The Impaler (32 page)

Like Edmund, Alfred the lawyer said he wasn’t gay—just
liked to “experiment now and then,” as he called it. And after the awkwardness of their initial meeting at the Barnes & Noble, Alfred and “Ken” experimented with each other a number of times over the next few weeks. Alfred began calling himself Ken’s “mentor” and taught him the differences between having sex with a woman and having sex with a man.

But afterward, especially when Ken was Edmund again and he was banging Karen Blume in her basement, when he thought about the sex with Alfred, Edmund had a hard time sorting out the differences between the two in his head. No, the only difference Edmund could see was that, when he was with Alfred—
and when he was Ken in general
—his fantasies of doing what he did to the animals were much more vivid, much more exciting. And one time after they had sex, when Alfred asked Ken what he was thinking, the young man came right out and said: “I’m wondering what you would look like stuck with a giant pitchfork.”

Alfred broke it off with Edmund soon afterwards; made some excuse about the wife catching on and said they had to cool it for a while. Edmund understood. He knew that he had spooked him; knew that he would never see Alfred the lawyer again. But it was all for the best, Edmund thought. He had grown tired of Alfred anyway, and thus exited his first homosexual affair with the same sort of mechanical detachment with which he’d entered into it.

The urge to kill, however, had been strong—the strongest yet with a human being. Edmund didn’t know why, and wondered whether Alfred sensed it, too. Yet something had held him back. What? He couldn’t put his finger on it right away, and only after he thought about it long and hard did he find the answer. An answer that surprised him.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,”
he heard his grandfather say.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”

“The Army or prison,” Claude Lambert said. “Those are pretty much your options now, Eddie.”

Edmund looked at his cheekbone in the pickup truck’s side mirror. The swelling had gone down some, but his face would still bruise up nicely. The punch had been hard—he got blindsided by the other guy’s friend—but in the end, Edmund had gotten the best of the both of them. He always did now.

“The way things is going,” said his grandfather, turning off the highway, “I give you a year before you end up killing someone like your Uncle James done.”

The old man was pushing eighty years old, but still it bothered Edmund how slowly he was driving.

“You don’t like me fighting anymore then?” Edmund asked.

“I suppose it’s partly my fault,” Claude Lambert said, ignoring him. “Taught you how to fight but not how to control it—didn’t think about that part of the equation. I reckon the Army will take care of that. It’s where James had been planning on going, too, but … well, you know what happened there.”

The fight in the bar had been Edmund’s doing. He went there after he asked his Uncle James what really happened on the afternoon he murdered Danny Gibbs.

“I reckon it’s simple,” James Lambert said from the other side of the visitor’s glass. “Sometimes you just gotta to do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

“A higher power?” Edmund asked. “You mean like the General?”

“Don’t know nothing ’bout no General. But I reckon what you’re saying is right if you was in the Army or something.”

Suddenly, Edmund felt emptier and more alone than he had felt in a long time.

“
C’est mieux d’oublier
,” he said impulsively, and waited for a reaction.

James Lambert was silent for a long time—his expression like stone.

“You best not be visiting me no more,” he said finally, looking him straight in the eye for the first time in eighteen years. Then he motioned for the guard and left.

That was the last time Edmund ever saw him.

He drove around afterward for hours and ended up at an eighteen-and-over bar in Greenville. He’d purchased a tube of Chapstick first and coated the back of his hands so he’d be able to wash off the
X
with which the doorman would mark him as underage. Edmund did so in the men’s room, stepped up to the bar, ordered three shots of Southern Comfort, one right after the other, and then just started swinging.

“You’re lucky the bar and them two other guys you floored ain’t gonna press charges, Eddie,” said his grandfather, parking the truck. “A good thing you ordered those shots, I reckon, too. Underage drinking and losing licenses—no one wants this to get any bigger than it already has.”

Edmund was silent as he looked up at the sign for the Army recruiting center.

“Sometimes you just gotta do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

A sign—what he had been searching for all along?

“But the Army will fix you up right, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “Best thing for your head now, I reckon.”

Searching.

But drifting now, too.

Basic training, then the assignment to Air Assault at Fort Campbell. More assignments here, more assignments there. Commendations and promotions—E2 up through E5. Sometimes Sergeant Lambert was with women, sometimes he was with men, but the drifting, the new places and new faces helped with the searching; made him forget about it completely for weeks at a time.

His grandfather had been right. The Army kept him focused; kept the fighting in his belly; kept the fantasies of doing to his lovers what he had done to his animals out of his head. Even when he was with the men, for a long time it seemed to Edmund that the only animal he ever thought about was the golden, seal-tailed lion on the crest of his 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment patch.

Perhaps that was why he took the ancient cylinder.

Edmund came upon the stash of stolen Iraqi artifacts in October of 2003, while on patrol in Tal Afar, a city north of
Mosul. The 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment was making a big push to secure the city for the upcoming elections, and Edmund was in charge of a door-to-door sweep to root out insurgents. He killed one man inside the house where he found the cylinder; he’d thought at first the house’s occupants were terrorists, then later realized the two remaining men were part of a smuggling ring.

The house secure, the men arrested, for the briefest of moments Edmund was left alone with the open crate. He didn’t know what the tiny cylindrical object on the top was at first, but knew it had to be valuable because of the other objects beneath it—stone tablets, figurines, a solid-gold jeweled bowl just like the bowl the soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division tried to smuggle back to Fort Stewart.

Edmund had heard about that little incident back in May; knew he could get in big trouble if he was caught stealing, too. But that had been at the start of the war; that had been before the contacts had been put in place in Qatar—contacts who were willing to pay cash on the spot for stolen ancient Iraqi artifacts.

Or so Edmund had heard.

Yes, as hard as it was to get that kind of stuff back to the United States, word on the street was a man with the right connections could make a lot of money in Qatar if he was willing to take the risk. And although Edmund Lambert had never even stolen a candy bar in his life, when he picked up the tiny stone cylinder and saw the lion heads that looked so much like the lion on his 187th patch, impulsively he pocketed it before his soldiers returned.

Afterwards, on his way back to the base, Edmund realized that for the first time since his enlistment his actions had not been his own—a feeling that reminded him so much of those days back on the tobacco farm in North Carolina. And when he was alone in the latrine, when he studied the carving more closely and figured out what the lions on the
cylinder were
doing
, well, Edmund Lambert simply could not believe his eyes.

At first he didn’t know the identity of the bearded man with the body of the winged lion; didn’t know why the lion-headed men were presenting him with impaled bodies, either. And although Edmund had seen similar objects during his time in Iraq, he wasn’t quite sure what the little cylinder was until he looked it up on the Internet. An ancient Babylonian seal, he discovered, most likely depicting the god Nergal.

And, after extensive research, Edmund concluded that the winged god to whom the impaled bodies were being presented
had
to be Nergal. The Raging Prince, the Babylonians called him; the Furious One; Lord of the Underworld—part man, part winged lion—just like Edmund himself in his 187th Infantry Regiment uniform.

The lion and the wings on the
seal
—just like his patch. Yes, it was all connected somehow. Edmund could feel it.

He figured the ancient artifact would fetch him a lot of money if he dumped it off in Qatar, but he had no desire to part with it—he didn’t tell anyone about it and studied the seal whenever he was alone. Eventually, Edmund was able to close his eyes and see the carved figures in as much detail as if they were right there before him. He kept the seal on his person always; carried it in his pocket for months while on patrol. His good luck charm, he thought; it got him out of a number of scrapes when others only a few feet away bit it for good.

But toward the end of January 2004, a week before he was scheduled to come home, Edmund Lambert’s luck changed—for better or for worse, he wasn’t sure at first.

His grandfather was dead.

Edmund spoke with Rally on the telephone, and received the news calmly, with little or no emotion, as Rally explained how he found the old man facedown in the cellar.

“Looks like he drank too much of that stuff,” he said, his voice tired and strained with tears. “Heart just gave out is what the coroner is saying.”

“I see,” Edmund said.

“The sheriff was there, too, Eddie, and—”

Rally was suddenly quiet.

“You still there?” Edmund asked. “Rally?”

“Yeah,” Rally said finally. “I’m still here, Eddie. But do you know if the Army tapes these calls?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but, well, all your grandfather’s stuff in the cellar—in the workroom—you know what stuff I’m talking about?”

“The stuff for the farm experiments?”

“Well, yeah, but … you see, that’s what he told you all that stuff was for when you was growing up. So you wouldn’t tell no one, and so your ma and grandma wouldn’t worry and give us shit. But, you see, Eddie, that stuff down there we was making for other reasons.”

“The moonshine, you mean?”

“Yeah, the moonshine was part of it. But there were two different batches of the moonshine, mainly. One, you drank for fun. Well, you remember. You seen us drink it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, we called it moonshine, but it wasn’t really moonshine the way most other people make it. It was something else, from a recipe that’d been in your family before they moved to North Carolina. The other batch of that stuff was kind of like that, at its base, you know, but mainly different in that it was stronger and had different effects when you drank it. And, well, let’s just say you could use it for more important reasons other than just drinking it for fun. We’d been close to getting the formula right for a long time. But before we could market it, we had to have the right patents to protect ourselves.”

“Rally—”

“Some of that stuff, the ingredients for the second batch, I mean, was illegal, Eddie. A lot of it we’d already used up—and we ain’t nearly been doing it as much as we used to—but, when I found the old man, well, there was still some of the illegal stuff that I needed to get rid of. I woulda dragged the old man upstairs and put him in the den so the sheriff wouldn’t have found it, but I’m too weak now, Eddie. And they found the stuff in his system. I mean, I got rid of what I could—Christ, Eddie, eighty fucking years old and I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I can’t breathe good no more and my back don’t work and I’m—”

“Rally, calm—”

“—worried it’s only a matter of time before they trace it back to me. I thought it best to leave everything else, all the equipment and books and stuff, so they could see he cooked it up and done it to himself—”

“Rally, calm down. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Look, Eddie,” the old man said, exhausted, “I really don’t want to talk about this on the phone—especially you working for the government. When you coming home?”

“I’m scheduled to process out in a week.”

“You can’t get here no earlier?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Eddie, I’m only telling you about all this so you won’t be shocked when you get home. I thought the old man would’ve told you himself by now.”

“I understand,” Edmund said. “You just keep him on ice until I get back to you.”

He hung up feeling irritated and confused, but at the same time curiously empty. He supposed he had loved his grandfather, but he never told him so. If he did love him, it was a love colored with fear. Where the fear came from, Edmund was never sure. Claude Lambert never laid a hand on him;
was never violent, never even raised his voice at him—not even when he got kicked off the baseball team.

Indeed, looking back, it suddenly occurred to Edmund that after his fight with the catcher Claude Lambert never touched him
at all
; never hugged him or tousled his hair like he used to when he was a boy. It was almost as if his grandfather was afraid of him, too. True, sometimes when his grandfather had spent too much time in the cellar, he would squish Edmund’s cheeks together and stick his finger in his mouth and feel around his teeth. Edmund asked him why once, and all his grandfather would say was that he was checking to see if he was healthy. But for some reason Edmund didn’t believe him.

And perhaps that was it, Edmund thought. Maybe the fear of his grandfather came from the knowledge that he would never really know the man who had become his guardian. Of course, there were plenty of things about Edmund that Claude Lambert didn’t know, either. And often Edmund wondered if that was where the searching came from—a quest for the thing that would finally close the distance between them.