The Joy of Killing (27 page)

There is no sound coming from the typewriter. My hands are on my lap. I'm finished with the narrative, the one I will leave behind anyway. I pull the last page out and stack it on top of the others, now a good inch or two high. I address it to the Professor's agent and suggest he may want to consider publishing it, as a companion to the other two books. A trilogy. Nonfiction, of course, for cross my heart as I sit here now I believe this to be the best version of events possible, and therefore the truth.

So, there is someone here. I'm pleased to see that. It will be a good feeling to take with me. I would say good-bye to the girl on the train, if I could. I would tell her I've loved her all these years, from the moment she asked me to kiss her. We spoke very little after telling our stories. We drifted off in each other's arms as night fled and a bleak dawn crept across the empty plains. We pulled into the Chicago train yards in a wintry morning light. The locomotives were coal black against a lightly falling snow. A string of brightly painted wooden cars rolled slowly past the window. I spotted the trainman in the caboose at the end and waved like a kid. The girl smiled at this and laid her head on my shoulder.

“No more bandits,” she whispered.

Or riders in the sky, I thought.

We understood then that the night would never be over. We would carry it with us for the rest of our days, in our very beings. I stood at the top step of the car and looked into her face and kissed
her one last time. Her eyes grew merry, and she whispered something to me, and I saw she hadn't buttoned her coat despite the winter wind blowing outside. One hand and then the other slipped inside and around the soft flesh.

I sat down alone on the second seat from the back, by the window. I watched the girl greet a tall older man dressed in a dark blue suit and overcoat. He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, then took her bag. The two walked away, toward the station, her arm loosely in his. The last image I have is of her lovely blonde hair lifting in the wind and settling on her gray coat. First love, last love, I think as I stick a final piece of paper in the Underwood and type out the scene.

I
RISE AND
put on my jacket. I leave the knife where it is. I pick up the Zippo, reach for the door and feel a paper in my inside coat pocket. I hesitate, then pull it out. My name on front; it's the funeral note from my first wife. I open and hold the letter to the moonlight, but cannot read it. I whip the Zippo down across my thigh: Clink! And whip it back up into a blue flame. “Good bye,” it says, after my name, “Love,” and then her name. I touch the flame to the bottom, watch the paper catch, then hold it until the flame leaps up to my fingers. I have no regrets. The night on the train was a moment of random harmony in my life. That it left me alone for the rest of my days now seems inevitable. I stomp out the sparks in the charred remains.

I flick on the light at the top of the stairs; nothing. Which makes me wonder again about creatures outside or in. The Zippo tosses
shadows about on the walls as I descend the stairs to the third floor. I pause at the bottom, but the house is now soundless. Passing my room, I see the chair where I sat by the window the night after Joseph drowned. It pulls me in, but I am determined to keep on moving. In the kitchen, moonlight is pouring in the windows. I flip the Zippo shut. I can see my mother putting sandwiches and apples in paper bags for our lunch at the cove, and then the living room, where my father is sitting in a chair reading the
Saturday Evening Post
. My sister joins me as we leave the front door and step onto the porch, and then she is gone. The darkness outside is lifting. I am feeling good: clear and strong. It was what I wanted, what I predicted if once and for all I could obtain a little clarity.

I pull the door shut behind me. My eye catches a dark blur on the long curve of the road coming in through the pines. A car. Sally is coming to see if I've retrieved whatever she left in the box on the porch. Or perhaps to see me. I feel a shiver of excitement—I can tell her now with ultimate certainty what happened to her brother. Because of the night here, the girl on the train, I know what happened that night in the water. I can tell her of Joseph's panic and convince her that if I had released my life jacket to dive for him we would both have drowned. Final clarity will clear my name in her heart, clear her mind of hate for me. Give her a chance, maybe, at a few decent years left.

The moonlight catches the black top of the sedan. I see a shadow behind the wheel. As the car draws nearer, I can make out the long hair flowing over her shoulders, then her hands on the steering wheel. The car pulls to a stop by the steps leading up to the
porch. The driver's door swings open, and a tall female figure steps out. She pauses for a moment, glances up at the house, the high window, then at the box on the corner of the porch. I try to say her name, but I hear nothing. Sally, I try again.

Standing tall and straight, unbending, unyielding, the figure closes the door and walks around the front of the car to the steps.

“Sally,” I finally say, and step out from under the eaves, into the moonlight. I raise a hand. She pauses for a moment, seems about to respond, then steps onto the porch.

“Sally,” I say again.

She's not ignoring me, I realize, she doesn't hear me. I say her name louder. She hesitates, but it's only a response to the sound of the bats whirling overhead. She steps past me to the corner of the porch, where she bends down and picks up the box. She opens it, examines the contents, and shakes her head in apparent disappointment. She closes the box and glances about her, as if to see whether she's been observed. She walks past me, ethereal, ghostlike in the ease of her movements, so close I could touch her on the shoulder. She reaches for the doorknob, twists it several times, as if to assure herself it's locked. I move to the space between her and the steps.

She pauses for an instant and glances at me. She looks out over the drive and then back to me, not as if she's seeing me, but as if she's feeling me, my presence. Her gaze softens to that of the playful girl on the bank by the river; she is urging me to grab the rope swing and fly far out over the water. Her eyes shine with promise, and I feel the heat of adolescent desire for her. Her eyes stop on my neck; they cloud for an instant before passing on. I touch my
neck and feel an odd ridge and something sticky. She shifts the box under one arm, then steps toward me. I force myself to focus and say her name one more time.

“Sally.”

She takes a step, and then another. Through me. As if I wasn't there. “It's me,” I say. But she is down the steps and moving toward the car. She tosses the box through the open rear window and opens the front door. She scans the window on the fourth floor, as if in a final good-bye, and gets in the car. The door slams noiselessly.

I stand perfectly still until the car has disappeared around the curve and into the pines. I step off the edge of the porch and walk around to the side of the house where I had earlier spotted a vehicle up on blocks. The driver's mirror on the old Ford is intact. I twist it up, to face the moon, and lean over it. I can see nothing because of my shadow. I twist the mirror at a slight angle, until my features slowly appear. I raise my chin a little and lean in closer. There, from one side of my neck to another, runs a thin red ridge. I run my finger over it. The flesh gives, but I feel nothing. I twist my head slightly from side to side; the red line spreads open a little, and I see it crosses both arteries. I raise my finger to my mouth, taste it.

I see it, then, the knife glinting in the mirror over the dresser in David's bedroom. My fingers are touching the edge of the Zippo, and I am figuring out how the lighter ended up there, starting to get pissed, when David's eyes edge onto the mirror. The nervous look is gone, replaced with one I've never seen before. I feel a sting on my neck. A red line zips across the flesh. My head is not wobbling, like Shelley's did, but I can tell from the scarlet flow from one
carotid that I must be finished. I manage to grasp the Zippo tightly in my fist. I swing out with it as I turn toward my friend, aiming for his chin. The tension lightens to a smirk as David shifts to his left and my hand glances off his shoulder. He dances back a step, and I begin to fall. My final image is the splash of blood on the colorful weave of the Turkish rug on the polished wood floor.

S
O, THAT
'
S THE
way it is. I am not the murderer, but the murdered. The clarity of a few moments ago was an illusion. I lean back from the mirror to catch more of my form; it's me, all right, a little worse for wear, eyes a little glassier than usual. Some charge of energy emanating through time and space from the house where I was murdered brought me to this place to unravel the true narrative and lay it out in heaven's light. I tap a knuckle against my front jean pocket. Thunk. I extricate the Zippo from my pocket and grasp it lightly in my fingers. The girl on the train had saved me from oblivion, I see now. I close my eyes to the light; she appears, her mystic eyes slightly somber.

“You know what?” she says. “I remember now that I always wanted to go away to prep school.”

Clink. Clunk. I drop the lighter to my side. Glancing a final time at my fourth-story warren, at the curve where Sally's car had disappeared, I walk around the front of the porch, past the steps, until I come to the garden. It is even more wildly overgrown with roses than had been apparent from the window, but somehow less forbidding.

The brick wall is too high for me to climb. I see a hinged wooden door between the wall and the corner of the house. As I pick my way carefully through the thorny vines, a fluttering brushes my ear. A small black form settles on my forearm. The fur tickles as the form folds in its wings.

The gate is rusted shut. I have to kick the latch twice before it swings out. I step through, and from the edge of the cliff I see what appears to be a narrow path winding through the rocks below. The wind has warmed further, and I am grateful for that. I maneuver my way carefully down the side of the cliff, grasping an occasional root to steady myself, until I come to the sharp black rocks at the water's edge. I glance about. The moon, I notice, has disappeared altogether, leaving a faint glow on the far horizon. In a matter of minutes, if not sooner, the edges of the night will begin to fray. The water has calmed; a young boy could get ten skips out of a flat rock on it.

I
HESITATE, SUDDENLY
alarmed by the unfairness of my imminent demise. I had done nothing wrong. I take a step back from the water's edge. In the moon glow I can see the glint of tiny ripples on the water.

“Now,” the girl says, in a tone of gentle encouragement.

She is right; the narrative of my life is now told and set for all time, which is all I've ever wanted, dead or alive. The joy of expiration is as natural as the joy of loving, the joy of killing, the joy of being.

I step in. Icy water fills my shoes. I wait a few seconds and take another step or two.

The water rises over my knees, to my belt. The furry creature has fled my arm and is now resting lightly on my head. I hold the Zippo out in front of me and snap the wheel. Its flame flickers brightly amongst the still-glittery stars. The water is up to my arm pits. I reach back and hurl the Zippo with good force into the night sky; the blue-orange flame tumbles far into the light-speckled blackness and then extinguishes. I hear the whisper of my name in the heavens.

The water fills my nose, rises over my eyes. The creature flutters off into the night. The girl is standing by my side, in front of the Underwood as the scene slowly fades to light.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE SEED FOR
this story was planted one mid-November morning in 2012. Julya (Hulya) and I were a planning a year-long road trip and I was telling my close friend Tom Pace how I was thinking of stopping in small towns along the way and digging up long-ago weird crimes and putting together some sort of true-crime anthology. I can't remember his exact words, but Tom said something like: “You've done true crime. Why don't you try writing with the voice inside your head?” Fiction, he meant; not fiction like a completely made-up story, but fiction that springs from your own, peculiar voice. Two days later, I began knocking out the first page of the manuscript.

Julya and I intentionally provided very little structure for our trip: leaving in July, we would head to New England for early fall and then head down the east coast with stops in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, ending up in St. Petersburg, Florida, Mexico, and Cuba for the cold months. In the spring we would head to Turkey and Spain. The rest was up for grabs. I had no goal to finish the book on the trip, but the unstructured nature of it, the lack of routine, proved to be the perfect context for the story to evolve.

Wherever we stopped for more than a day, I would work on the manuscript for a few hours. When I had thirty or so pages, I printed it out and asked Julya to read it. We would talk—and
often argue—about it over breakfast, while driving, or riding bikes along the shores of Lake Champlain. The book took on a shape of its own, turning this way and that, seemingly of its own accord. Its roots deepened substantially when we spent two weeks at the Vermont cabin of friends, Kathy and Walter Mulica. I wrote every morning for two weeks, and in the grand isolation of their cabin in the mountains, I was able to get a serious glimpse of the road ahead. Finally, months later, at the condo of cousin Bob and Nancy Blue in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, the rest of the story unraveled. I awoke one morning after a week or so and saw the ending. It really was as if the story had been there all along, and the key was releasing it from the burdens of consciousness.