Trigger Finger

by Bell, Jackson Spencer

  But I couldn’t stop. “Those guys will never learn from their mistakes, Abby. Not now, not ever. Whatever they could have become, we’ll never know, because they’re dead. We’ll never get a chance to win them back. And I think it’s sick to celebrate that.”

  “And I think that’s a bunch of nonsense,” she said.

  My eyes widened. My spine straightened and I drew back, as if she’d just reached across the table and slapped me.

  “They were going to rape me, Daddy.” Her voice remained level, but cool. “You shot them, though, so they didn’t. You can say all you want, but to me, I think that’s pretty awesome.”

  “Do you know what ‘rape’ means?” I asked. My face felt numb.

  “It’s when a guy holds you down and sticks his thing in you even though you don’t want him to.”

  They got her. They weren’t after Allie at all; they were after her. They went straight into her bedroom while I laid on the floor drooling in the basement.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Come on, Dad, I’m thirteen. By the way, they were going to rape Mom, too. Why else would they have come in when we were home? If all they wanted was TVs and computers and whatever, they’d have been better off waiting until everybody left in the morning. The cops even said that.”

  Abby folded her arms. She looked away at something I couldn’t see—an idea, maybe, a feeling—and her eyes narrowed.

  “So I guess I don’t really understand why you feel so bad about it,” she said. “They were going to rape me, they were going to rape Mom, so why would you ever feel guilty about shooting guys like that? I don’t get it.”

  Are you a pussy, Daddy? She hadn’t asked that, but I heard it dancing around in her words. Are you?

  Hell, no, I thought.

  Then what are you?

  I’m one hard son of a bitch.

  “What?”

  I blinked. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Your lips were moving. Are you even listening to me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Then why were your lips moving?” She demanded.

  “They’re not.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. Do you feel like I’m sorry about it?”

  “It seems like it,” she replied. The chicken sandwich had vanished. During this discussion of things like rape and killing, she’d eaten the sandwich anyway. The subject matter made that small an impact on her. Suddenly, I envied her very much.

  “God will forgive you,” she said. “But you know what? I think if you’d let those guys hurt me and mom even though you had a gun and could have stopped it, He wouldn’t forgive you. I think that would have made Him mad. I think that would have made Him really mad.”

  My mouth. I couldn’t eat anymore, McRib or not. “I think you’re right,” I said hollowly.

  She gestured at my sandwich. “But He’s not mad. And now you get free food at McDonald’s. Which is cool, because you deserve it.”

  I swallowed. A ki breath filled my chest. I didn’t want to ask this next question, but I had to. “What do you remember?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “About that night.”

  She shrugged and stole one of my French fries. I watched every movement of her face, searching for some sign of the truth.

  “A bunch of firecrackers going off, then a bunch of screaming. Mom hauling me out of bed, and I’m still half asleep. I’m all like, what’s going on here, and Mom’s dragging me into the bedroom and calling the police. Aside from that, not much. Why?”

  “What happened before that?” I asked.

  “Uh…nothing. I was sleeping.”

  “The whole time?”

  “The whole time. What is this?”

  I folded my arms. Ki breath. Time to ask point-blank: “There’s a theory,” I said, “advanced by my therapist. You knew I was going to counseling, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My therapist is wondering if maybe I didn’t encounter these two men on their way out of the house instead of on their way in.”

  Her face screwed up with the effort of trying to catch my drift, but then she got it and her eyes widened.

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Did something happen to you that night that you’re afraid to talk about?”

  “No!” She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no! Eeew, Dad, that’s disgusting! No, nobody ever…yuck! Gross! Absolutely not. I’d have screamed and screamed and screamed. They’d have had to kill me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “You know you can tell me and your mom anything, right? Anything at all? No matter what?”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Yes, Dad, I know. Tell you what, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a Bible that those guys didn’t rape me.” Her eyes came back to center and fixed on me. “And you know why they didn’t rape me? Because you shot them dead.”

  She reached out and stole another French fry. To Hell with Pinnix, to Hell with Ramseur, she was hungry.

  “And now you have a Facebook fan page.” She smiled and added, “Tell your shrink he’s stupid.”

  Her words made me feel better. Her smile made me feel better. I’d watched her reaction to Dr. Koenig’s suggestion and saw nothing hiding underneath it. I looked at the healthy glow on her face—a combination of winning her soccer game, seeing her father worshipped like a god and then getting to tell that same god he was being silly—and I thought, nope. Didn’t happen.

  It didn’t happen because I’d been ready. And I’d shot those two pieces of shit like a pair of landfill rats. Whatever remained of Pinnix and Ramseur lay now in a pauper’s grave in Burlington or Durham or wherever the coroner had sent the carcasses. And I sat in McDonald’s, eating free food with my daughter.

  And suddenly, I felt hungry again.

  “When you’re done,” Abby said, “go up there and see if you can score us some free ice cream.”

  11.

  That evening, I got on the internet and did a search on how to tell if your kid had been sexually abused. Her eating habits hadn’t changed, her grades hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t started sleeping more or sleeping less, she hadn’t suddenly become any more sullen or cantankerous than usual—nothing to indicate she’d suffered any sort of trauma. As far as I knew, she hadn’t suddenly become sexually promiscuous, either. I finished my web investigation satisfied that as to my daughter, at least, Dr. Koenig was barking up the wrong tree.

  But my wife had changed—she’d gotten interested in having sex with me again—and so before bed that night, I asked her.

  “Let’s say that I got knocked out longer than I think I did and when I shot those guys, they’d already come up here and…you know. Would you tell me?”

  She set down her book, a library hardback with a blurry picture of a girl riding a bicycle down a country road on the cover. She removed her reading glasses and put them on top of it. “Of course I would. Where did this come from?”

  “Dr. Koenig,” I said. “He remarked that the timing seems a little messed up with the shooting—he doesn’t think I could get hit, recover and get the gun in time to intercept Pinnix and Ramseur on their way upstairs. So he asked if there was a possibility that maybe I got them on their way down instead of up. Which would mean…”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry about it, because it didn’t happen. Okay?”

  I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Are you worried?” She asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just…that caller said a bunch of bullshit, and he rattled my cage. But then my therapist goes and brings up some of the same things, like the asshole might have been right or something, and so that really rattled my cage. Because it’s a good question. When you have so many coincidences and the outcome could change with any one,
you do wonder. Sometimes.”

  She picked up her book and glasses and placed them on the nightstand. Then she rolled over and propped herself up beside me, her brown hair spilling down over the hand on which she rested her head. I thought then that with a woman so beautiful, it was a miracle she didn’t have crazies following her home every week.

  “You know what I think?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think that you’re nervous about this whole thing and your therapist threw that out there to make you confront the idea. Bring it up, make you face it, let you put it away. It’s actually a pretty good tactic, I’d say. Do you feel any better after asking me about it?”

  “Yes.”

  There came a silence then, my mind working through what she’d just said and trying to decide whether or not to tell her that Dr. Koenig wanted her to come to treatment with me. I had agonized over that, because I didn’t want her there. I wouldn’t do that, man, Bobby had said when I asked him about it. You’re supposed to be her hero, which means you’re supposed to be strong. Not breaking down and crying in a shrink’s office. I agreed. My wife now understood better than most women the importance of a strong mate. Sniveling, crying sissies have ways of getting people killed.

  “What are you thinking?” She asked.

  “I’m just thinking that you’re right,” I replied.

  She smiled and turned off the light. “You should be getting used to that by now.”

  At our next session, Dr. Koenig was running behind and so I had to cool my heels without him for several minutes. When he came in, he found me standing at the window looking out over that little courtyard, my hands behind my back. Today, an old woman sat on the bench eating popcorn from a small red-and-white striped bag. White-haired and hunchbacked, the she chewed with the slow deliberation of one with few teeth and nothing but time—although, from the looks of her, she didn’t have much of either. A stainless steel walker frame stood parked beside the bench. Her eyes stared into space.

  Alzheimer’s, I thought. Dr. Koenig’s office occupied the first floor of a large building; she was probably an outpatient in somebody’s eldercare practice. Right now, a man or woman in his or her fifties or sixties was watching her from another office window I couldn’t see, talking with an entirely different doctor from mine about Mother’s options.

  “Who’s that lady out there?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  He joined me at the window. He had eschewed the informal attire this morning, and now his skinny neck poked out of a white collared shirt, the inverted noose of a necktie falling down towards his beltline. He had important obligations today, people to do, things to see. Drive over to the university in Chapel Hill, maybe, give a lecture to the next generation of psychotherapists so that they could adequately counsel the next generation of neurotic lawyers. Dr. Koenig had a life. When I wasn’t in his office, he probably didn’t even think about me. He ran marathons. He made organic salads.

  “She’s got Alzheimer’s,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” I replied. “It’s a guess. More than a third of the population has dementia by her age. Maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s something. Pick’s disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular dementia, could be anything, I guess. Look at her. Did I ever tell you I have a little experience in the mental health field?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I do. When I first started at Carwood Allison, they really hadn’t figured out what to do with me yet, so they had me running around doing all this random shit for this partner or that. I used to tell people at the courthouse I was like a hooker, only I had seven pimps. One of the things they had me do was Guardian Ad Litem work, where you get appointed by the Clerk of Court to represent the respondent in an incompetency proceeding. You know, make sure nobody’s trying to take advantage of them or anything, look out for their best interests.”

  The old woman chewed her popcorn. A pigeon lit on the sidewalk at her feet and she stared at it for several seconds before tossing it one white piece. The bird gobbled it whole.

  “I get appointed to represent these people, and ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re out to lunch. They have no idea what’s going on.”

  I paused, watching her and thinking.

  “Once upon a time, I felt sorry for them,” I remarked.

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m jealous.”

  I turned away from the window and walked to the suede sofa where I’d unburdened myself and gotten nowhere. Dr. Koenig took his customary seat. He reached into his briefcase and out came that legal pad, the one where he scribbled notes that he wouldn’t share with me, notes that ostensibly helped him reach a care plan that he wouldn’t share with me, either. I’d grown tired of not sleeping, but I’d grown tired of this, too, this talking. I was sick of talking.

  I was sick of everything.

  “You’re jealous of Alzheimer’s patients?”

  I sighed and shook my head. You couldn’t say anything around a shrink. They’d take it and twist it, and before you knew it, they’d have you strapped into a straitjacket. “It’s just an expression.”

  He looked down at his pad again. There came a long pause, as if he had to think hard about how to approach a difficult task.

  Then he asked, “Have you talked to Allie about coming in to speak with me?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “A number of reasons. Main one being, I disagree with your little theory.”

  “My ‘little’ theory?”

  “That I could have laid unconscious for longer than I think—that Pinnix and Ramseur had their way with my wife, my daughter or both and I nailed them on their way out. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s an interesting point. And a valid one—the timing is one of the miracles that night. But I talked to them about it. Allie and Abby. It didn’t happen.”

  “Do you think that if someone’s willing to go to the lengths necessary to block something out that they’re just going to tell you yes, this terrible thing actually did happen to me?”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “No, Doc, I don’t. But I do think that there’d be some kind of cue when you confronted them about it. If a woman gets held down and raped in her own bed, aside from the obvious physical evidence that would exist immediately after the act, there would be…this thing in her mind that she’d have to cover up. I think that if Allie or Abby had been attacked that night in any way, I’d have seen it. The coverup, I mean.”

  He studied me in silence, digesting what I’d said. He made a note on his pad and remarked, “Some people are very good liars.”

  “Abby’s never been a very good liar. And Allie, well—I’ve known her for eighteen years. I’ve got eighteen years of baseline behavior, and I’m telling you, the only thing that’s changed is she’s into sex again.”

  Another glance down at the pad. Due to the angle, I couldn’t see what he’d been writing on it and it occurred to me that it could be anything. I wondered if Dr. Koenig was doodling.

  “So you don’t believe there’s a possibility that something else happened there that you’re just not aware of,” he said.

  “No,” I replied. “I’ve considered it, I’ve given it a lot of thought and since I see absolutely no evidence to support it, I’m going to go ahead and discard it as a workable theory.”

  “Fine. But why haven’t you brought your wife in to see me? I told you I wanted to meet her. She’s not here.”

  “She’s not here because I didn’t bring her. I didn’t mention it to her.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged and took a deep breath. Not a ki breath—this was just your ordinary, everyday sigh.

  “This is kind of a…I don’t know…a weird process. Psychotherapy, I mean. Me coming in here, baring my soul to you. I’m supposed to confess and confront my insecurities. Lay out my fears. I will never look less like a hero than I do in here with you. If it’s all r
ight with you, I’d like to avoid looking like a pussy in front of my wife. Bobby agrees with me.”

  That seemed to catch his attention. “You consulted with Bobby about this.”

  “I did.” I gave a half-smile. Outside, the old woman had disappeared. All traces of human misery and tragic endings had vanished, leaving behind only the concrete bench and the full, green trees. “Women, he pointed out, want a strong man. Especially women who came within inches of getting raped and probably killed—they don’t want to see you in a shrink’s office, crying about your feelings. They may act all supportive, but what they really want is for you to handle it and go on.”

  “This is Bobby’s opinion.”

  “It’s mine, too. I’m going to tell you something else; Bobby thinks that what I need to do is go ahead and find this Bald Man who called into the radio show and get in his face. I tend to agree with him there, too, by the way.”

  “I see.”

  “See what? What is there to see?”

  “Bobby,” he said. “He was in your head that night, you said. Coaching you on.”

  “He was.” Forearms resting on my knees, I laced my hands. Thinking about Bobby’s running commentary that night made my trigger finger start to twitch.

  “Bobby’s your big brother. And he’s a Marine. You look up to him.”

  “I do. I actually don’t think I’d have made it that night without him.”

  Dr. Koenig nodded again, like all of this confirmed another theory he’d hatched beneath that shiny dome of a scalp. He tapped his pen on his pad and the notes I couldn’t see. I let him think through whatever he had to think through.

  Then he said, “I think we need to talk about Bobby.”

  12.

  I can understand why Dr. Koenig wanted to know more about my brother. What better way to map someone’s internal programming than to examine the people he admired? A man’s heroes offer you a glimpse of that which sets him apart from the frogs and mosquitoes in his backyard. They show you not only who he is, but who he wants to be. Who, given the right circumstances, he may just become.

  Bobby hit every life obstacle before I did, so our childhood was a story of him confronting demons, breaking their limbs and tossing them aside while I followed behind and gave their prone bodies a kick or two before moving on. He installed my values. With my father gone all the time and my mother drunk all the time, where else would I get them but television and Bobby? Being older, he also stood taller and ran faster. He snagged a beautiful girlfriend who turned into a beautiful wife, he joined the Marine Corps and he took up arms for his country even though wealthy parents would have paid his way into any lucrative, cushy career he chose. How could I not look up to this guy?