A Quiet Vendetta (19 page)

I hesitated for a moment, closed one eye and looked at Carryl Chevron, looked once more at the book he held in his hands. I could hear the sound of my mind working overtime; I didn’t know what to do, but I
had
to do something.

‘How many are there?’ I asked.

‘Nine,’ he said. ‘Nine books in all. All of them just like this one, right there in the box in the back of my car.’

Again I hesitated, not because I was in doubt about what I wanted but because I was uncertain of what I was going to do to get it. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘bring them in. I’ll get you some money, but you’re not to tell anyone, right? You don’t tell anyone you came here and gave me the books.’

Chevron smiled. A dream, he thought, another dream; the right place, the right time of day, another dumbfuck kid who knew where the money was kept and could be worked like a bellows.

Chevron walked back to the car and retrieved the box from the rear seat. He lumbered back, his cheap shirt chafing his shoulders and elbows, sweat running down his chest like a river. Times like this he didn’t care, times like this it was worth it. The trip had been good. Here a week in this Godforsaken shithole of a territory, and this would be his fifth sale, one of them to an old guy who seemed too blind to read, and sure as hell hadn’t managed to see the difference between a ten-dollar and a hundred-dollar bill, the rest to kids such as this one, kids old enough to know where the cash was stashed, young enough to be fascinated and think nothing of consequences. Work fast, dump this crap, drive on, lose yourself out there in another worn-out dustbowl of a town where no-one knew who he was or would ever see him again. He’d be back in New Orleans within three or four days, out of the state inside a week: fat through a goose.

He reached the porch, stood there for a moment, and then shoved on the screen door, stepping through it before it banged back against the jamb. He stood in the cool darkness of the hallway, his nostrils twitching at the rank undercurrent of alcohol and piss and body odor. It never ceased to amaze him how people could actually live like this. He dropped the box of books on the floor, nothing more than a deadweight meal-ticket as far as he was concerned, and waited for the kid.

‘Hey!’ I called from out back, and already I had decided that there was no possibility I could
not
have those books. With those books, with everything inside them, I could be the boy my mother wanted me to be, and then – one day – I’d be a man like Fidel Castro Ruz, a man who made a difference. ‘Money’s here . . . come get it.’

Chevron stepped through the hallway into a small corridor that led to the back of the house.
The kitchen
, he thought.
Always the kitchen, inside a kettle, in a sock inside a pan buried at the bottom of a cupboard. Jesus, I’d make a helluva thief. These people are so goddamned predictable
.

Into the kitchen indeed, and there he found me shuffling through a drawer.

‘Come help me,’ I said. ‘Hey, maybe you wanna beer or something?’

‘Well, that’s mighty fine of you offerin’ there, young man, but I really must be on my way, have a lot of folks to see before I leave this here town of yours.’

Chevron could hear the shit oozing from his own mouth, talking like some hick farmhand laborer, and tonight he’d be holed up in some dusty highway roadhouse, some brassy act who could suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch doing her thing in his lap, in his hand a bottle of something cool and sweet, laughing to himself about this here routine he’d pulled so many times it’d gotten to be corny.

He crossed the room and stood a foot or so behind me and waited for the money to show its pretty face.

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘Anyways, how much d’you want? You want all of this?’

‘That’d be fine,’ Chevron said. ‘You just find all you got in there, just keep it comin’ and we’ll make out just fine an’ dandy.’

‘Think I got all of it here,’ I said.

I turned then, and Chevron stood there, his hand out ahead of him, his eyes glinting greedily, and the strength of my grip as I held his wrist surprised him, and the power that pulled him suddenly forward into a handful of kitchen knives, tugged him all the way forwards until his cheap cotton-covered belly met the handles of those blades, seemed to surprise him more than the pain they delivered.

The shirt perforated effortlessly, as did the man’s gut, and from his midriff, through his pinioned tie, out over his belt and down the front of his pants, came a river of blood more suited to the slaughter of a pig.

And then the knives were twisting, and through his gaping gold and diamond-decorated mouth came a desperate sound, a sound like rattling, as if his lungs were attempting escape through the tortured confines of his throat, lodging somewhere against his trachea, against the palate and the roof of his mouth. Blood came with that sound, I could smell its earthy bitterness, and when his bulging eyes cast downward he saw my face, the face of a child, white and deathly-pale, and I was leaning up towards him, smiling, twisting away out of his line of vision as his eyes rolled up to their whites in the back of his head.

He staggered back against the edge of the table. The table rocked but didn’t give, and when I released his wrist he just continued to stand there, off-balance, everything gone wild inside his head, colors and sounds and the bursting sensation in his lower gut all rolled up tight into something indefinable. I’m sure he felt his bladder give, felt the warm issuance tracing a narrow and rapid line down the inside of his leg, and then he toppled forward onto his knees, his face now beneath mine, the knives exiting his flesh like the slow grinding teeth of some huge mechanical cog, spitting sideways across the dirty linoleum as his life bled out before him. Inside he slumped, his innards twisted up and glued together, his hands scratching frantically on the greasy floor . . . and I stepped away, picked up one of the knives from the floor, and then took a handful of hair at the back of Chevron’s head, tugged hard until I could feel the muscles straining in his neck, and then with one movement, a movement so deft it seemed natural, I sliced his throat from ear to ear.

This was my first kill. My first real human being, and to feel that sudden warmth bursting between my fingers, across my wrist, my forearm, to hear the spattering of life as it showered from mortality into dust was something unreal, something profound, disturbing.

Something almost perfect.

I was my father perhaps. For some brief moment I was my father, and afterwards I stood there and looked at what had happened. I looked at this strange man lying on the floor of the kitchen, and then I knelt down beside him. I reached out my hand and touched the skin of his face – his cheek, his lips, his eyelids, his nose. I felt the moisture of sweat on his brow, the coarseness of his hair, the rough unshaven folds of skin above the wound in his neck.

There was a smell, something earthy, like rust and damp corn, like . . . like someone had died. That was the smell. Unique. Unmistakable. Once you inhaled that smell there was nothing else it could be. I believed, perhaps, that this would be a defining moment, that this would be the point where I became the man my mother wished me to be, where I would take these books and read and study and learn all there was to learn about this world, and with that knowledge I would step forward with certainty, with confidence, and become something. Become someone.

Things had changed.
I
had changed. I was not aware of how much the killing of the salesman would change me. During those seconds that I kneeled beside his slowly cooling body, I imagined that all I had done was engineer a way to obtain something that I would have otherwise been deprived of. That was how I rationalized and justified my action. But there was more, much more, and it would only be later that I understood the insidious shadow such an action would cast across my entire life. Wanting to please my mother I had become my father. Only for a moment, perhaps, but nevertheless I had become him. Desiring of the one true thing in my life, I had become the one thing I could never have hoped to understand. I felt panic, apprehension, confusion, a sense of imbalance, and yet at the same time I believed that I had accomplished something of which my mother would have been proud. My father killed people for no reason at all. I had killed someone for a good reason, a very good reason, and with the knowledge that was now going to be mine I would become the person she wished me to be.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I was a child then, possessing a child’s eyes and a child’s mind. I had done something I did not fully understand, but
I
had done it, and thus
I
was someone.

I washed up first, and then I carried the books two at a time from the box on the floor to my small bedroom. I stacked them on a blanket, folded the blanket over them, and then pushed them all the way to the wall beneath my cot.

I returned to the kitchen, stood there for a moment with a sense of mild frustration. How could something so brief be so damned messy?

I removed all the money from Carryl Chevron’s jacket, the bills thankfully unsoiled with his blood. I took cloths from the cupboard beneath the sink, wet them beneath the faucet, and then started working along the linoleum floor from the door towards the prostrate body. When I had reached the body from all sides and cleaned up the blood I returned to my room. I took a sheet from the bed, carried it back to the kitchen and spread it out on the floor. I rolled Chevron sideways until he lay awkwardly in the middle, and then I folded the edges over his legs and arms, over his torso and his dumb, senseless face. I tied the sheet at each end, knotted it well, and then dragged the body out of the kitchen and along the hall towards the front door. The man was heavy, he moved inch by incredible inch, and I heaved and gagged with the exertion. I convinced myself that it had been worth it, worth every struggling, breathless, choking moment it took to haul the carcass to the inner porch. I acted swiftly, mechanically almost, and with an almost complete absence of emotion. The thing was done. It could not be undone. I did not see the point of being any more afraid or confused.

I took Chevron’s keys and walked out to his car. I opened it, released the handbrake, started the engine, and then reversed the vehicle back towards the front of the house. From there it was a mere three or four steps to where the body lay inside the front door. The man’s weight was remarkable to me, but once I had lifted the upper half of his body over the lip of the trunk the impetus folded him in all the way.

I drove east no more than a mile or so, parked the car at the edge of a deserted and narrow road that ran out towards the swamplands and everglades beyond Lake Borgne and the canal intersections, family territory I was familiar with. For a while I rested. The heat pressed in at me from all sides. I even turned on the radio and listened to some Creole music from a station out of Chalmette District. It came to me after about half an hour of no thought. I knew that that was the best way – to think nothing at all, just to plant the idea right there in the middle of my mind and let it grow of its own accord. It took seed, it grew, it blossomed and flourished like wisteria in the vague breathless humidity. I backed the car up and let it roll in amongst the hickorys and water oaks. A hundred yards, the tires already shredding up the loose fermented undergrowth, spitting it out in healthy brown gobs like chewing tobacco from beneath the chassis, and then I killed the engine. From the back seat I took a jack, and with something akin to Herculean effort I hitched the rear end of the car a good foot high. With the trunk now close to chest height I had some difficulty rolling out Chevron’s body, but I managed it, sweating furiously, my fingers stuck together with the man’s blood, my hair stuck to my face like paint. I let the body drop, removed the sheet, and then with the side of my foot I shoved the body back beneath the rear wheels, the head directly under the right, the waist and upper legs beneath the left. I stepped back, kicked the jack, and heard the crunching demolition of bone and feature as the heavy rubber tires ground their way back to earth through Carryl Chevron’s mortal frame. I cleaned my hands off on the sheet, threw it into the trunk, and once inside the car I started the engine and rolled the car back and forth over the body a few times for good measure. I wound up the windows, locked the door, returned to where Chevron’s battered body lay half-buried in the loose earth inside the boundary of the trees. I took each hand in turn, and using the jack lever I smashed Chevron’s fingers against a rock so no fingerprint identification would ever be possible. I did the same with his jaw and lower face. The jack, the rock, the sheet, even the shirt I was wearing – I took all of them and walked until the waterlogged earth started to suck at my feet. I pushed these things beneath the surface and felt the ground hungrily devour them. I watched them disappear, the mud closing over them like slow-motion oil, and then I turned and ran back towards the road. Ran like a kid to a birthday party.

I stopped beside the unidentifiable body of Carryl Chevron, a forty-seven-year-old confidence trickster, born in Anamosa, flunked out of high school, dishonorably discharged from the army for theft, survivor of two wives, three ulcers, a suspected coronary condition that turned out to be a gargantuan case of heartburn, and I smiled.

It had been different – the killing, the disposing of the body, the small moments of chilling panic, the cleverness, the deceit, the perfection of it all. I kicked the battered head once more, watched an angry arc of gray-scarlet matter jet from the toe of my shoe, and then I walked back to the car. There was a certain magic to it all, a certain power, its beauty and simplicity matched only by the stars I could see from the narrow window of my room during clear-skied winter nights.

That was my first and original sin; a sin I committed in an effort to become something of which my mother would approve, and in doing so I had perhaps allowed my father to infect and inhabit my soul.

Carryl Chevron was never found, never reported missing, perhaps – truth be known – never even missed. Maybe some brassy act in high heels with too much rouge and too little class was still waiting for him in a dusty roadhouse someplace down the stateline. And maybe some of the kids who bought his books were still sore from their beatings.