The November Criminals (11 page)

“Hey, man,” I started to babble, because this was moving into zones declared off-limits by our agreement.

I don’t mean that we were about to have some stupid
makeout session
. But we just try to be adult about everything between us. Keep it free of entanglements. And certain moments imperil the agreement. But the whole built-up nonsense of the day, of everything associated with the whole enterprise, had come charging into the open, blatting and gibbering. I was
so
exhausted. She must have been too. So can you blame us? We’d driven out to this dark little
nowhere
with a map, a brick, and a gun—cavemen, or not cavemen, I guess, but total primitives. Can you blame us for almost violating the basic terms of our association? So I opened my mouth and said, “Hey, man,” forcing a rich, witty tone into the words, to prepare her for I don’t know what piece of offensive sarcasm. You know, to wreck the mood?

Digger beat me to it. She put her finger to her pursed lips. Lights were coming on in the house. Which was weird, because it was
night
and there hadn’t been any lights on before. But hey, who knows what animates the minds of dumb hicks, right? Anyway, the lights were coming on, one at a time. The tenants were just waking up. Digger gestured with her head. She had picked up the gun, and she looked like a
squad
leader motioning me into combat or something. I hefted the brick and stalked out into the dim yard, trying to choose a window. I wasn’t
afraid
. I was just calculating what would be the worst blow. I also kind of secretly hoped I’d hit Lorriner with the brick. All I could see, though, were unclear shadows moving around behind the curtains, which were blue and printed with green-headed ducks flying in endless fascist ranks. There were three windows within what I figured was throwing distance, so I set my legs and hurled. With two hands, a swaying, lolloping throw. The brick rotated stolidly as it flew toward the middle window. The one I’d aimed at. Happiness, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe the purest. The glass broke, with the universal confused chime breaking glass makes. The brick thumped into the house, pushing aside the curtain enough for me to catch a flicker of the room: a blue-glowing television, or maybe an aquarium? Whatever. I was already dashing back into the pine stand to wait and watch.

“I can’t believe you
did
it, I can’t believe you
did
it,” Digger moaned in glee. At this precise instant, the security lights clipped to the rambler’s eaves blared on. And we saw
(holy fuck!)
the front door flap open and disgorge the great Michael Lorriner himself.

He was indeed short, as his nickname would suggest—my height. Round and stodgy-looking. His face was as white as the missing moon, and disfigured with those thick-framed institutional glasses? The ones that give you the ape face of a complete retard? He was wearing a black Baltimore Orioles shirt, beaten-up jeans, and white clunky sneakers. Childish in general appearance. This was a disappointment. I mean, I had this whole
theory
. I wanted to be able to look him in the eyes. To
know
. To see that determination, that precision of intent. Whatever it was that had allowed him to march into Stubb’s and execute three people. It
upset
me, the way he carried himself. A weakling, a nonentity. Then he started talking, and the tenor of the whole occasion changed.

“Someone out there? I hear yew, yew dirty fucker,” he yelled. His voice, though loud, was shockingly even. Free of anger, you know? He might have been yelling for someone to pass the salt. It
was
the same voice from the phone call. That, at least, was satisfying. “That yew, Jewboy? Get off my property! I got my
rights!
I got my
rights!
Fuckin’ Jew.” And then he was off, stumping around the side of the house to check and see if the brick thrower might be hiding there. His walk was bowlegged and graceless. It reminded me of my own clumsiness. He was sort of
waddling
. Though he wasn’t even all that fat, just chubby. And this was hilarious, I mean his
duckwalk
. I now had to clench my teeth to stop myself from laughing. Not even the fact that Lorriner had figured out it was me made a difference. It was
too
perfect, you know? Some guy in an Orioles shirt? What the fuck? The new laughs were making my diaphragm seize up. Digger pincered my hand, and I saw that she was fighting back laughter again, too, and we crouched there, linked in the semidark, watching Lorriner amble in fury around his flat-roofed house. A straw man wearing overalls slumped head-on-knees in a rocking chair next to the front door, and a plastic pink flamingo stood hammered into soil. You’d have been in a shit-fit of laughter, too, if you’d been there. “Come on, yew dirty fucker,” Lorriner bellowed. “I know my
rights
. Yew fucking Jew!” The lights in the lone neighboring house, the one right at the turnoff, came on, and another male voice screamed, “Shut up! Wud you shut up!” “No, I GOT my rights,” Lorriner yelled again.

So that was it! We’d thrown the brick; we’d seen the man himself. Done what we’d planned. Instead of righteous anger, there was this slack-muscled suppressed laughter. Digger and I decided to stay. Maybe it was the afterhaze of the comedy. Maybe it stemmed from the simple fact that human beings can be relied on to make as many retarded mistakes as possible. Maybe just because he looked so
harmless. This
was Kevin’s murderer, this
ordinary
guy—we could beat him! I knew that. I remember
thinking
that. I didn’t know what this victory would consist of, but I knew we would win. In the end it doesn’t matter
why
. We stayed, in the cold dirt, fallen needles rustling garrulously beneath us.

“I bet it’s like
hard
for him now. I bet he’s all terrified of getting caught. You know?” Digger muttered. It made sense. She has a real grip on the practical side of things. So we huddled there, freezing and expectant. Lorriner did not disappoint. With a final shout of “Jewboy!” he careened back into his house and out again right away, but better equipped. He’d put on a nylon jacket, bright teal, against the cold, which seemed much worse out here in farm country. The jacket made his moony face even moonier. In one hand he was holding a long black cop flashlight, the kind you read about in articles on police brutality. In the other, a racket of some kind. A tennis racket, but smaller. For badminton, I guess.

“Oh, come
on.”
Digger snorted. “You still out there, Jewboy?” Lorriner advanced, shouting, to the edge of the light perimeter, and started hosing his flashlight beam in wild loops across his dark yard. It grazed Digger’s face, the soft bulge of her cheek, and she slammed herself back against her tree, wrapping her torso in her own arms. “Yew dirty fucker! Come on out! Fuckin’ Jewboy!” I won’t lie: the slur got to me. I’m not stone-souled. And—in this blinding and glorious instant—I
knew
what I had to do. Doubt-free. I emitted a growl. Get it? Like a dog! And then some hoarse barks. Digger stopped embracing herself and joined in. Her dog voice was high and clear; mine was in the tenor range. Our imitations—which must have been terrible—set the neighbor off again, begging and begging everyone to shut up. To
please
shut up. “Wud you please, please just shut up!” “Get off my property,” Lorriner answered, waving his flashlight and badminton racket in loose semaphore. For at least a minute or two, the misty beam careening all over the place, fence, straw man, treetops. Vanishing into the sky. Digger and I kept up our howls and yodels. They got painful. But I couldn’t have stopped, some
joyous momentum
was driving me on; we barked and barked, high and low, till our voices went croaky and we had whipped ourselves back into a fit of comic hysteria. And, throwing down the racket but retaining the flashlight, Lorriner stomped around to the rear of his house again and vanished from our view. We’d
beaten
him! I’d known we would. Digger released my hand. We unbent our aching knees.

And a bass animal voice, a real voice this time, started belling and screaming. “Fuck,” whispered Digger, as though in echo: she figured it out before me. I remained clueless until, announced by the light percussion of a screen door, Lorriner’s dog came racing toward our clot of trees. Lorriner had released it in response to our barking. It looked as big as a steroidal horse, and its crimson pelt had this weaponlike gleam, and its ropy saliva trailed the brownish grass stubble it was loping across. Digger and I took off in a single motion, running blind into the cover of deeper trees farther back on the property. Lorriner started bellowing the word
Murphy
. The dog’s name, I realized as we ran. “Murphy! Geddem! Murphy! Geddem! Fuckin’ Jewboy! Geddem! Mur-feeeeeee!” he screamed, pumping his arms and bringing his white child’s fists down to crush some invisible foe to dust. Digger and I stopped, panting, and pressed ourselves against a huge royal oak. I don’t know why we thought this would help. The dog curved out from the glaring scrim of light and galloped straight at us, his shouts increasing in genuine rage. “Shut up, shut up, shut
up,”
the neighbor at the road head chanted. Lorriner kept screaming, “Geddem.” The world was whirling to an end. I was shit-scared. All the flatulent confidence Lorriner’s physical appearance had inspired was gone. And there was this monstrous
dog
torpedoing at me.

Remember what I said about Digger being a natural? With the gun, I mean. Well, imagine what a natural would do in this situation. Being a natural at something, anyway, means that you
need
to do it. As opposed to
wanting
to do it. I’m not saying Digger was
eager
to use the gun. But she
did
bring it. She’d let David hand it over without comment, she’d fired it at the Dump and destroyed her target. All of those are signs of consent, right? Now, given that we were about to be mauled by this giant death-camp Labrador, she acted like a natural. No one can blame her. I don’t. It’s even
more
proof, I’d say, that she’s marked out for an über-memorable life. So I stood there paralyzed, and Digger dropped into her shooter’s crouch, forearms wavering, brows drawn.

Then the gun went off. Have you ever seen any living thing get shot? I doubt it. I hadn’t, either, until just then. Nothing similar had ever come within the compass of my experience before. Absolutely nothing. I live in a crappy city. There’s no need to worry about the violent death of animals in a city. And it
was
violent, in the worst sense of the word. Maybe the relative helplessness of the animal made it more disgusting: it had no understanding of its situation. Either before or after the shot—which converted it into something inanimate, except for a few final quivers of life. The dog jerked and fell, legs splayed, like it had run into some invisible obstruction. The howls of enraged pursuit stopped. It
sobbed
. You could hear a light glug of escaping fluid, a sucking whistle, undercutting its moans. Other dogs began barking, in sympathy with their fallen comrade or whatever. All over the immediate vicinity.

Those empty-brained little sycophants! Where had they come from? Where had they been when
we
were barking? There weren’t even any other houses! Lorriner rushed to the dying animal and kneeled to shield it from further injury, with his whole nylon-clad torso. Bending as though in reverence. Maybe it was reverence. Who knows? He was speechless, at least. Silent as concrete. Digger was already striding out from our thicket, out into the glow of the security lights.
Covering
Lorriner with the gun the whole time. So, even with all this confusion surrounding me, what else could I do but follow? Murmuring, “Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck,” as I ran.

XI
.

T
HE NEXT TWO MINUTES
I have no contiguous memory of. Just chopped-up isolated moments in series. Life had been replaced by still photos, or medieval tapestries or something. You know? The ones where the perspective is all wrong, or it’s not adult perspective, and everything is the same size, and everyone seems to be standing in the air, even if their feet are firmly planted on that tan, ruined ground, and they all have those expressions of empty piety on their faces. Never a smile, never a grimace. They’re content to live forever in their absurd poses. So: Image One: darkness of the yard. Image Two: Lorriner standing there with his dying dog lifted in both arms. Image Three: all of us in this awkward circle, nobody saying anything. Image Four: a procession. Lorriner first. Digger is frozen at the sill of the door. She’s stumbled without making any noise, but Lorriner hasn’t noticed. Image Five: warm pear-colored light of the indoors. These
clean cuts
with nothing connecting the images. Except their stark contrast.

Time must have continued flowing by in its boring and inexorable way, though. We
did
end up in Lorriner’s house. And the laws of logic or whatever still obtained. He
had
to let us in. We were armed. I can’t believe I just wrote that:
armed
. I blinked and squinted to right my vision inside. Lorriner was carrying Murphy forklifted in two arms, as you would a dead child or a rolled heavy carpet, and there were broad swaths of blackish, viscous blood on the breast of his ugly jacket. Digger had recovered from her stumble, which I thought was awesome. I’d astonished myself by managing to not fuck any of this up, so far. We were
on the right track
, or whatever, to use one of Mr. Vanderleun’s expressions. Despite the jerkiness of my mental record, everything was going according to plan.

The house we’d forced our way into was hilarious. I’ve already gone over the details of the outside part. Which might lead you to expect beer cans scattered everywhere inside, and carpets stinking of dog piss. Whatever rural squalor you want to imagine. But the place, first of all, was über-neat. Not a scrap of garbage, not a single disordered article. The living room was crammed with furniture, all carved stiffly from this heavy black wood. You know what I mean: knuckled spheres at all the joints, each piece weighing half a ton. Heavy crimson cushions. He must have bought it in a single go from some furniture barn. They have a lot, out in his area. No bookcase, no television, no rug, just a pseudo-royal two-ton sofa, two armchairs, and a coffee table. The blue light I’d seen outside came from an empty, totally clean aquarium. I remember one piece of decoration: a poster of a skier in mid-jump, launched by a ramp resembling a single sure ink stroke, vaulted high above the speckled crowd, arms rigid, legs rigid … There was a smell of chocolate. I swear to fucking God.

And Lorriner was pale, paler than before. I could watch him at leisure now, shaking with the effort of holding up the dog. His face had this doughy, unfinished look. Or not unfinished.
Unfinished
is an overused descriptor for faces, anyway. But too cautious, too constrained, the work of someone second-rate. A type of handiwork I am familiar with. A look of petty alarm smeared across it. What some rabbit-gazed embezzler would wear at his arrest. Murphy’s sobs had quieted, and the start-stop gush of blood and fluid from the horse-size brisket (that’s the chest part of a dog) had stopped. Even though I have no clinical training, I knew the dog was dead. Lorriner seemed to know it too, because he started snuffling. Just two or three times, and then he mastered it. With a brief reddening of his throat from the effort. I was beginning to have my doubts. But Digger’s presence assuaged them. Or maybe it was just the gun. She was wagging it at him, now, telling him, “It’s okay to put the dog down. It’s okay. You can sit down now. We just want to ask you some questions.” She spoke with a perfect and unhurried cadence.

“Her nayme’s Murphy,” Lorriner told us in his reedy, light-stepping voice. Knowing the dog’s gender nauseated me.

“Yer that fuckin’ Jewboy?” he asked me, still supporting the corpse of his Labrador. “Man, yew fuckin’
people
. Like what the
fuck’s
like the matter with yew fuckin’ people.”

“I mean, like it has nothing to do with
that,”
I replied. What cutting intelligence! The bank-clerk’s alarm had fled Lorriner’s face. He was back on familiar ground or whatever. Jews are useful in that way. Providing a stable starting point for all
kinds
of rhetoric.

“Can I like sit down?”

“She like already
said
you could,” I answered. He lowered himself, with labor, onto the throne-size sofa, and arranged Murphy’s body on the coffee table. One of her legs was vibrating. To make up for my earlier failure, I added: “You fuckneck, I mean, you fucking redneck piece of
shit.”
This sounded fake. This look of mortification pinched Lorriner’s face. I expected him to get pissed. Kind of insulting that he did not, I guess. Some people just can’t deliver insults with any authority. Even Digger, in my peripheral vision, was somehow expressing embarrassment and disapproval.

“Do yawl like want
munny?
Cuz I have munny.” Lorriner smiled now. Which threw me. I mean, how does a guy with a gun pointed at his head smile? A guilty guy, no less. “I have like three-four thousand right here. In
cash.”
He panted the last word. “I have like other stuff, too. Like good
shit
, mayn.” I knew he meant drugs of some kind. Pot probably, also—given the rural location—meth, which is a going concern in Maryland. Another of the many reasons why it is the worst state. He directed all these offers to Digger. I wanted to tell him what a mistake this was. In case you haven’t already figured this out, she’s unbribable. I mean if the rest of her personality, flaws and all, is anything to go on. So she did not hesitate. Not even a fractional pause. The two of them hovered, eyeing each other. Lorriner, even seated, projected
injured dignity
. Fucking incomprehensible to me. Digger had this
clinical scrutiny
in her eyes. I might as well have been one of Lorriner’s eighty-pound ottomans, gauged by my involvement in this situation.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

“Mayn, I like
did
it because you fuckin’ people thank you like own the
damn world!”
This was uttered with whistling smugness, a complacent body jerk, a tweak of his dull hair. You’re thinking I was angry. Angry at Lorriner and angry at being ignored. I was not. I couldn’t stop clenching and fluttering my hands, because they were itching for a weapon, not to use but to hold. I couldn’t ask Digger for
hers
. She was sitting down, now, lowering her insubstantial ass
(white girl ass
, the argot goes) into Lorriner’s heavy armchair. Her movement made me feel even more awkward. I would have launched into some diatribe. But Digger spoke again. She telepathically knew, apparently, that I was about to break into stupid speech.

“I don’t mean throwing the brick through the window.” She sounded calm and tired, nothing more. “I mean Kevin Broadus. Why did you kill him? Was it because he insulted you at that party? Because you like got in a fistfight? Is that really a good reason to kill somebody?”

“Mayn, I
don’t
—” Lorriner began. Digger cut him off. Which she never does knowingly. She
always
waits for the other person to finish.

“If you lie I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you. I don’t care, Mike.” Calling him by his first name—amazing, right?

“Yeah, she like
means
it, man,” I informed him. I sat down now, too, with vicarious ease. Lorriner’s round mouth hung open, his silent, stupid, ragged mouth. He tried a new tactic. You have to admire his adaptability.

“Look, mayn, do you all know how like
duuuumb
you all are being? They have like
rill
cops here, not like those duuuumb niggers you git down in the city.” He had his old tone back: master of the domain. “I mean, like if they ketch yawl it’s gawna be like rill bad. I mean like if you leave now, I won’t call ’em, I swayer. They’re not
like
those dumb niggers down in the city. You unnerstand?” Yes, he had that
tone
. But he was flutter-blinking now. Sweat emerged in pearls from the wide pores of his forehead.

“Don’t use that word, please,” Digger instructed him.

“No, look, mayn, like if yawl leave
now
I won’t like
do
anything, awl right? Is that awl right?”

Digger sighed and steadied her grip.

“Please tell us why.” She’d closed her eyes halfway to draw a better bead on his skull.

“Yeah, keep your like bullshit to yourself, man,” I echoed.

“Addison,” said Digger. Not without kindness. I shut up. Lorriner hawked back what must have been a
colossal
gob of mucus, to judge from the sound. Then there was this huge melodic clatter, and everyone screamed at one another in surprise.

Now, I know you’ve been waiting for our
massive fuckup
this whole time. Since the gun appeared. This isn’t it, though it could have been. We were all über–freaked out by the sound, coming just when it did. Lorriner made a lunge, balked by the corpse-bearing coffee table, and I grabbed the iron-hard arms of my chair. It was the type of explosion that results in someone getting shot, in these situations. A flurry of chaotic motion, aggressive noise. But Digger did not fire. She’s
that
cool-handed. The noise—it became apparent after our initial burst of terror—came from a dim corner, where a
cuckoo clock
was exploding into action, sending out a bluish knight through high wooden doors to chase a reddish dragon around a heavy, cheap-looking battlement. It played an infuriating song, and then chimed eleven times. Was it that late already? The burst of terror the noise inspired in me died out. Lorriner’s breath came short and high and the pearled sweat on his face had spread to an even sheen. Digger kept the gun steady. Murphy’s right rear leg kicked and kicked in the contractions of arriving rigor, scritching against the wood. We represented a whole microcosm of
vibrant activity
. I didn’t blame Lorriner for taking so long to consider his answer. I mean, even murderers possess reason, right? Then the unique stench of human feces flowed up into our faces. I thought
I’d
shit myself, and shouted some inchoate noise of fear and regret.

I realized it was coming from Lorriner, who had also started weeping. He’d shit himself out of shock at the garish melody of the chimes. Writing it down, it sounds
sensible
and maybe even unavoidable. But still: he shit himself and started weeping.
Weeping
, ladies and gentlemen. A man voids his bowels and weeps. That’s what all human purpose
comes
to. Fuck! You could still detect the under-aroma of chocolate that had greeted us, which made the whole situation
impossible
.

“Are you like a
clock
enthusiast?” I crowed in my utter perplexity.

“Addison,” Digger repeated, in an exasperated tone.

“Look, like I ain’t never, I mean, like it’s just like I don’t
know
, mayn, where yawl like
heard
—” Lorriner stopped for breath. “Just please don’t, mayn, I like never even
knew
that boy.” He was
hyperventilating
. “Did like Noel tell yawl that? Noel Bradley? Yawl like
work
for him?” I realized he was, at most, a year older than we were. How the fuck did he have this absurd house? And why? Where were his parents? “No, mayn, like no no no no no,” Lorriner keened.

“Mike,” Digger said, in that same sweet, low voice. “Shut up about Noel. Just don’t lie, okay?”

“Why’d yawl like kill my dawg, mayn? How can I like believe what yawl like
say
now?” His hands were up, as though he could swat away the bullet when Digger decided to shoot. You think I was afraid, too. But I wasn’t. Just
interested
. Fucked-up, right?

“No, man, no no like
please
, mayn, like
please.”
Have you ever heard anyone begging for their life? It wasn’t even clear to me that Lorriner was in real danger. The astonishment provoked by all of that night’s anarchy kind of
dominated
every other emotion. We were holding someone at
gunpoint
. Have you ever tried
that
? It banishes other considerations. The idea of victory? Gone. Plans for vengeance? Double gone. I became a helpless retard, confronted with all this. “Like
please
, mayn,” Lorriner was babbling, “I
swayer
I didn’t. I
swayer
I didn’t. Like
please
. Mayn, like do you work for Noel? Cuz I can pay you whatever he’s paying you, I swear. I didn’t
dew
it. I swayer. I didn’t.” He sounded … resigned. I guess this is how interrogations
work
. There’s a point at which our fear of death vanishes, and beyond that point is the truth. Either that or permanent silence. Lorriner was not the silent type.
“Pleeeease,”
he throbbed out. He steepled his hands. He was mouthing a prayer. Holy fuck.