The Joy of Killing Page 8

  I kept the story going in vivid detail, until finally the student jumped to his feet, raised the knife overhead, and lunged at the figure on the floor. With a cry, he brought the blade down into the man’s back. Several women began weeping. Others looked away or walked out. I later asked those who remained to write up their version of the incident and their reaction to it. No one felt anything for the man; no one, despite my imprecations, saw him simply as the product of a careless or ill-intentioned creator. Suppose it was a python who had wrapped itself around the girl as she slept in her crib and squeezed the life from her? I asked. Would you blame the python? Would you fall into a fit of rage and stab it full of holes? No? Why not? Nature, they’d reply, as if man himself were somehow unnatural.

  THE SENTENCES ARE beginning to have a frantic feel to them, as if they might tumble off the end of the paper. I raise the cover and poke around inside, until I find a little rod that seems to have slipped out of its hole. I manage to force it back in. Tap, tap. The space key works. My fingers are covered with ink. I wipe them on my pants and see what looks like a red stain just above the knee on the right leg. I poke at it with a thumb; it’s dry, but not crusty. I press in and feel a sharp pain. I sort back through the day. Not surprisingly, my narrative is sparse and uneven. The gaps are spaces with no hints around the edges. The cat. The car. A hot midday sun with a thread of cool air in it. My briefcase on the kitchen table. An open newspaper next to it. On the kitchen counter I see a sharp wide blade attached to a black handle with two rivets in it, sticking point-up from the utensil box on the dish rack. I squint in my mind, trying to collect the pieces, sort out the puzzle. I had awoken this morning to a cool autumn sun. I was writing an article for Human Nature magazine on the wellspring of human motivation, but I had lingered beyond the submission date and had found within myself little desire to bend back into it. It seemed like a woman had crept from the bed in the first edge of dawn and slipped into her clothes and out of the room. But whom? The sun was midway up the east window by the time I swung out of bed. The slanting rays lit the living room on fire, yet the wood floors were still cold. Draft pages of my article were scattered on the living room floor as if flung about by a child. Two chairs were pulled out at the round breakfast room table by the front window. At each place was an empty wine glass. Then the briefcase, and the newspaper, laying half open. It didn’t add up. I didn’t feel a woman on my skin. Taste her. I picked up a wine glass, spotted a coral smudge on the rim. Of course. She always wore the same color. I could hear the door close, the high heels clacking down the wooden stairs. I walked into the small kitchen and set the glasses in the pocked porcelain sink. Thesis brushed through my legs. Sun-fire caught the blade of the knife. It was incredibly beautiful. I flicked a finger down the edge.

  The flow of images is, as always, somewhat suspect. I remember feeding Thesis from a half-empty tin of tuna in the fridge, then stepping to the window. The scene outside was very bright, almost painfully so, and the street seemed quite distant, as if of another world. A woman in a station wagon pulled into a spot in front of the small grocery next to the café and got out. I looked more closely. I recognized the thick chestnut hair pulled back and woven into a single braid, the gentle sway in her thin body as she stepped on the curb. Years ago her son had taken my Philosophy of Violence class. She had come to my office to talk about his reaction to the content. She was more curious than upset. Had I been subject to violence as a child? Did I believe violence was a natural state or behavior? My answers must have turned her on, for we ended up having sex on my desk. Her sweaty bottom printed on the proof of an article I was editing. The next year the school installed window air conditioners.

  Now I think I might have been mixing up the sex part with another woman, a colleague. It really doesn’t make any difference, does it? It got me where I am, which is not a particularly bad place, and if you rework it, if you rework any story, you could end up somewhere else. Which is how I got here, in this tiny moonlit room, with inky fingers and what appears to be a bloodstained tear on my jeans. Because I reworked the story a little.

  I remember turning from the kitchen window as the burbling of the percolator on the counter behind me reached a fever pitch. I didn’t drink coffee, but I liked the sound of it perking and the smell of it, which wafted through my small place like an almond perfume. Bright and shiny, with a glass top, the percolator was a wedding gift from the first marriage. My wife and I were driving home from a party when she told me she was leaving. It was two years after I had caught her fucking David. She was leaving to be with him.

  I grabbed the small brass handle on the kitchen window and jerked it up. A curtain blew in my face. I pushed it away, felt an autumn sting on my face, and stared through watery eyes at the door to the small grocery. It swung open, and the woman walked out, arms full of sacks. She lifted the rear gate on the station wagon and bent in a little as she set the sacks down. I leaned out and watched as she opened the driver’s door, got in, and looked over her shoulder to back up. I raised a hand. She caught it, and our eyes held for an instant. She smiled faintly and cranked the wheel. It’s not her, I thought as she backed out and pulled away. Just like it wasn’t the girl on the train in the main hall on campus years earlier. Just like there are no strange noises in this old house.

  I picked up the wine glasses and examined them for a hint of coral on the rim. Nothing. Thesis jumped up on the counter and sniffed them, as if to help out. I lifted him to the floor. The answer lay in the other room, on the table. I glanced at the glowing tip of the knife as I passed by. The living room was awash in dust motes. The brass clasp on the battered leather briefcase sitting on the white plastic cloth shone like a gold star. Next to it was a square glass ashtray with a half-smoked butt in the crevice. Next to that was the Booneville County Register. The front section was open. I walked a step or two into the room. Turn around, I thought, go out the door. I stepped closer. A headline at the top of the page stated: “Man Found Dead in Alley.” Beneath it was an image of an elderly man, probably in his mid-eighties, with wisps of hair across his pate and thin, almost invisible lips. It was him: Willie Benson, the man who had promised to get us girls. The same sharp eyes. His name was written beneath the photo; the lines read that an elderly Booneville man had been found dead in an alley between First and Main. A paramedic reported that his throat appeared to have been slit and that he had stab wounds in the back of the neck. The article read that Benson was eighty-six and had a criminal record, but didn’t say what it was. Police had no leads. And didn’t give a fuck, I thought. No one gives a fuck. Which is too bad. Willie was who he was. Certainly, were it up to him, he would have chosen a different configuration of needs and desires. You didn’t have to forgive Willie, or even sympathize with him; you just had to understand his origin, to place him along the continuum of nature, in which there is no murder, in which there are no unnatural acts.

  The steel radiator on the far wall of the living room began clanging. In my single room at prep school, the radiators had hissed and banged away half the night in the winter months. It wasn’t that cold in my apartment, but suddenly, every radiator in the place was clanging, a terrible, punishing three-note orchestra. I clapped my hands over my ears. I yelled at them to stop. They clanged happily on until my skull bones were vibrating. I sank to my knees, touched my forehead to the floor. The clanging slowly lessened, grew fainter. The steam vents whistled, first the one in the living room, then the ones in the bedroom and the bathroom. All together they shrieked. I rolled over on my back and wiped the tears from my eyes. So now he’s dead. After all these years, someone finally stuck him. The sound of laughter from my throat relaxed me.

  I GLANCE OVER at the briefcase on the floor. Inside, I suspect, is the rest of the newspaper. Perhaps other things. I press my thumb hard into the tear in my jeans. Even with that, the images refuse to loosen up and roll. I see Thesis lying on my stomach, looking at me with interest. I want to scratch his head, but my arms are stuck
to the floor. That’s where the show ends. I flick off the lamp. The moon has grown so large and bright the room is aglow.

  When did I know the true story of Willie and David and me? Do I know it now? It floats loose in the liquid of my brain, never clear and sharp, never hooked up, never logical, never appearing when you think. Looking back, it—the story—is a feeling wrapped in gauze. The girl with the alluring pain-struck eyes had sensed it. It was why she wanted me. A communion of damaged souls, I see now. Even if it wasn’t my idea; even if I hadn’t participated in anything, I had been there, I had watched it, and said nothing. It had clung unseen to me every day since, like the smell from the meatpacking plants on the edge of town.

  ON THE TRAIN, I dozed while the girl dreamed. When I came around, I had a thirst and a scratchy feeling inside my skull. Her head on my chest felt like a smooth stone. My hands had freed themselves of her. I could be anyone in this seat. Any boy. Nothing by morning. I was lost in her flesh. Lost to myself. Uneasy, uncertain, uncomfortable, unsafe, I wanted free of it, of her, to be sitting across the aisle, forgotten, put back together, empty-headed except for patterns of translucent stars whirling about in the formless heavens. I touched her head.

  “I need to get a drink,” I whispered.

  Her eyes opened.

  “Sorry,” I said. She murmured something, lifted her head. Her hair was tousled; her lips unpainted. I avoided her eyes. It all seemed kind of tawdry, after the fact. Like we should both wash up.

  “Hey,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  “I’ve got to pee.” I looked at her, hoping for release, but instead saw disappointment. She withdrew her hand, and I stood and stepped shakily into the aisle. I made my way forward, touching the seats to steady myself, seeing everything as if it were a sharply different reality. My legs felt weak, my breathing faint. It should be better than this, I thought. Your first blow job, your first piece of ass. You should be flying in glory.

  I opened a door to a small, dimly lit vestibule. Along one wall was a fabric-covered bench. Across the space was a small, shiny metal sink, and over that a long mirror with a light above it. A narrow door led to the toilet itself. The room smelled of Pine-Sol. Lights flashed in the window as the train began to slow. The train jerked to a stop. I pressed my face against the window, encircled it with my hands. The light on a tall pole illuminated a small brick building with a sign on it, which read in black letters: “Smithville.” Two men in wool caps and heavy jackets were throwing bags of mail from a boxcar onto a two-wheeled wooden cart. One of the men waved and shouted something and the train jerked back hard. My shoulder banged into the window frame. As we began creeping up the track, I saw the men pushing the mail cart into a doorway at the side of the station. We passed an unpaved street with a few lights and a café and bank, and after that rows of small wood frame houses, each one as dark as the other. The spindly, ghostly shape of a water tower loomed up behind them, and then Smithville was gone and we were slicing through rolling fields of grain.

  I stepped into a room so tiny I couldn’t straighten up. I steadied myself in front of the metal toilet and unzipped my pants. I worked my dick out. For all the pounding and throbbing and excitement not too long ago, it now seemed a small, harmless thing. I shook it a few times, to bring it around, and then remembered I really didn’t have to pee. I concentrated, and when a weak stream finally began I reached out with my other hand and twisted the handle on the wall. The metal flap snapped open, and down the chute I could see racing blurs of rocks and wooden ties. The clickety-clack was suddenly a tremendous clatter of machine guns, and the whoosh of air sucked the pee out in a mist. The metal racking grew louder and harder, until thinking became impossible. I stood at an angle over the toilet and allowed the shattering noise to flow through my legs and chest and up into my cheek and jaw bones, until I was rattling right along with it in perfect balance. My hand dropped from the handle, and the flap snapped shut. I was left in a deafening silence, and I fell back against the wall.

  MY EYES OPEN slowly. I’ve been nodding off. A sliver of panic rushes my throat; how long was I gone? How much time have I left? This drifting away in the middle of scenes is unfortunate. Time runs in a straight line, and the end of the line is the end of the line. The images splice and separate and hook up and fly away and crumble and linger in large and small forms; like right now, the Zippo is shining crisply in the light of the moon. On one side is the Marine Corps emblem; I remember how I used to rub it with my thumb and think of the boys who died on the sands and rocks of Iwo Jima. “Hard rain gonna fall,” Leon Russell used to sing. Toward the end of her life, my mother told me what my father was like before the war on that island broke him. Tough, smart, ambitious—a leader. The Zippo? He had brought it home, along with a carbine, a .45 sidearm, and a Jap helmet. (I can feel the top of the lighter snap open, hear the unmistakable clink, which is different from the clunk when you snap it shut. I can hear them one after the other. Clink. Clunk.) My father never spoke of the war or what happened on that island, but I heard the story from a friend of his who was there. My father’s squad was out of ammunition, and they were getting heavy fire from a company of Japs on a ridge about two hundred yards away. Two of his men were shredded by a wave of machine gun fire. My father rose from his foxhole with a bayonet on the end of his rifle and charged screaming up the hill. He gutted one Jap, and then another, and covered in blood he charged straight into the machine gun nest and stabbed two more in the chest, taking one bullet in his thigh and another in his shoulder. Afterward, when the Japs had pulled back, he returned to the enemy lying on the ground and stuck them one by one through the heart. When he got back to Booneville two years later, he veered away from a planned career in the law and ran a hardware store on the main street of town until he died of a heart attack at age forty-nine.

  I am caught by the orange glow of the moon. I stand and walk around the table to the window. The stars seem to have fallen away from it, leaving it in a dark hole. Half the night left, at most. A couple of hours. Nothing in this story will stand the light of day. The strip of light in the water is wider and softer and tinged orange as well. Joseph had floated into shore that night, whether in the moonlight or not I don’t know. Washed up in branches, face up, eyes open, he would have stared into eternity.

  I tilt to the left, to accommodate the jerk of the train to the right. I see the boy in the vestibule sitting on the bench and laying his head back. Trying to calm the swirling images in his head. He knows but he doesn’t know; he sees but he doesn’t see. He doesn’t want to leave, go back down the aisle to his seat, the girl. He’s best alone now.

  I SNAPPED THE door to the repair shop behind me. It was the day after the detectives’ visit, and I had come to confront David about why he had ratted me out. He was talking to the postman, who was taking a lawn mower engine apart on the bench. When he saw my face, David stopped talking. He tilted his head and walked out the back door. I followed him. The screen door slapped shut behind me.

  “The cops came to my house,” I said.

  He pulled a pack of sunflower seeds from his jean jacket and stuck a handful in his mouth. He began cracking the shells and spitting them onto the small cement apron, already stained with butts and spittle.

  “Yeah, mine, too,” he said.

  “Why’d you give them my name?”

  “They already had it,” he said.

  “It was your fucking wallett,” I said. “They showed it to me, along with your picture of Judy Pauling.”

  “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Willie’s in jail.”

  Yeah, he is. Your friend. You set it up. It was your idea. So I said it: “It was your goddamn idea.”

  “Take it easy,” he said. “Have a weed.” He pulled a pack of tall Pall Malls from his shirt pocket, shook it, held it out. I grabbed it out of reflex. I was supposed to take it easy? David struck a match. The weed stayed at my side.

  “Hey,” he said. “I talked to Judy this morning. She’s up for a
party.”

  “She told the cops we fucked her,” I said.

  He chuckled. “The cops made that up. I was with her last night. She asked about you. And,” he said, “it was your wallett, not mine.”

  “Bullshit,” I burst out. “I saw the fucking thing. It was yours.”

  He shook out the match, dropped it on the cement.

  “It was your fucking idea,” I insisted.

  “It was your wallett,” he responded. “How do you think the cops got to you? They talked to you first.”

  THE BOY SEATED on the bench in the vestibule on the train doesn’t know any of this; or if he knows it, it’s not connected with any filament leading to his consciousness. Same here: I couldn’t have told you about the sunflower seeds or the Pall Mall or Judy Pauling. The wallett? Not that either; nor that he claimed the one the cops had was mine. My narrative ran the way I’ve described: I went along with it because it was his idea. The detective with the dead eyes, or the one with the river on his cheek; neither of them said the thing was mine. They didn’t say either way, as best I can remember. As a matter of fact, I still don’t believe it was mine. It was David’s idea, it was his friend, and it was his wallett. And everything else that happened that afternoon was his doing.

  I could hear the sputtering of a lawn mower engine in the shop behind me. My green-and-white Schwinn, with my baseball glove hanging on a handlebar, was leaning against a pole in front of the shop. I was ready to head out for a game of pickup in the lot behind the junior high.

  A queasiness holds me in place. You went along on your own accord. No one forced you. You agreed. You walked through the sour smell of stale food down the hall to the last room on the left.