You can really put up with getting pushed around for awhile. You really can. But eventually it’ll catch up with you. That’s when you get even.
Those were words he’d lived by for quite some time. Now, as he was walking through the Super Wal-Mart, wooden baseball bat in hand, and whacking every man, woman, and child he could find, his philosophy was coming true.
Here was for the time he was hit by a car at age 12 only to have the driver leave the scene before his license plates or a good description could be written down. Here was for all the times Uncle Herb molested him as a boy. Here was for all the shit he put up with at work. It was time for revenge. For every wrong done, one was righted with the swing of the bat and the compacting of flesh.
‘FUCK THIS PLACE!’ he kept screaming at the top of his lungs. ‘FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT!’
The words were a mantra for him. They had the ring of a Buddhist ‘om’ or a Krishna ‘haribol’.
As the police surrounded him in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart and crouched behind their squad cars pistols drawn and firing, he flung the bat through the air one last time and hit the Captain of the force directly in the jaw. The Captain hocked blood successively for ten minutes.
He died that day in a hail of gunfire, and that left a lot of people wondering what he was intending on accomplishing.
You might say it was nothing, but it meant a lot to me.