Trigger Finger (4 page)

Bobby’s expression
didn’t waver for the duration of his reading.
 
As soon as Ruby stopped to draw a breath, he pulled his hand away and
dragged me forward, standing up and depositing me in his seat in one graceful
motion.

“Read his,” he
said.
 
“Can you read hairy palms?”

“Bobby!”
 
Kate admonished.

My face burned,
but Bobby just laughed and smacked me on the back right in between my shoulder
blades.

“We tried to get a
Ouija board to tell us when he was finally going to get laid, but the damn
thing clammed up, so now we need a psychic.”

Ruby took my
hand.
 
Her palms surprised me with a
softness I didn’t expect from that leathery skin, and the impact of expectation
against reality momentarily prevented me from speaking.

But before I could
say anything, she dropped—no,
threw
—my
hand on the table. Her eyes widened as she stared down at it like it held a
fistful of rattlesnakes.
 
I stared down
at it, too, but seeing no rattlesnakes, I looked back up.

Her mouth opened,
closed, opened again.
 
When she finally
spoke, she blurted, “Don’t get married.
 
Live alone always.”

“Why?”
 
I asked, confused.

Ruby turned her
head from one side to the other, faded green eyes narrowing as she stared into
my face.
 
She looked shocked,
bewildered.
 
Scared.

Terrified.

She pushed her
chair back and leapt to her feet, shaking her head vehemently.
 
She jammed a hand into her back pocked and
came out with a wad of cash.
 
She
withdrew a single twenty-dollar bill and threw it on the table in front of me.

“I can’t give you
a reading,” she said.
 
“So there’s your
money back.
 
Your brother and his
girlfriend are on the house.”

“I want you to
read his palm,” Bobby complained.
 
“Go
on, do him like you did us.”

But she continued
shaking her head.
 
She backed away from
the little table until the stove stopped her.
 
Unable to retreat further, she held up both hands.

“No,” she
said.
 
“This session’s over.
 
Ma’am, those cassettes are on the house, too,
y’all just go on now.”

“Man, this is some
bullshit,” Bobby said.

“Y’all go
on.”
 
She grabbed a pack of
cigarettes—Kings, like Chester—and
withdrew one.
 
As she tried to light it,
I noticed her hands were shaking.

“Let’s go,” Kate
said softly.
 
“We got our money back.”

“Go on!”
 
Ruby snapped.

Confused and
unsure of what to make of all this, I rose from the table and stumbled towards
the door.
 
Kate grabbed Bobby and shoved
him after me.

“Man, I can’t
believe this…”

Kate cut him
off.
 
“Will you please shut up and get
out of this lady’s trailer like she asked?”

Chester blinked at us as we descended the
metal steps to the ground, but he didn’t say anything about the tapes in Kate’s
hands.
  
Maybe he heard, I thought.
 
Then again, maybe he doesn’t need to hear;
maybe he’s psychic, too.

I didn’t
understand what had happened, and I didn’t get time to think.
 
Kate pushed Bobby away from the table and the
trailer, and Bobby pushed me.
 
We made it
about ten steps before Ruby threw open the door and called out to me.

“Kevin!”

I stopped and
turned.
 
Bobby ran into me, but I didn’t
fall.
 
Fat, gray-haired Chester looked from us to Ruby, Ruby to us,
back to Ruby.

Her cigarette hand
shook like mad.
 
The smoking cherry on
the end quivered in the darkness that enveloped the inside of the trailer, but
she held onto it.
 
She pointed at me with
the index finger of her other hand.
 
This
one didn’t shake at all.

“Beware the Bald
Man!”
 
Her voice rose in a raspy cry
above the shuffle and chatter of the flea market.
 
All over, heads turned.
 
From a tent full of stereo equipment
immediately to my right, Terrence Trent D’Arby sang the praises of a wishing
well, but Ruby outblasted him.
 
“You
steer clear of the Bald Man, Kevin!”

“We’ll do that!”
Bobby hollered back.
 
“Thanks for the
heads-up!”

We left.
 
And we returned to the business of killing
time.

And only later, as
I lay awake in my bed that night staring at the model airplanes dangling from
my ceiling, did I realize I’d never told Ruby my name.
 

5.

Out in the gravel
parking lot next to the building that housed the radio station, I paced back
and forth as Craig leaned against my BMW, head hung low.
 
I had exhibited behavior unbecoming a member
of the largest law firm in Burlington—an old law firm, a well-regarded law
firm, a law firm whose clients paid it large sums of money at least in part
because the words
Carwood
and
Allison
, when placed together, evoked
images of well-heeled, well-trained attorneys solving complex legal problems
with class.

I had gone on the
radio and talked like I’d just stumbled out of the trailer park across the
road.
 
I had invited someone to come
fight me at the office tomorrow.

“I don’t know,”
Craig said, raising his head.
 
“Maybe
there’s a positive angle to this.
 
You
sounded like an asshole; isn’t that supposed to be a good thing for a divorce
lawyer?”

I shook my
head.
 
I couldn’t think about damage
control or public relations or Carwood, Allison at all—I thought only of the
Bald Man.
  
But I couldn’t discuss this
with him.
 
If my recent behavior left any
doubt in his mind that the softball bat to the head had scrambled my brains,
talking about the palm reading would erase it.

“What was his
problem?”
 
I asked in a mutter.
 
The leather soles of my shoes crunched in the
gravel.
 
Despite the coolness of this
particular September night, sweat ran in rivulets down my face, my neck, and
disappeared into my collar.
 
I loosened
my tie.
 
“What does he mean, he’s going
to show the world that I’m no hero?
 
That’s a threat!”

Craig raised both
palms.
 
“Kevin?
 
Chill.”

“Chill?
 
Whatever!
 
That guy threatened me on the radio!”
 
My hands curled into fists and pounded against my legs.
 
My trigger finger had begun twitching, and
while I didn’t know if Craig would see it in the darkened parking lot, I didn’t
want to risk it.
 
“I want to know who
that son of a bitch is!
 
I want to know
where he called from!”

“Kevin…”

“And then I want
to march right up to his house or his trailer or his cardboard box or whatever
the hell he lives in and tell him say it to my face!”

“Listen.”

I pivoted on my
heels and marched back down the length of the BMW, fists clenched, shaking my
head.

“There’s obviously
something wrong with the guy, okay?”
 
Craig said.
 
“Strike One, he
listens to Billy Horton.
 
He sits around
on weeknights and listens to AM radio, which tells you he probably doesn’t have
a whole lot going on in his life.
 
The
other thing to remember is, you
are
a
hero, okay?”

“Whatever,” I
mumbled.

“You are.
 
You really are.
 
Everybody in Alamance County
looks up to you.
 
You faced their worst
nightmare and you came out on top.
 
So
they admire you, they praise you, they put articles in the newspaper about
you…and here’s this psychopath collecting disability in his rented
trailer.
 
When he’s not watching daytime
TV, he fantasizes about doing something remarkable, being somebody
special.
 
Then Kevin Swanson hijacks his
fantasy.
 
So he gets pissed and he says,
I’m going to take this guy down a peg.
 
And that’s exactly what he does.”

Craig paused.

“He was screwing
with you,” he said.
 
“That’s the last
you’re going to hear from him.”

“How do you know
that?”

“I spend most of
my time in District Court,” he answered.
 
“I know all about crazies.
 
I’m
like the Jane Goodall of wackjobs.”

He picked himself
up off the car.

“It’s getting
late,” he said. “Let’s get you back before Allie sends a search party after
your ass.”
 

I lived off
Highway 62 in Burlington.
 
Way
off Highway 62.
 
My house, old and
stately and far larger than I needed, sat nestled among the rise and fall of
cleared land that had once held tobacco, cotton, corn and wheat.
 
Now it just held grass that a man with a
Bushhog and a hay rake cut for me every month.
 
A dirt road shooting off the highway curled into thick woods that
screened the house from 62 even in the wintertime, when the leaves fell to the
ground and the house concealed itself behind denuded branches and the
topography of the land.

This privacy, this
sense of removal from the rest of the world, had drawn us here when we went
looking for a bigger house after Dad’s estate settled.
 
With all our money then, we could have bought
a place at the country club, but then we’d have had to look at our neighbors
every time we stepped onto our front porch.
 
Allie didn’t want that. She had grown up in the country in Pennsylvania, had
enjoyed the privacy and the peace and the nature there and wanted to give Abby
the same thing.
 
In the age of
automobiles, a person could mitigate the seclusion with a ten-minute drive up
the road to Burlington.
 
“You can always seek out people when you get
lonely,” she had said.
 
“You can’t make
them go away when you get tired of them.”
 
Out here, privacy abounded.
 
Set
back as we were from the highway and surrounded by woods, I could have walked
out on my porch and drank my coffee naked and no one would have seen me.
 
In the evenings, I could have stood in the
driveway and screamed my frustration at the world and no one would have heard
me.
 
Good money bought a man square
footage, acreage and freedom from the prying eyes of his neighbors.

But there existed
a flip side to this coin, and I noticed it the day we moved in.
 
A bottle of Heineken in one hand, the other
arm wrapped around Allie’s waist, I stood on the porch and stared out at my
land, my
estate
.
 
“We’re isolated now,” I said then.
 
“Do you realize that?
 
We’re going to have a devil of a time getting
pizza delivered out here.”

“I guess we’ll
have to eat healthier,” she replied before going back inside to resume
unpacking.
 
“Got plenty of land now.
 
Maybe we can grow our own vegetables.”

Plenty of land,
screened from the highway.
 
At least
twenty acres between any part of my house and the nearest property line.
 
At least forty acres between the nearest
property line and the next house.
 
I had
seen this coming even then.
 
I had
understood that if the pizza guy couldn’t find us, neither could a police car
or ambulance.
 
My newfound seclusion from
society’s problems came at the price of seclusion from its security.
 
I had calculated how long it could take a
sheriff’s car to respond if I called 911 after hearing a suspicious noise in
the night and I thought of the rifle then, which I kept locked by itself in a
gun cabinet in the basement.
 
The
circumstances under which I had come to own the AK-47 weren’t the typical ones
surrounding a man obtaining his first gun, but standing on my new porch—new to
me, anyway—I understood that on some level, I must have somehow known I would
end up here.
 
I must have known I would
need it.

Pinnix and Ramseur
probably slapped each other high-fives when they saw where we lived.
 
They would have seen the physical layout of
our property and realized that they could have raped my wife and our daughter
right there in the front yard and no one would have disturbed them.
 
They had seen this, I felt sure, and
experienced a rush of delight at finding such desirable prey this far removed
from the herd’s protection.
 
These people
are vulnerable, they said.
 
We can do
anything we want to them.
 
We can take
our time.

And they were
right about my family’s tactical position.
 
When Allie finally called 911 that night, the Sheriff’s Department took
more than twenty minutes to get there.
 
Allie remained upstairs, clutching a frightened and bewildered Abby,
while I sat on the bottom step with the rifle across my lap and looked down at
the bleeding bodies, and I thought,
thank
you, God.
 
With every minute that
passed without the appearance of a Sheriff’s car, my grip on the weapon
tightened.
 
In the age of the telephone,
the automobile and the Internet, in an age where you could watch movies and
attend videoconferences from a mobile phone, our survival had boiled down to
luck and a gun I never would have bought on my own.
 
I felt the seconds ticking away and it struck
me that had I called the police from the basement instead of charging upstairs
to engage the enemy, these two men would have been upstairs with Allie and
Abby.
 
Because of our isolation.

I understood that
then, just like I understood it now.
 
If
this Bald Man decided to make trouble, I still had the isolation problem.

Craig had parked
his car in my yard before riding to the radio station with me.
 
Usually talkative, he fell silent as I turned
off 62 and began the leisurely crawl up the dirt road to my house.
 
Although he didn’t share them, I read his
thoughts.
 
How the hell can you guys stay out here after what happened?

“B.F.E.,” I said
as we emerged from the woods and the headlights splashed across the covered
front porch of my house.

“Say what?”

“Butt-fuckin’ Egypt,” I
explained with a partial smile.
 
“My
brother Bobby used that phrase to describe this place the first time he saw
it.
 
I said, how do you like my new
house, and he said, you live out in butt-fuckin’ Egypt.
 
So when we called 911 that night and they
asked us where we were, we said, B.F.E., N.C.”

I laughed.
 
Craig did not.
 
When we pulled into my garage and said our
goodbyes, he stopped beneath the orange glow of the light over the driveway and
turned to face me.
 
I thought for sure he
would ask if I’d ever considered selling this place and moving back into town,
but he didn’t.

“You did get
really, really lucky,” he remarked.

“I know.”

He paused, lips
pursed.
 
He had another question loaded
but seemed like he didn’t know how to ask it.
 
Didn’t know if this new, volatile Kevin would unload on him the way I
had unloaded on the Bald Man on the radio.
 
So, very carefully, he asked, “You’re a Democrat, right?”

I stepped forward
and rested against the trunk lid of the BMW.
 
I folded my arms.
 
“Yeah.”

“You voted for
Barack Obama.
 
You voted for John Kerry,
you voted for Al Gore.”

“True, true and
true.”

“You don’t hunt
deer, squirrel or even housefly.
 
You
don’t hike, kayak, any of that shit.
 
You’re not a sportsman.”

“I’m not.”

He cocked his head
to one side, chewing on the ultimate question.

“So…why
do
you have an AK-47?
 
I mean, that
is
a whole lot of gun, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I
admitted.

He waited for
further explanation.

“I was waiting for
the race war,” I finally said.
 
“So when
I saw two black guys in my house, I said holy shit, Helter Skelter’s coming
down.
 
Yee-haw.”

“Come on,
man.
 
For real.”

“It’s a long
story,” I said.
 
“And I’ll tell you
sometime.
 
Just not tonight.
 
And not before you buy me at least three
beers.”
 

Sometimes, Allie
waited for me on one of the barstools arranged around the island, her most
recent find from the library open on the table before her.
 
Other times, she lay on the couch in the
living room, sleeping, the book resting on her chest.
 
Tonight, I found her in neither.
 
She had left the stove light on, though, and
its sickly glow rolled across the granite countertops and disappeared into the
floor.
 
She had done this so that I
wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark for a light switch.

I shut the door to
the garage and stood there, listening to the hum of the refrigerator compressor
and the soft whoosh from the vents as the thermostat clicked and the air
conditioning kicked on.

They’re dead.
 
They’re lying upstairs in the beds where they
were raped and strangled and I’m going to find them like that, used and
discarded like candy wrappers and