This was the other half of the tradition born from chaos that resembles order. Guns drawn, men and women walking toward a man, it’s almost always a man, with his own gun drawn, the barrel still hot from spraying a classroom or a theater or an office full of cubicles with chunks of lead in steel jackets moving at twenty-six hundred feet per second.
Titus felt his stomach tighten so hard and so fast it was like a cramp. His breath was slow and steady, but his head was pounding. The wind picked up and cooled the sweat wicking into his collar. Rays of sunlight reflecting off the windows were muted by his sunglasses as he moved forward. His feet crunched across the asphalt. The sound was polyphonic in his ears. To his right Carla was taking deep sharp breaths. To his left Davy was emitting a sort of keening noise like a bleating lamb. Roger was taking point. Titus could see the muscles in his thick shoulders knotted up like coils of deck rope.
In the past fifteen years Charon County had notched exactly two murders. One was solved in fifteen minutes when Alice Lowney confessed to stabbing her husband, Walter, with a pitchfork after she’d caught him sleeping with their next-door neighbor Ezra Collins, Pip’s cousin. The other one was unsolved, and if Ward Bennings’s file notes were to be believed it would remain that way for time immemorial. The victim had been a white male, age twenty-one to forty-five, found sliced in neat sections inside a suitcase that had washed up on Fiddler’s Beach. Conventional wisdom said the remains had come in from the Chesapeake Bay on a strange tide that wouldn’t come again. Folks liked to say Charon wasn’t a place where terrible things like that happened with any regularity.
Titus thought folks had short memories.
Charon’s recent history was indeed relatively quiet, but the past held horrors and terrors that had moved into the realm of legend. His father would sometimes share a quote from one of Reverend Jackson’s fire-and-brimstone sermons and say that Charon was long overdue for a season of pain. Titus didn’t think Gideon had the gift of prescience, but he did believe in the rise and fall of time. That what had happened before would happen again. The wheel spins and spins and eventually it lands on the same number it landed on twenty, thirty, forty years ago. No matter what they found inside the school, the season of peace had passed. Now the season of pain had returned, on his watch.
They were about fifty feet from the front steps of the school when the doors opened and a man carrying a leather mask with a wolf’s snout in his left hand and cradling a .30-30 like a newborn in the crook of his right arm walked out onto the top step. The man wore a weathered black peacoat buttoned in the middle and dirty blue jeans. His hair was twisted into fuzzy cornrows that needed to be redone. His mouth was frozen in a grimace that seemed to take over his whole face.
For a moment the world was calm again. The sounds of the crowd were snatched out of the air by the breeze. It was just the morning sun, the blue sky, and this man that Titus recognized peering down at them.
“Latrell, put down the gun!” Titus roared. The time for the inside voice had passed. Latrell turned his head toward Titus. The fact that five police officers had five guns pointed at him didn’t seem to disturb him at all. His smooth brown face was eerily calm despite a golf-ball-sized bruise on his right cheek. Pupils the size of pinpricks assessed Titus with a profound impassiveness. Titus figured it was the effect of either Oxy or heroin. Both were plentiful in Charon despite his best efforts. Latrell was here and not here. He looked like a toddler who had escaped the watchful eyes of his parents and who did not yet know he was in fact lost.
Titus knew Latrell’s parents. Calvin and Dorothy Macdonald. He’d gone to school with Calvin. He and Calvin and Patrick Tines and Big Bobby Packer had brought Charon their one and only state football championship. Calvin was a wide receiver to Titus’s quarterback. The night of the championship, Titus had lost his virginity in the back of Calvin’s Ford Mustang with Nancy Tolliver. She liked being choked, but Titus couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not back then. He used to wonder how a seventeen-year-old even realized she liked erotic asphyxiation, until he realized he didn’t really like any of the answers to that question.
Nowadays Calvin worked at the shipyard in Newport News. He was coming up on twenty-five years there. Dorothy was a nurses’ aide at Pruitt Nursing Home. They had another son, a twelve-year-old named Lavon. Latrell was their oldest and their most troubled. In the year since Titus had taken office, he’d arrested Latrell once for possession of drug paraphernalia after he was kicked out of a 7-Eleven for starting an altercation about not being allowed to purchase beer after midnight. That night he’d appeared much as he did now. Disheveled but mostly harmless. Except that night he hadn’t been carrying a long rifle and a leather mask. When Calvin had bailed his son out, all he’d said to Titus was that Latrell was “messed up.”
Titus had sensed his old friend had wanted to say more. Yearned to say more. But instead, he’d collected his son and kept his own counsel. Titus had watched them leave, fully aware Calvin was struggling with Latrell’s demons. Titus was also aware that he was no longer a shoulder for his former teammate to cry on or a listening ear for him to share his problems. The badge on his chest had slammed that door shut.
It seemed whatever demons Latrell were battling had multiplied tenfold.
“Latrell! Drop. The. Gun,” Titus said. He enunciated each word with as much clarity as his tongue could muster. He wanted to break through whatever fog had enshrouded Latrell’s mind. He needed him to hear him. He needed him to see the guns trained on him. He needed him to realize that, whatever he’d done, he could still leave this place upright. This was Calvin’s son. And even if he had been the son of a man Titus didn’t know, he still deserved that opportunity. A man Titus hadn’t drunk moonshine with or run two-a-days with for four years. A man Titus hadn’t grown up with under the shadow of that giant Confederate flag out by the county line.
“He’s one of the archangels,” Latrell said. His timbre was tremulous but loud and clear.
“Latrell, I’m going to need you to put that gun down and get down on the ground,” Titus said.
“He said he was the Black Angel. Angel of Death. Mr. Spearman used to say he just liked to hear himself talk,” Latrell said. Titus watched as tears trickled down Latrell’s face.
“Latrell, you need to put that gun down now,” Titus said. He said it loud and clear, but the threat had ebbed. This didn’t need to end with bullets.
“He made them call out for God. Then he’d tell them he was the Malak al-Mawt, the Destroyer. But that wasn’t true either. He was just a sick motherfucker, just like Mr. Spearman,” Latrell said. He dropped the mask and put the barrel of the rifle under his chin.
Titus stopped. He lowered his gun a fraction of an inch. He didn’t want Latrell to pull the trigger, but he knew how quick someone could go from suicide to murder. The words coming out of the young man’s mouth could be dismissed as the ravings of a broken mind.
Yet …
Titus saw the agony that wound its way through Latrell. It twisted his body. It contorted his limbs. It was as if his arms and legs were being pulled and drawn by the weight of a guilt and shame Latrell couldn’t properly articulate. His hands gripped the rifle with manic desperation, fingers undulating in and out like the tentacles of a deep-sea creature who had no knowledge of the sun.
“Latrell, listen to me. Whatever’s happened, we can talk about it. Whatever you’ve done, this isn’t the way to fix it. Put the gun down. Please. Put the gun down and let’s talk. It doesn’t have to be this way,” Titus said. He took one hand off his gun and held it palm up toward Latrell. Through his splayed fingers he watched as Latrell gingerly removed the barrel from beneath his chin.
“That’s it. Now put it down on the ground and walk toward me,” Titus said. He changed the orders he had given Latrell because he didn’t want him to be within an arm’s reach of that rifle if he changed his mind. Madness was coming off him in waves like heat rising from asphalt in the middle of July.
“Put the gun down, bitch!” Roger screamed.
“Deputy, stand down!” Titus yelled back.
Latrell closed his eyes.
“No…,” Titus murmured.
“You don’t know the things I’ve done. I tried to stop, and they said they’d kill my little brother. The Angel, he never took off his mask. But Mr. Spearman, he liked for them to see his face. He liked that a lot,” Latrell said. The words came out in one long sentence like a chant.
“Latrell, wait,” Titus said.
Latrell opened his eyes. “Check his phone,” he said. Titus lowered his gun one more fraction of an inch.
Latrell held the rifle above his head.