The Joy of Killing Read online

  On the other side of the river were the lights of a small town, huddled on the banks. Behind us, blackness. I stuck the Lucky between my lips, clinked open the Zippo, cupped my hand around it, and struck the wheel with my thumb. The flame bent toward me. The first pull burnt my lungs. The smoke swirled off into the stars. I held the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and waited for the cracking sounds beneath me. I took another drag. The door hissed behind me, and I felt a presence.

  “Hi.”

  It was the girl. She was taller than I thought.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked. Before I could answer, she glanced down at the river and asked, “Are you going to jump?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why are we stopped?”

  I shrugged. I felt a blast of desire. My hand rose and touched her neck. I leaned in to kiss her and felt the heat from her lips. After a few seconds, she pulled back. She was trembling. Her eyes held onto me. The sadness was gone and something else was there.

  I’ve never been able to put words to that look, and I’m not doing much better now. I can say the moment expanded into hours, yet lasted only a second. In her eyes, beyond the beauty and the heat, beyond the sadness, was a need so deep it held me fast in place. There was for an instant a communion of trust and belief, of gaining freedom from some unseen devils. Her eyes were an invitation. Her trembling hand touched mine. I willed my hand to turn and encompass it and hold it tightly. Instead I reached for the railing. I glanced away for a second, at the lights on the far edge of the river.

  I couldn’t have understood it at the time, I think now, as the keys strike the paper. She did, though. She saw it. She had made an offering, and I had fled. But, on my behalf, I have to say giving into her eyes felt scarier than jumping off the platform into the river.

  I feel it now, in my fingertips, her trembling, and I believe it is spreading into the rods and the keys, for the letters are smudged and uneven. I lift my hands, hold them in the air, then seek to force them down onto the keys to continue banging out the story and the scene as if I had grasped her hand and gone with her, wherever she led.

  There is no sound, I realize. Not the ticking on the window, not the rattling from below, not even my own breathing. Absolute stillness. I listen harder, then stand up to hear the chair scrape. Nothing. I twist the roller to hear the clicking. I see the sounds, but I hear nothing. Complete silence. The branches are knocking silently against the window. I say Joseph’s name, but nothing sounds. I say it again, louder, “Joseph!” and still nothing. “Motherfucker.” I bang my knuckles on the desk. I bang them again, and listen hard. I snap my fingers, I whistle. Has the world gone silent? I walk to the door, open it, and poke my head into the darkness. Nothing. I needed to go down the stairs, to the bathroom, but not in a soundless space. Whatever was rattling and scraping down there might be hanging around at the bottom of the stairs. The thought brings me to panic. I need to hear something, anything. A silent world is unbearable; it is noise that keeps you glued together, keeps the borders secure, the floors and ceilings in place. There must be a switch to flip. I kick the door shut. I turn back into the room. I inhale a large breath, and on the exhale hum soundlessly “row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.” I close my eyes, snap them open. My hands are someone else’s, thick and bulky, like a farmer’s. I spread the fingers wide, see a shakiness, like leaves in a wind. I press them onto the table, hard, until the trembling stops. You don’t suddenly go deaf, I think; it’s some sort of a hysterical reaction. I walk to the window. Lift the small, rusted latch on the right edge of the oval, swing the window out. The night seems sharp and clear, scrubbed free of the grime of perception. The branches framing the scene, black and spindly, seem tightly woven together as if by an overly industrious spider. The moon has turned a bright white and skimmed a little closer to the house. I can see the hatch marks of the bats on the surface quite clearly now. I reach out to touch the very edge. The almost-round orb holds perfectly still, until an icy tingle touches my fingertips. Suddenly, I see a million years back into the universe, a depth beyond imagination, as if I were sailing into the timeless glitter of the ancient, boundless heavens. The sense of isolation vanishes; whichever way I turn are endless dimensions of stars. The dark rim of the moon glows orange, until it finally catches fire, and the entire orb begins a slow spin forward. The universe is silence, I realize; the stars don’t whir as they sail on their paths; the planets hurl soundlessly through space. It’s neither cold nor hot out there, neither good nor bad, full nor empty. I feel a searing peace. A tremendous wave of gratitude overcomes me, and my eyes well up. Knowing is a false God. Understanding a ruse. Feel yourself a member of the universe, properly belonging, as much as a star or a galaxy, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto, and you will be free because you will know once and for all that nothing matters. You can live that feeling as you walk silently through the garden and climb the stone wall, and standing there, tall and straight, perusing the curvature of the universe and the mighty wave of stars overhead, tipping, tipping, ever so slightly forward, until your balance is gone, and forward you tumble into space. Not Joseph, or the detective, or Willie Benson, or David, or the look in my mother’s eye, or even the girl on the train, goes with you. Shrug your shoulders and it will all fall away like a cloak. Without the sound of the wind, or your cry, you will feel nothing as your form dissembles and your spirit flutters off. A soul at peace in the smooth lake at the end of the path. Clarity is an illusion. And a cruel one at that.

  A puff of air brushes my cheek. A touch. The girl on the train. My eyes close. So she is alive, somewhere, existing in the same moment under the same godless heavens. I shake my head. My moment of stillness and silence is over. I see that the story needs to be finished before anyone, even the girl on the train, finds peace. As I am closing the window, I hear a loud tap, the sound of a key on paper. I say the girl’s name aloud. I’ve known it all these years. It’s lain like a crumpled flower somewhere in the fecund subconscious.

  THE PROFESSOR

  IT’S TIME TO venture forth from my little warren. I need descend only one flight of stairs, to the bathroom in the middle of the hall. I think of the kitchen, but I’m neither hungry nor thirsty, and I’m not sure how many lights work. The rattling sound most certainly came from the kitchen, although the last time it seemed a little louder, a little closer, perhaps at the bottom of the stairs. I spot a broken stave leaning in a far corner. I walk over and pick it up. I swing at an imaginary animal scurrying across the floor, squeaking and belching, and catch it in the head as it leaps. It drops in a broken heap. I see I’ve caught a splinter in the web between my first two fingers, and blood has oozed onto my palm. Not good, if the thing is a blood seeker. I whack it in the head a couple more times, let the stave fall to the floor.

  Leaving the room might bring me around a little, but I dare not lose that elusive linear sense necessary to tell the story. Why peace can only come with understanding I don’t know. Perhaps in the end I’ll get that as well. I kick the chair with my foot. The girl on the train—so beautiful, so desperate, now floats free in my head, not in reproach but in yearning. What I wouldn’t give to change that story, to hold her hand and turn to her rather than away, into the night. You couldn’t handle it, I think. The point above all is to stay put together, isn’t it? What good can come if you end up scattered in pieces on the floor, a puppet whose strings have been cut? So you fuck up, so you’re on the run, so that’s life for most people. A little wisdom, late to come in life, brought you here, at last, and for that you should feel a little gratitude. Awaiting you now is the rest of the night on the train with the girl.

  When I sit down to resume typing I notice a bloody smear on the stack of fresh paper. I insert the sheet into the machine and spin the roller, until the top of the smear is right where the key hits. I tap out letters to see the effect: My second wife. Sally. Joseph. Blood tells the story, doesn’t it? I lick my palm. The images r
oil in my head, stimulated and freed up by the taste. I type the girl’s name into the red. It’s a stunning sight: Her name in blood. Next to Joseph, like they belonged together. What had become of them? Joseph had screeched to a breathless halt, while the two of us, the girl and I, sailed on. She struggled and fought and loved and lost and had grown so disconsolate by middle age that she let herself go so no man would want her. To no avail, though. Every fucked-up male was drawn to her. The need to take a life, to see someone’s blood flow from their corpus, to know the person’s very cessation of being resulted from a decision occurring in my brain, flowing out through my hands, abated somewhat as I grew older, but never completely. I type Willie’s name into the blood next to the girl’s. It’s obscene in a lovely way. I strike him through, and then type him in again, not so close this time. David arranged another meeting with Willie, again on the assurance that this time he would get us a girl. I remember the wet July heat boiling up from the summer sidewalk as we walked the few blocks to the edge of downtown where he lived in a rundown two-story yellow brick apartment building, the type found in every town over a few thousand, for drifters, ex-cons, any sort of misfit. Although I wondered how this guy could manage a girl for us, the idea of walking away never really materialized. My bike was locked up in front of the drug store only a few blocks away.

  A cold blast of air swept up from the river. The train jerked back, and then slipped forward, screeching and creaking, wobbling back and forth. I looked around for the girl, but she’d gone back inside. Given up on me, I thought, which was probably just as well. In those few moments I had felt the constraints of the involvement, the pressure in her eyes. Now I could ride with the Ghost Riders across the devil’s endless sky, hook back up with the train bandits in their hideout in a distant canyon. The train began to roll a little faster, and the lights of the little town on the far edge of the river grew brighter, and I wondered how many people in the houses there were eating or watching TV or sleeping. I wondered why I still felt nothing, despite the bitter wind. I stood there until the train was over the bridge and the clickety-clack sound returned to normal. Finally, I felt the chill of the night invade my bones. I punched the button for the door. Shivering, I hunched my shoulders and pushed in, only to have the door close on its own and catch me in the chest, pinning me to the frame, half in and half out. I pushed against it, but it only jammed harder. I flung around for the button, but my frozen hands could feel nothing. Suddenly the door snapped open, and there stood the girl. She had been waiting for me. “You poor thing,” she said and wrapped me up in her arms. She held me like that, moving her arms gently up and down my back. She lifted my chin, wiped the moisture from the corner of my eyes, and kissed me. She pressed her whole body into me. She led me back to her seat and motioned for me to sit in the chair by the widow. I reached for her, but she pressed my arms down. “Trust me,” she said. I lay my head back and forced an exhale.

  Her hands slid down and undid my belt and shot the zipper down. In the midst of the struggle I had forgotten about my dick, and now I could feel nothing of it. I flexed it, but still nothing. Frozen solid. Her hand slipped beneath my underwear. Suddenly, there it was. She leaned in to kiss me, and I pulled her in until our lips were smashed together. I found her tongue and sucked until most of it was in my mouth. She pulled my dick all the way out of my pants, and I could see by the way she looked at it that what was coming wasn’t another blow job. She held it lightly, turned in her seat and shifted a thigh over me. “Jesus,” I whispered. She sat straight up, and I held my breath as my dick disappeared under her skirt.

  I could feel the heat of her. She tossed a wave of hair off her shoulder. I fought back the impulse to thrust up into her. Her hands pressed down on my shoulders. I slipped my hands under her skirt and placed them on her thighs, and allowed them to slip up to just about where her panties would be. Her look told me not a millimeter further.

  I STAND UP abruptly. The scrape of the chair on the floor is the howl of an angry banshee. I see the wooden canoe, twisting in the waves, and realize I can’t remember what happened to it, if it finally floated ashore, or somebody pulled it out. It was ours, I remember now. Our dad had bought it at the end of the previous summer, and we had hauled it here strapped on top of our station wagon. Our name was painted on the green bow in white letters. It carried two paddles and two life vests. I see a vest lying on the sand where Joseph had tossed it. Bright orange. It would have brought him back, and all this suffering would have been avoided. Just because you wanted to impress the girls. You had them anyway; they loved you for your carefree arrogance. We didn’t look for our canoe. As I said, we left the day after the reception and never came back.

  The bathroom is in the middle of the hall, next to my old room. I have only to walk down the stairs, unlock the door, and it’s a few steps on my left. I hesitate to leave my warren, and not just because of the strange sounds coming from below. It’s more that I feel content in here, firmly in the spell of the images of the past, as unsettling and untrustworthy as they are. I have very few possessions left; I’d disposed of most of what I owned over the past couple of months, except my car, a green and white 1956 Chevy Bel Air convertible, which I said in a note on the breakfast table should go to my second wife. She liked to fuck in the backseat of the car at outdoor theaters, top down. Her goal was to screw under the stars in fifteen different theaters, and we eventually made it at the Night Vue Drive-In on the outskirts of Council Bluffs. We were together five years. She was the cello teacher in the college conservatory and played first position in the Des Moines Symphony. She liked to show me how she could masturbate with her bow, playing the Ninth on her clitoris, and coming in a long screech in the tumultuous finish of the fourth movement. One spring morning we were drinking coffee at the breakfast table, a light spring breeze raising the curtains, and she said we were over. I nodded, and she got up and packed her instrument and a few things and was gone by noon.

  Without David there would have been no Willie Benson, and without Willie Benson there would have been no detectives, no fedoras on the glass coffee table. David could talk his way out of whatever he did, by getting you to see how it made such perfect sense in his head. He denied having fucked my first wife, other than the night I caught them, and I had believed him, although she later confessed otherwise. Just like he denied having given the cops my name, and I let it go.

  I’m not an angry person. Nothing burns in my gut. I seek only a peaceful finish; but perhaps peace comes if you no longer struggle for it, if you give up the effort of trying to keep all the pieces in place, the wires hooked up, and let the world stream through you as it will. A movement catches the corner of my eye; the knob on the door turns, ever so slightly. I stare at it. No one could get up the creaky stairs without me hearing them. No person, anyway. Who else could turn it? A raccoon, with its tiny black leathery fingers? I walk to the door. I twist the knob and jerk the door open. Nothing, although I can’t see to the bottom of the stairs, where something could be crouching. I flip the light switch. Nothing. Flip it back. It had worked earlier. I remember the strange shadow cast by the hanging bulb on the walls. I flip the switch rapidly. “Fuck you,” I call out. There is a small bolt on the door at the bottom of the stairs. The stairs creak under my weight. At the bottom stair, I see that the bolt has been pulled back. I clearly remember jamming the thing into the notch, and then checking it. I run the scene backward in my head. I twist the knob and listen. I push the door open, and there is a clicking, as if something is running off. Joseph had a large black lab, I remember. “Joseph,” I whisper, and then again, a little bit louder. “Joseph!” Dead silence. “I’m sorry,” I say. Moonlight is slicing in through a window at the end of the hall. I see the door to my old room; across from it is the door to the bathroom. Something might be waiting in the doorway. Fuck it, I think. I don’t have to pee anymore. I step back, pull the door shut, and toss the tiny bolt into the slot. I hold still and listen. I ascend the stairs slowly, and s
top and listen again at the top.

  I return to the table. The stack of paper next to the Underwood is an inch high, yet the story is not half finished. I’ve never mentioned the girl on the train to a soul, until now. I miss her, yet I can feel her with me, here, tonight. I read back my last few lines, where she swings her leg over me and prepares to settle down on my dick, which is on edge from the wet heat of her. She leaned over, placed her hands on my shoulders, and kissed me. “Ready?” she whispers. I nod, and I feel her pussy brush over me, and then brush back. I wanted to touch it. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and lowered herself. I moved my hands slightly up her thighs until I could feel her bottom flattening a little on my thighs. I squeezed it lightly. The girl held me gently inside her. The sensation rolled up through me like a rough tide. Suddenly, still as a scarecrow, she squeezed me gently from the underside. I jerked involuntarily.