Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
The gunman, white male, approximate age thirty, medium height and weight about two hundred pounds, had been identified as a recently discharged employee of Niagara Precision. Mayweather?
There were Mayweathers in the Baltic Street area, and there’d been Mayweathers at Chandler’s high school. This Mayweather had shot and critically wounded a foreman; fired wild shots in the direction of fleeing employees, whom he shouted at but didn’t pursue; originally, he’d taken two women hostages, but released one after twenty minutes, a young pregnant woman, with instructions to tell police he wanted “safe passage” out of the country, by jet, to Cuba.
Cuba! Not a good sign.
As if Fidel Castro might give political asylym to a guy who’s been shooting up co-workers.
Chandler asked Rodwell how he felt about what was happening, and Rodwell said he hoped to hell the girl wasn’t already dead.
If the police knew she was dead, they’d go for Mayweather, immediately. They’d toss in tear gas, clear out the building. If Mayweather resisted, he’d be killed. It was a simple scenario, like a Greek tragedy in outline. Chandler knew from past experiences that there were few options for a barricaded gunman, and not one of them was in his favor.
Except, if suicide was the point.
The story, pieced together, was that Mayweather, fired from 352 W
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Niagara Precision the previous week, had showed up that afternoon with a rifle, stepping into the front office and demanding to see the CEO who, luckily for him, hadn’t yet returned from lunch; he’d decided to settle for the foreman, with whom he’d had disagreements, but after he’d shot the man he’d relented and allowed him to be carried out of the building by others, badly bleeding, and taken by ambulance to a hospital. Mayweather didn’t seem to know what he wanted any longer, which wasn’t unusual, Chandler thought, in such desperate situations.
Chandler made inquiries why Mayweather had been fired, and was told the exact reason wasn’t known yet by police. Drinking on the job had been mentioned. Insubordination? Mayweather’s co-workers described him as “quiet, a lot”—“sullen”—“thin-skinned.” The young pregnant woman who’d been allowed to escape had been too shaken to tell police much, and was being treated for shock at a hospital.
The bullhorn voice continued, tireless.
Mr
.
Mayweather? I repeat,
Mr. Mayweather, this building is surrounded
—
Chandler wondered when he’d be asked to intervene. Or if.
This was the suspense of the trenches during a lull. No shots had been fired by the invisible gunman for more than twenty minutes.
The air was so acrid here, Chandler had trouble breathing. His sensitive eyes stung. The predominant odor emanated from Dow Chemical close by, former manufacturer of napalm. At the Peace Bridge to Canada, years ago, Chandler had been one of numerous demonstrators against Dow Chemical. Police had arrested a few of the more aggressive demonstrators, but not Chandler Burnaby who’d never been one of those. You wanted to think that individual actions mattered, that there were real-life consequences following from ethical decisions, and maybe that was so. The despicable war had ended.
U.S. troops had returned home. Napalm had gone the way of nerve gas. Though Dow had recouped its public relations disaster, and was once again prospering, like much of industrial Niagara Falls.
Swann Chemicals had been bought out by Dow in the late 1960’s.
A multi-million-dollar sale, highly profitable for the Niagara Falls–
based company that had been the target of what was now referred to as an “early environmental” law action. Swann had won the Love
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Canal case, but times were changing.
The bullhorn voice continued, more urgently.
Mr
.
Mayweather? We
have surrounded the building. We need to know that Miss Carpenter is un-harmed. Lay down your weapons, step into the doorway
—
For Christ’s sake, Chandler thought. Let something happen.
No: he wasn’t impatient. Why, impatience? The point of his being here was patience. He was the “crisis” man; he’d been trained to embrace “crisis”; he wasn’t a professional, so this must be his vocation.
He had to admit he liked being anonymous. If he was Mr. Burnaby, the name wasn’t
him
. Not here, not now. This was a kind of grace, for one who couldn’t believe in God. Ariah wouldn’t know where her son was, and couldn’t be anxious/furious about him just yet. Royall couldn’t know, and wouldn’t be preparing to feel guilty/defensive if something happened to him. Juliet couldn’t know, though if the incident was being covered on TV, and she happened to watch the evening news, she might guess that her elder brother was on the scene.
And there was Melinda.
Chandler winced, thinking of her. He should have asked a friend to call her.
She was expecting him at her apartment, on the west side, sometime between six-thirty and seven. She’d call him, if he began to be late, and no one would answer his phone. They were to prepare dinner together (tonight, chili) as they did frequently. Chandler would play with the baby, turn the pages of a picture book, even help with her bath. Chandler would spend the night if Melinda invited him; if she sensed that Chandler wanted to be invited. Their lovemaking was tender, tentative. They were edging by degrees into a more defined relationship in the way of skaters, excited, apprehensive, edging out onto ice they aren’t sure will hold them.
Surrender! Surrender your weapons.
Mr. Mayweather, the building is surrounded
.
Hoping that no one would notice him, Chandler risked peering out around the van. It seemed unlikely that the gunman would be watching and fire at that moment. But the hairs at the nape of Chandler’s neck stirred.
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Royall always insisted his work at the Devil’s Hole was one hundred percent safe. It only looks dangerous, taking a boat into the Gorge.
Chandler pushed his glasses against the bridge of his nose, squinting. His heart had begun to accelerate though he knew (he knew!) he wasn’t in any actual danger. And so he was not. The facade of the grim building was unchanged. The door was ajar as before, the doorway empty. No movement there, or behind the shattered window. In the background a police helicopter droned. It seemed that time was suspended, but of course it was not. Police, paramedics, emergency workers, media people were waiting for something to happen, but where was the gunman? He’d set all this in motion, and had retreated with his hostage, barricaded. He wasn’t responding to the deafening bullhorn, and wasn’t answering the telephone. Chandler didn’t want to think that Mayweather and the young woman hostage might both be dead.
Maybe Mayweather had a knife, he’d killed the woman in relative silence. The police hadn’t heard gunfire. Maybe he’d slashed his own wrists.
Mayweather? This building is surrounded. If you hear me
—
You had to feel pity for a man, for whom being employed at Niagara Precision Humidifiers & Electronic Cleaners meant so much. This not-prosperous plant employing less than three hundred people.
Chandler overheard some of the cops making bets. Whether the guy would walk out alive, or be carried out. Whether he’d kill himself, or they would.
Chandler had been present at sites where men had died, or been wounded by police fire. Not a pleasant experience. The terrible noise of gunfire, lasting for several seconds, lodged deep in your brain. It was a noise beyond noise, a metaphysical assault. Noise like a machete severing bones.
I wish you wouldn’t, but I wish more that you didn’t feel the
need.
Melinda kissed him, Melinda held him trembling in her arms.
She seemed to sense that Chandler wasn’t hers to hold, in quite that way; yet he wanted to be, and she sensed that, too. He hadn’t told her more than she’d needed to know. Of course, she was a nurse, she’d worked in emergency rooms.
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Twice in the past three years, Chandler had been present when men killed themselves. One had used a revolver, in a stand-off with police in a tenement building downtown, on New Year’s Day, and the other had died in a plunge into the roiling American Falls from the tip of Goat Island, before a gathering of stunned onlookers. (This suicide, an eighteen-year-old Niagara University math major with no
“known history” of emotional problems, had hung stony-faced over the railing for nearly an hour before letting go. Chandler had been designated to try to reason with him, get him to talk and reconsider, but Chandler had failed, and crept away in defeat. Death in The Falls.
Of all deaths it seemed the most vengeful.)
In fact, most of the time Chandler was involved in emergency situations that came to no dramatic resolutions but simply ended, in stalemate and exhaustion. A drunken man barricaded in his apartment with his youngest child, shouting defiantly, weeping, smashing windows and furniture but putting up no resistance when police break in and take him into custody. A middle-aged flower-child on LSD who threatens to set herself on fire in a public place but, after drawing dozens of onlookers, and dousing herself spectacularly with kerosene, is unable to strike a match, and is led away giggling by police. Unshaven men in undershirts who rush at police officers, yelling obscenities and meaning to fight to the death, but are immediately overpowered, thrown to the pavement and deftly spreadeagled and their wrists handcuffed behind their backs.
So it went. Chandler had several times arrived too late, the drama was over, everyone was headed home.
That sinking sensation in the gut.
You haven’t made any difference,
what a fool you are. What vanity.
Yet there was the night last July when he’d driven Melinda to the hospital, to give birth. They had not been lovers, only just friends.
And Melinda had asked Chandler to stay with her because she was frightened to be alone and he had done so though frightened himself and when she began to have contractions he’d helped her, he’d gone to the hospital with her and remained with her through the seven-hour ordeal. It was the most remarkable experience of his life. He would never forget, he’d made a difference then.
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Mr
.
Mayweather? Pick up the phone. We need to talk to you, Mr
.
Mayweather. We need to verify Miss Carpenter’s well-being
—
No response from the gunman.
Chandler overheard cops talking quietly together, nerved-up and angry. It wasn’t believed that Mayweather had been wounded in the exchange of gunfire, but Chandler wondered if possibly he was.
Maybe the gunman and his hostage were both bleeding to death inside the building? “Well-being”—how quaint this sounded, how unexpected in the bullhorn’s deafening volume.
Mr. Mayweather, we are calling you at this moment and ask that you pick
up the phone. We need to know what you want. What your expectations are.
Mr. Mayweather? Are you hearing me? This building is surrounded. Release
Miss Carpenter at once and you will not be harmed.
This time, as everyone strained to listen, there was a shouted obscenity from inside the building. The voice was strained, and didn’t carry far.
Silence followed. (In the near distance, a rumble of freight trains.) There was the expectation that a gunshot might be fired, but nothing happened.
It was then that Chandler learned the gunman’s first name:
“Albert.” Hadn’t he known Albert Mayweather? From school? It was a name Chandler hadn’t heard in years.
In fact, Chandler had graduated with another Mayweather, a younger brother or cousin of Albert. But he remembered Albert Mayweather, as a young boy might remember an older boy whom he fears and dislikes and yet admires in that unspeakable way of adolescence.
Mayweathers lived in the Baltic Street area, though none close by the Burnabys. There were many of them, a virtual clan. But Chandler recalled Al distinctly. A strong, stocky boy with a wrestler’s build and dirty-blond hair coarse as rug fibres. He’d been a vocational arts major like so many boys at NFHS. His mood swung between a menacing silence and clownish exuberance. One of those boys whose idea of wit was to crack his knuckles, or fart, loudly. Al wasn’t a team athlete but he played pick-up basketball with his buddies behind the school, cigarette dangling from his thick lips. “Alley-oop,” his buddies called
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him. “Alley-oop” as if it were a term of endearment. Chandler understood reluctantly that girls, even “good” girls, were sometimes drawn to boys like Al Mayweather. At least initially.
Strange, and unspeakable: you wanted such boys to like you. To forgive you your high grades, your myopic eyes and faltering step, your stammer in fearful circumstances. You wanted a boy like Al Mayweather to acknowledge your name, a name given a perverse significance by scandal; a criminal name.
Burnaby? That’s you?
Chandler had a vague recollection that someone in Al Mayweather’s family, or in the family of a Mayweather in Chandler’s class, who was one of a number of OxyChemical workers who’d gone on disability young, in their thirties and forties; there was a class action suit against the company in the mid-1970s, much local controversy and anger. Chandler recalled such words as “betrayed”—“lied to”—
“workers’ rights”—“work-related illnesses”—in headlines. The multi-million-dollar lawsuit had not ended favorably for the workers, if you knew details. A jury had granted sizable monetary rewards to dying men, or to their surviving families, except these decisions were frequently overturned in appeals court, by which time the media had lost interest.
Mr. Mayweather? Step into the doorway with your hands raised.
Do not bring your weapons to the door, Mr. Mayweather.
Mr. Mayweather, the phone is ringing. Pick up the phone
.