27.
Pinnix and Ramseur hadn’t tried to kill me that night. They hit me hard enough to put me out, but only for a short period of time. They didn’t stop to make sure I was dead; they gave me a love tap with the bat and moved on.
How long was I out? I asked myself in the car on the way home from work that evening. Rural Alamance County, rushing past the windows of the BMW at 55 miles per hour, didn’t answer me.
It didn’t matter—I didn’t think it did, at least. It did matter, though, that the man who’d swung the bat at my head hadn’t actually tried to kill me. Had he put his heart and soul into it, my head would have shattered like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. Dr. Wingrove had said: nausea, disorientation, vomiting. Swelling of the brain. Getting up, loading an assault rifle, stalking the enemy, putting high-powered bullets exactly where they needed to go…
“Not bloody likely,” I growled to the empty air in the passenger seat beside me.
But why? What did the Bald Man want with me?
That’s no man, replied a voice in my head. This one didn’t belong to Bobby or Kate or Allie; I recognized this as my own. I think you know that.
But, again: why me? I understood why he wanted to see me go down so badly now; I’d wasted his two golems when they broke into my house in February. He’d set up this little game where I had a chance to rabbit right on out the basement door, but I hadn’t done it. I’d said fuck these two guys and fuck you—game on, bitch. I hadn’t played the way he thought I would, and now he had to show me who the bitch was, here. I got that. But I didn’t get why he sent golems after me in the first place. What had I ever done to deserve the attention of a demon?
“Who knows why the Devil picks people?” Kate had said on the phone when I’d called her from my cell that afternoon. Bobby was out in the woods near Camp Lejeune, she said, playing war. Bad-asses did that to stay sharp when there’s no enemy in the immediate vicinity for them to kill. “He just does. I don’t know. Maybe he looked at you and saw your house, your career, your wife, your child, and he said: this man is blessed by God. God likes this man, God loves this man; maybe I can’t touch Him, but I can destroy His little pet. And so he picked you.”
And so he picked me.
Dead leaves swirled in my wake as I piloted the BMW up the long driveway and splashed light across the front of my house. The garage door opened to receive us but I didn’t enter right away; instead, I sat in the driveway and tried to survey my palace with the eyes of an outsider. Allie had fallen in love with the porch and the gabled roof the first time she’d ever laid eyes on it, right here in the same spot as my car now sat—albeit in much better lighting conditions. Bigger than the Rock Barn house, I realized. Taller, wider, more square footage, bigger lot. If a house said something about a man, mine said: Kevin Swanson is a rich son of a bitch.
But the true riches lay inside, asleep in beds beneath smooth ceilings trimmed with crown molding. This house, as much as I liked to sit out here and stare at it like it had boobs or something, provided only a stage where the best part of my life played out on a daily basis. In a world packed to the gills with disabled children, drug-addicted children, rotten children, I had Abby. And in the same world, where more than fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce and people who supposedly loved each other lied, cheated and stole, I had Allie. I had married my best friend. This year would mark the point where I’d spent more of my life with her than without her. Maybe the Pinnix and Ramseur thing made no sense, but what had I done to deserve the incredible good fortune that constituted the rest of my life? I hadn’t set foot in church since my father’s funeral. I’d never even had my daughter baptized.
And yet I drove a European sports sedan with clean-smelling leather seats and a motor that purred like a porn star, and I could park it in a house bigger than the one my cardiologist father had raised me in. Whereafter I would go upstairs, undress and lay beside the most beautiful woman in the world—who had so very recently rediscovered the joys of having sex with me on an almost daily basis.
Okay, then. God had blessed me. And that made me a target.
A hard target, though. Six golems later, I still held this castle while the Bald Man raged and frothed at the mouth in his dark little rathole and dirtied his hands with the clay of yet another beast.
Which I would kill. Because I remained, as Bobby said, a hard son of a bitch—a stone cold killer.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I mumbled.
I put the BMW in gear and proceeded into the garage.
28.
“You’re an alien,” Bobby said on Saturday, Christmas Eve. He had homebrewed some beer at his house in Jacksonville and he had brought twelve bottles with him to Burlington. A glass of the jet-black brew in one hand, he stood in the hallway with me, observing the wall. The painters had patched over the bullet holes and painted over the bloodstains that I couldn’t scrub away. They used Sherwin Williams paint. I knew this because they’d done it on a weekend, when I was home, and on their lunch break I had gone and stared at the cans. The Sherwin Williams logo showed a can of paint spilling over the Earth above the slogan Cover the World. I had always found that a little eerie before. That day, I found it comforting.
“There’s this little document called the Ten Commandments that says we’re not supposed to kill anybody.” With his free hand, Bobby touched the spots where the bullets had torn through Pinnix and Ramseur and ripped into the drywall, nearly invisible now. Had I not shown him the exact spots earlier, he’d have never known. “It’s a rule riddled with exceptions, of course, so what you’re really dealing with is the Nine Commandments and One Suggestion. Nevertheless, we’re all brought up to think thou shalt not kill. But you’ve killed. You’re part of a special group of people now.”
“The one you’re in,” I said.
“That’s right. Welcome to the club. You failed to follow the One Suggestion, but you popped a bunch of shitbags who deserved it, so you’re a hero. But there’s a downside to that.”
He turned around and smiled. He leaned back against the wall, taking a short gulp of beer.
“I’m an alien,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“That’s not what’s bugging me.”
“You feel guilty for wasting shitbags. You’re telling yourself they were human beings, too, I shouldn’t get so juiced over killing God’s creatures.”
“No,” I said.
“So what is it now?”
I told him about my conversation with Dr. Wingrove and how it dovetailed perfectly with my theory that I had been somehow selected for special cosmic persecution. I didn’t mention the Bald Man. I had learned long ago that men have thoughts that make perfect sense within the confines of their own brains, but once spoken aloud they spoil into madness. This was one of them; the idea that the Bald Man wasn’t just a prank caller but also a demon belonged inside.
An idea occurred to me then and I gestured at the watch on his wrist. “That thing have a stopwatch feature?” I asked him.
“Uh…yeah.”
“I need your help with something.”
“What with?”
“I need you to time me.”
Allie, Abby and Kate were busy in the formal living room—upon the floor of which said room Allie and I had made love after I pulled my ninja act in Durham—and we left them there as Bobby followed me into the basement. I turned on the lights and laid down on the floor in between the coffee table and the sofa.
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s see how long it takes me to get locked and loaded and get upstairs.”
He frowned down at me. He regarded me this way for a long time, and for a moment, I thought he wouldn’t do it. But finally, with a roll of his eyes and shake of his close-shaven head, he removed the watch from his wrist and began pushing buttons.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready…set…go.”
I laid on the floor with my eyes closed for what felt like a long enough time for two me
n to creep upstairs into the kitchen. Then I leapt off the floor and made my way over to the gun cabinet.
“Thirty seconds,” Bobby said.
I looked down and worked the combination. My head had begun to pound with the memory. My trigger finger itched for action. When I heard the definitive click, I depressed the handle and opened the cabinet. Bobby said nothing as I withdrew the AK-47, checked the action to make sure the chamber was clear, and rammed an empty magazine into the receiver.
“Locked and loaded,” I said.
“One minute.”
I shouldered past him, barrel pointed towards the ceiling. I mounted the stairs and climbed slowly, careful not to make a sound. I paused at the top, replaying the conversation I’d heard in my head. Then I leapt through the door, spun on my heels, and hit the edge of the sink with my ass cheeks. “Time!” I called, barrel pointed down the empty hallway.
I heard a beep. A moment later, Bobby emerged from the basement.
“One minute, thirty-three seconds.”
I lowered the rifle. I swallowed.
Bobby looked at me blankly. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well? What did we get out of all that?”
One minute and thirty-three seconds. I laid the rifle down on the granite countertop and walked into the hallway. I stood where Pinnix and Ramseur had stood, where I’d seen them, where I’d killed them. Bobby joined me but didn’t say anything. For the moment, we just stood there in the hallway and listened to our women chattering in the living room beyond.
“If I was unconscious for only thirty seconds,” I said quietly, “they stood here for a full minute.”
Bobby looked down at his watch. He didn’t say anything.
I laid a hand on the opposite wall. I pointed at the place on the ceiling where the banister appeared on its way down from the second floor. “The stairs are right there,” I said. “You can see them even in the dark. As soon as they entered this hallway, they would have seen the way to get upstairs.”
“And that’s significant…why?”
“Because they stood here for a solid minute. At the least. They were carrying a rape kit, man, they weren’t interested in stealing any of my property; they wouldn’t have looked around for any goodies. The goodies they wanted were upstairs. They knew that. But they stood here for a solid minute.”
We stood in silence as I tried to imagine standing still in a strange house for that long. Funny; a minute had never seemed like a long time before. The seconds ticked by in our heads with the speed of molasses running down frost-covered iron. With each passing moment, the absurdity of what Pinnix and Ramseur had done only grew.
When a minute had passed, Bobby rolled his eyes again. He retreated into the kitchen and returned with our beers, which we had laid on the counter on our way to the basement. “They stood there for a while and listened,” he said. “Trying to hear if there was anybody else in the house other than the dumbass in the basement and the girls they were after. A little recon would have made sense.”
He handed me my beer. I accepted it but did not drink; I studied his expression and saw the discomfort there, the thoughts beneath his words. One minute doesn’t sound like much, but in the context of an assault it becomes an eternity. They wouldn’t have stood there for a full minute. Bobby understood this. I could read this in the tension set in his jaw, born of the effort it took to hold the corners of his mouth up in that wry, this-is-all-a-bunch-of-bullshit smile.
And he understood, too, that this exercise assumed I had lain on the floor for only a half a minute. It was entirely possible—and likely—that I had been out for far longer than that.
“Are you still obsessed with that stupid idea that you caught them on their way out? Do you still honestly believe it’s possible that your wife and maybe your daughter got raped by two strangers and don’t remember a second of it?”
No, I didn’t honestly believe that. Not anymore. What possessed me now—what quickened my heartbeat and narrowed my eyes and brought a sheen of sweat to my skin even though it was only sixty-eight degrees in here—was that the results of our experiment didn’t jibe with my theory of this attack. I had concluded that they hadn’t hit me that hard because the Bald Man had wanted my brains unscrambled and my faculties intact enough to send me running out the back door to get help—whereupon I would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had run while these men raped and then killed my family. But then, once they’d knocked me down, they should have proceeded upstairs post-haste. Not stood there in the hallway waiting for me. Why would they have waited for me?
Because the Bald Man knew you were coming up.
Not possible.
Yes, it is. Because he not only makes, but he also sees.
Bobby clapped me on the shoulder and spun me around to face the foyer. “You know what, man? I want you to take a look at something. Don’t say anything; just shut up and look.”
He propelled me into the foyer and then jerked me to a stop. We stood in the dark, the lights off. The only illumination in the foyer came from the lamps and the Christmas lights in the living room. The two beautiful women and one beautiful girl seemed oblivious to our presence. Sundry boxes of ornaments, basking in the warmth of their yearly furlough from the attic, stood open all around them. Allie pulled a little porcelain Barbie doll out and smiled as she showed it to Abby, her lips moving to the tune of the story that came with it. All of Allie’s ornaments had a story—Abby had heard each one every Christmas since she was old enough to hold her head up. But she listened anyway. Mama’s little stories were as much a part of her Christmas as beer was of mine and Bobby’s.
“Look at their faces,” he whispered.
I did. The contours of my wife’s already lovely face seemed highlighted, made somehow finer, in the warmth of the Christmas lights. My daughter, the best of this woman’s essence mixed with the best of my own, could have been an ornament herself—even thought she stood now, I realized, as tall as her mother. She laughed.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Bobby asked.
Santa Claus peddling an ice cream cart, the front wheel immobilized. Your uncle Steve broke it when he was four, Allie’s lips moved. Crimson and full in the soft glow of the lamps, they drew my eyes. He blamed it on his Superman doll.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
A little train. My grandfather made this for me when I was your age, Abby. He was good with his hands.
My daughter took the train and examined it with a curiosity that made her look four again.
“So leave it alone,” Bobby said. I turned away from the Norman Rockwell painting forming up in my living room and faced my brother. Beneath his shock of blond hair cut close to the skull in the typical Marine fashion, his face glowed with a tan bestowed by hours spent outside in the winter sun. Beer and good health ruddied his cheeks. But his eyes were serious. “Stop seeing this therapist; he’s not doing you any favors. Quit calling people and riding around and poring through files—quit investigating. If you see the edges, don’t pick at them. Because you know what? If these guys really did come in here and fuck Allie and Abby’s brains out and they simply don’t remember it? Then good.”
He leaned forward. I smelled the beer on his breath.
“Reality is overrated,” he said. “And if you can hide deeply enough, it really doesn’t matter.”
The furnace kicked on with a click and a whoosh. Outside the door to my right, freezing wind tore down Highway 62 and wrapped winter’s shroud around everything it touched. It buffeted under the eaves and rattled the screens, scratched at my doors and windows with a blind desire to get inside and do its work here just as it had out there. Winter, I thought, the dying season. The great Darwinian colander of nature that separated the old, the sick and the weak from everything else. Winter was cold and hard because nature itself was cold and hard; it had no soul, knew no mercy. In winter, God went to sleep.
Kate laughed behind me.
But in here, that laugh said,
He is wide awake.
Bobby slapped me on the back and pointed at my beer glass.
“Chug that so that I can pour you another. Then let’s go in there and help these ladies finish decorating the tree so that we can go downstairs, watch a movie and get drunk. Can you stop thinking long enough to do all that?”
I sighed.
“Yes,” I lied, bringing the glass to my lips. I drank now not out of thirst but from the need to drown the counterpoint to everything Bobby had just said; reality did matter. Because if you didn’t confront it, if you ignored it, you couldn’t see it. And when it bore down on you again, it would find you on your back.
Right now, my reality was busy in its dark room. Conjuring. Creating.
Making.
I finished the beer and spoke another lie.
“I can.”
29.
Christmas went well. Nobody broke into my house, nobody accosted me in any parking lots and nobody called me on the telephone to call me a sniveling little bitch and swear that they’d show me, oh yes they would. I ate and drank like any normal man and during this time, I experienced no nightmares. I woke up feeling refreshed—if not one hundred percent at ease, at least relaxed enough to confront the things that I felt certain Fate held in store for me.
December can be a slow time for divorce lawyers—existing clients go on vacation and new ones wait until after New Year’s—and so in the days after Christmas I found myself with space in my schedule to go visit my GAL client, Brandon Cross, again. I got him out of his room, where his slackjawed roommate stared mindlessly at Dr. Oz, and led him into the lounge. We sat across from each other and Brandon told me what he’d eaten for lunch. Chicken a la king, he said. A biscuit and green beans on the side. Chocolate milk for a drink. Not bad.
“Been sleeping okay?” I asked him.
Shake of the head.
“Why not?”
“Been sliding.”
I frowned, not understanding at first. Then I remembered.
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