The Blue Hour

Nineteen

Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday, Colesceau was shocked to see Seth Kaufman again.

But this time Seth was on the TV that Colesceau was idly watching while the crowd chanted outside his apartment home. And this time his name was Grant Major, of County News Bureau.

He was in his studio, telling a fellow TV reporter about his exclusive interview with the castrated rapist Matamoros Colesceau. He looked even prettier than he’d looked in the family-style restaurant. The other reporter, whom Colesceau recognized, said that this seven o’clock “special report” from CNB’s “newest investigative star” would be “bone chilling.”

Next, on CNB.

He saw himself on the screen, leaving the apartment home wrapped in Seth Kaufman’s long coat, leaning forward through the crowd of reporters and neighbors.

Then he was sitting in the restaurant, talking to the man he had genuinely believed was a lawyer from the ACLU.

Colesceau could tell that the camera had been hidden in the tray of dirty dishes.

He understood why the waitresses had been expecting them.

He felt his heart growing hard and cold again, but it beat fast, like a good machine.

He watched himself explain what went through his mind as he tried to rape the two old women — the anger, the confusion, the feelings of helplessness in the world, especially with women his own age.

He listened to his tales of hormone treatment — the swelling breasts and shrinking genitals. On TV it sounded like he was whining, ready to weep.

He sat and watched in helplessness as he explained the death of his father at the hands of the police. He couldn’t understand why Grant had edited out the part where he told how difficult it still was for him, how he still thought about his father, how the scars on his heart were worse than the scars on his body.

He made me look bad, Colesceau thought. And through his rage all he could think about was hurting Grant Major in a terrible way.

A chorus of boos erupted outside. He went to the window and cracked the blinds.

Trudy Powers stood at the forefront of the mob, her hair lifted away from her face by the breeze. Her brow furrowed as she glanced up at the sky. In that moment she looked like a saint in stained glass, Colesceau thought, or one of those Agony of St. Somebody paintings, maybe the one with all the arrows in him.

He let go of the blind string, stepped to his front door and opened it. The voices hit him like a gust of wind. Without the glass between them Colesceau could feel the heft of their presence, and sense that their forward thrust was held in check only by the restraining hand of human law. Without that, they’d hang him Western style, then drag his body through the streets of Irvine behind a Saab convertible.

Then the crowd hushed. He looked at Trudy Powers and the happy, shiny suburbanites and the news people scurrying toward him with all manner of cameras and contraptions. They came to a stop not ten feet away and knelt as if he was shooting at them. It was one of the strangest sensations he’d felt in a life of strange sensations — the world before him and at his feet as he stood firm as the pope and looked them over. He glanced down at the Bloody Mary still fresh in his hand, then back out to the mob.

“I am not a monster,” he said. “I have tried to be a good neighbor. I have paid for my crimes and want to be left alone now to live my life.”

Go live it somewhere else.

“I have received eviction. I have twenty-nine days.”

We’ll be watching you every second, scumbucket!

Colesceau raised his hand. He was utterly dumbfounded when the crowd stopped the chant. All he could hear then was the whir and click of the equipment aimed up at him from the sidewalk ten feet away.

“Ummm... I’ve never hurt a child in my life. Never.”

Yeah, just old women who can’t protect themselves! Get back inside you cockface or I’m going to yank your head off and stuff it down your fuckin’ neck!

He looked at the yeller, a burly long-haired man with a can of beer in his hand.

“Carl, you’re worse than him when you talk like that.”

Trudy Powers’s voice hung in the still air. She stepped forward from the crowd.

“We understand your problems, Mr. Colesceau. But we have rights, too. And we want this neighborhood safe for our children, our seniors. We don’t want trouble, either.”

“Then why do this?”

Ah, fuck you.

Trudy’s face turned in a flash of blond hair, then came back to Colesceau.

“We think you could find a more appropriate neighborhood.”

In the fuckin’ nuthouse you came from!

Trudy lifted one of her arms up without looking back.

“Sean, we’re dialoguing! Listen, Mr. Colesceau. We intend to keep this vigil every day until you find more appropriate lodging. We’re citizens with rights and we intend to exercise them. We’ll keep our demonstrations peaceful. But we’re going to have to watch you until you go. We won’t trespass or harm your property in any way.”

Colesceau stood with his drink in one hand and the mob stilled in front of him and the cameras executing him from ten feet away.

“I live here. I go to work. That’s all I do.”

He watched Trudy’s golden hair catch the light and the breeze. She was wearing denim short shorts that showed off her long girlish legs, white tennies and socks and a brief white blouse with a scalloped neckline. Her tall and feeble-looking husband had stepped up beside her now and Colesceau saw the sunlight condensed in his glasses. He was bearded and thin-necked. Colesceau had seen him driving a huge expensive vehicle that had stickers all over the back window asking you to save just about every animal you could imagine.

“We’re dead serious,” he said.

“Dead? What do you mean?”

“God, Jonathan,” said Trudy.

“It means you’ll see us every day for the rest of your life here. We’ll know exactly where you are, every second of your life.”

“I have no objection to this at all. I am an innocent man. And to show my innocence, I want to give you something. Please, wait here.”

No problem there, dude!

Colesceau went back inside his apartment and picked out one of his mother’s most preposterous painted eggs. It was a lavender ostrich egg with gold bric-a-brac and a little bunched-up skirt of lace around the middle of it.

He took the egg back outside and resumed his place in front of the TV shooters.

“This represents all the goodness I possess on earth. I offer this as a pledge of my perfect behavior for the next twenty-nine days.”

He held out the egg with both hands, elbows tucked and head slightly bowed, as if his posture could increase its value.

“For you, Mrs. Powers. For all of you.”

The cameramen inched closer. They emanated an instinctive fear that Colesceau respected. They were used to being hated.

But not Trudy Powers. Trudy, he clearly understood, was used to being adored and loved and deferred to because of her high value as a sex partner. So she came forward with a kind of gliding step, eyeing Colesceau with an expression of self-confidence and self-respect. You could tell she saw herself as an ambassador from one world to another, from the world of the good to the world of the damned. And her willingness to approach the damned pleased her deeply. She was going to accept a handful of feces from the devil himself, smile and be gracious about it.

My evil stimulates her, thought Colesceau. I am titillation. I fortify what she believes is her soul.

She came around the camera people, stepping over a thick bundle of cable with a jiggle of inner thigh, her eyes locked on Colesceau’s. There was pageantry in them.

Colesceau proffered the egg. She reached out with both hands, and a firm but forgiving expression on her face. She looks like Mary on the outdoor fresco at Voronet, he thought, pious and blank and immovable all at the same time. He trailed her palms with the tips of his fingernails as he laid the gift in her hands.

Then he stepped back and looked past her to the crowd. He bowed very slightly and strode back inside 12 Meadowlark.