to me that he could be doing you much harm.” I could see Walt out of the corner of my eye sliding his chair back toward the shotgun leaning against the wall. Griffin’s face turned the color of an October tomato, rotten, and he shook his fist at Father and said, “If I catch him anywhere near my house, I’ll kill him.” Then he bolted from the room. Walt began to laugh. “And so he was gone,” he said.
“I don’t want to see it happen again,” said Father to Will. “You’ve got to stop this. You’re too young anyway.”
“Too young?” jeered Will. “You mean old man Griffin’s too old, don’t you?”
“If I’d meant that, I’d’ve said it. You can’t understand anything yet — can’t see behind the act. Of course you’re old enough to grow a stiff prick and go around jabbing it into wherever it will fit; but too young to see behind that, behind where the ugly colors of emotions are. You’re too young because you don’t see that, and later, when you do, won’t want it anyway.”
“What’s wrong with using what was given to you when you were born?”
“Nothing,” yelled Father, “nothing was given to you. You just got what you have — nobody gave it to you. You just got it, and now that you’ve got it you’re in the same boat as everyone else. The kind of life you’re talking about will drive you mad; then you and Griffin can start a club.”
“And you had seven kids.”
“That’s different. Marriage is different. It’s why there is such a thing.”
“Like John’s.”
“John Charles was an idiot. I knew it from when he was little. He was too stupid to see that everything he would do was damned before he did it.”
“We aren’t vegetables.”
“No, and knowing that should teach you. Like a warning.”
These arguments between Father and Will were frequent. Nellie always left the room as soon as she could see them starting, but I always stayed — stayed and listened and tried to understand why Father hated Will as much as he did.
Father never convinced Will, but maybe he wasn’t trying to. By the time he was twenty Will had been three times ordered into court on charges of statutory rape and unlawful and lascivious actions, all of which were dismissed due to lack of substantiating evidence. Will was careful in that he never took advantage of anyone (except once), but would put himself in the position of being taken advantage of and ride along on the wave of emotion that he had festered until he grew tired of its personality and got off, leaving behind him empty accusations aimed at the ineffable part of Will that was empty itself, and there was never anything done to make that emptiness unlawful.
Father never argued with Walt. No one argued with Walt that knew him. In a half sentence of pointed words he was able to synthesize, capsulize, and ignoblize your premise, many times unknown to yourself, in such a way as to leave you nothing to do but walk away. (Only Nellie, she could laugh.) And any argument he couldn’t reduce to an absurd axiom would invoke the single response, “So what?” which was more damaging than all the rest. The steel trap of his mind took in thousands of mutilated, twisted, jumbled words, and like a machine in a junkyard that takes bent cars and smashes them into small steel cubes, fed out motionless propositions laid bare by the removal of all extraneous and colored words.
Walt was understandably the best street fighter in Des Moines and was afraid of nothing. Many times I had seen him standing out in the street in front of a tavern meticulously tearing apart some man with quick jabs and stompings. His object was one-fold, never cluttered with anger, revenge, jealousy, or envy: he was out to win, to reduce his opponent to a lifeless form on the cement, and his hate was of such a general kind that it never obstructed his view of the quickest and easiest method of achieving this end. He was not malicious though he was seldom in fights that he hadn’t provoked. Labor unions hired him during striking periods to stand in front of the factories and shops as a deterrent to scab labor, but his loyalty was never assured and he often fought with the picketers themselves. It was impossible to avoid Walt if he decided he wanted to fight with you because he had a way of looking at you and seeing just that part of you that was sensitive to the touch and then begin jabbing away at it. I do not mean to imply that this is difficult with most people because what is most suspect in them is usually surrounded by walls of protective clues standing out like street signs on the corner, and there are names for those things. But several are able to remain elusive to everyone — but Walt, who could dig up the most obscure, forgotten, seemingly insignificant characteristics, thus lighting a fire under his opponent. There was one way for the good people of Des Moines to protect themselves from Walt:
After dinner, Will and Paul and I were in the kitchen with Nellie when we heard shouts coming up the road in front. “What’s that?” said Nellie, but no one answered because the rest of us knew what it was. Will and I carried two kitchen chairs outside and Paul picked up a towing chain by the side of the house. Walt was backing up the asphalt road, holding a tire iron in one hand and a metal barrel-rung in the other. Around him circled five or six men from the Rooster Tavern trying to find a knife-blade opening between the revolutions of the tire iron and Walt.
“Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt was saying with as much emphasis as a long-distance operator at three o’clock in the morning. One of the men came too close, made a mistake and Walt caught him in the face with the barrel-rung and he fell screaming to the side of the road. “Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt said. Will and I started jabbing at three of them with our chairs. Paul was swinging the tow chain around his head but he should have known that it was too awkward to control and one of the men caught it with an ax handle and Paul backed up against Walt when we heard Father’s twelve gauge go off behind us. The five men turned around to see Nellie standing in the front yard with the gun leveled in front of her screaming that she would blow their heads off if they didn’t leave. They picked up the man Walt had hit with the barrel-rung and walked back down toward town cursing Walt and all of us in general. “Son-of-a-bitches,” said Walt and threw his weapons into the ditch. “Thanks,” he said.
“That’s the third time this year,” said Paul.
“That many?” said Walt.
“What are you trying to prove? Someone else might have been hurt. Yourself, maybe.”
“So what,” said Walt, and Paul walked silently back to the house with us. Father was standing in the kitchen and told Walt that one of these days he would be killed.
“Everything I know, I learned from watching you,” said Walt, and I knew he was right.
Walt was hired by a lobbying group to bomb a construction site at the edge of town in order that the city council’s judgment concerning further road construction would be assured in favor of construction companies. Although this is the only bombing I knew Walt to be responsible for, he was responsible for many more. But he was never discovered and never would be discovered because without passion, abnormality, or perversion his actions left no messy red threads hanging about the ragged sweater of the explosion. Of them all Walt was the greatest threat to me when I was young. I loved him even more than Nellie. I followed him downtown and he’d take me in the bars with him and no one would say anything about me being too young. The blind hate I felt for the good people of Des Moines was glorified when I saw Walt backing up into the front yard swinging a piece of metal he had picked up somewhere and saying, “Son-of-a-bitches,” which I picked up as a battle cry and ran screaming out of the house dragging Paul and Will with me to help.
Walt was offered a full scholarship from the Philosophy Department at the State
