The Blue Hour (22 page)

"We've been very
close since the murder of my father by fascist state police in 1979."

"You were actually
forced to watch as trained attack dogs mauled your father to death, Moras?"

"No. He was shot by
fascist police. The dogs attacked me when I ran to him after."

I
actually enjoyed every second of it, Seth. The
man
was a
drunken pig except when he was asleep. I was the one who made it possible. I
listened to his conversations. I made reports by a secret phone in the
cooperative leader's barn. I spoke creatively, as a child would. 1 added more
subversive material when I needed impact. I stole his letters and put them back
before he knew they were gone. I put die guns in our barn. When they finally
murder
ed him it meant more coffee for me
in the morning and nothing more. Stupid to rush to his side
asifl
cared. That was to throw my mother
off
my trail.
She
knew he had no
guns.
But what are a few hundred stitches compared to
living years on end with that cruel, stupid hog?

"Do you relive that
moment still? Do you ever
see
what they did to him, or what the dogs did to you?*

"Yes. Every morning
in the mirror I see what the dogs did to me. What the police did to my father is
a thing I can't remember without tears. For a boy, some horrors never die. The
scars on my body are nothing compared to the scars on my heart."

"Amazing."

The lawyer was
staring at him now like one of Pratt's or Lydia's friends, friends who were
trying to act like they knew nothing about him. He had seen the same expression
on
hundreds of TV audience members
during the daytime talk shows he sometimes viewed when work was slow at the
auto parts store. Of course Lydia was constantly tuned in. It was a look that
made him think of hungry cows. Purposeful. Intent. But lacking any means to
satisfy themselves except for the passive ingestion of whatever the host or
guest would say next. Such insatiable appetites for accounts of calamity,
misfortune, ruination, perversion, violence, death.

For them it was just
entertainment.

"Is it true, as it
states in the protocol here, that your breasts have swollen V

"I already told
you that they did."

Kaufman pursed his lips
and shook his head. He made a note in his book and sighed.

"Well, here comes
dinner. After we eat, would you mind talking about your rape convictions? I'll
need to know about them. I'm interested particularly in your state of mind during
the acts. Anger, sexual drive, your thoughts and feelings. What was going
through your head. Why you chose older women. It might help us toward an
overrule at some point. I'm thinking of the Circuit Courts of Appeal."

Colesceau looked at the
lawyer. Then he explained briefly that he needed to be loved and in his
confusion he thought he could force his victims to love him. He said, in a
confession that surprised him, that his penis felt like an extension of his
heart, which was actually quite true.

Seth looked
slack-jawed at this.

"But those events are past. My punishment was
supposed to end Wednesday, so long as I obeyed the rules. I obeyed every rule.
I allowed myself to be poisoned and polluted with unnatural substances. Every
week, into my veins, with needles. Now I have crowds outside my door. I have
been evicted. I will probably lose my job. A drastic injustice has been
done." "That's why I'm here. But my ammunition has to come from
you." "So, I will talk about these things if you need to know. Even
though they shame me." "It's going to help us, Moros. Everything you
can tell me is going to help us."

Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday,
Colesceau was shocked to see Seth Kaufman again.

But this time Seth was on
the TV that Colesceau was idly watching while the crowd chanted outside his
apartment home. And this time his name was Grant Major, of County News Bureau.

He was in his studio,
telling a fellow TV reporter about his exclusive interview with the castrated
rapist Matamoros Colesceau. He looked even prettier than he'd looked in the
family-style restaurant. The other reporter, whom Colesceau recognized, said
that this seven o'clock "special report" from CNB's "newest
investigative star" would be "bone chilling."

Next,
on CNB.

He saw himself on the
screen, leaving the apartment home wrapped in Seth Kaufman's long coat, leaning
forward through the crowd of reporters and neighbors.

Then he was sitting in the
restaurant, talking to the man he had genuinely believed was a lawyer from the

ACLU.

Colesceau could tell that
the camera had been hidden in the tray of dirty dishes.

He understood why the
waitresses had been expecting them.

He felt his heart growing
hard and cold again, but it beat fast, like a good machine.

He watched himself explain
what went through his mind as he tried to rape the two old women—the anger, the
confusion, the feelings of helplessness in the world, especially with women
his own age.

He listened to his tales
of hormone treatment—the swelling breasts and shrinking genitals. On TV it
sounded like he was whining, ready to weep.

He sat and watched in
helplessness as he explained the death of his father at the hands of the
police. He couldn't understand why Grant had edited out the part where he told
how difficult it still was for him, how he still thought about his father, how
the scars on his heart were worse than the scars on his body.

He made me look bad,
Colesceau thought. And through his rage all he could think about was hurting
Grant Major in a terrible way.

A chorus of boos erupted
outside. He went to the window and cracked the blinds.

Trudy Powers stood at the
forefront of the mob, her hair lifted away from her face by the breeze. Her
brow furrowed as she glanced up at the sky. In that moment she looked like a
saint in stained glass, Colesceau thought, or one of those Agony of St.
Somebody paintings, maybe the one with all the arrows in him.XXX

He let go of the blind
string, stepped to his front door and opened it. The voices hit him like a gust
of wind. Without the glass between them Colesceau could feel the heft of their
presence, and sense that their forward thrust was held in check only by the
restraining hand of human law. Without that, they'd hang him Western style,
then drag his body through the streets of Irvine behind a Saab convertible.

Then the crowd hushed. He
looked at Trudy Powers and the happy, shiny suburbanites and the news people
scurrying toward him with all manner of cameras and contraptions. They came to
a stop not ten feet away and knelt as if he was shooting at them. It was one of
the strangest sensations he'd felt in a life of strange sensations—the world
before him and at his feet as he stood firm as the pope and looked them over.
He glanced down at the Bloody Mary still fresh in his hand, then back out to
the mob.

"I am not a
monster," he said. "I have tried to be a good neighbor. I have paid
for my crimes and want to be left alone now to live my life."

Go
live it
somewhere else.

"I have received
eviction. I have twenty-nine days."

We'll be watching you every second, scumbucket!

MAKE our NElGHborhood. SAFE for the CHlldren!

Colesceau raised his hand.
He was utterly dumbfounded when the crowd stopped the chant. All he could hear
then was the whir and click of the equipment aimed up at him from the sidewalk
ten feet away.

"Ummm...
I've never hurt a child in my life. Never."

Yeah, just old women
who can't protect themselves! Get back inside you cockface or I'm going to yank
your head off and stuff it down your fuckin' neck!

He looked at the yeller, a
burly long-haired man with a can of beer in his hand.

"Carl, you're worse than him when
you talk like that."

Trudy Powers's voice
hung in the still air. She stepped forward from the crowd.

"We understand
your problems, Mr. Colesceau. But we have rights, too. And we want this
neighborhood safe for our children, our seniors. We don't want trouble,
either."

"Then why do this?"

Ah, fuck you.

Trudy's face turned
in a flash of blond hair, then came back to Colesceau.

"We think you
could find a more appropriate neighborhood."

in
the fuckin' nuthouse you came from!

Trudy lifted one of her arms up without
looking back.

"Sean, we're
dialoguing! Listen, Mr. Colesceau. We intend to keep this vigil every day until
you find more appropriate lodging. We're citizens with rights and we intend to
exercise them. We'll keep our demonstrations peaceful. But we're going to have
to watch you until you go. We won't trespass or harm your property in any
way."

Colesceau stood with
his drink in one hand and the mob stilled in front of him and the cameras
executing him from ten feet away.

"I live here. I go to work. That's
all I do."

He
watched Trudy's golden hair catch the light and the breeze. She was wearing
denim short shorts that showed off her long girlish legs, white tennies and
socks and a brief white blouse with a scalloped neckline. Her tall and
feeble-looking husband had stepped up beside her now and Colesceau saw the
sunlight condensed in his glasses. He was bearded and
thin-necked. Colesceau had seen him driving a huge
expensive vehicle that had stickers all over the back window asking you to save
just about every animal you could imagine.

"We're dead
serious," he said.

"Dead? What do
you mean?"

"God,
Jonathan," said Trudy.

"It means you'll see
us every day for the rest of your life here. We'll know exactly where you are,
every second of your life."

"I have no objection
to this at all. 1 am an innocent man. And to show my innocence, I want to give
you something. Please, wait here."

No problem there,
dude!

Colesceau went back inside
his apartment and picked out one of his mother's most preposterous painted
eggs. It was a lavender ostrich egg with gold bric-a-brac and a little
bunched-up skirt of lace around the middle of it.

He took the egg back
outside and resumed his place in front of the TV shooters.

"This represents all
the goodness I possess on earth. I offer this as a pledge of my perfect
behavior for the next twenty-nine days."

He held out the egg with
both hands, elbows tucked and head slightly bowed, as if his posture could
increase its value.

"For you, Mrs.
Powers. For all of you."

The cameramen inched
closer. They emanated an instinctive fear that Colesceau respected. They were
used to being hated.

But not Trudy Powers.
Trudy, he clearly understood, was used to being adored and loved and deferred
to because of her high value as a sex partner. So she came forward with a kind
of gliding step, eyeing Colesceau with an expression of self-confidence and
self-respect. You could tell she saw herself as an ambassador from one world to
another, from the world of the good to the world of the damned. And her
willingness to approach the damned pleased her deeply. She was going to accept
a handful of feces from the devil himself, smile and be gracious about it.

My evil stimulates her,
thought Colesceau. I am titillation. I fortify what she believes is her soul.

She came around the camera
people, stepping over a thick bundle of cable with a jiggle of inner thigh, her
eyes locked on Colesceau's. There was pageantry in them.

Colesceau proffered the
egg. She reached out with both hands, and a firm but forgiving expression on
her face. She looks like Mary on the outdoor fresco at Voronet, he thought,
pious and blank and immovable all at the same time. He trailed her palms with the
tips of his fingernails as he laid the gift in her hands.

Then he stepped back and looked past her
to the crowd. He bowed very slightly and strode back inside 12 Meadowlark .

Freedom. Velocity. Interstate 5. Windows down, air
blasting through the van. Bill felt the rage filling him now, moving throughout
his body. Like boiling water removed from the burner, it settled and filled the
shape of its container. Bill Wayne, he thought: vessel of retribution, bucket
of hate. Witness this.

He found Ronnie's beat-up
old four-door in the Main Place parking lot, near the entrance closest to
Goldsmith's Jewelry. So she hadn't lied. All the more reason to get to know
her. The mall shops closed at nine tonight, which gave him almost an hour, just
right.