The Scarred Man (7 page)

    "Wait a minute, man! Lemme say somethin'! We can talk this over…"

    "Go ahead and talk then. Who were the others? What were their names and where are they?"

    "Wait! Wait! Jeez, man, wait a minute! They split a long time ago. They…"

    I sighted along the barrel.

    "Wait! Listen!"

    "I'm listening."

    He began to talk. When I was satisfied that he had told me all he knew, and that it was the truth, I killed him. I dragged the body down to the canal and dumped him in. The heavy chain he wore around his waist took him down. The black water closed over him. The gators would finish the rest.

    I went back and scuffed sand over the bloody patch on the ground. Then I kicked the bike into life and headed south away from the main road. When I was a couple of miles from Chockoloskee, approximately thirty miles from where it had happened, I ran the bike into the canal, tossed the helmet in after it, and walked the rest of the way to town.

    The town was shuttered against the heat. Nothing moved. I found a bus schedule tacked to a tree and sat down to wait. When the bus came, I climbed gratefully into its refrigerated interior. By four o'clock I was back at the boat. I packed a bag and locked the hatch behind me. I flagged a cab and told him to take me to the airport.

    

    

    

    On the 747 that took me from Miami to Boston I had plenty of time to think about the man I had killed and the two more I intended to kill. Less than eight hours had passed since I had put a bullet through Stud's head. In that time I had crossed the line that divides the respectable citizen from the outlaw. I, who had devoted so many years to the study of the law, was now forever beyond it. At one point in my career I had worked hard to change the capital punishment laws, taking it as my thesis that the state had no right to demand a life for a life, since that in turn made the state a party to murder.

    If I had been right then, I was certainly wrong now. But I was no longer interested in right or wrong. An eye for an eye, read the biblical injunction. And vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. What did all that mean to me now? Nothing and less than nothing. The restrictions of society and my obligation to its laws had died with Stacey at the moment that her body had struck the terrace beneath our hotel window. I had broken the law and was clearly a criminal. Yet I felt no more criminal now than I had when I had killed while wearing the uniform of a marine officer. I had killed Stud out of the same cold necessity, not under orders from my government this time, but rather under strict orders from myself. And I would execute the others the same way. Unemotionally. Perhaps it would have been better if I had felt some passion in the act. The release of passion would have served as an emotional catharsis. Presumably I had now eased my thirst for revenge by one third. But it did not work that way. There was only a void instead of satisfaction.

    The clouds fled away beneath us. We-thirty or forty souls committed to sudden togetherness at thirty thousand feet-raced along to our separate destinations. It was a reasonably safe bet to assume that, of them all, I was the only one on his way to a killing.

    We touched down in a haze of burning rubber. I picked up my leather briefcase-bulging with the heavy weight of the .38-and made my way out through the terminal to the taxi stand. We took the tunnel in from Logan airport, and I had him drop me off across the street from the Common. It had been a good many years since I had been there, but nothing much had changed-still the swan boats moving in stately procession around the pond and the hundreds of kids sprawled across the grass in the spring sunshine.

    There was a crowd in front of the capitol building, and I saw a little girl who could not have been more than five or six carrying a placard bigger than herself, imprinted on it in flaming scarlet words ABORTION NOW! Behind her came a stout woman with the build of a miniature King Kong. She was wearing hot pants and carrying a bullhorn. The occasion, I gathered, had to do with the abortion hearings before the state legislature. When she raised the horn to her mouth, her voice came out like the crack of doom.

    "Why the fuck should I be penalized just because my diaphragm slipped?" she bellowed.

    The child, tottering under the sign, watched her attentively.

    "Let's rap!" continued the voice of the harpie. "Let's rap about fucking!"

    The stoned kids in the park never even looked up. Frisbies circled overhead like plastic' birds. There were bikes everywhere. And dogs. A dog to each kid. All happily frolicking. A turned-on generation. It was a new scene. I felt as old as Rip Van Winkle.

    On the fringes of the park were the rag-picking Beacon Hill biddies I remembered from my undergraduate days.

    Oarsmen sculling on the Charles. In some ways it was still the peaceful scene that Emerson and Thoreau must have known. But the kids were different. Glassy-eyed. The age of the lotus eater with the transistor umbilical attached to his ear. The hooked kids cruising the parked cars for a portable typewriter or tape recorder. Something to be sold fast to get enough for a fix.

    "To fuck is beautiful!" came the voice over the bullhorn. "But not with fucking male chauvinist fucking male pigs!"

    A lackluster cheer went up from her audience. The child carrying the ABORTION NOW! placard waved her sign. Had there really been a time when people came only to ride the swan boats and listen to the band concerts? Now it was Gay Power and Women's Lib.

    I strolled on across the park. Braless girls in tight jeans. The stuff of adolescent dreams. The whole scene in fact so dreamy as to make unreal the fact that I had just killed one man and was now on my way to kill another. Killing had seemed more appropriate to the black waters of the swamp where I had disposed of Stud's body. Here, with the sailboats scudding across the Charles and the flower children playing on the grass, death seemed far away.

    Stacey and I had walked hand-in-hand across the Common when I had been at Harvard Law and she at Radcliffe. Each Sunday we had bicycled here to lie on the grass and listen to the concerts. I could see her slim figure, her great dark eyes, her cherry red lips as clearly as if it had been yesterday. With my head in her lap she had looked down at me and stroked her silken fingertips across my cheek and said, "Oh, Mr. Shaw, I do believe I'm rather fond of you, Mr. Shaw."

    The memory was so painfully clear that for a moment I half expected her to come running across the grass to join me. I quickened my steps along the sharp incline of Beacon Hill.

    The place I wanted was on the other side of the Hill. I j was after an authentic chopper, not some lily-livered Honda 350 or Triumph. The owner of the bike-repair shop looked like a Beak or Hell's Angel himself. When I told him I was interested in a used Harley in reasonably good condition, he squinted at me over the tip of his cigar and said, "Like for what, man?"

    "To ride."

    "You?"

    "Me."

    "That's a going machine, man."

    "That's what I want."

    He shrugged. "You want to spill your brains on the road that's your business, mister."

    "Right."

    "I ain't got one here, 'but I know where I can get one."

    "Ready to go?"

    He removed the cigar and spat on the cement floor. "As ready as you are, man."

    "I want it today."

    "Like an hour if the price is right, man."

    "How much do you want for it?"

    "Eight bills."

    "Is it hot?"

    He looked pained. "Oh man, would I be peddling a hot bike in my own shop? You could be fuzz for all I know."

    I gave him a hundred on account and told him I'd be back in an hour to pick up the machine. I went into the first Army-Navy store I came to and bought levis, boots, a beat-up surplus leather jacket, and an Indian headband. I was torn between the headband and lovebeads, but decided the beads would be a bit much. I put on the outfit I had bought and dumped my shirt, suit, and tie.

    The bike was waiting for me as promised-four hundred pounds of dynamite. I kicked it into life, and it answered with a snarl. I handed over seven hundred dollars. In return I was given a registration and bill of sale that looked reasonably authentic.

    "I'll want to use the plate that's on there," I said. "At least temporarily."

    "For seven bills you can use my mother," he said.

    "Some other time."

    "You are like really making the scene, man. What are you doing, splitting on your wife or something?"

    "I'll need a helmet. Have you got one?"

    "Not new. Nothing in the joint is new."

    He produced a battered sky-blue helmet festooned with a sprinkle of stars. It was a little tight but wearable.

    "You look pretty good, man. If you really want to make it with the chicks, you ought to run up to Kildare in New Hampshire for the Eastern States Rally. There are gonna be like ten thousand little tight-assed broads there."

    "I might at that," I said.

    Kildare rang a bell. Stud had told me that if Soldier was anywhere it would be at Kildare. He showed up there every year for the rally. If he was alive he wouldn't miss it. I hoped he was alive.

    Through Portland and west on 302. Mount Washington a white cone against the sky. I let the Harley out around the curves. Station wagons westward. Pioneers on the move with kids, dogs, and assorted Sears Roebuck grills and Ban-Lon shirts. They gave me the hard eye as they went by, identifying me at once as an outlaw. Not all of them of course were straights. There were long-haired types in VW campers giving me the peace sign as they went by, and then, as I approached Kildare, an onrush of leather-jacketed gangs riding choppers much like my own.

    The bike riders seemed to be coming by the thousands, an invading army of freaks zooming in on the little town in the hills, all of them zonked out of their minds on something or other, acid, dope, grass, God knows what. Hair, muscle, flesh, thighs, breasts, all responding to the erotic thrust of high horsepower and gasoline. How would the white clapboard town fathers meet such an onslaught?

    There was already a feeling of tension in the air. The gangs rolling in at a steady pace with a roar like a flock of jets; the solid citizens looking askance. A sprinkling of state police just out cruising, hoping not to start anything. Now there were road blocks up ahead trying to narrow us down, not trying to stop anything but just to control the flow. Transistors blaring. The Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. Zonked. Grokked. Freaked. All part of a sunny, crystal clear Memorial Day weekend.

    Since I did not wear the colors of any gang I drew a few puzzled looks. Was I with the Angels, the Beaks, the Rockers, Werewolfs, Zombies, or whatever? There were no swastikas or death's heads on my back, and I was really too old to make the scene. A loner then, a middle-aged dropout or freak. A day-glow crazy without the colors. But no one cared. There were so many. What was one more?

    The outlaws were trying to outdo each other with red or green beards, orange goggles, brass rings in their noses, capes, and Apache helmets, and peaked Prussian helmets. Earrings,
Wehrmacht
headgear, and German iron crosses, along with the grease-caked levis and the sleeveless vests. And of course the tattoos: Mother, Dolly, Hitler, Jack the Ripper, swastikas, daggers, skulls, LSD, Love, Rape, and a variety of four letter words. And of course the more complicated esoteric symbols which constituted a code all their own. 13 (indicating a marijuana smoker) was the most common, but there were plenty of the other patches such as DFFL (Dope Forever, Forever Loaded) and the varicolored pilot's wings: red wings meaning the wearer had committed cunnilingus on a menstruating woman, black-wings for the same act on a Negress, and brown wings for buggery. Charming.

    All meant of course to shake up the solid citizens. As we pulled up to the road block where they were letting us 'through single file, an ape on a BMW looked ahead at the white town and said to me with a grin, "Those mothers in there are double shook, man."

    "Yeah," I said.

    "They better lock up the broads tonight, man."

    The line inched ahead. Hot sun and stench of castor oil and blare of walkie-talkies. Acrid odor of the joints being passed from mouth to mouth. Most people a little bombed already. I take a few puffs too so as not to draw attention to myself, but faking it, holding the smoke in my mouth instead of drawing it into the lungs. Somebody passes a plastic jug full of cider. There may very well be acid in it so I fake that too, holding a mouthful and then spitting it out into a bandanna. No one is watching me too carefully. Why should they? The heads are already getting happy on the acid and the joints. All we need now is a strobe and the acid rock and the amplifiers, and we can all become the mad bombers of the world. The air is suddenly so full of marijuana and the heady reek of smouldering violence that on this hot windless day you can get stoned just by breathing.

    A police car, with its great red orb winking, pulls slowly down the line, in it a mean looking deputy giving us the hard eye. Half of us are bombed and smoking the joints openly but what can he do about it? If he arrests one freaking monster, he will have to arrest us all. He has guns, but what good will they do him? At the first shot, there will be ten thousand outlaws on his back, and they will tear him into little pieces and shove him up the exhaust of his lousy prowl car. You can see all this going on behind his B-17 shades and under his broad-brimmed hat as, he moves down the line.

    An outlaw BSA moves up beside me, driven by a red-haired monster who looks eight feet tall. He stinks of oil and grime and rancid sweat. Clinging to his back like a monkey is a girl child who cannot be more than fourteen or fifteen. She climbs down to stretch, and I see that she is wearing a fishnet jersey and nothing else. Her naked young breasts and nipples are clearly visible. She sucks on the joint he passes, her beautiful young cornflower blue eyes fogged in the dreamy escapism of the lotus eater. Escape to what? To where? To why? To take on a dozen of these hairy apes in the fetid darkness of some backwoods shack? My gorge rises. The giant passes me his joint, and I take a quick drag. I have aroused his curiosity. Perhaps he has seen the bike before. Or perhaps, a more chilling thought, he has seen me before.