The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Hattie sat up in bed. It was a warm, breezy summer night and she heard the wind soughing in the cottonwoods along the creek behind the house, their stiff, fletched leaves clattering in the usual sound they made, a bit like rainfall, but that was all.

  When he repeated, “Call the police!” she realized that he was in a delusional state, that he was hallucinating. Sundowning. The horror of their situation overtook her.

  “I will,” she said, hoping to placate him. “Just let me find the phone.” She got out of bed and started toward the kitchen.

  “Company, halt!” he barked.

  She halted.

  “Let me go in first.” He held the gun up, two-handed beside his face, the way they did in television shows. She let him lead.

  The kitchen was dark and quiet. Outside the big window the trees tossed in the wind. Suddenly the refrigerator kicked on. He pivoted toward it, taking aim at the magnet-studded door.

  Hattie groped along the counter for the phone. Her mouth was dry and when she spoke she could hardly get enough moisture to say, “Let me turn on the light.”

  “Negative. Ix-nay.” When he was assured that the refrigerator presented no threat, he lowered the gun.

  In the darkness she found the phone but couldn’t think of what to do next.

  “Nine-one-one,” he provided. “Dial nine-one-one. Tell them we’re under siege. I’m going to check the perimeter.” Stepping cautiously around the corner, he moved toward the foyer and the front door.

  Hattie made the call. “Help,” she said when the dispatcher asked what her emergency was. “We need help. My husband has a gun. He thinks there are people trying to get in the house but there aren’t any at all. Nobody’s there. He’s…” She couldn’t find the word.

  “Drunk?” the dispatcher supplied.

  “Well, no, but he…”

  “Are you afraid for your life?”

  “No, he’s just”—at last it came—“imagining.”

  The dispatcher asked some questions and she answered them—her name, what kind of gun, how old was her husband, and would he happen to be the judge who had once presided over the Amicus court?—then the woman said, “Ma’am, I’m sending the police, but they won’t come near the house until the Judge puts down the gun. Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Hattie said. “He went out the front door.”

  “Can you check? I’ll stay on the phone with you.”

  Hattie put down the receiver and went down the hallway to the front door. It was open to the night air and Abel was nowhere to be seen. She crept forward and looked outside. He was in the driveway, sitting in his truck with the driver’s side door open. The alarm was pinging. By the dome light he was checking the magazine. She went back to report to the dispatcher.

  “Do you have another door you can get out?”

  Hattie tried to think. The house had five outside doors but she couldn’t summon their names or think of where she was in relation to them. Finally she was able to say, “Yes, the back patio.”

  “Then you should try to get out and go to a neighbor’s house.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Hattie told her. “I couldn’t leave him alone. He’s not himself.”

  “Ma’am,” the dispatcher said patiently, “you have to save your own life. If your husband…”

  Just then Abel appeared in the doorway. “For crying out loud, tell them to step on it.”

  The dispatcher had heard him. “Ma’am, put your husband on the line, please. You need to move toward the nearest door.”

  Hattie had no intention of leaving the house, leaving him, but she held the phone toward Abel. “They want to talk to you.”

  He eyed her suspiciously, but then he took the phone and said into it, “State your business.” After a time during which the dispatcher spoke, he said, “I will most certainly not.”

  Again the dispatcher spoke, and Abel replied, “I sat on the bench here for years. I suppose I know police procedure in this town.” He put down the phone and held out the gun, butt first, to Hattie. “I’m handing it over to my wife right now.” To Hattie he explained, as though she didn’t know it, “The police are outside, down the driveway, but they won’t come any closer unless this is out of the way. Put it in my top drawer.” She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to have come back to the world, or at least to be nearing its outskirts.

  She took the gun, handling it as she would a snake, and went down the hall to his back room and placed it in his drawer. She was on her way back to the kitchen when she heard voices at the front door. Abel was greeting three uniformed officers and telling them about the siege.

  A young officer entered behind the others, having checked out the house and yard. “Intruders appear to be gone now, Judge.”

  “And it’s a damned good thing,” Abel remarked. “I wasn’t sure how long I could have stood them off.” He peered at the lead officer. “What’s your name, son? You look familiar.”

  “I’m Clay Ramsay, sir. Geneva and Tom’s oldest boy.”

  “Well, Clay, did you ever stand before me on a charge?”

  “No, sir, but my kid brother did. Rex?”

  “Rex Ramsay. A DUI, if I recall. Nineteen ninety-eight?”

  Clay Ramsay’s eyebrows went up and he cocked his head quizzically. “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  “Well, I hope he’s straightened himself out.”

  “He has, sir. Has two little girls.”

  The two men fell to talking, with the officer complimenting Abel on his quick thinking and good instincts. He fed Abel questions that allowed him to reminisce about his days on the bench and old times on the police force. Even Hattie could tell that Clay Ramsay was patronizing him, using psychology on him to get him to soften up, but Abel seemed unaware. He was happy and talkative, eager to contribute. He told his story about the outlaw El Ray Brady, dumbest criminal in Amicus, who stole a flatbed truck and took the time to change its paint color but didn’t switch out the license plates before letting his teenage kid drive it down Hale Haven Avenue for the homecoming parade, carrying a load of football players and the cheer squad. Hattie had heard him tell the story many times. By and by Ramsay worked the conversation around to guns. “I’ll bet you have a fine collection,” he said.

  Abel took the bait. “I do, indeed.” He listed his guns, and when Ramsay said he’d love to see them, Abel led him down the hall to the cabinet.

  “Glad to see you keep these locked up,” Ramsay said. “Where’s the one you had earlier?”

  Abel opened his top drawer to reveal the gun, which lay where Hattie had placed it.

  “May I?” Ramsay asked, indicating that he’d like to pick up the piece.

  “Be my guest,” said Abel. “Got that one in a manslaughter case twenty years ago. Police relieved the slaughterer of his weapon and I bid on it at the auction. Nice weight and a neat little grip.”

  Ramsay took an appreciative look at the gun and then handed it off to another officer, presumably so he, too, might inspect it, but Hattie saw the second officer open the magazine and unload it. “A fine piece,” Ramsay said to Abel, drawing Abel’s attention away by pointing toward the gun cabinet. “Do you think I could see the others?”

  Abel nodded, taking the key from his ring. He opened the case wide to show the glistening firearms. A whiff of 3-in-One oil filled the room. Ramsay said, “Judge, you know that after a call like this we have to take these in, don’t you? Just to run them. Routine procedure.”

  Abel deflated. Hattie saw his hard fall back to reality. She saw, too, that he was exhausted. He merely stood aside while the officers removed the guns from the cabinet and carried them out. She stepped forward and took him by the arm. “Let’s get back to bed, dear,” she suggested, and for the first time in their married life he let himself be led.

  * * *

  Standing at the kitchen sink, feeling spongy and blurred from so little sleep, Hattie blinked hard to trick herself into staying awake. It was late afternoon, the b
lue hour, and the day had been miserable. She didn’t want to think about what happened in the night any longer. It was too big and too awful. She needed to put her mind on something—anything—else. So what was there? Any light spots in the day? Well, ClairBell had called. Hattie had tried to listen to what her daughter was saying, taking care to be attentive so as not to get on her bad side, but after they hung up she could barely remember a word the girl had said. Some grand plan for a birthday party.

  Outside the windows a gray lady cardinal splashed in the birdbath until her swift, bright mate swooped down and startled her into flight. Hattie watched for a time as the two birds stitched the air, the male chasing the female from the box elder to the Japanese maple, squabbling as they flew, until at last they darted into the honeysuckle bower. On the grass below, the neighbor’s cat toyed with a garter snake or maybe a mouse, crouching and twitching and pouncing like a mad victor. No matter which sight her gaze fell upon, she thought, the message was the same. She was the lady bird, she was the garter snake, she was the mouse, and something bigger and faster and fiercer was deviling her and it was no contest—she would lose.

  She felt alone and weary. She knew she should think about starting supper but she was at a loss as to what to prepare that would please Abel, who wasn’t speaking to her because of what had happened in the night.

  She wondered, as she had often wondered throughout this hot and seemingly endless solstice day, if she should call Doro to alert her to the trouble. A call could be a good thing and it could be a bad thing—with Doro it was hard to predict. She might laugh it off or she might mobilize and upset everybody’s apple cart and things would get even more haywire. Changes would come. Bad changes.

  To untangle the thoughts that snarled in her mind, she left behind the problem of supper and went down the hall to the guest room. She turned on the television set. She tried to select a program but the array of choices was too daunting and so she left the channel where it was. She closed the door to dampen the noise from Abel’s television in the next room. From the sound of things, he was watching another RFD-TV show about horses. Lately he’d been consumed with regret at having used a Spanish bit to train the horse he’d had as a boy. He watched any show about horses he could find, shaking his head mournfully, considering their beauty, nobility, and his own unwitting cruelty. He was taking it hard. He was wallowing. She wished she had the time to wallow.

  She sat in her platform rocker, put her feet on the stool and started a gentle glide to calm herself. She drew a deep breath and rested her head. As they always had, thoughts of Billy presented themselves the minute she closed her eyes. She tried to will them away; the problem to be dealt with was Abel. But—really—she didn’t want to think about him, either.

  Since making her decision to favor her husband over her son, since praying to be changed, she had thought more than once that it might have been the most impossible promise, the most impossible request she’d ever made. It wasn’t that easy to banish her worry for Billy, but she had tried. Sometimes she wondered which of the two would outlast the other. She imagined that Abel would go first—that would be the natural order—but you never knew. All she was certain about was that something had to give.

  In her darkest times she worried that what gave might be her own injured heart, beating stalwartly beneath her chest. Sometimes a sharp pain pierced her and it felt as if a fist were there inside her, gripping. Change me, she’d prayed, but she’d meant change her heart, not stop it from beating. What if He’d thought she meant that? Oh, she was so confused. She didn’t know what to do.

  Abel was a good man and she didn’t want to betray him by telling Doro what had happened with the gun. He’d been a good husband despite his, oh, what would she call them? Not faults, exactly, just his way of being, which could be prickly and demanding. The way he argued with her about everything. Ever since their wedding day he’d teased her about heaven. She had staked her soul on its existence, but he delighted in taking her notions apart. “How do you know?” he’d ask her, looking at her over the top of his glasses, grinning in his sly way, the better to bedevil her. If she cited scripture, he’d find a patch that contradicted it. When she recited the Apostle’s Creed, with its “He ascended into heaven,” Abel countered with scholarship that dated the creed’s origin in the fifth century. “God did not write the Bible,” he would remind her, and this would infuriate her. She knew that. But He had inspired it, she was certain. “Define ‘inspire,’” Abel would challenge, and their back-and-forth would go on until she was flustered and angry and she wanted to throw his biggest Isaac Asimov book at his hard head.

  She had promised to love, honor, and obey. Love was easy, honor was a matter of habit, but obey was getting harder and harder. As his disease advanced, he had made increasingly ridiculous decrees, decrees that were out of character. One day in late spring just after her trip to the Gypsum Hills he decided they would trade in the Skylark for a new Camry. They would pay cash. Up to the dealership they went and a few hours later came home in a brand-spanking-new car they didn’t have the slightest use for. Hattie hadn’t liked the salesman, who had no doubt seen them coming—two elderly rubes ripe for the bilking. The man had even let them take the car off the lot to drive back home to get the checkbook they’d forgotten—but Abel was intent and wouldn’t see that they were being manipulated. A few days later he wanted to redeem the Krugerrands he’d stockpiled and use the money to plant a peach orchard on the front acres. A legacy, he’d said, a memorial to his father, who’d grown peaches. She’d indulged him far enough to call the nursery and place an order for a tree catalogue, though she well knew that a peach orchard was a fool’s errand, as a salt seep from the oil wells around town had ruined all the other orchards many years before. He gave the five children, even Billy, out of the blue and no holiday in sight, a thousand dollars apiece. She’d gone along with this, of course. She was glad to help the children, especially Billy, but if they spent all their savings how would she live when Abel was gone? As it was, they got by on Social Security and the service disability benefit from his back injury. Abel had always been terrible with finances, and it was only through her economizing and an inheritance from her father that they’d put aside anything at all. She tried to be a good wife and go along, to let him be the man of the house. He was happier that way, and his happiness was the key to keeping the peace. That and being careful not to bring Billy’s problems before him. She tried harder than before to stop herself from mentioning Billy in passing, even refraining to suggest that Abel might want to wear one of Billy’s old but still beautiful ties to church on Sunday. She was surprised by how many times in a day it occurred to her to say her son’s name.

  On and on her mind wandered and she didn’t even try to stop it. Let it blow where it listed. Billy or Abel, Abel or Billy, it hardly mattered. But Abel: an old understanding about the way he behaved when a new baby came returned. He’d acted like an old lion, stalking around the house, eyeing the babies. He didn’t pick them up unless, desperate, she thrust one at him. He hardly seemed to notice them until they were in middle childhood, and she supposed that was when he had won them over and made them idolize him, at least for a while. He became their big, rowdy playmate, sitting cross-legged on the floor with them and watching Looney Tunes or Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. He led them in raucous games, letting them sled behind his motorcycle as he rode along a country road, building an igloo from snow blocks and a cardboard card table, encouraging them to slide down the antenna pole. One winter when they’d lived in Chicago he’d emptied the gunpowder out of the rifle shells he’d saved from the war, made a line of powder along a snowy sidewalk, and then lit a match. When the police arrived he informed them they had no physical evidence, as the blast had melted the snow and consumed the residue. He thought that was hilarious. He built a go-cart with a lawn mower engine and let the children race it on the road that led to the water treatment plant. Next to the swimming pool he built a cabana with a roof that
slanted upward so the boys could ride skateboards into the deep end. And those awful motorcycles. It was a wonder no one had been killed. Much of his behavior, she had decided, was because he wanted to remain a boy, free of the bonds of reality, and there rose in her a feeling—she couldn’t quite name it—that felt a little like resentment, but also a little like pride. She had managed to live with this man, to love him, and that was saying something. She had grit.

  The word grit reminded her of poor Billy. In a dim basement apartment that smelled of grime and matted carpet and his massage oils, of the vanilla-scented candles he set around. He had hopes of setting up a practice, but of course they were doomed. In the first place, he had no license, and in the second place, he’d never stuck with anything for long. To help with rent, he’d found a roommate. Who knew where they’d met. Hattie was afraid to ask, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, as she doubted that he would be a very good influence. His name was Haskell and he reminded her of a hairy little pirate, or maybe a wolf spider—his short legs and arms were covered in thick black hair, and he made abrupt, aggressive movements. He had bad teeth, an odd metallic smell, like burnt plastic, and tattoos he showed off by wearing muscle shirts. A skull and crossbones on his forearm. Some kind of serpent’s tail peeking out from his shirt neck. On one shoulder a Christian fish symbol. She couldn’t square the fish with his sneaky, jerky way of moving and the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes when she went uptown to help with one thing or another. Strangest of all, he had a family, a wife and two little boys who lived nearby. She had no idea why Billy had taken up with him, much less why a married man was sharing an apartment with Billy. Probably they had some kind of financial arrangement, but she couldn’t be sure and she was afraid to ask. But she knew she didn’t like him.

  Often she thought wistfully of Billy’s better years, when he was with Leo. Though the situation had been hard to get used to at first, they’d had a quiet life in Albuquerque in a lovely house near the grand cottonwoods of the Bosque, with vigas and a kiva and heated tile floors. They’d traveled to Europe, New Zealand, Peru. Those had been good times, and she had prayed they would last. While in Albuquerque he graduated summa cum laude from UNM with an art history degree and he’d undergone hip replacement surgery. She’d traveled to be there for both events, the graduation and the surgery, and she nursed him through his recovery. He’d stayed sober even through that ordeal and she’d been relieved that he was cured of his addiction. Then out of the blue he’d relapsed, and Leo had finally left.