The Joy of Killing (6 page)

I
GLANCE OUT
the oval window and consider the time. The sky seems to be blackening. I close my eyes. Images of violence slip through the loose weave at strange times, like this. After my wedding, I walked my bride from the steps of the church to the waiting
Chevy, being driven by who else but my best friend, the very one whose wallet the lead detective had so forlornly lay on the glass table in front of me, the very one who would later fuck the bride. As he came around the back to open the door, I pictured myself slipping a gleaming ice pick from the inside of my tuxedo jacket and thrusting it smoothly into my bride's back, between her ribs, and then pulling it out so quickly no one could tell. A whuff of air escapes her as she lowers her head, and I realize I'd hit a lung. She glances around, as if a bee had stung her, and her body hesitates a second, and I smile back. Little beads of blood finally begin appearing, one by one, through the tiny hole in the taffeta. It's for that image—the bright crimson on the pure white—that I've done it. It's not a desire to inflict pain, or to punish or humiliate, or even to injure or kill; it was simply a matter of curiosity. The
feeling
as you pulled the pick out, and you would know from the sight of it that life was irrevocably altered, and you couldn't go back to the second before you shot your arm out, when all was light and future and happiness—I wanted to know what that moment felt like. To be free of all responsibility for the rest of my life, to be able to watch it play out like a film, to not give a shit. How can you truly know life without taking one?

So, this murderer comes peeping in on me at moments where I'm blinded by the whiteness of my bride's wedding dress, or Shelley Duvall's smooth neck, and leaves behind an image of a crimson river streaming through the snowy whiteness. There's little to be done about it. In the backseat of the Chevy, my bride turns to me for a kiss, and I oblige.

One time I came a little closer than usual to living out the fantasy. Several years after the wedding, on a vacation, we stayed in a friend's guest cottage in a fishing village on the Maine coast. There were two single beds, one on either side of the room, and the second night, after we'd drunk two bottles of wine, we separated to the individual beds. Laying there, alone in the single bed, I imagined slipping from bed, walking quietly into the kitchen, and picking up the long thin knife I'd used to filet the salmon. I imagined running my finger down the blade, raising a drop of blood, before walking over to where she lay. The urge became so strong as I lay there, listening to her breathe, that I had to mentally paralyze my legs and arms so I couldn't get out of bed and walk to the counter where the knife lay. I felt no hostility toward her; I wasn't angry at her—this was at least five years before the “betrayal.” All I really wanted was to experience the shock on her face when she realized what was happening, when she felt the knife release and the blood stream between her breasts and down her stomach, the moment she saw my eyes and every dream of life vanished from her head.

I
LEAN FORWARD
in my chair. The typewriter seems a forbidding object—cold metal skin, worn gold letters, an array of knobs and levers, a ribbon soaked in ink—for tasks and times such as this. Yet, we are not alone, I know that. The winged creatures creasing the yellow-orange moon, the lingering spirits of the Augusts of my youth, whatever thing is rattling around down below. Perhaps Joseph's father has come back to force his son's name onto my
lips, his image into my eyes. What could I say? Sally, I would like to know about, but to ask about her would be to ignore Joseph, to point a finger at the hole where he should have been. She finally looked at me the afternoon of the wake, I remember. Her eyes green and cold as the lake water. We left the lake house the night of the gathering, although it was only the beginning of the second week of August.

I scan the words on the page on the table to the right of the typewriter. It seems like the word “wallet” should have two “t”s, to give it a bit more snap, and I decide I will spell it that way from now on. I remember working to figure out what the thing meant, lying there like that. How the detectives got a hold of it, what they were doing with it here.

“It belongs to your friend David,” the detective croaked, leaning a few degrees forward, as if to intimidate me.

The crease in his cheek, running from his left ear over his jawbone, was clearly a scar. What had confused me was how it seemed to hide in a fold. He caught me staring at it; the scar was like a prop, I thought; he uses it to distract people, to gain an advantage. I stubbed out the Lucky in the glass ashtray, glanced at the red and black bull's-eye on the flattened pack on the table. Three or four left. I felt myself wrap up, sink inside, deeper, leaving only enough behind to nod and murmur. I could hang out in this numb space for a long time, and there was nothing my mother or the cops could do about it. A few months earlier my mother had become so disturbed over my behavior that she had taken me to a psychologist in Booneville. I saw him four or five times, and he ran a large tape
recorder on his desk as I told him stories about what a tough guy I was at school. Somebody stole a cigarette from my locker, and I beat him up. Or all the things I had done with girls. I figured he knew I was bullshitting him, but it gave him something to report to my mother. Your youngest son lives in a fantasy world. He has difficulty telling the difference between what he dreams up and what's real. I denied having imaginary friends, but I almost had him convinced that Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger had stayed at my house over last Thanksgiving. Convinced enough that he asked my mother about it after the session.

I
STAND UP
, and the chair screeches back. The sound zips up my back, as if it were somehow related to the bats winging across the face of the moon or the rattling, scraping noises struggling up from below. A wind has come up; the jagged oak leaves are trembling; the branches are rising and falling, dancing. For a moment the moon seems almost hidden in the stars. I take a step toward the door. The old boards underfoot creak.

Willie Benson. All those years I hadn't heard that name. And now, standing here in the small space of my little warren, the name simply materializes, with no fanfare, as if it really wasn't strange at all. Maybe I could have told you “Willie” if you'd asked. Maybe. But never the last name. The detective had said it, and now that I think about it I remember reading a newspaper article that the guy had gone to jail. So I had known it at one time. David told me Willie could get us girls. Even at twelve, we talked constantly about girls and sex. We listened slack-jawed as one of David's friends
told us in detail about how he fucked his sister. We hung around a small engine-repair shop run by a good-looking middle-aged guy who smoked a pipe and delivered mail. He told us about women he screwed on his route. We followed him one Saturday morning. Halfway through his route, he walked up the steps to a small brick duplex, leather mailbag over his shoulder, and was greeted at the top by a young housewife wearing a yellow see-through skirt and a sleeveless top. After a few words, she opened the screen door and he followed her inside. We clocked him at ten minutes. We knew the husband—he worked at a dairy across town.

The fact was, as I've said, we were a little hesitant about the real thing. Now, there was Judy Pauling. She was very quick about everything; she took her panties off, stood there for a second, and we could see something nestled in the hair, but we never got a look beyond that. The thing with her came to an end one summer night when, according to plan, we showed up at her bedroom window with the intent of slipping her out and heading to a park a block away. When we knocked on the glass, she didn't respond, so we knocked louder, and the window finally opened, and her head poked out. “Go away!” she whispered. A male voice barked from inside: “Where's the fucking shotgun?” A large dog started barking. We took off, and I got my leg hung up on the sharp point of a picket on a fence in the backyard and ripped up a piece of flesh pretty good.

T
HE GIRL ON
the train lies imbued in my mind. But if I'm not careful, I could lose her amidst the tumult. The story could wander off
into hiding behind the fading stars of dawn. I sat back down in front of the typewriter. Underwood. God only knows what else had been written on the machine: letters and memoirs, scientific papers, short stories, even poems and diaries. Suicide notes. All the many fingers who had tapped out the thoughts of their owners on these very keys, struggling for clarity, beauty, or impact. On the drive up, I pictured myself sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling away on a pad into the night. When the caretaker, Joseph's father, had flipped through the keys on the ring on the front porch, he paused for a moment at the ones to the basement and the tiny room on the fourth floor, almost as if he were daring me to use them. The old Underwood had been sitting here on the table next to a stack of white paper, awaiting me. I saw that the view from the window down onto the garden and the stone fence and the water beyond would be perfect. I retrieved the lamp from the bedroom on the third floor and proceeded to the room in the attic, which I haven't left since.

T
HE HEAD OF
blonde hair continued rising and falling in my lap in a steady rhythm. My fingers pressed into the skull. Every time her head rose I was on the verge of coming. What would happen to us when it was over? She rested her head on my lap, eyes closed, and massaged my dick just enough to keep it stiff. Like this, through the dark night we would speed, rocking back and forth, connected by need and spirit and the steady click-clacking of steel on steel.

The rear door hissed open, and the click-clacking rose to a scream and the cold air whooshed in. You could hear the door try to close, and then jerk back open, meaning someone was standing
in the doorway, hesitating on whether to go on out. The baby started crying, and I wondered if the mother was going to throw it off the back of the train. The girl was so still I guessed she might have fallen asleep.

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMS
all my life I've been dragging my story behind me like a heavy, unseen stone. But tonight I am completely awake, and I am beginning to worry about the fleeting darkness. Everything stirs in my head. Rattling sounds, now more insistent, from below shiver up the boards and into my bones. The sounds fade gradually, like the end of a song. I can smell the ink on the page. If I were to rise and open the window, I could reach out and touch the moon, which seems in the past hour to have assumed a larger, more commanding presence in the sky, although now I notice a micro-thin layer of white clouds is sliding beneath it, scattering its light. After that night in the bedroom, I never made love to a woman without an image of my wife and best friend showing up on the screen. I never stuck her, either with a blade or a pick, or I wouldn't be sitting here at this table, but I have no doubt the image of her in my mind as she sees her blood on the tip of the ice pick is what she would have looked like had I done it. A stunning moment of completion.

And, of course, images of the girl on the train; but never before this moment have I tried to put them in chronological order, to tell the story from beginning to end. Why now? you might ask. I have no answer. Coming here, after forty-some years, in the fall of the year, on a moonlit night, with no memory of Joseph or the canoe,
or even his lovely sister. I can feel the icy water now, as it must have felt to him as he slipped under, the burn as it entered his nose. His head went down, then popped up, then went down again, and up again, and then down, and not up again. A few words the first time, then nothing, gasping and spitting. What was wrong with him? He knew how to swim. Cramps. That's what he was saying. Cramps. What was he doing way out in the middle of the lake where no one could hear him? Probably on his way to the Girl Scout camp on the other side. I had paddled over there and back with him a few days before. These images are so clear now, so frightening, that I believe them; they've been hanging around this old house all these years like dust motes or faded photographs, and my presence brings them back to life. The life jackets were bright orange, and there were always two in every canoe. I remember now, it began as a calm day on the water. We were swimming races between the docks on either side of the mouth of the river earlier in the morning and there wasn't a ripple. Sally was there, in a red bathing suit, black hair piled under a cap, but still pretty. She blew the starting whistle and declared the winners. When someone argued with her over a call she took off her cap, bent over the water, and talked into his face, and the boys peeked for a view of her tits, which were nice. The lake water was so still that morning the sun pooled lazily on it, and clouds of tiny bugs skimmed its surface.

Now I see quite clearly: Joseph is standing by the canoe trying to cajole someone into paddling to the Girl Scout camp with him. He's wearing black trunks with a red sea horse on the left leg. His yellow hair pokes out in all directions like straw. Sally watches
with little interest. Other boys are tempted to grab a paddle, but it's against the rules. When I went a week earlier, it took a lot longer to get there than he said. I talked with a girl at the camp for a while. I can't think of her name, but I remember she had red hair, worked in the camp kitchen, and lived in town. The wind had picked up a little on the way back across the lake, and it was pushing us sideways by the time we reached the shore. I can see Joseph standing up in the canoe as it slid up on the beach, showing off. That was it for me. Fifteen feet out and you were in over your head, and in the middle of the lake the water was over fifty feet deep and cold enough to freeze your heart in an instant.