Dr. Harding offered him a pleasant smile. “Let’s not worry about that just now, m’kay?” The session revealed to her Freddy’s carefully crafted guilt. He never blamed Josh for not waiting for him. He never expressed any anger toward any of his friends. He did blame Mike Thomas for starting the fight that held him late.
“If he hadn’t stopped me, I would have gotten in the car with them and none of this would have happened.”
To Liza Harding, whose university text books were still dust free, who still paused occasionally to consider the piece of wall she had hung her degree on, this appeared to be a clear case of survivor guilt. Freddy never went so far as to say it should have been him – I’m sure that would have seemed over the top. He did often tell Dr. Harding he should have been quicker getting home. Once, allowing a concoction of rage to blister up, he cried and said he should have been faster finishing off John so that he could have gotten to her sooner.
“It’s not like I knew what I was doing,” Freddy remarked in another one of their sessions. “The knife was on my desk. If it had happened during baseball season my bat would probably have been handier.” While he spoke, he rubbed absently at his eye, his gaze distant and haunted. “I must have stabbed him a dozen times – more, probably. Each time he just seemed to get more and more pissed off at me. Right up to the end I thought I was gonna die. If I didn’t have that knife, I think he would have killed me.”
Right near the end of their sessions Freddy was sitting forward in the art deco inspired armchair he had occupied twice a week in her small office, his intense gaze on her. He had only recently realized she was a beautiful woman. She had a model’s bone structure and hair as blue-black as a fountain pen’s ink. Her body was tight and toned. It was a jogger’s body. As he began to notice this, Freddy found he had no attraction to this woman whatsoever. He thought it odd.
“You may think I’m a psycho or something,” he told her. Freddy liked the way she had begun to squirm a little under his sudden scrutiny. His eyes could do that. Later, during university he could have any woman he wanted with that look alone. Back in high school the look was still in its infancy. “I don’t really feel bad about killing my dad. I miss him sometimes – I think. But I don’t feel bad about it.”
“Freddy,” Dr. Harding blinked. She shuffled her papers, quite suddenly having a hard time looking at him. “I don’t think you’re – well, you used the term, psycho. Under the circumstances most people would feel the same. Your father’s death has been a very traumatic event in your life. It’s something you’ll never completely get over. It’s something you probably shouldn’t completely get over. But as time goes by, your feelings will change. Right now, you’re still angry at him – both for what he did and for what he made you do. This is normal.” She looked at him then, her warm smile returning. “You are normal.”
“Am I?” He asked quietly. That night he imagined himself killing her. He would stalk her, take her and kill her. This fantasy was so completely different than killing Çin. Freddy considered Çin to be little more than an animal now, as wonderful as it had been at the time. The memory had begun to fade, as all his fantasies did – I still did not believe it was anything more.
Killing Liza Harding would be glorious. He would consume her. He would feed off her ebbing life in a way the others could not have provided. By doing so he knew he would become stronger. His life would be more vital, more real than before. Her death would be the real sacrifice and as he twisted the knife, she would not just squirm. She would writhe.
-
Freddy inherited Maybelline. Several offers were made to buy the car. Each was quite generous and each was a complete surprise. Freddy and Maggie both were stunned to discover just how valuable the car really was. It had its original paint. It was an SS optioned car and had the big 427 cubic inch motor and the Rock-crusher four-speed with all the factory options. It was a rare car and a classic. It even needed special insurance. When the time came to put it on the road Freddy couldn’t afford it. But he did not want to sell the car. He figured the Impala was a little reminder to people of what he had done.
Tom Anders remarked – quite innocently before performing a remarkable balancing act with one foot firmly planted in his mouth – that he would kill for a car like Maybelline. That clinched it for Freddy. He had to keep that car and he needed to put it on the road.
In November, shortly after he was released from Dr. Harding’s care but before the conversation with his mother, Freddy went down to Clausson’s after school to inquire about part-time work. He met with Nathan Hart – the same Nathan Hart who had given John a long weekend back in July. Freddy could work one full shift on the weekend and do a couple of half-shifts during the week. He mentioned how his dad always talked about the overtime being available and that he might be able to help out. He also added that he and Maggie could use the extra cash.
He was hired – twenty hours a week at eight-ten an hour. It was a damn good wage for a kid not yet sixteen in the early nineties. Nathan claimed the timing was perfect. They were actually getting ready to hire someone for just that position anyway. I honestly think both the job and the wage were given out of some misplaced sense of guilt or obligation.
The cash would pay his insurance and his fuel. He would even have a few bucks left over. The offers still came in – some close to fifteen thousand dollars. Freddy didn’t even consider selling despite what that cash would mean for his future. John had not been kidding when he said he could sell Maybelline and get two decent vehicles to replace her.
Freddy worked. Freddy played football and he made the senior team his first year. Freddy also hit the books pretty hard. By the end of the first semester he went from being an average student with potential to do better to being a pretty decent student with even a few ‘A’s making their debuts on his report card. By the end of grade ten the ‘B’s were mostly gone and a few plus signs had joined the ‘A’s.
With all this going on in his life one would think Freddy had little time for anything else. Not true. The perception of tragedy following him persevered. He had his choice of girls and never really stayed with anyone for too long. They all wanted him and would do anything to keep him. I strongly believe this is the reason he never killed again – at least not in high school. It was this obscene allure he possessed.
Freddy had a seemingly endless stream of teenage girls willing to do anything his diseased mind could and would conjure up. If they balked or proved unwilling in the end he would simply move down the line. His perverse reputation grew and it only added to his popularity.
That was his thing, the perversion. Sex, violence, domination, love: Pleasure and pain. To him it was all the same. Although he never knew what S&M was back then, he was a hearty practitioner. More than that, it was all he knew and all he could manage without someone like Nancy Hicks. It satisfied those deepest urges he could only talk to me about. The girls in high school kept the duster out. They swept out the high places and kept the cobwebs from building up. The corners of Freddy’s little world had never been so tidy.
-
The corners - I’ve spoken about them before, a neat little analogy. I should clarify what that meant for someone like Freddy, someone without a healthy mind. Morality as a human concept is a wonderful thing. Morality steps beyond the legal and the lawful into the righteous. The righteous will prevail in the face of tyranny. It says something about that in the Bible, I think. The righteous; I’ve often wondered exactly what that means, what it entails, what it’s worth.
I now believe what the righteous gain is sleep if little else – at least for the atheist. For the faithful, knowing they have followed the path of the righteous, living life by a code they know they will find comfort in Hamlet’s undiscovered country.
But what about the amoral? Are they any less righteous? Can they not believe? How much sleep do they lose? I claimed earlier that we only see into the corners of our little worlds in our darkest nightmares. I said I believed th
at all Freddy had were the corners.
Maybe that isn’t quite right. Maybe the corners are just the frontiers of our little worlds, the shadow-cast wall in Plato’s cave. If that is so then we have all been well schooled in what we know and in what we believe. And if that is true where does that leave Freddy? Is he free to come and go as he pleases? If we dwell in the corners, perhaps Freddy – those like Freddy – had everything else.
Someone has to cast the shadows.
-
I am embarrassed to admit this but for a time during high school I was jealous of Freddy. I had the TGIF line-up on TBS and orange stains on my penis from my Nacho Cheese Doritos. Freddy had Sylvia Harris, Jessica Abrahms or any of a dozen others he was known to make the rounds with.
Freddy was outside as I was but he made it work. He was free of the strictures of clique life. He was a jock and a nerd. He was a working-class kid from the west end of town and definitely not one of the social elites. Despite all this Freddy could socialize with anyone he wanted to and he was accepted. I wandered the halls a ghost, a shadow, unseen and ignored by my fellow students. When Freddy moved the world moved with him. The girls loved him, the guys envied him and all the adults in town were just a little afraid of him. He had power and he had control.
I think it was the happiest time in his life.
But it was not real. It was an illusion. To Freddy that life was like living in a semi-doze. His dreams continued even as many of his fantasies were fulfilled. He craved more than just the contact of warm, willing flesh. He craved the flesh itself. He craved blood.
Freddy was biding his time, waiting for the moment to be right. Çin forced his hand. As did John. He still claimed Çin as his first victim, his first sacrifice. He never considered John’s death a beautiful thing but rather a necessary thing. As for Carrie, he did not know what to make of her. But when he told me about Liza Harding, about his desire for her I came close to making an anonymous phone call. He said she would be a beautiful thing and I was afraid for her. Hell, I was terrified. I knew he would do it. He had even decided how he would do it.
“I can fix her car so one of her tires goes flat on her way home from work,” Freddy told me. It was summer again. Freddy was sixteen and Maybelline was running beautifully. “She doesn’t live in town. She’s got a place about twenty minutes west, a little rancher on about two acres. She’s out there all by herself – her and a couple of horses.”
No boyfriend?
He shook his head. “I think she’s a dyke. Shitty, with a body like that.”
Her tire, I prompted. I really didn’t care which team Dr. Harding played for.
Freddy chuckled. “If you back out the little plug in the valve stem it’ll start to leak. If you do it on the back, passenger side she won’t notice. Once she gets out on the road the tire heats up and the air really starts pissing out. It doesn’t take long.”
Freddy’s hand came up to stroke under his eye. I watched him do that so often I started feeling that little, buried itch myself. When I quit smoking after a decade of a pack a day, I found it easier than it often was to resist the urge to reach up and scratch that phantom just as Freddy was doing. What made it worse was I knew absolutely that itch was only in my head.
“She gets a flat, probably along that stretch of 518. You know, the one that crosses the old C&E rail tracks about a dozen times? I just happen to be out for a spin – coming from the opposite direction of course.”
I knew the stretch. The road wound through the foothills and was lightly traveled. The forest grew right up alongside it and there were no shoulders. If you pulled over you had two feet of grassy ditch before the pines began.
“I’ll take her first,” he decided. “I don’t know what it is but there’s just something about her that repulses me. But I’ll take her first.”
Control, I knew. Freddy was disgusted with Liza Harding because he had been forced to relinquish control to her. It was the source of his rage toward her.
“If I turn her over, I won’t have to look at her. I’ll force her face into the dirt,” he sneered, spit glistening on his upper lip. “But I want her to look at me. I want to see the look on her face.”
I was appalled. I asked him why he would want to hurt her.
“What?” Freddy glanced at me. He looked at me as though I was a child saying something both naïve and slightly amusing at the same time. He shrugged. I tried to believe his nonchalance was an act, an unconscious one set in place to hide what he truly was.
Killers like him are supposed to be dreadful, deeply serious and complex. We think of Hannibal Lecter with his art and his manners, his powerful intellect and dark beauty. Such is not the case. Real killers are more often like Jeffery Dahmer, quiet and unassuming. They walk among us, jarringly obvious if we take a moment to study them. But we don’t stare because they are good at hiding in plain sight and we are not rude enough to stare. The righteous don’t stare. The evidence is there for all to see but even when confronted with it we choose to deny its existence. The killer stays free to kill again. When the mask is finally wrenched free everyone is shocked and awed. They cannot believe the nice guy next door could do such horrible things.
I knew when Freddy was finally unmasked everyone would say the same thing. His nonchalance was not an act. He was nonchalant. He was typically easy-going, unassuming and a nice guy to get to know. But in a fugue, he would block that out. The monster stepped forward and he embraced it. I knew it was not often but sometimes – just sometimes – the monster slipped its leash and Freddy could not grab hold in time. He could not always keep it caged.
He might have lost control when he killed his father. He might have let it slip just a little. He tasted the monster, savoring it when Carrie died. But when he hit Jeff, lashed out across the coffee shop table and struck him the monster broke loose. It would happen again. I knew even then it would be his undoing.
Freddy took half a year or more to let his rage for Liza Harding simmer. The heat was down. The lid was on. It was not quite ready. After five months or so of Tuesdays and Thursdays she gave him a clean bill of health – sans the ‘sane’ rubber stamp on his permanent record. She said her good-byes and told him to feel free and call her if he ever wanted to talk. She did her job and covered her ass all at once. But if anything, the end of their sessions only served to fuel his rage. Dr. Harding chose when to end it – not Freddy. Dr. Harding had soul authority to decide his fate. Aside from putting on a performance no one would ever give him an Oscar for, Freddy could only sit back and wait.
He watched her comings and goings, always at a distance, never letting her see him. He followed her around town on Sundays when she did her shopping and would often slip out to her house when he knew she would be gone. It was a hell of a bike ride but once he had his license it was nothing. He made notes, studying her habits in preparation for the kill.
All his preparations made me suspect he would never do it, that this was yet another one of his fantasies. He would not kill her – or sacrifice her as he put it. All his preparations were for practice. Freddy was in training. He knew it and I knew it. Still the day would come when he would choose someone. It would likely be an arbitrary choice but it would be someone he knew. He would kill them, sacrifice them and the monster would slip again. He would be linked to the murder and would be put away.
Freddy might have been smart – brilliant actually in many ways – but the cops were smart too. They were only getting smarter all the time. DNA, those three bold capitals we may recall from high school biology, was no longer just an abstract thing with a pretty, abstract picture in a textbook. Already it was becoming a kind of identifying stamp, a fingerprint that defined who we were and where we had come from. It was only to be a short time before the law would use it to tell us what we had done as well. Yes, the cops were getting smarter. Freddy would kill and he would be caught. I would not have to fear him much longer.
Only now do I think back and realize just how cold that was
of me. I was allowing – I was going to allow – someone to die to expose him. A phone call was all it would have taken. It could have been done anonymously from the pay phone in front of the 7-eleven. But I could not even do that. Truly I was a coward.
-
Freddy told me about his mother’s confession, of wanting to kill John herself. He told me about the sensation of her breasts against his ribs and how deeply it had aroused him. Somehow that arousal had disturbed him. He told me about it because he was unsure what to make of it. I was of no help of course. I was thinking that perhaps incest was the one taboo he would not overcome.
I thought at first this might be something I could work with but I was mistaken. That sense of wrong, of being disturbed, of experiencing something naughty was compelling. Free of her husband’s tyranny Maggie once more became an attractive woman. She was fit, she was still young and once she began to realize it, she was quite beautiful. As she realized it, so too did everyone else.
The men around town noticed her and she noticed them noticing. She was asked out for coffees or for dinners. Each time she politely declined. I got the sense she was not quite ready to trust a man just yet. In time she would but in the years following John’s death she maintained her independence. This is not to say she disliked the attention. She loved it. Maggie was only human after all. I’m certain she had fantasies of her own. I’m also quite certain none of them involved her sociopathic child.
After The Flesh Page 24