The Falls (51 page)

Police had tried to contact Mayweather’s estranged wife, but hadn’t been able to locate her at her home or at work. His children were living with their grandparents in North Tonawanda. Were they all right? Chandler knew that in such cases the gunman might have begun his shooting spree at home.

Chandler wondered if Mayweather’s father was still living: probably not. None of those men involved in the lawsuit were alive now, probably. Lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer, cancer of the liver, skin cancers. Fast-moving cancers. Metastasizing cancers. That was the point of the lawsuit, a demand for reparation for speeded-up lives, premature deaths.

“Love Canal” had been evoked, often.

But not the debased name
Burnaby.

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Melinda had said
Chandler, please
.
You are not your father
.

Chandler could count more than twenty police officers at the emergency site. Some were wearing protective gear and all were armed. Elsewhere, on the other side of the factory building, there were more, similarly armed men. Mayweather hadn’t a chance. If he tried to shoot his way out he’d be riddled with bullets instanteously.

Chandler wondered, not for the first time in such circumstances, how it can happen that a man finds himself in such a place, one day. A rat backed into a corner. No way out.

Since high school, Chandler hadn’t given the Mayweathers a thought. He supposed that the families still lived in the Baltic Street area. Now the younger generation had come into adulthood, like Al, and had gone to work in the factories; they’d married, had children, their lives were set. Probably, Al had gone directly from vocational arts at the high school into this job at Niagara Precision. He’d been what is known as a skilled worker, to be distinguished from a non-skilled worker. The highest paid were draftsmen and tool and dye de-signers, though if a plant wasn’t unionized, as Niagara Precision probably wasn’t, wages wouldn’t be very high. Pension plans, medical coverage, insurance wouldn’t be high. Non-union help could be fired, too. At the whim of the employer.

Two hours, forty-five minutes since Mayweather entered the building, and began shooting. Since the wounded man was taken to the hospital, not much had happened. Chandler had asked several times if he could speak to Mayweather over the bullhorn, explaining he’d gone to school with Mayweather, but the captain wasn’t convinced this was a good idea yet. Police were still trying to contact the estranged wife, and Mayweather’s brothers. Someone close to Mayweather. Chandler said, “I feel close to Al Mayweather. I think I could get him to pick up the phone.”

(Was this so? Chandler wasn’t sure. Hearing himself say these words, in a confident, urgent voice, he felt that possibly it was so.) Chandler, like the others, was becoming edgy, anxious. The adrenaline rush was beginning to subside. Like low tide, waves retreating and leaving the sand littered with debris. Chandler was concerned that his head would begin to ache. That was his weakness, or one of
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them—throbbing pain behind his eyes and a rising sense of dismay, despair.
Why did he die. My father. Why, like a trapped rat. I loved him! I
miss him
.

He’d let Royall down. Royall who’d called him, appealed to him in a way Royall had never spoken to Chandler before.

Royall, and Juliet. He was their protector. Ariah had begged him, fifteen years ago. Of course he’d promised. Better to betray the dead than the living.

Chandler thought of Melinda, of whom Ariah didn’t approve; and of Melinda’s baby, about whom Ariah knew very little. He wondered at his mother’s animosity toward a woman she had not met. Because the woman’s baby wouldn’t be Ariah’s grandchild? Maybe that was it.

A baby whom Chandler might love, who wasn’t descended from Chandler, and from Ariah.

Family is all. All there is on earth.

Television news vans had been arriving since the time of Chandler’s arrival, strung out now along Swann Road. Behind the police line, media people drifted about, frustrated by inaction, and by the need to stay at a distance. These were professionals very different from those already at the scene: media people who saw the emergency as an opportunity, “news” to be exploited. They too were edgy, but expectant, hopeful.
Here we are! Now, something exciting can happen.
The most intrusive people were those who’d come in the van marked NFWW-TV “YOUR ACTION NEWS” CHANNEL 4. This was the local NBC-affiliate. Among them was a roam-ing cameraman with a bazooka-shaped instrument on his shoulder, aimed at shifting targets. By quick degrees, as dusk came on, the emergency area was being lighted. These were blinding lights with an eerie bluish cast. You expected to hear the powerful gut-thrumming chords of a rock band. There was now a cinematic sharpness to objects, textures, colors illuminated by the light, where, by the light of the ordinary overcast March afternoon, things had appeared blurred and insignificant.

A glamorous young woman reporter with NFWW-TV, tightly belted trench coat, crimson mouth and Cleopatra eyes, was trying to cajole police officers and medical workers into speaking into her mi-360 W
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crophone before the camera, but she wasn’t having much success.

Chandler knew, the media’s goal was to acquire as much film footage as possible, to be shrewdly edited, spliced together, distorted for dramatic effect back in the studio. “Mr. Chandler? You’re the ‘Crisis man’? May I speak with you?”—the young woman’s voice wafted to Chandler, who backed off, with a polite smile, “Sorry, I’m not ‘Mister Chandler.’ And no, sorry. I don’t care to talk with you just now, it doesn’t seem appropriate.”

“But why not?”

“Because it doesn’t.”

“Because the gunman is still in there, and the hostage, and—”

Chandler turned away, hoping to discourage her. She moved on.

Like the professionals, Chandler had come to dislike the eager media people as intruders, exploiters. They were every cliché that might be said about them, and it was possible to feel some sympathy for them, yet you didn’t trust them, you could not. When he’d first become a volunteer, Chandler had naïvely believed that coverage of such desperate incidents would be helpful, even educational, but he’d since changed his mind. The previous year, Chandler had been interviewed by NFWW-TV for the station’s nightly news and he hadn’t at all liked what he’d seen. To be identified as “Chandler Burnaby,” a science teacher at La Salle Junior High, a “crisis volunteer with a mission,” had seemed appalling to him, like self-advertising. He’d hated his voice, his smile, his nervous mannerisms; the transparency of his vanity, that he’d been successful in his effort, at that time. Worse, Melinda had happened to see him on TV before he’d had a chance to call her, and she’d been upset, more upset than he’d have expected.

Still, Chandler felt genuinely humble. He dreaded being made much of by the media, then failing publicly, ignominiously. He knew the irony and cheap pathos that could be generated by his being shot to death in the service of “saving” another.

Especially, aged twenty-seven, he felt humble around the Samaritans. This organization was strongly Christian, a suicide-prevention society that had begun in England decades ago and had af-The Falls X 361

filiates in the United States. Samaritans were both professionals and non-professionals, but all were volunteers; you had to be trained, and the training was rigorous. The Niagara Crisis Hot-Line alone required a five-week orientation course; it wasn’t for bored housewives and retirees looking for something to occupy their idle hours.

“Mr. Burnaby?”—now the TV woman had Chandler’s surname, and was sounding empowered. Suddenly she was before him bran-dishing her microphone like a scepter, speaking in a hushed, breathlessly reverent voice. “Is it true that you know ‘Albert Mayweather,’

the gunman who has taken Cynthia Carpenter hostage, and shot and critically wounded a foreman here at Niagara Precision—” Chandler, annoyed, blushing, turned aside, gestured for her to get away from him.

“Cynthia Carpenter.” The hostage, whose full name Chandler hadn’t heard until now.

He tried to think: did he know any Carpenters?

Several members of the Carpenter family were at the site, some distance away, in safety. Chandler had noticed an older couple in their fifites or sixties, dazed, stricken. (But no Mayweathers?) Chandler was thinking that, face to face, he could reason with the gunman. Al Mayweather whom he’d (almost) known. One of the older boys you steered clear of, if you could. Not that Al Mayweather would have troubled to torment Chandler Burnaby, years younger. Mayweather and his friends noisy in the corridors, on the stairs, in the cafeteria at school. Mayweather, or boys very like him, in the locker room after gym, stripping for showers, braying with laughter, shouting and punching one another in the biceps, penises swinging like blood sausages.

If Mayweather surrendered now, releasing Cynthia Carpenter un-harmed, surely that would mitigate the charges against him. He’d let the pregnant woman go. If the foreman didn’t die, and wasn’t permanently injured . . . Chandler wondered what Al Mayweather, now thirty years old, was thinking inside the building. That he was trapped? That he was in control? Trapped, yet (for the time being) in control? Chandler couldn’t imagine what a man in such a desperate 362 W
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situation told himself. Or did. As minutes, and then hours, passed.

There must be a point when he has to urinate badly. A point when he’s becoming light-headed from not eating, and exhausted. A point when he wishes to Christ he’d never made such a mistake, and brought his life to this.

Chandler was being asked how well did he know Mayweather in high school, and he said, after a pause, “Not very well. But I think he’d remember me, he’d trust me. Maybe I can get him to negotiate on the phone.”

Such confidence. Chandler wondered where it derived from.

It was nearly 6 p.m. when Chandler was given the bullhorn. He steadied his hands to keep them from shaking. A police officer was telling him to speak slowly and clearly and stay out of the range of any possible fire, don’t be misled if Mayweather picks up the phone and talks to you, don’t show your face. Try to get him to answer the phone.

The phone that’s been ringing, he won’t pick up. Get him to put the hostage on. We need to know how that girl is.

“Yes. I know. I will. Thank you, officer.”

Chandler swallowed hard. He’d spoken through a bullhorn once in the past, yet the vibratory sound, the volume of sound, took him by surprise. Like a dream of outsized, improbable power. Chandler brought his mouth to the bullhorn and was astonished at the magnification of his voice, and the authority of such magnification.

Al? Al Mayweather? This is Chandler Burnaby, we went to high school together. I’m from the neighborhood, Baltic Street
.
I’m not a police officer, Al,
I’m a private citizen, a volunteer
.
I’ve been asked to help because I know you,
Al. I wonder if you remember me? Please pick up the phone, Al, and we can
talk
.
I need to hear your voice.
Chandler paused. His heart was pounding with excitement. He wanted to think that Al Mayweather was struck by this new, unexpected voice. The voice of a friend, from the past. A voice that called him by his first name and uttered
please
.

Ten years. Maybe eleven since Chandler had last seen Albert Mayweather. Mayweather would never recall him, but they’d been in the same school building at the same time. They’d grown up in the
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same neighborhood, were wakened in their beds hearing the same thundering railroad cars and locomotive whistles.

Chandler hoped that Mayweather wasn’t thinking why the hell was he, Chandler Burnaby, so interested in him suddenly this afternoon, after these years of living in the same city with no contact?

Al, will you pick up the phone? I’m dialing now
.

In fact the phone was being dialed for Chandler. There were several police officers in the van with him, coordinating this procedure.

Chandler heard the phone ring, ring at the other end. He hoped that Cynthia Carpenter was alive. He wanted badly to feel a strong brotherly bond with Al Mayweather but not if Mayweather had injured his hostage.

Al? We need to talk to you. O.K.?

The phone was dialed, redialed. Chandler reiterated his earnest plea. He remembered Al from high school—did Al remember him?—

and he wanted to help Al now, wanted to help Al communicate with police to resolve this situation in a way best for all, so that no one would be hurt, was Al listening? Would Al please pick up the phone, it was being redialed . . .

A dozen rings and then, unexpectedly, the receiver was picked up.

A male voice sounded close and suspicious in Chandler’s ear:

“Yeah?”

Chandler had broken through. Where the police had failed, Chandler had succeeded.

“Al? Hello.”

The call would be monitored by police officers, and recorded. Yet Chandler would behave as if it were a private call, and the exchange between him and Mayweather an intimate one.

He identified himself as a volunteer for the Crisis Center. He spoke of having been brought here by police to open “lines of communication.” To discover how Al could be helped, in this situation he’d gotten into. But the voice was jarring as gravel pitched against the side of Chandler’s head: “Nobody can help me, I’m fucked.”

Chandler protested, no, Al hadn’t killed anyone, and paused to let that sink in. (Was it true? So far as Chandler knew, the foreman was still alive.) Chandler said, “You let a woman go free, the pregnant 364 W
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woman, that’s in your favor, Al. That’s what people are saying. And Cynthia Carpenter, the young woman who’s with you now, she’s all right, isn’t she?”

There was a pause. Then a muttered, inaudible reply. Chandler said, “Al? I couldn’t hear . . .”