The Human Stain

put him in restraints, and they won't let him out of the Northampton VA. And all he did was what they had trained him to do: you see the enemy, you kill the enemy. They train you for a year, then they try to kill you for a year, and when you're just doing what they trained you to do, that is when they fucking put the leather restraints on you and shoot you full of shit. He did what they were training him to do, and while he was doing that, his fucking wife is turning her back on his kids. He should have killed them all when he could. Him especially. The boyfriend. He should have cut their fucking heads off. He doesn't know why he didn't. Better not come fucking near him. If he knows where the fucking boyfriend is, he'll kill him so fast he won't know what hit him, and they won't know he did it because he knows how to do it so no one can hear it. Because that's what the government trained him to do. He is a trained killer thanks to the government of the United States. He did his job. He did what he was told to do. And this is how he fucking gets treated? They get him down in the lockup ward, they put him in the bubble, they send him to the fucking bubble! And they won't even cut him a check. For all this he gets fucking twenty percent. Twenty percent. He put his whole family through hell for twenty percent. And even for that he has to grovel. “So, tell me what happened,” they say, the little social workers, the little psychologists with their college degrees. “Did you kill anyone when you were in Vietnam?” Was there anyone he didn't kill when he was in Vietnam? Wasn't that what he was supposed to do when they sent him to Vietnam? Fucking kill gooks. They said everything goes? So everything went. It all relates to the word “kill.” Kill gooks! If “Did you kill anyone?” isn't bad enough, they give him a fucking gook psychiatrist, this like Chink shit. He serves his country and he can't even get a doctor who fucking speaks English. All round Northampton they've got Chinese restaurants, they've got Vietnamese restaurants, Korean markets — but him? If you're some Vietnamese, you're some Chink, you make out, you get a restaurant, you get a market, you get a grocery store, you get a family, you get a good education. But they got fuck-all for him. Because they want him dead. They wish he never came back. He is their worst nightmare. He was not supposed to come back. And now this college professor. Know where he was when the government sent us in there with one arm tied behind our backs? He was out there leading the fucking protesters. They pay them, when they go to college, to teach, to teach the kids, not to fucking protest the Vietnam War. They didn't give us a fucking chance. They say we lost the war. We didn't lose the war, the government lost the war. But when fancy-pants professors felt like it, instead of teaching class some day they go picketing out there against the war, and that is the thanks he gets for serving his country. That is the thanks for the shit he had to put up with day in and day out. He can't get a goddamn night's sleep. He hasn't had a good night's sleep in fucking twenty-six years. And for that, for that his wife goes down on some two-bit kike professor? There weren't too many kikes in Vietnam, not that he can remember. They were too busy getting their degrees. Jew bastard. There's something wrong with those Jew bastards. They don't look right. She goes down on him? Jesus Christ. Vomit, man. What was it all for? She doesn't know what it's like. Never had a hard day in her life. He never hurt her and he never hurt the kids. “Oh, my stepfather was mean to me.” Stepfather used to finger her. Should have fucked her, that would have straightened her out a little. The kids would be alive today. His fucking kids would be alive today! He'd be like all the rest of those guys out there, with their families and their nice cars. Instead of locked up in a fucking VA facility. That was the thanks he got: Thorazine. His thanks was the Thorazine shuffle. Just because he thought he was back in the Nam.

This was the Lester Farley who came roaring out of the bushes. This was the man who came upon Coleman and Faunia as they stood just inside the kitchen doorway, who came roaring at them out of the darkness of the bushes at the side of the house. And all of that was just a little of what was inside his head, night after night, all through the spring and now into early summer, hiding for hours on end, cramped, still, living through so much emotion, and waiting there in hiding to see her doing it. Doing what she was doing when her own two kids were suffocating to death in the smoke. This time it wasn't even with a guy her age. Not even Farley's age. This time it wasn't with her boss, the great All-American Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck could give her something in return at least. You could almost respect her for Hollenbeck. But now the woman was so far gone she would do it for nothing with anybody. Now it was with a gray-haired skin-and-bones old man, with a high-and-mighty Jew professor, his yellow Jew face contorted with pleasure and his trembling old hands gripping her head. Who else has a wife sucks off an old Jew? Who else! This time the wanton, murdering, moaning bitch was pumping into her whoring mouth the watery come of a disgusting old Jew, and Rawley and Les Junior were still dead.

Payback. There was no end to it.

It felt like flying, it felt like Nam, it felt like the moment in which you go wild. Crazier, suddenly, because she is sucking off that Jew than because she killed the kids, Farley is flying upward, screaming, and the Jew professor is screaming back, the Jew professor is raising a tire iron, and it is only because Farley is unarmed — because that night he'd come there right from fire department drill and without a single one of the guns from his basement full of guns — that he doesn't blow them away. How it happened that he didn't reach for the tire iron and take it from him and end everything that way, he would never know. Beautiful what he could have achieved with that tire iron. “Put it down! I'll open your fuckin' head with it! Fuckin' put it down!” And the Jew put it down. Luckily for the Jew, he put it down.

After he made it home that night (never know how he did that either) and right through to the early hours of the morning — when it took five men from the fire department, five buddies of his, to hold him down and get him into restraints and drive him over to Northampton — Lester saw it all, everything, all at once, right there in his own house enduring the heat, enduring the rain, the mud, giant ants, killer bees on his own linoleum floor just beside the kitchen table, being sick with diarrhea, headaches, sick from no food and no water, short of ammo, certain this is his last night, waiting for it to happen, Foster stepping on the booby trap, Quillen drowning, himself almost drowning, freaking out, throwing grenades in every direction and shouting “I don't want to die,” the warplanes all mixed up and shooting at them, Drago losing a leg, an arm, his nose, Conrity's burned body sticking to his hands, unable to get a chopper to land, the chopper saying they cannot land because we are under attack and him so fucking angry knowing that he is going to die that he is trying to shoot it down, shoot down our own chopper — the most inhuman night he ever witnessed and it is right there now in his own scumbag house, and the longest night too, his longest night on earth and petrified with every move he makes, guys hollering and shitting and crying, himself unprepared to hear so much crying, guys hit in the face and dying, taking their last breath and dying, Conrity's body all over his hands, Drago bleeding all over the place, Lester trying to shake somebody dead awake and hollering, screaming without stopping, “I don't want to die.” No time out from death. No break time from death. No running from death. No letup from death. Battling death right through till morning and everything intense. The fear intense, the anger intense, no helicopter willing to land and the terrible smell of Drago's blood there in his own fucking house. He did not know how bad it could smell. EVERYTHING SO INTENSE AND EVERYBODY FAR FROM HOME AND ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY RAGE!

Nearly all the way to Northampton — till they couldn't stand it anymore and gagged him — Farley is digging in late at night and waking up in the morning to find that he's slept in someone's grave with the maggots. “Please!” he cried. “No more of this! No more!” And so they had no choice but to shut him up.

At the VA hospital, a place to which he could be brought only by force and from which he'd been running for years — fleeing his whole life from the hospital of a government he could not deal with — they put him on the lockup ward, tied him to the bed, rehydrated him, stabilized him, detoxified him, got him off the alcohol, treated him for liver damage, and then, during the six weeks that followed, every morning in his group therapy session he recounted how Rawley and Les Junior had died. He told them all what happened, told them every day what had failed to happen when he saw the suffocated faces of his two little kids and knew for sure that they were dead.

“Numb,” he said. “Fuckin' numb. No emotions. Numb to the death of my own kids. My son's eyes are rolled in back of his head and he has no pulse. He has no heartbeat. My son isn't fucking breathing. My son. Little Les. The only son I will ever have. But I did not feel anything. I was acting as if he was a stranger. Same with Rawley. She was a stranger. My little girl. That fucking Vietnam, you caused this! After all these years the war is over, and you caused this! All my feelings are all fucked up. I feel like I've been hit on the side of the head with a two-by-four when nothing is happening. Then something is happening, something fucking huge, I don't feel a fucking thing. Numbed out. My kids are dead, but my body is numb and my mind is blank. Vietnam. That's why! I never did cry for my kids. He was five and she was eight. I said to myself, 'Why can't I feel?' I said,