by Thomas, Lee
“His father is missing,” she said. “We just got the telegram the other day. He’s been out of his mind with worry. We both have.”
“You have my deepest regrets,” Sheriff Rabbit said dryly, “but that doesn’t excuse the crimes in question.”
“He’s just a little boy,” Ma continued. “He’s confused. He’s not a criminal.”
“The law says different,” Deputy Burns said. “You can’t go around almost killing folks, even if they are queer.”
“That’s enough, Rex,” Sheriff Rabbit said. “Tim, I want you to take a moment and think really clearly, and then I want you to start at the beginning. I want you to tell me when Hugo Jones first approached you about this business, and then I want to hear in your own words what happened last night. Deputy Burns is going to write it all down, and remember we already have your accomplices’ testimony, so you’d best stick close to the truth.”
I considered a number of lies but lacked the strength to build them, so the truth trickled out in a sluggish stream. I told them what I’d seen through the German’s window and that Hugo had seen the same thing and said he’d seen more. I told them about kicking the man in the balls because he wouldn’t let loose of Bum, and I told them I beat the German with a sock, weighted down with a rock Hugo had picked up in the backyard, and finally when I’d come to the end of the story, I told them I was sorry.
“I’m sure Lang will be happy to hear it,” the sheriff scoffed.
“Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake?” Ma asked, reaching for her last shred of hope. “About Mr. Lang, I mean. You’re sure he’s not involved with those murders?”
“We were in pursuit of the real Cowboy last night,” Deputy Burns said. “He snatched another boy right off the street, not far from your house.”
“Another boy?” Ma asked.
“Bum Craddick,” Sheriff Rabbit said.
The name hit me like a club, sending me back in my chair. The room canted to the side and smeared at the edges as if suddenly framed in grease. Details began to melt – a wax diorama suspended over flame. I fainted then, dropping a hundred feet through my own head, and Bum’s name followed me all the way down.
Twenty-Seven: The German
In the hospital they look at me like I am a murderer. The injections of morphine are given clumsily, harshly; they rip the bandages from my wounds like wolves rending meat; they press salve into my burns as if in punishment for my taking up a bed. They know I prefer the company of men, and they think I am no better than the murderer of children.
I think about the blades and the cigarettes and the beating, and in my fevered opiate state there is the certainty that I could kill children – those children. When the nurses and doctors are around I speak only German, and I do not turn away from their expressions of repugnance but rather force them to avert their eyes, and when my friend Carl Baker arrives wearing concern like a virgin’s veil, I tell him to go home, because his weakness reminds me of my own. The sheriff comes to take a statement and asks me about my confession to the boys, and I tell him to go away, because I know I am innocent and so does he. Weakness and pain birthed my confession. The confession was meant to end the boys’ clumsy torture. I am shamed by it. I should have been a soldier. I should have said nothing, for that is the extent of my guilt. The confession they forced me to repeat was meant only to titillate their leader – that boy faggot Hugo – and I knew that every utterance of rape filled his cock with blood and painted salacious pictures in his mind.
He is unable to differentiate sex and cruelty. To him they are one roiling, ugly mass like the effluent beneath a slaughterhouse drain.
Then a doctor comes for one final, cruel examination before telling me I will be going home, and he tells me that the Bible will end my confusion and show me the way, and I tell him that the confusion is his, and he sneers at me and says he’ll pray for my soul, and I ask that he not waste his breath. A nurse and two orderlies arrive with a wheelchair. The men in white grab my wounded arms roughly with the pretense of helping me to the chair, and I shake them off of me, spitting obscenities at the idiot men.
And for the first time in this new life I know hate, the genuine and honest hate that once drove me to command a legion while simultaneously following a lunatic. What fragile peace I had found will never be reclaimed, and I consider all that is not me to be loathsome, insignificant, and expendable.
Except that is a poor deceit. All that is me similarly suffers this hatred.
A taxi drives me home. My sheets have been cleaned and the bed is made and the floors have been scrubbed with a cleanser and lemon juice and I still smell the blood and the piss and the shit and the cigarette stink of that boy faggot’s breath. I want to break everything I see. I want to burn it all down.
I don’t want to feel this way again. The scalding rage in my chest, once familiar to the point of imperceptibility, has been absent these last years, blessedly snuffed and cooled and soothed. No more. Is this the nature of the Bolivian’s curse? To never know peace, to approach the promise of it only to have it set afire and reduced to powder-soft ashes?
I sit on the porch drinking whiskey. It is cheap and harsh on my throat, but I guzzle the foul liquor because I don’t know what else to do. New wounds and old scars ache. Every pain I’ve ever known is with me. The lines on my cheeks and chin scald like red-hot wires. Holes open in my chest. Bullets break skin and bone and organ. Knives cut into my arms and my legs. A child burns my thigh with a cigarette. And I drink this shitty whiskey hoping to numb the persistent misery.
It isn’t right.
Cruelty is not taught. It is as certain as a compass point. One can be instructed in the specifics of cruelty, like one can be taught to use a spoon, a knife, a fork, but even without these skills a man will still eat. The need is with us. If man has any superiority to animals in this regard it is his ability to control the brutal impulses – should he choose to – but this is more than offset by the imagination he has been given, an imagination that allows perversions of creativity such as those employed by the Spanish Inquisition, and the prison camps built for wars. Torture is particular to man. He is very good at it.
Tim Randall walks out of his house. The little fucker keeps his head down. He doesn’t look at me. Good. Very good. If he looks at me, I will kill him. I will break this bottle over his head and open his neck with a shard. I’ll watch him gasp and convulse, trying to draw breath through the hole in his throat. I’ll spit on him and grind his pained face beneath the heel of my boot.
I was a captain. I was respected. I commanded a force of four million men. My name brought fear. Esteem. There was only one equal to my power – my very good friend – and he had me murdered. Unable to face the task himself, he ordered some milk-fed bitch with aspirations of greatness to put the bullets in me. I was a captain. Men dropped to their knees before me, in admiration and supplication. The aphrodisiac of supremacy wafted from my pores like the goddamn rose water I use to mask the scent of dirt. I took what I wanted. Before the betrayal and the passing, I was Thor walking the streets of man.
But children never brought Thor to his knees.
I take another drink and feel the whiskey erode the tissues. My eyes never leave the boy. He hurries down the road looking only at the sidewalk beneath his feet, racing away from the source of his shame. Would he walk with less haste, would he strut with pride if he knew he had conquered Thor?
I came to this place to find serenity. In the cities there is nothing but struggle. I thought to remove myself, first to New Orleans, and finally to this place. But a trivial population doesn’t guarantee peace.
Over the years I had convinced myself that brutality required motive, but this is a fool’s deceit. Cruelty is the motive; religion and politics and resources are simply the cloth man weaves to curtain his desires for violence. All ideologies are inherently wrong. None have worked. None have emerged as dominant to the point of suppressing all others, and if this is true – if time has n
ot proven a thing irrefutable – then a thing is a lie. Religion and politics encourage violence so that the meek will proudly throw away breath and flesh because their rot fertilizes fat succulent flora. Men thrive in these gardens of atrocity, proudly tending the blossoms, convinced that the clusters of lovely, vibrant petals – their gods, their governments, their belief in an unquestionable right to destroy all that does not resemble them – are worth the blood and the meat that feed the stalks.
A car stops before my house. It is a familiar car. The car belongs to a man whose face is unremarkable. I would not notice this face in a crowd.
“Ernst,” the man says, and I realize I still don’t know his name.
“Have a drink,” I say, handing the bottle to him. “Drink. Have a cigarette.”
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“Happened?” I ask. “Nothing happened. Everything is normal. Everything is as it will always be.”
“You’ve been in another fight,” he says.
The unremarkable face wears a frown. He pities me, and it makes me sick. My fist clenches. Pain from my mutilated fingers stabs, but I keep it at my side. He is weak, so fucking weak. He’s not worth my hate but like all others it is bestowed upon him. The pain from my wounds turns liquid, spreading over my skin like acid. Every nerve erupts with agony and I close my eyes against it. When I open them, the man kneels at my side.
“Did you come to fuck?” I ask.
His face burns red and he jerks his head around to see if there is anyone in the street to hear.
“I…just…. I wanted to see you.”
“Ah, good, yes. You wanted to see me.”
“Can we go inside?” he asks.
“It stinks inside,” I tell him. “We’ll talk here. You can see me here.”
“Yeah,” he says, but he is not certain. His eyes widen with fright and he quickly stands moving to my left side. “Jesus, Ernst, you’re bleeding.”
I look at my shirt and blood stains the cloth at my shoulder. My wounds are seeping. The unremarkable man is concerned, but I am not. Much more blood than this has escaped me in the past. I take another drink from the bottle and offer it to him.
“Did you hear me?” he says. “You’re bleeding. What happened to you?”
“Like you said, I was in another fight.”
“Was it the same man?”
I do not know what he means. What man?
“Did he come after you again?”
Then it occurs to me he means Carl Baker’s cousin: the coward Udo – the man who did not fight well.
I put the bottle on the table, ignoring the unremarkable man. I take a cigarette and light it and lean back in my chair.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks.
“Yes, I want you to leave,” I tell him.
“Can I come see you again?”
“Yes, you can come see me again.”
“You really are a strange man, Ernst.”
“Yes, I am a strange man,” I say, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. Through the smoke I see Tim Randall’s house. The sight of it infuriates me. I am drunk, I realize, but that simply frees my tongue. “And who are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who the fuck are you?” I say harshly. “Another coward in a nation of cowards? A terrified child afraid to offend his parents? A cocksucking piece of filth who wants his pleasures kept in secrecy because he cannot say I am a man, and I am this kind of man, and to hell with the masks you want me to wear? What kind of man is that? What does he call himself?”
The children’s torture is on my skin; their despicable words ring in my ears. I feel their breath and their spit and their hands and their blades and the tiny fires they use to sear my skin.
All moments are this moment because nothing has changed. Everything that has happened or will happen occurs in this time. Past and future are the same variegated smear of fluids leaking from an infected wound. At the center of this wound is this moment, this oozing agonizing second, and when it passes, another moment, equally as impure and painful occurs.
The unremarkable man is angry now. He rights himself and straightens his back as if with pride. What does he know of pride?
I was a fucking captain.
I was….
It doesn’t matter. Ernst is dead.
“You really are shithouse crazy.”
“Yes, I am shithouse crazy.”
He leaves quickly. Drives away without pause. This is better. This is good. I walk back into my home where it smells of blood and sweat and piss and shit.
I have another drink. Light another cigarette and I sit down to my journal.
I will write no more. If all moments are the same moment, recounting each is the exercise of a lunatic. Individual lives are not worth documenting. Only the corpse registry and the carvers of stones care about names. My name is Ernst and I am meaningless.
Twenty-Eight: Sheriff Tom Rabbit
Tom rushed through his morning routine, forsaking time with Pilar and wolfing down his breakfast, suddenly uncomfortable under the watch of Estella’s beautiful brown eyes. The city was quiet when he arrived, an hour earlier than was usual for him. In the office he met Walter, who told him the night had been uneventful, and Tom was grateful for it. He made it through most of the morning without interruption, reading reports and cross-referencing Ford vehicle registrations with a list of German names. He tried to keep Estella and Ernst Lang out of his thoughts as he poured over the documentation, attempting to see the Cowboy appear in the list. The change in his day came a few minutes after eleven when Gil limped into his office, wearing a frown.
“Those boys are here to see you,” Gil said. “Burl Jones is with them.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to change their statements.”
The burn in Tom’s stomach returned with a flash and he closed his eyes to keep his temper in check.
“Send them home,” he said. “We already have their statements.”
“They said we got it wrong.”
“We got it wrong? All we’ve got is what they told us?”
“I’m just telling you what Burl told me.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tom muttered. “Send them in.”
Burl Jones led his son and two of the other boys into the room. The Randall kid wasn’t with them, but Ben Livingston and Austin Chitwood entered dressed like they were going to church, hair smoothed down to a shiny sheet with pomade, heads slightly bowed and hands crossed over their crotches like proper and respectful Christian boys. The display disgusted Tom.
Behind the boys, Burl Jones stood in his everyday suit, which had a smudge of dust on the left shoulder. He removed his hat and stood straight and said, “We just come from Buck Taylor’s place.”
Of the dozen or so lawyers in Barnard, Taylor was the only one that Tom couldn’t stand the sight of. He was a pretentious old whale with white hair, yellowed at the temples. He walked around Barnard like he owned the sidewalks and was more than happy to chatter nonsense at a jury just to hear himself talk. But he won his cases, nearly all of them, and Tom didn’t like receiving the information that Taylor was defending the little monsters standing before him.
“And where is Buck?” Tom asked.
“He’ll be along,” Burl said.
“He tried to touch us,” Austin Chitwood announced with a voice that trembled so badly it sounded near to a giggle. “The German bastard tried to….”
Hugo shoved his friend to quiet him down.
“That’s enough boys,” Burl Jones said.
Tom examined the elder Jones’s face, and what he encountered was a sorrowful and confounded expression, not the hard defiance he usually found there. The man chewed on serious thoughts and he stood distracted. Something had gotten into Burl’s head and it was eating away like a worm through damp dirt.
No one spoke again until Buck Taylor walked into the office, wearing a lightweight, blue cotton suit. His full face shimmered w
ith perspiration, and a smile as phony as a three-dollar bill showed rows of white teeth.
“Tom Rabbit,” he said as if they were dear old friends, “it’s been a long time.”
“Yes, it has,” Tom agreed. “What can I do for you, Buck?”
“It’s a sad business,” Taylor said. In a dramatic display the lawyer lost his smile and slapped a fat palm to the back of his neck. He looked at the floor, shaking his head slowly as if he was about to reveal a tragedy. “I think it would be best if my clients waited outside. Burl, why don’t you take the boys down the street for some sodas? I’ll be over directly.”
Burl nodded. The boys filed out and the man followed them.
Tom recognized Taylor’s ploy. Burl and those boys were just for show. The lawyer had wanted Tom to see the boys, the children of the community. Buck had told them to dress in their proper Sunday attire and instructed them in contrition and manners. Tom wondered if the lawyer would have gone to such trouble if he’d seen Ernst Lang bound to his bed, humiliated and bleeding. Tom figured the lawyer would.
“We already have the boys’ statements,” Tom said. “I’d imagine your discussion at this point should be with the judge.”
“I’ll be headed over to Jeff’s when I’m finished up here,” Taylor said, making sure Tom understood the lawyer’s familiarity with the judge. “But we don’t really need to involve him in this.”