That night was ugly and mean. Some
nights, you know, drift around you like a silk scarf and make you think of soft
music and a girl’s sweet breath on your neck. But that night put rusty nails in
my head. I was jumpy and I kept looking behind me, and into the trees that
lined the road.
I had been following him and his
friends for a couple days. Truth is, I wanted to walk with them, not behind
them. But I felt like a little kid looking through the fence into a playground,
so I still kept my distance that night.
As dark as it was, it was lighter
around him. You don’t have to believe me, but it was. Like his clothes were
made of moonlight. And a couple times he looked back at me. He was beautiful.
No, not that way, if that’s what you’re thinking. Beautiful like a sunrise over
the ocean. Like a mountain. Strong and good. He made me want to come closer and
at the same time drove me away.
Sure, I’d heard all the rumors. It
seemed crazy that he wanted to go into the city in the first place. But at
night? On a night like this when it felt like the shadows could leave a filthy
stain on your skin. He had to know they’d be waiting.
So I just hung back, kept close
enough that I could see where they were headed. When the lights appeared,
winking against the black, I couldn’t tell whether it was cooking fires or
torches. Either way, it didn’t dent the hardness of that night.
I heard them before I saw them.
Many men’s voices, pumped with liquor and bloodlust. I guess his friends did,
too. Before long they had slipped away into the shadows and he stood alone.
I wanted to go, too. I can’t
explain why I stayed. Not that I moved any closer, not at first.
Their smoldering torches didn’t
bring illumination as much as a flickering obscenity to the inevitable
conclusion of that awful night. They circled round him, like hyenas around a
wounded antelope. Except he wasn’t weak. There must have been 30 of them, and
he just stood there, quiet and calm. They blustered and postured, like bullies
do. He spoke only once, with a gesture of his right hand, almost like he was
granting them permission or something, like he was in control instead of them.
I couldn’t hear what he said, but the men closest to him jerked back, tripping
on their own feet and slamming into the guys behind them.
But then they hiked up their
courage again, and began shoving him. Back and forth between them, calling him
filthy names even I wouldn’t repeat. I hated them and I was ashamed of them.
And I guess I understood them, too. They were afraid of him, like I was. It
could easily have been me in the mob, shaking with rage and spitting on him.
Instead I cowered in the dark with equal cowardice, paralyzed with indecision,
trying to make sense of the thought that was forming, unbidden, in my mind.
By this time they had gone from
cursing and shoving to a real beating, three or four of them taking turns
holding him up while another two or three would swing wildly at his face and
gut and crotch, hooting and congratulating themselves, slinging arcs of blood
and spit from his mouth as they connected. He kept falling and finally they let
him lie, bloody and moaning, while they stomped and kicked him.
I once helped a friend bury a flock
of lambs after a pack of wolves had literally ripped them to pieces. Their
throats were torn out, entrails dragged out in long purple ropes, and blood
blackening the pasture. This night smelled the same.
I hoped they would stop and I
probably prayed they would stop, but I knew they wouldn’t. Still I stood, clenching
and unclenching my fists, my eyes blurred and streaming.
Then, in a dreadful moment of
confirmation one man produced a long black leather satchel, and knelt to unfasten
and unroll it. The torchlight gleamed silver as he spread it on the ground. The
shadows seemed to lengthen as the man withdrew four long, curved blades,
handing each in turn to four others who now spaced themselves around the bloody
man collapsed upon the grass. The other men began a low chant, repeating some
ritual words I had never heard before and hope never to hear again.
If you aren’t familiar with this
particular tribe, I have no stomach for spelling out their unique method of
execution. I’ll just say that it is a manner of death so terrible that to think
of it even now brings the bile surging into my mouth. They save it for only the
most despicable, for traitors and thieves and heretics. No one, I mean no one,
not even they themselves, deserves the agony of such a death.
My ears roared with sound, but dull
and distant, like I was deep under water. And then it happened. If you had seen
me that night you wouldn’t have thought me courageous or noble. You would have
assumed I had lost my mind.
I screamed and cursed and ran
headlong toward the mob. Like a frightened animal stampeding toward a precipice,
I crashed through the outer ranks of the men as they all turned in fright to
face me. I bowled some of them over and some of them recoiled from me as if
they feared a ghoul from the shadows had crashed their party.
I fell in a heap next to him,
cradling his head and shoulders against me, his blood soaking into my clothing.
I continued to scream and curse them, and the crowd watched silently, no longer
afraid, just waiting and watching what for them was the unexpected but not
entirely unwelcome garish display of a fool
I heard myself beg, the entreaty of
my words as foreign to me as were their faces. “Let him go; take me. He doesn’t
deserve it, but I do. Take me.”
Then I looked down at his face, his
eyes swollen almost shut, his nose a grotesque broken mass. He smiled, his
smashed mouth contorting, teeth broken and smeared red. “What’s your name?” he
whispered. I told him. He repeated it, but then added my middle and family
names, though I had only given my first name. He said it like a title of
nobility.
He lifted one broken hand and
cupped my cheek, like you do with a lover, or a small child. “I’ll remember
you.”
“Let me do this,” I said, first
quietly to him, and then screaming again to the mob. “Let him go! Take me.” And
then I whispered to him again, “You don’t deserve this, but I do.”
“I know. That’s the point, isn’t
it?” He smiled again, as they dragged me away from him.
My beating was almost perfunctory,
as if they were bored. They kicked me away, like the nuisance I was, and I lay
in misery once again in the shadows. I listened as the chant resumed, and the
men with the knives knelt to begin.
So that’s why I am who I am. That
terrible night, when I burst out of the shadows only to be thrown back into
them, became the start of a journey where more and more the light actually
shone for me.
I’ll never understand how I could
be so wrong about so many things and still end up with the sun on my face.
I thought I could die in his place.
How upside down is that? I thought that night was the first and last good thing
I’d ever attempt.
And I thought I’d never see him
again.
