T. Parker - Iron River

To my surprise, Uncle Chester is standing in front of my third-floor desk. For a huge man, he’s always been quiet, and he’s staring down at me before I can even guess why he’s here. He’s wearing his usual unstructured cream linen suit, wrinkled and world weary. Blue dress shirt, no tie.

“Ronald.”

“Uncle Chester. Terrific to see you.”

“If you say so.”

I stand and come around and we hug. He feels unnaturally strong. With my arms around him, my hands won’t even come close to touching. As always he smells of baby powder. When I was growing up, it was said that Chester had once crushed a two-hundred-pound mastiff that had attacked him without provocation outside a camp-ground bathroom in the Sequoias. I have no reason to doubt it and I can feel that he could do the same to me here right now if he wanted to.

He lets me live and I step back. I haven’t seen him in over a year, since just before the judgment that finally flattened Pace Arms. He has never changed: same overlarge body, same shiny shaven head, same blue eyes, same baby-skin face with the pink blossoms on his cheeks, same trim white teeth. If I paint him as a grotesque, he is not quite. There is something leonine about him, something graceful and powerful and feral. He might be twenty-five or seventy. There’s just no way to tell by looking. I know him to be fifty-two, two years younger than his brother, my father, would be, and four years older than my mother, whom Uncle Chester married a year after my father’s suicide. Dad committed the act here at Pace Arms while seated at firing station two, down in the basement, using the same model Pace Hawk.40-caliber autoloader that would later discharge and kill eight-year-old Miles Packard when he dropped the gun while playing with it.

I move a good chair into place for him.

“I didn’t come halfway around the world to sit down.”

“We can stand.”

“Let’s stand in manufacturing.”

We take the elevator down. Uncle Chet stands with his hands folded before him and his head bowed and his eyes closed. He takes up more than half the space in the elevator car.

“I enjoy familiar sensations,” he says. “Your mother says hello. She’s stable as she can be, it seems.”

“She likes the new room.”

“I’m glad it makes her happy. It destroys me to see her like she is. Literally destroys.”

Which makes me wonder if that’s why he’s been gone for over a year. My mother, Maureen, was institutionalized not long after Miles accidentally killed himself. She’s a 295.30-paranoid-type schizophrenia, episodic with interepisode residual symptoms. She is only occasionally violent and twice suicidal. The doctors said that the boy’s death probably contributed to her sudden break, but they couldn’t say how much. Certainly she had already been destabilized by my father’s act. As if all that wasn’t enough, there is also a lineage of madness in her family. Chester said that she died when Miles died, that it just took a little time to become apparent. He said this often. Mom started out at a nice private sanitarium in Tustin, but with the death of Pace, Chester had her committed to a group home run by Fairview State Hospital here in Costa Mesa. It’s not a grim place, and she has her own room. Through longevity she recently graduated to the best and largest room in the home, first floor, corner windows, southwest exposure. The window glass is reinforced with steel mesh.

“I see her twice a week,” I say.

“Of course you do.”

We step out and I key us into the manufacturing bay. Chester holds his small hands together behind his back and strolls. This was a posture I imitated during my head-of-production days and I feel compelled to use it now. I fall in beside him. He moves down and around the long tables, towering over them, looking down at the wheeled chairs, the task lights and the table magnifiers, the power buffers and grinders, the trays of hand tools, the piles of new red shop rags, one per work station, the spray cans of oil and solvent, the bins of pins and bolts and springs and all parts machined, the files and tweezers, needle-nose pliers and nylon hammers, the waterless hand soap and the unempty ashtrays and the coffee mugs.

He stops. He wipes an index finger across the worktable and shows me the gray metal dust. He wipes his finger on a clean shop rag, then picks up a coffee cup and holds it upside down over the floor and waits. It takes a few seconds, but finally one milk-heavy drop of coffee rolls to the rim and hangs there.

“What are you making?” he asks.

“It’s called the Love 32.”

“I asked what are you making.”

“It’s a thirty-two-caliber full auto pistol, silenced. I’ll show you.” Down in the basement range, I pull out the lacquered box and unveil the Love 32. Uncle Chester sits at station five. He’s nearly my height when sitting. I assemble the gun. His blue eyes watch without blinking. His petite hands rest on his massive thighs, and his head is cocked. He has the same stillness that I remember. I release the brace rods and set them at full length though I know they won’t be long enough. I leave off the noise suppressor for now. I hand him the gun.

The last person to occupy his seat was of course Sharon, and I think of her sitting there with the peanut butter-filled pretzels sliding off her lap, and her sad beautiful face hidden behind her tangled blond hair. Right now she’s on break, off to South Coast Plaza for lunch with her mom and dad. She’s better. She has slept nine straight nights in the penthouse. That’s every night but one since her wedding day. During her one night of absence, I couldn’t sleep but I didn’t ask her about it. I don’t know what she does at night in the penthouse after I leave. I hear her lock the door after we’ve talked and watched TV or sometimes read. She sleeps late. But during her workdays, she has shampooed two stories of carpets, replaced the plastic electrical outlet faceplates with more fashionable models, purchased cheap but attractive framed photographs and area rugs for the vestibule that once held the Catlins and the mounted bear and buffalo, painted the bathrooms on the second and third floors, and replaced every bulb of recessed lighting with the new fluorescent minis that she found on sale at fifty cents each through a power company promotion. She has the energy of a.44 Magnum. Even without measurable evidence, I believe she will invite me to join her in my bed soon, and the idea of this momentarily obliterates Chester ’s presence in my world.

When I become aware of him again, he’s holding the Love 32 in both hands, lightly, as if it might be hot or very delicate. He gently hefts it for weight. He removes from his handkerchief pocket a small tool which he applies to the gun. In a few seconds the thing is in parts on the bench, fully decomposed by Chet’s precise fingers. He examines the parts where they lie. He rearranges them slightly. He could be divining the future. He becomes still again and ponders. Then from a brief entanglement of fingers and tool and parts, the Love 32 emerges whole again, fitted into Chet’s hand.

I hang a silhouette and send it out fifty feet, and Chester steps to the firing line with the machine pistol. His appearance there is the polar opposite of Sharon ’s. Whereas Sharon standing there with the Love 32 was one of the most beautiful visions I have ever had, Chester with the same gun and standing at the same firing line looks only menacing. He stands the line sideways rather than face-on, and rather than using his left hand to brace the gun against muzzle rise, he curls it behind his back like a fencer, his whale strength superior to that of any machine gun he’s ever fired, or so he has told me. He fires the five-second burst with the barrel so steady that the group in the middle of the torso is no larger than a softball.