Trigger Man Read online

  She’d been hanging curtains in the living room. Donnie and I were playing on the patio right outside the closed screen door, our voices clear from around the corner, according to what she told me. I heard nothing. But while up there on that chair, arms outstretched as she hung the curtain rod, she suddenly became aware of a presence behind her.

  My grandmother came from a large Nebraska family, four brothers and three sisters. Assorted wars and farming accidents had weeded out the brothers before I was even born, but the sisters lived on. There was Clara (my grandmother), Dorothy, and Inez. Inez was the oldest, and when I visualize her even now I find a smiling, white-haired woman in a vast kitchen alive with the smells of bubbling peas and rising bread. Nice, comforting.

  She’d lived not far across town in an ancient, though mystically-sound frame house. It was spacey, airy; I remember a feeling of hidden treasures and undiscovered territories; she’d owned a half-empty apartment building fronting the side street, and pushed back to the corner of the lot stood a two-story garage made up of another studio apartment perched on top of a derelict woodworking shop. I never knew of anyone actually living or working there. I’d only been inside once or twice myself.

  She’d not been in the best of health during this time, already in her seventies when my grandmother was not yet mid-fifties, but she had good kids that sent for her and kept her in groceries. Only she wasn’t with any of them That Day. Grandma told me (and even now I can see the nervousness, her eyes cutting to the corners of the room as if half-expecting to see the apparition again with her telling of it) her sister had flown to Atlanta a few days before. An old friend from Wherever, Nebraska had called out of the blue, asked her to fly out and stay the week-end. The woman’s husband had done well, Grandma said; he was a foot doctor of all things, a podiatrist, I believe. So for a couple of days Inez was not at home, and she was not with her kids. She wasn’t anywhere familiar is how Grandma put it (still looking away to the corners as if expecting the shape to slide into view any second). Because when she turned from the uncomfortable prickling at the base of her neck, there had been someone, or something, else in the room with her.

  Matt had always been a big man, a sheriff for the better part of thirty years, and a farmer before that. The one picture I’ve seen of him placed him well above six feet with a large, gregarious-looking face. He’d been standing by the couch in the sunlight streaming in through the front window in full uniform, hat in hand. And at that time the man had been dead for over fifteen years.

  The initial surprise had almost spilled her from the chair, but the ghost (if that is indeed what it was) had held out its surprisingly substantial hands, promising in a hoarse-cloak of a voice that it meant no harm. It only wanted to know, it said, where Inez had gone. She wasn’t home and she wasn’t with the kids. I can only imagine how Grandma must have felt then; I’ve never forgotten how her eyes strained frantically as she told me.

  ‘I told him she’d gone to Atlanta to see Stella,’ my grandmother told the apparition and right away (according to her) the ghost had smiled and nodded its head in a semblance of relief. Then it simply disappeared. No swirling of air, no strange smell of lingering brimstone. Just gone. And that’s when she rounded us up and called Cousin Linda. That’s also where she left the story. Never talked about it again even though that would have been highly improbable in retrospect. Her life was almost out.

  That tale, though, has left a mark on me like a footprint in wet cement; the memory of her telling haunting me like a mild, temper-less ghost itself. Because I’ve never been able to put a firm commitment to it; I’ve never been able to finally admit whether I believe what a woman who never told a lie in her life told me, or simply cast it off as some weird figment of her imagination. Seems there are never any easy choices, right? But if I’ve come to believe anything, including my own reoccurring dream, then it seems only logical to believe hers…or at least her ability to interpret whatever she thought it was.

  Only this question is left, then: Do ghosts really watch over the living, if they do, in fact, exist? Up until now I’ve thought…no, I’ll be plain, wished it not to be so. It lends itself to too many other disturbing possibilities. But there have been signs. Portents even.

  Chapter 2:The Party

  I was born in the proverbial hole in the road just outside Hot Springs, Arkansas. My mother and I lived in one clapboard shack after another until I was five years old and there’s not really much I remember about the essentially different but, nonetheless, same places. What I do remember is little more than snapshots, still-frames of places and scenes that make no more difference in my life now than shoes on a turtle would, ever. Scattershot pictures of an ancient station wagon grinding its way into the Smokey Mountains; a corner store proprietor who constantly twirled his handlebar mustache and joked about how I should have been a girl, with my face and all, he’ say, winking to anyone listening. And others: my mother as a young girl, no older than the ones I see everyday leaving high school, my grandmother, healthy, later on. Not much else though, nothing substantial, kinda like a book with most of the good parts ripped out or soiled beyond the point of readability.

  I have no recollections of my father at all, except the dream, and as I said, up until today I’d never admitted to myself that it was actually him. Of course, inside I knew. I believe I’ve always known.

  My Grandma was not around much then. It would have caused too much trouble while my grandfather was still alive. Grandma (on that stormy, revealing day of my thirteenth year) broke down and told me he asked about my mother late one night after he’d taken several (for him) very out-of-character drinks, and even now I do believe that may have been the only true lie she ever uttered.

  The problem was me, you see. My grandfather couldn’t abide a bastard and that’s what I am. He was a man of strict upbringing, a 99.9% teetotaler, straight-line Baptist, as inflexible as a nail in a two-by-four. And having a child out of wedlock was unthinkable, regardless if it was your own daughter or not.

  But I don’t hate him, at least now, because it’s hard to hate someone you never really knew, or at least it is for me. He had principles, and his daughter (to his way of thinking) had taken those principles and rubbed his nose in them. To each his own, I guess. We all live with our sins. But Shreveport, Louisiana was a much smaller town then than now, and he was a failed salesman. Business was one thing, but the shame my mother put upon him was something from which he obviously didn’t, or couldn’t, recover.

  Thank God my Grandma was different.

  Regardless, until they found him on the side of the road that day my mother and I were on our own. What little I learned of my father I had to get from my grandmother years later, a piece at a time, little tidbits like pieces from a mousetrap. I used to think she didn’t want to talk about him whenever I mentioned him, but now that I’m older and wiser (ha, ha) I think she didn’t say much because that’s about all she knew.

  I was born in 1968, conceived during the Summer of Love. It was the time of hippies, drugs, Vietnam, rebellion. And my mother, it seems, fit in quite nicely. But even so, it hardly explains how we ended up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that hotbed of social unrest. Hell, now I guess you’d be lucky to find a six-pack and a joint without turning over every stone for miles around. But then again, what the hell do I know? I haven’t been back since the snapshots were stored in my brain.

  I have no idea what my mother thought of the place; I don’t know what my mother thought about at all. Those first years were a daisy chain of cheap childcare dives and dry cereal. My father bugged out not long before I was due (in the proverbial dead of night to get a pack of cigarettes), and with my grandfather still gnashing his teeth over his black-balled daughter, she had no choice but to work. And the jobs she could find were menial, pathetic. One day ran uneventfully into another and perhaps that’s why I don’t remember much from that time. We was always on the move, never stopping long enough to get a bearing. But when we finally d
id touch down it was in a trailer park not too far from one of the numerous chicken-processing plants that sprout in Arkansas like dandelions in a spring field.

  You might ask how I know these things since I’ve already admitted to scarcely remembering my mother at all and Grandma being out of the picture at this time. So how? The smell really. There are certain things that never leave you: the first time you get laid, maybe the day you graduate from high school if you didn’t get any farther, more likely the day you got your driver’s license. For me (along with the snapshots of the old man at the corner store and the station wagon sloughing its way into the mountains) there is the smell of chickens. To this day I can hardly stand to look at those motherfuckers. One irony after another that I don’t remember my mother’s face but can’t forget how the decaying funk of processed chickens hung around her like an old dress that refused the hamper.

  She worked the Line, that much I know from Grandma. She told me as much and I guess it’s only Providence or Dumb Luck that kept my mother alive as long as she was. Because if she’d’ve died sooner it would have been an orphanage for me, for sure. Like I said, my grandfather was never one to live and let live.

  So we plodded on, a woman making only a whisper above minimum wage, and a bounced-around kid leaving early every morning and getting back to the leaky, chicken-shit-smelling trailer late at night.

  She worked alongside what my grandfather would have bitingly called niggers and poor white trash, taking each truckload of plump and lively chickens from the staging area to be beaten, thrashed, plucked, scalded, and subsequently dismembered. Like I said, even the idea of chickens is enough to make me want to puke.

  However, luckily for me, my grandfather’s ticker gave out on a two-lane stretch of highway between Homer and Coushatta in the poverty-ridden northwest corner of Louisiana. When the police found him the car was still idling on the shoulder, all his fruitless sales apparatus neatly arranged in the seat next to him, and him just as dead as a Kennedy behind the wheel. No life insurance policy, no retirement fund, not even a iron pot to shit in. Needless to say, my Grandma didn’t keep the house long.

  He kicked several months before my fifth birthday and before he was in the ground good Grandma decided what it was she had to do. She packed up, and from the bills that chased us around for the next coupla years like a bounty hunter on meth amphetamine, they were substantial. She rode into town on a bus and my mother and I picked her up at the Greyhound station in Hot Springs. And that is another snapshot: my Grandma hurrying toward us across the scuffed floor, skirting people as she came, a suitcase in either hand and tears in her eyes. And there to greet her: me and the shadow that was my mother. It’s one of a select few memories I have of being very happy, as if Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny had decided to appear in person. She’d sold my grandfather’s Chrysler and all the money she possessed in the world was tucked deep in the folds of both of those suitcases, in case she lost one or the other, she later told my mother.

  By the time of the birthday (both my mother and Grandma decided to go whole-hog for cake, presents and the like, since I’d not had a “real” party before) we were actually living for the first time as a family. I was cared for without the need of daycare for once, and the one thing that remains with me is a “sweetness” that found its home within me until my grandmother died. If there’s one thing I do know it’s this: between love and money, give kids love. The rest will take care of itself.

  So even though I was out of daycare, the friends I had were not forgotten. And it just so happened the current daycare had been run by the processing plant’s management. Many of the children I played with had parents who shared some, if not all, of my mother’s duties, so even if I wasn‘t with them during the day, they weren‘t far in terms of geography.

  The party was to be an extravaganza. It was lucky I was born in the Fall because the trailer could not have held the turnout of a cold, drizzling winter afternoon. And it did become an extravaganza, though nothing of the sort my mother or Grandma had envisioned. What happened is another thing she reluctantly told me on that stormy day in my thirteenth year. I’d finally come clean about the reoccurring dream I’d had the night before and I guess she figured it was finally time to do likewise. Because (unlike what she told me about my grandfather) I know this is true.

  The party was going well, the turnout thankfully lighter than mother had wished, but Grandma admitted the food scarcely held out for the ones present. There were crepe paper and balloons, a Mexican piñata they’d splurged for and tied to the rim of the basketball net in our neighbor’s yard, hot dogs and hamburgers, and of course a cake decked out with the Archie characters from my favorite Saturday morning show.

  It was a Sunday afternoon (the only day of the week that the plant closed shop) and most of the co-workers and their children were more than happy to share in the good times on someone else’s expense. Grandma told me she turned a blind eye to the amount of booze chugged down that day and I believe her on this one too. She was human first, Baptist second.

  It was during the cake-cutting that it occurred, whatever it was. Whatever has continued to dog my heels like an irritating mutt warning me away from its territory. The only thing I recall is the flash of light, another snapshot that could just as easily have come from a camera as from anything—or anywhere--else.

  When I mentioned this to Grandma her eyes tightened involuntarily at the corners, and I could see her holding back on some hasty comment. That was another of her more subtle talents. She was more of a plodder, someone who thought hard on any particular subject before voicing an opinion. I suppose she got that from living with my grandfather all those years.

  But during her telling, as the rain dripped and splattered across the roof tiles and echoed metallically in the several pots we’d placed strategically around the kitchen, she never wavered from the subject nor held back any of what my mother had believed.

  Because no one else saw a thing, or if they did, nobody said so.

  She was attempting to hustle some wayward kids out of her way to cut the cake when I suddenly began clapping my hands. Nothing out of the ordinary really. Just a typical five-year-old reaction to over-stimulation except…that my mother turned suddenly, knife in hand poised above the cake, as if to follow my gaze which was not centered on the cake anymore. Even Grandma admitted that much. According to her, I was actually pointing by the time it happened.

  This is what the people at the party saw: my mother turning, her eyes going wide as the scream began, falling backward onto the table, tripping and going down in a heap of folding chairs, cake, and children, the knife gashing her forearm so deeply an ambulance had to be called, and the party collapsing like a pricked balloon amid the following chaos.

  This is what my mother told Grandma late that same night after I’d gone to fitful sleep, her high on the pain killers the doctor had prescribed and shaking her way through the second pot of coffee. I remember the strain standing out in cords along Grandma’s neck as she recalled the unnerving episode.

  My mother said she’d seen a contingent of ghosts, of vast assortment. All eyeing me.

  It was a jumble of vague forms tightly knotted together, and in such configurations and overlappings they were really no more than a collage. Some were even super-imposed upon the party-goers, turning the whole area into a surreal panoramic mash of the living and dead, clustered all the way back to the line of trailers skirting the entrance drive. And even though they appeared insubstantial, many of their features and clothing were discernable. Races and ages were well represented: Arabs in robes of flowing iridescence, half-naked savages bloodied with rage, European aristocracy in powered wig regalia, hunched and bushy-haired humanoid creatures, and other more impossible beings packed and stacked together like rampant fans at a rock concert. All present and somehow drawing my attention; a silent multitude crashing my birthday party with their tenuous but studied presence. Mother said the hunger, the need, the longing in each pai
r of eyes was heart-breaking and unmistakable.

  And she’d fainted.

  And I remembered nothing. Just the flash of light and the commotion that followed. And as Grandma went on I soaked the information in, stored it safely away in a place where I could pick at it curiously when it had cooled, and I was alone. When she would not be aware of my disquiet. Time to think over both the dream (or vision) that had caused the revelation of the tale and then the tale itself; time to begin in earnest the strange path I’ve been following ever since.

  Chapter 3:Down, Out, Gone

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. The ages of five to thirteen were only good in the fact that Grandma was with me. My mother was too, for awhile, but the shadow sucked her up well before I had any chance to really know her.

  After the fiasco of the party Grandma said Mom had a hard time at work. The people were different. Not mean, really; it was not that, just different somehow. And as I’ve grown I’ve come to know what my grandmother could only guess; I’ve felt it at my shoulder like a mugger for years.

  One time is still crystal clear.

  I was walking home from one of my numerous schools (I don’t even remember if I’d been sent home or managed to last the whole day; the way things went back then it could have been either) when I heard a very vague whimpering coming from a ragged ditch not far ahead. It was cloudy and cool that day and there were no shadows except for the one haunting me. But by that time it was as familiar as sliding into an old pair of jeans, though hardly as welcome.

  It didn’t take long to find the dog. It must have been hit by a car a short time before because the blood bubbling out of its nose hadn’t had time to crust over yet. The real, initial shock came from the fact that it was so big, almost as long as a man. In fact, I thought it was a man in a brown coat until I saw the teeth. But even then, I only half believed it was a dog…perhaps more likely a demon with the luck I’d been living with. The lips were pulled back in a grimace and the eyes were almost human. I could tell from its frantic breath it was dying.