But then again you probably also remember Charles Manson’s staring eyes and the X he carved into his forehead, and the scrawl of helter skelter on the wall of the massacre he orchestrated. Sometimes guys do get the iconography down, with perfection.
After Cobweb, that was the one I got compared to. Manson. They thought what I wrote on the blackboard was my homage to the ‘helter skelter’. They thought I had dreams of being a cult leader as notorious and destructive as him.
Which isn’t true, by the way. Either part. Manson’s Family only killed eleven, for one thing. I may have only murdered three by my own hand— four if you include Chris— but Cobweb’s total count was forty-eight. If Manson gets the credit for the killings of his followers, then I demand the same treatment.
And it wasn’t about anything to do with Manson, what I wrote. The words just came into my head. I didn’t know they’d even work out that it had been me who wrote it. ONLY SKY, all in capitals like your band name years later. You were so tiny when it happened, sickly and worried about me on that last morning after I made you drink the mustard water.
You get the iconography thing. That’s how you know what to look like and what to say, even what to change your name to, in order to make it as a rock star. We’re so alike, you and me.
Like I was saying, girls do that iconography thing pretty well. Take Brenda Spencer, for example. You remember someone who stands at her bedroom window and opens fire on an elementary school playground. But what cements her place in history is that when she was asked why, she said “I don’t like Mondays.” Fuck! Fucking genius, right there. Action heroes on the big screen wish they had lines that fucking good.
She was only sixteen, too. I was already almost eighteen when Cobweb happened.
That’s the name I picked in the end, as you already know. Cobweb. We made up an insignia, too, so that everyone would know that everything was on purpose, not just some awful random coincidence. Not that there was really much chance of that, not when we timed it so all six schools got hit at once. But we had an insignia anyway: a vertical line with a horizontal line through it, like a plus sign. Then two lines at angles through that, so it was all like a big asterisk. Then a spiral, starting from the middle point of the lines and coiling its way out to the edges.
A stylized version of a spider’s web, waiting for the flies.
xE
---
Dear Nattie,
In Alabama in 2010, three people got wounded, and three people died when Amy Bishop stood up forty minutes into a university faculty meeting and pulled out a 9mm handgun. Before the meeting she’d taught her anatomy and neuroscience class. Students said she seemed perfectly normal.
In 2004, Holly Harvey and Sandra Ketchum, a pair of 16-year-old sweethearts, wrote out a detailed plan and broke it down into four simple steps. Holly wrote them on her arm: kill, keys, money, jewelry. They lit some pot in the basement to lure Holly’s grandparents, who were raising her, down to where the girls waited with knives. They stabbed the grandmother more than twenty times, the grandfather around fifteen.
Why? Same old shit as always. The grandparents wanted Holly to attend church with them and had forbidden the girls to see one another. The two were basically Romeo and Juliet with better planning skills.
Schools teach kids the greatest love story in all of literature is the one where a 19-year-old guy and his 13-year-old girlfriend rack up a body count and then kill themselves together. Then when kids learn the lesson, everyone blames pop music.
In 1983, Cindy Collier (15) and Shirley Wolf (14) knocked on random doors in California. An elderly woman let them into her condo. Cindy found a butcher knife. Shirley stabbed the woman twenty-eight times. When arrested the girls said that the murder had been ‘a kick.’ It was fun. They wanted to do another one.
But in the end, ladies often pick poison. In 1988, Laurie Wasserman Dann drove to several homes and left packages of food laced with arsenic on the front porches. She made two more stops and started fires. She then drove to an elementary school and used a .357 Magnum to shoot six kids and kill an 8-year-old. After that, she drove to a house and knocked on the door. She shot the man inside, went up the stairs, locked herself in a room, put a .32 revolver in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.
xE
AMY
Her name wasn’t Sally Oblivion to begin with. She stole the first part of it from Bonnie, better half of Bonnie and Clyde. Most people don’t know Bonnie was a writer or that she named her heroine Suicide Sal.
The “Oblivion” was a jab at her father, a big old fuck-you at the bloke who’d spent the first fourteen years of Sally’s life trying to beat the sin out of her and promising someday paradise would be her reward.
I don’t want paradise, she’d told the old bastard. Give me oblivion any day.
This was 1952, and Bonnie was long dead. So little Suicide Sally Oblivion was a touch out of fashion with her name. Then again, I guess the classics never go out of style.
I first met Sally Oblivion in hot afternoon light on the side of a February highway. She was drinking something oily and amber-coloured, and her hair was the berry-red of too much cheap dye, well before cheap dye was a fashion of its own. Mine was pale and tended to coarseness. I wore it long in a plait. Some had charitably described my eyes as tawny, but they were closer to hazel.
But let me introduce myself later.
“The King is dead. Long live the Queen,” Sally said to me and gestured for me to join her on the dusty ground.
I’d been walking since eleven that morning, and my fair skin was toasted to a darker, sorer shade on my bare arms and cheeks. My feet were fine, though. I always wore good shoes.
Sally passed me her bottle. Her skin was a warm, cinnamon brown. Most would take it for a tan.
“To Elizabeth,” I agreed, taking a swallow. It burned and stung my throat, and I coughed. “I don’t know if the new queen would appreciate her coronation being toasted with something like this, though.”
Sally laughed. Her laugh was a deep, belly-full sound, and it opened her mouth so big that I could see the dark gaps where some of her back teeth were gone. Not enough good food and too many parental lessons conducted with knuckle and palm. Her clothes were loose and charity-pale. They looked like they might’ve once belonged to a farm worker.
I was in one of my habitual cotton shifts, the yellow one I think, and my sturdy boots.
Her hair, which looked like it’d been dark blonde before the dye, had been bleached white at the root by the unrelenting sun of the summer.
“Caught any rides today?” I asked, even though I hadn’t seen a single car go past in all the day’s walk. Usually, I preferred to move at night. I was more comfortable that way.
“Not yet. Night’ll bring ‘em out. Blighters are too soft to brave the days in this weather.”
“That makes them smarter than us, then,” I said as I took another gulp from the bottle. My skin was beginning to ache a little less.
“I’m Sally.”
“Amy,” I told her for my part of the exchange. I’ve been so many other names, but with the sun beating down and the bourbon sharp in my throat, I went with what I knew best. Amy. It’s not a bad name as these things go. “Are you a native?”
She choked on her own mouthful. “What?”
“You’ve got some in you, don’t you? The only ones I’ve ever seen with hair that fair and skin that brown had native in their blood.”
She’d always passed. Always. Nobody had ever thought to even wonder before me. Sally told me that later in the same conversation from which I learned the origins of her self-chosen name. The same conversation in which I told her a little of the truth about me.
“Yeah,” she answered, there by the side of the road. “Great grandmother. Never knew her. Never knew the truth until I read the old diary of Mum’s that I stole when I ran. Funny how diaries can do things like that, isn’t it? Be letters from the dead, fulla stuff you never knew before.”
Dearest Nattie,
It’s been a while since I wrote. Sorry. I didn’t know what else to talk about and figured that just rambling about all the other girls who’ve done violent shit would get boring for you. This time I’m going to write about books and movies and television and rock music and how people say these things can make people like me do the things people like me do.
Chris and Dean and I all loved Natural Born Killers. My favorite part was always right near the beginning when they’re in the diner, and Mallory starts snarling along with the L7 song playing on the jukebox while she and Mickey murder everyone. I wanted to be her so badly I could taste it, copper-sweet on my tongue like blood and sugar.
So, Natural Born Killers. You don’t even want to know how many teenage murderers cite it as inspirational, but I’m going to tell you anyway. In addition to the various Cobweb participants, there’s been Sarah Edmonston, Benjamin Darrus, Michael Carneal, Jeremy Steinke’s unnamed 12-year-old girlfriend who helped him kill her parents and 8-year-old brother, a fourteen-year-old boy in Texas who decapitated a classmate, Nathan Martinez, Jason Lewis, an 18-year-old in Massachusetts who murdered an elderly handicapped man, and Eric Tavulares. And that’s not even counting the just-turned-twenty killers or the properly adult ones. All because of one movie. And, I mean, I like the movie a lot, but it isn’t like it’s perfect or anything.
Kip Kinkel’s one of the closest matches to me, crime-wise. He killed his parents before he went shooting at his school and only killed two of the twenty-four he wounded once he got there. He didn’t have the guts to kill himself, though. I guess I’m lucky I had Dean there to pull the trigger. Sometimes you gotta ask a friend to rip the Band-Aid off for you, you know?
He looked as scared as I felt, face gone white and his hair dark and lank with sweat and blood maybe, I don’t know. We were all a little gory by then. Weirdly, I felt better that he was afraid too. We were all in this together, to the end.
So, Kip Kinkel. When police got to his house, his stereo was still on repeat on the song he played all night after killing his parents, before heading off to school the next morning. The song was an aria from Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner; the CD in the player was the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack.
Kip Kinkel was only fifteen when he opened fire on his classmates. Those damn early achievers make me feel so old for having planned and waited for so long before Cobweb rolled out.
On his calendar, on Mother’s Day the year before Cobweb, Chris wrote ‘good wombs have born bad sons.’ That’s Shakespeare, same as Romeo and Juliet.
Everyone knows that Dean had a Marilyn Manson poster on his wall, but nobody cares that along with the KMFDM and Rammstein, Chris’s favorite music was Lorena McKennit, that new-agey floaty faux-Celtic stuff. Nobody cares that Dean’s favorite Nine Inch Nails song was a slow song, a longing song.
When Dan White killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone, he said he had diminished capacity as a result of eating Twinkies.
Twenty-two people died in the San Ysdiro McDonald’s massacre in California. The gunman’s widow said that the monosodium glutamate in the food should be held responsible.
Once the cycle starts, it sometimes keeps itself going. Sixteen-year-old school killer Jeffrey Weise’s favorite movie was that one Gus Van Sant made about Cobweb. The movie changed our names, of course, but everyone knew it was about us, even if suddenly Chris was Alex and Dean was Eric and I was Izzy. Names get changed all the time. You don’t even go by Nattie anymore.
Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, once wrote a paper about the Cobweb attack.
High school shooters Barry Loukaitis and Michael Carneal both read Rage by Stephen King, so King had the book pulled from circulation.
Thank fuck nobody told him how dog-eared my copy of Carrie was. Do you still have it?
Even while we were planning Cobweb, Chris and I kept getting excellent grades. Dean’s were never as good, but they went up a little just before the end. All that strategic thinking, orchestrating a mass murder, made him smarter.
Dean wrote a report for class about Natural Born Killers a couple of months before he put his Intratec TEC-DC9 semi-automatic against my temple and fired. He wrote that Mickey and Mallory ‘got lost in their own little world.’
We had names we only called each other. Dean was ‘Cordovan,’ Chris was ‘Indigo,’ I was ‘Violet.’
Independently from one another, in a coincidence that would not be discovered until after we were dead, Chris and I had both written the same sentence in our diaries in the weeks before we set our plans in motion. Each of us wrote ‘I want to burn the world.’
xE
SALLY
I’ve been on my own for two years now, though time’s not a measure of much when you keep to your own patterns. I wear a coat in winter and sweat in summer, but for all I care the world might as well be one day over and over forever, overlapping itself like layers on a cake.
I went up first. Really I went North, but after looking at maps in school so often, I always think of North and up as one. I went up from Brisbane to Townsville, mostly in cars and walking for some of it. I’ve never minded walking, and since I read Mum’s diary, I’ve started to wonder if that’s important. I’ve started wondering that about everything. Nothing’s just what it is anymore, now that I know The Secret. I like walking for days and days; does that mean something? I prefer the coast to the bush; does that mean something?
My mother was taken from her own mother when she was four years old. She had me at twenty-four and died at thirty-four. I don’t know if my father ever knew she was quarter-caste; the family who adopted her wasn’t too pale, and luck had given her unremarkable features. She passed for an especially sun-tanned Irish kid well enough. Annie Pegg. Sounds like just the kind of girl a young farmer like Duncan Fitzpatrick would take as a sweetheart, doesn’t it?
They were happy enough, I think. Duncan ruined fast when she was gone, and I can only guess that this is a sign he loved her better than anything else the world had to offer him. He was smacking me around in earnest before she’d been dead a year. I left at fourteen, and I’ve never looked back. There’s work enough out there for a girl who doesn’t mind the sun and just wants food and shelter in return.
I went up to Townsville first. Townsville’s where Mum came down from, and we went up once as a family when my grandfather died. Mum didn’t cry for him. I don’t know if that was just her way or if he was a rotten sort she didn’t care to mourn for. I never asked.
After reading Mum’s diary and finding out about what really happened when she was a kid, I wanted to see my grandmother again. Now that I knew we didn’t share any blood between us, I wanted something else of hers to make a part of me. A habit, a gesture. Something I could inherit, now that I didn’t know what anything meant.
She didn’t seem surprised to see me when I banged my fist against her door one slow, thick afternoon. The heat in Townsville’s enough to kill you even after growing up near Brisbane. Hotter than hell, Mum used to say when I was a kid. I’d end up wondering all the rest of the day if Mum had ever gone down to Hell to confirm the comparison.
My grandmother served us tea, despite the heat. I thought about taking that as the thing of hers I’d carry but couldn’t see it ever sticking well. I’m not the sort to serve tea, summertime or not.
She put out the sugar bowl and a bowl of jubes, the soft little sweets I remembered Tom sometimes giving me during the War. The sight of a little bowl of them, there on my grandmother’s lace tablecloth, made my eyes sting up a little. The War had been rough, but my Mum had been alive then, and we’d had Nell, and Tom visiting when he could.
“The blacks didn’t get a sugar ration,” my grandmother explained, seeing how I stared at the jubes. “They got jubes instead. So now we put out both with tea in case you’re used to sweeting with one rather than the other.” Her soft, old lips twisted up into somethin
g wry and ancient. “It’ll stay like this for another few years, I reckon. Something like a war leaves the memory fresh for a while. Then we’ll be back to the bad old ways. People will forget the reason they used to put out jubes and just do it out of habit. Then they won’t do it at all.”
I sat in silence for a few moments.
“Mum had a diary,” I said finally. “I read it after she died.”
My grandmother nodded, smoothing the already-smooth lace tablecloth between us. We didn’t drink our tea.
“Annie was a good girl. She was going to leave off telling you until she thought you were ready. It’s a crying shame she didn’t last that long.”
I felt my chin tilt up, incensed. “I’m ready. I’ll never be readier.”
My grandmother patted my knee. “Only because you’ve got no choice in it.”
“It’s still true.”
She nodded. “You’re like her, you know. I can see it better now than when you were here as a little one after Frank passed on. She was fiery when she wanted to be.”
“Tell me about her?” I tried to keep the pleading from my voice, but it crept in anyway. “Tell me about everything. Her diary… I don’t know anything anymore, not like I did. I’ve run off from Dad.”
So my grandmother told me about my mother. About a childhood spent learning how to look and act as white as possible, about the ways to deflect hard questions. About a little girl who loved stories and reading and writing but who knew it was more important not to draw attention and to do the ordinary, expected thing and get married and have babies. She only had one of those, though: me.
I cried for her, for the mother I’d never known as anything but a parent, for all the things she’d never had. I cried because there was nothing to be done about it but to cry and then forget.
As the sun went down, darkening the room where my grandmother and I sat over our cups of tepid, untouched tea, I asked “What was her favourite story?”
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 88