Blood Test, page 15
“████████████████████ and watch the elephant.”
“Burt, stop it. It’s the skull fracture talking.”
“I’ll show you skull fractures,” he said, emboldened by his brain injury. “I’m going to come and get you and take what is legally mine. █████████ You pushed me down those stairs and made me into the sorry person I am now.”
“You shouldn’t talk like this or say things like that to me. What’s all this business of coming for me? You better watch yourself. Besides,” I said, “I’d better warn you that I have a license to kill. I’m insured against everything. I’m insured against any harm I might do, I’m protected by those lawyers at Dawes, Walling. Didn’t anyone tell you about the Generomics thing? Would you put Cheryl on the line? I need to talk to her.”
“She ain’t here. A license to kill? That’s a good one. Suddenly you’re James Fucking Bond. Double oh eight.”
“It’s double oh seven, Burt. Well, it’s not quite like that, but it’s similar.”
At that point, he really got angry. His anger seemed genuine and sincere. “I’ve been listening to your stupid bullshit since first grade,” he shouted, “and I’d rather eat a breakfast of bubble gum than spend another minute in your company.”
“So hang up and calm down. Anyway, what’s your beef with me?”
“Beef?”
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
“Beef?” He seemed unable to process the metaphor. “You…it ain’t a beef, it’s more like I can’t stand you.”
“So it seems we’re at an impasse.”
“No, we ain’t.”
“How much money are you asking for this time?” I queried.
“All of it.”
“Now you’re being silly. You want all my money?”
“That’s it, that’s what I said. That’s my dough. The damages. And I’m gonna get it, too.”
“Well, you can’t have it. It’s not yours. Besides, it’s in the bank.”
“Okay, get this. When I was unconscious, you know, hooked up to those machines? I saw you, like in a coma, where…and I saw God and Satan too, and they was the same? That was a big-time surprise. Better not tell anybody. But my point is, I saw you, and I learned the truth from them. That truth you been hiding all this time.”
“Which is?” I was humoring him.
“You are totally made of plastic. Top to bottom. You are a replica human being.”
“Not that again.”
“And you was the person taking out my heart so you could have one of your own, and my skin and bones, and my inner organs, so you could be a human person. Instead of the plastic nonperson that you are.”
“What is this you’re talking about?” I asked. “Getting a heart? Isn’t that the Cowardly Lion? The Wizard of Oz? Really? Or…what? Maybe Pinocchio?”
“What’re you sayin’?”
“This conversation is over,” I told him.
“You ain’t real. You’re like what they call an optical illusion. I figured it all out. The dream showed me. You ain’t a real person, just a pretend person. I’m comin’ for you. I’m gonna █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ so called. That’s my alibi. Then I’ll take the money, the damages. Which is mine by rights. I don’t even need a lawyer, like you got.”
“Goodbye. I’ve heard enough.”
“Bottom line, I’ma comin’ for you. I got a hammer and you’re the nail. When I get finished with you, you gonna wish you was in a snuff film, compared to.”
“Good luck with that. Last I heard, you were on crutches. You’re going to hobble over here?”
“Bottom line, I’m coming for you.”
“You said that already. Bring it on.”
20
A bit later, Cheryl called to apologize. “Burt isn’t himself,” she informed me. “It’s not him who called you but…I mean, yes, it was him, but with his fall and the skull fracture, he’s been through some hard times. Please forgive him. He’s sorry he made that call. His accident changed his personality so he’s mostly unrecognizable.”
“Unrecognizable? I recognized him,” I said. “Did you hear what he said to me? His last phone call? He threatened me.”
“No, I was upstairs, changing the sheets.” She let out a little half-sob. “I have to do that every day. Our washing machine gets quite a workout. It’s been pretty difficult around here, with Burt the way he is, leaking and stuff. He can hardly get to the bathroom by himself. They told me that his brain injury would make him disinhibited, but I didn’t know what that word meant until he came home and started talking. He curses at me, really bad language, unspeakable except he speaks it. If he were capable of hitting me, he probably would. Oh, I almost forgot: Congratulations. I heard you married Gertrude.”
“You can call her Trey. Everyone else does. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Anyway, please don’t blame me for what Burt is saying. I really don’t know what to do. I can’t abandon him like this. I mean, he’s a mess. He doesn’t look like himself. He doesn’t even look like anybody.”
I was about to say, “I’m sorry,” but I wasn’t sorry, so I couldn’t say it.
“Oh, and about the money,” she said, and then came the ask.
* * *
—
Reader, it’s just possible that as a true-blue American, you are knowledgeable about firearms, their use and misuse. And so it’s also quite likely that you are familiar with the Finn 23. As I learned from YouTube presentations and from what Rogelio (a friend of mine from church, where he is a deacon) told me at his gun shop a mile outside of Kingsboro, the number 23 has nothing much to do with anything. The uninitiated might assume that the numeral 23 located after the brand name refers to caliber or some such thing. But no: “23” is simply the model number, whereas the actual caliber of the gun is nine millimeters, or, as the techies like to say, 9 x 19mm. (You can look up the Finn on the internet for more information, if you’re curious, as some of you are likely to be. I’ll wait here until you come back.) These are technicalities, but many of you gun fanciers will know what I’m talking about. The magazine of the Finn 23 contains seventeen bullets. The gun is equipped with a compact slide. It’s probably a rip-off of the more expensive Glock 45. What else do you need to know? I won’t bother with more details. You can look it up.
Now that I was a gun owner and was being threatened by a lunatic, I figured it was time to get some target practice. On a Saturday in February I took the Finn and several loaded magazines that I’d bought at Rogelio’s gun shop, and I drove out to Eben Sharib’s firing range. Eben (short for “Ebenezer,” I believe, a somewhat antique name from the Bible, as in 1 Samuel 7:12) has a farm outside of Kingsboro along County Highway 14b, and he has both an indoor and an outdoor range set up to make a little extra money. There are quite a few gun enthusiasts in Kingsboro, so you have to make an appointment to get some shooting time. Eben’s a nice guy—he’s bought and renewed several fire-and-water-damage policies from me over the years—and though he’s a little tattered as a human being, wounded in some obscure manner, he masks it quite well by wearing a big hat everywhere he goes, rain or shine.
When I got there, Eben took it upon himself to instruct me in the use of the Finn 23, and before you could say Jack Robinson, I was on the firing range, shooting at a target twenty-eight feet away. He had asked me whether the gun was registered, and I said, “Yup,” and whether I had a conceal-and-carry permit, and I said, “Uh-huh,” and he said, “Just checking.” The kick of the Finn wasn’t too bad, and before long I was getting the knack of it. Eben had outfitted me with Berman-Heffelfinger No-Sound™ ear protection—those over-the-ear things that look like headphones—so I wouldn’t blow out my eardrums shooting the Finn, and he also equipped me with goggles, to protect my eyes for some reason about which I won’t speculate, and after a period of time that seemed to fly by, minutes that passed like mere seconds, I was shooting with a considerable degree of accuracy and furthermore was getting a charged-up feeling that I had never experienced before in my life, except maybe in the moments before I first made love to Cheryl after the senior prom. (Backseat, my dad’s car, and, as I remember, quick.) I am compelled to say that the Finn made me experience the joy of a conqueror, a potent man of action who was almost if not quite invulnerable. My blood began to surge, to heat up. It was elemental and furnace-like. I felt the heat in my chest and thighs and in my balls, even in my hands, almost (you could say) as if I were transforming myself, de-virginizing myself with the aid of the Finn 23, into a different man altogether, someone who didn’t take orders but gave them out, a commander. I’m talking about power and consequence and invulnerability. I was growing bigger, stronger than I had ever been. Laugh if you must. Anything I had ever feared began to fall away, as if the Finn had given to me an insurance policy that could never be canceled as long as I had another magazine full of bullets.
I’m a Sunday school teacher, so I have to say that I was surprised by this outcome. I thought I knew myself fairly well, but this sudden power felt like a narcotic, except that I was not in a heroin lotus haze but its opposite, a powerful (I keep using that word) alpha male awakening in which I was fearless, a victor, a subjugator, no longer cowering in fear—if I ever did—but standing up tall and strong, a man to contend with. This was real insurance. The other kind, which I sold, was little pieces of paper.
Who could have predicted this?
* * *
—
Day by day, at the office, at my desk, I felt the need to get outside. I wanted to be a hunter, an adversary, a person to be reckoned with, one of those alpha and apex types, though I didn’t exactly want to kill anything; I wouldn’t go that far. I began to experience my own office as a drab, comfortable chicken coop of nothingness where no events of any importance had taken place or would ever take place. Chickens came and went. (I could recognize that my new mood was not good for business and verged on being inappropriate.) I would gaze out the window at the boring snow falling on the tedious streets and mind-numbing sidewalks where sad, dreary, unemployed fellow citizens were buying meth and cocaine in order to feel a little better about their stupid pointless lives. I had the cure for those feelings.
I was a changed man, is what I’m saying. For once in my life I felt that the proposition life = suffering was mistaken. If there was to be suffering, it would not be mine.
One afternoon I snuck out of the office and drove half an hour over to the Ringer County Wilderness Park, feeling the need to shoot something, though not to kill it, as I said. The park is not entirely a wilderness. Don’t be misled. It has shelters and trails. The Ringer Park consists of about four thousand acres of wooded land, Ohio’s answer to New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, with rocky outcroppings and streams and thick undergrowth and two lakes fed by natural springs. You could get lost in there if you really tried to evade capture, and in bad weather you could suffer exposure and die if you set your mind to self-fatality, but there are ranger stations at the roadside when you enter, and you have to register and tell them how long you’re planning to stay and what your intentions are, et cetera. Once in a while, someone gets lost in Ringer and is found, bedraggled, befogged, and dehydrated, resulting in a photo-and-interview op as the third or fourth story in the local Channel 8 six o’clock news broadcast. But that’s only once in a while.
I registered, said I didn’t plan to spend more than a couple of hours there (true), and they whizzed me through the gates into the big parking lot on the north side of the main trail. I had hidden the Finn 23 in the trunk, but I needn’t have bothered. No one cared.
Only two other cars were inhabiting the Ringer parking lot. Having given myself three hours to get in and then back out of the Ringer Wilderness, I grabbed the Finn and put it into a belt holster that I’d bought at Rogelio’s gun shop. I had my winter boots on, a good pair of thermal insulated gloves, a cap with earmuffs, and a parka: I had overdone the outerwear business, but that’s what someone who sells insurance does without thinking. An insurance agent will overprepare for any eventuality. I also brought a flashlight—can’t remember why—and a bottle of water and my cellphone in case of emergencies, but my thinking was that with the Finn, there wouldn’t be any such emergencies unless I wanted them to happen.
The firmament was overcast, one of those Great Lakes depression-inducing skies, and a light semi-sleety snow was falling, making dull drooping sounds as it dribbled itself through the trees, mixed with the occasional cry of a flightless bird, a pheasant or a partridge seeking shelter. I followed the Maple Trail #2 into the northern sector of the park and tramped off the trail and headed east, away from any other day-trippers or winter campers who might have heard or seen me. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, and I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I felt that I would know my prey when I found it.
After about half an hour’s walk through some thick undergrowth, in the middle of a forested nowhere, I took out the Finn and looked for something to shoot. Taking aim, I fired a bullet at a spruce tree that was in my way. Some of the bark sheared off where I hit it, and the sound echoed for a few seconds after I fired. Two more birds raised an avian alarm, and, close by me, I heard the frightened chittering and churring of a critter, probably a humble chipmunk. I aimed at the sound and fired. I must have hit it, whatever it was, despite the chances of a direct hit being a million to one, because the chittering abruptly stopped, silence took over from the echoing gun blast, and the snow-covered forest floor a few paces ahead of me displayed a sudden blood spatter and tiny bits of internal organs and fur.
At that moment I came to my senses, and I thought: What am I doing here? Who am I? What am I becoming?
I was not myself. As quickly as I could, I walked out of there to my car, and in haste I drove home.
I’m not asking for sympathy. This is not that kind of story. I’m just telling you what happened.
21
A few nights later, as I happened to pass by Lena’s bedroom door, I heard her say, “Daddy, could I talk to you for a minute?” I knew Pete wasn’t around—he hadn’t had dinner with us, as he usually did—so I pushed against the door, entered her room, my daughter’s inner sanctum, which I never visited these days without an invitation, and I sat down on her bed. She was in her desk chair with a biology textbook open, and her desk lamp streaming down incandescent light onto a translucent anatomy page illustrating the human body: the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, the intestines, the reproductive equipment (the body was that of a male)—all that. I felt an intense but microscopic shiver.
The bedroom of a high school girl—well, I can only speak about Lena’s—has a fierce softness, a kind of animal seductiveness decorated with pictures of horses and cats, track team trophies (Pete’s, and another one for her from middle school), earbuds, stuffed animals, iPhone, clothes on the floor, and an air of funky perfumed expectation. The room can seem to be both a refuge and a jail cell. With its lavender and pink and purple surfaces, the world is softened by these artifacts and made more feminine than it actually is. I had the impression that Lena’s room was enfolding me, and I wondered whether Pete felt that way when he was making love to her in this room, in the bed I was sitting on, or when they were making plans for the future together. I don’t know how else to say this: sometimes Lena felt more to me like a sister than a daughter, my sibling and not my child. Occasionally I felt I understood her as a brother understands a sister and not as a father understands his daughter. Then that feeling passed, and I was her father again.
She was wearing a Kingsboro High School T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and her brown hair was held back in a ponytail, and she was barefoot, with toenails painted green. She had been crying, and when she cried, she looked slightly like Cheryl, her mom. They scrunched up their eyes in similar ways. Her cheeks were red, and crumpled tissues littered her desk on either side of the biology textbook. A relic from her childhood, a little unicorn, gazed down at her from a bookshelf. My heart thumped in my chest out of sheer paternal pride and sympathy and desolation. She’s a beautiful girl, my daughter, and I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to her while she’s under my care, but I know that no parent can protect anyone forever from the tornadoes, the gunshots, the head-on collisions, the hungers, the disappointments, the betrayals, the lies, the pandemics, the solitudes, the sexual assaults, the manias, the accusations—all the dark nights of the soul and the body. No soul, no dark nights. There she was.
“What’s going on, kiddo?” I asked.
She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose, and I reached out to squeeze her other hand.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s everything.” Everything is everything and nothing when you’re her age.
“Such as?”
“Pete got the letter from Ohio Wesleyan last week. His application was rejected. His grades haven’t been so good lately, and he’s kinda blaming me. He says, and I quote, love takes too much out of me. Love saps his strength, he says. I mean, is he blaming me for the time we spend together? For the amount of time that we—”
I held up my hand. “Don’t say it.”
“Yeah, okay, I don’t want to offend your parental sensibilities,” she said, a practiced sentence. “But, you know, I mean you’re aware we’ve been sexually active. We make love. We have been known to fuck, pardon my language. You know that.”
“Burt, stop it. It’s the skull fracture talking.”
“I’ll show you skull fractures,” he said, emboldened by his brain injury. “I’m going to come and get you and take what is legally mine. █████████ You pushed me down those stairs and made me into the sorry person I am now.”
“You shouldn’t talk like this or say things like that to me. What’s all this business of coming for me? You better watch yourself. Besides,” I said, “I’d better warn you that I have a license to kill. I’m insured against everything. I’m insured against any harm I might do, I’m protected by those lawyers at Dawes, Walling. Didn’t anyone tell you about the Generomics thing? Would you put Cheryl on the line? I need to talk to her.”
“She ain’t here. A license to kill? That’s a good one. Suddenly you’re James Fucking Bond. Double oh eight.”
“It’s double oh seven, Burt. Well, it’s not quite like that, but it’s similar.”
At that point, he really got angry. His anger seemed genuine and sincere. “I’ve been listening to your stupid bullshit since first grade,” he shouted, “and I’d rather eat a breakfast of bubble gum than spend another minute in your company.”
“So hang up and calm down. Anyway, what’s your beef with me?”
“Beef?”
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
“Beef?” He seemed unable to process the metaphor. “You…it ain’t a beef, it’s more like I can’t stand you.”
“So it seems we’re at an impasse.”
“No, we ain’t.”
“How much money are you asking for this time?” I queried.
“All of it.”
“Now you’re being silly. You want all my money?”
“That’s it, that’s what I said. That’s my dough. The damages. And I’m gonna get it, too.”
“Well, you can’t have it. It’s not yours. Besides, it’s in the bank.”
“Okay, get this. When I was unconscious, you know, hooked up to those machines? I saw you, like in a coma, where…and I saw God and Satan too, and they was the same? That was a big-time surprise. Better not tell anybody. But my point is, I saw you, and I learned the truth from them. That truth you been hiding all this time.”
“Which is?” I was humoring him.
“You are totally made of plastic. Top to bottom. You are a replica human being.”
“Not that again.”
“And you was the person taking out my heart so you could have one of your own, and my skin and bones, and my inner organs, so you could be a human person. Instead of the plastic nonperson that you are.”
“What is this you’re talking about?” I asked. “Getting a heart? Isn’t that the Cowardly Lion? The Wizard of Oz? Really? Or…what? Maybe Pinocchio?”
“What’re you sayin’?”
“This conversation is over,” I told him.
“You ain’t real. You’re like what they call an optical illusion. I figured it all out. The dream showed me. You ain’t a real person, just a pretend person. I’m comin’ for you. I’m gonna █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ so called. That’s my alibi. Then I’ll take the money, the damages. Which is mine by rights. I don’t even need a lawyer, like you got.”
“Goodbye. I’ve heard enough.”
“Bottom line, I’ma comin’ for you. I got a hammer and you’re the nail. When I get finished with you, you gonna wish you was in a snuff film, compared to.”
“Good luck with that. Last I heard, you were on crutches. You’re going to hobble over here?”
“Bottom line, I’m coming for you.”
“You said that already. Bring it on.”
20
A bit later, Cheryl called to apologize. “Burt isn’t himself,” she informed me. “It’s not him who called you but…I mean, yes, it was him, but with his fall and the skull fracture, he’s been through some hard times. Please forgive him. He’s sorry he made that call. His accident changed his personality so he’s mostly unrecognizable.”
“Unrecognizable? I recognized him,” I said. “Did you hear what he said to me? His last phone call? He threatened me.”
“No, I was upstairs, changing the sheets.” She let out a little half-sob. “I have to do that every day. Our washing machine gets quite a workout. It’s been pretty difficult around here, with Burt the way he is, leaking and stuff. He can hardly get to the bathroom by himself. They told me that his brain injury would make him disinhibited, but I didn’t know what that word meant until he came home and started talking. He curses at me, really bad language, unspeakable except he speaks it. If he were capable of hitting me, he probably would. Oh, I almost forgot: Congratulations. I heard you married Gertrude.”
“You can call her Trey. Everyone else does. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Anyway, please don’t blame me for what Burt is saying. I really don’t know what to do. I can’t abandon him like this. I mean, he’s a mess. He doesn’t look like himself. He doesn’t even look like anybody.”
I was about to say, “I’m sorry,” but I wasn’t sorry, so I couldn’t say it.
“Oh, and about the money,” she said, and then came the ask.
* * *
—
Reader, it’s just possible that as a true-blue American, you are knowledgeable about firearms, their use and misuse. And so it’s also quite likely that you are familiar with the Finn 23. As I learned from YouTube presentations and from what Rogelio (a friend of mine from church, where he is a deacon) told me at his gun shop a mile outside of Kingsboro, the number 23 has nothing much to do with anything. The uninitiated might assume that the numeral 23 located after the brand name refers to caliber or some such thing. But no: “23” is simply the model number, whereas the actual caliber of the gun is nine millimeters, or, as the techies like to say, 9 x 19mm. (You can look up the Finn on the internet for more information, if you’re curious, as some of you are likely to be. I’ll wait here until you come back.) These are technicalities, but many of you gun fanciers will know what I’m talking about. The magazine of the Finn 23 contains seventeen bullets. The gun is equipped with a compact slide. It’s probably a rip-off of the more expensive Glock 45. What else do you need to know? I won’t bother with more details. You can look it up.
Now that I was a gun owner and was being threatened by a lunatic, I figured it was time to get some target practice. On a Saturday in February I took the Finn and several loaded magazines that I’d bought at Rogelio’s gun shop, and I drove out to Eben Sharib’s firing range. Eben (short for “Ebenezer,” I believe, a somewhat antique name from the Bible, as in 1 Samuel 7:12) has a farm outside of Kingsboro along County Highway 14b, and he has both an indoor and an outdoor range set up to make a little extra money. There are quite a few gun enthusiasts in Kingsboro, so you have to make an appointment to get some shooting time. Eben’s a nice guy—he’s bought and renewed several fire-and-water-damage policies from me over the years—and though he’s a little tattered as a human being, wounded in some obscure manner, he masks it quite well by wearing a big hat everywhere he goes, rain or shine.
When I got there, Eben took it upon himself to instruct me in the use of the Finn 23, and before you could say Jack Robinson, I was on the firing range, shooting at a target twenty-eight feet away. He had asked me whether the gun was registered, and I said, “Yup,” and whether I had a conceal-and-carry permit, and I said, “Uh-huh,” and he said, “Just checking.” The kick of the Finn wasn’t too bad, and before long I was getting the knack of it. Eben had outfitted me with Berman-Heffelfinger No-Sound™ ear protection—those over-the-ear things that look like headphones—so I wouldn’t blow out my eardrums shooting the Finn, and he also equipped me with goggles, to protect my eyes for some reason about which I won’t speculate, and after a period of time that seemed to fly by, minutes that passed like mere seconds, I was shooting with a considerable degree of accuracy and furthermore was getting a charged-up feeling that I had never experienced before in my life, except maybe in the moments before I first made love to Cheryl after the senior prom. (Backseat, my dad’s car, and, as I remember, quick.) I am compelled to say that the Finn made me experience the joy of a conqueror, a potent man of action who was almost if not quite invulnerable. My blood began to surge, to heat up. It was elemental and furnace-like. I felt the heat in my chest and thighs and in my balls, even in my hands, almost (you could say) as if I were transforming myself, de-virginizing myself with the aid of the Finn 23, into a different man altogether, someone who didn’t take orders but gave them out, a commander. I’m talking about power and consequence and invulnerability. I was growing bigger, stronger than I had ever been. Laugh if you must. Anything I had ever feared began to fall away, as if the Finn had given to me an insurance policy that could never be canceled as long as I had another magazine full of bullets.
I’m a Sunday school teacher, so I have to say that I was surprised by this outcome. I thought I knew myself fairly well, but this sudden power felt like a narcotic, except that I was not in a heroin lotus haze but its opposite, a powerful (I keep using that word) alpha male awakening in which I was fearless, a victor, a subjugator, no longer cowering in fear—if I ever did—but standing up tall and strong, a man to contend with. This was real insurance. The other kind, which I sold, was little pieces of paper.
Who could have predicted this?
* * *
—
Day by day, at the office, at my desk, I felt the need to get outside. I wanted to be a hunter, an adversary, a person to be reckoned with, one of those alpha and apex types, though I didn’t exactly want to kill anything; I wouldn’t go that far. I began to experience my own office as a drab, comfortable chicken coop of nothingness where no events of any importance had taken place or would ever take place. Chickens came and went. (I could recognize that my new mood was not good for business and verged on being inappropriate.) I would gaze out the window at the boring snow falling on the tedious streets and mind-numbing sidewalks where sad, dreary, unemployed fellow citizens were buying meth and cocaine in order to feel a little better about their stupid pointless lives. I had the cure for those feelings.
I was a changed man, is what I’m saying. For once in my life I felt that the proposition life = suffering was mistaken. If there was to be suffering, it would not be mine.
One afternoon I snuck out of the office and drove half an hour over to the Ringer County Wilderness Park, feeling the need to shoot something, though not to kill it, as I said. The park is not entirely a wilderness. Don’t be misled. It has shelters and trails. The Ringer Park consists of about four thousand acres of wooded land, Ohio’s answer to New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, with rocky outcroppings and streams and thick undergrowth and two lakes fed by natural springs. You could get lost in there if you really tried to evade capture, and in bad weather you could suffer exposure and die if you set your mind to self-fatality, but there are ranger stations at the roadside when you enter, and you have to register and tell them how long you’re planning to stay and what your intentions are, et cetera. Once in a while, someone gets lost in Ringer and is found, bedraggled, befogged, and dehydrated, resulting in a photo-and-interview op as the third or fourth story in the local Channel 8 six o’clock news broadcast. But that’s only once in a while.
I registered, said I didn’t plan to spend more than a couple of hours there (true), and they whizzed me through the gates into the big parking lot on the north side of the main trail. I had hidden the Finn 23 in the trunk, but I needn’t have bothered. No one cared.
Only two other cars were inhabiting the Ringer parking lot. Having given myself three hours to get in and then back out of the Ringer Wilderness, I grabbed the Finn and put it into a belt holster that I’d bought at Rogelio’s gun shop. I had my winter boots on, a good pair of thermal insulated gloves, a cap with earmuffs, and a parka: I had overdone the outerwear business, but that’s what someone who sells insurance does without thinking. An insurance agent will overprepare for any eventuality. I also brought a flashlight—can’t remember why—and a bottle of water and my cellphone in case of emergencies, but my thinking was that with the Finn, there wouldn’t be any such emergencies unless I wanted them to happen.
The firmament was overcast, one of those Great Lakes depression-inducing skies, and a light semi-sleety snow was falling, making dull drooping sounds as it dribbled itself through the trees, mixed with the occasional cry of a flightless bird, a pheasant or a partridge seeking shelter. I followed the Maple Trail #2 into the northern sector of the park and tramped off the trail and headed east, away from any other day-trippers or winter campers who might have heard or seen me. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, and I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I felt that I would know my prey when I found it.
After about half an hour’s walk through some thick undergrowth, in the middle of a forested nowhere, I took out the Finn and looked for something to shoot. Taking aim, I fired a bullet at a spruce tree that was in my way. Some of the bark sheared off where I hit it, and the sound echoed for a few seconds after I fired. Two more birds raised an avian alarm, and, close by me, I heard the frightened chittering and churring of a critter, probably a humble chipmunk. I aimed at the sound and fired. I must have hit it, whatever it was, despite the chances of a direct hit being a million to one, because the chittering abruptly stopped, silence took over from the echoing gun blast, and the snow-covered forest floor a few paces ahead of me displayed a sudden blood spatter and tiny bits of internal organs and fur.
At that moment I came to my senses, and I thought: What am I doing here? Who am I? What am I becoming?
I was not myself. As quickly as I could, I walked out of there to my car, and in haste I drove home.
I’m not asking for sympathy. This is not that kind of story. I’m just telling you what happened.
21
A few nights later, as I happened to pass by Lena’s bedroom door, I heard her say, “Daddy, could I talk to you for a minute?” I knew Pete wasn’t around—he hadn’t had dinner with us, as he usually did—so I pushed against the door, entered her room, my daughter’s inner sanctum, which I never visited these days without an invitation, and I sat down on her bed. She was in her desk chair with a biology textbook open, and her desk lamp streaming down incandescent light onto a translucent anatomy page illustrating the human body: the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, the intestines, the reproductive equipment (the body was that of a male)—all that. I felt an intense but microscopic shiver.
The bedroom of a high school girl—well, I can only speak about Lena’s—has a fierce softness, a kind of animal seductiveness decorated with pictures of horses and cats, track team trophies (Pete’s, and another one for her from middle school), earbuds, stuffed animals, iPhone, clothes on the floor, and an air of funky perfumed expectation. The room can seem to be both a refuge and a jail cell. With its lavender and pink and purple surfaces, the world is softened by these artifacts and made more feminine than it actually is. I had the impression that Lena’s room was enfolding me, and I wondered whether Pete felt that way when he was making love to her in this room, in the bed I was sitting on, or when they were making plans for the future together. I don’t know how else to say this: sometimes Lena felt more to me like a sister than a daughter, my sibling and not my child. Occasionally I felt I understood her as a brother understands a sister and not as a father understands his daughter. Then that feeling passed, and I was her father again.
She was wearing a Kingsboro High School T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and her brown hair was held back in a ponytail, and she was barefoot, with toenails painted green. She had been crying, and when she cried, she looked slightly like Cheryl, her mom. They scrunched up their eyes in similar ways. Her cheeks were red, and crumpled tissues littered her desk on either side of the biology textbook. A relic from her childhood, a little unicorn, gazed down at her from a bookshelf. My heart thumped in my chest out of sheer paternal pride and sympathy and desolation. She’s a beautiful girl, my daughter, and I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to her while she’s under my care, but I know that no parent can protect anyone forever from the tornadoes, the gunshots, the head-on collisions, the hungers, the disappointments, the betrayals, the lies, the pandemics, the solitudes, the sexual assaults, the manias, the accusations—all the dark nights of the soul and the body. No soul, no dark nights. There she was.
“What’s going on, kiddo?” I asked.
She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose, and I reached out to squeeze her other hand.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s everything.” Everything is everything and nothing when you’re her age.
“Such as?”
“Pete got the letter from Ohio Wesleyan last week. His application was rejected. His grades haven’t been so good lately, and he’s kinda blaming me. He says, and I quote, love takes too much out of me. Love saps his strength, he says. I mean, is he blaming me for the time we spend together? For the amount of time that we—”
I held up my hand. “Don’t say it.”
“Yeah, okay, I don’t want to offend your parental sensibilities,” she said, a practiced sentence. “But, you know, I mean you’re aware we’ve been sexually active. We make love. We have been known to fuck, pardon my language. You know that.”
