“That’s why guys like us don’t do it. You’ve got to get someone who doesn’t give a shit anymore, maybe dying or whatever. He takes one for the team, pooling up everybody’s enemies and shooting them in one afternoon. He’d be a hero.”
Oh, no, Dad. Shut up. Shut up.
“Who would you add to the list?”
“Theoretically?” My father didn’t take long to think about it. He flipped out his fingers one by one to count them off. “Your shyster Matthews, of course. Weiss the banker, too. That bitch who keeps trying to kick my bookstore out of the shopping center. That old Nazi down the block here who probably poisoned our cat sniffing around his garden. That blowhard at the Better Business Bureau, what’s-his-name with the bow tie.”
Henry nodded.
“Funny how five bullets could solve all our problems,” Dad said.
I thought of the Leaning Lincoln, encased in another coffee can on my closet’s top shelf. I thought, too, about the many bullets the rest of the lead could make.
Dad looked down at the rifle. “That’s what I keep these for. Like people who buy lottery tickets to imagine what they’d do if they won. I imagine what I’d do if nothing mattered anymore.”
My father talked and talked, and Henry listened. They drank far into the night, my father way more than Henry, and when it was time to go home, Henry took the rifle with him.
One cloudy afternoon a week later, I rode my bike home from the library and saw Henry’s truck wasn’t in the driveway like usual. I slowed my pace to postpone getting home, but it couldn’t last forever. I eventually had to go inside, opening the door as silently as I could.
“What are you sneaking around for?” demanded my father’s voice from the kitchen.
I froze. “Nothing.”
“You afraid of me?” he said, stepping into the archway. He filled it, tall and wide as he was. He had a short glass of heavily diluted orange juice.
Uh, oh. I had no idea what the right response would be. Did he want me to be afraid? Did he not? Either way, I had to hurry with an answer because the pause would be worse.
“No,” I said.
“They’re saying things about me, your little friends, the sons and daughters of the town worthies? About the thief?”
When I was within reach, he grabbed me by the back of the neck. He pulled me closer, pinching. Soon my face was so close to his that I could smell orange juice, vodka, cigarettes. My father, in other words.
I tried to tell him no, but he shook me hard enough to see stars. I closed my eyes to keep them in my skull. If only Henry could come. If only he’d been a little late, a little distracted, still on his way.
The next best thing happened. The phone rang.
It was my old man’s turn to freeze. He’d stopped answering the phone because of bill collectors, but it kept ringing long after they’d have given up.
His fingers released my neck and he grabbed the olive-green receiver hanging on the wall. “Hello?”
There was a long silence.
“Henry?” he said, letting out a laugh. “What the hell are you doing there? You get pulled over?”
My father’s smile faded. His eyes changed like they sometimes did toward the end of beating my mother or me, when he’d recovered enough conscience to wonder how he’d ever make good again. Then they tightened again, confident.
“Well, don’t tell them anything,” he said. “There’s nothing to tell. You want me to start calling around for a real lawyer?” He rubbed his hand across his stubbled crew cut while Henry answered. “Okay, if you’ve got it, that’s fine.” He listened again. “Well, take care of yourself, buddy.”
By then, Mom had come home from work. She wore her comfortable white shoes with the thick soles, but she still sighed when she sat down at the kitchen table. She was untying one before she noticed my father and I were silent.
“What happened?” she asked.
My father probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue in thought. Then, he reached into the refrigerator for a beer.
“Henry’s in the Sarasota County jail,” he said. He cracked open the beer and watched it foam through the tiny hole. He shook his head and chuckled. “That screwball killed Matthews.”
“What?” Mom sat up. “Why would he do that? What happened?”
“How the hell should I know?” my father snapped. “The guy was always a little weird, wasn’t he?”
It was true the only adult I’d ever seen playing with metal army men was Henry, and he’d made the crack-crack noises of guns going off when he did. I’d thought that was a good thing, myself; it made me think I didn’t have to grow up to be like my father. But under the influence of that lead, he’d become something else.
“What if it wasn’t his fault?” I asked, quietly.
My father scowled at me like I was crazy. “They found him with the rifle, Scotty.” As though that closed the case.
Mom cut out all the articles from the Osprey Herald.
On the afternoon of the murder, Mr. Matthews and two of his associates had gone to the Osprey Golf and Country Club to play a few rounds. Somewhere around the seventh hole near a stand of scrub pines, they saw a man lurking in the woods wearing an olive drab mechanic’s suit and carrying a golf bag. The golf bag was horizontal, though, and they didn’t see any clubs in it.
They said the man came shuffling out of the trees toward them, almost as though injured. They’d wanted to laugh, said one, because the guy looked so out of place. Mr. Matthews craned his neck to see who it was, and when he saw, he grabbed at his associate’s shirt sleeve.
By then, Henry was reaching in the bag for my father’s SKS, now converted to full auto. He slid it out by the barrel, pulling a few inches at a time before he got it free. Then he swung it around to spray the men and their golf cart. One of them got hit in the knee and rolled out of sight. The other ran across the fairway. Mr. Matthews tumbled back across the golf cart, his hands raised.
According to the man now hiding nearby, Henry didn’t say anything. He replaced the magazine, aimed the rifle at Matthews’s chest, and burned through another clip. What was left of Mr. Matthews slid from the other side of the cart.
Henry gazed out across the fairway into the cloudy glare. He dropped the rifle next to the cart and reached into the bag again. This time, he pulled out his .22 Explorer pistol and walked toward where the witness was lying.
The man slumped deeper against the grass, hoping he’d look dead. Henry stood above him a moment, holding the pistol over the man’s head with a swaying circular motion. Then, doing nothing, he limped back toward the woods.
“Jesus,” my mother said when she read that.
Henry climbed into his truck, hidden on an access road. He backed up in a spray of gravel and drove off.
According to authorities, he went next to a Circle K store where he bought a Dr. Pepper. He drank it inside, coaching a kid playing the Gyruss machine. Then he went back out to his truck and peeled back a tarp to fiddle with something before taking off again.
By now, the local sheriff’s deputies were searching along the two major highways into and out of town, but Henry wasn’t leaving. He headed toward the business district. There, seen by security cameras, he circled the Osprey Bank and Trust six times before parking in a handicapped spot near the entrance. He sat a few minutes, a darkened shadow in the cab barely visible to the camera.
As Henry’s bad luck would have it, an off-duty police officer had been depositing his paycheck in the drive-thru when he heard on his radio that a green Chevy pick-up had been implicated in a murder. He saw it parked in front of the bank and called for backup.
Henry was climbing out when a Sarasota County police cruiser thumped its wheels over the curb and nearly t-boned the truck and Henry with it. Henry pulled his twin .357 Colt revolvers with his hand-carved grips from his belt and raised them. The deputy in the car ducked behind his door, but by then the off-duty cop had tackled Henry from behind. One of the revolvers went
off and shattered a bank door.
In Henry’s truck under the tarp, they found three other guns and twenty-five hundred rounds. In his left front pocket, they found a list of names.
It took a few weeks for Henry’s public defender to come talk to my father. He sure wasn’t hard to find those days; the store had closed for good and my father spent his afternoons burning files in the fire circle he’d built in our backyard. I can only imagine what the lawyer thought walking up to this sunburned man wearing swim trunks feeding invoices to the flames on a ninety-degree day.
I don’t know if he saw me or not, sitting on one of the higher branches of our tree reading Sherlock Holmes stories. I did a lot of lurking after the murder, maybe because I didn’t know what else to do. The quieter I was, the harder it was for my father to find me.
The defender held his free hand up to his eyes as a shade; the other held a briefcase.
“Mr. Wrenwood?”
My father looked up. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m James Milona, Henry Butler’s defense attorney.”
“Huh. How’s that going?” he asked.
Milona shrugged. “Could be better,” he admitted. “Lots of gaps to fill, questions to answer.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Milona nodded at the burning papers. “Taking care of some business?”
My old man could muster an expression of innocence faster than anybody. “Oh, this?” he asked, as though he’d stumbled on it. “I’m disposing of old documents. The store’s closed, don’t need them anymore. Lawyers do that, too, don’t they?”
Milona conceded they did. He waited a moment, staring at the flames. Then he asked, “What do you think happened?”
“To Henry?” My father shrugged. “I wish I knew. He seemed pretty level-headed most of the time, but I guess that’s what they always say about killers.”
Killers. He’d called Henry a killer.
“Was Mr. Butler a violent man, do you think?”
My father tore out a few more invoices and let them slide into the fire. “I guess anybody is, if you push him enough.”
“Had Mr. Butler said anything? Made any threats? Seemed...different?”
“He was always different, never quite right in the head, a little ‘touched’ as you Southerners call it.”
I crushed my paperback above them in the tree, angry that he was throwing his friend to the fire as surely as he was those papers. I wanted to yell, “Bullshit!” but I knew it wouldn’t help.
Milona nodded. “You might be right. He doesn’t say much, even to me. He knows they’ve got him and his only hope is to give us some mitigating factor—depression, passion, rage—to keep him from the electric chair, but he isn’t talking.”
“Probably a good idea,” my father grumbled.
“Won’t look good to a jury, though. Neither will the bullets.”
“How’s that?”
“He made them himself. It looks a little creepy, like premeditation, when you reload old 7.62mm brass from the range with bullets you cast yourself. Looks a little meticulous. They shredded after impact.”
“Huh,” my dad said.
“Then there’s the list he had, those other victims he didn’t even know.”
My father was wily enough to pause before asking, “Oh? What other victims?”
“Five names but he was connected directly to one. The others are bankers, business people, a shopping center manager—random, almost.”
My old man spoke slowly now. “Well, he was a weird guy. Maybe he thought he was doing us all a favor, starting with the people everybody loves to hate.”
“Maybe so.” Milona reached into his briefcase and pulled out a card. “Why don’t you take this in case anything comes to you? He’s going to need all the help he can get, and if you think of anything...you know.”
“Right.”
“We might even need you to testify,” Milona said. “Character witness, that kind of thing.”
The irony of my father being anybody’s character witness would have made me slip from the tree if I wasn’t clenching the branch.
“Well, you take care, Mr. Wrenwood. We’ll all do our best for Henry.”
My father waited until the defender was halfway across the lawn with his back turned before dropping the card into the fire, too.
I stopped sleeping after that, at least the whole night through. My father wasn’t sleeping either, though we both stayed on our own sides of the house—him at the kitchen table smoking in the darkness, me reading under the blankets with a flashlight.
Henry wouldn’t say anything, I knew. He had one other thing in common with a kid, in common with me: he’d read too many books about being a hero to give someone else up in his place.
I could tell them what I knew. I could find Mr. Milona’s name in the phone book and call him and explain that I’d heard my father listing all those names. I could tell him the SKS was his, too, purchased from a friend-of-a-friend without any registration.
Then in the hours or days it took to arrest him, my father could kill me. Worse, he could kill my mother. He could barricade himself in the house to make one last stand before the world.
I could tell Mom what I knew, though by the time the school year was ready to start, she had taken a second job at night as an EMT and was hard to catch alone. She’d come home exhausted wearing her blue county uniform with the white doctor’s office one on a hanger, ready to swap them again after six hours of sleep.
I caught her as she woke up one morning and helped her unfold her glasses from the nightstand.
“Scotty,” she said. “Are you okay?”
It was like everything I wanted to say got jammed in my throat before reaching my mouth. I swallowed, but nothing would come out.
She sat up and pulled me close, which is something I hadn’t known I needed.
“It’s not always going to be like this,” she told me. “I promise.”
“What?”
“Your life. You’re going to go away to college someday, have a family, become a good man.”
That seemed impossible. I hadn’t thought much about what I’d do for a living because, well, I never figured I’d grow up.
“What about you, Mom?”
She smiled sadly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I’d held it in until then, but that’s when I cried. I couldn’t say it, but I’d have given up being born if it would have kept her away from my father.
“Not without you,” she said into my hair.
I didn’t mention Henry. Sitting there with Mom, skulking at the edges of my father’s hurricane hoping not to get swept out to sea, it was a lot harder. He’d taught us for years that he was the power of our lives, and he would always win.
Normal kids have projects, but I always had schemes: weird, labyrinthine plans with big theoretical payoffs and ten times the usual effort. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree as they say. I’m surprised it took me as long as the start of the school year to think of one to stop my father, but by then, the aura of that Leaning Lincoln had probably seeped into all our brains.
A scheme required a fellow schemer, and though she’d been avoiding me ever since the fiasco at the Flying Sailfish, Melanie had to have cooled off by then, right?
We had a signal for when we wanted to meet at our old fort in the woods: one of us would set a pine cone in the window of the other. But when the window didn’t work that fall, I started putting them by her front door, the back door, on the hood of her mother’s car.
I waited every day for her after school in the woods, and I was almost ready to go home when she stepped through the curtain of pine needles from the real world and into the one that had once been ours. Just inside, she stood with her arms folded.
“I’m here to tell you to knock it off. The pine cone crap, I mean.”
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Same places I always am,” she replied.
“Are y
ou okay?” I looked her over for visible injuries. “After the boat and all—”
“I’m fine,” she said. “See?”
She lifted her leg beside me, long and soft-looking. On the underside, though, was a crooked pink furrow where she’d been scraped by the mussel shells.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Did you want to talk about something?”
She wasn’t going to sit down, and I might not have much time.
“Did you hear about Henry?”
“Did I hear about Henry? You mean the psychotic who shot his attorney with a machine gun at my father’s country club? No, they’ve kept that pretty quiet around here.”
“He didn’t do it because he was crazy.”
She closed her eyes. “If you say he did it because of the lead, I swear I’ll never talk to you again. For real.”
Well, the lead was involved, but that wasn’t what I meant.
“He did it because my father told him to.”
She didn’t say anything but her eyes locked onto mine.
“They were drinking and my father had all these ideas, and Henry always wants to do things for us like we’re his family, and I think he thought he was saving us.”
“You think this or you know it?”
“I heard them.”
She sat down then on a milk crate. “Who are you going to tell?”
I could have rattled off the candidates, but I’d already dismissed them.
“You have to, you know.”
Once, when my mother had gathered the courage to tell my father she was going to leave him, he shoved her into the corner of the kitchen and swore he’d kill us all and then himself if she did. He wouldn’t let his own son send him to prison without a fight.
“We couldn’t get away fast enough. He’d get out on bail and then it’d be all over.”
I didn’t have to convince Melanie. She’d seen the bruises and had an instinctive revulsion to my old man of her own—somehow resistant to his requests to “come over with your bathing suit and go swimming in the creek.”
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