His testicle is mutilated. His breathing is messed up. He can see the other driver wiping blood from his knife as he climbs back in the dark sport utility vehicle. The huge Mercedes pulls the bumper from his Ford Focus, and now Ray Lincoln makes a mistake worse than running the red light. He writes down the license plate number.
The mistakes compile. His third mistake is trusting his lacerated testicle to County Memorial. The fourth is gripping the business card with the plate number as they load his convulsing frame into the ambulance.
He doesn’t sit upright again until the shaven-head Neanderthal bursts into his trailer a week later.
Ray lurches and yelps. Baldy looks at his wife, looks at him. Ray can tell the man is high, or crazy.
Without closing the door, Baldy nods and steps outside.
Ray is doubled over in front of the couch. “Who...what the hell?”
Karen runs at the door. Slams it. She cannot get it locked before Baldy thumps her across the parquet floor to the carpet. He yanks her up and puts her in a chokehold. Ray feels the warm tingle of a heart attack, watching the man raise a hammer over his wife’s head. A hammer, by Jesus, a hammer.
Ray’s father-in-law--thank God for the ancient, cantankerous pain in the ass--came over not a month ago with a 9 mm., and, looking around at the melting pot of a trailer park, insisted Ray keep it under the couch.
Ray is up with the gun, holding it sideways. Numb as he beads in on that sweaty dome. Not exactly from corner of his eye he sees some kind of anorexic hippy on the porch with a shotgun, and it very little makes sense to him, it gets weirder after the kapow when Karen is pulling red wet skull flakes out of her hair, crying.
Her looking-into-hell tremor sends an eel of nausea up and down his sternum. Hippy surprises him with SWAT-like professionalism, gun to his shoulder, crouched as he marches in, swinging the black metal barrel toward Ray.
Ray’s second shot seems louder.
Weirder still, he can see all the way through the hippy’s shoulder now, can see the neighbor’s black Nissan truck in the drive. Hippy drops his gun, still coming, walking towards him. A second gun falls from his pants. Hippy comes three more steps and reaches toward the ceiling. In the next instant, he is making a noise that could have come from a bird or a kitten.
Then logic breaks down, completely, and, by God, it doesn’t make more sense in replay, nearly headless, Baldy stands and gets off another shot.
 |
Ray and Karen in bed, two nights later. The bed is an inner sanctum in a despoiled home.
The media gods still seem to uncoil every seven or eight hours and slither into the world. They feed solely upon reaction, he has discovered, and he senses an intentional play on this theme in “his” story.
BOTCHED HOME INVASION TURNS BLOODY
CLARKSVILLE MAN SAVES SELF, WIFE FROM INTRUDERS
LOCAL MAN TWHARTS THIEVES, GUNS DOWN TWO
Such titles hint at a chronicle of an ever ready, gun-toting type, and indeed as the stories immerse the reader into the brutal panorama of that morning, he was John Wayne for minute there, huh?
Little, though, is so formulaic about his post-adrenal stew.
The past two days have stretched for miles in his head. Careening toward the morning’s violent and ugly encounters, Ray makes skillful and selective use of the present tense. Of knowing he and his wife are alive.
As the blood mists his memory, he is stunned--not at the gore so much as at his calm. There is nothing resembling any kind of recoil. No anger. Nor gladness. Real hell is the uncomfortable familiarity with the intruder’s motives: The skinny guy, holding the gun; a slave to chemicals; the bald-headed fellow, perhaps coerced into it at gunpoint.
It is his sympathy that sickens him.
Ray feels more at ease when he remembers the hammer. Sweet God, that hammer could have been a guillotine. It could have been a shark with black diamond teeth. If they had killed him first, what would they have done with Karen?
In these paradoxically serene moments of remembrance, he is glad for the graces that served to save him: the madman father-in-law’s lack of sensibilities; the pain of recovering from a one-second street surgery, which clouded and blinded him into gut-responses.
These are the times when he finds the HAMMER RISING OVER HER HEAD headline a fitting, strangely synchronistic prelude to the masterpiece of his actions. It all makes sense.
Then, there are moments he feels he has corkscrewed too far from logic. Get it together, Ray. It was chaos, and you were just goddamned lucky.
The common ground: the latter agrees that he retains much of his youthful spring and skill. We are animals. The former acknowledges there is far more to life than conflict. We are deities.
* * *
Karen drifts into slumber.
Ray gets up, flips on the computer, and checks his email.
Ah, there is the aggravation he needs to be distracted. He is, and he means this, starting to think that no woman should have internet access after menopause. At the very least, they ought to be required to get a license.
It’s the direct fault of the ladies at work. Poor old souls are doing jobs that most men have trouble with at thirty, and the validity of their complaints makes having to labor alongside them a weird hell. Trouble is, they are nuts. Miserable is only half the tale, and he does not know whether to pity them or smash their heads with a brick when they send along condolences, battling amongst themselves for sympathy superiority--fifty plus emails telling him to call if he needs anything.
Ray has responded with cleverly disguised sarcasm to all fifty-three when he hears a sharp knock under his left foot. It seems he could feel it a little bit too.
That’s the problem with trailers. Animals get under there so easily. Of course being too afraid of power tools to properly cut and fit the underpinning doesn’t help. So he has a few gaps where raccoons, possums, cats, rabbits, small dogs, skunks, and fucking lemurs for all he knew could be under his trailer and raising hell when he is trying to be witty.
He stomps down hard, twice, hoping.
And by damn if it doesn’t knock back twice, even harder.
Jesus Christ.
He gets one of those moments, it’s not dream-like or anything, but he’s kind of at loss for what the hell that moment is. You can call it a WTF, and that sums it up, but Ray is not crazy about saying WTF or even using it in an email.
So, he’s grimacing and looking down at the floor. A little chicken flesh forms over his butt; kind of vaporizes up his spine.
Then comes the stupidest thought, perhaps in the history of humankind:
Do I get the gun?
His father-in-law is still letting him “hold on to it.” The beauty of the males of our species is this: Ray had sort of nodded, and Karen’s dad had known that Ray was thankful. That was it. End of story.
So now he has the gun, which he didn’t think he’d ever touch again voluntarily, but to hell with it, there’s something knocking under his damn house and what could it hurt if he brings it out unloaded.
He goes back across the trailer, to the master bedroom. Karen is still asleep. It’s good that she’s able to.
He steps in quietly, and he reaches back over fireproof safe, through the winter clothes, and grabs the gun by the cool plastic handle.
Once he has it, he sets it down, just in case his lovely Karen wakes up. He doesn’t want her to see him holding it.
What am I doing?
He grabs it again.
After finding the flashlight on that little shelf over the washing machine—he’s making shit up to do—grabbing his hat, putting on slippers and deciding on boots instead, and after a while it gets kind of obvious to his ego that he’s stalling and he steps out onto the pine porch and notices the fog. It’s thick and tumbly. The grass is wet. The air is cool.
There are forty-two steps from the porch to the section of underpinning that he had screwed in, instead of nailing down. He twists and twists, sensing that the knock happened ten feet directly in front of his little underpinning-door. He gets it unscrewed and now, screw it, he clicks on the flashlight, bends and looks.
* * *
Sunrise doesn’t fully rid him of fear. Some six hours later, he still feels as though he could bite down on his heart. But if life has taught him anything, it is how to quash the weak look of anxiety.
It is one of many lessons.
Yet, if Ray were honest, which he’s not, he’d say there were quite a few B’s and a fair share of C’s in his straight-A student career.
Suffice to say that of life, he was a good student. Or even better, an astute one, brighter than people thinks he is; bright enough to be fascinated by ordinary things, like those subtle differences in how he greets the director of the warehouse and the other black guy, the fellow with the bald spot in his dreads who wears those ridiculous clothes and calls him Roy.
Ray doesn’t have a word yet for this front he’s putting on for Karen. Karen is making him pancakes, the meal she does better than Mom.
He spots an anticipatory look. She vocalizes nothing, but her face is saying she can go all day without asking why he went outside last night, but it’s going to bug him a lot worse than it will her.
So of course, it is better if he says there was something. Yeah, it was something. Not the luminous vapor he mistook for a ghost, because saying it was “ghost-like” would scare the hell out of her, and before he knows exactly why, he is saying he saw a fox under the trailer.
“Really?” asks Karen. But it is really more said than asked.
“Or a dog, but it was skinny and reddish. Maybe half fox.”
“Did you get it out?” asks Karen.
“No, it just left on its own,” he says.
“How many sausages you want?” asks Karen.
“Fifty-five,” he says, because they are turkey sausages, and eating turkey is vaguely healthy, better than cows and pigs, he figures, and kind of adds a little spice to all that sweetness.
She pauses and looks at him. Then laughs.
“Fifty-three,” he says, laughing. Because they smell delicious, and the sky is cold and clear, and a week into this, there is finally some understanding: that there is no understanding. There is him. There is Karen. And that is as near “back to normal” as he cares to be.
