Ruthless (12 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MY CRAZY FEVER BRAIN LIKES the look on Jerry T. Balls's
face when I say his first name. His eyes are hidden by the towel, but behind his big beard his mouth turns into a tight line. The knife is already in, and I decide to push on it, dig it deeper. I recite his full name and address. It might be a mistake, but I decide to say, “I wrote all that in giant letters on the Logan garage. Did you see the cop car head up to their place? I bet they've found it by now.”

He doesn't say anything. The towel and beard hide a lot, but there's something different about him, about the way he's holding his jaw, his arms. It frightens me, this change. I don't want to be frightened; I want to be satisfied.

“So, what did they call you? It wasn't Jerry. I don't remember hearing Jerry.”

“Ted.” It's a tight, single syllable. It comes out coiled, ready to strike.

“That explains the T in Jerry T. Balls.” He doesn't nod or act as though he heard me. “You want to know how I knew there were six?”

Long pause, then: “Yes.”

In truth I probably subconsciously counted six pairs of underwear on that horrific end table of his, but I want to tell him my ghost story, get deeper under his skin. “After you shot me in the field, by the bear-bait bucket, I hid up against some rocks. I prayed to your victims and asked for their help. You were right next to me, but you didn't know it. You kicked a rock down the hillside, and a buck spooked in the forest. You chased the buck. Then the six ghosts of your victims came to me. I saw them. All so young. I bet some weren't even teenagers.”

I don't expect him to say anything and he doesn't. I'm disappointed. I want under his skin, I want to burrow under it and scratch around. I want to make him bleed.

“You buried them under the cabin, didn't you?”

Wolfman sits immobile.

He needs to be provoked, so I yell, “Didn't you?”

In the end I don't think it's my volume but his curiosity that makes him say, “How do you know these things?”

It gives me satisfaction to say, “I told you. The ghosts.” I mention nothing of the lines I saw cut into the floor. Now that he's talking, I get to the meat of what I want to know. “Why did you kill those girls?”

“They were evil.”

“Bullshit!” This time I don't have to fake the anger. The rage is right there, ready for me. I ask again, in a controlled voice, “Why did you kill them?”

“They were impure.”

“Bullshit!”
I scream. “They were little girls! They were just little girls! Little girls can't be impure.”

Maybe it's because my rage has made my voice shake, but his old confidence returns, and when he speaks, it's with that principal-­explaining-something-complicated tone. “Have you ever spent time with children?” he asks. “Have you ever seen how children treat other children? Have you ever seen a bully on a school bus?”

He pauses, and I can tell he's really asking. I don't say anything.

“Have you ever seen a bully on a school bus?”

I decide to be honest. “Yes.” But yes doesn't really cover it. I've seen terrible things happen on a school bus, terrible, terrible things. Nothing ever happened to me, and I never did anything to anybody else. But I saw. And stayed quiet.

Wolfman continues, in that hateful, overly patient way of his. “It's when they're young that you can see them for what they really are. You can see their impurities.”

I bring the conversation back to the truth. “They didn't deserve to die.” He says nothing, just vacuums up more water. “I don't deserve to die.” Nothing again. “I think you do though.”

He swallows his giant gulp of water and says, “Hypocrite.”

I lean forward again, almost whisper, “I don't give a shit what you think I am.”

Minutes pass. Wolfman finishes his water. I fill his glass again,
and once more he drinks like he's dying of thirst. I watch him drink and keep sifting through my thoughts, my crazy fever brain chugging along slowly but surely. Finally a little light comes on and a ding sounds, and I know I've found something important to say.

“Here's the thing, Wolfman. Wolfman's what I call you, by the way, because of your creepy, creepy eyes. So, here's the thing. You're right that there's bad in everybody. School-bus bullies have evil in them. God knows, there's bad in me. But I try to be good.” To my surprise, something catches in my throat. I fight through it, determined not to show emotion. “I try to be good. I
want
to be good. Maybe I fail—maybe I fail a lot—but I want to be a good person. You, you're looking for an excuse to be evil.”

I want him to say something, but he is like a brick wall.

“You want to be bad. You want to be evil. You want to do evil things. And this whole excuse you've dreamed up, this purification crap, that's the ultimate bullshit. I call ultimate bullshit on you, Wolfman. What you want is to rape and kill and destroy, and you want to find a way to justify it, so you came up with that crap excuse. You hear me?”

He says nothing.

“You hear me?”

He still says nothing.

His silence sparks my rage, and I jump up and press the barrel of the gun against his forehead.
“You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You're a coward. You hunt people half your size, you hide
behind made-up justifications, you won't admit the truth of what you are, and what you are is a thousand times worse than me. As bad as I might be, you're a thousand times worse. A million times worse. And I'll admit it: I can be ruthless. I get why the barn girls call me that. I get why you think I'm arrogant and mean. I
am
arrogant and mean and ruthless. But you're a million times worse. Because at least I love my family. Even if they did say those things, I don't care. I love them. I love Caleb. I love them with everything I am and I would do anything for them. I'd die for them. The rest of the world, I leave alone. Unless they come at me first. And you, Wolfman, you came at me first. And now you deserve everything you get.”

Then I just sit there and wait. He says nothing; I say nothing. It takes a while. He must have been very dehydrated. But then he begins to shift in his chair. I let him shift around in silence for a long, long time, but even so, he breaks sooner than I expected.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“You can use the same bathroom I did.”

It's like he doesn't understand what I'm saying, and he repeats, “I need to use the bathroom.”

“And I'm telling you, you can use the same bathroom I did.” It's starting to sink in, but just in case he's missed any nuance, I say, “You can sit in your own sticky stink just like I did, Jerry T. Balls.”

There is a comedic level of disgust when he says, “You are a terrible person.”

“Hypocrite.”

Eventually, the shifting stops and there is a new smell in the air. Wolfman's shoulders have slumped some, but his mouth remains a thin, tight line. He looks pathetic and small and disgusting. He looks violated and degraded and wounded. There is no dignity to be found, tied up and blindfolded and sitting in your own mess.

And a part of me feels a thrill of gladness at the sight, for here is a man who deserves to suffer.

And in the echo of that gladness, horror blooms within me. In its own strange way, it's a horror as deep as any I've experienced so far. I've succeeded in taking another human hostage, in making him urinate on himself. I made a plan to torture someone, and then I carried it out, and it satisfied me to do so. As much hurt and hell as the Wolfman has caused, I don't want to be his judge and jury, his jailer and tormentor. I don't want to be that person. I want to be good. I don't want to fall into a big, black pit of darkness, because what if I can't get out?

“Wolfman? Can I ask you something?” My voice comes out hushed, oddly respectful. I get silence in return. “Were you born this way?” More silence. “Please tell me.” Even more silence. But I want to know, so I put the empty gun up against his head. “Were you born this way?”

“Born what way?”

“Bad. Were you born bad?”

“I don't know.”

“When did you first want to do bad things?” He doesn't want to speak, but I really want to know, so I push the barrel into his
temple. “When did you first hurt someone? Or want to hurt someone?” His lips are pursed tight. “I won't kill you if you tell me. And don't lie, or I'll know.”

“My mother.”

“Why did you want to hurt your mother?”

Wolfman tilts his head toward me, as though he can see me. “I'm not talking anymore. Shoot me if you're going to shoot me, but I'm not talking anymore.”

I look out through the giant windows of the great room, at the twinkling lights of the faraway town.

“How old were you when you first wanted to hurt your mother?”

Although he said he wasn't going to talk, he answers immediately. “Six or so. It's my first memory.”

I take the gun away from his temple, struck by his answer. I have memories of riding horses from age two. Mom would put me in the saddle with her. I remember the spots on the neck of the Appaloosa she had; I remember wanting to go faster, always wanting to go faster. I remember the breeze in my hair and the joy of it, the joy of sitting in the saddle with my mother.

How strange to have your first memory come so late, so strange to have that first memory be so dark. My feeling is his mother abused him. Did the abuse make him strange? Or did his strangeness shape his memory of his mother? I don't know. The only thing that is clear is that he fell into that dark hole right away; maybe he was even born there. Either way, having gotten such an early start, he's had a lifetime to dig himself all the way down to hell.

I don't want to dig down. I want to crawl out.

I want to get to that town over there, drop Wolfman off at the police station, and go to a hospital. I want to be done with him, done with all of this.

The peanut butter helped some, but my injuries have taken their toll. They've almost—but not quite—killed my desire to ride to glorious victory. I don't think anything can kill that innate thing within me, that thing that wants to win. It's what makes me want to bring Wolfman to justice, to stop him forever. I want to be a hero. Then I look at this rapist-killer tied up before me and think,
I am a freaking hero.

But there are some things I need to do before launching Operation Bring Jerry T. Balls to Justice.

Although Wolfman may have gone to the bathroom in his pants, I need to go too, and I won't be following suit. It scares me, the idea of leaving him unattended. When I get to my feet, they scream out in pain. My feet are damn near unusable at this point.

After cutting two more lengths of electrical cord from a couple of unlucky lamps, I double-tie his arms and legs to the chair. I test the knots, and they seem tight and secure. But it's hard to trust the knots, even though I've been tying ropes around the ranch since I was a toddler. A loose horse is bad; a loose Wolfman is infinitely worse.

I stop three times on the way to the master bathroom to return and recheck my knots before I finally commit to the plan. Once in the bathroom I keep my eyes away from the mirror. There's no toilet paper. Rummaging around, I find some under the counter, as well as a first-aid kit with a big bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It seems like
a smart idea to treat my wounds, try to fight the infection.

After I flush the toilet, it starts to run. The noise bothers me; it's covering up any sound Wolfman might be making. I go back and check on his knots, hobbling every step of the way. He hasn't moved, and the knots look good. Back to the bathroom, to clean these wounds.

The damn toilet's still running. Jiggling the handle doesn't help, and I give up trying to make it stop.

Even though my gun is empty, I keep it right by the sink, as though it could magically protect me if I needed it to. Opening up the first-aid kit, I find it's a good one. Gauze, tape, antibacterial ointment. I find Tylenol and take four, then pocket the bottle.

I want to stay in the moonlight. Flipping the switch will mean looking at myself and knowing the truth about what's happened to me. But darkness isn't practical for wound care. Time to be brave.

I turn on the light.

Someone I don't know looks back at me from the mirror. A tremble vibrates through my fingers as I take off the camo jacket. My head is stop number one. It's a significant laceration, one that would've required many, many stitches to close. The first step is to wash with good ol' soap and water. For a brief moment I contemplate the shower. That would be easiest. But loud. Wolfman would hear it, know what I was doing, know I was vulnerable. No, no shower for me. I'll use the sink instead.

I have to curl my head down to get under the faucet, and prop my arms up on the counter to deal with it. It's the only way to get my hands high enough.

It hurts like hell when I scrub, so I decide it's not a part of me. This is a wound on a cow or a horse, something to be dealt with firmly but gently. Just a matter-of-fact part of life on a ranch. This make-believe helps, and so I dive down deep into the disassociation, so deep I actually say “Whoa” out loud to myself when the pain gets intense. Once clean of mud, there's the flush of hydrogen peroxide. It bubbles like a witch's cauldron. There are a lot of wounds to get to, so I try to be sparing with it.

Before I tackle my bullet slice I head back to the dining room. My feet hurt so bad, it takes a force of will to make the trip. I peek around the corner. Wolfman is sitting perfectly still.

Back to the bathroom again. The shoulder is not quite as terrifying as the head. The edges are neat and tidy; that helps when looking at it. It looks maybe like a horse that sliced itself on a broken metal gate. I keep that mental image in mind. I've done so much horse first aid in my life, this is no big deal. This is just a slice, a simple accident. Not even one with long-term repercussions. This horse'll be just fine, once it heals up.