The Impaler

Chapter 49

“The Army or prison,” Claude Lambert said. “Those are pretty much your options now, Eddie.”

Edmund looked at his cheekbone in the pickup truck’s side mirror. The swelling had gone down some, but his face would still bruise up nicely. The punch had been hard—he got blindsided by the other guy’s friend—but in the end, Edmund had gotten the best of the both of them. He always did now.

“The way things is going,” said his grandfather, turning off the highway, “I give you a year before you end up killing someone like your Uncle James done.”

The old man was pushing eighty years old, but still it bothered Edmund how slowly he was driving.

“You don’t like me fighting anymore then?” Edmund asked.

“I suppose it’s partly my fault,” Claude Lambert said, ignoring him. “Taught you how to fight but not how to control it—didn’t think about that part of the equation. I reckon the Army will take care of that. It’s where James had been planning on going, too, but … well, you know what happened there.”

The fight in the bar had been Edmund’s doing. He went there after he asked his Uncle James what really happened on the afternoon he murdered Danny Gibbs.

“I reckon it’s simple,” James Lambert said from the other side of the visitor’s glass. “Sometimes you just gotta to do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

“A higher power?” Edmund asked. “You mean like the General?”

“Don’t know nothing ’bout no General. But I reckon what you’re saying is right if you was in the Army or something.”

Suddenly, Edmund felt emptier and more alone than he had felt in a long time.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he said impulsively, and waited for a reaction.

James Lambert was silent for a long time—his expression like stone.

“You best not be visiting me no more,” he said finally, looking him straight in the eye for the first time in eighteen years. Then he motioned for the guard and left.

That was the last time Edmund ever saw him.

He drove around afterward for hours and ended up at an eighteen-and-over bar in Greenville. He’d purchased a tube of Chapstick first and coated the back of his hands so he’d be able to wash off the X with which the doorman would mark him as underage. Edmund did so in the men’s room, stepped up to the bar, ordered three shots of Southern Comfort, one right after the other, and then just started swinging.

“You’re lucky the bar and them two other guys you floored ain’t gonna press charges, Eddie,” said his grandfather, parking the truck. “A good thing you ordered those shots, I reckon, too. Underage drinking and losing licenses—no one wants this to get any bigger than it already has.”

Edmund was silent as he looked up at the sign for the Army recruiting center.

“Sometimes you just gotta do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

A sign—what he had been searching for all along?

“But the Army will fix you up right, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “Best thing for your head now, I reckon.”