False Memory

None of them had fled the house as Dusty had urged them to do — or if they had gotten as far as the roof of the back porch, they had returned. At least Lampton and Claudette must have known that Junior was loading his crossbow with the intention of joining the battle, and apparently neither of them had tried to stop him. Or perhaps they had been afraid to try. Any parents with common sense or a genuine love of their child would have taken the crossbow away from him and dragged him out of this house if necessary. Or maybe the idea of a boy with a primitive weapon defeating a man with a machine pistol — a twisted incarnation of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, which set so many hearts aflutter in the academic literary community — had been too delicious to resist. Dusty could no longer pretend to understand the odd thought processes of these people, and he was weary of trying.

“He killed a man,” Dusty reminded his mother, because for him no amount of shrill argument could change this fundamental truth.

“A lunatic, a maniac, a demented man with a gun,” Claudette insisted

“I’d taken the gun away from him.”

“That’s what you say.”

“That’s the truth. I could have handled him.”

“You can’t handle anything. You drop out of school, you drop out of life, you paint houses for a living.”

“If customer satisfaction were the issue,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it, unable to restrain himself, “I’d be on the cover of Time, and Derek would be in prison, paying for all the patients’ lives he’s fucked up.”

“You ungrateful bastard.”

Distraught, on the verge of tears, Skeet pleaded, “Don’t start this. Don’t start. It’ll never stop if you start now.”

Dusty recognized the truth of what Skeet said. After all these years of keeping his head down, all these years of enduring and being dutiful but distant, so much hurt remained unsalved, so many offenses had never been responded to, that the temptation now would be to redress all wrongs in one terrible venting. He wanted to avoid that dreadful plunge, but he and his mother seemed to be in a barrel on the roaring brink of Niagara, with nowhere to go but down.

“I know what I saw,” Claudette insisted. “And you’re not going to change my mind about that, not you of all people, not you, Dusty.”

He couldn’t let it go and still be sure of who he was: “You weren’t here. You weren’t in a position to see anything.”

Martie had joined them. Taking hold of Dusty’s hand, gripping it tightly, she said, “Claudette, only two people saw what happened. Me and Dusty.”

“I saw,” Claudette declared angrily. “No one can tell me what I saw or didn’t see. Who do you think you are? I’m not a doddering old senile bitch who can be told what to think, what she saw!”

Behind his mother, Junior smiled. He met Dusty’s eyes and was so lacking in shame that he didn’t look away.

“What’s wrong with you?” Claudette demanded of Dusty. “What’s wrong with you that you’d rather see your brother’s life ruined over something as meaningless as this?”

“Murder is meaningless to you?”

Claudette slapped Dusty, slapped him hard, grabbed handfuls of his shirt, tried to push him back, and as she shook him, words shook from her, too, one at a time: “You. Won’t. Do. This. Vicious. Thing. To. Me.”

“I don’t want to ruin his life, Mother. That’s the last thing I want. He needs help. Can’t you see that? He needs help, and somebody better get it for him.”

“Don’t you judge him, Dusty.” Such venom in the emphasis that she gave to his name, such bitterness. “One year of college doesn’t make you a master of psychology, you know. It doesn’t make you any damn thing at all, except a loser.”

Crying now, Skeet said, “Mother, please —”

“Shut up,” Claudette said, rounding on her younger son. “You just shut up, Holden. You didn’t see anything, and you better not pretend you did. No one will believe you, anyway, the mess you are.”

As Martie pulled Skeet aside, out of the fray, Dusty looked past Claudette, to Junior, who was smirking as he watched Skeet.

Dusty almost heard the click as a switch was thrown and insight brightened a previously dark space in his mind. The Japanese called this a satori, a moment of sudden enlightenment: an odd word learned in one year of college.