The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  All the kids in G&T hold it as an article of faith that Maryland contains the second-highest number of Ku Klux Klansmen in America. There is some debate over whether Ohio or Indiana occupies the top slot. But Maryland, we know, comes in at number two. It’s not impossible to believe this, in the long stretches of emptiness beyond the suburbs, which shade into genuine rural territory, with farmhouses and cows that look up with almost human stupidity as you drive past. In a winter dusk, you can pick out bare oak branches and black-looking ponds, and a sinister readiness breathes out of the whole landscape. I have no idea if these suspicions about Klan activity are true, or if they derive from the contempt for the white poor that educated members of the middle class in America are taught to feel and hide, from their earliest youth. Especially, I’d say, kids in the G&T Program at Kennedy, which is a supercharger for the development of bourgeois ideals. Good and bad. It’s hypocritical to malign just your own class.

  Digger and I held this belief too, of course. And to combat the stark sense of expectation it fostered, we screamed along with the radio, shoving our faces out the window. Stations deteriorate into static one after another out there, and soon you’re left with anodyne and heart-twisting country music. We didn’t know any of the words. But we managed. We had a lot of enthusiasm. We even got a few honks in approval. Including one from a huge truck, which we sped ahead of. The roadside arc lights got more and more infrequent, and their high whine sharper and sharper. We passed gas stations, with stolid-faced loafers our own age lined up under blaring fluorescents. The highway climbed; we were out in the empty fields, with green weather-pocked steel signage to guide us. We could not see much farther than the guardrail, which gave us a nasty, cloaking sense of the dark. Nauseating, somehow. No stars visible, and just the desert of the dead farmlands spreading everywhere. Monotony remains the most horrifying thing imaginable. It’s why death is so horrifying, or a large part of why. Yeah, morbid, but what do you want from me?

  Two hours we drove. Fuck! Even if you live in a small, pretentious city—like D.C.—the speed with which urban life fades astonishes. You can be out in the middle of real country, real agricultural shit, in ninety minutes, and then in the utter desolation of wild or fallow fields if you drive for another thirty. What’s funny, though, here, is how oppositional everyone is on this issue. City people scorning country people, who in turn look with indignant suspicion on city dwellers. But they all share the same morality, right? Is the overt racism, for example, that you find among rednecks who say THE N WORD in casual conversation somehow worse than the covert racism of our teachers, who introduce us to a few nonwhites and then proceed to entomb us in our separate lives and consider their duty done? What about people for whom ethnic minorities serve an instrumental purpose? People who collect ethnic friends as ornaments, to show off to their other, white friends, and to prove to themselves their own tolerance and generosity of spirit? Can you say with any confidence that one of these is worse? I expounded these theories to Digger, who agreed and agreed, keeping her finger on the map. A pleasure über-masculine, to be pronouncing these judgments unopposed in a speeding car, and flinging glowing butt after butt out the window, where it would vanish in the slipstream. “It’s like a monument to like all the horror of the twentieth century!” I remember screaming that. It made sense at the time, I promise.

  The map became unnecessary, after a certain point: it all narrowed to one road, which wandered through clumps of houses, a few vague stores, back into open country, then more houses. This was Brander’s Hollow, I guess. Lorriner’s town. And then, out of nowhere, as Digger was mangling some more lyrics, something about a broken heart and wine, this surge overtook me. I felt like a baby. Adrift, alert, happy, secure. I don’t know why. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe the headlong murky nature of what we were doing. For some reason I wanted to know everyone in those decayed houses, know about their high school lives and friendships and misadventures. Do you ever experience that? When you stare out your window and into your city?

  We’d been off the highway for a while, rumbling over a rutted surface road—withered clematis and creeper on the guardrails, that sort of nonsense—when Digger cried, “Hey, hey, stop. We’re here.” I parked; we climbed out to check the road sign. The yolky flames of our two raised lighters revealed the street name: FORK LUTE ROAD. The map had not lied. This always amazes me. It was now eleven minutes after ten. Digger chambered a shell and hid the gun, still gripped, in the pocket of her coat. I cradled Lorriner’s rosy brick. “Okay, you like drive behind the bushes.” I was whispering, pointing with the brick. There was a screening juniper hedge a little ways in from the road entrance. Digger reparked and caught up to me at the dark beginning of Fork Lute Road, and we shared a short silence. There were two houses we could see, one right off the main road, and another at the far end of the lane. The closer house’s mailbox, subjected to my lighter’s flame, was numbered 9778, in these saddening gold stick-on numbers, with some limp corners curled over. We got a muted chuckle out of those. And then we picked our way down the carious asphalt dividing us from the second house, through tea-stinking fallen leaves. “It must be this one.” Digger sighed. There was another mailbox, and a small barn set right near the property edge. “It’s gotta be, right?” Lighters out, mailbox examined: it was indeed 9780. Lorriner’s address, according to the omniscient minds at the phone company. We had arrived.

  The little barn proved to be a garage faked up to look like a barn. Red timbers, white crossbeams. These are popular out in the sticks. There was a fence, but it was just split-pine rail. Digger’s breath was quickened by excitement and anger as we lugged ourselves over. I tossed the brick ahead of me, and Digger said, “Good arm.” We both giggled and then shushed each other. I swear to fucking God we were acting like kindergartners. In the brownish half-light, we could see the blocky outline of a house.

  “It’s a rambler, ranch-style,” Digger whispered, hoarse and tense. As though that made the problem of our brick hurling more difficult. “So let’s like get closer and then like pick a window?” I had the brick clamped in my right armpit. It was starting to hurt. I loped ahead, but she hung back.

  “Digger,” I hissed. She took her time walking up.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked. And that did me in. Just destroyed me.

  “Are you serious? Digger, you like brought the gun. Are you like out of steam after that? You brought the gun and now you’re like Commander Moderate Violence of the Mounties or whatever?” I couldn’t whisper-shout anymore, I was laughing so hard.

  “The gun’s for an emergency,” she got out, but she was gasping with laughter too. We were more nervous than we’d estimated. We had been conducting this whispered conversation as we walked toward Lorriner’s house, and we had reached the middle of a clump of pines, where we kneeled down in the fragrant needles. Digger had crammed a fistful of her jacket collar against her mouth, and I could see her ice-clear irises despite the lack of light. I put down the brick and she put down the gun, and she looked at me with this weird face, this open, appraising face; you couldn’t miss it even in the dark.

  “Hey, man,” I started to babble, because this was moving into zones declared off-limits by our agreement.

  I don’t mean that we were about to have some stupid makeout session. But we just try to be adult about everything between us. Keep it free of entanglements. And certain moments imperil the agreement. But the whole built-up nonsense of the day, of everything associated with the whole enterprise, had come charging into the open, blatting and gibbering. I was so exhausted. She must have been too. So can you blame us? We’d driven out to this dark little nowhere with a map, a brick, and a gun—cavemen, or not cavemen, I guess, but total primitives. Can you blame us for almost violating the basic terms of our association? So I opened my mouth and said, “Hey, man,” forcing a rich, witty tone into the words, to prepare her for I don’t know what piece of offensive sarcasm. You know, to wreck the mood?
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br />   Digger beat me to it. She put her finger to her pursed lips. Lights were coming on in the house. Which was weird, because it was night and there hadn’t been any lights on before. But hey, who knows what animates the minds of dumb hicks, right? Anyway, the lights were coming on, one at a time. The tenants were just waking up. Digger gestured with her head. She had picked up the gun, and she looked like a squad leader motioning me into combat or something. I hefted the brick and stalked out into the dim yard, trying to choose a window. I wasn’t afraid. I was just calculating what would be the worst blow. I also kind of secretly hoped I’d hit Lorriner with the brick. All I could see, though, were unclear shadows moving around behind the curtains, which were blue and printed with green-headed ducks flying in endless fascist ranks. There were three windows within what I figured was throwing distance, so I set my legs and hurled. With two hands, a swaying, lolloping throw. The brick rotated stolidly as it flew toward the middle window. The one I’d aimed at. Happiness, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe the purest. The glass broke, with the universal confused chime breaking glass makes. The brick thumped into the house, pushing aside the curtain enough for me to catch a flicker of the room: a blue-glowing television, or maybe an aquarium? Whatever. I was already dashing back into the pine stand to wait and watch.

  “I can’t believe you did it, I can’t believe you did it,” Digger moaned in glee. At this precise instant, the security lights clipped to the rambler’s eaves blared on. And we saw (holy fuck!) the front door flap open and disgorge the great Michael Lorriner himself.

  He was indeed short, as his nickname would suggest—my height. Round and stodgy-looking. His face was as white as the missing moon, and disfigured with those thick-framed institutional glasses? The ones that give you the ape face of a complete retard? He was wearing a black Baltimore Orioles shirt, beaten-up jeans, and white clunky sneakers. Childish in general appearance. This was a disappointment. I mean, I had this whole theory. I wanted to be able to look him in the eyes. To know. To see that determination, that precision of intent. Whatever it was that had allowed him to march into Stubb’s and execute three people. It upset me, the way he carried himself. A weakling, a nonentity. Then he started talking, and the tenor of the whole occasion changed.

  “Someone out there? I hear yew, yew dirty fucker,” he yelled. His voice, though loud, was shockingly even. Free of anger, you know? He might have been yelling for someone to pass the salt. It was the same voice from the phone call. That, at least, was satisfying. “That yew, Jewboy? Get off my property! I got my rights! I got my rights! Fuckin’ Jew.” And then he was off, stumping around the side of the house to check and see if the brick thrower might be hiding there. His walk was bowlegged and graceless. It reminded me of my own clumsiness. He was sort of waddling. Though he wasn’t even all that fat, just chubby. And this was hilarious, I mean his duckwalk. I now had to clench my teeth to stop myself from laughing. Not even the fact that Lorriner had figured out it was me made a difference. It was too perfect, you know? Some guy in an Orioles shirt? What the fuck? The new laughs were making my diaphragm seize up. Digger pincered my hand, and I saw that she was fighting back laughter again, too, and we crouched there, linked in the semidark, watching Lorriner amble in fury around his flat-roofed house. A straw man wearing overalls slumped head-on-knees in a rocking chair next to the front door, and a plastic pink flamingo stood hammered into soil. You’d have been in a shit-fit of laughter, too, if you’d been there. “Come on, yew dirty fucker,” Lorriner bellowed. “I know my rights. Yew fucking Jew!” The lights in the lone neighboring house, the one right at the turnoff, came on, and another male voice screamed, “Shut up! Wud you shut up!” “No, I GOT my rights,” Lorriner yelled again.

  So that was it! We’d thrown the brick; we’d seen the man himself. Done what we’d planned. Instead of righteous anger, there was this slack-muscled suppressed laughter. Digger and I decided to stay. Maybe it was the afterhaze of the comedy. Maybe it stemmed from the simple fact that human beings can be relied on to make as many retarded mistakes as possible. Maybe just because he looked so harmless. This was Kevin’s murderer, this ordinary guy—we could beat him! I knew that. I remember thinking that. I didn’t know what this victory would consist of, but I knew we would win. In the end it doesn’t matter why. We stayed, in the cold dirt, fallen needles rustling garrulously beneath us.

  “I bet it’s like hard for him now. I bet he’s all terrified of getting caught. You know?” Digger muttered. It made sense. She has a real grip on the practical side of things. So we huddled there, freezing and expectant. Lorriner did not disappoint. With a final shout of “Jewboy!” he careened back into his house and out again right away, but better equipped. He’d put on a nylon jacket, bright teal, against the cold, which seemed much worse out here in farm country. The jacket made his moony face even moonier. In one hand he was holding a long black cop flashlight, the kind you read about in articles on police brutality. In the other, a racket of some kind. A tennis racket, but smaller. For badminton, I guess.

  “Oh, come on.” Digger snorted. “You still out there, Jewboy?” Lorriner advanced, shouting, to the edge of the light perimeter, and started hosing his flashlight beam in wild loops across his dark yard. It grazed Digger’s face, the soft bulge of her cheek, and she slammed herself back against her tree, wrapping her torso in her own arms. “Yew dirty fucker! Come on out! Fuckin’ Jewboy!” I won’t lie: the slur got to me. I’m not stone-souled. And—in this blinding and glorious instant—I knew what I had to do. Doubt-free. I emitted a growl. Get it? Like a dog! And then some hoarse barks. Digger stopped embracing herself and joined in. Her dog voice was high and clear; mine was in the tenor range. Our imitations—which must have been terrible—set the neighbor off again, begging and begging everyone to shut up. To please shut up. “Wud you please, please just shut up!” “Get off my property,” Lorriner answered, waving his flashlight and badminton racket in loose semaphore. For at least a minute or two, the misty beam careening all over the place, fence, straw man, treetops. Vanishing into the sky. Digger and I kept up our howls and yodels. They got painful. But I couldn’t have stopped, some joyous momentum was driving me on; we barked and barked, high and low, till our voices went croaky and we had whipped ourselves back into a fit of comic hysteria. And, throwing down the racket but retaining the flashlight, Lorriner stomped around to the rear of his house again and vanished from our view. We’d beaten him! I’d known we would. Digger released my hand. We unbent our aching knees.

  And a bass animal voice, a real voice this time, started belling and screaming. “Fuck,” whispered Digger, as though in echo: she figured it out before me. I remained clueless until, announced by the light percussion of a screen door, Lorriner’s dog came racing toward our clot of trees. Lorriner had released it in response to our barking. It looked as big as a steroidal horse, and its crimson pelt had this weaponlike gleam, and its ropy saliva trailed the brownish grass stubble it was loping across. Digger and I took off in a single motion, running blind into the cover of deeper trees farther back on the property. Lorriner started bellowing the word Murphy. The dog’s name, I realized as we ran. “Murphy! Geddem! Murphy! Geddem! Fuckin’ Jewboy! Geddem! Mur-feeeeeee!” he screamed, pumping his arms and bringing his white child’s fists down to crush some invisible foe to dust. Digger and I stopped, panting, and pressed ourselves against a huge royal oak. I don’t know why we thought this would help. The dog curved out from the glaring scrim of light and galloped straight at us, his shouts increasing in genuine rage. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” the neighbor at the road head chanted. Lorriner kept screaming, “Geddem.” The world was whirling to an end. I was shit-scared. All the flatulent confidence Lorriner’s physical appearance had inspired was gone. And there was this monstrous dog torpedoing at me.

  Remember what I said about Digger being a natural? With the gun, I mean. Well, imagine what a natural would do in this situation. Being a natural at something, anyway, means that you need to do it. As
opposed to wanting to do it. I’m not saying Digger was eager to use the gun. But she did bring it. She’d let David hand it over without comment, she’d fired it at the Dump and destroyed her target. All of those are signs of consent, right? Now, given that we were about to be mauled by this giant death-camp Labrador, she acted like a natural. No one can blame her. I don’t. It’s even more proof, I’d say, that she’s marked out for an über-memorable life. So I stood there paralyzed, and Digger dropped into her shooter’s crouch, forearms wavering, brows drawn.

  Then the gun went off. Have you ever seen any living thing get shot? I doubt it. I hadn’t, either, until just then. Nothing similar had ever come within the compass of my experience before. Absolutely nothing. I live in a crappy city. There’s no need to worry about the violent death of animals in a city. And it was violent, in the worst sense of the word. Maybe the relative helplessness of the animal made it more disgusting: it had no understanding of its situation. Either before or after the shot—which converted it into something inanimate, except for a few final quivers of life. The dog jerked and fell, legs splayed, like it had run into some invisible obstruction. The howls of enraged pursuit stopped. It sobbed. You could hear a light glug of escaping fluid, a sucking whistle, undercutting its moans. Other dogs began barking, in sympathy with their fallen comrade or whatever. All over the immediate vicinity.

  Those empty-brained little sycophants! Where had they come from? Where had they been when we were barking? There weren’t even any other houses! Lorriner rushed to the dying animal and kneeled to shield it from further injury, with his whole nylon-clad torso. Bending as though in reverence. Maybe it was reverence. Who knows? He was speechless, at least. Silent as concrete. Digger was already striding out from our thicket, out into the glow of the security lights. Covering Lorriner with the gun the whole time. So, even with all this confusion surrounding me, what else could I do but follow? Murmuring, “Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck,” as I ran.