Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

The Indian nodded a silent agreement.

The Latina glared at me.

Since neither of the boxers dropped dead of a heart attack, the decision went to the judges. I didn’t wait around for it.

I kept working on my list, following Lune’s parameters: they had to be either wanting revenge, or fearing it.

The first category was much longer than the second. The people I would have wanted to hurt the most—the ones who had hurt me so much when I was little—I didn’t know most of their names, much less where to find them. They wouldn’t even know I was alive.

Anyway, they would know what the dumb-fuck government doesn’t. Most of us, damn near all of us, we don’t turn on the ones who hurt us. No, we turn on ourselves, mostly. Or on you.

And then you say we were born bad.

You and Hitler. Yeah, you don’t like the comparison? Then, while we’re doing time for what was done to us, don’t fucking tell us, “It’s all in the genes,” okay?

Just thinking about it made the back of my neck burn. A guy goes to work and spends the day kissing the boss’s ass. So he goes home and kicks his wife’s. Makes him feel like a man. We know what he is. A lowlife coward. But a kid who finally can’t take it anymore and kills the people—you call them “parents”—who’ve been torturing him forever, he’s the one you send to prison.

I love it when some punk prosecutor tells a jury the kid didn’t have to kill his father. The father who’d been sodomizing him since he was six. Why didn’t the kid just, like, assault him, or something? I’ll tell you why. Because we all know. We know what happens if we don’t kill them. As soon as they recover, they’ll make us pray we had.

When babies are born to beasts, when the government pats the beasts on the head and lets them keep feeding, when the kids know they’ll never get away because their baby brother or sister will be next … Oh, there’s a lot of things kids can do. To themselves . That’s okay. But if they ever dare to do it to the beasts, they’re penitentiary-bound.

I was there for patterns. So I could see the truth. And maybe the whole process was getting to me. I was starting to see a pattern myself. People hurt their kids. And the government doesn’t do anything to protect the kids. Soon, one of the kids figures it out—he can’t go through life without backup, and he’s not getting it from where other kids do. Next thing, he’s in some juvenile institution. Learning to be everything they said he was when they put him in there.

Meanwhile, there’s all these people who would give anything to have a kid of their own. And they can’t get one. If the government just moved on humans who hurt their kids, took them away, handed them over to people who wanted to be real parents, they could shut down a lot of the prisons.

But that would put too many people out of work.

I stopped it right there. Drove it out of my mind. Concentrated, focusing down to tiny points until I was … somewhere else.

And a lot of the names Lune wanted from me were right in there, too. Waiting for me.

I asked Lune if Gem and I could go outside one morning. “Go with Levi,” is all he said.

The Indian took us out through a different door from the one he’d used that first time. We were on a jagged expanse of rock that seemed to go on forever, but I could see trees in the distance. The air was thin—and so pure it was almost sweet inside my lungs.

“How long have you been with—?” Gem started to ask the Indian, before a look from me cut her off.

“Lune is a sensei, not a guru,” he answered, guessing where she was going. “The answers to every question a man can have are in what most of the world believes to be a series of random, unconnected events. To see the pattern in the randomness is to unlock the mystery … whatever the mystery is.

“Lune knows how to do that. Better than anyone who has come before him. If he wanted to lead a cult, he could. If he wanted to make a billion dollars, he could do that, too. But he is a seeker, just as we are. The greedy ones—the ones who learn of Lune’s work and want to profit from it—they never get past our screens.”

“Do people find their answers here?” I asked him.

“Some do.”

“And when they do—?”

“Ah. I understand. Yes, some leave then. But some return.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because a person of honor must honor his debts.”

I didn’t ask him if he was talking about himself.

“Do you know why Lune is helping Burke?” Gem said.

“Yes. Lune said they were brothers when they were very small. And that Burke was the first person who understood his gift. And his need.”

“So you know he’s—?”

“Searching for his real parents? Yes,” the Indian said, his face flat, but pain for his soul-wounded sensei clear in his eyes.

I kept working on my list. Gem wanted to help, but I told her I just didn’t see how she could.

“Tell me your life,” she said. “I will listen. Maybe I will hear something of value to you.”

So I started from the beginning. Again.

Occasionally, I would walk past their patterning wall. And see things on it that made no sense to me—I couldn’t imagine any connection.

Cayman Islands

New Utopia

Liberian registry

Dominica

Nauru

But I wasn’t a sensei, or even a student, so I just went back to doing what I knew how to do.

They had a pool table there. I spent some time teaching Gem. Played cards with Clint, Minh, and Heidi—she was murderous at poker, with that farm-girl face covering up a statistician’s mind. The Indian and I talked about his people. I learned a lot more than Hiram had ever told me. About a warrior named Juh, who Levi said actually did some of the things credited to Geronimo.

“No one knows what ‘Juh’ means,” he said. “It may be a nonsense name, or just a sound he made to refer to himself. But in historical accounts of several of the most famous and most tactically accomplished raids, survivors remember seeing the warriors looking toward a large, dark man who was signaling with his hands. Juh had a bad stutter and couldn’t really speak, so he used a complicated set of hand signals. He and Geronimo were childhood playmates and lifelong friends. And, if the stories are true, Geronimo may have been more vicious but it was Juh who never failed to find an enemy, even when it took years.”

I got along with—and learned something from—every one of them except the Latina. I asked Gem if she knew why that woman wouldn’t come anywhere near me.

“Yes,” is all she said.

It was late at night when I found Lune. He was alone at his computer, his angel’s face bathed in blue light from the screen.

“I’m done,” I told him.

He didn’t look away from the screen. “Are you sure, Burke?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’ve been going over and over it. Again and again. I must have told poor Gem my whole lousy life story a dozen times. If there’s anyone not on this list, I don’t know it.”

His head swiveled suddenly. “Sometimes …” he began, his voice soft, “people don’t remember things that—”

“It’s not like that for me, Lune,” I said, quickly, cutting him off before he went someplace he’d never return from. “I remember every one of them. Right to this day. You know what? You’re right—the stuff some people repress, it’s all right on the surface for me. And if I could find any of them …”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been working, too. Now we’re going to have to take what you’ve got and see where the pattern is.”