The Joy of Killing

THE JOY OF KILLING

A
LSO BY
H
ARRY
N. M
AC
L
EAN

In Broad Daylight: A Murder in Skidmore, Missouri

Once Upon A Time: A True Story of Memory, Murder and the Law

The Past Is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption

Copyright © 2015 Harry N. MacLean

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacLean, Harry N.

The joy of killing: a novel / Harry MacLean.

pages; cm

1.
  
Violence--Psychological aspects--Fiction. 2.
  
Psychological fiction.
  
I. Title.

PS3613.A27367J69 2015

813'.6--dc23

2015009478

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior Design by Megan Jones Design

COUNTERPOINT

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www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-645-2

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done—these are traits of the human race at large
.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN

For

Hulya O'Brien

CONTENTS

THE GIRL

THE PROFESSOR

WILLIE OR THE UNDERWOOD

JOY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE GIRL

T
HE STORY BEGINS
in the middle of my fifteenth year on this earth. It was a mid-December evening in 1958, and I was returning home for Christmas from an eastern prep school, where I had been sent a year earlier in response to what a school psychologist referred to as “serious behavioral problems.” I arrived in Grand Central Station on a train from the western hills of Massachusetts in the late morning. From there I would catch a train to Chicago, and from there another one to Des Moines, Iowa, where my parents would pick me up for the drive to Booneville.

In a fading light and cold wind, suitcase in hand, I tramped down the long walk to the last car and climbed the metal steps. I figured on settling in a window seat, lighting a weed, and checking out the sights as the train pulled out of the big city. Once rolling, I would walk up to the club car and see if I could talk the bartender into selling me a beer. I stopped at an empty row of seats and tossed my suitcase in the overhead rack. Across the aisle sat a girl, blonde, wearing a blue pleated skirt and dark sweater. Her face was turned away, but her bare legs lay sideways on the seat. The suitcase bumped down from the rack and knocked me on the shoulder. I thought I heard a muffled giggle from her direction. I jammed the suitcase back onto the rack, slipped out of my sports coat, loosened my tie, and sat down on the aisle seat.

The overhead lights threw a soft glare over the scene. People continued to climb aboard and bump their way down the aisle. I felt in my jacket pocket for the pack of Luckies I had bought at a newsstand in the station, along with a girlie magazine, and tore off the red stripe around the top edge. I extricated a weed from the
pack and whacked it on the back of my Zippo. The train lurched forward, stopped; lurched again, stopped; then began creeping up the tracks, tilting suddenly to the left, and then to the right, like a wounded buffalo. I flipped open the Zippo with my thumb. I felt someone's eyes on me. I glanced across the aisle and saw the girl's face in the window. She brushed strands of hair from her face, while sliding her half-exposed legs from the seat and onto the floor. I snapped the Zippo shut.

She turned to face me. The corners of her pretty eyes were slightly downturned. Her lips were in a faint pout. Blonde hair tumbled to her shoulders. I tapped the cigarette on the lighter again. She spoke:

“Where are you going?”

I hesitated: I was not good with girls, particularly ones this pretty. She shifted slightly in her seat, revealing even more, whiter thigh. The conductor arrived, stopped between us.

“Tickets, please!”

I handed him mine. He stuck the stub in a clip on the overhead rack, his narrow blue-coated body blocking my view across the aisle. “Chicago,” he said, and placed a stub in the clip above the girl, and then moved on. Her skirt was now tucked under her legs. The clickety-clack of the wheels grew louder.

“Chicago. I mean Des Moines. And then Booneville.”

“I can barely hear you,” she said. “Why don't you come over and sit with me? It's a long trip.” She patted the seat next to her.

I stuffed the Luckies in my shirt pocket and lay the weed and Zippo on top of the girlie magazine on the inside seat. I rose and stepped into the aisle. She removed her hand and seemed to guide
me into the seat with her eyes. I sat slightly turned, as she was, and struggled to keep my eyes from dropping to her thighs, which seemed even whiter up close. Before I could say anything, she spoke.

“You're a preppie, aren't you?”

“Yeah.”

“I go to a girls' school in Connecticut.”

I held out my hand to introduce myself. She touched my arm lightly before I could speak.

“All those dark cold months without anyone to hold you, or make out with.”

“We had dances with girls' schools,” I said.

“God, they were terrible,” she said. “I went to one dance. My date was the fullback on the St. Mark's football team. I never went again.”

“You're pretty,” I said. “I'm sure the boys wanted to dance with you.”

She smiled. Her eyes held onto mine.

“It's going to be a long night,” she said as she brushed back a blonde lock. She tilted her chin up a little. “Would you like to kiss me?”

I was stunned. After a moment, her eyes fluttered closed and her chin tilted up a little more. I leaned forward awkwardly. Her hand tucked under my chin and brought me in slowly, almost furtively, until our lips touched. Her tongue pressed between my teeth. I kissed her back, and she opened her mouth wider. She lay her hand on mine, lifted it slowly in the air, into the small space between us. I wanted to open my eyes, but before the clouds in my mind could clear my hand came to rest lightly on her breast, like a bird on a bush.

S
ITTING HERE, NOW,
some forty years later, at the wooden table, tapping out these words on the Underwood in the soft light of a tall gooseneck lamp, not immune to the starlit sky out the window, nor the sounds and shadows of the rustling branches on the tall oak, I accept that the way I tell the story of that night on the train might not be the way it actually happened, in specific detail, in exact rhythm and tone and sequence; this version has received a little lacquer here and there as life piled up on it; to simplify it or make it feel better or cleaner, a few facts have possibly been dropped out or slipped in; perhaps even a few images have been recolored or restored to a brightness they never had. That's what time and the mind do, for better or worse, and only a fool would deny it. Through the window I can see the purple black between the stars, and the moon rising in the corner, and I think this night, as that one, can't last; the black will begin to fade slowly to gray, and the morning light will bring with it the end.

Perhaps it would be best to leave the story alone, to let the reel run in my head, unshared, until the very last frame, by which time I would probably appreciate it more, with time growing short, and some considerable ground left to cover, although I've already begun editing much of it out in my head. As the night has grown darker and the stars brighter I've considered letting go of these final pages altogether, drifting through it all, without direction, letting the past overflow the present until it is the present; there will be no sensation of coming loss, because everything has already happened, and the first glimmer of light in the distant sky beyond the walls will be like a moment of grace, into which I
can move once and for all, perhaps into a final moment of undisturbed harmony.

I trust that the feelings of despair from unknowing will soon be gone, to be replaced by unwavering clarity, which may indeed bring its own form of despair, welcome only because of the absence of confusion, which is all I've ever asked for.

M
Y BREATH CAUGHT.
At home, if you went steady with a girl, you might be able to feel her up, and after several months you might get inside her blouse, and if you hung in long enough to be “serious” you might get to feel her bare flesh, but it was a long and arduous process. It was certainly never the girl's idea. It occurred to me that I might be dreaming. Or that it might be some sort of a setup.