Moonbog (54 page)

“D’you hear that?” Glenn asked, his eyes leaping back and forth from Tony to Butter to Shantelle and back to Tony.

“I didn’t hear a goddamned thing,” Butter said. His forehead was furrowed with confusion, and he cocked his head to one side, looking like a dog that was listening to a high frequency whistle that humans can’t hear.

“No, no. Listen again,” Glenn said.

He rewound the tape and played it again, making sure the volume was turned all the way up. Once again, he heard the writer say, “What the hell was that?”—followed by the loud bang, then silence. Through the tape hiss came the unmistakable sounds of a distant piano, playing “Listen to the Mockingbird.”

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Butter said, gasping as he sat back and let his shoulders slump. His mouth hung open, exposing his single yellow tooth. His eyes were wide and held a wild, confused glow.

Glenn quickly rewound the tape, and they all listened one more time. This time, everyone in the bar said they heard the faint strains of the distinctive tune.

“You ain’t fucking with us, are you Glenn?” Shantelle asked. Her eyes were wide, dark pools in the dim barroom light.

Glenn couldn’t speak. He could barely shake his head,
no
. His fingers were tingling so badly he’d all but lost his sense of touch. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold onto the tape recorder. A numb, hollow feeling slid open inside his chest, and the cold sensation between his shoulder blades spread like invisible fingers up the back of his neck.

Glenn clicked the tape off and looked around at his friends. They had all heard it, and they were all staring at him as though they expected him to say something profound. But it was Tony who finally spoke up.

“Wanna know what I think?” he said gruffly. Before anyone could draw a breath to speak, he continued, “I think, if you ain’t playin’ some kinda trick on us here, if this is for real, there’s only one thing you
can
do.”

“What’s that?” Glenn asked, looking at him, his eyebrows raised in desperate query.

“I think you oughta take that damned tape recorder, zip it back into that carrying case with all that other stuff, put a heavy stone in with it ‘n drop it overboard when you go out lobsterin’ tomorrow mornin’.” Tony raised his hand and pointed a gnarled forefinger at Glenn, shaking it like a schoolteacher who was scolding a child. “‘Cause if that tape’s for real, there ain’t no one ever gonna see that writer fella alive again. Not on The Nephews, ‘n not anywhere else.”

Tony leaned his head back and drained his beer glass with a few deep swallows. After wiping his chin and beard with the flat of his hand, he leaned forward and pinned Glenn with an intense, earnest look.

“That fella drove up here, you say?”

Glenn’s throat was so dry he could barely swallow as he nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

“Well, then,” Tony said, heaving himself up off the bar stool, preparing to leave. “If I was you, while it’s still dark, I’d think about drivin’ his car out to Nickerson’s Quarry and pushin’ it off Big Derrick Ledge where it’s deepest.” Tony wavered, a little unsteady on his feet as he took two twenties from his wallet and dropped them onto the bar in front of Shantelle. Before he turned to leave, though, he belched before leaning close to Glenn. His breath was sour with beer and stale with cigarette smoke as he whispered into his ear, “‘N I’d think ‘bout movin’ them thirty or forty traps you got out there by the Nephews.”

The Back of My Hands

T
he back of my hands started looking like a man’s back when I was—oh, maybe ten or eleven years old.

I remember how fascinated I was by the curling, black hairs I saw sprouting there; how amazed I was when I flexed and unflexed my hands, and watched the twitching blue lines of veins, the knitting needle–thin tendons, and the bony knobs of cartilage and knuckle. Sometimes, I used to constrict the flow of blood to my arms—you know, like a junkie—to make the veins inflate until they fairly bulged through the skin. The bigger they got, the more “manly” I thought my arms and hands looked.

It might seem laughable now, but I still believe hands are a God-given miracle. They let us touch and manipulate the world outside of ourselves. Sure, scientists say that vision is the only sense where the nerve connects directly to the brain, but hands are the only things that let us reach out, to touch and explore the world. They allow us to
feel
love and to
create
what we know and feel, both internally and externally.

They’re our only
real
solid connection to what’s “out there.”

Our other senses—sight, sound, taste, and smell—can all deceive us. They trick us into thinking we’re experiencing something that might not really be there.

But when we touch something, when we hold it in our hands and caress it, we have no doubt whatsoever that it truly exists. When I look at my own hands now, though, I can’t help but be filled with revulsion and horror.

Yes,
horror!

That’s probably an overused word these days, but there’s no better word for what I feel.

These hands—
my
hands—have done things so terrible, so hideous that I can truly say they are no longer mine.

They’ve acted as if powered by a will of their own—a will with a dark, twisted purpose. And in the process, they’ve ended the life of someone—of the one person I’ve ever really been close to—a life I should have cherished above all others.

O
kay, let me start at the beginning.

The easiest part was killing my twin brother, Derrick. No problem there.

I’m serious.

It certainly wasn’t very difficult to orchestrate. You’d think I was a musician, talking like this, but when it actually came time to
do
it, to aim the gun at him and squeeze the trigger, I didn’t flinch or have the slightest hesitation.

And I’ve had no qualms about it afterwards, either.

Why should I?

Derrick had it all. Everything. He was everything I wanted to be.

I know, I know . . . sure, he worked just as hard for it, maybe even harder than I did; but everything came so easily to him, almost as if it fell out of the sky and landed in his lap.

And it never came to me. Certainly not as easily, anyway, and no way near as much.

You see, he was the one who was born with all the talent. I couldn’t help but think that because I’d heard it my whole life, growing up. All through high school, Derrick was an honor student—popular, handsome, smart, and talented. He had it all. He graduated at the top of his class from college, too, married a gorgeous and intelligent woman, had a wonderful family—three kids and a beautiful country home about two hours north of Portland.

Far as I could see, he had it all.

And what did
I
have?

Nothing.

Squat.

The leftovers.

Sloppy seconds, if you’ll excuse such an inelegant expression.

All my life, I’ve had to listen to teachers and friends’ parents—even our
own
parents—exclaim with surprise that sometimes bordered on absolute shock how Derrick was so amazingly gifted, and that I was so . . . well, that I didn’t quite measure up to the standard
he
set.

The worst of it was when people would question, sometimes even to my face, how identical twins could be so . . . so
different
. Oh, we looked enough alike, so anyone who didn’t know us well couldn’t tell us apart, but it seemed as if all the intelligence, personality, and talent went into his half of the egg, and I was left with. . . .

Well, with sloppy seconds, like I said.

Maybe that really was the case.

I used to wonder about it, mostly late at night as I lay in bed, staring up at the bottom of Derrick’s upper bunk. I still lie awake at nights, wondering. Now I have plenty of time to think about things. Back when we were kids, I could hear my brother’s deep, rhythmic breathing coming from the top bunk, as if even sleeping was something he simply did better than I ever could.

I
t didn’t surprise anyone that Derrick and I both entered the field of art. Ever since we were kids, we’d both shown unusual talent for the visual arts although, as usual, Derrick’s paintings and drawings—hell, even his throw-away sketches—always seemed to be several notches better than anything I ever produced.

Not that my stuff was bad, mind you. I do have quite a bit of talent.

Now that I think about it, when I first started drawing was probably when I first really noticed the back of my hands. I remember how I’d spend a lot of the time not even paying attention to whatever it was I was drawing because I would be so fascinated by the interplay of muscle and tendons beneath my skin as I held the pencil or brush in my hands and rolled it back and forth or whatever. Probably the one thing I ever did better than Derrick was anatomy drawing. Especially hands. I seemed to have quite a knack for drawing hands.

S
o like I said, it didn’t surprise anyone when we both went off to college—the same school, of course. We both majored in art, but my grades were never quite up to Derrick’s level . . . and neither was my work. He graduated
summa cum laude
while I was simply lucky to graduate with honors.

Following graduation, we both landed jobs within our chosen field. Derrick started right out as a painter—an “artist” with a capital
A
. Within a year or so, he was having one-man shows of his work at galleries in Boston and New York. The “art scene” had apparently already taken notice of him, and his paintings were selling for astronomical amounts. Personally, I thought they weren’t worth the price of the canvas they were painted on, but there’s no accounting for taste, is there?

And what about me?

I went to work, pasting up ads for a local newspaper, all the while trying to convince myself of the worth of a steady paycheck while I concentrated on my own art during evenings and weekends.

I think—hell, no! I don’t have to lie about it anymore, right? I know that’s when the full measure of the resentment I felt toward my brother began to blossom.

Until then, that resentment had always been there, festering inside me, maybe even since before we were born; but it had always been—you know, buried deep, like a seed in the soil that was struggling hard to push its way up to the sunlight. It was only after college, once we were out there in the real world, settling into our respective careers and trying to make a living that I finally allowed the seed to break through the surface. Over the next few years, as I watched my brother accumulate success and wealth and fame—everything I wanted and felt I deserved—I watered and nourished that seed of envy and hatred. . . .

Yes,
hatred!

I cursed the fate that I had been born to, wondering why?—what cruel, uncaring God could do this to me?

Why couldn’t I have been given at least
something
—just one single fucking thing more than my brother?

But he had it all, and I had . . . much less.

That’s when I started planning to change it all by killing him.

You know, one person I talked to a few days ago, maybe a few weeks ago, now, said that she thought I didn’t really
want
to kill Derrick. That what I really wanted to do was kill myself. She said that by identifying so closely with my twin brother, and by envying his success so much, I was turning all my pent-up anger against myself. She used all sorts of fancy psycho-babble terms like “transference” and “guilt projection” and “displacement”—stuff like that, but I’m pretty sure she was wrong.

I
really
wanted to kill
Derrick
.

I
had
to kill him.