Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (20 page)

“What is your name?”

“Danny.”

“Now look down and tell me what you’re wearing.”

“It’s an army uniform. I am standing on a hill, the wind is cold, there is a smell of autumn in the air. I shouldn’t be standing here in my tropical uniform.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Dad’s funeral.”

“You can look around and see your surroundings. Tell me what you see.”

“They’re all down at the grave, relatives from my mother’s family who never had much to do with us. None from Dad’s family, but I didn’t know them either. Debra leaves them and walks up the hill toward me. She has a kind of blue glow in her eyes and a spiritual look on her face—and a strange kind of self-possession. She puts her hand on my arm and says, Dan, take me home. I feel … I dunno, like a man for the first time, like I’m taking my father’s place, like …”

“Go on. You felt like—”

“Like I was her lover, come home from the war.”

“Go on. Then what happened?”

I drove Dad’s old Buick out to the farm. I didn’t want to set foot in the house where Dad and Debra had lived, I never had and I never would. The old house was musty inside, there were rat and rabbit droppings on the floor, and a pair of possums had built a nest in the upstairs bedroom. But everything was there, even the old toybox with Danny on one side and Debra on the other, marked in red crayon. I kept wondering, Why did Dad do it? But I didn’t want to ask her now. I just wanted to understand my own mood, the feeling that everything was sliding away, and I stood with my eyes focussed on a limitless expanse of … nothing. We walked around the old place, climbed into the tree house we built when we were seven, looked at the old chickenhouse where Brindle was shot. The walls had crumpled, the posts had rotted off at the ground, the roof had collapsed. I stood there trying to figure out why it was important. I felt the wind blowing through my bones—not a cold wind or a warm wind, just a feeling of non-materiality. Then I noticed Debra was
shivering, I realized the temperature had dropped, and a cold drizzle was falling. When we got back to the house a neighbor lady had brought a pot of baked beans, and there was cake and ice cream, and carrots jiggling in yellow aspic, all sitting on the kitchen table …

While she changed, sitting at Mama’s vanity table with the door ajar, he smoked a joint of brown Vietnam weed from the bag he carried in his toilet kit. One hit made the world spin, another shattered it into mirror fragments tilted at bizarre angles. He was aware of Debra watching him through the open door. Her skin was like transparent alabaster, her nipples dark little eyes which stared at him through the sheer fabric of Mama’s nightdress. She rose and walked toward him, her eyes pinched down at the corners. She stood by his chair, and his face was level with her stomach. He pressed his nose against it and smelled the rose-water that Mama had used. Her hands caressed the back of his head, touched the scar tissue on his neck. “Let’s go to bed, Danny.”

“You want …?” His hand moved down between her thighs, came up to cup the cushioned hump of her
mons
.

“Yes. I want.”

How strange it is, he thought. Flesh of my flesh. The heat of her sex bathed his palm in pulsating waves; his own desire recognized no tabooed relationship. Dad had been the one to whom he had always looked for restraint, now he was gone, and looking down the long road of the future, Danny could see no power equal to his own. He could do what he wanted …

The night was strange. He hadn’t seen her in almost a year, and that had been a brief, confused visit to his training camp. He was intoxicated by the whiteness of her skin, the fragrance of her body—accustomed as he was to rotten-fish and garlic smells. She didn’t smoke, but while he did she watched him with her cat’s eyes, waiting for him to crush out the roach. Without words she blended into his fantasies; she became whatever he wanted, a princess, a goddess, a wife, a whore …
Next morning he looked up at the water-stained ceiling and said to himself:
This shit has got to cease
.

He smelled the wood burning in the old cookstove, sniffed the aroma of coffee and recalled that Mama had always gotten up first, even on the coldest mornings, to build the fire and brew the coffee while Dad lay in bed. Debra came in and set the steaming mug on an upended orange crate beside the bed. She sat with a blanket draped over her shoulders, watching him while he drank. Her face glowed with an inner radiance; through the gap in the blanket he saw the rising cones of her breasts, the dark shadow at the base of her stomach. He recalled her intoxicated passion of the night before, and wondered where she had learned the little licks and strokings which fed his lust. He could no longer think of her as Little Sister, the pure virginal creature who sits by the hearth while Brother dips his wick into the fleshpots …

“Stand up. I want to see what you look like.”

She stood up, turning as the blanket slid off her shoulders. He saw a pattern of greenish-yellow bruises on her buttocks. “Your boyfriend must have a pretty strong grip.”

“Boyfriend?” She turned to him with eyebrows arched, lifted the blanket and slid into bed. She shivered as she huddled against him. “I don’t need a boyfriend. You keep me warm enough.”

She played with him, and he thought,
Just once more
. A long time later, after a nap and another joint of Nam weed, she asked:

“What happens when somebody dies?”

“The government reassigns his social security number.”

“Not that. Don’t you remember the angels?”

“What about the angels?”

“They came and took Daddy. He was drinking. He’d been drinking a long time. He’d gone to AA but it wasn’t any good. He just didn’t want to go on. So he got the shotgun—”

“Don’t, Debra.”

“It was too long. He couldn’t reach the trigger by himself
He asked me. He said it wouldn’t hurt, he didn’t mind—”

“Don’t talk about it anymore.”

“I was trying to take it away from him. I don’t know how my fingers slipped inside the trigger guard. There was this enormous explosion and something knocked me across the room. I looked at Daddy and his head was … his face … there wasn’t anything
left!
I ran out—”

“That’s enough, Debra.”

“But it’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s all right.”

“He’s with the angels now, isn’t he?”

“Sure, sure …” He slid his arm under her neck and held her face against his chest, wondering: How the hell am I gonna break her loose from this? Somehow he had passed through the door of maturity, and she had gotten shunted off into some strange dark hallway hung with bats and ropes and creeping things. He was curious to see the place where she had gone, but he couldn’t see it without going there himself, and he wasn’t sure he would ever get back …

“Listen, is it true what you said? You don’t have any boyfriend?”

“You
want
me to have some?”

“Well I just got to thinking about the Parsons, living in that big old house, closing off one room after another over the years. Neither one ever got married. So there they are, Sal and Homer, both over eighty years old, staring right smack at a blank wall. When they go that’s the end of it, nobody will ever care what they did when they lived, or even if they lived at all.”

“But they’ve done what they wanted to do.”

“I know. But I think you might be unhappy in later years. Thinking about the family you could’ve had.”

“Are you really that sentimental?”

“You call
that
sentimental?”

“Give me your hand.” She took it, pressed it against her stomach. He felt the lumped coil of her intestines,
the trickle of her digestive juices. “If I have a baby, I want it to be yours.”

If I have a baby, I want it to be yours
.

He woke up sweating, trembling. The doctor’s right eye was a red coal burning into his brain. His palms felt moist, his shirt had stuck to his back …

“What happened?”

“You were beginning to thrash around. I thought I’d bring you out of it for a while. Want a cigarette?”

“Okay.”

Jeff lit a cigarette, handed it to him. “So … after the funeral … after you spent the night with Debra—what did you do?”

“I guess I spooked. I saw her giving birth to some weird monster with flippers for arms. I went back to Nam as soon as I could, spent my furlough in Cambodia. She called me up on her wedding night. Wanted to know how to get out of it. I told her she’d made her bed, and she had to sleep in it. I probably should have given her more encouragement, but I sort of resented the man she picked.”

“Why?”

“Boots—as I got to know him later—had this moral equivalent for making love. He made money. The reason he liked whores was because it gave him a chance to get something for his money. Kind of a capitalistic rape. Otherwise, if a girl put out because she wanted to, then his money was wasted, see?”

“So why did Debra marry him? Didn’t she have the perception to see what he was?”

“No, she knew what he was. You have to realize that everything she did had some relation to me. So when I told her to marry she did … and married a person I couldn’t stand, one who could be depended on to degrade her. She wanted to make me sorry I’d suggested it.”

‘Tough on Boots.”

“Well, he got what he paid for. She let him have it on schedule—four nights a week. It’s like those birthcontrol
pills you get with all the dates filled in. You take your pill and you fuck and there’s nothing spontaneous.”

“I see. And this business about the angels …”

“Oh, that goes back a long time. When Grandpa died—that’s my mother’s father—she told us that he’d been carried up to heaven by the angels. So we wanted to know why we couldn’t see them, and Mama said they lived on the earth in the shape of doves. I got the picture then, of four pigeons grabbing the corner of a handkerchief and flying up to heaven. Then I remembered Grandpa lying in his coffin and I said, No, it isn’t true. Pigeons can’t carry all that weight. But Debra noticed that the pigeons congregated up at the top of the loft, and I decided there might be something to it, since pigeons lived closer to heaven than anyone else. So Debra and I, we got this theory going, that they were only pigeons during the day, and at night they changed themselves into angels, and came down to play. That way it didn’t seem so bad.”

“What didn’t?”

“Death. It became acceptable to me.”

“How acceptable? So much that you could bestow this blessing on others?”

“No. But I see what you’re getting at, you bastard. I never killed anyone, except in combat.”

“Perhaps. Shall we continue?” Jeff took the cigarette and stubbed it in the ashtray. “Lie back and relax now. You are no longer twenty-one. I am going to count again, and you will feel the years slipping away. Twenty … nineteen … eighteen … seventeen …”

He felt himself jerk.

“Seventeen? All right, you are seventeen. When I reach the count of three you will remember everything. One … two … three … You are seventeen, and you are able to look around you and see what is happening. You are seventeen. What are you wearing?”

He was wearing a white formal.
No, that’s impossible!
In the lyre-shaped mirror he could see his ivory shoulders and the faint beginning swell of his breasts. The woman beside him (Get me out of this!) was Helen. Daddy came
in, gave him a purse-lipped sneer of disapproval. “Don’t go out with your tits showing.” He went away, and …

“You are seventeen …” droned the doctor’s voice. “It’s an important year. What happened?”

Dan couldn’t find his voice.

“You are seventeen. You can look around you and describe what is happening. Go on.”

“Can’t … can’t—”

“You can’t speak?”

“N-n-noo.”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t me!”

“Who is it?”

“Debra.”

“You … are Debra?”

“No. I … know … her—”

“Thoughts?”

“Mem-mem-memm …”

“Memories. Tell me.”

“Gregory comes, I go to the dance. I’ve been studying hard and I feel wild and irresponsible, like someone let out of prison. Also I am mad at Daddy because he said that about my dress. Gregory is two years older than I, but I feel older than him. We dance and laugh and we neck outside the gymnasium. He has a bottle, and I drink from it. I hate the taste, but it makes me warm inside. I take several drinks. I fall down and Greg carries me to his car. He drives and the heater makes me sleepy. When I wake up the car is parked and Daddy is shouting through the closed window. I don’t know him at first, he looks fierce and crazy. Then I realize Gregory is on top of me, he has my dress up and … he isn’t nice to me, he’s being nasty and it … feels good. Daddy jerks the door open and tries to pull Gregory off, but I hold on. Then Daddy pulls Greg out and knocks him down in the snow. He keeps hitting him, and the snow gets red with blood. And then he picks me up and carries me into the house. His eyes are red and he tears off my nice formal and Helen
says she’s going to call the police. Daddy tears the phone off the wall and locks Helen in her room. Then he comes toward me … no more, please. I don’t
like
you!”

“Don’t pull out,” said the voice. “Go on …”

He hated the voice that made him stay. He could feel the sweat running off him, gathering in the small of his back.

“I can’t remember any more.”

“You were Debra, you got drunk and your father beat up the boy who took you out, and then … what?”

“Weird plastic landscapes. I feel strange, a sense of floating, I hear a voice telling me things, telling me to …”

“Telling you to what?”

“To … put him out of his misery. Jesus! My father!”

“It’s Debra’s father too.”

“It hurts to think about it.”

“No, don’t wake up.
Don’t
…
wake … up!
Let’s keep going back.”

“No!”

“Just relax now. I’ll start counting again. Nothing can hurt you. These are only memories. Now you are no longer seventeen. You are sixteen … fifteen … fourteen …”

“Those willow switches cut like wire.”

“What?”