The Joy of Killing (5 page)

W
HAT WAS THAT
? A scraping sound? Like a heavy object being dragged across the floor. I close my eyes and listen closely: nothing. Old houses are full of noises. I had checked in the closets and under the beds, even the fruit cellar around back. Everyone is gone now. I'm carrying forth alone, and I'm tired. I can see my mother standing at the kitchen counter in her apron, cutting brightly colored vegetables on a board and humming quietly to herself. Joseph had been in our kitchen more than once for snacks after a day at the water. My mother loved to ruffle his thick sandy hair. I don't remember her, or my father, mentioning his name afterward.

The innocence the boy on the train wears as a cloak doesn't seem like that to him now; he feels clumsy and awkward and ignorant; but the girl sees it, and it draws her to him. She is used to boys seeking to devour her in one bite, and in his hesitation she sees sweetness, perhaps even caring.

I cherish the story of the night on the train, not only for its own sake, but because it's clear to me now that the telling of it is the only way to reach the finish line before the dawn.

I turn the light out and listen. Nothing. Through the window I see that night's black canopy has been punctured by a shower of tiny diamonds. Clouds sail beneath the moon, now a whiter shade in the glow of the stars, and cast their own shadows across the lake. There is time left, I think, but not a lot. I wonder, as I have before, what the boy would've been like if he had never lost the story of the detectives at the front door and what had gone before. Once the membrane is breached, there is little to be done. No repair. No healing. For some, the best way is to die before the roiling images burst through. As for me, the boy on the train, or the unsuspecting groom at the wedding ceremony, the future was long ago foretold. My father, in his slacks and summer shirt, came to the door in his usual pleasant attitude, which became grim as he listened to the detective. The first one, I noticed, did not remove his fedora until he had come inside and stood in the foyer with his partner. My mother's face was stricken. She glanced at me, as if she wished she could tell the two men they had made a mistake, there was no boy by that name living here. Neither of the men looked in my direction, as if not wanting to scare me into flight, but I noticed that the lead guy switched to talking to my father. I saw a thin fold of skin, or a scar, beneath his left ear, running down almost to his chin. I lit a filter cigarette with a silver table lighter and tried to listen. Both men were inside now, hats off, held in one or both hands, and now the second one, on the right, with motionless eyes and small ears set too far back on his head, spoke, and in his quiet words I could make out the name of my best friend, David. My heart lightened; David and I had done a lot of shit together, stealing watches from department
stores, cartons of cigarettes from grocery stores, even his parents' car in the middle of the night, which we joy-rode around Booneville smoking and bullshitting about stuff we'd done with girls. But that wouldn't account for the look of disgust on my mother's face, or the pain on my father's, or the dull undertone of the detective's voice. I crushed the lousy-tasting weed in a blue glass ashtray on the coffee table. I pulled a Lucky from the flattened pack in my jeans pocket, straightened and plumped it, and lit it. I exhaled and out of habit blew several smoke rings, which charged one after the other to the center of the room, where they hung in a row, until the last one blew through the first and settled down on the couch. The second cop caught it, and he seemed to calculate what sort of attitude they had here. Suddenly, all four of them were looking at me, and the lead detective stepped into the living room. Followed by my mother.

My tough-guy attitude was something I had acquired hanging around the corner drugstore. There was no steel inside, although the girl on the train didn't see that; she thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted to talk to her. Words were how I knew things. Like now, tapping on the keys of this ancient machine, gathering the letters and the silent sounds they represent into some sort of story of the night on the train so I can finally let go. I can't adequately describe the feel of the air as my parents and the two detectives entered the living room, or the sounds as they walked across the carpet, or the sight of their limbs dangling at their sides as they came to a stop, in a semicircle. Maybe there is a little steel, after all, for I remember I was quite determined that I was not going to stand up for the detectives. Neither was I going to stop smoking,
although I saw the smaller one with still eyes glance at the Lucky in my hand as if it were some sort of a weapon. So I stayed seated and waited for one of them to say something.

O
UR PARENTS
'
FEAR
at the lake house had always been that one of us would hang onto the rope too long and crash on the far bank of the river. It never seemed to occur to them that one of us could be lost when a canoe turned over in the middle of the lake. We could handle canoes; we tipped them over all the time for fun. We were all good swimmers. We jumped and dove off the dock, where the water was well over our head. So, the shock when Joseph drowned out there. I can feel the tightness in my chest. Maybe I did see him in the woody tangle on the water's edge. The purple-veined skin, the staring eyes are suddenly quite vivid.

T
HE TWO MEN
with fedoras? Clear as ice water. My mother said the men were detectives and wanted to talk to me. I stayed in my seat and said nothing, so the two men pulled up chairs across the coffee table from me and sat down. The big one set his gray fedora on the table next to the glass ashtray and reached inside his coat pocket and withdrew a small leather wallet and flipped it open to show a bright gold badge. He said his name, put it back in his jacket, and settled his elbows on his knees. His hands were wide and heavy.

“You smoke?” he said. “You're twelve?”

I lay the butt in the ashtray. My mother began to say something; he lifted a hand to silence her. A few months earlier, my best friend—the one whose name I had heard from the second
detective's mouth—and I had almost set the house on fire smoking in a crawl space in the basement; after which my parents gave me permission, begged me, to smoke in the house, in front of them. They even occasionally put a few Luckies in the silver box. The detective's gray eyes were serious. The thing with Judy Pauling in the basement, I thought. The three of us had taken our clothes off, and she had lain on the couch, on her stomach, and my friend and I took turns lying on top of her. Nothing happened. No one talked her into anything. In fact, we set up a date to do it again the next week, at her house, when her folks would be out of town.

I let his question pass. My parents were standing a few feet behind the seated detectives.

“Son, we want to ask you a few questions about your friend David and a man named Willie Benson.”

W
HERE WAS
I?

My nose was sore.

“Oh, dear,” the girl said, playfully. She reached in her coat pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed my nose. Red splotches showed on it.

“Sorry,” she said.

“All in the line of duty,” I responded. She continued dabbing at my nose.

“There,” she said, pleased.

Well, that's that, I thought. You've got a story, not
the
story, but still a story, with a bloody nose to top it off. Meanwhile, my pants were still unzipped.

A few stars had surfaced. Lights in a small community shone in the distance. A pickup raced us along the highway. There was not a sound in the car except the clickety-clack of the wheels. Her hand found my dick, now a shadow of its former self. I just wanted to hold her.

“It's all right,” I said.

“You think so?” She looked at me, and I saw a glimmer of lust in her eye. She wanted to finish it. She wanted to feel me come. That thought—that me coming turned her on—roused me instantly. She took over, and I lay my head back on the seat in surrender.

A
DARK FORM
catches my attention. Something flitted in front of the window. Bats. I'd forgotten; they'd been a problem every summer, living in the attic. My mother shrieked and chased them around the house with a broom, always knocking one or two to the floor, which our dog jumped on and tried to eat. I'd thought the bats would have headed south, to Mexico or wherever they went, by now. A couple of them flew across the face of the moon. One bat after another sliced through the reddening streak, leaving the crimson drops to slide down the cut and into the sky. The difference between it happening and me seeing it happen was so slight as to often be irrelevant, except as now when I was trying to sort out myth from truth, to obtain a little peace. The myth could say that the blood of the moon fell into a pool, and the pool had great powers for those who drank of it. Where was the pool? was the enduring question. Men searched their whole lives for it, dying unquenched. Those who found it swore an oath not to reveal
its whereabouts, for they would be turned to dust if they did. It wouldn't matter if no one ever saw the moon actually bleed, the crimson drops blacken as they hit the sky, for people wanted to believe in such things. I could write the myth out and not long after it would be accepted not as casual ravings but as archetypal insight by some, the truth by others. And I might come to believe it, as well, for reasons that should be becoming obvious by now. I turn all the stories of my life over and over in my mind and toss them in various bins, depending on the likelihood of their reality. I sometimes switch them around. The story of Judy Pauling ends up in the “very likely” bin most times, although I wouldn't swear to each and every detail. Same with the story of my best friend screwing my wife. Now, Joseph was a different situation. Just because I hadn't thought of him—the drowning—for all these years means nothing. We never returned to the lake after that summer. I hadn't been back until today, and I might not even then have remembered Joseph had it not been for the odd look on the caretaker's face. I know Joseph drowned; whether I saw his body in the woody tangle on the shore is another matter. In most instances, the truth really doesn't matter. I would have split from my wife whether or not my friend fucked her. Joseph was a tall, scrawny kid, but not someone you would try to push around. I liked him, although we didn't hang around a lot. I had a crush on his older sister, which didn't help me in his eyes, although I never even held her hand. Sally. I had forgotten her, as well. She had black hair but the same green eyes as Joseph, her only sibling. I saw her afterward, at a small gathering at their house. She wouldn't look at me.

T
HE TRUTH OF
a few things does matter. But the images always seem to be in shards, never linked, never whole; like the remains of a shipwreck, bits and pieces of which wash ashore over time, as the ocean gives them up. Some might clear for a time, and you think that's how it was, and then the next time it's blurry around the edges, and the blurriness spreads until the scene crumbles and fades like a photographic image taken out of the fixer solution too soon. Or the scenes run awry, the images mix and blend, and never stand in a straight line, where you could say this is the way it happened, never where there is a beginning and an end. It's nothing you can fix by attention, I've learned that. Nothing's ever there completely at the same time, for you to study and arrange in proper order, like a jigsaw puzzle. If you concentrate on the gray fedora, on the words out of the detective's mouth, or your mother's stiff-legged stance, or you remark on the thick tension in the room, in an attempt to move the story forward to the next instant in time, you're going to be disappointed. The first detective reached into his coat pocket and slowly lifted a dark object from it while keeping his eyes on me. It was a black wallet, and it looked familiar. It was thin and had worn edges. The detective held it out in front of me like a dead fish and asked if I'd ever seen it. I looked away.

“No,” I said.

The detective waited for me to look back.

“You're sure? You've never seen this before?” I took another look at it. It was my friend's. On the back was the imprint of the rubber he carried in the slot behind the money.

“No,” I said.

He knew I was lying; everyone in the room knew I was lying. Carefully, the detective laid the wallet on the glass coffee table.

S
O, YOU SEE
the confusion: the look of aversion on Sally's face, the stinking fish wallet on the glass table, my wife's face as my friend was fucking her, the smell of the lake water at the gathering, as if to remind us Joseph had been in the lake overnight, even the crackling hiss of the door opening at the front of the train car.

A dark form in the yellow light was moving down the aisle toward us, touching the top of each seat to steady himself. Maybe heading for the rear door, which was supposed to be locked, but which I knew from experience usually was not. Maybe it was the preppie I had seen on the platform. Blazer, rep tie, penny loafers. Perhaps he had spoken to the girl in the station; maybe he knew her; had done this with her before. I reached for the girl's coat and pulled it up over her shoulders and then up over her head. I peered into the dim orange light. The train rocked to the right, and the face in the aisle picked up a glimmer. It was the woman a few rows behind us, with the crying baby. She couldn't care less about what was going on here. Her eyes passed right over us.

“All clear,” I murmured, letting my hand drift down to the girl's hip.