The Joy of Killing Page 5

  THE GIRL ON the train lies imbued in my mind. But if I’m not careful, I could lose her amidst the tumult. The story could wander off into hiding behind the fading stars of dawn. I sat back down in front of the typewriter. Underwood. God only knows what else had been written on the machine: letters and memoirs, scientific papers, short stories, even poems and diaries. Suicide notes. All the many fingers who had tapped out the thoughts of their owners on these very keys, struggling for clarity, beauty, or impact. On the drive up, I pictured myself sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling away on a pad into the night. When the caretaker, Joseph’s father, had flipped through the keys on the ring on the front porch, he paused for a moment at the ones to the basement and the tiny room on the fourth floor, almost as if he were daring me to use them. The old Underwood had been sitting here on the table next to a stack of white paper, awaiting me. I saw that the view from the window down onto the garden and the stone fence and the water beyond would be perfect. I retrieved the lamp from the bedroom on the third floor and proceeded to the room in the attic, which I haven’t left since.

  THE HEAD OF blonde hair continued rising and falling in my lap in a steady rhythm. My fingers pressed into the skull. Every time her head rose I was on the verge of coming. What would happen to us when it was over? She rested her head on my lap, eyes closed, and massaged my dick just enough to keep it stiff. Like this, through the dark night we would speed, rocking back and forth, connected by need and spirit and the steady click-clacking of steel on steel.

  The rear door hissed open, and the click-clacking rose to a scream and the cold air whooshed in. You could hear the door try to close, and then jerk back open, meaning someone was standing in the doorway, hesitating on whether to go on out. The baby started crying, and I wondered if the mother was going to throw it off the back of the train. The girl was so still I guessed she might have fallen asleep.

  SOMETIMES IT SEEMS all my life I’ve been dragging my story behind me like a heavy, unseen stone. But tonight I am completely awake, and I am beginning to worry about the fleeting darkness. Everything stirs in my head. Rattling sounds, now more insistent, from below shiver up the boards and into my bones. The sounds fade gradually, like the end of a song. I can smell the ink on the page. If I were to rise and open the window, I could reach out and touch the moon, which seems in the past hour to have assumed a larger, more commanding presence in the sky, although now I notice a micro-thin layer of white clouds is sliding beneath it, scattering its light. After that night in the bedroom, I never made love to a woman without an image of my wife and best friend showing up on the screen. I never stuck her, either with a blade or a pick, or I wouldn’t be sitting here at this table, but I have no doubt the image of her in my mind as she sees her blood on the tip of the ice pick is what she would have looked like had I done it. A stunning moment of completion.

  And, of course, images of the girl on the train; but never before this moment have I tried to put them in chronological order, to tell the story from beginning to end. Why now? you might ask. I have no answer. Coming here, after forty-some years, in the fall of the year, on a moonlit night, with no memory of Joseph or the canoe, or even his lovely sister. I can feel the icy water now, as it must have felt to him as he slipped under, the burn as it entered his nose. His head went down, then popped up, then went down again, and up again, and then down, and not up again. A few words the first time, then nothing, gasping and spitting. What was wrong with him? He knew how to swim. Cramps. That’s what he was saying. Cramps. What was he doing way out in the middle of the lake where no one could hear him? Probably on his way to the Girl Scout camp on the other side. I had paddled over there and back with him a few days before. These images are so clear now, so frightening, that I believe them; they’ve been hanging around this old house all these years like dust motes or faded photographs, and my presence brings them back to life. The life jackets were bright orange, and there were always two in every canoe. I remember now, it began as a calm day on the water. We were swimming races between the docks on either side of the mouth of the river earlier in the morning and there wasn’t a ripple. Sally was there, in a red bathing suit, black hair piled under a cap, but still pretty. She blew the starting whistle and declared the winners. When someone argued with her over a call she took off her cap, bent over the water, and talked into his face, and the boys peeked for a view of her tits, which were nice. The lake water was so still that morning the sun pooled lazily on it, and clouds of tiny bugs skimmed its surface.

  Now I see quite clearly: Joseph is standing by the canoe trying to cajole someone into paddling to the Girl Scout camp with him. He’s wearing black trunks with a red sea horse on the left leg. His yellow hair pokes out in all directions like straw. Sally watches with little interest. Other boys are tempted to grab a paddle, but it’s against the rules. When I went a week earlier, it took a lot longer to get there than he said. I talked with a girl at the camp for a while. I can’t think of her name, but I remember she had red hair, worked in the camp kitchen, and lived in town. The wind had picked up a little on the way back across the lake, and it was pushing us sideways by the time we reached the shore. I can see Joseph standing up in the canoe as it slid up on the beach, showing off. That was it for me. Fifteen feet out and you were in over your head, and in the middle of the lake the water was over fifty feet deep and cold enough to freeze your heart in an instant.

  I picture him stepping in, settling on the rear seat, and reaching for the paddle. He’s not wearing a life jacket. Maybe there is one in the canoe and he put it on as he paddled out, but at that moment his skinny, tough frame is unencumbered. The rest of us left the beach to play on the tire swing, and I remember Sally was no more concerned than the rest of us. She grabbed the tire, ran a couple of steps, and swung out over the water. I can see the crack in the bottom of her suit as she kicks her legs; I can hear her scream as she let go, see the water rise and dance in the sunlight as she hit.

  LOOKING OUT THE window, at the streak of moonlight on the water, and the sudden appearance of ghostly dark clouds, I feel like I’m the captain of the ship, in the pilot house, guiding it confidently through the rough seas of the night. There’s nothing to fear anymore; I worry only that time will defeat me, although the darkness beyond the moon seems to be holding. As for the images of Joseph in the canoe? Sally on the tire swing? They come from somewhere, don’t they? The mind needs a story, and it sorts and keeps and discards as a narrative emerges, and so one embraces the current version at one’s peril, but when there is nothing left to defend, to keep put together for, when you’ve quit waiting to get somewhere, it seems to me the story might begin to bear a strong resemblance to what actually happened; and it also seems to me that these images should be entitled to a little more weight than usual since they have appeared from nowhere, after so many years of not thinking of Joseph—not just his death, but anything about him. That, and the vividness of them, although the images of my wife with a bloody ice pick wedged in the ribs of her white wedding dress are just as vivid. Could we have played on the swing, watched Sally spin off into the sky, before Joseph paddled off across the water? Yes. Absolutely. In fact, now I’m sure that it was after lunch that he left in the canoe.

  I walk over to the door and twist the bolt. The metallic sound strikes my skull. You push too hard on this stuff and you get nowhere. I don’t remember Joseph actually paddling off, for example; I just remember that he wasn’t there when it was time to go home. I don’t remember the lead detective ever putting the wallett back in his pocket. Of course I denied knowing Willie Benson. If I didn’t recognize the wallett, I couldn’t recognize the name Willie Benson.

  “You’re not supposed to hang around with David Wright.”

  My mother’s voice, reeking with accusation and shame, split the silence. The first detective glanced up at her. My father looked out the window. I didn’t have many friends, and those I did have were troublemakers like me, living on the outside of the circle. David�
�s reputation in Booneville was even worse than mine, and he knew characters way outside the circle. One day he came into the repair shop and began telling me about Willie. The man knew where to get girls, he said. We had talked about such a thing endlessly, dreamed about it, tried to imagine what a real pussy would feel like. It wasn’t so much about fucking as it was crossing the line from fantasy into reality, to actually touch a girl there. David was adamant; his excitement was catching. Have you done it? I asked. No, but he trusted Willie to find the girls. He would arrange for a whore at the state fair, or one of the girls working out of the Booneville Hotel. The two of us went out the back and sat on the step, where we could spit and smoke, and David went on about it, and I sat and listened.

  Funny, now I can remember the red pack of tall Pall Malls that David pulled from his shirt pocket, how he shook the pack hard once and a single weed popped out. I took it and thwacked it several times on the side of the Zippo (the same one I would carry on the train a couple of years later, shiny as silver, with the Marine Corps emblem on one side). I lit my weed first, then his.

  David let the smoke drift out of his mouth and then pulled it up into his nostrils. We shunned the new filtered cigarettes, except for Kools, which I stole by the pack from the carton my parents kept in a kitchen drawer. We talked some more about Willie and girls, and even then I felt there was something screwy. Why would a grown man want to get a girl for a couple of kids? David mentioned giving him a few bucks, but I didn’t buy it. What about Judy Pauling? I asked. No good, he said. Her father had figured out what was going on and kept her on ice.

  We sat there for an hour, smoking and spitting and talking about the girl Willie was going to get for us. The pavement in front of us got so wet it hissed when you tossed a butt on it. The screen door opened, and the postman appeared. He told us to clean up the mess.

  I HOLD MY hand up to the night sky and spread my fingers wide until the moon catches between the knuckles of the second and third digit. The moon seems to have filled up a little, as if someone had poured molten light into it. I squeeze gently until the orb flattens out a little. I relax my fingers, and it springs back into shape. The blood streaks on it are gone. The moon is pure and pretty as the first night it shone. My mother’s voice reverberates in my bones. I knew by then what it was about; the only way to survive this scene was to stay hidden. Once I said yes or no or maybe, I was screwed. I shook my head at another question. I hadn’t really done anything, after all, just gone along for the ride and watched the scene play out. The second detective, with the eyes that didn’t move, and the small ears stuck low and back on his head, picked up the wallett and opened it. There was a little pocket with a snap on it for change. Behind a piece of scratched plastic was a photograph. It was of David, with the usual smirk on his face, the flattop with the lock curled over his forehead.

  “You know him?” The guy’s voice was surprisingly deep, like a radio announcer’s.

  I nodded.

  “Who is it?”

  I peered closely.

  He took the picture out of its case and held it up to me.

  “David Wright?”

  I nodded. He lay the picture down on the glass table and opened the last fold in the wallett, as if to extract something else. He pulled out a small photo. It was a girl, with blonde hair, a forced smile. Judy Pauling.

  “You know her?”

  I shook my head. He lay it down on the table, next to the picture of David. I had misread the situation; this was about Judy. Her father had beaten it out of her, the stuff in the basement. But the cop had mentioned Willie. Willie and Judy did not go together. Maybe a photo of Willie was coming out next. I pictured him: slight, short, balding, small black eyes in a sallow face. The three of us met outside a drugstore on the main street of Booneville early one afternoon. David and I stood there for half an hour before he showed up. We stepped under an awning, and he explained that he had arranged for a girl from the fair grounds to meet us at his apartment. Her name was Janice. Half an hour apiece, and wouldn’t cost us a thing. He kept glancing around as he talked. Suddenly, he was gone. Behind us not twenty yards stood the postman. He had followed us, and Willie had spotted him and figured him for a cop. The postman gave us a ride back to the shop in exchange for a promise to stay away from Willie.

  I PUNCH THE keys on the Underwood in a vain attempt to describe the feeling of that night on the train. No other time with a woman came close to it. Surely I was to blame for that. I see myself as chasing that sensation the rest of my life, always slightly on the run, scared to come to a complete stop for fear of what might overrun me, and drop me. Sometimes, usually when booze or drugs were part of the mix, the barriers to impulse gave way, like the night of my best friend’s wedding party, some five years after I’d caught him and my wife together, when all supposedly had been forgiven and everyone, all three of us, had moved on. I was standing on the makeshift stage at the resort outside of Montego Bay giving the best man’s speech, rambling on about what a remarkable couple they made, and suddenly the bullshit of it all made me hesitate just long enough for the familiar scene of the two of them fucking to slip through the netting. I looked around for my former wife in the wedding party, and when I spotted her sitting with the bride’s parents, a half-empty rum drink in front of her, blonde hair pulled back into a long ponytail, smiling up at me, I raised my glass. “Finally, I’d like to thank David for fucking my wife. In the ass, I might add. I’m looking forward to returning the favor. Cheers!”

  It was one of my favorite scenes and pretty out of character for me. Particularly since their cheating had never really bothered me. Was I really that articulate? Was the look on the bride’s face as ghastly frozen as I see it now? Did I really slam the champagne and march happily off the stage? I should have felt bad, of course—Julie, the bride, had done nothing to me—but I didn’t. A funny thing was, my former wife came to my room a few hours later in her underwear, drunk, and demanded that I fuck her. I think I did, for old times’ sake, or to get a final laugh on David, but I couldn’t swear to it.

  I TRY TO refocus on the page in front of me, the round keys with the letters on them, but the distractions are beginning to take over; I’m losing the girl on the train; and time is thinning out. The stars surrounding the moon now have grown sharper, like there is fire on the edges. The wind ticks a small branch against the window, and it plays against the rattling and scraping noises from down below. The whole night is a concert, a play, of beauty and spirit. It’s like this at the end, I think. A purple haze drifts across the face of the moon. Or perhaps it’s always been like this, I just haven’t seen it.

  I see the problem now. The rods of the “t” and “h” keys have collided in mid-stroke and are stuck together. I stand and wobble a little. I reach in, twist the rods apart, and they fall easily back into place. I glance at the ribbon. It seems fat enough on the spool. The paper on the left is still stacked high. I punch a capital “T” for train. The conductor wears the same wire-rimmed spectacles as the second detective, the one with the still eyes and small ears. He massages the edge of the wallett like some sort of talisman. He addresses me, but I can’t hear his voice, only feel his eyes. It will go on, until I talk. But why are they here, if David didn’t send them? Maybe the weasel Willie ratted us out. I get it. They found David’s wallett in Willie’s room. But then, why aren’t they talking to David? I reach for my Luckies on the edge of the table, but the first detective flops a fat finger on the pack, pinning it down. Our eyes lock. He wins.

  I punch a key again. If I’m not more attentive, the girl will leave. I need her here with me until the stars begin to fade and I proceed to finish the long corrugated story of my life. The train, I remember, hurtled through the blackness like it could jump the tracks and shoot over the curvature of the earth. Inside it, with me, was this girl, her head on my chest, and beyond this there was nothing.

  She sat up. I slipped my hand from beneath her sweater. I began twisting my pants around an
d fumbling for the zipper, when she said, “I’ll be right back.” She straightened her clothes and ran her fingers through her hair. She patted my cheek, stood, and stepped into the aisle.

  I watched her walk toward the light at the end of the car, her hips swaying provocatively. The guys at school will never believe me, not that I would tell them. I glanced out the window. We were passing under a tall bridge, and the cars on it looked like they were magnets stuck in the sky. In spite of what the girl said, I feared she’d come back all fixed up with a new attitude. We’d talk, and eventually she would nod off, and there I’d sit basically alone, wide awake, until the train pulled into the Chicago station in the early light. Then there’d be a few words of affection, a brief kiss, and the story would be over. I could finish it in my mind and let that version become the truth. I was thinking that might not be such a bad ending, really, when suddenly the clickety-clack took on a slightly hollow sound. I looked out the window and realized we were on a high bridge, crossing over a wide river. Below us in the water were long thin dark shapes with red lights at either end. The whistle blew two long cries, and the train began to slow. The carriage jerked and slowed further. Maybe the rails ahead were torn up. What if the train pitched to one side and fell down into the water? We’d all drown. I could really use a weed. I looked over at my old seat; the pack of Luckies was sitting on top of the sack with the dirty magazine, like someone had helped themselves. Which meant the Zippo could be gone. I glanced up the aisle—no sign of her. The train jerked again, the brakes squealed, and we slowed almost to a stop. Still no one stirred. I zipped myself up and stepped across the aisle, found the lone weed and the Zippo on the seat, just where I’d left them. A long time ago, it seemed. Before the girl. I stuck the Luckies in the sack and glanced at the cover of the magazine: a brunette in panties and bra, looking over her shoulder at me. I made my way to the back of the car. The crumpled forms on the seat were fast asleep, unbothered by the screeching of metal on metal, by the fact that we hung suspended in the air over a dark wide river. I punched the button on the door, it hissed and slid open. I walked a few steps onto the metal platform and into the cold night air. The wooden ties stuck out only a few feet beyond the tracks; the struts of the bridge itself were made of wood. Metal against wood. Two steps and I was off the train; another and I was in the air. The train jerked to a complete stop, knocking me back into the door. I leaned out and looked ahead; the entire train was on the bridge; I saw the struts beneath us crumpling like toothpicks from the steel weight. At the first cracking, I would jump free from the train, fold up into a cannonball, and spin down. Praying to miss a boat.