Summer 1989
I’m back in the garage on Gargasz Drive. The brown Cape Cod I called home until my freshman year of high school, the one with the garage tucked along the south side of the house. It’s eighth grade again, and I’m barely 110 pounds soaking wet. My dad stands in front of me with both hands raised at shoulder height, palms out, like he’s offering a double high five. He tells me to hit them like a boxer would.
An older kid had moved into the apartments at the end of our street, the kind of kid who could sniff out weakness and seemed to take a personal interest in making my life miserable. Every time I went to hang out with my friends, he showed up wanting to fight me. My dad, who used to box, pulled me into the garage that afternoon to teach me how to defend myself.
I can still feel the sting in my knuckles as I punched at his hands, the echo of each slap against his palms. And I can still hear his voice—steady, grounded, a mix of warning and pride.
“Son,” he said, keeping his hands steady as I struck them, “you never start a fight. But by gosh, you better finish it.”
I didn’t realize until March 2006 how deeply that lesson lived in him—how naturally it resurfaced when pushed too far.
March 2006
The air was cold and the sky partly cloudy as I got dressed for my morning classes at Fairmont State. I was in a good mood. Three classes to knock out, no shift at work, nothing unusual on the horizon. It was the kind of morning where routine feels safe: drive to campus, sit through lectures, grab lunch, head home. By the time I pulled out of the parking lot after my last class, the sky had grown fully overcast, but nothing about the day stood out.
The drive home was uneventful—just the same familiar roads I’d driven hundreds of times. When I got to the farmhouse, Mom and Dad were lingering in that way people do when they’re debating what to accomplish. They hadn’t been out to John and Barb’s in a few days. They hadn’t checked the PO box either. Sometimes they rode the four-wheeler over the hill to get the mail, but since they were heading into town anyway, they took the Explorer.
I told them a little about classes, still tired from staying up too late the night before playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Before they left, I kissed them both, said I love you—something that was normal for us—and headed upstairs for a nap.
I hadn’t been in bed long when the phone rang. Once… twice… three times. I got up, checked the caller ID, and saw my mom’s name.
“Hello?”
Her voice was panicked and breathless:
“Come to the post office! Your dad just beat the snot out of Dale!”
And then she hung up.
For a split second, I just stared at the phone. Did she really say that? How were my parents and Dale even in the same place? Why would my dad fight anyone—much less Dale? The confusion and anxiety hit all at once. I threw on my shoes, ran outside, and drove to the post office.
The Post Office
When I pulled in, the gravel crunched under my tires. The parking lot wasn’t big—just a few spaces beside a small yard that separated it from the post office. A cement sidewalk cut through the center of the grass. The sky was the same flat, oppressive gray as when I left campus.
My parents stood near the Explorer at the front of the lot. On the south side of the sidewalk, Dale lay face-down in the grass, completely motionless. For a second I hesitated—some part of me wanting to check on my dad and mom, another part fixated on Dale’s stillness.
I walked to my parents first.
“Are you okay?” I asked my dad.
He looked exhausted. His shoulders slumped, and his eyes seemed far away, not fully anchored in the present.
“I’m alright,” he said, but his tone was hollow.
I turned to my mom.
“I’m fine,” she said, though she looked shaken and angry.
Then I approached Dale. He still hadn’t moved. Kneeling beside him, I rolled him onto his back. His face was a patchwork of reds—from light pink to a deep, nearly purple shade. Blood smeared around his nose. His eyes were glazed, not really focusing on me, more like he was looking past me at something far away. He made a noise—a grunt, something between a cough and a groan.
A wave of anger surged through me. I turned and looked at my dad, the words coming out slow and controlled:
“What did you do?”
It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t sympathy for Dale. It felt more like scolding a family dog for chewing the couch—an instinctive reaction to something you warned would happen if boundaries weren’t followed. We had talked endlessly about avoiding Dale, ignoring him, not giving him anything he could use against us.
Dad said simply, “He shoved your mom.”
That cooled the anger, but only slightly.
Don’t touch my mother.
But the anxiety came flooding in—another trial, another round of twisted stories, more lies. My stomach churned with memories of the first trial, the blackberry incident, and how Dale manipulated everything to make us look violent and irrational.
I kept demanding to know what happened, but my mom and dad were too rattled to give a straight timeline. Before I could make sense of it, Dale’s wife pulled into the lot and rushed toward him. Her face held pure horror.
She knelt beside him, looked up at us, and screamed,
“Why won’t you leave us alone?”
My parents reacted instantly—eyes wide, voices raised:
“Leave you alone? Why won’t you leave US alone!”
The air crackled with tension, sharper than the cold. I didn’t notice them at first, but across the parking lot, a man and his daughter were cutting pulp wood, witnessing the chaos from a distance.
I returned to my dad. His hands were white except for the knuckles, which were a inflamed and red. He avoided eye contact, staring instead at the ground, his breathing shallow.
“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.
He nodded. I opened the passenger door of my car and helped him sit with his feet on the gravel. He kept staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else.
I looked towards the post office. Standing in front of the door was my mom and Dale’s wife. They were nose to nose now, yelling like an umpire and a furious baseball coach. Their voices echoed across the small lot. I pulled my mom away and guided her to stand next to Dad.
Then everything went quiet.
Authority Arrives
The sudden calm lasted until the police cruiser and ambulance rolled in. Bev, the postmaster, had called them—she’d noticed that Dale had mail, which was strange since he never used the Four States office. My mom would later insist Dale planned the encounter, waiting for them to come out and blocking their path. The more she explained it, the less paranoid it sounded.
The officer who stepped out was tall, authoritative, and clearly irritated by the sight before him.
“You’re old enough to know better,” he told my dad sternly. “This kind of thing can end badly.”
Dad said nothing. He just stared at his red knuckles, pale and shaken.
When the paramedics knelt beside Dale, he suddenly sprang to life, clutching his chest and wailing,
“Oh my heart! I’m in so much pain! Oh my heart!”
The paramedics exchanged a look and rolled their eyes, while loading Dale into the ambulance.
Dad wasn’t able to give a statement. He looked like he was in shock. On the drive home, he still stared at his hands the entire time.
That Evening
The house was warm, but the atmosphere felt brittle, like one wrong word might crack it. We sat down to dinner and tried—half-heartedly—to talk about anything else, yet the conversation kept circling back to the police and what would happen next. My mom was still wound tight, recounting how she had warned Bev earlier when she noticed Dale standing alone in the post office lot, blocking the sidewalk. She described him with his chest thrust out, the way a schoolyard bully stands when he’s waiting for his next victim after the final bell.
“He followed us,” she said. “He knew exactly when we’d be there.”
I wanted to be skeptical, but under the circumstances it was hard to believe anything else. Dale didn’t use that post office. And in the past few weeks he had waited at the bottom of the right-of-way in his truck, to block my mom’s path. He’d poisoned our animals. He’d harassed us with those eerie half-ring phone calls that always seemed timed to our arrivals and departures.
So the idea that he might have orchestrated a confrontation at the post office wasn’t far-fetched. No matter how the confrontation ended, Dale would find a way to twist it, to paint himself as the victim. He always did.
Dad barely spoke. He seemed trapped inside his own head.
A few days later, when the officer came to take my statement, he asked something that struck me as bizarre:
“Did you or your parents ever tell Dale you wanted him dead?”
I laughed, telling him Dale was making up stories again. How could he believe such nonsense? Dale had been an object lying in the yard when I arrived. No one talked to him.
But years later, I’d regret brushing it aside. I didn’t realize he was planting seeds—laying the foundation of fear he would later use to justify pulling the trigger.
A Needed Talk
One night soon after, Dad and I were watching Stargate SG-1, the room dim except for a single lamp in the corner. He sat beside me, but his eyes weren’t on the TV. They were on his hands.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
There was a long pause.
“No,” he finally said.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t look up.
“Dale used to be a good friend.”
I didn’t know how to answer. I never liked Dale. I couldn’t understand how my dad mourned a friendship with someone who had harassed and tormented us.
I asked him the question I couldn’t shake:
“Dad… did you punch Dale first?”
He looked straight at me.
“No.”
Then back at his hands.
“But when I started hitting him… I didn’t stop.”
And in that moment, my mind drifted to the garage in 1989.
Trying to lighten the mood, I said, “Well, Dad, you didn’t start a fight. But by gosh you finished it.”
Nothing. No smile, no chuckle. He turned back to the TV, shoulders heavy.
Dad hadn’t wanted to fight. He never started fights.
But when pushed—really pushed—he finished them.
The Beginning of the End
We didn’t see Dale directly for weeks after the post office fight. No more one-ring phone calls. No more yelling when we drove up the right-of-way. But silence from Dale never meant safety. If anything, the quiet felt worse.
I never once believed Dale was afraid of us. That lie unraveled at the end of the month when another sign appeared on the right-of-way—this one reading, “Travel at your own risk.” He had spelled own as “owen,” which might have made it look cartoonish under different circumstances, but the message behind it wasn’t funny. It was a warning. A threat. And nothing about it reflected fear. If anything, it showed the opposite—a man growing bolder, letting us know the quiet wasn’t peace. It was preparation.
Looking back now, I see that the seeds of our downfall were planted that day in the gravel lot of the Four States post office. Dale’s pleading performance, his accusations of fear, his claim that we wanted him dead—all of it was groundwork for something darker.
Nothing about that morning had hinted at danger. It was just cold, cloudy, and ordinary.
But by the end of that day, everything had shifted.
The clock had started.
Time was running out for us.