“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

– Zen Proverb

 

Through the panes of the French door, I could see the blood.  Its varying shades, from fresh crimson to drying black, contrasted with the white concrete slab of the back patio, bright or bold even in the faint bluish light of these minutes before sunrise.

It was a clear, cool, Southern California morning in the middle of spring.  As usual I was up before the dawn, and as likely leaving my live-in girlfriend, still sleeping, to piss her day away.  So it was.

My first thought upon seeing the blood was that my dog must have gotten herself injured in the night.  I wasn’t too worried:  I could only see a few drops, and I was fairly desensitized to the sight of it from my time in The Middle East.  I opened the door and followed the trail of congealing blood to the left.  The amount of it increased as the drops lead me to her, to Bear, my big black Malamute-Lab mutt.  She lay there, shifting about as she does when she’s done something naughty.  Normally, she’d have been waiting happily to greet me at the door.

“Come here, girl,” I called, walking to her.  To my surprise she got right up and wiggled to me with her head down and her tail between her legs, all submission and guilt.  I ran my hands over her, feeling for blood, for a wound.  Nothing.

“What happened, Bear?  Huh?”

I looked back down at the blood trail and followed it further.  And there it was, a dead opossum.

“Oh, Bear!”

She’d been tortured by that opossum for months.  I’d seen it several times myself, having been drawn out back on a few nights to Bear’s barking at it, as it navigated atop the cinder block wall surrounding the backyard.

One night I knocked it off the wall with a shovel. Bear had been barking and leaping up the wall trying to get at it.  But for some reason the opossum just stood there, not moving, teeth bared and mouth open in that classic opossum silent snarl.  Looking for something to use in the faint light coming out from the living room windows, I saw the shovel.  With it I approached the opossum, dodging my frantically barking dog.  It didn’t flinch or budge as I closed in.  When I came within shovel strike range I slowed my approach.

I reflected upon my growing fear of the opossum, confused by it.  What did I fear, the opossum’s frozen pose, its bared fangs, its unknown reaction?  Would it leap upon me and slash and bite at my neck?  Had I survived two wars to die by the canines of a marsupial?

I poised for the shovel strike, winding back, telegraphing my move, hoping that the opossum would get the message and move on.  Yet it stayed frozen, silently defiant despite Bear’s wild barking and my threatening posture.  Leading with my hips I unwound.  The shovel swung forward in its arc and the spade-shaped head covered its mark.  I felt no resistance, heard only the dull smack of the fiberglass handle on cinder block.  I thought I had missed.  But the opossum was gone.

I now stood over Bear’s dead victim.  It lay on its side.  There was blood in its fur in a few places.  A dark red puddle of it pooled under the opossum’s head, and more leaked from its mouth.  In the mysterious predawn light its head appeared to be an already sun-bleached skull.

Fearing there had been a fight, I went back to Bear and checked her over again.  There were no signs of a struggle on her, no cuts or scratches.  She seemed fine, and no longer interested in the opossum.  She hadn’t even eaten any of it.  Bear had only been protecting her territory.  I doubt that the opossum fell into the yard and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bear had finally jumped high enough to snag it with a snapping bite and bring it down.  I couldn’t help but be proud of my girl and I gave her some love so she’d stop feeling guilty about what she’d done.  There was no way I’d punish her for guarding our home.

But she must have pulled the opossum down into the yard.  This reminded me of some of my fellow Marines – the gun nuts, the home defense fanatics.  They’d actually say that they hoped someone would break into their home just so they could shoot an intruder.  There were debates on the best firearms for home defense.  They joked about shooting the prowler outside of their house then dragging him inside to make it look like a legal Castle Doctrine killing.  Typically, such talk was uttered by those who’d never seen combat.  But that desire – not just to guard, not just to be prepared – to use deadly force on what wasn’t necessarily a deadly threat…  This instinct to kill seemed detached from its purpose of protecting.

The evolutionary, instinctual, desire was to perform an act that happened to achieve an evolutionary advantage.  The desire was not to achieve that advantage itself.

I was kneeling beside Bear, petting her head and giving her verbal kudos as well, when I noticed movement in the opossum’s direction.  I looked up to see the damned thing lifting its head and staring straight at me!  Holy shit, it was still alive!

The opossum laid its head back down. I walked over to it.  Sure enough, it was breathing, though laboriously; its eyes were open now, dazed, and slowly, randomly, looking this way and that.  Clearly the thing was dying a slow death and Bear could have cared less about finishing it off.

Damn it!  Because of this I was already running a little late for work.  I had to get to the plant and open it up.  But I couldn’t just leave the opossum to suffer.  I could get my Sig 9mm and shoot it in the grass, but the sound would freak out the neighbors and possibly wake up Liz, my girlfriend, and I didn’t need that right now.  I thought of beating it to death with the shovel – too gruesome.  A knife?  Nope.  Fuck!

I could smother it in a trash bag, but it would probably tear out.  I could bury it in a trash bag.  Yes.  The shovel was already out.  I could bury it in the side yard in front of my truck. No one ever went there but me. The side yard couldn’t be seen from the front.

I put Bear into her dog run and went quickly into the garage via the living room to get the trash bag.  Out back again it was easy enough scooping up the opossum with the shovel and bagging it.  I took it around through the gate into the side yard, set the bag down and started digging.

Guilt nagged me.  I was burying this thing alive!  How could I hasten its death?  Poison.  There was insecticide spray concentrate in the tool closet right here in the side yard.  Yep, there it was, and a rag.  I soaked the rag with the poison, opened the trash bag back up, put the rag in and sealed the opossum’s black plastic coffin with a quick knot.  Then I finished digging the little grave in no time and put the bagged, poisoned, near-death, opossum down in it.  I piled what I could of the dug dirt back in the hole, scattered what remained, packed it down with the shovel, and lastly stomped on it all with my feet.

Mission accomplished.  I was sweating in spite of the cool dry air.

As I turned to put the shovel away, I heard a car pull up into the driveway out front.  I leaned the shovel against the wall and went to check it out.  I heard the car’s door open and close, then footsteps leading away from me to the front door.  As I rounded the corner to where I could see the unfamiliar car in my driveway, I heard a knocking on the front door, then heard its opening and closing just before I could get around to the entryway to see who it was.  And now whoever-it-was, was inside my house, obviously welcomed in by Liz.  I heard the deadbolt slide home as I finally made it to the door and reached for the handle.

 

“When you look for it, there is nothing to see.”

– Tao Te Ching

 

Twenty-five years ago, barely out of high school and fresh out of boot camp, I married my elementary school puppy love girl, Erin.  She was a short, blonde, sweetie.  We had gone from first through seventh grade together, then I moved to another school district, though still close by.  We started dating in our senior year of high school and were pretty much inseparable.

All my friends went off to college.  I alone had gone the enlisted military route, having had quite enough of school.

The marriage went well enough at first, but after six years came the time for my hitch in the Marines to end.  After seeing how stressful my Desert Storm tour had been on Erin, I promised her that I would leave The Corps after that first hitch.  But when the time actually came, I really didn’t want to quit.  Erin said she understood and agreed to relieve me of my promise.  She may have done so, but I soon learned that her absolution didn’t include things staying the same between us.  She became increasingly distant.  All the little things I did that she judged to be wrong, rather than let them go like she used to, she boxed them up in a little collection by which she came to identify me.  I suppose that she felt I chose The Corps over her, and that was that:  I was no longer the man whom she’d married.

I left her a mere year into my second hitch.

After Erin, I tried to avoid relationships for a while.  Multiple overseas deployments helped to that end, but eventually I fell in touch with an old schoolmate, Himalia.  By this time I was living on the East Coast, far from my home, far from Erin, and now far from Himalia.  That was really fine by me.  I was afraid of getting involved with someone I actually liked, only for her to end up being my rebound girl.  The distance would let me reconnect with her without the stress and bullshit of dating.

Himalia’s and my relationship began on an intellectual level.  A common friend referred her to me regarding a shared philosophical interest.  Our email conversations were amazing.  It turned out we were both non-Christian, and both pursued a more ascetic experience of things divine.  We talked much of the various Eastern philosophies, of religions and the religious.  Humor and banter inevitably worked their way into the correspondence, as did each other’s relationship status.  Eventually, phone calls replaced emails and talks of meeting face to face ensued.  More and more the relationship included a physical attraction, despite our not having seen each other in a quarter century.  But if the pictures she sent me had been current, I wouldn’t be disappointed when at last we met.  She was Persian, with big dark eyes, lashes that were long and long; skin that made me weep; the body of a belly dancer, fit and ample.

Her job at the time had led her to Nevada.  She had been an investigative journalist working for some strange conspiracy theory website out of The Bay Area that supposedly kept watch on the Illuminati and the Freemasons.  In that position she’d had access to mounds of FOIA documents and had stumbled across some seemingly innocuous data containing the medical histories of military personnel working on Edwards Air Force Base.  She claimed that she’d identified a revealing trend in the data regarding Area 51, that the data weren’t even medical records at all, but were coded matrices of ionospheric readings.  She mentioned a heretofore unbeknownst connection between Area 51 and a joint Navy / Air Force installation in Alaska known as HAARP.  She mentioned coordinated efforts between Area 51 aircraft performing aerial chemical dumps and ionospheric agitation by HAARP.  Himalia claimed that world governments, under the collective New World Order, were actually manipulating hurricanes, creating earthquakes, and gradually optimizing the earth’s climate to facilitate control over the earth’s atmospheric and subsurface natural phenomena.  When she presented her hypothesis to the website’s editor, he immediately tried to hijack the project, to take it on for himself.  Himalia promptly quit and fled to Las Vegas to continue her research alone.

At the time when we were communicating, Himalia was embroiled in a legal battle with the website, which was suing her for the rights to the research she’d conducted while employed there.  I joked with her that someday I’d get my hands on her research and sell them to her former boss.  She didn’t appreciate that humor.

As the time neared for our initial hookup – I’d planned to fly out to Las Vegas – her mood became erratic.  She’d lash out at me more and more frequently, misinterpreting what she used to consider banter as my being intentionally hurtful.  Right before my scheduled trip out to Vegas, she left a frantic message, telling me not to come out to see her, that she was leaving Vegas and heading to Alaska to poke around the HAARP installation.  I was disappointed.  She was preoccupied.  Her emails became inattentive and short.  She was mean-spiritedly critical of me for no reason, and rapidly progressed to being downright hostile.  Everything I said she viewed as just another pickup line at a singles bar, just another angle to get her in bed.  I tired of this and stopped communicating with her.  She never apologized, never tried to contact me again.

Ending this relationship surprisingly took a big toll on me, harder than any other breakup, even my marriage from Erin, though it had never been physical.  It was a shame.  I’d felt like I’d finally found someone of a similar mind to my own, someone heading down the same spiritual path as me.  I guess her whole existence hinged on the quest and never on the answer.  She didn’t want me; she wanted to look for me.

In time I started up with Liz, my current live-in.  She was a tenant in the same apartment complex.  We met at a pool social and started dating.  It was purely physical; she was young and hot.  I don’t think she had any other interest in life but sex, specifically in getting me off.  I’d never been with a girl so obsessed with the fruits of ejaculation.  I mean obsessed, an extreme fetish.  From a left brain perspective I found this a bit disturbing, but viscerally it was intensely gratifying, and so I was reluctant to give her up.

You’d think after Himalia that my relationship pursuits would be more meaningful.  The explanation seemed to be that the drive in me to seek a companion with whom I was compatible intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, was neurologically cleaved from the drive to copulate with young women.  I was familiar with the concept of neoteny in the context of evolution.  I guess as far as my own conflicted self was concerned, neoteny was winning the battle of my procreative desires.  I could see in some others no such conflict at all.  They sought one or the other, social compatibility or visceral fulfillment.  For me, visceral satisfaction was a quick fix.  I knew that a more meaningful connection would be infinitely more gratifying, but such a thing was so hard to find, if it could be sought at all.  I myself had only stumbled into Himalia, never imagining such a connection was possible until it happened; while the Lizzes of the world were plentiful.   Would I forever have to choose between the two?

When Liz lost her job she moved in with me.  After I retired from the Marines with 20 years in, I decided to move back home to California.  She tagged along.

 

“…you loved him when you were both young, then you changed…”

– Gilgamesh

 

I stood there, staring at the outside of the front door of 1312 Jacaranda in SoCal.

I had my keys in my pocket but didn’t want to make the noise of unlocking the deadbolt, so I backtracked around through the side yard.  The gate to the backyard creaked minimally and I left it unlatched.  I stuck close to the back wall and crept toward the French doors.  When I got beside them, my back pressed to the wall, I Sliced the Pie – a technique used by the military to clear areas around corners, doorways, windows, in an urban environment – but didn’t see anyone downstairs.  I also noticed, out of the corner of my eye, Bear in her dog run, and realized that she had not barked at the car that had just pulled up.  She knew this person.  Cautiously, I entered the living room.

Immediately I heard voices coming from upstairs, a male and a female conversing.  This would be too easy, catching Liz in the act.  No messy breakup.  The separation would be immediate.  And she obviously had a new sperm donor to run to.  I could play the angry cuckold or the disenchanted lover.

Stair steps creak less if you walk on the sides.  I slowly, deliberately heel-toed up them in my well-practiced manner.  It was easy without a carbine in my hands, easy without a chest rig full of loaded mags.  I fairly glided upstairs and down the hall to just outside the bedroom door.

“So, yeah, I missed again,” I heard Liz say.

“Your period?” enquired New Sperm Donor.

“Yeah.”

“Have you told him?”

“Yeah.  It didn’t faze him.  But nothing does.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Shit, I’m getting rid of it.  I don’t want this fucking thing.”

Unbelievable.  It struck me then, the juxtaposition of Liz’s preoccupation with extracting the male reproductive fluid against her apparent disgust with having a child.

“What if it’s mine?” New Sperm Donor asked, weakly attempting indignation.

“Do you want it?” Liz snapped back.

“No, but still…”

“What?!”

“I don’t know…”

“Well, I’m just gonna do it, then tell him I must have miscarried.”

A brief silence.  A rustling of sheets.  Liz cooed, “Sooo, are we gonna talk all morning or are you gonna fuck me?”

I’d heard that line before and I must admit it worked every time.  More rustling succeeded, as well as the consequential intonations of coitus.  Anticlimactically, I decided against a dramatic entry and instead snuck back downstairs to the living room.  I thought that I’d just drive off in my truck, which they’d surely hear, the bedroom window being right above the side yard, and leave them wondering how long I’d been there, if I’d been inside, what I’d heard.  Clearly they’d fucked up and thought I’d already left for work.  Who’d have known I’d be delayed by burying an opossum alive?

As I stood there deliberating I was shocked out of my thoughts by the sound of the deadbolt on the front door turning.  Were they done so soon?  Was New Sperm Donor leaving?  How had I not heard him/them coming down the stairs?

Bear started barking.

A quick dash and I was out the French doors, back through the side yard past the little grave and down to the corner before the driveway.  Now I would catch a glimpse of the man from whom I’d been getting sloppy seconds.  Instead, when I peered around the corner, I saw not him, but his car still parked there and now a second unfamiliar car parked behind his.  What the fuck?!  A threesome?

Enough was enough.  I strode across the driveway and in through the now-unlocked front door.  I crossed the foyer and started up the stairs.  Halfway up I was stopped in my tracks by the pop! pop! pop! pop! of gunshots coming from the second floor hall.  Jesus Fucking Christ!

Close Quarters Combat training kicked in.  I recovered from my shock and, despite being unarmed, moved to the sound of the shots.  My bedroom door was open.  I entered quickly, knees bent, ready to spring, sidestepping left.

The threat stood there across the room from me beside the bed, holding a handgun and pointing it down at the bed on which lay two motionless, naked bodies.

The threat looked up at me.  I knew that face, her face.  Big dark eyes.  My firm and ample belly dancer.  Himalia.

Her recognition of me occurred in the same instant as mine of her.  Her eyes opened wide in shock and confusion.  She looked down at the bodies on the bed, then back up at me.  Again at the bodies.  Again at me.  Her expression changed.  Her eyes narrowed, focused.  Raising the gun, she leveled it square at my torso and fired.  I didn’t feel anything, but looking down I saw the hole in my shirt.  Fuck!  An abdominal gunshot wound.  Not good.

I looked back up at Himalia.  The gun was still pointing at me.  Another shot was coming.  I turned to run.  Crack! went the next shot.  I didn’t know if I was hit again or not and wasn’t going to stop and look.

Gotta run.  Get to the truck.  Escape.  Then hospital.

Down the stairs.

Crack! I felt that one hit my left scapula.  I lost my balance and tumbled down the remaining steps to the foyer.

Back on my feet.  Keep moving.  Get to the truck.

Down the hall, through the living room.  Keys still in pocket?  Yes.

At the French doors.  Crack!  Glass shattering by my right ear.

Out the door.  Move Move Move!

Getting weaker, dizzy.  Stumbling to the side gate.  Fumbling with the gate latch.

Crack!  This one in the back of my head just as I undid the latch.  I fell with the opening gate and to the ground, right next to the little grave.

In that moment I felt the sun rise as a ray warmed my cheek.

The earth had been moved, dug up.  Black plastic protruded from it, torn open.

The opossum had dug itself out.