Kaufman suggested a family-style restaurant on a busy boulevard up in Costa Mesa. He spoke to the waitresses by name and seemed expected. Colesceau was shocked to be introduced and not see them recoil in disgust. Pratt and his sneaky sidekick Garry had told all their customers about him before he even started work there, apparently, and rarely did he meet someone who failed to register morbid interest. You could see it in their eyes.
The booth was back in the corner by the rest room hallway. It was large and private and upholstered in vinyl. Plastic ferns hung above it from thin chains. There was a bus tray piled high with dirty dishes across the aisle from the table in front of them, but other than that the table was fine.
He studied the lawyer for the first time: a pretty man of perhaps thirty, physically fit, sandy brown hair and very blue eyes. Pretty in the sense that he was so vibrantly groomed: teeth and gums sparkling, fingernails coated with clear polish, casually perfect hair. Colesceau, no stranger to fine menswear—at least as a window shopper—priced out Kaufman's tie at $80. It made absolute sense to him to be represented by a lawyer who was successful.
First Kaufman told him what the ACLU was, how it stood for protecting individual constitutional rights, often from those very agencies that were supposed to guarantee them— government, law enforcement, the courts of law, and so on. There was no charge for their representation. All ACLU attorneys were paid an annual salary, modest at best. They had been behind some of the biggest decisions ever made in this country, and had successfully defended men and women from small civil courtrooms to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Kaufman personally saw his organization as the best and final weapon a citizen could use against the powers of the state. A weapon against fascism, racism, the abridgment of personal liberties. A sort of David to the state's Goliath.
Kaufman spit all this out in a hurry, and Colesceau had the impression he'd said it a million times before. The waitress took their orders.
"Are you willing to speak to me frankly?" Kaufman asked when she was gone. "I have nothing to hide."
The lawyer studied him with his cool blue eyes. "Did you bring the protocol for the hormone treatment?"
Colesceau withdrew the document from his coat pocket and handed it to Kaufman.
Kaufman unfolded it and smoothed it out against the tabletop. "Have you had all the injections, every week?"
"Every week."
"What's it feel like? To have that hormone in you."
Colesceau looked hard at the lawyer, then out toward the bus tray of dirty dishes still sitting in the aisle, then to the stout redhaired waitress busying herself under the flickering fluorescent light behind the counter. She glanced at him with exaggerated indifference.
"Don't answer that if you're uncomfortable. I just remember reading the Assembly floor analysis of AB 3339—the chemical castration bill—and thinking what a goddamned barbaric thing it was."
Colesceau almost liked this man. "It feels terrible. It turns you into a woman very slowly. But not all the way. I have gained weight and my genitals got small. My breasts have grown unnaturally. The hair on my face turned to fuzz. I'm irritable and emotional in a way I never was before. I feel like my soul has been asked to change. I feel like I am being forced to become a person different than the one I was born."
Kaufman had produced a narrow notebook and was writing in it now. "What's it done to your sex drive? Do you get erections?"
"Almost never."
Colesceau looked at the lawyer. This lawyer is really no different than anybody else, he thought: he's nosy, impudent, disrespectful and gleefully fascinated by the plight of my testicles. Colesceau imagined his own right arm in a short, chopping motion, totally unexpected, delivering an ice pick straight through the expensive cotton shirt and through the attorney's stunned heart.
What's it feel like? To have that pick in you?
"Can you describe to me what it feels like to be chemically castrated, then to see attractive women, or to be around them?"
At this point the soft drinks arrived and Colesceau went into that strange state in which he both observed and participated. He watched himself sitting there, as if he were looking in from the other side of the window. He saw the top of Kaufman's head, as if he were a bird perched in the fake fern above them. He heard himself chattering away now, laying it on thick for Kaufman, being as humble and misunderstood and innocently wronged as possible.
"... and you can understand the great disappointment of my mother. Without her love and attention, without her support, I truly think I might die."
He was careful to use the word support because Americans loved to use it so much, as if friends and family were actual structural elements that held them in place, as if they were so physically fat and mentally weak they'd collapse without support.
"We've been very close since the murder of my father by fascist state police in 1979."
"You were actually forced to watch as trained attack dogs mauled your father to death, Moras?"
"No. He was shot by fascist police. The dogs attacked me when I ran to him after."
I actually enjoyed every second of it, Seth. The man was a drunken pig except when he was asleep. I was the one who made it possible. I listened to his conversations. I made reports by a secret phone in the cooperative leader's barn. I spoke creatively, as a child would. 1 added more subversive material when I needed impact. I stole his letters and put them back before he knew they were gone. I put die guns in our barn. When they finally murdered him it meant more coffee for me in the morning and nothing more. Stupid to rush to his side asifl cared. That was to throw my mother off my trail. She knew he had no guns. But what are a few hundred stitches compared to living years on end with that cruel, stupid hog?
"Do you relive that moment still? Do you ever see what they did to him, or what the dogs did to you?*
"Yes. Every morning in the mirror I see what the dogs did to me. What the police did to my father is a thing I can't remember without tears. For a boy, some horrors never die. The scars on my body are nothing compared to the scars on my heart."
"Amazing."
The lawyer was staring at him now like one of Pratt's or Lydia's friends, friends who were trying to act like they knew nothing about him. He had seen the same expression on hundreds of TV audience members during the daytime talk shows he sometimes viewed when work was slow at the auto parts store. Of course Lydia was constantly tuned in. It was a look that made him think of hungry cows. Purposeful. Intent. But lacking any means to satisfy themselves except for the passive ingestion of whatever the host or guest would say next. Such insatiable appetites for accounts of calamity, misfortune, ruination, perversion, violence, death.
For them it was just entertainment.
"Is it true, as it states in the protocol here, that your breasts have swollen V
"I already told you that they did."
Kaufman pursed his lips and shook his head. He made a note in his book and sighed.
"Well, here comes dinner. After we eat, would you mind talking about your rape convictions? I'll need to know about them. I'm interested particularly in your state of mind during the acts. Anger, sexual drive, your thoughts and feelings. What was going through your head. Why you chose older women. It might help us toward an overrule at some point. I'm thinking of the Circuit Courts of Appeal."
Colesceau looked at the lawyer. Then he explained briefly that he needed to be loved and in his confusion he thought he could force his victims to love him. He said, in a confession that surprised him, that his penis felt like an extension of his heart, which was actually quite true.
Seth looked slack-jawed at this.
"But those events are past. My punishment was supposed to end Wednesday, so long as I obeyed the rules. I obeyed every rule. I allowed myself to be poisoned and polluted with unnatural substances. Every week, into my veins, with needles. Now I have crowds outside my door. I have been evicted. I will probably lose my job. A drastic injustice has been done." "T
hat's why I'm here. But my ammunition has to come from you." "So, I will talk about these things if you need to know. Even though they shame me." "It's going to help us, Moros. Everything you can tell me is going to help us."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday, Colesceau was shocked to see Seth Kaufman again.
But this time Seth was on the TV that Colesceau was idly watching while the crowd chanted outside his apartment home. And this time his name was Grant Major, of County News Bureau.
He was in his studio, telling a fellow TV reporter about his exclusive interview with the castrated rapist Matamoros Colesceau. He looked even prettier than he'd looked in the family-style restaurant. The other reporter, whom Colesceau recognized, said that this seven o'clock "special report" from CNB's "newest investigative star" would be "bone chilling."
Next, on CNB.
He saw himself on the screen, leaving the apartment home wrapped in Seth Kaufman's long coat, leaning forward through the crowd of reporters and neighbors.
Then he was sitting in the restaurant, talking to the man he had genuinely believed was a lawyer from the
ACLU.
Colesceau could tell that the camera had been hidden in the tray of dirty dishes.
He understood why the waitresses had been expecting them.
He felt his heart growing hard and cold again, but it beat fast, like a good machine.
He watched himself explain what went through his mind as he tried to rape the two old women—the anger, the confusion, the feelings of helplessness in the world, especially with women his own age.
He listened to his tales of hormone treatment—the swelling breasts and shrinking genitals. On TV it sounded like he was whining, ready to weep.
He sat and watched in helplessness as he explained the death of his father at the hands of the police. He couldn't understand why Grant had edited out the part where he told how difficult it still was for him, how he still thought about his father, how the scars on his heart were worse than the scars on his body.
He made me look bad, Colesceau thought. And through his rage all he could think about was hurting Grant Major in a terrible way.
A chorus of boos erupted outside. He went to the window and cracked the blinds.
Trudy Powers stood at the forefront of the mob, her hair lifted away from her face by the breeze. Her brow furrowed as she glanced up at the sky. In that moment she looked like a saint in stained glass, Colesceau thought, or one of those Agony of St. Somebody paintings, maybe the one with all the arrows in him.XXX
He let go of the blind string, stepped to his front door and opened it. The voices hit him like a gust of wind. Without the glass between them Colesceau could feel the heft of their presence, and sense that their forward thrust was held in check only by the restraining hand of human law. Without that, they'd hang him Western style, then drag his body through the streets of Irvine behind a Saab convertible.
Then the crowd hushed. He looked at Trudy Powers and the happy, shiny suburbanites and the news people scurrying toward him with all manner of cameras and contraptions. They came to a stop not ten feet away and knelt as if he was shooting at them. It was one of the strangest sensations he'd felt in a life of strange sensations—the world before him and at his feet as he stood firm as the pope and looked them over. He glanced down at the Bloody Mary still fresh in his hand, then back out to the mob.
"I am not a monster," he said. "I have tried to be a good neighbor. I have paid for my crimes and want to be left alone now to live my life."
Go live it somewhere else.
"I have received eviction. I have twenty-nine days."
We'll be watching you every second, scumbucket!
MAKE our NElGHborhood. SAFE for the CHlldren!
Colesceau raised his hand. He was utterly dumbfounded when the crowd stopped the chant. All he could hear then was the whir and click of the equipment aimed up at him from the sidewalk ten feet away.
"Ummm... I've never hurt a child in my life. Never."
Yeah, just old women who can't protect themselves! Get back inside you cockface or I'm going to yank your head off and stuff it down your fuckin' neck!
He looked at the yeller, a burly long-haired man with a can of beer in his hand.
"Carl, you're worse than him when you talk like that."
Trudy Powers's voice hung in the still air. She stepped forward from the crowd.
"We understand your problems, Mr. Colesceau. But we have rights, too. And we want this neighborhood safe for our children, our seniors. We don't want trouble, either."
"Then why do this?"
Ah, fuck you.
Trudy's face turned in a flash of blond hair, then came back to Colesceau.
"We think you could find a more appropriate neighborhood."
in the fuckin' nuthouse you came from!
Trudy lifted one of her arms up without looking back.
"Sean, we're dialoguing! Listen, Mr. Colesceau. We intend to keep this vigil every day until you find more appropriate lodging. We're citizens with rights and we intend to exercise them. We'll keep our demonstrations peaceful. But we're going to have to watch you until you go. We won't trespass or harm your property in any way."
Colesceau stood with his drink in one hand and the mob stilled in front of him and the cameras executing him from ten feet away.
"I live here. I go to work. That's all I do."
He watched Trudy's golden hair catch the light and the breeze. She was wearing denim short shorts that showed off her long girlish legs, white tennies and socks and a brief white blouse with a scalloped neckline. Her tall and feeble-looking husband had stepped up beside her now and Colesceau saw the sunlight condensed in his glasses. He was bearded and thin-necked. Colesceau had seen him driving a huge expensive vehicle that had stickers all over the back window asking you to save just about every animal you could imagine.
"We're dead serious," he said.
"Dead? What do you mean?"
"God, Jonathan," said Trudy.
"It means you'll see us every day for the rest of your life here. We'll know exactly where you are, every second of your life."
"I have no objection to this at all. 1 am an innocent man. And to show my innocence, I want to give you something. Please, wait here."
No problem there, dude!
Colesceau went back inside his apartment and picked out one of his mother's most preposterous painted eggs. It was a lavender ostrich egg with gold bric-a-brac and a little bunched-up skirt of lace around the middle of it.
He took the egg back outside and resumed his place in front of the TV shooters.
"This represents all the goodness I possess on earth. I offer this as a pledge of my perfect behavior for the next twenty-nine days."
He held out the egg with both hands, elbows tucked and head slightly bowed, as if his posture could increase its value.
"For you, Mrs. Powers. For all of you."
The cameramen inched closer. They emanated an instinctive fear that Colesceau respected. They were used to being hated.
But not Trudy Powers. Trudy, he clearly understood, was used to being adored and loved and deferred to because of her high value as a sex partner. So she came forward with a kind of gliding step, eyeing Colesceau with an expression of self-confidence and self-respect. You could tell she saw herself as an ambassador from one world to another, from the world of the good to the world of the damned. And her willingness to approach the damned pleased her deeply. She was going to accept a handful of feces from the devil himself, smile and be gracious about it.
My evil stimulates her, thought Colesceau. I am titillation. I fortify what she believes is her soul.
She came around the camera people, stepping over a thick bundle of cable with a jiggle of inner thigh, her eyes locked on Colesceau's. There was pageantry in them.
Colesceau proffered the egg. She reached out with both hands, and a firm but forgiving expression on her face. S
he looks like Mary on the outdoor fresco at Voronet, he thought, pious and blank and immovable all at the same time. He trailed her palms with the tips of his fingernails as he laid the gift in her hands.
Then he stepped back and looked past her to the crowd. He bowed very slightly and strode back inside 12 Meadowlark .
CHAPTER TWENTY
Freedom. Velocity. Interstate 5. Windows down, air blasting through the van. Bill felt the rage filling him now, moving throughout his body. Like boiling water removed from the burner, it settled and filled the shape of its container. Bill Wayne, he thought: vessel of retribution, bucket of hate. Witness this.
He found Ronnie's beat-up old four-door in the Main Place parking lot, near the entrance closest to Goldsmith's Jewelry. So she hadn't lied. All the more reason to get to know her. The mall shops closed at nine tonight, which gave him almost an hour, just right.
So he drove away and into the cluttered construction zone he'd scouted earlier, just .85 miles from the mall according to the van odometer. The mess had something to do with Cal Trans and the 1-5. He found the bumpy turnoff and drove along the beaten chain-link fence, past the scaffolding and the water trucks. The gate was closed but not locked. He drove inside with his headlights off and parked, hidden between two big Cats. He cut the engine and sat there a moment. The moon was just a faint face risen prematurely in the eastern sky. It looked alone and embarrassed. Perfect— just two blocks from a stop for the OCTA bus, which would take him straight into the mall when he was ready.
Bill slipped to the back of the vehicle and opened the toolbox. He wouldn't need Pandora's Box because Ronnie's car was almost certainly too old and cheap to have a comprehensive antitheft alarm wired in. Good. Less to carry, less to depend on. No fuses to slip out of place and end up who-knew-where? That meant he'd only need the knockout cloth in the heavy-duty freezer bags, his shopping bag and his trusty Slim Jim. Traveling light.
He got the gas bag out from his instrument kit. It sat atop his surgical "sharps"—the scalpels, dissecting scissors, retractors, forceps, needles and catheters used for the preliminary veinous removal of blood and arterial introduction of fluid.
THE BLUE HOUR Page 15