False Memory

blood.
    Junior tried to use the crossbow like a shield, to block the assault. Dusty grabbed the stock at midpoint, the revolving nut of the lock plate digging into the palm of his hand. He wrenched the bow out of the boy’s grasp, threw it on the floor, and kept moving. He drove the boy across the hall, into the space where the sideboard had stood, shoving him against the wall so hard that his head bounced off the plaster with a thock like a tennis ball off a racket.
    “You sick, rotten little shit.”
    “He had a gun!”
    “I’d already taken it away from him,” Dusty screamed, spraying the boy with spittle, but Junior insisted, “I didn’t see!” And they repeated the same useless things to each other, twice, three times, until Dusty accused him with such violence that his damning words boomed along the hail: “You saw, you knew, you did it anyway!”
    Then came Claudette, pushing between them, forcing them apart, her back to Junior, confronting Dusty, eyes harder than before, the unyielding gray of flint and flashing as if with sparks. For the first time in her life, her face didn’t astonish with its beauty: instead, such a hideous ferocity. “You leave him alone, leave him alone, you get away from him!”
    “He killed Eric.”
    “He saved us! We’d all be dead, but he saved us!” Claudette was shrill, as never before, her lips pale and her skin gray, like some stone goddess come alive and raging, a termagant who, by sheer power of will, would alter this bitter reality to suit her, as only gods and goddesses could do. “He had the guts, and he had the brains to act, to save us!”
    Lampton appeared, too, pouring out thick streams of soothing words, gouts of platitudes, slathers of anger-management jargon, no less containable than the oil spill from a floundering supertanker. Talking, talking, talking, even as his wife pressed her ceaseless strident defense of Junior, both of them chattering at once: Their words were like paint rollers, laying down obscuring swaths of new color over stains.
    At the same time, Lampton was trying to get the machine pistol out of Dusty’s right hand, which at first Dusty didn’t even realize he was still holding. When he understood what Lampton wanted, he let go of the weapon.
    “Better call the police,” Lampton said, though surely neighbors had already done so, and he hurried away.
    Skeet warily approached, staying well clear of his mother but nonetheless coming around to Dusty’s side of the standoff, and Fig stood farther back down the hall, watching them as though he had, at last, made contact with the aliens he had so long desired to meet.
    None of them had fled the house as Dusty had urged them to do—or if they had gotten as far as the roof of the back porch, they had returned. At least Lampton and Claudette must have known that Junior was loading his crossbow with the intention of joining the battle, and apparently neither of them had tried to stop him. Or perhaps they had been afraid to try. Any parents with common sense or a genuine love of their child would have taken the crossbow away from him and dragged him out of this house if necessary. Or maybe the idea of a boy with a primitive weapon defeating a man with a machine pistol—a twisted incarnation of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, which set so many hearts aflutter in the academic literary community—had been too delicious to resist. Dusty could no longer pretend to understand the odd thought processes of these people, and he was weary of trying.
    “He killed a man,” Dusty reminded his mother, because for him no amount of shrill argument could change this fundamental truth.
    “A lunatic, a maniac, a demented man with a gun,” Claudette insisted.
    “I’d taken the gun away from him.”
    “That’s what you say.”
    “That’s the truth. I could have handled him.”
    “You can’t handle anything. You drop out of school, you drop out of life, you paint houses for a living.”
    “If customer satisfaction were the issue,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it, unable to restrain himself, “I’d be on the cover of Time, and Derek would be in prison, paying for all the patients’ lives he’s fucked up.”
    “You ungrateful bastard.”
    Distraught, on the verge of tears, Skeet pleaded, “Don’t start this. Don’t start. It’ll never stop if you start now.”
    Dusty recognized the truth of what Skeet said. After all these years of keeping his head down, all these years of enduring and being dutiful but distant, so much hurt