16

They say you should never go to bed angry when you’re in a relationship, but we did anyway that night. I took some Benadryl which knocked me out in minutes.

Wednesday morning I found Stefan in the kitchen pulling open drawers and cabinets, banging plates and cutlery, generally making as much noise as he could without actually breaking anything while he put together a sandwich. Marco watched him, hopeful.

He angrily sliced some fresh rye bread, but I didn’t say a thing about his sawing away with that big knife and possibly cutting himself. “There are over three hundred million guns in this country that private citizens own,” he said, slapping the bread onto a plate. “Three hundred million. Why do you need to have one?”

“How is that a reason for me not to have a gun?”

“You’ve been proud that you don’t fit in, in lots of ways, and now you’re one of the sheep.”

“You converted, so how are you any different?”

He slammed down the knife, grabbed a smaller one, slathered Grey Poupon onto both sides of the bread, and slapped thin-sliced roast beef on both pieces. It looked messy but good. I registered that, even though our continuing argument had purged me of hunger.

I went after him because he hadn’t responded, even though I knew I was wrong to do it. “You’re a Christian now—”

“A Roman Catholic.”

“Last I heard, they were still Christians. You changed religions. You used to be a minority, now you’re in the majority. Fine. It’s what you want. It makes you happy. I’m getting a gun. That’s what I want. What’s the fucking difference?”

He shook his head disdainfully, and I despised him at that moment, even as I wondered how it was possible to be so angry at someone you loved and lived with. “Don’t compare faith to a firearm—that’s just stupid.”

“How about trying to sound like an adult when you trash me?”

Stefan bit into his sandwich, staring off behind me, as if willing me to disappear. Then he looked me in the eyes. “You’re right,” he said, his voice softening.

“What?”

“You’re right. I’m not being adult. I made a huge change in my life, and you accepted it. Now, when you’re making a huge change in your life, what do I do? I start freaking out. That’s wrong.”

Nonplussed, I didn’t know what to say. Was he sincere, or was this some kind of reverse psychology?

Stefan took a deep breath. “But it’s not the gun, not really. It’s that everything seems harder since … since what happened, it seems out of whack. I don’t even know how I can go back to teaching when fall semester starts, or write anything again. My life doesn’t make sense. If I’ve been touchy about Fieldwork, that’s why.”

“I feel the same way. And then the stalking, the threats, the—” I pointed up in the general direction of the bedroom, not wanting to even say what we had found there polluting our bed.

“Listen, Nick, you want to get a gun? As long as you learn how to use it, and you buy a gun safe to keep it in, that’s all that counts.” He tried to smile. “At least we don’t have kids to worry about. There’s no chance Marco could ever get a hold of it without us knowing.”

I could feel the fog of hostility inside me clearing. “Thanks.”

Marco had wisely kept his distance during our low-key rumble, and wherever he was, he suddenly went barking to the front door. We both froze. And then looked at each other in complete connection and forgiveness, because no matter what the current tussle had been about, we were in this together. It reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Brideshead Revisited, where Oxford students Charles and Sebastian feel themselves contra mundum: together against the world. It had truly felt all week that the world was leagued against us.

Stefan said, “I’m sorry,” as I headed to the door and I called back to him, “Me, too.”

Vanessa was there, and I could feel my shoulders relax. “Gotta minute? I left something at home, so I figured I’d stop here on the way back to my office.” She looked stunning in some kind of stretchy aqua sheath, with patent leather beige heels and matching shoulder bag. Seeing her was a shot of adrenaline—she was so bright and beautiful and tough. I may have been living in Michigan for a long time, may have considered it my home now, but I still loved New York flash.

She followed me to the kitchen, Marco dancing around her feet as she went. “Hey, kiddo,” she said, not ignoring him, but very focused.

Stefan said “Hi” and leaned back against the counter as if bracing himself for bad news.

“Okay guys, your friend in Ludington, he rented his car at Detroit Metro, drove straight to Ludington, didn’t leave when stuff was happening to you here in town.”

“How can you know that for sure?”

“My PIs are the best, I told you.” She winked.

“What about Lucky?”

“Jackpot, maybe. He does drive that model of Cadillac, it’s a 2011.”

“Sonofabitch!” I said. “He just made me feel sorry for him, I was sure he was for real. He played me!” I told her about our meeting at the gym, and his confession about his illness and his personality.

“Never trust a guy in a hot tub,” she said, smiling.

“So is he our stalker?”

“You tell me.” She handed me a Post-it. “This is his license plate number. You have to get the one on whatever car is following you, the next time it happens. Nobody can do that for you, really. If it matches, well, then it’s obvious. Oh, and that dean of yours? He drives an Audi, his wife has a Stingray, so he might be off your list. But my PIs will keep digging. There’s nothing they can’t find.” She grinned a bit mysteriously and made her exit, sleek and dynamic. Juries would either be blown away by her, I thought, or resent her blazing confidence.

Stefan came over to hug me, and we were silent for a moment. “Are you hungry?”

I was, now, and even though I hadn’t had breakfast, I was ready for lunch. I broke out some sliced Jarlsberg, half-sour pickles, and the broccoli coleslaw I’d made a few days ago, while he sliced bread for my sandwich. I looked down at the container.

“You made that coleslaw before last Wednesday night,” Stefan observed flatly, as if reading my mind. “That was like a different life, it seems like we were different people.”

“We were. It’s what Vanessa said. We’ve had easy lives compared to most people and nothing to do with cops, ever, real cops, I mean. The worst experience was speeding tickets, and how bad is that?”

We both sighed. In this moment of calm, with the hostility between us having evaporated, I wanted to ask him again what he was hiding from me and Vanessa, but my better angels held me back. As one of Oscar Wilde’s characters said, now was not the time for German skepticism. I’d never exactly understood what the quip meant, but that day, it seemed to fit.

We were both restless with Vanessa’s news, and we ate standing at the kitchen island, too jazzed to sit down, processing what she’d said.

“Maybe we both need to try and track our stalker?” Stefan suggested. “Or you could drive around hoping he’ll follow you, and I’ll be further back.”

“You really think we can work out the coordination? And if it’s Lucky for sure, he doesn’t seem predictable. How do we lure him into following me?”

“You could drive by his house a few times and piss him off.”

I suddenly felt deflated. “And then what?” I asked. “What proof do we have that he’s done all the other stuff ? The phone calls—the roadkill—any of it. We’d have to catch him in the act, somehow.”

After a moment, I added, “Listen, you’re more analytical than I am, while you figure it out, I’m going to check out the campus gun range.” I made sure I had the address and left him the pamphlet, now that it was no longer taboo.

SUM had begun as a small agricultural college in the mid-nineteenth century and if you had nothing to do with crop science or soil science or anything like that, it was easy to forget those origins. That is, until you headed south and the buildings gave way to vast acres of farmland and pasturage that felt as far removed from the built-up core of campus as Tibet was from Chicago.

The gun range was at the every southern edge of campus, isolated amid all those green fields. Apparently immune to irony, the university saw no problem with the Garfield range being on Lincoln Road—unless somebody thought the association with two presidents who’d been shot was perversely amusing. The building was low and gleaming, like some kind of health care pavilion, glittering with glass brick and solar panels. I parked in the near-empty lot and headed inside where the terrazzo-floored lobby was so large it felt like some kind of arena. There were several plush seating areas, racks with brightly colored flyers, a snack bar just like you’d find in a gym, and a small information counter. A scrawny, bored-looking guy with fashionable stubble asked if I needed help, and when I explained I was a faculty member and wanted beginner’s instruction, he suggested the afternoon class which was only fifteen minutes from now.

The place thrummed with air conditioning so loudly it felt like an ocean liner pulling out of port. I was glad for the noise, since there wasn’t any music playing anywhere and the silence made me uneasy.

I signed a waiver that I only skimmed, and looked around guiltily, the way an alcoholic might wonder about seeing someone he knew when he snuck into a bar. I deposited myself on a sofa and shut my eyes, trying to relax.

“Professor Hoffman!” The guy who came to claim me for his class greeted me as if we were cousins reuniting after years for a family wedding. “Hey! Great to see ya!” He was five-ten, swarthy, with green eyes, movie star lips, and large forearms. “Your class in crime fiction three years ago, remember? I wrote that final paper on Mystic River ?”

“Right …” How many students had I taught since that class? Then his name popped up as if on a flash card: “Seamus, how are you?”

He grinned, slapped my back and led me down a short hallway to a bland classroom like hundreds on campus. I was alone, which might have accounted for his enthusiasm. He started a PowerPoint that took me through the parts of a gun and gun safety, explaining everything with the zeal of a real estate broker pushing a house that had been on the market too long. Now and then he read exactly what was on the screen, which seemed a waste of time, but I wasn’t going to fault his pedagogy since I loved hearing about the construction of a pistol, how it operated, how the components fit together.

He kept asking “Any questions?” but I just shook my head, taking in the flood of information until I realized he was starting to look a bit anxious. After all, I’d been his professor, maybe he was suddenly a little self-conscious.

“You’re doing great,” I said. “Really.”

He relaxed and went on with his material. Even though I knew the parts of a pistol from research online, I quietly repeated for myself everything he named: barrel, magazine, slide, sights, grip, strap, etc., and all the steps of loading and unloading a gun.

I didn’t exactly follow him when he said some people called the magazine a “clip,” and that there was a debate in the gun world about which was correct, but nomenclature didn’t seem that important an issue right then. I briefly wondered if it might not be better to do this sort of instruction with a group so that other people could ask questions you didn’t even know you had, but it was too late for that. I’d made the plunge, there was no point in rescheduling.

When Seamus was done, he told me it was time to go across the lobby. “The center has a terrific filtration system for the lead in the air, and when we go through the first airlock, you’ll see a gray strip that looks like a carpet runner. That’s for when you leave, to get any lead particles off your shoes. You don’t have to rub, just walk along it normally on the way out. And then there are wipes for your hands, too.”

“Airlock?”

He nodded. “Two of them. For noise, and for filtration.”

Wearing goggles and noise-blocking headphones, I followed him through those two airlock doors into a gun range which looked like a smaller, less elaborate version of the ones I was used to seeing on TV and in movie thrillers. There weren’t any big tough cops or soldiers, and there weren’t any separations between the small tables people were sitting at. I was mildly disappointed, and had to remind myself we weren’t in New York or Los Angeles.

Once again, I was alone, and we took the far left position. The target in my “lane” wasn’t human-shaped as I’d pictured it would be.

“The board of trustees won’t allow any other kind of target,” Seamus explained.

“It’s pretty small,” I muttered.

The target was just a sheet of 8½ x 11 inch beige paper with a black circle in its center, and that circle was 2½ inches in diameter, he said. Was I really supposed to be able to hit that thing? It hung on a conveyer belt 4½ meters away—that’s what the indicator said on the wall, where there was a set of buttons, he explained to me, for bringing it closer, moving it further away, or reeling it in to change the target.

“We can start wherever you want the target placed,” he offered.

“No, this is fine.”

Seeing a Ruger .22 on the screen in the classroom was nothing like holding one in my hand, and I was glad that he began by repeating what we’d discussed before, showing me how to load the magazine five cartridges at a time, put it into the magazine well, listen for the click, push down on the slide stop, position the gun in my right hand aiming at the target, curl my right pinky, ring, and middle fingers around the grip, secure those with four fingers of my left hand holding the right steady. I did everything slowly, almost as if I were a second instructor telling myself what to do, or an actor studying his own performance, though the word “magazine” suddenly bugged me. I realized I might have to call it a clip or I’d be thinking of Time and Newsweek instead of ammunition.

The closer we got to firing the gun, the more I slowed down, making sure my right index finger was positioned along the barrel and both my thumbs parallel to each other and down below the slide, since that would pop out when the gun was empty and I could get injured.

“Last move,” he said. “Click down the safety with whichever thumb feels most comfortable.

I chose my right thumb, aimed, and took my first shots. The noise wasn’t much, neither was the recoil, but hearing the spent cartridges pop out the right side of the gun and clatter onto the table and floor was certainly weird. I dutifully reversed the steps and ended with putting a yellow plastic flag—the empty chamber indicator—into the Ruger’s chamber, and set the gun down on the table.

“Good,” he said.

But I was disappointed, because from where I sat, it didn’t look like I’d done very well. That was until Seamus pressed the button and the conveyer belt brought the target up to the table and I saw five distinct holes inside the black circle, all of them close to the center and each other.

My instructor whistled. “Nice! Have you ever done this before?”

I shook my head.

“That’s a great group, seriously. And for your first time, too. Let’s try you with the target further back, okay?”

Five cartridges at a time, we went through ninety-five more of them, and even when the target was twenty meters away, I almost always stayed inside the black circle, though the shots weren’t as close together as that first time. But I was still surprised—shouldn’t this be harder? And how could I have a skill I didn’t even know I had?

“Professor Hoffman, you’re an awesome shot!”