The Losers (38 page)

The judge looked startled. “Mr. Taylor,” he interrupted, “are you implying that this man was responsible for your injury?”

“No, Your Honor. The accident was simply that—an accident. Flood really had nothing to do with it. I can’t be sure exactly
what
it was that he originally had planned for me. By this time he had refined his schemes to the point where they were so exotic and involved that I don’t think anyone could have unraveled them. I honestly believe that my accident threw him completely off. It was blind chance—simple stupid bad luck—and he couldn’t accept that.

“Anyway, after the accident, when I had recovered enough to be at least marginally ambulatory, I left Portland and came here to Spokane. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, and it took Flood five months to find me. He wasn’t going to let me get away from him, but my condition baffled him. How can you possibly hurt someone who’s already been sawed in two?”

“Your Honor,” the defense counsel protested. “I don’t see the pertinence of all this.”

“Miss Berensen, please sit down.”

The young woman flushed and sank back into her seat.

“Go on, Mr. Taylor.”

“When I first came to Spokane, I entered therapy. Learning to walk again is very tedious, and I needed a diversion, so I started collecting losers.”

“Losers? I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Taylor.”

“In our society—probably in every society—there are people who simply can’t make it,” Raphael explained. “They’re not skilled enough, not smart enough, not competitive enough, and they become the human debris of the system. Because our society is compassionate, we take care of them, but in the process they become human ciphers—numbers in the system, welfare cases or whatever.

“I was in an ideal spot to watch them. I live in an area where they congregate, and my apartment is on a rooftop. I was in a situation where I could virtually see everything that went on in the neighborhood.”

“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, “I don’t want to interrupt Mr. Taylor, but isn’t this getting a bit far afield?”

“Is this really relevant, Mr. Taylor?” the judge asked.

“Yes, Your Honor, I believe so. It’s the point of the whole thing. If you don’t know about the losers, nothing that Flood did will make any sense at all.”

“Very well, Mr. Taylor.”

“It’s easy to dismiss the losers—to ignore them. After all, they don’t sit in front of the churches to beg anymore. We’ve created an entire industry—social workers—to feed them and keep them out of sight so that we never have to come face-to-face with them. We’ve trained whole generations of bright young girls who don’t want to be waitresses or secretaries to take care of our losers. In the process we’ve created a new leisure class. We give them enough to get by on—not luxury, regardless of what some people believe—but they know they won’t be allowed to starve. Our new leisure class doesn’t have enough money for hobbies or enough education for art, so they sit. I suppose it’s great for a month or two to know that you’ll never have to work again, but what do you do then? What do you do when you finally come face-to-face with the reality of all those empty yean stretching out in front of you?

“For most of the losen crisis is the answer. Crisis is a way of being important—of giving their lives meaning. They can’t write books or sell cars or cure warts. The state feeds them and pays their rent, but they have a nagging sense of being worthless. They precipitate crisis—catastrophe—as a way of saying, ‘Look at me. I’m alive. I’m a human being.’ For the loser it’s the only way to gain any kind of recognition. If they take a shot at somebody or OD on pills, at

least the police will come. They won’t be ignored.”

“Mr. Taylor,” the judge said with some perplexity, “your observations are very interesting, but—”

“Yes, Your Honor, I’m coining to the connection. It was about the time that I finally began to understand all of this that Flood showed up here in Spokane. One day I happened to mention the losers. He didn’t follow what I was talking about, so I explained the whole idea to him. For some reason I didn’t understand at the time, the theory of all the sad misfits on the block became very important to him. Of course with Flood you could never be entirely sure how much was genuine interest and how much was put on.

“Anyway, as time went on, Flood started to seek out my collection of losers. He got to know them—well enough to know their weaknesses anyway—and then he began to destroy them one by one. Oh, sure, some of them fell by natural attrition—losers smash up their lives pretty regularly without any outside help—but he did manage to destroy several people in some grand scheme that had
me
as its focus.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow that, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said.

“As I said, sir, I collect losers,” Raphael explained. “I care about them. For all their deliberate, wrongheaded stupidity I care about them and recognize their need for some kind of dignity. Social workers simply process them. It’s just a job to all those bright young girls, but I cared—even if it was only passively.

“Flood saw that, and it solved his problem. He’d been looking for a way to hurt someone who’d already been hurt as badly as he was likely to ever be hurt, and this was it. He began to systematically depopulate my block—nothing illegal, of course, just a nudge here, a word there. It was extraordinarily simple, really. Losers are pathologically self-destructive anyway, and he’d had a lifetime of practice.”

“Your Honor,” Miss Berensen protested, “this is sheer nonsense. It has no relation to any recognized social theory. I think Mr. Taylor’s affliction has made him …” She faltered.

“Go ahead and say it,” Raphael said to her before the judge could speak. “That’s a common assumption—that a physical impairment necessarily implies a mental one as well. I’m used to it by now. I’m not even offended at being patronized by the intellectually disadvantaged anymore.”

“That’ll do, Mr. Taylor,” the judge said firmly.

“Sorry, Your Honor. Anyway, whether the theory is valid or not is beside the point. The point is that I believe it—and more importantly Flood believed it as well. In that context then, it
is
true.

“In time Flood insinuated himself into this group of bikers up the street. The gang posed special problems for him. He’d been able to handle all the others on the street one-on-one, but there’s a kind of cumulative effect in a gang—even one as feebleminded as this one.”

Big Heintz came half to his feet. “You watch your mouth, Taylor!” he threatened loudly.

The judge pounded his gavel. “That will be all of that!”

Big Heintz glowered and sank back into his chair.

The judge turned to Raphael then. “Mr. Taylor, we’ve given you a great deal of latitude here, but please confine your remarks to the business at hand.”

“Yes, Your Honor. Once he became involved with the gang, I think Flood began to lose control. Crisis is exciting; it’s high drama, and Flood was pulled along by it all. He could handle the gang members on a one-to-one basis quite easily, but when he immersed himself in the entire gang, it all simply overpowered him. Being a loser is somehow contagious, and when a man starts to associate with them in groups, he’s almost certain to catch it. I tried to warn him about that, but he didn’t seem to understand.” Raphael paused. “Now that I stop and think about it, though, maybe he did at that. He kept after me—begging me almost—to move away from Spokane. Maybe in some obscure way those pleas that we get out of this town were cries for help. Maybe he realized that he was losing control.” He sighed. “Perhaps we should have gone. Then this might not have happened—at least not here in Spokane. Anyway, when I saw the gun, I knew that he’d slipped over the line. It was too late at that point.”

“Then you knew he had a gun?” the judge asked.

“Yes, Your Honor. There’d been a skirmish between the two gangs, and Flood had been beaten pretty severely. I suppose that’s what finally pushed him over the edge. In a sense it was like the beating he’d received from his cousin in his childhood, and Flood could never let something like that just slide. He
had
to get even, and he had to arm himself to make sure that it didn’t happen to him again. I think that toward the end he even forgot why he’d gotten mixed up with the gang in the first place. Anyway, when Heintzie’s grand and final war came, Flood was caught up in it—hooked on crisis, hyped on his own adrenaline, not even thinking anymore—a loser. I suppose it’s sort of ironic. He set out to destroy the gang, but in the end they destroyed him. And what’s even more ironic is that all Flood really wanted to do when he started out was to try to find a way to hurt
me.
He knew that I cared about my losers, so he thought he could hurt me by destroying them. In the end, though, he became a loser himself and wound up destroying himself. I suppose that his plan really succeeded, because when he destroyed himself, it hurt me more than anything else he could have done. It’s strange, but he finally won after all.” Raphael looked up at the ceiling. He’d never really thought of it before, and it rather surprised him. “I guess that’s about it, Your Honor,” he told the judge. “That’s about all I really know about Damon Flood.” He sat quietly then. It had not really done any good; he realized that now. Denise and Frankie had been right. The categories and pigeonholes were too convenient, and using them as a means of sorting people was too much a part of the official mentality. But he had tried. He had performed that last service that a man can perform for a friend—he had told the truth about him. In spite of everything, he realized that he still thought of Flood as a friend.

“Mr. Wilson?” the judge asked.

The prosecutor rose and walked toward Raphael. “Mr. Taylor, from your observation then, would you say that Mr. Flood was definitely
not
the leader of this—ah—group?”

“No, sir. It was Heintzie’s gang, and it was Heintzie’s war. The gun was Flood’s, though. I think it’s what they call escalation. About all Heintzie wanted to do was put a few people in the hospital. Killing people was Flood’s idea. In the end, though, he was just another member of the gang—a loser.”

“Uh—” The prosecutor looked down at his notes. It was obvious that he had not expected the kind of testimony Raphael had just given them. “I—uh—I guess I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

“Miss Berensen?” the judge said.

“Your Honor, I wouldn’t dignify any of this by even questioning it. My only suggestion would be that Mr. Taylor might consider seeking professional help.”

“That’s enough of that, Miss Berensen!” The judge sat for a long time looking at the bandaged and sullenly glowering young men seated behind the defense table. Finally he shook his head. “Losers,” he murmured so softly that only Raphael could hear him. Then he turned. “Mr. Taylor, you’re an intelligent and articulate young man—too intelligent and articulate to just sit on the sidelines the way you’re doing. You seem to have some very special talents—profound insight and extraordinary compassion. I think I’d like to know what you plan to do with the rest of your life.”

“I’m leaving Spokane, Your Honor. I came here to get some personal things taken care of. Now that all that’s done, there’s no reason for me to stay anymore. I’ll find another town—maybe I’ll find another rooftop and another street full of losers. Somebody has to care for them after all. All my options are open, so I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow—trust to luck, if you want to put it that way.”

The judge sighed. “Thank you, Mr. Taylor. You may step down.”

Raphael got his crutches squared away, stood up, and went carefully down the single step from the witness stand. Then he walked smoothly up the center aisle with the stately, flowing pace of a one-legged man who has mastered his crutches and is no longer a cripple. He hesitated a moment at the door. There was still the matter of the two derelicts who had been found shot to death in downtown alleys. He realized, however, that he really had no proof that it had been Flood who had so casually shot them as a means of proving to himself that he did in fact have the nerve to shoot another human being. Raphael also realized that he would prefer to leave it simply at that. A suspicion was not a certainty, and for some reason he did not want that final nail driven in. If it
had
been Flood, it would not happen again; and in any case, if he were to suggest it to the prosecutor or anyone else, it would probably delay the escape from Spokane with Denise that had become absolutely necessary. The bailiff standing at the back opened the door for him, and Raphael went on out.

The two young women who had been in the courtroom were waiting for him in the hall. “Mr. Taylor,” the blond one said, “we’re from the department of—”

“I know who you are.” Raphael looked directly into the face of the enemy.

“We’d like to talk to you for a moment, if you’re not too busy,” she went on, undeterred by his blunt answer.

“I am, but I don’t imagine that’ll make much difference, will it?”

“Really, Mr. Taylor,” the brunette one protested, “you seem extremely hostile.” “You’ve noticed.”

“Mr. Taylor,” the blonde said, “you really should leave social theory to the experts, you know. This notion of yours—it just isn’t consistent with what we know about human behavior.”

“Really? Maybe you’d better go back and take another look then.”

“Why are you so hostile, Mr. Taylor?” the brunette asked. She kept coming back to that.

“I’m bad-tempered. Didn’t you study that in school? All of us freaks have days when we’re bad-tempered. You’re supposed to know how to deal with that.”

He could see their anger, their frustration in their eyes under the carefully assumed professional masks. His testimony had rather neatly torpedoed their entire case, and they were furious with him. He’d done the one thing Frankie had warned him not to do.

“I’d really like to discuss this theory of yours,” the blond one said with a contrived look of interest on her face.