The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  “I guess so,” I said.

  A few moments later he returned with a pair of Coronas and set them down where our plates had been.

  “Tell me,” he said as he took his seat, “how do you want all this to turn out?”

  I gripped the bottle and pulled it to me. “I’m not wedded to any particular outcome,” I said.

  “But you’d prefer to live through it, yes?”

  “I don’t think of life and death as mutually exclusive,” I told him.

  Trumbull’s eyebrows bunched together. Outside, the FBI agent on the public address system promised that if Trumbull and his men came out they would be treated fairly.

  “Are you going to talk with them?” I asked.

  “Eventually,” Trumbull said.

  We looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe if you told me what you have planned, I could be more helpful.”

  Trumbull leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “Okay then,” he said. “For a few days we’re going to let the FBI cool their heels, so they understand that I’m in charge. Then we arrange a meeting.”

  “A meeting,” I said.

  “Which by then they’ll be only too eager to agree on. They’ll think they’re getting somewhere, making progress toward a peaceable outcome.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  They’re going to play this by the book,” Trumbull said. “Quid pro quo all the way. So I’ll ask for something—pizza delivery, lose the helicopters, whatever—and tell them if I get what I want, we’ll hand you over.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Except that when we meet for the exchange, instead of going with them, you’re going to kill my good buddy Frank.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “Correct.”

  “Kill him,” I said.

  “Well, you’re going to shoot him,” Trumbull said. “Of course I would prefer that, in doing so, you also kill him. But there’s only so much we can control in this life. And you’re not exactly a crack shot.”

  “Forgive me if this seems like a stupid question,” I said, “but why would I shoot Frank?”

  “Because he’s a coward and a traitor,” Frank said. “Also because if you don’t, I’m going to kill Claire.”

  I was silent.

  “This is happening,” Trumbull said. “You should say something.”

  “You want to make a murderer of me,” I said.

  “I understand,” Trumbull said, “that it’s an upsetting prospect.”

  “I can tell you,” I said, “that this is as close as I’ve been to what you would call ‘upset’ in a long time.”

  “Regrettable,” Trumbull said, “but sadly, it can’t be helped.”

  “I do have a couple of questions.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Why not shoot Frank yourself? You’re much better with a gun than I am.”

  “A fact none would dispute,” Trumbull said.

  “Also, I have nothing against Frank, whereas you seem to harbor a great deal of animosity toward him.”

  Trumbull nodded. “It is true that I’d like nothing more than to usher him directly into the next life with my own hand.”

  “So why don’t you?” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well for starters, he’s my brother-in-law,” Trumbull said. “A man doesn’t just go around shooting family. Much as he might want to.”

  “Actually, a large percentage of murders are committed by people related to the victim,” I said. “At least in America.”

  “This isn’t America. This is Texas.”

  “So Frank is married to your sister?” I asked.

  “That’s correct,” Trumbull said. “And though I don’t much care for her either, she’s still my blood.”

  “I guess I’ll defer to you on this subject, seeing as how I never had a family.”

  “No?”

  “I’m an orphan.”

  “I would say that’s too bad, but the truth is in some ways you’re probably better off. Family’s a gigantic pain in the ass.” Trumbull seemed to ponder this for a moment, then drained his beer at a pull and rose to go to the kitchen again. “You good?” he said over his shoulder.

  I’d barely touched my Corona. “All set,” I said.

  A minute later Trumbull came back with a fresh beer for himself. “Talk about family,” he said as he sat down. “My daddy installed a flagpole in our front yard the moment he got back from Vietnam. This was seven, eight years before I was born. Big thirty-footer, custom job. Bronzed aluminum. Put a hundred pounds of concrete in the ground to hold it in place. That pole stood up to a Cat four hurricane.”

  “He must have been quite patriotic,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Trumbull said. “Great patriot, my daddy. For thirty years he flew the Stars and Stripes over the POW/MIA banner. Every day. I could still recite for you United States Code, Title Four, Chapter One. Floodlights at night. Lanyard goes up the pole briskly, comes down slow and solemn. If the flag touches the ground, burn it and put up a new one. And I learned the hard way that when you fly a flag half-mast, you don’t just run her halfway up and call it good. You run it all the way to the top, then bring it back down.”

  “Rules are rules,” I said.

  “You got that right, at least where my daddy was concerned,” Trumbull said. “So anyway, I come home from my third tour of the sandbox, and I’m not feeling real chatty. My hitch is over, and I’m planning to just keep my head down for a few months, figure out what’s next. He wants to talk, though. What’s it like over there, he wants to know. I think he imagined it would be a way for us to bond, or some such. I’d talk about my war, he’d talk about his, we’d find some deep manly love for each other. But he was about twenty years late on the draw, as far as father-son bonding was concerned. And after a while I got tired of him asking. So one day I went out to the garage, grabbed the Skilsaw, ran an extension cord out to the front yard, and cut that flagpole down like a dead elm while my daddy watched.

  “‘You wanna know what it was like,’” I said to him. ‘That’s what it was like.’”

  “And how did your daddy react to that?” I asked.

  Trumbull smiled. “Ten years earlier he would’ve given me a beating,” he said. “Anyway, that’s family for you.”

  I thought for a minute. “If I shoot Frank,” I said, “won’t the FBI become much less interested in a peaceable solution, as you put it?”

  “I would certainly think so,” Trumbull said.

  “So the whole thing is tantamount to suicide,” I said.

  “No,” Trumbull said, leaning forward in his chair. “Suicide’s only aim is death. We don’t have a word for what this is. Hindus refer to it as ‘saka.’ The Japanese, as you probably know, call it ‘kamikaze.’”

  “I’m sorry to quibble,” I said, “but unless I completely misunderstand what you’re asking me to do—and what is likely to happen pretty much right after I do it—this sounds a lot like suicide. I mean, for me at least.”

  “You seem less concerned about dying than about semantics.”

  “That should be obvious to anyone who’s seen me on television,” I said.

  “Well listen, you’ll be the only person out there without a sniper’s reticle trained on your forehead. You’ll have three, four seconds before anyone draws down on you. Which might be enough time for you to beat feet back to the building.”

  “Might be,” I said.

  “No guarantees,” Trumbull said. “Twenty, thirty percent chance, probably.”

  “Again, I don’t mean to be a noodge,” I said, “but most people would think doing something that would result in your death eight out of ten times qualifies as suicidal.”

  Trumbull stared at me. “Fine,” he said. “Since like most people you have faith in nothing, believe in nothing, and aspire to nothing besides the satisfaction of your own base desires, this will be suicide. For you. If yo
u’re killed.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Better?” Trumbull asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Still grappling with the murder part.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Trumbull said. He lifted his bottle, tapped it against mine, and drained it with three big swallows.

  • • •

  “You understand,” I said to Claire, “the either/or nature of the situation.”

  “Considering that it’s my life on the line, yeah, I get it, thanks.”

  We lay side by side in bed, both of us on our backs, staring up as floodlight beams played across the ceiling. Trumbull had arranged for us to occupy a room on the third floor of the main building. The upside of this was relative privacy, with two guards on the other side of the door in the hallway. The drawback was that we couldn’t have been any closer to the thunderous rhythm of the helicopters. Each time they passed overhead the floor shook and the wrought iron bed frame squeaked beneath us. We listened to the Bradleys rumble around the perimeter, tilling prairie grass and spewing diesel smoke, while the agent on the public address system continued to promise a fair and impartial consideration of all grievances and demands.

  “I guess I don’t really know what to say to you about this,” I told Claire.

  “Say you won’t do it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Claire popped up out of bed. She stomped across the room in her stocking feet, threw open the door, and demanded a glass of water.

  “You want something?” she asked me.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I said, “that I might want.”

  Claire sent the guard on his way and closed the door again.

  “I have to confess,” I said, “that I don’t understand why saying what you asked me to say is so upsetting.”

  “Because it doesn’t mean anything,” Claire said. She came back, sat on the edge of the mattress, and gazed out the window. “They’re just words to you. I ask you to say them, and you say them.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I meant what I said. I won’t do it.”

  Claire ignored this. “Also because if you had just listened to me—if anyone had just listened to me—this wouldn’t be happening.”

  “Listened to you?”

  “When I suggested it was maybe not a terrific idea to come to the goddamn Memorial Day parade in goddamn Fort Worth.”

  “Ah, that,” I said.

  “But you and Theodore were all gung ho. Didn’t want to hear it.”

  “I don’t know if ‘gung ho’ is really the way to describe my state of mind, at the time.”

  “Whatever. Theodore, then,” Claire said. “And where is that fat bastard now? Sitting somewhere counting his money. Sipping one of those fruity drinks he likes so much.”

  “He told me,” I said, “that he was on his way here.”

  “Likely story.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure Theodore is sorry as well. For what it’s worth.”

  “It’s not worth a whole lot right at the moment, K.”

  The bedroom door opened again, and the guard came in, placed a glass of water on the dresser, and left without a word.

  Claire was quiet for a moment, still watching the FBI through the window. “What are we going to do?” she asked finally.

  “We’ve only got a couple of options,” I said.

  “That was pretty much the definition of a rhetorical question,” Claire said. She rose, went to the dresser, and came back with the water. “You can’t shoot that cop, K. There’s your one option: don’t kill anybody.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said, “that you’re so concerned about the life of someone you’ve never met. Especially over your own.”

  “I’m not worried about his life. I’m worried about my soul.”

  “Meaning.”

  “Meaning what will happen to it if a bunch of people die because I couldn’t go two hours without a drink.”

  I thought about this. “So you actually blame yourself. Not me or Theodore.”

  “Ding ding ding!” Claire said. “Bob, tell him what he’s won! A luxurious all-inclusive stay at the Cold Dead Fingers resort and spa in East Bumfuck, Texas!”

  “There’s no need to be nasty,” I said.

  Claire sighed. “Oh, there’s every need, my love,” she said sadly.

  22

  THE REPETITIVE, REDUNDANT, MONOTONOUS SPLENDOR

  Who knew armed insurrection could be so dull? Perhaps the defenders of the Alamo, who spent two cramped, sweaty weeks in the mission waiting for Santa Anna to make his move. But certainly not Trumbull’s men—no students of history—who must have envisioned an immediate, cinematic clash with the FBI, both sides hurtling toward one another across a wide panorama, teeth bared and bayonets fixed. They envisioned, in other words, a movie, or a Revolutionary War reenactment—a fantasy at the conclusion of which they would rise and wash the fake blood off their clothes and return to the agreeable tedium of life in twenty-first-century America, the jobs selling lumber and balancing tires, the homes with the leaky rain gutters and hostile children, the eventual real deaths, ever distant, from the usual base indignities like stroke and heart failure.

  It didn’t take long, there in Trumbull’s compound, for the lesson to sink in that it’s one thing to imagine fighting for a cause, another thing entirely to endure terminal boredom for it. Ill behavior abounded. Sentries slept at their posts, and people took more food than they were rationed, munching furtively in bedrooms and closets. Toilets clogged, then overflowed. The hallways echoed with the sounds of bickering nearly around the clock, and two fistfights—one involving the loss of several teeth—occurred on the same afternoon.

  Then the electricity was turned off.

  The next four days passed according to Trumbull’s plan, which is to say uneventfully. Helicopters circled, cell phones chirped, and the negotiator with the loudspeaker issued one overture after another. On day three the FBI parked a flatbed stacked with amplifiers just outside the main building, and at dusk began blasting Norwegian death metal, music that sounded not unlike a Cyclops screaming at the top of its lungs while operating a jackhammer.

  The men of Cold Dead Fingers occupied their posts in twelve-hour shifts. Despite rapidly waning morale, Trumbull continued to ignore the FBI, instead conducting phone interviews with every major media outlet, save NPR, whose requests he shunned at least twice. When not occupied giving interviews he spent nearly all his time watching them as they replayed endlessly, the television powered by a small generator. On the cable news networks our kidnapping and the resultant standoff remained the top item for days, beating out stories about live nuclear weapons being accidentally flown over the United States, as well as the emergence of a virulent new illness dubbed “equine flu” even though it appeared neither to be influenza nor to have anything to do with horses.

  It’s worth noting, probably, the gulf between the histrionics of the television coverage, with its frantic string arrangements and breathless commentary, and the crushing ennui inside the compound as we sat around waiting for something to actually happen. We draped ourselves over furniture, shifting a little from time to time as the parts of us in contact with leather and upholstery grew sore. We ate sardines in mustard sauce straight from the can. We read Trumbull’s library of Field & Stream back issues. All of us grew steadily more rank, until a sort of ambient funk hung in the air of the compound’s interiors, much like what I imagine a medieval castle would have smelled like.

  It may be true that there was a time in America when journalists sought clarity of circumstance and certainty of fact, but now, as I listened to speculation after speculation, each one more baseless than the last, I realized that the bread and butter of the modern newsman was opacity. When one has an endless succession of twenty-four-hour news cycles to fill, the fewer known facts, the better.

  And oh, the scenarios they concocted. Every hour Trumbull
had a new favorite, beginning with the civil rights lawyer who claimed that contrary to the popular image of militias as white Christian organizations, many in fact had satanic underpinnings, with all the dark beliefs and rituals that implied, and from what he knew it seemed likely that Cold Dead Fingers was one of these groups who worshipped Beelzebub. Others suggested that the men of Cold Dead Fingers were required to lend their wives to Trumbull for sexual favors whenever he desired (Trumbull’s reaction, scoffing as he threw his bowie knife into the wall behind the TV: “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”). A retired hostage negotiator worried that since no proof of life had been offered, it was possible that Claire and I had already been executed, and now Trumbull was stalling while, lacking any real leverage, he tried to figure out his next move.

  Trumbull, for his part, did nothing to either encourage or dispel any of these notions. When it was suggested that he might be heading a satanic cult, Trumbull responded that Cold Dead Fingers was simply a fraternal gun club whose members believed in the primacy of individual rights—but he did not explicitly deny the Satanism charge. When asked about serial cuckoldry with his men’s wives, Trumbull sidestepped and said he did not understand why the FBI had lain siege to his home with a mechanized army, except that perhaps in a time when the majority of Americans had surrendered their liberties for a modicum of security, even talking about reclaiming those liberties was too great an offense for a power-drunk government to let pass.

  “And this is hardly the first time the federal government has overstepped its legal bounds,” Trumbull said during a prime-time talk on CNN with Rolf Kibitzer. “This is the important thing for your viewers to remember: the government has actual limits on its authority. Now everybody hears that and says, ‘Well yes, of course.’ But they don’t really believe it, deep down. Their relationship to the government is the same as the relationship of a child to his father. In the child’s eyes, the father has limitless power—genuine omnipotence—and it could not be otherwise. But this of course is not the reality. In reality, the father’s power is more or less the same as any other man’s, and the limits on the father’s power are set by nature. They are codified and inflexible. So it is with our government.”