I

t was past midnight.  I’d spent six hours moving my shit from our house on Hendrix Street to my new tiny house on Whitham Avenue.  I missed her — my now ex-fiancée — and I wanted to see her, so I drove to where she lived with a waitress on the other side of town.  As I approached their house I turned the radio off and rolled down the window and took my foot off the gas to glide toward the driveway, the tires rolling slowly on the pavement the only sound in this mostly residential neighborhood in west Fayetteville. 

I’d been in this house once, a very awkward few minutes when I’d brought a painting to her that ended up being the wrong one because we’d each painted the same nature scene in a class we’d taken a thousand years ago when we lived in Massachusetts together.  The stupid painting was an excuse to see her, and now another two weeks and I needed to see her again.  I didn’t want to marry her, not now anyway, my second year of grad school, and it was a good idea to live apart for a while, but I desperately wanted to talk to her, for me, and I wanted to make sure she was okay as well.

So I knew the window to the right of the front porch was her bedroom window.  It glowed like a word-burning stove.  The rest of the house was dark, silent, and as I drifted by something told me to keep driving, go home, go to bed.  I parked in the lot of an apartment complex at the end of the street and walked back up the hill toward the house.  I had spied on her before, peeked through the window of a bar once to see what she was doing, which was leaning against a wall with a hooded sweatshirt on laughing with her friends.  I was an idiot, and here I was going to be one again.

I figured I’d peek in the window and find her reading, tap on it and make her scream.  I scared her all the time by pretending I’d just died or jumping out from behind a door or putting my hands on her throat as if I were going to strangle her.  Strange games we played.  The night was slightly cooler than a typical autumn night in northwest Arkansas.  The neighborhood was dead, and a sliver of moon had got itself caught up in the bare black branches of a large oak in her front yard. 

There was not enough light in there to read by, it was really late. On my tippy toes I could just get my head to the bottom of the window sill but couldn’t see over it.  The dull glow inside seemed to be flickering.  I found a cinder block under the front porch and placed it on the ground beneath the window, my heart pounding so loudly at this point I could hear nothing; the whole world was screaming things at me but I was deaf and trapped inside my head.  As I peeked over the sill and through the gauze on the other side of the glass, I saw her face and bare breasts framed by her long brown hair, and I had this desperate thought, a distraction perhaps, that she’d just now, just this very second, landed on the floor after falling out of bed, her mouth open as if she were about to scream.  This was the nano-second before I remembered her bed was a mattress on the floor and saw the other body beneath hers: her breasts jiggling, their skin, hairy legs shooting out behind her.  My mind reeled as I hopped down and bent over with hands on my knees.  I stared at the ground, which was spinning, and my head was roaring even more loudly, I couldn’t think of anything.  I went back for another look, made myself watch for another five seconds just to be sure.  This was not something, it turns out, that I could handle being witness to. 

I punched through a window pane, then another, and her screams ignited me.

I dashed up the porch steps toward the front door, like a French door.  My head went first and with all my weight and strength behind my shoulder I crashed through it like nothing, littering the floor inside with splinters of wood and shards of glass.  Running inside a house is a strange thing, something I’d never done as a man.  The house was very dark and I was in a dream on fast forward.  Front seat of a roller coaster plunging.  A few steps and I was in the hall and two or three more and I burst through the bedroom door.  I don’t remember how I went through the bedroom door.  All I remember is that neither door presented me with any difficulty.  

The police report dated October 19, 1990 at 12:48 am says I beat them both up and they both had teeth indentations in their skin.  She was Holly Flannigan, a woman I grew up with in Auburn Massachusetts.  We had been living in separate houses for two weeks, give or take a day.  I’d cancelled our wedding the previous summer but she decided since she’d gotten a job teaching fourth grade, she might as well take that job, and about us, well, we didn’t know what would happen, but we’d have options if she were in Arkansas.  So after a summer of living with my parents and of vicious fighting, we returned to Fayetteville. 

If Holly had left me alone once I burst into the bedroom, she’d have walked away from the incident unscathed, physically.  When I heard the claim that they both had bite marks I was horrified that they’d lied.  Then I thought, how would they lie about bite marks?  He didn’t bite her, did he?  Then an image appeared to me out of the mist of that night.  I was on the floor doing something to Dana Pauley, the man I’d watched her riding through the glass, and an arm came around me from behind, around my neck I think, it wasn’t her arm, just an arm, and I bit down on it like a rabid dog.  Didn’t plan to, just happened.  And the arm went away.  I cannot for certain say I did not mean her any physical harm when I crashed into that bedroom.  I didn’t have a plan, I was just going in.  But I’d been a student of the school of thought that said it is the man fucking your girlfriend whom you need to punish, which doesn’t so much dismiss the woman’s part in the crime as ignores it.  It’s easier on the ego that way.

I choked him close to death.  The worst act I have ever committed.

When I first burst through the door, he was hopping on one foot, trying to put a leg in his jeans, and that’s when I discovered who it was.  Dana and I were both earning MFA’s at The University of Arkansas’ Programs in Creative Writing, he in his third year, I in my second.  I loved his stories.  Later, they lied to the police and to everybody in our community about having sex — who wouldn’t?  Some time after the holidays in mid-January, Holly knocked on my door and we sat in her car in my driveway, a car I’d talked her into buying, and I looked her in the eye and admitted I’d lied to her and to everybody else about screwing Tanya Stevens.  Tanya was a poet in the writing program, a friend of mine with whom I’d had sex a few times.  After hearing that Holly had moved out of our house and that our wedding had been cancelled, this woman informed Holly of my transgressions, all of which had taken place the previous fall semester, a whole year earlier.  This was a particularly vulnerable and emotionally toxic time for Holly and me, and if someone wanted to hurt us, it was a good time to strike.  I trust Tanya had no idea her heartfelt confession would trigger anything other than a final bullet in the corpse of Holly and Jay.  Tanya had wanted more from me, and I liked her enough, a lot actually, as a person, a writer, a friend, but I was just fucking her because I could.  I’d told Tanya I was going to try to work things out with Holly, whom she had helped me deal with throughout our first semester when Holly was still in Massachusetts, especially Holly’s ultimatum: I will not move to Arkansas unless we are engaged.

So sitting in Holly’s car in the wake of our bloody reunion and during an ongoing legal process that forbade any contact whatsoever between us, I came clean about my trysts, and in turn Holly looked me in the eye and told me she was not having sex with Dana Pauley when I peeked through that window.  I didn’t peek, I told her; I watched.  I know what you look like when you’re riding someone, I told her.  I wasn’t, she said.  Honest.  She flashed me this sad painted smile, and as she held it, waiting for me to accept what she was saying as the truth, I felt sorry for her.  She was sticking to her lie, which made me worry about her, and her and Dana.

I should not have been talking to her in the first place.  I had a restraining order on me and wasn’t even thinking about going near her house.  I don’t know how restraining orders work.  Can the restrainer go visit the restrained?  Holly didn’t call before she arrived.  I just answered a knock on my door and there she stood on my front porch, coming over to return some photos or some such excuse.  She also told me that during Christmas break before I got back in town she’d come over, and finding me not home had sat in my car (she still had her key) for over an hour, just thinking.

So here’s Dana Pauley, fellow fiction writer, hopping on one foot, trying to get his other leg in his jeans, and Holly is on the mattress on the floor wearing panties and some kind of lacy top she threw on.  I bitch slapped him.  Bitch slap — for me — is a term that doesn’t so much describe how hard you hit a man but that you slapped him instead of punching him, him for whom you are not even going to bother curling your fingers into a fist.  Someone who does not deserve the respect due from one man to another.  Someone who is friendly to you one day, looking at your face and having polite conversation with you in front of Kimpel Hall after fiction workshop, and the next day he has sex with your woman — that person is a dog who’s lucky he’s getting only slapped.  I did not think of any of this, however; I did not choose to slap rather than punch.

I reacted.  And this is also what is so dangerous about that scene.  When you don’t think but react you can do anything that is programmed in your hard drive to do and in my hard drive if you found another man fucking your woman there were no rules or limits about what you could or should do.  Anything could be expected, all would be forgiven.  Luckily, I was not programmed to kill or maim.  I did not want to hurt Dana Pauley.  I liked him, as I said before, and I admired him and wanted to befriend him but just hadn’t gotten around to it, all of which is ironic because he never wanted anything to do with me even before his interest in Holly.  Someone told me he never liked me, which leads me to consider he may have enjoyed talking to me while knowing I didn’t know what he was doing with Holly.

Holly slapped me one time, hard, right across the face, one peaceful Sunday morning five days before I would crash into her bedroom.  I was at my house on Hendrix, the one that used to be our house, watching tv on the pull-out couch in the living room.  Tanya had just spilled the beans the night before, and I opened the front door and pow.  And I knew immediately why she slapped me because I knew she’d been hanging out with Tanya, and I also finally understood why men who get slapped usually just stand there dumbstruck: they deserved the slap.  And there was something else in that moment for me: I felt horrible about having driven this woman to do something that was not in her nature to do.  Right when I received that slap I became somebody else; she slapped me into seeing that I was a man who had cheated on her and disrespected her and hurt her, and I wished she’d knocked me out with a two-by-four instead.

You can land twice as many slaps as punches with less effort and more accuracy, but slapping is for when you don’t want to hurt someone but shock him or intimidate him or both.  I probably wanted to scare Dana in order to gain power over him.  Or maybe I slapped him to lessen the impact of my own humiliation.  By slapping him I was giving them time to explain to me that what I had seen had not really happened.  Punching him would have etched their fucking in stone.  I was in denial.  Denying he would do this to my woman, denying she would do this to me, denying anybody would hurt me like this.  Had I not been so devastated by what I saw, I maybe would have punched him unconscious.  Who can say?  If he had been a stranger I may have done something worse.  The stranger might be dead and I might still be in jail in Arkansas somewhere, perhaps on a chain gang picking cotton. 

I did threaten Dana in that bedroom that night.  My words, along with the screaming and sounds of glass breaking and doors being blown apart, were captured on tape at the police station because Holly had dialed 911 and told the operator I had a gun.  I’d punched through the window pane so hard they thought I had a pistol.  Holly and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Massachusetts.  I never owned a gun and didn’t remember ever talking about owning a pistol, but apparently I had.  That night in January when Holly and I finally talked after more than sixty days of court-sanctioned separation with no contact whatsoever, she reminded me how awestruck I was to be living in Arkansas where you could walk into Walmart with an Arkansas license and walk out with a handgun.  This was pre-Brady Bill.  Plus, Holly was a dramatic person back then, probably still is, and she had been since age seven when her father died suddenly while shoveling the sidewalk, leaving her mother and her sister and her to fend for themselves in a town where there were few single moms.  So everything took on extra weight with them, and also she was afraid of what my reaction would be to any kind of infidelity, real or perceived.  When we were first hanging out, she’d told me all about how she cheated on her previous boyfriend, meeting men in hotel rooms and cornfields and all sorts of shenanigans (I never have figured out why women and men but especially women divulge such things at the beginning of relationships, because it leads to much anxiety later on), and I’d always told her what I would do in such a circumstance.  So I understood why she may have thought I had a pistol and easily convinced Dana of same.

I bitch slapped him a few times and then I’m not sure what happened.  I think he may have had me in a headlock at one point and that’s when I bit him. 

My dad had taught me when I was about nine or ten how to get out of a headlock.  You dig your chin into the person’s side, preferably the ribs, and you have your hand ready behind him, his head should go back just enough so you can grab hold of his hair.  You yank his hair like you’re trying to pull the back of his head down to his ass, and when he lets go or at least loosens his grip you come up and under with the heel of your other palm, smashing under his chin.  I remember trying it out on my seventeen year old babysitter, the look of fear and astonishment on his red face when I took him down.  Maybe I tried to dig my chin into Dana and it didn’t work so I bit him, or maybe I just went straight to the bite to insure the outcome, I’m not sure, but I do know that’s when things became a little more complicated physically among the three of us.

I think we wrestled around a bit more before I threatened him for all to hear—Holly, the 911 operator, the Fayetteville Police Department, and later a very disturbed female district attorney.  Maybe just before that is when I bit him or them both, and maybe he got away from me and put his hands up and said, Jay, Jay, Jay.  Jay!  Good move on his part, using my first name like that, it did break my momentum, if only for a second or two.  Instead of continuing the physical fight, I screamed at him, words clearly recorded on the 911 tape, words that ended up not being very helpful to me during my legal proceedings.  I explained to my lawyer who explained to the district attorney that I was merely trying to get Mr. Pauley to leave the room.  No not so I could do Ms. Flannigan harm, but so I could talk to her.  I’d known her since I was a nine-year-old boy and she a seven-year-old girl when her family moved to our neighborhood just before her father died.  I dated her older sister for a year in junior high, our mothers had known each other since high school, we swam in each other’s pools as kids as our mothers sat chatting and smoking cigs.  I would not hurt her.  I just wanted him to leave. 

Smartly, Dana did not leave.  Not only did he not know I did not want to hurt Holly but he knew about me only what Holly had told him.  And he had just witnessed me smashing a window with what he thought was a pistol, crashing through the front door, and bursting through the bedroom door like it wasn’t there, and I was huffing and puffing and biting and fighting and had just nearly strangled him to death.  He said he could not leave.  He made a gesture that warmed me at the time.  He tilted his head, shrugged, and said with a squeaky voice, “You know I can’t leave.”  He reasoned with me — out of desperation no doubt, but I took it as some kind of compliment.  I know he was scared, I could see it in his eyes, his face.

If he had left when I told him to leave, would Holly and I have gotten back together somehow?  He maybe would not have gotten her pregnant a few months later, maybe there’d have been no marriage, no divorce, no Dana living in Vermont.  Maybe Dana could have lived in his home state of Mississippi, or anywhere in the South, instead of shoveling snow, and tending bar, and arguing with Holly in Vermont, where they’d moved to from Florida after Holly had a dream.  Mercy.

I strangled him, one hand, fending off Holly with the other perhaps, the climax of the fight but not of the night, had him pinned on his back on the mattress with a grip on his throat.  She might have been on my back trying to get me off him.  I had a knee in his sternum and squeezed until my thumb and middle finger met on the other side of his esophagus.  He just froze, the face of a dead man.  The struggle was over.  The fight was over.  It was like he wasn’t there anymore, had left his body and his mind was showing him some photographs of his life, of his long-sick or dying or recently deceased dad, or his mom who’d died three months prior to that from something.  I forget or never really knew exactly what all he had going on for family problems, but he had a lot going on — that’s what we’d been talking about in front of Kimpel Hall that time.  Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t fighting me anymore, and I knew I was going to kill this man if I didn’t let go.

I saw a chain gang this one time, prisoners picking cotton in southern Arkansas somewhere, a hackneyed image if there ever was one, until you see it for yourself as a northerner in a southern state where you nearly committed murder, and I got out of my car and strolled into the field to take a photo.  I don’t remember thinking about anything at the time other than the photo op.  Another writer and I were on a WITS (Writers In The Schools) trip and he’d spent enough time in the south having family down here in Arkansas that he knew it wasn’t a good idea and tried to stop me but I was out of the car and in the field before either of us knew what had happened.  They were about two hundred yards away, and I planned on walking until I had a decent shot.  I didn’t take twenty steps into that cotton field and here came this one guard barreling toward me on a horse and carrying a rifle in his free hand.  He got close enough to take a good read of me, and I could see his face all scarred up and that he was extremely agitated, making him meaner looking and scarier than anybody he was guarding, and I knew whatever he was going to tell me he was going to tell me only once.  He deduced fairly quickly I was harmless, and I felt him decide not to aim that rifle.  He was ready though, just waiting to be wrong about me.  I did what he said and threw in a couple yes sirs for good measure and got back in my car and drove on my merry way like a good little Yankee. 

I had no desire to kill a man, nor go to prison anywhere, especially Arkansas.  And sometimes I joke when I tell this anecdote about the chain gang, only because any other approach would be too emotionally taxing, but I will venture a guess that after you kill another human being, especially for no good reason, prison is the least of your problems.  I could have killed Dana Pauley.  I choked him past the point where he could breathe anymore, and then some.  He had to go to a throat specialist for his damaged esophagus.  I am ashamed all over again as I tell this.

I left him lying on the mattress and have no idea where she was when I left the room.  I hadn’t taken but two or three steps into the front room, the living room, crunching glass under my sneakers, the front door looming like an even larger mouth (Dana described it in a short story as “…this shark’s mouth…”) when Holly appeared.  She’d followed me out.  It was one of the most romantic moments of my life.  She asked me if I was okay.  Everything in that moment was perfect, everything that had happened over the last two weeks, the past summer of fighting viciously and canceling the wedding, all our fights, they all dissipated and left us standing here, two kids from the old neighborhood  who love each other and stick together no matter what.  I hugged her, or I wanted to and was about to or we did and then the room filled with swirling blue lights that slashed at us, blinding us, interrupting us, and there was Dana, and he grabbed her arm and told her let’s go, we have to go, c’mon, let’s get out of here now, we must go no, c’mon Holly, you know we have to go.  His doing this, telling her these things while I stood there like an animal caged in the lights, hurt me worse than the fucking. 

I had been hoping as I stood there watching him ignore me as though I were invisible, as though Holly and I had not been having this glorious moment, I had been thinking she would tell him to go away and that she would stay with me and we’d deal with the cops together and oh wasn’t this a great big mess but what a great story it would make, the story of how we got back together.  I pictured her at a Thanksgiving dinner laughing as she always did at me, shaking her head and laughing at how aggressive and insane and insecure and crazy I am, her eyes and smile lingering on my face as everybody else around the table laughed and admired us for some reason.  Psycho Duck she used to call me.  I had expectations, huge ones, in that moment, and as I stood there watching him do this, all of which took a few seconds but which had slowed down so that every second seemed to last three seconds, I did not imagine punching him in the face, not even a quick thought, a quick image, of tackling him, nothing, because I’d already done all that and Holly was with me now so there was no need for violence.  And as he acted as though they’d been together for years not days, I felt the opposite of ill will.  I felt like we were all free of what had just happened in there and that what had happened in there had put all three of us into something, some invisible container, and I felt a kinship with Dana, a closeness that I often felt with someone whom I had just fought.  She took one last look at me, which in Dana’s presence confirmed how insane and dangerous I was, and off they went, leaving me standing there alone, he guiding her by the arm and stopping to open the door, and when he couldn’t, both of them stepping into the mouth, being careful not to get sliced or punctured by its jagged teeth, and disappearing into the lights.

That was when another journey began.  Everything that had happened up to this point was real to me.  I could believe it because I’d imagined catching my woman fucking another man a thousand times before it happened with this woman, so to see it finally in real life was expected, as is the way with self-fulfilling prophecies.  It was scary, violent, and disturbing, but something about it was the truth, a pure and inevitable truth, a simple reality unfolding itself in front of me.  The events that followed, however, were surreal.  

A dream that started as I fumbled in the dark on the back porch of Holly’s house. I thought I'd escape out the back before the police surrounded the place.  I never found out if I would have escaped, even temporarily, had I gone out the door.  I was in the pitch dark unaware my glasses were not on my face, I couldn’t see my hands in front of me as they felt one deadbolt after another, and I’d turn one to open it and it would slide back into place as soon as I let go, and there were so many of them — five or six or seven or twenty.  And there was at least one chain lock, maybe two, and I couldn’t get the chains to come loose.  I was locked in.

I opened a door to another bedroom, empty, Holly’s roommate Theresa's.  Poor Theresa.  She was not home, but she later was quite disturbed when she found out what happened.  I returned to this house with Theresa less than a year later.  We’d met at a bar called George’s on Dickson Street in Fayetteville.  I was still a grad student, and we chatted.  She said she wanted to talk to me; she said she’d heard all versions of the story.  She said she’d heard I was a nice guy.  I was glad for our talk.  We both felt it would be cathartic if I went back to her house with her, since I’d never been back there.  Holly was long gone, having moved in with Dana up on a hill outside of town.  I walked Theresa through that night.  The bedroom door was a different color than all the other thick wooden doors in the house, and I stood there for a second, shocked at what I’d done.  She followed me onto the back porch where I found not six or seven deadbolts but just one, and one chain lock.  We chuckled tensely when I told her about my experience out here.  In the basement, I showed her how I got caught.

That night, after I couldn’t get out the back door, I opened two other doors, too.  A closet, and then the basement door.  I moved as fast as I could down the basement steps into the dark.  I felt around and had no idea what was what.  It was like waking up in the middle of the night when you’re a kid and not having any idea where you are even though you are standing in the corner of your own bedroom.  I knew they were coming for me, yet something told me I could hide and they wouldn’t find me.  They would think I’d gone out the back door, even though I had failed to open it to create that illusion.  I found the boiler, the big warm belly hiding against the wall like a quiet elephant.  We had the same kind of boiler in the house I grew up in, and this distracted me enough to make me realize just for a moment how much trouble I was in.  I kept feeling along the cold concrete walls until I found an opening.  Just below my waist, the wall ended, and I knelt and felt from the floor up and discovered the wall came up from the floor and ended just below my knees.  I felt dirt. The house I grew up in had a crawl space in the basement with a two-foot by four-foot opening, dirt floor, great hiding place, go way under the house and nobody could find you unless they peered in from the opening.  I felt to the left and to the right, the opening was plenty wide.  In I crawled.

The police thought I had a gun, but at the time I didn’t know that’s what they thought, so I lay there wondering what was taking them so long.  I fantasized their searching the house and shrugging their shoulders and going home.  That’s when I think I told myself I should have opened a window.  Using my forearms only, pulling my legs along, I crawled about ten feet, banged my head on a floor joist, ducked and went another five feet and stopped.  By this time my eyes had adjusted enough for me to see my faded blue jeans glowing in the dark.  I had to hide myself so that when the cops came down here and peered into this space they wouldn’t see me.  I had to hide my legs, so I quickly dug a trough with my hands, which reminded me of sand castles and being a boy on Thumpertown Beach in Eastham, Mass., flashes that were interrupted by footsteps from above.  I laid my legs in my trough and buried them.  I wore a black sweatshirt, but it had a gold logo on it I thought highly visible, so I felt around and found what turned out to be a large chunk of melded shingles, and I pulled it over my upper half like a blanket.  Then my hands glowed, so I pulled my sleeves down over them and burrowed them in the dirt, too.

I heard more footsteps upstairs, at least two sets this time, and allowed myself two positive thoughts.  It was Dana up there, and he and Holly had lied to the cops and told them I was gone.  After all, wouldn’t Holly do me this favor?  She’d come out of the bedroom, leaving Dana alone, and hugged me and asked me if I was all right.  So I was feeling good about her.  And my other positive thought was that even if this were a cop searching for me he would not come down here.  How I allowed myself to think either of these things is testament to how pathetic and desperate I was.

As I came down the steps with Theresa I didn’t tell her right away what happened when the cop came down the stairs.  I led her through it as I’d experienced it, because if I’d told her right away that the basement lights flashed on and the cop took three steps down the stairs and flashed his light right on me, she wouldn’t get the full impact of this particular part of my humiliation.  But that’s what happened.  I had assumed in the dark that I was in an enclosed crawlspace, that there was a wall between me and the stairwell.  There was not.  It was all open.  So there I was all fortified in the dirt, my big shield of shingles covering me from the waist up, my lower half buried in dirt, and the cop is to my right, hovering on the steps with a light shining in my face.  And remember, the police think I have a gun, and I don’t know they think I have a gun.  “Got him!” he calls out, and he goes back up the stairs.

No, I did not think he was leaving, although the thought zipped through my mind.  And yes he came back with more cops, two more to be exact, and a dog.   One cop stood on the stairs blinding me with an even brighter light, and another was at the other end where I’d crawled in, and he was shouting and then screaming at me.  “Show me your hands!”  Finally I pull off the big piece of shingles and duck my head to look the length of the crawl space, raising an arm to block the light.  The cop on the stairs shouts at me to put my arm down, and the other one keeps screaming for me to show my hands.  I push the shingles out of the way and pull my legs out and that’s when I see the cop at the other end is squatting or on one knee and aiming his gun at me with two hands.  His screaming becomes louder, and every instinct for survival and every police show I’d ever watched told me to hold my hands where he could see them, so I did, and I shouted, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”  When you hear yourself shouting the words don’t shoot, that’s when you know you’re in really big trouble.

So here I was months later with Theresa, showing her how all this went down.  And I think she was a bit disturbed by it all over again, even though we’d built up a level of trust between us, enough to be doing this together.  She didn’t like Holly or Dana, as it turns out, and thought they handled themselves in a very self-serving and melodramatic way.  I didn’t and don’t know exactly what she was talking about — the aftermath of all this, or what?  It’s hard for me to judge what those two did in the fallout, so I don’t — these days, anyway.  Theresa had no sympathy for either of them even when she learned Holly was pregnant.  She seemed angry, in fact, and thought them stupid for planning a wedding.  Bastard child of your violence, she said.  Stunned, I told her she was a poet.

Something had happened between the two women, roommate stuff, some dispute, perhaps over the damage I did and paid for through the courts.  Maybe Holly moved out, stuck Theresa with the full rent, or never paid for the damages she’d been paid for by me.  I’m not sure about any of it.  Something tells me Dana and Theresa had some history as well, and that perhaps whatever it was they had or didn’t have had left a bad taste in Theresa’s mouth.

I cannot judge Holly or Dana for anything that happened after this night.  Yes, she did get pregnant, and no their marriage didn’t last.  I predicted they wouldn’t make it three years, because three was this number I’d always had in my head about marriages that will fail.  They made it only eighteen months or so.  I mailed myself a letter with my prediction so I’d be able to prove I’d known their union would not last.  To exonerate myself maybe, to somehow deflect attention or blame away from me and on them so their failure would make them responsible for my actions that night.  When the quick divorce actually happened, I was not happy at all, but even sadder than I would have been had they lived happily ever after.  Instead of allowing myself to think I had caused a good thing to happen — their love and happy marriage — I thought I had caused a bad thing to happen.  At some point Holly and Dana moved to Florida where her mom and mom’s husband lived.  I don’t know what they did down there until Holly had her dream telling her to move to Vermont, but I remember feeling for Dana, for many reasons.  I wished he’d consulted me before listening to her about her dreams.

Dana and I went twelve years before we talked to each other about any of it.  I wrote him a lengthy letter, and he responded by thanking me in a warm message on my answering machine, and then later that year or the next we met in Oxford, Mississippi at a party in a friend’s driveway on a weekend when we were both there for The Oxford Conference of the Book.  His first novel had just come out.  “Twelve years,” I remember him saying, and we both shrugged and at his request walked off to talk.  I thought it big of him to ask, and of course twelve years should be enough time to process most things.  I cannot remember exactly how the conversation went, but I do know he again thanked me for my letter and I him for his message, and we chatted about Holly, which was the most interesting part, not because of what was going on with him and her then, but because we were two ex-beaus of Holly’s talking together about her.  Neither of us was mean.  He said he could not understand her anymore.  I asked what he meant, and he said her words, he couldn’t understand what she was saying.  She had gone New Age on him, he said.  He said the only reason he stayed in Vermont was to save his son from her.  I forget how he put it, but that’s how I heard it.  To balance her might be a better way to say it.  I agreed with him and told him about some correspondence I’d had with Holly. 

In 1994, when they were both living in Vermont but had been divorced, I wrote her a letter, a short one apologizing for the giant mess we’d made.  I purposefully used we.  I forget what else I wrote, something about healing and moving on and caring for one another as friends in the long haul.  She responded with photos of her and her son and a friendly letter.  I wrote her again and moved to Denver in the spring of 1995, at which time I got a letter from her that I thought belittled my last request of friendship by saying if she never heard from me again that would be fine but if we became friends that would be fine, too.  But that’s not what made me dismiss her and not answer her letter, ending a relationship started in 1973.

She told me that we’d known each other in another life — me, this a non-practicing Catholic from the Northeast who may or may not have drifted toward agnosticism.  She’d figured some things out about us, she claimed, but would explain some other time because she didn’t want to get into that right now.  Bad timing for her, for us, because I had just split up with my woman in Denver, a woman who did lots of that kind of talking.  Call it New Age thinking, call it whatever you want to call it.  I call it an inability to deal with your present because of your past.  The woman I’d just broken up with in Denver was a mean alcoholic who had been doing a lot of cocaine just before we broke up.  The last time I’d seen her was in a coke dealer’s apartment at four-thirty in the morning when I went to drag her out after her sister and father had the state police out looking for her.  She was one who liked to talk about things like angels and out of body experiences and everybody loving everybody, we’re all brothers and sisters. Dana kept nodding as I told him all this.  He could not agree more, he said.  I told him I had learned a lot from this woman I’d left in Denver, and I’d also become a better person in many ways because a lot of what she preached made sense to me, and I consider my time with her as the first stage of my healing, the first stage of my realizing how violent I was prone to be and doing something about it.  I have not heard from Holly since that letter.

As for Dana Pauley, I still feel bad about crashing through that window, and I feel responsible for his tenure in Vermont, but I have told him these things, and I believe that’s about all I can do.  I take no solace in the stories these events inspired, although I’m glad they were written: Dana’s story, my story, and a story by Donald Hays, our beloved friend and teacher.

So with the cop pointing a loaded weapon at me threatening to shoot me if I didn’t keep my hands in plain sight, all because he thought I too had a gun, I crawled with both hands held as high as I could without hitting my head on the floor joists.  “I’m coming,” I said.  “Don’t shoot,” I shouted again, because in that situation you can’t say that too many times.

A second cop flashed out of the shadows and yanked me by one arm and my hair onto the concrete floor, flat on stomach with a knee in my back.  It is very hard when you’re that wound up to relinquish yourself to someone, even a cop who is pushing his knee so hard into your back that it feels like your ribs will snap against the concrete.   “Where’s your weapon?” first one, then the other shouted.  There was no need for shouting at this point.  I was handcuffed and on my face.  They continued shouting, because that’s what cops do when they’re scared, and I kept giving the same answer.  Aloud and with their weapons still drawn and aimed at me, they told one another that the couple — and it was strange hearing that word, couple, in reference to this woman I loved and a fiction writer in the writing program, a guy I didn’t know that well but well enough to know he didn’t belong in her bed two weeks after we broke up because it takes a long time for two people who were engaged and moved to another state together and who grew up in the same neighborhood together to break up — reported that there was a gun: “suspect has a handgun” blared out of one of their radios.  I didn’t respond to that, only when they again asked me if I was sure I didn’t have a gun down here with me did I repeat, “No, I do not have a gun.”

Perhaps it was because they still didn’t believe me or perhaps this was going to happen anyway, but they spiced up their shouting act with a dog, German shepherd I think, barking like it was rabid and starving and wanting to eat my face.  Given just enough lead so its teeth were two inches from my nose, its snout twitching under my eyes. 

I was twenty-seven years old and had just witnessed my ex-fiancée engaged with another man, an acquaintance and colleague whom I’d strangled to near death.  I’d gone to a dark place and was still there, so this dog did not have the effect on me the cops had intended.  I was too far gone.  Wide eyed and not blinking, I tried to bore holes through this dog’s black eyes and into its stupid head to communicate to it exactly what I was going to do with my teeth to its face.

I can only imagine what the cops thought looking down at us.  Later at the hospital, the one cop guarding me said I’d spooked them.  They gave up their silly intimidation games, and were professional and quiet and cautious as they stood me up and led me out the bulkhead.  As we traversed the front lawn toward a waiting cruiser, I wanted Holly to burst out of the crowd of onlookers and swirling lights and wrap her arms around me and tell me she’d meet me at the station, that everything would be all right.

That did not happen, and everything was not all right.

I faced many charges, the most serious one being Breaking and Entering in the nighttime with intent to commit a felony.  I’d made a mess out of three lives, and disturbed many others.

I caused a rift in the creative writing department.  Every department has its rifts, but I caused this one.  There were writers who sided with Dana and there were writers who sided with me.  Most of our professors, save Bill Harrison, sided with me.  Sided with is a cheap way to describe people’s actions and reactions, but that’s what people did — they chose a side.  Skip — Donald Hays — remained as neutral as possible and friends to both Dana and me throughout the entire fallout and subsequent years, something that Dana and I both respected.  Jim Whitehead defended me to his death in 2003. 

He defended me in my thesis defense, too, against Bill Harrison, who had been friends with Dana Pauley, who had graduated the year before.  This is May, 1993.  Bill had it in for me for two reasons, I think: Dana Pauley, and the fact that I never took his fiction workshop, which had more to do with his following his Hollywood dreams back and forth throughout my years at Arkansas than it did any choices I made.  The irony used to sadden and anger me.  I had chosen The University of Arkansas because of Bill Harrison, whom I’d met in Augusta, Georgia in 1989 when I visited John Dufresne who was teaching there and hosting a writer’s conference.  I’d heard Harrison was ruthless in workshop, downright mean.  Dusfresne told me tales, and he liked Bill, and after spending a day with Bill, so did I.  I decided after that weekend to go to Arkansas instead of Syracuse, Montana, or Houston. 

Harrison attacked me in my thesis defense.  He said he did not like anything about any of my stories.  He said he not only thought my stories were weak, but disagreed with every editor and anyone else who liked my writing.  Skip, who was my thesis advisor, and I sat there stunned while Harrison and Whitehead battled it out.  Whitehead said I’d have a book in seven years.  Harrison said he didn’t care if I ever wrote another word.  These two had a long history of not exactly loving each other, having started the writing program together with Miller Williams in 1966 and since grown far apart, and on this day it was so obvious they were airing out their laundry that Skip and I could do nothing.  Skip finally asked me to leave.  He’d decided to confront Harrison, who up until this nonsense had been one of his favorite teachers and colleagues.  Before I left Harrison shook my hand and told me I did have a few images in my stories that he admired, and he named one.  I was twelve years old with quivering lips as I walked down the hall like a ghost.  He had gotten me good.

He had set me up.  Months earlier, when I’d approached him in the hall outside his office and inquired about his reading my stories for my thesis defense, he told me I had nothing to worry about, that he’d read enough of my work to know that this thesis defense would be a “paper tiger.”  I took him at his word.  I did not know, nor do I know now, how close Harrison and Pauley had been.  I knew they played tennis together.  This showdown between Harrison and Whitehead was a direct result of Whitehead having spearheaded my defense during the Holly and Dana fiasco, and it is my opinion that Bill Harrison harbored a grudge for three years and tried to strike me down for what I did to Dana Pauley and to the program.  I could be wrong.

For years after I left the program, whenever I saw Harrison in his own living room in Fayetteville or in a bar in Oxford or wherever we found ourselves, he would make comments to me and about me so everybody could hear.  “Best fighter the program ever had,” which meant to me that he still not only did not respect me as a writer but also still held his grudge.  He still openly despised me in this passive-aggressive way. 

It was yet another weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, this one a year before the one when I talked to Dana, at The Sons and Daughters of Barry Hannah, an appreciation ceremony for Barry from past students and admiring writers, that Bill made his peace with me — at least I am fairly certain this is what he was doing.  Friday night of that weekend, a bunch of us — and there were sixty writers for this gala event — had gotten drunk at a tavern called Murph’s, and for some reason Skip Hays started talking about me.  He said that I was a badass not to be messed with; he said I could sit in a bar and know everything was going on in that bar, he said somebody could throw a pool ball at my head and I could not even be looking and reach up and catch that pool ball without changing my expression.  He was heading somewhere with all this, I could sense it, so I turned my back on the conversation. 

Soon enough he and I were talking eye-to-eye, leaning, the audience of five or six writers, mostly former students of his, gathered around us but virtually invisible, and he was stinking drunk and repeating the same line or some variation over and over again:  “You really ought not have gone through that window, Jay.  You really ought not to have done that.  That was wrong to do that.”  And I would nod at him and say, “I know it was wrong, Skip.  I did a bad thing.”  And he’d go off on another tangent but soon return to the same.  “He ought not to have been fucking your woman, and he might have deserved it, but you still ought not to have gone through that window.”  I nodded again and again and just took all he had to give, because Skip is a beautiful human and wouldn’t say anything that didn’t need to be said.  And perhaps he’d been needing to say this for more than ten years, so I listened to him and looked him in the eye every time he said it, and every time he said it, he was right.  At the end of this weekend I went home and wrote Dana an eight-page letter, typed and single-spaced.

The very next night after the Skip-chiding, at a catfish fry in a shack in the country, after we all ate the best catfish of our lives from a place called Blankety Blank’s in Taylorville, Mississippi, Bill Harrison and Skip and many others were too hung over to drink, and Bill left early, but before he left he came up to me to say goodbye, and he held me at arm’s length with his hands on my shoulders and looked into my face as if seeing me for the first time and he said it was good to have seen me.  And he paused.  Then he gave me an intense hug, and I felt love from him, and I squeezed him back.  It was hard for me to pull away.  He’d stunned me to near tears once again, and I give credit for that turnaround in Bill, somehow, to Skip Hays, whom I suspect reported the previous night’s discussion in some way that made Bill finally let go.  I know none of this for certain.  Skip says he doesn’t remember, and I don’t speak to or hear from Bill.

Handcuffed in the back of a police car with the door open, I was read my rights by a plainclothes cop who had a warm voice.  I knew the trouble I was in was huge and told myself to say nothing.  I stared over his shoulder at the house, the window.  He asked me a second time if I understood the rights that had just been read to me.  I nodded real slow.

At the hospital, as the doctor stitched me up, I stared at the needle going in and out of my skin the same way I’d stared at the police dog.  Pieces of meat hung off my fingers.  Nothing hurt.  I couldn’t believe it.  Emotionally, I had left the planet.  There was a cop guarding me, because I was in custody, and because Holly and Dana were somewhere in the hospital and apparently Holly had made a good argument about my determination, convincing the police I could attack again.  Although I was planning nothing of the sort and was quite subdued, I do not blame her for that precaution. 

The doctor was polite but spoke only about what he was doing to me.  He told me to turn my hand, this will hurt, hold your arm up this way, things like that.  After a while he said, “You have a high tolerance for pain.  Have you always been this way?”  I thought of Holly in the living room amongst the shattered glass.  “Just tonight,” I said.  After that, the cop started talking to the doctor and the doctor to me and the cop to me and me to both of them.  The cop seemed genuine suddenly, and he made me look him in the eye and told me everything was going to be all right.  That was the first moment I realized Dana would have a tough tale to tell if he wanted to evoke sympathy from any red blooded heterosexual male anywhere, despite what I’d done.  

My attorney told me we’d offer what we would offer, and if they didn’t like it we would let them bring us to court and plead our case in front of a jury.  He told me he’d get twelve good ol’ boys on that jury who would have done the same thing, every one of them.  He offered financial reimbursement for Holly and Dana’s medical expenses and for the damage done to the house; he agreed to a restraining order on me from Holly (not from Dana because that would mean my not being able to teach or attend classes), and he promised I would attend anger management classes and undergo periodical psychological evaluations.  My attorney made all these promises for me; I had no idea what was going on.  I paid about five thousand dollars total, including lawyer fees, and this almost twenty years ago.  I never went to anger management nor was I analyzed by a professional; in fact, I didn’t know about these conditions until Holly told me about them during the aforementioned ice-breaking chat we had that January in her car.

It was really helpful to talk to Holly that night, her lie notwithstanding.  The next time I heard her voice was on the phone when she called me a month or so later to talk about a dream she’d had and ask me if I was okay.  I told her I was fine, and we talked a little about Dana and her, and before I could stop myself I was giving her advice, and the whole thing was very strange.  It felt as though I were humoring us both with this prattle, but I caught myself thinking we might get back together.  We’d have to sneak, perhaps, because who knew how long that restraining order lasted.  She called a second time a few days later to thank me for the advice.  After a week or two went by with no third phone call, I had a hunch she might be pregnant, so I put Fred Flintstone on my answering machine screaming: “I’m gonna have a baby, hey Barney, hey Betty, everybody, I gonna have a baaaaaby!”  I thought it would be funny if she called to tell me only to realize I already knew.  When I found out she really was pregnant, not more than a few days later, I took the message off and got real depressed.  She never called again, ever.  Instead of talking about Holly being pregnant, I told my friends about my Fred Flintstone message and how I’d predicted her pregnancy.

Something else I avoided talking about happened the night I got arrested.

I’d managed to dose off in my cell and woke up to a woman screaming, recognized Holly’s voice not far into it, and was so confused because I had no idea about the 911 call, I thought Holly was here in the station with me. Then over the same system I heard the sounds of a tape being rewound followed by a loud click, followed by the same screaming Holly, so I guessed a recording, some kind dramatization of what had happened, and I thought what kind of sick fucking joke is this. Then came the man’s voice, one I must have missed on the first time through because I hadn’t woken up yet, and he was screaming, really screaming, an angry disturbed person: “Get the fuck out of here or I’m gonna take a piece of this fucking glass and slit your fucking throat!”

My mind raced to distract itself: Was Holly in danger? Was this lunatic here now? Were they going to put him in my cell? But there was no denying it was me. I was a monster. The cops were tormenting me. I deserved it. I closed my eyes and lay there focusing on the dark and wanting to get lost in it. I’m not sure what happened after that. The scariest thing I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth, and I didn’t even know it did. I think I passed out, and for the better part of two decades I focused on not being able to eat that delicious-looking breakfast somebody slid into my cell, sometimes going into great detail about the packages of jelly and the steam coming off the coffee and the smell of it and the greasy glistening sausages and how I leaned off my bottom bunk to take a closer look to talk myself into it. That’s how I knew how messed up I was, I’d tell my listeners. Scrambled eggs and French toast!