Home Fires

REFLECTION 7: Guns

The little man with the big mustache had killed his wife. I remember the pain in his eyes and the hands that twisted each other’s fingers. “You have all these things,” the little man had said. “People and things you think will help you…”

He had said that over and over and every time he said it I nodded.

“Our family doctor. We’d gone to him for years. We thought he was our friend. It was psychiatric he said, and he didn’t do that. He wouldn’t treat psychiatric cases. So we went to the government. Everybody’s supposed to get medical care. Everybody, and it’s free.” He had battered his wife into submission and strangled her with a lamp cord.

“Supposed to.” I think that’s what I said.

The little man seemed not to have heard me. “They assigned us a psychiatrist. We never even spoke to him. He had all these patients, his girl said, hundreds and hundreds of patients. He’d get to Janice when he could, but it would probably be five years.”

I felt embarrassed then, as though it were my fault, and in a way I suppose it was.

“Our minister wouldn’t talk to her. She had to come to him—that was what he said. She had to come to the rectory willingly, asking his help. She wouldn’t go out of the house, Mr. Grison, and she said nothing was wrong with her. Every time we talked, it ended the same way. She’d say I thought she was crazy, but she wasn’t. She’d say I told everybody she was crazy, but it was a lie. I’d told her mother she was crazy, and her mother had called her up and told her all about it, but she wasn’t crazy, no, she wasn’t crazy, I was crazy, and I’d better stop lying about her or I’d be sorry. Her mother was dead.”

I nodded and said, “I see,” trying to make it sound as if it did some good, as if I’d helped him in some fashion.

“Our children wouldn’t help me. Jewel tried, but she brought her back after two days. The others wouldn’t even try. They’ve got their own families to take care of. I understand that. I know how it is, but they could have done something. I’d worked hard so they could eat well, so they could have nice clothes for school. That—it should have counted for something.”

To which I had agreed.

“She had friends. Three of the women got together and came over. They played some card game with her, and they all laughed a lot, and whispered among themselves, and told about their children. It lasted about four hours, and when it was over they came to me in a group, all three of them came, and they said there wasn’t anything the matter with Janice, she was perfectly fine and maybe she had been upset or something. As soon as they left, it was just like it had been before. Nothing had changed.”

The little man had leaned forward, suddenly intense. “She could turn it on and turn it off. She was only crazy when she wanted to be. Try to understand!”

And I had told him, “They can be very deceptive, I know.”

The little man had slumped as if exhausted. “She tried to set fire to the house three times, Mr. Grison. She’d wait until I was asleep, then get up and try to set fire to the house, and there was nobody but me to take care of her. I was in there with her, there in the house alone with her. I was all alone.”

It’s what we do when we’re all alone. We kill.

Here are the guns the captain gave me, right here in my belt. Guns are for that time. The police will protect us—but not when we need their protection. Our government will protect us, until we need its protection. The UN will protect us, so long as it doesn’t violate the UN’s great unwritten rule: In disputes between the third world and the NAU, always side with the third world.

How much help is the third world giving the human race against the Os? The Europeans are fighting, even though we spy on them and they on us. The Greater Eastasians are fighting, too, while spying on the NAU and the EU—perhaps because the NAU and the EU spy on them. The SAU’s fighting itself, and so is bound to win, and lose.

As for the rest … We think of their people as poor and hungry, and so they are. The governments that have robbed them of everything are waiting now to despoil us. Those governments are poor and hungry, too. As poor, and as hungry, as so many vultures.

The captain and I, alone and frightened here on this ship, are humanity in the same way that the word represents the thing. Or if not humanity, then Western civilization. Here, I am the law and the ideal of justice, the ideal our masters have forgotten—the ideal they would spit upon if they recalled it. I am justice, law, and civilization; and I am going to fight like a rat in a corner.

A cornered rat with two pistols and a submachine gun.