An Excerpt

I want to get back into my novel again, and so I thought I’d post a small piece of it.  Just to see what people think.  I was going to write something new and profound and poetic in here, but it just doesn’t come like that for me right now, it’s all in novel and play form and I don’t want to waste it, no offense meant, here.

Hugh knew him. His name was Cecilio Benjamin Ashtad, a strange and exotic name that he had given to himself – he let no one know his real name. He was a criminal, Hugh knew, untouchable, influential, and ancient, a man adherent to a wisdom older than Socrates, the wisdom of the first men, the caveman, the savage. Without a word the world around him bent to his will for all knew he possessed and practiced the old wisdom, and although “Uncle Bennie” as they called him moved like a plague-bearing cadaver through the bright-lit casinos of Las Vegas, all submitted to his whims without qualm or quarrel. Uncle Bennie had buried fifteen police officers and twice as many of his former associates. The police called him the “man without a memory,” for his callous cropping of former crooks regardless of any deeds, any loyalties, any sacrifices they had ever made for him. Those still a part of the well-greased machine that was Uncle Bennie’s operation were of only three kinds: those so professional that even the slightest curve of their skin was unrecognizable as that of a sinner, those whose coats revolved so quickly that they shed the blame from themselves like snakeskin, and the terminally stupid. 
            When Uncle Bennie arrived on the shores of the land of the free, he had little both in money and in morals – he was destined for greatness from that first placed step upon the paved streets of the American city. His parents had not come, for they had no money and no ambition to be more than victims of a tyrant’s caprice; they were resolute in their relegation to an early, unexpected death. Bennie had been driven by instinct, Darwinian and overpowering; he had run away. When he looked back, nothing gave chase but the darkness and the wind. But those beginning years of poverty and oppression had already bent his body like a piece of metal against the anvil, the hammer striking his hot skin and molding him, breaking apart the former form and building a sharp, dangerous new one. The edges became narrow and biting, all excess of proper behavior and rules broken away, leaving only goals. And when he left for the states, stowed away upon a vessel bound for Ellis Island, the sea cooled his orange-glowing bones; had he a mind for metaphors, he would have relished the heavy fog that swamped the boat as it settled into the harbor. He would have breathed it in and kept the scent forever in his nose, but had he done that, then the metaphor that made him, the names that followed him, and the person he would come to be would not have been. 
No one knows why his name came to be the one he introduced himself as – if one could find a single living being from Bennie’s early days they would have told of other names that he was called. They would have talked of watching him, thin and reedy, on his knees on the streets, bleeding quietly and remotely, looking at his blood without the slightest thought at all. They would have described the way he let the names they hurled stick to him, and unlike the barbed arrow wounds that most insults induced, every insult hurled upon Cecilio Benjamin Ashtad became a piece of his body. In those days, kids would attack Bennie; the tough wops and the black gangs would jump him in groups and beat him. These beatings would not last long because Bennie would not even grunt, they would admit. Perhaps, then, they would reflect enough to realize with revelatory profundity how they could not describe Bennie before the attacks, but ever after he seemed to have a life that they were helpless to follow. Some would whisper that they saw him kill at the age of sixteen – the victim was a runner for Bennie’s employer. Bennie got all the dead boy’s work and two other boys’ loads when they quit suddenly the next day. Later, they’d admit they never saw it, only knew that Bennie had been there at the time and that, somehow, they knew he had done it. Indeed, they knew that he would do it before it was done – they knew the action, just not who the blade would fall upon. He seemed, they would say, to treat people like he did not care that they breathed, did not seem to even see them as the same sort of beings in any way. They would not say – for most humans minds cannot reflect this far back upon their own guilt — that he was simply treating people the way people treated him, as not a person at all. The police never questioned Bennie about the murder, nor was Bennie’s name ever mentioned, since anyone would tell you that everyone who knew of him were afraid of him. That is, if you could find someone after all this time who remembered such things.
When the beatings proved fruitless, for despite Bennie’s odd nature and the offense it sparked in gangs of the neighborhood none wanted to touch a man who would kill some innocent working boy but never raise a hand in defense or anger, even the gangs ceased to deal with him. He was left alone for a few years of impoverished scrounging, working remedial jobs, not built for heavy labor, not savvy or skilled at anything. Instead, he had become a soldier in the strong days of the family, serving the Don with a ferocious, cold loyalty. To say he enjoyed it would be wrong, because there seemed no such emotion within him, as if he had, unlike all others, a limited amount of blood that had all bled out those years ago when his palms seemed planted into the cement of the sidewalk. Instead, efficiently, effectively, and even elegantly, he beat, tortured, and killed anyone the Don commanded. Those who were lucky not to have the latter could tell how the face remained resolute, almost placid, the eyes empty of any light, just two pearl-smooth black orbs. They could tell the horror and the desperation at wishing for a ripple of pleasure, of anger appeased, of even regret to run the length of those morbid orbs – for those qualities were emotions, powers expelled to an end, but for Bennie there was no end to the punishment he could and would deal. Those he worked alongside would discuss how little he ate, how little he slept, how little he did anything but work, and when forced to capitulate to his body’s demands he would do so silently and without any seeming enjoyment, instead staring forward and blankly. Eventually, the Don, too, began to be frightened of Bennie, frightened of his sparse words, his complete lack of humanity, the seeming perfection with which he performed duties, that while everyday to the Don, also remained tainted with the sour taste of wrong. Only Bennie seemed to believe – or if not believe, then not deny –that what he did was natural. 
Bennie was sent to Las Vegas to monitor the growing debtor haven; like every other job that Bennie was given by the Don, he thrived here. Now he did less killing, never tortured or beat, he had others to do it for him. He, however, unlike other crime lieutenants, insisted on his presence. Those who didn’t know him well would say he liked to watch them die or, perhaps, liked to look at the dead; Bennie didn’t like anything. He had no life. He was simply a body burning out its energy until there was nothing left of it, just the scattered remnants of the extraordinary existence of an unremarkable being, a being barely human, human only through his connection to history, human only because he had been at least at one time.
For Bennie’s early existence was enigmatic, unknown and forever forgotten to everyone and, as Hugh observed him he decided, even Bennie. The names that were thrust upon him, each and every one, aptly colored him, or perhaps, Hugh reflected trying to fill his fear up with fact and logic, he let them be everything that he was, replacing whatever he had been before. What awful world would compel one to wash it away with pitch and ash?