Angelhead (3 page)

Michael was confused and confined, stuck in murky thoughts of God and demons, already uttering odd fragments of church-speak, dialogue from horror flicks, and lyrics from heavy metal. Every day he seemed more outrageous, more defiant. Mumblings. A vague panic. People plotting against him.

At first, when he heard the voices after seeing God's face, it was like everything opened up for him, like the world made sense for the first time. The colors were brighter, the sounds were sharper. Narratives arose, beautiful, intricate narratives, where none had existed before. Everything could be connected. The most trivial things seemed vital. But now things were getting darker.

All of Michael's friends were still in Hampton, the next city over, in our old neighborhood. He didn't like the kids with money, had trouble making new friends with schizophrenia blooming in his brain, with this school full of strangers he was convinced whispered about him behind his back.

Michael's world started breaking into tiny pieces. He laughed for no reason, nowhere near a punchline. He said off-color things about death and dying and torture, about corpses and axes and Satan. He would look at a clock to tell the time, but then he'd see the round frame, the glass, the hands red and black, one sweeping, one still, and the actual calculation of time suddenly escaped him, moved just out of reach of his thoughts. Everything was like this. The world was like this.

At first it was perfect, this breakdown in thinking, this shattering of meaning, the perfect trip, the permanent high, but then he was stuck. He couldn't get out of his head. He couldn't say what he meant. Words got jumbled. Meaning was a series of knots. He became angry and depressed, buzzed with a kind of low-wattage rage.

Many of Michael's friends, those kids from Hampton who had grown into their teens with police records, had cars—Novas, Mustangs, El Caminos. They drove the thirty minutes to pick him up for the weekend, never getting out of the car, just beeping in the driveway, engine rumbling, windows smoked over, choking gas fumes bellowing out of the rusty exhaust pipe. They listened to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and Motley Crüe—a particularly delinquent group of kids who were so high all the time they barely noticed any change in my brother.

My mother would peek out the window as Michael ran out the door saying he was staying with one friend or another. For a while my father tried to stop him. The fights they had over this when Michael would return on Sundays sometimes lasted hours and usually ended up in a house full of tears and overturned furniture, another Sunday night melee. I'd crank up the stereo or the TV or both to drown out the yelling, the crashing.

My father would use a fat leather belt to beat Michael. The thwacks sounded like the punches and kicks in martial-arts films. I've always had an aversion to violence—it can make me physically ill. I've thrown maybe three punches in my entire life, which is odd for a boy who ran in the crowds I ran in. I trace my fear, my learned ability for compromise in moments of conflict, my outright—here's the truth—
cowardice
in the face of real violence, back to the solid sounds of those blows on my brother's back and head and legs.

After the beatings, my father would often go into the backyard and pretend to do yard work. He'd try to talk himself away from the act, from the uncontrollable anger that made him swing and swing. He would sometimes cry if he'd really hurt Michael, if there were bruises, but that wouldn't stop him the next time, because he didn't know how else to handle a kid like Michael, a kid, he knew, who was heading straight for prison or the grave. He thought if he'd acted like that, his father would simply have killed him.

At some point, worn down and worn out, my father gave up on trying to stop Michael from hanging out with kids he knew sold and took drugs, the same kids with whom Michael had taken six hits of acid at one time.

My father was exhausted when it came to Michael. He had worked so hard to get here, to get to this suburb. He had this new life where everything but his family looked promising.

SACRIFICE

The city where my family lived from 1965, five years before I was born, to late 1977 was built around shipbuilding and fishing. Hampton is less than thirty miles from Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, three of America's first settlements and beacons of historical tourism. Oddly, everything in Hampton looks as if it were built in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the big business of Military took over, when the Tidewater area was deemed a “strategically sound location.” Since then the military has dwindled, though there are still several bases—army, navy, air force, marine—nearby, and there has always been, at least to me, a transient, characterless feel to the place.

To the south, across the wide mouth of the James River, where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, is Norfolk and Virginia Beach, bridges and hotels and All-U-Can-Eat seafood buffets and T-shirt outlets and boat shows. To the east is Chesapeake Bay and then the rural, insect-infested Eastern Shore, that thin strip of land with its crab pots and peanut fields, farm equipment, fruit stands, and beautiful old homes. Beyond that, the dark Atlantic.

They are rebuilding Hampton nowadays, making it into a place for young professionals, with nice restaurants and beachfront properties going up where once only slums were (the slums have moved a few blocks and been condensed and are now more heavily patrolled by city police); nightclubs thrive; the parks are full of couples and families every weekend.

In 1983, however, when a young boy I will call S was murdered in our old neighborhood, Hampton was a place from which people wanted to move. It had been in steady economic and aesthetic decline since the early sixties. The buildings of downtown went unrented; they had cracked mortar and broken windows and some had begun to lean with their shadows toward the empty, trash-filled streets. The lower-middle-class suburban neighborhoods were racially mixed and volatile. The schools were among the worst in the state.

Here, just a few miles from where my father had attended high school and quit and attended again, just a few miles from our old house, my brother and his friends had a fort in the thick forest between the Briar Queen public pool and our old neighborhood. The fort sat deep in the guts of these woods, the same woods where I used to play after school when I was six and seven.

On the edge of the woods, half a mile from my brother's fort, there was a black man, a Vietnam vet, living on top of the junior high school, a man smelling of urine and feces and garbage, dressed in rags, a hat made of newspaper. His face was covered in fat, light brown scars like slugs. The neighborhood legend was that he had been a POW. He made toy birds out of leaves and pinecones. He spoke a kind of Southern urban gibberish, shouting from the roof to the kids below about the merits of calisthenics, the nutritional value of army rations.

From 1977 to 1983 my brother went regularly with friends to loiter around the junior high. They got drunk on bag-wrapped quarts of beer and stoned on ditch-weed joints, laughed, threw dirt clods, aiming for faces, for mouths and eyes. Sometimes they slugged it out with rival basketball teams, friend or foe, didn't matter who, just something to do. They either walked there from their fort or drove a guy named Clyde's VW bug, all of them packed in like clowns in a clown car, pot smoke billowing out of windows, bass beats bouncing off houses and into the sky.

They had to jump a high fence to come and go at the school after hours. Graffiti covered the building's bland concrete walls—gang insignia (B-Section Boys), or terse commands (Suck Me). They shot hoops on the outside courts—steel nets stuck to bent rims—and acted as obnoxious as bullies do anywhere.

For fun, for something to do, they called the old man on the roof a coon, a jigaboo, a spook, a spear-chucker. They said, nigga pleeze, said, yo, wipe that fuckin slug off yo face, nigga.

From the roof, the old man, covered in dirt from being recently hit with a dirt clod, told them again, this time with tears in his eyes, to do calisthenics or perish in physical disrepair.

It was here, on June 10, 1983, just a few hundred yards from Michael and his friends' fort, just down the road from the junior high and the homeless black veteran on the school roof, that S was murdered. I believe I would have all but forgotten the murder by now, wouldn't have to imagine and reimagine it, if it hadn't later become central to the story of my brother.

I picture a boring late afternoon in our old rundown neighborhood in our old rundown city, picture the small brick homes lined up straight as tombstones.

All the kids are inside watching TV as usual,
Batman
and
Romper Room
. They're lounging around on the shag carpets of their homes, mothers in kitchens, talking on phones, twisting cords around fingers, smoking cigarettes at kitchen tables, having kicked off one of those furry slippers to scratch their calves absentmindedly with their painted toenails.

Houses sit quietly. There's a siesta-like hush. Cars inch by on the streets, rolling through stop signs. Music in the distance. Someone washing a car. The tops of trees in the woods sway softly.

S—who is thirteen and quiet and a star student at an increasingly dangerous school—is heading to a friend's house on the other side of the woods, in Powhatan Park. He walks into the woods, shade falling like a curtain, then stops. He starts turning over logs, looking for bugs for a science project that his father, who has high hopes for S, has promised to help him with. He's wearing shorts and sneakers, thick glasses. He's skinny, clumsy, and trips over a stump, stumbling forward.

It's warm and gray, wind blowing in from the nearby Chesapeake. Green leaves and branches on the ground, across the path. The world is empty, desolate. The world is his.

He could spend all day out here on an empty afternoon like this, looking at bugs and spores, moss and mushrooms and fungi.

He opens his fly, pisses. He is smiling, pissing in the empty woods, pissing on a
natural habitat
full of
specimens
. He zips up, but slowly, unconcerned, convinced he's alone.

He digs a hole, sifts earth through his fingers, looking for life, feeling the coolness in his hands. He hears something, looks around, nothing. He sighs, leans against a tree, looks up at the tree tops, branches dividing the sky. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes—everything blurs.

A gang of boys ride up on bikes, white kids he doesn't know, has never seen, like a pack of ghosts, out of nowhere. They're filthy, spotted in dirt, holes in their clothes, some kind of lower-middle-class urban horde. They say,
Look ahere,
say,
What the fuck,
say,
Ho-ly ssshhhit.
There are ten, twelve of them.

Or he does know them, knows them well. They surround him.
Come on,
he says, palms up, pleading with half a smile bending his face.

It's some older kids—seventeen, eighteen years old, maybe drug dealers, a satanic cult (a popular notion since
Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Carrie,
and
The Omen
have made their way to
The ABC Saturday Night Movie
). They look dead, these kids, look like zombies, skeletal shadows in trenchcoats.

They ride up on motorcycles, but he doesn't hear them until the engines are whining loudly, nasally, beside him.

A group of black kids walk up, quietly, ducking behind trees until they snatch him by the arms. Black kids from the projects a half-mile away.

Or it's some of those Vietnamese—or are they Cambodian?—immigrants that work for minimum wage at the seafood docks downtown. Those people are nuts, S knows, scared of everything, scared of America, driving their boats up on sandbars because they don't understand the English channel markers, talking that gibberish my father mimicked,
Heyro, you wan scarrops or free, four fish.
They have orange-handled fish-gutting knives. Someone told him they eat dog.

No. One man, white, slender, a pedophile. He walks up, a serial killer spending one single day in the city. It is just terrible luck straight out of a movie.

He has a mustache, a beard, is clean-shaven. He has long hair, is balding, is going gray. He's wearing a coat, a T-shirt with something written on the front, he's bare-chested, all hair and big pink nipples.

It is the black man, the exercise guy, who lives on top of the school. He's hunting children in the late-afternoon warmth. His mental impairments have affected his frontal lobe and thus his moral judgment. Perhaps his brain will one day make it into the hands of science. He bets S he can do more push-ups.
You go first,
he suggests.

It is my brother and his friends, just screwing around, and something, something really awful and accidental, happens.

It is my brother out in the woods, by himself, still hearing those first, faint voices, the world a bright, glowing puzzle that has begun to make him angry. He hears God or Satan ticking off something in Morse code, using branches and wind.

S doesn't see them coming. The guy is just there. He sees him coming, but he doesn't look threatening.

The guy looks hurt. Looks helpless. Looks angry, sad, sick.

He limps, runs, walks and whistles. He says he's feeling sick.

He knows him. The guy waves, smiles, says,
Could you help me, son?

He is overdressed, almost naked, doing something in the woods by himself.

He lives down the street. He hangs out at the pool.

Or: Maybe they've been meeting for weeks, months.

Are you doing some kind of class project?
he says.
I'm a friend of your dad's. Your mom sent me. How many push-ups can you do? What are you so afraid of?

S puts on his glasses, leans hard against that tree, looking up at the branches caging the sky, and next thing,
wham
. . .

S is looking down into a hole, at termite larvae wriggling around wet roots, and someone taps him on the shoulder.

S is tying his shoe and then is on his stomach, a knee in his back, something tight around his neck.

They slam him against a tree.

They throw him down, hard.

He takes off his belt, unzips his pants.

He lifts a thick branch to shatter his skull.

He is smiling, then, suddenly, gripping S's face like a bowling ball.

He puts a funny-smelling handkerchief over S's mouth. It tastes like metal, it tastes like salt.

He doesn't give a fuck so everything is possible, and killing is just part of his day.

S struggles like a champ.

He gives up.

He pleads, cries.

He is just sort of blank.

He never knows what hit him.

The guy is touching himself, but everything is okay, then the guy starts talking about his dick, talking about his dick like it's another person standing here, with an opinion, with a temper.
Look,
he says.
Look,
like S did something to him that now he has to pay for.

Before S is unconscious, he sees a tree, the ground, the blurry shape of his glasses on summer leaves, a white face, a black face, an old face, a young face, a strange face, a familiar face, a bunch of faces looking down at him, edgeless and coagulating; a face from the TV, my brother's face; he sees a knee, a bare foot, a boot, a tennis shoe, white; he sees a blur of green and brown because the guy is swinging him around by his neck and he is vanishing into a dream already.

He just watches as his own sock moves over his face and tightens around his neck; he sees his killer(s), but he is already dead and won't be answering any questions.

He sees himself from above and thinks,
God, I'm just a kid
.
What kind of world is this?

He doesn't believe this moment is real. And maybe it's not.

He is reborn in the light of God.

He doesn't feel anything anymore. He's a body without a soul, or without the chemical synapses required to be considered alive. However you want to define it. Whatever you want to believe. He's just dead. The instant came and he was no longer.

A search party gathered early the next morning. S's family must have been frantic. But you never expect the worst. You can't. You'll lose your mind expecting the worst.

Men spread out and marched through the woods. Flashlight beams pierced the dawn. Within an hour, there was a body. No dramatic complication, no Movie of the Week, nothing of the sort. They started looking and there it—he—was.

The cops came, worked on the crime scene through the day, June 11, 1983.

S had been strangled by his own left sock and raped. There was evidence—blood, skin, semen. It was a reckless crime, unplanned, a crime of passion. It made the front page of the local paper the next morning, below the fold. I read it sitting at my kitchen table. S was one year older than me. I watched it on the six o'clock news. I said to myself, I know this person, but didn't feel anything. I tried to will myself to feel something. It was just words on a page, a pretty anchorwoman perfunctorily reciting a story. Another dead kid.

Once the body had been carted away in a black bag, my brother and his friends got as close as they could to the crime scene the next morning. My mother later told me that Michael said he was going to solve the crime and collect the reward. He told her about the black man on the school roof.

I wonder now what my brother, at seventeen, was thinking as he looked at the chalk-drawn shape of a body in the dirt. Did he feel guilt, even then, or was it only later, when the voices were chattering accusations, when the conspiracy against him was complex beyond explanation, drowning out everything?

My father, after a long search, found Michael at the edge of the woods where the body was found. He was alone and dazed. It was close to dusk of the same day, the day after the murder. My father, frantic, after calling around for Michael for hours, had driven down here in our Rambler. Michael hadn't been home in two days. No one had seen him since that morning. None of his friends knew where he was. He was in the woods, they said, but then he said he was going home, that my mother was going to pick him up.