Jackson Spencer Bell
TRIGGER FINGER
For Angel
1.
The typical nightmare ends with the victim shooting bolt-upright in bed and trying to orient himself to his surroundings as the dream he just escaped melts away. Mine didn’t end that like that. I woke up but didn’t sit up; au contraire, I awoke in a prone position and stayed that way, hollering at the top of my lungs, panicked but motionless. Whatever had happened in my dream, I took it lying down. So while I may have been less than a lion in real life, in my nightmares I was a complete pussy.
“Kevin! Wake up!”
Allie, my wife. She shook me vigorously, either trying to shake me awake or shake me to death so I would shut the hell up. I opened my eyes and quickly catalogued everything around me. My bedroom, my senses said. A hand on my shoulder, not a claw. My wife, not the enemy. My house. I’d had a bad dream. Nothing to see here, nothing to look at, all’s well, sorry for the interruption, carry on.
I stopped yelling. I lay still for a moment and stared into the master bathroom before flipping over and pressing my face into Allie’s chest. Her warm skin smelled like lavender. She held me as my heart rate returned to normal and confusion and terror yielded to understanding and shame.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Silence. Then:
“What was it about?”
“You know,” I replied.
I let her hold me for a long time, because it felt good and she smelled good and I needed pleasant things just then. She made it easier to resist the urge to remember my dream. My mind likes to pick at scabs. Left to its own devices, it wouldn’t rest until it made me unhappy again.
“I think you need to see somebody,” she said.
“I’m just nervous about doing the show,” I replied, still talking to her chest. I intended to keep my face there until she forcibly evicted me. “Stage fright. It’ll pass.”
“This is more than stage fright.” She pushed me back so she could look at me. My recent behavior had dug deep lines of concern into her face. “You need help.”
“I need to drink more and work less.”
“You should go see Tom’s friend, the psychologist. You shouldn’t have to go through this.”
“I don’t need a shrink,” I said, pulling away.
“Okay, Kevin, I need for you to see Tom’s psychologist friend. I shouldn’t have to go through this.”
Tom Spicer, the Spicer in Carwood, Allison, Spicer and York, P.A., held a certain amount of influence over me. I had practiced with the firm for ten good years. Maybe not so good the last six months, but the nine and a half years before those had earned me enough brownie points that my personality issues resulted in a cautious referral to a shrink instead of a Go Work Somewhere Else meeting with the equity partners. Tom had given me a business card and said: Talk to this guy right here. You can trust him.
He had given me the card two days ago. I hadn’t called the number on it yet.
“I don’t like seeing you like this,” she said. “It’s not right.”
I snuggled back up to her. “I can handle it,” I said into her chest.
“But I can’t. I need this to be over. We need this to be over. And it can’t be over until this stops. Not really.”
I inhaled her scent. The nightmare seemed far away now, the mindless terror a distant memory. My heart rate fell. I remembered Abby as a tiny baby, how Allie would hold her just like she was holding me and how she would first stop fussing, then stop moving and then fall totally asleep. Maybe it was the smoothness of her skin or the steady heartbeat beneath it; either way, Allie’s presence reached a place inside me that nothing else could, an elemental control panel where she could slow my heart or speed it up at will.
She kissed the crown of my head.
“You’re still my hero, you know,” she murmured. “Getting help isn’t going to change that.”
I was falling asleep now. “Mmmhmm.”
“You won. You did it. Now it’s time to clean everything up, okay?”
“Mmhmm.”
“So you’ll call that number in the morning?”
“First thing,” I mumbled.
She continued to hold me until I fell out of the world again. This time, I had no nightmares.
2.
In early February of this year, I shot and killed two men in my home. I call them “men” only because I understand that I’m supposed to do that. They had two arms and two legs and walked upright and had opposable thumbs; everybody else called them men. Me? I didn’t think two arms and two legs made somebody a man any more than the absence of a carapace and antennae made him not a cockroach.
“Quit calling them ‘roaches,’ okay?” Craig Montero, who had become my coworker, then my friend and finally my attorney, had advised me of this before I ever talked to the press. “No ‘vermin,’ either, or ‘rats’ or ‘snakes’ or anything like that. You’re an innocent homeowner forced to defend his castle and his family. You didn’t want to kill these guys; you had to. You are deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced you to do. Your sympathy goes out to their families.”
“I am deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced me to do,” I repeated in his office, a carbon copy of my own. “My sympathy goes out to their families.”
“Don’t grin when you say it.”
“Okay.”
“That’s fucked up. It makes you look fucked up.”
“Okay.”
“Heroes don’t gloat.”
“Okay.”
“Dangerous psychopaths gloat. You’re not a dangerous psychopath.”
“Okay,” I said yet again.
And so I called them “men” to the outside world even though I didn’t believe they qualified. They entered my home through an unlocked door in my basement and found me asleep on my man-cave couch in front of the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game. They used my own softball bat to crack me over the head in an attempt to kill me, then proceeded upstairs with a little bag of goodies that included handcuffs, duct tape, rope, a knife, pretty much anything that might be useful to you and a buddy if you’re looking to rape a woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter. But, contrary to the greater weight of the evidence—see Nazi Germany vs. Humanity, (1933-1945), The Rwandan Genocide vs. Humanity, (1994)—God existed. He placed His hand between that bat and my skull. I regained consciousness a few moments later, woozy and terrified but otherwise okay. I whipped my AK-47 out of my gun safe—tucked away in my man-cave—and charged up to the ground floor, where I shot them both. They never even found the stairs.
Anyway, I became a killer that night out of necessity, and that sucked because I respected life. A divorce lawyer by trade, I had never intentionally whacked anything higher than a wasp. In my mid-twenties, I accidentally ran over a box turtle on one of the myriad back roads that crisscross southern Alamance County, North Carolina, and the experience left me so riddled with guilt that I actually had to pull over and do some deep breathing to deal with it. I sat in my car on the side of the road and thought about how if I hadn’t been screwing around with my CD player, I’d have seen the turtle and could have avoided it. I felt terrible about it then—it sucks to kill anything, but it really sucks to kill something cute—and I continued to feel bad about it long afterwards. So much so that whenever I see a turtle trying to cross the road now, I pull over and help.