Odd Hours

“What?”

“It’s too up-close. Dangerous. Shoot them in the head.”

“Of course,” Utgard agreed. “Pop them, drop them. That’s what I said.”

“Well, first you said you had to cut some throats.”

“That was just a way of saying it.”

“You said it, I thought you meant it.”

“We’ll shoot them in the head,” Utgard said.

“The back of the head.”

“How else? What the hell, Joey.”

“It’s the only smart way.”

“We’re on the same page now.”

“So they don’t see it comin’.”

“I understand,” Utgard said impatiently.

I have only a few times been in a position to overhear bad men conspiring to commit evil deeds, and on every occasion, they had been pretty much like Joey and Utgard. Those who choose to live criminal lives are not the brightest among us.

This truth inspires a question: If evil geniuses are so rare, why do so many bad people get away with so many crimes against their fellow citizens and, when they become leaders of nations, against humanity?

Edmund Burke provided the answer in 1795: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

I would only add this: It is also essential that good men and women not be educated and propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth and that all malevolent behavior is merely the result of a broken family’s or a failed society’s shortcomings, amenable to cure by counseling and by the application of new economic theory.

Beyond my sight but not beyond my hearing, Utgard said, “From when we leave the dock till we’re to Rooster Point, you man the radio room.”

“Like we planned.”

“You got to piss, get it done now.”

“I’ll be at the radio.”

“We can’t pull the transponder, that’ll just make the Coast Guard sit up and take notice.”

“I know what to say to them.”

“They get a GPS report we’re at sea this time of night, they’ll want to know why.”

Joey’s turn for impatience had come: “I know. Don’t I know?”

“Just don’t get cute with them. Play it like we planned.”

Joey recited the story to prove himself: “A guest aboard Junie’s Moonbeam ate some shellfish, had a real bad allergic reaction, needs a hospital urgent. The yacht’s too big, a hundred eighty feet, draws too deep for the bay. So they called us, and so we’re just bringin’ the sick bitch ashore.”

“What’re you doing?” Utgard demanded.

“Relax. I’m not gonna call her a sick bitch to the Coast Guard,” Joey assured him.

“Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“Sick bitch? Would I do that? Man, I’m just havin’ some fun with you.”

“I’m not in the mood for fun.”

“I guess fallin’ down a bunch of stairs will do that to you.”

“Don’t try to dress up the story,” Utgard advised. “Keep it simple.”

“Okay, okay. But what kind of name is Junie’s Moonbeam for a major yacht, anyway?”

“What do I know? Why do you care? None of our business.”

Joey said, “Junie’s Moonbeam sounds like some half- assed put-put kind of boat.”

So it is these days that men plotting the nuclear devastation of major cities and the murder of millions of innocents can be no more interesting than those most vapid of your relatives whom you wish you did not have to invite to this year’s Thanksgiving dinner.

“Just park yourself at the radio,” Utgard said.

“All right.”

“We’re out of here in three minutes.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

The door opened but didn’t close.

I heard Utgard stomping along the passageway.

Joey waited. Then he switched off the light.

The door closed.

Apparently, unlike Utgard, Joey did not have a body mass equal to that of Big Foot, and I could not hear him walking away.

Because life has taught me to be suspicious, I waited motionless in the dark, not convinced that I was alone.

THIRTY-FIVE

WHEN THE ENGINES TURNED OVER AND MY COZY compartment filled with the drumming of the four-stroke diesels, with the throb of the pumps, with the rotational rata-plan of driveshafts, and with myriad other rhythms, and when we began to move, the boat yawing slightly as it had not done in its berth, I knew that I was alone, because Joey had committed to being in the radio room when we got under way.

Though I breathed more easily, I didn’t relax. I knew that what was coming would be terrible, that even if I were not shot or cut, I would come through this night with wounds that would never heal.

I bear similar wounds from other such encounters. To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke’s good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep again.

To do something, to do what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that, when recalled on lonely nights, make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.

Such doubts are high cards in the devil’s hand, and he knows how to play them well, in hope of bringing you to despair and ennui, if not to self-destruction.

Ozzie Boone, my novelist friend and mentor in Pico Mundo, had instructed me, on the writing of the first of these accounts, that I keep the tone light. He says that only the emotionally immature and the intellectually depraved enjoy stories that are unrelentingly grim and nihilistic.

As I have said and as I hope that you have seen, I am inclined to a love of life and to a sunny disposition even in the face of bleak skies and persistent storms. I can find a laugh or two in a split lip and even greater hilarity in the threats and posturings of a sadistic chief of police.

Fair warning requires the acknowledgment that some events resist the touch of a humorist, and what jokes may arise from certain acts can call forth only a less hearty kind of laughter. We are