Amp'd (27 page)

“Why? What bad thing is going to happen to you?”

“Why is it necessarily
me
something bad might happen to? It could be either of us—you could be crushed by a block of frozen urine falling from a passing airplane, or your appendix could burst before I finish this sentence.”

“For God's sake, what's wrong with you?”

“Or even just the lesson of Dad: aren't you glad you spent that last time with Dad, so there are no regrets? Besides having to sit in a dark closet for three days, I mean.”

She's silent a long time. “I didn't tell you a lot of what we talked about. Because I was a little pissed.”

“Why were you pissed?”

“Because he spent a lot of that time talking about you!” She sounds supremely annoyed. “About what good care you were taking of him!”

“He must have left out a few things.”

“I can only imagine. It was weird. He said you were ‘nice' like a hundred times, like it meant something incredibly wonderful.”

I'm stunned.

“He also talked about that poor, sick little boy—how come you never told me that?”

“Let's just say Make-A-Wish isn't rushing to recruit me.”

“Dad said you'd stopped thinking about yourself and were more concerned about him. Ugh,” she says, with obvious love, “he was really proud of you.”

It's a velvet-gloved gut punch, a moment both wonderful and sickening as I imagine what my proud dad would think now about his son, the dam bomber. I've had a series of good intentions with bad outcomes, and maybe I need to flip that equation. Reexamining this particular good intention, I'm forced to conclude:

Fuck those stupid fucking fish.

I have Mom's wedding to go to and a sister who, against all logic, loves me and, equally unfathomably, Sunny Lee thinks I'm “still so cute” and might let me write things for her to tell the world in her lovely radio voice. These are the things I want, weighed against the foolish promise I made to Will. I push my foot farther down on the accelerator, convincing myself that if I can talk Will out of it, I can have the thing I want without breaking a promise—a bit of wisdom that never occurred to my thirteen-year-old or adult self when forced to choose between what I wanted and promises made.

“Jackie, I need to call you back…”

Crossing the intersection, I see the other driver's face before we crash, and I wonder if the SUV driver who crashed into me saw mine, head turned, wide-eyed in terror, broadsided, glass and metal everywhere, face disappearing behind an explosion of air bags. The last thing I remember before blacking out is the voice of my sister, who had spent more than a month refusing to speak to me, now shouting into the phone, “What happened? Talk to me!
SAY SOMETHING!
” and feeling pretty good about that.

 

EMERGENCY

Waking up in the hospital is different this time, starting with the observation that my good arm is handcuffed to a gurney.

So, I've been arrested for criminal terrorism, the dam blown and Will in custody (or worse), and I wasn't even there. What a stupid plan, anyway … we killed thousands of fish and endangered everyone in the area, and now I'm going to jail where a one-armed man is easy prey, unless I join a gang for protection and wonder if my nub tattoo will earn me any prison cred. But I don't care about any of it.

“
Is she dead? Did I kill her?
What about her arm?
HOW IS HER ARM?
”
I shout the questions over the curtain until it's slid aside by Mom and Mr. Weber.

“Settle down,” Mr. Weber urges.

“She's fine, honey,” Mom assures me. “See?”

They stand aside and I see the woman whose face was swallowed by air bags sitting across her emergency room gurney, legs dangling, dazed, a few cuts, attended by her recently arrived husband and, happily, limbs intact.

“I'm so sorry,” I cry, my own dam blown and a river of tears rushing, unstoppable, carrying with them a torrent of emotional debris.

“Ohhh…” Mom leans in to hold me.

“Easy does it,” Mr. Weber tries again to settle things down. “You didn't do anything wrong. According to the police, she ran a red light.”

“I'm sorry…” she whimpers. “Are you okay?”

“They had to amputate my arm!” I shout back, suddenly laughing.

“He's hysterical,” Mom tosses over her shoulder.

“Hilarious,” I correct her.

“Then why is he handcuffed?” Mom asks Mr. Weber, and I start crying again.

“DUI. Sheriff says he expects his blood to test positive for all kinds of things.”

I start laughing again.

“Did anyone check his head? They should check his head.”

Of course, after more than a week's worth of painful withdrawal, my drug test will come back negative and the sheriff will have to release me. Except any minute now, I expect this emergency room will be crowded with victims of the dam bombing, possibly including the late shift in their underground counting stations, windows blown out and drowned—collateral damage I hadn't even thought about in my addled, drug-withdrawn state until now. I deserve everything that's coming to me and am about to confess my role in these terrible events when I see on the overhead television shaky cell phone footage of a masked suspect rushing from a bank with a sack of money and a bomb vest of thirty colorful chubes strapped to his torso.

Thinking back, Will never actually
said
he wanted to blow up the dam.

 

DECISIONS

I can only imagine the confusion of a teller receiving Will's bank robber's note if that teller also owned hamsters. A vest adorned with colorful hamster-chewable tubes would appear more fanciful than menacing unless, like some comic book villain, each chube were to produce a ravenous razor-toothed mutant hamster. But Will's note, published in the newspaper, would have dispelled any doubt as to the seriousness of his purpose:

I am wired to explode. Give me all the cash in all the drawers. I will check the bag when you hand it back to me, and if you include any booby-trapped dye packs, I assure you the force will be enough to blow us both up. I have nothing to lose.

What also proved effective was Will's prosthetic arm cloaked in sleeve and glove and on which the loot swung freely as he made his escape. Not a single witness took note of his arm, so no one was looking for a one-armed bank robber.

Doing the necessary research I should have done then, I discover it would take several hundred pounds of explosives to blow a hole in a dam, far more than the meager amount we were able to wring from rockets and roman candles. Will never had any intention of anything so noble as dam destruction, seeing instead an opportunity to enlist my witless complicity in his plot to commit a different kind of felony; ergo, I no longer feel any inclination to reveal my role in the actual felony I thought I was committing. And recalling how deliberate he was in shielding me from complicity (Will had purchased the fireworks without me, and by directing me to meet him at the dam he deliberately diverted me far from the crime scene), I feel confident that he will not give me up if apprehended.

Especially as his capture seems unlikely.

An hour after the robbery a stolen vehicle matching the description of the getaway car exploded while crossing a bridge over the upper tributary, hurtling into the river below where it presumably killed many fish. Despite the fact that no body or money were recovered at the scene, the conventional wisdom holds that the unknown bank robber died like he lived: recklessly, money and self blown to tiny smithereens. My own feeling is that Will wasn't stupid enough to be still wearing a bomb vest more than an hour after the robbery; he also seemed quite capable of timing an explosion even in a moving car he no longer occupied. Despite his humiliating deception, I prefer to think of Will as a one-armed D. B. Cooper still at large.

*   *   *

Conscience, concussion, and drug test clear, I'm released from the hospital and Fred Weber offers to let me move in with him—temporarily—if I'll promise to get a job and stop wearing Dad's old suits. It's a kind offer and better than the only other option I can think of, which might be to join Mom in her yurt with the firefighter (although she hasn't suggested any such thing).

Dad's suits earn enough at the vintage store to buy everyone at the Four Corners breakfast, and I encourage them to order the Lumberjack Special. Having contributed an unhealthy rise in local cholesterol levels, I walk mine off just far enough to spot the Help Wanted sign in the window of Broken Records.

“I'm just the man you're looking for,” I announce to Mr. Madnick, pulling the sign from inside the window.

“Actually, I wasn't looking for a man at all,” he counters. “More of an after-school gig for a student.”

“Some bored teenager in here staring at his phone all day? That'll just make you lose hope for the future of humanity,” I argue, his silence telling me I'm right.

I up the ante by telling him I can compensate for his area of weakness—any post-1980s music, especially from my own formative nineties. Before he can object, I download everything I know from A3 to Z-Ro, and then I L-M-N-O-P him with Lemonheads, Meat Puppets, Nas, Outkast, Portishead. I impress him by ticking off all the samples from Digable Planets'
Reachin'
and knowing what happened to each of the founding members of Fine Young Cannibals.

He reminds me that
none
of that music is on vinyl and then hires me anyway. Good for him; now I don't have to play the discrimination-against-the-handicapped card, which I had planted next in my deck ready to produce with a magician's flourish.

As if to prove how nondiscriminating he could be, Mr. Madnick gives me most of the work requiring two hands, like moving boxes of albums and working his antiquated credit card carbon copy imprinter, while he uses the smooth one-handed pricing gun to rub it in. Revenge on a former student is a dish best served with two hands.

After school, one of those hapless teens jacked into his iPod comes in and spends about an hour alternating swipes at our record stacks with pokes at his phone. But he redeems himself with his purchases: Bob Marley, Frank Zappa, the Ramones, and George Harrison (whom he remembers nostalgically as a Wilbury, not a Beatle). It isn't until well after I've wrestled his credit card through the imprinter (and handed him a carbon to stare at incredulously) that it strikes me: all these people died of cancer.

But at least they weren't eleven years old.

*   *   *

Arriving at the school building from which I've earned a lifetime ban, I would likely be immediately hustled away and/or Tasered by the wide-eyed security lug who previously escorted me from the premises, but he also recognizes Cancer Boy's mom.

“I'm sorry, miss, but I can't let him into the building.”

“He's with me.”

“I'm not allowed—”

Cancer Boy's mom begins to weep, and the security guard steps aside and bows as if welcoming a foreign dignitary. Once inside the building, she immediately composes herself … until we're turned away at the principal's office, and her eyes well again and his assistant tells us to
wait right here
and rushes inside.

“You're good at this,” I say.

“I've had lots of practice. The harder part is turning it off.”

The principal escorts us personally to Cancer Boy's class, where his teacher winces upon seeing me. But we're allowed to address his students, and soon consent forms are distributed and a field trip is arranged for the next day.

A morning out of the classroom is the greatest gift you can give a bunch of kids and these happy young students are no exception. A couple of boys have to be stopped from running and jumping into the shredded mulch of the Shop Smart coupon flyers, and it takes a while to gather them all in place to focus their attention deficits. We're here to remember their fallen classmate, friend, and the boy they will only occasionally recall as adults, usually to prop themselves up in the face of a much more minor setback with the rationalization,
I could have died of cancer at eleven like that poor kid in fifth grade.
After fidgeting through opening remarks by their teacher, all eyes turn laser-like to me, no doubt in part due to the possibility I might flash my nubby sea serpent. (The little boy who threw up last time appears especially distressed.)

“Jimmy…” I struggle not to call him Cancer Boy in front of his mother, “only came here once, but it's a place where he was happy just to be a normal kid. Not the boy sick with cancer. He ran and laughed … felt the sun on his face, and touched the trees. Just like a normal kid. He wasn't tired, or sick … or tired of being sick.”

His mom smiles approvingly, but only for a moment.

“He helped a sick, old man remember what it was like to feel vital again. He helped us rescue an alligator, and he gave that alligator his sandwich, and three more to lure him to safety.” His mom's stare reminds me,
Shit, she didn't know about the alligator,
and I change the subject. “And he had his first beer here, just like I did.”

She covers her mouth and shakes her head, and his teacher lets out a long whistle.

“Whatever,” I try to regroup. “I don't want to get off track. But let me tell you about the boy I knew. He showed his ass to a hallway full of nurses and played blackjack like a riverboat gambler. Who hits on nineteen and wins? His favorite word was…”—the intent curiosity on the little girl's face stops me from saying
fuck
—“started with
F
, and no one in history said it with more joy. Now, drinking beer and swearing like a sailor, ducking bullets and being chased by an alligator just prior to arrest may not be what most people think of as ‘just a normal kid.' But you know what he
wasn't
? He wasn't sad. He wasn't pathetic. He wasn't sick. Not the way I knew him.”