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By Root 464 0

standards: He derides blubberers like Paducah’s Michael Carneal who recant, who sully the purity of their gesture with a craven regret. He admires style—for instance, Evan Ramsey’s crack as he took aim at his math class in Bethyl, Alaska, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” He appreciates capable planning: Carneal inserted gun-range earplugs before aiming his .22 Luger; Barry Loukaitis in Moses Lake had his mother take him shopping in seven different stores until he found just the right long black coat under which to hide his .30-caliber hunting rifle. Kevin has a refined sense of irony, too, treasuring the fact that the teacher Loukaitis shot had only recently written on the report card of this A-student, “A pleasure to have in the class.” Like any professional, he has contempt for the kind of rank incompetence featured by John Sirola, the fourteen-year-old in Redlands, California, who blasted his principal in the face in 1995, only to trip when fleeing the scene and shoot himself dead. And in the way of most established experts, Kevin is suspicious of parvenus trying to elbow their way into his specialty with the slightest of qualifications—witness his resentment of that thirteen-year-old eviscerater. He is difficult to impress.

Much as John Updike dismisses Tom Wolfe as a hack, Kevin reserves a particular disdain for Luke Woodham, “the cracker” from Pearl, Mississippi. He approves of ideological focus but scorns pompous moralizing, as well as any School Shooting aspirant who can’t keep his own counsel—and apparently before taking out his nominal once-girlfriend with a .30-.30 caliber shotgun, Woodham couldn’t stop himself from passing a note to a friend in class that read (and you should hear your son’s puling rendition): “I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society push us and we will push back.” Kevin decried Woodham’s sniveling while mucus drizzled onto his orange jumpsuit on Prime Time Live as totally uncool: “I’m my own person! I’m not a tyrant. I’m not evil and I have a heart and I have feelings!” Woodham has admitted to warming up by clubbing his dog, Sparky, wrapping the pooch in a plastic bag, torching him with lighter fluid, and listening to him whimper before tossing him in a pond, and after studious consideration Kevin has concluded that animal torture is clichéd. Lastly, he is especially condemnatory of the way this whiny creature tried to worm out responsibility by blaming a satanic cult. The story itself showed panache, but Kevin regards a refusal to stand by one’s own handiwork as not only undignified but as a betrayal of the tribe.

I know you, my dear, and you’re impatient. Never mind the preliminaries, you want to hear about the visit itself—what his mood’s like, how he’s looking, what he said. All right, then. But by imputation, you asked for it.

He looks well enough. Though there is still a tinge too much blue in his complexion, fine veins at his temples convey a promising hint of vulnerability. If he has hacked his hair in uneven shocks, I take that as representation of healthy concern with his appearance. The perpetual half cock on the right corner of his mouth is starting to carve a permanent single quote into the cheek, remaining behind when he switches to a pursedmouth scowl. There’s no close quote on the left, and the asymmetry is disconcerting.

No more of those ubiquitous orange jumpsuits these days at Claverack. So Kevin is free to persist in the perplexing style of dress he developed at fourteen, arguably crafted in counterpoint to the prevailing fashion in clothing that’s oversized—the jib of Harlem toughs, boxers catching sun, sauntering through moving traffic as the waistband of jeans that could rig a small sailboat shimmy toward their knees. But if Kevin’s alternative look is pointed, I can only make wild guesses at what it means.

When he first trotted out this fashion in eighth grade, I assumed that the T-shirts biting into his armpits and pleating across his chest were old favorites he was reluctant to let go, and I went out of my way