We are too far away to make the people out.
“Get the video!”
Lying down in the sharp, wet Bermuda grass, zooming in on Herbert Laumann’s family through the camera lens, we discover a mother, father, and baby girl. The baby is sleeping on the mother’s shoulder. She walks up and down as the father yawns, rubbing his temples with two flat palms. They are all wearing nightclothes. The mother has a towel over her shoulder, on which the infant’s cheek is resting, blue-eyed slits staring into babyland.
Slammer says, “Babylon nation, prepare to die.”
The mother sits slowly at a table, balancing carefully to keep the baby still, as the father talks. His ordinary white bureaucratic all-American face — the face of evil — looks collapsed with exhaustion. He reaches out to touch the baby’s head — a cupped hand, a blessing.
“Are you really going to do it?” Sara whispers, mesmerized by the family on the tiny video screen, like a snow globe showing a scene of mystery and magic. In its light, a tiny floating square of light in acres of pitch-black farmland, the youngsters without a home and the spy with a soul of ash are watching transfixed, through a secret window, the simple arithmetic of two loving parents and a child. You would think they had never seen such a thing.
Prone, Slammer tries to sight the gun on wobbling elbows. He should take a lesson from Sterling McCord. The gun quivers.
“Wait!” I say, allegedly watching through the camera. “You don’t have a shot.” “I have it,” he grunts, but he lays the gun down to wipe his sweating palms on the wet grass.
I am a millisecond from disarming him.
He picks up the weapon but doesn’t shoot. The gun is shaking wildly. Comically. This is not surprising. In real wars, there are troops on the battlefield who refuse to fire, because they can’t. Unlike the movies, it doesn’t come naturally, killing another human being.
“Three minutes are way up,” I say gently. “We’re out of here.” Slammer slumps down to the grass and sobs. Helpless, deep, undifferentiated sobs. I lift the gun away.
Sara strokes his bristly head, then kneels and awkwardly puts her arms around his shoulders, laying her cheek on his back.
“Allfather will be mad,” she whispers.
“He can fuck himself,” Slammer replies.
I erase the videotape.
Twenty-six
The following day, Slammer walks into the kitchen, to find Dick Stone sitting at the sloping counter with the broken tiles, reading the daily fish report — how many chinook salmon and steelhead have passed through the bypass systems of the lower Columbia River dams — and holding the Colt.45.
The gun is aimed at the doorway. At the next person to walk through the doorway, who would be Slammer, back from the grocery store.
The devil boy stops in his tracks.
“What up?”
“You tell me.”
The gun is pointed at Slammer’s belly.
Slammer notices his voice has grown small. Besides the black hole of the barrel, Dick Stone is showing him the Look. Slammer, Sara, and I have talked about the Look. You can’t see his eyes when he does it: narrows them to a pair of emotionless chinks that the angry part of him seems to be just gazing through, like the faceless column of light that pulses behind the crack in the TV cabinet where the doors don’t shut. You have no idea what’s on. When Stone hunkers in like that, the worst part is the excruciating silent anticipation, because you know he’s slowly taking in your worthless mistakes and calculating the punishment. “The tax,” he likes to say.
Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.
“What’d I do?”
Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.
“Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”
The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.
“You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.
“I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.
“I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”
“Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”
Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.
“I didn’t do it because the
“Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”
“Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”
“I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”
“They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it — but they weren’t home!”
“Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.
“Hey, what about the ice cream?”
“Put the ice cream away.”
Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.
It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from the road for an instant — to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag — when she looks up and shrieks,
The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.
Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.
We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.
