Encounters

by George Gauthier

Chapter 9

Encounter 1

What is with people these days? Has the new generation lost all common sense?

The other day I took advantage of the fine weather and went over to our local park where I sat on a bench in the inner circle which surrounds a decorative fountain. Bushes and shrubs planted behind the line of benches separated park goers beyond the circle from the backs of the benches. For all the efforts of the pest control folks in the Parks Department, an occasional rat hole would appear amid the roots, the signal for another suppression campaign.

Just as I uncrossed my ankles, a rat creeped out from under the seat of my bench. Jumping up in surprise, I screeched in disgust and went after it. Thanks to my accelerated reflexes I had no trouble in stomping the animal to death. After which I kicked the corpse into the bushes and scraped the bottom of my shoe on the pavement in disgust. Ugh!

I made a note to myself to take a scrub brush to that sole once I got home.

Suddenly two young ladies confronted me, chiding me for killing a helpless animal. How could I have been so cruel?

"Seriously? It was a rat. Vermin."

The brunette shook her head and told me:

"It was a creature of Nature and had as much right to live as we do. What you just did just now was against the law, a crime really: cruelty to animals. I'm calling the cops on you so don't try to get away."

Unbelievable! Nevertheless I thought I would see this comedy play out. So I sat back down and waited for the police. A single cop who had been on foot patrol and been vectored to our location arrived in minutes.

"Are you the ladies who reported the killing of an animal? I didn't get the full story over the radio, so I need to know was it a dog or a cat?"

"Yes, we are the ones who made the call, and over there is the culprit, that pretty boy on the park bench trying to look oh so innocent and harmless."

I rather hoped the ladies would claim to have detained me in the park, which would have given me a a second opportunity to ask whether my park bench looked to them like a getaway vehicle. Alas I was disappointed. Instead they just told the cop:

"You'll find the body in those bushes."

"OK, but what kind of animal am I looking for?"

I answered for them:

"A squashed specimen of Rattus norvegicus, aka the Norwegian or Brown Rat."

"A rat? These ladies called in a complaint about someone killing a rat?"

"They most certainly did." I replied, smug now that the investigation was going my way.

"It was doing no harm," the ladies chorused in their own defense.

Turning to the young ladies, an incredulous look on his face, the cop took them to task for making a report about the killing of a rat.

"Rats are vermin. They are destructive; they spread disease and often bite children. They get inside the walls of a building and chew through the wiring, which kills them but also shorts out the electricity in the entire structure, sometimes starting deadly fires. Killing vermin is not cruelty to animals. Their extermination is a public service. Next time you see a rat anywhere, complain to the landlord, call animal control, or the Parks Department as applicable. Now let me get you ladies' names right for the list."

"What list?"

"The Do Not Respond List, aka the crackpot list. It's like the Do Not Fly List at the airport. We do not respond to calls from cranks and crackpots unless there is a serious crime in progress. Don't waste the department's time like this again. This is your first and only warning."

With that he gave me an approving nod and went back to his beat.

Embarrassed, the young ladies beat a hasty retreat. Meanwhile I shifted to another section of the ring of benches carefully checking the bushes beforehand for rat holes.

Encounter 2

My friend the elderly veteran Sean Danaher made the news again. This time it was not for rescuing me from a pit bull or for tricking and seeing off an armed robber. No this time he had to defend himself against a murder attempt.

It seems that young thief Enrique Lopez whom Sean had sent to prison a while ago had been turned into a boy whore and regularly raped by the older prisoners. He finally could not bear the shame of it and hanged himself. His cousin Raul vowed revenge and confronted Sean who was taking the evening air in his neighborhood. Their fight was caught on a passer-by's phone and on surveillance video.

The knife attack on Sean very nearly succeeded. Taken by surprise he had just enough warning to turn his torso so his assailant's blade skittered off his ribs rather than slid between them and into his chest cavity with fatal results. Instead Sean got a flesh wound which did not leak badly enough to weaken him immediately from blood loss. The missed attack had caused the attacker to take an extra step to recover his balance, a move which separated the two fighters very briefly.

Squaring off, Sean faced his assailant.

"Why? You didn't demand money, just tried to take my life. So why are you trying to kill me?"

"My name is Raul Lopez. That boy you sent to prison was my step-brother Enrique. I blame his suicide on you. I cannot get at his rapists, but you are someone I can get to, the man who started it all. Say your prayers, old man. You are going to die!"

Sean wielded his shillelagh against his foe's left kneecap with a swing too low to be easily blocked, certainly not with a knife. He then held the shaft vertically and smashed the face of his attacker. The impact actually detached the young man's nose from the bone leaving it to hang horridly. Switching his weapon around again, Sean followed up with a thrust to the throat, which crushed the windpipe, as the autopsy later showed. Raul fell to the ground, gasping unsuccessfully for breath. Sean could not help but gloat:

"You were right. I am going to die, just not today. No, today would be your day to die."

His blood up from his close call, Sean continued in a deceptively conversational tone:

"Do you know the Rule of Three in medicine? It's a rule of thumb so it's approximate rather than exact, but it goes like this. Humans can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, but only three minutes without air. Alas, your three minutes are ticking away, second by second: Tick tock; tick tock, tick tock. And when the last tick has finally tocked, that will be the end of you."

And so it proved to be for Raul. Sean had made no response to Raul's mouthed plea for mercy. There was nothing he could have done anyway, nor did he want to help a man who would have deprived him of his last few years on the planet.

Once he was cleared of any wrongdoing, Sean released a public statement through his attorney which defended his use of deadly force against his foe.

"I am an eighty year old widower crippled with arthritis and with heart and circulatory ailments besides. The man Raul Lopez who ambushed me was twenty-six, a backstabber who tried to murder me in cold blood. I have been asked why I decided to respond to the attack with deadly force of my own. The fact is that I made no such decision. It was my attacker who set the rules of engagement. Once I realized that deadly force was in play, I went along automatically. It never crossed my mind that I had a decision to make about whether I too should use deadly force."

"So as for killing him, I did what I had to do, which I had every right to do, to respond to his murderous attack with deadly force of my own. With my military training and combat experience in Vietnam and Cambodia how could I have done otherwise? We all of us have a dark side, and my personal history makes mine a little easier to call upon at need. Besides, if there is one thing you learn in combat it is that when you are fighting for your very life that it is no time for halfway measures."

"And yes I gloated. Not my finest moment and admittedly something I did not actually have to do but which I very much wanted to do, wanted with my whole being. With my blood up. I vented my anger at the sheer injustice of his attempt on my life. That is why I rubbed it in once he realized that he was about to die. Raul Lopez was not the first man I ever killed though I hope and expect that he is the last. And unlike those who died by my hand during the war, this was personal. So while I do regret the death of his step-brother Enrique in prison, I do not regret killing Raul Lopez, not in the least. He had it coming."

Direct and to the point. That is my friend Sean Danaher. He who does not mess around.

Encounter 3

After locking up after closing my boss Nigel Dalgleish, proprietor of the trendy gay watering hole Something Else Again, prepared the day's receipts for deposit with his bank and headed down the block to the night depository. As always Dalgleish kept his eyes peeled. The cash in the bag was enough to embolden even cautious thieves.

A supposed passerby asked him for a light, an obvious ruse a robber might use to approach his target. Suspicious, Dalgliesh waved him off but the guy had gotten close enough to pull a gun using their bodies to shield it from the view of anyone else who might be around.

"Hand it over. And no false moves, or I shoot. Better yet step into the alley. We are too conspicuous out here on the street."

"No. I like my chances of surviving this encounter better if I stay here out on the street than if I go into the alley where you could shoot me, grab the loot, and flee the scene of your crime unseen."

"You've got nerve. I'll give you that. Just the same, hand over the money bag, or I will shoot you where you stand, out on the street or not.

"You are making a mistake. You really don't want any part of this money."

"And why the hell not?"

"Some of this is mob money. I pay them a tithe as business insurance. You don't want their collection agents to come looking for you. And they will find you, especially with all the surveillance video on this block."

"Seriously? You think I am going to fall for that lame story. You insult my intelligence with threats of mob enforcers who are most likely only figments of your imagination. And I certainly don't care what you might try yourself, an old man like you."

Shaking his head and sighing for dramatic effect, Dalgleish told him:

"You fail to fully grasp the situation. Yes, compared to you, I am old. And tomorrow I will be one day older still, but you won't be."

Startled and puzzled by his intended victim's threat, the thief hesitated giving Dalgleish an opening to fire his Colt 1908 automatic into the robber's chest. Three shots in less than three seconds from three feet away. And that was the end of him.

[Another of John Browning's designs, the Model 1908 is a compact semi-automatic single-action pistol marketed as sized for a vest pocket for unobtrusive carry. Less than five inches long it has a six round magazine.]

Dalgleish was not so very old, not even fifty. His war had been the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His talk about a mob connection was a bluff, intended to distract his foe while he eased his pistol from its holster. The mob does not take checks. It takes its cut off the top and off the books ideally from a cash business like a bar. It does not accept protection money in the form of a draft on a demand account at a bank, a transaction which would leave an audit trail. Something Else Again was not mobbed up.

The armed confrontation left Dalgleish shaken. Here he thought he had left that kind of violence behind him. Back then he had hardened his heart and done his duty which was to kill and maim the unfortunate young men on the other side. Most were hapless draftees whose hearts were not in this war. Only those in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard had likely deserved their fate.

Now Dalgleish had been out of the Army for the better part of twenty years. These days he was little troubled by PTSD. Although he had come under fire during the brief campaign, his tank outfit came through largely unscathed due to the poor performance of Iraqi armor and artillery. His own Abrams tank had shrugged off multiple RPGs. US combat deaths were under four thousand, none in his tank crew. Most of those killed were in the mechanized infantry which supported the tanks.

Nevertheless Dalgleish was still jumpy and easily startled by sudden loud noises, but that did not mean he could not enjoy the life he had built, the friends he had made, and the success of the business he had built. Yet here once again he had had to fight for his life and not on some foreign battlefield, where he could expect it to happen, but back home, in civil society. Such things should not happen in a well-ordered world.

Dalgleish's confrontation with the robber and would be murderer was not captured by surveillance video or by the cellphone cameras of the few people on the street that evening. As witnesses they could only report what they had seen, which wasn't all that much till gunfire erupted. They were too far away, out of earshot of the verbal exchanges between the two men. Fortunately Dalgleish had engaged the Just Press Record app on his smart watch which provided the police with both an audio recording and a transcript. Legally he was in the clear.

In view of all three recent events Kyle later commented, only half in jest:

"I dunno Troy. You really do attract trouble not only to yourself but at one remove to those around you. And without even trying."

He regretted his jest when he saw how distressed I was at the thought that I might be a danger to my friends. Tears glistened in my eyes.

"I don't want any of this. I don't want anyone getting hurt because of me. Certainly not my friends."

Paolo and Kyle pulled me into a group hug.

Badminton

One afternoon at Franklin Dyson's estate, Paolo and Kyle were teamed against Will and me in badminton. It was all very casual so we were playing outdoors on the lawn. (Formal games are played on an indoor court.) The pace of the game is fast and furious and lets you work up a good sweat. You get an aerobic while staying within a court measuring only twenty by twenty-two feet. It is competitive but only in the friendliest way, so lots of laughter and jokes and oohs and aahs for a good return and boos for flubbing completely like actually hitting the net.

The drag from the feathers on the shuttlecock makes it fly quite differently from balls used in other sports. You whack it with the racket and at first it moves fast across the net only to suddenly slow down in mid air, which is when the other side tries to return it. Unlike in volleyball where the receiving team can pass it back and forth before sending it over the net, each side may strike the shuttlecock only once before it passes over the net.

It all looks simple enough but winning requires strategy and deception as much as physical skills. The sport could have been designed to highlight the lissome physiques of the contestants, especially since we played shirtless and in our tight fitting tan-thru bicycle style shorts.

[Trigger warning: partisan politics]

Now Franklin Dyson is someone whose intelligence and wisdom I respected so I asked him to handicap the presidential race this year. What he said surprised me:

"I say a pox on all their houses. It is plain awful that US is going elect to either a mendacious crook cum grifter or an enfeebled dodderer with a diversity hire waiting in the wings to take over when mortality catches up to the latter. And don't forget third parties and independents. A scion of a prominent political family, let's call him Candidate Brainworm, might get enough votes to bollix the election entirely."

"Now you well might ask how it has come to this. The answer is the misplaced ambitions of the candidates and a former president intent on settling old scores. I have heard pols and pundits dismiss concern over the President's poor showing in the recent debate as pointless hand wringing."

"Sorry, but I have to disagree. The only reason I am not wringing my hands is that I have recently developed a touch of rheumatoid arthritis in my left hand. Biden's poor showing at the debate was just the latest evidence that the man is simply too old, that at eighty-two he is visibly and inevitably failing. He can only get worse. Win or lose his body and his mind are likely to give out during a second term."

"Biden's greatest mistake was to go back on his promise to be a one-term president, a transitional figure, not a transformational one. He second mistake was his choice of a running mate, a diversity hire who had no business being a heartbeat away from the presidency. Yet if Biden wins, she is likely to succeed him as president during a second term cut short by mortality."

"Biden 's third mistake is running this year. He should have retired from the field for this election and let his party nominate someone else paired with a VP really up to the job. If Biden loses, he will become Trump's second enabler, another Hillary Clinton. She should have let someone else run for the presidency in 2016, maybe Biden himself before he got too old."

"I was never a Hillary hater, but I do blame her for letting her ambition get in the way of what she should have known was good for the country. He negatives made her candidacy chancy at best. So it was her failed campaign which let a lamentable former reality TV personality become president the first time in 2016. Joe Biden looks to do the same in 2024. Whoever wins the election, Biden or Trump, the country loses."

"Friends keep telling me what a good president Biden has been. My answer is OK, so what. His record is beside the point. No accomplishments in his first term can make Biden any younger or any healthier, anymore than the tremendous accomplishments in FDR's first three terms made him healthy enough for a fourth. FDR was a dying man going into the election of 1944 so he picked Truman for his VP, replacing his sitting vice-president Henry Wallace whom the party bosses mistrusted, with good reason as he proved in the next election in 1948."

"Joe Biden is not so much tried and true as tired and out of it, as we will all see for ourselves soon enough. No matter how much his supporters want to deny it, the next few years will not be kind to Joe Biden, should he even live that long."

"The syllogism is ineluctable. All men are mortal. Joe Biden is a man. Therefore Joe Biden is mortal, eighty-two years mortal and looking and acting older still ever day."

"You make the future sound so grim, sir," I said.

"That is the way I see it. There is only one faint hope, a real long shot. If I had my druthers, Trump's moment of triumph would turn to ashes if, as I dearly pray, he has a massive stroke in mid rant while delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. How satisfying it would be to watch him realize that he has lost the power of speech and has become an incoherent stumblebum who can no longer be president. No more bombast, no more lies, no more Trump. If only."

"I know, I know. Such wishes are unkind. Well-deserved in that man's case, but definitely unkind. As a bonus, after his stroke, in time we could look forward to the day when the Lord calls his good servant home."

"You mean when he dies?"

"Yes, and not before time, of entirely natural causes. If only..."

It sounds sir like you are clutching at straws."

"I am. Sadly, that is all I have left. Such are the times we live in."