The Spot: Stories

Dead faces, Collard thought, often spoke to the world, sending out final messages that were surprisingly heartfelt and concise. Dead lovers wore the betrayed smirks of the heartbroken. Dead adulterers had a worried cast to their mouths. The murdered had the silent look of the betrayed, glancing to one side or the other to indicate the direction of the perpetrator’s flight. The tortured held their lips as wide as possible at the arrogance of the living, wanting above all to arrange for a conversation with the future. But the victim of the crime down in the gulch seemed to say something else: his face was resigned and silent and nonassuming. (Collard was fully aware that it was easy to see something that wasn’t there, just as some drifter had found the Virgin Mary in a viaduct in Detroit last winter, recognizing her face in a splotch of salt and snow splatter cast up against the cement pylon by the passing snowplows.)

Collard — who was big on fishing — had a theory that the truth always sat deep, waiting to be snagged and brought to the surface. With the boys in this case, he would later think, his technique had been off. His voice had cracked, his words had arrived unstable. The boy, Stanton, was not exactly cocky. But he was unusually sure-footed and assured when he said that he had nothing to do with the crime, that he had stood to the side while the other kids performed the rites; he had done nothing except pass, at one point, the spikes over to Bycroff, who held them while someone else, maybe Highsmith, maybe not, because he wasn’t really looking, pounded them in with the croquet hammer.

Bycroff blamed Stanton, who in turn blamed Highsmith, who went around himself to point his finger at Bycroff in what most detectives traditionally call the golden hoop of blame. This three-way tag of culpability seemed particularly fine to Collard, who had gone so far as to hold the actual gag bandana up in Rudy Highsmith’s face during his interrogation. A green, snotstiff cloth that, when unknotted and straightened, still seemed to hold, in the wavelets of its hardened folds, a residue of the victim’s last words.

It was impossible to imagine such agony without inflicting some on yourself, Collard thought, and listening to descriptions of the event during the trial, he bit his nails to the quick just to find some small amount of pain from which to extrapolate the rest. Most in the courtroom did something to this effect. The jury box was stuffed with nail chewers. Lawyers snapped their fingers under the clamps of their clipboards; reporters in the gallery dug their fingers into their arms, pinching hard, as if to check their consciousness. Most imagined the suffering as a dreary succumbing to the knowledge of the pain, an almost delirious unknowing state as the nails came through, the first bloom of pain, and then a feeling of being fixed there, yielding to something soft and — at least the way Collard imagined it, still thinking in terms of the laundry on those lines — fluffy and smelling of starch. What did it mean, some of the jury wondered, to lay claim to the idea that the boy was not suffering as much as one expected? In an attempt to lighten the immensity of the crime, a pain expert was brought in to testify that the body did have certain chemicals that came to the defense of the afflicted in this kind of situation. (Torture, on the other hand, was a matter of countering the body’s natural opiates, of inducing pain incrementally, with a finesse that worked around these chemical defenses.) The boys, in their quick, careless plunge into the heart of whatever it was, darkness or evil (the prosecution couldn’t exactly decide), had nailed the boy to the cross hard and fast, producing a flush of suffering that had produced a flood of endorphins. Shock was nothing but the deepest joke on consciousness, and when this boy, on that cold fall night, was faced with spikes — through his hands and legs, as he twisted up against the face of the juryrigged cross — he flew the coop, so to speak, and became nothing but a vapor of soul stuff who just so happened to inhabit a body that was, at that moment, being crucified. (The defense argued.)