Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
In this new Niagara Falls where a shift in the wind turned the very air sepia, made eyes smart and breathing difficult, “crises” had become commonplace, like crime. Rarely did these crises involve individuals who’d made pilgrimages to The Falls to commit a spectacular
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act of suicide; these were natives of the city, nearly always men. They acted upon impulse in sudden rage, despair, madness fueled by alcohol and drugs committing acts of unpremeditated violence, much of it domestic. Their weapons were guns, knives, hammers, fists. Often they committed suicide after their rage played out, or tried to.
“Gunman/hostage.” The dispatcher at the Crisis Center had told Chandler that robbery or burglary didn’t seem to be involved. The motive had to be purely emotional, the most dangerous of motives.
Since he’d grown out of his awkward adolescence, Chandler had become a lanky, lean-muscled young man with a look of perpetual vigilance. He moved quickly like a tennis player confronted with a superior opponent, but not prepared to concede the game. His face remained boyish, somewhat undefined. He was easy (he knew!) to forget. His hairline had begun to recede when he was in his early twenties and his fair, feathery silvery-brown hair lifted from his temples as if lighter than air. His eyes were sensitive, moist. A girl he’d known in college had said of his eyes that they were “ghost-eyes”—
“old-young eyes of wisdom.” (Had she meant this as a compliment?) Chandler wore tinted glasses that gave him an offhand, sexy counter-culture look, but his counter-culture heroes had been the Jesuit Berrigan brothers, and he’d never dressed in any remotely radical way. If his hair grew long and curled over his shirt collar, it was out of neglect, not style. Chandler would never let his hair straggle to his shoulders and fasten a braided headband around his forehead, as Royall had done; Chandler was mystified by his younger brother’s physical ease, and Royall’s sense that others should be drawn to him, and were naturally drawn to him. Not that Royall was vain: he wasn’t. But if girls or women fell in love with him, how was he to blame?
I don’t make it happen. It isn’t me, it’s them
. By contrast, Chandler was astonished if a woman appeared to be attracted to him; he couldn’t help but doubt her sincerity, or her taste. He saw himself as a spindly-limbed boy of thirteen with watery eyes and blemished skin and a perpetual snuffle whose exasperated mother was forever chiding to stand up straight, to brush his hair out of his face, button his shirts correctly, and—
please!
—blow his nose.
“Almost, Chandler has become handsome,” Ariah said not long 346 W
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ago, staring at him in surprise. As if she were seeing her elder son anew, and not entirely liking what she saw. “Don’t let it go to your head, Chandler!” She’d laughed, with that Ariah-air of teasing and chiding, that made you wince even as you understood it was meant affectionately.
Why? Because I need.
Need to be of service. Somehow
.
Always, it felt to him like a privilege. An unknown wish, granted.
Today he’d been directed to a factory on the east side, on Swann Road. Not a part of the city Chandler knew well though probably, when he saw Niagara Precision Humidifiers & Electronic Cleaners, he’d recognize the building. Chandler Burnaby had been driving the grim grid-patterned streets of Niagara Falls all his adult life.
Sometimes it seemed he’d lived a previous life here, too.
Ariah had once said to Chandler, mysteriously, at the time of her hospitalization for gallbladder surgery, when she’d been frightened of what might lie ahead for her, “Dear, I do love you! Sometimes I think I love you best. Forgive me.”
Chandler had laughed nervously. What was there to forgive?
Today was a bone-chilling late-winter day like wet, dissolving tissue. Wind from the east, that metallic-chemical odor that coats the inside of your mouth. An asbestos sky, snowed-in yards, filthy sidewalks and curbs. Snow covered in soot, snow in mounds spilling out into the street. Snow-slush, snow-and-ice. Chandler’s heart had begun to beat more quickly, in expectation of what lay ahead.
He’d forgotten to call Melinda, to tell her he might be late that evening.
No. He hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t had time.
No. He hadn’t not had time, he might have asked one of his colleagues at school, a friend, to call for him. But he had not asked.
Sometimes, just approaching an emergency scene, Chandler felt his vision begin to darken at the edges. That strangest of neuro-optical phenomena, tunnel vision. As if at the periphery of what’s visible the world itself was disappearing, sucked into darkness. It was
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a phenomenon common to firefighters. Though Chandler’s crisis work was rarely physical, nearly always verbal; earnest counseling, giving advice and comfort. Often just listening, sympathetically.
Talking a desperate man or woman out of suicide you come quickly to sense how the soul of the other is on your side, wants to be saved and not to die. It’s the individual, blinded by despair, you must convince to continue living.
We all want to die sometimes, exhausted with the effort of living, but it
passes. Like weather. We’re like weather. See the sky? Those clouds? Blowing
over. Between the lakes like we are, everything blows over eventually. Right?
It was the most banal optimism. You could read it on a cereal box.
Ariah would laugh, pitying. Yet Chandler believed these words, he’d staked his life on them.
Burnaby, that name. That’s a Niagara Falls name?
Maybe adults remembered. But ninth graders did not. Children born in 1963 or later, what could they know of a fading scandal of 1962?
Chandler rarely thought of it, himself.
He’d had his chance, he might have left Niagara Falls. You would think he’d be living in some place where
Burnaby
was only a name. He might have gone to college in Philadelphia. He’d had scholarship offers elsewhere, too. But he hadn’t wanted to upset Ariah at a difficult time in her life. (What Ariah’s crisis of that time had been, Chandler couldn’t now recall.) Nor had he wanted to abandon Royall and Juliet to their temperamental mother. They needed Chandler too, though probably the idea would never have occurred to them.
Go to hell
Royall had told Chandler, and hung up the phone.
The brothers had been estranged for nearly six months. Chandler had tried to contact Royall without success. It was ridiculous for them to quarrel, they had only each other. Royall had never spoken to Chandler in that way before, and Chandler was left dazed by their exchange.
It was unfair, Chandler had promised Ariah to “protect” Royall and Juliet at the time of their father’s death, and so he had. He’d tried. All these years he’d tried. And now Royall had turned against him, refusing to understand. Royall had left home, was working for a 348 W
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businessman in the city; living alone, and taking night school classes at Niagara University. Royall, back in school! That was the most amazing news of all. Chandler heard of Royall occasionally by way of their sister Juliet, and then surreptitiously, for of course Ariah refused to speak of her “willful, self-destructive” son.
Chandler had wanted to ask his mother: how long could you expect Royall not to be curious about his father? And Juliet? Any reasonable mother would know it was only a matter of time.
“Reasonable.” Chandler laughed aloud.
Thinking of these things, he’d begun to drive faster. The speed limit was thirty-five, he’d been pushing fifty. No time for an accident.
He was needed out on Swann Road.
I don’t want to be protected, I want to know.
Chandler wondered how much Royall had learned by now. How much about their father before wanting to know no more.
Shame, shame! Burn-a-by is the name
.
There were children who’d actually chanted these singsong words behind Chandler’s back. A long time ago, in junior high. He had pretended not to hear. He hadn’t been a boy to be goaded into anger, or tears.
As he wasn’t an adult to be goaded into emotion. Not easily.
Melinda had asked him one night about his father, because of course she knew, or knew something, having been born and grown up in the city herself. The name
Burnaby
was known to her. And Chandler told her frankly that he rarely thought of his deceased father, and out of respect for his mother he never spoke of him. But he would confide in Melinda, because he loved her and believed he could trust her.
“Do you! Love me, I mean.”
“Yes. I love you.” But Chandler’s words were hesitant, uttered in wonder or in apprehension.
Chandler told her what he knew: that Dirk Burnaby had died that night in the Niagara River. Though his body had never been recovered, and for years it was rumored he’d somehow saved himself, managed to swim to shore. “But anyone who knows the Niagara River at
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that point knows that would be impossible,” Chandler said. “It’s a cruel joke, to suggest.”
Melinda listened. If she’d wanted to ask had Chandler gone to look at the accident site, she did not.
She’d been trained as a nurse. She understood pain, even phantom pain. She understood that pain isn’t therapeutic, cathartic, redemptive. Not in actual life.
The body of Dirk Burnaby had never been recovered, but the man was certainly dead, and an official death certificate had been issued, eventually. After a much-publicized investigation by police it was ruled that the incident had been an “accident”; which Chandler guessed was a euphemism. By tradition, the county coroner’s office avoided a ruling of “suicide” whenever possible. Deaths at The Falls were usually attributed to “accident”—“misadventure”—out of a wish not to further upset survivors, and out of a wish to downplay suicide at the famous tourist spot. Even when suicide notes were found, these notes weren’t always entered into the official police record.
The most grievous sin. Taking your own life in despair.
Chandler told Melinda that he supposed most people who knew Dirk Burnaby believed he’d killed himself. He’d been driving at a high speed (the speedometer was frozen at eighty-nine miles an hour) in a severe thunderstorm. He’d only recently lost an important court case, and he was nearly bankrupt. “There were other things, too. I knew from reading the papers. Ariah never had any newspapers in the house at that time, but I got hold of them myself. I read all that I could, but I’ve forgotten most of it now. Or I don’t want to talk about it now, Melinda. All right?”
Melinda had kissed him, in silence.
Shame, shame. Burn-a-by is the name
.
Chandler wondered if
Burnaby
was a name, finally, that would dissuade Melinda from marrying him. He would have to take that risk, he hadn’t any choice.
The Crisis Center dispatcher had given Chandler the address, 3884 Swann Road. Past Veterans’, past Portage, and now this stretch 350 W
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of Swann was closed by police to all but local traffic. Chandler showed his I.D. to a police officer and was flagged on. A quarter-mile to Niagara Precision Humidifiers & Electronic Cleaners, a low flattop cinderblock building set squarely in a parking lot. In the driveway were at least a dozen city and county police and medical emergency vehicles. Chandler parked on Swann Road and made his way to the scene as unobtrusively as possible, following the lead of a young police officer. Behind their vehicles and behind Niagara Precision trucks, police officers were crouched as in a suspenseful movie scene.
Except there was no background mood music here. There were no principal players, there was no script. Chandler Burnaby had been summoned by police but might not be used. The officer in charge would make that decision, but Chandler could have no idea when. He was available. He’d arrived, and was greeted. His hand had been shaken, and released.
The gunman had entered the factory approximately forty minutes before and at about that time he’d fired his first shots. The first calls to 911 hadn’t been made until some minutes after that, by individuals who’d been allowed by the gunman to leave the building. Chandler could see the part-opened front door of the building and a shattered window a few feet away. The window was oddly shaped, about five feet high and no more than a foot wide. The gunman had been firing from this window, Chandler was told, but seemed to have stopped for the time being. “But keep your head down, mister, O.K.? Don’t take any chances.” Chandler said, “I know, officer. I won’t.”
As if he’d been rebuked beforehand. A civilian at the scene.
A bullhorn voice was making the air vibrate. So loud, Chandler almost couldn’t distinguish words.
Mr. Mayweather, do you hear me?
Release Miss Carpenter at once. Repeat, release Miss Carpenter at once. Show
yourself in the doorway without your weapons, raise your hands, no harm will
come to you, Mr. Mayweather
.
We are Niagara Falls City police. We have surrounded the building
.
Come out with your hands raised, and do not bring your
weapons with you, Mr. Mavweather
.
I repeat, do not
— A police captain was speaking on the bullhorn, trying to exude an air of authority and calm.
At the site, Chandler was recognized by several NFPD officers to
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whom he was “Mr. Burnaby” of the Crisis Center. A plainclothes detective named Rodwell, whose daughter Chandler had taught two years ago at La Salle, crouched beside him to fill him in briefly. The gunman was known to have at least one handgun and one rifle, and he was believed to be “distraught, possibly drunk and/or on drugs.”
After his initial wild demand for “safe passage” out of the country he’d refused to communicate with police except for a few incoherent shouts; he hadn’t picked up the telephone in the CEO’s office where he was believed to be barricaded with a hostage, a young woman receptionist.
Mr. Mayweather? Are you hearing me? Mr. Mayweather we are
asking you to lay down your weapons and appear at the door. We are asking you
to release Miss Carpenter at once and allow her to leave. Are you hearing me,
Mr. Mayweather?