Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

I didn’t come back for two months. And when I did, I only came because I had to. After my father’s war with the people outside his house reached a boiling point.

In addition to milling about in the yard and trampling his flowers, these other people also occupied the trees and peered into the upstairs windows in an effort to pin down his movements. They hid in the bushes and watched him through the downstairs windows. Eventually, they attempted to remove the window screens, a difficult task for them because their hands weren’t like ours.

“They’re claws ,” he said later. “Best way to describe ‘em. Claws, talons. Made for tearing flesh, not opening windows. That’s why we have to lock all the windows—sooner or later they’re going to figure out they can just slash through the screens!”

I can imagine how this terrified him—seeing these people , if you could call them that, feeling that them watching him and wondering what they would do when they finally figured out how to get inside the house. I can also imagine how it must have frustrated him when nobody believed him.

So I can understand why he did what he did next.

In the wee hours of the morning approximately four months before he died, the phone rang. I woke up to the shrill electronic chirp and knew it was Kate, knew she had bad news, and so I pretended to still be asleep until Allie reached across my body and picked it up.

“Hello?”

A moment of silence. Then: “You’re… no. Oh my God. Kevin? Kevin, wake up!”

It’s the Big One, I thought, sleep cracking away from my brain like a disintegrating glacier sliding into the ocean. He’s dead. Or on life support in the hospital.

She shoved the phone, which I totally didn’t want, into my hand. “Hello?”

“I had to call the sheriffs on your dad,” Kate said in a ragged voice. “They’re hauling him down to the hospital on an involuntary commitment.”

“What happened?”

“He lost it,” she said.

She had awoken to a series of explosions detonating in quick succession, a sound like fireworks going off inside the house. The sound came from downstairs, and so she leapt from her bed and rushed to the stairwell, halting at the top when she saw the flashes like lightning strikes and heard the crash of breaking glass and understood that my father had a gun.

“Not just a gun,” she explained, “an assault rifle. He had a fucking assault rifle, Kevin, and he was shooting at these imaginary people in the yard.”

According to the Sheriff’s Department, he fired sixty rounds in all, a total of two full magazines. He blew out every window on the ground floor. Once the windows were gone, his bullets sailed unimpeded through the air and crossed property lines to puncture tires, punch neat little holes in garage doors and shatter even more windows on neighbors’ houses. By the grace of God, he fired on a flat trajectory and kept the damage down to ground-level; had he let the barrel get away from him and fired high, he could have shot through bedroom windows and killed the people sleeping there. When the Sheriff’s Department arrived, they found a first floor littered with shell casings, an assault rifle leaning against the fireplace in the living room and a confused old man wandering around trying to remember where he’d squirreled away the rest of his ammunition.

“Where in the hell did he get an assault rifle?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Who sold him that? I want to know who thought it was okay to sell a man of obviously diminished capacity any sort of firearm whatsoever…”

“Kevin, I don’t know! ”

Bobby was in Iraq, thousands of miles away from this mess. I wanted to turtle up in the worst way—I did not want to deal with this, I wasn’t equipped for it—but I understood that I wouldn’t get away with that this time. So I dressed, packed a few things and drove the two hours to Conover. I managed to stay awake and avoid running my car into a guardrail on I-40 with the assistance of coffee, bewilderment and a significant dose of worry over the court appearances and appointments I would have to postpone tomorrow in order to take care of this. Because although my father had just blown out his windows and nearly killed a bunch of his neighbors with an assault rifle nobody knew he had, things like court appearances and clients bearing billable hours still seemed important to me and worth freaking out about.

Yes. I was and am a self-absorbed prick.

I met up with Kate in the emergency room of Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory. Her hair in a messy blond ponytail poking slightly off-center from the back of her head, she wore blue jeans and one of Bobby’s old T-shirts. Dark circles under her eyes and a drawn quality to her face made me stop and wonder where she had picked up the extra twenty years.

“You talk to Bobby?” I asked as we embraced.

“I called the base. They’re going to try to reach him, but he’s probably in a tent somewhere, so it might be a while. Right now, we’re it.”

“You okay?”

She drew in a long, deep breath. Ki breath, I recognized; Kate possessed this technique, too, because she had taken aikido with Bobby and me. She shook a little bit as she let it out, and I saw on her face the stretched seams that explosive panic had left behind.

“I’m fine. Him, not so much.”

“What the hell happened?”

“The people tried to get in,” she said. “Apparently, he’s been going on patrol every night for weeks, walking around down there with this gun and… I don’t know… staring down these things he’s been seeing. He said they tried to get in. So he stopped them.”

“And all this time, you never knew about the gun?”

She gave her shoulders a tired lift. “I don’t search for contraband, Kevin. Maybe he’s had it for years, who knows? I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.”

“I’m just kind of shocked here, because he’s never said a damn thing about guns my whole life, he doesn’t hunt—hell, he doesn’t even fish —and hey, whoa, here’s a big, fat old gun that carries thirty rounds to a clip and he has one . It just doesn’t add up.”

“He’s got dementia,” she said softly. “Nothing adds up.”

We stood in the waiting room. On a flat-screen television on the wall above our heads, CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or some other 24-hour news channel ran continuous coverage of an airline crash in Europe. Air France, it said. Twisted, smoking wreckage, foreign-looking ambulances swallowing men and women on stretchers, police in odd uniforms holding back the crowds. The death toll stood at three hundred, with more to come because the plane had plowed into an apartment complex on the outskirts of Calais and they hadn’t sifted through all the rubble just yet. An industry spokeswoman called it the worst airline disaster in European history and the largest single-incident loss of civilian life on the continent since the Second World War. I blinked at this calamity on the other side of the world and looked back at Kate.

“Are they going to let me see him?” I asked.

“He’s medicated,” she said.

“I want to see him.”

They had dosed him with Thorazine or whatever they gave crazy people and handcuffed him to a bed in a tiny, glass-fronted room that reminded me of a reptile cage at the zoo in Asheboro. His eyes were closed, his mouth open to the acoustic tile ceiling. His white hair poked out from his scalp in an unruly mess. Pink stains—ketchup or strawberry jam, I couldn’t tell which—marred the chest of the LL Bean pajamas Allie had picked out for him the Father’s Day before. His wrinkled face bore the stubble of a man who needed to shave. Dr. Ernest Swanson had performed surgeries at this hospital—he had actually performed the first heart surgery at Catawba Valley after it opened—and this is where he ended up. Handcuffed to a bed in the ER, with food stains on his jammies.