List of the Lost (9 page)

“Yet … you look at this … and you still believe in some divine being? Some protector of the innocent and the good?” Nails is aiming directly at Ezra. “How could this boy's murder be watched over by some supreme being who remains … unmoved? One who claims to love and care and vows reward for those who love and care?”

“This is not the deed of God, but the deed of man,” said Ezra softly.

“Yes, man made in the image of that very God … who does not show divine mercy when it is needed most. Isn't everything in God's design? Even this? Why praise him for the miracle, yet remove him from the disaster? And what had this boy ever done to anyone?” Nails was now distraught. A long and thoughtful pause followed, to be broken by Ezra's request for practical action. Justy had the solution.

“I make a call to the flatheads, tell them the body is here, tell them the murderer's name, and click. What more information do they need?”

“Knowing the flatheads,” said Nails, “they'll need to know what day it is.”

“This isn't the time for flippancy,” said Eliza.

“Who exactly is being flippant?” snapped Nails. “Let them put the pieces together. Any move we make must be anonymous, and we must get away from here right this minute. All that we needed to do we've done.”

“Wait!” said Eliza in a louder whisper. She then produced a felt-tipped pen, knelt down to the torn tarpaulin, and wrote the boy's name very clearly above the upper section of his shroud: Noah Barbelo, murdered by Dean Isaac, 1955. From there, the four slid away.

Alone in the shower, Justy wept with ferocity. Alone in his bed, Nails wept in a malaise of torment. Enjoined, Ezra and Eliza coiled together under messy sheets, struggling to find meaning in the present.

With daybreak Dibbs stood alone on the college track.

“Where's them clowns?” asked an approaching Mr Rims, still hoping to revive what was now so very lost.

“No sign, Mr Rims,” said Dibbs, with characteristically vacant aspect and considerable embarrassment. Fated to suffer, his shorts were two sizes too small, and his socks did not match.

“Hmmm?” said Mr Rims, looking easterly then westerly. “I feel like the last one to know.”

“The last one to know what, Sir?” asked Dibbs.

“The last one to know what I don't yet know.”


As if to characterize unnecessary labor, Ezra, Nails and Justy eventually made a show for a late-afternoon drill brief, even if the stiffener of dead paste at the loss of Harri disadvantaged all three. Dibbs loomed as an eager superjock of one-line jokes; flat out when the bell rang and fully ready with untiring jibberish, yet green in judgment when the whistle announced the seconds to mount and destroy all opponents.

“Yeah, I've been known to draw first blood,” he joked (to smiles, of course, from no one), “I was born with teeth, haha,” eager as he was to disguise his all-American Neanderthal self and join the gang. It was all too much for the others who, play-by-play, burbed out like bowwow cellar dogs of faded greatness. In a sleepwalking state they somehow ran, and Rims looked on unable to convince anyone of anything yet always ready with savage Spanish Armada lash of the tongue. Enslaved, the evening continued, but nothing could show the way. It will come if it comes. The inner selves were spliced and finished, and enthusiasm constricted itself amid flashes of Harri's funeral and the wormed visions of Noah's leftover remains. Personal fallibility rose and … luck has an opposite. The bomb-burst had died, and Dibbs' conversational tone (for, loosely, it could perhaps be termed conversation) had the grating sound of religious fanaticism – tired torrents of trapped nonsense of empty-headed principles without any evidence to point to. Having let go of everything, Ezra now felt shelled and destroyed, and Dibbs (such a child still … at risk of degrading all children) was determined to not be outdone by his own inability. Nails yawned. It was done with. The Nineteenth Hole seemed too far away in stunning sunlight, and bullwhacker Rims interrupted a bunch start.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind,” he chewed, “that the horse, if not the barn itself, has bolted,” and with that he spat.

Three heads bowed solemnly as Rims revved up for further hell-driver analysis – no part of which the boys would wish to hear. Rims clambered aboard his soapbox and the grand performance began.

“We search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well, keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still. Your time could be devoted to far better things. Knitting, for example. Historians of track and field need watch you no longer. I need a stiff drink and a long sleep, or a long drink and a stiff sleep. I knew the end would come soon, but I didn't think it would come before the actual race began. At least I now realize how pointless it is trying to force things. You are all disqualified, your timings are punishable by death, and I watch your slackness in torture. If you are serious athletes then my mother is an astronaut, and you'll be sorry to hear that my mother is no astronaut. You should be forced to live face down in your own feces, as you probably do any way, if only for general identification purposes. I will be happy enough just to survive this. If I were religious, I'd pray. I could apply the lash, but why waste the lash? Now I see why some people laugh at F-Troop – not laughing with it but laughing because of it. You've been lavish with promise for so long yet now you backslide like factory-farmed pigs with no choice, pigs whose primal screams ignite no humane response from their human killers. I have watched an orgy of scared rabbits today, and Dibbs here had his harrier best at hand for all of youze. But the way through is barred. Close your eyes and try to recall all your previous numbers and opportunism. I now bear witness of your royal crapness. I see how Harri's death has inflicted drastic damage, and I'm enough of a humanist to feel sorrow, but you ought to be sportsmen enough to answer any challenge. You are no longer fit for consideration or even for human gaze. You are not a team. You'd get kicked out of bed. I take leave of absence. I am now very firmly a non-believer and I change my religion, the correct word for which is apostasy. You are the source of my panic and I shall let it go with some peace regained. I am free.”

At this moment, Nails snorted a bull's charge and fell into Rims by planting a bashed belt that poked the rim of the chin, a non-zinger that lolloped rather than Sunday-punched, as Rims calmly avoided the noisy rustle of the oncoming slug which, in any event, hurt Nails' fist far more than it cut up Rims. The purged Nails bent over in pain and humiliation, whilst Rims stood passively puritan, the understanding gagman of unhurtable Purple Heart. His calm was impressive.

“A gallant display, Nails, but you have shown me, once again, that I should expect nothing better from you. Goodbye.”

“Say … what!” jumped Dibbs, the dreams that money can't buy slipping through his fingers.

“The bad and the sad events of recent days have stripped your spirits. I see it all now just by standing here and looking at you. Sadness fleshes out … and out … and out. You are pretending and you look pale. You are crippled by the way you look and move just as much as by whatever you say. Self-floggers are of no interest to me – I've been around those people all of my life and they bore me senseless. You've just joined them. You've got to want it, and you don't, so you won't get it. Determination is not talent.” Rims ran on overdrive.

“I thought you'd said goodbye?” said Nails, nursing his hand.

“Nails. To you … someone will always be saying goodbye …” Rims threw his final dart. With that he walked away. The ton-of-bricks shock on the faces of Ezra and Justy registered failed nerve, a loss of vocation to Harri, and a stark overture of anger. Humiliated, the still largely unknown Dibbs twitched and then fell to the ground with his hands cradling his brain – this discouragement far too much for him to bear. Fate sealed, Ezra no longer felt like the golden-boy profiteer, and there was now no identifiable unscrupulous fire within. Never to be intimidated, Nails nonetheless knew that Rims' pitiless outburst had crassly called for denial by the boys – a denial that none had the strength to make. Love's labors lost.

The dark force of seven full days dripped by before local news reports shrieked discovery of the body in the college grounds. No responsibility fell to the godly whitewashed halls of Priorswood, even as it was incorrectly announced that the corpse had lain undiscovered for ‘just' five years. Since the boy had not been a Priorswood student, police assumed that the body had been dumped at the college without having any direct connection to the hallowed halls, around which an abnormally solid wall of respectability suddenly erected itself. Of course, knowing nothing, the police must always imply that they know something, whilst not actually solving any serious human problems. Local television news, meanwhile, gives a practiced air of impartial reporting but angles its wording at a pre-existing attitude towards whatever it reports. At its core its reporting must influence the moral and emotional nature of its viewers, because television news narratives always assume that every person watching is exactly the same in moral temperament and social outlook and will be sufficiently exhausted by their own private struggle that they will believe everything that they see and hear on television news. Passive goodwill is the middle line, yet the overall assumption is that television viewers themselves haven't the mental capacity to penetrate any news story, so why therefore should the actual reporters? It simply is not necessary, and as long as viewers remain tortured by worry and concern, then the news has fulfilled its contract to the human race. Torrents of horror rippled through the town, yet Noah's name – so precisely printed across his tarpaulin graveclothes – would not be mentioned. In the solemn echo-chamber of Boston's most esteemed public libraries, Eliza had investigated missing-person's files in search of Noah Barbelo, but had found nothing.

The oh-so-sudden and immediate retirement of Dean Isaac sneaked out into local newsprint, with smiles and waves following fifty years of devotional service as an impeccable educator. Still single at sixty-five years, he winked with easy conscience that he now at last had the time to find a wife – the utterly insensible assumption that a carefully preserved, pony-tailed slave might still be out there waiting, and in desperate need of Isaac's crinkled crabbiness and a new set of dishcloths. The honorary evangelist spent a pleasant Tuesday morning leaning into his flower-beds by way of benevolent inspection as they trailed the border of the small and private college garden that he considered his own since the window bay of his magisterial study squinted out across it, latticed and of deep window sills. Always fighting himself, this was where he found the light that his heart always yearned for, and where he could forget his disturbing associations, no matter how capriciously the mind dragged the fat body along. He could look suffering directly in the eye as long as that suffering was not his own, yet he was now in a terrible rush, for he had never heard of sexual presumptions in either heaven or paradise, and there were now fewer years to cram more of it in – at least as far as his capacities would allow … as a chronicler of horror, for even at twenty years old his timing had been all wrong, and life's general rites of passage were never his. The right response from the right loved one never came, and as middle age ambushed him, Isaac still struggled to construct lost youth at the Junior Prom that never was, and the Eagle Scouts that shut him out, having no idea what to do next, throughout years and years of sexual silence. Now, in slipping maturity, he was a sorry image of the overripe drifting into life's final chapters as if they were a sandy whirlwind of death – which, in fact, they were. A solemn parley of memories filled dull Thursday evenings, but the doctor was becoming the patient, which, in his confidence game, he did not like. The pain of being jealous of the very flesh that we admire! The pain of longing to be what would never be! Life surrounds like lumbering fat, further demeaned by each racing year, slavishly chasing the unattainable. Mother knew everything yet said nothing, for to say anything was to provide oxygen. Mother died and the son lied. It would all be over soon enough, anyway, and dean of the faculty had been position enough, and it is so easy to pervert and corrupt whilst occupying the most trusted and endowed chair of academic ranks. But oh, could there be someone one day who might make sense of me? And if it is not designed to be, then why am I able to imagine it?