The Indestructible Man (18 page)

For some reason, because I am now there, in line, where everything is about to happen, I am sure things will go differently. Carlisle looks up as Linton walks toward the counter and seems unfazed, but when Linton pulls the gun from his waistband and points it at him he sees Linton’s face, remembers my description, and his tan face goes white.

“Holy shit,” he says, standing there with the register wide open.

Linton demands the money, but Carlisle’s hands are shaking too violently, and he fumbles it, dropping a twenty and several smaller bills on the floor. Linton screams at him to pick it up, and Sgt. Russell moves, pushing his way past Mrs. Patterson. As he lunges at Linton I try to grab his arm to pull him out of the way, but I am too slow. A shot echoes through the store and I feel his body quake once, then go limp. My ears ring as I ease him down. I see no blood. Linton stares at me for a moment as if he recognizes me, then cocks the hammer and fires again. The bullet hits my chest with a muffled clang, but the sign holds, its warped metal poking my ribs. I fall backwards into a cartful of Hershey bars, landing flat on my back amid the crinkle of foil wrappers. I hear three more loud pops in front of me, a mad shuffling in the register, Linton’s rubber soles slapping the linoleum as he runs away.

It takes me a minute to realize I have been shot, and another to pull the sign from under my shirt to relieve the pressure from the jutting metal. I look around; when I am sure Linton is gone I call 9-1-1 from the register phone, then kneel over Mrs. Patterson, the knees of my khaki pants soaking up some of the blood pooling underneath her. Her eyes slowly find mine; I tell her I am sorry. I turn my back on the other bodies and try not to look.

The police drag me to the ER, cuff me to my hospital bed for my interrogation and official statement. It is not easy explaining how I knew the store would be robbed, or why I had a metal sign under my shirt; eventually they decide I am simply crazy. I do not argue.

Three hours later
Glynnis
arrives to pick me up. “What were you thinking?” she asks as I button my shirt to go home, a pair of
steri
-strips over my scraped ribs. It is a fair question. It would be perfectly reasonable to let it go, throw up my hands and say I tried. Then I remember Sgt. Russell trying to wrest the gun from Linton, though he was old and probably knew he had no chance.

“Have you lost your mind?”
Glynnis
says in the car on the way home, breaking a ten-minute silence. “You could have gotten killed. You have more important things to worry about, in case you’ve forgotten.”

I do not respond. When we reach a stop sign
Glynnis
looks over at me, her expression softens. “You know there was nothing you could have done, don’t you?”

After we get home she lies next to me for a while, resting her head in the crook of my elbow and staring at me—watching every twitch, every movement, making sure I am all right. But she has been short on sleep for weeks, and before long her breathing slows and I hear her light, airy snore. I close my eyes and drift back once more, determined not to fail again.

2:47 a.m.

When I roll out of bed I kiss
Glynnis’s
shoulder, tell her I’ll be back in a few minutes with ice cream and cookies. I tiptoe across the living room and rummage through the storage closet until I find what I need: the “Fallout Shelter” sign, as yet undamaged; my father-in-law’s old construction helmet, good and thick and heavy, which I once borrowed for a costume party;
Glyniss’s
aluminum softball bat, scratched from age and too many underhand fastballs; and a hunting knife with a six-inch blade that her parents bought me one Christmas, which I have never used. I lash the sign to my chest with an old elastic belt and button my shirt over it, sheathe the knife and tuck it into my back pocket. I picture my showdown with Linton—knocking the gun out of his hands with a lunge of the bat, clipping him in the shin or kneecap, sitting on top of him with the knife at his throat until the police arrive. Above all, I will be patient, I will stay composed, I will not panic, even if things start to go badly.

I pull into the same space as always and stand next to the car to wait, my skin turned to gooseflesh against the cold sign. I tell myself the trembling is from the chill. I catch my dim reflection in the windshield and see how ridiculous I look, a cartoonish vigilante. Somewhere, only a few blocks away now, Linton’s truck is headed toward the store. He is checking his gun, steeling his nerves, trying to decide if this is really worth it.

As the blue pickup coasts into the parking lot I think of
Glynnis
, at home waiting for ice cream, her stomach and breasts swelling under the white sheet. I want to tell him I know who he is, why his pants are bulging, that the register only contains sixty-seven dollars. Instead I climb back into the car, pretend not to notice, drive away before I have no choice.

3:12 a.m.

Glynnis
is sleeping diagonally across the mattress, but lifts her head when the floorboards creak under my feet. I tell her the store was out of pistachio, lie beside her, and wrap my arms around her bare torso, running my hand along the bulge. Leaning close, my lips an inch from her stomach, I whisper an apology to the baby inside, and promise to tell him this story someday, when he is old enough to understand.

“What’s that, honey?”
Glynnis
mumbles.

“Nothing,” I say, and kiss the nape of her neck, a delicate admission that there was nothing I could have done.

A Fear Of Falling

       
As children
we were taught that the moon used to roam free across the night sky, that the vast network of ladders stretching from northeastern Iowa to the middle of Indiana, a spindly bridge binding the moon to the Earth, has not always existed. For years scientists have theorized about its origins and purpose, but you have always preferred legends to science. According to your favorite, a man from a local tribe, who lost his wife and infant son in childbirth, became so grief-stricken that he refused to accept their deaths. He believed the glowing sphere in the darkness was the entrance to heaven, and decided to build a ladder to it so he could retrieve them. He and others in his village worked for years, cutting down whole forests, melting down bracelets and necklaces to supply enough wood and metal to finish the structure. They assembled it from the ground up, constructing a web of catwalks and struts, pushing it higher and higher until they felt the wood touch the dusty lunar soil, anchoring the moon in place. When he finally took the rungs and began to climb, his entire village gathered to watch, prepared to stay for hours, days if necessary, to see him climb down with his wife close behind, the baby under his arm.

       
But he never returned, and no body was ever found to signal his fall. The people of his village decided he must have made it, that heaven was too beautiful to leave. As the news spread, other villages interconnected their own ladders to form a giant wooden web, stretching from the fields of the Midwest all the way into space. People left their homes by the hundreds attempting to follow where the man had gone.

       
I remember watching the first lunar landing on our old black-and-white Zenith, snuggled next to you in a green leather beanbag, your leg twined around mine so your ankle hooked my calf. We watched nervously as the astronaut stepped onto the lunar surface, drew his blocky land rover up to the ladder and checked for footprints. You nearly crushed my hand in yours as you stared into the screen, breathless, hoping he would find evidence that the man from the legend, that
anyone
had made it. But as he looked round the base of the ladder his voice broke over the radio static: “Nothing here,” he said, voice crackling. “No sign of life.”

       
A few years ago you showed me an article from a science magazine claiming that, with proper equipment and a goodly supply of oxygen, it is theoretically possible to climb the ladders all the way up, above the networks of catwalks so vast that airplanes have to plot courses around them, to the final set of rungs that reaches all the way into space. When I laughed, you bet me a hundred dollars someone would eventually make it. Many have tried since then. You followed their progress religiously, checking the paper daily for news of their whereabouts. Most gave up after several thousand feet, angling their way back down to the jeers of onlookers; some were discovered months later, shrouded in remote cornfields, bodies crumpled beneath the overhanging catwalks. Or they lost their nerve, stopping just below cloud level and clinging desperately to one of the ladder struts, only to be pried loose and carried down by the Caretakers who spend their lives patrolling the ladders and crossways. But for every one who falls or is carried down, humiliated and sobbing, over a Caretaker’s shoulder, there are a dozen others determined or maniacal enough to try.

       
Many climb for the sense of adventure, leaving jobs and families behind to scale ladders and catwalks thousands of feet in the air, their concerns reduced to anthills. We used to call them cowards and traitors, and tried to forget them. Some finally descend, telephone their loved ones from truck stops and gas stations hours away, hitchhike back to their lives as if nothing happened at all; others disappear for good. When Fred
Millman
interrupted his morning jog to climb up and away from his wife and children and mortgage, the whole neighborhood spoke of him in whispers, as if he were an adulterer or compulsive gambler. And when the Whisks’ son Eddie dropped out of college to escape into the night sky you insisted we stop speaking of him altogether—out of respect for Edith and Abbott, we agreed—as if he never existed at all.

       
At the newspaper we run a “missing persons” section every Sunday; as I look through the pages I read each snippet and sigh: missing for three years, five, last seen near the ladder in Galena, the one just outside Sycamore—so many names to strike from conversation, almost too many to remember.

       
My fear of heights
is no secret; I cannot stand changing light bulbs or cleaning the gutters—not out of laziness, as you like to suggest, but because I become dizzy and nauseous even at the top of a stepladder. So I have never understood the charm of climbing a ladder many thousands of feet high. The key, you insisted, is to avoid looking down, no matter what—to concentrate only on where you are going, not on where you have been. You found it exciting, even romantic—climbing up into that web of wood and metal against the objections of gravity, not knowing where or even
if
you would come down. In another life, you used to say, if arthritis were not slowly stealing your wrists and ankles, it might even be
you
up there.

       
I should have known I would lose you to it then. Or later, when we stared out our kitchen window to the empty field behind our house, covered in knee-high grass, at the wood and metal struts stretching toward the void above. In the streetlight glow, teenage boys from the high school would pull up to the edge of the field in their beat-up cars, sucking back warm beer bought with fake
ID’s
at Roscoe’s. At first some would stumble across the field, jokingly climb the first few rungs, then jump back down into the grass; others discovered courage after two or three more pop-top cans and begin to climb—ten feet, twenty, a hundred—their friends below urging them to go higher. Usually self-preservation won out and they would reverse direction, hands and feet negotiating each rung with extra care on the way down. But once in a while their good sense did not return, and in the dim orange light we saw figures in sweatshirts and khakis spiral down, land in crumpled heaps in the grass. We used to run out to help, or at least to comfort the panicked children until the ambulance arrived. But it was almost always too late, and we could only watch the paramedics cover the twisted bodies of our town’s children with white cotton sheets, flop them onto stretchers like dead fish, and haul them away.

       
Some want to take chainsaws to the ancient struts and send our town’s ladder crashing to the ground, or douse it with gasoline and set fire to it. They argue that, for our children’s protection, it must be done. But three years ago, during the town meeting to discuss the “ladder problem,” Edith and Abbott Whisk begged us not to destroy it—as long as it stood they could hope that Eddie might climb back down into their lives. It was the first time Eddie’s name had been spoken publicly in years; you cried, and even I held back a tear or two. In the end the town council voted not to tear it down—some grudgingly—to give Edith and Abbott the benefit of the doubt. When the final vote was tallied most sat silently, a few applauded. I was not too misty-eyed to notice you were one of them.