The Prowler Around My Sister's House  − 20 December, 1980

The call came from the next door neighbor well after midnight. The neighbor said she'd seen a prowler around my older sister's house on Mt.Vernon. It was the holiday so my sister, her husband, and their baby daughter had gone to Alabama to see his mother. So we knew that no one was home. Daddy finished the call and told me to get my shoes and coat together.

He went upstairs to get one of those fake lumberjack plaid coats sold at Kmart. I had my coat on as we went out the front door to his van. It'd been overcast that day so the light was even more snuffed out as neither starlight nor reflection gathered. The street lamps gave off a sickly glow trying to punch through the thick soup the air had become.

We drove few minutes to Mt. Vernon Avenue, which was actually a long hill road that ran down from the top of one of North Chattanooga's ridges. On the left side going down, a string of Depression-era houses (bricks, white frames, a few rebuilds) ran with quarter and half acre lots. On the right, the slope fell off sharply with a few homes here and there but mainly a drop into some low bottom woods. My sister's house occupied the last third of Mt. Vernon, a low slung white A-frame that had a screen porch on one side and a drive way that curved past it to about a quarter acre in the back. The front of the house sat level with the street but the rear had filled a depression in the back, kind of a bowl. It made for more room but also a blind spot once the sun went down. We stopped about three houses from my sister’s place, lights off, engine switched off.

My father just sat there, motioning with his finger for me not to speak. Our eyes grew accustomed to the street without the head lights. Just waiting...around five or six minutes.

In a smooth motion, Daddy reached into the right pocket of the jacket and pulled out a .38 revolver. He didn’t look down at the gun but kept his gaze fixed in front of the van. His hands manipulated the weapon in the darkness. His thumb gently slid the cylinder lock forward. As it opened, his fingers brushed the brass caps of each loose cartridge in his coat pocket. He slid each one into the right hole until he had a full load. The cylinder then folded back, slipping well-oiled into the firing position. It'd taken less than ten seconds and he hadn't glanced down once.

Daddy turned and motioned me to stay in the co-pilots seat. He pointed toward the three houses between the van and my sister's house. The lights were off as everyone had taken off for the holiday weekend. A few homes had an oak tree but mainly people had hedges that lined the front edge of their homes. Daddy opened the door of the van but didn't shut it lest it made noise. He crossed the first yard and made himself parallel to the first hedge, squatting down to get a view of my sister's place. Then he'd go forward another eight to ten feet, squat again, and move forward. There was no hesitation. He was either fixed stone cold still or moving without noise.

He came to the corner of my sister’s lot. The hedges finished there, just a stone flower box in front of the house and then a single lonely oak. He didn't run or dash like the movies but moved smooth but steady to the tree. I then saw him take in the front of the house and then satisfied that no one was in the front year, he again did that strange direct walk to the front corner, the last area I could see before he'd need to disappear around the corner to check out the back.

As he started to make his way around that corner, I had to stifle a cry to call him back. But I couldn't without giving him away. So I could only watch him dissolve around the front corner to take the driveway to the back...seconds slowed and ticked without me seeing or hearing anything, no matter how hard I strained my ears. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing so I mentally mapped every detail I could remember about the backyard, every bit of piled firewood, the remnants of the swingset from the previous owner. I imagined him feeling his way around the garage door. Still no shot, no sound or light.

I wanted to light a cigarette but he'd taken them....in that waiting I thought why hadn’t we just called the cops. Or worse we had and cops would come up upon him unexpected and shoot him by accident....all of those thoughts circulated through my head when he re-appeared from behind the van and almost caused me to jump out of my skin.

"Nobody's there", he said matter-of-fact...the bullets slid out of the revolver and jangled loose again in his pocket. He turned on the van and we went back home. At the time, he was about a week from his 60th birthday.

He'd been one of the charter members of the 82nd Airborne in WWII, dropping into Sicily, fighting at Anzio, Salerno, then later Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, and into Germany. Duty in Korea followed soon enough and he'd finished his career representing the US Army to people who'd lost sons in Vietnam. All of that history seemed just history to me until that night, the numbing march of fact, dates, and action

However, a day or two later it dawned on me that the only way he had walked from the front of the van to return to the back of the van was that he'd doubled back through the rear gardens of all of those homes, quiet and purposeful in just a few minutes.

It then hit me full-force in the gut that my father had hunted men before....I never asked him to tell another war tale.

Comments:

edunn (February 15, 2007. 12:59am)

Happy Valentine’s Day! We want to make sure that you know about the contest for the iPod! Please visit the blog http://blog.dandelife.com/ for further details. Good luck.
Love ya, the Dandelife Team