Reflections From a Hazel Eye
Mark Hooper Epting

Mark Hooper Epting is a former lawyer, former lots
of things, whose singular claim to fame is that he
played in “Mother McRee’s Uptown Jug Stompers”, but
wisely quit before they went on to become The Grateful
Dead. He went to Vietnam instead, where he was
loved by all even though his helicopter(s) managed to
get shot out of the sky five times before he finally
managed to limp home. As you can see, solid career
moves have always been his strong suit, and now he
hopes to make disgusting amounts of money writing
drivel, and surrounding himself with scores of
nubile, underage women. You can help. Contact him
at hmarko@juno.com.
©Copyright 2001
Mark Hooper Epting

She appears below me every morning, dressed in her old
housecoat, standing next to the mailbox, gazing down the hill,
sometimes for hours at a time. It matters little the time of year, for
she will be there without fail on those mornings when the harsh
summer sun beats a relentless tattoo through all who dare stand in
its path, as well as those mid- winter days when a frigid northwest
rain fairly cuts a channel of pain straight to the bone.
No matter.
She is always there.
Waiting.
I do not know this from constant personal observation, for I am
not there to see her every day.
I have a life, after all.
But I know she appears just the same, for I truly understand that
she has little choice.
She awaits the return of her thirteen-year-old daughter, her
beloved last-born child who was cruelly snatched away by an act so
monstrous that I am loathe to discuss it. Yet discuss it I must, and in
that respect I probably have no more choice in the matter than she
does.
I have a daughter too.
My study overlooks the lonely place where she always stands,
and I’m sure her eyes have a far-away look as she scans the horizon
for that golden moment in time that is never going to come.
I approached her for the first time, several years ago. I thought
maybe there was something I could do, some kind of Christian act
that would ease those endless cascades of sorrow, if only for a few
precious moments. We have a summer home up in the Ochocos, a
few miles out of Prineville. It is a quiet place, and in the early
mornings the mule deer come down to gently lap water from the
creek and the silence is so profound that even the occasional
chatter of a troublesome squirrel seems somehow out of place.
I offered it to her and her husband. Just a place to get away for a
few days, a chance to escape the crushing burden of a memory too
horrible to be real.
“Thanks Mac,” she said. “But what would I do if my daughter
returned and I wasn’t here?”
I didn’t know what to say. What would she do? Slip finally off that
precarious slope and into the fires of unconditional madness?
There was a burn last night on a lot that is just up-slope from me,
and the air is still sharp with the scent of incense cedar. I want to
draw the smell in, let it take me away so I walk through the glass
door that connects my workplace to the second floor balcony.
I wave to my neighbor but I know she does not see me. She is
the kind of person who would never fail to wave back.
A thought struck me the last time I observed her like this. In all
these years, even though the early morning mail delivery would
always be there by the time she arrived, I have never seen her take
it inside. Her husband invariably picks it up when he gets home
from his job as a shift foreman at a local aluminum plant.
The crime was a loathsome one as I have already mentioned.
Three young men snatched her virginal, sweet daughter as she and
a playmate were walking down a lonely country road. According to
one of these cretins in a later confession, they began to rape her in
the back seat of their car within seconds of the abduction. All three
tried her only partially matured body multiple times over the next
few days-showing little mercy and even less humanity-and when
they grew tired of her, one of them simply slit her throat.
They discarded her sad little form in a burning barrel, at a
campground deep in the Olympic National forest. They discarded it
like so much unwanted trash.
I was a detective in the Farmington County Sheriff’s Office then-
sixteen years served out of my pension-vesting, twenty-and once
the case was finally concluded, I simply quit. There would be no
pension, and I flat-out didn’t care. I had reached my lifetime quota
of dealing with the human detritus left behind by an ever-increasing
army of psychopaths, and I knew that even a single day more might
push me into a strange and terrible land from which I would
probably never return.
This was all a long time ago-seven excruciating years, and I can
still recall the three suspects when they were brought in for
questioning several weeks after the little girl’s body was found.
By that time, there were four more victims added to the list
I had the misfortune of doing the initial interview on one Jerry
Bob Sanders, a miserable piece of white-trash dogshit who was also
far and away the most beautiful man I had ever seen. There were
movie stars who would kill to look like he did. Strong, muscular
body. Thick black hair, high cheekbones, an almost feminine mouth.
Impossibly white, even teeth. And the cruelest, sharpest hazel eyes
there could possibly be. He was one of those people who knew the
effect he had on other humans, and he took every chance possible
to exploit it.
“You a bone-smoker, Lieutenant? I can usually spot ‘em a mile
away.”
He had a smug, self-assured look on his face, and, before I even
knew what was happening, somebody’s right fist collided with his
mouth and he was suddenly spitting out several of those previously
perfect teeth.
The fist was, of course, mine.
In a third of a second, he was only a fraction as handsome as
he’d been a moment before.
“Those other two cretins are already giving it up, Elvis,” I told
him. “Top man on the shitheap might not take the gurney ride
down at OSP.”
“Oooh. I’m shakin in my boots here.”
“I don’t need you, Jerry Bob. Your confession would be the icing
that ruins the cake.”
He smiled at this, a bloody, missing-tooth smile.
“You’re stand-up, man, lieutenant. I mean for a queer. I like you.”
“Well you’re a bag of guts,” I replied. “And I don’t like you.”
He managed to maintain his smile, and what happened next took
me totally by surprise.
“I’m gonna give you the skinny on how we did that little girl, Yo.
Dying don’t scare me.”
My job required...No. It demanded that I listen to him, even as
something inside was telling me this was a story I should never
hear, a story that no one with an ounce of humanity should ever
hear.
He knew that, and I know it gave him immense pleasure.
But then I’ve already explained what it was he said, what it was
those monsters did to that helpless child.
It does not bear repeating here.
When he was through with his vile tale, for the second time in
my 16-year career I hit a custodial suspect. This time I broke his
nose and when he was finally led away, he was laughing, a
seemingly uncontrollable, mocking laugh that, even now, haunts my
dreams on those nights when my subconscious mind taps into some
awful dreamscape.
And because we ultimately had them cold on a whole string of
murders, there never was a trial. And that confession never saw the
proverbial light of day.
My neighbor asked me about it during the time I worked the
case. She wanted to be reassured that her daughter had not suffered
too much. She deserved to never know the whole truth, so I lied to
her.
You see, she had some reason to hope, for shortly before they’d
slit her child’s throat, they had allowed her a call from a rural pay
phone. A call where she’d told her distraught mother that she was
okay. That she was not being mistreated.
And all the while they knew she was going to be dead within
hours, but not before they had the last of their sick fun.
I never knew Carlene, for I moved next door to her parents some
time later, and quite by accident.
But I know for a fact that she was a special child, a terror-stricken
young girl who surely knew the deadly horrors the future held for
her-but wanted a last chance to reassure her equally terror-stricken
mother that everything would be okay.
I gave up on God the day I resigned from the force. Truth be
told, I think they were glad to see me go. But then, when I think
about it, maybe that isn’t entirely true. Maybe I lost my faith the day
I learned that Jerry Bob Sanders had been assaulted by three
inmates in the license plate shop, and had had one eye removed
and an ear cut off-before he was set on fire. I figured if there
really was a God, He would have made sure the same fate had
come to the other two as well.
By the time my own daughter disappeared, my neighbor and I
had become close friends. Or as close as two people who shared
what we did were likely to get.
“What’s happened with your Georgia isn’t likely the same as what
might’ve happened to my Carlene,” she told me one morning
recently as I stood watch beside her. It was one of those mornings
in the early spring when western Oregon often becomes a paradise
on earth. The heady smell of fresh pine wafted on a light breeze,
and the sky was a pewter blue that I swear you can’t find anywhere
else.
This was as close as she ever came to an admission of what had
happened to her daughter. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew
my personal fear concerning my own daughter’s fate was as
palpable as a brick chimney.
“You do believe that, don’t you Mac?” she continued in response
to my silence.
“Yes,” I finally said. “I can’t stand to believe the alternative.”
“It’s not your fault, you know. Young people today, they can get
pretty headstrong. She’ll be back. When the time is right, she’ll be
back.”
Sure, I thought. Unless she blunders into a piece of shit like the
ones that stole your little girl. You see, that was the legacy we were
both stuck with. Our souls were forever seared with the
knowledge-not the ‘five-o-clock news’ kind that most people have,
but instead the unshakeable variety that comes from bitter personal
experience-that the world was indeed an ugly and dreary place.
My neighbor knew what had later happened in my family, knew
how the cancer had torn through my wife like a runaway train until
it finally, mercifully, took her away.
My daughter was seventeen when her mother died and had cared
for her nearly 24 hours a day in those last months. And, as a result
of that strange, existential disease that often strikes even the closest
of families, we were able to offer one another little comfort after my
wife’s passing.
I came home one day to find Georgia’s closets and drawers
almost completely devoid of her possessions.
That was three months ago, and I have not heard a word from
her since.
“Takes time, Mac. You just give it some time.”
I nodded and simply left, not knowing those were the last words
I would ever hear come out of her mouth.
My neighbor made good her escape from this world, last night
shortly before the clock struck twelve. She did this with the
competent help of a Smith & Wesson 357 Magnum, one of those ‘L’
framed models, I believe; the ones with the long, full-lug barrels
that Dirty Harry always seemed to favor.
I heard the shot, but I didn’t call the police until late the next
morning.
“Why?” a detective asked, as we stood on the porch of her little
home. “Why did you wait?”
“If I told you,” I replied, maybe as seriously as I’ve ever been in
my life. “I’d probably have to kill you.”
He didn’t think it was funny, but then, it wasn’t meant to be.
So now it is me who stands a daily watch in front of her little
bungalow, looking down the hill, towards the vast fields of
strawberries in the valley below that will soon fill the air with their
sweet, and aromatic scent.
I am waiting for my daughter, waiting for the day when I can
welcome her with open arms, for the day when I can explain to her
that the world is a wondrous and joyous place, a place where little
girls are ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’, and the Jerry Bob
Sanders of this world are safely locked away where the only harm
they can unleash is the harm they can bring upon themselves.
The creation of such fictions are the very least we can do for our
children.