After the fight with the hairy man, my dad and I met a team of deputies from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office at the entrance to the Swamp and one of them took me home to my mom while Max and my dad led the others back out to the old house where the hairy man lay dead.
When I walked in the front door, the deputy right behind me, my mom came running out of the kitchen, tears streaming down her face. She saw me, and I thought she might collapse right there in the entryway. Instead she let a long, labored groan of relief and then scooped me up in her arms. I thought she had hugged me tight that night we took shelter from the storm in our hall closet, but that was nothing compared to this. And I didn’t care. For all the world, I didn’t care. I was home.
When at last she gave up the hug she held me at arm’s length and looked me over. I think I gave her another scare with the way I looked. I was covered in sweat and grass and bits of wood and a lot of dried blood. She could barely speak for shaking.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“I tried to rub my shoulder where I’d hit the porch column on the old house, but a sudden stab of pain shot from my joint and up my neck. I gave it up, wincing. “Shoulder’s kinda stiff,” I said.
“Oh baby,” she said. She hugged me again. The pain was still with me, but I didn’t care. Then she looked into my eyes and said, “Why did you do this? You had me so scared.” She sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ve never been that scared in my life.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
She started to cry and I did too.
Finally the deputy told my mom that I was needed at their Homicide Office, that Detective Travis needed to get my statement.
“Can I come with him?”
“Yes ma’am, Detective Travis said that would be okay.”
“One minute,” I said.
I pointed at my hip and said, “I still have my dad’s service revolver. I need to put it in his gun safe.”
The deputy was a giant of a man, and old, past fifty, with thin white hair and a chest like a keg of beer. His gaze drifted from the bulge under my shirt to my face. I couldn’t really figure the look on his face, whether he was mad at me for the delay I was causing or at himself for not realizing the gun was there.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” he said. “But do it quickly please.”
“Yes sir,” I said, and ran for my dad’s closet.
Once I had the gun safe open I slid the weapon out of my jeans, opened the cylinder, and ejected the spent shell casings into my hand. I thought back to the day my dad had come home and found me in this very spot, putting the weapon back. I remembered how he’d checked the weapon over, how he’d muttered to himself the gun safety rules I’d heard so many times before, and found myself muttering those same rules over now as I visibly and physically checked to ensure I had an empty weapon. It felt like I was paying a penance somehow. Like I was finally giving my dad the respect I’d been unable to offer up before. At that moment, for the first time in my life, I think I finally realized the power built into a gun, and what it meant to use one.
* * *
It was past two in the morning when Detective Travis put the cap back on his pen and said, “Well, I guess that about covers it. How you doing, Mark? You look tired.”
I was. I felt exhausted. I wanted to crawl into my bed and sleep for days.
“I’ll be alright,” I said. “Where are my parents?”
“Your dad’s been done for a while now. He’s out in the hall with your mom. Come on. I’ll take you there.”
I followed him out to the hall. My parents were down at the far end, near the exit doors, their arms wrapped round each other. My mom looked so comfortable in his arms. I started to call out to them, but Detective Travis put a hand on my shoulder to quiet me.
“They fight a lot, don’t they?” he said.
That caught me off guard, and my first reaction was to get angry. What business was that of his? But the look on his face wasn’t mean or cruel. Quite the opposite actually. I got the sense he was trying to tell me something.
“Yeah, they fight,” I said. Then I added defensively, “Everybody fights.”
“True. But it’s different for cops and their wives.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned a patient smile on me. For a moment I thought he might rough up my hair. Thank God he didn’t.
“When I was a cadet at the Sheriff’s Academy, there was this PT instructor who used to love to make us do push ups out on the lawn every time it rained. This one day I was there doing push ups, the rain coming down on my back, soaking my uniform, when this instructor comes strolling through our ranks carrying an umbrella. I remember he said, ‘Why did you idiots want to become cops? Three things will happen to you in the first year you wear a badge. You will buy a truck. You will buy a house. And you will get divorced. You are all a bunch of stupid mullets if you think you can beat those odds. Just quit right now. It’d be easier on you if you just found a woman you hated and gave her half your pension. That way you wouldn’t have to live with the misery of a divorce.’” Travis smiled to himself, like he was looking back on a fond memory. “I hated that man,” he said. “But he was right. Being a cop pretty much destroys any chance you’ve got of living a happy homelife.” He pointed down the hall. “But your dad and your mom, I think they’re one of the lucky couples that get to make it. If she’s stayed with him this long, I think she’s in for the long haul. God help her though. It’s tough being married to an ass. And believe me, every cop’s wife eventually discovers she’s married to an ass. Maybe a noble ass, but an ass just the same.”
“My dad is not an ass,” I said.
He smiled. “I know he’s not. Not to his boy. Not to the world. Your dad’s a good man. What I’m talking about is different from all that.”
One thing I always hated about adults was that condescending you’ll-understand-one-day smile. If he’d been a kid my age I would have accused his parents of being a separate species.
Instead, I offered him a bland smile.
“Go on,” he said, and gestured toward my parents with a nod of his head. “You guys will be just fine.”
* * *
Max was our big worry in the days after our encounter with the hairy man. He’d whimpered and whined most of the way out of the Swamp, and yet, when faced with coming home with me or going back out into the Swamp with my dad and the deputies, he hadn’t hesitated. He’d spent the entire day with my dad. But that night, when we came home, we found him whimpering in pain and drooling inside his crate.
Back in 1983, the Houston Police Department only had one on-call veterinarian for their service animals, and it had taken nearly four hours to get him on the phone.
But eventually we did.
He had a broken rib. The vet treated him, and he came home to us with bandages wrapped around his chest. We had instructions to change out the bandages every morning and every night, and to monitor him in case he tried to bite them off, but after three days he’d sort of accepted the bandages and the pain didn’t seem to bother him as much.
My dad was home the whole time, and I think that more than anything helped Max with his recovery. I know he whined every time my dad went out the door, like he was afraid his master was going off to work without him.
But he got better.
I was thankful for that.
About a week later, this was around lunch, I went into the kitchen and found my parents laughing. They each had a glass of wine in their hands and there was a plate of crackers and soft, gooey cheese on the counter behind my dad.
“Hey,” I said, nodding at them.
My mom glanced from me to my dad. Dad said, “You going somewhere?”
I’d spent most of that morning hanging out with Max and reading Robert McCammon’s The Night Boat, still in my PJs. Now I was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and an Iron Maiden t-shirt that I bought when I caught them at the Astrodome the year before.
“I want to go see Alan,” I said.
My mom stiffened. My dad frowned. “You think that’s the best thing to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I don’t know what to do, Dad. But I know I can’t sit around and do nothing, you know?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’m learning that about you.”
I nodded.
“You’ll tell me how Jeanne is doing?” my mom asked.
“Mrs. Crawford…uh, yeah.”
“What time will you be back?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess, you know, that depends.”
“If you get back in time we could go to the Cajun House for dinner.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Sounds great.”
The Cajun House did a crawfish boil that was out of this world. They put wax paper on your table and then the waiter came out with this big stew pot of steaming crawfish and corn and red potatoes and Andouille sausage and spilled it out across the wax paper. It was my all-time favorite restaurant.
“Go on,” my dad said. “Tell us how it goes, okay?”
Ten minutes later I was knocking on Alan’s door, and I realized as I took my hand away that I was feeling the same sort of fear I’d felt as I entered the clearing to shoot the hairy man. I had just made a long bike ride through my neighborhood without remembering an inch of it. I was so focused on what I was doing that time and distance had slipped by and I hadn’t noticed. And now I stood on my friend’s doorstep, much as I had stood on the hairy man’s doorstep, with no idea of what was to come, and even why I thought this was a good idea.
Alan’s mom answered the door. She looked like the last few weeks had drained the life out of her. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her face was haggard and gray. Not quite old, but getting there. Her eyes were vacant. I found it impossible to hold her stare. I think it was her hair that alarmed me most, though. It had been jet black for as long as I’d known her, but it had turned a lackluster brown, gray in places, and it stuck out like wires from the back of her head.
For a moment I don’t think she recognized me, but then she forced a smile and said, “Hello Mark.”
“Hello Mrs. Crawford.” An uncomfortable silence passed between us. “Is Alan home?”
“He’s upstairs,” she said. “In his room.”
“Oh. Um, would it be okay if I went up to see him?”
“I don’t know, Mark. He hasn’t been doing very well lately. He’s so sensitive.”
“I…I just want to speak with him. I promise I won’t be long.”
She looked down at the ground, and I got this feeling I was watching a woman so mired under grief and exhaustion that she could simply tune me out and forget she was standing in her open front door wearing only her nightgown and slippers.
For a moment, I almost turned away.
But then she said, “I heard about what you and your dad did, on the news.”
I didn’t speak. I waited instead.
“Thank you,” she said. “I go to church, Mark. Did Alan ever tell you that?”
“Uh, yes ma’am.”
“I’m shocked that I can put this into words, but I’m glad you killed that man.” She sucked in a breath and put a hand over her mouth. “That’s awful of me to wish a man dead, but I am glad. I wished him dead and then he was dead. I feel so ashamed.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. I honestly had no idea what to say. The woman in front of me was tearing herself apart with guilt and grief and things I probably couldn’t even put words to, and yet here was a grown woman sobbing without shame in front of me, even putting her arms around my shoulders so that I could feel her tears on my face, and I had no idea what to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting my arms clumsily over her shoulders. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. Heather was the coolest girl I ever knew.”
She separated from me then and stared at me, the tears lingering on her cheeks.
For a moment I thought she’d tell me to go, but she didn’t.
She said: “She was, wasn’t she?”
“The coolest,” I said.
“She used to tell me about babysitting you. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“She said you were such a smart kid. She said you knew everything there was to know about horror movies and scary books.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I remembered watching Trilogy of Terror with her, and the way she’d retreated to the kitchen as Karen Black bared her terribly sharp teeth and stabbed the floor with a kitchen knife as she waited for her shrew of a mother to arrive, the Zuni warrior in possession of her soul. It was the longest I’m-going-for-a-drink-of-water I can remember.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“She was cool,” I said.
Mrs. Crawford went blank at that, like the memories of her daughter threatened to consume her, body and soul. I thought for sure this time would be like all the other times and she would close the door in my face.
But she didn’t. She took a step back and let the door hang open wide.
“He’s upstairs,” she said.
“Oh, okay, thank you.”
I took a step inside and gave her a glance. She nodded in reply and I started up the stairs with ice in my gut.
It took Alan a moment to answer my knock on his door. I could hear him moving around in there, and then finally he opened the door.
He just stared at me.
I said, “Alan…”
“Go away, Mark. I want to be left alone.”
“Alan, please,” I said. “Please, let me talk to you.”
He still had a hand on the door, and for a moment I thought he might close it in my face, but then his hand fell away and he walked to the center of his room and turned around to face me. Our rooms couldn’t have been more different. Mine was walled with books, except of course for the poster of Phoebe Cates in that red bikini from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which dominated the spot above my bed. Alan’s room was devoted to his two great loves, music and movies. He had an acoustic guitar on a stand in the corner, and his beloved trumpet resting on his desk. There were few books, though. Instead, he’d covered his walls in movie posters, everything from the German version of The Thing to the fantastic cityscapes of Blade Runner to a cartoonish rendering of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I stepped into the room and glanced around and said, “I saw a Conan the Barbarian poster at the mall the other day.”
He just stared at me.
“How you been, Alan? I’ve missed hanging out with you.”
Again, no response.
“Alan, are we still friends?” I couldn’t endure more of his silence so I hurried on, just filling the space between us with the first thing that came to mind. “I want to be, but I just don’t know how to reach you anymore. I want to. Alan, please, come on. Talk to me.”
I waited.
Nothing.
At that moment I felt stupid for coming. And truth be told I felt angry at him for his silence. “Alright,” I said. “I’m gonna go, I guess. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
I turned to the door.
“Wait,” he said.
I turned around.
“I saw what you did on the news.”
I nodded, waiting for more.
“You’re a real hero, aren’t you?” His tone was suddenly venomous.
“I’m no hero,” I said guardedly.
“But you killed him. The police didn’t do it. Max didn’t do it. The Community Watch didn’t do it. Hell, your own father didn’t do it. You did.”
“I was scared,” I said. “The whole time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He stepped in close. Too close for my comfort, but I didn’t back away. “You think it’ll bring her back?”
It sounded like he was taunting me.
“What? No, of course not.”
His smile turned cruel. I tried to back away from him, but he rushed me. He threw three fast punches at my face and I tumbled over backwards trying to get out of the way.
He fell on me, throwing one blind punch after another.
“You think it’ll bring her back?” he screamed at me. “Do you?” Another punch. “Do you?”
I held up my hands to deflect the blows. It did little to stop them. He went on screaming as he hit me, but I couldn’t understand him at that point. Alan was completely gone. He just kept punching, one blow after the other. His face was twisted into a grotesque mask of rage, white bits of spit on his lips. There was blood on his hands. My blood.
“I want her back,” he said, and threw another punch.
I felt like I was about to black out, and I knew I had to do something.
“Get off,” I said, and rolled to one side. He tried to stay on top of me, but I heaved one knee up and it tilted him off balance enough for me to throw him toward the bed. He landed with one arm underneath it so that when he tried to get back to his feet his shoulder was wedged under the bed.
It gave me time to get back up.
He got up too.
I touched my fingers to my nose and they came away bloody. I glanced at the mirror above his dresser and saw that he’d busted my lip up pretty good. I was probably going to have a black eye, maybe two.
“I want her back,” he said. Suddenly all the wind seemed to go out of his sails. He deflated right in front of me. His shoulders drooped and he started to cry. “I want her back.”
There was a furious burst of knocking on his bedroom door. “Is everything okay in there?” his mom yelled. “What’s going on? Open this door.”
I waited for Alan to answer
“Alan?” she called out.
I looked at him. He was shaking all over.
“Yeah,” he said then, and despite his trembling, his voice sounded remarkably level and calm. “We’re fine,” he said. “I slipped.”
I lowered my fists. “We’re fine, Mrs. Crawford,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. She sounded uncertain, but soon enough we heard her footsteps going down the stairs.
He met my gaze, and all his ferocity was gone.
The tears kept coming though.
“You look a mess,” he said.
“So do you.”
“Yeah, well,” he said with a shrug, “it’s been that kind of summer.”
THE END