He asked, What would the recoil be like?
Magnificent, the linebacker said. Like holding a stallion in your fist.
The safety was on but Kelly gave the trigger a pull anyway, explored the short range of motion the safety allowed. He put the pistol down, asked how much.
The linebacker laughed. That’s it? Five minutes ago you didn’t know what you were looking at and now you know exactly what you want.
The linebacker laughed again. The sound filled the room, overflowed it. Somewhere above them a baby started crying. Kelly had forgotten there was an upstairs. He hadn’t even known about the baby. A woman’s voice could be heard comforting the child. Kelly made an awkward apology. He wanted to leave but not without the pistol, its halo of deathly want. The linebacker named a price and Kelly opened his wallet. The linebacker sealed the pistol in the bubble wrap, reaffixed the masking tape, searched the kitchen drawers for a plastic shopping bag. Upstairs the baby cried and cried. As Kelly walked out of the house the dogs kept their silence, cowed in their cages. He wanted to get down on his hands and knees and growl into their faces but the linebacker wanted him out of his house. Upstairs, the baby continued to cry and the woman’s voice lost its whispered comforts, rising harsh and frustrated as Kelly stepped out into the snow.
On the last night of the year they made love carefully, bodies angling against each other in the dark, their motions unhurried. Her cane was beside the bed, her nightstand full of muscle relaxers, creams, lubricants. It was up to him to find the proper approach, to move them through the stations of their sex, and now he did so easily, knowing what she liked best. Or else he thought he did and she let him think it. She was vocal in her desire in a way he had not previously known. He had preferred a certain roughness but this was good too. He’d never known any tenderness within himself, had only briefly approached it in the past. The way a child supposedly rewrites its parents: he’d craved this, thought he needed it. Even though the child wasn’t his own he had wanted the child to make him new.
Afterward they lay naked beside each other, waiting without talking for the end of the year, and in the quiet dark preceding the midnight hour he didn’t speak the sudden sadness she couldn’t see. The new year came and went and at first he said nothing, instead thinking about how distant all the other years he’d known had become, how everyone he’d ever loved then had been lost to him, their faces gone dark, the smell of their skin faded from memory. Now here he was in the zone, in a new year, living some new life. But every new affection bred its own fears. Because anyone you loved became a responsibility. Because to be a good man meant taking their protection seriously, meant removing every danger it was in your power to remove, no matter what the consequences.
Because any responsibility taken far enough inevitably risked an atrocity.
He could only rarely speak openly but now he turned toward her, tried to tell her what he felt for her, how he wanted what he felt to last. But as he spoke she moved closer, then stopped his mouth with hers.
No, she said, pushing herself up on one elbow, her pale body lean and luminous in the streetlight descending through the window. This is all temporary. I won’t last. Sooner or later the attack that ends all this will come.
He shook his head, denied the obvious truth. He said, I am with you either way. I am with you no matter what happens.
Temporary, she said again. Everything you love about me is temporary.
Her hands pushed upon his stretched chest, lifted her body atop his again. He was so much bigger than her, the difference greater than ever before.
She said, I think you are temporary too. I think you believe you know who you are because of something that happened to you a long time ago. You haven’t told me but I know. But there’s always a choice. You could be this person or you could become someone else.
There is a good man, she said. There is a good woman. We could become those people. Sometimes it feels so easy to choose.
FLORIDA
THE KILLER WAS NOT AFRAID. The killer knew who he was, how he had been made, made himself: The killer almost joined the marines. The killer almost remained a Catholic. The killer almost had a successful insurance business. The killer almost earned a criminal justice degree. The killer almost went to jail for threatening his then fiancée. The killer almost went to jail for shoving a police officer. All this in the almost-distant past and now the killer was almost thirty. Now the killer rented his home but he almost always thought of it as his.
The killer did not think of himself in the third person but there almost wasn’t enough of him to justify the first. The killer was living a life of almost but surely almost had not made him afraid.
The killer was not afraid. There had been four hundred police responses to his neighborhood in thirteen months but still the killer was not afraid and because he was not afraid he had placed fifty of those calls himself.
The killer was not afraid when he made his complaints: This loud party, he said; This garage door left open; These unbearable potholes; These children playing in the streets, where they might be hurt.
The killer was not afraid when he reported suspicious persons, loose dogs.
The killer was not afraid when he said Burglar into his cell phone, when he said Thief. Even if he had not seen any actual burglaries, any actual theft. Only almost, the potential of.
When the dispatcher asked him to describe the suspicious persons, he was not afraid when he said he was almost sure they were black males, when almost every single time he said they were young and black and suspicious.
The killer was not afraid of the suspected burglars or the suspected thieves. The killer was not afraid of the thugs he thought he saw, their dark shapes moving from house to house, looking in windows, eyeing flat-screen televisions and surround-sound systems.
The killer, who did not know he was a killer yet, was not afraid of meeting one of these thugs while he patrolled the streets, in command of the neighborhood watch.
Why not? Because the killer was not afraid.
Surely the killer was not afraid behind the wheel of the car, with his pistol on the passenger seat. Not just because it was raining and hard to see. It wasn’t the weather the killer wasn’t afraid of.
The killer was not afraid for his home.
The killer was not afraid for his wife.
The killer was not afraid because he was there, watching and waiting.
He would not let them make him afraid.
Even though he couldn’t say who they were.
The killer was not afraid when he dialed the emergency number.
The killer was not afraid when he said into the phone, There’s a real suspicious guy here.
When he said, Walking around in the rain. This guy is up to no good or he is on drugs.
When he said, These assholes. They always get away.
The absence of doubt. The pushing back of almost. This was what the killer wanted. To be sure. To be right. To be righteous.