Hystopia

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It is sometimes claimed that the second great riots were sparked by the assassination of JFK on September 17, 1970—the Genuine Assassination, as it came to be known. (Even now there is significant confusion over the identity of the real shooter[s]: Identical twins, Utah B. Stanton and Stan B. Stanton, both of Springfield, Illinois, claimed responsibility.) But the third burn of Flint and Detroit, along with the Canada Spillover (in which gasoline cans were hauled across the Freedom Bridge from Port Huron and used to ignite portions of Sarnia, Ontario) and the great Thumb inferno, cannot be definitively linked to Kennedy’s death. Anger had reached a boiling point; factors included the devaluation of the blue-collar worker, the destruction of factory infrastructure, and large numbers of wayward vets and minorities seeking justice. (Howard Harper in his study, Black Despair, New Slavery, the Burning of Detroit (Again) and the Way Talk Has Talked Itself into Talk, has pointed to an avoidance of clear analytic approaches in the assessment of the so-called riot sparks in the state of Michigan.)

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[Author’s Note: Accompany the main body of the story with author’s notes, editor’s notes, and interviews. When writing it go ahead and use real names and change them later if necessary. EA]

FURTHER INTERVIEWS

Ned Bycoff

He went over and served and came back and started right to work on his book. When he came out of the house he was wearing his combat fatigues most of the time. He’d just come out and look around the yard and then up at the sky and shake his head and go back in. We knew he was writing something because you could hear his typewriter going day and night. I’d come home from my shift — I was working the night shift as an electrician at Allied Paper — and he’d be up there typing. His desk was in the window and I could see his head bowed.

Molly Stam

Eugene’s sister had a breakdown. I remember that the Allen house got suddenly quiet that summer. You had the sound of his typewriter but otherwise it was silent. The summer before, it was doors banging, shouts, and cars roaring up and down in front of the house. Eugene mentioned something about that. He didn’t like these guys who came in to hang with his sister after Billy was gone. He told me once, I mean we were hanging out and he said: At night these guys come and pick her up, or drop her off, and I watch them out the window. That’s all he said, but it was the way he said it.

John Burns

Perhaps the true history, without enfolding, without JFK miraculously alive and in his highly improbable third term, was simply too painful for Allen. Not that I care. Like I said, I was weirdly happy to see that he offed himself after he got back from Vietnam. He bugged me. I beat the shit out of him one time when he was a kid. His sister was a slut. I mean, she was a slut when she was about fourteen, starting then, and went around asking for it. You know what I mean? Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. But that’s the truth, man. I can say that. [Prison noise in background.] Biggest mistake I made was not killing him before I landed in here. I mean, what difference did it make to me if it was this guy or that guy; I knew if I got caught I’d be in for life. Go ahead. Put it in your tape machine.

Eugene Allen

Billy Thomas came up to my room to talk. He was back from his first tour and came into my room and sat on my bed. He called me “son” that afternoon. He poked around my room and lifted my mattress and found a magazine and gave it a look, flicked through the pages, held up the centerfold, and then put it back and gave me a smirk and said: Good, son, you’re a normal guy. Then he sat down again on the bed and began to tell me what he wanted from me. “You gotta let the world know if I don’t come back what’s what, man,” he said. He told me once I’d been over there and finished my tour of duty, I’d understand, and then he left.

Buddy Anderson

His sister had been been missing from state hospital after she cracked up, or whatever. That was the summer girls were found all over the state. A girl was found at Gull Lake, battered and dead. Another girl was found in the sludge pond near the paper mill. It’s sick but it’s true. As far as I know, her boyfriend, Billy, went back for his second tour. They spent a lot of time together that summer and then he went back. He was AWOL, is what I heard, but they cut him some slack because he was a long-timer and was good at what he did.

Eugene Allen

This car drove up and this officer got out. He had that anxious look of a bearer of bad news. He stopped for a second, wiped his brow, looked up and down the street at the sun coming through the trees. He was wearing white gloves. He had some paper in his hands. I heard him knock on the Thompsons’ door across the street and then I heard the screams. Like steel on steel, maybe, or glass on slate, as keen and horrible as anything I’d ever heard — maybe like something being pried apart from something else — and then this new kind of silence that let the wind in, the sound of the leaves, the midsummer afternoon hush and then the abatement of hush and then an even deeper silence through which, far off down the street, you could hear kids playing ball, and then an even deeper silence that I can’t describe here but hope to get in at the end of the next revision.

Randall C. Jones

We were treating her with EST and I was the only male nurse on the ward, which seemed to mean something. Just this sweet little girl who’d been into all kinds of shit. We had a lot of those, and this was around the first riots, and there were a lot coming in, most of them lost causes, just wrap and let them rock away the afternoons. We used convulsions as an excuse to pump them full of Nembutal. I remember some of the weird nicknames. We had the Attorney in there. We had the Butler. He was a famous case because Dr. Morris was working him and he thought he was Lord Byron one minute and then went back to his usual state as a tool-and-die man out of Detroit. I remember that. But Meg stuck in my head — and I guess that’s why we’re having this interview. [The sound of a cigarette being lit. Coughing. A phone ringing in the background.] I remember Meg Allen because she was one of those rare breakouts. She took off one afternoon, slipped away from the back of the hospital, near the loading dock. She must’ve gone under the fence, worked her way down the hill behind the facility. It was tough going down there, but she had some skills. From that point it’s all conjecture. She was found upstate, from what I heard.

Lee Wolf

The thing was Allen hated it because these guys called his sister a slut. They didn’t just say she’s a slut. They’d say: There goes the Slut. She was slim, beautiful, unstable. I think we all felt that, as if her fate, if you know what I mean, was in her instability. For a long time Allen was just this quiet little geeky kid brother, and then he was a young man. I don’t remember that much. He was in my class in school, and we knew he was smart, and we knew that the older kids gave him a hard time. I don’t recall the incident you allude to. I mean I knew that he got picked on. That was the natural order of things back then. You had the bullies, and the tough kids from down the hill, and they just existed and you worked your life around the fear and found ways, if you could, to avoid contact. If they kicked your ass, you simply saw it as part of the way your world worked.

Buddy Anderson

I don’t believe the report would’ve used the phrase “friendly fire.” I’m not sure if they were using that phrase during the second phase of Nam, although I might be wrong. Whatever the report said, it alluded to the idea that Billy Thompson was somehow involved with his own death. There must’ve been something about the coordinates. I don’t believe Eugene made that up. That’s what he might’ve said to me when we talked about Billy coming into his room that afternoon and poking around and then saying something along the lines of: If I don’t come back it’s gonna be up to you, the writer, to tell my story. Have a vision of it, he might’ve said. Eugene was always talking about having visions. He’d say: I have a vision of myself at the very end, and I’d say, What the fuck are you talking about? and he’d say, Don’t you ever think about how it would be, right before you die? Don’t you think you’d have some kind of vision as the time compresses in on itself; I mean, you start splitting the seconds until you find eternity, man, he said. We were driving up north looking for a fishing spot, smoking a joint — I mean, I don’t really remember, but I kind of assume we were smoking. It was the summer after they found his sister, and he told me he was taking a break from writing his novel until he could figure out how to end the thing.

Dr. Brent Walk

We all know his sister wasn’t found up there the way Eugene described it, which for me is just a bunch of bullshit. Yeah, she was killed, most likely. But maybe not. Maybe she got lost or something. Or maybe she overdosed. But it’s just as possible that the cop killed her and then tossed her body into the weeds. I’ve been to that spot, not far from St. Ignace, just over the bridge. There’s one of those dunes on the other side of the road, across the beach. Pine needles and all that. Thing is her body was so far gone with decay that it’s just speculation, but he had to pin it, I think, on some gang of bikers. That’s what he went around telling us. He went around saying she was killed by some Nam vets. Least that’s the way I remember it.

Stan White

Here’s the thing, man. It’s not enough, the way I see it, to change the name Billy Thompson to Billy-T and leave it at that. Billy was more messed up than Allen lets on, and his fuckedupness was combined with Meg’s fuckedupness. But one thing Eugene had right about Billy was that he loved Iggy Pop. He said Iggy was Christ, or maybe Christ was Iggy. That’s what he said. But even before he went to Nam, is what I’m saying, he was messed up. He was one of those gentle screwups. He had this kind of slippery, lazy way of dealing with reality, and he admitted it. He’d say, Man, reality is too real for me. I’m gonna just take it slow and easy. We’ve got all the time in the world. He said that again and again until he didn’t have all the time in the world.

Capt. Willard Starks

I’m only speculating that Thompson told him about some of the fighting he’d done and Eugene combined that with his own war experience. His old man was in Korea, so he got some of that material from him. But Allen wasn’t in intense combat as far as I know. He seems to have had a desk job in a recon outfit in Saigon, although I have to admit that his files mysteriously disappeared.

Buddy Anderson

He wasn’t happy with the ending of the thing and said it fooled him. He said he let it play out but was shocked because he wanted the end to have a big shootout. He said his desire to have revenge in the end just didn’t work out. I never believed him when he said that.

Gerald McCarthy

You ever hear about Project 100,000? You know, man, the thing was these were all working-class guys and would’ve been rejected anyhow, at least I’m talking Billy would’ve been because he wasn’t such a bright bulb, not stupid but not exactly educated, if you know what I mean. If you haven’t heard about Project 100,000, you’d better look it up.

John Burns

The thing was Billy and Eugene were draft bait and couldn’t land a decent job because they were draft bait and they, meaning the managers hiring at the mill, or at the pharmaceutical plant, always asked if you’d fulfilled your service. Why would they train you on the line at Upjack, or in the mill, if you were going to be yanked out? They joined up because they felt it coming, if you know what I mean. Billy’s old man could’ve landed him a job. His old man worked at Ford and could’ve gotten him something down there, for sure. Eugene’s old man was a manager, but he started out on the line, I think, and worked his way up. He hauled a lunch bucket like the rest, though.

Buddy Anderson

I’m thinking his draft notice came right around the time he was just starting to write the first draft, which no one ever really got to see because he burned it and rewrote it when he got back. At least that’s what I remember him talking about. He was saying he was closing in on the end. His grandfather had been on the board years back, but from what I know that didn’t do no good with pulling strings and his number came up anyway.

Gerald McCarthy

You remember that recruitment ad the Army ran? You’d see it at the post office, or in school. It said, “Make the choice now — join, or we’ll make the choice for you.” That’s the way it was for us kids. I mean, it’s not like we had much of an option, not like the rich kids on the other side of the river who could get a doctor to write up some bullshit crook knee, or someone heading to school full-time. Billy Thompson was part-time in school for a while, but that didn’t do the job with the board because you had to be full-time. His old man just couldn’t afford it, and he knew he’d be drafted so he figured he’d sign up and make the choice like most of the other guys did.

John Frank

Operation plans during Nam were often written after initial contact. In other words, you’d go in and draw fire and fight and then they’d name an operation after the mess and the mission statement would be backdated to the start of the fight and written after the fact. Singleton and Rake were in Operation George Washington, I think. Singleton must’ve known at the end, tracking Rake, he was in Operation Duel. The way I read it, the guy knew the entire thing would be rewritten after the fact, after he caught Rake, to look retrospectively like it all fit together. Then it would seem as if there were intuitive — some might say conspiratorial — factors involved. I look at it as that kind of deal. That’s what led them into contact — that kind of delusion that was in the air, the delusion you get when what you’re going through, maybe you know it, maybe not, is going to be written up to make some kind of sense from an operational standpoint when presented to the bigwigs in Washington as a report. That shit was in the air when Eugene wrote this thing. There was still that shit in the air.

Carrie Anderson

Meg used to hang out at Look Park with the other stoners. It was just across the road from the school, so it was where you went when you skipped a class and then decided to skip the whole day. We were friends, I guess, but not close friends because she was one of those girls who hung around with guys more than anything.

Richard Allen

No comment. I’d rather not say anything in response to that question.

Buddy Anderson

It’s like you can’t really get your mind around it when it’s being thrown at you the way he threw it at me all the time, saying I’m going to kill myself if I get drafted. Then he gets drafted and goes. When he came back he worked hard day in, day out, and when he did come out for a drink he’d just sit with his head in his hands and ask questions: What’s the plot, man? he’d say to me. What’s the plot? Thing was, around the time he was drafted we thought the war was starting to wind down, or at least it seemed like it might end any day and we figured we’d be shipped to Fort Whatever, somewhere down south, to go through boot camp and all of that and then we’d come back here, like I did, and live out our lives. When his draft notice came he’d already written me a bunch of the suicide notes, and we thought, at least I thought, they were funny, so when he got back — and he was changed, man, of course he was changed like everyone else — and he started to write them again, while he was writing his book, it wasn’t so funny anymore. I didn’t save those notes. I saved the ones he wrote before he left.

Susan Habb

There was this time these kids beat Eugene. We were walking home and John Burns and some other guys jumped him. They broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. After that he was different. I mean, this kind of thing happened all the time. It was a tough neighborhood, with a mix of kids from the mills and kids whose dads were laid off and all of that. I’m not saying I saw he was different but now that I think about it, I mean looking back, I think he was different. He began to stay to himself more after that. He had friends, like the guy named Buddy. But things were different.

Markus Decourt

Yeah, yeah, that guy named Rake is a lot like the guy, Johnny Burns. That was the guy who came around to see Meg after Billy Thompson was killed in Nam. This sleazy snake came knocking, so to speak. Real snake, this guy named Johnny. There weren’t really established gangs in our town, but there were loosely associated, you might call them, somewhat organized clumps of young men who liked to fuck things up, and he was one of them. He could exploit her weakness, and I always guessed that he was the one, if there was somebody, who helped her escape the nuthouse and took her up to where they found her body. What would they say in court? I guess they’d say that’s all hearsay. But hearsay means something, too, is what I say.

Markus Decourt

It seems important that he wrote his book before they found his sister’s body, because he had to guess where she was, and the truth is he guessed pretty close to what really happened, except she wasn’t up in Canada safe and sound with some lumberjack like Hank, searching out trees, trying to make a killing in the lumber business. Whatever happened to her up there, she came into contact with some bad elements, rest assured. Actually, those are the words his father used when he could finally speak again, after the funeral. He said, bad elements. She got in with some bad elements, and they took advantage of her. That’s what he said.

Carl O’Brian

Allen had one thing right. You’d write an operation report after the fact and backdate the thing and then it would somehow fit the strange, horrific logic of the battle, at least the initial point of contact with the enemy and the charge up the hill and the number of your KIAed and injured in relation to the number of VC KIAed and all of that, all written in a kind of cable-ese that reduced the complexity of battle; even reports that were not written in the field, by some desk jockey in Saigon and meant for secret transmission, were written in that jargon, that reductive nonsensical, staccato mode. I get the feeling that Billy knew, and I mean we used to sort of talk about this stuff, in our own way, that if he was KIAed over there in his second tour, he’d be reduced to just some bullshit lingo on an outgoing report that somehow rat-tat-tatted out on a teletype machine in some deep basement of the Pentagon.

Richard Allen

[Static, fumbling with microphone.] Like I said, I really can’t talk about it. My father-in-law died shortly after my daughter was killed and so the grief was double, and I lost my son. So it was three in about two years.

John Burns

I seriously doubt if Billy ever went up to that kid’s room and had a man-to-man with him. I know for a fact he wouldn’t call him “son.”

Chuck Stam

Billy had a lisp; something about his teeth and his tongue. So I can see that he might’ve called in the wrong coordinates. That mind-flash — or whatever you want to call it — that Meg, the character Meg, has when she’s in the water and he speaks is about the way he sounded. He was a big questioner. He asked a hell of a lot of questions and then came up with a lot of answers. He loved to talk. He would’ve attended his own funeral for sure.

VARIOUS SUICIDE NOTES

Dear Buddy. Here’s the basic problem as I see it. Now that I’m back, I’m bored with the mystery of life. Why did Meg end up dead in a ditch? Why am I still here? What does it mean that I wake up early in the morning to hear a mourning dove cooing and listen to it intensely, as I did one summer morning a few years back? I lay and listened, knowing that I’d remember that moment forever. I told myself — in bed, shrouded in the cool sheets — that I should and would remember. And the deeper, eternal mysteries that, just a few years ago, I seemed to care so deeply about. That silence between Mom and Dad when the conversation, usually about what to do about Meg, lulled and then they were looking at each other, for just a second, fondly. The question of where time goes when it’s finished evoking the present moment. What it means when history devours a beloved, like Meg, or JFK, or MLK or whoever. I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of giving the slightest shit anymore. This isn’t the kind of suicide note I’m sure you expect from me. But right now, here, on the edge of doing myself in, it’s all I can come up with. I wrote my draft and now I want to terminate myself before I finish revisions, partly because the entire mess is obviously built around the thing I’m avoiding. As Grandpa said to me years ago, I’m a hider by nature. I’m a loner. I’m sure I’m abnormally reacting to the fact that my sister was killed, on one hand. On the other hand, my own manhood was at stake. Whatever. I’m lonely, sad, and I’ve been beaten. That afternoon, the one you know about already, when I was walking home and jumped by Larry, and John, and some other assholes. They got me. I mean, they told me that Meg was a slut, and then beat the shit out of me. I said a prayer for them, and it was my last prayer. So let it be recorded here that Eugene Allen, on his last day on earth, admitted that he said one last prayer and knew it was going to be his final attempt. I mean, let it be known that I said goodbye to my attempts at forgiveness for those guys, who for me at that time, on the street, walking home, were emblematic — I can admit this — of certain men who have an inclination toward violence, that I also said so long to the inclination to forgive the world in general. In other words, my friend, where is the grace in all this? I mean, the war goes on. I see the photographs. I pay attention. Billy is gone, of course, but the men like him still go off to fight as I write this. (Note: Buddy. I know you’re gonna see this as yet another in a long line of relatively lame suicide notes I’ve composed this summer. This one might be for real. I’ll put it in your mailbox later tonight and you’ll get it before the lights go off. So I’m sure you’re thinking: Ah, man, Eugene does it again, spells out his last thoughts.) Anyway, back to my main point, which is that the deeper mysteries that I used to be able to feel with such ease, and by feel I mean respect, sense, and take in but not answer — that’s it, man, Buddy, I can no longer take in the mysteries. And I could do that a year ago, even when Meg was AWOL, out there somewhere, and the cops were coming to the door. I could still feel that delight — yeah, that’s the word — in the strangeness of reality. But that went away and with it my urge to stay involved with the present moment, and I have to add here, Buddy, that I have an unwillingness to look back, so I can’t even live in the past, not really, which would include some pretty traumatic shit — and you know what I mean — when we didn’t understand that Meg was going crazy, or was crazy, and before she was, as they said, diagnosed and treated.

Dear Grandpa,

I’m writing this first off, ahead of the fact, to say I’m sorry for whatever pain I’ve caused you. Please forgive me and know that I went out believing most, if not all, of what you taught me about God and about my place in the world and the importance, as you said again and again, of looking at the big, big picture, the one that goes forward in time and backwards and shows, or as you always said, the vastness of eternity in relation, as you said, to our small speck of lives. There are some things I’ve got to get down in this letter to let you know that I do remember. First off, I remember your elegance and the way you dressed — won’t force it in here, but I’ll describe a few things: the way you wore your hat, with your name and address and a note in the band that said, Reward if found. Return to Harold B. Allen. (I’ll spare you what you know.) The suits you bought in Chicago, and the time you took me and let me watch while the tailor chalked and measured and lifted the bolts of fabric out for me to finger, treating me, the tailor, like a man instead of a kid; also the cufflinks you wore along with the sock garters and the shoes. Anyway, your elegance and the house and the time you let me stay there, those days, when things at my house were too chaotic. I’ll spare you the narrative here. This note isn’t to explain why I’d end my life early. I realize that my desperation, my despair, will be linked directly to my tour of duty in Nam, of course, and also Meg’s death and the pain of all of that and the way Mom drinks and so on and so forth, but the truth is I’m simply not equipped for manhood as it is defined in this — I’ll spare you the rest [indecipherable scribble] … I should type this up because the writer’s cramp is killing me, but it seems wrong to type out a note like this on the same machine on which I wrote fiction. I’m slightly obsessive about your hats, to return to that subject. It seems to me that the covering of the head with an elegant object somehow is emblematic of your time and place in the world, and the fact that I’ve grown my hair long, too long to fit under the kind of hat you wear — although in theory it might work — should stand out as a major indication of the difference between your generation and mine, although I do, as I stand here, with a can of gas in my hand (or a gun, or whatever), have to admit that I side with your comment, and agree wholeheartedly, that the concept of generations is a creation of, as you say, the culture gone haywire, and that between your world and mine there is really only a slight, tweaky difference. I go out now because I can’t find a way [indiscernible scribbles] … foothold might be the right word. My body feels unable to relate to the gravitational pull. I thought of this when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and I became obsessed with that footprint more than anything, the pattern on the sole, the boot prints, and then I began to wonder if maybe the world would be better if he had stepped onto the lunar surface in a pair of Florsheims (can’t think of a better brand), or better yet one of your handmade shoes, the ones with nails holding the sole. If he’d left a better print perhaps the whole Year of Hate thing, the riots and so forth … I won’t go there. Suffice it to say that a young man who can only come up with a lame little riff on the nature of moon footprints deserves, in some way, to stop existing. Or maybe I should say that a man who has to resort to a riff on footprints and then resorts to resorting to mention of that resorting as a lame excuse and then talks about his desire to end it all deserves to end it all? Anyway, I know you did your best with the draft board and pulled whatever strings you could and were in the uncomfortable position because of your former service.

Dear Buddy,

This is it, man. The real deal. Please disregard other notes and take this one seriously. I’ve been typing like a madman and failed to get the following, not verbatim, but in essence. Here’s a last list of things:

The time we went fishing up at the Two Hearted, which we agreed was really a shit stream, and you caught the hook in my fist when I was watching you cast from the footbridge, looking down and studying the riffles, trying to see where the fish might be lurking from a better vantage. You were wading with your back to me and made a fantastic cast, just beautiful, and then another even better cast, and I was watching the line and the hook — I think it was a muddler — stuck in my wrist and you thought it was a snag and before I could yell you began yanking; not that actual moment but the way we used it later, driving up to Duluth, smoking, talking, as the butt of a joke, twisting it and turning it, taking your point of view and then my point of view. That moment, in the car, rehashing the snag, is where the glory of my life stands. I mean it, man. That was the peak, and the fact that I lived through that moment — I should say moments, in the car — while back home all hell was probably breaking loose, with Meg going into the hospital, is enough for me. In other words, I’m sure now that I’ve had my moment of grace and glory. There’s that moment and the other moment. One night when I was about twelve and Meg was about fourteen we went out into the snow and hiked around, just walking, and the streets were buried and the snow was pouring down and we held hands and she told me that she didn’t care if Johnny Burns called her names, and I asked her what he called her, and she told me and it was the first time I heard the word. I listened and she shrugged it off and that was it, man, the moment I relish because I didn’t know the word and yet heard the word from her own lips and it didn’t pain me yet the way it would when, for example, Burns said it when he beat the shit out of me. The fact that I got all the pain in the thing I’m typing but couldn’t get that tiny, little sliver of grace irks me, but only insofar as any writer feels irked, and they all must, over the limitations of story. As I think we talked about a few days ago, it’s impossible, for the most part, at least for this writer, to get in there and find a way to show how those tiny, little fucking moments of ignorance provide pure grace. Time, I think I said, is the only thing [indecipherable scribble].

Love, your buddy

Dear Buddy,

Scratch that last note, if you got it. I’m sure you got it and I’m sure we’ll have a good heart-to-heart about it if this one doesn’t do the trick. I’m off to the blue yonder. So long. But before I go let me say. Things I’d Enfold If Tripizoid Really Existed:

Basic image of my sister in brush before her body was found, as I imagine it. Alone with the hiss of wind through the pines. The sound of waves breaking down on the shore. Can’t stop seeing that image and would like very much to find a way to enfold it.

Entire war from start to finish with the exception of a couple of R&R leaves, one in Saigon, another in Hong Kong.

[Editor’s Note: The following handwritten fragment was found taped to the back of the manuscript.]

Up in the weedy ditch, not far fromb the lake, on a singular fall afternoon — the few trees about a half mile away flaming bright, astonishingly colorful, and then beyond them the muted slate clouds against a tinge of autumnal blue. The cop in the patrol car just making his usual run down on Route 2, heading west, trying to catch one more speeder, to write the last ticket of the day, not so much trying to reach his quota as wanting to find some way to close it down. He was thinking of his daughter, Anna, and her play at school, and he caught sight of the body in the weeds, a bit of white, could’ve easily been some garbage. But his cop gut was at work. The third wayward girl he’d found that year. They always look windblown, silent, with speckles of mud and blood on their cheeks, and almost always the legs akimbo with a sad kind of entwinement that speaks of being parted and then moving back together with a kind of resistance, an elastic snapback. A naked torso. He had his own way of looking at a body; it was a resistance to the truth that even an officer of the law, seasoned in those parts, having seen several bodies of young women in woods, covered half buried in pine needles, or mourned with leaves. Most of the killers made only a halfhearted attempt at full burial. They were pressed for time, or simply didn’t care. Most of the killers up there worked in homicidal haste, not giving much of a shit if they left evidence or not, always seeming to assume — it seemed to him — that the onus of the crime would somehow be cast back into those twilight, silent, betrayed eyes that stared up out of the skull, sometimes bones, the flesh almost eaten away; the crime — drugs, usually, and then abduction and rape and eventually, using them up, murder — no matter what, at least in the mind of the killers — he thought — was a natural outcome of a sequence of events that began far, far back, starting with a casual pickup, or a seductive lure, or the usage of pills in various forms, and then followed a jagged logic of fear. He theorized a lot about this kind of stuff, as did all of his colleagues. Anyone who came upon the end result in the form of a body, at least any law officer, had to go back through the chain of events, in theory, and attempt to guess at some kind of motive — in a mind-flash — and in doing so felt stained and sullied and implicated somehow in the crime itself, as if by finding the body you were playing a key role in the death itself. Any cop will admit — in some secret part of themselves — that they’re just one step away from the criminal; that the good-cop part is closely associated with the fact that with ease any one of them could’ve gone the other way, into crime, as an avocation, and in making that deep admission also saying — again silently — that crime itself is a vocation, and around any good criminal, even a psychopath, stood a calm that seemed to hold the realities of life in acute focus. Psychopaths, the ones who seem to come about it naturally, worked with a fluidity, a deeper instinctual, even, some cops (this one included) might say, artistic flair, and when he saw the body, as he walked through the weeds, smelling the sweet taint of lake breeze, he knew right away that this one had been the work of someone in a certain zone. How could he tell that? What triggered this sense of all-knowing understanding in a man who had a young daughter; in a man who had just two days ago attended her first performance in a school play? What part of him understood the killer, or at least told himself — perhaps later, in retrospect — that he had had an understanding right away, intuitively, putting two and two together, knowing that this was some guy who had been in Nam, or at least been through some primal trauma — in the parlance of the times — and so could connect somehow with the man who had killed? (Nonsense, he’d tell himself years later, when he’d been through so much more and understood, from the keen view of wisdom, that what he had been sensing at that time was just a rookie’s vision. A rookie cop — or a young cop — made up for his deficiencies, and his fears, by creating an inner narrative that was, above all, coherent: he — or she — saw a causal sense of one thing leading to another; whereas the older, wiser cop, or the retired officer, understood that the terminal result — a dead body — was often of dispirited, random, windblown, senseless events.)

PRAYER FOR POP

Twisted on the gist of Christ

against the beat of Raw Power

twisted on the twist of nice

you tore another (a)hole

in the beat blood senseless

Ann Arbor night, right

before “Search and Destroy.”

“Somebody’s got to save

my soul, somebody’s got

to save my soul…”

[Eugene Allen, August 20, 1973]