The Wrong Man (14 page)

I saw Johnny’s silhouette turn suddenly down one of these trails. The silhouette was impressive the way any weightlifter’s is—packed with muscle through the shoulders, with a bull neck supporting a small-looking head like a cantaloupe on top of a Roman column. I wouldn’t want to grapple with the mothefucker, but I didn’t intend to. I followed him, stepping lightly, wearing my gloves, feeling the weight and force of my hammer.

A moment later my eyes had adjusted to the new level of darkness in this leafy nook, and I could see that he’d already sat down. There, in shades of blue and black, were those hulking shoulders, that bull neck and that black melon head rising up over the back of the bench
.

I rushed up, hearing my breath suck in the darkness, and I felt the jolt of the hammerhead against his skull. It struck somewhere over the right ear and the hammer bounced off, but not all that much. The skull had given way, at least partially. He immediately sagged as if falling asleep, and I flipped the hammer around and hacked the claw into the neck, up under the jaw where I guessed the fabled jugular veins are—guaranteeing he would bleed out—I figured.

I paused. He had now slumped over until he was about to spill off the bench. The black blood was indeed surging forth, and I touched his head with my gloved fingers to steady him and raised my arm for another hack—

“What the fuck?” came the voice from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder, hammer still raised high like I was some player in a comedy sketch. I could see the guy’s dirty blond hair. His narrow, almost petite frame.

“Dude, who are you? What the fuck are you doing?”

I lowered the hammer and turned to face him, and it was almost a bad joke.

My eyes were fully adjusted now, light was angling over from somewhere, and I recognized him from high school, although I couldn’t remember his name. A white trash heavy metal kid, a year or two behind me. It was in my head so suddenly and completely that I almost wanted to exclaim it and laugh, to celebrate the recognition. In a heartbeat I saw him as he’d been fifteen years ago, a ridiculously cocky, strutting, underweight little shit with a cigarette in his mouth, the bill of his cap flipped inside-out to display the “M.O.D.” written across its green underside in magic marker.

“I know you,” he said. Then, “Is that a hammer? Hey, man, what the fuck are you up to, guy?” And he changed, hunkered down and was pointing something at me. It was a knife, of course. “You better get your ass out of here, guy,” he said, seeming almost as if he was about to laugh. Still a cocky little shit.

I looked at him and was at a complete loss. A breeze made a sound like TV static in the leaves around us. And then, behind me I heard the sliding
 
. . . a beat of pregnant silence, and then the slightly wet
fwwwump!
of Johnny hitting the ground.

The heavy metal kid’s eyes bugged. He pointed with his knife. “Is that
 
. . .?” he said, then “—with a fuckin’
hammer?
You hit—” And he was backing up, backing up, and I finally rushed him.

I don’t know what to tell you about it. I had no choice because he recognized me. He couldn’t get close enough with his knife, and I kicked at him and took Viking swings with my hammer until I knocked him down as he tried to turn and run. Then I was on top of him, and I did it. I hit his neck, and when he stopped moving I hit it again and again, crushing it between the hammerhead and the crumbling asphalt walkway until I was sure the passages for air and blood had been demolished and he’d never move again.

Then I rose, huffing. Held my breath, listened to the town, and found it totally indifferent to what had happened here.

I went over to Johnny, who was a black bulk piled in front of the bench. The ground around his head was dark and glisteny, as if a five gallon bucket of used motor oil had been dumped there. But I leapt over and did my work on his neck. Three horrid blows, with the claw this time, and if he survived it would be a miracle and he’d spend the rest of his life wishing he hadn’t. He had no idea who I was anyway.

I began to walk away, then stopped over the heavy metal kid, bent and cleaned the hammerhead as best I could on his pants. If you’re wondering what he was doing there, well, the brutal double murder was on the front page of the Blackmer
Sentinel
the next day. He had a roll of cash and four baggies of pot in his pockets. He was there to make the pettiest sort of drug transaction. I read his name, Dean Merriman, and immediately flashed on everyone back in Blackmer High calling him Dino. Since he hadn’t been robbed, and due to the medieval nature of the crime, the article in the paper said police were looking into groups or individuals with extremist views in the area. People who might be outraged at the illicit activity that tended to take place in the dark corners of town.

But there, in the murky darkness with my bloody hammer, next to the bike path, I started to move again, remembered seeing something and went back one more time. Beside Johnny I fished one of the half-dozen thin plastic grocery bags from the branches of the shrubbery and put the hammer and gloves inside it.

I finally walked back, crossed through the parking lot and glanced at the little go-cart. And only then did it hit me. I had never
seen
Johnny the rapist before tonight.
Jesus fucking Christ
—what information was I working off of? What if this was some other jackass in some other little Japanese go-cart with a gray-primered fender? What if I had just done this demonic thing, and had obliterated the life of
the wrong man?!?

I stopped in the parking lot. The bodies still warm and oozing, just a few hundred yards away, the murder weapon and blood-spattered gloves in the bag hanging at my side. I stood there for anyone to see, and I walked directly up to that car. I walked around and squatted behind its rear bumper where I couldn’t be seen by any passers-by. I set the grocery bag down and fished out my wallet. Was the paper still in there? I had no memory of removing it or cleaning out my wallet at any point these last several months. I shoved my index finger under the library card, behind the driver’s license, beneath a few business cards—and I felt the folded piece of paper bag. My wallet on the ground between my feet, tilting the paper toward the light, I read the license plat number I had scribbled down and . . . Jesus-fuck . . .

It matched.

I balled my jacket up and shoved it on the floor of my car, next to the grocery bag. Racking my brain, I remembered a gas station just a few blocks away with an outside restroom that you had to put quarters in to enter, and I drove there. No attendant to deal with, you just pulled up and paid. I had an ashtray full of change.

It was well worth the price of admission. I found blood on my cheeks and forehead and washed it off, then combed water through my hair with my fingers in case there was blood there too. My pants were newish
Levis
, still a deep blue, and I scrubbed the front with a wet paper hand towel. I could hardly see the spots afterward. I splashed water in my armpits and put some liquid soap up there to mask the smell. My shoes were, thankfully, old, and they were so weathered and broken down I myself couldn’t tell if there was anything on them. I flipped my legs up and caught my toes one at a time and looked down, and the smooth yellow soles were clean. I hadn’t stepped in—or tracked—any blood.

E
pilogue

M
aybe
you
’
ve
been
to
a funeral like this. It’s early afternoon on a gray winter day.
 
You’re standing on a green hillside spotted with headstones and plaques, planted with a decade or two’s worth of the deceased. You’re shaved and groomed and dressed up so you feel embalmed yourself, and it’s so fucking windy that you keep squinting and turning your face away, squeezing tight against the girl next to you, thinking the goddamned priest must have ordered the weather up special just for dramatic effect. Your newborn daughter keeps crying over the priest’s recital, reminding everyone there of the cycle of life and death, hinting in a vague way at some redeeming, beauteous, poetic arc to everything, but you know she just needs to be changed again.

And yet you see your girlfriend, surreally attractive in the formal dress, holding the child, bouncing and shushing her, and you can’t feel too dismal—about anything.
 

It’s more of a family reunion, really. The tears have come and gone and now you’re in the company of the aunts and girl cousins and other women you’re somehow related to but never see, and the uncles and male cousins who came to be pall bearers with you. Your jailbird cousin, Tommy, who ought to pay his respects if anyone ought to, is conspicuously absent. But you would have expected nothing else from Tommy.

In truth, it’s a relief when someone dies like this, after running their course. Grandma Anne can go live with your Aunt Laura and Uncle Sonny now; Laura and Sonny have three daughters and you can tell the old woman’s looking forward to being among them. Hers and Grandpa Art’s house in Blackmer is going up for sale and money won’t be an issue, so things seem to be working out. But later you’ll all be in that house one last time. Surrounded by all the eerie pictures of the past and Grandpa Art’s smell and presence, and you’ll all take shots from his fifth of Jack Daniel’s he kept up in the cupboard over the oven, someone’ll go pick up a twelve pack or two, a couple of the guys will no doubt go out back and smoke a bowl, and you’ll all sit around and catch up and laugh until midnight. There’s no shame in admitting that you’re looking forward to it.

Because if you’ve been to a funeral like this you’ll understand that people die and that’s that. Sometimes they get to die with dignity, but mostly they don’t. You might worry that you could have been nicer, or could have done different, but you don’t worry for long. Because what you finally understand is the dead don’t give a shit. They’re somewhere else, or maybe they’re nowhere, but they’re sure as hell not here anymore. And then maybe you realize that it’s the same with the past and all your mistakes. They’re dead and buried and you’re still alive. Make the most of it.