The Old Man

He had asked her a hundred times what had possessed her to insist on coming with him when he ran from Chicago. Why would a woman whose only crime was having an affair with a man she barely knew decide to become a fugitive, to run away with him from the government? Why would she be so stupid?

She wondered if she should have told him. She could have. He would never tell anybody else. He had been eager to know, and he almost certainly would not have blamed her. But telling him would not have changed anything for the better. It was better to let him think that she was in love and easily controlled than to know what she really was.

Her father had been in the air force, so the family moved every few years. She was born when her father was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. The family lived in a house seven miles west in Rosamond. She didn’t remember anything much about the place because they moved on to Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee, when she was six. Then there was a long period when her father was stationed in other countries. She made friends in Tullahoma, learned to play the piano, had her first dates, and even got to be secretary of her class in school. She had been happy on and off, as teenaged girls were. Then her father came home, and they had to move to Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota.

It had been hard moving away from a world she liked, and to some extent tamed, to a new, alien place during the summer before her senior year. Families of enlisted men didn’t usually live on base. Instead the air force paid her father some money for “separate rations,” so he could live off base with her mother and the kids. Air force bases had ten-thousand-foot runways, so they tended to be in flat, empty places. But in South Dakota, for once they weren’t in the middle of nowhere. They rented a house outside Rapid City, which she’d thought of as a big, interesting city.

It happened in July, when the family had just moved in. The house sat on a large yard, but the building wasn’t really big enough for them. There was some vague promise from her parents that they would keep scouting for a better one. They assembled the beds, hung up what they could, but most of the family’s belongings were still piled in the attached garage or the living room. Her father was working nights to start. As she’d thought about that night since then, she guessed the night shift was probably something they did to newcomers.

At around 4:00 a.m. she woke and heard a noise. She wasn’t sure how she knew it was a hostile noise, but she did. She got up, crept to the doorway of the room she shared with her younger sister Katy, and looked up the hall. There were two men in the house, and one of them had tripped over the pile of belongings in the living room. He got up, whispering swear words.

She slipped into the next room, where her parents’ delicate or important things had been put until permanent places could be found for them during the next few days. She saw her father’s uniforms on hangers, her mother’s good dresses, the television set, the sewing machine. She moved to the closet and felt for the shotgun. The cold, smooth barrel came to her hand. She found the box of deer slugs on the floor, knelt, and pushed the shells into the bottom of the gun one by one, sliding them into the tubular magazine. She remembered loading four, because there were two men and she would probably miss.

She got up and went to the hall. The two men were just stepping into the hallway toward her. They seemed huge in the dim light. She said, “Stop and put up your hands.”

The men stopped, and then one turned, planning to dash into the room where Katy was sleeping.

She fired hastily, hoping to hit the middle of the man’s body, but the slug hit the side of his head. The second man turned away and ran toward the living room, but she pumped the shotgun and fired again. He pitched forward and lay there facedown.

Her mother reached her about a second later, and then everyone else was up, running to her and asking what had happened in frightened, whining voices. Her mother took the shotgun from her and sent the younger kids into the parents’ room, where they wouldn’t see any more horror than they already had.

The two men were an awful sight. The man who had fallen into the bedroom where Katy slept had the contents of his skull spattered against the wall and the doorjamb and the floor. The other had a huge hole in his back and a pool of blood growing on the floor around him. The door in the kitchen that led into the garage was still open, with her father’s crowbar lying on the floor beside it, and she knew that was how they got in.

At 6:00 a.m. her father returned, and saw what had happened. He and her mother had a conversation alone in their room, and then came out. Her mother and the other children were all fully dressed now. Her father rolled one of the men into a tarp he’d bought to paint the new house, and dragged him into the garage. Then he rolled the other into another tarp, and dragged him out into the garage too. A few minutes later he drove away.

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