Ginkgoes of Ben Venue

When I arrived, the State Troopers were outside pulling wires through holes in the back wall of the trailer, angling them into the ground where bullets had punctured the earth, making notes of the trajectories. Other faceless officers were lifting clumps of grass, searching for evidence and combing the hillside.  “It’s uncertain,” they said, “suicide or homicide.” How could they imagine suicide?  Dad commit suicide.  Never.  He wouldn’t do that to me.  And he wouldn’t go without a fight, and he wouldn’t go easy.

For me. He did this for me.  Hanging on to his crisp twenties, sliding them under all the Persian want-to-be rugs, saved for the day he would peacefully die and surprise me.  This is not what you had in mind Dad, or was it?

I stepped over shards of glass, absent-mindedly pointing out to the officers where I knew Dad hid his money.  All of it, still there under every carpet, had no meaning now, except to flaunt it at the killer, and swallow it slowly in front of him. I maneuvered the cluttered kitchen, past a pan of cold Dinty Moore beef stew, half eaten from yesterday. The thumping pulse in the tunnel of my throat raced up the back of my head drowning the background of official chatter.

His gaudy ring hung to the edge of the disheveled night stand, the design almost polished away, too worn to be of any value to anyone, except me. This is not how it should be, I thought, aiming myself to some unknown planet, this is not how an old man’s life, anyone’s life, should have to end.

Broken lamps littered the floor.  Doors on the small safe were flung open; papers were strewn across the room. Guns he collected were missing. Spattered blood painted a dichotomy of life and death upon the ceiling, the windows, the walls. I was in a dream, somewhere, but not there, as I knelt and pushed my palms to the reddest part of the wall, bits of him, hearing...yet deaf. I was a raped and wounded child in the depths of fear...a fear unlike any other...dissolving my soul, stealing my words, erasing my thoughts, leaving me naked in the midst of raging flames. Then, for the longest time, I held my fingers in my mouth. Never, would I get to feel him again.