Erica moved closer to Walt and tried to take his hand but he, more or less, slapped her away. Eventually the figures were only a few feet away and Erica could start to make out some of their features. There were three guys and a girl on the far left. The two men on her right wore black t-shirts with nothing on them and blue jeans. The next guy in line wore a white t-shirt like Walt and the girl had dyed black hair and wore all black, the layers so indistinguishable she could have just been wearing a jumpsuit.
“Walt,” the second guy to the right said, holding out his hand.
“The Boys.” Walt took the hand and shook it vigorously. He wasn’t exactly smiling. He looked crazed. “This is Erica. Erica this is –” He went from right to left. “Jask, Blake, Shump and . . .”
“Dawn,” Shump said.
“She with you?” Walt said.
Shump laughed and said, “She’s with all of us.” He put his arm around the girl’s shoulders and pulled her close to him.
“Good to see you again, man,” Blake said. “Got a good night planned. Let’s go grab some beer.”
For a moment, Erica felt stupid for worrying. This was just a get together of blue-collar mid-western males. Something she was familiar with.
Then she followed them into the barn.
Shared Interests
The light was so harsh it took her eyes a moment to adjust. She didn’t know what she expected. Something sparser. Maybe something to do with cars or woodworking. Something more normal. And there were cars in there, which is what she noticed first. A silver Mercedes and a black BMW.
The second thing she noticed was what she thought was a dead dog, suspended from the ceiling by a chain, dangling over a rusted barrel with a fire going in it. Whatever it was, its fur had been burned off and the whole barn smelled like burnt hair and cooking meat. The odd effect it created was something like nausea with an underlying hunger.
On the back wall was a pile of maybe ten naked human corpses. Erica had seen concentration camp footage. That’s what this made her think of except they weren’t all skinny. In an effort to look away from this, her eyes took in everything else in the barn: piles of watches and jewelry, piles of clothes, vases and artwork, prescription bottles, liquor bottles, laptops, cell phones, other things of relative mundaneness, the obsessiveness of the themed piles and the quantity of items contained therein the only things lending an air of peculiarity to them.
If Erica had let her fear subside during the brief walk to the barn, it was now back with a raging certainty.
She hoped this wasn’t what Walt meant when he’d said the Boys were people like them. Because, so far, it looked like they were murdering thieves.
“Looks like you guys’ve been busy.” Walt’s eyes scanned the contents of the barn. “Got anything good in the pile over there?”
Blake shook his head. “Nah. We let em get too old. Gonna have to end up just burning them all. Feels like a waste.”
Jask and Shump each had one side of a big red Coleman cooler. They set it down and opened the lid. Jask reached in and started passing around the cans of cheap beer. Erica opened hers and took a big drink. She thought it might calm her down. If something didn’t calm her down soon, she was pretty sure she would run screaming from this place and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what would happen to her if she did that.
“What’ve you been up to?” Blake asked.
“This and that,” Walt said.
“Been in one place long?”
“Nah. I’ve bounced around. But we’re headed to Dayton, Ohio. Might stick around there a while.” This was the first Erica had heard of this. She thought, Dayton fucking Ohio? But, oh well, it would seem like the big city compared to Shitsburg, Missouri.
“Dayton, Ohio? Why the fuck you want to go there?”
“Passed through late last year. Not sure. Felt something. A certain vibe.”
Blake smirked. “The I-don’t-give-a-fuck vibe?”
Walt shrugged.
Erica felt something unspoken pass between them. It made her think of something rotten.
Shump and Jask came back carrying green lawn chairs. The old school kind with the scratchy plastic belts woven together.
They all sat down and kept drinking their beers. The men seemed to drink theirs much faster than she did hers. She kept glancing at Dawn thinking, Erica wasn’t completely sure, that since they both had vaginas they’d be able to talk. Blake and Walt seemed to do most of the talking. Erica half-listened for clues as to what exactly she’d gotten herself into or even just something that could explain or rationalize what she sat in the middle of. But, unless they spoke in some kind of code, they were talking about the most common shit imaginable. Mostly it seemed like they were talking about other people. Again, it was mostly Blake and Walt doing the talking, Blake taking long chugs from his beer before wiping the condensation on his fingertips through his already damp hair. Jask and Shump sat next to one another and mostly nodded or smiled like they were just happy to be around the other two men. Toadies, she thought, and felt a moment of prideful relief that Walt was not a toady. She concluded the girl, Dawn, must be on something. Dawn took small sips of her beer and lit cigarette after cigarette, letting the ash get ridiculously long before taking a drag from it. Of course, Erica wondered how she must look to Dawn. She felt so tired and odd it probably seemed like she was on something, also. And she still had the paint on her face that she kept forgetting about. There certainly wasn’t any attempt to bring her into the conversation. If Walt and the Boys were of a certain kind of person and Walt had, in her, recognized some kindred spirit, she would have thought there would be some attempt to reveal to her what was shared and inherent between them all. That, if there was something to take away from the conversation, was the only thing she would be able to manage paying attention to. Dawn stood up and walked toward the entrance of the barn. Erica watched the musical shuffle of her hips until the darkness swallowed her. She reached into the cooler for another beer. She opened it and sat back in the chair. Her head spun. She closed her eyes to try and lock into some part of the conversation, telling herself she should at least try to join in. After all, they weren’t going to be here very long so she didn’t really need to worry about embarrassing herself but, the harder she tried to focus on it, the less sense it made. Now it seemed like they were all talking at once and at first she thought they were talking in a foreign language but, if that were the case, it was one she couldn’t even identify. It sounded like an ancient language made up of hisses and breaths. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the man sitting across from her and at first she thought they’d all turned into reptiles and that the barn had been replaced by a cave. Then she thought, No, this is home. Then: No, not home. Very far from home. And while it was true that she was, technically, right now, as far away from her home as she’d ever been, she felt like the distance her brain was trying to convey was somewhat more glacial, something having to do as much with time and mental state as distance. When she finally blinked away the image of the men as ancient monsters, they were brought back into focus, standing, all pounding their beers. Again she saw this thread of normalcy and had to remind herself they were surrounded by dead bodies, stolen merchandise, and a dog dangling over an open flame.
“We’ve gotta take off,” Walt said. “You girls stay here and guard the fort.”
Erica tried to say something but her mouth wouldn’t work and she followed them out into the night, the air and the lack of acrid smoke clearing her head somewhat. She lit a cigarette as the guys piled into the van and shot down the gravel lane. It was immediately quieter and Erica felt a pang of loneliness until she heard a sound to her left and turned to see Dawn shuffling around the barn.
“You get high?” Dawn asked.
No, Erica thought but said, “Maybe.” Because, well, at this point, how could it hurt?
Serve the Self
Only a few feet away from the security light, the night was considerably more palpab
le. Erica followed Dawn deeper into the back yard. The other girl moved with tired resignation. Erica imagined her doing everything slowly. Perhaps this was why Erica had thought she was on something. Since she was following her with the purpose of smoking pot, it was possible she was just one of those people who’d smoked so much pot for so long she was incapable of moving faster. Perma-stoned.
Dawn stopped and stared at something. It took a moment for Erica’s eyes to adjust to the low light. Dawn stood in front of a stack of furniture taller than either of them. She scratched her head and took an exasperated breath, her shoulders slumping even farther.
“Blake said he wanted me to get the fire started while they were gone. We should have brought some beer with us.”
“I can help.”
“Probably better do it now. Once we smoke I’m not going to feel like doing anything.”
“What do you need me to do?”
Dawn pulled her hair back and banded it into a sloppy ponytail. She pointed a few feet in front of her. “The fire pit’s over there.” She pointed at the pile of furniture. “This is what we’ll be burning.” She put a cigarette in her mouth and offered Erica one from the pack. Erica took it. Dawn slowly lit both of them, taking a moment to look into Erica’s eyes as she lit hers. Leaving the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, Dawn took a drag, put her hands on her hips, and exhaled smoke from her nose. The smoke hung virtually unmoving in the thickness of the air and she said, “I don’t see a point in feeding the furniture into the fire piece by piece.”
Dawn walked to the fire pit and circled the wide perimeter, her eyes downcast, looking for something. Erica stood in the same spot, listening to the softly muted sounds around her while watching the other girl lazily search amidst the ethereal drifts of their twin plumes of smoke. Dawn came back carrying a can of lighter fluid, the cherry of her cigarette glowing out from her black lips.
With her free hand she pulled the cigarette from her mouth and said, “Would you mind going back to the barn and seeing if you can find a dry piece of paper? Newspaper or something.”
Erica didn’t want to be in the barn alone, even for a second, but said, “Sure,” anyway.
She took a few steps and Dawn yelled, probably as loudly as she was capable of yelling, which wasn’t that loud at all, “And could you grab me a beer? Thanks.”
Erica thought she’d probably grab one for herself, too.
The cold blue light spilled from the barn and, even before entering it, she thought about the horrors contained inside, clinically spotlighted under that clear stabbing glow. She tossed her cigarette, took a deep breath, and went into the barn. She thought she would dart in, get what she needed, and dart back out. The smell hit her once inside and she stopped to look around for paper. She spotted a stack of newspapers to her right, noting it before her attention was drawn to the pile of corpses against the back wall. Again, staring at them, she was hit with a certain feeling. She didn’t think it was fear, exactly. She wasn’t really afraid of anything happening to her. Theoretically, she supposed, nothing could happen to her that she didn’t want. Unless Walt or one of the Boys wanted to do something to her. She’d have to ask him how that worked. Maybe she could ask Dawn, if Dawn was one of them. Or did it cancel each other out? If one of them wanted to do something to her and she didn’t want it to happen, was it still possible for it to happen? What she felt wasn’t because she was afraid of ending up as one of the people in the pile. It was more like thinking this was what those people had been reduced to. How they’d ended up. When a person wakes up in the morning and works hard or just simply exists, she doesn’t imagine herself stripped and decomposing in a barn in the middle of nowhere along with a bunch of other naked and rotting corpses. And, Erica thought, maybe that was where the despair came from. It was like, since there wasn’t a single dead body, they were further purged of identity. Like a psychopath or a serial killer would most probably use a single body for some sick or disturbing purpose, but these were just piled there, useless, something to be gotten rid of. Which possibly begged the question: Why did they die in the first place?
Another thought struck her.
Nothing was keeping her here. She didn’t know how long Walt and the Boys would be gone but her car was right out there and, even if Walt hadn’t left the keys in the ignition, she was sure she could become sufficiently lost in the woods in a short period of time. So lost they would never be able to find her. And, after all, this was Missouri, and they were near St. Louis, not exactly the Canadian tundra or something. She wouldn’t have to wander that far before she found some sign of civilization.
But she knew she wasn’t going to leave.
You’re here because you want to be here.
She didn’t know how comfortable she was about accepting that thought. Accepting that thought was to somehow accept a shred of responsibility for everything that had happened up to this exact point in time: the death of Granny, the dead dog burned to blackened bone and sinew, the pile of nameless rotting corpses lying in a black puddle of ooze, and . . . and whatever was going to happen.
What’s going to happen?
Something terrible. Or something fabulous. Or both. Did everything have to be either/or? What if something was beautiful to her but terrible to the person it happened to or somebody else? Was that good or bad? Was it good and bad? Did it just, in the grand scheme of things, even out? Was there even a grand scheme of things? She doubted it. It was impossible to know what another person felt. She could speculate and hypothesize, but why waste the brain space? She was left with nothing to arrange her perceptions of the world except the gauge of her own wants and desires. This would make her happy. This would make her sad. But that only applied to things happening to her. Another person’s happiness would not make her happy. Another person’s sadness would not make her sad. She opened the cooler and took out a couple of beers, swimming in icy cold water. Something still held her back from buying into Walt’s philosophy completely. What was it? Compassion? Empathy? Were those the same things? In order to take everything she wanted and do everything she wanted to be happy, she felt like she would have to lack compassion for the feelings and lives of others. It seemed an impossible notion.
She tried to shake the thought away, at least for now. In its current agitated and alcohol-muddled state, it would be impossible to draw any kind of resolution from the random thoughts she had. As if to prove her point, she reminded herself what she had come into the barn for and that her mind had led her into some kind of half-witted ethics class. A deep breath. Beer. Dry paper. Get back to Dawn. Push everything else to the black space of the cave. That was where thoughts like that were supposed to hide. Nothing could hide under this fluorescent glare. It shined the thoughts away. It had purpose. Like it dissected everything and put it on display so you could see how useless it was. It turned everything into a joke or a commodity or something. A naked corpse and a BMW (probably stolen) became equal.
Deep breath.
She stared at one of the lights, let it scrub her brain, listened to the buzz humming through her bones.
Cradling both beers in her left arm, she grabbed a thick newspaper and headed back outside. She walked in the general direction she remembered until she heard Dawn moving around and smelled the lighter fluid fumes.
As Erica approached the other girl, Dawn was just finishing her cigarette. She took the last drag and tossed it onto the glistening pile of furniture. A tower of flame quickly ascended and the girls backed away. Everything was damp. The rainwater hissed and the smoke was intense.
“Guess maybe we didn’t need the paper,” Dawn said.
The fire was so hot they were able to sit on the stumps arranged around the original fire pit. Erica spread several sheets of the paper on the stumps before they sat down.
“Good call,” Dawn said.
“Thanks.”
From somewhere within all her black, Dawn produced a joint and handed it to Erica.
�
��I like your makeup,” Dawn said.
“Thanks. I like yours too.”
“Can I kiss you?”
Erica thought about it. She’d never kissed a girl before. The thought excited her. It excited her, possibly, because she’d never done it before.
“Okay,” she said. Walt had told her not to say no. Told her he would not be possessive or jealous and, besides, he’d probably never know about it.
Dawn moved in close and Erica felt like she stepped into a room. Or maybe like the room stepped into her. Dawn put a small, moist hand on either side of Erica’s face. Erica was shaking. The fire towered behind them and Dawn pressed more heat into her face. Their lips touched and a shiver of excitement ran through Erica. She thought of home. Of coming home. Some imaginary home. Not the one she had left but some place filled with clean linens and sunlight. Dawn pressed her tongue into Erica’s mouth and she tasted beer, smoke, and some essence she couldn’t describe. Their lips and tongues worked against each other, they went deeper into each other, their small breasts pressed together.
Dawn quit and backed up a step.
“I should stop,” she said.
Erica didn’t want her to stop. She took a second to find her voice and said, “That was nice.”
“You’ve never kissed a girl before, have you?”
“No.”
“Now you have.”
“I liked it.”
“Maybe we’ll do it again.”
They sat down on the stumps. The fire’s smoke had died down and the orange flame looked more sharply focused.
“Go ahead and light up,” Dawn said.
Sociopaths In Love Page 4