Take One With You (9 page)

***

JT had become such good friends with the old man that he told his grandmother all about him in long, rambling emails he wasn’t at all sure she would understand. Mister Tee, for his part, enjoyed their time together, finding JT the ultimate in safe associations. He was, quite literally, a friend who would self-destruct.

That didn’t mean that the old man had lost his edge; to the contrary, he posited whether there might come a moment that would require him to slit the throat or bash in the skull of his new companion, and he knew he would not hesitate if it had to be. It had been a long time for him, but JT was becoming weaker by the day.

Even the thought that he could still take a life if he needed to gave the old man a spring in his step; El Culo was feeling more and more like his old self as JT declined, like Dorian Gray and his painting or a vampire deriving strength from the life of his victims.

Then came the picture.

Mister Tee protested, of course, but not enough, and before he knew it his picture was on its way to the kid’s senile old grandmother in a little town in the Basque region of Spain near the French border, known mostly for its slaughter of supposed witches during the Inquisition.

When she viewed the picture on the tiny hospital’s computer from her bed at the Consultorio Medico Zugarramurdi, the old woman recognized the face as clearly as she remembered most things from the distant past.

As she looked into the eyes of El Culo de Arica, her blood ran cold, and she ordered the nurse to call the boy in America who claimed to know her daughter.

***

JT explained it t
o
clairebea
r
as best as he could, but it boiled down to the fact that his grandmother had known the wife of one of El Culo’s survivors quite well, a woman who had lost her only son in a tiny village in the mountains above Lima in a particularly heinous fashion. The man responsible was well known in the city where her friend lived most of her life before she too ended up in Spain.  She carried a faded picture of the man who later disappeared, which had been published in the newspaper during Fujimori’s bloody war against Shining Path.

She gave the picture to JT’s grandmother on her deathbed, extracting no promise to search for him or take revenge, but simply to keep the memory of his crime against her son alive in some way.

JT had not believed her at first, but something in the old man’s eyes changed the following day when he asked if he had ever lived in Peru, and then the questions started. JT told Mister Tee that his grandmother said he looked like an old friend she had known from Lima.

It was at that moment that Mister Tee knew he would get to kill at least one more time.

***

JT opened his eyes.

Have I been…sleeping?

Mister Tee looked down at him. He was holding a shovel from the tool shed.

“What happened?” JT asked.

“You had a seizure,” the old man said cheerily. “Hit your head.”

JT looked from his eyes to the shovel.

“Have you been waiting long?”

Mister Tee threw his head back and laughed at that one. He was really going to miss this boy. It had been exhilarating to let someone in again, and in spite of the danger, or maybe because of it, he felt twenty years younger.

The old man helped JT up from the walkway and unlocked the pool room himself. JT noticed, but said nothing about the fact that Mister Tee had apparently rifled his pockets while he was out. He felt a little unsteady, and the old man allowed him to hold onto his arm as they walked inside.

JT collapsed into a poolside chair. He felt like he was going to pass out. He looked up at the old man, who was standing over him with the shovel, smiling.

Jesus Two Bears knew that the tables had turned, and in spite of his bold talk t
o
clairebea
r
the night before, he simply wasn’t capable of killing the old man. He believed he was an evil man, just as his grandmother had told him, but he just did not have the strength.

“Do you want to say goodbye?” the old man asked, and JT knew exactly what he meant.

“I don’t have her number here,” JT answered, and even if he did, he had never had very much luck getting her on the phone.

“What time is it there?” the old man teased. JT could see a headless soldier standing behind him, but he knew that wasn’t real. His vision was getting blurry.

“Hey!” Mister Tee shouted. “Are you still with us?” He threw down the shovel. There was not going to be any need for it again, which both relieved and disappointed him. He had planned to use the kid’s dementia as an excuse, to claim that he had to defend himself, which would have worked but drawn attention to him. This way was better. He could just watch JT die and then call for assistance.

“Just barely,” JT whispered. The headless soldier had grown two heads now, which were in the process of eating each other.

“I have her number,” the old man said, finally dropping all pretense. He still had people who could get information for him if he needed it. “Why don’t I call her for you?”

JT just nodded. He could feel himself slipping into darkness.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

He jerked his head back from the old man, who was trying to drill into his head with a horned snakehead.

“Talk to her, son,” the old man said softly, and JT saw that the old man was holding a phone to his ear.

JT took the phone, but it was the voice of his father he heard.

“Take your stand, boy,” he said. “Look it in the eye, and take your stand.”

JT dropped the phone, which the old man caught with surprising speed and dexterity. He pocketed the cell and looked down at JT, waiting for a sign he knew what was to come, but JT was silent, his breathing more and more labored.

The two-headed soldier, his faces now half-eaten, rose up into the air and hovered over the center of the pool, emanating a brilliant glow that shone like a spotlight in JT’s eyes. He moved his eyes into the shadow of the old man, the light from the soldier now ringed around his head like the halo of a dark angel.

JT tried to speak, but couldn’t. The old man nodded, smiling sadly. He had almost wanted the boy to fight, to give him a taste of days past. JT closed his eyes and teetered on the edge of the chair.

“I ‘spect the same from you, son.”

He opened his eyes. It was the old man’s voice now, but his lips were unmoving. The two-headed soldier began to descend into the water, his mouths snapping at each other, newly roused.

JT reached out as if asking for help to stand, and the old man took his hand. JT stood up slowly, then stumbled, and the old man wrapped his arms around him, holding him up.

With his last bit of strength, JT hugged the old man and propelled them both into the pool.

JT could feel the old man’s panic as they sank below the surface, and now it was he who derived strength from the weakening of the other. JT opened his mouth and allowed water to rush in, struggling against every human instinct to let go and break for the surface.

He looked into the old man’s eyes and saw the evil he was meant to confront. For his ancestors, it had been the 7
th
Cavalry, for his grandfather, U.S. Marshals, for his father, the bottle.

For Jesus Two Bears, it was El Culo de Arica.

Just before they died together, JT saw Iya the younger float past, his older brother just behind. As the spirits watched him, his entire body relaxed and the struggles of the old man in his arms faded to nothingness. To JT and those who came before him, there was really no such thing as an evil spirit as others might imagine. Without the bad, there can be no good. Without suffering, there is no joy.

All things must balance, and so all things serve their own unique purpose.

The coroner was amazed at the two men found entwined at the bottom of the pool. It would have taken an almost superhuman effort not to struggle against the water and embrace death in the way it appeared the younger man had done. It was almost supernatural.

As the coroner was examining the two men, a very old woman across the Atlantic was feeling particularly happy but didn’t know why, and across the country, a very young women felt much the same way, and did.

2 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

Valerie Mosley
             
38,507 Views             

Two months after 16-year-old Monica Tinsley of Porterville posted her last message on Facebook and then slit both wrists halfway up her arm, police finally arrested three 17-year-old boys on rape and sexual battery charges. It was alleged the former straight A student was brutally assaulted by her fellow classmates while she lay naked, bleeding, and unconscious in the bed of a pick-up truck parked in the garage of one of the hockey players who savaged her. She cited in her final post the cruel texts and cellphone photos of the attack that had been passed around to many other students with whom she attended Turner Woods High School.

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But the boys, whose parents all “lawyered up” immediately, were quickly released due to a lack of evidence and, in a sadly ironic twist of fate, the death of a living witness willing to testify against them.

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If all this sounds heartbreakingly familiar, perhaps you’re thinking of the Seattle case, or the Toronto case, or any number of rapes and sexual assaults whose victims are increasingly wounded again and again by the cretinous use of technology and social media to shame and badger and harass them, this time with tragic and not unexpected results.

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But now there appears to be an even greater backlash against such “re-raping”, going beyond the posting of the names and private information of the perpetrators to call attention to their oft-unpunished crimes.

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A website, towy
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l
a
, has begun soliciting people with terminal illnesses and suicidal thoughts to “take one with you” on their way out the door, a kind of purpose-driven death for the Twitter generation, even going so far as to ferret out the names and locations of child molesters and other such vermin. The Turner Three were added just yesterday.

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While it seems to me a rather scary concept, as most vigilantism is, I must admit there is a certain horrifyingly beautiful symmetry to the notion that the depressed and dying can feel good about their demise by leaving a better world behind them. ‘Taking out the trash’ is one of the clever euphemisms the site uses, probably to skirt the legal letter of solicitation laws.

The problem I see is the same problem that afflicts anything when you throw it out into that great big expanse known as the world wide web.

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To put it simply, there are an awful lot of crazy people out there. So mark my words: This “take one with you” idea will either fizzle quickly or fast outgrow its debatably reasonable goals.

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That’s a mighty mean genie to try and coax back into the bottle.

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Be slow, my friends.

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VM

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