Since I had no idea if they still lived there, the next step was to call New Jersey information and ask if Anwen and Gregory Meier still lived in Somerset. They did. Goddamnit, they did. In that strange and spooky house that was supposed to be a replacement for their lost child.
I sat and thought, then hopefully called a couple of different charter airlines listed in the phone book to ask how much they charged to rent a private plane and pilot to fly East. The prices were insane, but I was willing to do it until they said they’d need at least three hours, minimum, to arrange it. I called the airports in Burbank, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Nothing worked. There were flights to New York from these places but not the right connections to get me to them in time.
Seconds after I put the phone down after the last futile call, it rang again. Praying it would be Lincoln so I could tell him the one essential thing he didn’t know, I snatched it up. Only to hear Mary Poe’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Max, it’s Mary. I’m calling from the car phone, so it’ll be a bad connection. Lincoln’s gun is definitely real, and it’s stolen. The serial numbers say it’s part of a shipment of guns from a truck that was hijacked in Florida six months ago. It’s also a major league weapon, very high-powered shit. Terrorists love Glock guns because they’re made mostly out of plastic and can be snuck by airport metal detectors. It’s no Saturday night special, Max. It’s the kind of piece that gives you the willies even when you carry a gun yourself. But you say it’s still there? Then it’s all right. Just take it down and hold it in your lap, or stick it in a safe till boyo gets home.”
I got off as quickly as I could, after asking her to be sure not to tell Lily about the gun. Having no idea how long I would be in the East, I went into our bedroom and packed a small bag with jeans, a couple of shirts, underwear… enough for three or four days. I knew I had to write Lily a note explaining some of this so she wouldn’t go mad with worry when she returned and found both of us gone. But what could I say? “I am running after our son, who has discovered he was kidnapped…” What could be said? There was no time to think about it. I wrote that he had run away, possibly with Elvis and Little White. I was going to try to find him before anything bad happened. That was why I’d run out of the restaurant earlier—because he told me he’d had enough of us and was going to go and live life on his own. It was the kind of lie that left out enough to be almost true. She would go for it and that was all I could hope for at that moment. Lily was stubborn about Lincoln, but not stupid. She knew how angry he was and how unpleasant he could be. Hearing he’d flown the coop would not surprise her. I wrote I would call her the minute I knew anything.
I ran out of the house, locked the door, and unthinkingly looked through the living-room window and saw that I’d left on a number of lights. One memory flicked through my mind of changing a bulb in one of those lamps, calling to Greer to please go to the kitchen and get me a new bulb. “Yes, Daddy.” The soft sound of her slippered feet racing down the carpeted floor and in a far part of the house asking her mother for a light for Daddy. What would our lives be like the next time I changed a light bulb in our home? How long would it be before that happened?
In contrast to all the frightening possibilities, the Los Angeles evening was lovely and fragrant. It would have been pleasant to sit out on the back patio, drink a glass of brandy, and talk quietly late into the night. We did that often. Greer would fall asleep in one of our laps as Lincoln had years before. We wouldn’t disturb them. It was too nice being there together. When he was still alive, the greyhound would lie on his side near our chairs, his long legs stretched out straight. He was still around when Greer was very young. More than once we’d enter a room and see this tiny girl standing close but never actually touching him.
“Cobb! Oh my God.” I remembered something intriguing when I thought of our dog. Lincoln was the only human being the old eccentric let touch him. Until one day the boy ran into the house in tears, wailing that Cobb had just snapped at him. Neither of us could believe it, knowing their special relationship. We reassured him, saying the dog had probably been sleeping and was in the middle of a bad dream or whatever. The three of us went out to find him and see what was up. He was in his favorite place—lying in the sun on the warm stones of the patio. We told Lincoln to go try petting him again. When he bent down to touch the gray giant, Cobb either grumbled or growled. The sound was not friendly. That was the end of an era. From that moment until he died, he didn’t want any of us touching him, not even his young pal. He still stuck his tongue out in those long, slow swipes Lily insisted were kisses, but he wouldn’t be touched. When was that? Walking to the car, I tried to figure out exactly when the change happened in him. It seemed to have been after Lincoln and I became blood brothers. Or it could very well not have. My mind was racing so fast and trying to tie so many different strings together that it was unhelpful and dangerous. I made up a line that has become a kind of all-purpose prayer for me: “I want calm and not control.” As I backed out of the driveway, window down for the cool air needed across my face, a part of me still couldn’t believe I was about to fly across country chasing a son who’d found out too much too soon and was doing exactly what he shouldn’t.
Turning the steering wheel, I started repeating over and over, “I want calm and not control.” Down Wilshire, weaving through the red and yellow taillight traffic, I said it. Down La Cienega Boulevard out to the airport: “I want calm and not control.”
The car was almost out of gas. I drove into a station and stopped by a self-service pump. The man in the cashier’s booth looked at me through a pair of binoculars. No more than thirty feet away, he used binoculars to see if I was going to rob him. It was a great idea for “Paper Clip,” but the life where I did that job now seemed as far away as the Ivory Coast. I went to the booth and slid a twenty-dollar bill beneath a bulletproof-glass window thick enough to stop a Cruise missile. The man held the bill up to the light to see if it was fake. His face was all suspicion. How many times had he been robbed, or simply scared to the bottom of his bones?
“We get a lot of counterfeit twenties.”
“I can imagine.”
My mother used to say, “You feel black, you see black.” The drive to LAX that night was one scene after another of worry or angst or hell, beginning with the man with his binoculars. Was it coincidence that I saw a drunken man standing in the middle of the street screaming, or two police cars screech up in front of a house and the officers jump out going for their guns? Further on, a gang of black kids stood in front of a Fatburger all wearing the same black-and-white Oakland Raiders baseball caps and windbreakers. There must have been fifteen of them in this uniform and they all looked ready for murder. The road widened out and began to rise toward the oil-well-covered hills. Streetlamps dumped their fake orange glare over us. I looked to the side and saw ugly, sinister faces in the cars passing mine. Drivers with narrowed-down heads like weasels, bald rats, and lipless ferrets pointed forward, so eager to get somewhere that even their heads were squeezed down by the G force of anticipation. A young child in the back seat of a Hyundai had its hands and open mouth pressed to the window. A beautiful passenger with long blond hair looked at me with such burnt-out, nothing-interests-me eyes. Was she dead? Was the world I knew suddenly so macabre and threatening because of what had happened tonight with my son? Or had it always been this way and only now was I able to see it with understanding eyes?