Land of the Blind (10 page)

C
lark Anthony Mason works over the third legal pad just as he did the first two, almost in a state of self-hypnosis. Caroline watches him with a new kind of fascination. Tony Mason. No shit. He chews the end of his pen and takes a sip of the coffee she gave him. She didn’t say anything when she got back from Pete’s, just handed him the coffee and went to write an intelligence report encouraging the drug detectives to go back and visit Pete Decker. She looks in the window of Interview Two. So that’s Tony Mason. Now it’s obvious: the solid good looks, the weird diction, the politician’s bearing. Before, she couldn’t see past the dirty clothes, the long hair, and especially the eye patch. She kept running the current version of the Loon through her memory (Who do I know with an eye patch?) rather than trying to picture him without it.

Caroline checks her watch. It’s going on nine o’clock Saturday morning. He’s been at this almost twelve hours. She walks back to her desk and flips through her Rolodex until she finds the number of a newspaper reporter she nearly dated before remembering that she hates newspaper reporters. She taps out the number and Evan O’Neal answers on the second ring.

“Evan. It’s Caroline Mabry. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

“How you been, Caroline?” Evan covered cops back when she was on patrol, but now he’s a government reporter.

“Good. I need to run a name past you: Tony Mason.”

“The kid who ran against Nethercutt?” Kid. Only in politics does someone in his thirties qualify as a kid. But in truth he
had
seemed like a kid, standing at the opposite podium against the gray-haired four-term Republican, looking as though, if elected to the House of Representatives, he would act immediately to change the mascot and make Homecoming a formal dance.

“Yeah, that Tony Mason.”

“No shit? You seeing him now, Caroline?”

Funny that a cop would call a reporter and the reporter would assume that it was about romance. She’s not sure if that says something about her, or Evan, or Tony Mason. She looks up, through the small window of the interview room. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am seeing him,” she says.

“You get fixed up?”

“Something like that.”

Evan is quiet for a moment.

“What is it?” Caroline asks.

“It’s just…I don’t know…you can do better.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m starting to think that. What do you know about him?”

“Mason? Just that he got thirty-six percent and that was twice as much as anyone expected from such a lamb.”

“Lamb?”

“Yeah.” Evan shifts the phone. “Nethercutt owns the seat, just like Foley did before him, so the Democrats have to pick their spots, only take a big run every six years or so. The rest of the time, they just throw lambs to slaughter—an old labor tough or a cute young lawyer like Tony Mason. Some political outsider who gets outspent five-to-one and goes home disillusioned and broke.”

Caroline writes down the word “lawyer.” She’s beginning to recall details of the election now, and she wonders if her lax memory has to do with her job, or the funk she’s been in, or if the loser in any election just naturally fades from memory that quickly—the Dukakis syndrome. “Wasn’t he rich?”

“Mason? Yeah,” Evan says. “Cashed out some tech stock and spent all his money trying to get elected. That’s the only reason he even got thirty-six percent.”

“Do you have a list of his donations?”

“I got his filings at the office. Sure.”

“Fax it to me?”

“Monday?”

“Today?”

“It’s Saturday, Caroline.”

“I know. But you owe me.” She gave Evan a tip once about a former police chief who drove around drunk at night, pulling over teenage girls and “frisking” them.

“Okay,” Evan says. “But remind me to never go out with a cop.”

“Why?”

“I’m just not sure I could pass the background check.”

She ignores this. “So does he sometimes go by the name Clark?”

“That’s his real name. Clark Anthony Mason. He didn’t think the Maxwell House Dems would vote for someone with two last names. And he thought Anthony sounded too professorial or blue blood or something. If you can imagine some kid from the Valley worrying about being too blue blood.”

Evan laughs as he remembers. “Boy, that’s classic lamb behavior, worrying about the menu while the restaurant burns down.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline asked.

“It’s just…here’s this kid, doesn’t look twenty-five years old, all stiff and square, grows up in the Valley and goes off to Seattle, comes home thinking they’re just going to hand him a congressional seat. And…Jesus, that eye.”

“Yeah, he wears an eye patch,” she says. “I don’t remember that from the election.”

“No, he wore one of those glass eyes, didn’t move at all. You got the feeling he sat in front of the mirror until he figured which angle the eye looked straight and not cockeyed. That was the only way he’d face people, straight on, without moving his eye. On his posters, he was always staring right at you. It was a little creepy, especially in the debates. Guy moved like a robot.”

Caroline had just assumed he was stiff and liked that about him, that he didn’t seem polished. But mostly she voted for him because he was for gun control and Nethercutt wasn’t. Over time she’d become a one-issue voter. “I was trying to remember what exactly he ran on…”

“Oh, the usual economic development crap; he was gonna bring high-tech jobs here. ’Course, back then, you couldn’t run for dogcatcher without promising you’d bring computer jobs to Spokane. I have to admit, your boy really sold it, though.”

“So how did Nethercutt beat him?”

“Mostly by ignoring him. Let the PACs and the issue people run the neg
ative shit: that he was a flaming liberal, that he burned flags and liked Internet porn. And of course there was the Seattle thing.”

She vaguely remembers television ads that had knocked Mason for going to college and working in Seattle, ads that accused him of being in the pocket of liberal Seattle power brokers.

“Yeah, that provincial shit is the gold standard in Spokane,” Evan says. “We don’t trust anyone who
doesn’t
live here and we assume anyone who
does
live here is stupid.”

“You know what he’s done since the election?” Caroline asks, and she thinks, I know what he’s doing. He’s sitting in my interview room, writing his memoirs.

“No idea.”

“But he’s not still involved in politics?” she asks.

“Mason? Nah. Lambs never run a second time. They go back to their insurance offices, or their teaching jobs at the community college.” Evan clears his throat. “So, are you gonna keep going out with the guy?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline says. She looks up in the window again and sees that Clark is still writing, that his face is shot with hard memories, with misgiving and regret. She leans forward and watches closely. And watching him like this she knows there is a body somewhere.
Tell me, Clark. Who did you kill?

Caroline sits back. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she says to Evan on the phone. “I can do better.”

N
obody emerges whole from childhood. I know this. And I don’t pretend to think that the shattering of my left eye that day on the south bank of the Spokane River was in some way unique or was an unfair burden, that it put my suffering on a par with the suffering of someone like Eli Boyle. Truth is, I have got along fine with one eye. I can’t say that it was a help in my run for the Fifth District congressional seat, or that I would knowingly choose the patches and glass eyes and dark sunglasses that I have worn since childhood, or that I have gone more than a day without shifting my gaze to the floor in the presence of the binocular, ever conscious of the fact that I am incapable of that most basic human communication—looking deep and straight in someone’s eyes.

But except for the external nature of my scars, I don’t imagine myself different from any other adult, limping and scuffling and scurrying along with all manner of insecurities and fears and defects, the results of bad parentage and low self-esteem, of being unprepared and unprotected in a world that seems on its surface so inviting and safe. The world is not safe. I need only continue the story of Eli Boyle’s life to prove that.

But I am afraid I won’t be able to offer a full accounting of Eli’s indignities, for instance during our junior high years—the classroom-clearing farts, the daily capture and rolling of boogers between his fingers, the untold humiliations dreamed up by his classmates. There is simply not time.

So, Detective, in the event that I am unable to finish this statement, this story of Eli’s life and death, which is also in some small way, I realize, the story of my own life and death (and the string of failures that connects them), then at least I can offer some proof of fidelity to you, to this arrangement you have made with me, to the comfort and understanding of your two eyes.

To you, Caroline, I offer this:

I did it.

I killed Eli Boyle.

If such a statement is all the court wants, then I am happy to no longer be an officer of that temple of disasters. And if such a confession is all that is required for deeper forgiveness, well…I don’t look forward to the lines in heaven.

I took my friend’s life, metaphorically and unintentionally when we were young, and then, two days ago, I ended it literally and with malice. And forever. And yet that is not the only crime I have to confess, and it is certainly not the most heinous, and if you think Eli Boyle is the only victim of my greed and anger, then you underestimate the heart’s potential for darkness.

You told me this process usually begins with a body.

You may find Eli’s at a house at the west end of Cliff Drive, not in the main house, empty and cold, with its Gatsby staircase and deco chandeliers, but in the small, dank apartment above the garage out back. He is lying on the floor, in a lake of his own blood. He is on his left side, with his left arm behind him and his right against his head, as if something important has just occurred to him. There is a long black hole in his head, from his jaw to his scalp. I put the hole there.

I will forever be haunted by the look on his face in the moments before the horrible event played itself out. I saw that look once before, a look of surrender, of disbelief, a look that asks how life can keep getting
worse
—a look I first saw on Eli Boyle’s face twenty years ago, during a moment that now seems like the first step toward his death, the first blow.

We were in high school. (I skip the horror of junior high with the request that you pause a moment to calculate your own adolescent social pain, multiply it by a thousand, and figure that you are still well short of Eli Boyle’s.)

We arrived the way every kid has ever arrived in high school, taller but no smarter than our elementary selves, swimming in self-consciousness, wishing at once to be universally loved and left alone. I had been fitted for my first glass eye, and hated the way it sat unmoving and creepy in its drooped socket, staring straight ahead while my other eye bounded like a puppy from corner to corner of my skull. I will share a few of my old nicknames, skipping over such obvious names as Cyclops and Patch and Cap’n Hook, names insulting only in their lack of imagination. My favorite—Dead Eye—worked on two levels, in that case to describe both my injury and my free-throw shooting accuracy in basketball. I appreciated Ol’ One Ball for its
suggestiveness, McGoo for its canny reference to the old goggle-eyed cartoon character, Eye-nstein for its nod to my high grade point average, Glass for its jazzy simplicity, Lefty for its ironic coolness, and Lighthouse for its clean imagery.

As I said, I smoked pot nearly every day in junior high school, but then quit suddenly before my sophomore year of high school. Two things happened that summer: My former friend and supplier Everson moved to Sacramento, and I woke up one morning six feet tall and 175 pounds. With the sudden physical change I decided, the way teenagers decide, that from that moment on I wasn’t who I had been. I was now an athlete, in spite of the lung damage caused by three years of pot smoking and the even more daunting disadvantage that I couldn’t see a thing out of the left side of my head.

Most coaches, it turns out, will make room for the early-developed on the offensive and defensive lines in football and on the bench in basketball, so I managed to make teams and even start a few games and figure in their outcomes. But I doubt that I distinguished myself in anyone’s memory of those games—except once. That moment took place during my senior year, against our hated basketball rival in their packed, raucous gym, when the player ahead of me fouled out early in the fourth quarter and the coach sent me in to kill time, hoping that I would do nothing to ruin our chances.

I didn’t. Instead I had my best game ever in those six minutes of that fourth quarter, pulling down a couple of rebounds, hitting a jump shot and two free throws, until we had managed to tie the score with about a minute left, at which point our team got a steal and we began to run up the court for a three-on-one fast break. I had duly filled the left wing and was sprinting toward our basket, looking to the point guard in the center of the court, playing out all sorts of athletic fantasies in my mind, when I strayed slightly out of bounds, bearing down on a cheerleader for the opposing team who was just then kicking up one leg on my vast blindside. There was a gasp and a clap of thunder. I hit her square, with the whole left side of my body. They found her three rows deep, unconscious and bleeding from her nose. The referees blew their whistles and met at center court to see if I could be whistled for a foul for killing a cheerleader. The game stopped, the fans threw programs and Coke cans, and the coach pulled me out for my own safety. We lost by six points. The poor cheerleader, I found out from the newspaper
story, had a broken collarbone. And I never scored another point in basketball. That experience, with its long rise and sudden fall, as much as I can trace it, describes the arc of my high school life.

For Eli high school was by no means perfect but was at least bearable, a drastic improvement on the earlier grades. He spent four periods in regular classes and two periods a day in special ed, and he began to outgrow a few of his afflictions, leaving his leg braces and corrective shoes behind. As we got older most of the bullies and dickheads dropped out or were arrested or they spent their days so stoned that they couldn’t muster much antagonism, even toward a shit magnet like Eli Boyle. We eventually caught Matt Woodbridge in eighth grade, and left him there when we moved on to ninth. For all I know he’s still in eighth grade, forty years old, firing spitwads, looking up “fornication” in the library dictionary, and demanding to fight some kid at lunch. Pete Decker turned out to be too small and skinny to be an effective bully once the rest of us hit puberty. He and I never spoke about what he did to my eye. In fact, we rarely saw each other after that except for the few occasions I saw him walking in the neighborhood and found myself amazed at how small he’d become. He’d ask about some sport I was playing, or which girl I was going out with, and then we’d go our separate ways. He became less and less real to me, and I can’t even say that I hated him. It was more like I stopped believing in him. I never had any sort of confrontation with Pete; none of the kids he terrorized ever came back to wreak Hollywood vengeance. Pete just stopped coming to school and eventually faded away, into the big willow tree, into the bad dreams of children.

With the slow extinction of our classic bullies, Eli’s torture in high school came from a less dangerous but far more insidious place: the culture of boys and girls and make-out parties, of dances and football games, of going out and going steady and going all the way, of the complex system of bases—first and second and third—a world ruled by sex in which few of the inhabitants were actually having it, but all of us were always daydreaming and working toward it, hoping that something we did or said would lead us to a beanbag chair with a girl in it beneath a black light, fumbling around, hands down tight pants, desperately trying to figure out what to do with the stuff we found in there.

Eli, obviously, was not getting much
stuff
.

On his best days in tenth and eleventh grade, he was invisible—ignored
or tolerated, safely in place at the bottom of this hierarchy. On his worst days he slipped on ice and his books flew across the lawn, or he sneezed and covered his desk in snot, or he wore a black coat that was two-toned by his abiding dandruff. He had been the target of our mockery for so long that by this time the whole thing was starting to feel like nostalgia, and even with his slow improvement a true Eli moment could still be counted on to elicit waves of laughter.

But not from me.

He had saved my life. So as quietly as I could—my own social status being constructed of such fragile material—I helped Eli. I picked up his books and offered him a Kleenex. I wiped the flakes from his coat. I sort of became his sponsor in those days, and if we both understood that a kid like Eli needed a sponsor to live among the athletes and clean complexioned, we were also careful to adhere to the rules of such a relationship and the rigid caste system that meant we didn’t talk much at school.

Did I feel my own stock rising during this time? I can’t say. I knew I was striving for that thing we called popularity, and I doubt there was a more aggressive and eager-to-please teenager than me. I sought out the best parties and most popular girls and joined and followed and dressed and hung out and made out as if my life depended on it, as if redemption lay in becoming homecoming king. I joined every club and ran for office in every club I joined. I’ve heard (secondhand, actually, from a mental-health professional by way of my angry ex-wife) that my desire to belong comes from a deep sense of personal fraud—the feeling that I don’t fit in—a situation I fought by joining more groups that I didn’t fit, thus increasing my feelings of fraud and pushing me to join more groups, causing more fraud, and on and on until I found myself president of both the French and Spanish clubs, without speaking a word of either.

In the same way, I dated dozens of girls, not really because I liked them, but just to see if they actually would date me. I ascended a sort of social ladder, finding that if Anita Wallace would go out with me, then it was okay for Sheila Kerns and then Wendy Bellig, and as long as I didn’t try to skip too many steps, it was only a matter of time before the Amanda Rankins of the world parted their pom-poms for me.

My tireless pandering and joining and self-promotion may have prepared me for my later political life, but it didn’t allow much room for Eli or anyone
else during high school. And yet the distance between us wasn’t entirely my doing. We didn’t have a single class together in high school until the beginning of our senior year, when we ended up, implausibly, in the same physical education class, during the last period of the day. It was an experiment in what was then called mainstreaming, working developmentally disabled and other special education students into “normal” classes with their “normal” peers in the slim hope they would someday pass for “normal.” And so every day the loopy and infirm and blind and drooling made their way from what was euphemistically called the Resource Room to the gymnasium, because some administrator had decided their usual daily humiliation wasn’t enough, and they would be well served to have footballs bounce off their faces, have golf clubs sail out of their hands, crack one another in the shins with floor hockey sticks, while the “normal” kids stood back and laughed.

I still see the terror on Eli’s face that first day in class, the terror on all their faces, nine boys who’d been pushed aside and discounted and beaten up and ignored and loathed for as long as they could remember. There were fifty of us senior boys and nine of these special cases, each suffering from some manner of retardation or dwarfism or water on the brain or who knew what else—what afflictions and defects might have caused those lax mouths and blank stares. Eli existed as sort of a bridge between the two worlds. Most of his classes he took with us, but since he was in the Resource Room two periods a day, he was still, undeniably, one of them.

They dressed silently in a separate corner of the locker room, eyes on the floor. A few of my classmates lobbed insults, feeling them out, but it was halfhearted. We all emerged into the gym in the same gray sweat shorts and shirts, us joking and laughing, them staring at the ground. “Pencil! Pencil! No no no!” yelled the kid we called Repeat, who may have had a form of Tourette’s before it was called that. “Go home go home go home! Please please!” he screamed as we lined up in front of the first-year PE teacher, a guy in his twenties named Mr. Leggett, who had one of those throbbing veins in his forehead and who looked on his new charges with deeper disdain than any of us felt.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “looks like we’re gonna have to play a lot of dodgeball.”

And we did play dodgeball, or rather an even lower-skill variation called battle ball, in which two teams stood on either side of the gym, against the
walls, and simply pelted each other with hard rubber balls. The rules were simple and barbaric: You threw a ball at the other team, and if you hit someone, that person was out of the game and his team had one less member. If you somehow caught a ball thrown at you, then one of the people on your team who had been put out earlier got to come back in. You threw balls at each other until one team was wiped out completely.