BLOOD ON THE MOON

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a form; he started aping Grandfather’s broadsides against Catholics and Jews.

“Tom was fourteen then, and he didn’t have a friend in the world. He used to make me play with him. He was bigger than me, so I had to go along with it or he’d beat me up. Dad was an electrician. He was obsessed with television. It was new, and he thought it was God’s greatest gift to mankind. He had a workshop in our backyard. It was crammed to the rafters with TV

sets and radios. He spent hours and hours out there, mixing and matching tubes and running electrical relays. He never watched TV for enjoyment; he was obsessed with it as an electrician. Tom loved TV, though. He believed everything he saw on it, and everything he heard on the old radio serials. But he hated being alone while he watched and listened. He didn’t have any friends, so he used to make me sit with him out in the workshop, watching Hopalong Cassidy, and Martin Kane, Private Detective and all the rest. I hated it; I wanted to be outside playing with my dog or reading. Sometimes I tried to escape, and Tom would tie me up and make me watch. He . . . He . . .”

Lloyd faltered, and Kathleen watched his eyes shift in and out of focus, as if uncertain of what time period they were viewing. She put a gentle hand on his knee and said, “Go on, please.”

Lloyd drew in another breath of fond memories.

“Grandfather’s condition got worse. He started coughing up blood. I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I took to running away, ditching school and hiding out for days at a time. I was befriended by an old derelict who lived in a tent on a vacant lot near the Silverlake Power Plant. His name was Dave. He was shell-shocked from the First World War, and the neighborhood merchants sort of looked after him, giving him stale bread and dented cans of beans and soup that they couldn’t sell. Everyone thought Dave was retarded, but he wasn’t; he slipped in and out of lucidity. I liked him; he was quiet, and he let me read in his tent when I ran away.”

Lloyd hesitated, then plunged ahead, his voice taking on a resonance unlike anything Kathleen had ever heard.

“My parents decided to take Grandfather to Lake Arrowhead for Christmas. A last family outing before he died. On the day we were to leave I had a fight with Tom. He wanted me to watch television with him. I resisted, and he beat me up and tied me to a chair in Dad’s workshop. He even taped my mouth shut. When it came time to leave for the lake, Tom left me there. I could hear him in the backyard telling Mother and Dad that I had run 170

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away. They believed him and left, leaving me alone in the shack. There was no way I could move a muscle or make a sound. I was there for a day or so, cramped up in awful pain, when I heard someone trying to break into the shack. I was scared at first, but then the door opened, and it was Dave. But he didn’t rescue me. He turned on every TV set and radio in the shack and put a knife to my throat and made me touch him and eat him. He burned me with tube testers and hooked up live wires and stuck them up my ass. Then he raped me and hit me and burned me again and again, with the TVs and radios going full blast the whole time. After two days of hurting me, he left. He never turned off the noise. It grew and grew and grew and grew . . . Finally my family came home. Mother came running into the shack. She took the tape off my mouth and untied me and held me and asked me what happened. But I couldn’t talk. I had screamed silently for so long that my vocal cords had shredded. Mother made me write down what had happened. After I did, she said, ‘Tell no one of this. I will take care of everything.’

“Mother called a doctor. He came over and cleansed my wounds and sedated me. I woke up in my bed much later. I heard Tom screaming from his bedroom. I snuck over. Mother was lashing him with a brass studded belt. I heard Dad demanding to know what was happening and Mother telling him to shut up. I snuck downstairs. About an hour later, Mother left the house on foot. I followed her from a safe distance. She walked all the way up to the Silverlake Power Plant. She went straight up to Dave’s tent. He was sitting on the ground reading a comic book. Mother took a gun from her purse and shot him six times in the head, then walked away. When I saw what she had done, I ran to her, and she held me and walked me back home. She took me to bed with her that night and gave me her breasts, and she taught me how to speak again when my voice returned and she nurtured me with many stories. After Grandfather died she would take me up to the attic and we would talk, surrounded by antiquity.”

Rigid with pity and terror, tears streaming down her face, Kathleen breathed out: “And?”

“And,” Lloyd said, “my mother gave me the Irish Protestant ethos and made me promise to protect innocence and seek courage. She told me stories and made me strong again. She’s mute now, she had a stroke years ago and can’t speak; so I talk to her. She can’t respond, but I know she understands. And I seek courage and protect innocence. I killed a man in the Watts Riot. He was evil. I hunted him down and killed him. No one ever