Page 79 of So Far Gone

“Dean—” Shane started toward him.

From the ground, Kinnick, too, began crawling to help.

But Burris took Bethany by the hair and began dragging her backward toward his pickup. “Lying whore needs to be taught a lesson.”

“Dean!” Shane yelled. “Let go of her!”

From the ground, Bethany punched backward, over her shoulder, and hit Burris’s arm, but he just kept dragging her down the driveway, her feet kicking up dust.

“Dean—” Shane pleaded again.

Bethany swung again and this time Dean reached down and smacked her in the ear with the gun butt, pulling her by the hair with the other hand. “Someone needs to teach... this bitch—”

“Dean!” Shane said once more. “That’s enough!” And he started running toward them.

Seven

What Happened to Shane

Shane used to have this recurring nightmare: it’s dawn and he’s outside their old house in Grants Pass, wearing flip-flops (always, for some reason, he’s in flip-flops), looking up and down the street, when he hears a buzzing sound, and darkness rises on the horizon, becoming waves of monstrous locusts from the Book of Revelation approaching as helicopters (the noise of their wings... like chariots with horses... tails like scorpions)and demonic hordes of faceless soldiers (...with hair like women’s hair...) begin moving up the street, pulling people from houses (...slaying a third part of men...),and in the dream, all he can do is stand there, rooted to the ground, watching as they approach, wishing he’d been more prepared, more diligent, that he’d built a bunker, or moved them to the mountains, or put a better dead bolt on the door, anything—knowing that his wife and children are inside and that he is helpless to stop what is coming... How long, he wondered, had he been so afraid? Of something terrible happening to his family? To his country? How long had he suspected it wasalready happening?

No, heknewfear.

But this—this was something different: immediate, primal, physical.

Systems beyond his cognition fired up: fight-or-flight amygdalasignaling hypothalamus, pituitary gland releasing hormones into the blood, nervous system firing adrenaline into the mix, cortisol raising heart rate and blood pressure, skin pores tightened, lungs on fire, pupils dilated, mouth dry, tunnel vision—an enraged Shane running toward this man he’d thought was a friend, this man he’d thought could helpprotecthis family, thinking,I might have to kill him, this man who was dragging the woman he loved by the hair, and that’s when—

A quick vision from the past interrupted this rush of pure instinct.

Nothing more than the synaptic spark of an out-of-the-way neuronal sensor—a fraction of a millisecond in mental processing time, a day forever lodged in his brain—and, as Dean Burris dragged his struggling wife by the hair down the dirt driveway—this was the memory that popped unbidden into Shane’s mind:

Junior year high school. First mustache. Hot Sharon Bell invites him to Young Life. (You mean Lame Life!) But Sharon Bell has a butt you’d follow anywhere, even to church, and Shane goes to their dumb picnic where he meets a flock of bland, smiling-Christian types, of no interest socially,solame they are somehow lamer thanhislame friends. (Shane is a gearhead, a motor monkey, always in the parking lot, comparing tires, speakers, horsepower.) Despite Sharon Bell’s righteous backside, religion doesn’t stick with Shane that day at Young Life—it will be another twelve years, many of them spent wasted, pissed at the world, before Shane truly hears the call of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—but this one image from high schoolwillstick with him—

—and it came to him now, in the instant he moved toward Dean Burris—

A slow kid at his school, known asBones(because he’s so fat, an early high school attempt at irony), is being teased by a few baseball players in the parking lot on a warm spring day as Bones waits for his mom to pick him up. They push the kid back and forth like a human Hacky Sack.What did you have for lunch today, Bones? Everything? You like to eat dicks, Bones? Or just balls?Submental stuff—no one is morehateful than high school baseball players, hat brims low, chaw in their gums, a-hole subset of the most popular kids in school, and years later, when Shane hears people rail about “elites” and their vicious attempts to control and sabotage good Americans, it is these baseball players he will sometimes picture, confident jerks who come from places like Forest Lake and who think they’re so much better than you. But on this day, no one at his school is dumb enough to stand up to these bullying princes, to insert themselves in the trouble. And so, while Bones is tortured, they all look away, or wander off, Shane staring at his Sambas. And that’s when one of the Smiling Christians he recalls seeing at the Young Life picnic, a small, nerdy senior in a red polo shirt, whose name might actuallybeChristian, steps between Bones and the baseball players. “What’s the matter with you,” Christian scolds them. “Do you get off bullying people?”

And that’s it. Predictably, the baseball players turn from Bones to Christian, making fun of the nerd’s clothes, calling him queer, but Shane is impressed that Christian isn’t fazed by this—of course nothing changes that day, life goes on, it’s just one of a million daily encounters between high school haves and have-nots—

But twelve years later, when Shane Collins, on probation for possession, found himself weeping at a court-ordered NA meeting in a church basement in Salem, Oregon, hefeltthe Lordcome into his soul and his chest seemed to crack open and his limbs began to tingle as he remembered brave Christian, or whatever his name was—

No—it was something even weirder! Charlton, yes, Charlton!

Anyway, he remembered thinking:Thatis what God can do. He can make the fear go away. He can fill you up, the way He filled that smiling string bean in the red polo shirt and gave him the strength to stand up to a demonic horde of baseball players, to stand up to the bullies and the elites—

Thatwas the kind of Christian, the kind of Charlton, that Shane had longed to be, the conqueror of fear, not its slave—

And now, as his wife swung her fists over her shoulder helplessly, and Dean Burris dragged her toward his truck, and his battered jerk of a father-in-law crawled away in the dirt—typical—Shane looked quickly over his shoulder, hoping the kids weren’t seeing this—Oh, God, Asher, please don’t be watching—but if he was, Shane knew what he’d want his son to see, his fatherstanding upto the bullies and baseball players of the world, standing up to the demonic hordes, and maybe, just maybe, it was never too late to be a better Charlton, and maybe, if you could be born again, you could also be born again...again, because Shane yelled, “Hey!” as he wound up and threw a haymaker at Dean Burris, missing his intended target, Dean’s bulbous chin, but landing with a dull thump on the man’s thick neck—Yes, Shane thought,thisfelt right,thiswas good, the endlessfearturned now to fighting for the people he loved—as Shane swung again, brushing Dean’s cheek and nose this time, and he said once more, “Let go of my wife!” which worked, because the spit-furious Dean finally let go of his handful of Bethany’s hair, dropped her to the ground, swung his handgun up to the right, and shot Shane Collins in the forehead.

***

All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed these adages to be true, but now, bleeding on the ground, watching Dean Burris stand over his dead son-in-law, Rhys wondered if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil. He wondered if cruelty and its bride, fear, didn’t just exist spontaneously, forces as elemental and eternal as gravity.

“Jesus, Dean!” Goateed Bobby was the first to speak, the shot still ringing in the air. “What thefuck! What did you do?”

And then Bethany’s voice, screaming, begging, crying: “Shane? Shane? Shane!” She crawled toward her husband, who had fallen backward, his head turned away, legs crumpled unnaturally beneath him. She reached his left side, weeping, trying to pull his limp body into her arms.

On the ground, Kinnick crawled in the opposite direction.

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