The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  “That’s all fine and well, Mr. Trumbull,” Kibitzer said. “But the FBI insists that a call was made from your compound with the telephone of one of your hostages, the reality television star K. And that during this call, you claimed to have kidnapped K. and his costar, and also claimed to be in possession of hundreds of illegal weapons.”

  “As I’ve said repeatedly, Rolf, we’re hoping for a peaceable solution to all this,” Trumbull said. “Frankly, we’re terrified by what we see outside our windows. But we also believe that the world needs to be shown how the United States government deals with dissent, which was written into our Constitution as a patriotic duty. Look at the army assembled on my property, and you’ll see what the government thinks of dissent now.”

  Claire, Trumbull, and I sat in front of the small television in an upstairs room, watching the rebroadcast of the Kibitzer interview. Trumbull and I dined on cold beans and rice, while Claire continued to subsist on water and little else.

  “Not for nothing,” I said to Trumbull, “but you don’t seem terrified.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “I don’t understand why you’d say you were terrified,” I told him, “if you aren’t.”

  “He’s setting them up,” Claire said.

  Trumbull looked at Claire and touched a finger to the tip of his nose. “What she said. You think they’re smart enough to figure that out?”

  “If you mean do they know you’re full of shit with this ‘peaceable solution’ nonsense,” Claire said, “the answer is yes.”

  “You may be giving them too much credit,” Trumbull said.

  “Can someone explain this to me?” I asked.

  “A setup, K.,” Claire said as Trumbull flipped the television to MSNBCBS, where the Muppets sang maniacally about the virtues of the Toyota Highlander during a commercial break. “Our boy here tells the FBI that he’s got a stockpile of illegal weapons, as well as a couple of hostages. Then he spends the next week telling anyone who will listen that he’s the victim of an overbearing police state. Meanwhile, people are being treated to nonstop images of government storm troopers plowing around in deathmobiles just waiting to spill some blood. When the FBI is finally forced to blow the place up, the libertarian shitstorm will ensue.”

  “More or less the size of it,” Trumbull said, stirring his food with a spoon.

  “Have to hand it to you, it’s actually quite elegant,” Claire said.

  “A few rough spots,” Trumbull said. “But it’ll do.”

  MSNBCBS came back from commercial and, after an in-studio lede, suddenly the screen was filled with the incongruity of Theodore’s mass. He stood outside the compound in the Texas twilight, dressed in full safari gear, looking like a morbidly obese Crocodile Dundee. Beside him stood MSNBCBS’s man on the scene.

  “Turn this up,” I said.

  “What is he wearing?” Claire said, snatching the remote control from Trumbull and mashing the volume button.

  “… to get in there one way or another and do whatever I must to secure the release of my colleagues,” Theodore said into the microphone proffered by the reporter.

  “You have to know,” the reporter said, “that the authorities are not going to allow you to enter.”

  “The authorities are doing absolutely nothing,” Theodore said. “I repeat: one way or another. I will fly a hot air balloon in there, if I have to. I will build a trebuchet and fling myself into that compound.”

  “Sure you will,” Claire said. She sat forward. “Whatever, Theodore, you pork chop.”

  “Who is this man, now?” Trumbull asked.

  “Our producer,” I told him.

  “You don’t say.”

  “There are people who have suggested,” the MSNBCBS reporter said, “that this situation is nothing but an elaborate publicity stunt for you and your show. How do you respond to that?”

  “With absolute indignation,” Theodore said. “This is the very definition of life and death, for people about whom I care a great deal. I am not a violent man, but if I were I might be inclined to punch you in the nose for repeating such baseless slander, my dear.”

  Behind Theodore it was now almost full dark, the time when the FBI usually began its lullaby of Norwegian death metal. But tonight there would be no Norwegian death metal. And now the first hint of why took form: glittering sequins on the horizon, like earthbound stars. These lights grew steadily larger and brighter, multiplying and drawing closer as Theodore spoke. Headlamps, it became evident. One set followed another off the main road, until there were forty or fifty lined up in the long driveway.

  “What is that?” Claire asked.

  Trumbull set his bowl on the floor next to his chair and went to the window.

  “Looks like cars,” I said. “Lots of them. Or maybe mostly pickup trucks, actually.”

  “Hey, why not,” Claire said. “More the merrier.”

  “Let’s assume that you were able to get inside,” the reporter said to Theodore on the television. “What would you do then, unarmed and outnumbered a hundred to one?”

  “I am a businessman,” Theodore said. “Businessmen negotiate.”

  FBI tactical teams in full combat gear ran past Theodore and the reporter, setting up positions at the mouth of the driveway. Spotlights and gun turrets were hastily rotated away from the compound and pointed at the approaching vehicles. Through both the television and the walls of the building we heard the man on the PA bellowing at the new arrivals to halt their advance.

  Which they did, twenty feet or so from the end of the driveway.

  At the window, Trumbull shoved his hands into his pants pockets and took in the scene. “Right on time,” he said. “More or less.”

  23

  THE PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOG AND MAN

  The next morning Trumbull requested my presence again in the shooting range.

  When I entered, escorted by a guard, the range reeked of burned sulfur. Emergency lighting produced a gray twilight, and with the air-conditioning off for nearly five days the atmosphere resembled a dim corner of hell. Trumbull waited outside the first booth, clad in his brown duster despite the heat. We barely spoke for the first fifteen minutes or so. I was at first reluctant to even handle the Desert Eagle, let alone aim it at a representation of a human being. But as I’d been given little choice, I concentrated on sights, target, locked wrist—efforts that yielded middling results at best.

  After three clips I was trembling, damp of both armpit and forehead, weak-legged from the heat. Trumbull called for a break.

  “So if you didn’t have a family,” he said as he secured the pistol, “I assume you didn’t have a dog, growing up?”

  “A couple of my foster families had dogs,” I told him. “But they didn’t seem like mine, any more than the people did. In fact, one of the dogs actively disliked me. Richard. A little Lhasa apso mix, named after the Shakespeare character, and aptly so. Sometimes he’d get me cornered somewhere and wouldn’t let me escape. This went on for months, until the family was forced to make a choice between me and the dog.”

  “And which choice did they make?”

  “Richard had tenure. Whereas I did not.”

  Trumbull shook his head. “Now see,” he said, “that leads quite nicely to the reason why I brought up the subject in the first place. Down here, not only would Richard have been the one on the outs, but it’s likely someone would have taken him in the field and plugged him with a twenty-two.”

  “This couple were humanities professors,” I said. “They were not in the habit of shooting their problems, I don’t think.”

  Outside the sound of helicopters circling was still audible, though barely so through the concrete walls of the gun range.

  “How you kill the dog is not the point,” Trumbull said. “The willingness to do so—especially when the choice is between a dog and a human being, an orphaned boy no less—is the point.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I hardly re
sented them for going with Richard.”

  Trumbull placed the Desert Eagle on the stainless steel counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “I had a bunch of dogs, as a kid,” he said. “First one was the best, though. German shorthaired pointer by the name of Bentley. He started as my daddy’s, but became mine as soon as I got old enough to hunt. Bentley was an outstanding gun dog. Swam four hundred yards in whitecap chop to retrieve a snow goose. Four hundred yards.”

  “That’s impressive?” I asked.

  Trumbull raised his eyebrows. “Average mutt, you’re lucky to get him to go half that distance. And Bentley was nine, ten years old at that point.”

  “Fairly aged, for a dog,” I said.

  “Especially a gun dog,” Trumbull said. “In fact, the very next year I took Bentley on his last hunt. He’d gotten old fast. Cancer, probably. So that day, instead of birds, we hunted for a place to bury him. When he found a spot he liked and lay down, I measured him with the shovel and dug a hole while he sunbathed. Then I took out my Walther and put one behind his ear. And that was it for old Bentley.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “What do you think about that?” Trumbull asked.

  “I think,” I said after a moment, “that that must have been hard for you.”

  “And you’d be wrong,” Trumbull said. “It was easy as rolling out of bed in the morning.”

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Twelve.”

  Again, I was silent.

  “What was there to be sad about?” Trumbull asked. “Bentley never spent a second of his life on a leash. Sure, he got hit by two cars and had more porcupine quills yanked out of his muzzle than you could count. But that’s just the cost of doing business. He had as good a life as a dog could hope for. Better than those city dogs you all claim to love so well, who spend most of their lives cooped up in an apartment. Wearing ridiculous costumes. Shitting on sidewalks, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t claim to love any dogs,” I said. “I own a cat.”

  Trumbull lifted the empty magazine and began loading bullets into it one by one. “Today if I did Bentley the favor of putting him out of his misery, I’d be looking at two years in prison. Now tell me, what kind of country do we live in where a man can’t shoot his own dog?”

  “A civilized one?” I asked, not very hopeful that this was the answer Trumbull sought.

  “Funny you should use that word,” he said. “‘Civilized.’ Because that’s really what this is about. For a hundred and fifty years you bluecoats have been trying hook or crook to civilize us. Animal cruelty laws are just the latest gambit. It’s class warfare, and it’s snobbery of the first order.”

  “Again, I’m not sure I figure into this one way or the other.”

  “Do you eat meat?” Trumbull asked.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Then you figure into it,” he said. “Out here, we don’t have the luxury of softheartedness. We slaughter ten million cattle a year to keep you Yankees in steak dinners and clean consciences. Some things die on their own, other things need to be killed, and that’s just the way it is.”

  Having finished loading the magazine, Trumbull slid it carefully into the butt of the pistol and pulled the slide to chamber a round.

  “Speaking of which,” he said, holding the weapon out to me once more.

  24

  GUILT IS NEVER TO BE DOUBTED

  Sarah and I hadn’t been getting along well for the better part of a year. Less fighting than just feeling as though we weren’t quite sure what the other person was doing in our house.

  This was before she got sick.

  Actually, it’s more accurate to say she was sick, but we just didn’t know it yet.

  What we did know, both of us, without question, was that we hadn’t had sex in over six months. Eventually I got frustrated enough to backtrack and pinpoint the date we’d last made love, the better to stoke my resentment with an exact count of days. I’d also mounted a petty campaign of civil disobedience, engaging in small domestic misdeeds that I knew drove Sarah crazy: not closing the shower curtain after bathing, for example, or putting dirty dishes in the kitchen sink with food still on them.

  Childish, I know. And not likely to help break our cold snap. Also more than a bit regrettable, given everything that was about to happen.

  Then one day, Sarah came home from her office, and I came home from a different office. I went into the kitchen and found her at the sink, rinsing the breakfast plate and coffee cup I’d left behind that morning. Both of us taller than average for our respective demographics, with nice teeth, nice hair, nice bodies kept slender and taut by treadmill and barbell. Both of us dressed in tasteful wool suits designed to leave absolutely no impression on anyone, both of us the very picture of white middle-class kayaking-on-the-weekends success, and both of us carrying a bale of misery in our guts like we’d bundled up a length of barbed wire and swallowed it. Meowser perched on top of the refrigerator behind Sarah, watching us with his cold cat eyes, passing silent judgment on us as individuals and as a couple. We gazed at one another, Sarah and I, across the counter that separated the food prep area from the dining area, and although for many weeks we had traded the sort of look one gives to a bare acquaintance for whom one feels little other than disdain, tonight, instead, in her eyes shone familiarity. Affection, even.

  It pierced me. I stood there like a deaf-mute for a few moments while dueling impulses of Yes please and Fuck that duked it out in my frontal lobe.

  “What do you think,” Sarah asked, “about getting a cocktail?”

  “On a Tuesday?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud,” she said, the affection flickering. “It’s not like we’ve got three kids or anything.”

  Thank Christ for that, I thought.

  She picked the place, a small gastropub on the edge of downtown called North Point. With its brick interior and exposed ductwork, a cramped bar where the liquor bottles huddled together like refugees, and those dim Edison bulbs that suddenly seemed like they were everywhere, North Point was more Sarah’s style than mine. I preferred clean lines, bright splashes of track lighting, gray sheetrock walls hung with unobtrusive bits of contemporary art. But I hardly intended to complain. The barroom was warm, the martinis were dry, and Sarah was smiling, then laughing. I laughed with her as the vodka set my earlobes afire and made my eyes well in a pleasant way.

  We sat facing one another on adjacent bar stools. Near the end of her second drink Sarah draped an arm over my shoulder and said, “What exactly is our problem, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “If I knew, I’d do something about it.”

  “Would you?”

  “I’m not enjoying this any more than you are, Sarah.”

  “You know what my mom says?”

  “You’ve been talking to Peggy about this?” I asked.

  Sarah shrugged. “She’s a tough old bird, but every once in a while she’s able to cut through the bullshit in a way that’s enlightening.”

  “Did she this time?”

  “Hardly. ‘Have more sex,’ she said.”

  I fished an olive out of my martini. “That was it?”

  “The entirety of her wisdom on the subject of marriage. Yes.”

  “As far as relationship advice goes,” I said, “that’s not the worst I’ve ever heard.”

  Sarah offered a mock-suspicious squint.

  “I’m just saying, I can only think of maybe two scenarios in which ‘have more sex’ is a bad relationship strategy. And one of those scenarios involves a prolapsed rectum.”

  “But I mean what are you thinking?” she asked. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That marriage is marriage and we’re in a trough and given enough time we’ll hit an upslope again?”

  “More or less,” I said. “We’ve hit troughs before. Not quite like this, but.”

  She looked at me. “You’re not fucking around, are
you?”

  It was, suddenly, like being interrogated by a cop: even if you tell the truth, you feel like you’re lying. “No,” I said, barely convincing myself though I was being honest.

  “Are you thinking about it?”

  “No,” I said, and this was the truth, too.

  “Because if you were thinking about it I could hardly blame you. After, what, five months or so.”

  “Six months.”

  She smirked. “Not that you’re keeping track.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m not fucking around, and I’m not thinking about it, either.”

  She removed her arm from my shoulder and lifted her martini glass. “Well to hell with it, anyway,” she said. “Tomorrow we can get back to whatever mysterious ailment is crippling our marriage.”

  “And tonight?”

  She shrugged, tilting her head from side to side. “Tonight,” she said, “I want to get good and drunk. After that, we’ll leave it to the Fates.”

  The Fates, it turned out, were conspiring to land Sarah and me in bed several hours later. Half a year’s worth of pent up carnal impulses, along with most of a bottle of Ketel One, had us pawing at each other with good enthusiasm, heading toward what would have been, in all likelihood, satisfying coitus. But then I put a hand on Sarah’s right breast, and froze.

  She picked her head up off the pillow and looked at me. “Why are you stopping?” she groaned. “What’s wrong?”

  “I felt something,” I told her.

  “You felt nothing, K.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  Sarah sighed magnificently and pushed herself into a sitting position against the headboard. “You felt what. Where.”

  “In your breast,” I said. “Something lumplike.”

  “What? Show me.”

  I took her hand and guided it to the spot. “There. You feel it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s in there pretty deep,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and, like mine, her hand came to a halt. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s something. For sure.”