“The only sign these pigs will leave on Black Gangster Disciple turf will be their rotting corpses. Take these bodies to the borders and leave them as markers.”
His men left and he focused his attention on us—a weary, wounded group who had achieved success but found no joy. The man we had come to rescue had been possessed by another. And we didn’t know how to bring the original back.
“You have my gratitude,” James said to all of us, “for showing respect to my people and our laws. And for your courage. Without your help we would have lost many more men.”
“Without our help,” I said, sarcastically punching the last word, “you wouldn’t have lost any men at all. This was our battle. We’re sorry those soldiers had to die, James.”
“You’re missing the point, McCall,” James countered. “It doesn’t make any difference that the Messengers came down here to get Merlin because they wanted to fuck with you. That’s not part of the equation. What’s important is that Merlin was under our protection. For years he’s lived in Disciple territory with our knowledge and permission. Except for a couple of minor hassles, he’s always paid for the privilege. Our men died with honor, protecting our territory. If the Messengers had gotten in and out and whacked Merlin here in the process, the BGD’s may as well just roll over and die. Because every clan in the city would know—both Folks and People—and they’d all be after our turf. In a couple of weeks Disciples would be nothing but a bad memory.”
“The way I figure it, James,” I said, “it’s us that owes you one. Not the other way around.”
He smiled. “I’ll accept that. Make it flow both ways. Here’s what I want from you. We’re not going after the Messengers right now. Be suicide to front them on their own turf. But we got long memories. And any of us would be honored to fight with you again. Including the dog. I saw him flying through the air, munching on The Babe’s face. You fuckers are something else. This battle will be legend.”
“The Messengers sure as hell won’t be talking about it,” Stevie said.
“We will,” James said. “Everyone likes a good story. And this is gonna be one of the best. What I want from you is that we get to finish the story. You let us know if you meet the Messengers again. This isn’t over for us.”
“If the opportunity presents itself,” Weasel said, “we’ll let you in. Now,” he continued, pulling James aside, walking away from the rest of us, “I got something you can do for us.”
• • • •
On a yellowed interior wall of the bullpen, Stevie found the special communique that the Messengers had left for me. It was a primitive drawing, etched in blood, of a dog fucking a woman. Stick figures except for two details—the dog’s penis (they were downright artistic when it came to depicting sexual organs) and the woman’s hair. Rich in detail, requiring more blood than the rest of the childish sketch, the woman’s hair was represented in a deeper red than any other part of the drawing.
As I gazed upon the crude sketch, painted in the blood of dead men on an east wall, brightly lit by the morning sun, my insides turned cold.
He knew about Sarah. Grasped that there was a connection between the two of us. Perceived the value of the auburn haired woman to the man he now sought more desperately than ever.
Beneath the drawing was a red lettered caption:
NOW IT WILL BE YOU
AND THE DOG
AND THE CUNT MACCAL
SWEET DREAMS
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Home was comfortable. Home was nice. Home was vulnerable.
The man in the closet was a testament to our vulnerability. He was more manageable now that the drugs were expunged from his system. But he was stupid, and he was mean. Being drug free didn’t change that.
He had found us. Now the Messengers would be looking for him. Only safe place was another state. But we wouldn’t run.
“You know,” Sarah said one morning over breakfast, five days after we had returned from the AON Center, “we could go live with the Cobras. Or the Disciples. Either clan would accept us.”
“It would just make the war bigger,” I said.
“Live with them and we’d have to abide by their rules and customs,” Weasel said. “We wouldn’t fit in too well.”
Sarah worked on some egg yolk with the corner of a piece of raisin bread. Bread from our oven, raisins from our grapes. “I know all that. The suggestion wasn’t one that I necessarily would prefer. But I want all of your thoughts. We could be sitting at the site of our funeral right now, you know. What about you, Stevie?”
“I’ll never live with a clan again,” he said. “No matter who they are or how different they may seem. This here,” tapping the table, “is my home. You are my family. We keep this business to ourselves.”
“Merlin,” Sarah said to our taciturn friend, the man who used to chatter like a squirrel, who had uttered barely a word for days, “how about you? What’s your opinion?”
“I’m just along for the ride,” he muttered.
I counted off the words on my fingers. Six of them. A veritable oration. We had been home for five days. Merlin had barely spoken. First couple of days we let him be. Figured he needed time to himself. When he got hungry, he requested we bring the food up to him. We refused, making him come to us, feel the presence of someone who cared.
Didn’t do a bit a good.
He was stoned all of the time. He showered incessantly, at least four times daily, hour each session. When we returned to the compound after the rescue, he had headed straight for the shower, stayed in until the hot water ran out.
We weren’t sure if he had gotten any sleep. The bags under his eyes, his pasty color, more washed out than his usual pallor, the haunted look on his face were reflections of the internal battle he was waging.
The only color on his pallid features was the blues, purples and reds of the healing bruises and contusions on his face. The swelling had subsided. There would be some scarring. There were a few missing teeth. None of us had seen the rest of his body. He kept it covered, as if winter were in the air.
On the third day, after we found Merlin tearing up the house looking for the Bad Boy we had taken from the Messengers, Sarah went to the computer, searching the files for psychological problems, rape victims, treatment modalities for victims of abuse.
She found hundreds of references, thousands of pages.
None of it did any good.
Last night, Duke had wrested Sarah and I from our sleep and led us downstairs, where we found Merlin playing a deadly game with the man in the closet. Merlin located my Ruger Super Redhawk .44 Magnum revolver, one of the heaviest, most powerful pistols we possessed, and was placing it in and out of the Messenger’s mouth, spinning the cylinder each time. The click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber was a haunting sound.
I took the pistol from him (there was no resistance) and Sarah walked him back to his room. The prisoner was happy to return to his home in the closet, particularly when I showed him one ominous .44 magnum slug in the cylinder. I locked the Messenger in, then hid the keys to the padlocks.
Sarah returned to our bed two hours later. She removed her gown and slipped under the sheets, melding her body to mine. “Hold me,” she said.
I put aside Farnham’s Feehold and extinguished the light. She rested her head on my shoulder, encircled my chest with one arm. “He’s in such bad shape, Mac,” she whispered. “He just doesn’t care.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Not much. But he talked a little. He’s so full of hate, it’s like his body is simmering internally.”
“Wouldn’t you be? Wouldn’t anyone?”
“Most definitely. It’s a natural response. But the shame, the humiliation he’s feeling is more dominant. It’s more debilitating than the hate. If he can’t beat that, he’ll never come out of it.”
“How do you think you would handle the same problem?” I asked, sickened by the thought. “Maybe if we brainstorm that, we can
figure out ways to help him.”
She thought about it for awhile, absentmindedly twirling her hair. “Even if I could conjure up the feelings such a horror would generate, I don’t think it would help Merlin,” she finally replied.
“Why not?” I stroked her bare shoulder. Small comfort, it seemed to me, but she always liked it. Said it soothed her.
“Women handle the aftermath better than men. I’ve seen it. Clan and indie women are raped all the time. Before you and I met and we removed ourselves from the indie camps,” she continued, “I came across women who had been victims of violence by men all the time. I can remember it even from my childhood, my mother trying to console women who’d been beaten, raped.”
“But if we figure out how women survive it, the mental part, maybe we can use that to help him.”
“I don’t think so. I think it has something to do with both gender and sex. I never really thought about it. But…if you look back, as far as thousands of years, I think we see women in the role of victims more frequently than men. Men are programmed for aggression. Often against their own kind. But when it get mixed up with sex, then women are the natural recipients. We don’t have any mechanism like that. Sex and violence don’t go together for us. So maybe we have a gene or something that allows us to survive the mayhem caused by your genes of aggression.”
“So women have a biological mechanism that allows them to survive our transgressions.”
“As well as a gender mechanism—a learned behavior. We share victimization. We’re taught to go on. We naturally comfort one another. If we don’t, the family falls apart. It may get biological here. If we collapse, so do our children. So we’re programmed to survive being victims.”
“Genetically and socially.”
“Who knows. They hadn’t figured it out up to the time of the collapse. No reason to think our ideas aren’t as good as theirs. Probably better. Look what happened to them.”
“So what does all this mean?”
“It means,” she said, “that this may be a man thing. His problem isn’t with women, wasn’t caused by women, and the shame he feels isn’t related to women. It’s men he’s worried about. It’s men that will see him as weak, think he should have died before he submitted.”
She sat up. In the dark I could sense her sorrow. “What is it, hon?” I asked, reaching for her hand.
She tried to choke back tears. Failed. Sobbing quietly, she said, “They raped him both anally and orally, Mac. They stuck their filthy cocks in his mouth, taunting him while they used his body. He told me everything, Mac. Said it’s in his head all the time. He can’t get over the shame.”
“He’s lucky they didn’t kill him.”
“Not to his way of thinking. He wishes they did.”
• • • •
In the morning, we told Stevie and Weasel what Sarah had learned from Merlin, extracting their pledge of silence. They needed to know what really happened to their friend. Could never let him know they had the knowledge. As the four of us sat at the table, a thousand times over ritual for us, I suddenly realized that Stevie had faced his biggest demon of all in that skyscraper six days past, and none of us had said a word. We licked our wounds, congratulated ourselves, and fussed over Merlin. Stevie was lost in the shuffle.
“We,” I said, indicating Sarah, Weasel and myself, “are a bunch of assholes.”
“What’d we do?” Weasel asked.
“Six days ago Stevie stood this far,” I held my hands six inches apart, “from The Babe, smashed his arm with his rifle, got a backhand that punched his lights out in return and generally saved the lives of me, Sarah and Duke.”
“Son of a bitch,” Weasel said. “Why wasn’t I told about any of this? You OK, boy?”
“Didn’t seem like a blow by blow playback was appropriate,” Stevie said, smiling. “All of us faced the same shit. And, yeah, I’m fine. I was kinda hurt at first, wanting to be treated like a hero, but then I realized everyone was a hero.”
“Weren’t you scared,” Sarah asked, “when you found yourself face to face with him? After all, the man almost ruined your whole life, killed your best and only friend right in front of your eyes.”
“I was real scared at first. Then I just reacted. I’m all right now. What I realized afterward, is that I’m a man now—not the nine year old boy who lived with the Messengers when it happened. And when I smashed his arm, it hurt him. Suddenly I realized he’s not invincible. Flesh and bone like the rest of us. Just real big…and dangerous.”
Weasel reached across the table and took Stevie’s hand in his two. “I’m proud of you, boy,” he said. “You just figured out the number one rule of survival.”
“What’s that?” we all asked.
“The glass is half full.”
• • • •
We went through three more days of hell with Merlin before Weasel decided to try something. We were at dinner. All of us were bone tired, having put in twelve hours on the compound’s defenses. Merlin had hidden in his room all day, exiting only to eat, shower or go to the bathroom. Now at dinner, he was picking distractedly at his food, nibbling now and then, moving his meal from one section of his plate to another, refusing to speak when spoken to.
“Stevie,” Weasel said, “will you get me a towel, a big one?”
As Stevie left, Weasel stood up and began to disrobe. Shirt first, then shoes and socks. Sat down to remove his pants.
“I’m glad I’m finished with my dinner,” Sarah commented. “I’m thinking whatever it is you have in mind would not enhance my appetite.”
Weasel looked at her and smiled, then made a muscle man pose with his arms. “I’m hurt you’d call my physique unappetizing,” he said.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
“A guided tour,” he replied.
“This would be of your body?” Sarah asked.
“Only the exterior,” Weasel said. “Minus the privates. That’s what the towel’s for. Cover my privates.”
Stevie returned with a bath towel, tossing it to Weasel and returning to his chair, a look of anticipation on his face. He knew when the good stuff was starting.
“What’s up, Weasel?” he asked.
Weasel stood up, removed his underwear and circled his waist with the towel. “What I got in mind is a graphic presentation to Mr. Dopehead here,” nodding in Merlin’s direction, “that he isn’t the only one suffered a few bumps and bruises in this life. Matter of fact, if we rated the injury and injustices all of us here have experienced, it’s very likely he may have to go to the back of the line.”
Merlin looked up from his dinner plate. “Fuck you, Weasel,” he said. “You don’t know shit about what I went through.”
“Ain’t no way for me to know, ass wipe,” Weasel snapped back. “You’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself to talk to any of us about it. Too wrapped up your dope fogged head to consider anyone else may have just as much pain in their past.”
Merlin looked up again, a flicker of anger in his reddened eyes. “You tryin’ to make some kind of point here, Sophocles? Some goddam psychological ploy?”
“Take your shirt off, Merlin,” Weasel challenged. “Let’s compare scars.”
Weasel raised his arms and did a slow turn, revealing a blueprint of human depravity sketched across his wiry frame. Scars and welts and angry red rashes dotted the landscape of his upper body.
He began a travelogue then, categorizing the multiplicity of wounds by part of the country he was in when they occurred, beginning at the shoulders and working his way down to his legs. Bullet hole in Atlanta, knife scar in Memphis, graze wound in Carbondale, whip lashes from Effingham, bayonet in Peoria.
The nastiest looking defacements were the ten parallel lashes that marched down his shoulders, ending on his buttocks. “Whipped like a mule by a bunch of shit kickers ‘cuz I walked in the wrong field. They made a mistake by letting me live.”
Merlin listened to the monologue, sitting back in
his chair, arms crossed, expressionless. When Weasel sat back down and started dressing, he said, “I get it. I’m supposed to see what you’ve been through and reach out to you, setting aside my selfish concern for my own little ordeal.” He did sarcasm well. Generally physically non-aggressive, Merlin compensated with a sharp tongue. “It won’t work. Fuck you, Freud.”
“You know,” Weasel said with a wave that encompassed all of us at the table, “this little group been together nearly five years now. If I ask Mac and Sarah and Stevie to strip nekkid and show their scars, they’d do it. But there’s not much to show. Most of it is inside. Mac and Sarah never talk about theirs, but it’s there, the pain inside. Stevie’s been through shit that’s hard to imagine. When he was nine he saw his best friend sodomized and murdered right in front of him. By The Babe, the man that tried to separate Stevie’s head from his shoulders a few short days ago—while we were rescuing you. That’s the first time he’s faced him in nine years, Merlin. He did it for you.”
Weasel didn’t punch the last five words. He gave them the same inflection as the rest. But they were out there, in the open, a little reminder, lest Merlin forget, that we had faced more than physical danger during the rescue.
Merlin shifted his gaze over to Stevie. “I’m sorry, Stevie,” he said softly. “I didn’t know.” Then a little hesitation. “How’d you get through it, man?”
“I’m not sure I ever did,” Stevie said. “It’s just that in my life now, it’s…not important to me anymore. It’s been replaced. The fear, the pain. We can’t take it away, Merlin, all of us who are here with you. Mac and Sarah and Weasel never made it go away for me. But we can give you something more important than the pain.”
“It’s not the pain. It’s the…humiliation…the…” Merlin searched for the word. Maybe he had it, but didn’t want to bring it out.
Weasel finished the sentence. “…Shame. It’s like there’s a big fucking sign across your forehead.”
“Yeah,” Merlin replied. “A scarlet letter. How’d you know?”
“Been there,” Weasel said. “They call ‘em rump rangers down south. This part of the country hasn’t cornered the market on sodomy. It’s the same everywhere. It’s why I came up here. I felt like everyone knew. Judged me as a coward. I never even told anyone—until now.”
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