The Emperor of Any Place (32 page)

Her face is actually kind of sweet. Or it was, anyway. It’s sort of sour now.
Which is funny,
he thinks,
because she chose the sweet and sour dipping sauce.

“It’s not like a social comment or anything,” he says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, yeah, I’ve got a ton of stuff on my mind, but I’m having a good time.”

Her hands slowly extricate themselves and slide away along the Formica tabletop, to fall off the edge and disappear into her lap. She looks down at two sad, cold Chicken McNuggets.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Really, I mean it. Bree?”

She looks up and now there’s an actual tear in her eye. “It’s Kira,” she says.

Oh!
That’s
it! She thinks I’m pining over some other girl. Then he looks more closely at her face, at her offended eyes, and he realizes that Kira is
her
name.

Evan finds the back door locked. He hasn’t a key. He never carries one anymore, since his father retired. This is yet another habit to unlearn. He pulls out his phone. It’s almost eleven. He drove Kira home in silence. Then at her place, she smiled, really nicely, his slipup forgiven. “When I get back, maybe you can tell me what’s going on.” Her voice was different. She’d dropped the date voice. He liked how she sounded. “I’m going to do that,” he said. “Kira.” She laughed, and her laugh was definitely an eight this time. He looks at the house and thinks how it might be good to see her again. When she gets back from camp. Assuming he survives.

He peeks through the kitchen door — the curtain’s not quite closed; the kitchen is empty. He cranes his neck. His amp is gone. So is his guitar. He remembers Griff telling him about breaking all of Clifford’s records. Evan remembers how the old man had relished telling him that.

There’s a light on in the hall beyond the kitchen door. He knocks. No answer. He swears to himself. Knocks louder. Nothing.
The grump must be downstairs watching TV,
he thinks. Listens. Hears nothing.

Shit.

Two thoughts tumble over one another. He’s gone. He’s dead. He tries to imagine finding another dead body in the house. He remembers firemen lumbering through the place. He wonders if they’re going to be as supportive this time. I mean how many dead bodies can you report in one month before somebody gets suspicious?

So, does that mean he’s gone? Will there be a letter on the table?

Dear Evan,

I’ve gone. Fend for yourself, you ingrate.

Yours affectionately,

Grandpa Griff

How great would that be? But he knows it can’t be true. Griff never runs away, never backs off. And now it’s late and dark, and all of Evan’s misgivings are back like a bevy of ghosts huddling way too close.

He shakes them off and goes around to the front door; tries it. Locked. He rings the bell. Holds his finger on it, getting angrier and angrier.

He needs to pee. He should have gone at McDonald’s.

“What is this?” he says to no one. Some lesson he’s supposed to learn? Never trust anyone. He looks through the side window: the front hall is shadowy — the light he saw from the back door was from the upstairs hall, dimly illuminating the stairs. He steps back, out onto the front lawn, and looks up. There is only one other light on, the one in his father’s bedroom.

Evan looks next door at the Guptas’ house. There are no lights on. It’s after eleven now. He could go there, anyway. They’d take him in, no questions asked. Well, no, not exactly; there would be questions asked, questions he doesn’t have the answer to.

There are lights on at the Reidingers’, as well, but the only light he cares about right now is the one in his father’s room. He gets a lump in his throat. How many times has he come home late — way later than this — to see that light on? And it was never like he was in trouble, even if he’d missed curfew. It was just that his dad couldn’t sleep until Evan was home and safe. This was different. His dad always left the front porch light on for him, the door unlocked.

Shit!

He runs around to the back garden, opens and closes the gate. Looks around and then pees in the begonias. Or are they petunias? Are these the flowers Rachel Cope just did something to?

Shit!

Okay, that’s taken care of. Now what?

He could phone, he thinks, but if Griff hasn’t heard the doorbell, what are the chances he’ll hear the phone? And then he remembers, finally, that there is a spare key. Of course! In the days when Evan was a latchkey kid with a working single parent, there were the occasional times he forgot his key. He goes back to the carport and locates a jar of nails on a shadowy worktable in the back corner. The key is in there. He pricks his finger on a nail.
Serves me right,
he thinks.

He heads toward the back door. Stops, turns around. Sees the aluminum baseball bat in the corner of the carport gleaming with a smear of streetlight. Shakes his head.
I’m not going there,
he tells himself.
This is
not
a military operation.

He unlocks the door and steps into the kitchen. The kettle stands glistening in reflected light from the hall. The old man had brought a shine back to its greasy sides. He couldn’t stop at just the toaster.
There’s no stopping him,
thinks Evan. The idea fails to lighten his mood. He crosses the kitchen and listens at the entranceway. The light above the stairwell down to the rec room is off. Maybe Griff has retired early and just left the light on upstairs. After doing what?

He climbs the stairs, his hand too tight on the railing. Silent on the broadloom, he reaches his father’s open bedroom door. Griff sits on the far side of the double bed, his back to the doorway, seemingly unaware of Evan’s presence. Evan checks this time. There is no mirror or darkened window in front of Griff — no way to see Evan’s reflection. Besides, the old man is leaning over something in his lap. Evan waits, holds his breath, his hand on the doorjamb, prepared to push himself off and bolt.

“Are you just going to stand there?”

Must be Spidey sense.

“How’d you know I was here?” says Evan.

“I can smell you, boy. Smell the fear.”

Evan goes very still. There’s a bed between them — between him and a ninety-year-old man. He could take the car. Get the hell out of Dodge. Or he could reconsider violence — go to his room and get that walrus penis bone and put it to good use.

But, no. No violence. Not here in his father’s room. And the bottom line is he’s not going anywhere. He’s not the one trespassing.

“What are you doing?”

Griff turns his head but only so that it is in profile. “I was looking for something.”

“What?”

“Something your father took, when he left home.”

“He took a backpack with a few clothes in it.”

“Was that what he told you? Is that the fable he spun?”

Evan doesn’t speak. He can feel the old man lifting the hammer of a mousetrap, bending it back against the pull of the spring. “He didn’t tell you about the money, did he?” says Griff. Now he’s folding the hold-down bar over the hammer, setting the cheese in place. “It was money we kept in a coffee tin for emergencies.”

“He did tell me. What was it, fifty bucks?”

“It’s still theft.”

“So you want the fifty dollars back?”

Griff snorts. “Don’t be a damn fool.”

Evan waits. Gets his feet firmly underneath him. Makes fists of his hands. He’s ready to smash his hand down on that mousetrap just to hear it snap!

Whatever the old man has up his sleeve, Evan is not going to get fooled into losing his shit. He takes a deep breath. Waits. Hears a clicking sound.

“There was one other thing,” says Griff.

“Something Dad took.”

“Something of mine.” Now he turns his head enough to look at Evan. “Well?”

Well, what, shithead?
But Evan knows exactly what he means. Can he resist asking? Can he resist knowing what it is that Griff is talking about — maybe even holding in his lap?

He steps into the room, stops. Waits. “Did you find it?” he says at last.

Griff nods. Then jerks his head in a come-here motion.

Evan doesn’t move.

“Are you going to take all day?”

Evan cautiously circles the bed and stops five feet from his grandfather.

Which is when he sees the gun.

He gasps but doesn’t move. The gun is in the old man’s lap, held lightly in his right hand. It’s an old-fashioned pistol with a wooden handle and a black barrel about three inches long.

This was not here! My father did not have a gun in this house!

“It’s a Nambu,” says Griff. He lifts it slightly for Evan to see, and Evan immediately steps back. Griff grins, turns it a bit so that the flat black barrel catches dull glints of lamplight. “A Type fourteen,” he says. “They were issued by the Japanese army to every NCO — that’s noncommissioned officer. Oh, sorry. I know you don’t like me using military terms.”

He glances up at Evan again, and in the lamp-shaded light, his eyes seem rheumy, glazed over.
Not tears,
thinks Evan.
Something else — some disease that clouds the eyes of the very old.
It makes him look more monstrous than ever.

“It’s a semiautomatic,” says Griff, his voice quiet but firm. “Takes a clip of six.” He does something quick with his hands, and the bottom of the stock opens; a slender magazine falls out into his left palm. He holds it up. It’s empty of bullets, as far as Evan can tell. He realizes suddenly that he has stopped breathing. It occurs to him it might be a good idea to start again.

“You’re lying,” he says.

Griff shakes his head.

“Why would my father steal a gun?”

“Maybe he had plans for it.”

“You mean using it? I don’t think so.”

Griff looks up at him, and there is something like begrudging respect in his eyes. “You’re right,” he says. “He’d have never had the guts to shoot me.”

Evan has the overwhelming feeling he should not be here. The message is very clear in his head, a flashing light going on and off, sirens wailing — the whole early warning system of firing neurons working perfectly, except for the part about getting the message to his legs. He is transfixed. That little black gun, even without any bullets in it, even without being aimed at him, has him in its grasp, more strongly than Griff ’s hand on his wrist the night before. It’s a kind of seizure. And from the look on Griff ’s face, he knows it.

“He took the gun because it was something I prized,” Griff says. “That’s why. Something small enough to carry that would inflict the maximum amount of pain on his old man. That’s what a handgun does, doesn’t it?”

“That’s crazy.”

“I agree. Your father, the pacifist, packing heat.”

Evan can’t take his eyes off the gun.
Nambu.
Is that what Griff called it? The name rings a bell.

“I took him once to the range when he was old enough. Couldn’t hit a damn thing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That your father was a lousy shot?”

“No, not that — him stealing the gun. It’d be crazy. How would he ever get it across the border?”

“Dumb luck, I guess.”

“No way! He wouldn’t have risked it. Anyway, he didn’t believe in war. The last thing he would have wanted was to be caught with something like that.”

“He was a naive boy,” says Griff. “He’d never been anywhere near an international border. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about customs officials. Anyway, back then security was lax. Canada wasn’t yet considered a hotbed of terrorists. ‘Canuckistan,’ as someone once called this home of yours.”

Griff seems to find this funny. “Anyway, faced with some scruffy-haired, pimply no count of a boy, the customs folks were probably looking for drugs, if anything.”

Evan shakes his head. “Dad hated guns. I wasn’t even allowed to play with toy guns.”

Griff nods, then he fixes Evan with a look as sharp as a spear. “Pity,” he says. “But you are right, he did hate guns. Lectured me on the subject a time or two. But you see, he hated me more.”

That message of alarm in Evan’s head is making its way to his limbs at last, carried by a mule train of neurotransmitters, a slow seeping of electrochemical charge. He inches to the side.

“You think I brought it with me, then?” says Griff. Evan stops. “You think that’s how this got here? Like I was going to plant it, or something?” Evan doesn’t say anything. “Have you traveled by airplane lately, son?”

Evan shakes his head.

“That much is obvious.”

Evan slides another inch to his left.
Just fucking run,
the voice in his head says. But Griff is squinting at him now, as if he can hear the alarms going off. “He never showed you, did he?” Evan shakes his head. “Never bragged about it — getting one over on his old dad?”

Evan just keeps shaking his head, and Griff smiles a nasty, triumphant kind of smile. “A man could write volumes about the things you don’t know, son.”

Griff shoves the magazine home, clicks it into place. Weighs the heft of the gun in his hand. “And speaking of volumes,” he says, “I gather there’s one you’ve been dipping into lately.”