Skeletor’s Death is the news BB Easton had been unable to stop anticipating: on May 28, 2009, she learned that Ronald McKnight had died, stabbed in a bar fight at the age of twenty-eight. The death closes the immediate threat of his repeated calls, but the story’s later, disputed account of the fight makes the news less a simple release than a collision of fear, grief, and uncertainty.

The Call and the News

Before she learned of McKnight’s death, BB still received calls that rang day and night. When the caller ID showed Blocked, she had to restrain herself from screaming and stomping on her phone. Yet changing her number felt more frightening than enduring the calls: she could not bring herself to cut that connection, although she did not understand why. The persistence of the phone line gives the news its long-delayed force. She had been waiting, without fully recognizing it, to hear what had happened to the man she had met years earlier.

The message came from Tim, an old high-school friend with whom BB had not spoken in years. Fortunately, he still had her cell number. After hearing his clipped, foreboding voicemail, she called him back, and he told her that McKnight was dead. The facts were stark: he had been stabbed to death in a bar fight, aged twenty-eight. The date, May 28, 2009, marks the moment when the unanswered question surrounding McKnight became a death BB had to reckon with.

The Disputed Circumstances

The circumstances of McKnight’s death reach BB through two sharply different accounts. As the story was told, he was trying to break up a fight between a friend and another man when that man’s girlfriend stabbed him in the back. The media presented McKnight as a heroic veteran who had stepped into a local bar dispute to defuse violence. The account offers a clean moral picture: a man intervenes, an assailant’s companion kills him, and the veteran becomes the victim of the very violence he tried to stop.

BB finds that version difficult to reconcile with the man she remembers. After returning from overseas, McKnight had been an emotional paradox: in their irregular phone calls he could be pensive, candid, and introspective, but after drinking he became more violent, brash, and reckless. Within months of his return, he wrecked his motorcycle twice. The second crash left his back so badly scraped that his McKnight coat-of-arms tattoo disappeared. These details do not establish what happened in the bar, but they shape the lens through which BB receives the public account; his postwar volatility makes the heroic version feel to her less like an explanation than a simplification.

Her own imagined alternative is harsher. BB believes that the McKnight she knew may have started the fight or joined it to finish it, and that, once enraged, he might have kept beating the man in his grasp until the man went limp. She even recognizes that if McKnight had put her boyfriend on the ground in that state, she might have wanted to stab him herself to make him stop. Yet she immediately questions the story she is telling herself. Perhaps she wants to believe in a just world where a veteran returning from overseas would not be killed by a fellow citizen while trying to prevent a fight. The death therefore remains both confirmed and morally unresolved: McKnight is dead, but the competing accounts leave BB unsure whether she is confronting his final act or the version of it she can bear to believe.

The Casket, the Terminator, and the Unborn Child

At McKnight’s funeral, BB faced the distance between the boy she remembered and the man in the casket. A sonogram photo rested in her pocket, its edges worn beneath her fingers as she looked at him: the freckle-faced boy who had once picked dandelions for her and drawn stick-figure pornographic pictures at school had become old, leathery, and spent. His weathered skin bore deep wrinkles, and his long, slicked-back blond hair lay thinly against his head. Without the vivid blue eyes that had once been the only striking color in his pallid face, he seemed almost unrecognizable to her, like a person wearing an unfinished rubber mask.

The altered face made the death feel unreal. BB’s mind turned to the ending of The Terminator, when Sarah Connor sees the machine that has pursued her finally lie still. She recognized her own relief and disbelief in that image: McKnight had been her personal Terminator, obsessive and unrelenting, a threat that seemed programmed to kill. Now he lay motionless, the blue light in his eyes extinguished for good. His death meant that the relentless danger she associated with him had ended, but seeing him dead did not make the years of fear or the loss of their earlier intimacy disappear.

The sonogram in BB’s pocket made the moment doubly charged. As she mourned her first great love, another great love was growing inside her: the little boy she was carrying. In retrospect, she described her four-year-old son as entirely her own—a lover, rebel, artist, and old soul—and imagined that the universe had sent him to keep her from killing her husband. The juxtaposition does not resolve her grief; it places an ending beside an approaching life, so that McKnight’s death is remembered both as the stilling of a personal menace and as a moment when BB was already carrying a new future.

Narrative Closure and Uncertainty

The chapter title, “Hasta La Vista, Knight,” gives the news a farewell-shaped frame, but the account refuses the certainty of a clean ending. BB Easton can identify the date and manner of Ronald McKnight’s death; she cannot know whether the public story of his intervention, or her darker reconstruction of his conduct, is true. By setting what she heard against what she remembers, the memoir makes the limits of her knowledge part of the event itself: McKnight’s death is final, while its meaning remains unsettled.