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
“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.
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