Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [97]
“Yes,” said Flood, “but does he understand?”
“I’m told not—I’m told he doesn’t believe anything can get to him. Everything about him is supposed to be in this file. We’ll see.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to make it like I never heard of this freak,” I told her. “And I want to cancel his ticket—watch him die, have him understand that he is going to die just like that girl did—find the field his tree grew in and dig up the roots and pour salt in the ground.”
“It’s not wrong to be afraid,” Flood said, thinking she understood.
“Flood, for chrissakes, I know that—I probably know that better than anyone you’ll ever meet. You ever watch a pro football game—ever see how those guys come over to the sidelines and take a hit off an oxygen bottle so they can go back and do their work? That’s what I do with fear. It makes me smart—it’s the fuel I run on. You don’t understand—you didn’t see the tape.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“That won’t help. Damn it, Flood—I didn’t want to see it either, but even if we never saw it it would still be—it will always be, even if this maggot is dead and gone.”
“Like Zen?”
“If a tree falls in the forest . . . maybe so—I don’t know.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” she said, “he’s just a man.”
“Flood, there is just no place for people like you where I live. Good for you, you’re not afraid—you going to protect me?”
“I can.”
“Not from this—it’s inside of me, it’s inside all of us. What he did—people do it. Rich people pay for it with money and poor people just do it and pay the freight in some mental hospital or prison. People do it—not animals, not birds—people. If you’re not scared of it, it just means you can’t see yourself there. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s so rich—there’s so much strength when you have money . . .”
“It’s not money, Flood, it’s power. When I was in Africa once, in Angola before they kicked out the Portuguese—I was near the airport in Luanda and the rebels were getting closer and it was time to get out. The soldiers were all over the place and they were searching luggage, you know, to find contraband—ivory carvings, diamonds, hard currency. Two of them opened my bags on the ground. Nothing in there, but they found the malaria pills I had with me. One of them opened the bottles and just poured them out on the ground, right in front of me, smiling in my face all the time. There was nothing I could do except act stupid and confused. That made them happy—I would get malaria and I wouldn’t even understand how it happened. That was enough for them, that much power—for some people, it’s not enough. There’s a line you cross—and once you cross it you never get back. Then you’re not human anymore.”
“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