I don't know whether the rumor started in the aftermath of my father's murder attempt or of his death. Either way, a rumor started going around that my father had a hit list of the people he was going to kill after he got rid of Walt Suhaka. 

Who started the rumor? Decades later my brother said he'd asked around the family and nobody else knew about any hit list, so he told me 

the rumor 

must have started with me 

and I was furious. Didn't talk to him for months. I've spent years wondering who was on it, who was up next. Quite a few people who go crazy with guns these days end up killing their immediate families, but even back when I first heard and/or started this rumor, I figured we would all be on it. 

Who better to kill, if you're the killing type, than the ones who cause you the greatest frustration? Who causes more frustration than your own family? Might he have killed us first to spare us the shame of living in his dark shadow? Might he have saved us for last, hoping that the cops would get to him in time for us to be spared? 

If a hit list ever existed, it died with him. I don't talk to my dad's side of the family enough to ask about something like that, and I can barely imagine asking my mom about the hit list. But I'll do that, right now. Nothing to lose.

So maybe I did make it up. I'm the fiction writer, after all, and the most likely culprit. The spinner of lies both beautiful and ugly. 

I was nine at the time, ten. Might I have heard the phrase hit list from someone, even from TV, and spun a yarn around it that I came to believe? Or at least a yarn that lives deep in my gut and gets activated every time some crazy person with a gun kills a bunch of people? 

That could have been my dad 

I say when their stories flash across the news screen. Instead of their names plastered on my TV and computer I see 

Thomas J. Wingate

SHOOTER  

and feelings that words can only swipe at run up and down my esophagus. Feelings that make me write about characters who have fallen off the edge, who choose to live on an edge they know they can fall off of if straddling it ever gets too tough. 

Every time I hear about the shooters the nine-year-old comes out, the shell-shocked kid who thought he'd get shot if he didn't step out of his father's way. The nine-year-old who, grown up now, stares at the digitized faces of the shooters looking for words to describe the sickness that led them to pull the trigger. 

If I can find words to describe them, I'll finally know what to call my father. He had the same disease, I could feel its poison emanating from his body. I'd like to say I saw it in his eyes, but I don't think I looked at his eyes that morning. No matter how I envision that living room encounter on 8/15/73, I can't imagine my eyes meeting his at all. 

If they did, I would know terror better than I do now. I might have been infected with the trigger disease. I picture his eyes as red pinpricks behind thick, lizardlike corneas. Staring ahead most of the time but occasionally twitching in another direction, never settling on anything but twitching right back to the center line, through whatever stands before him.... 

But back to the hit list. Even if he actually had one, I'd like to retroactively claim it as my own invention. That way, it wouldn't matter who was on it and what order they would be killed in. I could shuffle the order daily, if I wished. I could add friends and enemies my father never knew. 

I could spin polylinear stories like this one that change their shape depending on who was victim #2, victim #3, etc. I could write a video game based on his demise and make a soundtrack of his voice (spoken by me, of course) as he grumbles out each wrong ever done to him by those he seeks to avenge with murder.

I would offer players only one avatar: the kid who tries to tried to stop him. The nine-year-old. Me.