They called him “Heap” or “Lumpy” but his given name was Filmore Lakeworry. They had been calling him Heap or Lumpy since the second grade, and there were just too many of them to beat into a quiet respect for an abandoned Mic-Mac Indian boy named Filmore dressed in the hand-me-downs and shabby overalls of foster care. What was worse was that these names were actually apt and not without solid descriptive basis. Filmore was in fact low and squat, always the shortest boy in his class. Being that he was almost as wide as he was tall with the apish posture of a near dwarf, it was just about impossible to combat all commentary.
But it wasn't for lack of trying.
After having been sent home one time too many to face more cracks of the strap on his naked ass, Filmore knew in his child's mind that a different solution was in order.
He did the only sensible thing: he embraced it, beating down only those comers who wanted to take the derision any further than that apparent acquiescence. So the quiet deal was struck, the acceptable level of ridicule adopted and confirmed. He chose his battles by the code of the crowd and no one blew the whistle.
Being that he never lost a fight, a certain level of fear was passed off as respectful distance, and it suited him from that young age on, or so he thought.
Filmore was far from stupid, but by rights he should have been closer to stupidity, if not a permanent resident of it.
His face betrayed the morphology of fetal alcohol syndrome with his wide thick head, flattened exaggerated nose and squeezed almond eyes, and if his cortex had been smoothed out somewhat by this defect, it was minimal enough to leave him cunning and shrewd and able to complete many higher functions which he often deliberately chose not to do. He liked to think there was so much ability to begin with that the grotesque defect barely made a dent in it. It set him apart for special treatment while at the same time giving him cover to do necessary things. One of his best tricks was to act confused, then come up behind a detractor, an opponent, a disciplining teacher and pointedly dispense with him, either with a quick, forceful beating or a handy disappearance.
In the hands of the Commonwealth, he had learned the quiet ease of the long homemade shiv, the exacting leverage of the garotte.
Filmore was clever in making unwanted individuals disappear handily.
His third and last foster family had three older and considerably larger Jewish sons—the parents liberal accountants from Shrewsbury who took him in out of social guilt, status for tonier Newton and Wellesley friends and charitable committees, in addition to making homeownership and REIT investment numbers work during the heyday of the 80s trickle down recession. The compassionate spirit was not among the Steingross boys, who made Lumpy their punching bag and the butt of every humiliation that could be inflicted on a new adolescent, exposing his precociously adult genitals in front of the girls volleyball team and beating him bloody in the JFK Junior Highschool Lunch commons, dumping him with food. They behaved like New England white-bread preppie jocks, picking on the smaller, weaker, confused and hesitant creatures who were Jewish enough in their aspect to distract from the grudgingly known taint of their own Jewishness. Feebs like lumpy were perfect foils for the deflection game.
Lumpy played stupid. Lumpy played along.
Lumpy took it in stride.
Eddy Steingross died drunk in his wrecked Trans-Am.
Lenny Steingross ran away from home and was never seen again.
Sammy Steingross stopped talking and had to be hospitalized for “nervous exhaustion.”
The truth was, Lumpy was feeling his oats, testing his abilities by playing “retard” and suckering the Steingross boys one at a time with the sort of ruthless desperation that allowed for no mistakes. He would have been a suspect, but for his disability, the mild mental illness that kept him in the special classes where he could dream away the time without any effort. And Lumpy learned long ago the world was in denial about murder, from the first boy he had drowned as an experiment in a toilet at the New England Home for Little Wanderers.
Tragic accident. Poor confused, weepy little FAS Mic-Mac boy having to watch it all. Sad.
The wounds of class.
The rape of Sammy Steingross couldn’t be brought up or talked about and was something Lumpy picked up in the hands of Youth Services from the older boys. It was simple: if you marked a boy like that, then you owned him and he caused you no further trouble. You established an intimate connection, or he killed you. And Sammy wasn’t even a killer with his two bigger brothers to back him, never mind alone.
Lumpy had been marked and owned lots of times, in Juvie lockup, on the grounds of Leverett Saltonstall Youth Correctional in Dracut, but the ownership never stuck.
Since that very first accident at Assault ‘n’ Stall—the death of a clumsy, bucktoothed Canuck kid with his cervical spine shattered—Lumpy knew that he possessed the facility to kill. Everyone back then knew the fish-eyed, mildly retarded boy was far too slow and docile to have done it. He could hardly tie his shoes. And the few inmates who knew said nothing and bartered silence for use of Filmore as muscle.
He didn't mind—it kept him busy and it gave him a place in the world.
He had even bawled convincingly like an infant when they picked up that first suspicious corpse on the grounds of Assault ‘n’ Stall, just as he did at the latter-day disappearances of his foster brothers.
It was hard work getting Eddy to drink all his dad's Chivas, then daring him to take the Trans-am up to Breakheart with the brake lines cut. Harder still drowning Lenny in the quarry and then keeping him sunk nice and deep with dumbbells from his own home weights set. But having achieved his adult height of four feet eleven inches at an early age, he was nevertheless precociously strong, a horribly tortuous knot of hard muscle, compressed and compacted into his small frame by either a mirthful or angry god, depending on what looking at him did to your gut at that moment.
When Lumpy was of legal age, he dropped out of high school, burned down the Steingross house without so much as a thank you and headed off to join the rest of the young men of his disaffected and grudgingly atomized tribe. This meant working construction, and not just at the most menial hod carrying level. No, Lumpy joined the elite of the highest paid workers dancing effortlessly along the narrow girders and slender scaffolding of the buildings in Boston. Whether genetics, training, or some hybrid amalgam of nature and nurture, the Mic-Mac Indian men had zero fear of heights and an ability to move fast at the most perilous level as if each of them had for years been a practiced balance beam gymnast. The biggest state construction contractors recruited them, sending spotters up the Conne River in Newfoundland, known to some as the Miapukek First Nation of Mi'kmaq, and down through Aroostook Maine, hotbeds of the Human Being or L'nu, the new politically correct nomenclature for the Mic-Mac who nevertheless still worked construction, got soused and brawled in the pubs with the rest of the hard, defeated men of the city.
Lumpy was an edgewalker.
He could hang his balance on the edge of a steel beam 500 feet up and never tremble a twitch.
The stereotype applied, and at the age of 17, he was welding and riveting hundreds of feet up with the other Mic-Macs and the occasional Boston Irish supervisor who would sweat and count the minutes until a few of the solemnly mirthful human beings lowered him down to the temporary elevator on a plywood landing. He was a natural hireling for the mob crews that came and went over the years of power-struggle and consolidation to take their cut of the construction boondoggle, from unions, low-bid kickbacks and inspectional assurances. One day, a muscle guy decided to bully Lumpy. He was quickly found beaten to the knees at the feet of his confreres. They dumped the guy and signed Lumpy on. One day, mob work outweighed skyscraper girder dancing when the Ork took him on as added muscle—with bonuses for the occasional disappearance.
Lumpy now did a different kind of edgewalking.
He was there at Gary Lee Obidowski's Garage, watching Andromeda mix it up a little with the Padrone, and he helped work on the under-assistant accountant at crucial points, though without enjoyment. It was always humorless work grinding weaker flesh down to agony and then death, with some slight degree of satisfaction if that flesh was in the person of an enemy, but little else. Especially when it was all for show, especially when the outcome was already assured.
The money was good, that and the inclusion within a group that didn't hector him so much as it ignored him even while he executed informal-seeming commands with mechanistic precision. It was something. Being left alone entirely—never having to give an accounting beyond the requisite violent act—and then being recompensed impressive chunks of clean, bankable paper were greater satisfactions still. There was also a fleeting perverse pride in his work—in doing it well and not with sloppy abandon.
But alone was alone, and at best, but for the occasional prostitute or retribution rape of the loved one of whomsoever had flauted Malek’s wounded dignity, a cold comfort of hard-won sanctity.
But for the gum.
He was given a few sticks of it by the geeky dweeb and it changed him.
Lumpy was flooded with feeling, yearnings and a sense of connection to all living things after he was handed the first few trial sticks. He wanted to love, to not only take, but be taken by a woman with passion; to exchange deep and detailed compassionate understanding with others like himself, and even those not like himself he could somehow strike a chord with. Chewing the gum, he felt a profound sense of being a link that helped keep the entirety of the great reality of life together. He was integral to it, a crucial part of what made the world and the universe work and run as it did.
The gum gave him a sense of destiny, an assured knowledge that humanity was actually the greatest value, and not just the cheap, monkey-like thing used, run over and dispatched to achieve your ends while groveling for survival before yet more lordly and fortunate primates. The preciousness of life flooded him like rising tide in a cramped, crabbed estuary; he wanted to celebrate it, preserve it, protect it, touch it and feel it touch him back.
Then the gum subsided and he ran mad into the street with nerves on fire to crack heads, beat faces, break every imbecile he saw in two until the sorrow would take him that might bring back the joy. It came like a wave and he needed to ride it, let the world understand and experience his justifiable rage, his passionate wrath, smashing them all to clue them in to the clear and basic fundamental point of life—
That and another stick of gum.
It was what he was after tonight, walking effortlessly along the gutters of the dilapidated three-story Edwardian in Arlington in the dead of night. It was what he wanted deep within his 59-inch chest when he crashed through the shuttered window of the gambrel roof into the attic to make his presence known. He let his footfalls sound loud on the old floorboards of the chill and musty attic and nimbly negotiated the trap door folding ladder down to the third story hallway without a thought of suppressing any noise. It was surprisingly bright when he came down and let the spring-loaded trapdoor creak back up. The lights were burning everywhere revealing how truly rundown the house had become, with cavernous fissures in the plaster walls, loosened baseboards and the wood floor bearing the damage of carelessly installed wall-to-wall carpeting even more carelessly removed.
Lumpy barely had time to recognize just who it was approaching him in long, tentative strides down the hallway, being that he had to get over the two empty black and sightless ends of a double barrel sawed-off shotgun that met him square in the eyes.
There was the sound of a wheezy, stertorous breathing.
The holder of the gun trembled and squinted behind it. Lumpy smiled, knocking the stunted double barrel off to the side as an afterthought.
“Dr. Benway, I presume?” he said.