My prisoner stepped briskly from coma to consciousness.
"Hey…what…?" he slurred.
I had worked with the centered tranquility of a strung out crack whore as I threaded frayed nylon rope into clumsy knots around his wrists. Function was my goal, panic my enemy, and ignorance my burden.
Sheathed beneath pale, pimply skin, the tendons in the young man's neck bulged like bridge cables as he first registered the bindings and then strained to break free of them.
Function served and the knots held. As a bonus, the lad winced.
"I want two words from you,"
"Wha—"
"Two words," I repeated.
"Where am I?" he asked.
Beneath my feet eight sets of padded calipers clamped down on four smoothly spinning disks. Wheels froze in mid-rotation, kicking up gray clouds of desert sand as my SUV skidded to a halt. My unbelted passenger halted a split second later, the pause in his journey announced by a rich, resonant thud as his skull bounced off the front windshield.
"Ow!" he cried.
"That was three words," I said as I pressed the accelerator.
Groaning, he slumped back into the seat. Blood trickled in a thin stream down his face.
"Shut up!" I counseled, annoyed by his piteous moans.
Perhaps he didn't hear me.
"SHUT UP!" I yelled.
He continued, as though to spite me. I clutched the steering wheel and again bounced the break pedal off the floorboards. This time the windshield shattered in a feathery spider web where his forehead hit the glass. His moaning stopped and I thought for a moment that maybe I'd killed him.
I didn't want to kill him. I wasn't done with him.
"I never did a rotten thing to someone that didn't come back to bite me in the ass," my dad once told me. My mother's thoughts were even simpler: "We get what we give!" Kindness, my mother explained, reminds people that they are good while meanness tells them they're not. The surest way to make a good person bad is to treat him poorly, and the only way to help a bad person find his goodness is to treat him with respect.
Courtesy breeds kindness.
Rudeness breeds evil.
That's how I lived.
So, I assumed, lived everyone else.
After almost forty years, I still haven't quite recovered from my parents' fucked-up worldview.
I guess I'm a little slow.
To my credit, I realized early on that some people were indifferent to the high cost of meanness. For the love of malice, Tammy Parker, a classmate from kindergarten, told Mrs. McKenna that it was I who'd dipped Claire Something-or-others' Barbie in green finger paint. Of course, I hadn't—we get what we give—but Mrs. McKenna, apparently all too ready to believe me a liar as well as a Barbie vandal, set me to policing trash in the playground for the rest of the afternoon. As my dad paced a course of concentric circles in the living room, my mom explained to me that Tammy Parker was sad and that if I should feel anything at all, it should be sorrow for a person raised to mistake meanness for wit.
The next day I told Tammy that I forgave her.
She poured juice on my head.
This was my first hint that a lifestyle celebrating the virtue of kindness was fundamentally twisted. Tammy Parker tried to warn me, but, of course, I didn't listen. Instead, I allowed the hint to gather dust in the attic of my psyche while downstairs the choir sang hosannas and neighbors pilfered the silverware.
My wife, who I cherished beyond reason and trusted without question, found the antidote to a restless spirit in the bed of another man and then, holding me accountable, took our home in divorce. My best friend achieved his lifelong dream of early retirement by stealing millions from our business and then fleeing the country.
Ignoring Tammy's lesson, I retreated from those betrayals into the rose-colored fog of my childhood. If I should feel anything at all, I recalled, it should be sorrow for people raised to mistake meanness for wit. Not that I needed a reminder, of course—by then this perverse credo was the cornerstone of my conscience. I mourned, therefore, not for myself but for the burdens of guilt my former loves must now carry as an inevitable consequence of their depravity. I was so invested in sorrow for the saddened spirits of these people I loved that the evil they'd done to me somehow seemed trivial…unimportant. Worse still was the fact that my compassion for their sadness did nothing to help them rediscover their souls. In their own ways, they each responded to my sympathy by pouring juice on my head.
One day I woke up, alone and abandoned by all who had ever claimed to love me. In this vacuum of companionship that I'd purchased for myself with countless acts of obstinate kindness, I surveyed the circumstances of my life and realized that my parents were mistaken—kindness wasn't worth a damn.
Alone and detested, I resolved one morning over toast and cold coffee to reject the instruction of my parents and embrace evil.
Courtesy breeds evil.
Kindness breeds evil.
Rudeness breeds evil, but hey, so does everything else, so what is there to lose?
That's how I would live.
So, I had come to learn, lived everyone else.
When renovating a life, bold, dramatic steps propel the human spirit toward change. The newly converted Christian runs home from salvation and purges his bedroom of porn and roach clips. The new dieter returns from his first trip to the grocery store laden like a Peruvian pack mule with vegetables he has no idea how to cook and fruits that will eventually rot in the refrigerator. Giant steps are easy to engineer but almost impossible to sustain.
So it was with me.
I marched forward with grim gusto, determined to embrace self-centered contempt for others whenever chance set an opportunity in my path. Large-scale sociopathic villainy was beyond me at that point, but petty evil was well within my grasp. I pushed the "close door" button when I saw people rushing to catch my elevator car. I cut in front of lines at the movies and scowled at anyone who dared to complain. I crossed on "Don't Walk" signs, thumbing my nose at mothers on the corner instructing their children to wait patiently for green. I stopped carrying plastic bags with me when I took my dog for walks.
Still, when ingrained from childhood, the inclination to good manners is as difficult to suppress as the instinct to flinch when a car backfires. For every act of conscious evil I inflicted upon the world there were ten cases where I forgot myself and lapsed into damnable courtesy. Engrossed in my morning newspaper it occurred to me only after she'd left the table that I'd thanked the server for bringing me my breakfast. I failed, again and again, to fill the gap in traffic when I saw someone ahead of me who wanted to merge into my lane. Although I tried, I simply could not bring myself to empty the coffee pot at work without setting a new pot on to brew.
Half measures always result in disaster.
Instead of remaking myself into a man of ruthless, self-serving action, my tepid first steps to expunge my heart of courtesy only made me into a pud. In addition, true to my dad's prediction, my little acts of petty mayhem invariably came back to bite me in the ass. A movie theater manager ejected me from the Cineplex, I received two tickets for not picking up my dog's shit, and once an angry mob of stroller shoving mothers actually pursued me down the street hurling insults at me for my stunt at the intersection.
Alone on this unpaved road in the middle of the Mojave Desert I stopped the car and checked his pulse. I'm no doctor, but know that if a man has a pulse he can't be dead. I pressed my fingertips against a patch of zit-cratered flesh next to his Adam's apple and felt thuds of rhythmic pressure.
Satisfied that he was alive, I set about to ensure that his continued existence posed eventual no threat to my own liberty. I found the rope I'd packed in the cargo compartment of the SUV, cut a length, and used it to gag the senseless boy. I'd been tempted to gag him at the 7-11, but decided against it when it occurred to me that a gagged man in my car might inspire police intervention on our drive to the desert. Unconscious from the beating I'd administered to him in the parking lot, I instead shoved six Valiums into his mouth and held it closed until I was certain he'd swallowed them in his sleep.
Now, alone in the middle of the night on this isolated service road, stuffing a gag in his mouth didn't seem too risky, but I gave him another good dose of Valium just in case I needed to remove the gag in a hurry.
Besides, I worried that if he spoke again I might kill him.
The Mojave Desert is a remarkably crowded wasteland. Ribboned with miles of dusty roads that connect undeveloped plots of chaparral-carpeted land, the daytime desert is the very picture of desolate isolation. At night, however, lights shining from thousands of isolated houses and trailers betray the desert's permanent population.
I am familiar with this area only because I dated a girl who dragged me out here one weekend to introduce me to the desert's wonders. I disliked the desert before we arrived, got sunburned, and grew to loath it before we left.
Naturalists and desert lovers go on and on about the Mojave's rugged beauty and the resilience of its diverse plant and animal species.
Naturalists and desert lovers are idiots.
Cockroaches and crab grass are resilient too!
I think the place is a dump. I intended to use it as a dump.
I didn't know exactly where I was going, but I knew what it would look like when I got there. From the road, the perfect spot would be within a short walking distance to one of the thousands of jagged, wind-eroded hills that cover the desert floor. The hill would be substantial, yet unremarkable; tall enough to cast long shadows to the west each morning, yet too dull to attract the attention of erstwhile developers or recreational rock climbers. At its base, the hill would be dotted with massive, construction-limiting boulders half submerged in an apron of soft alluvial sand.
Finally, of course, the perfect spot had to be far, far away from any lights.
Like any sensible Southern California SUV owner, I passed on the 4-wheel drive option when I bought my car. While it saved me some money at the time, I regretted the decision now. The roads off the state highway were mostly unpaved and where I was going they amounted to little more than cleared ruts through the chaparral. The potential for disaster made me edgy. Things would not go well for me if I had to explain to a tow truck driver what I was doing in the middle of the night with lumber stacked on the roof of my car and a man bound and gagged in the front seat.
The moon was full and the outlines of distant hills were visible in the nightglow. I chose roads that seemed most likely to pass promising spots and crept forward cautiously. At one point, I panicked when the goat path down which I was traveling reached an abrupt dead end within a hundred yards of a Beverly Hills
Around 2:30 I was creeping along what I hoped was still a road when I rounded a cluster of massive boulders and found what I had been looking for all night. The area illuminated by my headlights was almost exactly as I'd imagined it, only better in that it was actually downhill from where I'd have to park, making it easier for me to carry my supplies.
I whooped.
My prisoner groaned.
For the next few hours I knew I'd be busy working at the little patch of baked over desert that God had so graciously made available to me. I had to do something with my guest while I worked. I was reluctant to give the young man any more Valium, but also didn't want to return to the car at some point and find that he'd escaped.
I pulled more rope and a roll of duct tape from the back of the SUV and then went to the passenger side to collect the kid. He lolled precariously to the left for a moment when I opened the door, then, as I had hoped, toppled sideways out of the car. I ducked underneath, caught him as he fell, and then hoisted him up over my shoulder like a sack of manure.
He was tall, but skinny. His limbs were stick thin and his hipbones dug uncomfortably into my shoulder as I wove a path with my burden through the desert grass and Joshua trees.
Although his frailty made my job easier, the economy of his build sickened me. His body was the vessel of an ambivalent mind. I pictured this repulsive wraith sitting for hours every day in a darkened bedroom, smoking weed and playing computer games as his body atrophied; the victim of a youthful metabolism that created excess energy for an owner too lazy to use it.
I carried him without particular effort towards a table of flat rocks about twenty yards from the car. Resisting my initial inclination to drop him on his head, I instead lowered him gently onto his back and then rolled him, face down, against the rock.
The kid groaned and I suppressed the urge to kick him.
Working with brisk efficiency, I retied the ropes around his ankles and wrists and then linked the two of these by a third length of rope, cinching it tight enough to cause his face and knees to lift a few inches off the rock. Now hogtied and incapacitated, I reinforced the ropes around his wrists and ankles with a thick layer of duct tape.
The lad was going nowhere and, if he happened to wake up as I worked, the best he could hope for was a little life-affirming agony.
I spent the next half hour lugging supplies and materials from the SUV to the spot I'd chosen behind the table rock.
When I was finished I paused to review the plan and take a quick inventory.
I had not planned to kidnap the kid. I'd left the house with nothing more nefarious in mind than buying a pack of cigarettes and a newspaper. Then, insulted by the young man, I'd acted in rage.
The plan that I was now so successfully executing occurred to me in an instant of inspired purpose as the shit eating little punk lay in an unconscious heap in the parking lot next to my car. It had all happened so quickly. One minute Joe Cocker begged over the car radio for an unchained heart and the next I was driving home with my unconscious victim to pick up the supplies I would need to make him suffer in ways as cruel as my imagination could conceive.
Things planned in haste rarely work out well, yet, as I looked over the materials spread out before me I found, to my surprise, that I had forgotten nothing that I thought I would need.
I decided to dig the hole first.
The soft ground looked easy to dig, but I worried that there might be boulders submerged beneath the sand. I'd dig until I reached the desired depth or hit a rock I couldn't move. If I did hit a rock then, depending on its depth, I would either begin a new hole somewhere nearby or revise my construction design to accommodate the space that geography had made available to me.
I broke ground on Phase II around 3:30 in the morning.
The point of my shovel slid with a crunch into the loose soil; I pushed down on the handle and pried a gratifyingly large clod of dirt from the earth. About a hundred more of these should do the trick, I thought to myself, quickly extrapolating the result of this single effort over the entire project and estimating that I would finish the work in about an hour.
My hands began to hurt by the fourth shovel load. By the tenth, the blisters tore; dime-sized folds of dead skin bunched like open eyelids exposing a pink dew of blood and abraded flesh. It occurred to me then that gloves would have been helpful. I wondered what else I had forgotten.
I originally conceived of a one by three foot hole, eight feet deep. Around the time that I had grown to truly hate myself for having forgotten the gloves, it dawned on me that my original concept was flawed. I would only get about three feet deep before the planned dimensions of the hole would prevent me from digging any deeper; the deeper I went, the longer and wider the hole needed to be to accommodate the action of the shovel. The new and vastly expanded hole, now three wide by five long, was only about four feet deep when I noticed the stars begin to fade on the horizon.
Morning comes quickly in the desert and by the time I'd clawed another six inches out of my hole the final vestiges of night had disappeared. Although my construction site was still in shadow, it had already begun to get hot. I have fair skin and am ridiculously susceptible to sunburn. I don't own a pair of shorts, always wear a hat and even on the hottest days throw on long sleeved shirts to protect myself from the sun. When I had gone out in the middle of the night to buy smokes, I'd left the house wearing jeans, a light T-shirt and no hat. As I watched the sun's glow brighten on the horizon I imagined what the desert would be like in a couple of hours after the sun crested the hill. I looked down at my exposed arms and cringed.
Beyond the grim expectation of heat exhaustion, the weeping sores on my hands represented a source of agony for which I didn't have to wait. My hands ached and the pain was slowing me down.
I dug until I couldn't stand it anymore and then stopped to go look in the car for something to cover my hands. Of course, there was nothing. I quickly considered and rejected several hair-brained ideas, including, but not limited to, fashioning gloves with flesh harvested from my victim's dismembered hands. Okay, I was pissed, but I'm not Hannibal Lecter. I finally improvised a pair of gloves using my socks reinforced with a thick layer of duct tape. With my hands now resembling a pair of black and silver crab claws, I looked like an idiot; but the gloves helped a little and I was able to continue digging.
I had hoped, when I selected this spot, that the shade cast by the hill would protect me from the sun for at least a couple of hours. Within twenty minutes the shadow was gone and I worked fully exposed.
Somewhere between dawn and the completion of the hole three hours later, the youth regained consciousness. He registered active participation in the process of his own abduction, first with low moans, and later with curses and shrill cries for help. By this point the hole was well over six feet deep. I continued to dig, betraying my presence only by the occasional shovelful of dirt I hurled over the rim.
He found this very disconcerting.
He called to me, pleaded with me, begged and threatened me. I continued to work in silence, paying attention to his complaints only to the extent that his petulant bitching renewed my determination to finish the project in every detail—blisters and heat stroke be damned.
It was around 9:00 when I decided that I was finished.
The kid fell silent when I hooked my crab claws over the edge of the hole and pulled myself out. I was fine with his silence; appreciated it, even. It really was a nice hole and I was grateful for the for the brief moment of peace that allowed me to pause, rub my aching hands, and admire the magnitude of my creation
The hole's ridiculously inadequate original design anticipated the excavation of about 24 cubic feet of earth. By the time I was finished, I had clawed close to a hundred cubic feet out the ground. I had been lucky; the ground was soft and there hadn't been too many rocks. Still, this phase of the project took about five hours longer to complete than I had originally expected, had killed my hands, and almost broken my back.
My palms, still bound in ridiculous cocoons of dress sock and duct tape, had a sick, sticky feel to them. The crab claws were now more important as bandages than they had ever been as gloves. Still, while my improvised design had been fine for digging a hole, I needed mobility in my fingers for the work ahead. My hand as crab claws would not get the job done.
The knife I had used all morning lay at the foot of the table rock.
"Hi," I said to the kid as I made myself comfortable next to him on the stone table.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Throughout the morning I'd periodically tried to distract myself from the pain in my blistering hands by imagining this conversation. I scripted elaborate dialogues in my mind, anticipating exactly what he would say and formulating brilliant responses, eloquent and sinister, in return.
"That," I said, repeating the line I had rehearsed a hundred times throughout the morning, "depends on you." Brandishing the knife with evil exactitude, I cut open the toe of the sock covering my left hand and freed my fingers by pulling the resulting cotton poly flap down over my palm.
"This hurts," he said.
"Oh," I said indifferently as I freed the fingers on my right hand.
Determined to create a sense of ominous drama, I then turned away, just as I had staged in mental rehearsal, and again surveyed the supplies for Phase III.
"Why don't you just lay there and relax," I offered. "When the time's right it'll all become clear to you."
"What are you gonna do, man?"
A constant in these scripted vignettes was the sense of soul rocking fear that I had expected to hear in his voice. I'd anticipated it, planned for it, hoped for it. A tremulous quality, packed to the point of bursting with barely restrained panic and despair; this was the cream I had waited for, the antidote to the rage he'd provoked.
The fear in his voice was everything I had imagined.
It sickened me.
It frightened me.
"Like I said, Sport, that really depends on you."
"Oh please," he begged, not for the last time, "don't kill me."
This was exactly as it was supposed to be. The arrogant, cocky, mannerless little turd laid low and completely in my control. I was the archetypical mad scientist about to slide the needle into his arm and fill him with a serum that would slowly turn him into a goat or a lizard.
I tried to enjoy it.
"Up to you," I repeated.
"How?" he asked. "How is it up to me?"
"Two words."
"What?"
"You owe me two words," I said simply.
"What does that mean? Two words? What two words?" For a moment the fear in his voice stepped aside, replaced by indignant petulance.
"That's up to you to figure out."
"Fuck you!" he hissed. "How's that for your two fucking words."
Ahhhhh.
A tonic.
His words, dripping with hollow contempt, worked like a shot of Novocain applied to the sensitive tissue of a conscience grown quietly restless. It suddenly became clear to me why it was that I had just dug a hole in the desert.
I met his angry glare and calmly shook my head, indicating silently that "Fuck you" was, indeed, not the two-word combination that would set him free.
"I see this isn't going to go well," I said after a pause.
"Well, what do you want from me?" he asked.
"Look, I'd love to stand here all day and shoot the shit," I announced cheerfully, picking up my trusty roll of duct tape as I leaned closer, "but I've got some work to do."
I pulled a foot long strip of tape from the roll.
Rip.
"Hey," he cried, "what are you doing? No, don't do that!" The petulance was gone and he was again my soon-to-be goat.
I started to feel better.
He tried to twist away from me as I reached towards his head. I stuck the exposed strip of tape over a patch of dingy blonde hair and, as he turned in panic to face me, I simply held the roll steady and allowed him to wrap the tape across his own mouth. Again, in panic he turned away in the other direction, which allowed me to rip an additional segment from the roll and, with greater ease than I'd ever have thought possible, wrap it the rest of the way around his head.
"Mummpf," he declared through the fresh layer of tape.
"Two words," I whispered, my lips now next to an ear half covered by a strip of silver duct tape. "Two words will set you free."
"Mummmmmmpf," he repeated, shaking his head from side to side.
I was a child during the 1960s and grew up watching the television adventures of Batman and Maxwell Smart. Even as a kid I recognized that it was the bad guys' compulsion to spell out the details of their evil schemes that invariably led to their own downfall. The bad guys always failed, and worse, because they'd been such loudmouths about their plans, looked like assholes when the hero eventually prevailed.
Of course, this long-held insight did nothing to stop me over the course of the morning dig from working up versions of my own elaborate monologues, each designed to instill terror and compel recognition of my newfound evil genius.
If ever there was an appropriate moment for a monologue, this was it.
"Two words," I reminded him.
Perhaps, being new to evil, I felt a certain "walk before you run" sense of restraint. Maybe, having forgotten sunscreen and a hat along with the damnable gloves, I was feeling a little less than brilliant when the moment presented itself. I think, however, it was ultimately a dawning sense of dread over what I was planning to do—the realization that I was about to torture and kill another human being—that compelled me to shove the stupid monologue up my ass and get on with the business of murder before I lost my nerve.
"Two words." I repeated, and walked away.
I hoped without much optimism that the next phase of the project would go better than the last.
I was fairly certain that I had everything I'd need to finish the job quickly; yet having incorrectly held the same belief at the beginning of Phase II, I couldn't help but wonder what critical supply I'd forgotten and hoped I would discover it, whatever it was, before the oversight was too late to fix.
As with the hole, the design for the box was simple; one foot by three, seven feet long.
Several months earlier, endowed with enthusiasm that ultimately exceeded my long-term level of persistence, I decided to learn how to make my own furniture.
I got the idea one night as I sat at home alone watching the History Channel. The show had been about ancient artisans and the incredible furniture they created for their kings and masters. Watching the show, I came to admire and respect the level of workmanship required to produce these wonderful works of art. I became particularly interested in the intricate inlays they created to decorate the pieces. Working with crude tools and an abundance of patience, workmen possessed with creative abilities that far exceeded my own, crafted delicate patterns carved seamlessly within the larger surfaces of the beautifully finished furniture.
Ambition soon followed admiration and by the time the show ended I was convinced that with modern tools and lots of practice, I, too, could create museum pieces of my own. The next day I bought some books on the topic and by nightfall my garage bulged with several thousand dollars worth of new tools and expensive lumber stock.
Carpentry, I quickly learned, was harder than it looked. By the time I grew bored and gave the hobby up, a reasonably accomplished birdhouse and a wobbly coffee table represented the total tangible return on my woodworking investment.
I originally bought the stock to make a china hutch. Instead, I was now going to use it to fashion a coffin.
From my brief foray into the world of furniture making, I learned that one of the keys to success was to have a solid surface upon which to work the wood. I was sure there were other keys as well, but I gave up on the hobby long before I ever figured out what they were. Remembering this, however, I loaded two sawhorses into the back of the SUV, along with a handsaw, hammer, a bucket of nails, and a battery-powered circular saw.
I set up the sawhorses well away from the table rock, too far away to hear the eventual muffled protests of my captive.
I'd bought over a hundred board feet of quality ash to construct my china cabinet.
This, of course, was enough stock to make three cabinets, but I was excited with the promise of my new hobby and thought at the time that I could use the excess to later make a matching dinner table and, ultimately, chairs. Embracing the 'having too much is never a bad thing' school of project management, I strapped all of it to the top of the car and brought it with me to the desert.
I forgot to bring a tape measurer and a pencil, so I used lengths of my trusty, all-purpose rope to measure and marked the resulting segments in the wood with the point of a nail. Satisfied that my quick improvisations would be good enough to get the job done, I resolved not to allow my forgetfulness to get me down.
This resolve crumbled when I went to cut the first segment and found that the battery in the circular saw was dead. I pulled the trigger repeatedly, each time hoping in vain to hear the saw's blade engage with its sweet, high-pitched whine, and instead heard a succession of flat, soul-wrenching clicks. This, it occurred to me, would have been a good thing to check before I left the house.
"Fuck me," I spat, and threw the saw to the ground.
With no other options available to me, I found the handsaw among my tools and started to work.
Near noon the temperature reached 115 degrees. If you've never been in that kind of heat, no description that I offer here can adequately capture the magnitude of its depravity. I could waste my time trying to describe it, but unless you've ever stood under a sun so hot that it feels like it's melting your hair, prose brought to bear on the topic is pointless.
Let's just say that when it's that hot you're fucked, and leave it at that.
"Oh, but it's a dry heat," desert lovers explain, as if dryness was somehow a virtue that makes nut-numbing heat okay.
No!
Nothing makes that kind of heat okay.
You're fucked.
Full stop.
Of course, there are different degrees of fuckedness. In this case, the difference between being fucked dead and only fucked miserable is water.
With water, you can continue to function.
Without it, you die.
Luckily, I had water.
Were it left up to my own innate capacity for long-range logistical planning, I would have been fucked in the dead sense as I'd set the water I needed at home right next to the tape measurer and my gloves. The water I had available to me, however, was not the result of forethought, but rather, of laziness.
I'm not a particularly tidy man and prefer to take the long view on matters of neatness and personal housekeeping. When it comes to, say, cleaning out my car, the long view can mean as much as six months between excavations.
You can accumulate a lot of shit in a car over six months.
My daughter once read an article in Teen Vogue that drew a correlation between Diet Coke consumption and acne. From that moment on she swore off carbonated beverages and became, instead, a militant water addict. She would hit me up for bottles of designer water every time we stopped the car at a place sporting a cash register, refusing, of course, to carry with her bottles filled from the tap at home.
For all of her passion, however, she never quite seemed to finish a whole bottle in one sitting. The water, she informed me, "goes stale" when it sits in the bottle overnight, thus justifying her demand that I buy her "fresh" bottles every time we leave the house. Like me, she's a slob and feels no sense of revulsion at sitting in the back seat surrounded by the result of months of accumulated untidiness.
Thank heaven for little girls.
Since my last cleaning, no less than fifteen half-filled bottles of extraordinarily expensive water had accumulated under the back seat of my SUV. All tolled, the undiscarded cache amounted to over three liters of potable drinking water. There was enough to allow me to keep working, despite the blistering heat, with a little left over to share.
I set a bottle next to my victim on the table rock and graciously invited him to help himself whenever he felt the need. Of course, the bindings on his hands and the duct tape across his mouth prevented him from taking advantage of my generosity. In utter disregard for the inherent thoughtfulness of my gift, he writhed violently and swore at me in muffled screams.
"I get the impression from you," I said, leaning across the rock and lowering my head to his, "that there were a number of very important life lessons that you never learned from your mom. Here's one you might want to remember…it's the thought that counts."
His hostile screaming redoubled.
The kid was a lost cause.
"Two words," I reminded him, and then went back to my project.
The good news was that the water allowed me to keep working.
The bad news was that the water allowed me to keep working.
The work, sun and resulting dehydration had begun to exact a price on my body. The length of arm visible beyond the sleeves of my T-shirt glowed red through a thin layer of sweat and desert grime. Worse than the sunburn, however, was the sick headache that began at the base of my neck and wormed its way across the top of my skull towards my eyes.
I was a wreck, and getting worse. I really should have quit. Of course, I couldn't.
Exhausted and thoroughly miserable, I continued to saw away at the ash through the early afternoon. The wood was roughly the consistency of concrete.
When I started, I had imagined a simple, well-crafted box large enough to accommodate the young man's mass and strong enough to hold him until he died. I planned and executed each of the early cuts with painstaking exactitude; careful always to measure twice and then draw the saw's blade carefully in line with the mark I'd scratched into the stock. This passion for precision didn't survive long in the heat and, over time, concern for the quality of my workmanship deteriorated along with the flesh covering the palms of my hands.
As the afternoon progressed and the brutal sun continued to bleach my mind I fell into a stupefied groove, hardly registering the completion of one cut before beginning the next. By the end I hardly understood what I was doing and truly could not conceive of a time when I'd cared what the box looked like.
It was in this addled state that I cut through the last piece of ash. One minute I was shoving the saw blade through hardwood, and the next I was numbly reaching for another piece when it occurred to me in a moment of inspired exhaustion that I had everything I needed to begin assembly.
"Screw this," I muttered to myself as I dropped the unnecessary plank back onto the pile of excess stock. There was lots of excess stock. Not bad, I thought glumly. I still have enough to make a dinner table and some chairs.
With the wood cut, the rest of the project came together quickly. I fashioned the sides of the coffin from long planks stapled together with shorter cross sections. Of course, exhausted, I had managed to mismeasure several of the boards by an inch or two in one direction or the other. To true the segments up, I set the planks side-by-side on the sawhorse with the edges flush along the top, and then nailed apron segments along the bottom where the ends were uneven. It was a lazy patch necessary to recover from my poor workmanship, but in the end it worked so, could not bring myself to care. When the finished segments were reasonably flush, I nailed them together at the seams in a matter of minutes. I completed the project by tacking some short pieces across one of the hollow box's two open ends, creating the floor upon which my victim would stand for the next few months as he decomposed.
Satisfied that the damn thing would hold, I pushed the box off the sawhorses and dragged it over the mound of dirt heaped around the edge of the hole. Circling around to the open mouth of the box, I grabbed the top edge with my fingertips, lifted, and let gravity pull it the rest of the way over the edge. The box bounced with a hollow thud as it hit the uneven floor.
Lifting the shovel with all the enthusiasm of a girl scout handling a tarantula, I proceeded to fill the void surrounding the box.
The limitations I placed on the young man's mobility had taken an obvious physical toll. His skin had adopted a pallid flatness that was apparent despite the crimson blush of his own ripening sunburn. His motions, earlier so vigorous in their resistance to the restraints, were now slow and tortured. Whereas before I could make out distinct words as he'd sworn at me from behind the mask of duct tape, his vocalizations were now little more than a series of low moans punctuated now and then by indiscriminate guttural heaves.
I looked at the kid and, recognizing the shape he was in, felt suddenly concerned. Earlier, all I had wanted my prisoner was silence. Now that I was finished with my preparations, his silence no longer pleased me. I was now ready chat with the lad and hoped, as I looked down on his ruined body, that I had not gone too far by letting him spend the whole day exposed to the sun.
"You ever read any Edgar Allan Poe?" I asked as I picked at the seam of the duct tape where it ended at the back of his head.
He groaned.
"Poe?" I repeated. A quick jerk at the tape freed the left side of his head along with a regrettable quantity of his unruly hair. As he writhed facedown on the rock, I threaded the lose tape end under his head and then pulled from the other side, freeing an area from his left cheek to the upper half of his right ear. I don't know whether this second effort hurt any more than the first, but with his mouth now free, the resulting scream was more audible.
"Poe?" I asked. "Are you familiar with Poe?"
Before he could answer, I jerked the remaining length of tape off his head, removing by their roots another mass of dingy blonde hair.
He rewarded my cruelty with a rich, full-throated scream.
To my surprise, I realized that I was taking no joy in his pain. Someone who was as truly evil as I desired to be would find pleasure in the young man's agony. Despite my best efforts to convince myself otherwise, I couldn't feel the pleasure I knew I was supposed to feel. His screams seemed hollow, pointless; as though I was exacting cruel revenge on a dumb beast, innocent and afraid.
I wanted him to understand what he'd done. I wanted him to connect his action, trivial though it may have been, to the horrible reaction I'd worked so hard to construct for him. I wanted to delineate for him in as cruel a manner as I could imagine the path of logic that had brought him from a 7-11 in Long Beach to a coffin in the Mojave Desert .
Rather than embolden me to see my lesson through to the end, his cries evoked my sympathy.
I felt mean.
I felt small.
"Ed-gar…Al–lan…Poe?" I repeated, taking out my frustration on him by shoving his face into the rock as I articulated each syllable of the poet's name. I pulled on his hair, jerking his head to my lips. "Edgar Allan Poe," I screamed into his ear as though I were calling down the mouth of a well to a small child who'd just fallen in.
"Edgar Allan. . ."
"The Cask of Amontillado," he croaked.
I was stunned.
Without realizing it, I let loose of his hair and his head snapped forward onto the rock as though it was mounted to the business end of a mousetrap. He cried out again.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"Amontillado," he groaned.
I was lost for a moment.
In the event that I've been unclear, let me state now for the record that I did not think highly of this kid. He'd crossed a line with me and I was prepared to commit murder to demonstrate to him that his contempt had been misplaced. That he knew of Poe's classic tale of murderous revenge was surprising. That he had been able to read his current situation and find the parallel to Poe's story was disturbing.
The kid moaned. Were he fresher I'm sure he would have had something to say; in his current state, however, he could barely retain his grip on consciousness.
Without thinking about the kindness it represented, I found the bottle of water I had set out for him earlier, held it to his lips, and helped him drink.
"How, in the name of God, do you know about Poe and the Cask of Amontillado?" I asked.
The kid responded by sucking greedy gulps of water; his eyes squeezed shut as if he were halfway through an exquisite, life-altering orgasm. The instant he drained the bottle he fell back on the rock and coughed in deep, lung-wrenching spasms. If he tried to answer my question, the reply was lost in the geyser of spittle and blood that erupted from his mouth.
I patted him hard on the back—solid, solicitous thumps to help him rid himself of the congestion in his lungs. He curled into a piteous ball, rolled over on his side, and continued hacking until the junk cleared and the spasms passed.
"Better?" I asked, disgusted with myself that I should suddenly care.
He nodded.
"So you've read Amontillado?" I asked again.
"In school," he croaked.
"Good," I said, trying to affect an icy confidence I no longer felt. "So you know what happens next?"
He nodded again.
This was my first foray into evil.
It wasn't going well.
I had acted in rage—a visceral response to the kid's contempt that I simply chose, for the first time in my life, not to control. The suit didn't fit well and so, had stoked the fires of my rage with deliberate precision, aware at some level that the brutality I demonstrated was out of character, yet once acted upon, could not and should not be abandoned. That I had carried my assault this far was nothing short of a wonder. With each step, I had listened to the little devil on my shoulder and silenced the indignant screams of my conscience; substituting grim intellect for passion in my pathetic grasp at self-esteem.
The kid knew Amontillado. In knowing my playbook, this simpering self-absorbed ape had risen to his feet and looked me in the eye as an equal. . The kid was Batman, I was the Penguin, and Edgar Allan Poe delivered the monologue. With depressing speed, I had somehow gone from sinister, evil genius to petty jackass.
"It's almost Amontillado," I said, struggling to maintain the upper hand. "In the story, Poe's victim was doomed. You're not."
"Why are you doing this?" he asked. His voice sounded like glass crunching under the heel of a boot.
"Well," I answered calmly, "here's where we come to the interesting part. You're asking a great question and I want to give it the time and attention it deserves. Really, I do. If you work through the question and say to me what you need to say, I'll let you go. If you don't figure out what you need to say, I chain you to the wall and brick you up inside the grotto."
"I'll say anything you want," he gasped.
I was beginning to feel better.
"Ah, ah, ah! Not so fast, Sport. First off, it's not what I want you say that's important. Oh no. What's important is what you come to want to say yourself. Figure it out and you go free. Second, this isn't the place to explore this. I've built you a nice tomb on the other side of this rock here and I need you to step inside of it before we go any further with the discussion."
"No," he said.
"Yes," I demanded.
Bones crunched as I brought the hammer down on the back of his hand. He squealed, tucked his broken hand up under his free arm, and clutched it to his chest. In a smooth, unbroken arc, I brought the next blow down on the pointy end his exposed elbow.
He screamed.
I was back and in control—evil's new sheriff in town.
A sticky river of opaque ooze slid down his upper lip as he redoubled his fetal curl and cradled his arms deep inside his lap.
I shushed him and gently stroked his hair. I doubt these fatherly ministrations did much to calm him; indeed, I hoped they only served to intensify his terror. Still, I wanted to step it back a notch so that I could communicate with him.
As his breathing slowed, the wet, throaty sobs dried first to wrenching hiccoughs, then measured panting.
I gently rested the head of my hammer on his exposed knee. "I don't think you want me to hit you again," I said. "This is where I'll hit you the next time you say 'no.' I'll shatter your kneecaps and then drag you where I need to take you."
He shook his head in fitful right to left jerks.
"You can get out this," I advised, speaking quickly before he could refuse again and force me to make good on my threat. "Poe didn't offer his victim a way out. I am. You can walk away from this, but you've got to do exactly what I say."
His jaw knotted, as though every thought he'd ever had sought community in the distended muscles framing his face. His Adam's apple bulged, retreated, then, after a long pause, bulged again.
I had him.
"It's up to you."
"What do you want?" he asked.
"Two words," I said. "I want two words from you. I can tell you right now, though," I added, "that they're not 'fuck you.' I swear to God if you say 'fuck you' to me again I won't be responsible for what happens to you."
"Okay, okay!" he gasped.
"Now, what's it to be?" I asked. "Are you gonna' come with me and maybe figure out how to walk away from this, or do we spend another hour or two here on this rock?"
"You're going to kill me, man," he said, his voice calm. "It doesn't matter what I do."
The next blow landed over his left shoulder where the arm attaches to the torso.
"Wrong!" I bellowed, "you little dumbass! What you did got you here and what you do will get you out."
I doubt he heard much of this through his screams.
"Now get up!" I ordered.
He writhed on the rock.
"I said get up!" I raised the hammer to strike again.
The kid saw what I was about to do. "No!" he cried. "No…I'll go! I'll go!"
I brought the hammer down again on the same spot over his shoulder. I let loose the blow before I realized what I'd done, as if the hammer had a mind of its own and I was but its tool.
"Ahhhhhhhh!" he shrieked.
"Get up!" I yelled, enraged by my loss of control. The hammer rose again and I wondered at the power, foreign and cold, that lifted my hand.
"Get up!" I shouted. "For the love of God, get up!"
In a counterpoint of reason contrary to my rage, it occurred to me that in his current state he might not be able to get up. Still, I required it. The hammer in my hand would accept nothing less. He had to stand.
"Get up," I said.
"I can't," he cried, trying, at least, to sit up. "My feet…"
He was right, of course. His feet remained bound with rope and duct tape. Unless I freed him, he would not stand.
I am a fraud and a coward.
I loathe violence. Suffering repels me. I can't have it around me, and yet, cannot bring myself to walk away from it. The hysterical screams of my own inflamed conscience drive me towards manifestations of human misery as a moth to flame—not to observe or gloat, but to put an end to them. There is nothing noble in this. It is cowardice cleverly disguised as compassion.
I started to feel sorry for the kid. I began to regret what I had done to him. I began to forgive him. Petulant and wounded, his voice evoked in me the purest shame.
I almost let him have it again with the hammer.
I needed to get myself under control.
"Get up," I hissed, throwing the hammer down on the rock and reaching for the knife. He squealed when I stood, certain, I suppose, that I was going to bury the blade in his chest.
Instead, I knelt and cut through the bindings on his feet.
"Now," I said, "get up."
He rolled onto his stomach and wiggled his knees up under his body. He then stalled, his ass shoved in the air and his face buried in the rock; the trauma to his elbows and shoulder prevented him from lifting his upper body.
It's the thought that counts.
Satisfied that he had at least made the effort, I helped him the rest of the way up by the roots of his hair. Although he didn't seem to appreciate the assistance I took grim satisfaction from the fact that when I was done, he stood.
Realizing early on that the kid would be bound for several hours, I had been careful not to cinch the ropes so tight that they cut off blood flow. This precaution notwithstanding, the kid only made it about three steps before collapsing as the blood began to course normally though the veins and arteries of his feet.
"My feet," he said, as if to apologize for having fallen down.
"Hurts when your feet fall asleep, doesn't it?" I asked.
Lying discarded by the rock, the hammer now seemed indifferent to the kid's level of dedication. Pushing him forward before the circulation returned to his feet served no practical purpose and I felt no need to compel it in satisfaction of rage.
"Why are you doing this to me?" he asked through clenched teeth.
"It feels like little needles," I commented. "I hate that feeling."
He hissed as another wave of molten pinpricks washed across the soles of his feet. "Oh man…why?"
"Two words, my boy," I answered.
"What does that mean?" he asked. "You keep saying it, but I don't know what you want."
"We'll talk about it in few minutes. I don't want to discuss it here."
"Please," he whined.
The hammer called, but I ignored it.
"Get on your feet," I ordered.
"Please."
"You really don't want to push me right now," I warned, lowering the point of the knife to the level of his eyes. "Get on your feet and we'll talk about it when I'm ready."
"C'mon man . . .please"
With my free hand I grabbed into his mop of hair and pulled.
"Okay, okay, okay! I'll get up." Writhing to escape, he wiggled himself to his feet.
I shoved him forward on wobbly legs the twenty paces between the rock and his grave.
"Hop in," I said as he swayed at the edge of the box.
He looked into the hole, and then at me, his eyes a plea for mercy.
"The way out of here is through that box," I instructed. "There's no other way. Get in and we'll talk."
"But—"
"If I've got to put you in, we're done. I'll nail the top shut, go home, and take a shower. At this point, it's entirely up to you. I really don't care anymore."
His feet shifted from right to left, then back to right. He leaned forward and looked into the hole, then straightened again. Right, left, lean, straight, right, left, lean, straight in a silly wobble that looked like a top at the end of its spin.
"C'mon, kiddo, be a good boy and get in your coffin."
Leaning now, the kid probed the lip of the hole with his toe, running the sole of his Chuck's mournfully along the rim. "I…" he began to no one in particular, then, "whatever!" He stepped off the edge and disappeared.
"Jesus," I heard myself say.
"All right," he said. "I'm in."
To be honest, his voluntary compliance was the last thing I expected. At best, I thought I'd get him to the edge of the hole and somehow shove him in. That he simply stepped in of his own accord caught me off guard.
"I can't believe you did that," I said.
"This is what you wanted, wasn't it?" his voice echoed from inside the coffin.
"Well, yes. But I never thought you'd be dumb enough to actually do it."
It was now late afternoon, yet the sun was still high enough to shine down into the box and illuminate his face. His eyes met mine.
"What do you want?" he asked. His voice, an amplified echo off the walls of his tomb, was eerily clear.
"I've told you several times what I want. I want two words from you."
"Please," he said, "I don't know what that means. What two words?"
"Do you remember when we met?"
From inside the box I saw the top of his head bob, indicating a nod.
"Tell me about it."
There was a long pause as he thought over his next words, then a sigh. "I was driving home from a party, but I ran out of gas," he began. "I left the car and started walking home. I was pissed off. I'd gotten into a fight with this girl I know and then my car 'd run out of gas."
"Were you drunk?" I asked.
"Buzzed," he said. "High. Kind of drunk, I guess."
"Why did you go into the 7-11?"
"It was on my way home. I wanted to get some more beer."
He paused, waiting for a question.
"That's it?" I asked. "That's the end of your story?"
"No, I just…" he began.
"I'm not going to stand here and try to drag this out of you," I said. "Keep talking or I'm going home."
"I went to the 7-11 to get some beer, okay?" he continued. "I wasn't done partying and I was pissed off. I went into the store, picked out a six-pack, and went to pay. The fucking rag head behind the counter asked for my ID and I told him I didn't have it with me. He wasn't going to sell me the beer without ID."
"You're not twenty-one, are you?" I asked.
"No," he snorted, as if I was stupid for even asking the question.
"Mo," I said.
"Huh?"
"Mo. Mo.
"Whatever," the kid said. "Fucker pissed me off. All I wanted was some beer. I even offered him ten bucks to sell it to me, but he just told me to get out."
"Go on," I said, counting out in my head the number of nails it would take to seal the lid onto the top of the box.
"Right, right," he said, hastily resuming his story. "Anyway, we shouted at each other. He threatened to call the cops, so I left. Next thing I knew you ran me down in the parking lot and started wailing on me."
"That's it?" I asked. "Are you done?"
"Yeah, man," he said. "That's what happened."
That wasn't all that had happened. I knew it and if he thought about it, so did he. It wasn't as though he was lying, however. He wasn't trying to hide something from me—to him the matter that so enraged me was an unimportant detail not worthy of inclusion in his story.
I stood and circled around the hole to the stack of wood.
"Hey, what are you doing?" he cried.
"Two words," I called over my shoulder.
"I don't…" he began. Then, as if moved by some desperate insight, screamed, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! There! There's you're two words. I'm sorry."
I smiled down at him. "'I'm' is a contraction."
"What?"
"Do you have a job?" I asked.
"I'm sorry," he blubbered.
"'I'm' is a contraction, so 'I'm sorry' is actually three words, not just two. I-am-sorry. See? Three words. Do you have a job?" I repeated.
"No. Look, I'm really sorry."
"That's four words. You're getting colder. So if you don't have a job where did you get the money for the beer?"
"I just had it, okay."
"Where," I repeated, "did you get the money from?"
"I found it," he answered.
I knelt down and set the lid over the hole.
He cried out.
I'd waited for this all day.
He screamed.
I screamed.
He called for help.
I joined him.
He bellowed at the top of his lungs, a long, primal wail.
I matched his cry in every detail.
I too, fell silent.
"Please," he begged.
I lifted the lid just a crack. "You remember this part, don't you?" I asked, referring again to Amontillado.
"Yeah," he said. "Please, man. Don't do this."
"Where did you get the money?"
"I stole it from my mom," he said. "I took it from her purse."
"Ah," I said, "I figured it was probably something like that."
I imagined his mother as she opened her purse and found, probably not for the first time, that her son had robbed her. There would be an arc of crushing despair so profound and subtle that she'd not realize that it was this, and not the loss of the cash, that provoked the bitter anger that swelled inside of her. Certain of what'd happened, determined not to be soft, she would script in her mind the cruel, cutting things she'd say to him. She would corner him, confront him, pursue the truth with relentless savagery immune to his attempts to lie, laugh or sulk. He should be ashamed of himself, and by God she wouldn't stop until she was satisfied that he was!
Secretly, however, she would hope that she was wrong; that maybe she had been the one who'd actually spent the money and simply couldn't remember where, or on what. She would spend hours second-guessing herself, certain the money should be in her purse, but then…maybe she'd… and what about…
She would wait for him, continuing with the sick desperation of sorrow to scratch at her memory, even as she practiced her script and willed her blood to chill to an icy boil. That he didn't come home on time would fuel her tenuous rage; so like him to stay out all night with his loser friends and not even consider making a quick phone call to put her mind at rest. Soon, however, as night turned to dawn, then dawn to noon, her anger would ripen by degrees into panic. As this day then turned into tomorrow and tomorrow turned into forever the panic would mature into soul-numbing despair.
In the years to come, she would think on her son. Triggered by some random occurrence or maudlin melancholy, she'd summon memories of him as a baby, and then as a little boy with a child's innocent, trusting eyes. How beautiful they had been. How sweet. How full of everything good. She would smile and try to push from her mind the terror that came as the boy grew, his spirit atrophied and that luminescent sparkle, once so wondrous and clear, faded to black. How, she would wonder silently to herself, given all of the love she had for her boy and all of the promise his young life represented, could she have allowed his soul to die?
And where, she'd wonder for the rest of her life, is her little boy now?
Fuck her, I thought.
Fuck her, I thought.
I returned to the hole with my hammer and the bucket of nails.
I'd have my two words or the screams of my conscience be damned I'd bury him in the desert and never look back.
His screams began in earnest as I set the first nail into the upper right corner of the lid and pounded it into place.
"No! No! No! No!" he cried, the words echoing from underneath the lid in staccato bursts of panic.
I waited. The kid screamed on for a while until, quite suddenly, he realized that I hadn't set the second nail. A long, unnatural silence fell over the desert; I, ready with my hammer to finish the job and he, pensively waiting for something to happen.
"Start," I said, "from the moment you realized that Mo wasn't going to sell you the beer and you decided to leave the store. Describe for me everything—and I mean everything, every single detail—that happened."
"I turned toward the door," he continued. His voice, muffled through the coffin lid, sounded hollow and dry. "I was pissed, so…so…wait, I'm thinking…so, as I left I reached out and swept my arm across the counter and dumped all the candy and gum and shit onto the floor. I said something to him. I think it was, like, 'Fuck you, Abdul!' or something like that. You were at the door. I walked past you into the parking lot. You followed me and, like, grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. I started to say something, but you…but you punched me in the stomach before I could talk. I remember you hit me in the head…I don't remember anything after that."
"Okay," I said as I set the point of the second nail in the upper left corner of the box. "It sounds like you've got the story down. That's exactly what I remember, too." With that, I began to drive the nail into the lid.
"You get what you give," my mother once said.
"The hell I will. The hell I will. The hell I will," I muttered to myself to drown out the kid's screams.
"I pushed the shit off onto the floor," the kid shouted from underneath the lid. "I pushed it on the floor."
I drove the next nail into the lower left corner of the lid.
Bang.
My wife.
Bang.
My friend.
Bang.
My life!
Three hits and the nail's head set flush with the wood.
"Okay," he continued. He was breathing fast and the words escaped from his chest in short explosions of air. "I walked towards the door. It was maybe, I don't know, ten steps from the counter to the door. I saw you. I walked right past you."
Bang.
My dad.
Bang.
My mom.
Bang.
The fourth nail secured the final corner of the lid over the top of the kid's coffin.
"I didn't say shit to you, man! I saw you and thought you might try to stop me, so I just kept walking. I thought you'd…I don't know, do something."
Bang. Bang. Bang. I figured that five nails along each edge of the box would do the trick.
"The hell I will," I repeated with each blow.
"I didn't say shit to you! Why are you doing this?"
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"Two words!" I yelled.
"I'm sorry!" he screamed.
"That's—" Bang. "Three—" Bang. "Words—!" Bang.
"Why are you doing this to me? Why?" Bang. "Why?" Bang. "Why?" Bang.
"Mom! Help me!"
"Too late," I screamed. "She tried to help you but you wouldn't have it and now it's too fucking late."
"Mom!"
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"How did you get out of the store?"
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Silence.
I drove the next nail.
"I walked out of the front door! Don't you remember?" His words, choked with sobs, were almost impossible to understand.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"I walked out of the front door."
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
"Two words," I whispered softly to myself.
"You…"
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
"Thank you!" he said.
I clutched the last nail in my fist.
"You held the door for me," he gasped. "You held the door and I didn't say thank you."
I squeezed the nail until its point pierced the flesh of my thumb and drew blood.
"That's two words," he crowed. "Thank you."
Courtesy breeds kindness.
Rudeness breeds evil.
Lost in thought and oblivious to the kid's vandalism, I vaguely perceived the presence of another human being through the glass as I got out of my car and approached the door to the 7-11. In that moment of absentminded distraction, I forgot my pledge to reject kindness and, without thinking, I stepped forward to do what I always do—what I'd been raised to do—what, my half-assed resolution to embrace evil notwithstanding, I knew was the right thing to do.
I opened the door and courteously stepped aside to allow another person to pass.
The kid sailed by me without so much as a nod.
This, the young man was now learning, had been a mistake.
Still, rude though it was, it was not an offense worthy of death.
His snide condescension inspired me to murder. His lips curled in a contemptuous smirk and his eyes radiated disdain for anyone cursed with the bad fortune not to be him. At one level he was pathetic in his self-absorbed arrogance; yet, in his own mind he was an entire civilization unto himself. His face, so cold and aloof, projected with an eloquence transcending words the conviction that the rest of us were beneath him—unworthy insects to be crushed under his silly heel without scruple or moral consequence.
"Thank you. Thank you. Oh fuck, man, please. Thank you."
Listening to him as he cried out his belated appreciation for my courtesy, it occurred to me that maybe this experience had helped to broaden the young man's horizons and expand his concept of community. The contemptuous smirk had not reappeared since I beat the shit out of him in the parking lot and, as he'd looked up at me from inside his coffin, the disdain for his fellow man appeared to have vanished.
Kindness, my mother explained, reminds people that they are good while meanness tells them they're not. She trusted that every human soul yearned to be good. She believed, I mean, really believed that kindness inspired people to rise above their petty self-doubt and embrace the nobility of spirit to which, in her view, we were all innately predisposed. To her, the kid I'd planted in the box was not a lost cause, but rather a masterpiece in progress; requiring significant work but well worth the effort. She would have looked past his self-centered arrogance, reached into the black corners of his heart, and mined for the gold that she knew was there.
The day was almost done and the sun began to set. I stood in the wash of nights approaching gloom and listened to the kid's muffled sobs. Clearly, he'd undergone a fundamental change since we'd met the previous evening. If only in this moment his arrogance was gone and contempt for other's forgotten. Admittedly, only extreme terror had provoked his contrition, yet it had been provoked. He had it inside of him. My mother, it seemed, wasn't totally wrong in believing that there is gold to mine in the hearts of even the worst of us. As for the boy, I truly could not imagine that, if given the chance to continue living, this broken creature would ever be unkind to another person ever again.
I had sealed the lid well. A lever would be required to remove it. The shovel stood nearby, its blade buried to the hilt in the pile of desert earth I'd created when I dug the hole.
"I never did a rotten thing to someone that didn't come back to bite me in the ass," my dad once told me.
My mother's thoughts were even simpler: "You get what you give."
After almost forty years, I still haven't quite recovered from my parents' fucked-up worldview.
I pushed down on the handle and pried a gratifyingly large clod of dirt from the pile. About ten more of these should do the trick…
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Owen
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