Mark of Cain
By Michael Fountain
So the devil you know is preferable to the one you don’t? In a future where the criminally inclined are branded so that others may recognize them, to be warned for safety’s sake, it’s easy to become complacent. What if you don’t know just what someone, however harmless-seeming, is truly capable of? Maybe it’s just a mistake, an oversight, or maybe even when you can see it, sometimes it’s too late to recognize the Mark of Cain.
“Mo-onica-a!” I always gave her name at least five syllables when I was angry. “What is he doing here?”I had sense enough to be afraid of him, but how could she be so stupid? We were two women, camping on our own.“What?” She was baffled, shaking her head. “I just invited him over for a beer. We’re neighbors. No one else is camped out here.” She really had no idea what my problem was.
She must have met him on her way to fetch potable water. He was camped just the other side of the ridge. He’d never heard of the tablets that we used to make the water safe. He’d never used a GPS system. We were wilderness camping because we wanted to; I think he was camping out because he had to.
He was a real beauty. You could send Monica off on a blind date to a Nobel Prize ceremony, and she’d come home with someone like Randy. Typical Mr. Biceps, mullet haircut buzzed short with a ponytail behind, one of those little goatees they learn to grow in trailer parks and juvie halls—why would they ever think that’s attractive?
He was always looking at the ground, even when he spoke to us. Little sharp blue eyes and a thick dull face. And he had it. He had The Mark, a little red tattoo on his face like a biohazard sign.
Something was wrong with the boy somewhere; when they tested him in preschool, he had that little killer stain on gene number sixteen or seventeen, third chromosome to the left. One of his alleles said double A or double I when it should have said A or I or ai-yi-yi. His parents must have had him tattooed as a child, or maybe he’d stolen a car in grade school or something.The school nurse would have taken a swab to the inside of his mouth and then had the school send it off to some lab tech in Maryland, or the Davenport Institute at Berkeley. Someone looked at his little polymorphites and found the genetic marker for criminality, and now he had to wear The Mark, a big bright warning sign for employers and innocent bystanders that there was Something Wrong with this guy.It should have been obvious even to blind idiots like my girlfriend Monica, except that it wasn’t.
“Are you worried about his mark?” She was incredulous, as if I’d complained about his race or the way he was dressed. “I cannot believe that you take that so seriously.” She laughed. “He got that when he was a kid; it’s not for anything serious. . . .”She left Randy there by the fire while she went to the creek for cool beer; I went along with her because I wasn’t finished arguing, and I didn’t want to be alone with him.“How do you know it’s not for anything serious?”“Because he told me that it wasn’t.” She was using her kindergarten teacher’s voice, the voice that speaks to people as though they were idiots. “It was for shoplifting or something. God, I wouldn’t have brought him back here if there was anything really wrong with him, God, I’m not stupid. . . .”
“Did he say it was just for shoplifting?” I was used to Monica embellishing all of her little everyday lies; she did it to make herself look better or to avoid explanations.
“He got his mark a couple of years ago, before they started color coding them.” The new tattoos were all different—red for potential violence, yellow for a known thief, and so on—and again she’d avoided a straight answer to my question.
“He was one of the first ones to get a tattoo, when all the marks were red,” she whined, which to me meant that we didn’t know if he was a murderer, or a child molester, or a drunk driver, or what. How could you know?
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, complaining about the tattoo,” Monica went on. “You told me last week that you didn’t believe in testing.”
It’s my own fault; I shouldn’t have been surprised at anything Monica did. When we shared an apartment back in college, she’d come dragging in after the bars closed with the most unbelievable bunch of losers, drunken thugs, and lousy lovers. After they fell asleep she’d always crawl into my room and complain about them.Sometimes she’d have a fight in the middle of the night, with her slapping her new “boyfriend” until he finally hit her back. I lost count of how many times the new beau would wake up the neighborhood, laying rubber and peeling out at three in the morning.I just tried to sleep through it all. A couple of times they actually tried to climb into bed with me.That was enough to cure me of ever having a roommate again—but I thought that just the two of us, alone on a camping trip, we could have some fun, and Monica might actually last one day without a man. Now, here she is, with the only guy within a hundred miles of Wilderness Park, and she pretends not to notice the scarlet red tattoo on his face.
To make things even more pathetic, Randy’s government mark was the best looking thing about him—the original design for The Mark came from some old Renaissance painting, a portrait of Cain by Titian.This loser was wearing that elegant red mark, three homemade tattoos, and a secondhand “gimme” shirt with a movie logo on the front—probably a movie he hadn’t seen. Randy wouldn’t have changed his style since he turned fifteen, when he thought pro wrestlers were fashion ideals.
“Here you go. . . .” Monica passed out the beer, like she was the teacher and the two of us were surly, little kids. She wanted me to play nice with this loser.“Thanks for the beer,” he muttered, holding his bottle up high—some feeble attempt at a toast. Glory be to God, it could speak!I sipped at my beer and waited for Monica to slug a few back. She laughed like a witch at everything we said, and got louder and raunchier with every swallow of beer. Finally she had to go pee.While she was gone, I motioned for Randy to follow me. It’s pretty easy for a woman to get a man to follow her, and Randy was more of a follower than most. Not a thought in his ugly head, no plans for the future, just drifting through life waiting for the next thing to happen.
He followed me down the path like a lamb, like a baby duck. He may have been just as innocent, not a criminal at all. I guess it’s rare that you find that specific effect tied to a specific gene; evolution just doesn’t work that way.Maybe he had been given The Mark because he had Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, the genetic marker for self-mutilation; or just a variant gene on his thyroid hormone receptor, nothing but plain old hyperactivity.It didn’t matter much to me. If Randy had been innocent once, he wasn’t any more. If he’d had any jail time, he probably spent his “rehabilitation” in criminal college, learning how to steal cars and hurt people. Once he’d been marked by the system, he’d been in and out of institutions all his life. Randy was damaged goods, and I wasn’t going to sleep well with him around our campsite.I hadn’t worried about our isolation, until Monica had brought him back to camp. I was just grooving on the wilderness. I’m not afraid of wolves or cougars or bears; I’m afraid of people like Randy.
The thing I always notice first about the desert—first thing I notice when I turn off my engine—is just how quiet it all is. Back home, even on a quiet street, there’s some background noise; but out in the desert there’s nothing, just a big empty silence, so quiet the blood almost roars in your ears. If you sit still long enough, you might hear the night movement of little critters in the brush, or a slight breeze, or sometimes a far away truck will Doppler up through the gears and then Doppler away into the distance, until the sound finally leaves you alone in the silence.If Randy wanted to kill us out here, no one would ever hear us. We could scream all we wanted and the screams might echo off the blue hills for an hour. We might call on God to save us or let us die, but no one would ever hear us, no one would ever know. There was nothing out here.
I showed him a deer trail that cut across the hiking path. I paused just long enough for Randy to slip past and get in front of me.As he went by, I put one hand on his shoulder, very gently, to steady him so he wouldn’t turn around. I took it out of my belt pack and swung it up against the base of his skull.It made quite a noise in all that silence, but he himself dropped down without even a squeak. His body arched twice and then settled. The dry sand soaked up most of the blood.His bowels cut loose when he died, so I used a stick to roll him off the path. There was a little depression in the sand, a swale between the dunes, and he slid down easy enough. That would do for now.
I climbed back up to the path and started back for Monica. I meant to tell her whatever I had to, to get her out of there before the sun set. She was not the type to go up that deer trail looking for Randy when she was drunk, and she’s not exactly the most observant girl in the world.
If I told her I’d scared her new boyfriend off, she’d probably just shrug; it would save her the trouble of having to deal with him herself. Monica was pretty good about accepting whatever story I told her.
We would pack up our things and be gone. There was nothing to tie us to the spot. We were supposed to be camped miles away.
But people will surprise you. I guess Monica didn’t feel like waiting, and she’d started up the path after us, waving her beer and singing to herself.
She must have heard the sound, and for once in her life Monica showed some intellectual curiosity. She was there on the hiking path just as I climbed back.
“Where’s Randy?” she said. Before I could answer she grabbed my arm. “What have you done? What have you done? You did it again—” She saw the change in my eyes. She turned and started to run.
My legs are longer than hers; I caught her by the ponytail and pulled her down. She was light enough to get into the trunk without too much trouble. I knew a good spot for her in another park, two states away. A secret place I used to visit with my folks.
Seeing that spot again, walking the grounds after Monica went in the sinkhole, it reminded me of my parents. I made sure to send them a note after I’d finished dropping her off.I told them Monica had met up with some guy and the two of us had separated; we would try and meet up in Yosemite. More fun, really, without her.I added a sincere thank you to both my Mom and Dad for having taught me to be independent, not having to rely on others.Seven years of home schooling, I guess. When I was in public school, my teachers wanted to have me tested—in pre-school and again in the sixth grade—but my parents refused. They home schooled me until I could finish school in another district.
So I never had to be tested when I was a baby, and they didn’t want me immunized either. Mom was convinced that the so-called MMR immunization caused autism, and most of those diseases have disappeared anyway. We got around that with a certificate from immunization resisters in Colorado.
Daddy thought his baby was too pretty to wear a red tattoo on her face, or maybe Mom got on her high horse to the school board about “Liberal Left-Wing Propaganda and the Public Schools and the Government as Nanny.” Whatever the reason, I’ve never been tested, so I don’t really know.
I should maybe drop a note to Monica’s parents, but what can you say when you do something really bad? Sorry? What good would that do?
I wasn’t going to put my folks through that again. I just want them to know how proud I am, to still be their little girl.
