Blood Test, page 18
Sincerly, Burt Kindlov
Over the phone, Cheryl said to me, “He says he sent you an email, but he won’t tell me what it says. I guess I could go to his computer and check it out.”
“He’s challenged me to a duel. I can send you the email he sent me. He sounds completely unhinged. He can’t even spell ‘duel’ correctly.”
“That’s the brain injury.” A pause followed. “On the other hand, he was never a good speller. Don’t bother resending his email. I know what it says. He talks about you all the time. I can’t get him to stop. He hates you. He blames you for everything. You’re an obsession with him. Almost like love, except not.”
“The leaking roof?” I felt my sciatica starting up, and a pressure in the chest.
“Yes. He blames you for that.”
“His fall down the stairs?”
“Of course especially that.”
“His tremor?”
“You name it, you’re responsible. Honestly, Hobby, I don’t know what to do anymore.” Her voice did indeed sound rather desperate, and I felt a flare-up of the love I once had for her when she and I were in high school. The love had nowhere to go, so I tried my best to snuff it out but did not succeed. “Burt’s got this obsessional loathing for you and says you’re a disgrace. It’s one of his favorite words. Disgrace, disgrace. It’s right up there with ‘fuck’ in his word pantheon. You’re really all he thinks about. I mean, he obviously can’t go to work or earn money, so he sits around and curses you. All day! It’s unbearable. He’s especially bad during his physical rehab sessions. I mean, thank God we have some disability payments, but he repeats ‘Fuck that guy’ so often, it’s like a mantra when he’s trying to walk in the rehab facility using the parallel bars, each step, and the therapists ask him to please pipe down. His colorful language upsets the other patients. Maybe he’s got a case of Tourette’s? How should I know? Plus all the debts we’re piling up. I’m sorry I’m going on like this. With the money problems and the disability, he hasn’t been thinking clearly ever since his fall. Me neither. He wants revenge.” She waited. “He wants it bad. Against you.”
“Well, I’m sorry for you, but duels are against the law.”
“Yes, I know. But I’ve had an idea. What if we humor him, you know, play along a little? Get rid of the obsession? He might calm down, become himself again. Go into self-rehab.”
“That’s batshit crazy.”
“No, it only seems crazy.”
“What is this, High Noon? You must be joking.”
“Well, I am but only a little. The thing is, maybe we take him out in his wheelchair, somewhere way out of town, maybe at the wilderness park, and he gets to shoot at you, sort of, but with his tremor of course he’ll be lucky if he can even pull the trigger, much less hit the broad side of a barn, and that’s that, he’ll have had his day, and we get on with our lives, and, as I say, that’s that.”
“And what about me? Don’t I get to shoot at him? It’s supposed to be a duel.”
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“I wouldn’t mind killing the guy. I wouldn’t do it, but I wouldn’t mind killing him.”
“That’s insensitive. Now you’re the one who’s joking. Those Generomics people really got to you.”
“Hmmm.”
“Well, I’m almost sure he’d stop talking nonsense if we go through with this. Maybe it would bring him to his senses. Rid him of his obsession, which is the point. Incidentally, are Lena and Pete smoking weed?”
“You noticed. Yes, they are. They suck on the spliffs in his Toyota and then come in here, reeking.”
“Yes,” she said. “I thought so. Over here, too. Shouldn’t we do something? Maybe it’s just a case of senioritis they both have. Or could you and Trey do something? I worry about drugs. And speaking of that, Burt has been…Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you heard about edibles?” she asked me.
“I have.”
“He’s gotten his hands on them, by mail order, and he says they help with the pain.”
“I’ll bet. I thought edibles made people calm and peaceful.”
“Not with Burt, they don’t. They just add to how deranged he is.”
“Come to think of it,” I said, “I think I’d like to have a duel with that guy. I’d enjoy it—guns blazing in the fresh air, out in the open, springtime. Bees buzzing around, blue sky, birds singing, flesh wounds, the blood spurt, halcyon days. Yeah, I think we should do it.”
“Now you’re kidding.”
“Not a bit. You go tell him I said yes. We’ll go on from there.”
* * *
—
In my calmer moments, I couldn’t imagine why Burt hated me. Sometimes in the mornings I would take walks in the town square, doing my best to identify the trees—oak, maple, linden—and the birds—sparrow, cardinal, chickadee—and I would think: I’m not such a bad guy. I like to identify trees and birds. I’ve paid my taxes, I’ve helped to raise the kids, doing the best I could with Lena and Joe. And Pete. I’m a God-fearing man. I’ve gone to the PTA meetings and have been attentive to the goings-on at our school board meetings. My business has helped people who have suffered losses from fires, windstorms, water damage, and collisions. I pay my office assistants living wages, complete with healthcare benefits, and on a regular basis I have given money to Cheryl and Burt. I give to charities. I teach Sunday school. Face it: I’m not a bad guy.
Nevertheless, Burt wanted me dead, and he wanted to do the job himself. Sometimes in life the urge to kill a fellow human being does arise. These things happen.
One late-spring evening, thinking that maybe the gunplay we were contemplating could after all be quelled by a heart-to-heart talk, I drove over to Burt and Cheryl’s little house on the west side of town. It was a nice evening. Trees were leafing out, and I didn’t have to turn on the car’s heater. To get there, you have to drive past an auto junkyard, with the piles of rusting Chevettes, Pintos, Azteks, Cimarrons, and Pacers among others (I had provided insurance for many of these lemons), and then you pass by a strip mall where there’s a daycare center, a rival insurance office, a dance studio, an Indian restaurant, a massage parlor, and a pizza parlor. After that, the real estate goes rapidly downhill. You see houses that look as if they’ve been abandoned even though they haven’t been, houses with broken windows, yards with slop, trash, and pudder scattered everywhere, a landscape of poverty and neglect. When you see people, they gaze vacantly at you and your shiny undented passing car. Their expressions seem to say, “You’re in the wrong place.”
I arrived at Burt and Cheryl’s house, 2164 Westfield Lane, Kingsboro, Ohio, a rickety little dump domicile set back from the road and projecting a subtle aspect of depression and squalor. You could almost smell the cancer coming from in there. I decided not to park in their driveway but to locate the car a block or so away and walk to the site of their former connubial bliss. Once there, I could see a light from one of their windows, and from inside the house came the sound of a radio tuned to an oldies station playing “Unchain My Heart.” As an insurance guy, I can do quick estimates of a house and its possible failings: bad roof, drafty windows, dark brown shake siding missing in one or two spots and needing either a coat of paint or a staining, dead tree nearby, ready to fall smack on the house in a windstorm. With a place like this, vinyl siding would give better, more efficient protection against the elements and would be a better bargain. I could go on. Mold, for example.
I pressed the button for the malfunctioning doorbell—well, I was uninvited over there, after all—but as usual, silence greeted me. I went down the front steps and walked over to the north side, passing by a bathroom window, brightly lit. I stepped back. The light inside was so bright that if they turned their eyes to the window, they would see only reflections of themselves. They would not see me outside watching them, as my ex-wife ran a soapy washcloth over Burt’s ruined body, sagging now from muscles that had gone from firm to limp. His entire body was wasting away. The lawn where I stood was unkempt. From inside came the sound of a barking dog, no doubt a mutt who had sensed my presence outside the house.
Burt bent his head, and Cheryl soaped and washed the back of his neck and then his face with a regal tenderness that she had never shown to me during our marriage. His face was demure, the look of a man accepting love-bathing from a woman. She washed his shoulders with delicate swipes of the washcloth and then dried him with careful applications of a towel. She did everything for him that he could not do on his own. From where I was standing, I did not see in detail how she would bathe his genitals, but I knew, as I walked away, back to my car, that she loved him now and had never loved me in the same way, despite the evidence of our two children and their existence on the planet. For her I had been the reproductive means to an end. She had never shown me such physical or emotional caritas, if I may use that word. I had received it from Trey, but not from her.
I wept, and I hated him. A wreck of man, unemployable, unintelligent, a bully and a braggart, a man who had offered nothing to the world and who had called my son a faggot, and who was loved fiercely by my ex-wife, despite her denials. It would be my pleasure to remove him from our shared existence here on Earth.
Hey, I’m just kidding!
24
By this time my Sunday School class had become a group of Free Thinkers and were in open rebellion against me—at least the boys were. They were trying to be polite but they didn’t believe me anymore. I considered quitting. But they were just kids—was I going to give up so easily? On matters of faith? Which people live by? But it turns out that you can’t always counter faith with reason. The girls were also getting impatient: with me, with the boys, and with Scripture. Nerves were on edge. And Easter had turned out to be a particularly knotty time of year: the questions were more pointed on the subject of Christ’s resurrection. I was encountering skepticism about the life after death: what it was like, had I been there, would there be fast food and video games? For that matter, would there be anything?
I said we wouldn’t need fast food in the afterlife because we would be pure spirit, and they asked me how I knew that. Had I been dead yet? If so, what was it like?
I had been explaining to them about the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 28, where Jesus appears after he has died and been reborn, and Luke 24:36, where something similar is going on, and where Jesus appears as a spirit, and Billy Tarbox, who was often the first person to speak up, just put his head down, and, speaking not to me but to the table, said, “He didn’t hang around? He didn’t stay? After he was dead and then came back?”
“Who? Jesus?”
“Yeah, him. It says he was there for a little while, and then he left. How come he didn’t stay? They were his disciples and stuff. Like his posse.”
“Well, he didn’t have to be there for long. All he had to do was prove that God is…Well, he had to show that life and love can defeat death.”
Jake Goetz had stopped raising his hand. He would just speak up whenever he felt like it. “Mr. Hobson,” he asked, “where’s Heaven?”
“Well, the Bible says that Jesus ascended into Heaven. So it’s up there, somewhere.”
“Up where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“You’re supposed to know.”
“I don’t know everything,” I said. “We have to accept some things on faith.”
“So if you believe this,” Tommy Edie said, “like we’re supposed to, and someone came along and, like, shot you, would you go into Heaven?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so. But I don’t plan on getting shot.”
“Nobody plans on that,” Sally Horns said. “But it happens sometimes anyway.”
* * *
—
After much searching and covert investigations, I felt I had found the right place for a duel between Burt and me: a meadow out there in Ringer Wilderness Park, which you could reach by means of a dirt road that almost invisibly attached itself to County Road 2a on the park’s southern border. It had to be accessible by road, since the only way that Burt would get there was by automobile and wheelchair. On crutches, even with help, he couldn’t make it down a single city block. This was a guy who couldn’t put on his own socks. In every respect, the location was ideal: remote, flat, unencumbered by flowers or other unnecessary decorative distractions—and it was public property.
Now the only barrier was my family; I would have to persuade them of my good intentions in having a duel between Burt Kindlov and myself. I could foresee many of their negative arguments. They would say that Burt and I were behaving childishly, or like characters in a novel by someone from the olden days like Tolstoy (no, they probably wouldn’t say that), and they would argue that dueling, as I have already noted, was illegal, and that someone could be hurt or, who knows, possibly wounded or killed. And then what? Crime and punishment! They might claim that dueling is not a practice that Christians should engage in, although they had done so in the distant and recent past. They would say I was being impulsive. Was that really true? Of course I could keep the whole thing a secret, but I don’t like secrets and had decided to tell everybody everything.
So on the appointed evening, at the dinner table, following our main course of beef stew and salad, I said, “I have a little announcement.”
But by this time, Joe, Lena, Pete, and Trey had brought out their iPhones from their pockets and were texting god-knows-who-or-what. I disapproved of iPhones at the table but had lost that battle many times. Bobby the rat was dozing on top of Joe’s head, and Pete and Lena were sitting side by side but not holding hands, making me wonder if the romance was over, and Pete had brought some orientation materials from Ohio State to read, and Trey was deeply involved with Lena in some discussion of policy at Knoblauch County Park.
I said, “I’m going to have a duel with Burt Kindlov out at Ringer Park, only it won’t be a duel, more like a pretend duel.”
“You are?” Trey looked up at me. She was worried. “Why?”
“Because he wants to.”
“Somebody could be hurt.”
“I don’t think so. He has a tremor and his eyesight isn’t the greatest. I wouldn’t worry.”
“You wouldn’t shoot him, would you?” she asked.
“No, probably not.”
“Oh. Okay. Promise you won’t shoot him?” I promised. She went back to the text she was sending. After a moment, she said, “That Finn has brought us nothing but bad trouble. There’s good trouble and bad trouble, and this is bad. I wish you had never taken that blood test.”
But someone had been listening: Joe. He searched my face, as they used to say. “Are you gonna kill him?”
“No. I just said I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. I just want to scare him and put a stop to his crazy ranting.”
“He doesn’t scare.”
“Well, he was the one who challenged me to a duel, and I don’t want to look like a wuss.”
“He’s a space cadet, Dad.” Joe started to smile. “This is so cool. The blood test said you’d kill somebody, and now Burt has challenged you to a duel, and you could get lawyers at Dawes, Walling to defend you, and like that. It’d be like a free murder.” He finished up what was on his plate while the rat watched him eat. “You should do it. Hey, can I join you? I want to go out there. I’ll be your second. What did Mom say?”
“She said he’s got a one-track mind on this subject and I should pretend to have a duel with him, but no one should get wounded or anything.”
“So do it,” Joe advised me. “A guy wants you to fight him, so you fight him. Can I go with you? I’ll shoot him if you don’t.”
“No. That’s not what Christ tells us to do,” I said. I was touched by his efforts to enter the fray on my behalf.
“Christ didn’t live in the twenty-first century,” Joe told me. “And he never owned a handgun.”
25
The day of our duel dawned clear and warm, with a slight overcast. Any day, rain or shine, was a good day to pretend-shoot in the direction of Burt Kindlov, who had it coming and deserved a good scare, after which he would reform himself. I called down to the office to tell Amanda Edmonds and Sheila Holzer, my assistants, that I wouldn’t be coming in (bad cold, whose effects I imitated by sneezing and snuffling), and I dressed informally, donning some old jeans and a plain black T-shirt, the way I imagined Death himself would dress up. I brought along a sweatshirt in case it was chilly. I carried the Finn to the car gently, as if it were a colicky infant. Outside, it being late May, the birds were screeching and warbling and in general making a commotion, enough to wake you up and get you out of bed and into your dueling gear. No point in dawdling: time and tide wait for no man when there’s a shoot-out scheduled at an appointed hour. It pays to be prompt. This is one of my cardinal rules.
Insurance agents cannot be late for appointments. It’s bad for business. We are early birds.
I had no fears and wasn’t scared or even apprehensive. The panic attacks had subsided completely. The absence of jangled nerves was a surprise to me. My sciatica had not returned, nor had the diverticulitis. I happen to believe in guardian angels and felt their presence near me that morning, which perhaps accounted for the dead calm I felt.
