Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“What if it’s not what?”

“What if it’s not a training session? What if it’s a memory?”

Her body stiffened.

I propped myself up on my elbow. “What if it actually happened?”

“We’ve been over this already. It couldn’t have happened.”

“Why not?”

She rolled her eyes and flipped over on her back. “Do we have to go through this again? Well, Kevin, it just seems like I’d remember getting attacked like that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that would be a pretty memorable experience. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m wrong about that. Say I’m really good at repression. Better than you.”

She paused. I listened.

“It’s still impossible,” she said. “You shot and killed two men. You keep the rifle in the gun cabinet in the basement. If we accept the proposition that this assailant is raping me on the pool table, what are the chances that he’s going to let you creep away and open the gun cabinet? And then, who did you shoot in the hallway downstairs?”

She shook her head.

“You’re under a lot of stress,” she said, “and you’ve been through… well, you’ve been through a lot. And you’re not exactly made for things like this.”

“I seem to have done okay,” I protested. “6-0 in favor of the good guys at this point.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “That’s true. Which is all the more reason to believe a man like you would never just sit there and watch somebody hurt me. Or our baby.”

She sat up long enough to kiss me on the cheek, not a romantic kiss, but a punctuation kiss—marking as it did the end of a conversation and sending a clear message that she’d finished discussing such things and that I should finish, too. She laid back down and covered her shoulders with the sheet and comforter.

“Now go back to sleep,” she ordered. “You have to work in the morning.”

I laid back down, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, trying every little mind trick in the book to calm down enough to where I actually could sleep. I found myself thinking about Brandon Cross disappeawing right in front of Kenny. Brandon disliked his present reality so strongly that he had invented a way of escaping it and going to a place where nothing that plagued him here existed—where everything that bothered him and made his life intolerable wasn’t real at all, but a nightmare. I pictured another Brandon then, the face and skull a little wider and less pinched, more normal-looking. Hair cut short in the military style, skin clear, manly angles chiseled into the kind of face that you would expect to see on a fighter pilot. A handful of men in a locker room, donning flight suits. Brandon grinned, and he said, you guys would not believe the fucked-up dream I had last night. I dreamed I was a retarded kid in a care home in North Carolina.

That is fucked up , said one of the men.

Cross needs to stop smoking crack before he goes to bed, said another. I couldn’t tell them apart; they all looked the same.

I’m telling you guys, Brandon went, it’s those damn powdered eggs. You eat those things and they mess you up all day.

Let’s go kick some ass.

Yeah, buddy .

And they headed off along the route that fighter pilots take to get from their locker room—do fighter pilots have a locker room, my loosening mind wondered, or do they just get dressed at their bunks—to the flight deck. Where they would climb into their steel birds and wait for the steam-powered slingshot to catapult them into the sky.

I thought about Brandon flying a plane. I hoped he found a way to do that tonight; the thought calmed me, made me feel good; so good, in fact, that when a less calming, less feel-good thought tried to surface, I was able to force it back down below the waterline. I never even knew what it was. Instead, I thought about Brandon, I thought about missile-laden fighter planes climbing towards the sun, and I fell asleep.

“The Bald Man raping your wife again,” Dr. Koenig said. “This is beginning to sound familiar.”

I snorted. “Tell me about it.”

Southern Rifleman —the cover, anyway—had disintegrated into almost nothing. On my way back from court the other day, I had swung by Office Depot on Church Street and picked up a clear plastic cover into which I inserted the magazine. There beneath the translucent plastic film, it looked like a museum artifact.

“Have you discussed her coming to see me?”

“She doesn’t want to,” I said. “Guess you’re stuck with boring old me.”

I chuckled, but he didn’t. Instead, he pursed his lips and made another notation on his notepad. Patient uses humor to deflect unpleasant questions . Remember to check insurance coverage.

“What did she say about the dream this time?”

I told him. When I finished, he frowned at me.

“Did you tell her about the pool table?”

“Pardon?”

“You said, ‘you were getting raped again. All I could do was watch.’”

“Yeah.”

“When did you tell her it was happening in the basement? When did you ever say anything about the pool table?”

I blinked. For a moment, I couldn’t speak; my lips froze as my brain flipped through its Rolodex of memories until it found the card corresponding to the night before. I pulled it out. I read everything on it.

I hadn’t said anything about the pool table. Or the basement.

“I’ve had the dream a lot,” I said. “Not just last night. Like, a lot. So I’m pretty sure that even if I didn’t say my dream took place in the basement last night, I probably said it another time.”

“Because it does take place in the basement,” Dr. Koenig said.

“Yes. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep psychological meaning there.”

“Are you.”

I nodded. The one drawback about the plastic cover was that it made rolling the magazine into a tube more difficult. Static electricity made the plastic want to bind to itself and resist my rolling efforts. Maybe I could find a less clingy cover next time I went to the store.

“The basement is mine,” I said. “The rest of the house belongs to Allie, but the basement is my man-cave. Big TV, old furniture that doesn’t match, a custom bar and a pool table. Basketball posters. It’s mine. If you really want to hurt a man, plugging his wife’s a great way to do it. But it’s even better to bend her over his pool table and make him watch.”

“The man-cave is yours,” he noted. “And so is Allie.”

I looked at him. He looked back at me expressionlessly.

“That part of her is,” I said. “She’s never been with any other man. Just me.”

He wrote. I always felt a little defensive when he did that; he could have been writing something positive or something innocuous, but I always felt the scratching of pen on paper to be a criticism of whatever I’d just said.

“And I’ve never been with any other woman other than her,” I added. “We met when we were 18. We belong to each other in that way. That’s not a bad thing.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“I’m not some possessive psycho just because I like the fact that no other guy has ever had sex with my wife. I think it’s perfectly fine.”

“It is.”

“So what did you just write down?”

He looked up. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Because I feel like a lab rat in here. Like you’re making these observations, these judgments, about everything I say and you’re writing them down. So I’d like to know what you’re writing. I’d like to see your notes.”