VI
Tod didn’t expect a police convention - okay, just two cops and a former cop, but around here that was a large gathering for something as small as attempted homicide on an inanimate object - when he returned to blow the stump of the tree Will Kurtz tried to drop on the bridge. He cleared the tree earlier, so they might not have noticed the stump had it not been for the state chick - she noticed everything. She was right on it and doing some weird CSI thing where she paced the line from the stump to the bridge. She and Deputy Steve were having a bit of an argument while former Sheriff Ben, Gil and a couple of tourists - he knew they were tourists because they were dressed for Miami in winter which was fairly close to Miami in summer which was entirely wrong for Vermont in any season - watched in bemused interest. The female tourist asked Gil to pose with her husband by the bridge and Gil managed to get his father in the shot as well. Tod didn’t need photos for memories and didn’t understand people who did. It was all up in his head even when he didn’t want it there.
Sadly, he lost his moment in time to remove the evidence of Kurtz’s “crime.” If he went and removed the stump anyway, they would wonder who had come along and removed it and then he might be in something like a pickle if they found out that he had been tampering with crime scenes even if there wasn’t a real crime. That still wouldn’t stop Deputy Steve from arresting him for something. Deputy Steve had become something of a jackass of late and was terrorizing the town with his strict interpretation of the law. Tod was well schooled in avoiding the law, he made it a point not to cross Deputy Steve’s path. They all knew it was Kurtz and that he was pretty harmless for the most part and that even if they went out and talked to him about trying to knock a hole in the old bridge, which had never been damaged before, he wouldn’t say anything reasonably sane in return. But he wasn’t really a danger to anything but the bridge and wasn’t really a danger to that. At least, he had never really been before. Tod did notice something strange, however. Something he had never seen before. The tree had chipped the bridge a little. Just a little. He wondered if Kurtz saw it. He was sure he had. Tod looked down at the stump remover and thought for a moment that when all the attention was elsewhere, perhaps now might be the time to try to destroy the bridge again.
No. It wasn’t his job. It could never be his job.
He would stick with stumps… making the world a better place instead of a blighter place. As the stump wasn’t going anywhere, he stowed his gear in a shrub out of anyone’s way. He thought he would go and kill some time with old Samuel Taylor. Samuel lived out in a shack up in the woods and sometimes Tod would go up and just make sure he was alive. Tod already discovered one or two dead hermits. He didn’t like doing it, but he didn’t think anyone else was going to. So he headed on out to Samuel’s.
The problem with Samuel is that he talked. A lot. Samuel was one of those hermits who was starved for human company but who seemed to think he was so interesting that people should seek him out for wisdom, like some Green Mountain Guru who held office for any truth seekers. And boy, did Samuel have some truth to tell. Samuel knew everything there was to know about Stansbury for some ten generations back or so. Back to the beginning of the place, he told Tod. He said his family had been responsible for keeping the soul of the town from dying.
“And how does one go about doing that?” Tod inquired.
Tod was interested. Once upon a time, Tod had very little interest in Stansbury outside of wanting to see it removed from existence. Even though it pained him to think about it, it was ironic. After all this time, at least he could appreciate that he had become a caretaker of sorts for the town, even if they didn’t know it was him. If they knew what he was up to, they would probably be frightened. They probably should be. They only really knew that once upon a time he was deadly.
Tod realized he had a gift for death and destruction at an early age. His father used to take him hunting and Tod could bring down a full-grown bull moose with a single shot from a few hundred yards. When he was young, he learned how to kill and use everything he took and he soon provided his family with a steady supply of meat and leather. He never did keep trophies, though. He always found them to be disgusting. He killed the thing. He didn’t need it staring down at him from the wall, asking him why he killed it. He knew that’s what the things were asking from their wall mounts. Tod didn’t like to answer those questions because he knew that, deep down, he just liked killing things to destroy them.
He always planned on destroying the entire town before he was done. He hated Stansbury from when he was forced to go to the stupid school where they didn’t learn anything important. Tod knew how to read. He didn’t need anyone to tell him what to read or what the books and stories and poems meant. Yeah, Robert Frost wrote a poem about walls and neighbors and horses in woods and paths and the teachers would sound all self important as they would ask questions that they had the answers to and if your answers were different from their answers they would tell you how wrong and dumb you were for thinking differently…for having a different kind of thought. Tod read those Robert Frost poems and he knew what they meant to him and he knew he was right to think those things no matter what the teachers told him. So one day he went and burned down the school because the path he was choosing was one of destruction of those things that he found offensive. He knew sometimes neighbors would never stay out of your business no matter how good the walls, so he burned the school down because he was right.
Of course, others didn’t think his solutions were the right solutions and he was taken and placed in a facility until he turned eighteen. He learned lots of things in the facility. For one, he learned that he was still smarter than the rest of them and that he was right in thinking that it all needed to be destroyed. He believed the world would end in a fire he started. Of course, he stopped sharing what he believed because he had learned that if he was to make a real difference in the world, if he was going to put his stamp on the place in a meaningful manner and not just be another lame traveler stopping to confuse his horse because the snow looked pretty at night, he was going to have to play along. He learned there were places for him to go to learn how to be better at those things he had already shown some skill at and he convinced those in charge of the facility that they could help him be a better citizen if they assisted him in moving on to the military. They weren’t stupid, those people. They were much smarter than his teachers back in Stansbury and understood that some people were made for destruction and that those people belonged in a controlled environment like the military. They did everything they could for him to achieve that goal. He took all the right tests and the military was thrilled to have such a savage young killer as Tod had shown himself to be.
After basic, he was sent to one of those secret schools that fiction only hints about for so-called super soldiers. They didn’t give him any drugs or do anything more than show him more effective ways to kill and destroy things. They also showed him that where two paths diverge in a forest, scout around a little and you’ll find the road that you should always take which is not one indicated by any kind of traffic. It’s the one you make for yourself. It’s the one that comes from building while you destroy. You build that little space for yourself. While Tod was in the military, he never thought about Stansbury at all. Ever. He was building new roads through places that people in Stansbury never even heard of. He was killing people who he was supposed to kill and sometimes he’d kill people for sport, if they intersected his path.
But as much as the people at the facility and the people at the secret base all thought that Tod was somehow less than human - or more than human, depending on your perspective and need - he was very human, after all. He didn’t want to be, but he was. He started having dreams. In his dreams, all those good walls he was building couldn’t keep him safe from all that he had done and all those people he destroyed were not being very good neighbors and respecting those walls. He hated those dreams because he was powerless in them.
In his dreams, everything he built himself into during his waking life was destroyed by the animals he killed and the people he killed. The only way for him to continue to do what it was he so desperately desired to do, to destroy the world and lay waste to the very foundations of the universe, depended on the kind of perfection of mind that those dreams undid every night. So he had to escape from sleep.
He began to take drugs. Uppers. Anything to keep from sleep. It wasn’t too bad at first. He could go days, sometimes weeks, without sleep and so long as he spent some hours everyday in deep meditation and exercise, it did not affect his ability to carry out his assignments. But after awhile, the dreams began to break through when the drugs stopped working so well. He would see his victims staring back at him from the shadows of the corners like ninjas waiting to slit his throat if he turned his back on them. The more drugs he took, the longer he could keep them at bay, but the less effective he was. He started to make mistakes and his handlers started to notice.
They realized right off that he was not meant to be the kind of soldier they tried to make him into. In the movies, they would have sent a group of other super soldiers out to erase him. In the movies, he would have been more super than the rest and he would have killed them before hunting down his handlers and killing all them and, at some point during all of this when he needed some help, some beautiful girl would get caught up in his adventure and help him escape to some far off paradise where he would retire to run some sport fishing business before they needed him again for the sequel. That’s what would have happened to him in the movies. Instead, he was sent a retirement notice and a severance check, which he promptly blew on drugs.
When he got that check and that notice, he thought about Stansbury for the first time in many years and thought that before he put a gun to his head to kill all the bad dreams, he would blow up that stupid bridge. He took his toys home with him and built himself a little place up in the woods. For a long time, he planned his assault on the bridge. He had taken a huge amount of the huge amount of the drugs that he spent his severance on. Speed was cheap and they gave him a lot of money. He bought so much of the stuff that he had what the dealer called a small mountain of meth. Every time he would use, he would call it “mountain climbing.” The problem was, he was quickly eroding the mountain and he knew that when it was gone, he would eat a bullet. He had to destroy the bridge first.
Then there was that Kurtz kid. Will Kurtz seemed to have a love affair with that stupid bridge. He was out there almost everyday sitting on it and drawing his pictures of it and making his models of it. He seemed to be making a kind of artist’s study of the thing that Tod had made of killing. Tod couldn’t remember a time when Will Kurtz wasn’t haunting the bridge. The kid must have started hanging around it when he was nine or ten and then it was like he lived there. He was there before Tod went off to the facility and was there when Tod came back, only just a little bit older and a little bit stranger. His bridge art had grown in skill and beauty, not that Tod thought much about it at the time. All Tod thought was that Will Kurtz was in the way of his need to destroy the bridge. Tod thought about killing the kid. He thought a lot about killing the kid. He thought that there would be a kind of poetry in killing him along with the bridge. After a month or so with no sleep, Tod started to suspect that Will Kurtz was hiding out in his cabin and stealing his drugs when he wasn’t looking so that the kid could spend more waking hours with his precious bridge. It made Tod want to destroy the thing all the more knowing that Will Kurtz loved it so much.
That’s why Tod decided not to kill the kid.
He thought it would be better to destroy him utterly. For a while, Tod thought just blowing the damn thing up would ruin the kid’s life in a really meaningful way. He had quite a bit of training in psychological warfare and knew that to take away something someone loved could destroy that person. But Tod needed more. Tod needed the satisfaction of making the kid bleed. He needed to feel bones crunching under flesh. Will Kurtz needed to be a bloody ragdoll on the shore…awake. Tod had the drugs for that… for feeling all that physical pain. And then, while the boy wondered why he had been chosen, Tod would add the anguish of knowing that thing he loved more than anything in all the world, that bridge that served no good purpose except to draw tourists to the town like insects to spilled syrup… Will Kurtz would see it all blown all to hell and he wouldn’t understand why he had been chosen to witness the death of the thing he loved because he would then witness the death of the man who destroyed him. He would watch Tod put a pistol in his mouth and send a bullet through the top of his skull, erasing any rationale for this mad act.
Tod was good at what he had been trained to do and even though his brain was impaired, he took special care to set all his charges right. Everything in its right place. On that night in November, the woods were snowy. If Tod had thought too much about it, he would not have wanted to destroy the beauty of the night. But he just wanted to destroy, so he didn’t think too much about it. He didn’t stop to consider anything. He chose this path and it led him to the bridge and to the end of Will Kurtz.
The kid was there. He didn’t even notice all of the explosives that were planted at every critical juncture on the structure. He just seemed to be in the weird daze that he always was when he sat on the bridge. He didn’t even notice when Tod dropped down from the roof of the structure onto his back. It would have been so easy to snap the kid’s neck like they taught him to do… it took a lot of effort not to snap the kid’s neck like they taught him to do. But that wasn’t how he planned the evening. He knew that he had to limit injuries to the head to make sure the kid stayed conscious, so he concentrated on breaking the body. The legs first so the kid couldn’t escape. The knees are especially vulnerable and easy to disable. Tod disabled the kid like they taught him to do… it didn’t take a lot of effort. They snapped so easily. The little breaks echoed in the covered bridge and Tod waited for the scream to follow. The scream always followed, but this time it did not. Will Kurtz didn’t scream. He just kind of whimpered. Tod looked into his eyes and saw the fear. But the lack of screaming made him see red. He would make this kid scream. Tod broke his arms at the elbows. He could feel the sinews snap as they detached. Jagged broken bones ripped through the kid’s skin and blood splashed black and thick in Tod’s face. Tod looked into his eyes and saw fear and saw hopelessness. But no screaming. Will Kurtz never screamed, though. He never asked why. He just kind of whimpered. Tod continued destroying the kid’s body, bit by bit, the way they taught him to do… a bone here and there was just enough to do it and still keep him awake. Normally Tod knew they were awake because they screamed themselves hoarse and then silent. The kid didn’t scream. Tod looked into his eyes and was pretty sure the kid was awake even though much of what had been there now dimmed to a dull reflection of the soft whimper that continued to escape from the kid’s mouth. He didn’t understand why after all he had inflicted, there was so little. It wasn’t the first time that night he wouldn’t understand.
Tod pulled out his pistol, a revolver. Automatics fail and for this, he needed something that couldn’t fail. He showed it to Will Kurtz’s dull stare.
“Not for you.”
Tod pulled the kid up to a tree a short distance from the bridge… come to think of it, it was the same tree Kurtz just dropped. Funny thing, that. He sat the kid up against the tree and made sure the eyes were still open, however dull the stare. He would see and he wouldn’t know why and he wouldn’t understand anything and he would be broken… not like Tod was broken, but worse because Tod would be dead and no one would ever be able to explain to him what had happened or why his life’s love had been blown all to little red wooden bits all over him before his tormentor’s head was blown all to little red bloody bits all over him. Tod really didn’t understand it anymore. He just knew he had to do it. He couldn’t even explain it if he wanted to… he didn’t want to have to explain it. He just pressed the button on his transmitter and watched
it all blow up.
It all exploded all right. Just like they taught him to make it all explode. He pressed the button and it all exploded. Except it didn’t. It being the bridge. The explosives went off exactly like were supposed to go off exactly where they were supposed to go off exactly when they were supposed to go off. All the fire and all the smoke exactly like it always had been except it wasn’t right because the bridge was still there and it didn’t blow up and it didn’t burn. Where there should have been fire and debris and destruction, just like he planned, there was nothing at all but the echo of what he did and then the bridge was there like nothing had been done at all. Like Tod hadn’t been there at all.
But something had been done. Tod looked down at the kid and knew he destroyed something after all because where there was nothing but a blank stare had now been replaced by something else. Will Kurtz had seen something in all of what Tod did and it had broken him ever so much more than Tod had anticipated. The kid had seen something in the explosion and the fire and the nothing that happened. He had seen the why of it. What Tod did to him, planned on doing to him, was a generic kind of evil. Will Kurtz had seen real evil and Tod could see it in his eyes and hear it in the kid’s screams. Seeing the kid and hearing the kid… it destroyed something inside Tod. Tod started crying. He pulled out his pistol and put it in his mouth and looked at Will Kurtz who was not looking at him. Will Kurtz was seeing something Tod could not see and screaming with the kind of fear that Tod could never know. But Tod knew that something he did ricocheted off of the kid and hit him and now he was there and broken and didn’t know what happened or why. He only knew he unleashed a deep pain within the two of them. He tried to pull the trigger and end it all for himself. He thought about ending it all for Will Kurtz and then ending it all for himself, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. Something was broken inside of him - although some would say something had been fixed - and he knew he couldn’t do it anymore. All he ever knew or thought about knowing was the destruction of things and now he couldn’t think about destroying anything without hearing the screaming and seeing the fear. Then he was screaming and looking into the abyss of his own soul which was dark and bloody and had accumulated evil beyond repair. He couldn’t be that Tod anymore. He couldn’t pull the trigger on the gun and he started crying while Will Kurtz screamed and he swore he would do no more and maybe he could make something better.
“How does one go about saving the soul of the town from dying?”
Tod really wanted to know because maybe if he could save the town he could somehow rescue Will Kurtz from whatever it was that still haunted him.
Samuel smiled at him. There was a lot of pain in that smile. A lot of regret. “You have to sacrifice little bits.” There wasn’t the slightest bit of deceit in Samuel. But there was something else. Something darker. Tod recognized it in people in that he had come to really understand it about himself. He did things in his life that would forever taint him. No good work could ever undo it. Samuel was the same. Tod knew Samuel could never speak about it just as Tod could never speak about it.
“When you grow tired of the job, let me know.”
Samuel, knowing that Tod and he were alike in a way they would rather not be, nodded. “Someday, son.”
As Tod walked off towards Samuel’s place, he looked back at the bridge and still couldn’t explain why it was still there when it didn’t have any right to be. He saw all those cops and Gil and the tourists and wondered that maybe if they would all stop coming out to see it and paying homage to it and protecting it. Then maybe it would simply fade away from their minds and then it would be able to rot and die like it should have all those years ago.
Then he saw Kurtz. Even from far away, he knew Kurtz saw him. He though about going to him… to tell him about the damage… to tell him how to do it. But Kurtz saw him and there was still fear and pain in him. Tod felt his eyes tear up and quickly turned away.