I (7 page)

In his early years Keith passed most of his free time with a man sixty years his senior, his maternal grandfather, Roy Bellamy. “He wasn't like my Jesperson grandpa. I could talk to him, and if I did something wrong, he would never tell Dad. Grandpa Bellamy's strongest word was
no
. We used to troll for salmon in his twelve-foot boat,
Little Cotto
. We'd leave at sunup and come back at dark. I still see him steering the boat and drinking coffee from his thermos while I keep my finger on the line to feel for strikes. We were the only ones on either side of the family that had the patience for this kind of fishing.

“Grandpa always made sure I caught the most fish—silver salmon and chinooks up to thirty pounds. We were good company, didn't need anybody else. I wonder how I would've turned out if Grandpa had lived a little longer. He died when I was nine. That's the only funeral I ever cried at. They played ‘I Hear a Symphony.' I cried again when I got home and learned that Grandpa had left me his boat and gear. I used to open his tackle box and stick my nose inside to pick up his smell. Dad traded
Little Cotto
for another boat. I kept on fishing, but it was never the same.”

 

For a while Keith had problems with a mischievous boy named Martin. “His parents would bring him over when they visited and he was always getting into trouble and blaming me. Dad would punish me in front of everybody. One day I'd had enough. I cornered Martin behind the garage and yelled, ‘I'm gonna kill you, you son of a bitch.' When Dad pulled me off, Martin was unconscious. I would have killed him if I hadn't been stopped—not a doubt in my mind. I wasn't surprised to get the belt. That was one time when I was guilty.”

Looking back, Keith considered the incident as a watershed in his early development. “That's when I began to think of myself as two people, one watching the other. When I was kicking Martin's ass, a gentler part of me stood by and watched. Maybe I'm still that way. When I'm taking care of a serious problem, I feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I can honestly say that the person that beat Martin was not the real me. I would never hurt another kid, no matter what he did. It wasn't my nature. But that day I just kind of stepped aside and let the bad side take over. It was the same with the women I killed. My murders happened in slow motion and later I would fantasize about what I
should
have done. I'd be thinking,
If only I could do it all over, I would do it different
. But the girls ended up just as dead.”

 

At seven Keith contracted simultaneous cases of impetigo and pneumonia and was restricted to his room. His mother applied salve to his festering sores while the others stayed as far away as possible. At the end of the long quarantine, Brad, Bruce and Sharon built him a lean-to fort of cedar boughs. In his selective memory it was the only act of sibling camaraderie he could recall from his childhood. The lean-to remained his refuge until he broke into a small abandoned school and created a fort in the dusty attic, coexisting with bats and mice.

For as far back as he could remember, animals large and small had seemed more real to him than his family. He explained that he'd spent his entire childhood in something he thought of as “Keith's World.” His brothers and classmates were firmly excluded. “I was always treated different, and this was my solution.”

He shared a birthday with his older brother, Bruce, and every year their mother arranged joint parties. Bruce was an outgoing, convivial boy, and to Keith the festivities always seemed focused on the older brother. “I was hurt by that. The only thing good about the parties was the cake that mother always cooked—German chocolate with raspberry filling and chocolate icing and marshmallow rabbits on the side. She made a nest of coconut on top and filled it with jelly beans. Then she wrapped dimes and quarters in waxed paper and hid them in the cake.”

In keeping with his dark brown memories, he claimed that other party guests always found the coins.

 

From his first days at a five-room elementary school a mile down the road, the boy was teased about being oversized. He didn't challenge the name-callers because he was afraid that he would be punished by his teachers and later by his father. He hung back and tried to imitate the other students. “In first grade, I filled up notebooks with ‘pretend' writing—scribbles and circles and crooked lines. I couldn't understand my own writing, but I thought the teacher would. That's the way I thought it worked in school. At the end of the first week, she held up my answer book and said, ‘This is exactly how
not
to do it.' She put me on display.”

In his first years of school, his grades were consistently low, and there was talk of leaving him back. “I was scared to take my report card home. It took a lot of spankings to find out that I was nearsighted. I couldn't see the writing on the blackboard. I would have complained earlier, but I thought every kid had the same problem. That was
my
mistake, not the teachers' or my parents'. When they finally found out, they got me glasses, and my grades improved a little. But I never really caught up.”

The boy's coordination seemed to lag his rapid growth, and he developed an ambling, disconnected walk. He never quite learned how to sit a horse. If the family horse Dynamite broke into a trot, he usually fell off.

On a school sports day, he was entered in the hop, skip and jump. At the starting line a teacher called out, “Okay, Keith, go ahead.”

He hopped, skipped, and jumped in place.

The other students laughed as he fled the athletic field for home. “I said to myself,
That's fine. I don't need them.”

 

In elementary school the boy became so upset by corporal punishment that in later years, when he had little to do except brood about his wrong turnings, he composed an essay on punishment and pain. Written in his usual overwrought style, “The Strop at Unsworth School” included meticulously drawn diagrams:

As he approached adolescence, Keith continued to aggravate his teachers and amuse his classmates, but he tried to live with his own nonconformity. His friendships were few and short-lived. “You become convinced that there's something about you that sets you off. After a while it just seems natural. My brothers were never my friends. My sisters were nice, but they were girls. I learned not to care about friends.”

He found companionship in the animal world: his dog, Duke, the family horses, tame rabbits, wild birds. He splinted a raven's broken wing with a popsicle stick and arranged the convalescing bird in a bed of soft rags. “After school my big brother Bruce took Blackie to a neighbor's house. They dumped the orange crate and threw their jack-knives at him till he died.”

The enraged Keith stomped into Bruce's second-story room. “I threw all his plastic airplane models out the window, little planes that he'd assembled, with decals, controls that worked, wheels. I said, ‘Fly, suckers, fly!'
Crash crash crash
. My mother finished the job by driving over them when she came home. I got punished for wrecking the models, but Bruce didn't get punished for killing my crow. Dad just said, ‘Get over it, Son. It's just a dumb crow.'”

In Keith's memory his father abided most dumb animals but hated cats. “He would put them in a gunnysack and drown them. He was easier on dogs. He'd shoo away strays and they'd run off whining. Townspeople dumped their unwanted pets at the end of our road. We had a steady supply.”

Sometimes Keith helped his father control invasions of feral cats. “I felt the same as Dad—they were a pain in the ass. They'd get in our garbage, yowl all night and keep everybody awake. We always made sure to kill the kittens. Sharon and Jill didn't approve, but they were girls. Sharon would say, ‘That's not nice, Keith!' My sisters would see bloodstains in the barn and start bawling.”

The boy also helped rid the family property of garter snakes. “Our place was overrun—hundreds of them. Dad taught me how to take a hoe and chop them in half. I enjoyed watching them fight the blade and sometimes I tortured them with gardening tools. It was one more way to have fun.”