Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“He mentioned the Bald Man?” Dr. Koenig asked.

Outside, the dogwood trees flanking the concrete bench had largely shed their leaves. The weather had turned colder as we slid into that time of year when a body feels the first chills borne on the winds of autumn and understands that the temperature will continue falling, and falling and falling.

“He did,” I said with a sigh. I felt exhausted from too little sleep but wired at the same time—the lingering effects of this morning’s massive infusion of coffee and the adrenaline rush of the evening before.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed them underneath his glasses. He too looked tired and I wondered then what challenges he himself faced on a daily basis. I wanted to know more about his life outside of his office and my problems, but to date my attempts to uncover facts about his personal life had met with deft changes of subject and therapeutically appropriate reminders that we needed to focus on my case and avoid the small talk. Which, he noted, Southerners have a hard time doing.

“So…” he trailed off as he finished rubbing his eyes and had to readjust his glasses. “You killed this guy. Without a gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He had a knife. You took it away from him?”

“I did,” I said.

“Tell me again how you did this. No; show me.”

So I recreated the scene right there in his office. I showed him how I had stood with my hands up, pantomimed the robber’s own body movements. When it ended, I realized that my face and whole body had grown pleasantly warm. I was smiling.

“That’s amazing,” he said.

“It is,” I agreed.

“How long has it been since you’ve attended an aikido class?

Now I rubbed my own eyes, and I sat down. “About twenty years.”

“Two decades. And yet you remembered that move. That’s incredible.”

True. Toothpaste syndrome vanished and everything I knew deployed exactly where it needed to. “It is,” I admitted.

“You’re a hero again.”

“Yep.”

But I didn’t feel like one. Instead, I felt scared. The mugger had said “Bald Man.” I knew this to a moral certainty. But why?

He’s not a man , a voice inside me said. Not Bobby or Kate or Allie or any of the other people who habitually talked to me in my head—it wasn’t even me. I didn’t know who it was. He’s so much more than that.

I cleared my throat.

“When the Burlington Police got there,” I said, “Both of the responding officers knew who I was. One of them told me I’d done a good job. The other one whistled and said, you’re one hard son of a bitch, Mr. Swanson. Then a detective sergeant arrived and ‘investigated.’”

I raised my fingers and put quotation marks in the air around that last word.

“I say it that way because his ‘investigation’ consisted of him telling me what happened, closing his notebook and offering to buy me a beer. I’m not kidding. He said, so this guy tried to mug you, and I said yes, Sergeant. Then he said, then he attacked you with the knife when you didn’t comply fast enough, and I said, yeah, you know, basically that’s what he did. So, he concluded, you had to wrestle the knife away from him and defend yourself. You had no choice. I said, you’re right, I didn’t. He didn’t ask me a single question, Doc. He told me what happened and I agreed with him.”

“Did you want him to take you downtown? Book you for murder?”

“Not at all,” I said with a shake of my head. “And I’m not a criminal lawyer, so what do I know, maybe they do that all the time. But it was….”

I hunted for the right word. When the detective arrived, I’d been standing there over the body with the two uniformed patrol officers—who had done absolutely nothing to secure the crime scene. They’d let me stand there, leaning against the BMW, while they asked me questions not about the dead guy at my feet, but Pinnix and Ramseur.

I swallowed again. I rolled up my magazine and tapped it on the table. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that maybe… something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”

“Were there reporters?” He asked.

“What?”

“Reporters. Did the media come to your office? Has anyone asked for your statement?”

“Oh, yeah. WXII met me in the parking lot when I showed up for work this morning and shoved a microphone in my face as soon as I got out of my car. I can’t remember the reporter’s name… you watch the news? Ever seen that hot brunette?”

“I have.”

“It was her. She asked me for a comment, and I told her that it was a tragic event, that I was shaken but otherwise okay and that my heart went out to the families of the deceased. I’ve been told that I’m going to be on the six o’clock news. I’ve been talking to reporters all day , Doc. Except for my wife, my kid and my secretary, you’re the only human being I’ve spoken to today who isn’t going to print something I said.”

“So you’re going to be a celebrity again,” he observed.

I sighed. “I guess so.”

He stared at me.

“Does any of this strike you as odd?” He asked.

“Absolutely.”

He moved his stare from my face to his notepad. I watched his lined features, his manicured goatee, and tried unsuccessfully to read his thoughts.

Finally, he capped his pen and clipped it to his notepad, which he slipped into his leather briefcase. “Do something for me,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Our next session, bring Allie. I still need to talk to her. Can you do that?”

I looked at the window and inhaled a deep ki breath.

“Can you do that?” He repeated.

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

Getting mugged in the same year that you suffer a home invasion stretches the imagination almost to the breaking point. Lightning, we’re taught from an early age, doesn’t strike twice in the same place. There’s this cosmic bad luck budget and we’re only allotted so much of it in any given time span. Think about it: how many people in their twenties and thirties lose both their parents close together? Not many. It happens, but when it does even people who don’t know you pinch their faces and purse their lips and breathe through their noses and say something like, My God, that’s terrible. Because you’re only supposed to suffer so much suckness. We have faith in the ability of statistics to protect us from receiving more than our fair share of tragedy. He Who Shovels the Shit will only pile so much on you, because, as we know, his wagon has to serve everyone.

I say “we,” but that’s a crock because I don’t actually believe that. I know it to be untrue and I didn’t need to get mugged to understand it. I’ve understood it ever since the day, back when I was a kid, when I met a woman named Angela.

I don’t remember her last name, nor the precise time we met. October, November, something a like that. The leaves had largely vanished from the trees that lined the back roads of Catawba County, a few brown hangers-on dangling from skeletal branches in stubborn refusal to surrender to the oncoming winter. A night wind blowing down from the mountains to the west ruffled these and sent the occasional victim fluttering in the air over the highway, spinning and twirling and dancing before coming to rest on a blacktop that blended seamlessly with the sky. The three of us—Bobby and Kate in the front, I in the back—sat comfortably ensconced in the warmth of my mother’s Mercedes. Driving around, burning up gasoline, trying to postpone the moment when we couldn’t avoid going home any longer.