But I never experienced a shred of remorse for shooting the two dildos that broke into my home. You’d think that a civilized man, an educated man, a family man like me would have felt something at having taken human life, no matter the necessity. I’d seen documentaries where veterans of various wars teared up in front of the camera over bayoneting this Nazi or napalming that North Vietnamese, pick your former enemy. These people had trained for it, yet they cried on camera. They needed counseling.
I had to have Craig Montero tell me not to grin.
My brother Bobby had an explanation for this.
“You’re a hard son of a bitch,” he said to me over beers one time in the wake of the shooting. A Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bobby was a logical choice for me to consult regarding my feelings about taking lives. “I never thought I’d say that, but there you go. You’re a hard son of a bitch.”
I appreciated that, because Bobby was a hard son of a bitch himself. And now, instead of calling me a chairborne commando, a REMF (Rear-Echelon Mother Fucker) or something more prosaic—like pencil-pushing pussy—my brother called me a hard son of a bitch. I liked that.
“And because you’re a hard son of a bitch, you don’t give a rat’s ass about these two guys. And think about it, dog; what were these guys going to do to Allie and Abby?”
Dog, instead of man or dude. Another thing hard sons of bitches called other men.
“Seriously, duct tape and handcuffs? After I found that shit out, I’d have gone back over and killed them again. Fuck them. And fuck anybody who thinks you should feel bad about it—including you. Listen, did you rip yourself up that time you killed the copperhead in the garage?”
There—I had intentionally killed. Five years ago, Abby found a poisonous snake coiled up beside her little pink bicycle in our garage, and I cut its head off with a shovel.
“No,” I admitted.
But at the same time, I didn’t say to Bobby then, I hadn’t felt proud of it, either. There existed now a dark truth I hadn’t related to anybody; when I thought about pulling that trigger I felt not sorrow, remorse or disgust but pride. I sat in court, in my car, on the john and thought, I’m awesome. With the twitching of my trigger finger, I cleansed mankind. I excised two bits of gangrene from the flesh of my species. A mediocre father, husband and lawyer, I finally did something not only extraordinary, not only courageous but good. I made society a better place. Whether that made me a psycho or not, that was how I felt. I wanted a parade.
So when I finally walked into Dr. Robert Koenig’s office for the first time, I actually didn’t go in there to discuss my feelings, to analyze my healing, to share my pain or anything like that; I went to brag. And to maybe figure out why, when I felt nothing but pride over this, it still gave me nightmares.
“So,” said Dr. Koenig, “are you a gun enthusiast.”
Despite the diplomas on the wall that marked him as a graduate of Emory University and the University of Georgia, he asked the question in that instantly recognizable way peculiar to those from Pennsylvania—the up-and-down of the sentence, the absence of the expected interrogatory rise at the end. Echoes, perhaps, of the German immigrants who had settled the area where he grew up. I smiled at the inflection. Allie had talked like that once, as a freshman in college there at the beginning of the years in North Carolina that would gradually eradicate her Yankee accent. When she got drunk or spent too much time around her family, it would come out again. Did you like the pot roast. Did you run into a lot of traffic there on 95.
Are you a gun enthusiast.
I answered, “I am now.”
A battered issue of Southern Rifleman, the monthly gospel of gun nuts everywhere, rested in my hands. The magazine exerted a calming effect on me; consequently, I hadn’t let go of it since coming in. This probably made me look crazy here, which was totally not my desired effect. My dark hair, thinning but still there, poked this way and that in a fashionable mess that required a dab of gel and almost a whole minute of teasing to perfect. The suit I had worn today remained hung on a body from which all unnecessary fat had melted over the preceding months. I had always been handsome—hey, man, I can’t lie—and at thirty-six, the weight loss only enhanced this. I looked good, I thought. Felt good, too. Not at all like a man who should clutch a gun magazine like some kind of redneck security blanket.
I forced myself to lay it in my lap. The coffee table that stood between the Doc and I looked like a beaten refugee from a fraternity house. Scratches, cigarette burns and drink rings marred a cheap veneer surface that ruined the chord of understated luxury prevailing throughout the rest of the office. The suede couch and chair and the mahogany desk could have come from a showroom in New York or London. The conference table looked like Craftique. And among all this, here at my knees sat the furniture droppings of a passing Wal-Mart. I didn’t want my precious magazine—the trophy I had received for my good deeds—on that damn thing.
The separation of hand and Southern Rifleman lasted exactly two seconds, and then I picked it up again. I cleared my throat.
“Umm… I’m not a subscriber. Somebody told me about this, so I went to Barnes & Noble and got one. I thought maybe it’d be a good thing to show you.”
“Can I see it?”
He tacked a question mark to the end of that one. I looked down at my magazine for a moment, then forced myself to hand it over.
“What am I looking for?”
“Turn to the back. There’s this section called Heroes of the Month, where they do these write-ups of everybody who bagged a home invader since the last issue. Back page. Mine’s the first paragraph.”
He opened the magazine. The pages sounded like dry leaves as he turned them. He was a thin man, a marathon runner by appearance, with fingers almost as long and skinny as his legs. He wore jeans and a navy-blue turtleneck sweater. The narrow face and bald head perched atop the shoulders recalled Steve Jobs, the departed icon of Apple fame. He even wore little rimless glasses like Jobs and sported the same carefully-cultivated beard stubble. They could have been twins.
He located the story and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his prominent nose. I waited as he read. When he finished, he closed the magazine and handed it back to me.
I gripped it in both hands again. Realizing how crazy I looked then, I blushed and forced myself to set it down.
“See, Doc, I’m not just a Hero of the Month,” I said. “I’m a double Hero of the Month. That’s what it says. Listen, before I came in here, had you ever heard of me?”
He nodded.
“Thought so. Everybody in Burlington knows who I am now, because I’m a double Hero of the Month. I’m Kevin Swanson. I’m a bad son of a bitch, I’m a hard son of a bitch, I deserve a frigging medal. I’m on top of the world. My teenage daughter thinks I’m cool again, and my wife respects me as a man again. I have 1500 Facebook friends, up from 95 in January. I can tell you with complete sincerity that my life has never been better. Never. That’s God’s honest truth. Yet here I am in a shrink’s office. Talking to you.”
He regarded me silently, a skinny finger over his skinny lips. He appeared deep in thought, as a psychologist in session should appear—although, I realized, he could have been thinking about anything. An upcoming oil change on the Mercedes, perhaps, or whether he should get kale or spinach to go with the organic free-range chicken tonight. He looked like an intelligent man, an intellectual man, but I learned a long time ago that some people just looked thoughtful.