Why weren’t they using their sirens?
The vehicle approached; large, dark, boxlike.
It could only be something like a SWAT team.
Good.
The dogs looked at the vehicle, then calmly went back to their respective tasks of disassembling the driver and guarding me.
Dusk was coming fast. There was maybe an hour of daylight remaining.
Still, the vehicle shone its headlights directly into my eyes. I blinked, pulled back my head, and tried to turn away, only to find the face of the second mastiff batting its nose into mine to turn my head forward.
There was the sound of a metal door sliding open. A figure stepped from inside the van. It was difficult to make out any features because of the headlights’ glare, but I could make out some if his shape.
Not a police officer. Not unless the Cedar Hill Police Department was now issuing bowler hats as official head gear.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted something in a language like no other I’d heard before. It sounded like an amalgamation of languages; guttural clicks of Basque, monosyllabic tones of Mandarin, retroflex consonants of Gondi and Kurukh, even the musical complexities of Welsh.
Over two decades, and now my World Language minor comes in useful.
Whatever language he spoke, the dogs understood.
They both stopped what they were doing and trotted over to the man with steps that were almost light and happy.
“You need to go,” said the blurry figure behind the lights.
“B-but… but they killed that man!” I said, pointing toward the body as if the other man didn’t have a clear view of it already.
“Raw material is a bitch to get hold of these days, Gil. You’ll remember soon enough. Now, you’d best be on your way to get Carson.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but the two mastiffs came lumbering out of the light, their red eyes glaring, their lips pulled back in full snarls.
I staggered back to my feet, stumbling toward my car, not wanting to take my eyes away from the dogs.
When my opened car door hit me in the ass, I twisted around and fell into the seat, slamming the door closed, putting the car in gear, and tearing away from there in a squeal of tires.
I ran two stop signs and least one red light on my way toward Audubon’s Graveyard. How I didn’t get pulled over by the police, I’ll never know. I only know that I was so far beyond scared that it would have taken the light from scared a thousand years to reach me.
I need to concentrate, to find something concrete, something real, something of the world I knew and understood to grab hold of and not let go, to ground me, to let me know that I wasn’t cracking up again.
(Again? Did I hear the word “again”? Does that mean you’re finally going to let it come back to you, pal?)
Ignoring you.
I pressed a hand against my chest as if that would help slow the jackhammering of my heart, then slid it up to press against my screaming shoulder. Even through the jacket and shirt I could feel the old scar tissue beginning to swell, and suddenly I had it, the one thing I could latch onto, the one thing that might keep me in one piece until I’d found Carson and could start making sense out of all of this.
The promise of seeing Beth again.
Because if it hadn’t been for this old wound, I never would have met her…
NINE
Two months before my tenth birthday my aunt Amy, who was then eighteen, invited me to go along with her to visit one of her friends who was away at college. Aunt Amy usually took me out at least once every two weeks-a movie and pizza, then shopping at the seemingly endless supply of record stores in Columbus (usually near or on the Ohio State University campus). Even then, people twice my age were aware that when it came to contemporary music-be it rock, folk, progressive (“prog,” to those of us in the know), even crossover jazz like John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, this little geek from Cedar Hill was The Kid to Ask. Whenever Amy was going to have a party and wanted the music to be perfect, she’d come to me to help her record tapes. The deejays at Stereo Rock 92 had nothing on me when it came to instant recall of who played in what band and on what label and when.
The excursion that day promised to be a good one; the new Steppenwolf album was just out and I’d been saving my allowance to buy it. No place in Cedar Hill carried it yet, but I knew I’d find it at the first record store I walked into in Columbus. Amy told me that she needed me to settle a bet with some of her friends about the last couple of Grand Funk Railroad albums, and if I’d come along with her and “put those know-it-alls in their place,” she’d buy the Steppenwolf album for me. (Amy made it a point to never tell me ahead of time what the “bet” was specifically about, because she knew I enjoyed being put on the spot when it came to rock trivia. I’d been the ace up her sleeve on at least five occasions, and not once had I failed her or been stumped by any of her friends. I liked that. I liked being good at something and briefly admired for it: “Hey, this kid’s good. Really good. Now get rid of him and let’s party.”)
The drive from Cedar Hill took forever, it seemed (two hours in a car in kid-time is an eternity, remember?), but eventually we arrived at our destination. I knew something was wrong as soon as we started driving down a side road that led to the dorms.
“Shit,” said Amy, banging a fist against the steering wheel. “They’ve got it blocked off.”
We turned around and tried three other side roads but all of them were closed. Finally, Amy drove around one of the roadblocks and ended up on a really nice road lined with hills and trees. It would have been pretty if it weren’t for the smoke coming over the trees and all the shouting in the distance.
Just as we were coming around a bend in the road Amy hit the brakes. Several yards ahead sat an ominous looking truck that I recognized as having something to do with the Army.
Amy’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, Lord…”
I rolled down my window to see if I could get a better view of what was going on. I could hear a lot of people shouting somewhere on the other side of the hill. I could also hear something that sounded like the voice of a robot trying to be heard over the shouting. (I later found out it was a bullhorn being used by campus security.)
A soldier walked around the side of the truck and pointed at our car. Amy grabbed my hand and said, “Stay here,” then climbed out to meet the soldier. I sat there looking at the smoke coming over the trees. I wasn’t so much nervous as I was impatient to know what was going on, so like every curious, annoying nine-year-old you’ve ever met, I looked to make sure Amy and the soldier weren’t watching me (they were arguing, rather loudly), opened the door of the car, and made my way toward the hill. I was almost to the top when I heard the robot voice shout something I couldn’t understand, and then something made the loudest crack! I’d ever heard and the crowd screamed.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, my Aunt Amy had driven us to Kent State University. It was May 4, 1970, and we’d arrived just a few minutes before the National Guard opened fire on students gathered to protest the war in Vietnam. They were supposed to fire over the protestors’ heads, but some did not. All of this I discovered in the days and weeks to come; at the moment all Hell broke loose and invited Purgatory to join the party, I was flat on my face at the top of that hill. I looked up and saw a structure a few yards away and, figuring it would be safe, crawled toward it.
There is a very famous photograph from the Kent State shootings. In it, a young female student is halfkneeling, half-squatting by the body of a student lying facedown on the sidewalk. Her arms are parted at her sides like a celebrant blessing the hosts at Mass; her long straight hair is caught in the wind and flowing to the right. She is in the middle of releasing a scream of anguish that to this day I still hear in my dreams.
In the background, past the people running by in panic, past the lush hillside, through the wisps of dissipating tear gas, up in the corner, you will see a small gazebo. If you are a person who has the technology to do so, and if
