The Joy of Killing Read online

  My tough-guy attitude was something I had acquired hanging around the corner drugstore. There was no steel inside, although the girl on the train didn’t see that; she thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted to talk to her. Words were how I knew things. Like now, tapping on the keys of this ancient machine, gathering the letters and the silent sounds they represent into some sort of story of the night on the train so I can finally let go. I can’t adequately describe the feel of the air as my parents and the two detectives entered the living room, or the sounds as they walked across the carpet, or the sight of their limbs dangling at their sides as they came to a stop, in a semicircle. Maybe there is a little steel, after all, for I remember I was quite determined that I was not going to stand up for the detectives. Neither was I going to stop smoking, although I saw the smaller one with still eyes glance at the Lucky in my hand as if it were some sort of a weapon. So I stayed seated and waited for one of them to say something.

  OUR PARENTS’ FEAR at the lake house had always been that one of us would hang onto the rope too long and crash on the far bank of the river. It never seemed to occur to them that one of us could be lost when a canoe turned over in the middle of the lake. We could handle canoes; we tipped them over all the time for fun. We were all good swimmers. We jumped and dove off the dock, where the water was well over our head. So, the shock when Joseph drowned out there. I can feel the tightness in my chest. Maybe I did see him in the woody tangle on the water’s edge. The purple-veined skin, the staring eyes are suddenly quite vivid.

  THE TWO MEN with fedoras? Clear as ice water. My mother said the men were detectives and wanted to talk to me. I stayed in my seat and said nothing, so the two men pulled up chairs across the coffee table from me and sat down. The big one set his gray fedora on the table next to the glass ashtray and reached inside his coat pocket and withdrew a small leather wallet and flipped it open to show a bright gold badge. He said his name, put it back in his jacket, and settled his elbows on his knees. His hands were wide and heavy.

  “You smoke?” he said. “You’re twelve?”

  I lay the butt in the ashtray. My mother began to say something; he lifted a hand to silence her. A few months earlier, my best friend—the one whose name I had heard from the second detective’s mouth—and I had almost set the house on fire smoking in a crawl space in the basement; after which my parents gave me permission, begged me, to smoke in the house, in front of them. They even occasionally put a few Luckies in the silver box. The detective’s gray eyes were serious. The thing with Judy Pauling in the basement, I thought. The three of us had taken our clothes off, and she had lain on the couch, on her stomach, and my friend and I took turns lying on top of her. Nothing happened. No one talked her into anything. In fact, we set up a date to do it again the next week, at her house, when her folks would be out of town.

  I let his question pass. My parents were standing a few feet behind the seated detectives.

  “Son, we want to ask you a few questions about your friend David and a man named Willie Benson.”

  WHERE WAS I?

  My nose was sore.

  “Oh, dear,” the girl said, playfully. She reached in her coat pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed my nose. Red splotches showed on it.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “All in the line of duty,” I responded. She continued dabbing at my nose.

  “There,” she said, pleased.

  Well, that’s that, I thought. You’ve got a story, not the story, but still a story, with a bloody nose to top it off. Meanwhile, my pants were still unzipped.

  A few stars had surfaced. Lights in a small community shone in the distance. A pickup raced us along the highway. There was not a sound in the car except the clickety-clack of the wheels. Her hand found my dick, now a shadow of its former self. I just wanted to hold her.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “You think so?” She looked at me, and I saw a glimmer of lust in her eye. She wanted to finish it. She wanted to feel me come. That thought—that me coming turned her on—roused me instantly. She took over, and I lay my head back on the seat in surrender.

  A DARK FORM catches my attention. Something flitted in front of the window. Bats. I’d forgotten; they’d been a problem every summer, living in the attic. My mother shrieked and chased them around the house with a broom, always knocking one or two to the floor, which our dog jumped on and tried to eat. I’d thought the bats would have headed south, to Mexico or wherever they went, by now. A couple of them flew across the face of the moon. One bat after another sliced through the reddening streak, leaving the crimson drops to slide down the cut and into the sky. The difference between it happening and me seeing it happen was so slight as to often be irrelevant, except as now when I was trying to sort out myth from truth, to obtain a little peace. The myth could say that the blood of the moon fell into a pool, and the pool had great powers for those who drank of it. Where was the pool? was the enduring question. Men searched their whole lives for it, dying unquenched. Those who found it swore an oath not to reveal its whereabouts, for they would be turned to dust if they did. It wouldn’t matter if no one ever saw the moon actually bleed, the crimson drops blacken as they hit the sky, for people wanted to believe in such things. I could write the myth out and not long after it would be accepted not as casual ravings but as archetypal insight by some, the truth by others. And I might come to believe it, as well, for reasons that should be becoming obvious by now. I turn all the stories of my life over and over in my mind and toss them in various bins, depending on the likelihood of their reality. I sometimes switch them around. The story of Judy Pauling ends up in the “very likely” bin most times, although I wouldn’t swear to each and every detail. Same with the story of my best friend screwing my wife. Now, Joseph was a different situation. Just because I hadn’t thought of him—the drowning—for all these years means nothing. We never returned to the lake after that summer. I hadn’t been back until today, and I might not even then have remembered Joseph had it not been for the odd look on the caretaker’s face. I know Joseph drowned; whether I saw his body in the woody tangle on the shore is another matter. In most instances, the truth really doesn’t matter. I would have split from my wife whether or not my friend fucked her. Joseph was a tall, scrawny kid, but not someone you would try to push around. I liked him, although we didn’t hang around a lot. I had a crush on his older sister, which didn’t help me in his eyes, although I never even held her hand. Sally. I had forgotten her, as well. She had black hair but the same green eyes as Joseph, her only sibling. I saw her afterward, at a small gathering at their house. She wouldn’t look at me.

  THE TRUTH OF a few things does matter. But the images always seem to be in shards, never linked, never whole; like the remains of a shipwreck, bits and pieces of which wash ashore over time, as the ocean gives them up. Some might clear for a time, and you think that’s how it was, and then the next time it’s blurry around the edges, and the blurriness spreads until the scene crumbles and fades like a photographic image taken out of the fixer solution too soon. Or the scenes run awry, the images mix and blend, and never stand in a straight line, where you could say this is the way it happened, never where there is a beginning and an end. It’s nothing you can fix by attention, I’ve learned that. Nothing’s ever there completely at the same time, for you to study and arrange in proper order, like a jigsaw puzzle. If you concentrate on the gray fedora, on the words out of the detective’s mouth, or your mother’s stiff-legged stance, or you remark on the thick tension in the room, in an attempt to move the story forward to the next instant in time, you’re going to be disappointed. The first detective reached into his coat pocket and slowly lifted a dark object from it while keeping his eyes on me. It was a black wallet, and it looked familiar. It was thin and had worn edges. The detective held it out in front of me like a dead fish and asked if I’d ever seen it. I looked away.

  “No,” I said.

  The detective
waited for me to look back.

  “You’re sure? You’ve never seen this before?” I took another look at it. It was my friend’s. On the back was the imprint of the rubber he carried in the slot behind the money.

  “No,” I said.

  He knew I was lying; everyone in the room knew I was lying. Carefully, the detective laid the wallet on the glass coffee table.

  SO, YOU SEE the confusion: the look of aversion on Sally’s face, the stinking fish wallet on the glass table, my wife’s face as my friend was fucking her, the smell of the lake water at the gathering, as if to remind us Joseph had been in the lake overnight, even the crackling hiss of the door opening at the front of the train car.

  A dark form in the yellow light was moving down the aisle toward us, touching the top of each seat to steady himself. Maybe heading for the rear door, which was supposed to be locked, but which I knew from experience usually was not. Maybe it was the preppie I had seen on the platform. Blazer, rep tie, penny loafers. Perhaps he had spoken to the girl in the station; maybe he knew her; had done this with her before. I reached for the girl’s coat and pulled it up over her shoulders and then up over her head. I peered into the dim orange light. The train rocked to the right, and the face in the aisle picked up a glimmer. It was the woman a few rows behind us, with the crying baby. She couldn’t care less about what was going on here. Her eyes passed right over us.

  “All clear,” I murmured, letting my hand drift down to the girl’s hip.

  I GLANCE OUT the oval window and consider the time. The sky seems to be blackening. I close my eyes. Images of violence slip through the loose weave at strange times, like this. After my wedding, I walked my bride from the steps of the church to the waiting Chevy, being driven by who else but my best friend, the very one whose wallet the lead detective had so forlornly lay on the glass table in front of me, the very one who would later fuck the bride. As he came around the back to open the door, I pictured myself slipping a gleaming ice pick from the inside of my tuxedo jacket and thrusting it smoothly into my bride’s back, between her ribs, and then pulling it out so quickly no one could tell. A whuff of air escapes her as she lowers her head, and I realize I’d hit a lung. She glances around, as if a bee had stung her, and her body hesitates a second, and I smile back. Little beads of blood finally begin appearing, one by one, through the tiny hole in the taffeta. It’s for that image—the bright crimson on the pure white—that I’ve done it. It’s not a desire to inflict pain, or to punish or humiliate, or even to injure or kill; it was simply a matter of curiosity. The feeling as you pulled the pick out, and you would know from the sight of it that life was irrevocably altered, and you couldn’t go back to the second before you shot your arm out, when all was light and future and happiness—I wanted to know what that moment felt like. To be free of all responsibility for the rest of my life, to be able to watch it play out like a film, to not give a shit. How can you truly know life without taking one?

  So, this murderer comes peeping in on me at moments where I’m blinded by the whiteness of my bride’s wedding dress, or Shelley Duvall’s smooth neck, and leaves behind an image of a crimson river streaming through the snowy whiteness. There’s little to be done about it. In the backseat of the Chevy, my bride turns to me for a kiss, and I oblige.

  One time I came a little closer than usual to living out the fantasy. Several years after the wedding, on a vacation, we stayed in a friend’s guest cottage in a fishing village on the Maine coast. There were two single beds, one on either side of the room, and the second night, after we’d drunk two bottles of wine, we separated to the individual beds. Laying there, alone in the single bed, I imagined slipping from bed, walking quietly into the kitchen, and picking up the long thin knife I’d used to filet the salmon. I imagined running my finger down the blade, raising a drop of blood, before walking over to where she lay. The urge became so strong as I lay there, listening to her breathe, that I had to mentally paralyze my legs and arms so I couldn’t get out of bed and walk to the counter where the knife lay. I felt no hostility toward her; I wasn’t angry at her—this was at least five years before the “betrayal.” All I really wanted was to experience the shock on her face when she realized what was happening, when she felt the knife release and the blood stream between her breasts and down her stomach, the moment she saw my eyes and every dream of life vanished from her head.

  I LEAN FORWARD in my chair. The typewriter seems a forbidding object—cold metal skin, worn gold letters, an array of knobs and levers, a ribbon soaked in ink—for tasks and times such as this. Yet, we are not alone, I know that. The winged creatures creasing the yellow-orange moon, the lingering spirits of the Augusts of my youth, whatever thing is rattling around down below. Perhaps Joseph’s father has come back to force his son’s name onto my lips, his image into my eyes. What could I say? Sally, I would like to know about, but to ask about her would be to ignore Joseph, to point a finger at the hole where he should have been. She finally looked at me the afternoon of the wake, I remember. Her eyes green and cold as the lake water. We left the lake house the night of the gathering, although it was only the beginning of the second week of August.

  I scan the words on the page on the table to the right of the typewriter. It seems like the word “wallet” should have two “t”s, to give it a bit more snap, and I decide I will spell it that way from now on. I remember working to figure out what the thing meant, lying there like that. How the detectives got a hold of it, what they were doing with it here.

  “It belongs to your friend David,” the detective croaked, leaning a few degrees forward, as if to intimidate me.

  The crease in his cheek, running from his left ear over his jawbone, was clearly a scar. What had confused me was how it seemed to hide in a fold. He caught me staring at it; the scar was like a prop, I thought; he uses it to distract people, to gain an advantage. I stubbed out the Lucky in the glass ashtray, glanced at the red and black bull’s-eye on the flattened pack on the table. Three or four left. I felt myself wrap up, sink inside, deeper, leaving only enough behind to nod and murmur. I could hang out in this numb space for a long time, and there was nothing my mother or the cops could do about it. A few months earlier my mother had become so disturbed over my behavior that she had taken me to a psychologist in Booneville. I saw him four or five times, and he ran a large tape recorder on his desk as I told him stories about what a tough guy I was at school. Somebody stole a cigarette from my locker, and I beat him up. Or all the things I had done with girls. I figured he knew I was bullshitting him, but it gave him something to report to my mother. Your youngest son lives in a fantasy world. He has difficulty telling the difference between what he dreams up and what’s real. I denied having imaginary friends, but I almost had him convinced that Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger had stayed at my house over last Thanksgiving. Convinced enough that he asked my mother about it after the session.

  I STAND UP, and the chair screeches back. The sound zips up my back, as if it were somehow related to the bats winging across the face of the moon or the rattling, scraping noises struggling up from below. A wind has come up; the jagged oak leaves are trembling; the branches are rising and falling, dancing. For a moment the moon seems almost hidden in the stars. I take a step toward the door. The old boards underfoot creak.

  Willie Benson. All those years I hadn’t heard that name. And now, standing here in the small space of my little warren, the name simply materializes, with no fanfare, as if it really wasn’t strange at all. Maybe I could have told you “Willie” if you’d asked. Maybe. But never the last name. The detective had said it, and now that I think about it I remember reading a newspaper article that the guy had gone to jail. So I had known it at one time. David told me Willie could get us girls. Even at twelve, we talked constantly about girls and sex. We listened slack-jawed as one of David’s friends told us in detail about how he fucked his sister. We hung around a small engine-repair shop run by a good-looking middle-aged guy who smoked a
pipe and delivered mail. He told us about women he screwed on his route. We followed him one Saturday morning. Halfway through his route, he walked up the steps to a small brick duplex, leather mailbag over his shoulder, and was greeted at the top by a young housewife wearing a yellow see-through skirt and a sleeveless top. After a few words, she opened the screen door and he followed her inside. We clocked him at ten minutes. We knew the husband—he worked at a dairy across town.

  The fact was, as I’ve said, we were a little hesitant about the real thing. Now, there was Judy Pauling. She was very quick about everything; she took her panties off, stood there for a second, and we could see something nestled in the hair, but we never got a look beyond that. The thing with her came to an end one summer night when, according to plan, we showed up at her bedroom window with the intent of slipping her out and heading to a park a block away. When we knocked on the glass, she didn’t respond, so we knocked louder, and the window finally opened, and her head poked out. “Go away!” she whispered. A male voice barked from inside: “Where’s the fucking shotgun?” A large dog started barking. We took off, and I got my leg hung up on the sharp point of a picket on a fence in the backyard and ripped up a piece of flesh pretty good.