Spilled Milk, no. 1 Page 8

  I watched him in the rearview mirror and saw it happen: the sudden raise of his eyebrows, his mouth forming a quick “O,” the duck of his shoulders as realization washed over him. He whipped around, rushing back to his truck as quickly as his legs could carry him.

  I swore and hit the brakes, a sickening realization clawing at my gut. He was going to call it in, and I couldn’t let that happen. I shifted into reverse and stomped the pedal, careening back toward his pick up. Maybe I could reason with him.

  My truck skidded to a stop beside his, and I unrolled the window. He stared up at me, a cell phone crushed to his ear, an expression of shock frozen on his face.

  I stuck the .38 out the window. “Hang up.”

  He moved slowly, too slowly, as if his arms were trapped in Jell-O. I cocked the hammer of the gun, hoping to motivate him.

  It worked. He closed the phone, and it tumbled from his grasp. He put a trembling hand over his heart, clearly distressed. “Please…” he began, “I don’t know nothing. I never saw you, swear to God.”

  I smiled, hoping to reassure him. He was really a poor liar. “Give it to me.”

  He bent forward and picked up the phone, placing it in my hand. I glanced through the windshield, and then in the mirror. The road ahead and behind lay empty. I imagined it’d stay that way for most of the day. I could seriously slow down this man. Take out his tires, he’d have to hoof it back to his house. Given his relative age and that his house was out of sight, I’d gain at least an hour head start, if not more.

  I never thought he’d try it, and I suppose it’s mostly my fault for taking my eyes off him too long. I wanted to check his call log, see who he’d dialed, learn whether or not the call had been completed. I was unfamiliar with the phone’s menu and was scrolling through the options when I caught a blur of movement from the corner of my eye.

  My finger clenched as I tensed up. He’d launched himself at me, going for the gun. A pop jolted the air, and the birds nesting in the branches of the woods around us took flight, launching into the air in a cloud of fluttering wings, like tiny black devils pouring out of a rupture in the abyss, fleeing hell. I gasped, too stunned to realize what had happened.

  I looked down. The old man lay on his face beside my door. A growing pool of blood welled beneath him, spreading into the asphalt, staining the surface of the road. I stumbled out of the truck, breathing execrations, and knelt down beside him. He didn’t move. His face was turned to one side, and his eyes were wide and staring, unfocused. I put two fingers on the side of his neck, but found no pulse.

  I’d killed him.

  Some kind of loud whine filled my ears. I covered them with my hands, but couldn’t shut it out.

  What was happening to me?

  Shooting the judge and bailiff I could sorta justify. They were regrettable, but necessary. Unfortunate casualties in my war to rescue my kids. But this old man? What had he done except ask that I not sleep on his property?

  He was calling the cops.

  I could’ve just kept going. Taken my chances on the road and probably escaped, too.

  They’d have closed the net on me, captured me too soon.

  He didn’t deserve this!

  “He was going for my gun. That’s the only reason it went off. It’s not like I meant to shoot him. It was just an accident. That’s all. I didn’t do this.”

  I pushed myself to my feet, knowing there was nothing I could do for the man. I’d done enough.

  “I didn’t do this,” I said again, hoping I could believe it. I swore, scrambling into the truck. I stomped on the gas pedal, leaving twin black streaks burned into the pavement.

  Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done?!

  I screamed, hurtling down the road. In the mirror, the image of the dead farmer dwindled into the horizon, and was soon lost to view.

  ***

  I didn’t stop driving for at least an hour, and by the time I came to a stop I’d driven well into the southern tier of New York. Around me, the hills had steepened and the roads crumbled into less well-maintained highways than those around the major population centers. I buried myself somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, far away from places where stubborn old farmers cared about who parked on their property, who might recognize a fugitive from the law like me.

  I couldn’t escape seeing the man’s face. Every time I shut my eyes he was there. His eyes filled with shock. His face a blur of anger and pain. I saw it all in slow motion. Over and over again. Every sound of a branch breaking in the forest around me, every sudden flutter of birds taking wing brought it back to me.

  I built a fire outside the truck and sat in front of it, warming my hands. The wood hissed and spat, tormenting me with sudden pops and fizzes.

  I’d killed before. During the war, I’d shot my share of insurgents and innocents alike. I could justify it, ‘cause I was just obeying orders. Judge Rawles and the bailiff threatened my family, even though they were just acting in their official capacity as agents of the beast—the governmental bureaucracy that tried to run my life. I could make an argument.

  But this farmer? I didn’t even know his name. He was just an innocent bystander. A good citizen, doing his public duty to help catch a criminal. He was the kind of guy I’d have heralded if I’d heard his story on TV, or bought a drink for if I ran into him in a bar.

  And now he was dead. And it was all my fault.

  “It was just a stupid accident,” I told myself again. Must’ve been the thousandth time. “Didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  I wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. I couldn’t be. Hot-blooded, maybe. But I wasn’t the kind of guy that just went around shooting old men for no reason at all.

  No way.

  I turned on the truck’s radio to escape the noise of my own thoughts. Boy, was that a mistake. After two and a half songs, I got treated to the local news. “Authorities are continuing their statewide manhunt today for Gerrold Smith, wanted in connection to two murders and a shooting incident at a local motel.”

  Two murders? Did they know about the farmer already?

  “Mr. Smith is five foot six, a hundred and eighty five pounds with blue eyes and brown hair. He is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. In related news, State Police are investigating the murder of an unidentified man found dead this afternoon beside his truck due to a single gunshot wound to the chest. Ballistics reports indicate that the man was shot with a .38 caliber revolver. It is yet unclear whether or not Gerrold Smith was involved in this shooting as well, though authorities do point out that a similar gun was reported missing from Judge Rawles’ chambers after Tuesday’s fire that he allegedly set. Anyone with information regarding Mr. Smith’s whereabouts should contact police directly at the Crime Stoppers Hotline.”

  Two murders plus the farmer. That meant both the judge and the bailiff must’ve died of their injuries. That was too bad. I felt sorry for them and their families. I was racking up quite the body count—and the week had barely gotten started. And all of them were just regular people who got in the way of me and my kids—people who themselves hadn’t done anything wrong.

  In a way, I don’t suppose it was really my fault that they were dead. I wasn’t after them. I had no ill will toward the judge or the bailiff, and certainly not toward this poor farmer. But against the system—that’s where I directed my animosity. These poor people were merely cogs in the great juggernaut that was our society—the judge and bailiff in their respective duties, and even that farmer doing his duty as a good citizen. Who could find fault with them for doing as they should?

  But that system had turned against me, and I was now in a war against it, and if that meant that people got hurt in my quest to bring it to a flaming halt, then so be it.

  I felt callous for saying that. I suppose I was. Am. Whatever. Thing is, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what was happening to me, what I was becoming. It felt as though the blackness inside of me had welled up and taken over, swallowing me b
eneath a cold tide of anger, fear, and revenge.

  I was going to get my kids back. And no one was going to stand in the way of that.

  Chapter 14

  I spent the rest of that day sitting in front of my fire, watching the gyrating flames pulsate among the coals. Twisting shapes like figures writhed in the heat—faces formed and dissipated, like souls tormented in hell. For the first time, I began thinking of my fate, what I’d face if I died.

  I’ve never been a particularly religious man. Went to a Baptist church when I was a kid, dragged there with Angie by my Momma ‘cause she thought we needed the Bible. It never made a whole lot of sense to me. God seemed like some kind of remote, grandfather type with a bad temper, like a cosmic cop waiting to zap you for breaking some obscure commandment. Either that, or he was a pushover, someone who’d look the other way whenever you did something wrong ‘cause he couldn’t stomach the thought of meting out some appropriate punishment. I never could figure out which one I was supposed to believe in, and eventually I just shoved the whole thing into the back of my mind, somewhere on the top shelf next to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. He just never seemed that real to me. I indulged Mary when she wanted to take Matt and Sara with her to the local Catholic Church—mostly because that’s what my mother did to me—and even showed up a time or two myself, usually on Christmas and Easter. I never could get into all the standing and kneeling, though. It felt like some kind of weird, slo-mo calisthenics. Maybe that’s what they meant by religious exercises.

  When Mary took sick with cancer I took a chance on him, even tried my hand at prayer, dutifully kneeling before her bedside and pressing my palms together, muttering the words the priest told me to say. None of it worked. Mary died anyway, and I guess I figured that if God couldn’t be bothered to help my Mary when she needed him too—and she was the one who believed in him—then maybe I didn’t owe him anything. The priest came to visit me once after she died. I remember him standing in front of me, looking all apologetic and nervous. He tried to tell me Mary’s death was part of God’s plan. I resisted the urge to punch his lights out. Instead, I told him where God could shove his plan and showed the man the door. He never came back.

  After that, I forgot about God, and didn’t give my eternal soul a second thought.

  Until now.

  Now as I stared into the fire, thoughts of eternity and hell seemed suddenly close and alarmingly real. I didn’t know which one of the commandments said, “Thou shalt not kill,” but I knew it was in there. One of the big ones, too. Made the top ten and got included in the seven deadlies, and here I’d gone and broken it three times in less than a week. To top it all off, I was planting bombs all over the city that’d probably kill dozens more. I couldn’t imagine God would be pretty happy with me. Even if he turned out to be a pushover, he was bound to put his foot down sooner or later, and when that happened it wouldn’t be good.

  I pulled a beer out of my cooler, popped the cap, and lifted the bottle to my lips. I took a long swig and leaned back, looking at the stars. They hung like droplets of light scattered amidst the endless black. Millions of them, and many more too remote to see. Even our most powerful telescopes could not capture more than a tiny fraction of what hung in the heavens. And beyond them spun entire galaxies to the furthest reach of the universe, all of them composed of myriads of stars themselves. How many of those suns had worlds of their own? And were they populated with billions of souls like our world, each with their own problems and sins? And all of them bending the ear of the Creator at the same time?

  Shoot, I thought, no wonder God never helped Mary. It was doubtful he even knew her name or had heard my prayers at all, as many as bowed their knees at night and begged him to intervene. I’m sure we just disappeared into the background noise of space.

  Maybe my own crimes would do the same, washed away into the darkness of man’s sins like drops of water lost in the ocean—instantly indistinguishable from the rest and soon forgotten, like we didn’t matter at all.

  I found scant comfort in that.

  If nothing really mattered, sure it meant my sins didn’t matter, but didn’t that also mean my loves didn’t matter, either? That my joys, my justice, my triumphs and tragedies—all were likewise lost in a sea of nothingness? Neither Mary’s death nor life, nor Matt nor Sara mattered either.

  Or maybe it was just that it mattered to me. Maybe my family meant something because I wanted them to, and right and wrong and everything else only had the meaning that I assigned to them. In which case, killing those people or setting off the bombs was only wrong if I believed it was wrong. But if they were the unfortunate but necessary casualties in an equally unfortunate but necessary war, then I hadn’t really done anything wrong at all—and those who thought differently only did so because they were on the opposite side of the conflict as me. Wasn’t history written by the winners? Besides, it’s not like the state was automatically the good guy just because they were in power. I was like Mel Gibson playing William Wallace, fighting for a free Scotland in Braveheart. Or that time he played Benjamin Martin in The Patriot, fighting the British in the American Revolution. Or even Russell Crowe in Gladiator, ready to battle the emperor of Rome because he killed his family.

  In short, winning would justify everything, and the only way to be condemned was to surrender or die or both. So I had to keep fighting. I could be the hero my kids needed, whether anybody understood it or not, and even whether or not I’d ever be portrayed in film by a Hollywood heartthrob.

  I had no other choice.

  I finished my beer, scattered the fire, and went to bed. In the morning, everything would start.

  ***

  I don’t know how long I slept, though it was longer than I’d intended by a few hours. I made some coffee and ate a quick breakfast before starting the truck and heading back to the city.

  I pulled into a rest area outside of town and made a phone call.

  “KTPY News. How may I direct your call?”

  “Hello, I need to speak to a reporter.”

  “Regarding?”

  “Regarding news.” Duh, I thought. Why else would I be calling? “News about Gerrold Smith.”

  “Hold please.”

  I sat there in the rest area, watching cars and trucks pass intermittently on the highway, listening to phone music while my call connected. After a few minutes a cheerful voice said, “Mark Durand.”

  “You a reporter?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Gerrold Smith.” There was silence on the other end, and I began to think he’d hung up. “Did you hear me? I said my name was—”

  “Yes, yes, I heard you.”

  “I’m the guy that shot the judge and the bailiff. And the farmer—but that was an accident. See, he charged me and my gun just kinda went off. I didn’t mean to—I had nothing against him. Just kinda wish that hadn’t happened.”

  “I see.”

  After an awkward pause, I said, “So, did you want to ask me questions or something? I’ve never done an interview before. I got no idea how this works.”

  “Are you offering to let me interview you?”

  I furrowed my brow. What didn’t this guy get? “Yeah, that’s kinda why I called.”

  “I see. Well, why don’t we start with your name.”

  “I told you my—”

  “Your real name.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, lemme put it to you this way. You’ve got to be like the fiftieth Gerrold Smith that’s called our office in the past two days.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one calling.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Did you think it was original? This happens every time there’s a major news event. People like you crawl out of the woodwork and start making claims to be this guy or the other guy. Maybe your beer buddies put you up to it. Maybe
you thought it was a quick way to make a buck, or score your fifteen minutes. Maybe you thought it was a joke—”

  “Or maybe I’m the real guy.”

  “Yeah,” Mark agreed, “but how would I know? You’re gonna have to give me something more than just your name. And it’s got to be something that isn’t known in the papers or on TV already.”

  “I have two children. Matt and Sara. That’s what this is all about. Matt has allergies. I put him on a raw milk diet some months back to clear up his health conditions. It was working right up until the boys from the FDA showed with a warrant to shut us down. I stuck a shotgun in their faces and told them to get the hell off my property. That’s when all this started. Cops arrested me for aggravated assault, making threats, menacing, and uh, interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty—or something like that. Then they took my kids away. My wife Mary passed away some years back. Cancer. That’s what got me started on the raw milk diet in the first place, y’know, thinking Mary’s cancer might’ve been genetic. That’s why I’ve been doing this. The raw stuff was helping Matt out. He’s had behavior issues ever since he was a little kid. This diet’s the only thing that’s ever worked, y’know?

  “The stuff they want to give him—the drugs and such—it’s just poison. It’ll kill him in the end. I can’t let that happen.”

  “I see,” said Mark. “Any way I can corroborate this?”

  “I suppose you could call social services or the hospital. Find out about Mary’s cancer. It was renal cell carcinoma. Chromophobe. They did a radical nephrectomy, but she was stage four.” I sniffed. It still hurt saying it. “There was nothing else they could do for her.”

  Mark’s voice was quiet. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Smith.”

  “Matt and Sara’s all I got left. Now they’re gonna take them from me. I can’t let that happen. You a father?”