And then it was over.
Edmund twisted the pitchfork’s handle into the soft dirt, and when it would stand upright on its own, he stepped back a few feet and studied his work. His heart was beating wildly, and he felt exhilarated overall, but something was missing. Impulsively, he dipped his fingers in the cat’s blood and brought them to his mouth. The blood was warm and tasted coppery, and for some reason Edmund thought of the wind from his grandfather’s grinder in the workroom.
But something was still missing. And the more Edmund thought about it, the further away the answer seemed to be.
Later, after he buried the cat in the woods, Edmund lay in his bed wide awake, thinking and listening to the other cats outside as they mourned their fallen comrade. He felt no guilt, only confusion. And then the searching again—still there, creeping back in, the answer tomorrow maybe.
No, killing the cat and tasting its blood—at least that cat and that blood—wasn’t it. And Edmund Lambert felt as empty as he did before.
Chapter 48
Edmund’s first time with a man was with a lawyer named Alfred, an older gentleman he met in an AOL chat room called RaleighMen4Men. It was in the spring of 1998, during his senior year of high school, while he was still going hot and heavy with Karen Blume. Edmund liked Karen; well, he liked banging her, but didn’t really enjoy spending time with her, and often found himself thinking strange thoughts when they were together.
He wondered what it would be like if he did things to her: things like he had done to the cat; things like he had done to some of the other animals he’d captured over the last couple of years—squirrels, mice, a possum or two, and that stray dog. And of course, there were more cats. So many cats.
Edmund had also fixed up his uncle’s old van, and his favorite fantasy involved drugging Karen and driving her out into the woods, where he would park the van and set up a little workshop with the tools he had brought along to play with her. But at the same time Edmund suspected that doing those kinds of things to Karen Blume wouldn’t be worth the risk and wouldn’t satisfy him in the long run.
No, something was missing. Something was always missing.
Edmund didn’t know why he started going in the Men4Men chat room; didn’t know why searched the male-modeling sites until he found a picture that sort of looked like him. Edmund called himself “Ken” and asked a lot of questions of the men online; even sent his picture to a few of them. But just like the phony photo and the phony name, Edmund felt as if his actions were not his own, and watched himself with the same detached curiosity as if he were watching a character on a TV show.
And of course there was the searching. Always the searching.
Edmund and Alfred had gone back and forth on AOL for about a month before Edmund agreed to meet him one afternoon in the philosophy and religion section at Barnes & Noble. The plan was simple enough: if each liked what he saw, Edmund would follow the lawyer to a hotel room a few miles away. Alfred was married, he said—had one child already and another on the way—and the only time he could get away was during the weekdays. It also worked out well for Edmund, who had been suspended from school again for fighting. He was one step away from being expelled, his counselor said, and would have to go to summer school to finish up his coursework. Indeed, it was Edmund’s counselor who had made the case for Edmund to be allowed to graduate; reminded the principal that Edmund had a 3.8 GPA and had tested the previous year at the genius level. If the boy could just get his temper under control, his counselor said; if he could just focus, it would pay off for him in the long run.
School had always been easy for Edmund Lambert. Girls, sports, the respect and envy from the other boys—it all came just so goddamn easy to him. But the searching? Yes, only the searching was hard.
Like Edmund, Alfred the lawyer said he wasn’t gay—just liked to “experiment now and then,” as he called it. And after the awkwardness of their initial meeting at the Barnes & Noble, Alfred and “Ken” experimented with each other a number of times over the next few weeks. Alfred began calling himself Ken’s “mentor” and taught him the differences between having sex with a woman and having sex with a man.
But afterward, especially when Ken was Edmund again and he was banging Karen Blume in her basement, when he thought about the sex with Alfred, Edmund had a hard time sorting out the differences between the two in his head. No, the only difference Edmund could see was that, when he was with Alfred—and when he was Ken in general—his fantasies of doing what he did to the animals were much more vivid, much more exciting. And one time after they had sex, when Alfred asked Ken what he was thinking, the young man came right out and said: “I’m wondering what you would look like stuck with a giant pitchfork.”
Alfred broke it off with Edmund soon afterwards; made some excuse about the wife catching on and said they had to cool it for a while. Edmund understood. He knew that he had spooked him; knew that he would never see Alfred the lawyer again. But it was all for the best, Edmund thought. He had grown tired of Alfred anyway, and thus exited his first homosexual affair with the same sort of mechanical detachment with which he’d entered into it.
The urge to kill, however, had been strong—the strongest yet with a human being. Edmund didn’t know why, and wondered whether Alfred sensed it, too. Yet something had held him back. What? He couldn’t put his finger on it right away, and only after he thought about it long and hard did he find the answer. An answer that surprised him.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he heard his grandfather say. “C’est mieux d’oublier.”
Chapter 49
“The Army or prison,” Claude Lambert said. “Those are pretty much your options now, Eddie.”
Edmund looked at his cheekbone in the pickup truck’s side mirror. The swelling had gone down some, but his face would still bruise up nicely. The punch had been hard—he got blindsided by the other guy’s friend—but in the end, Edmund had gotten the best of the both of them. He always did now.
“The way things is going,” said his grandfather, turning off the highway, “I give you a year before you end up killing someone like your Uncle James done.”
The old man was pushing eighty years old, but still it bothered Edmund how slowly he was driving.
“You don’t like me fighting anymore then?” Edmund asked.
“I suppose it’s partly my fault,” Claude Lambert said, ignoring him. “Taught you how to fight but not how to control it—didn’t think about that part of the equation. I reckon the Army will take care of that. It’s where James had been planning on going, too, but … well, you know what happened there.”