When We Were Animals(42)

Roy advanced on one of the boys, going up close and sniffing his neck as a dog might. Then he said something to him, low in his ear, and I couldn’t hear what it was. But the boy wasn’t laughing anymore, and he was no longer hypnotized by the naked bodies all around him—he just wanted to get away.

Roy wouldn’t let him. He grabbed the boy and flung him to the ground, then seized him by the arm and dragged him into the middle of the park. The crowd of breachers separated to let him through—Roy was giving them something to be hungry for.

“Tear him,” Marina Anderson said, breathless, to Blackhat Roy. “Rip him.”

“Rip him,” the others started to say. “Bleed him.”

The other two boys tried to run to their friend’s aid, but the breachers fell on them, too, beat them and tore off their clothes and rubbed themselves lewdly against the whimpering boys.

Then they came back to the car for the two tearful and screaming girls.

I watched.

I was stirred.

The breezes blew, and I wondered how much awfulness had to be released from one location before you could smell it on the wind.

The girls had locked themselves in the car, but they didn’t have the key to start the engine. I could hear their muffled shrieks as the breachers stalked around the vehicle, trying all the doors, pressing their hungry faces against the glass. Blackhat Roy slapped a bloody handprint on the windshield. It was impossible to know whose blood it was.

“Open your eyes,” he called to the girls. “Open your goddamn eyes!”

The breachers rocked the car back and forth, some climbing up the hood and onto the roof. The girls screamed.

Finally someone brought a cinder block from the alley and threw it through the windshield. Then it was just a matter of reaching in and dragging the girls out by their fragile, flailing limbs.

*



In the past, the infrequent attacks on outsiders hadn’t been so bad. They could be explained away, mollified with sympathetic fictions. A troubled local youth gone off his medication. A traumatized girl, escaped from her abusive foster home, taking out on innocents what had been perpetrated on her for years. In the daylight, the breachers could be brought forward to apologize, which they did with all true sincerity. They had not meant it. They were full of regret.

Truth be told, even during the full moon, breachers could sense the difference between themselves and others. In general, there was no joy in preying on those who did not stink of nature and violence. The outsiders usually came away with maybe a bruise or a busted lip. Maybe not even that. Sometimes just the uneasy fright of witnessing a naked figure running across the road in front of your car and howling at you as it passed.

The sheriff from the next town over might visit our mayor. There may have been jolly slaps on the back, amicable chuckling, head shaking with regard to the moral abandon of teenagers these days. What was to be done? Mutual shrugs. It was a brutal time we were living in. Sad nods. But the children would survive and be better for it, as the two men had. Reassured stares skyward.

This time, though, it was different. I had seen it. Had just one breacher been there, or two, they might have made a display of animalistic defiance and run off. But it wasn’t just one breacher, it was a whole pack. Violence, I discovered, could be contagious. It fed off itself until it had lost its purpose. The result was five teenagers mauled in our town square on the day after Christmas.

The attacks were just too brutal to be ignored. Two of the boys and one of the girls were hospitalized. One of the boys had had his eye gouged out and would have to wear a glass eye for the rest of his life. One of the girls was a cheerleader and had promised her parents and her pastor that she would remain a virgin until the day she married. Someone had to be held responsible.

So our sheriff questioned some of the breachers. It didn’t even take a whole afternoon. All we needed was a scapegoat, and we had one readily at hand. The next day everybody knew that Blackhat Roy had been held responsible for the crime and would be sent away to live in Chicago with his uncle.

I hated him. Still, when I thought about him going far away, part of me ached for him.

On certain days in the spring, in late April, say, it is possible to believe what the animals believe—that horror and beauty are hearty allies, and that when you live in the full roiling of your guts it’s impossible to make distinctions between them.

*



Late that afternoon, near sunset, Peter Meechum came to me. He came to the front door, rang the bell, and stood there looking mournful and respectable.

“I came to apologize,” he said.

“For what?”

“For everything.”

I wondered about his willingness to apologize for everything in the world. It was the marvelous kind of stuff that martyrs are made of. He stood there, sheepish and strong, and his smile was just on the final edge of regret, ready to break through to whatever passionate gesture was next. Maybe I was still weak to the fact that he seemed interested in me when there were so many other girls whose doorsteps he could be standing on—but it was more than that. He was wound up, kinetic, and you felt that you could either go along with him or be left behind—and I wanted to go with him.

I invited him in, but he didn’t want to be indoors. Instead we walked, wrapped in our winter coats. I kept my eyes on the shoveled sidewalk, paying close attention to whether or not I stepped on the cracks. I wondered if he would try to take my hand, and I left it dangling just in case—but he seemed morose and inattentive.