, but before he can dial 9-1-1 the man fires two shots into the base of his throat. The old woman is the last victim, taking a bullet in the stomach. She lives long enough for the ambulance to speed her to the hospital, but dies before sunrise. By 3:15, I am home fixing a bowl of ice cream and crumbled Oreos for Glynnis, two people are dead and a third fatally wounded, and the gunman is running across the parking lot, clutching sixty-seven dollars from the register. At 4:17, after I have gone back to sleep, he is shot by a policeman while trying to flee into the cornfields at the edge of town.

  At six o’clock Glynnis gets up with morning sickness and sees the story on the morning news. “Wake up and watch this,” she says, dragging me out of bed by the arm. On the screen is a still photo of the blond man. His name is Charles Douglas Linton, a Rockford native who suffered from alcoholism and bouts of severe depression. His victims: Sergeant Bernard Russell, retired, 57; Millicent Patterson, 77; and store clerk Adam Carlisle, 20.

  “Wow,” Glynnis says, easing herself onto the loveseat next to me. “You only missed it by a few minutes.”

  “I guess so,” I say, reaching under her bathrobe to rub her thigh. “Some luck, huh?” When she goes into the kitchen to fix breakfast I lie back down, bury my head under the heaviest pillow, and do not move. I call off for the day and stay in bed until noon. Though my eyes are shut, I still see Linton passing me in the darkened lot, the suspicious bulge in his pants. I think of the old woman, and wonder if she was afraid. And I think, I should have been there.

  When my eyes finally open my body feels heavy, my head filled with cotton. I shuffle into the kitchen where Glynnis is chopping carrots for a salad. While she finishes I tell her I intend to travel back in time to a few minutes before the shooting, and stop Linton from committing the crime. It may be dangerous, and I may even be hurt, but it is the least I can do.

  Glynnis feels my head and asks if I am all right, if I have been talking to my mother. When I insist I am fine she hides the knife in the bread drawer and asks if this is such a good idea. I explain that there is no other way, so she makes me wait a few minutes while she makes me a sandwich, in case I get hungry on the way. I shuffle back to the bedroom, turn on the vaporizer for its low, relaxing hum, and lie on top of the covers. I close my eyes and listen to the wet droning hum, focus on the blue truck and the parking lot’s dirty asphalt, hoping this time I will get it right.

  3:04 a.m.

  I am walking toward my car, grocery bag in hand, when the blue pickup pulls into the space across from mine. As Linton crosses the lot he looks from side to side several times. I notice the bulge in his jeans and stare a bit longer than I should. He turns his head and glances at me; caught, I can only look away, pretend to fish for something in my grocery bag. I get into my car and back slowly out of the space, stealing a glance as he walks through the automatic doors, then circle the lot and peer into the storefront windows. I turn onto the street, slowly to avoid attracting attention, stopping at a gas station two blocks away to call the police on a pay phone. I give them Linton’s description and the truck’s plate number, then hang up and drive home, sure I have done my part.

  At home I tap Glynnis’s shoulder to wake her, pull the sheets back from her bare, swollen torso. Since she has grown too big for her maternity nightgowns, she sleeps in nothing but a pair of tiny briefs, and the chill wakes her faster than my nudging. I tell her I did it, the situation is fixed. “That’s wonderful, dear,” she mumbles, then takes the ice cream and wanders into the kitchen. For the next few minutes, until I collapse on the blankets and fall asleep in my clothes, I am satisfied.

  I get up early and beat her to the TV. The story is the same: Linton has still robbed the store, has still shot the cashier and the retired policeman and the old woman. When the news goes to commercial I slam my fist down on the dining room table, so hard that Glynnis’s vase of orchids falls on its side. She does not stir, even when I topple my chair to the floor. I think of our baby, how I will one day explain to him why I did so little.

  I gently nudge Glynnis, tell her my solution did not take, that I have to go back. “That’s nice, baby,” she says. “Come back to bed.” But I am already gone.

  2:56 a.m.

  I arrive at the store a few minutes early and hit the line before either the old woman or the retired policeman come to the checkout, and in addition to the ice cream and pound cake and Oreos I buy a lighter and a pack of off-brand cigarettes, the kind Glynnis wouldn’t have touched during her worst chain-smoking phase, before the baby. I walk outside and loiter by the automatic doors. In a few minutes Linton’s blue truck coasts into the lot, eases into its parking space. I am so nervous my ass is sweating, and if Linton even raises his voice to me my bowels will release in the parking lot. With a moist, trembling thumb I flick the lighter without pressing the button, causing it to spark weakly. The plan is to reason with him, ask if he really wants to go through with this, tell him to put himself in the place of his victims. It has diffused fights among my fifth graders; with a bit more effort it should work on Linton as well. At any rate, it is the best I can do.

  I watch Linton without appearing to stare; he seems to take forever just getting out of the truck. As he shuffles toward the entrance I do not make eye contact until we are face to face.

  “Hey buddy,” I say as he approaches. “Got a light? Damn lighter just died on me.”

  “Nope,” he says, walking past as if he does not see me.

  I hold in a sigh, afraid to exhale. I quickly glance inside; Mrs. Patterson is still checking out. I only need to stall Linton a minute or two, but Carlisle seems to be moving in slow motion. When I speak my voice is reedy and high, like a child’s. “Getting crowded in there,” I tell him. “Must be a late beer run.”

  “Doesn’t look so bad,” he says.

  “Liquor aisle’s pretty packed,” I say. “Another minute or two there�
�ll be a dozen people in line.”

  He looks me over, his thumb hooked in the waistband of his faded jeans, right above the bulge. I stand frozen, wondering what I will do if he draws the gun. There are few cars in the parking lot to duck behind, and I could not reach one in time anyway.

  Finally his hand falls to his side and he turns from me, heads into the store. I could stop him, I think—go back inside and rush him from behind, knee him in the spine, try to snatch the gun away, yell out a warning to Sgt. Russell, just now emptying his basket on the checkout counter. Instead I watch Linton walk inside, my legs shaking too violently to move. Finally I inch my way back to my car and stare at the dash. When the first shot rings out I floor the gas and speed away.

  At home I sit cross-legged on the floor next to the bed. Glynnis lifts her head, scans me with half-closed eyes. “What’s going on?” she mumbles. I tell her everything is fine and fix her a bowl of ice cream. When she goes back to bed I look up the phone numbers of Linton’s victims and scribble them on a sticky-note I shove into my pocket.

  2:36 a.m.

  I dial all the numbers on my list, hoping to warn the three victims, prevent them from going to the store in the first place. Mrs. Patterson is not home; Sgt. Russell answers, and I tell him everything, but he chides me for making prank calls in the middle of the night, threatens to alert his friends at the station if I call again, and hangs up. Carlisle answers at the supermarket; I tell him what is going to happen, give him a complete description of Linton, but he only laughs. “Dude, get a life,” he says when I am finished. I call a second time but he does not pick up. I even try phoning the police, hoping to find someone who will believe me; I am transferred to three different officers before I finally speak to a dispatcher. She asks over and over how I know this will happen, and apparently “I just do” is not a plausible answer. If I tell the whole story, she will either hang up or send someone to the house to arrest me. So I say Linton and I are old friends, that he talked about holding up the supermarket, that he has a gun.

  The officer takes my name and number and tells me they cannot arrest Linton for something he hasn’t done yet, but she will send a car to check out my story.

  I sit for ten minutes or so, wondering if I should call back and see if Linton has been arrested or at least questioned, but think better of it. I want to trust the dispatcher to send someone, but I know she was only humoring me.

  I reach into the closet and pull out a yellow “Designated Fallout Shelter” sign I liberated from the school’s garbage pile as a gift for Glynnis, and tuck it under my shirt front, pull on my hooded sweatshirt to conceal the odd protrusions. I do not wait for Glynnis to wake and ask for ice cream; I kiss her cheek and tell her I am going, and run out the door.

  I linger in frozen foods for several minutes, taking extra long examining the ice cream, hoping it will give Mrs. Patterson time to check out before Linton arrives. Carlisle is busy ringing up her groceries when I step up to the line, Sgt. Russell waiting patiently behind her. For the first time I think it all might turn out okay, but then Carlisle has trouble scanning Mrs. Patterson’s canned green beans and has to call the service desk, turning on his flashing light and leaving the line paralyzed with a blinking “3” to mark the seconds. He gets his answer just as Linton walks through the door.

  For some reason, because I am now there, in line, where everything is about to happen, I am sure things will go differently. Carlisle looks up as Linton walks toward the counter and seems unfazed, but when Linton pulls the gun from his waistband and points it at him he sees Linton’s face, remembers my description, and his tan face goes white.

  “Holy shit,” he says, standing there with the register wide open.

  Linton demands the money, but Carlisle’s hands are shaking too violently, and he fumbles it, dropping a twenty and several smaller bills on the floor. Linton screams at him to pick it up, and Sgt. Russell moves, pushing his way past Mrs. Patterson. As he lunges at Linton I try to grab his arm to pull him out of the way, but I am too slow. A shot echoes through the store and I feel his body quake once, then go limp. My ears ring as I ease him down. I see no blood. Linton stares at me for a moment as if he recognizes me, then cocks the hammer and fires again. The bullet hits my chest with a muffled clang, but the sign holds, its warped metal poking my ribs. I fall backwards into a cartful of Hershey bars, landing flat on my back amid the crinkle of foil wrappers. I hear three more loud pops in front of me, a mad shuffling in the register, Linton’s rubber soles slapping the linoleum as he runs away.

  It takes me a minute to realize I have been shot, and another to pull the sign from under my shirt to relieve the pressure from the jutting metal. I look around; when I am sure Linton is gone I call 9-1-1 from the register phone, then kneel over Mrs. Patterson, the knees of my khaki pants soaking up some of the blood pooling underneath her. Her eyes slowly find mine; I tell her I am sorry. I turn my back on the other bodies and try not to look.

  The police drag me to the ER, cuff me to my hospital bed for my interrogation and official statement. It is not easy explaining how I knew the store would be robbed, or why I had a metal sign under my shirt; eventually they decide I am simply crazy. I do not argue.

  Three hours later Glynnis arrives to pick me up. “What were you thinking?” she asks as I button my shirt to go home, a pair of steri-strips over my scraped ribs. It is a fair question. It would be perfectly reasonable to let it go, throw up my hands and say I tried. Then I remember Sgt. Russell trying to wrest the gun from Linton, though he was old and probably knew he had no chance.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Glynnis says in the car on the way home, breaking a ten-minute silence. “You could have gotten killed. You have more important things to worry about, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  I do not respond. When we reach a stop sign Glynnis looks over at me, her expression softens. “You know there was nothing you could have done, don’t you?”

  After we get home she lies next to me for a while, resting her head in the crook of my elbow and staring at me—watching every twitch, every movement, making sure I am all right. But she has been short on sleep for weeks, and before long her breathing slows and I hear her light, airy snore. I close my eyes and drift back once more, determined not to fail again.

  2:47 a.m.

  When I roll out of bed I kiss Glynnis’s shoulder, tell her I’ll be back in a few minutes with ice cream and cookies. I tiptoe across the living room and rummage through the storage closet until I find what I need: the “Fallout Shelter” sign, as yet undamaged; my father-in-law’s old construction helmet, good and thick and heavy, which I once borrowed for a costume party; Glyniss’s aluminum softball bat, scratched from age and too many underhand fastballs; and a hunting knife with a six-inch blade that her parents bought me one Christmas, which I have never used. I lash the sign to my chest with an old elastic belt and button my shirt over it, sheathe the knife and tuck it into my back pocket. I picture my showdown with Linton—knocking the gun out of his hands with a lunge of the bat, clipping him in the shin or kneecap, sitting on top of him with the knife at his throat until the police arrive. Above all, I will be patient, I will stay composed, I will not panic, even if things start to go badly.

  I pull into the same space as always and stand next to the car to wait, my skin turned to gooseflesh against the cold sign. I tell myself the trembling is from the chill. I catch my dim reflection in the windshield and see how ridiculous I look, a cartoonish vigilante. Somewhere, only a few blocks away now, Linton’s truck is headed toward the store. He is checking his gun, steeling his nerves, trying to decide if this is really worth it.

  As the blue pickup coasts into the parking lot I think of Glynnis, at home waiting for ice cream, her stomach and breasts swelling under the white sheet. I want to tell him I know who he is, why his pants are bulging, that the register only contains sixty-seven dollars. Instead I climb back into the car, pretend not to notice, drive away before I have no choice.


  3:12 a.m.

  Glynnis is sleeping diagonally across the mattress, but lifts her head when the floorboards creak under my feet. I tell her the store was out of pistachio, lie beside her, and wrap my arms around her bare torso, running my hand along the bulge. Leaning close, my lips an inch from her stomach, I whisper an apology to the baby inside, and promise to tell him this story someday, when he is old enough to understand.

  “What’s that, honey?” Glynnis mumbles.

  “Nothing,” I say, and kiss the nape of her neck, a delicate admission that there was nothing I could have done.

  A Fear Of Falling

  As children we were taught that the moon used to roam free across the night sky, that the vast network of ladders stretching from northeastern Iowa to the middle of Indiana, a spindly bridge binding the moon to the Earth, has not always existed. For years scientists have theorized about its origins and purpose, but you have always preferred legends to science. According to your favorite, a man from a local tribe, who lost his wife and infant son in childbirth, became so grief-stricken that he refused to accept their deaths. He believed the glowing sphere in the darkness was the entrance to heaven, and decided to build a ladder to it so he could retrieve them. He and others in his village worked for years, cutting down whole forests, melting down bracelets and necklaces to supply enough wood and metal to finish the structure. They assembled it from the ground up, constructing a web of catwalks and struts, pushing it higher and higher until they felt the wood touch the dusty lunar soil, anchoring the moon in place. When he finally took the rungs and began to climb, his entire village gathered to watch, prepared to stay for hours, days if necessary, to see him climb down with his wife close behind, the baby under his arm.