The German (29 page)

Tom did mind, and he didn’t say. The doctor would know soon enough anyway. Doc Randolph shook his head, disappointed, then he climbed in his car and drove off.

Tom closed up the German’s house and drove back to the station. He’d have a deputy round up the three older boys, wake their folks, and give them all something to chew over while he worked on his report. In the morning – at least later in the morning – he’d call Estella and ask her to run by Lang’s house to clean up those sheets and do what she could with his mattress.

The German might as well have a clean bed when he got home.

I didn’t sleep.

My mind overflowed with sound and motion – a big band dance filled with trampled and bloody dancers, twirling to a blaring, discordant dirge. Even my mother’s demands for answers couldn’t break through the cacophony. Once home, I flew past her and ran into my bedroom and collapsed on the bed, curling into a ball, and she instantly followed to ask where I had been and what I had been doing and was I okay, and I said nothing. She sobbed and held me, convinced I was the victim.

Amid screams pouring from the German’s bloody face, I remembered the sheriff’s words:
Jesus Christ, he didn’t touch them.
At the time, his certainty had been like a splash of cold water delivered in unison with an electric shock. I felt my own certainty then: Hugo had manipulated me – had manipulated
everything
. My mind was too shattered to identify the specific deceits, but one moment I firmly believed my neighbor was a monster, and in the next I saw him as the casualty of monsters – beaten, cut, bloody. Innocent.

Later in the morning my mother returned to my room. Her demeanor had changed, but she continued to cry. In a terse voice, she told me to get up and straighten my clothes. Comb my hair. Deputy Gilbert Perry was waiting in the living room to take us into town. He greeted me with a sour expression and a stern, “Morning,” and then he led us outside.

Ma sat next to me in the police car, silent and wiping the tears from her eyes. At the police station, Gilbert limped around the car and opened the door and when I stepped out, I felt his hand on my back, as if ready to grab me should I decide to run. Inside, Ma and I were led into a small, poorly lit room that smelled like cigarettes and sweat. A fan clacked noisily as it pushed warm air around the cinderblock cell. We were asked to sit at a table, and then Deputy Gil shambled out of the room, leaving me alone with my mother, who insisted on answers.

“Timothy George Randall, you tell me what this is all about.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it wasn’t far from the truth. The dance continued in my head – one bloody face after another, though they were all the German’s face contorted in different ways. I could no longer summon the rage that had so easily guided me into his house, that had made his wounding justified. So I didn’t know what
this
was all about, because I couldn’t understand how any of it had happened.

“He said you kidnapped a man,” she pressed. “He said you hurt him very badly.”

“Yes,” I replied. That’s exactly what had happened, but I didn’t want to remember it that way. I wanted to remember how brave we’d been, how smart we’d been, how we’d made the German confess. We were heroes.

The interrogation room door opened and Sheriff Rabbit walked in, followed by Deputy Burns. Both of them looked like they’d just come from the funeral of someone they loved. My belly twisted tight with sickness and the dance played on in my head, the music faster, the dancers all the more damaged.

Deputy Burns took the chair across from me. He dropped down in it and glared over the table. Sheriff Rabbit remained standing.

“Mrs. Randall,” he said, “I want you to understand the seriousness of this business, and further, I want you to know that I witnessed the crime in question, so I would appreciate the cooperation of you and your son. It’ll make life easier for all of us.”

Ma nodded at this and threw a frightened look at me.

“Tim,” Sheriff Rabbit said, “we know what happened, so there’s no use in lying about it. We’ve already spoken to Hugo and Ben and Austin, and we have their statements on file. We know you entered the residence of Ernst Lang…” Ma gasped at the mention of our neighbor’s name. “…and that you proceeded to subdue, restrain, and commit acts of violence on the man. Can you tell me why you did this?”

Deputy Burns spoke up then. His voice rolled over his tongue like a thresher chopping through a field of stone columns. “I’m thinking you’d confess to a whole lot of things yourself if you were tied to a bed and cut up and burned with cigarettes. Now, I don’t have much use for Lang’s sort, and I sure don’t have much liking for them. I see a queer and I pop him in the jaw to let him know he best look the other way. I handle it like a man and I move on. But you could have killed that son of bitch, Tim. It’s a goddamn miracle you didn’t. Then it wouldn’t matter a bit if he was queer or not; you’d be a murderer. That sound good to you?”

“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.

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 not 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.