Iron River

21

To my surprise, Uncle Chester is standing in front of my third-floor desk. For a huge man, he’s always been quiet, and he’s staring down at me before I can even guess why he’s here. He’s wearing his usual unstructured cream linen suit, wrinkled and world weary. Blue dress shirt, no tie.

“Ronald.”

“Uncle Chester. Terrific to see you.”

“If you say so.”

I stand and come around and we hug. He feels unnaturally strong. With my arms around him, my hands won’t even come close to touching. As always he smells of baby powder. When I was growing up, it was said that Chester had once crushed a two-hundred-pound mastiff that had attacked him without provocation outside a camp-ground bathroom in the Sequoias. I have no reason to doubt it and I can feel that he could do the same to me here right now if he wanted to.

He lets me live and I step back. I haven’t seen him in over a year, since just before the judgment that finally flattened Pace Arms. He has never changed: same overlarge body, same shiny shaven head, same blue eyes, same baby-skin face with the pink blossoms on his cheeks, same trim white teeth. If I paint him as a grotesque, he is not quite. There is something leonine about him, something graceful and powerful and feral. He might be twenty-five or seventy. There’s just no way to tell by looking. I know him to be fifty-two, two years younger than his brother, my father, would be, and four years older than my mother, whom Uncle Chester married a year after my father’s suicide. Dad committed the act here at Pace Arms while seated at firing station two, down in the basement, using the same model Pace Hawk.40-caliber autoloader that would later discharge and kill eight-year-old Miles Packard when he dropped the gun while playing with it.

I move a good chair into place for him.

“I didn’t come halfway around the world to sit down.”

“We can stand.”

“Let’s stand in manufacturing.”

We take the elevator down. Uncle Chet stands with his hands folded before him and his head bowed and his eyes closed. He takes up more than half the space in the elevator car.

“I enjoy familiar sensations,” he says. “Your mother says hello. She’s stable as she can be, it seems.”

“She likes the new room.”

“I’m glad it makes her happy. It destroys me to see her like she is. Literally destroys.”

Which makes me wonder if that’s why he’s been gone for over a year. My mother, Maureen, was institutionalized not long after Miles accidentally killed himself. She’s a 295.30-paranoid-type schizophrenia, episodic with interepisode residual symptoms. She is only occasionally violent and twice suicidal. The doctors said that the boy’s death probably contributed to her sudden break, but they couldn’t say how much. Certainly she had already been destabilized by my father’s act. As if all that wasn’t enough, there is also a lineage of madness in her family. Chester said that she died when Miles died, that it just took a little time to become apparent. He said this often. Mom started out at a nice private sanitarium in Tustin, but with the death of Pace, Chester had her committed to a group home run by Fairview State Hospital here in Costa Mesa. It’s not a grim place, and she has her own room. Through longevity she recently graduated to the best and largest room in the home, first floor, corner windows, southwest exposure. The window glass is reinforced with steel mesh.

“I see her twice a week,” I say.

“Of course you do.”

We step out and I key us into the manufacturing bay. Chester holds his small hands together behind his back and strolls. This was a posture I imitated during my head-of-production days and I feel compelled to use it now. I fall in beside him. He moves down and around the long tables, towering over them, looking down at the wheeled chairs, the task lights and the table magnifiers, the power buffers and grinders, the trays of hand tools, the piles of new red shop rags, one per work station, the spray cans of oil and solvent, the bins of pins and bolts and springs and all parts machined, the files and tweezers, needle-nose pliers and nylon hammers, the waterless hand soap and the unempty ashtrays and the coffee mugs.

He stops. He wipes an index finger across the worktable and shows me the gray metal dust. He wipes his finger on a clean shop rag, then picks up a coffee cup and holds it upside down over the floor and waits. It takes a few seconds, but finally one milk-heavy drop of coffee rolls to the rim and hangs there.

“What are you making?” he asks.

“It’s called the Love 32.”

“I asked what are you making.”

“It’s a thirty-two-caliber full auto pistol, silenced. I’ll show you.” Down in the basement range, I pull out the lacquered box and unveil the Love 32. Uncle Chester sits at station five. He’s nearly my height when sitting. I assemble the gun. His blue eyes watch without blinking. His petite hands rest on his massive thighs, and his head is cocked. He has the same stillness that I remember. I release the brace rods and set them at full length though I know they won’t be long enough. I leave off the noise suppressor for now. I hand him the gun.

The last person to occupy his seat was of course Sharon, and I think of her sitting there with the peanut butter-filled pretzels sliding off her lap, and her sad beautiful face hidden behind her tangled blond hair. Right now she’s on break, off to South Coast Plaza for lunch with her mom and dad. She’s better. She has slept nine straight nights in the penthouse. That’s every night but one since her wedding day. During her one night of absence, I couldn’t sleep but I didn’t ask her about it. I don’t know what she does at night in the penthouse after I leave. I hear her lock the door after we’ve talked and watched TV or sometimes read. She sleeps late. But during her workdays, she has shampooed two stories of carpets, replaced the plastic electrical outlet faceplates with more fashionable models, purchased cheap but attractive framed photographs and area rugs for the vestibule that once held the Catlins and the mounted bear and buffalo, painted the bathrooms on the second and third floors, and replaced every bulb of recessed lighting with the new fluorescent minis that she found on sale at fifty cents each through a power company promotion. She has the energy of a.44 Magnum. Even without measurable evidence, I believe she will invite me to join her in my bed soon, and the idea of this momentarily obliterates Chester ’s presence in my world.

When I become aware of him again, he’s holding the Love 32 in both hands, lightly, as if it might be hot or very delicate. He gently hefts it for weight. He removes from his handkerchief pocket a small tool which he applies to the gun. In a few seconds the thing is in parts on the bench, fully decomposed by Chet’s precise fingers. He examines the parts where they lie. He rearranges them slightly. He could be divining the future. He becomes still again and ponders. Then from a brief entanglement of fingers and tool and parts, the Love 32 emerges whole again, fitted into Chet’s hand.

I hang a silhouette and send it out fifty feet, and Chester steps to the firing line with the machine pistol. His appearance there is the polar opposite of Sharon ’s. Whereas Sharon standing there with the Love 32 was one of the most beautiful visions I have ever had, Chester with the same gun and standing at the same firing line looks only menacing. He stands the line sideways rather than face-on, and rather than using his left hand to brace the gun against muzzle rise, he curls it behind his back like a fencer, his whale strength superior to that of any machine gun he’s ever fired, or so he has told me. He fires the five-second burst with the barrel so steady that the group in the middle of the torso is no larger than a softball.

He lowers the gun and turns to me. “The run?”

“One thousand.”

“Shifts?”

“One. Our best people only.”

“Customer?”

“Private security firm, Paris, France -Favier and Winling.”

“Price per?”

“Nine hundred.”

“That pains me. More to come?”

“A thousand maybe.”

“How long until delivery?”

“Eight days. Ten.”

“I assume this is all off the books. No contract, no permits, no licenses. Cash payments to suppliers and labor, no taxes, no ATFE.”

“That’s right.”

“And no serial numbers on the guns.”

“Right again.”

“Ron?”

“Yes.”

“I’m somewhat proud of you. Reload it and put on the silencer.”

I screw on the noise suppressor and click in a fresh magazine. He fires left-handed this time, the group slightly looser than before. The bullets tap through the paper and patter against the sandbags two hundred feet away. Chester looks back at me, then past me. His smile is, as always, disturbing. I turn to see Sharon standing behind the partial wall of Plexiglas that fronts the spectators’ area. She comes around it and down to the stations. She frowns at me, then trains her eyes on Chester still at the firing line. She’s wearing a sleeveless white lace top and black trousers and nonsensible shoes. Her hair is swept up over her ear on one side and falls freely on the other.

“Hello, Mr. Pace,” she says to Chet.

Chester turns and faces her with all his mass, the machine pistol dangling from his left hand. “ Sharon. I have never in my life seen you so beautiful.”

She looks at me, then back to him. “Well, thanks. Sorry. I saw the light on my camera console and wondered what was going on down here.”

“Join us for lunch,” says Chester.

“I just had lunch,” says Sharon.

“We need your participation on a key front.”

She hesitates, cuts a look at me.

“We do,” I say.

She nods unhappily.

I get Chinese delivered and we set the little white boxes out on a card table in the third-floor conference room. We sold off the conference room furniture months ago, but last week Sharon presciently purchased a folding card table and four chairs. They are miniaturized by the big room and the tremendous size of Uncle Chester, who stands because the chairs are too small to support him. He cups a box in one hand and works the chopsticks with the other, a paper napkin tucked into his dress shirt and spread across a very small portion of his chest. I see the distress on Sharon ’s face.

“First things first,” says Chester. “We need to raise the price per unit. Our design is simple and efficient. The materials are sound. The gun performs well. We will not sell it for that price.”

“It’s been contracted at that price,” I say.

“There is no contract. There is only our word, and our word can be changed. Offer an incentive for an early commitment to the next thousand units. I suggest three percent off the renegotiated price of twelve-fifty. Next, we will renegotiate the cost of the sound suppressors separate from the gun. This feature is worth far, far more on the world market than you have guessed, Ronald, and good business is never guesswork. Believe me, your buyer is cackling to himself over the deal he’s made with you. I do not enjoy the sound of that cackling. Now, with the design work complete and some start-up capital coming in, we need to produce in much larger quantities. In spite of what you may have heard, fortunes are not made one penny at a time. They are made hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. True opportunity does not whisper. It screams. We must answer it loudly. Sharon, this is where you come in. We need to contact all of our former like-minded customers. By like-minded I mean anyone who might be interested in such a clean, dependable, and value-priced killing instrument. We have designed a beautiful thing. There is nothing like it in the world, at such a price. The market out there is vast, I promise. I’ve seen it this last year. Our world is a different place than it was when I began with Pace Arms back in 1978. It’s even different than it was a short five years ago when you came to work for me, Ronald, and you, Sharon. Our world has blossomed. It has matured. It is famished for something like the Love 32. Sharon, you must find the people who need us. They are legion. It’s time you move from the reception desk to marketing and sales. Your salary will be increased commensurate with your performance. You can accumulate wealth, Sharon. You can do this job.”

She shakes her head and stands. Her face is calm, but I can see the anger in her eyes. “No. I can’t and I won’t. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

She marches from the conference room and lets the door huff shut behind her.

Chester stares at the path of her departure, then at me. “Fire her or I will.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“Yes, you will. Is there a chance she’ll take one with her and try to sell the design as vengeance?”

“She wouldn’t do that.”

“Would she contact the authorities?”

“She’s completely trustworthy.”

Chet considers the door through which Sharon had gone, then turns back to me. “Consider the best ways to implement the other orders I’ve just given you, Ron. You have much to learn. I’ll be in close touch.”

With this, Uncle Chester sets his tub of pork and his napkin on the card table and places the chopsticks on the napkin.

I walk him to the elevator and ride down. No words, just the faint smell of baby powder and gun smoke and Szechuan pork. He keeps half a step ahead of me across the first-floor lobby and he pushes through the doors and into the soft Orange County sunshine without looking back.

Sharon is at her desk, aggressively tapping away on the keyboard. She does this when she’s angry, much as Mom used to slam pots and pans around in the kitchen.

I stand there and she glances at the security monitors on her desk. “Here’s what I think,” she says. “I think he can’t march back in here and take over. The Love 32 is yours. This buyer is yours. You’ve kept the doors open here for a year while he’s been out in the world doing, truly, God knows what. You pay his taxes on this place. Pace Arms is yours as far as I’m concerned. I want that man out of here. ‘We have designed a beautiful thing.’ You designed it, Ron. Not him.”

“He owns the building and the fixtures. He owned the company.”

“Owned. There wouldn’t be anything left if it weren’t for you. I won’t let you give this away, Ron. You’ve worked too hard for it.”

“Mind if I sit?”

“Please do.”

“Coffee?”

“Sure.”

I pour coffees and make hers as she likes it, cream and sugar. I pull up a reception chair close to her desk and sit.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“He knows. He’s going to take over the deal and take over the company.”

“I see that.”

“I will not work for him.”

“Why not?”

Sharon continues to look at me, and I see the anger come back to her eyes. She has good outward control over her emotions, but her eyes are a dead giveaway, status indicators, like the LEDs that tell you what your TV is doing.

“You haven’t seen the way he looks at me, have you, Ron?”

“Oh?”

“It’s an ugly thing. He looked at me that way the first week I worked here when I was seventeen. It felt like he was injecting a virus into my bloodstream. He’s looked at me that way a thousand times over the years. He looked at me that way today. But he held it longer. Ron, your Uncle Chester is an evil man.”

In fact Chester was once questioned in a rape but never arrested. This was hush-hush. It never got below the third floor. It was a long time ago. “Describe the look.”

“It’s a show of strength. Like an army. Weight and power. He sees that compared to him, I have little. He knows that I know it. He loves my fear.”

I feel my own anger stirring now, low level but with potential, like a nest of wasps feeling the first warmth of spring.

“And, Ron? I think he drove your mother insane. She was reeling from Tony’s death. She was a little nutty, sure, it runs in her family, but she was smart and lovely and right there in the moment. She had spirit. She worked hard, but she was always ready to have a good time. He bludgeoned her down. He crushed every last bit of hope out of her. He sat on her so long, she forgot how to breathe.”

“I think that, too.”

“Everybody did. But nobody said anything and nobody did anything.”

“She married him.”

“It wasn’t a marriage, it was a surrender. She was empty by then.”

We let a moment of silence be. The brothers-my father and Chester -were very different men. Suicide points many fingers and whispers many rumors.

“Don’t let him have this company,” says Sharon. “If you do, I’ll walk out that lobby downstairs and never come back.”

“That’s clear.”

“Stand up for yourself, Ron. Stand up for me, too. Change the locks. Keep him out.”

“I’m capable of doing that.”

“I know you are.”

It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling right now, but as usual I try, not necessarily a good idea. “ Sharon, I can feel different rivers and streams of history coming together here. They will move on without us, but they’re here now.”

“I don’t see a river. There’s no river within miles of here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This all matters.”

“Of course it does. May I have the rest of the afternoon off?”

“Of course.”

She shuts off her computer and flips her desk calendar to tomorrow, then rises and slings her purse over her shoulder. She comes around to where I’m now standing and she raises her face to mine.

“Good. Because I’d like to spend it in your bed with you.”

It’s not comparable to anything else that’s ever happened to me. Two minutes after we lock the penthouse door, we are in bed, but seconds later I’m uncontrollably spent though still half dressed. I’m not a veteran of love. I feel humiliated, but Sharon finds humor in all this and assures me that things will be looking up soon. And up they do look. An hour later we’re finished again, and two hours after that, again. I call up a sushi place that delivers, then make hot fudge sundaes, and after that we’re back at it. We are electricity. By midnight, we lie in each other’s arms, and Sharon snores on my chest. I look out the window at the lights of the mall and the Christian compound and the freeways red with taillights going one way and white with headlights coming the other, and these are the rivers of the here and now, the rivers I tried to tell Sharon about. I know that we are waist deep in them and getting deeper. I press my nose onto the top of her scalp and breathe deeply. Human female sweetness beyond words. For the first time in my life, I feel absolutely responsible for another person. I know that her welfare is more important than my own. I realize that I am no longer the most important person on earth. In fact, I barely rate a distant second.

Early that morning while Sharon is sleeping and long after the manufacturing team has gone, I let Bradley Smith into the building through a rear fire exit and we make our way to the manufacturing bay. Here I unlock and open the steel safes that contain the first five hundred Love 32s.

“You look like you’ve been worked over by the sultan’s harem,” says Bradley.

“Better than that,” I say.

“ Sharon?”

I smile and feel myself blush.

“She’s pretty quick on the rebound,” says Bradley.

“I take it as a sign of healing.”

“Well, congratulations. All your tail wagging paid off.”

I watch Smith examine the weapons. I must admit they are beautiful. Not like a woman is beautiful, or a sunset, but as a car might be, or a laptop. Even with his hair cut short, Smith looks familiar to me. I know I’ve seen him before.

“You still look familiar,” I say.

“You’ve said that before, Ron.”

But the longer I look at him, the less it helps. I have a good memory for faces, yet it does me no good now. I feel drained but in the best of ways.

“If Herredia will commit to another thousand now, I can come off the price,” I say.

“How much off?”

I think Uncle Chet is wrong. You keep your prices down. You build relationships. You make friends. “Three percent. It would save him twenty-seven grand.”

“Indeed. And put another eight seventy-three in your hot little pocket. How much commitment?”

“One hundred K. I can deliver them by the end of September. Tell him he can name them something else. He didn’t like the name.”

Bradley looks hard at me. “What about Harry Love and all that bullshit you call history?”

“He can name his own gun is what I’m offering.”

“He’ll want muerte something. I’ll see what he says.”

Bradley extends the brace rods on one of the Love 32s, sets the gun into the crook of his arm, and sweeps it across the room.

“He’ll use them against the Zetas, won’t he?” I ask.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I think-”

“Do not attempt to think. Stay far away from your customers, Ron. You are a gunmaker. That’s all. If you go sticking your nose into other people’s business, they’ll chop your head off and mail it to Sharon. I’m serious.”

The mention of Sharon ’s name sobers me. Bradley counts the guns. They’re packed ten to a wooden case in twenty stacks of five. Each gun is housed in a foam envelope and the layers are separated by pasteboard sheets. Of course the lids aren’t nailed on yet. There are four hundred and ninety-five weapons, not counting the first five production-line guns I fronted him last week. The cases smell of freshly milled steel and gun oil and grip rubber. There are little blotches of new-gun oil on the pasteboard packing sheets, a sight that has always pleased me, something akin to a job well done. The noise suppressors are packed separately.

Bradley steps into a corner of the bay and makes a short phone call. When he’s finished, he wraps his phone in one of the red shop rags from a workstation, then picks up a hammer and pounds it to pieces within the rag. He drops the package into a trash can, then pulls another phone from a pocket and pushes it into the carrier on his belt.

We sit on patio chairs on the third-floor balcony and watch the sun rise. Highway 55 is already busy and the Santa Ana Mountains to the east are rimmed with light. We drink coffee spiked with whiskey, and Bradley has two good Cuban cigars, so we light up. Breakfast of champions. This is our third such celebration. The first was when he delivered the three hundred thousand start-up money, and the second was when Herredia enthusiastically accepted the production model last week. Now we can celebrate the halfway point.

What a way to start my first day of being Sharon Novak’s man.