Chapter One
I am the assistant district attorney of Davidson County,
Tennessee, and on May 18, 2004, I killed Wilson Owens. He was determined, and I
was willing. We were like lovers, in that way. Wilson pursued me with a string
of petty thefts and miscellaneous criminal acts – working his way through his
lesser loves – until he could wait for our union no longer. On that day – three
years, two months, and eleven days before his own death – Owens killed Steven
Davidson, the manager of the Sunshine Grocery Store in east Nashville. The
moment Wilson’s bullet entered Davidson’s chest, the dance between us began.
I mention these names because it’s important in my line of work that they are
remembered. Both are dead, and both are lamented by their families. Ironically,
both have gravestones in the same cemetery, Roselawn Memorial Gardens, in east
Nashville; Wilson is buried underneath a flat, nondescript stone inscribed only
with his name and the duration of his life. A hundred and fifty yards away,
Davidson lies beneath an ornate, marble monument paid for by his numerous
friends, fellow churchgoers, and family.
Wilson was what society calls a bad man. The truth, as usual, is more
complex. What is certain is that his life went off the rails as a teenager, when
his father – a man to whom the notion of family responsibility was as alien as a
day without alcohol – took a final uppercut at his mother and walked out the
door. From those sullen seeds Wilson grew, nurtured in the subculture of the
Nashville projects, until he emerged, at eighteen years old, already twice a
father, already once a felon. His destiny was sealed, as was mine.
I was born to kill Wilson Owens as surely as he was born to be my victim.
This is clear only in retrospect, of course. When I was growing up in Wichita,
Kansas, the son of a civilian airplane mechanic who worked at McConnell Air
Force Base, the idea that I would one day kill a man was as distant from my mind
as India. My father’s world was full of wrenches, grease, and secondhand tales
of pilot braggadocio. I loved that world nearly as much I loved my father. In
those days of blissfully low security, I would ride my bike from home to the
base, wave at the bored guards, and screech to a halt outside the hanger 3,
where my father worked. I would watch him clamber inside one of the huge General
Electric engines hanging under the wing of a tanker, or, perched on his
shoulders, I would peer inside the still-warm tailpipe of an F-15 fighter. He
and the other workers wore flattop haircuts, black shoes, and the gray coveralls
of Faris Aircraft, the company that subcontracted the overflow aircraft
maintenance work at the base. I wore my hair the same way, even though in the
early eighties this had all the cachet of a funeral director. It didn’t matter.
To identify with my father and the easygoing men of his world was all that
mattered.
My mother lived in an entirely different world, one which I generally viewed
with suspicion. A legal secretary, she worked in the grandly named but decrepit
Century Plaza Building, an aging structure with noisy plumbing and elevators
with doors that had to be manually pulled shut. The few times I went there – no
more than five or six in my entire childhood – confirmed to me that the world of
suits, ties, and paper-pushing was greatly inferior to the vibrant, masculine
world of my father. My father’s coworkers were muscular, told dirty jokes, and
had eyes that sparkled when they roughhoused. The men of my mother’s world all
seemed slick, dark-haired, and smiling with secret agendas. That my mother
seemed so completely at home in this world haunted me then, and now that I
occupy the same world myself, haunts me still. To my surprise, I am more my
mother’s son than my father’s, although physically I am his younger picture. I
have his photograph before me now, as I sit at my desk at the DA’s office on a
gray, August afternoon. He is bare-chested, his wide-open smile pointed at the
camera, a cigarette in his left hand, ready to fix any airplane that happens to
roll by. Looking at his smile, I can almost believe he could fix the world.
On the day he died – having fallen thirty-eight feet from the wing of an
AC-130 Hercules onto the griddle-hot asphalt beneath the plane, breaking his
neck as cleanly as a chicken’s wishbone – the world as I had known it ceased to
exist. I spent the next year or so trying to bring him back, which my current
profession has long since taught me is impossible. But at eighteen, the answer
to my problems seemed to involve smoking a good deal of dope, drinking beer, and
arguing with my mother over the direction of my life. Predictably, I wanted to
join the military. She wanted me to go to college and become a lawyer. The
compromise was inevitable: I agreed to go to college if I could be in ROTC,
which paid my tuition in exchange for two years of active service. Since my
father left us little, my mother could hardly refuse. I enrolled at Wichita
State, and somewhere between marching for ROTC and an English class I found the
part of my mother inside myself that I had denied. I was a hell of a student and
a hell of a recruit. I put the two together, traded two more years of active
duty with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for law school, and in 1992 walked
out of Vanderbilt Law a second lieutenant ready to fulfill my commitment to the
army.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Blood of Angels by Reed Arvin
Excerpted by permission.
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