Every Dead Thing

“Christian Morals: ‘Behold not Death’s Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook’st them.’ ” His back was to me but I could see his face reflected in the window and his eyes seemed far away. “I’ve spent too long looking at death. I don’t want to force myself to look any longer.”

He sipped his coffee. “You should go away from here, do something to put your ghosts behind you. You’re no longer what you once were, but maybe you can still step back, before you lose yourself forever.”

A film was forming on my untouched coffee. When I didn’t respond, Walter sighed and spoke with a sadness in his voice that I had never heard before. “I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to see you again,” he said. “I’ll talk to some people, see if you can go.”

Something had changed within me, that much was true, but I was not sure that Walter could see it for what it was. Maybe only I could really understand what had happened, what Adelaide Modine’s death had unlocked within me. The horror of what she had done through the years, the knowledge of the hurt and pain she had inflicted on the most innocent among us, could not be balanced in this world.

And yet it had been brought to an end. I had brought it to an end.

All things decay, all things must end, the evil as well as the good. What Adelaide Modine’s death had done, in its brutal, flame-red way, was to show me that this was true. If I could find Adelaide Modine and could bring her to an end, then I could do the same with others. I could do the same with the Traveling Man.

And somewhere, in a dark place, a clock began to tick, counting off the hours, the minutes, the seconds, before it would toll the end for the Traveling Man.

All things decay. All things must end.

And as I thought of what Walter had said, of his doubts about me, I thought too of my father and the legacy he left me. I have only fragmented memories of my father. I remember a large, red-faced man carrying a Christmas tree into the house, his breath rising into the air like the puffs of steam from an old train. I remember walking into the kitchen one evening to find him caressing my mother and her laughter at their shared embarrassment. I remember him reading to me at night, his huge fingers following the words as he spoke them to me so that they might be familiar to me when I returned to them again. And I remember his death.

His uniform was always freshly pressed and he kept his gun oiled and cleaned. He loved being a policeman, or so it seemed. I did not know then what it was that drove him to do what he did. Maybe Walter Cole gained some knowledge of it when he looked upon the bodies of those dead children. Maybe I, too, have knowledge of it. Maybe I have become like my father.

What is clear is that something inside him died and the world appeared to him in different, darker colors. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and become a reflection of what he saw.

The call had been a routine one: two kids fooling around in a car late at night on a patch of urban wasteland, flashing the lights and sounding the horn. My father had responded and found one of the local boys, a petty criminal well on the road to graduating into felonies, and his girlfriend, a middle-class girl who was flirting with danger and enjoying the sexual charge it brought.

My father couldn’t recall what the boy said to him as he tried to impress his girl. Words were exchanged and I can imagine my father’s voice deepening and hardening in warning. The boy made mocking movements toward the inside pocket of his jacket, enjoying the effect on my father’s nerves and bathing in the ripples of laughter from the young woman beside him.

Then my father drew his gun and the laughter stopped. I can see the boy raising his hands, shaking his head, explaining that there was no weapon there, that it was all just fun, that he was sorry. My father shot him in the face, blood streaking the interior of the car, the windows, the face of the girl in the passenger seat, his mouth wide in shock. I don’t think she even screamed before my father shot her too. Then he walked away.

Internal Affairs came for him as he stripped in the locker room. They took him before his brother officers, to make an example of him. No one got in their way. By then, they all knew, or thought they knew.