Two-Legged Vermin

Two-Legged Vermin

October 12, 2018. Six years ago today. I’m not claiming any kind of special ability to remember every moment. Every hunter remembers their first kill. That was the day of my first kill. Unlike most hunters though, my prey was what my father would’ve called, “two-legged vermin”.

I had grown up curious about hunting. But you’ll have that, when everyone you grow up around is a hunter. I grew up blaming it on my dad for not being around to teach me, but the truth is, I put more effort into blaming him, than I did in trying to learn myself.

Anyway, growing up a momma’s boy made me soft I guess – and being soft got you bullied in Rutvegas. I’m not gonna lie, I used to have fantasies about fighting back against my bullies. I don’t even know if you could call it an ‘urge’ at that point. At the very least, definitely not an urge to kill. I think ‘fantasy’ is the right word for it – just passing fantasies of a bullied kid.

The thing is though, the bulling never went away. Oh sure, the names and the circumstances changed. But getting pushed around and taken advantage of – that didn’t go away when childhood turned into adulthood. It wasn’t until I lost everything that ever meant anything to me, that I finally decided to fight back.

You might think that losing Rebecca would’ve been enough to make me snap. And thinking about it now, maybe it was. Maybe it just hadn’t sunk in yet. Man, I’m telling you, she was my everything. I used to tell her that I loved her more than air – and I meant it. I didn’t want to live after she died giving birth to Steve. I had to keep going for his sake though. The poor kid was never gonna know how amazing his momma was. I was all he had. Well, me and that three-legged fleabag, Hank.

We decided to get a dog when we found out we were gonna have a baby. Rebecca said that she was fine with having a baby and fine with getting a dog, but since they were both my idea, she got to make the rules. (She liked to pretend it was all my idea to have a kid, but you should’ve seen her face glow when she handed me that positive pregnancy test.) Knowing how sweet she was, I wasn’t too worried about her coming up with any unfair ‘rules’. Anyway, I agreed, and she said she got to pick the baby’s name and I had to be in charge of anything dog-related.

I wasn’t surprised when she did the sweetest thing imaginable and decided to name the baby after my father, Steven Michael. Before he died, we had buried all of the hatchets that we used to cut each other down for so many years. She knew it would mean a lot to me to use the name that he and so many others in my family had used.

She wasn’t surprised when I came home from the pound with a three-legged mutt that nobody else wanted. I grew up as an outsider who spent a lot of time alone in the woods, feeling like nobody understood me, or wanted to be my friend. I’ve always had a soft spot for people or animals that nobody else wants. Rebecca knew that, and just shook her head with a Mona-Lisa smile on her lips, and the kind of love and understanding in her eyes that you only get from one person in your life – if you’re lucky.

If you knew me, you would know that my son was going to love football. All four of his birthday parties were football-themed. The kid could throw a football before he could talk. Every day after I picked him up from daycare, we went to the park and threw the football before we came home – that was our routine. If it was raining, we would throw it right in the living room. It was a bachelor pad - it was allowed.

The last day that we went to the park, it was a beautiful day – not a cloud in the sky. For October, it was pretty warm – probably about seventy degrees, but with a cool breeze. Maybe it was the breeze that carried the ball too far, or maybe there was a good reason I was never a quarterback in high school. Either way I missed Steve with my throw, and he took off running after the ball.

I saw his right foot jerk back like as if he had tripped on something, and then do a faceplant onto the ground. He wasn’t the most graceful of children, so I didn’t think it was anything serious, until I got close enough to see the hypodermic needle sticking out of his shoe. I turned him over and his eyes were rolling in the back of his head. His skin was already turning blue as I pulled my phone out of my pocket to call 911. I remember hitting the ‘dial’ button, but I don’t remember anything else until I was sitting beside his bed in the same hospital that I had lost Rebecca in.

I had promised myself I would never step foot in that hospital again, but there I was – again. With the wires and the tubes and the beeping. With the questions and the paperwork and the medical jargon that sounded like gibberish. I never wanted to experience any of it again, but there it all was – again.

It was some small comfort though, to see Jane. She was a nurse that was there when I was sitting next to Rebecca’s hospital bed. I remembered her because she was sweet and looked oddly similar to Rebecca. Apparently, she remembered me too. She saw me pacing in the hallway and came up and said hi.

Apparently, she also remembered that I forget to eat when I’m stressed unless someone reminds me. Her shift had just ended, and I felt like I could use the company, so I ‘let her’ convince me to join her in the cafeteria for some food. I don’t remember what I ate or how it tasted, but I do remember thinking how easy she was to talk to.

I hadn’t had a cigarette since I promised my step-father on his deathbed that I would quit. But when Jane leaned in and asked me in a whisper if I wanted to join her for one, I tried to be as nonchalant as possible about saying yes. I think I would’ve agreed to just about anything to spend a little more time with her at that point.

I don’t know if she spiked that cigarette with some truth serum, or if I had just been carrying too much baggage for too long, but either way, I did a lot of talking and she did a lot of listening. I told her about how much of a mess I had been after I lost Rebecca, and how I couldn’t imagine losing Steve too. I told her how some junky had left a dirty needle in the park with heroin still in the syringe, and how Steve had stepped on it.

She didn’t say much, but she did say that her dad had been an abusive junky. She said one day her mom couldn’t deal with it anymore, and mixed enough fentanyl in his bag to kill a horse. She said it served him right, and the cops just assumed it was a run-of-the-mill Rutvegas overdose. I wasn’t sure if she was just making up a story for the sake of creating a connection, or if she trusted me enough to tell me the sort of things that you wouldn’t normally tell people. Either way, it was a comment that got stuck on an endless replay loop in my head. Play, stop, rewind, play again. Aaannd repeat.

By that point in the conversation, we had walked around the entire outside of the hospital and were back at the entrance. Jane wrote her number on the back of a business card and told me I could give her a call if I ever needed someone to talk to. We had one of those - you’re. not. close. enough, hugs - and she took off walking toward the parking lot. I got one last look at her and headed back to Steve’s room.

I knew something was wrong by the look on the nurse’s face that was standing just outside the door to his room. When she told me he was gone, that was the first time I felt a strong urge to kill. I wanted to walk down to the park and shoot a junky right in the face.

I couldn’t do that though. Rebecca wouldn’t want me to do that and neither would Steve. Besides that, I had a funeral to plan – again. So in spite of the unshakable daze that I was in, I wandered out to the parking lot, stumbled into my car, and drove home on autopilot.

I was still on autopilot about three months later when I decided to take Hank for a walk around town. They say unlucky things happen in three’s right? Well I must have murdered a leprechaun in a past life, cuz sure enough, I lost the last thing that meant anything – that meant everything to me.

We were walking around the edge of the park by the road – I hadn’t walked through it since I lost Steve. Then here comes Junk, going about a hundred miles an hour right through town in a stolen car. I know it was him, cuz I looked right at his face. Anyway, as he was flying by, Hank darted toward the car for some reason, and I jerked his leash back real hard – too hard. I broke my own dog’s neck. How’s that for a gut punch? It was in that moment that the urge to kill became even more than an urge. Something inside of me snapped and I knew what I was gonna do, and I knew who I was gonna do it to.

When the cops came around asking if I saw the driver of the car, I told them I only saw the car. Junk was the son of the sheriff, and his dad had gotten him out of jams like this too many times to count. Junk was above the law in Rutvegas. I mean - everyone called him “Junk” cuz the whole town bought their drugs from him, for crying out loud.

That wasn’t gonna happen this time though, his dad wasn’t gonna get him out of this one. Junk’s days of dealing drugs and stealing cars was about to come to a screeching halt. I wasn’t sure how or when yet, but I knew Junk was going to be my first kill.