A Quiet Vendetta

hundred yards, the tires already shredding up the loose fermented undergrowth, spitting it out in healthy brown gobs like chewing tobacco from beneath the chassis, and then I killed the engine. From the back seat I took a jack, and with something akin to Herculean effort I hitched the rear end of the car a good foot high. With the trunk now close to chest height I had some difficulty rolling out Chevron’s body, but I managed it, sweating furiously, my fingers stuck together with the man’s blood, my hair stuck to my face like paint. I let the body drop, removed the sheet, and then with the side of my foot I shoved the body back beneath the rear wheels, the head directly under the right, the waist and upper legs beneath the left. I stepped back, kicked the jack, and heard the crunching demolition of bone and feature as the heavy rubber tires ground their way back to earth through Carryl Chevron’s mortal frame. I cleaned my hands off on the sheet, threw it into the trunk, and once inside the car I started the engine and rolled the car back and forth over the body a few times for good measure. I wound up the windows, locked the door, returned to where Chevron’s battered body lay half-buried in the loose earth inside the boundary of the trees. I took each hand in turn, and using the jack lever I smashed Chevron’s fingers against a rock so no fingerprint identification would ever be possible. I did the same with his jaw and lower face. The jack, the rock, the sheet, even the shirt I was wearing – I took all of them and walked until the waterlogged earth started to suck at my feet. I pushed these things beneath the surface and felt the ground hungrily devour them. I watched them disappear, the mud closing over them like slow-motion oil, and then I turned and ran back towards the road. Ran like a kid to a birthday party.

I stopped beside the unidentifiable body of Carryl Chevron, a forty-seven-year-old confidence trickster, born in Anamosa, flunked out of high school, dishonorably discharged from the army for theft, survivor of two wives, three ulcers, a suspected coronary condition that turned out to be a gargantuan case of heartburn, and I smiled.

It had been different – the killing, the disposing of the body, the small moments of chilling panic, the cleverness, the deceit, the perfection of it all. I kicked the battered head once more, watched an angry arc of gray-scarlet matter jet from the toe of my shoe, and then I walked back to the car. There was a certain magic to it all, a certain power, its beauty and simplicity matched only by the stars I could see from the narrow window of my room during clear-skied winter nights.

That was my first and original sin; a sin I committed in an effort to become something of which my mother would approve, and in doing so I had perhaps allowed my father to infect and inhabit my soul.

Carryl Chevron was never found, never reported missing, perhaps – truth be known – never even missed. Maybe some brassy act in high heels with too much rouge and too little class was still waiting for him in a dusty roadhouse someplace down the stateline. And maybe some of the kids who bought his books were still sore from their beatings.

Who the hell knew, and who the hell cared?

The car I drove a mile further into the swamplands, and then I watched as it slid effortlessly, silently, gracefully into the everglades, never to surface.

I had my books, and I learned to read them, and I read as if my life depended on it. Hard-earned volumes of wisdom where I found the heart, its workings, the subclavian and vena cava, where I found Da Vinci, Einstein, Michaelangelo, Dillinger, Capone: the many geniuses the world had offered and then greedily taken away. They were my one true possession, all my own, worshipped and tended with care, for they had cost me dearly, both me and the man who had brought them. And my father, too drunk or too bruised to see what was there in front of him most of the time, and my mother, cowed and quiet in his presence, never thought to ask or enquire how I had come by such things. I kept them safe, there beneath my bed, and I walked through every word on every page and then started over again.

Those nights, cool and loose, the sky clear, peppered with stars and constellations I could identify and name, the heat somehow eased by the breeze that came north from the river, feeling alive, anxious…

Feeling there was so much I wanted – needed – to know.

Later, many years later, when time had unfolded and I had learned so much more of the world beyond my home, I would think these things:

Perhaps if I had been someone, if I had really been someone, then these events would not have happened.

Perhaps if I had fought in Vietnam and come home a hero, my breast painted with ribbons, the girls from Montalvo’s Diner crowding my arms as if they could all be enveloped in one fell swoop. And bearing a scar across the cheek, above the eye maybe – visible, but not so visible as to be ugly.

Perhaps if I had walked out through the mud and blood and shit of Da Nang or Quang Ngai or Qui Nhon, shouldering a rucksack heavy with C-Rations, Kool-Aid, salt tablets, ammunition, lucky mascots, a flak jacket rolled tightly between my burden and my spine. Things you could close your eyes and still feel the weight of.

Perhaps if I had been there to carry some wounded comrade through the thigh-deep water of a raining napalm nightmare, the vegetation crumpling around me, falling, dissolving, staggering breathless and burned, my hair scorched to my scalp, my arms bloody with the red sweat of my load.

Perhaps if I had walked a hundred miles to the back-lines, the rear, where the medic tents stood white and clean and filled with the smell of anaesthetic and morphine, where fresh-faced first tour medical students turned their eyes away from the carnage, where I had to stand and bind and weave and amputate and stem the heavy flow of blood from the gutted stomach, the jagged wound, the missing eye, the greenstick fracture leaping from the surface of the skin like some winter-silhouetted teeter-totter…

Perhaps if I had lost a finger. A toe. The lobe of an ear.

Perhaps if I could have worn a tee-shirt bearing the legend IF YOU WEREN’T THERE SHUT THE FUCK UP, and know that I had been there, that I could talk, and possess every right to talk and tell people what it was like – the night, the fear, the ghost-gray image of moving troops, their symmetry, their identities merged one into another and back again as the mud and blood and shit of the war blended their uniqueness into one great slow-motion, breathing, vacant, beyond-questioning machine…

Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.

And thus would not have felt empty.

It was I – who wished folks would called me Six or Lineman or Doc, or some other well-earned nickname, a name that people would hear and ask of its origin, and in being told they would understand what a deep and perfect human being I was, flawed, yet brave and bold, and experienced, and rich in something few possessed – it was I who was in some way nothing, and yet so afraid of being nothing I imagined that everything I wanted could be taken from others.

And so I did.

I remembered times I would sit back in the corner of Evangeline’s only diner, Montalvo’s, popping peanut M &Ms, snapping them back against the roof of my mouth and feeling them thunk against my teeth, and grinding up their bitty sweetness, and finding the candy shrapnel tucked down inside my gums… and it was late evening, and soon Montalvo’s would close, the warm-faced Creole-Irish halfbreed cook whose name I could never recall would turn me out into the depth of the night, wishing me well, laughing in that broken Americanized twang that sounded like no accent I had ever heard, or would ever hear again. He rolled, that man did, rolled across the greasy linoleum floor, rubbing his hands through a greasy towel, wiping the back of his greasy hand across the lower half of his greasy face, and he smelled of fried onions and fried eggs, of fried fries and tobacco. Like a roadhouse on fire. A unique smell that no human being should ever have to carry, but he did, and he carried it effortlessly, the smell a part of him in everything he said and did and thought.

But for the time being I was safe, there at the back of the diner, watching the three or four regular kids dance to the jukebox, the two girls, their wide mouths popping the spearmint tang of gum, their rah-rah skirts over firm brown thighs, their flats and ponytails and rubber bands and the men’s wristwatches they wore, and me wondering what it would be like to fuck one of them, wondering what it would be like to dissolve my tongue in that spearmint tang, or maybe to fuck two of them together, to lose my hands beneath those spinning skirts, to touch the very heart of whatever they believed their lives really were.

For now, they were safe.

I believed that if I had read novels I could have talked, but I did not read novels, merely facts from encyclopedias.

To talk of such things would have made it all too obvious that I had no life at all.

Perhaps if I had read those things that were named in my volumes – books called Flight To Arras, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, To A God Unknown, Narziss and Goldmund, Altona, Men Without Shadows, A Very Easy