by Morrissey
She made the sign of the cross with an outstretched hand and in the monotheist’s way of cupping the index finger from mouth to chest to left then right shoulder, throwing the gesture Ezra’s way. She turned too quickly and swept out of the room as if on castors. In the hallway Ezra knew that there would be no sight of her even though any earthly creature would have still been visible … shrinking towards a shadowy beyond-the-stars exit.
“I can’t forget that battered, motherly face,” cried Ezra as he sat hunched and downcast at the kitchen table. There were tears in the eyes of the boy who wouldn’t cry. Around him, Eliza, Nails and Justy took up different parts of the kitchen, either standing or sitting or sloping, with their hands clasping their faces in stooping and bending despair as they listened to the full account. None would dare breathe as they sank into the deflation of Elizabeth Barbelo’s visitation, and to the cruelty meted out to her son. Where, they wondered, was God? Any God? If Satan could be capable of so many assignations, then why wasn’t God also at hand? If God had been the God of so many miracles, then why had he ceased his mission of miracles? Why halt?
“How are we meant to act on this when you can barely believe it yourself?” asked Eliza, half whine, half demonstration.
“I haven’t asked you to act on anything! Every ache of this woman cried out for release … and I … will not … let her down,” Ezra now had the look of madness, “for even to contest her words would be wrong. I have the power and the means to return her child to her … wait … what am I saying?”
“But where is she now and was she even real?” shouted Eliza, mid-panic.
“Her dread was real. I can’t guarantee what she was or where she came from or where she went to, and I’d be rightfully strapped to an iron bed if I began to warn people of haunted locker rooms. I’ve taken in too much, and I’ve revealed more honesty to you tonight than anyone else would feel comfortable with.”
All three instinctively enveloped Ezra with a wrap of tender loving arms.
“It’s almost one o’clock,” began Ezra, a slight rocking to his body, whether of power or anger, yet also a fortification as he attempted to shake off his sadness. “We have access to the college grounds if we approach by the old coast road, and there are shovels and spades, trowels, forks in the garage, and please don’t think I’ll ever sleep until I at least take this woman’s words to mean what they say.”
“Is that you down there, Ezra?” came the voice of Ezra’s father, unseen at the top of the stairs.
“Nooooooooooo!” called back Ezra.
“Oh, good,” said his father, returning contentedly to bed.
A golf bag hid the digging equipment as the four shifted quietly into the college grounds and across to the sordid spot, shaded by a shambles of overhanging oak trees – indistinct in its permanent protective darkness. Here, the vigilantes pulled at stubborn shrubbery of bramble, brier, scrub and brush; the gnarl of knotted tree-roots and trunk of bough and branch. Thickset greenery twisted into sprigs of twigs and underbrush of stem and stalk. Heavy outhouse doors were lacquered with sprouting germination and curly grass, and climbing fern wrapped possessively around perished bicycles. Woodworm waste scattered along with reptile-like millipedes that raced across tick and larva and maggot. Earthworms wiggled annoyance at the disturbance, and termites chased for cover as spade and shovel sliced into gnat and midge territory. Magnetic force had the boys tugging and pulling and lifting with anticipation of dread fused with victory-lap excitement. Eliza cautiously supervised surveillance as Priorswood slept a deep valium sleep of fatted contentment, and security lights within the grounds were few and not directed towards the excavation spot where the now-disturbed earth sank and stank messily into a sloppy plop ditch that was likely and willing to swallow up any defeated posture. Ezra, Nails and Justy swung ferociously with spade to soil, heatedly seeking a verdict, deeper into the ground of soggy bog where sunlight could neither reach nor imagine, and thus the marshy mire wallowed a swampy wetness of peat bog, when suddenly a sound like the crust of dry land. Something. Arrogant assurance pushed a soaked Ezra, and Nails slipped further into the clammy clay with an even stronger impulse as the minutes ticked like seconds. Their feet and legs now covered in quicksilver slime, their demand began to push even more forcefully, punishing them as the gulch slipped into a gorge of filth now five feet in depth, as Justy’s feverishly scraping trowel slid across a stretch of tarpaulin. The ice was broken, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew, and then there came a sight that further darkened the sky. They froze with a shivering fixity, making no moves, saying nothing, paralyzed by what the immediate minutes would reveal and how this would re-position their lives, and how, and what, and if, and when. Without thinking, they simply knew, at that moment when details become evidence immune to debate or argument.
“By unearthing this body we also unearth the murderer. You realize this?” said Eliza, uncharacteristically shaking.
“Yes!” thundered Ezra, firing his spade further into the ground, “and don’t make the mistake that such bloodthirsty evil is human and worthy of any consideration … don’t, don’t, don’t!”
Spades wading into despair, they were instantly repaid for their stubborn obstinacy. The outline of a small skeletal frame choked its way through the mud and unfolded from its straitjacket of humiliation as a shrunken but human-shaped figure of life and death, now slain remains in earthen clay, floating through the tarpaulin … condemned to extinction simply for … being there at the appointed hour, and he had been waiting for you at your mercy for twenty silent years. In stillness, the clump was unidentifiable, yet what it had been was obvious, and the mouth open widely in silent shout indicated the grisliness and brutality of its final minutes. All four witnesses cried softly, muttering invectives, their arms now wrapped about each other as they looked down upon the most distressing sight of their lives, asphyxiation in its watery grave at the ‘supreme day and inevitable hour’, running out of the sands, still in death’s struggle, the calling carcass of a boy not ready to succumb. Lifeless, the head is thrown back as if still shouting up and out, struggling against slaughter and slaying and all attempts at the final deathblow. The bloodbath boy lay back, like sheep, like pigs, like slaughterhouse bulls, cut into ribbons by the thrill-kill human race who are nothing without butchery and hatchets and vindictive cruelty. Spare none and take no prisoners! Depopulate and feel greatness! Murder and kill and cherish the skill. Laugh when the bull cries real tears, laugh when the sheep struggles at repeated stabs, laugh as the pigs dash their own brains out in preference to the massacre ahead … and this bloodbath boy did the same … kicking against entombment, punching against his urn of tarpaulin, grieving at his own funeral … the live burial which would later be termed at rest, when such reductions lead only to crypts and vaults and tombs without any assured rest of any kind. How very self-serving of the living to gaze upon the consigned grave spot of another and assume at rest. Coiled like packed supermarket pork, the short-term agony for the boy whose shape was now hardened mud, yet the sharp bones of his right hand stretched out across his chest as a final, hopeless shield at the end of a night of unforgiving beatings. Woven into the carcass were small loops of thorny blue denim – mother’s hard-earned Christmas gift, divine love in sterile hell. In shadow, the terrifying weight was pulled to higher ground, and now the giant knots of tree-roots and human bone were clearly laid out as a nose-piercing fetid reek of what Shakespeare had felt when he wrote of “the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril”, poor, poor Noah. Rope and leather belts of bondage clasped around the tarpaulin, and there would be no need to invest-igate further since the mechanisms of murder were all in place, and enough shock had already relieved those present of additional confirmation, as sockets empty of eyes on the thin round head of youth in decay overwhelmed our spectators. Here is the end of everything, and enough is enough. Time staggered. There came momentary pause of
gentle melancholia, as if Ezra, Eliza, Nails and Justy had been taken out of themselves (or into themselves) by this misery, knowing also that none can ever escape from whatever bad deeds they have done.
“Yet … you look at this … and you still believe in some divine being? Some protector of the innocent and the good?” Nails is aiming directly at Ezra. “How could this boy’s murder be watched over by some supreme being who remains … unmoved? One who claims to love and care and vows reward for those who love and care?”
“This is not the deed of God, but the deed of man,” said Ezra softly.
“Yes, man made in the image of that very God … who does not show divine mercy when it is needed most. Isn’t everything in God’s design? Even this? Why praise him for the miracle, yet remove him from the disaster? And what had this boy ever done to anyone?” Nails was now distraught. A long and thoughtful pause followed, to be broken by Ezra’s request for practical action. Justy had the solution.
“I make a call to the flatheads, tell them the body is here, tell them the murderer’s name, and click. What more information do they need?”
“Knowing the flatheads,” said Nails, “they’ll need to know what day it is.”
“This isn’t the time for flippancy,” said Eliza.
“Who exactly is being flippant?” snapped Nails. “Let them put the pieces together. Any move we make must be anonymous, and we must get away from here right this minute. All that we needed to do we’ve done.”
“Wait!” said Eliza in a louder whisper. She then produced a felt-tipped pen, knelt down to the torn tarpaulin, and wrote the boy’s name very clearly above the upper section of his shroud: Noah Barbelo, murdered by Dean Isaac, 1955. From there, the four slid away.
Alone in the shower, Justy wept with ferocity. Alone in his bed, Nails wept in a malaise of torment. Enjoined, Ezra and Eliza coiled together under messy sheets, struggling to find meaning in the present.
With daybreak Dibbs stood alone on the college track.
“Where’s them clowns?” asked an approaching Mr Rims, still hoping to revive what was now so very lost.
“No sign, Mr Rims,” said Dibbs, with characteristically vacant aspect and considerable embarrassment. Fated to suffer, his shorts were two sizes too small, and his socks did not match.
“Hmmm?” said Mr Rims, looking easterly then westerly. “I feel like the last one to know.”
“The last one to know what, Sir?” asked Dibbs.
“The last one to know what I don’t yet know.”
As if to characterize unnecessary labor, Ezra, Nails and Justy eventually made a show for a late-afternoon drill brief, even if the stiffener of dead paste at the loss of Harri disadvantaged all three. Dibbs loomed as an eager superjock of one-line jokes; flat out when the bell rang and fully ready with untiring jibberish, yet green in judgment when the whistle announced the seconds to mount and destroy all opponents.
“Yeah, I’ve been known to draw first blood,” he joked (to smiles, of course, from no one), “I was born with teeth, haha,” eager as he was to disguise his all-American Neanderthal self and join the gang. It was all too much for the others who, play-by-play, burbed out like bowwow cellar dogs of faded greatness. In a sleepwalking state they somehow ran, and Rims looked on unable to convince anyone of anything yet always ready with savage Spanish Armada lash of the tongue. Enslaved, the evening continued, but nothing could show the way. It will come if it comes. The inner selves were spliced and finished, and enthusiasm constricted itself amid flashes of Harri’s funeral and the wormed visions of Noah’s leftover remains. Personal fallibility rose and … luck has an opposite. The bomb-burst had died, and Dibbs’ conversational tone (for, loosely, it could perhaps be termed conversation) had the grating sound of religious fanaticism – tired torrents of trapped nonsense of empty-headed principles without any evidence to point to. Having let go of everything, Ezra now felt shelled and destroyed, and Dibbs (such a child still … at risk of degrading all children) was determined to not be outdone by his own inability. Nails yawned. It was done with. The Nineteenth Hole seemed too far away in stunning sunlight, and bullwhacker Rims interrupted a bunch start.
“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind,” he chewed, “that the horse, if not the barn itself, has bolted,” and with that he spat.
Three heads bowed solemnly as Rims revved up for further hell-driver analysis – no part of which the boys would wish to hear. Rims clambered aboard his soapbox and the grand performance began.
“We search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well, keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still. Your time could be devoted to far better things. Knitting, for example. Historians of track and field need watch you no longer. I need a stiff drink and a long sleep, or a long drink and a stiff sleep. I knew the end would come soon, but I didn’t think it would come before the actual race began. At least I now realize how pointless it is trying to force things. You are all disqualified, your timings are punishable by death, and I watch your slackness in torture. If you are serious athletes then my mother is an astronaut, and you’ll be sorry to hear that my mother is no astronaut. You should be forced to live face down in your own feces, as you probably do any way, if only for general identification purposes. I will be happy enough just to survive this. If I were religious, I’d pray. I could apply the lash, but why waste the lash? Now I see why some people laugh at F-Troop – not laughing with it but laughing because of it. You’ve been lavish with promise for so long yet now you backslide like factory-farmed pigs with no choice, pigs whose primal screams ignite no humane response from their human killers. I have watched an orgy of scared rabbits today, and Dibbs here had his harrier best at hand for all of youze. But the way through is barred. Close your eyes and try to recall all your previous numbers and opportunism. I now bear witness of your royal crapness. I see how Harri’s death has inflicted drastic damage, and I’m enough of a humanist to feel sorrow, but you ought to be sportsmen enough to answer any challenge. You are no longer fit for consideration or even for human gaze. You are not a team. You’d get kicked out of bed. I take leave of absence. I am now very firmly a non-believer and I change my religion, the correct word for which is apostasy. You are the source of my panic and I shall let it go with some peace regained. I am free.”
At this moment, Nails snorted a bull’s charge and fell into Rims by planting a bashed belt that poked the rim of the chin, a non-zinger that lolloped rather than Sunday-punched, as Rims calmly avoided the noisy rustle of the oncoming slug which, in any event, hurt Nails’ fist far more than it cut up Rims. The purged Nails bent over in pain and humiliation, whilst Rims stood passively puritan, the understanding gagman of unhurtable Purple Heart. His calm was impressive.
“A gallant display, Nails, but you have shown me, once again, that I should expect nothing better from you. Goodbye.”
“Say … what!” jumped Dibbs, the dreams that money can’t buy slipping through his fingers.
“The bad and the sad events of recent days have stripped your spirits. I see it all now just by standing here and looking at you. Sadness fleshes out … and out … and out. You are pretending and you look pale. You are crippled by the way you look and move just as much as by whatever you say. Self-floggers are of no interest to me – I’ve been around those people all of my life and they bore me senseless. You’ve just joined them. You’ve got to want it, and you don’t, so you won’t get it. Determination is not talent.” Rims ran on overdrive.
“I thought you’d said goodbye?” said Nails, nursing his hand.
“Nails. To you … someone will always be saying goodbye …” Rims threw his final dart. With that he walked away. The ton-of-bricks shock on the faces of Ezra and Justy registered failed nerve, a loss of vocation to Harri, and a stark overture of anger. Humiliated, the still largely unknown Dibbs twitched and then fell to the ground with his hands
cradling his brain – this discouragement far too much for him to bear. Fate sealed, Ezra no longer felt like the golden-boy profiteer, and there was now no identifiable unscrupulous fire within. Never to be intimidated, Nails nonetheless knew that Rims’ pitiless outburst had crassly called for denial by the boys – a denial that none had the strength to make. Love’s labors lost.
The dark force of seven full days dripped by before local news reports shrieked discovery of the body in the college grounds. No responsibility fell to the godly whitewashed halls of Priorswood, even as it was incorrectly announced that the corpse had lain undiscovered for ‘just’ five years. Since the boy had not been a Priorswood student, police assumed that the body had been dumped at the college without having any direct connection to the hallowed halls, around which an abnormally solid wall of respectability suddenly erected itself. Of course, knowing nothing, the police must always imply that they know something, whilst not actually solving any serious human problems. Local television news, meanwhile, gives a practiced air of impartial reporting but angles its wording at a pre-existing attitude towards whatever it reports. At its core its reporting must influence the moral and emotional nature of its viewers, because television news narratives always assume that every person watching is exactly the same in moral temperament and social outlook and will be sufficiently exhausted by their own private struggle that they will believe everything that they see and hear on television news. Passive goodwill is the middle line, yet the overall assumption is that television viewers themselves haven’t the mental capacity to penetrate any news story, so why therefore should the actual reporters? It simply is not necessary, and as long as viewers remain tortured by worry and concern, then the news has fulfilled its contract to the human race. Torrents of horror rippled through the town, yet Noah’s name – so precisely printed across his tarpaulin graveclothes – would not be mentioned. In the solemn echo-chamber of Boston’s most esteemed public libraries, Eliza had investigated missing-person’s files in search of Noah Barbelo, but had found nothing.