Good Day to Die (24 page)

She heard the strident call of a crow in the distance, heard an answer, then another. Wishing herself to be as free as them. Free of …

Her mind hesitated for a moment, then filled with a single idea: the knowledge of good and evil. So much better not to know. Such a curse, to know and not be able to change. She recalled another line from her childhood Bible classes, this one from the Gospels. “For ye know not the day, nor the hour.”

Maybe not, she decided, but you do know there will
be
a day and an hour. And that makes a difference. That makes
all
the, difference.

She lowered her mouth to the stream and drank again, this time more slowly. The sun was very strong, strong enough to negate the cool breeze on her wet body. An airplane passed overhead, a small plane from the sound of it, flying very low. She stood and began to wave her arms frantically.

“Help me! Help me!”

The plane droned on, the roar of its engine gradually fading. Lorraine stumbled away from the stream, following the sound of the plane until it disappeared altogether.

She had never felt more alone.

“I have to make a decision,” she said out loud. “I have to do something.”

She remembered losing her mother on a crowded beach. Asked herself, How old was I? Old enough to talk. Old enough to get lost. She recalled looking out at the ocean, then back at the hundreds of faces. Faces on big beach blankets. Stuffing food into their mouths. How could they do that when she’d just lost her mommy?

She’d concluded (she can remember this clearly) that they didn’t care. They were all devils, and they laughed to show that her condition pleased them. The condition of being lost.

But when she began to cry, they had come to her. Talked to her, led her to a lifeguard who took her to the hotdog stand and fed her ice cream and soda until her mother finally showed up.

Lorraine sat on the grass, plucked blades of grass and put them into her mouth. Maybe, she thought, I can eat grass. Like a cow or a sheep. If I could eat, I could escape. I could somehow find my way out.

But when she thought about food, she found Becky’s face in her mind. Becky, the source of nourishment. The nurturing maniac.

Lorraine managed a laugh. The irony was too powerful to resist. And there were so many ironies here. Every possibility negated by a drunken moment on a Queens street. And then the worst of it, the most cutting irony of all—if she weren’t blind, she’d already be dead. They’d allowed her to live
because
she was blind. And helpless. And hopeless. And so forth, and so forth, and so forth.

She lay back on the grass. Remembering screams inside a van. Remembering bloody, violent, painful death. Her death, eventually. If Becky returned. If Daddy returned. If she didn’t starve.

“I’m not going to go like that,” she said. “Without fighting back. Why should I, when I know what’s coming?”

Her mind began to form a plan. She didn’t rush it, didn’t try to shape it. What was the point? It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to go.

Sooner or later, she finally decided, Becky or Daddy or both would come to her. They hadn’t abandoned her to starvation and thirst. No, far from it. If Daddy wanted her to die, he’d do it himself. He’d do it and enjoy it. In fact, sooner or later, he
would
come. He’d come to kill her.

If Becky came, she’d bring food. If Daddy came, he’d bring death. Either way, they’d arrive with the conviction that she, Lorraine, was helpless. That she couldn’t fight back.

“And that’s where they’re wrong. The fatal flaw in their fatal argument.”

The plan was simple: Find a weapon, a rock or a sharpened stick, then go back into the cabin. Replace the window and wait for one of them to show up. Wait until they open the door, until they’re standing in sunlight, peering into the darkened room. Wait until
they
are blind, then strike. Again and again and again.

If I can walk into a room and know someone else is there, she concluded, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can find the keys on a typewriter, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can cross Flatbush Avenue, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can clear a floor of broken glass, I can find the body of my enemy.

It was, she realized, a litany. One she vowed to repeat until it became impossible to forget. Until the assertion became rock-hard reality.

Whoever came, she told herself, would come in a car. She might find a telephone in the car. Or a CB radio. Or a canteen. Or a backpack. Or a gun that she could fire off as a signal to rescuers.

Whoever came would bring a day’s supply of food. She could ration that out for a week. A week of travel toward civilization.

Whoever came would come clothed. That would mean shoes; she knew she would not get far if she couldn’t protect her feet. It would mean a jacket and pants to shield her body from tree branches, shrubs, and brambles. It would mean extra warmth at night.

Lorraine picked herself up and began to look for a stick large and sharp enough to be a spear. Ten minutes later, she settled for a dead branch snapped off a dead tree. It seemed sharp, but she had no way to know if it would actually penetrate flesh, and she decided not to rely on it.

No, she would use rocks instead, lots of small rocks. All she needed to do was find one with a sharp edge, then gather the rest. She knelt on the bank of the stream and let her fingers drift over the stones at the bottom, finding a piece of slate after the briefest of searches. Even in water, she could feel its oily surface and polished edges. Then, quickly, she located the rest—half a dozen palm-sized, rounded rocks—and began to carry her ammunition back to the cabin.

Twenty minutes later, she was back inside, the window recovered, the water jug full, the bucket-latrine empty. She felt almost serene. Something was going to happen, and she would be the agent of that something. She was no longer helpless, no longer hopeless.

“Let the chips fall where they may.” she muttered, “as long as I get to throw the dice.”

She sat at the edge of the bed, took up one of her blankets, and carefully hacked a large square, then a narrow strip. She folded the larger piece into a pouch, then began to add rocks, stopping occasionally to test the weight. It had to be light enough for her to swing quickly, yet heavy enough to incapacitate, at least temporarily.

When she was satisfied, she made a series of slits just above the rocks, wove the narrow strip through the openings, then knotted the strip. The stones were now tightly packed, the outer part of the wool square extending two feet. It would make an effective handle.

She crossed to the door, taking a position alongside it. The door opened outward, and she imagined Becky stepping through. Becky chattering as she came.

Should she strike at the head? Or go for the body, the larger target, and count on a second opportunity? And what would happen if Daddy showed up? Or if they came together? Or if they showed up while she was sleeping? Or if they didn’t come at all?

“If I can walk into a room and know someone else is there, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can find the keys on a typewriter, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can cross Flatbush Avenue, I can find the body of my enemy. If I can clear a floor of broken glass, I can find the body of my enemy.”

W
HEN I FINALLY GOT
home, twelve hours after my day had begun, I found that my trip to the country had put me in a decent mood. Maybe it was just the stress-blower outside Pete’s Eats—I won’t deny smacking that redneck had done me a world of good. But there was also the fact that I’d gone back to the north country (if not quite as far north as Paris) for the first time since the day I’d left it to enter the army. The day’s journey had had its share of bad memories, but they hadn’t crushed me. In fact, you could make a decent case for the proposition that my bad memories had crushed someone else. Which, I suppose, was par for the course.

In any event, when I picked up Ms. Brock’s article (and there was no doubt that I was
going
to pick it up), I thought I was ready to deal with any new revelations. They weren’t long in coming.

Rocky W. killed and mutilated five women in a period of six months in 1963 when he was nineteen years old. He didn’t deny his guilt at time of trial, though the judge hearing the case refused to accept a guilty plea because of the distinct possibility of a death sentence. The killings, it should be noted, were clumsily executed, the product of a typically disorganized serial killer. Rocky did not stalk his victims; he chose them impulsively and in so doing left behind enough forensic evidence to guarantee his eventual conviction.

Rocky W. came from the abusive background typical of our sexually motivated murderers. His father, George W., an alcoholic, drifted in and out of Rocky’s life. His mother, Simone, was obsessed with religion and dragged Rocky to various church functions, sometimes as often as four or five times a week. Rocky, an only child, had virtually no contact with other children before beginning school and reports engaging in sadistic fantasy “as far back as I can remember.”

It should not surprise us to learn that Rocky did not share these fantasies with his parents, but we should also understand that he would have been unlikely to relate them even to trained personnel. Rocky’s fantasies sustained him; they belonged to him alone. He saw them as his property.

The goal, of course, from society’s point of view (and from the point of view of the individual therapist), must be early identification. If the progression from abused child to sexual murderer is to be halted, intervention must begin early on. If society cannot identify children at risk, such intervention is unlikely, if not impossible.

We must, therefore, discover observable behavioral indicators of eventual sexually based aggression. Two of the most common of these indicators are cruelty to animals and/or cruelty to other children. More than 70 percent of the men in our cohort reported one or the other or both.

Rocky W. is typical of those children who actualized their fantasy lives by exhibiting long-term cruelty to animals. He began by killing the family’s parakeet, though it is not clear that killing was his aim. Rocky, over a period of two weeks while his mother was at work, sprayed the bird with an insecticide, then settled back to watch as the animal convulsed on the floor of its cage. He did not do this every day, because, as he reports, “If Tweety died, I wouldn’t be able to spray him any more.” Rocky, according to his mother, was five years old when the bird finally expired.

Rocky admits to being “turned on” by the experience, but as his mother did not buy another family pet, he was unable to continue what he called “my experiment” on a regular basis until he reached adolescence. By that time, still friendless, he was spending most of his free time on a series of long-abandoned piers and wharfs extending into a major river near his home. The piers were populated by large rats, animals that both fascinated and repelled young Rocky. At first, he was satisfied to throw stones at them, but his efforts quickly accelerated. He reports, for instance, sprinkling the piers with rat poison, only to be disappointed when the rats ate the poison without noticeable effect.

Finally, Rocky discovered a method of entrapment that afforded him maximum satisfaction. He took a bird cage (Tweety’s old cage, ironically enough) from a back closet, baited it with food stolen from the refrigerator and devised a way to close the door of the cage once a rat was inside. He would then take cage and rat onto a pier and lower the cage into the water. With practice, he was, he reports, able to gauge exactly how long the animals could remain below the surface and still survive. He would pull the cage up, give the trapped rat a chance to recover, then lower the cage, repeating this sequence until …

The sound of a key turning in the lock on my front door interrupted Ms. Brock’s somewhat passionate recital of Rocky’s childhood obsessions. A moment later, the door opened and Marie Koocek appeared.

“Wha’cha doing, Means?” she called as she crossed the apartment. “You alone?”

“Actually, I’m cuddling in bed with Miriam Brock.”

“Well, save some for me.”

By that time, she was close enough to see that I was alone. I won’t say she was disappointed, but I don’t believe she would have been embarrassed if I’d actually had company. Marie tended to take events in stride. The only thing she couldn’t handle (that I knew about, at least) was her work going badly. At such times, she would pace my apartment, swearing at the top of her lungs while she announced her determination to put the art business behind her once and for all.

“So, who’s Miriam Brock?”

I handed her the article without comment. “Oh, that,” she said, then began to scan the pages I’d just finished reading.

“Did you torture animals, Means?” she asked when she was done.

“Well, I
killed
enough of them. Does it count as torture if you eat them after you kill them?”

She thought about it for a moment, then said, “Only if you don’t cook them first.”

“In that case, I declare my innocence. You know …”

“What’re you thinking about, Means?” Koocek had a way of doing that to me. Of asking the wrong question at the right time.

“I’m thinking about a little birdy.” I didn’t expect it to get me off the hook, but it was the first thing that popped into my head.

“And?” Her eyes were filled with intense curiosity.

“Well, I guess I was eleven or twelve when this happened. By that time, I was just about living in the forest, hunting for meat, cooking it right there. As I was pretty experienced, I rarely had trouble finding prey, but unless it was high summer when there were berries available, or autumn when the hickory nuts and acorns dropped, meat was all I could get my hands on, so I used to filch a few pieces of bread or a couple of muffins before I went off on my expeditions.

“It’s a funny thing, Marie, about animals. You fire a rifle, you
kill
something, and for a few minutes the forest is completely silent. But then it’s as if nothing ever happened. The birds come back first, moving through the branches, claiming territory, scrabbling in the underbrush. Then I’d begin to see a rabbit or two, maybe squirrels in the trees. It was like they knew it was all over. That I’d done what I had to do and the danger was gone.