by Toni Jensen
VI.
I date three men in my three years in Kingman, and two of them are good men, and all are affected by guns and difficult fathers and this place—either a pull to stay or a pull toward fleeing.
The one who’s not a good man is also someone I work with, so work now shifts from enjoyment toward apprehension.
To work, James wears a tie and button-down shirt, ironed with care, a pair of wire-framed glasses that need to be tightened. He has a bony yet boyish face and can’t stop pushing up his glasses. Still, there’s probably something attractive in the bone structure, the high cheekbones or his bright green eyes. He works in the administration building—something to do with technology—and I don’t know him even a little bit, have maybe said hello once.
I am almost never attracted to blond men. I don’t notice them in crowds, at least not in good ways. When he comes into my office the first time and stands almost at military attention, I wonder if I’ve broken a computer rule or protocol, or if he’s there to fix something I’m not yet aware is broken.
All of which is to say, I’m not interested in him. I can’t imagine he’s there in the doorway for reasons other than work. Also, looking back, it’s possible I’m made uneasy by how he comes into my office and lingers there, a tall, hovering presence, not getting to the point, making very awkward small talk while my hands pause over my keyboard, ready to resume typing.
Eventually, I grow to understand this is a social call, of a sort. I put my hands at my sides but still have the impulse to resume typing. I have a desire to be polite in a new workplace environment, but I grow impatient. Eventually I ask if I can help him with something, and he stumbles out an invitation, and I say I’m busy that night and when he proposes another night, oh, well, I’m busy that night, too.
When he leaves, he smiles and says he’ll try again, and I say, “Oh,” and this makes him laugh softly.
There’s nothing sinister in the exchange, exactly, but also there is no way for him to have interpreted anything I said or did as encouragement. Men in workplaces all across America, more than twenty years later, still are getting this wrong. If women at work give no clear signals, if there’s no flirting, no interaction of any sort, then why would a person end an exchange with “I’ll try again”?
I dismiss the interchange, but he does, in fact, try again a few more times, and eventually, he sits down in the chair in my office, and we talk awhile, and after a few times of that, I agree to go to dinner.
There’s a world in which this means he’s worn me down, and I suppose that’s part of it. But also, I’m lonely and in a new place, and he seems lonely and also harmless.
We go out a few times, and I spend a lot of my free time thinking of ways to break up with him, but I don’t do any of them. His behavior swings from overly conciliatory and sad to somewhat aggressive. I feel too off-balance to know the easiest way to extricate myself.
During this time, I leave the Bivinses’ rental house and buy a house of my own.
I’m not in a newer subdivision like many of my colleagues but in a mixed part of town that includes older and newer construction. My house is new, brand-new. It’s the first house I’ve ever owned, the first the builder’s ever made, and I’m the first to live in it. It’s small, with mauve stucco, three bedrooms and two baths, with a good layout and a fenced-in dirt yard for the dogs.
I have good neighbors, including the middle-aged couple next door whose son, Ben, is a little younger than I am, who comes home to visit them most weekends.
According to NeighborhoodScout, “With a crime rate of 43 per one thousand residents, Kingman has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes—from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One’s chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 23.”
It was higher, even, when I lived there, and so though it’s true Kingman then and now has a high crime rate and was known then as being a rough town, I mainly experience violence there that could be classified as interpersonal or domestic.
One weekend, when Ben is home visiting, a group of us agree to go out hiking together—James, his younger sister, Deanne, another friend of theirs, Ben, and me. There are perhaps too many of us for one vehicle or there’s some other complication, but in any case, the younger sister and Ben end up riding together alone in his truck and the rest of us follow in a car.
Ben leads because he knows the area, knows the spot he wants to show us.
James is quiet on the way out of town and, when we reach the city limits, begins muttering to himself. His friend sits up front, and I’m in the back, and both the friend and I ask what’s wrong, and he only shakes his head, saying, “I don’t like it.”
I have no idea what the “it” is to which he’s referring. Up until now, the day has been regular and fine. The sky is its ordinary bright blue, and though James had been talking fast, making arrangements and gathering gear, while the rest of us sat around, I had thought he was perhaps just a little jealous of Ben.
Ben’s broad-shouldered and good-looking, with an easy smile and a genuine interest in other people and their histories. If he were a dog, he’d be a golden retriever or a chocolate Lab—easygoing and personable and good to be around.
Before we’d left, he’d tried repeatedly to engage James in conversation, but James had answered in brief phrases, terse sentences.
As town gives way to desert, the pavement gives way to dirt, and Ben’s truck accelerates, so we drive faster, as well. The dust his truck kicks up makes it difficult to follow, and soon we’re fishtailing around bend after bend.
“Slow down,” I say over and over. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“We don’t know him,” he says. “He’s got Deanne. We don’t know what he’s capable of.”
I tell him repeatedly that I do know Ben—that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s not going to do anything to Deanne. But James drives faster and faster, until we come around a bend and have to slam on the brakes because the truck is parked there, right in front of us.
James gets out of the car so fast that both his friend and I have to scramble to keep up. It’s a two-door car, and by the time I extricate myself from the back seat, James is already out on the road, yelling at Ben, and I as run closer, I see James is holding a knife to Ben’s neck.
Deanne, the friend, and I all work to talk him down, and it takes a few long minutes, but he does put down the knife, and his friend picks it up, and Ben backs away toward his truck, red-faced and shaking. I follow him.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I had no idea he would do something like this.”
Deanne is telling her brother how ridiculous he is, asking him over and over what’s wrong with him, but her tone is off, is like she’s scolding a child, a bad boy, rather than a grown man who’s just held a knife to another man’s throat for no reason.
We drive back to town, Ben on his own in the truck now, the rest of us crammed into the car. Deanne berates her brother in the same singsong voice, like none of this is serious or real, like, oh, how silly. Nausea rises inside me, and I breathe slow and deep to keep it down.
Back in town, I arrange all of them in my living room and put them into a sit-stay position like they’re dogs. I instruct the friend to give everyone glasses of water. I instruct James that if he wants to stay out of jail, he should start working on an apology.
Next door, the neighbors and Ben look shaken. I talk them down from calling the police, and later of course will wish I hadn’t. I grew up in a house where I heard no good comes from calling the police; no good comes from calling social services—no good, no good, on repeat.
It’s still ingrained. It’s a flawed way to think in some circumstances but is sound advice, sound thinking, of course, in others.
That day,
I go back to my house and get Deanne and James. Deanne apologizes for her brother, so now both of us are doing his job for him. She says he’s protective of her, that since he’s gotten out of the military, sometimes he’s overprotective—sometimes he overreacts.
It’s true he was in the military; there’s a framed picture of him in uniform on the wall of his house. But he hasn’t been to war, and he hasn’t given any signs of this level of volatility before this day.
James follows his sister’s lead and apologizes and talks about the military, about “his training taking over,” and I feel entirely nauseous now—how well these two are reading the neighbors, who are good, everyday people, who will not want to call the police on a veteran who’s not been home long, who’s having some trouble adapting.
Never mind that he’s been out of the service for years. Never mind that he never went to a war.
I’m exhausted now and just want the day to end. Back home, James stands in my driveway, trying to convince me to come over to his house, to let him apologize more, and I tell him I’m much too tired. I say no—I say it many times—and when I shut the door, I lock it behind me, and he’s still standing there.
It’s not much longer, of course, until I break it off with him. I wait a few days, hoping his mood will stabilize, and when he seems a little calmer, I let him know to stop calling me, to stop dropping by my office, to stop.
He calls me, alternately crying and threatening, every other night for weeks, until I change my phone number. After, he drives by my house with about the same regularity, until one night he comes to the door and rings the bell.
He’s out front, crying loudly and apologizing to the front door, and the last thing I want is for the neighbors to think they have to intervene.
He comes inside, and by this, I mean I let him inside my house.
He sits in my living room on my new couch, crying and shaking, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses and running his hands through his hair.
“I’m sorry about the knife,” he keeps saying. He’s rocking back and forth a little, holding onto himself, repeating it.
Jack sits near his feet, expecting treats or pets. I’m in a dining room chair across the room, and Lucy has positioned herself in between James and me, and her hackles are raised, her whole body at attention. She’s never liked him, has often sat in between us, watchful, wary.
Huskies don’t generally make any sound before they attack, and I’ve only seen her act this exact way one other time—when a man tried to break in through the back door of our apartment the first year she came to live with me. He picked the back door’s lock, and as it was swinging open, she sped through the gap, and there was a small scream and then running feet, and I called to her and called, out into the dark.
When she came back, she had a small, torn piece of light denim in her mouth, which she presented to me. I gave her two pieces of lunch meat and a steady stream of praise. I pushed the dresser in front of the back door, the recliner in front of the front door, and we slept together that night on the couch. No good ever comes from calling the police.
This night, though James has no idea, she’s coiled and entirely ready.
I’ve been thinking instead of listening, and he’s stopped shaking as much but is saying something different—“I’m sorry I brought the knife.”
And I say, “What?” and he says, “I’m sorry,” and I say, “Where is the knife?” and when he doesn’t reply, I say, “What did you do with the knife?”
I say it slowly, and I click my fingers for Jack, and he comes to me.
James is all alone on the sofa now, except for how, maybe, he’s brought along his knife.
I rise and keep my hand on the kitchen chair. It’s not a particularly easy weapon but is solid wood, is plausible. I’ve also just bought these chairs—mid-century, teak—and I’m cold all over with the idea of having to break one.
“Did you bring a knife,” I say, “into my house?” I’m angry now and no longer as aware as I should be of my tone, of keeping myself together.
I’ve crossed the space of the living room, am two or three steps from him, still carrying the chair, standing next to my dog, thinking, if worse comes to worst, I can throw the chair into the window beside his head and run.
“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t do that.”
I back up then and walk toward the door, but I keep my face turned to his.
“It’s in the car,” he says—like this is a good and reasonable answer.
“Why,” I say, “did you bring a knife?”
“Because I don’t have the gun anymore,” he says.
“Get in the car,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“You’re going to get in your car now, and you’re going to drive.”
I don’t know what it is about my voice—perhaps it’s the nature of the direct order or the dog beside me—but he goes to the door and he gets in his car and he drives.
He calls me a few nights later, and I remind him that the gym I work out in is the cop gym, and I say if he calls me again, I’ll have two or three of those guys at his door every night, and though I don’t actually know the name of a single cop at my gym, have never spoken to any of them, the threat works, and this is the last time I hear from him.
If, that night, he had brought into my home his knife or a gun, would this have been domestic or workplace violence? Would he have argued this violence was related to his time in the military, for sympathy or because, in some way, it was? Is this violence related to this place’s history, to its roots in taking land from the Hualapai, in how its ranchers got rich off both theft and war profit?
I am not prone to making bets, but if I were, I’d put my money on the chip marked domestic. And perhaps it doesn’t matter in the end what you call this sort of everyday American violence. But simplifying violence like this, demoting it down to the world of the domestic, is a lessening, a looking away.
I know I would not ever have gone on a date with James if we hadn’t worked together. I know I felt some pressure to be nice, to be accommodating, to give him that thing we call a chance.
I’m suggesting that the ways in which our violence is connected layer—they twist and turn like a car chasing a truck down a dirt road, kicking up dust, making it difficult to see where one part begins and the other ends.
VII.
Sometimes, after, on the weekends, I arrange camping trips with my hiking friend and stay over at her house in Lake Havasu City. A roadrunner lives in her cul-de-sac and likes to race back and forth by the mailboxes in the early mornings. I drink coffee and watch its gliding and leaping stride, the tuft or crest on the top of its head making me want to call it dapper. Sometimes it makes a cooing noise and other times it will race alongside me if I run back and forth on the circular drive.
I like this fun better before my friend tells me the roadrunner most likely is hunting the small, Kelly green lizards that also live down by the mailboxes.
By the time I leave Kingman, Michael Fortier will have left, too, having become a witness against Nichols and McVeigh, having gone into witness protection with his wife.
I’ve read almost everything that’s been published on Fortier. McVeigh and Nichols lived at Fortier’s trailer, and McVeigh used soup cans to demonstrate to Fortier and his wife how he was going to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. They saw his violence; they saw his plan, but in a place like this, it seemed to them to be all talk, to be regular talk. They did not recognize any of it as extraordinary.
This story seems to me to embody the how and why of Kingman’s strangeness, of the tendency its citizens have not to flinch or look away in the face of violence, but not to see the depth or breadth of it coming, either.
I lived in Mohave County maybe just the right amount of time to feel like I
was beginning to belong. But the everyday violence tallied against any such certainty, soup can atop soup can, precarious and ever shifting and certain to fall. I left there for a job back closer to home, on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. I left there with the mountains held close, with an enduring love for the big sky. I left there maybe just in time to carry it all with me, to know you can love a place and still never want to return.
Dog Days
I.
When my daughter is seven years old, we are at my father’s house, which sits on an acreage only a few miles outside Exira. We’re back visiting for his birthday, and he is telling the story of trying to hit a four-year-old girl. June is the month of marriage, the height of summer, flowers at full enchantment, the sky as blue as it will ever be. It’s not quite the Fourth of July, not yet anywhere near the dog days of August, not anywhere near the summer’s end.
Webster’s defines dog days as “the period between early July and early September when the hot sultry weather of summer usually occurs in the northern hemisphere” or, secondarily, “a period of stagnation or inactivity.”
My father’s brain hasn’t yet devolved into stagnation or inactivity. He doesn’t yet have dementia—it will be a few years still before the diagnosis, Lewy body dementia, the second most common kind of progressive dementia. So this day in June represents my father at full power.
The girl he’s tried to hit had been a foster child living with one of my stepmother’s relatives. The girl ran around the living room of the house they were visiting, pursing her lips and blowing little spit bubbles, making little spit noises as children that age are prone to do, as my daughter had been prone to doing just a few short years gone.
“You better not spit on me,” my father reports saying. “You better not, you little shit.”