by Cylin Busby
“I think Polly got the semiautomatic, didn’t she?” Rick said, taking aim. He shot at a bottle and shattered it.
“Oh yeah, maybe you’re right,” Don agreed.
“Ready?” Dave said to Shawn, who nodded nervously. He took aim again, doing a little better this time. He actually hit the top of the bottle, but it just fell over, broken on the top. Eric took a turn and hit a can with a loud ping.
It was my turn again, but when Dad went to put the gun into my hand, I just shook my head. “I don’t want to,” I said.
“Let me see your hand there,” Don said, looking at where the gun had pinched me. I had a tiny blood blister in the web between my thumb and index finger. It hurt, but not too much. “Don’t you want to try one more time?” Don asked quietly, and I shook my head and turned away. I wandered off, poking through the garbage with a stick, listening to the sounds of my brothers shooting. I could hear some of the things the cops were telling them. “If you need to shoot repeatedly, you cock the gun like this,” Don told Shawn. “No, no, you don’t bring it down and look at it. Hold it up like this, pull it back, and just fire again. If someone is coming at you, you don’t want to give him a second chance, right?”
“You want to aim here, not just at the head, because most people aim too high and miss,” I heard Rick explain to Eric. “The body is bigger, so look for the chest first. Second shot, go for the head.”
I dug around in the garbage pretending that maybe I would find a piece of jewelry—a necklace or a ring that someone had lost. I wondered if Eric and Shawn would ever really need to shoot someone in the chest first, then in the head second—an actual person. I looked over at Dad. Whoever shot him didn’t take Rick’s advice; they just went for the head. They probably didn’t know much about guns. I already knew more than they did about guns and I was only nine.
I watched Dad take a shot. He looked good with the gun in his hands—strong and powerful. I hadn’t seen him look that way for a long time. His shoulders looked broad from the back when he held the gun out in front of him. He fired the revolver, hitting a bottle, then shot again, and again. Bang, bang, bang. All the bottles in a row cracked and shattered, one by one. No one said anything as Dad shook a box of ammo out of his pocket and quickly reloaded. His eyes were blank as he slid the bullets into the chamber and snapped it back. He stood for a moment, the gun in his palm, looking off into the distance, at the hills just beyond the town dump.
“Dad, can I have another turn?” Shawn asked, breaking his trance. Dad looked over at him as if he had forgotten who Shawn was.
I picked up some bottles I’d found and brought them over to the guys so they could break them. I searched around the rest of the dump and brought over cans and other stuff for them to shoot at too. It started to get pretty cold, and I was wearing just my light fall jacket, so I sat on the ground behind the guys and pulled my knees up to my chest, tucking them under my jacket, until it was time to go home.
“Look,” Shawn said in the car on the way back, “my hand is still shaking.” He held out his right hand and I touched it. I could feel a little shiver running through him, like he was cold or scared. “That’s from shooting,” he said.
I looked down at my own hand, running my finger over the tiny red blister. That’s from shooting too, I thought. I never wanted to hold a gun ever again.
chapter 24
JOHN
THE days got colder, shorter, and before we knew it, winter had arrived on the Cape. The cold made my face hurt so badly it was almost impossible to go outside. The pain was mind-blowing, like an intense ice cream headache that didn’t go away, so cold days were to be avoided whenever possible.
Sometime in November, I became aware that I wasn’t dreaming at night, or at least I wasn’t remembering any dreams. I also started having a hard time remembering people’s names, something that had never been a problem before.
“Everyone dreams,” Polly told me. She had learned in her nursing psych classes that people who don’t have dreams have something wrong with their brains—psychotic folks, schizoid. “Maybe you just don’t remember your dreams, but you must be dreaming. Right?” She looked a little worried. Next visit to Mass General, I mentioned this to Dr. Keith.
“You lost a great deal of blood after your shooting,” he pointed out. “There is a chance that your blood oxygen levels got so low, a part of your brain was damaged or affected.” I might make an interesting case study, he added, to see if there is a small portion of the brain that controls dream memory and is also linked to remembering names and faces. Overall, he didn’t seem concerned about it, so I wasn’t either.
Around this time I was also taken in for hypnosis, something the detectives had recommended. “We have some information that we believe is related to the car you described in your shooting,” Dimatto told me one day. “We have a witness who saw a similar car in that area, with Florida plates. It could be that the car was a rental.”
“Maybe these guys were hired out of Florida, and if that’s the case, we’re going to have a hard time tracking them down, or that car,” Reaves added.
I don’t know how much of what they were telling me was legitimate, but I went along with the hypnosis to see what I could come up with. They wanted me to try and remember the plate numbers, or if the plates were from out of state. Maybe I was wrong about Meyer pulling the trigger. If he was the one who wanted me dead, maybe he did hire someone to whack me. It would have been a smart move, considering that if I’d died he would have murdered a police officer, a serious offense, even for him. And Meyer, with his previous criminal experience, would know this.
So I was taken in to meet the doctor who was going to hypnotize me, and the two detectives came along, and a couple of guards. The doctor asked me to sit in a comfortable chair and then close my eyes and put my hands out in front of me. “Imagine that in your left hand, you are holding a dictionary. It’s a large dictionary, very large, like the kind you see on a wooden pedestal at the library,” the doctor said. “And in your other hand, you are holding the string to a balloon.” Then he started talking in a very soft voice about how heavy the dictionary was and how light the balloon was. My left hand started sinking down and down, and I was leaning over toward the left, trying to hold up the dictionary, while my right hand floated upward into the air. Then, suddenly, the objects were gone and I heard the doctor say, “Go back to when you were driving down Sandwich Road on the night you were shot. The moment you hear the gun go off, you will feel no pain, just the situation as it happened and what you saw and did.”
Under hypnosis, I tried to talk, answering the doctor’s prompts, but no one could understand me in my guttural voice, jaw wired shut. But once I was awake, I remembered everything I’d seen and wrote it all down for them. The doctor had me go through it two times, to be sure I was truly hypnotized and that I had gotten all the information possible.
I could see the car, but no plates. After I’m shot and the car pulls in front of me, there is a moment where I can see three silhouettes inside. Two are men. One is smaller, but I can’t tell—the hair went down and then curled out, so it’s hard to say, could have been male or female. No faces. That’s all I could remember, which was of little help to the investigation.
I had told myself in advance not to put too much hope in the hypnosis, but I guess a part of me still thought that maybe I would remember something that would point to Meyer, something undeniable, something even the detectives couldn’t ignore. But my subconscious only contained a few bits and pieces of the night, and I ended up, after all was said and done, feeling that little was gained.
I was still getting a lot of visitors at this point, one of them an old friend and local attorney, Winny Woods. She had just been starting as a lawyer when I was still new on the force, and I would often see her in court. Don Price and I had helped her through her initial phase as a prosecutor in the district court, since most of our cases were open-and-shut textbook law. I didn’t arrest someone for a
crime if I didn’t really think, or know, they had committed it, so most of the cases I went to trial on were pretty easy for a lawyer to wrap up. After a few years of meeting in court, Winny became a friend. Polly and the kids thought as much of her as I did, and we all tried to get together on a regular basis.
After my shooting, Winny came by one afternoon for a visit. We got to talking about the case, the “noninvestigation” as I liked to call it, and I noticed that Winny got quiet for a minute.
“You know, John,” she finally said, “I’m really concerned with your anger level.”
“Join the club,” I wrote to her in my notebook.
“Seriously,” she said, meeting my eyes. “I can’t believe that the police department hasn’t recommended that you talk to someone. I think you need to, before you do something that you’re going to regret.”
I had to agree with her. I had been spending too many hours a day plotting my revenge against a man whom I suspected of trying to kill me. What if I did whack him and it turned out to be someone else who had wanted me dead? What if those bullets were meant for someone else—mistaken identity? The detectives on the case couldn’t seem to find any links to Meyer, so maybe I really was just crazy and paranoid.
I promised Winny that I’d see someone but dragged my feet about it until she pushed me to actually make an appointment with a shrink she knew and thought was pretty good. My first visit to this doctor took about two hours, in part because I had to write down everything I wanted to say, and he also needed the whole backstory. But eventually we got around to the point at hand: I was angry and couldn’t seem to get unangry. I wanted to blow someone away and felt that I would never rest until I did.
“I agree with you,” the doctor told me. “I agree with your attitude. You have been dealt a great injustice, and I think anyone would understand how you feel.”
For a moment, it sounded like he was giving me license to go out and murder Meyer, but then he went on to argue against taking any action. “We need to work on getting you over your anger another way.” We talked about ways that we could do that, focusing on my family and how I had conducted myself at other times in my life. But obviously it was going to take more than a few sessions with this guy to resolve my problems.
Before I left, he told me an interesting story. “I have to tell you that I’ve seen you before, before we met today,” he said. I thought he meant that he’d read about me in the papers, seen me on the news, knew my case. But that wasn’t it. “I live in Hatchville, and for years I used to see you running by our house almost every day. You always looked so serene, confident. I guess it’s what they call the ‘runner’s high’,” he went on. “Because of you, I decided to start running, and it’s taken me a while to build up to it, but I just ran my first marathon recently. And I have you to thank, so thank you for introducing me to running,” he said, and shook my hand. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never run more than ten miles a day, but I’d somehow gotten this guy running marathons. It was a strange twist of fate—of all the doctors in town, I ended up seeing this one.
As I rode home from the appointment, I thought about what he had said. Not just about Meyer, but about the coincidence with the running. Call it fate, call it synchronicity: you never know what your actions are going to lead to, or the possibilities they can cause. There is a ripple effect to every action you take, intended or not. I walked out of his office feeling better than I had in months.
The feeling lasted until I got home and a couple of my cop buddies came by the house. One of them ended up telling me that Meyer had stopped by the police station. Since Meyer had the city contract to haul trash, he seemed to feel like he could come by whenever he wanted, and most of the guys at the station were too scared to say “boo” to him. As Don had told me years before, some hornets’ nests are better left undisturbed. So on this day, he came by and actually put his feet up on the chief’s desk and said something like, “So, do you have anything that you want to ask me?” This guy had no fear whatsoever of getting caught for anything, and that really burned me.
One of my friends from the force, a former cop, Mickey Mangum, couldn’t stand the way Meyer was known to march into the station whenever someone he knew was given a ticket or citation and make sure it was cleared up fast. If Mickey ever saw him there, he would actually stop and say, “Raymond, what business do you have in here?” There was no love lost between him and Meyer.
There had been an incident a few years back between the two of them involving hauling garbage for the town. The cops had set up a detail to block off some roads for the Barnstable County Fair, and Meyer tried to drive through that Friday night. He got pissed off when the cops told him the road was closed—it was like the regular rules weren’t supposed to apply to him. A few days later, when he was scheduled to do the trash pickup along the same route, he refused. Obviously, it didn’t take a lot to light his fuse. So the trash along that route went without pickup for over a week—long after the fair was over and the roadblocks were down. Mickey had to call up Meyer a couple of times and tell him to go pick up the trash, but he refused. Said he was there to do his job last week and got turned away. Fuck them, and fuck you too. Hung up. Mickey finally had to go and pick up the trash himself in a police station wagon.
Next day, I saw Meyer in the station, who knows what he was doing there. Visiting one of his cronies—Monty, Mustafa, any of the guys on the force that he was related to or friends with. Didn’t matter to me; he was invisible as far as I was concerned. He was small-time, or so I thought then. But Mickey saw him and they had some words. Later, when Mickey went to his locker, he found a plain white envelope—it contained two burned matches. He knew what that meant.
After my shooting, I learned that Mickey had the same attitude about Meyer that I did: you couldn’t back down, you had to face him with the same level of intimidation that he gave out. And that’s what Mickey did. He knew that Meyer hung out at Jake’s Tap every afternoon, so he went and found Meyer at the bar. Before saying anything, he put a bullet down in front of him, sharp side up. “That’s for your mother,” he told Meyer. “If anything happens to me or to my family, I know a guy down south who will come up here and take care of your mom for me. How would you like that?” He didn’t wait for Meyer to say anything, just turned and left the bar.
It seemed to do the trick. But a couple of weeks later, a teenage confidant of Meyer’s told his high-school girlfriend that Mickey’s house was going to burn that night. The girl was terrified of Meyer but also knew that Mickey had little kids, so she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t tell somebody. The information reached Mickey, who got a sleeping bag and his 12-gauge shotgun and stayed outside all night, waiting. Sure enough, around two in the morning Meyer drove by slowly in his truck. Mickey shone the flashlight at him and he kept on going.
A few nights later, when Mickey came into the station after dinner, he saw Meyer sitting in the dispatcher’s room, just hanging out. The small-town police politics had worn thin by this time, and Mickey couldn’t take it anymore. “Get out of here, Raymond,” he told him. “And I don’t ever want to see you in here again unless you have some official police business.”
But Meyer didn’t move, just sat there and smiled. So Mickey pulled his police-issue .357 and pointed it at him. “I should just shoot you right now,” he said. It was a tense moment. Meyer got up and left without a word, but it was clear that these two had unfinished business.
By the time I had my major run-ins with Meyer and his family in 1979, Mickey had already resigned from our police department and taken on a teaching job at the community college. Meyer wasn’t his problem anymore. When Mickey came to see me in the hospital after I was shot, I could tell that he was thinking it could just as easily have been him in that hospital bed. It could have been any of the cops on the force who had ever stood up to Meyer. I was starting to get the feeling that my shooting was only half motivated by the upcoming trial that I was going to testify in, and h
alf motivated by pure intimidation tactics. Meyer wanted to send a message to the cops, to everyone: “Don’t mess with me, I’m not just threatening. I will kill you.” And from the look on Mickey’s face the day he saw me after the shooting, I could tell the message had been received, loud and clear.
chapter 25
CYLIN
ONE night, just before school closed for Christmas break, Mom asked us all to sit down in the living room for a family meeting. “Your dad is going back into the hospital after Christmas for more surgery,” she explained. “Before he goes, the police are going to build a fence around our house with an alarm system.”
Dad wrote something in his notebook and showed it to her. “Tell them about the dog.”
“Oh, and we’re getting another dog. This is not going to be a family dog, like Tigger, it’s a trained dog to help keep us safe.”
“What kind of dog?” Eric asked.
“We haven’t picked one out yet, but it will be an attack dog, so it’s not going to be our pet.”
“What do you mean, an attack dog?” Shawn asked.
“It’s a dog that’s trained to keep you safe. If anyone is bothering us, the dog will . . .” Mom stopped herself.
“Can it come in the house?” I asked.
“No, it’s not that kind of dog.” Mom sounded exasperated with us. “It’s going to have a doghouse outside, and it will be trained to be your father’s dog. We’re going to get the dog when Dad comes home from the hospital.”