The Joy of Killing Page 7

  “Hey,” she said.

  Her face was blurry, but there was a hint of a smile on it. I could feel a powerful thrust building inside me.

  “Hold still,” she whispered. “Very still. We’re OK.”

  WELL, NOW THAT I think about it, I might have seen the girl once again, after our night on the train, although the memory has until the last few minutes lain dormant as a walnut buried deep in the frozen Midwest countryside. I was a professor at City College in Booneville. I’d published a collection of short stories and one novel, the last about a philosophy professor at a major university who became a killer. In the novel, entitled The Professor, the teacher had developed his own peculiar theory of nature and the human experience. Research had convinced him that humans, like other animals, were essentially amoral. They behave in their perceived best interest 100 percent of the time. The only reason humans conform their behavior to social norms, like not stealing or committing murder, is that it’s in their perceived best interests to do so. Given the right situation, we will all commit murder, without hesitation—in defense of self, or others, or even country. Importantly, the Professor believed that mistakes in perception of self-interest could not be held to be the fault of the individual. If a man felt it necessary to rob a bank to survive, that perception and the impulse behind it were not of his own making. Punish him, if you will, for the best interest of society, but be honest about judging him morally for what he did. Was he involved in the construction of his own personality? Did he design himself to lack impulse control? A conscience? He did what he did because he was who he was.

  The Professor was able to shift himself into neutral, from where he could see everything clearly and intimately for what it was. Late one night he caught his wife in the act with his neighbor, in the hammock in their backyard. The next night he cut her throat with a straight razor while she lay asleep in their bed. A few hours later, after organizing his writings, he called the police and turned himself in. He defended himself at trial, was convicted and sentenced to death. The Professor caused quite a stir on campus and pissed off my feminist colleagues since they saw the novel as proposing a moral justification for murdering a woman because of her unfaithfulness. Which really wasn’t the point at all.

  I was walking down the hall of the liberal arts building on campus when I imagined I saw the girl. She was probably twenty feet ahead of me as we descended the wide steps in front of the main building, which opened onto the campus. She turned slightly, as if she sensed I was there. I saw in the face the same look of sensuality and mystery, sadness, although now it lacked the softness of youth. She had a leather bag over her shoulder and was wearing high heels. For a second our eyes touched. She smiled faintly, then looked away. She reached the bottom of the steps and disappeared quickly in the crowd. If it was her, which now I don’t think it was, I understand why she hurried off; she knew, as I knew, that the treasure of that night lay in its submersion in the past. The present would interrupt the story and perhaps destabilize it. The narratives of people’s lives are what hold them together. Crazy people are those whose narratives have fallen apart, leaving them in chaos. If the story of your life has played out, like mine has, and you’d care to write the end of it, then you do something like I’m doing. You sever yourself from the future, in hopes of finding a final, more enlightened present.

  Against the wall, a few feet away, sits my briefcase. Leather, with a strap and buckle, fat at the bottom. Battered from years of lugging books and papers around campus. I’d finally left the college five years ago, when the evident dishonesty in the pursuit of knowledge had become intolerable.

  The briefcase has a dark splotch on the leather flap that I don’t remember. Like something viscous had spilled on it. I tilt the lamp in its direction; it’s seeped into the leather, whatever it is.

  David had moved back to Booneville when his father died and took over his commercial printing business. The local paper occasionally ran pictures of him, the lock of hair, now gray, still falling provocatively over his forehead, the same half-ass smirk on his face.

  A heavy cloud is passing in front of the moon. I walk to the window and see that the garden is now lost in the shadow. As the cloud drifts by, the shadow lifts. Now I can see in the garden the beauty of what had been; a tangle of vines of faded roses climbing and descending the stone wall in wild profusion.

  I feel a twinge of panic. This wandering about in the darkness, while somewhat interesting, will waste the remains of my life. I turn away from the heavens, from the garden below, flick the light back on, and return to my seat. The typewriter has grown cold in my absence. I twist the lamp head to face the paper in the machine. I see the names typed in blood. I add “fedora,” because I never heard the detectives’ names. They pressed me hard, back and forth, occasionally glancing up at my parents as if to say we can’t get anywhere if your son keeps lying. They picked up the wallett, opened it, leaving the head shots of David and Judy Pauling next to each other on the glass table, as if their flat stares might shake me up. “Fedora” doesn’t fit within the smear, so I twist the knob and retype it in the middle of the stain a line lower. I was on the verge of pointing the finger at David, but I knew I was dead if I gave the detectives the slightest opening. Everything had been his fucking idea. When we had met Willie the second time and he suggested we go to his room, where the girl would supposedly meet us, I hesitated. David took me aside and told me Willie had introduced him to the girl the day before and she was a beautiful redhead with great tits and willing to do anything. The images in my head overwhelmed my skepticism, but I remember asking Willie if we couldn’t first meet the girl outside the drugstore. He said she worked at the state fair, but would meet us at his room in half an hour. Gina. I should have walked away right then.

  The first detective must have sensed my weakness, because he leaned forward, tried to be casual and sincere at the same time, and said nothing would happen to me, it was Willie they were after. He knew I was lying, but didn’t want to have to report me for it. His eyes tried to pin me, and I hesitated, then I caught the glisten of the scar on his face, running like a river from the lobe of ear across his cheek and to the edge of his chin, and was within an instant of asking him how he got it, when he dropped his hand hard on the table.

  I jumped, and saw from the corner of my eye that my parents also jumped. Both detectives sat stock still. The voice of the second detective, with the flat eyes, said, “You were in Willie’s room, weren’t you? With David Wright.”

  My mother dropped her head.

  I could remember quite clearly the two-block walk on the hot sidewalk to the seedy part of town. I walked behind the two of them, past small stucco houses with weed-filled yards and abandoned corner gas stations and old taverns with faded neon signs hanging askew over the front door. I could smell the meatpacking plant across the viaduct. I willed myself to turn around and walk back to the drugstore, but I couldn’t. The paint on the front door of the building was peeling. As Willie pulled the door open, I caught the eye of an elderly woman in the second-story window. I could feel sweat on the back of my neck. Willie held the door for me, and I knew it was my last chance. His thin lips disappeared in his oily smile.

  “No,” I replied to the cop.

  He began rubbing the knuckles on his left hand. Staring at me. I flipped open the top of the silver cigarette case and extricated a filter. He twitched like he was going to grab it from my hand, and I sat back immediately, out of his way. Problem was, the lighter was still on the table. My father turned and left the room. My mother glanced at him, then called his name. He had a golf game every Saturday morning. This would really piss her off. She called his name again, more annoyed, and swirled from the room. The second detective, with the small ears too far back, owner of the brown fedora—it had a red feather in the band, I see now—reached for the lighter, lifted it, leaned forward, and punched it. I hesitated. He pushed it out a little further, and the flame bent back. I finally lit the weed. It
was tasteless after the Lucky, but I sat back and exhaled. I held the cigarette between two fingers, like an adult. I felt saliva collect under my tongue.

  “We know about Judy Pauling,” the flat-eyed cop said calmly.

  I glanced at the photo on the glass top. I could smell the sweat in the small of her back. Why would David tell them about her, except to save his own skin? She had been his idea, too. I could feel myself weaken. Then get pissed. This shit would get all around school, the whole town.

  “Her dad’s not too happy,” the cop continued. “Says you fucked his daughter. She’s thirteen years old.”

  “We didn’t,” I said.

  The cop smiled. “Really? That’s not what she says.”

  I could hear voices from the kitchen. Mom was nailing the poor guy.

  Still eyes leaned in a little. “Your parents don’t have to know about Judy,” he said. “Just between us.”

  I NOTICE THE “a” in “fedora” is stuck in blood. I punch the key a couple of times. I hook the letter with my fingernail and release it, and it snaps back into place. I tap the letter; it sticks again.

  The girl on the train wanted what she wanted, and I was handy, I understand that. But that’s how love happens, isn’t it? The minute she descended on me both of our breaths caught, and we held there for an instant, until she closed her eyes and exhaled in a soft sound of pleasure. Her hands pressed into my shoulders. She lifted up a little, and I could feel the tug of her. I glanced at her image in the window; her head was back, her throat exposed. I touched it, let my fingers slide up and down, until my thumb and forefinger closed lightly on the ridges. I pressed in a little, and then tightened the touch. Her eyes opened in a cauldron of heat. “Do it,” she whispered. My hips jerked into her. She bucked, and I slammed again, grasping her rear with both hands. Fingers slid around to touch the crack, which I could feel open with the pressure. “Good,” she whispered. Her hips rocked a little, massaging me. Back and forth, up and down, back and forth, up and down, until I would slam into her, pulling down on her hips at the same time, and she would hold and shudder a little, and I would stare at the whiteness of her throat reflected in the subtle starlight. I let go of watching and thinking about what I was seeing. I pushed in with my thumbs until I could feel the edge of her pubic hair. My thumbs slid down, touched the lips themselves. I spread the flesh apart, pressed onto the nub. “That’s it,” she said. She lifted up until I was barely inside her. There she froze, shuddered, tossed her head back, rocked once, twice, and dropped down hard onto me, with a primitive moan. Her rear was quivering in my hands. Her head fell forward. She slowly brought her eyes into focus.

  She whispered, “Did we wake anyone?”

  “Only the baby,” I said.

  ALL KEYS ARE now working, I note. And the bloodstained paper has been removed and a clean one inserted. Reading what I just wrote, I see the slenderest thread of something new, something more than sexual pleasure.

  WHEN DID I decide to come here to the house on the lake? I sort back through the past several days. I dropped off Thesis—a long-haired orange male cat I’d had for five years—at a friend’s house with a bag of cat food and enough money for five years’ worth of medical care and food. I unhooked my telephone and tossed the answering machine down the garbage chute in the hall. The hours after that are unclear, and they’re gradually becoming less and less clear, which is all right. It’s not the final days I seek to understand. I admit I didn’t fuck Shelley Duvall, and so what if I was cheated of the experience of having taken another’s life? If the images would simply hold in pattern, march across the sky in some sort of order, to an end yet unseen but certainly there. They never have before, I chastise myself, why would you think they might now? I shake my head over the fact that I could have driven all the way up here to the little village and stood on the front porch of our vacation house and looked the caretaker in the eye before I remembered Joseph. Jesus, I could remember the color of Judy Pauling’s eyes, picture the amused look on David’s face when I finally confronted him about the detectives.

  AFTER DROPPING OFF Thesis, I parked the old Chevy convertible in front of my second wife’s apartment, with a note on the windshield, and called a cab from a corner grocery. A chattering Somali driver took me to the only car rental place in Booneville. I thought of stopping by David’s print shop. It wasn’t necessary, I told myself. But it would be right, I thought. Jar the story into its final reality.

  In fact, I would like to see Joseph and search out the truth of what happened the long-ago afternoon of his demise. Once he’d left in the canoe, we seemed to forget all about him. Someone would call out a game—first one across the river and back—and then someone another game—who could dive farthest out from the dock—until we were on the verge of fatigued hysteria. My shoulders were burned and I had a slice on the bottom of my foot, but I wouldn’t be the first one to quit. Finally, someone said, “Hey, where’s Joseph?” The sun had slid to the top of the pines, and the air was cooling. We looked out over the lake. No sign of him. Sally shot a glance at me, as if I were somehow complicit because I had gone over with him a few days earlier. We walked to the edge of the lake for a better view, searched for a shadow on the water. The life jacket lay flat on the sand. I backed up a few feet. It struck me that Sally might suggest that we, or at least I, jump in the second canoe and go look for him. “He probably stayed over there, at the camp,” I said. “I would have. Look.” I pointed at a dark blotch spreading in the middle of the lake. A good squall could dump a sizeable sailboat, not to mention a canoe. The others agreed. Sally stared at the water, glanced up at the sky, now darkening, and took off in a dead run in the direction of her family’s cabin.

  A READING LIGHT flicked on a few rows ahead. People rustled about in their seats. An elderly lady wearing a dark shawl padded up the aisle to the restroom. The only sound was the relentless clickety-clack of the steel wheels skipping over the cracks in the steel rails, and the steady breathing of the sleeping girl, whose head lay on my chest. Outside, the sky had deepened, although the moon was not to be seen. Dark forms flew by like ghosts. The girl sighed gently, as if she were in a sweet dream. Her hand rose to my neck, and her fingers spread wide. I breathed in the strange smell of sex. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift with the sensations. The clinking sound of the Zippo opening brought me around. I cracked an eye: it was the elderly lady, lighting a cigarette with my lighter. She glanced at us as she puffed, and then padded on down the aisle. The peace of our little capsule was shattered by a shaft of light flashing around the inside of the car. Racing around a curve up ahead was a jittery white moon. Two whistles screamed in unison. The girl stirred. I brushed her hair back. Her eyes opened.

  “Another train,” I said.

  Around the white eye you could barely make out a ring of black steel. The monster was aimed right at our very gut; it would lift us off the tracks and toss us over. The girl shifted in her seat, and her arms tightened around me. The white eye lit us up like ghosts. At the last moment it screeched a few degrees off, and I could feel the whoosh of the air as the black steel flashed by. Not a separation of more than ten feet, I thought. The girl sat up. The twin whistles shrieked again, and the trains rocked violently. The metal racketing vibrated the skin on my face. I placed a hand on the window. The girl placed one next to it. Boxcars flashed between our thumbs.

  NOW THE SPACE key on the typewriter has stopped working. I tap it, nothing, so I tap it harder and still nothing. So, it will all run together. I hold my finger up in front of the space where the key hits and punch a key, which whacks my finger, and the carriage moves one space. It’ll take too long. Still, I feel the beginning edge of a peaceful wave. I’ve lived long enough to get a good taste of life. Fifty-five years, two wives, no children, a novel, a variety of lovers, lots of blind alleys, vivid moments of piercing insight, walls of sightlessness. Friends, of a sort. Students who went out of their way to express gratitude, although fewer in the latter years, wh
en my emphasis shifted to the nature and origin of violence in the human animal. I weaved relentlessly toward an inescapable determinism, which, if followed faithfully, could only lead one to conclude that there is no such thing as moral responsibility.

  I would nod to one of the football players in the class and ask: Suppose you were born with this need for very young girls. Would you not curse the god who made you that way? Would you not change yourself if you could? You wouldn’t believe it was your choice, would you? Are we not helpless in the face of our fate? As we did not make ourselves, so we cannot change ourselves. All else is delusion. The discomfort on the students’ faces usually began to show by the second class.

  “So what would you do with the guy who rapes little girls?” a student asked in frustration.

  “What would you do?” I responded.

  “Give him the death penalty. Kill him.”

  “To make yourself feel better.”

  “To stop him from doing it again.”

  “Life in prison would do that.”

  “He deserved it.”

  “But his death would make you feel better, wouldn’t it?”

  I could never understand their reluctance to admit the obvious. It’s why we do everything we do.

  “Uh-huh.”

  And on it went. Several of the girls and one or two boys dropped the class. Others added when the word got out. I experimented with different methods of making what I thought was a fairly simple and obvious point: nothing transcends nature, nothing exists outside it, or is separate from it. I would pose a hypothetical. Imagine, I told a student, that you have a six-year-old daughter. One night you are awakened to a noise; you search the house and find her missing from her bedroom. You grab a knife from the kitchen. You find a man holding her on the floor in the garage behind your house. The man has her knees apart and is bending over her.