Everyday Psychokillers (20 page)

Ted said, “You know, it's weird about the Price Chopper sign, how the red ax cuts into that giant red coin. Right into the lady's head. You think they'd notice it's unpleasant.” He thought of something and leaned back against the glass door to the apartment and wiggled his free hand down into his pocket. His jeans were pretty tight and he was almost rolling on his back with his other hand in the air for balance, dainty and quivering with his cigarette. He finally got his hand back out and righted himself, and then he opened his fist and looked at the collection of pennies and nickels in his palm. He left his cigarette in his mouth for a bit and squinted through the smoke at his one hand, pushing the coins around in his other hand so that all the heads faced up. “Like Indian head coins, you know,” he said. “She's scalped, like an Indian. I mean, look: heads and tails. We're talking
decapitation
. We're talking
disembodied.”
He went back to having one hand work his cigarette and he held the other one, with the coins, as if his palm was a little dish, like he had an assortment of heads on a platter. “Man, talk about exchange,” he said, feeling the weight of the coins.

“Exchange?” I asked, exactly as he wanted me to.

“Chop the head off a person, put it on a coin. Swap it for a package of meat. It's uncivilized. That's the whole reason I'm Marxist, if you want it in a nutshell. That's the whole reason I left school, if you really want to know.” He balanced a penny on his thumbnail and then he flicked the penny past me and over the balcony railing.

“I think I'd like school if I got to take classes I liked,” I said.

“You're missing my point,” said Ted, flicking a nickel. I listened for the coin to hit something, but of course I couldn't hear it hit anything, especially behind my back where I couldn't even see it. Little meteors zipping by me, one flashing mineral bit and then another.

“When CiCi starts college, are you going to move up there with her?” I asked.

“You kidding? CiCi's not going to college.”

Right then a bird flew, zooming into our little balcony area, smacked against the glass door and dropped next to Ted's knee. We both watched, gaping, as the bird wobbled there, near the bent can of ashes.

It was a weird moment, because I had double thoughts in my head. One was that CiCi was always telling me about how she was definitely starting college in January, definitely, and she could even move back in with her parents who were so old they might not even be a pain anymore. I'd never thought that she might not really be going to college, that it might be what you call a pipe dream.

The other thought was how, because I was facing Ted and my back was to the balcony railing, the coins had been going by me in one direction, like slow traffic, as he flicked them, and then this bird seemed just flung by me, in the other direction. It was weird. Most likely the bird was just flying along and smacked into the door, not seeing it was glass, like birds do sometimes. But I couldn't get the thought out of my head that some guy, from a balcony out across the parking lot in the complex, some mirror of Ted somewhere behind me, had flicked the bird with his thumb and it landed here.

It was a little brown bird, a plain little thing. Little wobbling brown bird, the kind of bird you might find anywhere. Ted started to move his hand toward the bird and suddenly I was terrified. I didn't know what to do for a moment, but then I leaned toward Ted, keeping my eyes on the little bird. I leaned on one hand and let the other one travel past Ted's body and toward his hand as his hand moved toward the bird.

I watched his hand move toward the bird and thought of a top spinning. I thought of how tempting it is when you see a top spinning to touch it and watch it fling itself on its side and bound crazily from its broken orbit. If you can only keep from touching it you can imagine it spinning on and on, as if friction and gravity might really step aside and let it go. I put my hand on Ted's wrist and closed my fingers on it but not all the way around it, his wrist was so wide and flat. 1 could feel the knob of his ulna shift beneath his skin. The bird bounced in place once or twice, and then it sputtered into the air between our faces. It landed for a moment on the back of one of the new flimsy chairs and then used its legs to push off. The chair didn't move, but I thought I heard it make a tiny metal sound against the bird's feet. Ted shook my hand off his wrist like it was something dirty, and he scrambled to his feet and leaned over the balcony rail to see if he could see where the bird flew off to, but he couldn't. He didn't turn around or look at me to say it, but he said, “What the fuck's your problem? I wasn't going to hurt it.”

If you read about Bundy it'll say how good-looking he is. If you read another thing about him it'll say how he looked like anybody, like your next door neighbor. At that time my next door neighbor was a squat blond woman who wore orange pancake makeup and her two little kids and one baby. They were crabby and noisy. The neighbor next to her was a hollow-faced, bent-over Seminole guy, an adult, but not old, maybe Ted's age. He was sad and quiet. He liked to fish in the canal.

So not
my
neighbors.

Maybe rich people's neighbors, I liked to think. Although that still didn't make it seem likely he wasn't around any corner I turned, or around any corner turned by anyone I knew.

Sometimes people say you can look at ten different photos of Bundy and he'll look different in each one. Sometimes people say they can see it in his eyes. I can look through any stack of photos, through any school yearbook or any issue of the paper. I can see it in the eyes of anyone I look at.

CiCi arrived distant, grumpy, in a floaty sundress. It was close to seven and still light out and still hot. We went inside to greet her and she flung her bag onto the kitchen counter and said “Jesus, Ted, why don't you get a damn air conditioner?” We followed her to the balcony and squeezed together on the threshold of the open sliding glass door, holding our grins, waiting to make her day.

“Nice try,” she said when she saw the chairs, and tipped one over with, her foot. She was wearing her slim white tennis shoes and holding a pair of high-heeled sandals by their heels in one fist, the way you hold a bouquet of flowers, but in the way that holding a bouquet of flowers is like holding them by their necks. With her foot, she lifted the airy beach chair and kind of kicked it into the corner of the balcony where it clattered and then collapsed into a square heap. Then she sat on the other one with her knees together and her elbows on her knees and her fists to her temples. The strappy sandals seemed to come right out of her head like a trick dagger. Their straps flopped and dangled.

“I want take-out, Ted,” she said. “I want greasy, ground-up chicken smushed into a patty and boiled in oil. No goddamn tomatoes. Extra mayo. Go. Fetch. And fries. And a shake.”

Ted mussed the top of her head. I think it was one of his favorite things, when CiCi played baby. He said nothing and went off happily, jangling his keys.

Now here's one thing I knew about CiCi since I first met CiCi, which was right when she started going out with Ted, which was right around when I turned twelve, which was over a year before this time with this guy in Miami. Ted told me this thing, or CiCi told me, or they told me together, swapping off, my point being that it came up all the time, it was no secret and we all knew it had everything to do with whatever magical connection there was between those two. So what we all knew, the background information, if you want to call it that, was that a couple years before I met CiCi, before Ted met her even, back when she was living with her parents in Tallahassee and just starting high school, one day CiCi was finished taking a tennis lesson and sitting on the curb in the parking lot by the courts, zipping her racket back into its case, waiting for her mother to pick her up. The sun was pretty low, a really dense rosy sun coming at everything sideways, and CiCi sat there on one of the parking-spot dividers re-doing her ponytail. She pulled the rubber band out, shook her hair out over her head, and then, with the band clutched in her teeth, she closed her eyes for a second and flipped it back and ran her hands over it to put it back into its ponytail. She opened her eyes and in that moment a man appeared before her, a looming shadow in front of the sun, and she squinted up at him with her hands holding her hair and the rubber band still in her teeth.

She was so tired from school all day and then the lesson. She was pretty dizzy in fact, and as her eyes worked on adjusting, trying to see him against the sun, her head was tilted, because the man was standing not directly in front of her but to the side a little. The world was a little tilted, and she could see the man, in a glowing silhouette, with the sun making stratified rainbow bursts over his shoulder. The sun made sparks fly from the bits of glass and shell ground up in the blacktop everywhere except where the man's shadow fell. So the shadow was dull and flat, and everything shimmered around it.

And remember her angle, which made the man himself so hard to see. The silhouette and the shadow he cast, it was hard to tell which was which. It was like seeing two shadows, bound at the feet and leaning away from one another. Like a moment before, he'd been one man, but he'd been sliced crosswise down the center, and as he was hinged at the feet, one of him fell one way and the other of him fell the other. She felt giddy and giggled briefly at her private image and how silly it was.

When she fixed her focus the man was smiling and pointing at his ankle.

“I'm such a klutz,” he said. “I twisted it.” He held a racket, but he wasn't sweating. She put her hand to her brow so she could see him better. She could see little glinting lights in his hair, but mostly he remained a shadow. She stood up, and then she could see him. He was really good-looking.

That's what she thought, and that's what she said to me: He had medium brown hair, but he'd been in the sun a lot and when the light hit it you could see reddish and golden strands.

Like her own hair, in fact, a worn sorrel shade, but his was hollow, without gloss.

He was kind of tall, she said. He had normal features, his eyes were cool-looking, he was good-looking is what she said.

The man's shadow loomed, and he said, “You're pretty good out there.”

“I am not,” CiCi said, smiling despite herself, and I could see the funny half-blushing look she'd make with her face, because it was true, she was lousy at tennis, but when he said it she thought for a second that maybe he was right, maybe she looked good out there. I knew the face I made when I felt like that, part embarrassed that anyone had noticed me, that I'd been unaware of being watched, part hopeful that maybe I was wrong, maybe I was good.

He said he had an old racket in his van, that it wasn't as good as the one he used, but it was a damn sight nicer than hers. He said he thought she had a lot of potential. That he'd like to give her the racket because a good racket made all the difference.

“I don't even like tennis that much,” she said.

“Oh, you should,” said the man. “It's not right to waste your gifts.”

She walked with him across the parking lot to where his van was, carrying her racket and her duffel bag, and he limped at her side, carrying his. He opened the sliding door and put his duffel bag on the van floor. He was standing to her side and a little behind her, and his hand touched the small of her back as he leaned past her to put his tennis racket on top of the duffel bag.

“I'm sorry,” he said, sounding truly sad. “I'm such an idiot. That other racket's at the pro shop. I'm having it strung.”

“Well that's okay,” CiCi said.

The man said his name was Mark, and he offered her a ride home if she needed one. CiCi was mad at her mother anyway, so she said yes, she actually did need a ride. They drove off. They chatted. Then after a couple miles Mark started to sound stuttery. Suddenly he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the van with such force that it rocked. He leaned across her and opened her door. “Get the fuck out of my car,” he said, and shoved her. And he left her there on the side of the road.

CiCi stood, empty-handed, on the shoulder of the road, and then she walked. By the time she got home, her father was out driving around looking for her and her mother was standing by the telephone, unraveling the fringe on a dishtowel, frantic. She'd called the police. “I want to strangle you!” she said, hugging CiCi. She said the police were out looking for her, that they'd relayed her description to patrolmen all over town.

But I don't know, maybe the police said they had to wait forty-eight hours, that's what I hear they have to say.

But CiCi said her mother said the police had her description, so maybe CiCi's mother lied. Or maybe the police lied to CiCi's mother.

Either way, she clutched at CiCi and wept, and then she held CiCi at arm's length and yelled and said, “Where on God's green earth have you been? The police are out using their resources right now!” So CiCi told her mother a strange man had tricked her into his van. She said he took her duffel bag and her tennis racket and then he left her on the side of the road, and as soon as CiCi's father came home, they all got into the car and drove down to the station and made out a report.

Two days later, five sorority sisters at the Chi Omega House at the State University were variously raped, beaten, killed, mutilated, and a couple weeks after that, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was abducted in Lake City, and eight days after that, Ted Bundy (who'd abandoned the white van he'd been using) was pulled over (in what turned out to be his second Volkswagen Bug, an orange one this time; the first one, some less interesting color, he'd used all through what you call his “string” of killings in Washington, Colorado, and Salt Lake City) and arrested.

A few days after that CiCi was called in and interviewed about Mark and his tennis rackets, his ankle, and his van. They interviewed her for hours, she said. She said at times there were eight to ten people in the room taking notes. She said there was a one-way mirror in the room and that at one point a lady psychiatrist came in and asked her about whether “this Mark” touched her here or there, and she just knew tons of people were behind the glass, watching. She did the lady psychiatrist's voice in a sort of fake-British accent, in a kind of tea-party voice. “Well my dea-h Beatrice,” that sort of thing. She pretended to be the British psychiatrist and pointed at my chest the way a schoolmarm might point at a blackboard or a disgusting lump of mud on the floor.