Trigger Finger (5 page)

“Allie!”
 
I yelled.
 
“Abby!”

“Upstairs,” came
my wife’s distant reply.
 
“Abby’s doing
her homework!”

I rubbed my eyes,
shaking my head.
 
I trudged over to the
refrigerator and grabbed a Heineken, setting my battered
Southern Rifleman
on the counter next to the bread box.
 
Taking a long pull, I closed my eyes and
savored the beer.
 
When I raised my
eyelids again, I found myself staring at the two doors set side-by-side into
the wall before it opened into the dining room.
 
The one on the right led to the pantry.
 
The one on the left led to the basement.

I stood with my
back to the sink and fridge, island and stools at two o’clock, straight shot
down the hallway into the foyer.
 
Dark.
 
Same position, same
lighting conditions as when I’d shot Pinnix and Ramseur.

The hallway was
clean now.
 
The cleaning company had
mopped and polished the floor, scrubbed and disinfected the framed pictures and
carried away their rags in buckets of pink water.
 
My handyman had patched the bullet holes in
the wall with drywall compound, sanded them smooth and then painted them
over.
 
Almost like it never happened at
all.

I raised my arms
as if holding an invisible rifle.
 
I
pressed my trigger finger against the Heineken bottle.

“Bang,” I said out
loud.
 
Then I moved my imaginary sight
just slightly to the right and said it again.

“Bang.”

By the time I
finished checking all the doors and windows on the basement and ground floor
levels, I had finished the beer.
 
I
grabbed another and headed upstairs.
 
I
checked the windows in the study and guest bedroom, then stuck my head into
Abby’s room.
 
She sat cross-legged on her
bed in pajamas, her long brown hair still wet from her shower.
 
A book lay open between her knees.
 
She looked up.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey.
 
How was school today?”

“Good.”

“What’d you
learn?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at her
window.
 
The latch pointed to the left,
which meant it was locked. “Nothing?”

“Not a thing.”

I looked at the
book.
 
“What’s that?”

“Civics.
 
We’re reading about the second Iraq
war.”

“Your uncle Bobby
was a part of that.
 
You should get him
to talk to you about it sometime.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t say
anything about the radio show, so I didn’t, either.
 
Maybe she hadn’t tuned in.
 
Sensing that my presence was unnecessary, I
withdrew my head and continued into the master bedroom.
 
Allie looked up at me and smiled.
 
“How’s she doing in there?”

“I’m
concerned.
 
She spent all day at school
and didn’t learn anything.
 
I’m trying to
figure out whether it’s the public school system or you drinking during
pregnancy.”

“Stop it.”

Off with the suit,
on with the battered Carolina T-shirt.
 
I
checked the windows remaining unaccounted for—master bedroom, master
bathroom—and hopped into bed.
 
She put
her book aside and took off her glasses.
 
Her walnut-colored hair framed a face that had outrun the aging process,
like a precious doll someone had placed in a velvet-lined box and only took out
to show very special people.
 
This is a masterpiece
, the doll’s keeper
would say.
 
Not
owner
, but
keeper
; you
didn’t own beauty like this.
 
See the detail of the cheekbones and
chin?
 
The eyes?
 
You won’t find work better than this
anywhere.

Of course Pinnix
and Ramseur had followed her all the way from Durham.
 
Once a man laid eyes on a woman this beautiful it became very, very hard
to tear them away.
 
Expose her to the
wrong sort of man, and…

“Are you okay?”
She asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be
okay?”

“I was
listening.
 
I heard.”

“Did Abby?”

Allie sighed and
shook her head.
 
“No, thankfully.
 
When you went on the air, she was up here
screwing around on Facebook.
 
She forgot
all about it.”

She had forgotten
about it because she had other things going on in her life, important things
like boys and the constantly shifting tectonic plates of friendship that
comprised the middle school social structure.
 
She could do this because on that night back in February, she saw
nothing.
 
She had awakened to the sound
of gunfire, but then her mother had appeared in her room, telling her not to be
afraid, everything was okay.
 
She hadn’t
seen the bodies or the blood, because after the deputies left, I’d concealed
the bloody mess with garbage bags so that she wouldn’t see a single drop of
it.
 
The mindless terror of that night
had missed her; while she had stood closer to ground zero than most people, the
incident had, in the end, happened to someone else.
 
Consequently, she forgot about it from time
to time.
 
It didn’t rule her life like it
ruled mine.

“Thank God for
small miracles,” I muttered.

“Who was he,” she
asked, dropping the question mark off the end like Dr. Koenig.

“Who?”

“That crazy
caller.”

I shrugged and
folded my hands on top of my head as I lay on my back.
 
I had read once about sleeping positions and
their correlation with personality; lying on one’s back supposedly demonstrates
an inner confidence.
 
Hands folded atop
or behind the head indicates a cerebral quality that goes along with it.
 
A confident and intelligent man—dare I say
hero
—would lay like this.
 
I intended to fall asleep in this
position.
 
I possessed that inner
confidence.
 
Two men had tried to kill me
and I’d killed them instead.

As I would kill
the Bald Man if he tried anything.

“Some nutjob,” I
said.
 
I toyed with the idea of telling her
about Ruby the Redneck Fortune Teller but decided against it for the time
being.
 
Allie held a college degree, but
she still carried around elements of the superstition that her Germanic
tribesman ancestors had passed down through the centuries.
 
She would create a connection there that
didn’t actually exist, and then she would get scared, because Ruby had said to
beware the Bald Man.
 
“Dumbass sitting
around in his trailer with nothing better to do than call in to AM radio
shows.
 
He’s a nobody.
 
Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re not
worried?”

“No,” I lied.
 
“Not one little bit.”
 

 
                                                                                                                             
           
6.

I didn’t fault
Craig Montero for asking me why I had an AK-47; I had never told him about it
before.
 
Actually, I hadn’t told
anyone.
 
Although it was only
semiautomatic and therefore perfectly legal for me to own, I considered it one
of my dark secrets, evidence of a side of my personality that I didn’t want the
outside world knowing about.
 
People
would make their jokes about Kevin Swanson ranching up down in the country and
getting paranoid just like all the other rednecks out there, but that wasn’t
really it.
 
I kept it quiet because it
said things about the inner workings of my mind—specifically, that I, Kevin
Swanson, attorney-at-law, had considered and accepted the idea of possibly
having to take a human life one day.
 
Had
I wanted to hunt—which I didn’t—I’d have bought a deer rifle or a shotgun.
 
Had I just wanted to target shoot, I’d have
bought a .22 rifle, maybe a pistol.
 
But
I had an AK-47, the Kalashnikov so beloved of terrorists and third world
armies.
 
This said things about me that I
didn’t want anyone hearing.

I also didn’t want
to explain how I came to own it.
 
The
short answer: my dad left it to me.
 
Like
most short answers, though, this one is grossly inadequate.

My father died
three years ago, when I was thirty-three and he seventy-five.
 
The year before that, he suffered a series of
small strokes that profoundly altered his personality and rendered him unable
to continue living alone in the house at Rock Barn.
 
While Bobby and I could occasionally forget
that our father was old, the strokes reminded us.
 
Even doctors have health problems; even
nonsmokers and marathon runners begin to break down.
 
For my father, it happened at seventy-four,
when the hard drive in his head started to go bad.

Although Allie and
I lived closer to Hickory
than Kate and Bobby, I didn’t get out there very much.
 
I could blame Carwood, Allison and its needy
clients, but truth be told, I didn’t want to go.
 
I didn’t want to see him struggle for the
names of everyday objects; I didn’t want to hear him complain about my mother
like she was still alive and lying drunk on the couch in the living room.
 
So I turtled up.
 
I went to see him maybe once every month or two,
ignoring the rapidly approaching time when I couldn’t see him at all.

Yes, I am ashamed
of myself.

Kate and Bobby, on
the other hand, traveled there every weekend.
 
When Bobby deployed to Iraq,
Kate quit her job in Jacksonville
and actually moved in at Rock Barn.
 
She
called us daily with updates on Dad’s status, for which I was profoundly
grateful because looking back on it, I don’t think I would have called on my
own.

Shortly after he
returned from the hospital after the last of the smaller strokes, Kate called
to say that he had begun seeing things.
 
This occurred mainly near the end of the day, when the sun grew low in
the sky and lengthening shadows combined with a tired and damaged brain to
create an environment ripe for hallucinations.

“There are people
in the yard,” he told her.
 
“Back and
front.
 
We have to do something about
this.”

“They’re looking
for their golf balls, Daddy,” she replied.
 
By this point, he had forgotten that Kate wasn’t actually his
daughter.
 
But, honestly, so had the rest
of us.

“That’s what
happens when you live on a golf course.”

“No,” he
insisted.
 
“Not golfers.
 
Not those kind of people.
 
Other
people.”

“What kind of
people?”

“
Others,
” he said, face scrunched with
worry.
 
“And they want us.”

They had this
exchange dozens of times, my father insisting that he saw people in his
yard—which irritated him, because he spent a great deal of money on
landscaping—and Kate doing her best to assure him that no, he didn’t.
 
When she asked him what these
others
looked like, his lips would
tighten into a nearly invisible line and he would shake his head and he would
stand beside whatever window he’d spied them from, maintaining a watch.

These
others
appeared with greater frequency
as time went on.
 
When they began showing
up at night, my father would shuffle into Kate’s room and wake her up.

“They’re trying to
get in,” he hissed.
 
“We have to call the
police!”

“There’s nobody
out there,” she replied.
 
“Just go back
to bed and try to relax.”

God bless her, but
you can’t say
go back to bed and try to
relax
to a man convinced that shadowy assailants are trying to break into
his house.
 
Eventually, he grew so
frustrated with Kate’s continued lack of interest in their mutual safety that
he called the police himself.
 
After he
pulled this a few times, she hid the phone and told us that we needed to
consider putting him in a rest home, a request I denied for weeks until I
finally relented and made the journey out to Conover to broach the subject with
him.
 
As I expected, that discussion
didn’t go well.
 
It ended with me getting
up from the living room couch and storming out the door, hunching my shoulders
to protect my neck from the arrows of ugliness he shot at me.
 
I remember getting into my car and thinking
about Abby, that sweet little face that recalled my mother and my wife at the
same time, and I thought,
I’m never going
to do this to her.
 
I’ll kill myself
first.

I didn’t come back
for two months.
 
And when I did, I only
came because I had to.
 
After my father’s
war with the people outside his house reached a boiling point.

In addition to
milling about in the yard and trampling his flowers, these
other
people also occupied the trees and peered into the upstairs
windows in an effort to pin down his movements.
 
They hid in the bushes and watched him through the downstairs
windows.
 
Eventually, they attempted to
remove the window screens, a difficult task for them because their hands
weren’t like ours.

“They’re
claws
,” he said later.
 
“Best way to describe ‘em.
 
Claws, talons.
 
Made for tearing flesh, not opening
windows.
 
That’s why we have to
lock
all the windows—sooner or later
they’re going to figure out they can just slash through the screens!”

I can imagine how
this terrified him—seeing these
people
,
if you could call them that, feeling that them watching him and wondering what
they would do when they finally figured out how to get inside the house.
 
I can also imagine how it must have
frustrated him when nobody believed him.

So I can
understand why he did what he did next.

In the wee hours
of the morning approximately four months before he died, the phone rang.
 
I woke up to the shrill electronic chirp and
knew it was Kate, knew she had bad news, and so I pretended to still be asleep
until Allie reached across my body and picked it up.

“Hello?”

A moment of
silence.
 
Then:
 
“You’re…no.
 
Oh my God.
 
Kevin?
 
Kevin, wake up!”

It’s the Big One,
I thought, sleep
cracking away from my brain like a disintegrating glacier sliding into the
ocean.
 
He’s dead.
 
Or on life support in
the hospital.

She shoved the
phone, which I totally didn’t want, into my hand.
 
“Hello?”

“I had to call the
sheriffs on your dad,” Kate said in a ragged voice.
 
“They’re hauling him down to the hospital on
an involuntary commitment.”

“What happened?”

“He lost it,” she
said.

She had awoken to
a series of explosions detonating in quick succession, a sound like fireworks
going off inside the house.
 
The sound
came from downstairs, and so she leapt from her bed and rushed to the
stairwell, halting at the top when she saw the flashes like lightning strikes
and heard the crash of breaking glass and understood that my father had a gun.

“Not just a gun,”
she explained, “an assault rifle.
 
He had
a fucking
assault rifle,
Kevin, and
he was shooting at these imaginary people in the yard.”

According to the
Sheriff’s Department, he fired sixty rounds in all, a total of two full
magazines.
 
He blew out every window on
the ground floor.
 
Once the windows were
gone, his bullets sailed unimpeded through the air and crossed property lines
to puncture tires, punch neat little holes in garage doors and shatter even
more windows on neighbors’ houses.
 
By
the grace of God, he fired on a flat trajectory and kept the damage down to
ground-level; had he let the barrel get away from him and fired high, he could
have shot through bedroom windows and killed the people sleeping there.
 
When the Sheriff’s Department arrived, they
found a first floor littered with shell casings, an assault rifle leaning
against the fireplace in the living room and a confused old man wandering
around trying to remember where he’d squirreled away the rest of his
ammunition.

“Where in the hell
did he get an assault rifle?”
 
I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Who sold him
that?
 
I want to know who thought it was
okay to sell a man of
obviously
diminished capacity any sort of firearm whatsoever…”

“Kevin,
I don’t know!
”

Bobby was in Iraq, thousands
of miles away from this mess.
 
I wanted
to turtle up in the worst way—I did not want to deal with this, I wasn’t
equipped for it—but I understood that I wouldn’t get away with that this
time.
 
So I dressed, packed a few things
and drove the two hours to Conover.
 
I
managed to stay awake and avoid running my car into a guardrail on I-40 with
the assistance of coffee, bewilderment and a significant dose of worry over the
court appearances and appointments I would have to postpone tomorrow in order
to take care of this.
 
Because although
my father had just blown out his windows and nearly killed a bunch of his neighbors
with an assault rifle nobody knew he had, things like court appearances and
clients bearing billable hours still seemed important to me and worth freaking
out about.

Yes.
 
I was and am a self-absorbed prick.

I met up with Kate
in the emergency room of Catawba Valley Medical
Center in Hickory.
 
Her hair in a messy blond ponytail poking slightly off-center from the
back of her head, she wore blue jeans and one of Bobby’s old T-shirts.
 
Dark circles under her eyes and a drawn
quality to her face made me stop and wonder where she had picked up the extra
twenty years.

“You talk to
Bobby?”
 
I asked as we embraced.

“I called the
base.
 
They’re going to try to reach him,
but he’s probably in a tent somewhere, so it might be a while.
 
Right now, we’re it.”

“You okay?”

She drew in a
long, deep breath.
 
Ki
breath, I recognized; Kate possessed this technique, too,
because she had taken aikido with Bobby and me.
 
She shook a little bit as she let it out, and I saw on her face the
stretched seams that explosive panic had left behind.

“I’m fine.
 
Him, not so much.”

“What the hell
happened?”

“The people tried
to get in,” she said.
 
“Apparently, he’s
been going on patrol every night for weeks, walking around down there with this
gun
and…I don’t know…staring down
these things he’s been seeing.
 
He said
they tried to get in.
 
So he stopped
them.”

“And all this
time, you never knew about the gun?”

She gave her
shoulders a tired lift. “I don’t search for contraband, Kevin.
 
Maybe he’s had it for years, who knows?
 
I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing
right now.”

“I’m just kind of
shocked here, because he’s never said a damn thing about guns my whole life, he
doesn’t hunt—hell, he doesn’t even
fish
—and
hey, whoa, here’s a big, fat old gun that carries thirty rounds to a clip and
he has one
.
 
It just doesn’t add up.”

“He’s got
dementia,” she said softly.
 
“Nothing
adds up.”

We stood in the
waiting room.
 
On a flat-screen
television on the wall above our heads, CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or some other
24-hour news channel ran continuous coverage of an airline crash in Europe.
 
Air France,
it said.
 
Twisted, smoking wreckage,
foreign-looking ambulances swallowing men and women on stretchers, police in
odd uniforms holding back the crowds.
 
The death toll stood at three hundred, with more to come because the
plane had plowed into an apartment complex on the outskirts of Calais and they hadn’t
sifted through all the rubble just yet.
 
An industry spokeswoman called it the worst airline disaster in European
history and the largest single-incident loss of civilian life on the continent
since the Second World War.
 
I blinked at
this calamity on the other side of the world and looked back at Kate.