The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  The Testing of Luther Albright

  A NOVEL

  MacKenzie Bezos

  to Granyan

  and to Jeff,

  for similar things

  Contents

  1 The Research Topic

  2 The Razor

  3 The Drink

  4 The Roof

  5 The Book

  6 The Lie

  7 The Stand-Up

  8 The Gun

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1 The Research Topic

  THE YEAR I LOST MY WIFE AND SON, MY SON PERFORMED NINE separate tests of my character. One night during Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the sofa tipped beneath us, and this is how it began.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  His palms were flat on the sofa cushions. Liz was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and before I could think to stand, she had taken him by the wrist and led him to the shelter of the door frame. She reached to place a hand on his shoulder, and although he was fifteen, this was all it took to get him to follow her into a crouch. In a second, I had joined them there, and as I kneeled, I had to grasp the door casing for balance. Now I noted objects in the room by weight; our distance from windows. I became aware of sounds—a quick pop that could have been wood or glass; three dull thuds from different corners of the house—all of it muffled by the persistent rattling of our things: of flatware in drawers and knickknacks on shelves and pills in their bottles.

  When the room stopped shaking, we uncovered our heads, and Liz’s eyes, which normally ignored the television, turned immediately to it. Jim Fowler was rappelling down a cliff face toward a nest on a narrow ledge.

  Elliot stood.

  “We should wait here a minute,” Liz said.

  He crouched again. “It didn’t feel very big.”

  “All the same…”

  When the condor saw Jim Fowler, it spread its wings, a span the length of a man. Jim wrapped his arms around it from behind, folding them in. His boots dangled in the air. He tagged the condor’s ankle, and then opened his arms wide to release it, a burst of feather against the blue sky. As he was hoisted away by the helicopter, the head and shoulders of a local newscaster replaced him.

  “We interrupt your regular programming with a special report. An earthquake was just felt in the greater Sacramento area.” Her eyes flitted offscreen and back. “We do not yet have any data on the magnitude or the epicenter of the disturbance, but, here in our studio, objects dropped from high shelves.” She touched her ear and paused. “The sensation was reportedly felt as far away as Redding, as this caller describes….” From an invisible speaker in the studio came the voice of a Citrus Heights woman explaining that she had been talking to her sister in Redding on the telephone when it happened; her sister had been carrying a mug of hot coffee at the time, and at the exact same moment that the caller heard the tinkling of wind chimes on her own porch, her sister screamed because her coffee had soaked the front of her blouse.

  Liz stood and crossed the living room. She had a beauty so striking even I could not recall it fully from morning until nightfall. She was over forty by then, and still people spent the first moments of any encounter with her as they would in a hospital room or a cathedral, their eyes locked first on one feature and then another, trying to decode their composite power. She bent at the waist and picked up a set of proof Kennedy half-dollars that had fallen from the shelf and fingered a crack in the clear plastic case. She and I had met twenty-two years earlier at the Wells Fargo Bank on J Street; she monitored access to the safe-deposit boxes, where I appeared weekly to deposit coins of dubious value. She had thought me an inheritor or a man in the midst of a legal battle until one day she stepped into the vault while I was pulling a small tin of wheat pennies from my coat pocket.

  Now she set the cracked case back on the shelf and looked at us, two men she had left in the safety of a door frame. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go make sure nothing else is broken.”

  Elliot led the way. He had grown so much in the last month that from behind he was like a stranger: a thicker trunk, and also a change, from loping to shambling, in his gait. We followed him into the kitchen, and we all three surveyed the room with a sensitivity to disorder we had not felt when we cleared the dinner dishes an hour before. Elliot stooped to pick up a ballpoint pen that may well have been dropped that afternoon. Liz righted things on the counter: a cookbook, an orange that had strayed from an overfull basket of fruit. We had heard no noise that could have come from the direction of the kitchen except that pop, and now I opened cupboards trying to find it. The dishes sat stacked behind smooth oak doors I had purchased twenty-two years ago and waxed with a T-shirt. Little felt pads I had glued to their inner corners let them close without sound.

  When Elliot’s patience with the normalcy of things ran out, he passed back into the hallway, and again we followed. In the hall above us was a small antique table that I had bought for Liz last fall when Elliot began high school. On it, she kept a potted jade plant, a framed photograph of the three of us in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, and a souvenir core of bedrock, which had rolled from the table to the carpeted floor. We found the other thuds without trouble: a thick book on gardening Liz kept on her small nightstand, and a five-pound hand weight she had set on an ottoman in our walk-in closet. This left only the pop.

  When I built the house, I’d left the attic unfinished, and over the summer, Elliot and I had made a project of its completion. I had done some of the prep work for this during original construction—installing a subfloor; fitting extra collar ties between the rafters to take a ceiling—so that when I described the job, he was disappointed by how easy it would be. I tried to explain that nothing about our job would be easy—we had to install a knee wall, and just getting the studs properly bevel-cut to fit the sloping roofline would take a lot of care and time—but secretly I was moved by his ambition. He wanted to add dormers, something that altered the exterior of the house as well, and so that’s what we did, kneeling on the scaffolding we had built together and snapping level chalk lines to mark space for them—the two sharp changes in topography they would be. Now the space was a sitting room where he did all of his homework, and as I watched him crest the stairs, I was frankly worried that one of these windows he had framed with such care had cracked under the strain of the earthquake. But the windows were fine. When we caught up with him, he was kneeling on the floor over the three large shards of a broken drinking glass.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said.

  She laughed. “Who are you: Mother Nature?” She reached out for his shoulder—he was at that age when he would shy from my touch, but not from hers—and gave it a squeeze.

  I tore a few blank sheets from one of his notebooks and crouched next to him. By folding it, I made a sort of catcher’s mitt. “Here,” I said. He hesitated. The pieces were sharp and curved, like licks of flame, cloudy with fingerprints and the residue of soda. They clinked as he laid them on the paper, and this raised an odor—not soda: beer.

  Liz put her hand out to lead him; “Besides, it’s only a glass,” she said, and he followed her, as he had to the door frame, down the stairs.

  In the living room, he settled next to her on the couch. I sat alone in the armchair, and although the news of the earthquake was riveting in its way, now my son was his own quiet spectacle. The birth of one’s first child is supposed to be a joyous occasion; so my initial assessment of what those nine months of waiting had yielded was a surprise. At first a lump of flesh. At worst, a stranger with needs so many and so persistent it was difficult not to resent him.
I would go to his room at night to watch him sleep because, although by day I bent over his basket to make sounds, secretly his clear, dark, stranger’s eyes watching my face so intently gave me a hollow feeling that scared me. I tried to make it go away. I lifted him in my arms and put my mouth to his soft cheek and walked him around our yard. I bundled him in blankets and made myself change his diapers, thinking the intimacy this would force might eventually overwhelm this sense of mine that I had invited a stranger—a tiny, judgmental intruder—into our home.

  But then one day a change. I had his basket on the bathroom counter. Strands of Liz’s hair had clogged the sink drain, and I had brought him in with my toolbox so she could sleep. I was about to crouch to open the trap, and when I switched my flashlight on, he tracked the bright beam on the wall with his eyes and then looked, God bless me, at my hand holding the flashlight. I released a laugh of pure astonishment, and at this, this single laugh, he gave me his first smile.

  After this it was different. His body felt firmer in my arms, less precarious, and his face, once (forgive me!) a threat, seemed full of acceptance and promise. Instead of leaving the house to escape my feelings, I sometimes asked to take him with me when I ran errands. Without my noticing, his frightening, fragile neck had strengthened, and one day I found I could carry him down the aisles of a hardware store sitting up on my crossed arms. A damp heat rose from his hair, and I smiled first at a beautiful woman whose eyes I normally would have avoided on fearful principle; next, a one-armed man sorting through a box of nails. Something about Elliot’s company: his head rested against that low spot at the center of my chest where, in their first pictures, children will draw the heart.

  On the couch next to Liz now, he snorted at the television. Newscasters had taken over the programming completely, but mostly with interviews of people who had been no more than frightened. They had several good shots of shattered windows, and helicopter footage of a pileup on I-5. They reran this clip countless times, ending with a two-minute spot on what we could all do to make ourselves safer in the event of an aftershock: bolt tall pieces of furniture to the wall, hang pictures on tremor hooks, and remove sharp or heavy objects from high shelves.

  “How about padding non-upholstered furniture?” Elliot said.

  “Or wearing a helmet around the house,” I said, and he laughed.

  There was some real damage. In the days that followed, scaffolding appeared downtown on buildings that had dropped bricks to the sidewalks. On the right shoulder along Interstate 5 where that ten-car accident had killed two people, commuters slowed and rolled down their passenger windows to drop bouquets of flowers. But newscasters undermined solemnity with exaggeration. Local stations floated banners in the upper-right-hand corner of the television screen: “Uncovering the Damage,” “Aftermath,” and even “Sacramento Under Siege.” For a full week, Channel 3 ran a nightly story about one of the injured: a waitress with a broken leg; an air-traffic controller with a neck brace; a schoolteacher with a sprained wrist, the camera zooming in dramatically to catch her writing on the blackboard in her shaky left hand.

  I joined in the joking about this, but secretly I felt a sense of foreboding much deeper and more troubling than anything the media tried to stir. I tried to trace it to its source. Late one night, I reviewed our wills for oversights, but this did not make it go away. On my lunch hour, I mapped and then test-drove four separate routes from my office to Elliot’s school for emergencies, but the next day in the kitchen as I filled our tumblers with orange juice, my pulse quickened in a way that I could neither suppress nor understand.

  Finally, alone in my car on the way to work, another explanation occurred to me. I worked then as a civil engineer for the California Department of Water Resources. I had done so for twenty-three years, longer than Liz and I had been married, and in that time I’d seen the arrival, installation, and departure of three Principals above me as I rose from checking shop drawings to supervising a team of as many as twenty-eight in the design of dams. At the time of the earthquake there were three other Supervising Engineers in our division, and we reported to Don Moraine, a slight man with yellow teeth who touched his temple and looked sideways when he laughed. He was shy, but competent, and above him was our Division Chief, Howard Krepps.

  Back in 1957, when I took my first course in Civil Engineering, water resources planning had a mystique in California that anyone now would have difficulty imagining. California is an important state, with an economy larger than all but six countries in the world, and its prosperity is largely dependent on the reorganization of its waters by engineers. This is not why I picked CE as a major—I picked it because the jobs were plentiful and stable, most of them state jobs where hours are reasonable and benefits good. But it is also true that in spite of myself I was enchanted by certain facts. Engineers had made whole rivers flow backwards. The California Aqueduct is one of two man-made structures visible from space.

  It hadn’t been difficult for me to get a job within the Department of Water Resources, but not long after I did, the climate changed. In just a handful of years, a complex set of political forces reduced the projects we were asked to design to a fraction of what they had been before. Between 1960 and 1973, sixteen dams had been built, and since then only one. I had done well during this period, surviving the cutbacks, and remaining part of a team that, as might be expected within a government agency, even after the trimming, was larger than it needed to be. Just months after the deepest cuts had been made, Don asked me to propose a design for a large earth embankment dam a mere seventy miles outside of Sacramento. It was a plum project, not only because we all sensed the change that would make it the last large dam constructed in over two decades, but because of the visibility its location would give our work in the local news. A photograph of Governor Brown cutting the ribbon on North Fork would appear on the front page of the Sacramento Bee.

  Driving past a block of scaffolding on L Street, it came to me that it was only a matter of time before this coveted proximity made my dam an object of scrutiny again. There was a division within the Department charged with reevaluating dams when new data made better assessment of risks possible, and an earthquake of this size would almost certainly trigger one. Maybe this had been the root of my vague apprehension. I thought about it. Although these investigations were legitimately important and the dam safety engineers just as smart as any in our division, supporting the reevaluations was tedious and unrewarding work under any circumstances, and at the time I was wrestling with the design of Governor Brown’s big geothermal project. But try as I might, when I dwelled on the implications—the time wasted rechecking old design assumptions, the traction lost on a technically challenging project—I could muster nothing more complex than irritation.

  Which is honestly all I felt a few mornings later when we passed the newspaper to each other sheet by sheet, looking at more photos of fallen bricks and people covering their heads on the steps of the capitol, and Elliot said: “Do you think they’ll investigate your dam?”

  I said, “They’ll at least explore it within Safety of Dams. Whether they hand it to us to look for deficiencies depends on what they find.”

  “Would it annoy you if they did?”

  His spoon hovered over his soft-boiled egg. When he was four, he had come to the kitchen smelling of my aftershave. Last month, Liz had shown me a video of the two of us working on the attic together, and when at the end we both walked towards the camera with identical slope-shouldered posture, heat gathered beneath my arms. She rewound and showed it to me again, laughing sweetly, but still I felt the solemn press of responsibility that haunted every moment of his scrutiny or emulation.

  Now he held his spoon steady, waiting.

  I wrinkled my nose and shook my head almost imperceptibly, a look conveying good-humored dismissal. “Nah,” I said. “Benign distraction.”

  Fear did not seize me then—not right away—but it’s telling that I can remember so vividly the way he looked
at me when I said this. The bright window behind him furred his head with a corona of sunlight, like the head of a martyr in some old painting, and gave his features a dark quality that matched the intention forming inside him. He watched me; he did not break his gaze when he lifted his juice glass to his lips, did not stop studying my face even when Liz showed us a photo in the paper of a man standing next to a doghouse he had reinforced with steel.

  I forced myself to glance at the picture. I forced a laugh. “At work they distributed an Earthquake Evacuation Procedures memo.”

  Liz said, “At the supermarket they’re selling flashlights and first-aid kits near the checkout.”

  Elliot took an orange from the fruit basket. “Mrs. Parks changed our research assignment. Now we have to do it on an ancestor instead.”

  Liz cocked her head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Someone in Mr. Delmonico’s class lost an uncle in that pileup on I-5.”

  He cupped the orange in a napkin and began to peel it. When he was small, I had taught him to eat fruit wrapped in a napkin. Citric acid brought out a fine rash on his skin that never burned or flared, but lingered for hours and had nagged me with thoughts of small dangers that might befall him.

  Liz said, “I don’t mean to belittle his death, but that seems a little extreme. You’ve already started. You’ve read two books on automotive history.”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “So who are you thinking of doing? My Great-Uncle George would be good. He was a coal miner. Or kooky Cousin Lisa.”

  He pulled a strip of peel from the orange. It made a ripping sound and the kitchen filled with a sharp smell. In my exhortations on the use of a napkin, I never mentioned the rash, but instead talked of courtesy. The juice also left a brown stain on upholstery, and I wanted him to learn respect for his mother.