One Monday We Killed Them All Read Online Free PDF Page A

McAran wasn’t irritated, or even interested. It is difficult to describe the way it was done. If a fly buzzes around your face you flick your hand at it, and it is a matter of total indifference to you whether you cripple it, kill it or merely drive it away. The end result is the same—the fly stops bothering you. Were you to kill it and be chided by a Hindu, you would stare at him as ifhe had lost his mind. In order to have any understanding of his point of view you would have to go deeply into Hindu philosophy so as to understand why every life form is considered sacred.
    The back of my neck felt cold. I was the Hindu facing the alien who could never comprehend my philosophy. He looked like a man and talked like a man, but we could not have been born on the same planet. I felt helplessly weakened by my own sentimentalities, by all the emotional baggage I had to tote around with me in a world where Dwight McAran was unencumbered. Up until that moment I had been apprehensive. With one casual jolt of his knee he had turned apprehension to a primitive unreasoning fear.
    Meg came hurrying out onto the small back porch and down the steps and across the yard toward Dwight, making small sounds of gladness, and for one nightmarish moment I had a vision of the knee lifting again with a force suited to this larger object, to send her, too, tumbling onto the sodden ground.
    I watched them embrace. And then they went toward the house together, with Meg asking questions he had no chance to answer. I followed along behind them into those kitchen aromas of the lunch which Meg hoped would erase the memories of five years of prison starch.

iii
    As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a policeman. Most small boys get over this. I didn’t. I don’t know why it should have been this way with me. Most men who become cops do so when other dreams become unattainable. They go onto the force as a compromise with reality.
    Perhaps there is some order about it all which we do not yet understand. In every community of men there must be some who build, some who lead, some who heal, some who serve God. And every community must have laws, and men to enforce them. Just as every war has increased the percentage of male births in some pattern we do not yet understand, maybe there is some assignment of direction so that the communities of man will remain workable.
    Without us, without the directed ones, you would not be safe in your homes at night, because it is too desperate a business to be handled entirely by the men who have drifted into it.
    I am a good cop. It is a complex profession, laborious, drab and unromantic. I have a high school education. My army time, after basic, was spent in Military Police. I’ve had two tours at the FBI school. I study every issue of such technical publications as the Journal of Criminal Law , Criminology and Police Science. I do outside reading in these fields, as well as in sociology, psychology and public administration. I have learned the tricks and devices of command. I have a distinguished marksman rating. I have shot and killed two men, one in an alley and one in a bus station. I have wounded two others, and wish I had been able to just wound instead of kill the ones who died, and still dream about them sometimes, just as I dream about the time I picked up a woman’s slender red high-heeled shoe at the scene of a violent collision just inside the city limits and found it heavy with the fragment of foot still in it. I have been shot in the meat of the thigh with a zip gun, and I have been slugged from behind with a tire iron. I have three citationson my record. I moved up from probation through two patrolman grades and three detective grades to gold badge rank in eleven years. I work an average seventy-hour week and receive no overtime for any hours worked beyond forty-four. Every two weeks I get a check which, after deductions, amounts to one hundred and eighty-six sixty. It is the most money I