When a dog team gets tangled up, Candice Archer thought as she drove the minivan home, you straighten out the tangle and get on with the race. But what do you do about this? Who do you ask for help? What help do you need, anyway? There was nothing in the parenting manuals that told you what to do when your son killed two people. Sure, it may have been self-defense, and the people may have been scum, but killing was killing, and it wasn’t an easy thing to contemplate. Candice was not a religious person and hadn’t been to church in years, but she remembered that the Bible said pretty straightforwardly, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Typical of the Bible, she thought. She wasn’t much of a Biblical scholar, but it struck her that the commandment was somewhere between “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and David slaying Philistines to show his righteousness. A lot of help that was. The Bible condoned a lot of killing, she thought cynically, and it had set off even more over the ages. Whatever the answer was, whatever the question was, the answer didn’t seem to lie there.

She glanced over at John, who was being very quiet. Probably he was having the same thoughts, wondering what this meant, wondering what he ought to do. John was a very reasonable person, usually taking time to think things out before he did something. Though for entirely different reasons than hers, he was not a guy to panic in a tight spot either. He was not a guy who flew off the handle, although he could be firm about things if he needed to be. They were going to have a talk, but if she had to bet she would have guessed that he didn’t have any more idea of what to do than she had.

Cody was being quiet in the back seat as well. What could he be thinking? Cody had always been the quiet one of the two boys, the most introspective, and she just didn’t have a good idea of what he must be thinking. She did know what an adrenaline crash felt like – she’d had a few over the years – and she could believe that he didn’t have a lot of energy.

What to do? The only idea that seemed to make sense was the one Charlie Wexler had suggested, a good stiff drink. She and John weren’t much in the way of drinking, but there was a bottle or two around the house, and right at the moment it seemed like a hell of a good idea.

The heck of it was that in a way she was actually proud of her son. He’d seen a wrong and set out to right it, and really, had done it competently, even though it led to the police station. Sergeant Wexler hadn’t quite come out and said it that way, but it appeared that was pretty much how he felt. Cody hadn’t panicked, he hadn’t flown off the handle – he’d just maintained his cool until the situation was under control. Protect the weak from the strong? She couldn’t recall using those words, but she’d tried to teach him to do something along those lines with his life, and he’d done just that. If she had been in the same situation she hoped that she would have done much the same thing. In fact, Cody had done it better – she was no great shakes with a pistol, barely able to hit the broad side of a barn if it wasn’t moving in spite of a lot of practice and coaching from Gil Evachevski.

Gil Evachevski . . . that actually had the ring of a good idea. If anyone she knew had the capability of putting this into perspective, it would be him. She didn’t know a great deal about that part of his history, but she knew he’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam back before she’d been born, and he had fought in the Korean War. Moreover, he’d spent years teaching martial arts, which involved that kind of perspective. Even though he was well into his seventies, now, she knew that Cody respected Gil as he did few others. Maybe she ought to call him. It was getting late tonight, but maybe in the morning, if anyone could get any sleep tonight.

Really, she didn’t have a lot of time to ruminate, since it was only a few blocks from the police station to their house, a big bungalow a century or so old, set a few houses back from the city beach on a side road off of Lakefront. She and John had been together for more than two decades and this seemed more like home than anywhere else they’d lived. With Shay gone for the most part and Cody probably headed for college in a couple years as well, it seemed a little on the large side but as far as she was concerned she had no intention of moving ever again. She hit the garage door opener and drove the minivan inside. It seemed a little strange to have the three of them there with the Escort gone. Back at the police station, they’d made the decision to just leave it over on Railroad Street until morning.

Nobody moved to open a door; it seemed to Candice that everyone was afraid of what would happen next, and no one wanted to say anything or do anything. The silence lasted for several seconds, until Candice decided it had to be broken. “Look,” she said, “I’m going to say it, even though it might not be the right time. Cody, as far as I’m concerned, you did the right thing.”

John let go of a sigh. “Yeah,” he said, in a long, dragged-out word. “However this turns out, it’s going to be hard on you, but you did what had to be done. If it had been me . . . well, I don’t think I’d have done as well.”

“Are you sure?” Cody asked quietly. “Right now, I feel . . . I don’t know how I should feel.”

“Cody,” Candice said, “think about this. How would you feel if you hadn’t stopped them?”

There was a long silence. “Yeah, Mom,” he replied finally. “I see what you mean.”

“Keep that thought in mind,” she advised. “You’re going to be facing some trouble. We all are, for that matter. But as far as I’m concerned, after what I’ve heard tonight, you aren’t going to be facing any trouble from us. You did the right thing. Now, we’re all going to have to do the right thing.”

“What’s the right thing now, Mom?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “It depends on what happens. We’re just going to have to see.”

“I suspect that the right thing will be hard but obvious when it happens,” John said. “For now, I don’t think the right thing is to sit out here and brood about it. Let’s go inside. I’ve been thinking that what Sergeant Wexler said about a good stiff drink might not be a bad idea.”

After a little looking it proved that there was half bottle of vodka in an upper kitchen cupboard, and some tomato juice in the refrigerator. “Cody,” John said as he worked on the drinks, “I learned a long time ago that booze isn’t something you want to use to blunt your feelings all the time, but there are times when there are exceptions to every rule. I think this is one of those times.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Cody sighed, his exhaustion still showing as he sat half-slumped, with his elbows on the kitchen table. There was no doubt about it, he felt like hell. Even as tired as he was, after what had happened he had plenty of doubts about how well he was going to sleep. Maybe this would help.

“One of those things that a parent is afraid to ask of a kid your age is how much they know about drinking,” John smiled. “I know you’ve had wine a time or two, but ever had any hard stuff?”

“Yeah, you made Shay and me a couple weak ones to celebrate the last time Mom got to Nome,” Cody smiled. “That’s about it.”

“Well, I’m going to make this a little stronger, but I’ll add some Tabasco to kill the taste a little,” John smiled.

“You can make mine pretty strong,” Candice said. “I think I’m going to need it.”

John looked over at his wife with a little bit of admiration. He was having to dig deep to stay calm, but she was holding on well. She was a little shorter than he was, with long black hair. He shook his head. She was still a good looking woman, and had always been; she looked years younger than her early forties – unlike he did; he was paunchy and balding. While not a workout fiend, she worked at keeping in shape, and running dog teams called for being fit. She wasn’t planning on running the Iditarod again next spring, but she’d done it twice in the last five years and depending on the way things worked out she might well do it again. When she got dressed up she could be a knockout, although there wasn’t often the need to be dressed up in Spearfish Lake. Still, she filled her jeans out nicely. In other circumstances that could have been inspirational, but not tonight.

They had gone through some rough times for a while, back a few years ago. Before they’d moved back to Spearfish Lake, she’d been a bookkeeper in a bank, the perfect suburban mom with a job in an office, and they both had been satisfied with their lives. After they moved up here, he’d pretty well expected the same things to continue, but they hadn’t. First, she’d taken a job at Spearfish Lake Outfitters, his brother and sister-in-law’s store. The problem was that his brother Josh and sister-in-law Tiffany were dogsled racers, and Candice had gotten involved in that. To give the boys a bit of responsibility, she’d also gotten them involved with helping her with feeding and training the dogs. That led to dogsled racing, and, a little surprisingly, to the Iditarod itself. There had been some tension between the two of them because he felt that she was shorting her time with the boys. Ultimately he realized that she was spending even more time with them than she had before they moved back – it was just that he was also spending vastly more time with them, and the comparison was hard to see. She was good at dogsled racing, good at the outdoor stuff, which he hadn’t expected.

His brother Josh had said it best years before: “Nobody realized that under that tailored suit there was beating the heart of a true musher.” It had taken John a while to accept it and admit it, but now he had a lot of admiration and even awe for what his wife had become – she was much more than he’d ever dreamed.

“Yeah,” he said, dragging himself out of his reverie, “I think I can stand a stiff one myself.”

He was just finishing making the drinks when the doorbell rang. “Now who could that be at this hour?” Candice said. “God, I hope it’s not more trouble.”

“If someone knocks on the door at this hour it probably is,” John said, hoping that Charlie Wexler hadn’t changed his mind. “I better go see.”

He left the drinks on the counter and headed through the house to the front door. Since whoever it is wasn’t at the front door, it probably wasn’t a close friend. He flipped on the porch light and glanced through the glass of the door to see Gil Evachevski standing outside. That was a relief in a way; it wasn’t the police. Gil wasn’t what John would have called a close friend; a few years before, Gil had sold his appliance store to his son and retired, and John had done the store’s books, and now only occasionally saw him around town anymore. Still, he knew that Gil was Cody’s shooting coach, and, like most people in town, John had a lot of respect for him. He opened the door and said, “Hi, Gil. What brings you out at this hour?”

“Charlie Wexler called,” Gil said. “He gave me a rough idea of what happened, and said you folks needed someone to listen to you and help wind down a little.”

“No fooling,” John shook his head, mentally making a note to thank Sergeant Wexler as he opened the door wide. “I’m just glad you could come.”

“Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” Gil told him, “and I think that’s about what everyone around here needs to figure out.”

“We’re out in the kitchen,” John said as Gil stepped inside. “We all figured we could stand a drink.”

“Probably the best medicine you could have right now,” Gil smiled as John closed the door and headed toward the kitchen. “In fact, I probably could use one, too.”

“Not as bad as we do, I suspect,” John said.

“Yeah, that’s probably right,” Gil agreed. He sat down at the table and said, “How you doing, Cody?”

“You want the truth?” Cody replied bleakly. “Not worth a shit.”

“Cody, you may not want to hear this,” Gil told him, “but you’re not the first person to feel that way after the experience you’ve been through. Maybe not the billion and first. This stuff happens more often than most people think, and it’s always the same.”

“Not like this,” Cody replied flatly.

“No, but close enough,” Gil told him. “Cody, I’ve had the same experience, believe it or not, and I wasn’t a hell of a lot older than you are when it happened. I can tell you that when you hurt somebody or kill somebody in action, no matter how justified it is, you have remorse afterwards. It goes with the territory, and I think that’s good, or it would be all too easy to kill. I’ve tried to teach you that while there’s sometimes a need to use violence to protect yourself or someone else, you have to bear the consequences with it. Shooting is fun, but really, the idea of guns is that they’re there for a purpose, and that purpose is to kill. You’ve experienced that in about the most direct way possible. One of the things you need to do is to examine the experience and see what you can learn from it, and it’s best to do it while it’s fresh.”

“Shit,” Cody swore, “I haven’t thought about much of anything else for hours.”

“Your mind has just been going over the same thing, right? Over and over again?”

“Yeah, I don’t know how I’m ever going to get it out of my mind.” Cody shook his head. “Gil, I don’t know what else I could have done.”

“You could have walked away.”

“No,” Cody replied. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t have done. I mean, I could see them hitting her, raping her. I could see the fear, hear it, even smell it. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d walked away. However bad I feel now, it would have been worse.”

“So you used the power in your hand to protect the weak from the strong,” Gil summed up. “Cody, I think you know where I’m coming from, and that was the right thing to do in the circumstances.”

“Yeah,” Cody said slowly, “I guess it was the lesser of two evils.”

“No, Cody, it wasn’t,” Gil said. “Evil is what Jack and Bobby were doing to Janice. Let’s suppose, just for a moment, that you didn’t have the gun. Let’s say you had a baseball bat. Would you still have waded in there and tried to help her out?”

Cody sat and looked at the table for a moment. Sometime in the last minute or two John had set a weak Bloody Mary down in front of him, and it was something to look at. He let it sit there while he considered the options. “Christ knows,” he said finally. “I like to think I would have, but I knew I had the gun and that I knew how to use it.”

“So you went ahead and did it,” Gil nodded. “Do you have any idea how hard a decision like that is to make? Even with as much experience with guns as you and I have, we’re afraid of them since we know the power they represent. Cody, it’s not easy. I’ve seen a lot of combat, Cody. I spent two years in combat in Korea as an infantryman, and another year on the ground in Special Forces in Vietnam. Especially in Korea, I saw a lot of kids come under fire for the first time. Would you like to guess how many freeze up and just can’t handle it, even to save their own necks? A hell of a lot of ’em, Cody, and I was one of them, until a sergeant kicked my buck-private ass. There’s been a lot teaching us to not use that power, and when you realize what it can do it takes a little something extra to be able to use it. You just went ahead and did what needed to be done. Like I said, that’s pretty damn good in my book.”

“Then why do I feel so shitty about it?”

“Mostly because you haven’t put it into perspective yet,” Gil told him. “Like I said, we’ve been taught for most of our lives how bad it is to actually use that power, so we’re reluctant to do it, even when it’s kill or be killed for us or for someone else. It goes against everything we’ve been taught. Cody, you and I share something you don’t share with your parents, or most other people. That is, we’ve been faced with that decision and made the choice. Speaking as a soldier, when you’re a greenhorn you have no idea of how you’re going to react until you face that decision. Even a lot of people in the Army never have to face it. I doubt your parents have. Really, there’s only a few of us in this town who have ever had to do it, and for most of us it was a long time ago. But I’ve faced that decision time and again, and I did what had to be done, just like you did what had to be done.”

“Yeah, but you were a soldier,” Cody protested. “It’s not the same thing.”

“The hell it’s not,” Gil said. “It’s exactly the same thing. You didn’t go in there to deal with them for fun. You did it because it had to be done, to protect Janice, an innocent victim, to protect yourself, or in my case, to protect my buddies and my country, as well as my own ass. You don’t have to be wearing olive drab to be a soldier, just like you don’t have to be wearing blue to do the job a cop has to do. Frankly, from what I know about it you did a pretty damn good job of it.”

“You really think so?”

“I really think so or I wouldn’t be here trying to help put your mind at ease,” Gil reassured him. “I know it sounds weird as hell as many times as you’ve already been over this, but let’s go over it again, move by move and pick it apart. Grab yourself a big old drink of that souped up tomato juice, take a deep breath, and let’s get started.”

In a way, it was the after-action debriefing from hell. Gil took Cody over the events of the evening at the Lufkin house, then over them again, pointing out where decisions had to be made, what those decisions were, and how he’d made them. He exhausted the alternatives until only the one alternative was left, and then how he’d reacted to the training he’d had to get the job done. By the time they’d pretty well wound it down it was well after Cody’s normal bedtime, and the exhaustion he’d felt from the incident was mixed with plain old fatigue from the late hour.

“I think you’ve got the picture,” Gil said finally, “and I know you’re tired as hell. But there’s one thing that I really think you ought to do, no matter how tired you are. That’s get back on the horse.”

“What do you mean?” Cody asked.

“Get back on the horse that threw you and ride it again. Like I said, I know you’re tired as hell, but let’s go back out to the range and pop some caps. I really think you should do it before you try to sleep on everything.”

“Can’t do it,” Cody protested. “The cops still have my gun.”

“Hell, you’ve shot my .45 before, you can shoot it again,” Gil smiled. “It’s out in the car. It won’t take long, but you really need to do it, or you’re going to have a hell of a time picking your P226 up again.”

Cody looked up at his mother, then his father, with a questioning look in his eyes, but didn’t say a word.

Candice frowned for a moment, then looked back at him. “I have heard a lot dumber ideas,” she said slowly. “I’ve even heard some dumber ideas tonight. Gil is right, Cody. I’ve been bucked off a few horses and fallen off a few sleds in my time, and you need to show yourself that you can still do it before you let your fears get the best of you.”

“Well, all right, I guess,” Cody replied hesitantly.

“Just a couple clips or so,” Gil told him, “just to prove to yourself that you still can.”

“Gil,” John spoke up, “do you need us to come along?”

Gil shrugged. “You can if you want,” he told them after a moment. “But maybe this should just be Cody and me. We won’t be long, maybe a half hour or so.”

“Then we’ll stay here,” John nodded.

“Grab your coat, soldier,” Gil said. “Let’s get this done. I’m an old man, and I need my sleep, too.”

Candice grinned – it was the first time for her to do that in hours. “Gil,” she smiled, “you’re never going to be an old man. You’re only as old as you think you are, and I’ve never known you to think like an old man.”

“I’m old,” he replied, half in jest. “I spent a lot of years getting here and I propose to enjoy it. The main good thing about being old is that you’ve had the time to get around a lot more blocks.”

In a couple minutes they were gone – Cody reluctantly, unsure of himself, and both John and Candice understood why. “God, I’m glad Charlie thought to call him,” John said as soon as the door was closed. “I think that did me as much good as it did Cody.”

“I thought about calling him, but decided to put it off till morning,” Candice admitted, “but I’m glad Charlie had the good sense to send him tonight. I don’t think we’d have gotten very much sleep without it, none of us.”

“Me either,” John shook his head. “I suppose we’d better stay up, though. Would you like a refill on that drink?”

“Yeah,” Candice replied. “I think so. Even with Gil’s therapy, it could be a long night.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.