Trigger Finger (24 page)

38.

That night, I sat
at my kitchen table with the AK-47 laying in front of me, and I screwed around
with my phone.
 
I talked to my
father-in-law, each of us doing little more than blowing hot air.
 
Everything’s fine, everything’s great, hope
you’re getting along okay.
 
That kind of
shit.
 
There came a long, awkward pause
when I asked to speak to Allie.
 
Just
when I thought the connection had interrupted, he told me she wasn’t in.

“Where is she?”

Another awkward
pause.
 
Then he said, “Kevin…you know…I
couldn’t tell you.
 
Because I don’t
know.
 
I don’t know where she is.
 
I don’t think anybody really does.”

I could have asked
him why he didn’t know, but I already knew.
 
She’s thirty-six years old,
he
would say.
 
I don’t keep tabs on her anymore, even when she’s staying with us.
 
Speaking of her staying with us, what’s this
bullshit about bald devils popping in from alternate worlds?

Of course our
conversation was awkward.
 
Had Allie told
him the truth, it made me sound crazy.
 
If she’d hedged—she’d told me she would make up a story about just
needing to get away for awhile—it would have sounded like we were having
marital problems, severe enough to pull Abby out of school just a month before
it let out.
 
So I’d either gone crazy or
made his daughter miserable enough to have to leave me.
 
Either way, this wasn’t a guy to lean on
right now.

So instead of
asking to speak to my daughter, I just asked him to let Allie know I’d
called.
 
Then I texted Abby.

U doing okay?

She didn’t answer
me right away.
 
I held the phone and
stared at it for two solid minutes before I got a response.

Im OK.
 
U?

Great.
 
Where is Mom?

Pause.
 
I remembered that she could conduct multiple
text message conversations at the same time.
 
Maybe she could work as an air traffic controller when she grew up.

Out with high school friends.

Before I could
text a response, she asked me:

When can we come home?

That made my
stomach ache.

Soon,
I responded.

WTF is going on?
 
Why did we have to leave?

Instead of chiding
her for the WTF, I closed my eyes and shook my head.
 
How to answer that one?

It’s not safe,
I finally
replied.
 
But
Ill make it safe for U.

I want to come home.

U will
, I typed.
 
Really
soon.

ILY.

I love U too.

There came nothing
after that.
 
I didn’t know if she’d
fallen asleep or become so engrossed in some dialog with one of her text-crazy
friends that she simply forgot about me.
 
Either way, she was safe.
 
And
that was good enough for me.

I picked up the
AK-47 and trudged down into the basement to turn on ESPN and hopefully fall
asleep in front of the television.
 
But
before I did, I walked around and unlocked every door and window on the ground
floor.

Game on,
I thought as I descended the
stairs.

Game on,
Bobby repeated.

39.

In 1989, Ruby the
Redneck Palm Reader told Bobby not to join the Army.
 
The Soviet Union
still existed then, hunkered down there behind the Iron Curtain with all of its
tanks and missiles and men with red stars on their helmets; perhaps Ruby saw
war.
 
And perhaps not.
 
Either way, she said stay out of the Army,
and when 1990 rolled around and the time came for all young men of Bobby’s
cohort to decide what they would do when high school ended, Bobby enlisted in
the Marines.

I asked him about
it.
 
I was 14, him 18, and I said,
“Bobby.
 
Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.
 
What the hell, man?”

We were drinking
beer on the back porch.
 
Mom lay in the
living room, passed out on the couch, while Kate studied at the dining room
table.
 
I didn’t know where Dad had gone.
 
The hospital, I assumed.
 
In my memories of childhood, my father is
always something of an extra; he made so few appearances, and they were of such
short duration.
 
But he had evidently
made a trip to the store at some point, because we’d found beer in the fridge.

I remember Bobby
shrugging in the fickle glow of the Tiki Torch we had planted in the grass and
lit.
 
In early May, the mosquitoes had
yet to arrive in force, but we couldn’t wait for full-fledged summer.
 
We wore denim shorts and our Guns & Roses
tee shirts.
 
But for the difference in
height, we matched.

“I want to serve
my country,” he said.
 
“No big deal.
 
You ought to consider it, too, when you get
old enough.”

“Yeah, but…the
Marines?”

“The few.
 
The proud.”

“You always said
the Army,” I protested.
 
“You always said
you’d join the Army so you could get stationed at Bragg and be closer to Kate
for her last year of school.
 
The nearest
Marine base is clear over on the ass end of the state!”

I didn’t relish
the idea of him leaving.
 
On mornings
when he slept in and Kate and I ended up in the kitchen at the same time, a
silence always came over us as we munched our cereal or ate whatever Kate had
cooked up in the skillet.
 
We understood
that soon, Bobby would leave.
 
And it would
always be like this—silent, something missing.
 
We had comforted ourselves by saying he wouldn’t go far, but we
understood now that yes, he would.
 
A
five-hour drive to Camp
Lejeune was the best we
could hope for.

“The Marines look
sharp,” he said.
 
“Those uniforms are
bodacious; I mean, have you
seen
those dress blues?
 
And Marines are
bad ass
.
 
The Russians are scared shitless of Marines, man.
 
Everybody’s scared of Marines.”

“What’s wrong with
the Army?”

He shrugged again
and took a drink.
 
I had noticed that
when I asked Bobby something uncomfortable, he always raised his bottle to his
mouth.
 
Whatever he was drinking at any
given time, he had to pour something down the hatch before he could answer.

“Nothing,” he
said.
 
“I just wanted to join the
Marines, that’s all.
 
Why are you
suddenly so gung-ho about the Army?
 
Hell, man, it’s not like they could
promise
me Fort Bragg.
 
They have bases all over the world.
 
For all you know, they could send me to Korea.”

“It’s just…weird.”

“No it’s not.”

Silence.
 
Drink, drink, drink, two boys too young to be
holding beers but big, fat doing it anyway.

“Does it have
anything to do with Ruby?”
 
I asked.

“Who’s Ruby?”

“That lady at the
flea market in October.
 
You know.”

“The one that ran
us out of her trailer?
 
The one that
smelled like an ashtray?”

“Yeah.”

Before he
responded, he took another drink.

“Absolutely not,”
he said.
 
“You’ve got to be crazy.”

And maybe so.
 
But the idea that Bobby put stock in
something that someone like Ruby said stuck in my mind and wouldn’t leave me
alone.
 
She had spooked me when we
consulted her, because of the things she’d said, the way she’d acted.
 
Out of one side of his mouth, Bobby told me
she was dumbass trailer trash, probably so hung over from her acid trips in the
’60s that she could hardly see straight.
 
I shouldn’t worry about anything she said, dumbass trailer trash like
that.
 
Let’s go eat.

And then he joined
the Marines instead of the Army.
 
This
bugged the hell out of me and so the Saturday immediately following our
beer-drenched exchange on the deck, I grabbed Mom’s keys and hopped in the
Cadillac.
 
I didn’t have a license then,
but that hadn’t seemed to deter Bobby when he was my age, and so I wouldn’t let
it deter me, either.
 
I fired up the
motor and pointed the bumper in the direction of the flea market.

I found Ruby there
tending her table.
 
Her husband—Chet, Chester, Chuck, something
that started with a “ch” sound—was gone.
 
Lying in a hospital somewhere with a machine breathing for him,
probably, the end of a road paved with cigarettes.
 
Ruby sat in a chair alone, but when she saw
me approaching, she flicked her cigarette on the ground, stamped it out and
abruptly retreated into the trailer.
 
I
marched right up there and knocked on the storm door.
 
She didn’t answer.

“It’s Kevin
Swanson,” I said.
 
“I need to talk to
you.”

“Go on!
 
You get on out of here!”

“Not until I talk
to you.”

“You go on or I’m
calling the police!
 
You’re trespassing!”

I snorted.
 
“You don’t have a phone in there!
 
And anyway, I’m a customer!
 
I want to get my palm read!”

“I ain’t reading
your palm, boy.”

“I got a hundred dollars.”

Pause.
 
I thought that got her attention, and the
inner door opened.
 
Ruby, old and wizened
and looking like Yoda with dyed-blond hair, looked down at me through the
Plexiglass.

“I wouldn’t read
your palm again if you had a thousand.”

I blinked at her.

“Why’d you tell my
brother not to join the Army?”

“Because he’ll
die.
 
Get himself blown away.”

She had given
Bobby his money back.
 
Our encounter had
produced absolutely no profit for her whatsoever.
 
And now she stood on the other side of the
storm door, regarding me as one would a copperhead coiled up on his stoop.
 
I was fourteen years old.
 
And short for my age.

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“You dropped my
hand.
 
You told me to never get married,
you told me to always live alone.
 
Why?”

Her face
tightened.
 
I didn’t think it possible
for her thin and wrinkled lips to compress any more than they already had, but
they did.
 
She pressed them into a little
raisin so small and compact that the bottom half of her face disappeared into
it.

“What can you see
about me?”
 
I asked.

Her eyes filled
with tears.

“What can you see
about me?”
 
I asked again.

“You’re bad,” she
said.
 
“You’re very, very bad.
 
So bad.”

“Why am I
bad?
 
What do I do that makes me
bad?
 
Do I beat up my wife?
 
Get drunk and run over one of my own kids,
what
?”

“You
failed
,” she said.
 
Her voice had lowered to a whisper raspy and
dry, like newspaper left in the desert sun.
 
“You make me sick.
 
You’re not a
good person, boy.
 
You’re not good at
all.”

I felt slapped,
kicked.
 
Assaulted.
 
I remained, in many ways, a child.
 
Modern American children weren’t used to
adults telling them they’re not good people, that they’re
dark
.
 
So while her words
didn’t reduce me to tears, I felt my cheeks growing red.
 
Who did she get off saying I wasn’t a good
person?
 
Who was she to pass judgment on
my character?

“You don’t know
shit about me,” I growled, hands clenching into fists.

“I know more than
you do,” she snapped.
 
“And you ought to
do the world a favor and go kill yourself.
 
So go on.
 
And don’t you never
come back here.”

“This isn’t your
property.
 
It’s the flea market’s.
 
I can go wherever I want.”

“Go.
 
On
!”

The venom in her
voice drove me backwards.

“I don’t want to
see your face!”
 
She spoke in a strangled
cry, like her voice had to blow something in her throat out of the way before
she could say anything.
 
“Don’t you
darken my door again!
 
Get gone!”

My eyes
widened.
 
Further away, a group of people
at another table watched us.
 
I felt
their eyes all over my shoulders, the back of my head.

And Ruby’s voice
rose to a scream.

“Get out of here,
you lousy piece of shit!”

I stepped
back.
 
I hit Chester’s
chair—
Chester
,
I thought,
his name was Chester
—and knocked it into the
table.
 
A stack of Betamax tapes tumbled
and fell.

Skin prickling
from the stares of all those around me, I turned and ran.