“Where in the hell did he get an assault rifle?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Who sold him that? I want to know who thought it was okay to sell a man of obviously diminished capacity any sort of firearm whatsoever…”
“Kevin, I don’t know!”
Bobby was in Iraq, thousands of miles away from this mess. I wanted to turtle up in the worst way—I did not want to deal with this, I wasn’t equipped for it—but I understood that I wouldn’t get away with that this time. So I dressed, packed a few things and drove the two hours to Conover. I managed to stay awake and avoid running my car into a guardrail on I-40 with the assistance of coffee, bewilderment and a significant dose of worry over the court appearances and appointments I would have to postpone tomorrow in order to take care of this. Because although my father had just blown out his windows and nearly killed a bunch of his neighbors with an assault rifle nobody knew he had, things like court appearances and clients bearing billable hours still seemed important to me and worth freaking out about.
Yes. I was and am a self-absorbed prick.
I met up with Kate in the emergency room of Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory. Her hair in a messy blond ponytail poking slightly off-center from the back of her head, she wore blue jeans and one of Bobby’s old T-shirts. Dark circles under her eyes and a drawn quality to her face made me stop and wonder where she had picked up the extra twenty years.
“You talk to Bobby?” I asked as we embraced.
“I called the base. They’re going to try to reach him, but he’s probably in a tent somewhere, so it might be a while. Right now, we’re it.”
“You okay?”
She drew in a long, deep breath. Ki breath, I recognized; Kate possessed this technique, too, because she had taken aikido with Bobby and me. She shook a little bit as she let it out, and I saw on her face the stretched seams that explosive panic had left behind.
“I’m fine. Him, not so much.”
“What the hell happened?”
“The people tried to get in,” she said. “Apparently, he’s been going on patrol every night for weeks, walking around down there with this gun and…I don’t know…staring down these things he’s been seeing. He said they tried to get in. So he stopped them.”
“And all this time, you never knew about the gun?”
She gave her shoulders a tired lift. “I don’t search for contraband, Kevin. Maybe he’s had it for years, who knows? I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.”
“I’m just kind of shocked here, because he’s never said a damn thing about guns my whole life, he doesn’t hunt—hell, he doesn’t even fish—and hey, whoa, here’s a big, fat old gun that carries thirty rounds to a clip and he has one. It just doesn’t add up.”
“He’s got dementia,” she said softly. “Nothing adds up.”
We stood in the waiting room. On a flat-screen television on the wall above our heads, CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or some other 24-hour news channel ran continuous coverage of an airline crash in Europe. Air France, it said. Twisted, smoking wreckage, foreign-looking ambulances swallowing men and women on stretchers, police in odd uniforms holding back the crowds. The death toll stood at three hundred, with more to come because the plane had plowed into an apartment complex on the outskirts of Calais and they hadn’t sifted through all the rubble just yet. An industry spokeswoman called it the worst airline disaster in European history and the largest single-incident loss of civilian life on the continent since the Second World War. I blinked at this calamity on the other side of the world and looked back at Kate.
“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 y
ou 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?”
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