Blood on the Moon (4 page)

He sat down on the curb and thought of the two wretched people in the photographs, and of Janice who wouldn't blow him, but who did the final deed on their first date two weeks before high school graduation, leaving Lloyd Hopkins, Marshall High Class of '59, aglow with wonder at the love in his future. Now, six years later, Lloyd Hopkins,
summa cum laude
graduate of Stanford University, graduate of the Fort Polk Infantry School and the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Class and six year lover of Janice Marie Rice, sat on a curb in Watts wondering why he couldn't get what a fat Negro slob probably got all the time. Lloyd shined his light in the back seat window again. It was as he suspected; the guy's dick was at least two inches bigger than his. He decided it was God and commitment. The jerk in the photo had a low I.Q. and a bad build, so God threw him a big wang to slide through life on. It all worked out.

Janice would take him orally when he graduated the academy and they got married. The last thought made him sex-flushed and sad. Janice made him sad. Then he thought of the daughters they would create. Janice, five foot eleven barefoot, slender, but with a robust set to her hips, was made for bearing exceptional children. Daughters. They would have to be daughters, made to be nurtured by the love in his Irish Protestant credo…

Lloyd took his Janice-daughter fantasies to ends of fulfillment both good and bad, then shifted his mind to women in general–women pure, wanton, vulnerable, needy, strong; all the ambivalences of his mother, now silent in her strength, rendered dumb by years of giving shelter to her lunatic male brood, from which only he emerged sane and capable of providing solace himself.

Lloyd heard a burst of gunshots in the near distance. Automatic weapon fire. At first he thought it was the radio or TV, but it was too real, too right, and it was coming from the direction of the African Church. He picked up his M-14 and ran to the corner. As he rounded it he heard screams, and turned to look in the shattered storefront window. When he saw the devastation inside, he screamed himself. Sister Sylvia and three male parishioners lay on the linoleum floor in a mass of tangled flesh, melded together in a river of blood. From somewhere within the twisted mound of bodies a severed artery shot up a red geyser. Lloyd, transfixed, watched it die and felt his scream metamorphose into the single word, “What! What! What!”

He screeched it until he was able to will his eyes from the bodies to the rest of the cordite-reeking church. The tops of dark heads peered above pews. Dimly, Lloyd perceived that the people were terrified of him. Tears streaming down his face, he dropped his rifle to the pavement and screamed, “What? What? What?”, only to be answered by a score of voices hurling, “Killer, killer, murderer!” in horror and outrage.

It was then that he heard it, faintly but plainly, back off to his left, clicking in so succinctly that he knew it was real, not electronic: “
Auf weidersehen,
niggers.
Auf weidersehen,
jungle bunnies. See ya in hell.”

It was Beller.

Lloyd knew what he had to do. He tossed the Negroes huddled behind their pews his sternest resolve and went after him, leaving his rifle behind on the pavement, crouching his long frame low behind parked cars as he made his way toward the destroyer of innocence.

Beller was running slowly north, unaware that he was being followed. Lloyd could see him framed plainly in the glow of those streetlights not destroyed, turning every few moments to look back and savor his triumph. He checked the second hand on his watch and calculated. It was obvious: Belter's unconscious was telling him to turn around and scan his blind side every twenty seconds.

Lloyd sprinted full out, counting to himself, and hit the pavement prone just as Beller would turn and peer backwards. He was within fifty yards of the killer when Beller ducked into an alleyway and started screaming, “Freeze, nigger, freeze!” A burst of shots followed, fully automatic. Lloyd knew it was the elephant clip .45.

He reached the alley and halted, catching his breath. There was a dark shape near the end of the cul-de-sac. Lloyd squinted and discerned that it was clad in fatigue green. He heard Beller's voice a moment later, spitting out garbled epithets.

Lloyd entered the alley, inching his way along a brick wall. He pulled one of his .45s from his waistband and flipped off the safety. He was almost within firing distance when his foot hit a tin can, the sound reverberating like hollow thunder.

He fired just as Beller did, and the flash from their gun barrels lit up the alley blindingly, illuminating Beller, crouched over a dead Negro man, the man headless, blown apart at the shoulders, his neck a massive cavity of bloody, charred tissue. Lloyd screamed as the recoil from his .45 lifted him into the air and slammed him back to the ground. A dozen shots tore into the wall above him, and he rolled frantically on the glass strewn pavement as Beller fired another burst at the ground, causing glass and blacktop shrapnel to explode before his eyes.

Lloyd started to sob. He flung his arm over his eyes and prayed for courage and the chance to be a good husband to Janice. His prayers were interrupted by the sound of footsteps running away from him. His mind clicked in: Beller was out of ammo and was running for his life. Lloyd willed himself to stand upright. His legs wobbled, but his mind was steadfast. He was right: Beller's empty M-14 lay across the torso of the dead man, and the .45, spent and burning to the touch, lay a few feet away.

Lloyd deep breathed, reloaded and listened for sounds of flight. He caught them; off to his left he heard the scuffle of feet and strained breathing. He followed the sounds by the shortest possible route, scaling the cement alleyway wall and coming down into a weed-strewn back yard, where the breath-noise mixed with the sound of a radio playing jazz.

Lloyd blundered through the yard, mumbling prayers to engulf the music. He found a walkway leading to the street, and the light from the adjoining house let him pick out a trail of freshly spilled blood. He saw that the blood led into a huge vacant lot, pitch dark and eerily silent.

Lloyd listened, willing himself to assume the ears of a highly attuned animal. Just as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and let him pick out objects in the lot, he heard it: a snapping of metal on metal, coming from the direction of a portable construction toilet. It was unmistakable: Beller was still armed with one of his evil customized .45s, and he knew Lloyd was near.

Lloyd hurled a rock at the outhouse. The door creaked open and three single shots rang out, followed by the sound of doors slamming all the way down the block.

Lloyd got an idea. He walked down the street, scanning front porches until he found what he was looking for, nestled among an evening's array of potato chip bags and empty beer cans–a portable radio. Steeling himself, he turned on the volume and was bombarded by rhythmic soul music. Despite his headache, he smiled, then turned the volume down. It was poetic justice for Staff Sergeant Richard A. Beller.

Lloyd carried the radio into the vacant lot and placed it on the ground ten yards in back of the construction toilet, then flipped the volume dial and ran in the opposite direction.

Beller burst out the door of the outhouse seconds later, screaming, “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Blindly, he fired off a series of shots. The light from his muzzle bursts illuminated him perfectly. Lloyd raised his .45 and aimed slowly, pointing at Beller's feet to allow for recoil. He squeezed the trigger, the gun kicked and the elephant clip emptied. Beller screamed. Lloyd dug into the dirt, stifling his own screams. The radio blasted rhythm and blues, and Lloyd ran toward the sound, the butt end of his .45 extended. He stumbled in the darkness, then got down on his hands and knees and bludgeoned the music to death.

Lloyd stood up unsteadily, then walked to the remains of Richard Beller. He felt strangely calm as he carried first the entrails of the former civilian soldier to the outhouse, then the lower body, then the disembodied arms. Beller's head was nothing but splattered bone and brain debris, and Lloyd let them lie in the dirt.

Muttering, “God please, please, God, rabbit down the hole,” Lloyd walked out to the street, noting with his animal antennae that there was no one about–the locals were either scared shitless by the gunfire or inured to it. He emptied his canteen into the gutter and found a length of surgical tubing in his bayonet case–good strangling cord, Beller had once told him. There was a '61 Ford Fairlane at the curb. Deftly manipulating the tubing and canteen, Lloyd managed to siphon a solid pint of gas from the tank. He walked back to the outhouse and doused what remained of Beller, than reloaded his .45 and paced off ten yards. He fired, and the outhouse exploded. Lloyd walked back to Avalon Boulevard. When he turned around, the entire lot was engulfed in flames.

Two days later, the Watts Riot was over. Order had been restored to the devastated underbelly of South Central Los Angeles. Forty-two lives were lost–forty rioters, one deputy sheriff and one National Guardsman whose body was never found, but who was presumed dead.

The riot was attributed to many causes. The N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League attributed it to racism and poverty. The Black Muslim Party attributed it to police brutality. Los Angeles Chief of Police William H. Parker attributed it to a “breakdown in moral values.” Lloyd Hopkins considered all these theories fatuous nonsense. He attributed the Watts Riot to the death of the innocent heart, most specifically the heart of an old black wino named Famous Johnson.

When it was over, Lloyd retrieved his car from the parking lot of the Glendale Armory and drove to Janice's apartment. They made love, and Janice provided what comfort she could, but refused the oral comfort Lloyd begged for. He left her bed at three in the morning and went looking for it.

He found a Negro prostitute at the corner of Western and Adams who was willing to do the deed for ten dollars, and they drove to a side street and parked. Lloyd screamed when he came, frightening the hooker, who bolted out of the car before she could collect her money.

Lloyd cruised aimlessly until dawn, then drove to his parents' house in Silverlake. He could hear his father snoring as he unlocked the door, and he saw light coming from under the door to Tom's room. His mother was in her den, sitting in her bentwood rocker. All the lights in the room were off, except for the colored light from the fish tank. Lloyd sat down on the floor and told the mute, prematurely old woman his entire life story, ending with the killing of the killer of innocence and how he could now protect innocent people as never before. Absolved and fortified, he kissed his mother's cheek and wondered how he would kill the eight weeks before he entered the Academy.

Tom was waiting for him outside the house, stationed firmly on the pathway leading to the sidewalk. When he saw Lloyd, he laughed and opened his mouth to speak. Lloyd didn't let him. He pulled a .45 automatic from his waistband and placed it against Tom's forehead. Tom started to tremble, and Lloyd said very softly, “If you ever mention niggers, commies, kikes, or any of that shit to me ever again, I'll kill you.” Tom's florid face went pale, and Lloyd smiled and walked back to the shattered remains of his own innocence.

Part Two

Torch Songs

3

He cruised west on Ventura Boulevard, savoring the newness of daylight-saving time, the clarity of the extra-long afternoons and the unseasonably warm spring weather that had the harlots dressed in tank tops and bare-midriff halters and the real women in a profusion of demure summer pastels: pink, light blue and green, pale yellow.

It had been many months since the last time, and he attributed this hiatus to the shifting weather patterns that had his head in a tizzy: warm one day, cold and rainy the next, you never knew how women were going to dress, so it was hard to get a fix on one to rescue–you couldn't feel the colors, the texture of what a woman was until you viewed her in a context of consistency. God knows that when the planning started the little fluxes of her life became all too evident; if he lost love for her then, the resultant pity reaffirmed the spiritual aspects of his purpose and gave him the detachment necessary to do the job.

But the planning was at
least
half of it, the part that edified, that cleansed
him,
that gave him abstention from minor chaos and precarious impunity from a world that gobbled up the refined and sensitive and spit them out like so much waste fluid.

Deciding to drive through Topanga Canyon on his way back to the city, he killed the air-conditioning and put a meditation tape on the cassette player, one that stressed his favorite theme: the silent mover, self-assured and accepting, armed with a compassionate purpose. He listened as the minister with the countrified voice spoke of the necessity of goals. “What sets the man of movement apart from the man dwelling in the netherworld of stasis is the road, both inward and outward bound, toward worthwhile goals. Traveling this road is both the journey and the destination, the gift both given and received. You can change your life forever if you will follow this simple thirty day program. First, think of what you want most at this moment–it can be anything from spiritual enlightenment to a new car. Write that goal down on a piece of paper, and write today's date next to it. Now, for the next thirty days, I want you to concentrate on achieving that goal, and allow no thoughts of failure to enter your mind. If these thoughts intrude, banish them! Banish all but the good pure thoughts of achieving your goal, and miracles will happen!”

He believed it; he had made it work for him. There were now twenty pieces of carefully folded paper attesting to the fact that it worked.

He had first played the tape fifteen years before, in 1967, and was impressed. But he didn't know what he wanted. Three days later he saw her, and knew. Jane Wilhelm was her name. Grosse Point born and bred, she had fled Bennington in her senior year, hitching west in search of new values and friends. She had drifted, oxford shirt and penny loafer clad, to the dope scene on the Sunset Strip. He had first seen her outside the Whisky Au Go Go, talking to a bunch of hippie low lifers, obviously trying to downplay her intelligence and good breeding. He picked her up and told her of his tape and piece of paper. She was touched, but laughed aloud for several moments. If he wanted to ball, why didn't he just ask? Romanticism was corny, and she was a liberated woman.