The Impaler

No, something was missing. Something was always missing.

Edmund didn’t know why he started going in the Men4Men chat room; didn’t know why searched the male- modeling sites until he found a picture that sort of looked like him. Edmund called himself “Ken” and asked a lot of questions of the men online; even sent his picture to a few of them. But just like the phony photo and the phony name, Edmund felt as if his actions were not his own, and watched himself with the same detached curiosity as if he were watching a character on a TV show.

And of course there was the searching. Always the searching.

Edmund and Alfred had gone back and forth on AOL for about a month before Edmund agreed to meet him one afternoon in the philosophy and religion section at Barnes & Noble. The plan was simple enough: if each liked what he saw, Edmund would follow the lawyer to a hotel room a few miles away. Alfred was married, he said—had one child already and another on the way—and the only time he could get away was during the weekdays. It also worked out well for Edmund, who had been suspended from school again for fighting. He was one step away from being expelled, his counselor said, and would have to go to summer school to finish up his coursework. Indeed, it was Edmund’s counselor who had made the case for Edmund to be allowed to graduate; reminded the principal that Edmund had a 3.8 GPA and had tested the previous year at the genius level. If the boy could just get his temper under control, his counselor said; if he could just focus, it would pay off for him in the long run.

School had always been easy for Edmund Lambert. Girls, sports, the respect and envy from the other boys—it all came just so goddamn easy to him. But the searching? Yes, only the searching was hard.

Like Edmund, Alfred the lawyer said he wasn’t gay—just liked to “experiment now and then,” as he called it. And after the awkwardness of their initial meeting at the Barnes & Noble, Alfred and “Ken” experimented with each other a number of times over the next few weeks. Alfred began calling himself Ken’s “mentor” and taught him the differences between having sex with a woman and having sex with a man.

But afterward, especially when Ken was Edmund again and he was banging Karen Blume in her basement, when he thought about the sex with Alfred, Edmund had a hard time sorting out the differences between the two in his head. No, the only difference Edmund could see was that, when he was with Alfred—and when he was Ken in general—his fantasies of doing what he did to the animals were much more vivid, much more exciting. And one time after they had sex, when Alfred asked Ken what he was thinking, the young man came right out and said: “I’m wondering what you would look like stuck with a giant pitchfork.”

Alfred broke it off with Edmund soon afterwards; made some excuse about the wife catching on and said they had to cool it for a while. Edmund understood. He knew that he had spooked him; knew that he would never see Alfred the lawyer again. But it was all for the best, Edmund thought. He had grown tired of Alfred anyway, and thus exited his first homosexual affair with the same sort of mechanical detachment with which he’d entered into it.

The urge to kill, however, had been strong—the strongest yet with a human being. Edmund didn’t know why, and wondered whether Alfred sensed it, too. Yet something had held him back. What? He couldn’t put his finger on it right away, and only after he thought about it long and hard did he find the answer. An answer that surprised him.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he heard his grandfather say. “C’est mieux d’oublier.”

Chapter 49

“The Army or prison,” Claude Lambert said. “Those are pretty much your options now, Eddie.”

Edmund looked at his cheekbone in the pickup truck’s side mirror. The swelling had gone down some, but his face would still bruise up nicely. The punch had been hard—he got blindsided by the other guy’s friend—but in the end, Edmund had gotten the best of the both of them. He always did now.

“The way things is going,” said his grandfather, turning off the highway, “I give you a year before you end up killing someone like your Uncle James done.”

The old man was pushing eighty years old, but still it bothered Edmund how slowly he was driving.

“You don’t like me fighting anymore then?” Edmund asked.

“I suppose it’s partly my fault,” Claude Lambert said, ignoring him. “Taught you how to fight but not how to control it—didn’t think about that part of the equation. I reckon the Army will take care of that. It’s where James had been planning on going, too, but … well, you know what happened there.”

The fight in the bar had been Edmund’s doing. He went there after he asked his Uncle James what really happened on the afternoon he murdered Danny Gibbs.

“I reckon it’s simple,” James Lambert said from the other side of the visitor’s glass. “Sometimes you just gotta to do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

“A higher power?” Edmund asked. “You mean like the General?”

“Don’t know nothing ’bout no General. But I reckon what you’re saying is right if you was in the Army or something.”

Suddenly, Edmund felt emptier and more alone than he had felt in a long time.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he said impulsively, and waited for a reaction.

James Lambert was silent for a long time—his expression like stone.

“You best not be visiting me no more,” he said finally, looking him straight in the eye for the first time in eighteen years. Then he motioned for the guard and left.

That was the last time Edmund ever saw him.

He drove around afterward for hours and ended up at an eighteen-and-over bar in Greenville. He’d purchased a tube of Chapstick first and coated the back of his hands so he’d be able to wash off the X with which the doorman would mark him as underage. Edmund did so in the men’s room, stepped up to the bar, ordered three shots of Southern Comfort, one right after the other, and then just started swinging.

“You’re lucky the bar and them two other guys you floored ain’t gonna press charges, Eddie,” said his grandfather, parking the truck. “A good thing you ordered those shots, I reckon, too. Underage drinking and losing licenses—no one wants this to get any bigger than it already has.”

Edmund was silent as he looked up at the sign for the Army recruiting center.

“Sometimes you just gotta do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

A sign—what he had been searching for all along?

“But the Army will fix you up right, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “Best thing for your head now, I reckon.”

Chapter 50

Searching.

But drifting now, too.

Basic training, then the assignment to Air Assault at Fort Campbell. More assignments here, more assignments there. Commendations and promotions—E2 up through E5. Sometimes Sergeant Lambert was with women, sometimes he was with men, but the drifting, the new places and new faces helped with the searching; made him forget about it completely for weeks at a time.

His grandfather had been right. The Army kept him focused; kept the fighting in his belly; kept the fantasies of doing to his lovers what he had done to his animals out of his head. Even when he was with the men, for a long time it seemed to Edmund that the only animal he ever thought about was the golden, seal-tailed lion on the crest of his 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment patch.

Perhaps that was why he took the ancient cylinder.

Edmund came upon the stash of stolen Iraqi artifacts in October of 2003, while on patrol in Tal Afar, a city