Without the gun he had no weapon, so for the moment we were an even match. I had the gun. He had the bullets.
What I needed was a weapon.
I remembered the nail gun in the backyard. Too far away. Besides, the boy would catch me when I tried to jump the fence.
In desperation I spun around looking for something, anything I could use to try and stop the boy.
The only thing I could find was his Porsche.
Turnabout was fair, right?
I ran toward the car. “You think a smashed window was bad? You want to play smash things? Let’s smash your things now.”
Massachusetts has lots of rocks. Plenty of rocks. In the spring they rise out of the ground we have so many. I picked up a good five-pounder and ran toward the Porsche.
“No, get away from there. I’m warning you.” I could hear the panic in his voice.
I held the rock over the car. “Get down on the ground. Put your hands over your head.”
“Fuck you.” The boy ran toward me.
I dropped the stone on the hood and ran down the driveway without a plan other than to escape. He was a lot faster than me, even in my prime.
I picked up another stone and waited for him. Just as he reached me I threw the stone toward his foot, hoping to break a bone so he couldn’t run.
I missed.
He reached out and grabbed my left hand, then twisted my arm behind me. “So you like to throw stones, huh?”
Looking past the boy I saw the dog inching forward as if stalking prey. Ears laid flat, hair on his back standing straight up, his snarl showing teeth, the dog took a position just out of reach of the boy.
He began barking and barked and barked.
The boy turned around and kicked at the dog, “Get out of here.”
The dog just barked louder. Maybe he sensed the boy’s fear without the gun.
It was all the distraction I needed. With my free hand, I reached under my shirt and pulled out my fishing knife, then ran at the boy and sunk the knife in his back.
On his left side.
Where I figured his heart should be.
He sunk to the ground, moaning, then went silent. The dog inched toward the still body, barking louder than before.
I ran for the open door. Back to my family and to call for help.
I had thrown a rock to save a dog, and ended up killing two boys. Even as I rushed into the house I knew the boy had gotten what he wanted. He had destroyed something I valued almost as much as my family — that image I had of myself as a good, decent person, incapable of what I had just done.
I would never look at myself the same, but my family survived.
That was my payback.
Suzanne Proulx
If You Say So
from False Faces
She’s way out of your league, a classy New York woman who would be unapproachable. Yet, remarkably, she approaches you.
In the park, early spring. You’re out there with your DSLR and your tripod, concentrating on getting scenes with trees reflecting in the water, and the water reflecting the sky, so at first glance it’s a puzzle. The kind of thing someone would look at, and at first wouldn’t know what they were seeing. Maybe they had it upside down — then it would resolve and make sense.
It’s a tricky process, and you’re wrapped up in it, so you don’t even sense her presence until she speaks.
“Are you taking pictures of me?”
She’s the kind of woman people take pictures of. She’s perfect. She’s dressed probably fashionably, definitely expensively. She even smells expensive. She doesn’t exactly take your breath away, but for a moment she does take your words away.
After an awkward couple of seconds you manage to answer. “Sure,” you croak. “I mean, I’m not — wasn’t — but I’ll take your picture. If you want me to.”
“Yeah,” she says, and she smiles at you, a smile that makes you want to jump straight up, but you contain yourself. Then she says, “But you know what? I take better pictures when they’re candid.”
You stand there dumbly, as if you don’t know what that word means. How are you supposed to take a candid shot of someone who’d just asked for a picture and she’s standing right there?
“So I’ll just wander over there,” she says, indicating some trees in the opposite direction of the lake. “Do you have one of those big lenses? You look like you might have one of those big ones in your bag.” The way she says this, it sounds — well, provocative. A woman like this, anything could sound that way. But those specific words...
Yeah, in fact you have a couple of different lenses in your bag. You have a lens the size of an elephant’s trunk, but not in this bag. And while you’re standing there, with your elephant’s trunk in your other bag, she walks away. You grab the biggest lens you have and aim the camera at her. At her back. She seems to sense it and turns half around and holds up her hands in a way that says stop! Her sleeves fall back to reveal that her gloves go up at least as far as her elbows.
“Not yet,” she says. “Wait till I get over there.” She turns and keeps walking. The way a woman walks away from you when she knows you’re watching.
She goes toward the trees and twirls around once without looking back. Click. She looks into her bag. Click. She aims her face to the sky. Click. She takes the sunglasses off, sits on a bench, crosses her legs, pulls something out of her bag, looks at it. Click, click, click. She stands, picks a piece of trash off the ground, drops it in a trash can. Everything she does, every pose, looks exactly like a picture in a magazine. And then, without even waving at you, she melts away.
There was supposed to be more. Pictures, then phone numbers, perhaps some more flirting. Instead, it’s like the whole thing never happened. Like a magical interlude that took place only in your head.
But then, there are the pictures. You stick the camera in the bag and head for where you saw her last, but she’s gone.
After that you can’t go back to shooting landscapes. You head home, or what’s passing for home this week. As you walk, you think about how, in your mind, the situation had been so full of promise. You fantasized things, simple things to be sure (getting her number), more complex things (walking into a restaurant with her, nibbling on her neck), impossible things.
Why did she pick you? Of course, it isn’t immediately apparent that when you’re not house-sitting, you crash at your sister’s place in Queens, or that your current job, in addition to house-sitting, consists of walking people’s dogs. Maybe you looked prosperous. Maybe you didn’t look like a twenty-one-year-old with no niche in the world. A person who once wanted to be a tattoo artist, but then realized that would mean you’d have to get a tattoo and you didn’t want one. Or maybe a wedding photographer, only you didn’t think you had the temperament to put up with brides.
You don’t think of yourself as the type that even normal, ordinary, girl-next-door types would approach, because they never have.
And if you thought she was flirting with you, you were dead wrong. You’ll probably never see her again.
Of course you’re going to keep your eyes open. Walking the dogs in the park, you’re going to pass by that bench and look at it, and she won’t be there. Instead there’ll be an old woman, feeding the pigeons. You think you see her in a crowd, but by the time you get close enough to know for sure, either it’s not her, or the person you thought was her is gone.
When you head to your sister’s to check your mail, you show her the pictures, and you ask her, without going into a lot of detail, if maybe this is somebody famous, recognizable.
“I’m flattered that you think I can recognize every midlevel celebrity or fashion icon,” Diane says, scrolling through the photos. “But, no.” Diane shakes her head. “But she’s too old for you anyway.” You didn’t even ask that, but she sensed it.