The Joy of Killing (9 page)

I could feel the heat of her. She tossed a wave of hair off her shoulder. I fought back the impulse to thrust up into her. Her hands pressed down on my shoulders. I slipped my hands under her skirt and placed them on her thighs, and allowed them to slip up to just about where her panties would be. Her look told me not a millimeter further.

I
STAND UP
abruptly. The scrape of the chair on the floor is the howl of an angry banshee. I see the wooden canoe, twisting in the waves, and realize I can't remember what happened to it, if it finally floated ashore, or somebody pulled it out. It was ours, I remember now. Our dad had bought it at the end of the previous summer, and we had hauled it here strapped on top of our station wagon. Our name was painted on the green bow in white letters. It carried two paddles and two life vests. I see a vest lying on the sand where Joseph had tossed it. Bright orange. It would have brought him
back, and all this suffering would have been avoided. Just because you wanted to impress the girls. You had them anyway; they loved you for your carefree arrogance. We didn't look for our canoe. As I said, we left the day after the reception and never came back.

The bathroom is in the middle of the hall, next to my old room. I have only to walk down the stairs, unlock the door, and it's a few steps on my left. I hesitate to leave my warren, and not just because of the strange sounds coming from below. It's more that I feel content in here, firmly in the spell of the images of the past, as unsettling and untrustworthy as they are. I have very few possessions left; I'd disposed of most of what I owned over the past couple of months, except my car, a green and white 1956 Chevy Bel Air convertible, which I said in a note on the breakfast table should go to my second wife. She liked to fuck in the backseat of the car at outdoor theaters, top down. Her goal was to screw under the stars in fifteen different theaters, and we eventually made it at the Night Vue Drive-In on the outskirts of Council Bluffs. We were together five years. She was the cello teacher in the college conservatory and played first position in the Des Moines Symphony. She liked to show me how she could masturbate with her bow, playing the Ninth on her clitoris, and coming in a long screech in the tumultuous finish of the fourth movement. One spring morning we were drinking coffee at the breakfast table, a light spring breeze raising the curtains, and she said we were over. I nodded, and she got up and packed her instrument and a few things and was gone by noon.

Without David there would have been no Willie Benson, and without Willie Benson there would have been no detectives, no
fedoras on the glass coffee table. David could talk his way out of whatever he did, by getting you to see how it made such perfect sense in his head. He denied having fucked my first wife, other than the night I caught them, and I had believed him, although she later confessed otherwise. Just like he denied having given the cops my name, and I let it go.

I'm not an angry person. Nothing burns in my gut. I seek only a peaceful finish; but perhaps peace comes if you no longer struggle for it, if you give up the effort of trying to keep all the pieces in place, the wires hooked up, and let the world stream through you as it will. A movement catches the corner of my eye; the knob on the door turns, ever so slightly. I stare at it. No one could get up the creaky stairs without me hearing them. No person, anyway. Who else could turn it? A raccoon, with its tiny black leathery fingers? I walk to the door. I twist the knob and jerk the door open. Nothing, although I can't see to the bottom of the stairs, where something could be crouching. I flip the light switch. Nothing. Flip it back. It had worked earlier. I remember the strange shadow cast by the hanging bulb on the walls. I flip the switch rapidly. “Fuck you,” I call out. There is a small bolt on the door at the bottom of the stairs. The stairs creak under my weight. At the bottom stair, I see that the bolt has been pulled back. I clearly remember jamming the thing into the notch, and then checking it. I run the scene backward in my head. I twist the knob and listen. I push the door open, and there is a clicking, as if something is running off. Joseph had a large black lab, I remember. “Joseph,” I whisper, and then again, a little bit louder. “Joseph!” Dead silence. “I'm sorry,” I say. Moonlight is
slicing in through a window at the end of the hall. I see the door to my old room; across from it is the door to the bathroom. Something might be waiting in the doorway. Fuck it, I think. I don't have to pee anymore. I step back, pull the door shut, and toss the tiny bolt into the slot. I hold still and listen. I ascend the stairs slowly, and stop and listen again at the top.

I return to the table. The stack of paper next to the Underwood is an inch high, yet the story is not half finished. I've never mentioned the girl on the train to a soul, until now. I miss her, yet I can feel her with me, here, tonight. I read back my last few lines, where she swings her leg over me and prepares to settle down on my dick, which is on edge from the wet heat of her. She leaned over, placed her hands on my shoulders, and kissed me. “Ready?” she whispers. I nod, and I feel her pussy brush over me, and then brush back. I wanted to touch it. She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and lowered herself. I moved my hands slightly up her thighs until I could feel her bottom flattening a little on my thighs. I squeezed it lightly. The girl held me gently inside her. The sensation rolled up through me like a rough tide. Suddenly, still as a scarecrow, she squeezed me gently from the underside. I jerked involuntarily.

“Hey,” she said.

Her face was blurry, but there was a hint of a smile on it. I could feel a powerful thrust building inside me.

“Hold still,” she whispered. “Very still. We're OK.”

W
ELL, NOW THAT
I think about it, I might have seen the girl once again, after our night on the train, although the memory has until
the last few minutes lain dormant as a walnut buried deep in the frozen Midwest countryside. I was a professor at City College in Booneville. I'd published a collection of short stories and one novel, the last about a philosophy professor at a major university who became a killer. In the novel, entitled
The Professor
, the teacher had developed his own peculiar theory of nature and the human experience. Research had convinced him that humans, like other animals, were essentially amoral. They behave in their perceived best interest 100 percent of the time. The only reason humans conform their behavior to social norms, like not stealing or committing murder, is that it's in their perceived best interests to do so. Given the right situation, we will all commit murder, without hesitation—in defense of self, or others, or even country. Importantly, the Professor believed that mistakes in perception of self-interest could not be held to be the fault of the individual. If a man felt it necessary to rob a bank to survive, that perception and the impulse behind it were not of his own making. Punish him, if you will, for the best interest of society, but be honest about judging him morally for what he did. Was he involved in the construction of his own personality? Did he design himself to lack impulse control? A conscience? He did what he did because he was who he was.

The Professor was able to shift himself into neutral, from where he could see everything clearly and intimately for what it was. Late one night he caught his wife in the act with his neighbor, in the hammock in their backyard. The next night he cut her throat with a straight razor while she lay asleep in their bed. A few hours later, after organizing his writings, he called the police and turned himself
in. He defended himself at trial, was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Professor
caused quite a stir on campus and pissed off my feminist colleagues since they saw the novel as proposing a moral justification for murdering a woman because of her unfaithfulness. Which really wasn't the point at all.

I was walking down the hall of the liberal arts building on campus when I imagined I saw the girl. She was probably twenty feet ahead of me as we descended the wide steps in front of the main building, which opened onto the campus. She turned slightly, as if she sensed I was there. I saw in the face the same look of sensuality and mystery, sadness, although now it lacked the softness of youth. She had a leather bag over her shoulder and was wearing high heels. For a second our eyes touched. She smiled faintly, then looked away. She reached the bottom of the steps and disappeared quickly in the crowd. If it was her, which now I don't think it was, I understand why she hurried off; she knew, as I knew, that the treasure of that night lay in its submersion in the past. The present would interrupt the story and perhaps destabilize it. The narratives of people's lives are what hold them together. Crazy people are those whose narratives have fallen apart, leaving them in chaos. If the story of your life has played out, like mine has, and you'd care to write the end of it, then you do something like I'm doing. You sever yourself from the future, in hopes of finding a final, more enlightened present.

Against the wall, a few feet away, sits my briefcase. Leather, with a strap and buckle, fat at the bottom. Battered from years of lugging books and papers around campus. I'd finally left the college
five years ago, when the evident dishonesty in the pursuit of knowledge had become intolerable.

The briefcase has a dark splotch on the leather flap that I don't remember. Like something viscous had spilled on it. I tilt the lamp in its direction; it's seeped into the leather, whatever it is.

David had moved back to Booneville when his father died and took over his commercial printing business. The local paper occasionally ran pictures of him, the lock of hair, now gray, still falling provocatively over his forehead, the same half-ass smirk on his face.

A heavy cloud is passing in front of the moon. I walk to the window and see that the garden is now lost in the shadow. As the cloud drifts by, the shadow lifts. Now I can see in the garden the beauty of what had been; a tangle of vines of faded roses climbing and descending the stone wall in wild profusion.

I feel a twinge of panic. This wandering about in the darkness, while somewhat interesting, will waste the remains of my life. I turn away from the heavens, from the garden below, flick the light back on, and return to my seat. The typewriter has grown cold in my absence. I twist the lamp head to face the paper in the machine. I see the names typed in blood. I add “fedora,” because I never heard the detectives' names. They pressed me hard, back and forth, occasionally glancing up at my parents as if to say we can't get anywhere if your son keeps lying. They picked up the wallett, opened it, leaving the head shots of David and Judy Pauling next to each other on the glass table, as if their flat stares might shake me up. “Fedora” doesn't fit within the smear, so I twist the knob and retype it in the middle of the stain a line lower. I was on the verge of pointing the
finger at David, but I knew I was dead if I gave the detectives the slightest opening. Everything
had
been his fucking idea. When we had met Willie the second time and he suggested we go to his room, where the girl would supposedly meet us, I hesitated. David took me aside and told me Willie had introduced him to the girl the day before and she was a beautiful redhead with great tits and willing to do anything. The images in my head overwhelmed my skepticism, but I remember asking Willie if we couldn't first meet the girl outside the drugstore. He said she worked at the state fair, but would meet us at his room in half an hour. Gina. I should have walked away right then.

The first detective must have sensed my weakness, because he leaned forward, tried to be casual and sincere at the same time, and said nothing would happen to me, it was Willie they were after. He knew I was lying, but didn't want to have to report me for it. His eyes tried to pin me, and I hesitated, then I caught the glisten of the scar on his face, running like a river from the lobe of ear across his cheek and to the edge of his chin, and was within an instant of asking him how he got it, when he dropped his hand hard on the table.

I jumped, and saw from the corner of my eye that my parents also jumped. Both detectives sat stock still. The voice of the second detective, with the flat eyes, said, “You were in Willie's room, weren't you? With David Wright.”

My mother dropped her head.

I could remember quite clearly the two-block walk on the hot sidewalk to the seedy part of town. I walked behind the two of
them, past small stucco houses with weed-filled yards and abandoned corner gas stations and old taverns with faded neon signs hanging askew over the front door. I could smell the meatpacking plant across the viaduct. I willed myself to turn around and walk back to the drugstore, but I couldn't. The paint on the front door of the building was peeling. As Willie pulled the door open, I caught the eye of an elderly woman in the second-story window. I could feel sweat on the back of my neck. Willie held the door for me, and I knew it was my last chance. His thin lips disappeared in his oily smile.

“No,” I replied to the cop.

He began rubbing the knuckles on his left hand. Staring at me. I flipped open the top of the silver cigarette case and extricated a filter. He twitched like he was going to grab it from my hand, and I sat back immediately, out of his way. Problem was, the lighter was still on the table. My father turned and left the room. My mother glanced at him, then called his name. He had a golf game every Saturday morning. This would really piss her off. She called his name again, more annoyed, and swirled from the room. The second detective, with the small ears too far back, owner of the brown fedora—it had a red feather in the band, I see now—reached for the lighter, lifted it, leaned forward, and punched it. I hesitated. He pushed it out a little further, and the flame bent back. I finally lit the weed. It was tasteless after the Lucky, but I sat back and exhaled. I held the cigarette between two fingers, like an adult. I felt saliva collect under my tongue.