Twilight Songs of the 9mm: the Morning My Parents Were Almost Murdered

  I leave for work every morning a little after 5:00AM.  My shift starts at 6:00AM.  It’s an hour commute and I’m always late.  On the rare occasion I actually arrive on time, my coworkers look at me with odd expression and ask “are you alright?”  This particular morning I arrived at work at 6:11AM and had just clocked in when my Apple watch tapped my wrist.

    Mom: “Call me when you have a chance.”

    I immediately grew worried.  In the past whenever my mother accidentally called while I was at work I answered with concern, assuming something bad had happened.  She knew not to contact me unless there was an actual emergency.

    Walking back to the meat department I phoned her.

    Her voice was shaky.  “We just had an emergency situation!”

    My hands began to tremble and my legs were unstable.  I kept walking until I arrived in the office and came face-to-face with the assistant market manager and two coworkers.  I played through my mind something she might consider and “emergency.”  Something that probably wasn’t that big of a deal, just telling myself this to calm down.  Maybe one of the cats got ran over or my father fell again.  Maybe something caught on fire on the stove.  I had no idea to expect the next two sentences.  

    “Someone broke into your truck.  They fired a gun at your dad.” My mother explained frantically.

    My eyes grew wide and terror spread across my face.

    “Do you have an emergency?”  Asked the one coworker from New York.

    “Yes!” I replied and walked out of the office.

    “Do you need to leave?” Asked another as the door closed behind me.

    “Did you have your gun in your truck?” My mother questioned.

    I did.  I had a .45 in the center console.  My immediate thought was regret.  The way it sounded was that when my father confronted the thief, the robber fired my pistol at my father.  I was stricken with remorse.  Had I left my truck unlocked after I went hunting on Thanksgiving?  I NEVER leave my truck unlocked.  Goddamn, to have my father shot by some gangster-wannabe with my pistol!?  I could never forgive myself.

    “He shot fifteen or twenty times.” My mother explained.  “How many bullets were in your gun?”

    “Five.”

    “No honey, it wasn’t your gun.  It sounded like fireworks going off.” she reassured me.  “The police are here.  I’ve got to go.”

    I walked back into the office and tried to explain the situation.  I grabbed my butcher coat off the rack.

    “What are you doing with your smock?  You need to go home!” one coworker said as I kept on rambling and shaking.

    “Josh!  GO HOME!” the assistant market manager yelled.

    I kept on trying to explain so they would believe me.  I couldn’t even believe me!  Who calls out of work because their parents were almost brutally murdered?  That’s one excuse I’d never heard as a market manager.  I had a girl try to kill herself by overdosing on anti-psychotics.  She spent a week in the psych ward.  But never this.  I was in shock.  I was upset.  I was angry.  Goddamn, if I had only been there.

    They pushed me out of the office and said “fuck this place!  Family comes first!”

    I clocked out and left.

    Driving down the road a million thoughts raced through my mind.  A million emotions.  I could have just lost my parents.  I don’t have a lot of people in my life and I cherish every single one.  I have my folks, my younger brother, four friends who live in South Carolina.  Outside of that I have no family I am close to.  My closest kin are a seven hour drive away.  I no longer have friends in the state of North Carolina outside one buddy I used to work with years ago.  The song “Orphan Year” by NOFX ran through my mind as I pointed my car south down 401.  I could have been all alone.  I was angry.  Fuck that guy for trying to take away my family!  God, if I had only been there, I thought.  I would have walked outside with a 12-gauge full of buckshot, toting a .357 magnum with bear-killer rounds in the back of my jeans.  Jesus!  THE WHAT-IFS!?  

    I moved to North Carolina because I sustained a traumatic brain injury seven years ago.  I wasn’t right for a while.  My parents came and picked me up and said “you live with us now until you get better.”  I had the money to move out after a few years.  I was working in Fayetteville.  But me being with them in their 70’s brought them so much joy.  They were really lonely so far away from their families and my younger brother.  I wanted to see my parents happy after all the shit I put them through in my 20’s.  This was my amends, my path to forgiveness.  I made so much money as a market manager.  Every wish they had was granted.  I just wanted to make them happy.  I gave my mother $1,000 for her birthday and it didn’t even dent my wallet.  I bought my father a generator.  On holidays when they wanted a fancy meal they never had growing up, I bought whole beef tenderloin or a rib-roast.  I cooked elaborate, delicious meals for them.  I gave them what they never had and I felt good about myself.  I was repaying them the years of being picked up from police stations, them funding money for restitution that I had to pay back.  This was me actually making something of myself and taking care of them.  I wanted to give back more than what I took from their sanity and social standing when I was young.  All I knew how to do was buy happiness for them and be there to take care of them.  And here I was, facing their near deaths, when I still have never fully paid them back.  I never will.  

    I arrived home an hour later.  My coworker later asked “how fast were you going?”  I replied “five miles over the speed limit.”  There was no need to rush.  The shooting was over.  Police were there.  I couldn’t undo the shots or cut that guy in half with a wad of buckshot by pushing my car so fast it would travel back in time.  The deed was done.

    The police were gone by the time I arrived.  My mom showed me the damage to the front porch and my father’s car.  Bullet holes through posts and shattered wood.  I took one of my bullets and placed it against the entry to my father’s car.  It was too large.  Definitely not my .45.  These were not hollow points either, just practice rounds by the way they hit and mushroomed.  No less deadly.  The neighbor’s house had four bullet marks.  The round in my father’s car was lodged on the right side in a outward-facing dent.  Two rounds in the posts on the front porch.  We found broken branches on the bushes and a bullet hole through the metal legs of a flower pot.  One hole through the roof.  We collected three mushroomed  9mm bullets off the porch.

    I walked over to examine my truck.  I pulled the handle and the door swung open—I had definitely left it unlocked.  Damnit, I thought, I almost killed my parents through my carelessness.  And I lost a $700 pistol with a laser sight.  That could be replaced, though.  My parents could not.  Looking down at the gravel driveway, I searched for shell casings.  I noticed where they had been.  Small circular sections of gravel were missing, the police having collected the spent shells.  I counted eight spots in the fifteen feet from my truck door to the end of the driveway.  I’m not sure who arrived at the total of shots fired, but the number nineteen kept being tossed around.  The dude had an extended magazine.

    My mother sat me down and pulled up the doorbell cam video of the encounter.  She had noticed someone breaking into the truck on a motion-sensor camera connected to her phone at 6:07AM and informed my father.  From the doorbell cam, my father walked out first and went down the steps onto the sidewalk and yelled “EXCUSE ME!” while my mother stood in the doorway with the door ajar.  Immediately you hear an explosion, then another.  The rest of the gunshots are only recorded as faint pops.  My father pointed as the thief ran down the road firing.  

    “Get!” My father yelled. “You Devil outta Hell!”

    After the gunman exited view of the camera my father yelled “Call the Police!  Call the police!”

    “I’m trying, Mike!  I don’t know how!” my mother replied as her trembling hands fumbled at the phone in front of her.    

    “Nine-one-one.” My father said cooly.  Then went back to screaming at the gunman.  “You Devil!  You’re going to burn in Hell!”

    Twenty seconds.  Twenty seconds elapsed from the time my parents walked outside and confronted the robber and him firing nineteen shots from a semi-automatic  9mm while running down the road.  In twenty seconds I could have lost one or both of my parents.  One of the first shots when watching the video can be seen to enter the post in between my parents and fly through the flower pot a few feet next to my mother.  He came so close to taking them away from me.  I was full of rage.  If only I had been there.  That was the only thought running through my mind.

    My mother called my brother.  He cried.  He was never one to handle the tougher aspects of life.  One of those who believe no one should own a firearm; they should be banned.  Meanwhile my folks and I all watched the video on repeat, over and over, laughing at my dad for yelling at the gunman while being shot at.  Laughing at my mom not knowing how to dial 9-1-1.  My grandmother taught us all a valuable lesson when she was alive: life can’t get to you if you learn to laugh it off.  She was paralyzed on the left side of her body from a stroke in her 70’s.  But you could never get her down.  So that’s what we did: we laughed and joked.

    The reality sank in that evening like a bad hangover.  My father grew angry.  My mother afraid.  Days later she confessed she had dreams of the gunman returning to the house and shooting the place up.  My father told her that he felt the holiday season was ruined this year; he just was not in the spirit.  I developed a bloodlust and went to toting my .357 everywhere I went.  I wanted that son-of-a-bitch to come back and find someone who wasn’t unarmed and in their 70’s.  I wanted vendetta, to take back everything my parents were feeling and bear the weight on my own shoulders.  Happiness in their twilight years, that’s all I wanted for them.  But the twilight songs of the 9mm robbed them of that.  People kept having to remind me: you still have your parents…calm down…everything is alright…y’all were lucky.  We were, but it hasn’t taken back the bullets or the trauma my folks experienced.  

    If the 9mm comes back to sing her morning song, it will be a duet.  The .357 magnum will sing along in unison and match the chorus.