Signs of Struggle (31 page)

T
he shooter got off four shots before Moon’s blast stopped her.

One. Liv Olson was struck with the first bullet. The nine millimeter round had gone completely through her right trapezius muscle, entering the front and exiting cleanly on the other side. The wound produced considerable bleeding and would leave a scar for discussion when she wore tank tops or summer dresses, or nothing at all. She was shot just as she turned to grab me.

Two. The second round deflected off my head and ended up in a trashcan twenty feet behind me. Lansberger found it. A miracle he found the slug, a bigger miracle no one else in the crowd was struck by it. The damage? Nothing a long string of stitches couldn’t repair. Minor crease in the bone of the skull. Serious headache that, after a couple of intense days pretending to be a migraine, began to fade. Good drugs.

Three. Four. The last two shots killed Horace Norris. Two bullets, not one, had pierced his chest. One in the heart, another just below. He was dead before he hit the ground, as they say. I am not ashamed to say I wept when I heard. I am ashamed to say it was my fault. That will not, ever, go away. It would have been better for me had one round gone into my heart. Less pain. The truth hurts more than any other wound. I understand that more than ever.

Because people scattered from the shooter almost immediately, and he was so close to her, stray pellets from Moon’s shotgun blast struck only one man, a superficial wound that was treated on site.

They took Liv to one treatment room, me to another. Later, during the day, a steady parade of visitors went from room to room until nurses ran them off.

Because she had moderate blood loss, even though the wound was clean and relatively small from the 9 mm the shooter carried, Liv was encouraged to stay overnight, then see her personal physician for follow-up. As for me, they suggested I stay overnight given my brief period of disorientation at the scene. They wanted to monitor my mental status for concussion or other brain injury. There’d be a CT scan if I wasn’t clear in the morning.

So the medical staff kept us both overnight for observation, but not very close observation. Sometime during the late night or early morning Liv made her way in to see me. “I am here to comfort you, Thomas,” she said. And she did. We whispered words. I thanked her, said I was sorry my situation had gotten her shot. She said no problem. See you later, alligator.

They released her first thing in the morning. “How do you feel?” I asked as she came into my room to say good morning. Rachel and Molly were with her.

“Very, very sore,” she said, rotating her shoulder and yelping. “I chirp a lot, grimace, mutter meaty Anglo-Saxonisms. They say I’ll be fine, shouldn’t have any complications. Groovy scar, no pun intended. How ‘bout you, Thomas?”

“They’re letting me go after lunch. Headache’s still shouting at me. I’m going to have to let my hair grow a little longer to cover up my body art. Should get my stitches out quickly. I feel tired.” I did not say I felt like shit because of what I had brought to the sleepy little town of Rockbluff. I had begun calculating the damage done by my presence after Olivia left my bed hours before, and I wanted a drink more than anything.

“Get some rest at home, then give me a call when you feel better. I want to know how you’re doing,” Liv said, then she came over to me and kissed me full on the mouth, but it felt like goodbye. Molly and Rachel smiled and looked at the ceiling. Then they were gone.

After lunch, Mike came by, brought me clean clothes, and gave me a ride home. He told me Gunther and Carl retrieved my keys and took my truck home yesterday, leaving the keys under the doormat.
Original idea
, I thought. But then, I didn’t have any more killers to worry about, did I? They also fed Gotcha last night and this morning and aired her out twice, then dropped off my clean clothes at Mulehoff’s Earthen Vessel Barbell Club and Video Store. And Mike brought them the rest of the way. Such good men.

We didn’t say anything on the drive out to my place. When we pulled up at my front door, I asked about the shooter. “Who was the girl, Mike? Did Harmon find out anything?” Mike looked ahead through the windshield. He took a deep breath and I felt sick to my stomach. Could the news get any worse?

“Thomas, the shooter was a runaway who disappeared eight years ago when she was fourteen. Milk carton kid from California. No idea how she turned into a professional hit man, hit person, whatever. Her work history is not traceable. Her family’s coming to claim the body today.” He stopped talking, his gaze focused on the thick stand of red maples, oaks, and birch trees to the north.

“And?” I asked. Then it hit me. The band uniform. “How did she get the damn band uniform, Mike?” Chills jumped out all over my body.

He turned his head from the woods and looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry, but Stephen Doltch found the body of one of our band kids behind the McDonald’s two blocks from the shooting. The ice pick was still in her ear.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, suddenly without strength, and without strength to stop the tears. I could do nothing but weep. Sob is more like it. No strength. Nothing left. Mike was silent. I summoned resolve. “Who was she?”

Mike swallowed hard. “A good kid. Maggie Rootenbach. Fifteen. Sophomore. Only child. Parents have a farm north of here. Solid folks. I’m awfully sorry, Thomas.”

I had to get away from Mike, from everyone, before I heard anything more that I was responsible for. “Thanks for the ride, Mike. I appreciate it. Tell Gunther and Carl thanks for me, willya?’ I put my hand on the door. Mike put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like an anvil. I could not look at him.

He said, “I know you don’t want to hear squat right now, Thomas. I’m not going to lay any platitudes on you, but I am going to say please let me know if I can do anything to help you. You did not do anything wrong, and I’m glad you’re here and I, for one, thank God you’re among us. .”

“Thanks, Mike,” I said, and I got out, shut the door quietly behind me, strode to the front door, took the keys out from under the mat, and went inside, where the cold beer waited. And Gotcha, of course.

In the middle of a community where my presence had brought devastation, death and disaster, Gotcha came up to me, her little corkscrew tail wiggling, trying to grin against the great grip of gravity pulling on her pendulous facial folds. What I got was a grimace, but under the circumstances, I took it. She didn’t know I was about to lose my mind, and just maybe her face would be enough to keep me from it.

I got down on one knee and petted her massive head, massaging the heavy rolls of loose skin around her skull and under her chin, kneading her goozle and petting her and rubbing her chest. She toppled over in delight, and I rubbed her belly. When I stopped, she emitted her soft growl of encouragement to continue, and I did, and then I surprised myself by weeping again.

To my credit, I stifled the tears when a couple spilled onto Gotcha.

My next stop was the refrigerator. I took out two, then three, Fat Tires and grabbed a pint glass I had bought from The Dirty Duck, my favorite pub in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then I went out on the deck in the heat of the day and took a seat in one of my Adirondack chairs. Gotcha chose to stay in the air conditioning, and I couldn’t blame her.

I filled the pint glass and drained it, filled it again and drained it, got up and went inside, retrieved a cold four-pack of Three Philosophers and took it out on the deck. Hell, it was the last day of the Pork Festival. Time to celebrate. Last day in July. Time to celebrate. Last piece of the puzzle with the shooter dead. Time to celebrate.

“Wait!” I said out loud. The shooter wasn’t the last piece of the puzzle. Poor Maggie Rootenbach was.

Time to get drunk.

I knocked back another pint and was grateful for the way it took away some of the ragged edges of my mind, which felt like it had been ripped by a crosscut saw.

Now that it’s over
, I thought,
I guess I can count the cost to Rockbluff, the cost to the people who welcomed me into their midst when I was trying to get over losing my wife and daughters.
Now it was their time to lose family.

I topped off my Dirty Duck pint glass and held it up to the sky. And then I drank and called out names of people who died since I came to town, beginning with Hugh Soderstrom and continuing through Maggie Rootenbach, calling the dead hit person “Shooter,” like the guy in the basketball movie, just so she’d have a name.

“I’m hungry,” I said to myself. Drinking always makes me hungry. I struggled to my feet, thinking about a can of smoked almonds and three stale raspberry-filled doughnuts in a box on top of the refrigerator.

Although I was a bit wobbly, I managed to keep my balance. I banged my right knee hard against a chair, skidding it a few inches. And then I let it go, a string of filthy language that came and came and came, erupting from the pit of my being, every curse directed at myself. When I finished, I just stood on my deck overlooking the distant Mississippi River valley, breathing hard, woozy, ashamed of what I had said, more ashamed of what I had done. Most ashamed of what I was.

I thought of Karen and Annie and Michelle.
If they could only see me now
, I thought. Karen could see me in bed with Liv, and the girls could see me drunk with a bullet wound in my head. A husband, a dad, they could all be proud of? If you can’t stand the answer, don’t ask the question. I remembered.

Every now and then, since my family was crushed to death, incinerated, I speak their names out loud, just to be saying them. Oddly, it helps a little. It’s like if I say “Karen,” or “Annie,” or “Michelle,” they aren’t so far from me. So dead. Sometimes I even say things to them, like, “How ‘bout those Red Sox?” or just, “I miss you, girls.”

It always messes me up inside but, at the same time, it’s like I’m keeping the memory of them alive. That helps. I look at their pictures, too, and I wonder what they’d be doing now, if they hadn’t died.

I know that, years from now, I’ll wonder what Annie would have been like as a mid-30’s something woman, or Michelle as a recent college graduate. Or especially, what Karen would have looked like with streaks of gray in her hair. And I know that I will never, ever know. When we had been married just a few years, I told her one morning before we got out of bed, “You know, some morning you’ll wake up and look over and see that you’ve been sleeping with an old man.” She had just smiled and whispered “Good” and kissed me. It will never happen. Now I wake up, alone, and the first thing that comes to mind is that part of my heart and soul has been carved out of my life.

Now, because of me, the Rootenbachs would get to go through the same thing.
God help me.

I stumbled back inside the house, banging my stitched-up head against the sliding glass doorframe. There was pain, but mild. Nothing like a little liquid anesthetic taken orally to numb the discomfort. And get a start on the other kind of hurting.

I was sweating from the heat and my cursing fit and wiped my hand against my face. It came back bloody. “Probably plopped a few stitchers,” I said out loud, then laughed at my mumbling. I touched my head again, my fingers finding the place. I looked at my fingers. Blood. “Fuck it,” I said, then banged my head again, hard, on purpose. It hurt. Good.

At the refrigerator, I swung the door open, steadied myself, looked inside. A fresh four-pack waited for me, and I pulled it out, almost spilling one from the cardboard caddy. I set the ale on the counter, put my hand on top of the refrigerator, found the half-empty box of doughnuts, dragged it down and pushed it next to the beer.

At the cupboard over the sink I retrieved the can of smoked almonds and dropped it into the flimsy doughnut box next to the three desiccated treats. Taking the box in one hand and the ale in the other, I started for the door. Through the kitchen I could see Gotcha on her tuffet. “Wanna celebrate my accomplishments with me?” I asked. She lifted her big head, then put it back down on the double pillow, watching me.