The Sin-Eater's Confession, page 1
Text copyright © 2013 by Ilsa J. Bick
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Cover photographs © iStockphoto.com/Nic Taylor (envelope); © iStockphoto.com/Renee Keith (blood); © iStockphoto.com /t_kimura (stamp).
Interior photographs © Julian Ward/Flickr/Getty Images (face); © iStockphoto.com/Nic Taylor (envelope); © iStockphoto.com/Renee Keith (blood).
Interior photographs © Julian Ward/Flickr/Getty Images (face); © iStockphoto.com/Nic Taylor (envelope); © iStockphoto.com/ Renee Keith (blood).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bick, Ilsa J.
The sin-eater’s confession / by Ilsa J. Bick.
p. cm.
Summary: While serving in Afghanistan, Ben writes about incidents from his senior year in a small-town Wisconsin high school, when a neighbor he was trying to help out becomes the victim of an apparent hate crime and Ben falls under suspicion.
ISBN: 978–0–7613–5687–5 (trade hard cover : alk. paper)
[1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Hate crimes—Fiction. 4. Farm life—Wisconsin—Fiction. 5. Homosexuality—Fiction. 6. Photography—Fiction. 7. Wisconsin—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B47234Sin 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012015291
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 – BP – 12/31/12
eISBN: 978-1-4677-0948-4 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-6821-4 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3170-6 (mobi)
Call me Ben. Okay, it’s not Ishmael or anything, but the idea’s the same. Wicked and repentant, that’s me.
But here’s the truth: I could be anyone from my town, or any soldier. People make assumptions on the basis of what they see all the time. In the airport, total strangers wander up and thank me for my service. Old guys want to shake my hand. Little kids want to know if I’ve killed anyone. And girls give me that … look. Come on, you know the one I’m talking about. And honestly? It’s a little creepy. It’s like I’m Batman. What everyone sees and imagines … it’s not about me. It’s the uniform.
Yet here’s what they forget: the face in the mirror is the mask. Way better not to peek or ask because that way, you never have to tell and they don’t have to know. They see what they want. The mask doesn’t slip. Everybody’s happy you haven’t rocked the boat.
So I’m Ben.
Right now it’s dark, but I’m writing this by hand—yeah, a real, live, hi-tech ballpoint—because a computer’s so bright you might as well wear a sign: SHOOT ME. I’ve got night vision, though, and a red penlight, and the moon is this glowing thumbnail sliver. Without NV, the snow shimmers silvery-white and the night’s milky with stars. Cold, too, because we’re in the mountains, and my fingers are stiff. So if this is messy, you understand. I’ve got a thermos of mint tea, but that stuff runs right through you and then you pee neon green in the NV. I know a marine who does piss angels. Which you’d think is sick, but isn’t. I mean, this is Afghanistan—and just about as far away from Wisconsin as I could run.
Anyway.
Reason I’ve started this now is because this lance corporal ate his gun about two hours ago. His buddy started bawling for a medic. (Actually, he screamed, “Doc, Doc,” because that’s what all marines call their medics. See? Not even they really know my name. It’s all about the mask.) Anyway, there wasn’t anything I could do except cover the mess with a blanket. The buddy was pretty freaked out. Not screaming-hysterical. These are marines, after all. But he was shook. Crying, moaning. Had a bad case of the shoulda-coulda-wouldas: how he shoulda seen this coming, and then may be he coulda done something for his buddy, and then the dead dude woulda gotten help. Guilt—like God—is real big over here because life is so frigging random.
Things went downhill when the senior NCO arrived on scene about thirty minutes later. He’s like a cartoon, a bullnecked jarhead, the kind of guy who probably picks his teeth with his KA-BAR. Not five seconds after he got there, but he started in on the oorah-marine-speak: how they were tough and had to stick to the mission and blah, blah, blah. Went on about how the dead guy didn’t deserve a real marine send-off, seeing as how he’s burning in hellfire for deserting his unit because he ended his life in a way that wasn’t God’s will. Whatever that is. Guy’s a real maniac.
Only he kind of has a point. I’m saying sort of, okay? With all the crap you go through here, when someone checks out like this, you’re upset, you’re sorry the guy’s dead, but you’re also kind of like: Dude, fail on so many levels.
Then you kind of freak out, because that same exit? No matter what that senior NCO says about brimstone and everlasting hellfire? Eating a bullet’s occurred to you more than once. Because what’s waiting on the other side can’t be worse than the second that IED’s triggered: that monstrous orange plume towering so high and bright and terrible your eyes melt if you stare too long.
Only, the hell of it is … you can’t help but look. That tower of fire might be all that’s left of the Humvee your buddy was riding. Looking away from his death would be wrong.
Because someone should remember how he died. Someone should get it right.
Someone.
Now, this is a true fact: everything can always get worse. In this case, it’s our captain who’s coming back from Kabul sometime tomorrow or the next day. Scuttlebutt is he’ll ask for—insert air-quotes—volunteers for a mission into a village where we know the Taliban are strong. The volunteers will infiltrate, figure out where the bad guys are and, oh, try not to get shot. And did I mention that one squad already got its butt kicked, lost two guys last week? That’s how bad this village is. Call me a pessimist, but I figure a volunteer’s got about a one in a bazillion chance of getting out alive. Trust me: this is a megabucks lottery you’d be better off skipping.
Except I don’t think that I will.
Which is okay. It’s time I got all this down and as fast as I can, without too many breaks. It’s when you step away from something that you can change your mind or just flat-out not finish.
And then … we’ll see. It might be like a friend once said: sometimes writing things out helps you see your path. Now I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not sold that writing or talking does diddly. But I’d like to believe that it might.
Because—trust me—I need all the help I can get.
I don’t have all the answers to what happened back home, or why people did what they did, or, more to the point, why I didn’t do what I should’ve. All I know is that I can’t stand the secrets anymore. There’s blood on my hands, which is ironic considering I spend my days breathing in the stink of overcooked gore and flash-fried guts. Considering that, some days, I don’t have time to wash the blood from my boots before the next dust-off.
Anyway, I need to tell someone what happened back in Wisconsin. Because I’ve been looking over my shoulder these past few years, and I guess I’m getting tired. It’s the weight of it, all that horror and guilt and doubt I’ve swallowed back, bottled up. Kept deep down in the dark.
Everything happened almost three years ago. I was just a kid, a senior in high school. I’ve kept the secret all this time for a lot of different reasons. Mostly, I was afraid. That may sound stupid coming from someone who spends his days with bullets whipcracking around his head as he tries to keep soldiers from bleeding to death or figures out which ones are going to die no matter what. But I was seventeen and scared out of my mind. There wasn’t anyone I could tell, not my mom or my friends or my little sister, and no way I could tell my dad, because he’d have put me in jail. I was just a kid.
The other thing is, even now, I’m not exactly sure what happened. That is, I think I know what I saw, but I was far away; it was night, and I wear glasses only they got knocked off … and, honestly, everything happened so fast.
The thing is, every story has a beginning that sometimes doesn’t become clear until you’ve made it nearly to the end. Your life’s story doesn’t necessarily start when you’re born, but maybe when you’re five or ten, and your mother dies, or your dad runs off, or a tornado tears your house apart while you’re cowering down cellar.
Or maybe your story starts when you’re seventeen, and the life you thought you were destined to lead gets derailed. Like the train you’ve taken to work for a million years suddenly slams another head-on.
I think: Dude, that’s me.
So, I just broke my own rule. I stepped away. Mentally, and just for a sec. Put down the paper and my pen and took a couple minutes to look at the stars. This may sound stupid to you, but I never looked up much when I was home. I was always head-down, staring at my own feet, thinking about what had to get done before it was time to move on to the next assignment
Anyway, clock’s ticking. So, the beginning.
Well, that’d be where I’m from: a little town named Merit, about three hundred miles northwest of Milwaukee and an hour north of Wausau. Farm and timber country, mostly. The town’s about two thousand people, so the school is pretty small, about five hundred kids altogether, and no more than forty kids to a grade. I was pretty normal. My parents weren’t divorced; they still loved each other; no one had cancer; I wasn’t abused; and my little sister was a pest. I was a good student, top of my class. I worked two jobs: one to look good for college and the other because it was the right thing to do. Which I’ll tell you about in a sec.
So, yeah, normal. Maybe a little boring. Which I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about because when you’re normal, it’s like the refrigerator’s always full and you never have to put gas in the car. Bad things happened only to other people who deserved it.
I was way too busy to think about girlfriends. I mean, I had friends—three guys I’d hung with until we were about fourteen or so. Then I started to bear down on my studies, and they got girlfriends. We still saw each other in school, and they’d invite me to hang out, but I really didn’t have time. I was busy. Anyway, there just wasn’t anyone I was all that into.
The summer before my senior year, my mom was all over me about getting my Common App essays done before school started. My mom is a surgical nurse and was really hot that I should get into someplace like Yale, Cornell, Harvard. She’d lug home books from interlibrary loan: how to write killer essays, what colleges look for, the ten most frequent mistakes people make on their application, what not to say if you get an interview, and blah, blah, blah. Crap like that. She was a real maniac about it.
I tried not to think about not getting into Yale—my first choice from her list—although I had backup schools. How I was going to pay for school … I hoped that would sort itself out. My dad just didn’t make that much as a chief deputy. There were scholarships, and I could take out loans. I just didn’t want to. Starting out life after Merit with a mountain of debt wasn’t appealing.
The real irony? I got a ton of calls from military recruiters, who fell all over themselves wanting to help me put together the money in exchange for a little quid pro quo. Only my mom always ran interference. Soon as she saw US Govt flash on that caller ID, she’d give that recruiter an earful about how no son of hers was going to fight an unjust war, blah, blah, blah.
So, yeah. I guess the last laugh is on her.
Anyway. That summer, I hunkered down at the computer, trying to think of all the exciting, amazing things I’d ever done and coming up with a big fat zero. I hadn’t composed a symphony, written a novel, discovered a comet, or gotten mauled by a grizzly and then stitched myself up before racing through the forest—at night, in a snowstorm, with no shoes—to save the grizzly from getting shot by a squad of sharpshooters. About the most exotic thing about me was being from Wisconsin.
“What about the emergency room?” asked my mom. This was in August, about a week before school started. She pestered me at breakfast because coffee was one of my main food groups and she was into extortion. She held the pot over my mug but didn’t pour. “Don’t tell me that’s not interesting.”
If only. Volunteering in the ER, which I’d been doing for almost two years by then, meant I wheeled people to X-ray, cleaned treatment rooms, and mopped up blood. Sure, I got to see a lot of things: heart attacks, drunks, MVAs, moms who brought in their whiny little kids at midnight because the ER seemed like a fun place to hang out. I was even thinking that maybe being a doctor would be pretty cool. But I hadn’t actually done anything because of liability and all that, though a surgeon let me put in a couple staples once.
Well, and then there was Del. But there was no way I’d write about him.
“There’s really nothing.” I held up my mug, hoping she’d get the hint. “Honest.”
Mom kept the pot out of reach. “That’s ridiculous. What about Del?”
“Absolutely not,” said my dad, who was into his second cup already. He’d just switched from third to first shift, which he wasn’t happy about at all. Normal people like being awake when the rest of the world is, but my dad really loved being chief deputy, and he especially loved third shift, when all the good stuff happened. Well, I don’t know if he loved accidents, which he said were bad because, like as not, he knew the people involved. Sometimes kids my age got killed.
Like Del Lange.
That past May, Del had been on his way back from prom. His whole life ahead of him and then, boom! A head-on collision with some jerk so drunk he rolled right out of his car, not a scratch on him.
I was in the ER when the EMTs came crashing through, doing CPR on something that looked more like bloody hamburger than a person. The nurses and docs swarmed all over Del, and then my dad was there, his khaki uniform soaked purple with blood because he’d been first on the scene and done CPR.
After the Langes—Del’s parents and his younger brother, Jimmy—got to the ER, the doc and my dad kind of herded them into the back. A few seconds later Mrs. Lange started screaming, and they had to give her a couple shots and put her in a room.
Dad drove me home. I was pretty shell-shocked. I didn’t know Del all that well as a person, but he was our star quarterback, good enough that he got a full ride to Minnesota. So, a big deal. Anyway, on the way home, Dad mentioned that the Langes ran that dairy farm, fifty head of cattle and about thirty goats, and those animals would need milking come morning.
Now, I’d never milked a cow. Or a goat. But every time I blinked, I saw the EMT straddling Del’s body as the gurney clattered into the trauma room. I knew what the doctor had said that started Mrs. Lange screaming, and I couldn’t shake the image of Del’s brother, Jimmy: this skinny, sad kid standing by himself, face streaming with tears. So I told my dad, sure, I’d help with the milking.
And that’s what we did, my dad and me and three other farmers who’d heard the news and came at dawn to help out. Sure, it was hard work. I had no idea how to attach the milk cups, and I wasn’t in love with filling the manure spreader, which was just about the most spectacular fun I’d ever had in my entire life. But helping out was the right thing to do. The look on Mr. Lange’s face when he came out to the barn later that day told you that.
You might think things like that don’t happen except in movies, but they did in Merit.
Along with a lot of other things.
Anyway. Helping out at the Langes was how I got to know Jimmy.
Jimmy wasn’t like Del, who’d been big and handsome and athletic and popular. Jimmy was rail-thin, shy, and very clumsy, as apt to get all tangled up by his own feet as anything. He was a sophomore when Del died, but I really didn’t know him. The school let Jimmy finish out the year at home on account of school would’ve been up in two weeks anyway. I’m sure the school thought this was a kind thing to do, but if I’d been Jimmy and stuck on that farm during all that sadness? I’d have had a nervous breakdown. Mrs. Lange wasn’t in any kind of shape to do much. After the funeral—where pretty much the whole town showed—she retreated to her bedroom and hardly ever came down for the first month or so after Del died.
Other people tried to help. The Langes were big into this new evangelical church in Hopkins, which was about twenty-five miles west of town. The first week or so, people from their church came by with casseroles and groceries and things like that. Only the flow of people out to the farm gradually slowed to a trickle, then stopped. After the first two weeks, I and one other farmer were the only people still coming by every morning and evening to help with the milking.
Anyway. One morning, I’m biking up the Langes’ drive and suddenly catch a whiff of something burning. Then I spotted black smoke churning out of a kitchen window. At the sight, my heart jammed into the back of my throat, and I thought, Oh crap. I didn’t have a cell phone, which I know sounds unbelievable, but phones cost money and my parents couldn’t “see the need.” I knew that biking to a neighbor’s would take too long. So I did the only thing I could think of. I pedaled up that hill fast, thinking, Got to get everyone out of the house … My bike skidded, but I was already hopping off, slip-sliding on gravel. And the cows, got to get to the cows, turn ‘em loose in the heifer pasture up the hill, drive out the goats…
