The Good Shepherd

I have never been afraid before. Not really. Not like this.

I know this is true. The truth of it is affirmed in the pounding above me. There is nothing in the world like the pounding. It is unique even to the imagination of God. It is Mike slamming my mother’s head into the floor. I’m standing alone in my basement room, listening to everything. My knees are shaking furiously. He’s choking her to death. “Help! Killing me!” her words are weak and clipped. She isn’t lying.This is not what makes me afraid.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in my closet mirror and turn away. It’s what I see in the mirror that makes me afraid. I wish it wasn’t there.

The shotgun Mike got for Christmas is shaking in my hands. I’m doing my best not to look at it, but every time I turn to the mirror, there it is. I take my finger off the trigger for fear of accidentally firing. It hurts to breathe. My reflection stares at me from the corner of my eye asking me a question that I don’t want to answer.

Less than two minutes ago Mike’s junkie brother George had run past my room, gushing blood from his arms and torso. Mike had caught him fucking my mother. He’d had suspicions, but this was the first time he had caught them in the act.

From what I could hear from down below, my mom and George had locked the door in time to stop him from entering right away, but Mike had clawed through the glass and unlocked it again. Before George could run away, Mike had shoved him into wreckage of the window, the shards of glass lacerating his arms and torso. That was all the excuse that George had needed to turn tail and run. I had just managed to catch a glimpse of him on his way out through the basement. Wherever George is now, he is probably still running.

Coward George is gone. There is no one left to do what has to be done.

If you do this, you get close. That’s a shotgun, and it sprays.

I nod at the internal voice. It is my grandfather’s voice. Ever since he had died, I had managed to keep a small bit of him locked inside. It was both the iron in my spine and the sage in my court. My door swings open like a choice.

If you start, you don’t stop.

I nod again. It isn’t a decision to start, only a condition if I do.

If I go out the door everything will change. No more being the school nerd. No more facetious jokes. All of that ends at the door. Left behind like old luggage filled with outgrown clothes. The end of the masquerade ball. All masks removed. For the tenth time I check to make sure the safety is off.

Thirty seconds pass. Would to God I had eternity to contemplate. Bryan shouts at Mike to stop. I hear my mom’s head pound against the floor above me. She isn’t saying anything anymore. I take a step toward the door, then another. I turn one last time to my reflection. He’s staring back at me.

Are you a killer? He asks.

I walk out of my door.

I guess so.

George’s blood is everywhere. It smells like a bowl full of pennies, or old pewter silverware touched by too many hands. It is the first time I have seen so much human blood on something as cold as cement. The drops spread like small red Rorschach tests, only I can’t see anything in any of them. Outside my room, the steps leading to the upstairs stretch as distant as Heaven.

I put my foot on one of the old wooden steps. Its creak is louder than Mike’s curses. The creaks affirm the awful reality. I’m really doing this.

My knees tremble a little less with every step. The fear is washed away and replaced by a blissfully thoughtless series of actions. The gun feels like an anchor.

You can do it.

That’s what scares me.

The gun swings out of my left hand and fully into my right. As the butt presses against my shoulder, I have the sensation of being trapped under a fallen timber inside a mine. Walls of black coal collapse in around me. Only a pinprick of light remains at the end of the tunnel, and it’s running away from me.

I put my hand on the final door, and turn. Mike is already dead. The lock clicks, as the tumblers fall like dice. He was dead the moment I started walking out of my room. Dead the moment I looked at my reflection and realized I could. The lock keeps clicking. The knob turns in my hand. His brain is already splattered on the carpet. The lock stops. The fear stops.

The door swings open a few tiny inches. Using the barrel of the gun, I open it wider.

It is the first time in my life I have ever hated myself. And I thought nothing of it. I thought I was a good person once. No more. No amount of wealth, class, or sophistication will replace the honesty of this. I’m a killer. All else is either a lie or a pretension.

I’m stepping onto the carpet. I already know what I’m going to say when the police arrive. The murder is already over. I know instinctively how to make the judge let me go. I know everything. I feel horrible. I feel honest.

Sirens howl.

I stop. I am as still as the dead. There are no thoughts, only blood and muscles connected to a pump. The machine stops, but retains its identity.

Mike is moving away from me toward the ruined door. He’s going to try to make it away on foot. There’s no time to for me to move down the hallway to the living room. He’s already run down the porch And with the cops here, I can’t sneak up on him anymore. The police will hear me…the game’s over.

The first thought is not relief. The first instinct is not to wash away the truth of what I had been about to do.

Hide the gun. Hide the gun and no one will know.

I’ll know.

It doesn’t matter.

I walk back down the steps. My legs are not shaking. The gun is not heavy. I know I have enough time. Even as I hear the police marching up the steps, I know I will not be caught. I put the gun back on its rack. A cop runs in through the basement door. He sees me. He’s concerned, but not for the right reasons.

“Don’t worry there, son. We got him. We stopped him.”

He continues to assure me that they have captured Mike. He can’t hurt me anymore, says the officer’s reassuring smile. I keep nodding at everything he says. It’s what a normal person would do.

I do not have to look behind me to see the weapon in its rack. It’s not the weapon I need to see, but my own two hands. I see them with every downward sweep of vision. The hands I will use to type with in the future. The hands I will see in the periphery of every story I ever write.

“I’m not afraid, Officer.”

Not of Mike, anyway.