Choice of Evil

“I. . .”

“You knew my dog was there,” I said quietly.

“Look, if I was wrong, I’m sorry. I mean, we can still work something—”

“You’ll never see it coming,” I promised him, cutting the connection on my last word.

That was it, then. Humans are the only pack that tolerates predators of its own species. Most think “family” is a biological term. Not my family. My family is my choice, and I belong to them like a wolf cub does to a pack. Only I’m grown now. All of us, grown. Only babies—some lucky babies—get that “unconditional love” the talk show psycho-flashers are always bleating about. We know better. For adults, there’s always conditions. And one of them is that the pack survive, that the house stay safe.

We had killed to do that, all of us, together. And when it was over, Crystal Beth asked me if I was going to stay. Not here, not in this cesspool of a city where I was born—stay with her.

I told her the truth then: I didn’t know.

But I was there now. Me and Pansy. Trying. Living in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, seeing if it could maybe be my house too. That’s when it started.

People don’t kill for no reason. What the cops don’t get is that sometimes no reason is the reason.

They thought it was random, that first one. A target of opportunity. Like the victim of a bomb dropped from above the clouds, the pilot certain everything down below was the enemy. Killing things, not people. Following orders.

But not all bombers are military. And some take orders only from inside their twisted-circuit heads.

When people from the other side started to fall, the cops got it all distorted. And once they worked it backward to me, they were sure they knew the motive.

It fit me like a good pair of handcuffs.

It’s hard to say it even now. Hard to say her name. When Crystal Beth died, so did my chances.

It didn’t happen the way she thought it might. It wasn’t one of the risks she knew she was taking. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. It didn’t have anything to do with that “purpose” she was always talking about; the one her mother had tribal-tattooed on Crystal Beth’s teenage face before she went out to meet her own destiny. Crystal Beth’s purpose was the safehouse. The network. Fighting stalkers and protecting their victims. Why even go to a gay-rights rally? I remember asking her, deep in the quiet darkness of her room on the top floor.

“It’s not you, girl,” I said.

“Why not?” she answered, her soft voice as rich and round as her thighs. “You know I have. . . I mean, you know I did. . . with Vyra and all. It wasn’t her who started that, it was me.”

Vyra was gone now. My old. . . what? Not girlfriend. Not even friend. Sex partner, I guess. I never saw any real piece of her until the wheels came off last year. When my own house was threatened by a pack of race-haters and my brother Hercules went into the fire to save us. Homicides happened. And when it was over, Vyra left with Hercules. To new lives, out of mine.

But before she went, I saw her and Crystal Beth make love to each other. Right in this room, on this bed. I wasn’t a spy or a voyeur. They wanted me to stay, wanted to show me something. Much later, when Crystal Beth was sure I’d seen what was really there, she asked me if I was going to love her.

I told her I didn’t know. Lying is encoded in my genes. I learned lying so I could keep them from hurting me. It didn’t always work, but it was all a little kid had. Later, I learned better ways.

Couples who want to make a baby tell everyone they’re “trying.” It always makes me sick to hear that. . . like they’re making me watch them try. But I understand what they mean. I was trying to love Crystal Beth then. I’ll never know if I was going to get it right.

“That doesn’t mean you’re gay,” is what I told her.

“Because I’m a woman? That’s the way men think. If you have sex with another man, even once, then you’re gay for life. That’s the fear, isn’t it? When a little boy is raped, he’s afraid he’s going to be just like the rapist. . . only he doesn’t think ‘rapist,’ he thinks ‘queer.’ But if you’re a woman, it’s like. . . okay, right? Just an experiment. Just playing. You know what, baby? Gay people don’t like my way either. I’m not out enough for them. Not for the lesbians, anyway. If I still have sex with men, I’m not really, see?”

“Really what?”

“Not really real. Not. . . myself, whatever that’s supposed to mean. You know, ‘yourself’. . . the person someone else wants you to be. For them, not for you. Funny. Gay people are discriminated against, hated, feared. . . and they do the same thing to themselves. I’m bisexual. And they have no tolerance for me just as straights have no tolerance for them.”

“So fuck them. Why go?”

“Because they’re wrong. I belong there too. And I’m going.”

“No, you’re not, bitch.”

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” she whispered, flashing her smile in the darkness. “I took your orders when we were in the middle of. . . that thing. But it’s over. That’s over, I mean. This is me, now. Me, no matter what a pack of fools think.”

“It’s not about being gay,” I said. “Who cares? But why go where you’re not wanted? It’s just another bullshit demonstration anyway—it’s not like it’s gonna change anything.”

“Tell that to the Freedom Riders.”

“Hard to talk to dead people,” I said, warningly.

“This isn’t Mississippi, Burke. It’s not even close. The climate has changed. And it didn’t change by itself. We helped make it change. I’m going.”

“Crystal Beth—”

“Shush up, now,” she mumbled against my chest. “I’ve got something better for you to do.”

It was just cracking light when I left the next morning. I looked down at Crystal Beth, sleeping on her belly, soft cheek against the pillow. Heavy-haunched and glistening in her own dew, her face open even with her eyes closed. I thought about giving her a kiss but I didn’t want to chance waking her up.

I never saw her again.

The papers had it pretty close to accurate. I know because I went down there. Not to the scene—to where I could find the people who saw it. People who wouldn’t talk to the law.

Crystal Beth wasn’t even one of the speakers. She was just in the crowd, toward the back. Not a big crowd, maybe a couple of hundred or so. Right on the rim of Central Park, west of the Ramble. Protesting another fag- bashing episode, demanding the Police Commissioner send some undercover cops in there to stop it. The speaker was saying something about how they used undercovers to bust straights looking for hooker sex, but they wouldn’t spare any to protect gays. Talking about voting as a bloc. . . knowing as he spoke that you might tip an election for a local City Council seat with a threat like that, but it wouldn’t make the Mayor blink.

A car swept by. Nobody saw it good enough to say much except that it was a dark color, moving fast. Gunfire poured from the windows. At least two guns—they found that from the ballistics lab later. Five people went down. Two dead. One of them was my Crystal Beth. The car flew north, disappeared somewhere in Harlem.

That didn’t prove anything—didn’t mean it was their home base. There’s a hundred ways out of Harlem: bridges, tunnels, alleys. Underground garages where you could stash a car and switch to the subway.

The first thought was that the drive-by had to be about the dope business—a typical triggerboy spray-and- pray hose-down job. One of the guns had been a Tec-9, so that sounded right. For about a minute. Then it went on the books the same way the streets already had it—as a hate crime.

Fag-bashers all over the city were high-fiving.

Then they started dropping.

The first three weren’t hard to connect. They’d been convicted of beating a gay man to death after luring him into a playground at night. Aluminum baseball bats and bicycle chains were all they needed, although one of them stabbed him a few times after he was dead. Didn’t take a psychologist to figure out that last part.

One rolled over immediately, took a short manslaughter hit in exchange for his testimony. The other two went to trial. The lawyers got a lot of camera time. And their clients got a lot of time Upstate—a pair of life sentences.