NOVEMBER 8, 2010 

Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse. That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me. Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away.

“The story of your life is that you’re not to blame for anything,” my mother always said when I told her that. “Out of everybody on earth, you’re the only one who never did anything wrong. Whatever happens, it’s always somebody else’s fault.”

“It is always somebody else’s fault,” I told her.

“Poor you,” she always said back. “Screwed by the world.”

“Hey, Dr. Jägermeister’s calling,” I used to tell her. “Bottoms up.” And she’d just go back to whatever she was watching.

“So what’s the deal with dinner?” sometimes I’d say. “You have a busy day?”

“Go to Pizza Hunt,” she’d tell me.

“That’s Hut, you fucking idiot,” I’d tell her back. And then she’d say something else wrong the next time, just to frost my ass.

I was thirty-nine years old and living with my mother. I hadn’t had a good year.

“What was your last good year?” my friend Owen asked me. “1992?”

He wasn’t doing too well himself, but he managed to come over once or twice a week to eat whatever we had lying around.

I made some comment about whatever it was we were watching and he said, “What do you like? Do you like anything?”

“He likes to complain,” my mother told him. “He likes to make trouble.”

I liked to complain. I almost choked.

What did I like? I liked my dog. I liked hunting in the woods. I liked target shooting. I liked my kid, when I was first getting to know him. I liked women who weren’t all about money or what I planned to do with my future.

“It’d be different with you if you ever got laid,” Owen said during a commercial. My mother snorted.

“Hey, you’re the one with the hand in your pants,” I said.

“Now he’s going to tell us about Stacey,” my mother told him. But I didn’t say a word.

My kid was down there in Stacey’s house a thousand miles away. I was supposed to send checks but otherwise not come around more than once or twice a year. I mean, try to cram a whole year’s worth of family time into one week. Maybe it’d work for you, but it didn’t for me.

Stacey said the kid was asking where his dad was, and that if I wanted to see him I had to send money. It got so I let my mother answer when she called. They’d stay on the phone telling each other stories about me. “You think that’s bad,” my mother would say.

A guy in basic told me that girls who weren’t good-looking were the smart move because they were more grateful and weren’t as likely to run off with somebody, and that made sense to me. I met Stacey at Fort Sill and liked her family better than her. I was a 71 Golf, which is like a clerk, hospital stuff, administrative. She was, too. I’d be dropping off discharge batches and she kept her head down when I teased her, but I could see her smile.

We went out for a year and five months and then we got married and had a kid. She was always saying she was going to move out, but she finally did the deed when I pushed her down the stairs. She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like “Hey, you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well, what did you do to me?” And the cop who showed up was a guy who had had a crush on her in high school and he was all “You can’t be with this person. You want to press charges?”

He’s standing over her while she’s crying at the kitchen table and I’m in the den thinking, Why don’t you rub her fucking back. And she was all Miss Generous: “No, just get him out of here. I don’t feel safe.”

Out here in the fucking sticks, you don’t meet anybody. I went to this singles social in the basement rec room of the church. You had to fill out forms so they could match people up. These two women were running the thing. They asked if I could read and write. When they saw my face, they said it was just a question on the form.

But then I always reminded myself I didn’t have it so bad. Our next-door neighbor’s nineteen-year-old had some kind of thing, muscular dystrophy maybe, and they told her that kids like him only lived to be about twenty-one. When she came over for coffee with my mother, she told us to pray that his heart muscle stopped before his lungs, because that’d be a less horrible way to go.

I had all kinds of jobs. If it was some fucking thing no one else wanted to do, I did it. I worked in a hospital laundry. I washed pots and pans. I separated metals in a scrap yard. I drove a shuttle. That job had a little pin that came with it that said “Martin, for Comfort Inn.” Whenever I said stuff to my mother like I could see why my dad walked out, she’d go, “Where’s your pin? Don’t lose your pin.”

I started thinking I should just go off the grid. You know: if I wasn’t using anything or spending anything, I didn’t need to make anything. I’d grow my own garden and shit. In the winter there’d still be rabbits and deer. I’d work out. Read a book. Improve my mind, unlike the other fucking imbeciles around here.

“Who says you’re not using anything or spending anything?” my mother said when I told her. “Somebody’s cleaning out the refrigerator every two days.”

“That’d be your friend Owen,” I said. “Your TV pal.”

“My friend Owen?” she said. “He doesn’t come over to see me.”

“Well, I never asked him to come over and see me,” I told her.

“So why’s he come?” my mother said.

“Because he’s a fucking bum, like me,” I told her. “ ’Cause he’s got nothing else to do with himself.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “Don’t get excited.”

“Don’t get excited,” I said.

“Don’t get excited,” she said. “Put that down.”

The Comfort Inn was my last job. I took two days off to go to my grandmother’s funeral and they never let me forget it. The week I was back, even when I did a good job on something, all I heard was “You never told anybody you weren’t coming in, you didn’t let us know we were supposed to cover for you, you left us holding the bag.” I’m working and the supervisor’s just standing there running me down instead of doing his job. I finally told him that kind of horseshit was all well and good but, you know, it was pretty unprofessional.




You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.

There was this girl Janice who I saw a lot at the store. I started talking to her, because it seemed like she was always out, and I was always out. I’d go to the library, or the store, and I’d see her. She seemed like a good person, and when I was with her I found myself thinking maybe I could do this or maybe that. Sit down at a restaurant with someone and eat like a human being. Take her back to my place and maybe watch a movie or something, if my mother would ever leave the house.

Naturally, this Janice had an ex-husband who was a cop. But as far as I could tell she didn’t see too much of him.

I didn’t need to be near any cops. The last thing I needed was somebody running a check on me.

My mother and Owen didn’t know about Janice. They didn’t know that I had a plan all worked out, that asshole here hadn’t completely given up.

One of the times I saw her in the library, she was taking out like three DVDs about Milo and Otis. I said to her, “So you like dogs, huh?” and she said she did. I asked if she had one and she said yes to that, too. I told her I had one and she asked what kind and I told her. She said when she was leaving that maybe she’d see me walking it and I told her that maybe she would.

I went over there twice with my dog and couldn’t get myself to go up to the front door either time. The second time, I was talking to myself and it still didn’t work. And while I was standing there my dog took a dump on her sidewalk.





I walked the woods for however many years and know the whole area better than anybody. Down the end of the logging road where people went to park, on the edge of the state forest, I hid a bag, a big duffel, that had a sleeping bag and two knives and one of my rifles in it. One of the knives was really more like a machete and axe combined. I had some bug spray in there, too. I thought it would be like a survival bag, if it came to that. I had it all in a big plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Then somebody stole the whole thing.

I got everything in Wichita Falls at a gun-and-knife show after I got out of the military. I still had the .308 and a .357 Desert Eagle and a lot of ammo, so I started another bag. This one I made sure I hid better.



Fifth grade, we used to play this capture-the-flag game where anybody who got touched had to go stand on the base and there’d be fewer and fewer kids left after one side started winning. Fifth grade for some reason everybody decided it was boys against girls, and they’d pick out who they wanted to get caught by. You had to use two hands to touch and I would always tear free and so I’d be one of the last ones running around. This horrible cold day, the girls were looking at their first win if they could just get me. Four or five of them boxed me in and everybody on both sides was going crazy. This girl named Katie Kiely was right in front of me and all she had to do was step forward. I remember not being able to stop myself from grinning. And her expression changed when she saw my teeth, and she couldn’t make that last move. The other girls were shouting at her and then it was like they caught what she had and they couldn’t step forward, either. It was like I was a hair in their food. The teacher rang the recess bell and we all just stood there looking at each other. Then she rang it again and we all went inside. My dad left the year before, or the year before that. I was in either third or fourth grade. Apparently, when he and my mother could still joke around it was always about me coming to a bad end. At least, that’s what she said later. Like anybody could tell anything about anybody when they were nine years old. One Christmas, she said that as part of the joke he gave her a VHS of “Boys Town,” the movie where Spencer Tracy’s the priest and Mickey Rooney’s the tough kid who goes straight because he gets a new baseball glove or smells some home-cooked bread or some fucking thing.

She watched it every year around Christmas. I think it might’ve been the only thing he gave her that she didn’t throw out after he took off. She’d always go, “Your movie’s on,” after she put it in the machine, but she always ended up watching it by herself.

There was one scene in it I liked, where a kid at one of the big lunch tables at the home tells Mickey Rooney how easygoing the place is, and how if he wants he can go on being Catholic or Protestant or whatever. And Rooney tells him, “Well, I’m nothin’.” And the kid says back, “Then you can go right on bein’ nothin’. And nobody cares.” And one of the other kids showing him around says that on a clear day you can see Omaha from there. And Rooney goes, “Yeah?Then what’ve you got?”

I didn’t think I’d seen the movie that often, but I got it in my head, so I must’ve watched it a lot. There’s this other scene where they’re about to strap a guy who didn’t pan out into the electric chair. And the guy goes to Spencer Tracy, “How much time have I got, Father?” And Tracy goes, “Eternity begins in forty-five minutes, Dan.” And the guy asks him, “What happens then?” And Tracy goes, “Oh, a bad minute or two.” And the guy’s like “Yeah, I know. After that?” And Tracy tells him, “Dan, that’s been a mystery for a million years. You can’t expect to crack that in a few seconds.”



There were a lot of things I wanted to do about my appearance, but only so much could get accomplished until I got certain things squared away. I recognized that. I had a lot of stress. That’s what nobody understood. I was in the military and after that I was working two jobs and trying to raise a family, and it seemed like even so, living at home and doing nothing, I had more stress than I had back then. Back then I never complained about it, I just did it, but people didn’t realize that I was doing whatever the average person did times two. I took whatever shit the average person took times four. And I never said anything. I did my job and worked my eighty-hour weeks and knew as sure as shit that whatever I wanted was going to get taken away from me.

And the kind of thoughts I started to have people had all the time. But it was like everybody said: thinking and doing were two different things.

After my dog took the dump on her sidewalk, I didn’t see Janice around for like three weeks. I thought maybe she was avoiding me. Or maybe she’d gone to Florida. Or maybe she was dead. I wrote a note, finally, and stuck it in her screen door: “are you still interested in dog walking?” And then when I got home I remembered I hadn’t put my number on it. And then I remembered I hadn’t put my name on it.

That third week my dog finally flushed a turkey in the state forest and I blew its wing off. I took it home to my mother and she said, “I’m not cleaning that fucking thing.” And I said, “I bring you a whole turkey and you act like all I’m doing is making work for you?” And she said, “I’m not gonna start up with you,” and went back to her show. So I threw the turkey in our dumpster. Then when I was walking the woods I thought that was stupid, so I hiked all the way back and pulled it out. I’d give it to some charity or church so some poor kid could have some decent meat. So somebody could get something good out of it.




The guy who sold me my Desert Eagle told me that it was the last of the Israeli ones and that no more were going to be imported. Somebody else told me later that that was bullshit. I got all the extras at the same time and taught myself how to change the barrel length, so the version I had in my new bag had the ten-inch barrel instead of the six. The guy at Gilbert’s Gun & Sportsman kept telling me he wanted to see it again. He called it the Hand Cannon. I joined an Owners’ Forum on one of the USA Carry Web sites for a little while to get some tips and just talk to somebody. My user name was MrNoTrouble and somebody trying to be funny asked if that was the name my mother gave me and I said yeah. I met some guys online who seemed O.K. and some of them said they knew what I was going through. One guy, triplenutz, didn’t live too far away and said we should meet up and go hunting together, but we never did. Another guy talked about taking his old toilet out back and letting fly at it with his Eagle from eighty yards. He recommended the experience for all Eagle owners. He said a piece of the flush tank broke the garage window behind him.

I got my dog from the stray facility at Fort Sill when I was leaving. I saw his photo on the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Web site. The poor little fuck was just sitting there behind the chain-link looking at his paws. The adoption fee was fifty-two dollars, but that came with rabies and distemper-parvo shots, plus deworming and the heartworm test.



I stayed away a couple of days after the turkey incident and when I got back I sat on the porch and cleaned my rifle in the cold. After a while, the porch light went on and finally the door opened and my mother asked me to take her shopping. She had the door open only a little, to keep the heat in. “I need some things,” she said after I didn’t answer, like she was explaining.

“Why didn’t you have Owen take you?” I said. She’d had trouble driving since she hurt her back. It didn’t bother her to ride, though.

“He hasn’t been around since you left,” she said. “So you gonna take me or what?”

We went to the Price Chopper and the state package store. “It’s not for me,” she said when she told me about the second stop. “I’m getting stocking stuffers for Daryl.”

I went up and down the AM dial while she was in there. Every single song I heard was what my father used to call a complete and utter piece of shit. “Don’t ask me who Daryl is,” I said to her when she finally came out.

“You know who Daryl is,” she said. She dumped the bags on the seat between us.

“Remember, ‘accounting’ and ‘accountability’: nothing in common.”

“I thought this wasn’t for you,” I said, looking at the Jägermeister.

“I was here, I figured I might as well get something for myself,” she said.

The other bag was filled with little travel bottles of liquor. “I got an assortment,” she said. “He likes those and peppermint patties.”

“I think you got that thing they talk about on the news,” she said when we were halfway home. “P.T.S.D. Is that what it is? I think you need to talk to somebody.”

“P.M.S.,” I told her.

“I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said.

“I talk to somebody every day,” I told her. “Believe me, it’s no fucking picnic.”

“Owen said you could file a claim,” she said. “Everyone gets something from the government except my kid.”

“That’s because your kid’s an imbecile,” I told her. “We already know that.”

“All I’m saying is I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said. “And now I’m gonna drop the subject.”

When we got home, the poor fucking dog had wrapped himself around the tree with his chain. I don’t know why we left him outside, anyway. “You’re not gonna help me carry stuff in?” my mother said when I left her in the car.

She showed up at the door to my room a few hours later, after I was in bed. “There’s phone numbers and stuff you can find,” she said. “Owen told me.”

“So have Owen call them, then,” I said.

“Owen doesn’t need them,” she said.

“You got enough money,” I told her. “And I been through worse shit in this house than I been through out of it.” And that shut her up for like three days.



When she was finally ready to talk, I went back to the woods. I took the dog, but of course he ran away. I only found him again when I got back to the house. People like to talk about cancer or strokes, but if I was going to get something I’d want to get cholera. I came across it on the Plagues & Epidemics Web site and somewhere else it said that cholera killed thirty-eight million people in India in less than a hundred years. It even sounds like nothing you want to fuck with: cholera.

After basic at Fort Sill, I was in for four and a half active and then four in the reserves. In the reserves I trained to be a 91 Bravo, which was a field medic, but I washed out. When they gave me the news, they said not to worry, they’d still find me something to do. I ended up working out at the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center. “What’d you do there?” my mother wanted to know when I got back. “Oh, you know, a little bit of this, little bit of that,” I told her. I think she was watching “The Farmer’s Daughter.” Even Owen had to laugh.


You want to talk about sad: even after all I been through, one of the saddest things I ever saw was a year after I got home, when my mother pulled over at a stop sign, it must’ve been ten below, and she’s got the window down and she’s scooping snow from the side mirror and trying to throw it on her windshield to clean it. We’d gone about three blocks and couldn’t see a thing before she finally pulled over. I’m sitting there watching while she leans forward and tosses snow around onto the outside of the glass. Then every so often she hits the wipers.

She did this for like five minutes. We’re pulled over next to a Stewart’s. They got wiper fluid on sale in the window twenty-five feet away. She doesn’t go get some. She doesn’t ask me to help. She doesn’t even get out of the car to try and do it herself.


My hair started falling out. I found it on my comb in the mornings. I could see where it was coming from. Not that anybody gives a shit, but you put that together with the teeth and you have quite the package.

I came in from thirty minutes of sliding slush off the porch and there was my kid’s voice on the machine. My mother was playing it over again and turned it off when I got inside. She went back to whatever she was doing at the sink.

“Were you gonna tell me he called?” I asked.

“You cleaned up all that ice already?” she asked me back.

“I didn’t do the ice. I did the slush,” I told her.

“What am I supposed to do about the ice?” she wanted to know. I left her and went into the living room. She said, “There’s a message from his mother, too. She says she’s gonna get a lawyer to hop your ass unless you start sending some money. And somebody else called,” she added once she was back with me in front of the TV.

I went out to the kitchen and played the machine. There was only one message and it was from the kid, saying he wanted to wish me a happy holiday. He said, “There was a thing about your unit in the paper, so I sent it up to you.” I could hear a little buzzing, maybe something in our phone, maybe something in his. “Let me know if you get it,” he said after a minute, like he was waiting for someone to answer.

I’d been getting a headache that felt like lights going on and off and trying to crack my skull. “Who else called?” I asked. I was still standing at the machine. The water from my boots was black from all the shit in the snow.

“How would I know?” my mother called from the living room. “She didn’t leave a name.”

“It was a woman?” I asked. “She wanted me? Was her name Janice?”

“I just said she didn’t leave a name,” she said. When I went back to the living room and stood in front of her, she said, “I can’t see,” meaning the television. “You got in here fast,” she added, after I sat on the sofa. “What do you got, a girlfriend?”

I kept thinking this was my one chance, and then about how Janice could’ve found my number. Maybe she asked someone at the library?

“You’re not answering me now?” my mother said.

“I’m trying to think here,” I told her.

She shut up for a while. Then she finally said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to give you the time of day.”

I was thinking I should get the dog and go over to Janice’s house, but it was sleeting. I figured I’d do it when it got better out. But I couldn’t sit still, and my mother finally said, “You’re shaking the whole floor,” meaning with my leg, so I went up to my room. The dog came up to check on me and took one look and went downstairs again.

Then it got so bad I had to go out anyway, so I hiked down to the creek and checked some of my traps. I was wearing my field jacket with the hood, but I still got soaked. Two of the traps I couldn’t find and there was nothing in the third, because I don’t even know if I’m setting them right, but a month ago I found one snapped shut with some blood around it in the snow. When I got back, there were police cars all around my house. I hid in the sandpit a few houses down and watched until they went away.

What is this what is this what is this? I was thinking. I was surprised how much it freaked me out. I had some tricks I’d come up with over the years to keep from losing it, and I used them all. I waited half an hour after the cop cars left and lay there banging my chin on my gloves. Who else did I know who’d be in a sandpit in the snow outside somebody else’s house?

The sleet changed to rain. It was so cold my head was rattling. One of the medics supposedly training me in the reserves used to call me T.B.I., for Traumatic Brain Injury. The first time he called me that, I told him I hadn’t had any brain injuries, and he said, “Well, maybe it happened when you were a baby.”

Finally, I stood up and came down the hill and circled my house on the outside. The back yard was like a lake. The light was on in my mother’s bedroom and I went up to the window. On the dresser under the lamp there was a pamphlet that said “Your Service Member Is Home!” The TV was going in the living room, but maybe she was in the cellar. I waited until she came up the stairs and then pushed through the back door.

“They’re looking for you, boy,” she said when she saw me. Not “You must be fucking freezing.” Not “How about a warm shower?”

“What’d they want?” I asked.

“They said they had a number of things they wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They wanted to look in your room and I said, ‘You got a warrant?’ I told them you’d be back tonight.”

“What’d you say that for?” I asked.

“What was I supposed to tell them?” she said. “That you were out looking for a job?”

I went up to my room to think. There were some issues about prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Some bad checks back in Wichita Falls. There was a girl I’d scared by not letting her past me when we ran into each other in the woods. She’d torn her sleeve when she finally got away. It could’ve been a lot of things.

“I gotta go,” I said when I came back downstairs. “I’m gonna do some camping for a while.”

“Camping,” she said. “In this.” She put her hand out to the window.

“Don’t tell them where I went,” I said. “Far as you know, I never came home.”

“I should be so lucky,” she said.


I changed into dry clothes and put on like twelve layers and got together a rain fly and a cooking stove and a tent and a big pack full of cans of food and other shit and got out of there. “You taking your dog?” she called, but I never heard what she said after that.

It took me an hour to get to the end of the logging road, because I was covering my tracks with a pine branch as I went, and then another hour to find the duffelbag in the snow, and from there I followed a creek uphill way into the forest. I found a spot I already knew that had good cover and visibility and got everything set up and then started going through what I had and just what it was I thought I was going to do.

There was a trail fifty yards below that did a hairpin, and snowmobilers used it and cross-country skiers. Farther down was a waterfall and swimming hole and I remembered a notice on the library’s Christian Outings bulletin board about a faith hike for teens called the Polar Bear Mixer.

I figured, well, if I’m going to jail I might as well get something to eat first, so I made some stew. And while I was eating I started thinking that once the cops had me one thing would lead to another and I knew what went on in jail, I’d heard stories. So I emptied the duffel in the tent and got all geared up. I had stuff I didn’t even know I had. A bipod mount for the rifle and a winter-camo wrap for the stock and barrel and scope. Even winter-camo field bandages. When I was finished, I felt like this way I was at least ready for whatever.

But nobody came down the trail. It got dark. I got some sleep. Nobody came the next day, either. I had little meatballs for breakfast and sat around and waited and finally went out looking for rabbits, but the snow was too deep, so I had to come back.

I’d stepped in the creek and even with three layers of socks my feet were freezing. In the credits part of “Boys Town” right at the beginning there was a kid in an alley warming his hands over a fire in a bucket. I’d forgotten that.

The guy that gets electrocuted is the one who gives Spencer Tracy the idea for the orphans’ home in the first place. When they’re getting ready to take the guy to the chair, the governor tells him he owes a debt to the state, and the guy goes nuts on them. He asks where the state was when he was a little kid crying himself to sleep in a flophouse with drunks and hoboes. He says if he had one friend when he was twelve he wouldn’t be standing here like this. Then he throws everybody but Tracy out of his cell.

I spent the afternoon keeping the stove going and sitting on a tarp and squeezing my head with my hands. The difference between where I was and my mother’s house was that where I was I didn’t have to listen to TV.

I had everything I needed in front of me and I still couldn’t let well enough alone. That night, it sleeted again and the next morning my stove was covered with ice. I washed my face and changed my socks and got my Desert Eagle and hiked back down to the road and through the woods to the culvert that led the back way into town. It was sunny and I was sweating like a pig by the time I climbed out of the culvert at the turnaround at the end of Janice’s street, but I didn’t want to hang around for too long, so I stood there for a few minutes with my field jacket open, flapping it to dry myself off, and then went up to her house and rang the bell. The Eagle hung in the big inside pocket like a tire iron and I thought, I don’t know what you brought that for. A guy swung the door open like he’d been waiting for me. He had to be the ex-husband. He looked me up and down and said, “What can I help you with?” But I let it go and just said, “Is Janice here?” And he gave me another look and I remembered how sweaty I was and that I was wearing four shirts under my field jacket. Collars were sticking up all over the place.

He said, “Yeah, she’s in the back. What can we help you with?”

I stood there bouncing my leg for a second and reached under my coat like my Eagle might’ve fallen out. Then Janice came up behind him and I saw her get a good look at me. And I just said, “Nothing. I’ll come back,” and I left.

“Hey,” the guy called from behind me, and I heard Janice laugh. Halfway down the block, I cut through somebody’s yard into the culvert. My heart was going so fast I was sure I was having a heart attack. She was probably still laughing. He was laughing with her. It was a comedy. I crouched at the bottom of the culvert and stepped around like a midget taking a walk. Even my outside shirts were soaked. I can never believe how fast I sweat through my clothes at times like that.

I worked my way up the culvert to Janice’s back yard and then ran up to their window but it was too high to see in so I just reached up as far as I could and squeezed off four rounds. From that angle, I probably just hit the ceiling. The Eagle’s so loud that at first your ears can’t believe it. After the second round, somebody yelled something but I couldn’t tell what. After the last one, I was booking back through the yard for the culvert. I could hear somebody whooping from the next house over. They probably thought it was fireworks. And while I was hauling down the culvert to my path through the woods I got to hear sirens from every cop car in upstate New York.

The whole way back through the woods and up into the hills, I thought, You’regoing to be hard to track. I mean, the snow was three feet deep. Even the town cops weren’t going to be able to screw this up.

I had to rest on the logging road and again along the creek but finally got back to the tent. I pulled out my sleeping bag and threw my rifle and the Eagle and all the rounds I had on top of it. I could hear guys on the logging road already, the sound carried that far.

People talk about, Oh, this kid’s sick and that kid’s bipolar and this and that and I always say, Well, does he piss all over himself? And the answer’s always no. That’s because he chooses to go to the bathroom. Because he knows better. Hecontrols himself. People control what they do. Most people don’t know what it’s like to look down the road and see there’s nothing there. You try to tell somebody that, but they just look at you. I don’t know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but they do.

Guys are breaking through the brush down below to my left and right, which tells me they’re not only coming but they’re coming in numbers. I can start to see them even through the trees.

I haven’t cleaned the rifle. Mr. Logistical Planning. Even when I try to make lists for myself I can’t follow the lists.

At least I tried, though. I tried harder than most people think. But what I did was, in life you’re supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn’t.

I can hear even more sirens, way off in the distance. The cops down below have stopped short of the hairpin. They’re keeping their voices low. They might be starting to catch on. I shove my elbows deeper into the snow, wipe my eyes, and put my face back to the scope, sighting back and forth. I don’t even know if I’ll open fire. I never know what I’m going to do next. They’ll probably just come up here and pull me to my feet and push me all the way down the hill. Another scene that always got me in that movie was when the kids were waiting for Spencer Tracy to bring something home for Christmas. Of course, he didn’t have any money, so all he can pull out and show them is a package of cornmeal mush. And this one little kid just stares at him. And then the kid finally says, like he wants to kill somebody, “What else you got in that bag?” And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn’t have anything else, the kid goes, “I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.” ♦