My life. My mind.
I slam a front kick into the hundred-pound bag, sending it nearly to the ceiling before it comes rushing back toward me. I angle step and meet it with a hard roundhouse kick, smashing it with my shin and sending it into a spasm of bucks and jerks.
Inside the house, the phone rings and rings and rings, just as it’s been doing nonstop ever since we got home at seven o’clock. Tiff was answering it—the one in the living room, since I’d trashed the kitchen phone—telling people that I’m not available. Now it just rings and rings and…
Clicking footsteps out in the driveway.
“Tiff?” I poke the red button by the kitchen door, which sets the big garage door into upward motion. When it’s high enough, I see her shoes, part of a suitcase, and the bottom of her open white car door.
“Tiff. Wait.” By the time the garage door rolls all the way up, she’s behind the wheel and pulling her door shut. A few weeks ago, I would have run to the driver’s window and begged her to stay. That was a few weeks ago.
She starts the engine and turns on her headlights, laser beams that pierce into my eye sockets, which I try to shield with a bloody hand. When the Honda begins backing down the driveway, I step backwards, stumbling over one of my dumbbells. My arms flail madly as I sway like a drunk, but somehow I stay upright. Tiff backs out into the street, stops, and accelerates away.
*
It’s three a.m., I’m in bed, and I just realized that I can never leave my house—ever.
After Tiff drove off a few hours ago, I slumped to the garage cement and laid there for an hour, maybe three or four, I don’t know. I didn’t weep and I didn’t get angry; I just closed my eyes and breathed in the raw night air that drifted in through the open garage door. After a while, I opened them and stared hard at the bare light bulbs hanging from my ceiling, enjoying the punishing throb in my head. I eventually fell asleep, a cold, wet, slipping-in-and-out-of-consciousness slumber.
Sometime after midnight, maybe one o’clock, a white cat strayed through the open garage door and poked its wet nose into my ear, startling the hell out of me, and getting me to my feet faster than I could have on my own volition. After I caught my breath and shooed it away, I went to poke the button to close the big door, but something gave me pause: a feeling that someone was watching me.
I peered out into the dark but didn’t see anything. I walked part way out onto the driveway and looked back at the porch, around the yard, into the deep night shadows made by the giant fir tree near the sidewalk, and up and down the street. Nada. Just my paranoia running Code Three, I guess. So I shut the big door, went through the kitchen, down the hall, and into my bedroom where I crashed onto the top of the covers.
That’s where I am now, a couple hours later and still awake.
I like to think I’m good at compartmentalizing; that I can focus on whatever I’m thinking about and nothing else. But this time—I killed a child. It’s just so overwhelming. How can I ever put the shooting into its own terrible box so I can think about anything else?
I roll onto my side and draw up my knees. I can smell Tiff on my sheets. Damn, that was an ugly scene. Ugly, but not a surprise. Was I wrong?
A few months ago, several weeks before the first shooting, I joked with her that if we were ever confronted by an angry outlaw biker clutching a kitchen knife, she would try to understand his sad childhood, give him a big, warm hug, send a fruit basket to his family, and offer him free legal representation. Then the guy would stab her.
Tiff argued that without hesitation, I would shoot the armed guy dead with all the rounds in my weapon before learning that he was simply an upset, leather jacket- and black boots-wearing gourmet chef, who had just cut into his prize-winning soufflé to discover that it’s raw.
It was our fun inside joke until I capped the tweaker.
“Did you have to kill him?” she said to me on the phone. That was a gut punch. I would expect such a question from a blockheaded citizen, but not from my girlfriend.
Hey, look at me. I’m doing it. I’m compartmentalizing.
Tiff and I were no longer an item when the shooting happened but she was somewhat supportive in the weeks that followed, mostly with an occasional phone call or email. There was always a theatrical flavor to it, though, as if she were playing the role of a sympathetic friend, ex partner or whatever the hell we were. Are. One time when she called, she quizzed me for more details than what little I had initially told her and what had been on the news. Actually, it had been more like an interrogation. I somehow managed not to react to her accusatory, left-wing attorney questioning style. Instead, I just answered her straightforward in hopes that she might see the light and understand that sometimes there are dangerous predator types who need killing so that others can live. But people like her will never let reality get in the way of what they deem to be the truth.
I couldn’t see her face on the phone but I swear I could hear it scrunch up when I told her about deliberately aiming at the tweaker’s medulla oblongata. I said that had I shot him anywhere else he would have still been able to shoot the old man. I told her killing the medulla oblongata instantly kills the trigger finger. By then I could tell that she was no longer listening. I was hurt and angry by Tiff ’s reaction and she was upset by what I had told her. I decided not to continue. Of course, not talking about it made things just as tense as talking about it. So we both resumed our acting roles, me pretending that everything was okay and Tiff continuing her phony supportive role.
The booty calls were pretty darn awesome, though.
Now I’ve killed two more people. One—God, I can hardly even think it—a child. Why couldn’t Tiff have at least faked a little support for a day or two instead of being instantly revolted by me? Frightened by me. Why couldn’t she have… oh forget it. Water under the bridge.
Okay, I’m done thinking about this. I’m closing the Tiff compartment.
I sit up, scoot over to the edge of the bed and gaze at the backs of my raw hands under the nightstand light. My big knuckles show some abrasions, but they aren’t as bad as all the blood around the garage would indicate. Man-oh-man, do they ever ache, though. All the way to my elbows.
I walk over to the bedroom window and peer out into the night, but it’s my reflection that dominates the view. My face is a carnival exhibit.
“Right here folks,” I say aloud, sounding like a midway barker. “The face of a real-life killer in captivity. Throw him a peanut… .wait, wait, throw him a bullet and he’ll kill again for you. It’s what he does.”
I back away from the window, breathing hard. “I can’t go outside,” I say aloud. “If I do, I’ll kill again. ‘It’s what he does.’”
Twenty-eight years of martial arts training, six black belts, two national championships and I’ve never hurt anyone in anger. I’ve used my training on the job hundreds of times, and one time off duty when I rescued a woman being attacked in a movie theater parking lot. I’ve avoided many more fights by being aware of what’s going on around me, knowing how to read dangerous situations, and knowing how to talk the biggest and meanest suspects into the backseat of my police car without having to resort to force, something I’ve always been proud of.
So how did I go from that, to killing three people?
I look beyond my reflection, at the street
