Robby was feeling guilty over the killing,
so Michael told him how it was:
He said, in not so many words, that given
infinite universes, the world is always ending—everything that can go wrong is going wrong, somewhere.
In the skies a star is
at all times dying, its agonies measured in numbers you can say
but not think. Somewhere in our world, night is always falling and the sun is
always rising on dead people who were alive the last time it saw them, in which
case it can say goodbye; but there are others who disappear—with or without
traces, but their bodies gone—and they the sun never sees again.
Shit, Robby, is forever rolling downhill.
The house was set back off the main
road, down a winding gravel track. The forest overgrown so you couldn’t see
the house from the road.
The car was
there, a bright yellow four wheel drive, and they got out of their own car
without talking and moved to the house with their guns in their hands, leather shoes
scraping through the gravel, heads sweating under balaclavas. The screen door was open and they walked in. He was
watching television and they shot him, twice each, silenced guns louder than
Robby had expected, the dying man flopping like a fish.
In our world, every patch of earth is a
grave, but nonetheless, locations and times are distinguished by their
production of bodies. In some the death is thin and old, or well hidden,
and you have to scrape, analyze the dust, make estimates, guesses really, based
on frequency and history and unsubstantiated reports. In other places the black
earth spits out teeth like seeds.
It’s a cycle Robby, like nature, like history,
some people just have to go the way of the Indian, you know? You should just be
happy we have claws.
And if you insist on being superstitious -- because that's what right and wrong are Robby, they are superstitions, like god, remember that they never saw our faces and so they cannot touch our souls
Robby had grown up near the Mystic River,
gray and oil slicked. He liked to go down to the docks near the big cranes and
watch the river and toss gravel into it; he would look into the water and
think, or not think, depending on what the situation demanded. Robby told his
friends that he saw a dead body float by once, a blonde woman with no hands. It
was a lie told to impress, but that detail: her bobbing handless arms ending in butcher’s
stumps, had been so real that he had come to believe it himself, and lain
awake at night wondering what the dead woman had done that would make someone
take her hands.
Some people are sad that this country is a strip mall, because they have forgotten that it used to be a slaughterhouse.
Not even time to say GOT HIM before a
door on the other side of the room opened and a woman walked in, seeing the
dying man, seeing them. Behind her were two children, about ten, a boy
and a girl, dark skinned like their dying father. Robby freezes and Michael
sighs and shoots, blaming Arturo who told them the man would be alone,
absolving himself, (which is something he does easily, like picking food from between his teeth or tossing aside the wrapper of a candy bar).
They die quickly: he’s done worse for
less. Some shots pierce a blue plastic bottle that says Arctic Springs, one of
the big ones you turn upside down and put in a dispenser, and water streams
over the dead children, washing their faces, diluting their blood.
Some slaughters seem haphazard, they
leave bodies jumbled in the sun for vultures; this might be a mistake or a
message or a whim, depending on the time. They might be carried out with guilty
haste, or languidly as though the killers grew bored. During the war in China,
two Japanese officers had a contest, covered in the newspapers, to see who
could be the first to cut off a hundred heads, they both did eventually, and in
the end they weren’t sure who had won. When the Americans burned Tokyo a
hundred thousand civilians died in a night. What is brutality?
People got medals for burning live
children, Robby, we just had to burn some dead ones.
Michael had set a candle in a puddle
of gasoline. The police, he said, know this man has problems.
If we bury him well, they’ll think he
did the wife and kids and ran. Happens all the time.
That’s who kills you if you’re a woman
usually, the person you love.
Though I guess that’s true of everyone,
if you mean it metaphorically.
We didn’t want to hurt them. Intentions
matter, intention, Robby, is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It
wasn’t murder, understand? Forget the legal definitions; ethically speaking—and I mean in terms of professional ethics, ours and his—ethically speaking it was a necessary process. The others, they came
at a time they shouldn’t have, it wasn’t our fault or theirs.
Michael read, always. He read about
death and murder and war and everything that can go wrong in the world and he
thought that made him very wise. His ponytail was flecked with grey and hung on
the shoulder of his blue suit.
After they (Michael, but still they really, Robby knew) had shot the man's wife
and her two beautiful children, Robby had again been sure that he saw the dead
woman floating in the river all those years ago, he remembered her halo of blonde
hair, just like the woman Michael had killed, floating in the river between her
extended arms, face down as though she was begging, or praying.
Michael reminded Robby to be glad that
the women and children did not get a chance to beg, because it would have been
harder. He said not everyone is cut out for this and maybe you’re not either,
no matter who your uncle is or how many Iraqis you killed.
Afghans. In Afghanistan. I never went
to Iraq.
Michael stiffened because he was worried
he’d sounded stupid, like he didn’t know the difference between Iraq and
Afganhistan, which he did, and he explained to Robby in a calm but tense voice
that he knew the difference, and the problem was Robby’s cousin Dave, who talks
like an asshole—don’t tell your uncle I said that—who had just said: Robby’s a bad motherfucker, killed a buncha sand-niggers when he was army.
They stopped for coffee at a diner with
a fading sign and leaning pine trees; they parked the car behind the restaurant
where you couldn’t see it from the road, and checked their clothes carefully
before they went in.
Michael had eggs which were good and pie
which wasn’t, the crust soggy and the cherries flavorless. Robby was nervous,
stuttering and stirring his coffee too much.
I killed—
Shut the fuck up.
I did
things before Michael.
Robby—
Kids, Michael—
Talk about the war or shut the fuck up.
Humans are a species distinguished by
the diversity of their behavior.
Are you a bad motherfucker Robby?
In the middle of twentieth the century,
notably, the techniques and tools of the industrial age were turned expressly
to the purpose of slaughtering humanity in several of its many varieties.
Telegraphs, printing presses, railroad lines, cast steel, incendiary bombs,
identification papers, logistical planning, banks, bureaucracy, allocated
capital, departmental budgets, ideology, propaganda, punch cards, and atoms restless with as
yet unrealized potential provided a new definition of civilization that would encompass the purge, the death camp and the mushroom cloud.
In Russia twelve men, all by themselves,
killed twenty thousand over two years. Can you imagine how busy they must have
been? The snow crunching under their boots in winter, the sweat on their necks
in summer, killing, killing, killing. They must have been tired no matter how
cruel they were.
Do you think only men are killers,
Robby? Did you know a lake once killed almost two thousand people while they
slept, in Africa? Suffocated them. It probably never even occurred
to you to be afraid of a lake, did it? Not them either. They fished in it,
washed their clothes in it, then one day it killed them all, just like a
husband kills his wife.
They left the diner and were driving again down roads that curved like snakes.
The point Robby is that we are just
small knives and what little dirt is on our hands will wash off easily enough.
Let me tell you a story about the man in the back Robby—
Can you tell me a story about his wife,
and his kids? Don’t talk about that. You read too much, you talk too much, you
say my name too much.
Only a fool doesn’t read.
They drove in silence on out into the pine
forest, looking for a lonely spot with soft ground.
Michael turned off the car, rolled his
shoulders and reached over to clap Robby on the arm, catching his eyes.
It was four-thirty and light streamed through the canopy in buttery yellow rays.
Now get him out of the trunk and let the
sun say goodbye.
