Trigger Finger (3 page)

“Oh, yes it
is.
 
Everyone loves you, Kevin.
 
Everyone admires you.
 
So bravo.”

“Thanks,” I
said.
 
My throat tightened.
 
Sweat sprang forth from my armpits and
collar.

Thomas from
Mebane, if that was even his name, hadn’t called to praise me, I realized.
 
He’d called to destroy me on the air.
 
Suddenly, I saw this very clearly.

“It’s incredible,
really.”

“What’s
incredible?”

“Everything about
this little tale of yours.”

Tale.
 
The way he said it, the amused inflection, spiked my heart rate and made
my face flush. “What are you getting at, Thomas?
 
Are you saying…this is just a story?”

I hadn’t prepared
for this accusation.
 
In my head I’d
rehearsed somebody calling in and accusing me of being a bloodthirsty killer,
saying I didn’t have to kill them, I could have just wounded them, I should go
to jail for murder.
 
I’d rehearsed
that.
 
Not somebody calling me a liar.

“I’m saying it’s
incredible that you have one solitary weapon, which happens to be an
AK-47.
 
Most people who buy assault
rifles have dozens of guns; you have one.”

“I inherited it,”
I said.
 
“My father died and left it to
me.
 
Otherwise, this would be a
completely different story.”

He continued as if
I hadn’t even spoken.
 
“I also find it
incredible that these intruders struck you in the head with a bat and it not
only failed to kill you, not only failed to crack your skull but also failed to
knock you out for an appreciable length of time.”

My face
burned.
 
Stage fright gone now, I felt
only anger.
 
I envisioned this man
sitting in his house, his apartment, his trailer, whatever hole in the ground
he occupied when he wasn’t out torturing small animals, and I saw the upturned
corners of his lips.
 
Smirking.
 
Ensconced in comfortable anonymity, seeing if
he could make me squirm.

The trigger finger
on my right hand twitched.
 
Fuck him.

Craig must have
seen these thoughts on my face, because he locked eyes with me and shook his
head.

“And then,”
continued Thomas from Mebane, “these men dilly-dally on the first floor of your
home while you recover from the bat strike, unlock your gun safe, load the
rifle and sneak upstairs.
 
Where you find
them lined up in your hallway like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

I leaned forward
into my microphone.
 
“Are you calling me
a liar?”

Craig’s
head-shaking intensified.

“I don’t know,
Kevin, what do you call a man who fabricates a story like that?
 
Makes it up out of whole cloth?”

Craig leapt
up.
 
He had known me ever since both of
us had come aboard as rookie associates at Carwood, Allison ten years ago, and
he knew what I would say next.

But he’d
positioned himself on the other side of the room.
 
Too far away.

“You, Thomas,” I
said, “are an asshole.”

Billy’s fat face
turned white and he grabbed his microphone.
 
He made a cutting motion to Dylan or William, who didn’t see it because
he was busy staring at me.

“And you know
what?” I continued, “You’re batshit crazy.
 
How could I make up a story like that?”

“You tell me,”
Thomas from Mebane replied, emotionless.
 
“You’re the one who did it.
 
You’re truly a coward, Kevin.
 
You’re a sniveling, worthless
coward
who…”

“Coward?
 
Why don’t you come on down to my office
tomorrow morning and I’ll beat your ass?
 
And hey, what’s your real name?
 
Too pussy to share that, you little bitch?”

Now Billy lunged
sideways to push Dylan or William out of the way.
 
The boy hit the floor at the same instant as
Craig’s right hand fell on my shoulder, pulling me backwards exactly as his
left pushed the microphone away from my face.
 
Billy began furiously fingerstabbing buttons on Dylan or William’s
console.

Thomas from
Mebane’s voice glistened with amusement at the commotion he’d caused.
 
Classic psychopath.
 
“Oh, that’s not important,” he said.
 
“Why don’t you just call me…”

Pause.

“…the Bald Man,”
he finished.

At that moment,
Billy found the button that ended the call.
 
He slid back over to his own station to announce a commercial break,
ostensibly to give everybody time to get me under control, but he needn’t have
bothered.
 
Every joule of anger had
drained from my body just as the blood had drained from my face.
 
I found myself sitting in shocked silence as
Dylan or William climbed up off the floor and Billy tore off his headphones and
Craig was saying something in my ear about what was I thinking, saying
ass
and
shit
and
pussy
on the
radio? What was wrong with me?

I didn’t answer
him.
 
Three simple words—
The Bald Man
—and all my hot water turned
cold.
 
Because while nobody else could
have known it, not even Allie, I’d heard those words before.

4.

I’d like to say
that I’d reached this station in life—job at my city’s largest law firm, big
house out in the country, BMW, beautiful wife who didn’t have to work for us to
live—through nothing but the strength of my own character.
 
But I can’t.
 
I grew up in a house on the golf course of the Rock Barn Country Club in
Conover, North Carolina,
right outside the larger city of Hickory.
 
My father, a prominent cardiac surgeon, made
sure that my family never had to worry about money.
 
The closest my brother Bobby and I ever came
to the school of hard knocks was attending public school, which meant that we
mixed with the proletariat.

But life can suck
in any number of ways.
 
In our case, we
never had to worry about subsistence issues only because our father worked his
ass off, meaning he stayed gone all the time.
 
He left us in the care of our mother, who had this nasty habit of
clocking out every day before lunch.
 
We
only saw her in the mornings, a red-eyed, irritable presence that burned the
toast, overcooked the eggs, never smiled and occasionally fled into the
first-floor powder room to vomit.
 
On
days when my father left before breakfast, we had to burn our own toast because
she wouldn’t even get out of bed.
 
Every
afternoon, I’d find her lying down either in her bedroom or on a couch.

“Your mother’s
depressed,” Dad explained.
 
“Leave her
be.”

“Our mother’s a
sorry drunk,” Bobby explained.
 
“Want to
order some pizza?”

We spent our
afternoons and evenings watching television, playing Nintendo, eating junk food
and occasionally doing homework.
 
When
Bobby reached driving age, we’d cruise around Hickory in Mom’s Mercedes with Kate, the
girlfriend who would later become his wife, and look for reasons not to go
home.
 
A lot of my memories of childhood
take place in that Mercedes, or somewhere I went in it, with Bobby and Kate.
 
By virtue of the location of her parents’
single-wide trailer in relation to the Rock Barn Country Club, she and Bobby
met in kindergarten.
 
They became such
good friends that we actually took her on vacation with us.
 
I remember my mother and father arguing about
her once when I was really little, on the way back from one of the rare family
dinners out that Kate didn’t attend.

“We’ve got two
kids of our own,” Mom protested in response to something Dad said.
 
“Two.
 
Not three.”

“What are we
supposed to do?
 
You saw how they live.”

“They’re her
parents.”

“They’re sorry
drunks,” Dad snapped.
 
“They lay around
getting plowed all the time and it’s shameful.
 
You know that?
 
They ought to be
ashamed of themselves.
 
Those aren’t
parents, those are sorry, worthless sacks of alcoholic trash.
 
I have absolutely no respect for people like
that.”

My mother fell
silent.
 
The conversation ended there.

One Saturday
morning during Bobby’s 12
^th
grade year and my 8th, we went to the
flea market at the fairgrounds on Highway 70.
 
This wasn’t special in and of itself; the fairgrounds always hosted a
flea market on weekends, and that Saturday wasn’t the first time we’d gone
there to kill time.
 
But I always
remembered that particular Saturday, because that was the day we went to the
palm reader.

The flea market
had always reminded me of a scene from the first
Star Wars
movie, where Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi navigated
the hardscrabble streets of Mos Eisely on Tatooine.
 
Closely-packed clumps of Hmong jostled for
space with Mexicans, Cambodians, everyone chattering in the indecipherable—to
me—tongue of his or her people.
 
We saw
white people, but they were different from us—they wore tattered jeans, denim
shorts, T-shirts, arms and necks tanned leather-brown by the sun and nicotine.
 
They also seemed to speak a different language,
perhaps because they didn’t all have their front teeth.
 
They sold; they bought.
 
They haggled to save a dollar here, a nickel
there.
 
They inspired a deep, strong
desire to finish high school.

We didn’t go with
the expectation of consulting the palm reader.
 
We ended up at a table under an awning on the back lot, rifling through
the seller’s offerings with no particular retail goal in mind.
 
The table had grabbed our attention because
of the brace of rifles and shotguns standing with a steel cable running through
their trigger guards, threaded there to keep anyone from stealing them.
 
Bobby and I picked up and inspected the
weapons like we’d been handling them our whole lives—
barrel’s in good shape on this one,
Bobby commented, to which I
responded with a
yeah, it is
, as if I
knew a decent barrel from a crappy one.

The seller also
had a box of cassette tapes from bands whose music had reached that difficult
age where albums tend to migrate from cars and bedrooms into cardboard bins at
flea markets just like this one.
 
Kate
busied herself separating out the wheat from the chaff.
 
When she found one she liked, she’d open the
case and inspect the tape itself, looking for bends or discoloration, winding
the spools with her index finger to see if they actually turned or if one of
them would bind up the moment she popped the cassette into the dashboard.
 
If it passed muster, she’d set it aside.
 
Suddenly, she stopped rifling through the
tapes and stared at a small placard displayed in a card holder on the table next
to her box of treasures.

“Are you a palm
reader?”
 
She asked the seller.

The man looked
sixties-ish but could have been any age behind his gray beard shot through with
flecks of black.
 
He wore a red trucker’s
cap advertising some tree removal service out of Conover and a red tee shirt
with a pocket on the left breast that read “Marlboro” but held a pack of
Kings.
 
Steel wool covered his
forearms.
 
He opened his mouth to reveal
a set of teeth that appeared relatively intact but bore the telltale stains of
too much tobacco and not enough toothpaste.

“Naw,” he said,
“That’s my missus.
 
She’s in the
trailer.”
 
He pivoted his head a
half-turn on his fleshy neck and shouted, “RUBY!
 
YOU GOT CUSTOMERS!”

The awning
attached to a large camper trailer itself hitched to a pickup truck that looked
big enough to tow the space shuttle.
 
The
trailer was obviously old, its beiges, browns and harvest golds worn and
pitted.
 
The same held true for the woman
who stood now in the doorway, leaning against the metal frame.
 
Ruby was a tiny shred of shoe leather in a
blouse and blue jeans, hair graying like her husband’s, cigarette dangling from
the fingers of her left hand.
 
Rode hard and put away wet,
Dad would
have said.
 
I thought it now as Ruby
spoke in the sandpaper rasp of the ancient smoker.

“Y’all looking to
get your fortunes told?”

“How much?”
 
Kate asked.

“Normally ten,”
Ruby said, taking a drag on her cigarette.
 
“But it’s a slow day.
 
I’ll do all
three of you for twenty.”

Kate shot a
hopeful look at Bobby, who rolled his eyes as he set a battered Enfield rifle
back on the display table.
 
I didn’t know
why he cared; it wasn’t even his money, cadged as it was from Mom’s purse.
 
But Kate had asked.
 
That meant that she would receive.

“Whatever,” he
said.

“Pay up front to Chester there before
y’all come in,” said Ruby, turning to go back into the trailer.
 
“Don’t want to get stiffed if y’all don’t
like what I tell you.”

“Does that ever
happen?”
 
Kate asked as Bobby divested
himself of a twenty-dollar bill, passed it to an appreciative Chester and motioned for me to follow them.

“From time to
time,” Ruby answered over her shoulder.

The inside of the
trailer reeked, of course, of cigarettes.
 
It smelled like every gas station and bowling alley I’d ever been in, an
odor so strong that years later, when I got old enough to start going to bars
and clubs and other places where large numbers of smokers congregated, I would
remember Ruby’s trailer.
 
Smell, Allie
once told me, is more closely linked with memory than any other sense.
 
I believed her because of the way every puff
of smoke reminded me of that afternoon at the flea market, and the way every
one made me shiver.

But that day, the
intense aroma of tobacco was nothing more than a stink trapped inside a camper
trailer that had probably cost its original owner a great deal of money.
 
Ruby and Chester, I felt, not so much.
 
The interior was as dated as the outside,
with a thick shag carpet that had seized and held every unpleasant odor that
ever passed over it.
 
I had only the briefest
opportunity to observe the paisley upholstery before Ruby drew shut the
blackout curtains on the sunny side of the trailer and plunged us into a
darkness that she replaced moments later with a sickly light dangling over what
passed for a kitchen table.
 
She motioned
for us to sit down.

“How’s she going
to read our palms if she can’t see them?” Bobby whispered to me.

If Ruby heard him,
she gave no indication.
 
She stubbed her
cigarette out in a little gold foil ashtray, then took Kate’s hand and flipped
it over to expose her palm.
 
“What’s your
name, sugar?”

“You can’t
tell?”
 
Bobby quipped, prompting an
irritated scowl from Kate.

“I’m Kate,” she
said, turning back to Ruby.

“Pleasure to meet
you, Kate,” Ruby said.
 
“You ever had
your fortune told?”

She shook her
head.

“Okay, here’s how
it works; I’m going to read your palm, but I’m going to feel your energy,
too.
 
I studied palm reading with the
Gypsies—real, honest-to-God gypsies—but I come by my other talents naturally.”

“Other talents?”
Bobby asked.
 
I could hear the raised
eyebrow in his voice.

“I’m also a
psychic.”

“Oh.
 
I see.”

“No,” Ruby said, “
I
see.”
 
She looked down at Kate’s palm and said, “Let’s take a look at what you
got here, sweetie.”

Kate, she divined,
hadn’t had an easy life (true, but highly generalized).
 
But she’d managed to do well for herself
within its confines, and her lifeline showed her avoiding the mistakes of her
parents (highly generalized, future prediction impossible to disprove at the
present time).
 
She stood on the cusp of
a major life change (like every other seventeen-year-old girl in America).
 
She may have already met the man she would
marry, and she would marry him soon.
 
Not
soon as in during the school year, but within a relatively short time after
graduation.

Kate smiled.
 
She liked this.

Now Ruby took
Bobby’s hand.
 
She grimaced then, like
she’d suddenly experienced a bad cramp.
 
She let his upturned hand fall to the table as she made a fist and
coughed into it.
 
We listened to her
scrawny body struggle to expel the black tar from her lungs, struggle with a
force so pronounced it seemed almost cartoonish.
 

“You okay,
ma’am?”
 
Bobby asked.

At last, she spoke
again.
 
“Don’t join the Army,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t join the
Army,” she said again.
 
“You’ve been thinking
about it.
 
Don’t do it.
 
Bad idea.
 
Go to college and get a desk job.”

She meant this as
an ominous warning, I saw, an attempt to wipe that wry, this-is-bullshit grin
off his face.
 
It failed.
 
Bobby raised one eyebrow and said, “O-kay.”

“I’m serious,”
Ruby said.
 
“You’ll die.”

“I don’t want to
die, so…okay, no Army.”

The reading
proceeded.
 
He would also get married
soon, Ruby predicted.
 
He came from
privilege, but he’d experienced his share of hardship.
 
He would find peace in marriage, and he hungered
for that above all else: peace.
 
Life
without worry, without drama, the simple life of a man who works, who pays his
bills and who has not the slightest difficulty falling asleep at night.
 
This would provide a welcome change from what
he had experienced in the past, because while many words applied to his life,
peaceful
didn’t number among them.
 
He suffered a great deal of inner turmoil,
explosive amounts of it.
 
He sought
peace, and he would find it if he made the right choices.