T. Parker - Iron River

Dear Mom & Dad,

I apologize for not writing the last two days. I won’t go into details, but we were part of a diplomatic mission south of the border. We were successful at great cost. Jimmy is back with us, but eighteen are dead-all fourteen narcotraficantes and four Mexican policemen. Jimmy was treated very badly, but he’s going to heal up. Blowdown departed Mexico that very night and left it to Baja authorities to make some sense of it. I’m trying to make my own sense of it. At a certain point, fighting is your only choice, and I brought myself to that point willingly. I now own a full soldier’s soul, something I never quite earned in my months in Iraq. I don’t know what the cost will be to me. Right now I am numb and very tired. I’ve been here for ten days now, and they have been the bloodiest and deadliest days I’ve ever seen. I still don’t know if I’m shaping my life or if my life is shaping me. I suppose most of us never answer this question finally. I met a little man who claimed that God can put dreams into the minds of sleeping people and the devil can, too. But they don’t ever know how the person is going to react to the dream. That stuck with me though I’m not sure why. Maybe because I used to believe that God and the devil are in competition for us. I believed that when I was a kid, anyway. Or maybe because I’ve had some very strange dreams lately! I continue to believe that I belong here. What this says about me, I honestly don’t know. Yet.

Love to all,

Charlie

“This makes my heart glad, Marcos,” I say. “Yes, Mr. Pace.”

We’re in production for one thousand units of the Love 32. Today is Friday, August tenth-one year almost to the day since Pace Arms made its last gun. I watch from the third-floor security window as the machinists and assemblers and finish men punch in. They were rounded up by Marcos. Some have come from as far as Mexico City to take this work. I know most of them from before. They’re skilled and honest and hardworking men, and mostly undocumented, too, so I don’t have to pay them much. As I watch them file into the manufacturing bay, I realize how much I’ve missed them. I don’t think a single one of them genuinely likes me, but that’s not the point.

I’ve decided to start with just the night shift-four to midnight-which will allow our activity to blend in with the other assembly plants in this manufacturing zone. We’ll increase to two shifts once the bugs are out. I say “bugs” somewhat guardedly because these production lines have a proven track record for speed and efficiency. During my finest year as production manager, we turned out 139,554 weapons. Recalls were slight. And Marcos has fielded the cream of the crop, just as I asked him to.

“I have work,” says Marcos, turning for the stairs. Marcos was happy to commence work again, but since learning that our thousand-unit lot is to be produced without serial numbers or an identifying gunmaker’s symbol of any kind, he has been somewhat subdued. He knows it’s illegal. He knows there are bad people waiting for these lovingly crafted products. He knows that they are paying his salary.

I sit in my third-floor office to enjoy a few minutes of nostalgia. I can hear the muffled sounds of sidearm manufacture two floors down, and the loopy Mexican music the crew always plays. As always, the building smells of cut steel and bluing agents and gun lubricants and ignited gunpowder. I think of coming here as a little boy, seeing Mom and Dad in their professional worlds-Mom in marketing and Dad in contracts. I think of Uncle Chester, too, immense in his cream linen suits, pink-cheeked and small-fingered, his head a bald immensity. I remember the respect he demanded and got, and I wish that of all the Pace family traits, I could have gotten his confidence and gravity instead of the general squirrelishness with which I try to make do. Yes, it was pure Ron Pace to faint when Herredia slaughtered the five men down in Mexico. No, it was not the first time I’ve fainted at the sight of gore: viewing a car wreck when I was ten, seeing a neighbor saw off two fingers at his garage workbench when I was twelve, watching a lung surgery video as part of a smoking prevention program when I was fourteen. Etc. I faint but I do not look away. This is my smidgen of bravery. The incident in Mexico was by far the worst.

I enjoy the view through our freshly washed windows-one of the first things I did after getting the start-up capital from Bradley and Herredia was to recontract with the janitorial service. So right now, just after four o’clock on a hazy warm Orange County afternoon, I can see South Coast Plaza rising profitably out of what was once a lowly bean field, and I can see the graceful maze of the freeways and boulevards and interchanges, and of course to the west I see the sacred holy ground of the evangelical Trinity Broadcasting Network, rocked recently by a scandal of homosexuality. I feel bad for the scandalized minister because I know what it’s like to be hated by the media and a large portion of the public. And I thought his broadcasts were sometimes moving though often corny, too.

And of course I think of Sharon Rose Novak, to be married tomorrow at noon in Newport Beach. It’s fitting that Pace Arms is born again and Sharon Novak dies a symbolic-to me-death within the same twenty-four-hour period.

So I walk out to the lobby and sit where she has worked for the last five years and where she will continue to do so-I truly hope-after her Maui honeymoon, for many, many years to come.

Here is where she sits.

Here is where she works.

Sharon and I are almost exactly the same age. We were born on the same day of the same year. I’m actually two and one-half hours older. Soon after we discovered this coincidence, we began making lists of differences and similarities between us. It was a way to test astrological theory. Well, the list of differences got real long real fast, and there were not many things we had in common besides basic human nature. She is generous and I am selfish. She is outgoing and I’m reserved. She is open with her words and feelings and I am closed. She is ignorant of the past while I like knowing what has happened before. She hates making plans and I love making plans. She resists commitment and I’ll commit to practically anything. She thinks astrology is total bullshit but I believe it has certain truthful aspects. So far as unusual things in common, we both love bagpipe music and loathe walnuts and we both constantly dream of having siblings though we are only children. And that’s about it. A few weeks after she started working here, I told her I loved her. We were seventeen. I presented her with a brand-new, never-fired Pace Hawk autoloader chambered for the.22 Long rifle cartridge, arguably our finest gun. I had it engraved for her: For Sharon, safe forever in the arms of Pace, smug that the arms would be my own. It was in a presentation box. She heatedly scoffed at this and didn’t really speak to me for almost half a year. I nearly cracked. Gradually, we became friends again and I was always very careful not to exhibit affection or desire of any kind though I’m sure these things showed through. I compensated with a tireless work ethic and what I thought was a haughty cool. I became aware of certain nicknames and gossip being circulated here at Pace Arms, mostly on the second and third floors, but I had to admit I deserved them. She kept the gun but never referred to it again. Sharon will be married in less than twenty-four hours and I still think she’s the most delightful and desirable woman in the world as I know it.

It’s nice to sit in her chair for a few minutes. Like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, though more comfortable. Here in her work area, I look at the pictures of her cat and a pop singer whose name I don’t even know, and of course the snapshot of her fiancé. And when I finally stand up, I remind myself that it is time to let her go. It really is. This is not a new idea for me. As always I am wholly, utterly, spectacularly unenthused about it.