Shame

by Alan Russell

  “Come on down.”

  Her voice again. Below, he could see her motioning for him to climb down. Caleb loosened his hold on the branches, but getting down wasn’t easy. Everything hurt. Moving just reopened wounds. He felt as if he were being killed by inches. He thought of letting go and dropping to the ground, but he still had enough awareness to not want to break any bones. Lola talked him down.

  “That’s it, honey. You’re almost there. Just a little more. I can see it hurts, but relief’s only a few feet away. That’s it.”

  She reached up to ease his descent, and he ended up in her arms. Together, with Caleb leaning heavily on her, they made their way over to the Mustang.

  “You’re hot,” she said, then felt his forehead with the back of her hand. “Oh, Jesus. You’re burning up. I got some Evian in my workout bag. Now don’t you go collapsing on me. I can’t carry you. Come on, just a little farther.”

  Once in the car, Caleb sat unmoving, his eyes closed, but he revived at the sound of a water bottle being uncapped. His eyes remained closed even as he upended the bottle and started drinking. Lola thought he looked like a newborn animal in the zoo nursery. Sometimes she went there just to see them, little ones too young to open their eyes but old enough to hold on to their bottles for dear life.

  “I’m taking you to the hospital,” Lola said.

  He shook his head and the empty bottle with it before removing it from his mouth. His eyes remained closed.

  “I need some more time to think,” Caleb said. “I almost caught him.”

  “Is that how you got so scraped up?”

  A nod. “Look for a car with my skin on it.”

  As Caleb spoke, his voice grew softer, and his breathing became more regular. He slept the rest of the way and woke to Lola trying to help him out of the car. She walked next to him up the path and into the bungalow, then tried to guide him into bed, but he resisted, insisting on the sofa instead.

  “I need the MP3. I have to listen to the Shame recording.”

  “What you need is some doctoring. That story can wait.”

  “Can’t. There might be some clue.”

  “You’re in no condition to be a hero again.”

  “What?”

  “What part don’t you understand?”

  “The hero.”

  “Your setting off that alarm saved the girl in the sorority.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Caleb fought off unfamiliar tears. It had been so long since he had heard any good news.

  “Of course no one in law enforcement’s ready to pin a medal on you,” Lola said. “They think you probably have some partner in crime. That explains how you were able to call Elizabeth right after she was attacked.”

  Caleb shifted on the sofa and then wished he hadn’t. Lola noticed his flinch. “Sweatshirt’s going to have to come off,” she said, “and so’s the shirt. They’re looking like some petri-dish experiment.”

  Caleb struggled to get the garments off. He tried not to groan aloud, but the sounds kept escaping him.

  “Let me help you,” Lola said.

  He was in no position to resist her efforts, and besides, it was so much easier, and she was so gentle about it. When she removed his garments, Lola stared at his exposed chest and drew in her breath.

  “That cut looks ugly. It looks like you tried to carve yourself another belly button.”

  She took a closer look, then shook her head. “I’m no Florence Nightingale, but I think it’s infected.”

  “There’s antiseptic in your medicine cabinet.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “When you apply the antiseptic, you can wear your white nurse’s outfit.”

  “Only if you’re in the market for an enema as well.”

  She left the room. On the end table nearest to him Caleb noticed a newspaper. He reached for it, took a look at the front page, then wished he hadn’t. The picture was yellowed with age. He had hated it then and hated it just as much now.

  He’d been surprised when the photographer had jumped out and snapped the photo, and that showed in the picture, but to the casual viewer, he knew, he just looked defiant. The snarl caught on his face gave him a wild look that was further accentuated by the particular baseball cap he was wearing. The headline read, PICTURE PROVES PROPHETIC. Caleb threw the paper down in disgust. He didn’t need to read the story.

  Lola walked into the room with a bottle of antiseptic and some washcloths. She saw the newspaper being tossed and saw Caleb’s expression. She never commented, just walked out to the kitchen and returned with some aspirin and a gallon of water. Most of that gallon disappeared within minutes. When his thirst was slaked, she took a washcloth, wet it with water, and placed it on his forehead.

  She wasn’t as certain about what to do with the other washcloth. She poured some antiseptic on it, said, “This will probably hurt,” then tentatively started in on the minor scrapes. As Lola dabbed, it was her face that showed the pain.

  “When I was young,” she said, “my mother believed the only good kind of antiseptic was one that hurt. So when I’d get a cut, she would pour Merthiolate on it, and I’d scream out in pain. No one else I knew had to endure that. Their mothers used stingless ointments.”

  Lola took on her first major abrasion, tried to gently clean out the dirt. “You can talk, you know,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m nervous,” she said. “I don’t know how those people in the ER do it. I’d hate to have someone’s life depend on my every move. I couldn’t take that kind of responsibility.”

  Caleb shrugged.

  “You probably don’t talk or laugh during sex either, do you? Out of necessity, you learned to swallow your pain. Problem is, your joy got swallowed up as well.”

  She started to work on his very raw jaw. “What was that newspaper picture all about?”

  He chose his answer carefully. “No lie like an old lie.”

  “It wasn’t you?”

  “No. It was.”

  Caleb sighed, shook his head, then started talking. “That picture was shot a few weeks after my father was arrested. By then I’d already learned to be wary of reporters, but apparently not wary enough. Mama had told me they lied better than politicians, and she was right about that.

  “Two of them were waiting for me outside my school. I remember the reporter had a big mouth, and in that mouth was enough gum to make it look like a chaw. The photographer was a short, fat guy with three or four cameras around his neck.

  “‘Hey, Gray,’ the gum-chewer called to me, all friendly like. I didn’t trust him. I walked away from him, and when he started following me, I ran. I took the back route home. But they knew where I lived.

  “Mama was at work, so I was by myself watching TV when I heard our doorbell ring. I pulled back the curtain a little and saw the same two men. The curtains to our house were drawn. That’s how we coped with the outside world. From the day my father was arrested to the day I left Eden for good, we never opened those drapes, never let any sunshine in.”

  Caleb took a deep breath. Had he ever opened those drapes, he wondered? But he only allowed himself a moment of self-pity.

  “The men kept knocking, and Mr. Chaw kept calling out my name. ‘Just want to talk to you for a minute, Gray,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ll make it worth your while. Give you fifty bucks if you just have a few words with me.’ I didn’t say a word, though. Mama had taught me that if I said anything, even the word no, it just encouraged them.

  “What I remember, though, is how tempted I was just to talk. Not so much for the money but because nobody at school was speaking to me other than to call me names. The town mothers had figured I was contagious or something and had told their kids to stay away from me. But I didn’t talk with those reporters, didn’t say a word, because Mama had been as serious as death about me not having anything to do with them.

  “The gum-chewer tried calling me out eve
ry which way, but finally he seemed to give up. He must have known I was watching him, though, ’cause he called out, ‘All right, Gray, I’m sorry you don’t want the money, but tell you what, I’m going to leave you some presents in this here bag. Going to leave you my card, too. You can watch me leave the bag on the path right here.’”

  Caleb realized his voice unconsciously took on the tones of the gum-chewing reporter. He still remembered his voice.

  “The man dropped the bag down on the dirt path that led up to our house. Then he walked over to this shiny van parked on the street, started it up, and drove away.

  “I kept looking at that bag. Watched it for maybe five minutes. Finally, I opened the door and looked around. No one was in sight. I walked down the path, but I didn’t pick up the bag right away, just worried it with my foot a little. Nothing happened, so I opened it up. Inside was a baseball cap, some gum, and some chocolate. I dumped the bag out, pocketed the goodies, and then I tried on the baseball cap. It fit just right. I didn’t bother to check out the writing on it or the patch. That was my mistake.

  “The patch showed two hands reaching for a throat, and beneath it was the word shame. I heard some clicking going on, and I turned toward the sounds. The fat guy was hiding behind one of our pecan trees, shooting pictures of me as fast as he could. I ran back into the house, but it was too late. A week later I saw myself on the cover of one of those tabloid newspapers. The banner headline said, ‘I Want to Be Just Like My Daddy! Says Son of Shame.’

  “Everyone in town seemed to have a copy of that paper, and everyone seemed to believe what they read. That made-up article justified their prejudice.”

  Lola said nothing. She started working around the knife wound. It had to be tender. It had to hurt like hell. But the physical pain seemed to bother Caleb far less than the mental. He didn’t even appear to notice her ministrations.

  “There was another story in the paper,” said Lola, “one you didn’t read. Two of your employees vouched for you. They said they had worked for you for years and that there’s no way you could be a killer. They told about the time you tried to talk a man out of cutting down a tree because there was a bird’s nest in it, and that when the man insisted it be cut, you took the nest and the birdies home and hand-raised them.”

  “The whole family helped.” Caleb had never been so happy as when those birds fledged. It had been an around-the-clock project.

  His character references and the bird story had to have been supplied by his two longtime employees, Roberto Zúñiga and Tyrone Hayward. His workers, whom he called the Cisco Kid and Sheriff Bart, had thought he was a little crazy to take the birds home. He’d nicknamed his employees after screen cowboys, the one brown and the other black. On tree jobs there was a lot of use of ropes, and both men handled them like cowboys, lassoing branches and passing equipment up and down rope trams. With Sheriff Bart and the Cisco Kid on the job, sometimes work even sounded like a roundup.

  “That’s the story you ought to read,” said Lola. “Not the other.”

  “It’s the other that people will remember.”

  She started putting Band-Aids on his smaller cuts and then worked up to bandages for his chin and stomach. Her hands were cool against his hot skin, gentle. He didn’t flinch at her touch.

  “You’re still awfully hot,” Lola said.

  “I’ll take a few more aspirin.”

  “You’ve already taken four.”

  “Really? I don’t remember.”

  Caleb could feel his mind drifting. He tried to rein it in. “I need you to bring me the recording of Shame.”

  “You need your rest even more,” Lola said, but her tone already conceded him his wish.

  She left the room again and returned with the MP3 and speakers, setting everything up on the side table next to him. Caleb was watching her. His eyes were glassy.

  “Thanks,” he said. “For everything.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He looked around the room. “This is all real, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was having these dreams. I even dreamed about you. It was like I noticed you for the first time. I could never see that you were pretty before. I couldn’t get beyond what you were. But in this dream I finally saw you. And it didn’t seem wrong that you were pretty. And you weren’t a spectacle. You were just you.”

  Lola knew it was his fever speaking and that without it he would never talk like this, but she still said, “Thank you.”

  He didn’t hear it. Caleb’s mind was already somewhere else. “After the Second World War, young Germans didn’t want to admit their nationality,” he said. “They said they were Swiss or Austrian. They didn’t want to be guilty by association. But it was more than that. I know it was more than that. They were afraid that the beast lurked inside of them as well.”

  “The beast?”

  “I don’t think this generation of Germans worries about that. They say the Holocaust happened a long time ago. Do you think my children will be free of the guilt?”

  “Yes.”

  Caleb shook his head, as if trying to remember something, and then he did. He turned to Lola, suddenly focused. “Where’s the MP3 player?” he asked.

  “Right next to you.”

  Caleb nodded and hit play.

  “Look through the classified ads of the New Orleans Times-Picayune,” Elizabeth Line’s voice said, “and you’ll likely see more ads to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, than in any other daily in the country. The volume of ads is that much more impressive when you consider that New Orleans the myth is larger than New Orleans the city, with its reputation far exceeding its numbers.

  “The daily supplications to Saint Jude extend to a number of areas. Some ads thank Jude for his generosity, for having listened to and answered their prayers, but most are cries of desperation, people trying to raise their heads above water for a third and last time.

  “Parker was almost that desperate when he fled into Louisiana. No longer was he this nebulous figure, this Bogeyman of the night who signed SHAME on all his victims. The law now had a good description of him, and his likeness was being circulated throughout Texas and beyond. The police were getting ever closer to him.

  “Perhaps because of that, Parker’s killings had become ever more hurried and thoughtless. His MO never changed, though; he continued to kill with his hands, his murders ‘personal.’ He didn’t want the distance or dispassion that a gun allowed, or even a knife, the almost ‘third person’ of me, you, and the weapon. When he strangled another human being, there was no third part of the equation, no tool doing the killing. Parker described his actions as the ‘sacrament of murder.’ He spoke of his murders reverentially, relating how there was a sacred moment when the victim’s life force gave out, and how this energy entered back into him, strengthening him. In his own mind, Parker was convinced that all the deaths were necessary.

  “Apparently, even his own.”

  Caleb reached over and stopped the narrative. He didn’t acknowledge Lola’s being in the room, just started mumbling to himself. At first Lola couldn’t make out his words, only noticed that his voice was higher-pitched than usual. And then she started making sense out of what he was saying. Caleb was repeating some of the phrases he had just heard.

  “‘No longer was he this nebulous figure,’” he said. “‘MO never changed. No tool doing the killing. All deaths were necessary.’”

  Caleb shook his head. “‘All deaths were necessary,’” he said once again.

  The voice sounded like a woman’s, Lola thought.

  “‘All deaths were necessary,’” he said for a third time, “‘apparently even his own.’”

  Not just any woman, Lola realized, but Elizabeth Line. “‘Apparently even his own.’”

  Caleb’s mimicking ability was so uncanny that Lola felt uneasy. It was as if someone else were inside him. She was glad when he started listening to the recording again.

&nb
sp; It was in New Orleans that Parker had first experimented with a victim. Jenny Lucas was found with the usual Shame MO, but he didn’t leave her body with only his signature. Her breasts were found ravaged with tooth marks, her right nipple almost completely severed. There were also bite marks all around Jenny’s labia.

  Parker didn’t use lipstick to do the lettering on Jenny. Lab results confirmed what the police on the scene had guessed: that Parker had applied his signature with Louisiana hot sauce. Hot sauce was also found inside her vagina.

  Caleb turned off the recording. He appeared agitated at what he’d heard. He kept smoothing his hair. His cheeks were flushed red, but the rest of his face was drawn and pale.

  Lola went over to check his fever. She took away the washcloth. Steam all but rose from it. She put the back of her hand on his forehead.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re so hot.”

  “Louisiana hot sauce,” he said but in Elizabeth’s voice.

  Lola wished a priest were at her side. She thought Caleb was possessed and in need of an exorcism. It was all she could do not to run screaming from the room.

  “Some Louisiana hot sauce,” he said, “that’s what I need.”

  This time he didn’t speak in Elizabeth’s voice. But it wasn’t Caleb’s either. Lola felt chilled. She was sure it was Gray Parker voicing the request.

  29

  “CAN’T ESCAPE ME,” Feral said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Feral thought of Robert O. Pierce and how he had tried to escape his appointed destiny with death. On the night Pierce was due to be executed, he managed to get a piece of glass and cut his own throat. The wound had been too deep for the prison doctor to treat him successfully, but instead of taking Pierce to the hospital, the guards had carried him to the gas chamber. And there he had lived just long enough to die by gas.

  It still bothered Feral that he’d had his hands around Queenie’s neck and she had gotten away. But like Pierce, she was about to go from the frying pan into the fire.