The Human Stain

Because I died already. Because I died already in Vietnam. Because I am a man who fucking died" The group consisted of Vietnam vets like Farley except for two from the Gulf War, crybabies who got a little sand in their eyes in a four-day ground war. A hundred-hour war. A bunch of waiting in the desert. The Vietnam vets were men who, in their postwar lives, had themselves been through the worst—divorce, booze, drugs, crime, the police, jail, the devastating lowness of depression, uncontrollable crying, wanting to scream, wanting to smash something, the hands trembling and the body twitching and the tightness in the face and the sweats from head to toe from reliving the metal flying and the brilliant explosions and the severed limbs, from reliving the killing of the prisoners and the families and the old ladies and the kids—and so, though they nodded their heads about Rawley and Little Les and understood how he couldn't feel for them when he saw them with their eyes rolled back because he himself was dead, they nonetheless agreed, these really ill guys (in that rare moment when any of them could manage to talk about anybody other than themselves wandering around the streets ready to snap and yelling "Why?" at the sky, about anybody else not getting the respect they should receive, about anybody else not being happy until they were dead and buried and forgotten), that Farley had better put it behind him and get on with his life.

Get on with his life. He knows it's shit, but it's all he has. Get on with it. Okay.

He was let out of the hospital late in August determined to do that. And with the help of a support group that he joined, and one guy in particular who walked with a cane and whose name was Louie Borrero, he succeeded at least halfway; it was tough, but with Louie's help he was doing it more or less, was on the wagon for nearly three whole months, right up until November. But then-and not because of something somebody said to him or because of something he saw on TV or because of the approach of another familyless Thanksgiving, but because there was no alternative for Farley, no way to prevent the past from building back up, building up and calling him to action and demanding from him an enormous response—instead of it all being behind him, it was in front of him.

Once again, it was his life.

2 Slipping the Punch

WHEN COLEMAN went down to Athena the next day to ask what could be done to ensure against Farley's ever again trespassing on his property, the lawyer, Nelson Primus, told him what he did not want to hear: that he should consider ending his love affair.

He'd first consulted Primus at the outset of the spooks incident and, because of the sound advice Primus had given—and because of a strain of cocky bluntness in the young attorney's manner reminiscent of himself at Primus's age, because of a repugnance in Primus for sentimental nonessentials that he made no effort to disguise behind the regular-guy easygoingness prevailing among the other lawyers in town—it was Primus to whom he'd brought the Delphine Roux letter.

Primus was in his early thirties, the husband of a young Ph.D.-a philosophy professor whom Coleman had hired some four years earlier—and the father of two small children. In a New England college town like Athena, where most all the professionals were outfitted for work by L. L. Bean, this sleekly good-looking, ravenhaired young man, tall, trim, athletically flexible, appeared at his office every morning in crisply tailored suits, gleaming black shoes, and starched white shirts discreetly monogrammed, attire that bespoke not only a sweeping self-confidence and sense of personal significance but a loathing for slovenliness of any kind—and that suggested as well that Nelson Primus was hungry for something more than an office above the Talbots shop across from the green.

His wife was teaching here, so for now he was here. But not for long. A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit—a panther ready to pounce.

"I don't doubt that Farley's psychopathic," Primus told him, measuring each word with staccato exactitude and keeping a sharp watch on Coleman as he spoke. "I'd worry if he were stalking me.

But did he stalk you before you took up with his ex-wife? He didn't know who you were. The Delphine Roux letter is something else entirely. You wanted me to write to her—against my better judgment I did that for you. You wanted an expert to analyze the handwriting —against my better judgment I got you somebody to analyze the handwriting. You wanted me to send the handwriting analysis to her lawyer—against my better judgment I sent him the results. Even though I wished you'd had it in you to treat a minor nuisance for what it was, I did whatever you instructed me to do.

But Lester Farley is no minor nuisance. Delphine Roux can't hold a candle to Farley, not as a psychopath and not as an adversary.