Trigger Finger (6 page)

“Are they going to
let me see him?”
 
I asked.

“He’s medicated,”
she said.

“I want to see
him.”

They had dosed him
with Thorazine or whatever they gave crazy people and handcuffed him to a bed
in a tiny, glass-fronted room that reminded me of a reptile cage at the zoo in Asheboro.
 
His eyes were closed, his mouth open to the
acoustic tile ceiling.
 
His white hair
poked out from his scalp in an unruly mess.
 
Pink stains—ketchup or strawberry jam, I couldn’t tell which—marred the
chest of the LL Bean pajamas Allie had picked out for him the Father’s Day
before.
 
His wrinkled face bore the
stubble of a man who needed to shave.
 
Dr. Ernest Swanson had performed surgeries at this hospital—he had
actually performed the first heart surgery at Catawba Valley
after it opened—and this is where he ended up.
 
Handcuffed to a bed in the ER, with food stains on his jammies.

I should have
broken down in tears.
 
But instead, I
found myself angry.
 
Irritation at the
inconvenience he’d caused me back at work didn’t figure into it; I looked at
him cuffed to the bed, and I thought,
how
could you let it get to this?
 
Obviously, he could have done something to prevent it.
 
This had to be his fault somehow.
 
There had to have been steps he could have
taken to prevent himself from descending into this, and yet clearly, he’d
screwed up.

He opened his
eyes, turned his head to stare at me, then closed them again.
 
For a moment, I thought he didn’t recognize
me.
 
But then he said, “Hello, Kevin.”

“You okay?”
 
I asked.

He tried to raise
his hands, but the handcuffs stopped them at hip level.
 
“My nose itches.”

Kate reached
forward and scratched it for him.
 
He
sighed with relief.

“God damn,” he
muttered.

“You want to tell
us where you got that gun?”
 
I asked.

Kate shot me a
look.
 
My father shrugged.

“Well, I guess I
got it at a gun store, Einstein.
 
By the
way, nice to see you, too.
 
You’ve put on
weight.”

I stood beside the
bed with my arms crossed over my chest, staring down.
 
Kate stood on the other side, holding one
handcuffed hand.

“You could have
killed somebody,” I said.

He sighed at this
and looked away from me.
 
He shook his
head.
 
“I know,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Kevin, be nice,”
Kate admonished me.

“It’s okay,” Dad
said with another sigh.
 
“Your old man
gets you out of bed in the middle of the night to come visit him at the loony
bin, it’s irritating, I get it.
 
You’ve
got things to see, people to do.
 
Crazy
old relatives can be inconvenient.”

I pushed aside the
guilt trip.
 
“You know, I don’t think
inconvenient is the word here.
 
I think
‘miraculous’ is a better term—I think it’s a miracle that you didn’t kill one
of the neighbors.
 
Or Kate.”

He closed his eyes
and appeared to engage his own
ki
breath, even though I knew he had never set foot in an aikido
dojo
or any other kind of martial arts
establishment.
 
Bobby had invited him to
come with us, I remembered.
 
But he
didn’t have the time.
 
As a surgeon, he
couldn’t risk the injury to his fingers and hands that would surely result from
hopping around a room in white pajamas.

“Hindsight’s
20/20,” he said, shrugging.

“You understand
that maybe you’re not firing on all eight cylinders now?”
 
I asked.
 
“I mean, do you realize that you were shooting at
people who weren’t really there?
 
Do you understand what that means?”

“It means I can’t
live on my own anymore,” he said softly.
 
“It means you all are going to put me in a home.”

“Are you going to
fight us?
 
I mean, you don’t exactly
leave us much choice, do you?
 
Pulling
stunts like that?”

“I’m crazy,” he
said, eyes closed, not looking at me.
 
“I
know.
 
Okay?
 
And I screwed up, I realize that.
 
So get off it, okay?”

“I want to know if
you really get that or if you’re just
saying
it so we’ll let our guard down and you can get out there and do it again.”

“Kevin…” Kate
groaned.

“Didn’t we have a
conversation about this here recently?”
 
I continued, speaking to my father.
 
“Do you remember telling me to kiss your ass, you weren’t going
anywhere?
 
You remember calling me a
greedy son of a bitch who just wanted to get his hands on your house?”

“Not really.
 
But if I said that, I apologize.”

“So you get it
now?
 
You understand that there is no way
in Hell you can be allowed to stay out in the world when you pull crap like
that?”

He nodded.

“Really?
 
You get that there was nobody there?”

“Completely.”
 
He turned his head to Kate’s side of the
bed.
 
Her tired, drawn expression
softened.

“Sugar,” he said,
“you mind letting me talk to him alone for a minute?”

“As long as you
don’t chew him up too badly,” she replied.
 
She looked at me as she said it, and I couldn’t figure out if she meant
that for me or for him.
 
But either way,
she gave his hand one more squeeze and retreated behind the curtain.
 
I felt the air pressure change as the door to
my father’s glass cage opened and closed.
 
No sooner had this happened than his act fell away and his expression
changed entirely.

“Listen,” he said
firmly.

Taken aback by the
sudden shift, I blinked.

“I know what I
saw,” he said in a voice as hard as his face.
 
“I’m not crazy.
 
Those people were
out there.
 
They figured out how to get
the goddamned screens off and they were on their way in.
 
I did what I had to do.”

I swallowed.
 
“Dad…”

“Don’t ‘Dad’ me,
just listen!”

I saw his Adam’s
apple bob as he swallowed, too.
 
He
looked briefly over my shoulder and then back at me.

“I haven’t told
her what they look like,” he said with quiet urgency, “because I don’t want to
scare her.
 
I haven’t told her the whole
story, either.
 
And I haven’t made up my
mind yet whether I’m going to tell you.
 
But I need you to promise me that you’re not going to let her go back to
that house.
 
Not to stay by herself.”

“Just in case
those things that were out to get you come back?”

“No,” he
said.
 
“Those things that were out to get
her
.”

My insides got
cold.
 
Silly, because my father was just
talking crazily and I should have remembered that, but I felt cold anyway.

He wetted his lips
with a tongue that made a brief appearance and withdrew back inside his pinched
mouth.

“They’re…not from
here,” he continued.
 
“They’re from
somewhere else.
 
And they want to take
her back with them.
 
I bagged a few of
them, but there’s more out there, so I want you to take her back with you.
 
Keep her until Bobby gets back.”

I had no problem
with this part of it.
 
Although Allie and
I wouldn’t move out to the country for another year at that point, our old
house in Burlington had more than enough space to move another adult in with
us, especially on a temporary basis.
 
And
Allie and Kate got along better than sisters.

“So here’s a deal
for you,” he said.
 
“I’ll go into a home
without a fuss.
 
But you got to take
Kate.”

“Deal.”

“And you got to
take the gun.”

Now I
scowled.
 
“Excuse me?”

“Go to the Sheriff’s
Department and pick it up.
 
Take it home
with you.
 
Learn how to use it.”

“I don’t need an
assault rifle.”

“Yes you do, for
when they come after you.
 
Don’t be a
pussy, Kevin.
 
Take the goddamned rifle,
learn how to use it and defend your family with it.”

“Can you at least
tell me who these guys are?”

My father pursed
his lips.

“They’re
evil.
 
If you don’t have the gun, they’re
going to get Kate.
 
And then they’re
going to get you.”
 

7.

After a quick
check of my criminal background, the Sheriff’s Department in Catawba County
released the rifle to me upon my promise to never, never ever let my father
have it back.
 
Before retrieving it, I
went to Wal-Mart and bought a case for it, because it seemed strange to throw a
rifle in the trunk of my car and just carry it home that way like it was
nothing, like my dad had given me his electric hedge trimmers or his toaster
instead of a lethal weapon.
 
I put the
key for the lock on the chain with my car keys.
 
Effectively, I announced to myself my intentions of not only taking the
gun, but keeping it.

When I carried the
rifle out of the Law
Enforcement Center—empty,
of course, bolt open, the two spent box magazines rattling in each of my side
pockets—I opened the trunk and laid it gently atop the egg-carton foam that
lined the case.
 
Then I stepped back and
stared at the rifle in the light of the morning sun.
 
The matte finish absorbed the light, creating
something of a black hole right there in the trunk of my car.

I am a gun owner,
I thought.

And not just any
gun, either.
 
Inside the LEC, I’d
mentioned to the deputy that the weapon looked familiar, and he said I’d
probably seen it in the movies.
 
It was a
Kalashnikov AK-47, he told me, Russian manufacture, which made it more
valuable.
 
That’s a bad-ass piece of
hardware, buddy.
 
Staring down at it, I
reflected that it was indeed bad-ass, but also wholly unnecessary.
 
Not just to me, but to anyone; I’d long felt
that the government needed to ban these things.
 
I voted for people who wanted to eliminate weapons like this from
American households.
 
Yet now I not only
had an assault rifle in my trunk, but I’d bought a case and lock for it.
 
Evidently, I planned on keeping it, which
made no sense because I was not and had never been an AK-47 kind of guy.
 
I stared down at the weapon and I thought to
myself,
why are you doing this?

And the answer
came:
I don’t know.

No, I didn’t
know.
 
At the time, I would have said—as
I said to Allie—that I wanted to humor my ailing father and that I wanted to
hold onto it until Bobby got back from Iraq.
 
But I never turned it over to Bobby, and
after my father died, I didn’t sell it, pawn it or do any of those other things
people might do with unwanted property.
 
By this point, I had bought a safe for it, and I had bought ammunition.
 
Publicly, I continued to vote Democratic and
joke about right-wing lunatics, all the while saying nothing about the little
secret in my basement.
 
On some level, I
believed my father’s warnings.
 
Evil
existed.
 
It had claws.
 
And someday, it would try to get me.

He’d been right.

And the Bald Man,
whoever the hell he was, had been right, too.
 
That I just happened to have an AK-47 down in my basement seemed like an
incredible coincidence.
 
Had I seen it in
a movie, I’d have said
yeah, right
,
because it didn’t seem believable.
 
Guys
like me normally didn’t even own guns, let alone Soviet military hardware.
 
No one understood that better than I.
 
When you added all the truths of my life and
personality, the math said that I shouldn’t have had a firearm the night those
two yahoos attacked my home.

The implications
of this truth haunted me as I sat on the couch in Dr. Koenig’s office,
pondering what would have happened had I refused the gun.
 
Pinnix and Ramseur would have gotten
upstairs.

Rape.

Murder.

I shivered.

“Did the caller
scare you?”
 
Dr. Koenig asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

I had told him
about the radio show and the Bald Man.
 
Now I told him about the rifle, how I’d come to own it and how such a
thin little thing had made a difference between life and death.
 
My mind kept returning to this—
these,
actually, because so many thin
little things had determined the outcome of that night.
 
Remove any one of them…

“I think what’s
happening in my nightmares,” I said, “is I’m re-living the experience.
 
I’m trying to assure myself that I would have
prevailed no matter what, so my brain’s in there running these little
what-if
productions and trying to work
out ways I could still come out on top.
 
During the day, I think about it all the time because my brain is
training for the next time it happens.”

Dr. Koenig shifted
in his seat.
 
The sun had warmed his
office to the point where he’d found it necessary to roll up his shirtsleeves
and loosen his tie.
 
Fashionably rumpled;
Steve Jobs would have approved.
 
He
looked up at me and canted his head to one side, his mouth an unreadable
line.
 
I had come to understand that this
was his way of telling me to elaborate, because I had said something that
interested him.

“And I feel like
it is going to happen again,” I said.
 
“Or it could.”

“Because of the
caller,” Dr. Koenig said.
 
“The one who
calls himself the Bald Man.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to tell
him about what Ruby had said at the flea market back in 1989. But how do you
discuss such things by the light of day?
 
I had the strong suspicion that if I started talking about redneck
psychics and what they may or may not have foretold, Dr. Koenig would have
called the men in white coats to come and take me away.

“You’re afraid of
him,” he observed.

I nodded.
 
“Crazy people are scary.”

“Why do you think
he refers to himself as the Bald Man?”

Because 23 years ago, a old psychic who
looked like a strip of beef jerky threw me out of her trailer right before
telling me to look out for him.
 
“I
don’t know, maybe because he’s bald.
 
You’re bald, by the way.”

“I don’t listen to
Billy Horton.”

“Didn’t figure you
did.”

I rubbed my
forehead, looking down.
 
The coffee table
looked back up at me with its crappy veneer trying and failing to conceal that
fiberboard core.
 
I wondered what the
Chinese who manufactured garbage like this said when they packed it into boxes
and sent it off to the discount stores.
 
The Americans are a shallow people, they probably said.
 
Look at what they want, look at what they
buy.
 
It’s not wood, they know it’s not
wood and yet they don’t care.
 
It doesn’t
matter to them that it’s really only sawdust and glue sandwiched between sheets
of photo-etched plastic.
 
It’s cheap.
 
That’s all they want.

“Do you think
you’ve encountered this man before?”

I looked up.
 
“No.
 
I
know a lot of bald guys, but none of them would call me out on the damn
radio.
 
You want to know what I really
think?
 
I think I’m suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“What did these
guys look like, Pinnix and Ramseur, the men who broke into your house?”

I blinked.
 
I looked towards the window, then down at my
issue of
Southern Rifleman.
 
“Um…they were black—African American, I
mean.”

“Tall, short, fat,
skinny?
 
Thick lips, thin lips, big
noses, small noses, scars, facial hair, who are we talking about, here?
 
If you hadn’t shot them, if they’d run off
into the woods, what would you have told the police to differentiate them from
any other black guys?”

No one had ever
asked me that before.
 
What did they look like
?
 
The police hadn’t asked, because they’d seen
the bodies.
 
The reporters hadn’t asked,
Allie and Abby hadn’t asked, Craig Montero hadn’t asked, Tom Spicer hadn’t
asked.
 
So I hadn’t considered it.
 
As many times as I’d re-lived that shooting
in my mind, I had never examined their faces.
 
I hadn’t needed to.

But now Dr. Koenig
wanted me to describe them and I drew a blank.

“I don’t know,” I
said.
 
“I can’t see their faces.
 
I’m sitting here trying to remember and I
just…can’t.
 
I can see bodies lying in
the hallway, I can see myself shooting at them, but no faces.
 
What do you think that means?”

He recrossed his
legs.

“You tell me.”

I looked at the
window.
 
Outside, the sun shone down on a
concrete bench, the kind you see in graveyards with nobody sitting on
them.
 
The bench stood between two
adolescent trees.
 
Dogwoods, I
thought.
 
Or Eastern redbud.
 
Without flowers, I couldn’t tell which.

“Why don’t we do a
little exercise?”
 
Dr. Koenig asked.

“What kind of
exercise?”

“Why don’t you
tell me what you do remember?”

And so I did.

“I was down in the
basement,” I began, “watching the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game.”