DAN GROAT

Her mother had been wrong, dead wrong when she offered two choices, either fight or flight. There was a third. You could stand paralyzed, a shackled prisoner of fear. You could freeze, iced over in stiffened time, suspended in horror. You could wait for the inevitable.

The feeblest tree limbs drooped under their white load. The woman stooped from the weight of perceiving things she didn’t understand. Her moment was gone. He was four feet behind and then three and then two.

Like dirt on a coffin, the cocaine was burying his dreams.

Holding a hostile gaze was a habit he had learned early. When he was ten, his mother moved them from the ugly brick high-rise downtown tenement into the ugly little brick rental house on Oklahoma Avenue on the Southside of St. Louis. In that neighborhood, he had learned that when someone wouldn’t back down from the stare, you had better be ready to throw the first punch.

"When I was a kid, my mom was gone a lot. A bar called Spider’s Web was two blocks from our house. Everybody called it the Web. Owned by Kelvin ‘Spider’ Harris. In the evenings, I’d go down there and hang around outside. It was somethin’ to do. I’d listen to all the chatter mixed in with the crack of pool balls from the table in the back."

"Things were different then. Or it was a magic in that place and in those people. Nobody gave much attention to what color you were. We all had poverty in common. That painted everybody gray."

"My mind works better when I’m involved in a project, when I have a goal, a mission. If I’m not focused, my thoughts drag me to a bad place. The structure needed for an assignment is good for me."

"The secret to detective work is making a picture out of dots. The art world calls it pointillism. Trouble is, the investigator has to collect every dot he finds. Some help. Some don’t, but you can’t throw anything away. The goal is to eventually make sense out of seemingly unrelated stuff."

"An investigator probably operates better if mercy is not his main concern."

"Selfish people make mistakes because of ego."

"I wouldn’t know normal unless it was a city in Illinois."

She was twenty-five. He was thirty-two. She felt like fifteen. She wondered what their friendship made him feel. He had a rough childhood. He went to war and came home with more scars inside than out. Fought his way out of homelessness. He had faced death on the battlefield and on the streets. He had lived several lifetimes. She was just getting started.

"You think they blamed Goliath’s death on the slingshot? You think they started licensing slingshots and declaring that they were the evil that was ruining the world. If the world is bein’ destroyed, it’s by people. It’s time the blame goes where it belongs. A lot of things in a man’s hand can become a weapon bad enough to kill."

"The truth’s seldom funny."

"I’ve spent much of my life alone. Not necessarily with no one around, but alone just the same."

"Attractions between people are complicated, not like metal being pulled to a magnet. Both people are magnets. Both people have a north and a south pole, opposite things inside them. Both people have their own force field and respond to other force fields in positive or negative ways. The connection occurs when everything is aligned. Right time, right place. Magic."

“You’re the second person I’ve known named Elvin. When I was a kid, eleven or twelve, we were living in the rental house on Oklahoma. Two guys from the neighborhood, guys I didn’t know real well, brought this new kid to meet me. His name was Elvin. I can remember it like it was yesterday.

“He was about my age, but bigger. Had a scar across his nose. He said he had come to fight me since the other two said I was the toughest kid around. I told him I didn’t want to fight, that I didn’t even know him. He shoved me. I got mad, but I just stared at him. He shoved me again, so I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could. Blood started running down his chin, and he spit out a tooth.” “What happened next?” “Nothing. He sat down on the curb and cried and looked for his tooth.” “Sounds like you didn’t have much choice,” Elvin said. “That’s what I tried to tell myself, but it didn’t work. I felt like crap for days.”

Frustration always made him want to punch something. His response to unwanted emotion was a desire for physical action. He knew it was a long-time scab on his personality that had been scraped by his military training.

"I’ve never gotten to the point where I’m comfortable with the past. I keep replaying it and wanting to go back and change it. You sound angry with yourself. I am, too, angry at coincidence or fate or destiny or evil or whatever kidnapped the people in my life and replaced them with emptiness."

"If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. That’s a load of crap. I’m not dead yet, but I sure don’t feel stronger for my suffering. Surviving ain’t living. Surviving ain’t strength. And without strength, I’m not sure who I am. More than anything, that’s what I’m afraid of. When I’m weak, I can’t find myself. Part of me disappears. I don’t trust myself, and then I don’t know who to depend on."

"High school yearbooks are like a time capsule, things from the past hidden in pages of hope."

"When I’m old, or older, and looking back on high school, I hope I remember the good times and forget the bad, because, like everybody, I’ve had some of each. I figure the future will be hard enough without memories that interfere."

"I think we know ourselves, and we know others better when our lives are simpler. Like when we’re in high school. We’re not afraid to learn. They say wisdom comes from experience, but experience gathers other stuff, too. A lot of pain. A lot of fear. It’s hard to choose what to keep. Mostly, you don’t get to choose. Some things stick whether you want them to or not."

"It’s out of character for me, the opening up, letting the bottom stuff out, you know? The stuff that feels funny when you share it because you’ve always kept it private, you’ve always hidden in some deep, secret spot."

"On her good days, she had been such a good and patient teacher, often saying that playing the piano was her sanity, and she wanted to give that to her son and daughter. The children often wondered and discussed privately if she meant the gift was the joy of playing piano, or sanity."

"Over time, you learn to cope with the things that hurt. I can’t say it makes more sense to me now, but the wounds have scarred over. I’ve got my own life to live."

“My grandfather told me the story. It was about a Hungarian girl in the 1800s. Her name was Rosalia. Her grandfather was very religious, a fanatic. When Rosalia became pregnant without a husband, her grandfather said she had to do penance for her passion. He told her the only thing that would make her pure and allow her the perfection of heaven was to eat nothing but rose petals. That would symbolize her sorrow for her immorality. She obeyed her grandfather and eventually died of starvation. The legend said the following spring, beautiful red roses grew from her grave.”

"That’s the trouble with the news. They keep repeating the same crap to us until everybody takes it as normal. It’s not normal. Enough! People have to stand up and say it. That’s all I’m trying to do. Stand up and say, that’s enough."

"I can always tell the ones that are afraid. It’s their shoulders, you know. They always have that vulnerable, ‘don’t hurt me’ stance. You can pretend you’re not afraid, but your posture will give you away every time. I’ve seen it plenty. I hate fear. Even on other people, I hate fear. Fear is a liability. That’s why I don’t allow it. The best adversaries don’t allow it either."

"Curious is like a rubber band. Stretch it only so far before it snaps back in your face."

"If what you’re doing is successful, people say you’re lucky when it’s really all about hard work and smart decisions. I’ve fought hard for everything I have, and I take it as an insult if somebody even hints it was easy. That’s total disrespect."

"It’s part of who I am. It’s how I’ve always seen myself. I observe. I analyze. I watch. I deduct. I listen. I organize. I look for patterns. I practice. I repeat. I survey, and I learn. It’s the way I’ve always been for as long as I can remember. Those things are survival to me. That’s how I’ve lived. They got me through the hard times. Always. I expect to be good at this stuff."

"Everybody has their own idea about justice. Is it your definition or mine? Is it the definition that the greatest number of people accept, or is it the definition the government brainwashed you with, or your church, or your parents, or some school teacher? What is justice?"

"When he acts like he’s shutting you out, he’s relying on himself, the one thing that has always worked for him. He is his own protector. He’s self-sufficient. It’s always been that way for him. He never felt he had a choice. Being an individual doesn’t have to mean you’re selfish. And it does not mean that in Gifford Ulrich. It’s self-preservation. He can’t save anyone else without saving himself first."

"You are responsible for what happens to you today and every day. Whether you do something great or insignificant, it’s on you."

"Don’t let your team down. The individual endures for the group. That’s how they both win. Before you can win, you’ve got to survive. There is no team without the individual."

"Coping should be more than a habit. It had to have a purpose. There could be no blurring of that scratch on the consciousness separating existence from life, that narrow jagged mark between breathing and yearning."

"It’s not truth you avoid. It’s openness."