Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  She stopped when she saw Lucy. “Everything burnt up. I’m lookin’ fer Ollie. Have you seen him anywheres?”

  “No. But there’s no one alive in that direction.” Lucy grabbed the girl gently by the shoulders and turned her around on the road. “Is Ollie your husband?”

  The girl was pale, with a wandering in one of her close-set, slaty eyes; there was something subtly wrong with the proportions of her face. “My brother,” she said. “Papaw ain’t give me no husband yet.”

  “Papaw?”

  “The Cade. I have to carry the first fruits of the Father afore I get me a husband. But it’s all burnt up now. The hell devils took it all away.” This last syllable rose into a cry. “He has prophesied the end and the end has come!”

  And more of that as they walked along, the idiot fragments of an insane faith. Like most such, the main part of it was that the old guys got to fuck all the young girls. The girl said that there were a good number of babies who were cursed by God. The girl hoped that hers would be one of the keepers, as she called them.

  After some minutes, they came to a large clearing. On either side were fenced fields decorated by dead cattle and one white horse on its back with one leg in the air. There were mortar craters all around. Ahead, a large wooden structure was burning. Clumps of women and children stood around in nightclothes, wailing around the corpses of men. It looked to Lucy like a scene from Bosnia or Chechnya or Guatemala, someplace far from West Virginia, at any rate. The girl ran to one of the groups of women. Lucy sat down on a stump. She found that her head was still completely empty, all volition gone. A time to wait, then. She watched the dawn start to burn away the mists.

  Then it seemed that men in black uniforms appeared as if by magic, poking warily into the smaller houses and mobile homes scattered around, collecting the women and kids. Then vehicles appeared, ambulances, trucks, and vans. A fire engine rolled in and firemen began putting out the fire. A man with a submachine gun told her to come along and she did, and joined the wailing women and children sitting on the ground in a circle, being guarded by black-uniformed men.

  Lucy dropped to her knees and said, “Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing dismay thee, all things pass, God never changes, patience attains all that is strived for, she who has God finds she lacks nothing.” And repeated, over and over, St. Teresa of Avila’s own prayer, not the sort of thing that was ever voiced in the maniac religion that Ben Cade had established on Burnt Peak, but after a time she became aware in a distant way that the wailing had stopped and even the children had grown quiet. All the women sank to their knees, surrounding Lucy as she prayed. Thus her father found her as the sun poked over the edge of the mountains.

  * * *

  The hospital had arranged for beds to be brought into Giancarlo’s room, so that his brother and a parent could sleep there. Nothing was too much trouble for their most famous patient. When Lucy and her father arrived there, morning sun was lighting the windows. Zak was asleep and Marlene was sitting on the edge of her bed, fully dressed, her head in her hands.

  “What’s wrong?” Karp said.

  “You keep asking that. You should say, ‘Anything more wrong?’ I would reply, “ ‘Still the same amount of wrong, Butch.’ ” Marlene rubbed her face and looked at them. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “They killed forty-two people, Marlene, your guys did, plus losing three of their own.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Karp raised his voice. “Oh, for God’s sake, tell me you’re not going to compound this by pretending innocence! You brought a bunch of murderers down here for a goddamn vendetta. The FBI already knows about it.”

  “You told them? You ratted me out?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! You thought you could conceal it? You didn’t think anyone would suspect? Are you completely out of your fucking mind?”

  “Oh, fuck you! They murder your son and you fart around with your clever legal tricks . . . what the fuck kind of man are you?”

  “How could you, Mom?” said Lucy. “Forget the Cades, how could you do that to Tran?”

  Now Zak was up, a look of dismay on his face. “Stop shouting,” he shouted. His parents continued to scream at each other, joined occasionally by Lucy.

  “Yeah, stop shouting,” said Giancarlo.

  “I can’t believe this,” screamed Karp. “She still doesn’t realize what she’s . . .”

  The whole family now did a double take, and in an instant the four of them had swarmed over Giancarlo, to the extent that the various tubes allowed.

  “Oh, baby,” cried Marlene, “you’re back. How do you feel?”

  “It hurts, Mom. It hurts like a bitch.”

  Karp dashed out into the hallway bellowing for nurses, for doctors, for analgesics. Lucy and Marlene were weeping and clutching one another. Zak was holding his brother’s hand.

  “I caught a big fish,” said Giancarlo.

  “I saw it,” said Zak. “Then you got shot. You got a bullet in the brain, but they took it out.”

  “My head doesn’t hurt, just my back.”

  Nurses arrived, and Dr. Small, now the happiest non-Karp in McCullensburg.

  “Can you move your toes?” asked Lucy.

  “Yes.” Giancarlo demonstrated.

  “You’re going to be fine,” said Marlene, touching the boy’s face.

  He smiled at her, the famous GC smile. Then this faded and he asked in a puzzled voice, “Why don’t you turn on the lights? Why are we sitting around in the dark?”

  * * *

  Karp and Lucy stood together on the roof of the medical center and watched the helicopter lift off, carrying Marlene and the twins back to civilization and a more advanced level of medical care. They watched it dwindle into a red speck. He put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Let’s go to Rosie’s,” he said. “It’s catfish day.”

  They walked through normal small-town streets. The news vans were gone, after a frenzied week of reporting the aftermath of the Burnt Peak War and the simultaneous recovery of the Miracle Twin. At Rosie’s the Karps got the kind of service that Edward VII used to get at the Café Royale. Everyone loved the Karps in McCullensburg.

  “Why did they let her go?” Lucy asked. “I thought she’d be in jail for sure.”

  Karp shrugged and sipped his iced tea. “Well, she denies everything. And what proof do they have? Her prior connection with Tran? That’s not a crime. A helicopter trip for him from Bridgeport to here and back? The maps from Dan? Suspicious, but also not a crime. No money has changed hands that anyone can see. The Viets have vanished except for that old housekeeper, on which they have nothing. They took all their weapons with them. If they had Tran or his people and they could get them to implicate Marlene, it’d be a different story. But they don’t even know their names.”

  “But she did it.”

  “Yeah, you know and I know how it went down because we know her. But the law deals in facts. Okay, let’s say they decide to bring her to trial. Ernie Poole is a good lawyer, probably better than Stan Hawes, when you get right down to it, so it’s going to be fought. That brings up the politics of it. Does Stan Hawes want to prosecute the grieving mom of the Miracle Twin in Robbens County? For eliminating a family that’s terrorized this county for a hundred years? Could he even get an indictment? Hey, much easier for everyone concerned if it’s a gang war massacre. It’s not the worst thing that ever happened in Robbens County, and at least the bad guys lost for a change. The FBI will do their national manhunt and come up empty.”

  “It’s still wrong.”

  “Yes, it is. The law’s an imperfect instrument. I recall a couple of years back they had a case out in some Midwest town, probably just like this one. They had a fellow who was just bone bad—an arsonist, a tire slasher, a vandal, a bully, a rapist. He’d been in and out of jail a couple of times, and each time he got out, he headed home and kept behaving the same way, or worse. One day a group of guys came up t
o him on the street, broad daylight, middle of town, and beat him to death with pick handles. No arrests were ever made. Do I deplore it? Yes. Do I also understand it? Yes. We do the best we can. Meanwhile, the instigators of this disaster are going to get a trial, a scrupulously fair trial, and I confidently expect they will spend their entire remaining years in prison. So I have to be content with that.”

  “Will you try the case?”

  “I’ll get it started. I want to see George in a courtroom at least. But Stan can carry it out as well as I can. Old Bledsoe isn’t going to stand for any delay, so I figure ten days to can Floyd. Lester will plead if he’s smart. After that . . .” Karp shrugged.

  “Back to the City?”

  “I guess. I hate my job.”

  “So change it. What do you want to do?”

  “What I’ve been doing here, minus the crazy stuff. Prosecuting cases. I want to be like Domino’s Pizza, we deliver hot—no politics, no social work, no supervision: somebody gives me an ass, I put it in jail.”

  “If they’re guilty.”

  He grinned. “Picky, picky! And what about you? You’re leaving today. I presume you’ll stay in the City for a while.”

  “Yeah. I need to marshal the neurological resources of New York to focus on Giancarlo.”

  “You think something can be done?”

  “I don’t know. I already talked to some people. Occipital-lobe injuries are funny. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes there’s partial impairment, sometimes it’s dark for life. At least he’s alive. And cheerful, considering. It’s funny: there’s no one I know that it’s less fair to make blind than Giancarlo, and at the same time there’s no one I know who could take being blinded with less bitterness than Giancarlo. He’s talking about getting a guide dog and taking up the piano. A lot less bitter than Mom, which isn’t hard.”

  “Yes. That’s going to be an issue.”

  “You and her.”

  “Yeah. I knew she did sneaky and probably fairly dirty stuff for years, but this is different. It’s murder for hire, when you cut to the chase. I don’t know if I can . . .” He stopped and closed his eyes briefly. “Anyway, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this kind of stuff. We’ll work it out.”

  Or not, he thought. “What about you and her?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t look at her and she can’t look at me. It’s not just the killings. It’s her, the way she thinks, what she does. I love her, but I can’t be in the same room as her anymore. A failure of charity, I know. It’s something I still have to work on.”

  They finished their meal and he walked Lucy to her truck. A hug and a kiss and she was gone. Karp walked across the square and into the courthouse.

  * * *

  She drove to Dan’s brother’s place and found Dan in the back, in a deck chair, in cutoffs, with a cooler of beer within easy reach and a thick astrophysics text propped up on a board athwart the chair arms. She marched up to him, removed the board and books, and plopped herself down on his lap.

  When he was able to breathe again, he said, “Does this mean you’ve decided to be nice to me?”

  “It could be. Or it could be I am planning to plumb new levels of cruelty and this is the softening-up phase.”

  “I’m betting on the latter. When are you splitting?”

  “Now. You’re the last soul in McCullensburg I will see, forever.”

  “You can’t leave without telling me what that Chinese writing on your shirt means.”

  “No. It says zhi si bu wu, meaning roughly ‘unable to understand until death.’ It’s from a Tang-dynasty story about a hunter with a pet deer who gets along with the hunter’s own dogs. The hunter warns it that not all dogs are like his pals, but the deer doesn’t listen. It runs off, meets a strange pack of dogs, and gets eaten, without ever understanding why. It’s an idiom used to refer to an incorrigibly stubborn person.”

  “You got that part right. So . . . will I see you in Boston, or what?”

  “Oh, yes, I certainly hope so. But I don’t know how long I’m going to stay in school.”

  “What will you do instead, and will they need a computer geek?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  “So we just, you know, go on like this? Necking? And, you know, raising the tension to the heart?”

  “I hope so. I’ll understand, however, if you feel the need to consort with women of easy virtue.”

  “You’ll wait there patiently, like a stained-glass window, huh?”

  “Yes, until you ask me to marry you, at which point I will say yes.”

  “What if I marry someone else? One of those easier-virtue ones?”

  “Then I’ll dance at your wedding and stifle my disappointed tears, and then join the Ursulines. But if you wait, I will show you delights beyond the range of your adolescent fantasies. We will have to honeymoon at the Mayo Clinic, you’ll need IV tubes, to replenish your bodily fluids, which I will have sucked from your pulsing flesh.”

  “You are such a lunatic,” he said, after which she did suck a little fluid from his mouth.

  She then leaped to her feet. “So long and God bless you, Dan Heeney, until we meet again.” She ran out of the yard.

  He stood up and watched her. Later, that was how he most often remembered her: running down the narrow lane to her truck, with her long legs, and those floppy shorts and the clunky boots kicking up the gravel, and the grin she gave him over her shoulder, and the head of the great black dog hanging out of the window as the truck pulled away.

  ATRIA BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS

  RESOLVED

  ROBERTK.TANENBAUM

  Now available in hardcover From Atria Books

  Turn the page for a preview of Resolved . . .

  1

  THE INTERIOR OF NEW YORK state gets surprisingly hot in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.

  The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can’t actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven’t are pissed off because they haven’t, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that’s all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men’s bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.

  Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman’s punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then—it was Ma
rvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled—Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started dry-humping him right there in front of everyone, and all the white guys had dropped their weights and gone after him.

  Felix had picked up a weight bar and gone in, too. After that it got blurry. He remembers cracking some heads with it, before the screws came in and started whacking everyone they could reach. He touched his side, moved his left arm. It stung, but didn’t feel that bad. Someone had shanked him. He’d have to find out who and get even. Felix always got even and everyone knew it. It was one of his two main things, which was why no one had fucked with him after the first week, and now it was going on nineteen years here in Auburn. He was nearly forty-two.

  A face swam into his field of view. A thin, pale brown face, the color of a sandy dirt road, shaven-headed, beak-nosed over a cropped gray beard, with prison glasses glinting in front of wide-set intelligent eyes. The Arab.

  “How do you feel?” the Arab asked. He had a soft voice, only slightly accented. The Arab had been the chief trustee attendant at the infirmary for at least ten years. The Arab wasn’t in a gang, not even in the Muslim Brothers, although he was an actual Muslim. Everyone left him alone for two reasons: one, you never could tell when you might have to go into the infirmary and hence find yourself in his power, and two, he provided dope for the whole prison. The doc was a junkie, and nodded off half the time. The Arab ran the place. Actually, three reasons. There was something about him, a look. The toughest cons, the yard bulls, could read it, and they treated the Arab with respect, and so, accordingly, did everyone else, including Felix. The prison records gave his name as Feisal Abdel Ridwan, which was somewhat true, and the crimes for which he had been sentenced as felony murder and armed robbery were also somewhat true. His actual identity and his actual crimes were kept secret, even from the prison authorities. This was part of the deal his lawyers had negotiated, to keep him safe, and to keep the information in his head on tap, should any of a number of U.S. government agencies wish to tap it.