Beyond the Breakers

Introduction

That I am an assassin I will not deny…but consider why.

1 - The Ocean

Long Island is about 110 miles long east to west and about 30 miles wide at the thickest part north to south. That’s where I grew up – to the left of the middle.

Along the southern side there are a number of thin islands close to shore. The one separated from Long Island by Great South Bay is called Jones Beach Island. It contains Jones Beach State Park, which covers 6.5 miles of the island's ten-mile length. It’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and has more sand than you could ever want to play in.

As a family, we often went to Jones Beach to swim in the Atlantic Ocean. I loved it there. Sometimes after my dad got home from work, we quickly drove out there and ate cold fried chicken and cold boiled potatoes in the cooling ocean breeze of the early evening. And the water was freezing too. It was great!

When I go there now my senses fill up with memories, mostly of the waves, beautiful and terrifying, waves that would knock the largest man down without any effort. The day after a hurricane went through, I once saw waves higher than the top of our house roof – power beyond belief – power from Hell! As a boy, I used to stand at the water’s edge and watch the waves come ashore in wild chaos, crashing down as frightening breakers, or so it seemed to me, fascinated and fearful. I couldn’t swim very well then, and have remained so, but I never even thought about the actual drowning process. It was simply the power of the breakers, simultaneously beautiful and deadly, that I feared. And yet the greatest lesson of my life was theirs to give me.

When the ocean was relatively calm, I could walk far out in the freezing water, but eventually a wave would always rise up to attack me. The fear of that wave, not of drowning, would overtake me, over wash me with shear unthinking terror, and there I was, just a little boy alone. I would run with legs as in a dream, slow, impeded, fighting the irresistible undertow, and seldom did I outrun the inevitable. I would tumble in a world of sand, water, violence, and darkness, drinking in the very wave I feared. I never cried, but it was my personal solid proof that going beyond the breakers was never to be done.

I look at ocean waves now, and they calm me down. Back then they were a living nightmare. Other children my age and younger would enter the water and go out beyond the breakers. Just get beyond the breakers, my parents would say, but I knew they were wrong. Yet, deep inside of me, the will and strength to do it was there all the time and growing. And then one day I did, and I became stronger than the ocean that threatened me. The ocean became calm for me in the midst of fury, chaos, and destruction.

The fear didn’t leave me, but now I knew its name, its face, its illusion. Now I could trick it, outsmart it, defy it.

And then I grew up and married, and we had a son who would hopefully someday learn the lesson of the breakers, but instead, in an instant, my wife and child were gone, as if washed out to sea by a violent, irresistible undertow, far beyond the breakers – lost in the darkness, yelling my name and yet uttering not a word, forever beyond my reach.

2 - The Aftermath

The murderer was never caught, and his reasons for the murder were drowned in a sea of ignorance.

I had been brought up a Christian, yet I couldn’t believe it was God’s will. Still, it was one of God’s creations that had shot them. One lone breaker had finally risen to a height that I couldn’t cross. And it continued to grow as the minutes and hours flew by. Along with that breaker came an unrelenting undertow – grief, hatred, and darkness – the searing confusion of the greatest loss. I knew to approach the wave would bring more destruction, maybe my own, but I wasn’t ready to stop hating it. Those of you who have been through deep grief know what I mean. You would do anything to destroy the destroyer, even at the risk of your own life, but what was the name of the wave? No one knew.

I was left without my family, and surprisingly without some who had called me friend. They could leave rather than face it. I had no choice. The only thing I had left was a dying dog that hung on for what, for me? I don’t know. Maybe she wanted vengeance, and knew she couldn’t get it if she died. It was her family too. She had to know something about the horror. She was there. She was part of it. How deep can a dog think? Where was the reasoning in any of it?

Still, Esther hung on. She had been shot once, and after two nights at the vet, she returned home bandaged and on death’s brink. The vet held out no hope, but there we were in our house, just Esther and me. Esther was a comfort to me between the tears, and sometimes even while they rained down. A few friends, relatives, and even strangers offered advice and food. Esther offered only extremely weak and intensely sad eyes, her breathing abnormal and labored. Strangely, at least to me, food was a big part of it. It was probably about the only real comfort that got through the haze along with Esther.

On went the ocean, waves of grief, waves of anger, waves of bewilderment, and the undertow of hatred for the person that did this.

I remember thinking soon after it happened, Two hours ago they were fully alive, unharmed…three hours…four hours…a day…a week. How can it be true and yet seem so untrue? Let’s fix this mistake before it becomes permanent. And at that point my body would almost come to a complete stop.

Their names? You want to know their names? It’s hard even now to say them to people. They’re gone, and I feel so responsible for the thing that I could not possibly have predicted or prevented. I can just barely talk about it, but say their names, and it becomes too real to talk at all. I can only say them to Esther. Ask her. She’s still alive.

What purpose was there to leaving me here and taking them? They deserved their lives. They were good. Why kill good people? Why maim an innocent dog. Why give it the pain of a long recovery? Esther never barks anymore – for joy, for anything, with few exceptions. And the point is?

How can God allow this? Why fill me with hate and grief?

The police had all but given up. And I didn’t see why they had any reason to go on. Unlike the police, I had no choice, neither did Esther. Move along, there’s nothing more to see here.

I can’t. I won’t.

3 - Another Parting

When you stand in the water near the edge of an ocean where it’s only inches deep, the waves run out just a few yards behind you, and your feet alternate between being covered by water and not covered by water as the waves play their periodic song upon the sand, and your feet slowly sink into it. I doubt you would ever let it get very high up your ankles before you would move, but you do become fixed in the moist sand for a time. Squirm, and it happens faster.

Ultimately you have to move, and you pull your feet out of the grit, first one and then the other. You just don’t hop out. In my case, I couldn’t hop out of my life if I wanted to, but I didn’t squirm. I just stood there, not knowing what else to do, not understanding anything. I read somewhere that people who go through the shock of sudden grief and who are close to their church often move away from it, while others who are not close move towards it. We blame our crutches for our lameness and abandon them.

So, when the day came to pull my feet out the sand, I left God in it. It required only a little water to wash off the residual. I could not in good conscience spend a lifetime hating a loving God that had allowed the death of my family. We were both better off parting ways. And I could think more clearly without having to hate God, as well as the killer.

I knew a woman at work who had lost two children, and she had moved closer to God. And to that I say, good for her. Belief in God is not my enemy. Believe what you must to find comfort in a world filled with injustice. And I will also.

4 - The Tracker

The police did a thorough job. They were sympathetic. They were tenacious. There was evidence that included observations of witnesses – people who heard the shots, and people who saw the dark, unrecognizable form of a person leaving the house and disappearing into the black woods beyond it, but there was no DNA, no fingerprints, no shell casings, no recognizable footprints. There were bullets, but no gun to match them. And much worse, there was no apparent reason for the killings!

I had been on a business trip, but that alibi wasn’t totally airtight. For a few hours I was a suspect – until all possible friends, neighbors, and family members disabused the police of the idea. The detective never really believed it anyway.

So, the Dark of Night Killings, as the press called it, went without solution. I hold nothing against the police for that conclusion. We had discussed it together at length. They withstood my concerned questions, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in their work.

As the months went by, the trail simply disappeared. The news media moved on, the long deathly quiet of the rest of my life began, or so it seemed.

Much to the surprise of the vet, Esther recovered, and although somewhat scarred, grew stronger. However, she was never free of pain after that. I gained the habit of taking her for walks around a nearby pond at a town park. The ground was level there, and the natural setting seemed to calm her. She walked with little pain there.

Our house, on the other hand, was at the lowest part of the road, and when I first started to walk her at home, we would get to a place a few houses up, and she would start to whine in pain. I would stop, lean down, and comfort her, but she could not go farther. Esther wanted to go home. I don’t think I ever carried a dog so much before in my life.

Esther isn’t a really big dog, maybe 60 pounds or so. For a German Shepherd, that’s not a lot. She’s basically tan. She doesn’t look menacing. She looks sweet. And that is how her life had always been, but the shooting had left her weak in spirit and body. She used to run, chase balls, play with other dogs, and curl up with her family. The only part of her that was not diminished by the wound was her nose, which no bullet had harmed.

The day it happened, fully a year after the murders, it was raining off and on. Esther and I had been on hundreds of walks since the shooting. I was short on time, and she seemed much stronger from the months of exercise. So, I figured she could make it up the hill on our road. I didn’t have the time to take her to the pond.

Everything went well as we approached her usual hill limit. And then, she lifted her head and sniffed the air. Out of the corner of my eye I could see one of our neighbors, a stranger to me, walking across his yard towards us. He yelled out a greeting, which I returned...and Esther froze. Then she started to squirm and whimper like she had many times before at that point on the hill, but when he reached us I heard it. The thing I hadn’t heard in a year, actually had never heard before, the most vicious bark she had ever in her life given out. With all her diminished strength she pulled at the leash to get at the neighbor, pain forgotten. I pulled her back. She was drooling profusely, foaming with rage. I apologized, and turned to head home, a reluctant dog dragging at the end of the leash, trying to finish what she so desperately wanted to start. I felt like I was in a movie. It seemed unreal. Esther had never been like that with anyone, ever.

I should have known it right then. I should have realized that I had been looking into the eyes of a murderer.

We reached home, and things returned to the still very new normal. Esther limped exhausted to her bed and flopped while I watched TV and wolfed down some breakfast before rushing to work.

5 - The Forty-Five

It finally struck me while driving home from work that same day. And the first thing next morning, Saturday, I bought a gun, a handgun, almost by instinct. It would take at least five days to actually get the gun because they had to do a background check, but I had gained a new friend, a mechanical friend, a deadly friend – one that would say things to the killer of my wife and child that he needed to hear and feel.

When I got home, I sat on the couch with the literature for the gun in front of me on the coffee table, a box of ammunition resting beside it. I thought about the gun. I thought about my life. I thought about my neighbor. Now I could kill the killer. I knew who he was, but the only simple thought in all of it was the gun. Its sense of purpose and order stood out. My life had no such characteristics.

Killing a man was not just pulling a trigger, and yet it was. True, the killing was not as pristine as the gun itself, but it was sincerely more pristine than my life.

Could I actually look into the eyes of another man and murder him in cold blood – watch his pain, watch life drain from his mind and body? And could I live with that vision for the rest of my life?

On the other hand, what purpose did my life still hold but to avenge the deaths of my wife and son?

I couldn’t answer any of those questions, especially the last one, and therein lay the problem.

I had never owned a gun. I had never spent any time around guns after my time in the military. When I was in the US Air Force, I was required only once to go to the gun range and fire a military forty-five semi-automatic. I was a lousy shot. No one ever taught me how to shoot. I don’t remember how many rounds I fired that day, maybe twenty or thirty rounds. The target was a paper outline of a man, twenty-five feet down range. Did I ever hit the target? Quite honestly, I don’t remember, but there was another young officer next to me, about my age. He calmly put seven rounds closely spaced into the head, and then did the same for the heart.

For those of you who know even less about guns than I do, a forty-five caliber bullet is nearly one half inch in diameter – not small. It leaves the barrel of the gun at over 700 miles per hour, just under the speed of sound at standard sea level conditions.

The old forty-five is semi-automatic. It doesn’t have to be cocked to fire each time. The gun does it for you. You just pull back the slide to cock it the first time, and the rest is done by the action of firing each bullet until the gun is empty. That way you can put several large holes in a person very quickly. It was designed for close combat, to drop a man high on drugs or his own adrenalin dead in his tracks – literally. It’s not the most powerful handgun in the world, but it’s up there. It’s a one shot man killer.

The forty-five that I bought was a step up from the old army forty-five in accuracy. It was a Kimber CDP II with a four-inch barrel, with the same basic design as the old military standard. And it was a gun that looked like it knew why it was made.

Most soldiers use a rifle. They’re much more powerful and accurate than any handgun, and there is no sense in being closer to the enemy than required, but I wanted to be close. I wanted to see death spread across his face. I wanted him to know who killed him. I wasn’t interested in torture, but I wanted to feel myself kill him. I wanted him to feel himself die. I wanted to see him lose what meant so much to him – his ego, his sense of self-importance, his life. So much hate had built within me that I was shaking just reading the gun literature.

And then he called! I didn’t know it was him, but the ringing startled me, and I almost knocked the table over getting to the phone and saying, Hello.

A slightly hesitant, but reasonably friendly greeting from a man that I had learned to brutally hate in a single day came back at me through the phone. He introduced himself as Bradley (just Brad) Smithton – almost a lisp for a last name. He said he was sorry that we had never formally met in all the years we had lived only a few houses apart. I was instantly tongue-tied. I wasn’t about to make my enemy my friend. He seemed to ignore the silence, and plowed onward to his goal.

"I want to apologize for scaring your dog yesterday. Dogs and I don’t usually get along very well.

I’m going to be in town for a little bit today. Could we meet for coffee around four? I thought I would pick up some treats as a peace offering for your dog, what’s his name? he said.

Esther, I replied. I couldn’t think fast enough to answer the coffee question right then. My heart rate was up and climbing.

Oh a female, he said. So, can we meet? At The Coffee Tin? Four o’clock? I’ll buy.

Silence for three seconds, then a hesitant Sure, I’ll be there. I think I’ll leave Esther at home though.

Great, see you then. We’ll get to know each other, dog or no dog. Click!

What just happened? was all I could think. Why had I said yes? Why had he even asked? I sat thinking virtually nothing for a few minutes until I could relax. Then I started to think, If I had the gun, I could load it right now, bring it with me, and kill him. The rage came back in a microsecond, without warning and without limit.

And then I started to cry. I couldn’t control it. All the grief swept any sense of myself aside as easily as an ocean breaker would sweep aside a small boy, and I nearly drowned in sorrow. Esther came over, hung her chin over my thigh, and waited. I couldn’t make a coherent sentence; I couldn’t find a coherent thought. I had just agreed to drink coffee with the killer of my wife and child, and I was stuck back at that point in time when they had ceased to exist. If there is anything beyond empty, I was way beyond even that.

6 - Coffee for Two

When I ran out of liquid for tears I was a mess, and I only