Relentless (27 page)

The air is cool and the light is sharp, but by late afternoon, the edge wears off the sun, whereafter the day is blue and gold and magical during the drive out from the city.

Twilight distills blue into purple, reduces purple to crimson, by the time the family gathers for a celebration at the spacious farmhouse Uncle Ewen has bought and restored.

His forty-acre property by the river is not a working farm. A large freehold has been subdivided into smaller parcels.

The river runs red under the stain of sunset. Ripples, whorls, and lapping wavelets imply that exotic forms of life swarm under the surface.

My uncle has bought the place to have a weekend refuge from the city. As a man who plans ahead, he intends to retire to these fields and gentle hills in two decades.

In the dining-room fireplace, the andirons are brass griffins. They have wings and seem to be flying toward me, out of the fire.

My father, Ewen, and Kenton own a numismatics business. They buy and sell collectible antique coins as well as contemporary gold coins and bars desired for the protection they offer against inflation.

The brothers also have expanded into a proprietary line of gold and silver jewelry. They find good profits with every endeavor.

As I wander through the party, an unusual grandfather clock in the living room enchants me. Carved from mahogany, a monkey climbs the cabinet. His long arms, reaching up, encircle the face, while the fingers of his hands entwine above the twelve. His tail is the pendulum.

“Time is a monkey,” Uncle Ewen tells me. “Full of mischief, unpredictable, quick as a cat, with a nasty bite.”

At six, I have no idea what he means, but I like his words and their enigmatic quality.

Ewen, Kenton, and my father are the kind of men who view success as a reason to share. The entire family is lifted on their shoulders. Every employee is a relative, and enjoys a profit-sharing plan.

Only Tray is not part of the enterprise. He lacks the sense of responsibility for a position with his brothers. Besides, having no interest in real work, he would turn them down if made an offer.

Tray remains out of jail in spite of scrapes with the law. As will be discovered, he operates an illegal methamphetamine lab.

Ewen’s housewarming draws all the family except Tray, who has not been invited, and my mother’s sister, Edith, who lives nine hundred miles away.

Counting Ewen, his wife, Nora, and their daughter, Colleen, thirty-nine family members are present, including children.

An hour after sunset, Tray arrives unexpectedly. He is so estranged from the family that none of them has seen him in six months. No one imagines he knows about the gathering.

I am in the front hall when he knocks.

Through a moon-and-cloud pattern of clear and frosted leaded glass, I recognize Tray on the front porch. Seeing me, he puts his eye to the clear moon and winks.

I open the door to him.

“Cubby,” he says, “clean up your act, kid. You’ve got a string of snot hangin’ out of your nose.”

When I wipe at my nose with a sleeve, he laughs, plants a damp icy palm against my face, and shoves me aside so hard I almost fall.

Closing the door, he brings the gun out from under his long coat: a compact, fully automatic rifle, essentially a short-barreled submachine gun capable of single-shot or continuous-fire action.

He grabs me by the hair and pulls me with him into the archway between hall and living room. Then he shoves me forward while he remains straddling the two spaces.

People see the weapon and shy back, but they do not at once try to flee, as though openly acknowledging the threat of violence will precipitate it.

The guests are distributed throughout the four main rooms of the lower floor, but Uncle Ewen happens to be in the living room when his errant younger brother appears.

“Hewey,” Tray says, “how’re they hangin’?”

Ewen remains cool. “What do you want, Tray? What do you need?”

“I don’t know, Hewey. Maybe … two million in coin inventory?”

As it unfolds, Tray has heard a rumor—or has fantasized—about his brothers splitting their inventory between the walk-in safe at the shop and a secret safe in Ewen’s newly restored farmhouse.

In truth, their inventory is only a fraction of what he imagines it to be, and the safe at the shop contains all their holdings.

Tray professes not to believe Ewen on either point. A short discussion ensues between them.

I cannot take my eyes off the gun. The weapon gleams like a magic object, like a sword once frozen in stone but pulled free, except the sorcery in this case is a dark variety.

Yet I do not realize that it might be used. The weapon is an object of wonder, magical because of its appearance alone, and does not need to function in order to cast a spell.

Because of the through-the-house music system and many lively conversations, the guests elsewhere do not hear the quiet drama in the living room. They do not remain out of the loop for long, because Tray soon makes some noise.

Kenton’s sixteen-year-old daughter, my cousin Davena, stands beside an armchair.

After calling Ewen a liar, Tray says, “Hey, Davena, you’re all grown up and pretty. When did that happen?”

Davena smiles nervously, not sure what to say. When she smiles, a dimple forms in her right cheek. Her ears are delicate and smooth, like blown glass.

Tray shoots her twice, and she falls dead over the footstool, her face in the carpet and covered by her hair, bottom in the air, skirt tossed up and panties revealed.

Although the word “dignity” is not in my vocabulary yet, I know this is wrong. I want to pull her skirt down, lay her on the floor, on her back, and smooth the hair away from her face.

Strangely, I do not think of her as dead, not right away. That is a recognition from which I rebel.

I do not want Davena to look foolish or clumsy, because she is in fact smart and graceful. No matter how much I feel that I should attend to her, arrange her in a more suitable fashion, I cannot move.

The gunfire draws shouts of surprise from other rooms.

Some people try to flee.

But Tray has come with two friends. They kick through the back door into the kitchen, through the side door into the dining room.

People scream, but the farmhouse is far from any neighbor.

My father, also in the living room, must realize the time for effective resistance is quickly fading. He seizes an eighteen-inch bronze statue of a farm boy and his dog, and rushes Tray, winding up the art work to swing it when he is close enough.

Tray shoots him in the face. And shoots him twice again as he lies dead on the floor.

I watch it happen, turn away.

Resorting to the magical thinking that children use to cope with trauma, I tell myself that my father will be okay until the ambulance arrives. The medics will rush him and Cousin Davena to the hospital, where both will be revived in the nick of time—revived, healed, home soon.

In the nick of time. The right thing always happens in the nick of time. Every storybook says so.

No one goes out through any window before the three gunmen have control of the residence.

They herd the family into the living room and dining room. They make everyone sit either on the furniture or on the floor.

Tray goes to work on Ewen again, demanding the location of the secret safe, the fortune in coins that does not exist.

Ewen offers to take Tray to the brothers’ store and open that—the only—safe.

Tray thinks the risk is not worth taking when a Midas trove is hidden in this very house.

I am not listening to much of their argument, and I am so young, with the limited perceptions of an ordinary child, yet I sense Tray does not really believe in the secret treasure room. This is a story he invented to induce his buddies to come there with him.

In truth he has one and only one intention: to kill us all. Some atavistic part of my brain, afire with primitive wisdom older than I am, brings me finally to the recognition that two are dead and that others will be killed soon.

With Davena and my father murdered, the men who came with Tray have nothing to lose. As accomplices and kidnappers, they are already candidates for death sentences or life in prison.

Later, police will determine that Tray and the other two were amped on methamphetamine—and in a mood to make a sport of violence.

In frustration, Tray uses the butt of his weapon to smash Ewen’s face, then shoots him in the stomach.

By this time, I am no longer turned away from what is happening. I am so afraid, but for some reason I feel that I must watch.

Tray no longer has any interest in the secret trove of inventory that he has known does not exist. He is Fate, and exhibiting the cold enthusiasm of a serpent going egg to egg in a henhouse, he moves deliberately from one seated relative to the next.

He greets each of them by name, sometimes calls them an ugly word or makes an obscene suggestion, sometimes offers a compliment. Regardless of what he says, he shoots each of them to death.

Two curious things happen in that farmhouse, and this is the first: Even after the initial deaths, there are enough people in the living room to rush Tray and overpower him before he can shoot them all, yet no one makes a move against him. They see him kill each of them in the order they are seated, and those still alive weep or beg, or sit in a silent daze, but they offer no resistance.

We see this occur on other occasions in the twenty-eight years since the Durant killings, but on that night it is a new phenomenon.

Are the victims so committed to a reasoned disbelief in the existence of Evil that, when face-to-face with its agent, they are incapable of acknowledging their error?

Or are they capable of recognizing Evil but unable to believe there is a power opposed to it that stands ready to give them the strength— and a reason—to survive?

Perhaps it is the nurtured narcissism of our age that leaves some unable to imagine their deaths even as the bullet is in the barrel.

This is the second curious thing that happens in that farmhouse: I survive. How I survive is easy to describe.
Why
I survive is beyond my ability to explain.

After watching Tray kill three more people where they sit, all fear lifts from me, and I know what I must do.

I do not run. I do not hide. Neither option crosses my mind.

First I go to my cousin Davena and restore her modesty by straightening her skirt. And that feels right.

As carefully as I can, I roll her off the footstool over which she has collapsed, and I get her onto her back. I smooth her hair away from her lovely face.

I say, “Good-bye.”

My father’s face is broken and fallen inward. Over the arm of a chair is Aunt Helen’s shawl. I arrange it to drape my father’s ruined countenance.

“Good-bye.”

Tray proceeds through the room, killing people one by one, and I follow several deaths behind him, restoring where I can some small measure of dignity to the deceased.

A psychologist might say these are the actions of a boy in a dissociative state, but that is not correct. As I minister to the dead, I remain at all times aware of what I am doing, of where I am, and I know that the killings are proceeding beyond my control, in this room and subsequently in the next.

Not only has fear been lifted from me but also horror, and for the purpose of completing my task, I seem to have lost the capacity for
repugnance. These are members of my family, and nothing about them in death can disgust me, just as nothing about them in life disgusted me.

To each, I say good-bye.

I am conveyed across the bar of grief, that I might do this service, and though the day will come when I will find myself on the harder side of that bar, for now I do not weep.

Cousin Carina, one week short of her twentieth birthday, sits on a chair with a cane back, head lolling against the wall. Before being shot, she lost control of her bladder. Her skirt is soaked, and her stockings.

As I move toward the sofa to get a camel-colored cashmere throw, with which to cover Carina’s lap and legs, I step aside to let one of Tray’s friends pass.

He is a pale man with a mustache. An ugly cold sore mars his lower lip. He is looking for women’s purses.

While I arrange the cashmere throw to cover Carina properly— “Good-bye”—and while I examine the remaining victims to see if there is anything I can do to make them more presentable, the man with the cold sore rummages through the purses for money and takes the wallets from the dead men.

He does not speak to me, and I do not speak to him.

Tray enters and says to his friend, “I’m gonna see what shit they might have upstairs.”

“Be quick about it, this is so goddamn off the rails,” his friend replies. “Where’s Clapper?”

“In the dining room, doin’ what you’re doin’.”

Having done what I can for the twenty dead in the living room, I proceed to the dining room to continue with my mission.

Tray’s other friend, Clapper, is a large bearded man. On the dining table are gathered the purses and the wallets of the eighteen victims in
this room. He is stripping out the folding money as he half mutters and half sings “Another One Bites the Dust,” which had been a hit for Queen a couple of years earlier.

My brother, Phelim, who is twelve, sits on the floor in a corner, his back to the junction of walls. His legs are straight out in front of him, arms at his sides. Except for the hole in his throat, he looks peaceful. I cannot see anything to be done for him.

“Good-bye.” I do not whisper the word but say it openly.

Apparently the people on the dining-room chairs were instructed to put their arms behind them and to hook them between horizontal backrails. They are not only sitting in their chairs but also hanging from them. This prevents the limp bodies from collapsing onto the floor.

My cousin Kipp’s wife, Nicola, has been humiliated before being murdered. Her sweater has been pulled over her head, hiding her face, and her bra has been torn off.

I am an easily embarrassed boy. With great care not to touch her breasts, I work the sweater off her head and gingerly tug it down over what should not be exposed.