Storm Runners (2 page)

S
tromsoe was in high school when he met the boy who would someday murder his wife and son. The boy’s name was Mike Tavarez. Tavarez was shy and curly-haired and he stared as Stromsoe lay the mace on the cafeteria table. A mace is a stylized baton brandished by a drum major, which is what Matt Stromsoe had decided to become. Tavarez held his rented clarinet, which he hoped to play in the same marching band that Stromsoe hoped to lead, and which had prompted this conversation.

“Sweet,” said Tavarez. He had a dimple and fawn eyes. He could play all of the woodwinds, cornet and sax, and pretty much any percussion instrument. He had joined the marching band to meet girls.
He was impressed by Stromsoe’s bold decision to try out for drum major now, in only his freshman year. But this was 1980 in Southern California, where drum majoring had long ago slipped down the list of high school cool.

A little crowd of students had stopped to look at the mace. It was not quite five feet long, black-handled, with a chrome chain winding down its length. At one end was an eagle ornament and at the other a black rubber tip.

“How much did it cost?” asked Tavarez.

“Ninety-nine dollars,” said Stromsoe. “It’s the All American model, the best one they had.”

“Waste of money,” said a football player.

“May I help you?” asked Stromsoe, regarding him with a level gaze. Though he was only a freshman and a drum major hopeful, Stromsoe was big at fourteen and there was something incontrovertible about him. He had expressive blue eyes and a chubby, rosy-cheeked face that looked as if he would soon outgrow it.

“Whatever,” said the football player.

“Then move along.”

Tavarez looked from the athlete to the drum-major-in-making. The football player shrugged and shuffled off, a red-and-leather Santa Ana Saints varsity jacket over baggy sweatpants, and outsize athletic shoes with the laces gone. Tavarez thought the guy might take Stromsoe in a fight, but he had also seen Stromsoe’s look—what the boys in Delhi F Troop called
ojos de piedros
—eyes of stone. Delhi F Troop turf included the Tavarez family’s small stucco home on Flora Street, and though Tavarez avoided the gangs, he liked their solidarity and colorful language. Tavarez figured that the football player must have seen the look too.

That Saturday Matt Stromsoe won the drum major tryouts. He was the only candidate. But his natural sense of rhythm was good and his summer months of solitary practice paid off. He had been accepted for summer clinics at the venerable Smith Walbridge Drum Major Camp in Illinois, but had not been able to come up with the money. His parents had thought it all would pass.

On Friday, one day before Stromsoe won the job of drum major, Mike Tavarez nailed the third b-flat clarinet spot, easily outplaying the other chairs and doing his best to seem humble for the band instructor and other musicians. He played his pieces then spent most of the day quietly loitering around the music rooms, smiling at the female musicians but failing to catch an eye. He was slender and angelic but showed no force of personality.

Stromsoe watched those Friday tryouts, noting the cool satisfaction on Tavarez’s face as he played an animated version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The song was a Santa Ana High School staple. By the time Stromsoe retired his mace four years later he had heard the song, blaring behind him as he led the march, well over five hundred times.

He always liked the reckless joy of it. When his band was playing it aggressively it sounded like the whole happy melody was about to blow into chaos. Marching across the emerald grass of Santa Ana stadium on a warm fall night, his shako hat down low over his eyes and his eagle-headed All American mace flashing in the bright lights, Stromsoe had sometimes imagined the notes of the song bursting like fireworks into the night behind him.

The song was running through his mind twenty-one years later when the bomb went off.

D
ays after the blast he briefly wavered up from unconsciousness at the UC Irvine Medical Center, sensing that he had lost everything. Later—time was impossible to mark or estimate—he fought his way awake again and registered the lights and tubes and the grim faces of people above him, then folded into the welcome darkness one more time.

When he was slightly stronger he was told by his brother that his wife and son were dead, killed by the same blast that had landed him here almost three weeks ago. It looked like we would lose you, said his mother. He could barely understand them because his eardrums had ruptured and now roared. A doctor assured him that a membrane graft would help.

Stromsoe lost his left eye, the little finger of his left hand, most of his left breast, and had sixty-four tacks removed, mostly from the left side of his body. The bomb makers had used three-quarter-inch wood tacks for close-range destruction. His torso and legs were a dense constellation of wounds. His left femur, tibia, and fibula had been shattered. Just as the bomb went off, Stromsoe had turned to his right, away from the blast, so his left side—and Hallie and Billy, who were two steps ahead of him—bore the fury.

A doctor called him “beyond lucky to be alive.” His mother cried rivers. One day his father stared down at him with eyes like campfires smoldering behind a waterfall. Later Stromsoe deduced that his dad’s eyes had been reflecting a red monitor indicator.

“They got him,” his father said. “
El
fucking
Jefe
Tavarez is now behind bars.”

Stromsoe managed a nod before the immensity of his loss washed over him again—Hallie whom he loved and Billy whom he adored both gone and gone forever. The tears would have poured from his eyes but the empty left socket was wet-packed with gauze and saline in preparation for a glass implant scheduled for later that week, and the right eyelid was scorched so badly that the tear duct had yet to reroute itself through the burned flesh.

A month later he was released with one functioning eye and a German-made cryolite glass one, a four-fingered left hand, a surgically reconstructed left breast, seven pins in his leg, sixty-four wounds where tacks had been removed, and two tympanic membrane grafts. He had lost ten pounds and most of his color.

He rode the wheelchair to the curbside, which was hospital release policy. His old friend Dan Birch pushed the chair while a covey of reporters asked Matt hopeful, respectful questions. He recognized some
of them from the endless hours of television news he’d watched in the last month. Motor drives clattered and video cameras whirred.

“How are you feeling, Deputy Stromsoe?”

“Good to be on my feet again. Well, kind of on my feet.”

“Do you feel vindicated that El Jefe Tavarez was arrested and charged so quickly?”

“Sure.”

“You
finally
got him,” said Susan Doss of the
Orange County Register.

“That’s nice of you to say, Susan.”

He rolled along in the lambent April sunshine. Iceland poppies bloomed in the planters. His ears were ringing but he had never in his thirty-five years been more aware of the magnificence of nature’s colors.

“Do you look forward to testifying against Tavarez?”

“I look forward to justice.”

“What’s next for Matt Stromsoe?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

When they reached the car Stromsoe shooed away Dan and his father, and got himself into Birch’s Mercedes without much difficulty. Stromsoe pulled the door shut and Susan Doss leaned in the open window. He flinched because his peripheral vision was bad, then flushed with embarrassment because Susan was a reporter—young and pretty and intelligent—not someone about to kill him.

“You went to high school with him, didn’t you?” she asked.

Stromsoe had kept his relationship to Mike Tavarez a private thing, but not a secret.

“He played clarinet in my marching band.”

“He and your wife were an item back then.”

“That came a little later.”

“Will you talk to me about it? All of it?”

She gave him a business card and asked him for his home and cell numbers. He gave her his home but not his cell.

“I can’t pay you for the interview,” she said. “But I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to other media. You’ll have offers from TV—real dollars.”

“I turned them down.”

She smiled. “I’ll call you this afternoon, after you’ve had time to settle in and get some rest. You’re going to need rest, Matt.”

“Give me a few days.”

“Absolutely.”

I
t took Stromsoe a full month to find the strength to talk to the reporter. At first he couldn’t say anything to anybody, could hardly order a combo at the drive-through window.

Two weeks after coming home he had scattered the ashes of his wife and son at sea, as Hallie had requested in a living will. The Neptune Society ship was filled with friends and family, and dipped and rolled noticeably in the big swells off of Newport while the minister spoke. Several people became sick. It was the worst two hours of Stromsoe’s life.

He continued to drink on top of the Vicodin, a little more each night. He thought about the big sleep, saw some advantages to it.
He thought about a lot of things he’d never thought about before.

Among them was the idea that the only way to save his sanity was to tell the story of his wife and son, staying his execution like Scheherazade.

“We got to be friends our freshman year,” he said to Susan.

They faced each other at a picnic table in the small courtyard of his Newport Beach home. Susan’s tape recorder sat between them, next to a cobalt-blue vase filled with cut wildflowers. She also had a pen and notebook.

Across the courtyard from where he now sat, Stromsoe’s garage was still under reconstruction. His parents had begun the project weeks ago as a way of doing something optimistic but there had been some trouble with the original contractor. Around the partially rebuilt garage, trampled yellow crime scene tape had been replaced by very similar construction site tape. The muffled blasts of a nail gun popped intermittently in the cool afternoon.

The bomb had taken out one wall of the garage, blown a big hole in the roof, and shredded the bodies of two cars with thousands of tacks. What it had done to Hallie and Billy was unimaginable, but sometimes, against his will, Stromsoe did imagine it. Billy was eight. Stromsoe hadn’t gone into the garage since that day. He was afraid he’d find something.

Stromsoe inwardly shivered at the sound of the nails going into the drywall. None of the reconstruction men had ever spoken to him or looked him directly in the eye. They were all Mexican, and familiar with the presence of the dead.

Use your words, he thought: tell the story and save your self.

“The marching band wasn’t a very hip thing back then,” he said. “It was us and them. But I liked us and them. That made it easy for
me to become a cop. Anyway, the band members made friends pretty easy. One night some of the football players bombed our practice with rocks. We were under the lights, marching and playing, and these goofballs stood off behind the chain-link fence in the dark and let the rocks fly. A dumb thing to do. We didn’t know what was going on at first—just a bunch of yelling and screaming about what fags we were. But then Kristy Waters sat down on the grass and covered her face and the blood was coming out from between her fingers. Kristy was first flute, a real sweetie, her dad ran a tire shop on First. I jumped the fence and caught up with a couple of those guys. I messed them up fairly well. I wasn’t the type to get angry but I got very angry then. It seemed wrong that they’d thrown a rock into Kristy’s face because she played the flute in the marching band. Three of my musicians stuck with me—he was one of them.”

“Mike Tavarez?”

Stromsoe nodded and touched the vase. He looked at his four-fingered hand then slid it casually beneath the bench.

“Yes. It surprised me because he was small and quiet. But he fought like a demon. It said something about him. Anyway, he was a good musician and nice kid, a real wiseass when you got to know him. So we became friends. That seems like a hundred years ago, you know? Part of another world, or someone else’s past.”

“I can only imagine what you’re going through, Matt.”

Stromsoe met her gaze and looked away. She had arrived today with the wildflowers in the vase, and a bag of fancy cheeses, salami, and crackers from an overpriced market nearby.

For relief he looked at his house. It was an older home on the Newport peninsula, on Fifty-second Street, two blocks in from the ocean. It was white. There was a fence around it and you could hear
the waves. It was a nice little place, yet in the month that Stromsoe had been home from the hospital, he had come to hate it because it seemed complicit in what had happened.

But he loved it too—it had been their often-happy home—and the power of the two emotions made him feel paralyzed.

He thought about selling the place, fully furnished and as is, and moving away. He thought of selling the place but renting storage space for Hallie’s and Billy’s things, so he could visit them when he wanted to. He thought of just staying here and living in it as it was. He thought of burning it down and never coming back, and of burning it down with himself in it. The idea of never seeing his son’s stuffed bears again broke his heart a little more, and the idea of seeing them every day broke it again in a different place.

He took off his sunglasses and noted again the odd sensation of breeze cooling his good eye while his prosthetic eye felt nothing at all.

“How long did your friendship with Mike last?” asked Susan.

“Four years. It was a good friendship. We disagreed about a lot of things and argued about everything. But always the big stuff—does God care or does God laugh at us? Is there heaven and hell, do we determine our lives or is there a divine or a satanic plan?”

“I had a friend like that too,” said Susan. “Funny how we talk about those things when we’re young, then stop talking about them when we get older.”

Stromsoe thought back to the endless games of eight ball on the slouching table in Mike’s garage. The talk, the competition. Two boys looking for a way to face the world.

“We both went nuts for Hallie Jaynes when she transferred in but we were good friends by then. We figured she was out of our reach. That was our sophomore year. She was pretty and smart. Stayed
above things, had an edge. Unafraid. Unfazable. Always said what she thought—called Mike and me the marching gland. Sarcastic twinkle in her eyes. Nice face, curly blond hair, pretty legs. Our senior year, I finally got her to go steady. I knew her heart wasn’t in it, but I was flattered that she’d do it for me. We didn’t want to leave Mike out, so the three of us did a lot of things together. The summer after we graduated, Hallie took up with him.”

Sometimes, as he remembered something good about his wife, terrible visions rushed in and destroyed his pleasant memories. How could he keep Hallie in his heart with these hideous pictures attached?

He cleared his throat and focused his attention on a hummingbird.

Talk on, he thought. Tell the story, shed the skin.

“That must have hurt,” said Susan.

“Sure. But I was busy. I was getting ready to go to Cal State Fullerton. I was set to study prelaw because I wanted to be a cop. He was on his way to Harvard on scholarship because his grades were high and he was a great musician. He made the news—barrio kid bound for Harvard, all that.”

“Did you see it coming, Hallie and Mike?”

Stromsoe nodded. “I wasn’t totally surprised. Hallie always liked the hidden side of things and he had secrets. One of them was that at the same time he took up with Hallie, he was taking up with the Delhi F Troop. He hinted what he was doing. She dug it at first—the secrecy, the whiff of violence.”

“Unafraid and unfazable.”

“The minute that game started, she was out of her league.”

Susan finished writing and looked at him. “You don’t like to say his name, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Does it bother you when I say it?”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ll get you another beer if you’d like.”

A minute later she was back with a cold bottle, then she set out the cheese, meat, and crackers on a plate that she had found in his kitchen. Stromsoe was annoyed that this reporter would commandeer a dish last touched by Hallie.

“When did Mike join Delhi F Troop?”

“They jumped him in that summer.”

“Jumped him in?”

“They’d beat the shit out of you to see if you fight back. If you fight back, they give you a heavy job to do—an armed robbery, a retribution, maybe a killing. Once you do it, you’re in. Usually, the kid is thirteen or fourteen. He was old. But they wanted him because he was smart. His parents tried to keep him away from the gangsters. They had him attend Santa Ana High instead of Valley, because Valley had the gangs. But Flora Street was Delhi turf, so he was surrounded by them anyway.”

“What did he do to get in?”

“He held up three stores at gunpoint down in San Diego, where the Ten Logan 30s would get the blame. He did a good job, got some old plates for his car, cased the stores, waited until the end of the night. He hit the mom-and-pop places that didn’t have fancy safes. He dressed preppie for the jobs, never banger, so it was a big surprise when the gun came out from under his sport coat. He got eleven hundred bucks, something like that. Turned half of it over to his homies, and he was in.”

“They let him keep half?”

Stromsoe nodded. “He was supposed to give them all of it but he learned early to pay himself first.”

Susan wrote quickly. “Did Hallie go east with him when school started?”

“No. But he came back to Santa Ana often while he was a Harvard student.”

“To run with the Delhi F Troop and rob liquor stores,” said Susan.

“And to be with Hallie.”

Stromsoe sipped the beer. He allowed himself a memory, one that seemed useful: after Hallie had taken up with Tavarez, Stromsoe understood that she would come back to him someday. He didn’t know when or why, only that she would.

Susan frowned, tapped her pen on her notepad. “How did Mike Tavarez go from being a clarinet player to an armed robber? And so quickly? Why?”

Stromsoe had given these questions more than a little thought over the last fourteen years, since he’d learned that Mike Tavarez had pulled off a string of nine armed robberies in Southern California while posting a 3.0 GPA as a Harvard undergrad.

“The robberies were a rush for him,” said Stromsoe. “He told me that in jail. He said they were better than coke or meth or Hallie, or any combination thereof.”

Susan nodded. “But he was giving up his future.”

“He thought he was making his future. He hated Harvard. He felt dissed and out of place. He told me he just wanted to be a homie. Not a poster boy for Equal Opportunity. Not a newspaper feature about the poor kid in the Ivy League. He felt like a traitor to
la raza,
being singled out for all that praise and promise.”

He didn’t tell her that Hallie liked it when Mike came back from
those robberies, jacked on adrenaline. She didn’t know exactly what he was doing out there, but the mystery turned her on. Hallie told him so. And Mike had told him how much he enjoyed fooling her. A binding secret.

“What did he do with the money?”

“He told the court that he’d robbed to help his mother and father. But he didn’t—he bought stocks and did well for himself. Most of that money he lost under asset forfeiture laws. His attorney got the rest. That was the last time he did anything traceable with cash. Anyway, the judge hit him pretty hard. Mike got ten, did a nickel, and walked in ’93. By the time he left prison, Mike Tavarez wasn’t a Delhi street hood anymore. He was La Eme.”

“The Mexican Mafia. The most powerful prison gang in the country.”

“They made the Delhi F Troop look like Campfire Girls.”

“And by the time he got out, you were married to Hallie.”

“Yes,” Stromsoe heard himself say. “Billy was one and a half. It took us a long time to have him. Hallie had a hard time getting pregnant after what he did to her.”

“Tell me about that,” said Susan Doss.

“I can’t,” said Stromsoe. Exhaustion closed over him like a drawn blind. “I’m sorry. Maybe later.”

“Tomorrow? Same time. I’ll bring lunch, how’s that?”