Andrew Vachss - Flood

“All soldiers act evil,” Flood said. “That’s the way they’re trained. Everything is black and white, friend or enemy. They don’t think, they just obey-”

“And when they rape some helpless woman after a battle, is that obedience?”

“That’s evil too. A lot of soldiers do evil rotten things, but when they’re no longer soldiers there’s no need for them to be evil. They can stop.”

“Goldor is no soldier, Flood-his marching orders are in his head.”

“You talk like you know him. You were only watching an evil film-you don’t know him.”

“I know him, all right… There was a kid once, a few years ago. A sort of halfwit, you know? Halfass burglar. The Man kept catching him, kept putting him in the can-like meat on a hook in a freezer, hanging up to be cured so it’s fit for people to eat. And every time he goes to the joint he listens to those degenerates talk how about they’re going to kick some woman’s ass until she gets on the street for them and makes them some money, or how they’re going to pull a train on some retarded girl down the block-every sicko fantasy in the world. And this kid listens-he don’t say much, not because he has enough smarts to keep his mouth shut but because nobody ever listens to such a lame. So he gets out again, right? As soon as he gets on the street he hits a housing project to do another of his dumb penny-ante burglaries. He goes in a window and it turns out to be a bedroom. There’s a woman sleeping there and she wakes up. If she’d screamed or tried to fight him he would have run away. But this woman, she read too many books-she tells him, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me,’ and for the first time in his pitiful life he’s in control-he’s got power. He is a fucking god right there in that bedroom-and every evil thing he ever heard about in the joint floods his tiny brain. He puts the woman through every kind of change he can think of. He stays there for hours with her, just power-tripping. And when he leaves there’s a Coke bottle sticking out of one side of the woman and a wooden spoon sticking out the other. He doesn’t kill her, doesn’t take a thing from her apartment. And the next time he goes prowling, he’s not looking to steal-you understand me? He crossed that power-rush line and he can’t ever step back over it-he has to live on that other side until he stops living. He’s not a man anymore, not a person.”

“How could you know this?”

“I knew that kid,” I told her, “I talked to him”

“In prison?”

“No. He was in a juvenile prison, one of those dumps they call a training school for delinquents. No, I met him on the street-and I talked to him just before he died.”

“Couldn’t he have been locked up for the rest of his life?”

“There’s no such thing. He’d sit in his cell and draw pictures of women with blunt objects sticking out of them-or he’d do like another freak, a guy I did know in prison. This guy had a little tape recorder and he’d prowl around the blocks until he heard some kid being raped and then he’d just roll up and record the sounds and go back to his cell and play the tape and giggle to himself and jack off all over the walls. Sooner or later the parole board’s going to cut that freak loose too. And then he’ll do some cutting-loose of his own.”

“How did that other kid die?”

“He jumped off a sixteen-story building,” I said, letting her think it was suicide.

“Oh. And Goldor…?”

“What he does is more addictive than any heroin. But there’s more to him than just being a sicko. He believes in what he does-you can tell. The way he smashed that woman-it was because he was so angry. So much hate because she wouldn’t see the Way-you know, like the Tao. The perfect way-pain for life. And we have to find a way to make him tell us something,” I said, thinking how hopeless it was.

“Maybe if we-”

“Forget it-I know what you’re thinking. He would beat us, Flood. You could kill him easy enough, but could you really torture him? He could outwait us-he’d know we don’t have his feeling for pain-he’d know he could survive. He just wouldn’t believe we would kill him.”

“You remember that guy in the alley? When I-”

“You going to castrate him, Flood? The problem’s not in his balls, it’s in his head-he wouldn’t be any different gelded. Even the threat wouldn’t make him talk to us.”

“We have to try.”

“We are going to try, but first we have to read all this stuff and then make it disappear. Then I have to sleep, and then see some people. And then I have to-”

“Burke, you want to sleep first?”

“I can’t-can’t sleep. This stuff…” I held out the Goldor file.

Flood stood up and shrugged off her robe. She held out her hand. “Just come and lie down with me. Sleep first-I’ll put the papers where they’re safe.”

I got up with her and went inside. She took my clothes off and pushed me back against the mats. She lay across me with her warm body, her chubby little hand rubbing the side of my face. She kept rubbing me, whispering that Goldor wouldn’t win… that it would be us, that she believed in me, that I would find a way for us. I got calm and quiet but still not sleepy. And Flood understood the last door for me to go through before I could fight this freak-she helped me inside her and softly and slowly took me past the murky darkness of my fears and into a gentle place where sleep finally came.

FLOOD AND I woke up together in the morning. My left hand was buried somewhere beneath her so I couldn’t see my watch, but the light outside told me it was well past sunup. Flood stirred against my shoulder, mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I bounced her gently with my shoulder until she came around. She opened her eyes and blinked at me. “You okay, Burke?”

“Yeah, and I’m ready to go to work. Let me just get cleaned up a bit, and I want to start on Goldor’s file.”

She rolled over onto her side so I could get off the mat, then lay back and closed her eyes. I watched her practice her breathing for a minute before I walked into her tiny shower. My face in the mirror startled me-it was healing but the lower jaw was all bluish-yellow-it would probably stay discolored for another few days. I used some of Flood’s mouthwash and then examined my teeth in the mirror-the stitches were holding.

When I went back inside, Flood was lying on her back, her legs in the air, toes pointed up. She was doing some kind of exercise where she split them until they were nearly parallel to the ground, then brought them together again, lowered them almost to the floor but didn’t touch it-she held them for a few seconds like that, then broke them again and started over. Her movements were so smooth they looked effortless, but they couldn’t have been. I waited until her legs were straight up again and grabbed an ankle in each hand. “You have thick ankles, Flood,” and moved my hands away from center to spread her legs again. They didn’t budge-I increased the pressure and watched the long muscles flex on the inside of her thighs. I could feel the strain in my forearms, and finally her legs started to yield. I pushed harder and suddenly her legs shot open and I fell forward right on top of her. But before I could land she whipped her legs back, doubled up her knees, and caught me on the pads of her feet. And then she tossed my entire bulk into the air like a seal playing with a ball. She caught me on the way down, giggling like a little kid. The second time I was headed down I flipped my shoulders back, landed on my feet, grabbed her ankles again and pulled her upside down and erect, facing away from me. But before I could do some giggling of my own she slammed into my ankles with the heels of her hands and I toppled over with her underneath. This time her damn laughing fit made it feel like I was lying on top of some rocky Jello. I rolled off, reached for a cigarette-she was still chuckling.