Shame

story had to have been supplied by his two longtime employees, Roberto Zúñiga and Tyrone Hayward. His workers, whom he called the Cisco Kid and Sheriff Bart, had thought he was a little crazy to take the birds home. He’d nicknamed his employees after screen cowboys, the one brown and the other black. On tree jobs there was a lot of use of ropes, and both men handled them like cowboys, lassoing branches and passing equipment up and down rope trams. With Sheriff Bart and the Cisco Kid on the job, sometimes work even sounded like a roundup.
    “That’s the story you ought to read,” said Lola. “Not the other.”
    “It’s the other that people will remember.”
    She started putting Band-Aids on his smaller cuts and then worked up to bandages for his chin and stomach. Her hands were cool against his hot skin, gentle. He didn’t flinch at her touch.
    “You’re still awfully hot,” Lola said.
    “I’ll take a few more aspirin.”
    “You’ve already taken four.”
    “Really? I don’t remember.”
    Caleb could feel his mind drifting. He tried to rein it in. “I need you to bring me the recording of
Shame
.”
    “You need your rest even more,” Lola said, but her tone already conceded him his wish.
    She left the room again and returned with the MP3 and speakers, setting everything up on the side table next to him. Caleb was watching her. His eyes were glassy.
    “Thanks,” he said. “For everything.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    He looked around the room. “This is all real, isn’t it?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I was having these dreams. I even dreamed about you. It was like I noticed you for the first time. I could never see that you were pretty before. I couldn’t get beyond what you were. But in this dream I finally saw you. And it didn’t seem wrong that you were pretty. And you weren’t a spectacle. You were just you.”
    Lola knew it was his fever speaking and that without it he would never talk like this, but she still said, “Thank you.”
    He didn’t hear it. Caleb’s mind was already somewhere else. “After the Second World War, young Germans didn’t want to admit their nationality,” he said. “They said they were Swiss or Austrian. They didn’t want to be guilty by association. But it was more than that. I know it was more than that. They were afraid that the beast lurked inside of them as well.”
    “The beast?”
    “I don’t think this generation of Germans worries about that. They say the Holocaust happened a long time ago. Do you think my children will be free of the guilt?”
    “Yes.”
    Caleb shook his head, as if trying to remember something, and then he did. He turned to Lola, suddenly focused. “Where’s the MP3 player?” he asked.
    “Right next to you.”
    Caleb nodded and hit play.
    “Look through the classified ads of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
,” Elizabeth Line’s voice said, “and you’ll likely see more ads to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, than in any other daily in the country. The volume of ads is that much more impressive when you consider that New Orleans the myth islarger than New Orleans the city, with its reputation far exceeding its numbers.
    “The daily supplications to Saint Jude extend to a number of areas. Some ads thank Jude for his generosity, for having listened to and answered their prayers, but most are cries of desperation, people trying to raise their heads above water for a third and last time.
    “Parker was almost that desperate when he fled into Louisiana. No longer was he this nebulous figure, this Bogeyman of the night who signed
SHAME
on all his victims. The law now had a good description of him, and his likeness was being circulated throughout Texas and beyond. The police were getting ever closer to him.
    “Perhaps because of that, Parker’s killings had become ever more hurried and thoughtless. His MO never changed, though; he continued to kill with his hands, his murders ‘personal.’ He didn’t want the distance or dispassion that a gun allowed, or even a knife, the almost ‘third person’ of me, you, and the weapon. When he strangled another human being, there was no third part of the equation, no tool doing the killing. Parker described his actions as the ‘sacrament of murder.’ He spoke of his murders reverentially, relating how there was a sacred moment when the victim’s life force gave out, and how this energy entered back into him, strengthening him. In his own mind, Parker was