He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be accounted a curse to him.
Proverbs 27:14
As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed—they never would be missed!
W.S. Gilbert
The Joy Boys were just a bunch of young guys who looked a little bit alike and had fun hanging around together in Miami Beach; they were tall, pretty well built, blond or bleached, no big noses or anything, blue- or grey-eyed. The uniform kind of evolved: they wore T-shirts with the arms cut off, wide blue-grey belts with big buckles that said JB, grey cutoffs in the summer and grey tightbottoms in the winter, and they always had twisted grey-blue headbands around their foreheads. The hair was crewcut to begin with, but then they started cutting it short in the middle and letting it grow longer on the sides. When they walked down the street, they got a lot of respect, and when they walked down the street together, they got a lot of respect.
Once in a while they got into shoving matches with some other gang, but everybody knew the days of brass knuckles and auto antennas were over, and they really weren’t into that anyway: it wasn’t a competitive thing, like proving they were meaner than anybody, they just enjoyed seeing the straights get off the sidewalk to let them by, or pushing them off if they didn’t. And then they would go into a bar and drink a lot of beer, and go home doing the same thing, or sometimes other things.
One afternoon five of them were walking down the street, Carter, Erv, Tim, Walker, and Mark. All in a row. And they nudged an old dentist type off the sidewalk into the gutter. Then a couple of tourists in Hawaiian shirts.
And Erv fell down, just facedown on the sidewalk, drooling on the concrete, his arms wide. And then a couple of seconds later Mark went down, just the same. The rest of them ran, but Walker went, and Carter, and only Tim got away.
That was the year when the big die-off begun. I remember it real well, because three of my relatives went that same year. My uncle Ralph, my aunt Lorraine, and my cousin Jeff. It wasn’t no kind of disease—they weren’t sick or nothing—it was them McNultys done it. Seemed like anybody that was just a mortal nuisance to all and sundry, why, they had better watch out, because the McNultys would get them. And after the first few months, you could see folks walking around kind of holding theirselves in, trying to be polite, don’t you know. But it was too much for them mostly. Sooner or later they would take to cussing and carrying on like they used to, and that would be the end of them.
Oral history, Paul Z. Wilson, recorded November 23, 2036.
This little kid, nasty little brute, about ten or eleven I’d say, red hair, freckles, mean little eyes too close together, horrid child, his parents should have drowned him at birth. He had a sort of feud going with a man named Palmer who lived two doors down. Palmer didn’t like him crossing the front garden, you see. And the kid knew that Palmer had a temper. I saw the whole thing from across the road. Nice morning in May, Palmer working in his petunias. Here comes the kid on his bicycle, swerves into the garden, makes Palmer jump up and shout, goes on round the comer. Five minutes later, back again, same thing, off again. Palmer waited for him. Kid came by, riding no hands, thumbs in his ears, gave Palmer the raspberry. Palmer grabbed him off the bicycle—just what the kid was hoping for, do you see—and next moment he was lying in the gutter dead as mutton. No, not Palmer, the kid. It was a big surprise all round. Palmer quite cut up about it, but the inquest cleared him absolutely. Kid dead, not a mark on him. Cause of death, act of God—that was what they called it then.
Oral history, Victor Levering, recorded February 2, 2041.
His name was Raul Pacheco Quinones; he was thirty-five, a lawyer, a widower, a poet who never showed his verses to anyone. He thought of himself as essentially normal sexually, if perhaps a little more fastidious than most; his shyness prevented him from approaching any woman unless he felt a shared attraction . . . Well, anyhow, in his successful encounters he instinctively and naturally behaved in a caring way, solicitous of the woman and desiring her pleasure, and yet in his fantasies and in the kind of pornography he preferred, he thought obsessively of women stripped and compelled —not brutally raped, as a rule, but compelled to submit nevertheless, and moreover forced to respond against their will. And of course this was a sick fantasy, the rapist’s fantasy that the victim really likes it. Later he began to have other fantasies, in which he experienced the excitement of blood and dismemberment. In actual life he would never take part in such a thing, but he remembered that as a young boy he had had daydreams of this kind, of stripping and humiliating a certain woman teacher, for example—this was early, before he had even found out what men and women did with their sexual parts. And perhaps this sadistic motif came from that time, when he had felt sexually confused, ignorant and powerless, and wanted to retaliate by injuring a woman. Sometimes, with a metal fist, he wanted to strike his parents in the face with such power that it would drive them back against their parents and grandparents and knock them all down like trees felled by a hurricane.
In a suburb of Lima called Miraflores, where he had just finished lunch with a client, he was walking down a sunny street between whitewashed walls toward the holotheaters and the bus stop, looking at the people he passed. Here a woman in her thirties, face a little drooping and sad, and he thought of closing the door, the fright in her eyes, then the first slicing blow. He saw rich rolling intestines cascading out on the floor, blood spurting between fingers, grey intestines and yellow fat, all the forbidden interior; yes, and the closed eyes, the mouth straining open to scream its disbelief. That this could happen, that another human being could ...
He slipped out and into an elderly woman named Velasquez who was walking in the same direction. Come and look at this, please. Without pleasure.
. . . another slice, and the white bone before the blood covered it; then the hairy pubis parting . . . But he has never—? No. He knows he would die. Unusual. Let’s call a few others.
They rode him together into a bus, where he sat looking out the dusty window awhile, then took a pad from his breast pocket and wrote:
This ugliness is beautiful to him. True. And he harms no one.
Then why kill him?
Only to spare ourselves from having to see these things again?
Let him live.
What if he is unhappy?
He says his business as
a poet is to tell his own truth, even if it is bitter.
How can we know he is wrong?
All right. Good-bye. *Pop* *Pop* *Pop* *Pop*
Ralph W. Steinleser owned and operated an electronic parts manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio; he was a choleric man of fifty-six who had been disillusioned in love several times and whose doctor no longer allowed him to eat the foods he liked best. Lately he had noticed that the people in the office were giving him strange looks. The new head of his catalog department, Tom Eberhard, for instance. One morning Steinleser was saying to him, “I wouldn’t wipe my ass on a piece of junk like that. A kid nine years old could—” There was that look again. It wasn’t suppressed anger; he was used to that, and people who worked for him damn well had to suppress their anger; it was something else, almost like fear or, no, more like excitement.