“How can I help you?” he says. His voice has a rasp to it, a wheeze, like a punctured accordion, gasping.
“You knew John Sung,” she says. Despite herself, her voice ticks up at the end, as though she’s asking him a question, or asking for confirmation of her statement.
Wayne winces, regarding her. Doesn’t answer. She continues.
“I’m his daughter, Eleanor. I’m Eleanor Sung.”
“Did I ever know you?” asks Wayne.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think so,” she says. “I only just met my father. And I don’t remember him at all.”
“Can you tell me how he is?”
“He’s dead.”
Wayne hears this, then sits silent for a very long moment.
“Do you remember my father?” she asks finally.
“In a sense,” says Wayne. “They don’t let me forget. That’s how they keep me here. Or at least that’s what they believe.”
He points toward the kitchen with a finger so crooked that it’s no longer suited to the task of pointing. “I have a kettle. I can put some water on. I can offer you hot water.”
“I’d like that,” she says.
He stands. He’s so tall, she sees now. As he unfurls himself, like a flag, for the first time she sees perhaps what her father saw.
This fearsome, gallant man.
The famous killer, William Wayne.
The love of her father’s life.
William Wayne was born Esau Unruh and loosed in this world like a plague. As a boy, he knew nothing but whippings and darkness, these being the preferred punishments of his father—the strap or the closet, or both. One punishment would follow the other without reason or restraint. Exiled in a farmhouse on the coldest plains of Manitoba, Canada, he soon learned there was little point in crying out at his father’s hand. His mother, for her part, always screamed as his father beat her; as a young boy, bruised, Esau fell asleep nightly to the lullaby of his mother’s further wailings. She was a woman haunted, by visions and dread, and his father was convinced that fists, relentlessly applied, were the only remedy for her sickness. She rarely raised a hand to intervene or spare Esau from his own whippings. The fact that Esau was marked as a newborn by a wine stain like Cain only furthered his mother’s conviction that her son was tainted at birth by something corrupt and otherworldly. And she may have been right.
He left home at an early age. He lived for two years on the streets in the closest city, with nearly nothing to his name but a fierce will to protect what little he had. The stain on his face had long since taught him not to anticipate human kindness as a rule. Cain, not Esau, struck him as his biblical precedent. And he quickly learned two lessons: to defend his personal possessions with a vigor that far exceeded their actual worth; and to counter his attacker’s violence with a savagery that far exceeded the original aggression. If they shove, you kick; if they punch, you puncture. Brutality that’s swiftly and almost inexplicably escalated can be a very effective deterrent, he found.
A reputation can serve as a kind of armor.
Then, at age fifteen, he returned home, finally succumbing to a persistent, nagging compulsion to intercede on his mother’s behalf. As it happened, on the night he returned unannounced to his homestead, he walked in on one of his father’s beatings, not that such beatings were rare events. His mother, bruised and cowering; his father looming over her with the posture of a prizefighter in training. Esau stopped it, first with his newly expert fists and then with the family shotgun. After he shot his father, his mother, unhinged, distraught beyond reason, and cursing him as the earthly manifestation of some unbound demon, came after him wielding a long kitchen knife. She had already cut herself many times with the blade in a rabid fervor, and blood trailed over her person like festive ribbons. Esau killed both his parents that night. He believed the trigger-pull, the sharp report, the echoing boom, represented a kind of spiritual release for her. He hoped it did.
Then back to the city. What friends he’d made were of a type well versed in criminal enterprises, and they weren’t really his friends, and he understood this. They used him. They recognized in him an exploitable ferocity. He understood this, too. It didn’t bother him. The fact is, once you’ve killed your own parents, there’s no one in the world you can’t kill. This is a truth passed down from Bible times.
As a young man, he became the type of nomad who trails fatalities. He never killed out of malice or anger, only from a plain recognition that death is as natural a feature on the landscape as the trees, the water, the earth itself. The human instinct to avoid death at all costs seemed to him the basest form of folly, a grand misunderstanding of our fleeting place in the cosmos. And, like many who come to a quiet peace about the inevitability of their own demise, he came ironically to avoid that fate almost as if by divine protection.
He ventured south. Bound for the United States, a country where his skills and attitude attracted no end of eager suitors. As a professional, he developed a reputation for finality, once dispatched. He was efficient but he did not relish cruelty. The problem with many professional killers is that they themselves become problems: greedy, ambitious, sloppy, disloyal. He was none of these.
He lived this way for many years. He never married. He had, on occasion, sexual relations with women but the act seemed unnatural to him. It was one he pursued mostly out of curiosity, until he abandoned the pursuit. With no desire to procreate, it struck him as pointless, even laughable, to go through the clumsy motions.
He was aware of an emptiness inside himself but could not name it. Rather, his life drifted toward the monastic. This was not a choice he made but rather a return to what felt to him like a natural state.
Over time the kind of men who’d once employed him came to fear him and, eventually, to avoid him. Most men who are drawn to a violent life are driven by an appetite for fear, a desire to generate sufficient fear in others that it might temporarily nullify the smallness and fear in themselves. Either way, fear is the currency of their world. For that kind of man, to encounter a person like Unruh, who had no appetite for instilling fear in others and no apparent occasion for fear in himself, can be almost existentially unnerving. Such a person is impossible to comprehend. So these fearful, violent men came to avoid him. Which bothered him not in the least.