Evil in Our Mists
(It may have been just because I drove by the high school the other day. Or that this Saturday, October 4, is the 20th anniversary of our arrival here in the Northwest, driving a green Chevy Citation with a U-Haul in the rear, $500 to our name and the future all we had. David was my best man at the wedding, a tall gay guy who moved Heaven and Earth to ensure that Julie and I might make it, and he sat in the front seat while I drove and Julie languished in the back among the luggage, making cracks about my driving, a tradition that has survived two decades. She had her comments and Dave had his pipe, which he would haul out every hour or so and puff on. I had no interest in drugs; I was a Stranger in a Strange Land, and I had the impression that there was water on my left, an eerie thought for an Arizona native. So I just drove.
(We made it and we've made it, although David has long since departed for Tucson. It reminds me, though, that we've come a long way; that, like 9/11, some things on the East Coast seem foreign and familiar at the same time. We relate, hard as it is to believe. From last October...)
I moved to the Pacific Northwest in early October of 1983, so I know all about October.
October is a prankster, a con man, a swindler and a liar. If October tells you your shoe's untied, don't look down. If October whispers the name of a certain stock, don't buy it. If October shakes your hand, check your wallet.
October wants you to believe that the sunny days of summer weren't all that good, that August was too hot and it rained all of July. October wants you to appreciate the sparkling afternoons and the brisk mornings, the colors of the leaves and the taste of caramel apples. October wants to pull the wool over your eyes and at the same time yank your underwear up to your chest when you're not looking. October is leading you down a primrose lane, and at the end of that is November, so don't fall for it.
I thought about this last Thursday afternoon, driving down Beverly Park Road. It was sunny and clear, but to the west was something. Something different, a change of color in the sky. Not dark, not threatening. Just different.
This was the day they caught the sniper. Or snipers. And maybe they're innocent, but no one believes that. The terror that swept across Maryland and Virginia and Washington, D.C. for over a month ended with a whimper, some diligent police work and hubris on the part of the perpetrators, along with an observant trucker. Sleeping in their car, the bad guys became the unsuspecting targets they'd been threatening for weeks. And they got off easy, the freaks.
I walked outside at 6:45 that evening to head for the high school choir concert, and October had left me a business card. Fog, dense and rolling, covered the neighborhood, and it was too late to think about summer. But then, I'd seen it coming.
"It's smooky," my wife said, using the term my daughter coined when she was 6 years old and it was foggy. It's a good word. Part smoky and part spooky. Let it roll around your tongue for a while and you'll understand. It was a smooky night all right. I let my wife drive.
Fog is the prop in our film noir fantasies, the mist at the airport in Casablanca when Rick lets Ilsa go on her way and says he doesn't know much about being noble. Fog holds suspense and mystery, and the killer who strikes and disappears and leaves no clues.
Fog played no part back east when the sniper was killing at will. There was still the mystery, though, the sudden shots and the lack of shells and the occasional message. "I am God," one of them said. He struck and disappeared (and we knew it was a he, the way we know certain things in an uncertain world, not worth talking about), and while he wasn't God he was foggy and elusive, and reminded all of us, even those far away from the danger, that there was evil out there.
But we've always known it, right? Even if we stretch our rationalizing brains to explain every flaw, every mistake, listing our reasons from bad parenting to post-traumatic stress to depression, even if we allow perpetrators of evil to become understandable and even possibly worthy of forgiveness, we still recognize evil. It's always there, always has been and always will be.
Without evil there would be no good, or so they say. We need the contrasts, or else sunny days become common and not worth mentioning. So in a world where evil lies in the trunk and picks off children, I went to a high school choir concert and heard teenagers sing for the fun of it.
There were three choirs and two a cappella groups (and there's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple), and they sang for 75 minutes and I hummed all the way home. We forgot to stop for milk, so I ran out later and got it, then stood in my driveway in the fog for a minute, hearing the evening's music run through my head once more.
The power of evil, someone once said, is not the act itself, but its ability to distract us from seeing the goodness of God and the joys of life. We have to fight it, or else what's the point? So we risk danger and expose ourselves, take some chances and let October deceive us every year. There are more important survival instincts than fear, I thought then, so I ended my day standing alone in my driveway on a smooky night, an easy target for a sniper, holding onto a gallon of milk and singing to myself in the fog like a fool.
8:55:34 PM 
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