David Cody
April Third
On the network news that night, the town where the shootings took place, which is the town where you live, is characterized as sleepy, bucolic, a company town where people look out for one another. The immigrant community – the shooter was Vietnamese – is described as small, though it doesn’t seem small to you, who have lived your whole life here – it seems large, and growing. Residents are declared to be in a state of shock, but most of the people you have encountered today, at the post office or the grocery store, though they might express shock, don’t seem shocked at all. You can’t blame them for this – why should the fact that it happened here be any more shocking than if it happened anywhere else? Yet your own lack of shock seems like a shortcoming. It is an unstated point of pride with you that you don’t manufacture or express emotions to conform with others’ expectations of what you should be feeling; but right now you’d like to feel more than you do.
The weather was supposed to be good, so you stayed home from work to clean the yard. Shortly after you got back from dropping your daughter off at the high school in the morning, she called to say she had forgotten her violin, which she needed for orchestra. No hurry – she didn’t have orchestra until the afternoon – so you helped your wife with the breakfast dishes, drank a second cup of coffee, read the sports section, then drove back across town with the instrument. The day is crisp and sunny; buds are appearing on the trees, and though the grass is not yet growing, it has turned a vivid green. As you near the school, you see street barricades and flashing lights down the block, but think nothing of it. At the rear door to the school – the delivery door, usually unlocked and unattended, which you use to avoid going through the metal detector and being issued a visitor’s badge by the cop at the desk at the main entrance – you are met by an excited blond woman you know vaguely, a secretary at the school, who tells you there’s been a fatal shooting at the American Civic Association. She says that hostages have been taken. The Civic Association is around the corner from the high school. The blond woman tells you the school is under lockdown: she will let you in, if you’d like, but you won’t be able to get out.
Looking at this woman’s round, flushed, expectant face, you are a bit dazed; then you feel the mind-clearing interest and relief that come in the moment when reality shifts and your routine is disrupted.
Your daughter will not be needing her violin today.
You will not be cleaning the yard.
You return to your car and begin the drive home, trying without success to find some news on the radio. You notice a helicopter circling in the clear blue sky overhead.
Shootings, though hardly common here, are common enough; but you can’t recall anyone having been taken hostage. The hostage aspect, and the fact that whatever is happening is happening at the Civic Association, already give the event some context. The Civic Association provides services to immigrants. English and citizenship classes are held there, as well as cultural events – a garlic festival takes place each June in its parking lot. Your mind begins to entertain various violent scenarios, having to do with the difficulties of adjusting to American life, nativist hostility towards newcomers, inscrutable foreign feuds transported whole to upstate New York.
When you get home, your wife is upstairs in the shower. You are reluctant to break the news to her, anticipating the puzzlement, the embarassed expectation, on both sides, to react. You sit on the couch and flip through the television channels, still looking for some news.
Then the phone rings. It’s your wife’s brother, calling from Texas. He is on the edge of hysteria. Driving to work, he heard on the radio of a mass shooting and hostage situation in your town. Fifteen people are dead. Like you, your brother-in-law is a native of this place. You assure him that the family – the very large extended family – is fine. Of course, you have no way, at this point, of knowing with absolute certainty that this is true; but how could it be otherwise? Calming your brother-in-law takes some time. A few minutes after you hang up, your wife comes downstairs, toweling her hair. She asks who called.
Suddenly, the story is all over the television. The coverage is both local and national – the networks already have correspondents on the scene – and for the next two hours, you and your wife sit at either end of the couch and watch. The situation is ongoing. Fourteen dead – your brother-in-law’s figure was high – have been removed from the building; but the building has not yet been secured. SWAT teams are moving through the building room by room. There has been no communication with the gunman, or gunmen – on Fox, there is speculation that there may be more than one. As many as forty people remain in remote areas of the building. It is unclear whether any of them are being held hostage.
You have heard nothing from your daughter. The public has been asked to refrain from the use of cell phones so that the frequencies will be open for emergency communication. On Fox, someone suggests that the gunman, or gunmen, may have escaped the Civic Association building and be on the loose. You are not worried – even if this is true, what are the odds of him– of them– getting into the school?
In mid-afternoon, with the news coverage tending to repeat itself, you walk to the post office and the grocery store. When you get back, there is still no word from your daughter. You dial her cell phone, and hear a ringing in the kitchen. You find her phone on the kitchen counter, hooked up to its charger. You decide to do some yard work after all. As you rake a winter-hardened ridge of leaves from alongside the garage, you can see the helicopter continuing to circle over downtown. You are loading an armful of dead branches into a garbage can when a car pulls into the driveway and your daughter gets out.
The newswoman who refers to your town as bucolic reported from Ground Zero on 9/11 and from inside the Super Dome during Hurricane Katrina. Now she is reporting live to the nation from a picturesque streetcorner in this “company town” – but the fact is that the company is virtually gone, the population is half what it was fifty years ago, and the mostly vacant downtown, where many people no longer feel safe walking at night, is struggling, with the help of state grants, to transform itself into an arts center. All over the television dial, famous faces are trying to explain what happened today in your town. In this saturation news coverage, you feel a perverse sense of pride, a proper sense of shame, and a powerful sense of the transitory – this attention, which somehow seems worth holding onto, will shortly be withdrawn.
Your daughter was brought home from school by the mother of one of her friends. The students had been confined to their classrooms all day. They had been served pizza and bottled water and watched movies. They were not allowed to listen to news – there was concern that some of the students might have relatives in the Civic Association building – but your daughter could see the building, and the commotion there, from her classroom. There had been talk among the kids about having to spend the night at school, but in fact they had been dismissed at the usual time. Apparently, by then the danger had passed.
Most of her schoolmates, your daughter reports, ignored the request that they stay off their cell phones; but she is otherwise uncharacteristically gentle in her assessment of the conduct of students, teachers and administrators during the lockdown. Your daughter is an only child. You had her late in life, after years of trying – in fact, you had given up trying. She is an excellent student who hates school; but she hates it for all the right reasons, and even in this you are proud of her.
A news conference comes on the television, live from City Hall. You flip through several channels, and see the same image on each of them: a somber lineup of public officials standing shoulder to shoulder behind a lectern topped by a bank of microphones. Though only the public officials and the backs of the heads of the front row reporters are on screen, you can tell that the room is crowded. At the lectern, the mayor speaks haltingly, the governor eloquently, their words punctuated by the clicking of cameras. The chief of police provides what details he can. At nine fifteen that morning, a Civic Association client, still not positively identified (though his name is all over the national news), barricaded the rear door of the Association’s headquarters with a borrowed car. He then entered the front door armed with two semi-automatic pistols. He shot two receptionists, killing one. Next, he went to a classroom. In less than a minute, he fired ninety-eight rounds, killing a teacher and eleven students. Then he turned a gun on himself. Four other people were wounded. Two of those are in critical condition. Thirty-seven people who were in the building at the time of the assault barricaded themselves in the basement. They remained there for three hours until police finally entered the building. Contrary to earlier reports, at no point had anyone been held hostage. There is no evidence that there was more than one shooter. The shooter’s motive is unknown. The guns were legally obtained. Asked to describe the scene in the classroom, the chief refers to it as “unbelievable” and leaves it at that. Counseling has been made available to any law enforcement or emergency personnel who feel the need to talk to someone. The chief’s predictable characterization of the shooter’s suicide as “cowardly” strikes you as a misstep – if the perpetrator, instead of killing himself, had shot it out with the police, would the chief have called him brave? – but for the most part it’s an impressive performance. You know the chief slightly. He’s been chief for less than a year. He seems to you to have grown in the job.
When the officials are done speaking, the camera moves to a young reporter for a local station. She is frantically preparing for her turn on camera, which she doesn’t realize has begun. She brushes back her hair, checks her notes, fumbles with her microphone. She is talking, to someone off camera, or to herself; she looks towards the camera for a sign. Even when she begins to speak to the camera – to you – her veneer of professionalism is too thin, her ambition too apparent. The utter falseness of her position seems somehow to parallel your own. When she refers to the community’s shock, you change the channel.
The news is over, but you and your daughter continue to sit in the living room, watching television. Outside, it is growing dark.
Your wife is in the kitchen, making a late dinner.
She is a fine cook.
She is still beautiful.
You have been lucky in your life.
Every night, you and your wife and daughter have dinner together. You do not have many family rules, but this is one.
Tomorrow, you will go out of town on business for the day. When people hear where you’re from, they will offer their condolences, and you will find yourself in the same position as the public officials and newscasters, the headline writers and editorialists, having to say something.
Tomorrow, or the next day, a list of victims will be published. You will scan the list for a familiar name. Obituaries and profiles of the dead will appear in the newspaper. Reading about their lives, their places in the community, the reactions and recollections of those they’ve left behind, you will begin to feel a little bit of what you are supposed to be feeling.
You sit in the living room and watch television.
Your wife tells you it is time for dinner.
***
David Cody is a married father of five and 1975 graduate of Binghamton University. He retired in 2005 as Deputy Commissioner of the Broome County Parks and Recreation Department, and coaches track and cross country at Binghamton High School. His fiction has appeared in The Seattle Review.
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"Bali", Photilation by Larry Hamill