take aim.
I’m crouching beside a terrified octogenarian not long after shots rang out and, likely, someone called dispatch with distress calls. Plus, I stand in dim light holding a small silver object.
“Your only crime is your phone is outdated,” one cop says, chuckling, as he holsters his gun. In San Francisco, you can get grief for carrying an obsolete gadget without a permit.
The officer is named Everly. He’s thin, with an unruly moustache and pockmarked cheeks from adolescent acne. The other cop is a paunchy woman with thinning hair; Officer Thompson has alopecia, female-pattern baldness.
When people meet someone new they tend to focus on faces or names. I see pathologies. My annoying sixth sense is associating humans with their past, present, or possible future conditions, a vestige of my medical-school training. Parkinson’s, Bell’s palsy, cirrhosis, psoriasis, pigeon-toes, halitosis, hairy tongue, or the ever-reliable attention deficit disorder, which is somewhat subjective, and maybe everyone has it in modern life, so it’s a solid fallback.
The balding cop checks Grandma’s condition and deems it unnecessary to order an ambulance.
Everly asks for my identification. Then the evening goes from dangerous to frustrating.
“It’s the one and only Nathaniel Idle,” he chirps to his partner. “The Journalist Type.” He says “journalist” the disgusted way a health nut might use to refer to inorganic produce not grown locally.
I’d characterize most of the stories I write as quasi-medical journalism — fluff pieces about aging, beauty, nutrition and the biotech companies investing in sparing us the ignominy of our natural decline. This is how I pay my bills.
But I keep my sanity writing investigative stories. And they periodically run me afoul of the cops.
Two of my stories led to arrests of local cops. One — about the high rate of HIV infection among prostitutes — identified an officer in the vicious beating of one of the hookers. The other story nailed two cops for their role in a cover-up of an explosion at a San Francisco Internet cafe.
More recently, I worked on a story involving police and torched Porta Pottis, which, I suppose it goes without saying, bordered on the absurd. In recent months, there was a rash of fires set to portable johns outside construction sites. I learned this one morning when I was jogging and witnessed a simmering stinkfest of erstwhile blue walls. Moments later, two city workers arrived to clean up the mess. They informed me this was the ninth incident of potty pyromania; the fires appeared, they said, to stem from a battle for city funds between cops and firefighters. Allegedly, cops were igniting latrines to force their firefighting brethren to ignominiously extinguish the fetid flames (though it would also seem to make the firefighters more valuable, but maybe I’m overthinking).
I wound up making a few bucks breaking the pun-filled extravaganza in the
Cops hate me, or at least the ones whose cleverness peaked in high school do.
The upshot of it all is that I can count on not being able to talk my way out of a speeding ticket, or on getting an extra dose of skepticism when I explain that Grandma Lane and I were nearly gunned down by a phantom in the park.
The officers’ sympathy wanes further when Grandma has trouble confirming my account.
“You’re very fit but you have too much facial hair,” she says to Officer Everly when he asks her to describe what happened.
When he asks her whether she also saw a Prius, she says, “My husband drove a Chevrolet.”
Fortunately, the cops can’t deny the damage I point out has been endured by the eucalyptuses we used for cover. A cursory look in the dark for bullet remains proves fruitless.
By this time, two more cop cars have arrived, as have a handful of onlookers. One humpbacked cop I suspect suffers scoliosis strings yellow tape around the distant grove of trees. I inquire as to whether the grove has produced any evidence — shell casings, footprints, tire tracks. But the cops want to ask all the questions.
“What did the phone caller sound like?” Everly asks.
“Digitized. Masked somehow.”
Everly digests this placidly.
“Have you ticked someone off with one of your stories?” he asks. “Was the man taking aim from a Porta Potti?”
“Very funny.”
But of course, the possibility has tiptoed across my journalistic psyche, which by definition has a penchant for seeing conspiracy. Was this attack something other than random gunplay?
The cops finish taking our statements, or mine. Grandma sits in the back of a police car, arms crossed, lost somewhere else, doubtless hungry.
“There are lots of crazy people in the park,” says Everly in dismissing me. “Maybe you should be careful what circumstances you put your grandmother in.”
I hold my tongue.
The cops are nice enough to us — or at least to my grandmother — to drive us over to my car. We pile into my aging Toyota. As we drive back to Magnolia Manor, I gently press Lane on what she remembers, and about the “man in blue” and why she sensed danger. She’s unresponsive, fiddling with a mobile phone given her by the home. She uses it not to place calls — it doesn’t even get service — but to play simple games, sometimes obsessively, where she organizes falling blocks or guides mice through a maze.
“I’m okay,” she finally says, defiantly.
“It’s hard for you to remember things, Grandma. I understand that.”
She’s fallen quiet again.
“Hey, who wants a fruit roll-up?” I ask.
It’s an ongoing joke, or was. I carry a well-traveled green backpack full of snacks to feed Grandma’s unpredictable food demands and keep up her calorie intake. Before her mental faculties started to go up in smoke, she’d retort with a demand for some exotic foodstuff, like a braised rabbit sandwich, smile, wink, and then settle happily for the cherry fruit roll-up, Snickers, peanut-butter cracker.
This time, she places a frail hand on my right forearm. She looks at me.
“What is it, Grandma Lane?”
She clears her throat.
“Nathaniel, there’s something I should tell you.”
Chapter 4
“What, Grandma?”
No response.
We’ve arrived at the gates to her retirement home. I pull to the side and put my car in park. The metal dinosaur still hums reliably, despite its age. I want to see Lane’s eyes and I’m tempted to put on the inside light but decide it might feel like scrutiny. Nothing is surer to derail her. We sit shadowed by street light.
“What do you have to tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeats.
“What are you sorry about?”
“I did a bad thing.”
“What bad thing?”
No response.
“Grandma Lane, you said there’s something you have to tell me.”
“It’s catching up. It’s caught up. Things from a long time ago catch up, right? Eventually.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Depends on what things, Lane.”
