Blind Spot

by Tom Kakonis

  Arms and legs flailed and splashed around him. He didn’t mind. Nothing to him. Barely conscious of them anyway, for all that remained of his strength was funneled into his hands, and all his rage codified in a single word, chanted over and over again, a lunatic singsong: “Kill kill kill kill.…”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Quinn.”

  His own voice, counseling mercy? Seemed doubtful. The demon in his head, urging prudence? Even less likely. He turned slightly, enough to detect a new figure, pair of them actually, a male, bear-bulky, baggy-faced, vaguely familiar, and next to him, sheltering Jeff in her arms, a female who appeared to be his wife. He stared at them dazedly.

  “Said that’s enough. Let him go.”

  There was, in that sharp command, an authoritative growl Marshall remembered from somewhere. Couldn’t quite place where. He released his grip on the throat, and the man waded into the pond, jerked the soggy dancer upright, dragged him roughly onto the bank, flattened him, yanked his arms behind him, and slapped handcuffs on the wrists. It came back to Marshall who he was, this briskly efficient fellow. That cop, Sergeant somebody, forgot the name.

  The cop shambled over to the other figure, the fallen one, lying in the grass, mouth ajar, eyes wide open and bulging and fixed on nothing at all. He stooped down and examined him, but only briefly. With a hard glance at Marshall he said, “This one’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah, dead.”

  Marshall, still standing in the water, did his best to assimilate that blunt pronouncement, bald in its simplicity, stark in its finality. But it wasn’t easy. Something seemed to be giving way inside him, like a tunnel punched through a wall of granite and out into the wan light of what he remembered of what was commonly called reality. Dead. This man who could have broken him in two but hadn’t, rescued them instead. And all the others: Lester dead; the one he’d killed at the plant; the one he might have killed had he refused to speak, drilled him through without a second thought; and the one up on the bank that he surely would have killed had someone not intervened. The lilting strains of the carousel drifted down the hill. Corpses of wasps and dragonflies floated on a scum of moss lapping at his knees. Living, he was surrounded by death.

  “How ’bout him?”

  The cop again, indicating the cuffed figure twitching like a snared fish on the grass. “What about him?” Marshall said. Question for a question.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A squint of doubt came into the canny, weary eyes. “Lot you don’t know, Mr. Quinn.”

  “He tried to kill us. That much I know.”

  “Well, you better come outta there. It’s over now.”

  Over, was it? Every fable has a beginning and an ending and events in between, but an ending is not necessarily a resolution, nor a beginning a commencement. The memories of all that had gone before this fable’s beginning and the visions of all that would follow its ending came to him now like a dream draped in shadow, its dreamer a stranger to that man he had once been, the two no longer even on nodding terms.

  The woman who held his salvaged son and who was certainly his wife regarded him cautiously, as though from across some galactic distance, a melancholy speculation in her eyes. She rewarded him with a faint smile, scarcely more than a flicker, and said, “You did it, Marsh. You found him.”

  Though it cost him a small stitch of pain and no little awe over all he had forfeited to arrive at this moment of tarnished triumph, he lifted his shoulders in a lopsided shrug. “Yes, well…promise is a promise.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tom Kakonis was born in California, squarely at the onset of the Depression, the offspring of a nomadic Greek immigrant and a South Dakota farm girl of Anglo-Saxon descent gone west on the single great adventure of her life. He has worked variously as a railroad section laborer, lifeguard, pool hall and beach idler, army officer, technical writer, and professor at several colleges in the Midwest. He published six crime novels before retiring for over a decade, then resumed fiction writing with the novel Treasure Coast. Currently he makes his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.