Critical Injuries (11 page)

It's like he's two people, or three, being here. One's watching this, like from up in a corner or off to the side, and the other one's sitting on this hard metal chair, right in the middle of it.

The lucky one is following the plan, asleep in his room, everything warm, well, and safe.

“Start talking,” the older cop says.

“You don't have to,” the lawyer says, although he nodded before and seems to want Roddy to. It's late. He probably wants to go home.

Anyway there's no way out now. Not talking wouldn't help that. So he begins. He thinks his words make sense, one following another, on and on through the day, every move. He's listening to be careful he's not screwing up, but it doesn't feel like he's actually speaking, himself. His own voice buzzes slightly in his ears. This is weirder than dope. Mainly dope makes him sleepy, but he's wide awake now, just split into speaker and listener. Plus the one who got free. Really strange.

Maybe he's insane.

Maybe he should have thrown himself off a bridge.

Too late now.

He tells even what he and his dad and grandmother had for supper, which was pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas. Now and then one of the cops interrupts to ask things like “And what time was that?” or “When you dropped the shotgun out your bedroom window, how could you be sure nobody would see you?” or “Describe where that bush is that you went behind to put the gun down your pant-leg.” Mainly they just let him go on.

He has to be careful once he gets himself to Goldie's storeroom. He can't, for instance, say a word about whistling the first notes to
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, has to make Mike look pleased to see him at first, assuming he's just dropping in, and then shocked by the gun. He has to make it sound as if Mike could really be scared of him. “I don't know what he thought. But he looked like he figured I'd shoot him.”

“Would you have?”

Roddy feels himself shrug again. “I don't know.”

“He was willing to hand over the money?”

“I don't know. It didn't get that far. I just know he looked real upset.”

That's the best he thinks he can do for Mike. He wonders what Mike's doing for him. But then, what can he do? If he wanted to, he couldn't save Roddy.

He'd just like to know how bad Mike wants to.

“Then what happened?”

He sees Mike's eyes widen, at the same time hears the first small doorway movement. He's whirling again. He's hearing the buzzer and seeing the woman's face, flattened by shock into no expression at all. He sees the blue suit, the wrinkles across the lap. She's turning and his hands, not part of his body, removed from his brain, are bringing the gun up. His betraying finger is tightening. “I didn't mean it,” he cries. “It was an accident.”

Accident
isn't quite the right word. He can't think what the right one might be. Just “I swear to God, it wasn't supposed to happen. She startled me, and I kind of jumped. I don't even know how to use a gun, really. I didn't know. I didn't mean it.” He hears his voice rising and rising. If he can make them hear, if he can only get through, they'll have to see he's innocent in a way that should count. They're looking at him like they're thinking, “Man, are you stupid.” And he's not! Haven't they ever done an awful thing sort of by accident? Haven't they ever been in some situation they're desperately wishing hadn't happened, but did happen, that they can't fix or undo?

“Right then.” The big cop stands up suddenly, so that his chair scrapes back. “That's it.”

Roddy looks from face to face. His lawyer and the other cop are standing as well, but more slowly. Nobody seems to notice that Roddy doesn't know what's going on. “What?” he asks.

“Huh?” says his lawyer. “Oh. You're going to the cells. I'll see you in the morning, at court. I'll talk to your folks about bail, but I wouldn't hold out a whole lot of hope. With charges like this, the chances aren't very good.”

When Roddy was younger, he and his grandmother and his dad used to sit on the sofa watching TV and eating popcorn. They fit tight, one on each side of him. His grandmother used to pat his knee now and then, or dig her elbow into his ribs if she thought something was funny, or should catch his attention. He'd be in his pajamas. He hasn't thought about that for a really long time. And maybe they didn't really do that so often, maybe it was just a few times that stick in his mind now. But it was nice, sitting crunched in between them, he remembers that pretty clearly.

He would do everything different, just about everything.

Maybe what his mother could see was futures. Maybe when she was safe, or even high up the way she would get, she could look down and see bad changes coming, good things getting all twisted and out of hand. So she jumped, instead.

“Charges?” he manages.

“Armed robbery,” the smaller cop snaps. “Attempted murder. We told you all that to begin with.” Did they? He guesses they must have.

“Don't you remember?” his lawyer asks, as if he's interested in the answer. Roddy shrugs. His lawyer sighs. One of the cops starts hauling on Roddy's arm. Roddy tries to shake free. The cop tightens his grip and everybody goes tense again, all those muscles expanding.

They must misunderstand. They must think he's dangerous.

Somewhere in all that there was good news: that the word
murder
wasn't just all by itself, that it's
attempted murder
.

The woman in the blue suit, with the blood, is alive. He hasn't killed anyone. He could sit right back down, his whole body gone weak and watery, if that tight hard hand wasn't holding him up.

“Let's go.”

“Any chance,” the lawyer asks, “he can see his folks before you take him out?”

“They can see him in court in the morning. They can bring him whatever he needs then, too. You know the drill.”

He's grateful, actually, that he can't see them right now. He'll have to sometime, but at least not tonight.

“Don't forget he's a juvenile,” the lawyer says with a kind of warning in his tone.

“Oh, don't worry. We won't fucking forget that.” So much disgust. It's hard.

Out in the hall Roddy looks around, into doorways, for Mike, but there's no sign of him. Maybe he's home by now. Maybe he got himself off the hook.

With Roddy's help. Maybe Roddy's an armed robber, even an attempted murderer, but he isn't a traitor. He can't tell anybody, and it may not be much compared with everything else, but he thinks it's got to be something good, anyway.

Cops and Robbers

There was a time, long ago, when Isla's only two experiences of police were when she was stopped once for speeding, and once when she failed to totally halt at a stop sign. That was an innocent time. If not exactly friendly, the cop-faces she encountered then were not hostile, nor worryingly blank. Today the police at her side are — how would she say? — business-like, but sympathetic. Their eyes contain a deplorable pity, their voices rise and fall with humanity. They are trying to tell her in these ways, it seems, that they're on her side. Which is nice. She has no reason to be angry with them, except that they fell down on what's supposed to be their job: preventing people from being shot in the first place.

Looking up, she sees hair curling out of the nostrils of one of the cops, wavering along with his breath. “We've arrested the suspect,” he says. “He tried to run, but not in a very smart way, and he didn't get far. We've charged him with attempted murder and armed robbery, and he's fairly thoroughly confessed, at least to his own part in it. He's good friends with the clerk at Goldie's, and we have some strong suspicions he was involved, too, but so far the kid we've charged won't give him up. But we wanted you to know that the one who shot you is safely in custody.”

Safely for her or for him?

Attempted murder. Yes, she supposes. It didn't look as if he was actually attempting anything, but no doubt there isn't a specific charge that covers being startled, frightened, shocked into shooting. The kid's eyes, as she remembers them now, looked ferocious and terrified: an unfortunate combination. She guesses it's good to know he's been caught, is tucked up in jail, out of harm's way. It sounds too comfortable, though. She might have preferred a longer, more dangerous, more frightening, menacing hunt.

“What's he like?” she asks, and sees them exchange glances, these two men in their blue uniforms with all their badges and belts. The older, bigger one shrugs slightly. The word
beefy
comes to mind. There are people she thinks wouldn't look out of place on a butcher's chart: broken into flank steaks, loins, roasts. Juicy, this one. Lots of high-quality marbling.

Unlike the kid, all skinny, flesh-and-bone youth.

“He's been in minor trouble before,” the big cop says. “Suspected of this and that, theft, shoplifting, a few fights, that sort of thing. No charges, though, and no serious violence. Nothing that would have pegged him for something like this.” Her impression as well, seeing him lounging around town with his friends. Just a kid who was going nowhere special, including anywhere especially bad.

“I think he's, uh,
surprised
, mainly. By how badly everything's gone. How much trouble he's in.” And does the boy imagine at all Isla's surprise? How badly everything has gone for her also, and how much trouble she's in?

“How old?”

“Seventeen. Something happened with the mother, and he and his father moved here to live with the grandmother. They didn't see it coming, either.” Isla knows the feeling. Some people can be held too close to the eyes, causing blurred vision. Creating assumptions and, perhaps, carelessness. And consequently, surprise.

“Basically, since he's confessed to most of the facts, we won't likely need to trouble you much. We just wanted to let you know the kid's in custody and the case is in hand, so you can relax on that score and just work on getting better.” He looks uncomfortable; perhaps has realized how many words, such as
relax
, are not relevant and are beyond her capabilities. Everyone's struggling with language right now, noticing, often too late, that any verbs implying action, even muted action like
work on
, or
relax
, are currently unusable. She has been through circumstances before when people have not known what words could be safely, inoffensively used. James, specifically, drove most people to silence, at least around her.

Was that disaster more shocking than this one, or milder? Well, apples and oranges, really. If James, not she, had been shot, that might have been apples and apples.

“Thank you,” she says to the cops. “For coming.”

“Yeah, well, we'll be in touch. Good luck, eh?”

At seventeen, people are stupid. They can barely make out, in the distance, the ridges and hollows of long terms and consequences. Certainly they don't discern mortal injury, even if, like Isla for instance, their fathers die practically in front of their faces. If they perceive hope, it's blurred, rosy hope. And seventeen is pitiless. The rest of the world does not truly exist. Some people grow out of that, others do not. At the moment she, too, is like a seventeen-year-old, most interested in herself, and not much interested in any other soul in the world.

Well, though, that kid, who's been caught, and confessed, and is currently, she imagines, sitting around feeling shocked by events — she has some curiosity about him. Some recollection. A connection if not, of course, an attachment.

The trajectory of a bullet hardly constitutes an attachment.

By the time Isla was seventeen, her father had died. He did so slowly, painfully and, at forty-five, much too young. Isla, during this process only fifteen and sixteen and inexperienced with disappearance, never mind loss, was curiously, stupidly taken by surprise. Things crept up. Symptoms and conditions overlapped and overlaid each other. Isla resisted believing. She had some idea, a confused, arrogant, adolescent idea, that a refusal to acknowledge something prevented it, warded it off.

Obviously she was wrong.

Her father began having to sit down on occasion and cough for a while. Then he was coughing so hard bits of himself came up into the tissues he took to carrying everywhere. Then he wasn't going to work, and spent whole days in bed. Sometimes his eyes got wide and wild with the effort to breathe. And even so it was unexpected to be sat down on her parents' bed and be told it was time for him to go into hospital. They were surprised by her surprise. She didn't understand what they meant by
time
. He took her fingers and his hands were bony and frail. There were a lot of things she didn't have a very good grip on.

Most days after school she visited him in the hospital and saw his efforts to smile or speak or even rouse himself fail and then disappear into a haze of drugs. Finally she was called out of class to the school office. Her mother was there waiting. She put her arms around Isla and said, “I'm sorry, dear. Your father has passed away. He had a heart attack. That was unexpected, you know. We'd thought there was still a bit of time, with the other.”
The other
being the cancer.

“What?” Isla was staggered. She
did
stagger, out of Madeleine's arms, because what had she been thinking? Why hadn't somebody said, “Look, this is what's going to happen here. Look. Look. Look.”

Maybe somebody had.

“The end was very fast,” Madeleine said. She wept, of course, but also seemed rather soon lightened, unburdened of something unbearable. Isla was shocked by that, too.

Still, listening to her mother weep in the night, Isla saw she didn't know much about her own parents. Their own life, she meant, the one just between them. This was a new idea to her.

It was a magic trick, his death: the one where a tablecloth gets whipped with a wrist flick from under a whole elaborate setting of china and cutlery, leaving it rattled but still sitting there, barely altered. Although she knew this wasn't how it had been. She knew it hadn't been swift, and that she was the only one so amazed.

Life was
unsturdy
. This was hard information to learn, and she went around for some time stone-faced, remote, cold. She could not seem to get irretrievable loss into her head, but apparently had to.

As her mother did, too. “Life goes on,” Madeleine said eventually. She looked older, and thin. “It has to. There isn't a choice.” Suddenly she was working in a women's wear store selling dresses and blouses, sweaters and slacks, scarves and brassieres. And then, in a year or so she was looking at seventeen-year-old Isla over their Sunday night dinner for two, saying with a remarkable look of astonishment, even happiness, “Do you know, I enjoy it? I really like being with people all day, and helping them find what makes them look good or,” she laughed, “at least not too awful. I like hearing why they're looking for a new outfit: if they're going to a wedding or a conference or starting a job or going on a date for the first time with someone, and I like watching them when they look at themselves in the mirrors, trying to decide, one outfit over another.” She was looking trim herself. She had her hair done every week, and resumed painting her fingernails. She made special friends with a nice man named Bert from the bridge club she'd joined.

It was true, and seemed faithless on both her mother's part and Isla's, that life did resume. There were huge holes and gaps, absent customs and habits, lost embraces and stories and sounds and moments to recover from, but for Isla there were also classes, exams, dances, friends. At seventeen she began working part-time herself, in James's father's office supply store although she had no notion at the time that the main thing about him would be that he was James's father.

She sold pens, notepads, paper clips, file folders, and also school supplies such as little cartooned backpacks for children. She liked the feel of paper, she found, and of file folders and notepads. She continued working there part-time in university, while she vaguely studied in preparation for some vague career. She would need, her mother told her seriously, and her mother would certainly know, to be prepared to look after herself. Be responsible for herself.

Isla realized that. She was waiting, and she figured this would come about in a classroom or at an unforeseeable job interview before graduation, for something to present itself as a capturing, interesting pursuit. Her father's life in the world, the stories he brought home — she leaned towards words in one form or another, but was content to wait to see what emerged. She could also see, though, that as her mother said, there was no time to waste, and was impatient for her own unanchored, real, free life to begin. “Your father and I might have done a few things differently if we'd realized how short time would be,” Madeleine said. She mentioned farther-flung, more adventurous holidays, a more scrupulous attention to day-to-day life. “Appreciate the moment,” she advised, and Isla thought she more or less did.

Isla worked in the store every Saturday. Then one Saturday, and always afterwards, there was James.

He'd been at a university on the other side of the country, getting a business degree. He came home a cocky, on-the-cusp-of-things graduate. He was lean and at work wore suits that fell flat over his bones. Isla hadn't before considered there was any appeal or beauty in suits, but now saw that there was. He was five years older than she and moved through the store in his suits like languid, dangerous water. When he asked her out the first time, he didn't exactly ask. He said, “I'd like to take you to dinner on Friday.”

They went to a restaurant with white linens and humble service and glass-shaded candles burning on intimate tables; a
serious
restaurant, she thought. He talked about his plans for his father's business, which he did not express as hopes, or even intentions, but as plans. This confidence was amazing to her, and when he said, “And what are you going to do?” she was embarrassed by her uncertainty.

She'd shrugged, her shoulders shifting under the delicate, nearly sheer fabric of her new dress. She'd bought the dress through Madeleine, who got discounts at the store where she worked. It was mainly a boutique for the middle-aged, but now and then carried nice things for the young, and this dress, pale blue, unbelted, with a tiny pattern of pale yellow flowers, was among them. “I'm not sure yet. I like words, I guess, and persuasion.” Probably neither of them quite knew what she meant, although there was truth in it. Probably neither of them was especially interested, either.

It's well known that power is an aphrodisiac. Even James's small power in that business was large to a girl, young woman, who only worked there. Anyway he had a chin to be stroked like a cat's, lush dark hair, intent eyes, and those long, long thighs. He struck her as a man of variety and extremes. His attentions to her included not only his serious, intent regard, but his pale sculpted chest, those long thighs, all the rest of him. And his appreciation of her, captured in all the apparently delighted ways that he touched, stroked, and reached into her. “You're beautiful,” he told her and it seemed to her that under his gaze she was actually beautiful, not just pretty, or merely attractive. She took this praise, and a powerful sort of desire, as sufficiently different from anything she'd experienced before that it had to be robustly adult. It felt extraordinarily real, being touched by him.

Life was short. Love was precious.

While Isla continued her slow passage to graduation and some kind of future, James pursued his own rather swift passage. At work, more abruptly than gradually he pushed his father aside. The world of the office was changing. James understood this, and argued that his father did not, could not, that only the young could expect to keep up. His takeover didn't strike him as brutal, nor did it seem especially brutal to Isla, only necessary, as he said. She was loyal to him anyway, as a matter of principle and of, by then, love.