Raymond Kowalski got up at five in the morning, drank coffee from a chipped mug, and walked to his job at the waste processing plant. He had been doing this for two years. Before that, he was unemployed for four. Before that, he was a steelworker at the mill that once employed three thousand men and now employed nothing but rust and the memory of rust.

Steelville, Ohio, was a town built around the mill and currently surviving on a Dollar General, a payday loan store, and a church that handed out free pancakes on Sundays. The mill was a rusting shell with "PROPERTY OF INDIANA STEEL HOLDINGS" spray-painted on its side in letters the size of a man.

Ray was forty-five, divorced, with two children who lived with his ex-wife and called him on birthdays that he marked in a calendar he kept on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a beer Stein his daughter had given him in third grade.

His life was a series of small humiliations. The bank that repossessed his truck. The ex-wife who stopped returning his calls. The guy at the Dollar General who asked if he needed help reaching something on a high shelf. He said no. He did everything himself.

His daughter sent him a birthday card. It had a dollar inside. He put it in his wallet. He kept it there long after her birthday was over, folding it flat against the plastic sleeve so it would not blow away.

Ray's sister Linda got sick. Cancer. She was forty-two, worked double shifts at the Walmart, and was the only person in Ray's life who had not stopped trying to help him. She needed treatment that her Medicaid did not fully cover. Ray took on overtime at the waste plant. He drove twelve hours a day, hauling garbage from the new shopping mall built on the site of the old mill. The mall had Target and Best Buy and a food court. The mill had had a paycheck and a future.

The guy who ran the waste plant was twenty-six, wearing a polo shirt with the company logo. He called Ray "daddy" as a joke. Everyone laughed. Ray did not laugh. He kept hauling garbage.

Linda's condition worsened. The treatment cost more. Ray started taking money from the waste plant's cash register, small amounts once a week. He told himself he would pay it back. He would never pay it back.

He started watching the people in the mall. The young couples with new TVs. The women with strollers and designer bags. The security guards who got free coffee and a parking space. He hated them. He knew he should not hate them. They did nothing to him. But he hated them anyway.

Ray snapped. Not with a bang but with a series of small ugly decisions. He started going after the people he believed had hurt him: the boss at the waste plant who had embezzled from the pension fund. The bank manager who had signed his foreclosure papers. The guy at the VA hospital who had treated him like a number.

The violence was not elegant. It was clumsy, brutal, and desperate. Ray used a hammer. He did not plan well. He left fingerprints. He got caught on camera. But the targets were so powerful, so well-connected, that the crime barely registered on the local news. It was a headline that ran for twelve hours and then disappeared.

Deputy Carl Hargrove investigated. He knew Ray. They had gone to high school together. He visited Ray at the processing plant and they talked. Not as cop and suspect but as two guys who used to shoot hoops and now could not afford their rent.

"You don't have to do this, Ray," Hargrove said. Ray looked at him with dead eyes and said: "I already did it. Now I just have to live with it."

Ray was in jail. He sat on a bunk and stared at a cinderblock wall. He did not cry. He did not rage. He sat. He thought about Linda. He thought about his daughter's dollar bill.

Hargrove visited him. "Why them?" he asked. Ray shrugged. "They were the ones I could see."

Hargrove left. Ray went back to staring at the wall. He had been doing this his whole life, staring at the wall, waiting for something to change. Nothing would. But he would keep staring anyway.

Raymond Kowalski sat in a cell and looked at a wall that was exactly the color of the sky he would not see for a long time.