To Save the World, Idiot, Start with Your Own Trashy Backyard

1: Que Sera, Sera

The two gunmen entered Que Sera as the sun was setting on a warm Friday night.

The restaurant was fully occupied, and those waiting for their own banquettes had been shown to the waiting area, which doubled as a bar and where two bartenders were busy mixing dirty martinis, Manhattans, and the usual menu of pink drinks featuring simple syrup and Grenadine. The Muzak was playing over-orchestrated and over-loud versions of the American Songbook, so no one could be quite sure what was happening, when it happened, or how.

The gunmen had entered by the rear service entrance, where they encountered a dishwasher on a cigarette break; they knocked him to the asphalt and left him in a puddle of water and grease next to the food waste bin. They then entered the kitchen. They wore fedoras pulled low across their foreheads and matching black trench coats, in spite of the warm April weather. Since they looked nearly identical if not comical, given that this was Fresno in mid-spring, where so few own a winter coat, must less have a need to wear one, the chefs and servers assumed that someone sitting at the tables was having a birthday, and this was some kind of joke. “Blues Brothers,” one said, on the assumption that they were a tribute band brought in as cheap entertainment. “Idiot white men,” said Alfaro, the albino sous-chef, whose knives were always sharp and who knew white for the loss that it was.

That was when the shooting and the screaming began and those diners with less desirable tables and who were thus the farthest from the path of the bullets began falling through the swinging doors of the kitchen. Their faces told the story, and Stacy Werner, the youngest of the servers and therefore the closest to her phone, dialed 911, while the rest of the kitchen staff helped get customers and each other out the back door where they found their dishwasher who was unconscious and bleeding from the divot on the left side of his head.

Patrol cars arrived within three minutes of the first 911 dispatch, but by then, there were nearly two dozen bodies slumped in their leatherette booths and on the floor. The gunmen were gone, presumably out the front door, and the reasons for their rampage went with them. Blood streaked the walls and pooled on the floor. On the sound system, Tony Bennett sang “It Had to be You” accompanied by the screams and groans of those who had survived.

The first officer on the scene radioed for all available ambulances and EMTs, and then, because he was young and inexperienced, he went outside to throw up while his partner began to check for the living and those more likely to survive. Most of the dead and dying were in their sixties and seventies because it was still relatively early on a Friday night, and that was the usual clientele of Que Sera, anyway, so it’s not like they were that resilient in the first place, no matter what lies and embellishments they might have told to one another. They were ten and twenty years removed from The Greatest Generation, but they trafficked by proxy in a limited glow. Then, again, the shooters were armed with modified Glocks and seemed to have had unlimited ammunition. The cooks reported that the gunmen had not seemed to be in any special hurry. They aimed and fired one burst, then aimed and fired another, and their shots were mostly true, and Que Sera was not so large that their aim needed to be anything like marksman quality. Not with the distance and their rate of fire.

One survivor, a woman in her early forties had just arrived with her ninety-six-year-old grandfather. He was shot twice in the head while she had taken a bullet in the shoulder. They didn’t seem that interested in her, she said, while they treated her grandfather with more seriousness if not downright contempt. Her dress, a Louis Vuitton, was clotted with her own and the old man’s blood. Her grandfather, it should be noted, had survived Bastogne without so much as a scratch only to be killed by wannabe wise guys seventy-eight years after the fact. Que Sera, she said, had been his choice. His treat for her birthday.

Another survivor, the newish owner of the rightest of the right-wing talk radio stations in town, had come out of the restroom, just as the gunfire started, and, so, was behind the gunmen. He said that neither of the two shooters said a word during the massacre, but one of them seemed to be giggling the entire time, especially when a bullet found its mark. The laughter, he said, was more intimidating than any direct threat. Why he hadn’t been targeted he couldn’t say, other than the good fortune of being behind rather than in front of them.

On the other hand, one unlucky couple, the Gulbransons, who were coming to celebrate their fifty-second anniversary, had been about to enter the front door and thus were blocking the gunmen’s escape. Pieter Gulbranson was shot in the forehead and the throat while his wife Heidi took three in the chest, and they fell together in a heap in the doorway. Like sandbags piled against a storm.

The bartenders, two young men in their thirties, with only the beginnings of beards, came out from behind the bar where they had crouched during the shooting. They had glass in their hair but were otherwise unhurt except for a sense of obvious shame and guilt.

“Why?” one of them said, over and over. “Why?”

“Shut up,” the other said. “What would you do if you knew?”

In another banquette, a couple in their late seventies were nearly asphyxiated under the weight of their overweight waiter, who had been hit three times in the back and once in the back of his thigh while carrying a tray of salads and baskets of bread, and then—in an attempt to escape the gunfire—fell onto their table and rolled over the glassware and tableware and onto them.

“He saved us.”

He saved us. This was the statement that Roza Arakelyan gave to the officer who interviewed her two hours later. Her husband had been taken to the hospital for a scalp wound and neck wounds that refused to close. He had been hit by shattered glass, and his injuries would require stitches and antibiotics and an overnight stay, but he and his wife could only count themselves among the blessed. Recipients of a random grace.

“He was shot, but he saved us.” Roza repeated herself. “He saved us. Nicky. Mina’s boy.”

Oh, my god. Nicky?

Nicholas Bolsonaro. No relation to any world leader of a similar name. No relation, in fact, to anyone who was known, for if he was Mina’s boy, he was only her boy by legal decree.

2: Punchline

It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it, or the beginning of one? Three gunmen enter a bar? Only there were two nearly identical gunmen rather than three of a different order, and Que Sera was more restaurant for the senior citizen set than bar for those with lives yet to live, and the joke, well, there was no joke. Who but a sociopath would joke about a mass shooting in this day and age? Tempting, but no.

I first tried to get my thoughts together about this recent mass shooting all of three days before Uvalde, and if (so many months later) you don’t think that took the steam out of my enthusiasm, you are clueless and a fucktard. Days and then weeks and months went by. Has it been a year yet? Who wasn’t knocked for a loop by the events of that horrible day in Texas? How can you keep such a thing light? In the first place, we are stupid-drunk with guns and should be ashamed of ourselves, and in the second place, how do the law enforcement agencies in gun-loving Texas defend 376 officers waiting for more than an hour before moving against an eighteen-year-old who was in possession of both hostages and an assault rifle? Mistakes were made, as the passive voice construction would have it. And—in the active voice—failures multiplied.

What I mean is this: joking about a mass shooting takes some serious hutzpah, if not recklessness, and there was no joke except for the fact that after he had thrown up in the bushes near the front door, the first policeman came back inside only to slip in one of the many puddles of blood, much to the disgust of his partner, who told him to get the hell outside and quit fucking up the crime scene. Officer Numbnuts. As if they were in some sort of Keystone Kop routine. Funny, but not. As if John Q. Public didn’t already have enough reservations about the role and utility of a local police force. Defund the comedians and the incompetent. You child, he said to his partner, or thought he said. Wished he’d said. They were putting fucking children in uniform, and then giving them sensitivity training, as though policing were nothing more than a series of staged interventions. Sensitive as all hell, but they didn’t know enough to look at their feet or where they were going. Take that as a metaphor for our time. This second cop, who was in his fifties and just soft enough that his Kevlar vest caused chafing, thought maybe he’d like to write a book someday, the same day that he’d join a gym and lose twenty pounds, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to include one of these millennial drips in the plot. He might have been soft, but he wasn’t that kind of soft. He had always thought he’d write a crime novel, and if he didn’t get around to it now, he probably never would. His kids were grown, and he and his ex-wife were at least on speaking terms, so there were no impediments. None that he could see. He could do what he wanted. Wambaugh did it. Wrote novel after novel. Made a life after his life in a black-and-white. He knew what he was talking about, that Wambaugh. Not like those lady crime novelists who make all policemen seem like dolts. Read them, and you’re left thinking that all homicides involve elaborate methods of delivering poison and are solved by women in tweed and Wellingtons or fat men in mustaches in towns dominated by pines. On the other hand, now that he was looking at the floor and walls of Que Sera, he thought maybe he’d write a romance instead. Not that he knew so much about it since marriage and romance are not one and the same. As he well knew. But something light, anyway. Fluffy. Two people enter a bar and have sex in a bathroom stall. That kind of thing. That would sell, wouldn’t it? More fun to write, anyway. Think of all the mechanics and logistics and the heavy breathing. Which was why when the forensics unit showed up, he wasn’t fully focused on the task at hand because he was thinking about what might lead one attractive person to follow another and the noise two conjoined bodies can make as they thump and bump into one another as well as slam against a metal partition. Yes, a romance.

“Foster,” one of the gowned lab rats said. “Henry.” He snapped his fingers, no small feat with latex gloves. “Henry, give me a hand here, will you?” The lab rat was pointing to some swab thing or other from his wizard box. Pointing with urgency, even as he held the partially destroyed head of a woman whose hair retained evidence of a recent perm.

He nodded, unwilling to come back to reality, still lost in thought about bathrooms and romances.

Because this… this was a travesty. Without making it more than it was, it was the very picture of carnage. Of a warzone. Of hell on earth. Blood dripped from the tables, and the dead lay in impossible angles and poses. Here and there, a face had been deconstructed to the point of sacrilege. Foreheads became mouths, and mouths became human tunnels.

Those bullets not finding a home in human flesh had augured through the banquettes, and the stuffing drifted in the updrafts of the air conditioning.

This, on the other hand, was something else. Not romance. Not even romance on its worst days, which he’d seen and known.

Which was when the EMTs rolled Nicholas Bolsonaro away from the Arakelyans’ booth, and the cop could see that familiar blank expression, even from behind the oxygen mask.

“He saved us,” Roza Arakelyan said. “Mina’s boy.”

“Nicky?” he said. “Nicky Balls? What the fuck are you doing here?”

3: The Fairy Kid

My friend, the second cop, tells me such stories, because he’s a Fresno native of several generations and considers it his duty to keep me informed about all things local. This one was all over the local news for a week or more, and I should have known without being told, but I had been out of town. And yet, and yet… If I’d been half-aware or if our various news media were something other than what they are, I wouldn’t have needed to be told. Our newspaper, The Fresno Bee, once a robust brick of local and national and international reports, has become, since 2008, little more than a broadsheet, but its coverage of this recent tragedy was animated, nearly joyful, a last gasp of what it had once been. Local news broadcasts also found a level of limelight since their reporters were called upon to give cutaways for their national counterparts. Such is the benefit of horrible calamity for those otherwise unaffected.

Henry tells me such stories, especially when he plays a less than noble role, but he also tells me such stories when his sensibilities are offended and he has an axe to grind.

“You’d think it was a carnival, the way the vans came out with their cables and cameras and satellite dishes,” Henry said. We had spoken by phone a day or so after the massacre. “I kept waiting for vendors to show up. Like at a ballgame. Hot dogs and beer.”

For all of his gruff assessment of his younger colleagues in general and his partner in particular, Henry is not your standard issue veteran of the force. Would you believe it if I told you that his parents had once been a trampoline-and-clown act, and that they performed during the summers at Disneyland? For years and years. I can hardly believe it myself even though I’ve seen the pictures and flipped through the programs. Chuckles and Pickles. During the other three seasons of the year, when they were on sabbatical from the Mouse House, they showed up at school assemblies and church fairs in their make-up and portable nets, and when Henry was younger, they made him part of the act in a green leotard and pointed ears, calling him the Fairy Kid as he sailed through the air. It beggars belief, but maybe that explains his diverse interests, like the novel-writing that he talks about ad nauseum, even if he has yet to write a word. On the other hand, he still takes parts in community theater productions, often playing characters half his age. He played The Baker in Into the Woods, for example, and I have to give him credit: he wasn’t bad, no matter how his middle-age spread might play; a nice voice with enough range and control not to mangle Sondheim. Like most of us late-Boomers, he is still in a stage of becoming rather than being: he tells me repeatedly that he wants to be a baseball player or an astronaut when he grows up. As if. When his pension kicks in and his cop phase is over.

“Humans,” Henry told me during that phone conversation, “are disgusting with their prurient and salacious interests.”

Prurient, he said. Salacious. Really? Who knew what was in a cop’s vocabulary?

“Rubber-necking,” I said, “writ large.”

“And then to see Nicky,” he said. “Your boy Nicky.”

“Nicky Balls,” I said, “who would have guessed?”

“That’s right,” Henry said. “Not in a million years. You can’t make this shit up. Wambaugh wouldn’t touch it. Even Henning Mankel and his terrible grammar would know better.”

“Mankel is translated, isn’t he?”

He paused, and in that pause, I could hear him shrug. It was eight o’clock in the morning on the West Coast. I was standing in front of my stepmother’s rowhouse, watching the junk haulers throw her book cases and end tables into their dumpster, and he had just come off yet another overnight shift. I could imagine that he had changed out of his uniform, he would be wearing a tee shirt and shorts and drinking a beer; he was relaxed, but he would still be on edge somehow. Watchful.

“You’re never going to write that cop novel,” I said to break the silence. “You know that don’t you? You can read them and read them, but it’s not a matter of osmosis. No matter how much you talk about it.”

“Maybe not,” Henry said. “But fuck you, Freddy. You of all people should know: dreaming about it is practically the same thing.” I imagined him smiling, inwardly as though he knew something I didn’t. And how much he enjoyed cursing at me over the phone. “Then again, wouldn’t Nicky make quite a story?”

4: Nicky Balls

If it’s a commonplace that names are predictive of personality, then Nicky Balls was something of an oxymoron, for he was neither gangster, athlete, nor gigolo. Although he was as round as his name suggested, he was otherwise a compendium of insecurities and sentiment and anxiety, and his personality was best embodied by a damp Kleenex. On the few occasions during high school when he was forced to speak in front of a class, he sweat through his voluminous Hawaiian shirts. He was fat, he was fluffy, he was Gabriel Iglesias before his time. As an adult, he cried during rom-coms and any movie in which a dog was harmed or a child was lost. When he grew excited, which was more often than one might expect, he spit when he stammered. A saturated sponge, he leaked on demand.

I didn’t think much of Nicky Balls when we were in those Lord of the Flies years. In high school, I was one of those football team morons who, if we weren’t stuffing him into various trash cans, thought it great fun to stuff his pillowy bulk into the dirty towel cart in the locker room and then pile on wet, used towels on top of him, some of which had been liberally anointed with Tiger Balm, just to make matters more pungent and eye-watering. It took four of us, all offensive linemen, to pick him up. As emotive as he was in every other situation, he never struggled or cried out when we trashed him; he turned as limp as wet lettuce. I can only imagine that someone told him that, by not reacting with anything other than a smile, by playing possum, playing dead, we’d eventually grow tired of the game. Adults lie to children and teens, of course. All the time. We never did get tired of abusing him.

I wasn’t one of the stars of the team, nor was I a nice person, but that didn’t give me any greater perspective on the subject of Nicky Balls. Sympathy, empathy, or otherwise. He was doughy-soft, and for a group of hormonally aggressive teenage boys, he was a temptation too available to resist. If I didn’t think much of Nicky Balls, I was not alone in this opinion, and I tell you this now only because he managed to defy others’ expectations as well as my own. And if I still don’t hold Nicky Balls in high regard, the fault is surely mine, for if I didn’t think much of Nicky Balls and hadn’t for nearly forty years, I also had no right to think very highly of myself, given how alike we were and are.

Maybe I felt the teeniest bit of guilt. Maybe I knew that I was tormenting him rather than punishing myself for the deficiencies I couldn’t help but loathe. But that’s my perspective now. As a junior or a senior in high school, on the other hand, I couldn’t help but join the lynch mob, he irritated me so much, and he was such a convenient target for others.

Given the above descriptions, you might be forgiven for thinking that Nicky Balls was somewhere on the developmental spectrum, but if that were true, I never would have abused him since, even as a teenager, I had some boundaries.

Aren’t I a good person? At least I like to think I am.

He was just a fat slob, and he made us too aware of our own fallibilities. Too aware of our own insecurities. Which was maddening.

To summarize: Nicky Balls grew up in a tract house in one of the nothing-neighborhoods in our nothing-city with his adoptive mother and her verbally abusive husband, a disabled sister and an aging Weimaraner. He was neither distinguished nor exceptionally gifted in any way, and for him, as it is with so many, high school was hardly an enjoyable experience, only one to be endured as silently and with as little reaction as possible because he had learned at the tongue of his father and the hands of his contemporary tormenters that resistance was painful and only a trigger for worse.

Rather than becoming an insurance salesman or an agricultural products dealer, a mechanic or a plumber like the rest of our crowd upon leaving school, he gravitated toward a position in the hospitality industry. His term, not mine. Stupid, stupid slob. Trying to make his life sound like something it wasn’t, to make up for the love he was denied at home and school. He found a job as a waiter at one of the fern-bar-cum-restaurants along the strip mall corridor of Blackstone Avenue and then endured the changing mores as the decades passed by.

He was married once; can you believe it? But maybe it becomes more believable if you know that his wife was someone he met online in his forties. Brenda. Brenda Ovechkin. And to top it off, she was a harridan in a full-to-bursting Spanx bustier, who made sure he worked every shift he was offered. Dinner, lunch, even the lousy, no-tips-allowed Sunday brunch. He labored at work and at home until she ran off with their shared bank account and the therapist who encouraged her to take risks with her life.

On the other hand, Que Sera catered to an older crowd; no one who worked there or dined there ever believed that risk was a good thing, which explained the menu which remained unchanged for thirty years, and the diners who rarely, if ever, changed their order. Somehow, it had been Que Sera and always would be. Meat loaf. Lamb shoulder. Maybe that—its unwillingness to be the latest fashionable thing for the twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings—was its secret to a little-changing but long-lasting life. I’m sure you know what I mean: a generation grows up, puts on some weight and a little heft in a wallet here and a purse there, and grows old; meanwhile, their favorite watering hole—if it lasts through the roller coasters of recessions and changes of ownership—takes on the characteristics of its customers. While younger generations rise up, take over, and find other, newer, trendier places to the north and the west where they can spend their money and their time, the older generation becomes a little less vigorous and their restaurant of choice a little more down at heels. They don’t ask for much except to be remembered. They stick with what they know. Each woman is beautiful and gorgeous and the same age as her daughter, and each man is someone worthy of being remembered for the potency of his youth and intellect and wit. Nicky was one of those servers who loved his old farts, and they loved him, even as he aged and become one himself, the waiter most often requested for those suffering their latest birthday or anniversary. After he became the Arakelyans’ bullet-proof shield and savior, his star rose even further, and when word of his unintentional bravery was first broadcast, the hospital florist moved nearly its entire stock to his second-floor room. His heart stopped four times in the ambulance—I don’t know that it’s true, but that’s how the story came to be reported—and yet the fat slob survived. Somehow. He became the hero who died multiple times and somehow yet lived through no virtue of his own.

5: A Collector of Stuff

But as I said, I missed most of the fuss. I had been in Baltimore, that starchy, mid-Atlantic city that seems only to make the news when the networks need a location for a new crime series. Otherwise, it is home to my stepmother, Helen, who drank in memory of my father and in mourning for her younger self. On the other hand—after twenty-some years alone in isolation—no excuse was really necessary. Habit alone sufficed. She drank her calories, and if she had eaten solid food in years, I don’t know what the menu might have entailed, only that it must have come from a box or a can. She was an avid Amazon and QVC shopper, whose intentions were good, even if her follow-through was not. Every week, apparently, she bought more and more cleaning products and tools. She must have owned seven vacuum cleaners, for example, although there was no evidence that any had been used or even unboxed. One did not walk through her narrow rowhouse so much as navigate a path through the stacks and stacks of boxes and trash bags that had become secondary walls and doorways.  Hoarder? Yes, you might say so, although she preferred the term collector, no matter how obviously euphemistic.  You might say hoarder or collector but never in the context of mental health, at least not in her presence. Even if her presence was limited to a recliner in the center of her small living room, a room made smaller by the encroaching piles of brand-new items and the garbage of the last decade. The floor and walls were damp and sticky, evidence of a leak long suspected but never inspected much less repaired, the ceiling on the first floor was falling in on itself, and the smell was a bouquet of dirt and urine and a body long unwashed.

That was Helen, and I knew her life for what it was. I suppose I could have intervened years ago, but doesn’t everyone deserve the right to his or her own destiny? You might call that laissez-faire or denial, but I call it the ticket to a life of least resistance.

I went back to Baltimore because Helen’s next-door neighbor called, not that I wanted to listen.

“She’s in the hospital,” Sissy Duvall yelled. It is important to note that when Sissy is calling long distance, she yells, and her volume is proportional to the distance. Since I was on the other side of the country, her voice was at ten on the dial.

I said, “What?” as though I couldn’t hear her because I like to give Sissy the business during her infrequent calls to me about the state of my stepmother. “What are you saying?”

“HELEN,” she yodeled, as though she were an Alpine goatherder, “IS IN THE HOSPITAL.” I held the phone away from my ear; even so I could hear her wheeze and pant from her breath so entirely expended. “She fell down, one of her junk walls came down on top of her, and she couldn’t get up. No one knew to look for her, so she just laid there. For days and days on the floor. She… Lay there? Laid or lay?”

“What are you saying?” Nothing made sense at the moment, she had caught me watching “Private Ryan” mid-view, and under the best of circumstances, Sissy was not known for being the most linear reporter of information. To make matters worse, we were having a heat wave in late March, and my eyes kept closing while Tom Hanks and company continued their virtuous journey; outside, in the salvia, the bees were drunk and confused, and so was I. What was she trying to say? And, why would a group of firemen need the Jaws of Life to extricate Helen from her living room?

“What’s right,” Sissy yelled, “‘lay’ or ‘laid’?”

“Back up,” I said, and by now I was yelling as well. “Back up and tell me about Helen.”

She told me that someone had to come. I had to come, since there was no one else left. Sissy could go to the hospital to see her, but what good would that do? She was just The Neighbor, after all, not family, step or otherwise.

“I’m deaf, you know,” she said, “there’s Covid, and I don’t drive. And as friends go, I mean, we wave now and then.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get what you’re saying. I need to drop everything that I’m doing and get on a plane, that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“So, what are you doing that’s so important it can’t wait?” She paused. “What are you doing, Mr. Big Shot?”

“NOTHING.” Because we can all play that game—yelling into the phone as though to rouse the deaf and resurrect the dead—even if it meant I had to drop the remote and get on a plane.

6: The Power of Not Being Present

Henry worked the Que Sera site throughout the night. Along with Numbnuts. Who wasn’t so bad, he had to admit it, even if he wanted to tear his head off every fifteen minutes or so, or whenever he opened his mouth and repeated something from the latest human resources training. They did the initial door-to-doors, and then they stood outside the crime tape to keep the photographers and television people away. Far enough away that they couldn’t make a fortune out of gore, which seemed to be their mission in life, more so than any actual news. Just seeing all the flashing lights along with the ambulances that stood outside the restaurant like a taxi rank—that should have been enough. But no, they wanted to film bodies on the floor, puddles of blood, and those tell-tale forensic markers littering the hardwood floor and the tables. Even if the powers that be decided at the last minute not to show anything so graphic. Local news is family entertainment, after all.

All the while, Henry couldn’t help but feel as though the experience was happening elsewhere, to someone other than himself. He was somewhere outside of his body, going through the motions, and when he yelled at one of the Fox affiliate reporters, it was someone else doing so, no matter how much he approved. He swore at the reporter and pushed a cameraman, which he had always wanted to do, even if the person that did it was someone other than himself.

He could feel Numbnuts looking at him. With disappointment, and as though he were taking measurements. Who are you? He might as well have said it out loud.

“Look,” Henry said, “don’t. Whatever you’re thinking.”

“I’m not,” Numbnuts said. “I’m not thinking anything at all. But maybe you want to get some coffee. Or something.”

“That’ll help.” Henry rubbed his eyes, then looked back through the opened front door at the choreography of the white jumpsuited techs tiptoeing among the bodies and the markers and the blood, illuminated by their spotlights. Ghosts among the dead. He couldn’t rid himself of the sense that he was untethered somehow, flying through the air. “Caffeine will cure anything. Anything and everything.”

One block to the north was a doughnut shop with traditional, oh-dark-thirty doughnut-shop hours and never more than two of the world’s most uncomfortable stools available. Not an invitation to linger, even if the grease and dough, icing and sugar and coffee made for a powerful fragrance.

Henry opened the door, and the chimes went off in the backroom, announcing his presence. A shortish woman emerged, wiping her hands on the white baker’s apron that dangled from her neck; what he could see of her tee shirt was mottled with damp patches of sweat. She was dark in that Italian way, her eyes rimmed with dark circles and set in a perpetual squint, as though she needed glasses but refused to wear them.

“What?” she said, eyeing his uniform. “You’re from down the street, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw all the lights when I opened up,” she said. “Kinda hard to miss.” She lifted the apron and wiped flour from the corner of one eye. “What happened?”

“A shooting,” Henry said. “At Que Sera. Last night.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no. What happened?”

“Nobody knows,” he said. “Not yet, and you don’t want to know, either. Not really.”

“No?” She poured a cup of coffee and set it down on the counter in front of him, then grabbed a glazed doughnut from the case with a pair of tongs and slid it onto a napkin next to the coffee. “You probably need something, though. Don’t you? Something more than sugar?” She rummaged below the counter and held up a bottle of Jack Daniels. “No charge.”

He shrugged but pointed to his cup. “Sure.” What did it matter, how much got told? A cup or two of that and he’d be blabbing everything he knew. But what did it matter? After what he’d seen, what did it matter if he took a pull this early in the morning? Who was going to check? Officer Numbnuts, he of the sensitivity training?

“It was a massacre.” An image of one woman, who had been shot in the neck, nearly decapitating her, flashed for a moment, and he felt his eyes begin to swim behind his knuckles. “Dozens. A total shit show.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.” She pulled the bottom of her apron over her head as though it was a magic blanket and could undo the negatives of time and space. “I probably know everyone who works there.”

“If it makes a difference, it looked like they were only targeting customers.” He took a breath. “And the oldest among them, at that. Like they were making an argument for euphemism, eugenics, euthanasia, whatever. As I say: a shit show.”

Then there was Nicky.

“I know one of the waiters, too.” He waited for a while until she took the apron off her head. “Nicky Bolsonaro. He got hit. Looks like he got in the way of the people they were trying to shoot. He should be in the hospital by now.” Then he clarified with the voice inside his own skull, the one that sounded a little like a parent, especially fueled by bourbon: “I know of him, I should say. He’s a friend of a friend. I can’t say I know him very well.”

“Oh, Nicky,” the woman said. “That’s awful. He’s wonderful. He’s so sweet.”

“Sweet,” he said. “I guess you could say that. I wouldn’t know, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, covering one of his hands with her two-flour dusted ones, “you have seen something awful, and since there’s no waking from it, you can’t even call it a nightmare.”

In moments like this, when in the presence of blood and carnage, he couldn’t say for sure if there was anything worth saving about the human race, so easily and thoughtlessly was it eradicated, maimed, or irreparably altered. But, according to one good person at least, Nicky—that putz!—was wonderful, and she was more than willing to grieve the fat slob’s wounds as well as his own.

7: Bottom Lines

Talk about fat slob, did I mention that, when she left him just before the Millennium, Brenda took everything in their shared bank accounts, hers and Nicky’s? She milked him for what she could as long as she could, and then when she saw a better offer, she took off with everything she could carry in her purse and digital wallet, up to and including an autographed Mickey Mantle baseball that Nicky had been given when he was twelve.

He had spent ten years guarding that baseball from his father, who always threatened to sell it in order to pay his considerable bar bill, and then just when he thought it was safe, his soon-to-be ex-wife took it purely out of spite, with no real thought of what it might mean to her husband. True or false… This is what happens to fat slobs and only to fat slobs. It has always seemed so to me, even if I don’t like it: the Nicky Balls of this world get taken to the cleaners by those who supposedly love them, and then when they call the police, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in making things right. In Nicky’s case, the officers—those who came to his house, who witnessed the general ransacking that Brenda had done in the wake of her departure—seemed more prone to blame the victim than indict the perpetrator.

“You never thought to get a safe deposit box,” the older of the two officers said, “for valuables?”

“Why?” Nicky asked. “I liked to look at it.”

“Sure,” the officer said, “and I’d like to look at a ten-thousand-dollar bill, but I’m gonna put it in the bank instead.”

The other officer was Henry, who hadn’t been given an introduction to Nicky until that moment. He tried to be solicitous since Nicky looked as though he was about to cry. “We’ll put in some alerts to the pawn shops and memorabilia stores, but you may want to keep an eye on eBay,” he said, not realizing that he would then have to explain eBay and online selling, Y2K and the internet to Nicky, who then did begin to cry, because—as he saw it—the world was about to collapse.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Henry said. He was trying to reassure the fat, tear-streaked slob, whose emotions were somewhere near puberty even if he was already in his early-forties. “I mean the only value it has is what you’re willing to sell it for, and if you weren’t thinking of selling it, you’ve only lost a ball that you weren’t supposed to play with. Am I right, or am I right?”

“I guess.”

Long after the fact, Henry told me that Nicky hung his head; he felt bad about making another human feel bad even when it was the other human’s fault. We’re all flawed in some way, right? Either through our dispositions or our stupidity? If in Nicky’s case it was a little bit of both, that still didn’t relieve Henry’s uncomfortable sense that he was, in some respects, responsible for extra anguish, more anguish than was necessary.

“We’ll keep looking,” Henry had said, “and you do the same. You never know what might turn up.”

8: The Soap-on-a-Rope of Kids

So, I wasn’t in attendance for Nicky and Henry’s first meeting. Before they even knew it was a first meeting. I wasn’t around for all the excitement at Que Sera either. And I wasn’t around for the aftermath. While the gunmen were shooting anything and everyone geriatric, I was trying to get some sleep in my Baltimore econo bed next to the chipboard nightstand, complete with phonebook and a newly printed Gideons. The floor shook when I walked from the bed to the bathroom, and the television flickered when it rained; the channel selection was less than basic. Sirens were a nightly accompaniment, and the blackout curtains were no match for the lights from the nearby beltway. And while Nicky was fighting for his life in the ICU, I was hiring cleaners and movers and wearing a respirator all the while because you just can’t believe the effect that mold can have on the air that one breathes or what kind of stench human beings are capable of creating. Helen had been working on her toxic environment for quite some time, decades, and her immune system must have been bullet-proofed. When I wasn’t doing hazmat duty, I was standing by her bed in the hospital, looking down on her and fighting that impulse that made me want to see her dead because her death would have simplified so many things, and anyway, keeping her alive was just prolonging the inevitable, wasn’t it? I mean, we all have that end to face, don’t we? And she had been in the business of killing herself for years. To be fair, I never picked up a pillow or anything, but now and again, I needed to have a conversation with myself about being a fucked-up piece of shit, a younger senior citizen, who’d never developed a moral compass. Then I’d take a breath and settle down, all before those wishes—about her demise, about her absence from the earth—would resurface once again. Not to mention any idle curiosity I might have had about her will and the remainder of her finances.

“Good morning, Helen,” I’d say, even if it was afternoon and even if I was hoping her eyes wouldn’t open. But then, although her eyelids would butterfly the air, her eyes remained unfocused, and I’m sure I was nothing but a blur at the foot of her bed. Clear enough, though, that she was able to say, “Oh, it’s you. Kid Sonuvabitch,” which was how she referred to me when she was feeling fond and how, by implication, she referred to my mother, her rival absent by death these past forty years.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right, it’s me, the gift you never wanted.”

“You were the soap-on-a-rope of kids, that’s a fact.”

All of which was our shorthand for the fact that my mother died of her cigarettes and lung cancer when I was thirteen, and my father remarried when I was fourteen, and Helen didn’t know what she was getting into with an instant family containing one sullen, discourteous teenage boy.

Since I don’t know where else to put this, let me mention it now in this out-of-order way: my mother had been my father’s secretary in the years before they married and even after I was born. My father, who would have been one more engineering professor at one more state college otherwise, had made a pile of money during the early 1960s when he developed an electronic doohickey essential for scanning and intercepting radio signals. The Pentagon wanted it, one of those multinational defense contractors bought it, and my father profited beyond his wildest expectations, no matter what moral qualms he might have entertained. Helen had been his graduate student and then his research assistant for years, and since my father rarely left his lab, he was fortunate that his romantic needs could be met in so orderly a way and so close to work and home.

Marriage is hard enough, but marriage with a built-in second generation is harder still, and I didn’t make things any easier for her. Quite the opposite. I stole her cigarettes, and I drank her Cabernet, and when questioned, I blamed it on her absent-mindedness, which was not entirely off the mark, because she had a reputation for putting her keys in the freezer when she was distracted, which was often and always, her mind being on other things such as the aerodynamics of Superman or the state of our body politic in the 1960s. She was that wide-ranging in her concerns beyond the science of her research, but—as she said—all of the answers had to do with propulsion and lift, even if no one could tell her why and how. And then the worst of the worst happened when my father died when I was twenty-five, and we split the proceeds of the estate as my father had stipulated; she took what she was left and went back to her childhood home in Baltimore to drink her punishment, acquire more of that which she did not need, and live surrounded by her leavings, while I quit my internship at Horace, Ovid, and Aeschylus and came back to Fresno in order to do the NOTHING as Sissy so kindly and previously implied was my life. I had had academic pretensions once upon a time, but I discovered to my surprise that they were nothing I couldn’t leave behind and forget. Fast forward through the years, and my trip to Baltimore and the shooting at Que Sera, and here’s what you would have seen: Helen hadn’t made a move except from the floor of her row house to her bed in the hospital, and I hadn’t relinquished my death grip on NOTHING either: forty years later, I was still waiting to see what I might become.

9: Negative Space

It’s not altogether true that I do NOTHING although there are those who know me who might argue that I don’t exactly do SOMETHING either. As I said, I gave up my academic pretensions easily enough—as soon as I looked at the dollar amount of what my father left, I thought, What am I doing? And, like a rider, Why am I doing it? The moment I said What and Why, I withdrew from all my classes because I had no answers to the above questions. But about three months after I took my father’s blood money inheritance, I had two thoughts: first, You have become complicit in the deaths of innocents (for example, if I think about it for just one moment, I can connect the dots between my father’s invention and the little girl running naked down a Vietnamese path, but I had chosen a life of the inconsequential, a life in which cause does not have its corresponding effect; such has been my ticket to an easy if not an entirely blissful existence); and second, You have got to get a handle on yourself. Because apart from the moral qualms—or maybe because I had sold my soul for a life of ease and a lack of responsibility—I could feel my life drift and dissipate, like a cloud that disappears when the weather gets warmer and drier. That’s what I thought, that I could disappear. I could have gone back to school, but I didn’t. Because it would have seemed like the worst sort of déjà vu. I mean, who is school for anyway—eggheads and believers in the narrowest of unreal realities. So, I set up certain schedules and routines for myself, a gym membership that I actually used; I treated it like a job with a performance review. And then I found a book group, and unlike the other members, I read most everything that we chose, even the titles that I thought were ridiculous for one reason or another. Like those crime novels that Henry was always reading, especially the paperbacks that he tried to give me now and again, the ones that were particularly awful. Unlike Helen, I got rid of more things than I acquired, and although I never spoke about it, I liked to keep a mental tally of how much of my father’s and Helen’s furniture I had sold or hauled away and how little I actually needed. Helen could have taken all of it, if she had lived a little closer. My living room, for example, was a bare hardwood floor, but every time I thought about putting a couch or chairs on it, I thought about how that would violate the empty space, so I left it as it was. The peace and quiet. The simplicity of the negative. Serving as a reminder that people, like furniture, were not absolutely essential either.

Which is not to say that my life was entirely empty of any social or romantic relationships. I went on the occasional date for the sake of appearances if not with any grand expectation or desire for social satisfaction or sex. I met friends in the evening after they had finished work and I had finished the whatever of my day; however, I could go whole weeks without a personal conversation, and I’ll admit to the fact that I sometimes kept telemarketers on the line, just for the practice of human interaction. In that regard, maybe Helen and I were not so much different.

10: Someone Who’s Not a Cop or a Tenor

But that was how I ran into Henry. The gym, I mean, one of the few places where I was sure to be around other humans. I saw him there in the afternoons—practically every day—before he went on the overnight shift, and I came to expect to see him there, so if he wasn’t, I’d wonder. Finally, one day he stopped me in the locker room, and he said, “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.” And he proceeded to tell me my own name and where I lived and who my father had been. I didn’t know whether I ought to feel flattered or stalked. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I started college thinking I’d be an engineer, and I took one class from your father, and that fact alone told me that I was wrong. I was no engineer at all, and he was not exactly nurturing, and I figured I’d do better as a theater major.” But that had seemed silly to him, so he turned to criminology instead, which, as it turned out, was equally silly except that it led to a job whereas theater—well, that would have been a crap shoot, wouldn’t it? We were sitting in the sauna—this was many years ago, long before we worried about viruses—and he said, “Fresno is really a very small town, isn’t it?” And I said, yes it was, and the more it grew, the smaller it got. That was when he told me that he was a police officer but also about his parents and their trampoline act, growing up in Los Angeles and his childhood identity as The Fairy Kid, not to mention the green tights and his love of Broadway, and I thought I’d have to revise my opinion of cops in general since it was clear that they weren’t all cut from the same cloth, any more than all doctors, lawyers, and teachers are the same.

But that was years and years ago when we met. I didn’t know it during our first conversation, but that was when he was going through his divorce, and his emotions were as raw as they could be when two people were in conflict, even though they weren’t exactly angry with each other. They just knew they couldn’t live together any longer. They were trying not to harm their daughters unduly, and they had no one upon whom they could lay blame. He’d tell me these things while we perspired in the dry air and dropped eucalyptus oil on the stones, and I thought, All the more reason to keep my living room as it was.

We still run into each other at the gym, but more often now he’ll call out of the blue and say, “I need to drink with someone who’s not a cop or a tenor,” and I’ll say, “Sure, come on over,” and we’ll sit on the floor in my empty living room if it’s winter and foggy or on folding chairs on the patio during the rest of the year. If it’s winter, he’ll offer me furniture, and I’ll tell him I like the hardwood unadorned, thank you very much. We are friends of a kind after all these years, and we know enough not to get too personal or ask too many questions. We go only so far. And to this point, we are happy enough knowing only what’s necessary. What the other is willing to reveal.

For example, not so long after his divorce was finalized and when it seemed as though his life would not stop falling apart, Henry had surgery to remove two malignant growths in his salivary glands; he quit smoking as a result, but that’s the only thing he told me: “I quit smoking,” he said. That’s all he said. Period.

As was so often the case, we were in the sauna, and some joker thought to turn it into a Turkish bath. Steam and the rank odor of sweat rose from the rocks, a reminder of our rotten mortality. “Oh?” I said. “You finally wanted to make your workouts count for something other than penance?”

“Nah,” he said, clamping down on his nicotine gum, “it was time.”

Fast forward another few years, and he mentioned something about the surgery and the fears he had once had of metastases. Only then did I put two and two together. But did I say anything? No, I did not.

11: Intelligence Gathering

If we don’t ask questions about each other, we never ask questions about Nicky. Or, rather, Henry doesn’t ask questions about Nicky unless I offer some information from that shared past that requires some clarification or context. Henry had never met Nicky, except for that time after his ex-wife burgled him, but once when he had come for a no-cops, no-tenor drink, I had caught Henry leafing through one of the high school yearbooks stashed in the bottom drawer of the television stand. I remember pointing out a picture of Nicky folded like a jackknife in a trash can, only his legs, arms, and head to be seen, while the offensive line stood in a semi-circle behind him. We wore our lettermen’s jackets, just in case anyone might have been mistaken about the kind of people we were.

“Look,” I said. “We had so much fun.”

A photo of a weekly, if not a daily, event. After years of trying to stop such behavior, even our school administrators found his trash can passivity as crudely endearing as it was disturbing; eventually, though, through repetition, it became iconic, and there we were. No one objected to its depiction in the yearbook of our senior year even if, decades later, we appear to have been utter jackasses. Even I can see that. What once made me laugh, now makes me cringe. I admit that.

“And you participated in this?” he said. His expression as he held the yearbook was quizzical as well as judgmental.

“Well,” I said, “when you put it like that. I only ‘participated’ in the sense that I was just one of the ones carrying him and putting him in the trash can. I wasn’t the only one, and I can’t say that I instigated anything.”

“That’s okay, then,” he said, shaking his head. “You were just following along. It could happen to anyone.”

“You have no idea,” I said. “I know you’re being ironic and facetious, but he was such a moron that even Jesus would have given him a pinch. You could make him cry on command, and it was hard to refrain.”

“Maybe an actor, then,” Henry said, “if he’s that in touch with his emotions.”

“He was only in touch,” I said, “with his next meal.”

I wasn’t happy with Henry’s line of questioning or sympathy, but I hoped to put myself into a better light.

“You have to put this into context,” I said. I was really trying hard to turn that argumentative corner. “It was high school, and he was begging to be picked on. Nicky couldn’t have done more not to fit in.”

“All the more reason for a little compassion,” Henry said. “Don’t you think?”

“How much compassion did you have at sixteen?”

“Enough,” he said.

“Sure you did.”

“Look,” he said, “I wore a green leotard until I was twelve.”

“Okay, so being the Fairy Kid gave you a little extra insight.”

“Enough not to be an asshole.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe you had to have been there. Then you’d know how much compassion you really would have had.”

12: Maybe I’m Just an Asshole After All

The morning after the massacre, Henry wrote the initial reports on the events at Que Sera since he couldn’t trust his lamebrain partner not to get too personal and sensitive about it. No need to share what the experience, confronting so much horror, felt like. We came, he wrote, we saw, we established the perimeter, we informed the detectives and the lab rats. Blah, blah, blah. No mention of his partner, his partner’s vomit, or that worthy’s banana peel second entrance. Nor a mention of Nicky-Balls-as-hero. What would be the point? No doughnuts. Just the facts—two unidentified males in hats and overcoats entered the restaurant from the rear; they knocked a dishwasher into the silliness of his future then proceeded to shoot up the place, including twenty-seven diners and drinkers, and of those twenty-seven, there were fourteen fatalities, whose limited futures ended before they could be experienced in the present.

Henry didn’t get home until eleven that morning. Throughout the night and early the next day, his phone had vibrated with calls and texts from his ex-wife and various drinking pals.

Had he heard about the shooting?

Was he okay? What a horrible, horrible thing. Talk about a reminder of the dangerous job he was doing.

Two gunmen walk into a bar… What a jokester. Best friend, best buddy. Fucking idiot.

(Okay, so I lied; I had heard about it. A little. And without thinking, I had sent a thoughtless text, which begs the question of how else one could send a thoughtless text. I might have been ten years older than Henry, but that didn’t keep me from being the worst of the fucktards. Then again, I had my own concerns. What did I know about what the restaurant looked like after its most recent renovation by gunfire? What a tragedy it was, its dimensions, or who was there. I should have been able to imagine, I suppose, but I was more than a couple thousand miles and three time zones away, and I hadn’t taken the time. That, I suppose, is an example of “a lack of empathy.” Or, maybe I’m just an asshole. You choose. What’s clear, though, is this: after forty-some years, I hadn’t exactly improved my standing from high school.)

Could Henry possibly send a little extra this month? His wife had texted after stating her own breathless concerns about the shooting and his own health. Could he possibly send a little extra this month, since the gutters needed to be replaced? It was the least he could do for old times’ sake and the house that they had bought together in the flush of their youth and optimism. He could have been killed in the line of duty, but you have to compartmentalize. He knew that. Tragedies happen, but life moves on, asshole. Household repairs become necessary. Ex-wives need money. Didn’t he see that?

Did he know anything about what had happened at Que Sera?

Did he know anything about…

Did he know…

Please, everyone: shut up.

For every disaster or catastrophe, local or otherwise, friends and family seemed compelled to voice their opinions and judgments, their thoughts and prayers and concerns in his voicemail. His phone continued to bleep and blap until he came home, turned it off, and plugged it in.

And that was when he poured a water glass full of store-brand gin. Even before he could yank off his shoes or throw his keys on the kitchen counter. Before he could put his head under the faucet in the kitchen sink and rinse off the tragedy that, for the last twelve hours, had been clinging to him like cobwebs from a seldom-used doorway. He poured himself a triple of blue-label booze. A poor man’s martini, no olive required or available, for that matter. After what he’d seen, he had a right. To the gin and a pretense of vermouth. That’s what he told himself. More than once. I have a right. Even as the tang of the gin took him right back to when he was six and The Fairy Kid, and his parents were throwing him through the air between each other and their trampolines. He didn’t know to be scared, so he wasn’t, even though his father reeked of sweat and drugstore cologne and that tartish sweet juniper smell he couldn’t yet name; he wasn’t afraid even though some part of him knew he should be, but he also knew that his best response was to call “higher” no matter how high he was being thrown and caught by Chuckles and Pickles on their respective trampolines, neither of whom was necessarily sober or altogether trustworthy or responsible, and day by day they traded being one or the other or both. Never neither, and he had learned over time how to register the signs. What that might mean for himself.

In all those years at the Mouse Palace, he had gotten to know some of the regulars, mostly the college-age kids, who were playing characters—Goofy and Snow White, Cinderella and Mickey—none of whom knew quite what to make of the third-grader who hurtled through the air between his less-than-clearheaded parents. One afternoon, when said parents were both unsteadier than normal, Jill Akin, who became Snow White on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, took Henry around to the Disneyland jail and asked the officer to look after him.

“One of these days, they’re going to drop him onto the concrete,” she said, “but I’d prefer it not be today. If they’re worried he’s been kidnapped, so much the better.”

It might have been Disneyland, but the officer was not used to children. Go figure. His experience extended only to drunken teenagers and belligerent adults. He locked Henry into one of the cells and handed him three bags of Fritos.

“Just until your parents are done,” he had said.

His parents performed their routine, throwing an invisible child between them, and then went to the Blue Bayou in their clown suits to drink until the park closed and only then did they think to go to the office of Lost and Found Children where they were directed to the jail and their reunion with the son they hadn’t missed. And now, in late-middle-age, that same son, the Fairy Kid grown soft and old, walked from room to room with his tumbler of gin and turned on, then turned off the television. Back on, only to find one of the midday news heads reporting from the front of Que Sera, giving the no-news news about the assassins, their identities or motives. But then the camera panned to the window outside Nicky Balls’ hospital room, where he lay asleep in a room filled with flowers and balloons and greeting cards. He appeared to be floating, tethered only by breathing tubes and sensors. A potted plant with alien blossoms sat in the window sill. The crawl read, “Life-saving hero recuperates after surgery. Takes four bullets meant for others in Que Sera Massacre.”

Well, that was enough, wasn’t it? Could he sit at home, after that, after seeing yet another son at the mercy of gravity? He put his shoes back on his feet and rebuttoned his blues, poured the gin into an empty Dasani bottle, and went to the hospital.

13: Entering the Television

Henry knew Nicky only as a one-time call-out, the victim of a domestic dispute, but he also knew him as a curiosity and a friend of a friend, and since all curiosities are the subject of risk and I was that last friend, he used the terms advisedly. A name within stories. A question without an answer. A tenuous and unworthy connection.

Even so, Henry drove downtown so quickly that, when he entered Nicky’s second-floor room, he had the odd sensation that he had moved from his own life and entered the television coverage that had been contained on the screen in his living room. There he was, duplicated: Nicky draped in white with IV lines in both arms, nasal cannula in each nostril, sickly sweet flowers and plants spilling from every flat surface in the room. His eyes were closed, and one hand, lying atop the hospital blanket, twitched. Henry took a picture with his phone and sent it to me. I had to agree: he did seem saintlike even if I knew it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true, could it? Not unless saint meant some form of holy fool. Henry caught the light just right to make it seem as though Nicky slept with a halo of memory foam. But what seemed angelic, I knew, was merely the unconsciousness of fear and shouldn’t be confused as anything else.

Henry sent the picture as a text, and I felt my phone vibrate at the same moment that the junk haulers pushed Helen’s armoire from her second-floor bedroom window. It landed in the back of the dump truck with a crash, forty years of stubborn refusal splintering in the midst of a refuse pile. A red scarf flew up and fluttered as if it were a penalty flag.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. I mean Nicky was practically dead, and he had never looked so good.

One of the junk haulers happened to be nearby, picking up some of the detritus that had missed the back of the truck. He shrugged. “It’s a sickness,” he said. “You can’t read anything into it.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good to know.”

“This is not uncommon,” he said. “Last week we cleared out a storage unit in Columbia that was filled with nothing but used pizza boxes and old newspapers. Thirty-year-old grease and cheese and copies of the Sun dating back to 1952.” The grease had spread everywhere, the junk hauler had said, and the newspapers could have been used as windows.

What could I do? I tut-tutted my response to that evidence of human irrationality, but my mind was elsewhere: Henry’s picture of Nicky… Given that moment of vulnerability—Nicky looking so helpless and innocent in his hospital bed—you probably want to know whether or not I felt any regret for my actions of the past. The answer is, I did. Of course, I did. What functional adult would not feel at least a trace of chagrin? In my case, that chagrin fluttered between an embarrassment of self and a continuation of that decades-long irritation I harbored toward Nicky. No rhyme or reason, just a visceral anger toward the passivity that he had come to represent. How functional is that? Feelings must be felt, but there is no promise of redemption for letting them fester, and here I was: as rotten as ever.

14: A Surprise

By the time I came home from Baltimore, Helen had been moved from the hospital to skilled nursing; she was ordering the staff with something like royal imperiousness, and I was sorry that the pillows had remained beneath her head rather than over it. She had months of physical and occupational therapy ahead of her, and I promised to return when she was ready to move, even if privately I harbored my doubts as to whether that day would ever come. Besides, Kid Sonuvabitch had emptied out her rowhouse to the point where it was little more than a shell, the memory of an environmental disaster fronted by its brick façade. She didn’t know the extent of it yet, but nothing had been saved, and difficult conversations about her losses had yet to be conducted. She would have to begin her collections all over again.

In the meantime, I had called Henry to tell him about Helen and Baltimore and my role as the great de-clutterer. Or, as Helen would see it, The Stepson Who Tore Her Life Apart. The shit hadn’t hit the fan, but it would. Inevitably. The mess would be general, and gratitude would not enter into the equation.

For his part, Henry told me what he knew or didn’t know about the events at Que Sera: “It was a mistake,” he said. “That’s one of the possibilities we’re hearing through the grapevine. A mob hit that targeted the wrong restaurant. They got whackos from LA, who don’t know Fresno from Chowchilla from Merced. They got the right street but the wrong town. Dumb asses. Is there anything more stupid than a dumb criminal?”

“My god,” I said. “Those poor people, all for what? A mistake?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it was all a mistake and a misunderstanding. But what’s worse: a mistake or a deliberate targeting? The other possibility is that there’s someone out there who can’t stand the elderly and the infirm. They were bound and determined to wipe out the equivalent of a nursing home. Why they didn’t just go to Shady Acres to do the job is anybody’s guess. Someone pissed about their sports cars and disposable income? We just don’t know. Besides, these days, who needs a reason?”

What could I say? That the world had gone mad and was not to be recognized as a paradise to be enjoyed? That much seemed like an assumption that needed no examination, and I said so. I also apologized. To him for my thoughtless text on the day after the night before. I truly didn’t know what horrors he had seen, and there I was making a bad joke that didn’t have the saving grace of being funny. “I’m a shithead,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

“I know,” I said. “I was being flip when the circumstances didn’t call for it. For that, I’m sorry.”

Which was when he told me that if not all was forgiven, there would, nonetheless, be a surprise waiting upon my return.

“A surprise? What am I, a third-grader?”

“You’ll see,” he said, but more he would not say.

So, I came home with trouble behind me as well as trouble hovering ahead of me, only to find Nicky Balls and a medical bed in the middle of my bare living room hardwood because Henry, that joker, had a set of keys that he could use to check on the house in my absence, and he also had a jaggedly uneven sense of what might be good for my soul.

“What the hell?” I said, turning to Henry, who had picked me up at the airport sometime after midnight, a gesture that had seemed kind before I knew what it presaged. By the pale light of a pole lamp, I watched Nicky Balls as his chest rose and fell under the sheet. My television had been moved to the foot of his bed, and a giant of a man in a beard and a powder blue medical smock had risen from an arm chair when we opened the front door. “Whose idea was this?”

“Well,” he said. “Think about it this way: you had all this unused room, and Nicky was uninsured. Three-hundred-thousand-plus for two weeks in the ICU. Even heroes need health coverage, no matter what the news reports might say. And you know the old story: better to have insurance than a reputation. But now you’ll have something to tell St. Peter when he asks you to give account. Think about good deeds, think about karma. This,” Henry said, pointing at the medical smock, “is Sally, by the way.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sally. You don’t look like a Sally, but what do I know? Nicky Balls. Karma. Have you installed a family of Lithuanian tumblers in the third bedroom, just to fill out the roster?”

“Funny.”

“Ha, ha. I’m not really laughing. Especially if they’re noisy. The tumblers.”

“No tumblers. Just Nicky Balls.”

“And Sally.”

“And Sally.” He heaved a sigh, Henry did. Too theatrical for my taste, but what did I know? He was the Fairy Kid, and he knew about timing and craft and conversations conducted at cross purposes. “Apropos of nothing, did I tell you I found a new doughnut place?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Save it for another time, no questions asked, and I’ll buy you a maple bar.”

He appeared to be turning over something on his mind.

“You know what Nicky told me, that first day I saw him in the hospital? He told me he had no idea that the Arakelyans were under him or behind him. He was just trying to get away from the bullets, and he just happened to be in the right spot where they were concerned.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, so he’s a reluctant savior. That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Reluctant and embarrassed,” Henry said. “Embarrassed and a little ashamed. For all the attention. All this talk of being a hero.”

“Okay,” I said again, “I get it.” And in that moment, I couldn’t help myself from seeing Helen asleep in her own hospital bed with me sitting beside her, contemplating pillows and best practices.

“Okay,” I said, one last time. “I get it. We’re just two orphans of a kind. Jesus. Me and Nicky Balls. If that don’t beat all. From one hospital room to the next, we’re doing the right thing without intending to and hating every minute.”

Which was when Sally cleared his throat with a rumble to get our attention. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “this is your house. And other than this eyesore of a bed in the middle of your living room, you’ll never know that we’re here. But you’re doing a good thing for another person. That’s all you need to know.”

“If that’s the case,” Henry said, looking away from me, “then it will be for the first time.”

“Hey,” I said. “You know what? I’m standing right here.”

To learn more about David, click on his bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/david-borofka-bio/