“The song’s not racist,” Bill told Dakota. “It’s about the desperation of the narrator. He’s looking to lash out, to blame anybody available.”
“I fought that nigger again,” Dakota quoted, reading the lyrics from his phone. “I fought that nigger again / I said, ‘Boy, don’t you know, you stole my granddaddy’s soul / Now I got my enemies as kin.’ ”
“Right, he’s talking to a specific person. That nigger, who’s now somehow a part of his family. Who he thinks stole from his grandpappy, probably with the Voting Rights Act or some shit.”
Dakota’s face remained skeptical as he read more of the song.
“I killed a man again / I killed a man again / I stuck a knife in his ribs outside a bar in West Texas / I got his ATM pin.
“I beat my son again / I beat my son again / I said, ‘Kid, don’t you know, this hard world grows you cold’ / I broke his arm again.
“I raped his mother again / I raped his mother again / I met her on a FOB over in Afghanistan / I killed her heart with my sin.”
“Exactly,” said Bill. “They’re expressions of the dispossessed. It’s about a dude who can’t even understand why he acts out in these ways. People dismiss him as a monster because that makes it easy on them. But he’s been bred and brought up, almost like a dog, to be vicious, to be cruel. The song’s about his remorse. Very Johnny Cash.”
Dakota arched his eyebrows. “If you say so.”
From what his parents told him, Harrington’s music had been fairly polarizing back home. Certainly no sign was going up at the city limits: HOMETOWN OF WILLIAM BENJAMIN HARRINGTON. He’d had a following, he’d played the festival circuit, but he’d never really broken out. He’d certainly never made money. A gruesome OD may have since helped record sales and mythos, but rock stars don’t get remunerated for the good career move of dying at exactly twenty-seven years old.
“At the bar tonight we were talking about this New Canaan rumor—you heard of this? The Murder That Never Was?”
Dakota checked over his shoulder, the road empty. “Sure, everyone’s heard of that.”
“Right. So someone decides to make it up for a laugh. But it sticks, it spreads. It’s like any urban legend, like the guy with the hook for a hand who murders kids on lovers’ lane. That’s so teenagers will stop having sex at the Brew. It serves a social utility.”
“You lost me, man. Lost me good.”
“You know,” Bill said, waggling both hands in the air as he tried to capture his point. “It’s trying to provide meaning and narrative where there is none. The murder rumor is like a conspiracy theory in that way. People don’t want to believe dark, terrible violence can just spring out of—or onto—bored normal folk. Look at the kids we grew up with. How many ODs do you know?”
Dakota snorted a laugh. “That are dead or that just OD’d and started shooting up a week later?”
“Curtis Moretti, Ben Harrington.”
“If you’re only counting from the popular cliques. My class alone had eleven. If you’re talking jail, you got Tony Wozniak? Ron Kruger? And are we counting the Flood brothers? They’re like on frequent flyer miles. Still not sure what you’re steering at.”
“It’s the Harrington song, man. It’s all part of the same phenomenon in the end. You either fight for your dignity and some fucking justice or you lose it—no other way. And once you start to really lose it, the rot sets in.”
He knew a bag of weed was hidden somewhere in the substratum of Dakota’s jeans. The guy had a scent like a cyclohexane refinery.
“We’re here on business,” Dakota warned. “Don’t fill my ear with your liberal bullshit.”
Bill stopped, his feet skidding in the gravel berm, and regarded him. “Thought you were down with my T-shirt protest back in the day?”
“Didn’t mean I was no Democrat. Ain’t like I voted for Barack O-fucking-bama.”
In the wind, the leaves looked like an addict’s agitated fingers, stroking night and sky. They turned onto New Canaan Avenue, which ran by a few industrial lots, the bowling alley, the park, and over the Cattawa. For some reason the town had never felt it necessary to put a sidewalk on this road, so they walked on the berm, uncapping their booze and swigging, vigilant for the NCPD patrol car.
“Yeah, well, neither did I. The second time, I mean. I was in Mexico anyway.”
“Doing what?”
Bill went on to describe his many aborted journeys: the reservation, Cambodia, Occupy, the cartel town. It sounded a hell of a lot more exciting than it actually felt to live, sitting unbathed in interminable airports waiting on delayed planes; broken phrases in disparate languages; chopped English and hand-gesture communication; keeping your whole life strapped inside a forty-pound Osprey pack. Of course that was after he lost his job on the 2008 campaign.
“See,” said Dakota. “Democrat.”
He laughed, thinking of when he got fired for an “outrageous, indecent, indiscriminate” tweet (Ready to string up these Wall Street fucks & their families from light poles on Park Ave #JacobinTime). He hadn’t bothered cleaning out his desk, accidentally leaving behind a glass cube with a piece of the net from when Harrington tipped in his own missed free throw for the conference championship. Self-fucked, out of the whole incident Bill regretted this the most.
They passed under a street lamp, one of those sodium-vapor deals that cast the worst kind of orange-soda color and made half the streets in America look washed-out and sick. Only under its glare did Bill now realize that roughly a third of the lights on New Canaan Avenue were dark, which created large pockets of sallow shadows.
“What you learn’s like: the American system…” He flicked his cigarette into the road. “It’s not like this conspiracy of Illuminati. It’s just this adaptive, fucking assimilating, smooth motherfucker. It gives you cars and credit and religion and television and all this other comfort that we go and call ‘freedom.’ Problem is, there’s no raging against the machine because the machine just consumes whatever objection anyone makes about it.”
“Hey, can I bum a smoke?”
“Sure.” Bill fished in his jeans for the pack of Camels. He popped the top with one hand, offered the pack to Dakota, and then drew another for himself with his teeth.
“But it’s— Here, I got a lighter.” He snapped a flame for Dakota and then lit his own. “It’s way more subtle than that. Like anyone trying to say her piece,” Bill explained. “You’ll just get commodified, assimilated, appropriated. You’ll get a tenure-track teaching job or a record contract or your own TV show, or God forbid, a publishing deal. Now you’re owned by the status quo. By GE or Comcast or Pearson PLC or worst of all, some neoliberal Ivy League university.”
Dakota ashed with expert flicks and ticks of his fingers, like an old-timer sitting on the porch matter-of-factly recounting the moment his wife left him. They passed the varsity baseball diamond and neared the secluded safety of the football field where—eons ago it seemed—he’d graduated on one balls-dripping-hot summer day.
“Democrat? Liberal? Duckfuck. At this point I’d rather be called a Nazi. Liberals are the Harvard grads interested in diversifying the plutocracy. And if you’re really causing trouble, if you’re really being heard, and it needs you to shut up? It’ll find a way.”
Dakota appeared bored by this, but at least he was someone to talk to. Bill had never actually met a person to whom he did not enjoy ranting.
“Ever seen that John Carpenter movie? The Thing?” Dakota asked, smoldering Camel sticky-tacked to his lower lip.