Trigger Finger (12 page)

I hadn’t set foot
in an aikido dojo since high school, but it all came back to me then.
 
My right foot slid behind my left, my hips
pivoted and my adversary found himself caught in the whirling dervish my body
had become.
 
I spun him once, twice, then
stepped back and felt the bones crack in his hand as I folded it over and
released the knife into my own.

He fell back
against the BMW, bounced off it, stunned.
 
I could have let it go at that—I had disarmed him, I had the knife
now—but Bobby was in my head then.
 
And
Bobby said:

Handle it.

I darted forward
and pinned his body against my car.
 
And
I jammed the blade as far as it would go under his right rib cage.
 
Right into his heart.

His eyes widened
and his mouth opened.

“Think you’re
going to rip me off?”
 
I hissed.
 
“How do you like this?
 
Huh?
 
This how you thought it would go down?”

My face was six
inches from his.
 
I could smell tobacco
and beer blending with the stench of rotting teeth and gums.
 
Something wet and warm flowed down over my
right hand, but I didn’t look at this.
 
I
looked at the man.
 
I looked at his
face.
 
I looked for recognition of his
position, the mistake he had made in attacking me and the understanding that he
had accosted the wrong man.

But I found none
of this.
 
His face was slack,
expressionless.
 
I looked at those
dilated pupils and a crazy thought danced across my mind, hooting and hollering
and waving its arms as it barked at the moon:

He has no brain.
 
He has no soul.

I swallowed.
 
My jaw shook as I parted my lips to whisper,
“Who sent you?”

He opened his
mouth.
 
Blood gushed forth, but he
managed to say, “The Bald Man.”

And he dropped.

I didn’t even try
to catch him.
 
I let the body fall with
the knife still buried beneath the rib cage.
 
His blood glistened on my hand and ran from the wound in his chest in a
dark, sticky river that soon enveloped my Mastercard, my Visa, my Alamance
County Public Library card.
 
His eyes
stared sightlessly at my shoes.
 
He
didn’t move.

And I stared right
back at him, unable to speak.
 
I had
killed again, but this wasn’t what gave me pause.

Did he just say the Bald Man?
 
I thought.
 
Did he really say that?

Blood dripped from
my hand and splattered on my pants, my shoes, the asphalt.
 
I looked all around me.
 
The Carwood, Allison building, the only
witness to my third killing this year, regarded me with dark, silent
windows.
 

“What’s going
on?”
 
I asked aloud.

The meth addict—or
whatever he was—I’d just stabbed through the heart didn’t answer me.
 
A dark stain blossomed across the front of
his jeans from where he’d wet himself when his brain had let go of his
involuntary muscle control functions.
 
When I knelt down beside him, my nose detected the stench of his feces
mixed in with the coppery-sweet odor of his blood.
 
I breathed in through my mouth and held my
lungs still as I reached into his front pocket and fished out my watch and
smartphone.

Bewildered and
even more terrified now than when I’d seen the knife for the first time, I
dialed the police.
 

15.

“He mentioned the
Bald Man?”
 
Dr. Koenig asked.

Outside, the
dogwood trees flanking the concrete bench had largely shed their leaves.
 
The weather had turned colder as we slid into
that time of year when a body feels the first chills borne on the winds of
autumn and understands that the temperature will continue falling, and falling
and falling.

“He did,” I said
with a sigh.
 
I felt exhausted from too
little sleep but wired at the same time—the lingering effects of this morning’s
massive infusion of coffee and the adrenaline rush of the evening before.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes
and rubbed them underneath his glasses.
 
He too looked tired and I wondered then what challenges he himself faced
on a daily basis.
 
I wanted to know more
about his life outside of his office and my problems, but to date my attempts
to uncover facts about his personal life had met with deft changes of subject
and therapeutically appropriate reminders that we needed to focus on my case
and avoid the small talk.
 
Which, he
noted, Southerners have a hard time doing.

“So…”
 
he trailed off as he finished rubbing his
eyes and had to readjust his glasses.
 
“You killed this guy.
 
Without a
gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He had a
knife.
 
You took it away from him?”

“I did,” I said.

“Tell me again how
you did this.
 
No; show me.”

So I recreated the
scene right there in his office.
 
I
showed him how I had stood with my hands up, pantomimed the robber’s own body
movements.
 
When it ended, I realized
that my face and whole body had grown pleasantly warm.
 
I was smiling.

“That’s amazing,”
he said.

“It is,” I agreed.

“How long has it
been since you’ve attended an aikido class?

Now I rubbed my
own eyes, and I sat down.
 
“About twenty
years.”

“Two decades.
 
And yet you remembered that move.
 
That’s incredible.”

True.
 
Toothpaste syndrome vanished and everything I
knew deployed exactly where it needed to.
 
“It is,” I admitted.

“You’re a hero
again.”

“Yep.”

But I didn’t feel
like one.
 
Instead, I felt scared.
 
The mugger had said “Bald Man.” I
knew this to a moral certainty.
 
But why?

He’s not a man
, a voice inside me
said.
 
Not Bobby or Kate or Allie or any
of the other people who habitually talked to me in my head—it wasn’t even
me.
 
I didn’t know who it was.
 
He’s so
much more than that.

I cleared my
throat.

“When the
Burlington Police got there,” I said, “Both of the responding officers knew who
I was.
 
One of them told me I’d done a
good job.
 
The other one whistled and
said, you’re one hard son of a bitch, Mr. Swanson.
 
Then a detective sergeant arrived and
‘investigated.’”

I raised my
fingers and put quotation marks in the air around that last word.

“I say it that way
because his ‘investigation’ consisted of him telling me what happened, closing
his notebook and offering to buy me a beer.
 
I’m not kidding.
 
He said, so this
guy tried to mug you, and I said yes, Sergeant.
 
Then he said, then he attacked you with the knife when you didn’t comply
fast enough, and I said, yeah, you know, basically that’s what he did.
 
So, he concluded, you had to wrestle the
knife away from him and defend yourself.
 
You had no choice.
 
I said, you’re
right, I didn’t.
 
He didn’t ask me a
single question, Doc.
 
He
told
me what happened and I agreed with
him.”

“Did you want him
to take you downtown?
 
Book you for
murder?”

“Not at all,” I
said with a shake of my head.
 
“And I’m
not a criminal lawyer, so what do I know, maybe they do that all the time.
 
But it was….”

I hunted for the
right word.
 
When the detective arrived,
I’d been standing there over the body with the two uniformed patrol
officers—who had done absolutely nothing to secure the crime scene.
 
They’d let me stand there, leaning against
the BMW, while they asked me questions not about the dead guy at my feet, but
Pinnix and Ramseur.

I swallowed
again.
 
I rolled up my magazine and
tapped it on the table.
 
“I’m afraid,” I
said, “that maybe…something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”

“Were there
reporters?” He asked.

“What?”

“Reporters.
 
Did the media come to your office?
 
Has anyone asked for your statement?”

“Oh, yeah.
 
WXII met me in the parking lot when I showed
up for work this morning and shoved a microphone in my face as soon as I got
out of my car.
 
I can’t remember the
reporter’s name…you watch the news?
 
Ever
seen that hot brunette?”

“I have.”

“It was her.
 
She asked me for a comment, and I told her
that it was a tragic event, that I was shaken but otherwise okay and that my
heart went out to the families of the deceased.
 
I’ve been told that I’m going to be on the six o’clock news.
 
I’ve been talking to reporters
all day
, Doc.
 
Except for my wife, my kid and my secretary,
you’re the only human being I’ve spoken to today who
isn’t
going to print something I said.”

“So you’re going
to be a celebrity again,” he observed.

I sighed.
 
“I guess so.”

He stared at me.

“Does any of this
strike you as odd?”
 
He asked.

“Absolutely.”

He moved his stare
from my face to his notepad.
 
I watched
his lined features, his manicured goatee, and tried unsuccessfully to read his
thoughts.

Finally, he capped
his pen and clipped it to his notepad, which he slipped into his leather briefcase.
 
“Do something for me,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Our next session,
bring Allie.
 
I still need to talk to
her.
 
Can you do that?”

I looked at the
window and inhaled a deep
ki
breath.

“Can you do
that?”
 
He repeated.

“I’ll do my best,”
I said.
 

16.

Getting mugged in
the same year that you suffer a home invasion stretches the imagination almost
to the breaking point.
 
Lightning, we’re
taught from an early age, doesn’t strike twice in the same place.
 
There’s this cosmic bad luck budget and we’re
only allotted so much of it in any given time span.
 
Think about it: how many people in their
twenties and thirties lose both their parents close together?
 
Not many.
 
It happens, but when it does even people who don’t know you pinch their
faces and purse their lips and breathe through their noses and say something
like,
My God, that’s terrible.
 
Because you’re only supposed to suffer so
much suckness.
 
We have faith in the
ability of statistics to protect us from receiving more than our fair share of
tragedy.
 
He Who Shovels the Shit will
only pile so much on you, because, as we know, his wagon has to serve everyone.

I say “we,” but
that’s a crock because I don’t actually believe that.
 
I know it to be untrue and I didn’t need to
get mugged to understand it.
 
I’ve
understood it ever since the day, back when I was a kid, when I met a woman
named Angela.

I don’t remember
her last name, nor the precise time we met.
 
October, November, something a like that.
 
The leaves had largely vanished from the
trees that lined the back roads of Catawba
County, a few brown
hangers-on dangling from skeletal branches in stubborn refusal to surrender to
the oncoming winter.
 
A night wind
blowing down from the mountains to the west ruffled these and sent the
occasional victim fluttering in the air over the highway, spinning and twirling
and dancing before coming to rest on a blacktop that blended seamlessly with
the sky.
 
The three of us—Bobby and Kate
in the front, I in the back—sat comfortably ensconced in the warmth of my
mother’s Mercedes.
 
Driving around,
burning up gasoline, trying to postpone the moment when we couldn’t avoid going
home any longer.

We found her
wandering on

He slammed his
foot to the floor.
 
A machine-gun opened
fire somewhere as the antilock brakes deployed, snatching the Mercedes to a
chattering and shuddering halt as inertia threw me forward and then jerked me
violently backwards just as fast.
 
Had we
not just stopped at a gas station ten minutes before, I may have wet
myself.
 
Instead, I just said with my
eighth-grade eloquence, “What the fuck?”

“You almost hit
her,” said Kate.

“Almost hit
who?
”
 
I demanded.

“Her,” said Bobby.

I followed the
invisible beam shining from Bobby’s extended index finger.
 
When he’d slammed on the brakes, he guided
the Mercedes partially onto the shoulder and now the headlamps shone in a crazy
oblique direction across the pavement and into the barely restrained wilderness
that abutted the shoulder.
 
There, on the
outskirts of the light, sat the woman.

Long brown hair
hung in strings over the shoulders of a pink bathrobe.
 
She sat hunched forward, eyes open but
seemingly unaware of our presence.
 
She
didn’t move, not even when Bobby moved the car fully onto the shoulder and
brought the front bumper to within mere feet of where she sat.
 
In the electric glow of the headlamps, her
eyes looked solid black.

“What’s wrong with
her?”
 
Kate asked.

“I don’t know,”
Bobby said, “but I’m about to find out.”

He unbuckled his
safety belt, opened the driver’s door and got out.
 
I swallowed then, my pulse quickening just a
little because the woman not only didn’t look at us, but she didn’t even
blink
, and I thought,
who doesn’t blink
?
 
My gut flooded with something cold and black,
and I wanted to reach forward and grab Bobby back into the car.
 
Leave
her alone,
I wanted to say.
 
Something’s wrong with her.
 
Something is very, very, very wrong.

“Be careful,” Kate
cautioned.
 
It came out as a whisper.

Bobby didn’t hear
her.
 
By the time she said it, he’d
already made it out of the car and around the front bumper.
 
He knelt beside the woman, said something we
couldn’t hear.
 
When they both stood, her
bathrobe fell open to reveal a pair of pink sweatpants and a matching T-shirt
that read,
What Would Jesus Do
?

Bobby walked her
to the other side of the car and put her in the back with me.
 
She moved under her own power, compliantly
obeying his instructions as he told her to
get
in
and
watch your head
and
buckle your safety belt.
 
But she didn’t look at me.

Kate turned and
stared from me to the woman, from the woman to me.

“Uh…hi,” Kate
said.

The woman didn’t
answer.
 
Bobby closed the door and made
his way back around to the driver’s side, where he got in and buckled up
again.
 
He placed both hands on the wheel
and looked in the rearview mirror.

“This is Angela,”
he said.
 
“And she needs a ride to the
hospital.”

Angela spoke.

“There’s been an
accident,” she said in a monotone.
 
“With
David.
 
And Johnny.”

“Who are David and
Johnny?”
 
I asked.

“Husband and son,”
Bobby replied, shifting into drive and pulling back onto the road.
 
He found a driveway and used it to reverse
directions, taking us back towards Hickory.
 
“Car wreck.”

 
“Are they okay?”
 
Kate asked.

“I need to go to
the hospital right away,” Angela repeated.
 
“Because there’s been an accident.”

They probably
weren’t okay.
 
You didn’t wander out onto
the highway when the hospital called to say your husband and your kid have a
nasty case of whiplash.
 
Her shuffling
walk, her catatonia, that could only follow an earthquake or the detonation of
a nuclear bomb inside the brain case.

“Oh.
 
Oh my God.”
 
Kate turned around in her seat to face us.
 
“It’s going to be okay,” she said.
 
“Everything’s going to be fine.”

“There’s been an
accident,” Angela repeated.

“Pray,” Kate
urged.
 
“That’s what you need to do right
now.
 
You pray, and we’ll get you to your
family.”

“I’m needed at the
hospital right away,” Angela said.

“And we’ll get you
there.
 
Bobby, can you move it little
faster?”

“Christ on a
stick, what do you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t know,
Bobby, what
are
you doing, move it!”

When we reached
the emergency room at Catawba Memorial, Kate hopped out to open the door for
her.
 
I hopped out, too, because if I
remained in the backseat Kate would ask me to reach over and unbuckle the woman
and if I did that our skin might touch.
 
I hung back, not touching, not helping, remaining as far away from her
as I could.
 
Bobby and Kate each took a
side and guided her into the building, but I hung back.
 
I didn’t want to touch her, because bad
luck—really bad luck, like this kind—is contagious.
 
I could smell it on her.
 
She was cursed.

And I was
right.
 
Inside, we learned that David and
Johnny had lost their lives to a drunk driver on Highway 321 two hours
ago.
 
The year before, the nurse said,
she’d been in here another time.
 
When
her daughter and her other son had died in the same kind of accident.

One husband, three
kids, two car wrecks.
 
Everybody dead.

Up at the admissions
desk, both of Kate’s hands flew up to her mouth.
 
Bobby just stared at the nurse—he didn’t say
anything.
 
I turned to look at Angela,
whom they’d planted in a seat beneath a television bolted to the ceiling.
 
Above her head, a rerun of
Growing Pains
did its best to ease the
suffering of the patients waiting in slumped agony for a chance to see a
doctor.
 
She stared at the black windows
until she noticed me looking at her, and we locked eyes.

“I need you to
fill out some paperwork,” the nurse said.

“But we don’t know
her,” Bobby protested.
 
“I just found her
sitting on her behind out in the middle of nowhere…”

“We’re a little
shorthanded tonight, do you think you could help us out a little?”

“I don’t mind
helping you out, I’m just saying that I just turned eighteen, like, last week
and I don’t even know who this lady
is
…”

I walked over to
Angela, leaving the conversation behind me.
 
She didn’t look away as I approached and sat down in a chair just
outside of touching distance.

“God hates me,”
she said.
 
“He wants to see me burn.”

How do you argue
with that?
 
I didn’t want to get too
close to her, but I did want to comfort her, ease her suffering if at all
possible.
 
But what do you say?
Cheer up
? Uh, no.
 
Everything’s
going to be okay?
 
Bullshit.
 
Everything would
not
be okay.
 
Not for her.

“It’s not true
what they say,” she told me.
 
She leaned
forward and spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, like she wanted no one but
me to hear her.
 
“They tell you He loves
everybody, but he doesn’t.
 
They say He
punishes the sinners, but that’s not true either.”

 
“Don’t say that.”

“There’s no one
protecting you,” she said.
 
Now she was
smiling—or grinning, or grimacing, something that involved an upturn of the
corners of the mouth but played something black and out of tune on my ribs
because why would anybody do anything but scream at a time like this?
 
“There’s not.
 
You can pray to the empty heavens all day long, but
there’s no one listening.
 
You can be a good boy, but that won’t protect you because He doesn’t care.
 
He’ll let your guts spill out all over this
floor.
 
He’ll cut you.
 
And when you think you can’t bleed anymore?”

She raised her
chin and regarded me the way teachers habitually did when they stood on the
verge of an important revelation about history, literature or algebra.

“He’ll cut you
again.
 
Because you can always bleed
more.
 
And He likes that.”

“Who likes
that?”
 
I whispered.

That crazy,
hellborn smile.
 
She raised her index
finger, but whether she meant to emphasize her point or to direct my attention
heavenwards, I didn’t know.

“Him,” she hissed.

Ten feet away, my
brother and Kate tried to complete hospital admissions sheets for a woman they
didn’t know.
 
Angela stared at me,
watching me digest what she just said.
 
I
sensed her waiting for a response, I really didn’t know what to say.
 
Had I been a more enthusiastic disciple of
Christ, I would have been better practiced in the logical jiu jitsu employed by
the faithful when confronted with things like nuclear weapons, the Holocaust
and families dying in car accidents.
 
Maybe I could have provided her with some small measure of comfort in
that moment.
 
But, lacking any better
ideas, I allowed my lower jaw, that thing dangling from the bottom of my empty
skull, to open and I said, “Shit happens.”

As soon as I said
it, my face reddened and my skin burned with shame.
 
But her eyebrows rose like I’d just said
something incredibly profound and revelatory.
 
She nodded three times, her eyeballs remaining fixed on mine as her head
rotated around them.

“Yes,” she
said.
 
“And then it happens
again
.”

I don’t know what
became of Angela.
 
After we left her at
the hospital, we didn’t speak of her for many months, hoping, maybe, that if we
didn’t talk about it we could forget whatever lessons we’d learned that
night.
 
It didn’t work—not for me,
anyway.
 
I thought about her again and
again over the years.
 
And I thought
about her yet again on my way out of Dr. Koenig’s office that afternoon, after
again agreeing to bring Allie to one of our sessions.