The Human Stain

There's no collision so, though he has some sense of it, he's got no details, and when he gets home from driving and gets out of the truck he's not sure what happened. Big day for him. November the eleventh. Veterans Day. That morning he goes with Louie—that morning he goes to the Wall, that afternoon he comes home from the Wall, that night he goes out to kill everybody. Did he? Can't know because there's no collision, but still quite a day from a therapeutic point of view. Second half being more therapeutic than the first. Achieves a true serenity now. Now Kenny can speak to him.

Firing side by side with Kenny, both of them opened up on fully automatic, when Hector, the team leader, gives the screaming order "Get your stuff and let's get out of here!" and suddenly Kenny is dead. Quick as that. Up on some hill. Under attack, pulling back-and Kenny's dead. Can't be. His buddy, another farm boy, same background except from Missouri, they were going to do dairy farming together, guy who as a kid of six watched his father die and as a kid of nine watched his mother die, raised after that by an uncle he loved and was always talking about, a successful dairy farmer with a good-sized spread—180 milking cows, twelve machines milking six cows a side in the parlor at a time—and Kenny's head is gone and he's dead.

Looks like Les is communicating with his buddy now. Showed Kenny that Kenny's not forgotten. Kenny wanted him to do it, and he did it. Now he knows that whatever he did—even if he's not sure what it was—he did it for Kenny. Even if he did kill someone and he goes to jail, it doesn't matter—it can't matter because he's dead.

This was just one last thing to do for Kenny. Squared it with him.

Knows everything is now all right with Kenny.

("I went to the Wall and there was his name and it was silence.

Waited and waited and waited. I looked at him, he looked at me. I didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything, and that's the point I knew it wasn't okay with Kenny. That there was more to be done.

Didn't know what it was. But he wouldn't have just left me like that.

That's why there was no message for me. Because I still had more to do for Kenny. Now? Now it's okay with Kenny. Now he can rest."

"And are you still dead?" "What are you, an asswipe? Oh, I can't talk to you, you asswipe! I did it because I am dead!")

Next morning, first thing, he hears at the garage that she was with the Jew in a car crash. Everybody figures that she was blowing him and he lost control and they went off the road and through the barrier and over the embankment and front-end-first into the shallows of the river. The Jew lost control of the car.

No, he does not associate this with what happened the night before.

He was just out driving, in a different state of mind entirely.

He says, "Yeah? What happened? Who killed her?"

"The Jew killed her. Went off the road."

"She was probably going down on him."

"That's what they say."

That's it. Doesn't feel anything about that either. Still feels nothing.

Except his suffering. Why is he suffering so much for what happened to him when she can go on giving blow jobs to old Jews? He's the one who does the suffering, and now she just up and walks away from it all.

Anyway, as he sips his morning coffee at the town garage, looks that way to him.

When everybody gets up to start for the trucks, Les says, "Guess that music won't be coming from that house on Saturday nights anymore."

Though, as sometimes happens, nobody knows what he's talking about, they laugh anyway, and with that, the workday begins.

If she located herself in western Massachusetts, the ad could be traced back to her by colleagues who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, particularly if she went on to describe her appear-ance and list her credentials. Yet if she didn't specify her place of residence, she could wind up with not a single response from anyone within a radius of a hundred, two, even three hundred miles.