by Beau Johnson
Flush, the bat splits him open at the right temple. Brick-like, he crumbles to the ground like a building coming down.
I don’t remember much after that. Not where Randy and Jeff and Rodney ran off to. Not how much time elapsed before our parents found us in the grass, one of their sons cradling the other in such a way as to make their mother scream until her voice runs dry. I don’t remember any of those things, not one. What I do recall is feeling Jason die. Down the middle of my head, as the bat collided, I remember a snap, a crack—a split inside my mind. I don’t have the words to fully describe what this was. It was there though, like a line of white pain running from the back of my head to the front. First time I felt anything like that, ever. With some twins it is said they can read each other’s thoughts, know what the other is thinking—that they are that entwined. Jason and I didn’t run like this, not once. What happened when he died was new. This is also what the doctors believed to be the cause of my blackouts.
They don’t happen so much anymore, not like they did during that first couple of years after Jason died. One moment I would be watching Little House on the Prairie and the next I would find myself sitting outside the arcade down beside the plaza. People saw me. Even said I spoke with them when my parents really began to dig at why this was happening to me. Both the psychologist and psychiatrist they sent me to eventually told them—in better terms than this—to let it ride; that it was more than possible that this was just my way of dealing with the guilt. Made sense to me; made sense to them. We still moved however, despite the blackouts decreasing in frequency.
Littleton is where we ended up, the big city just north of New Dumfries and the life my parents wished to leave behind. Things improved with time, as things often have a habit of doing. Time heals all wounds, right? This is what they say. I can’t say I totally buy into such a thing, but I will say it is something to consider when the bleakness sets in and all seems lost. My blackouts? Regrettably, they remained a part of my life for quite some time, but continued to lessen the older I became. Between episodes, three years was the longest I went without losing time. This was during my sophomore year. Unfortunately, this was also the time the murders began.
Was it me? The unknown person of interest they labeled the Campus Killer? I don’t know and can’t say with any degree of certainty. It was Rodney Bowers who had caused my—then—latest blackout; that me running into him on campus nine years removed from the day with the toads sparked what I think I have secretly feared since the moment Jason died.
Walking home from chem-lab was when it happened, and he noticed me before I could notice him. He had a beard now, close cut and red. His face was no longer a child’s, not puffy nor chunky nor young. Nevertheless, it held the shape I remembered it having. Not as pointy at the chin, but still as overly wide. His eyes remained exactly the same however, small and hateful—a thing I have never forgotten. Eyes like that never change, not once they’ve matched the heart within.
“Well, if it isn’t one half of the Smothers brothers! What’s up, baby killer? How you been?” It must have been my face, what he registered on it. From the moment he said it, you could see he wished he could retract the words. After that I can tell you nothing. Not for an entire two week period. Oh, I have speculations, don’t you worry—as well as assumptions. I can prove nothing, of course, not without admitting to something I am not even sure I have been a part of.
He’d been murdered, you see. Rodney. He and three others, all women, during a span of time I have yet to regain. The position this put me in…I would wish it on no one. Not only because of the history Rodney and I shared, but because of his cause of death: blunt force trauma to the base of the neck. Some type of heavy instrument bashing in the back of his skull.
It had echoes, you see—shades of a bloody, if not symmetrical past.
I was never questioned, not once, and the killings ended as abruptly as they began—what the papers printed repeatedly as the months wore on. Was it another coincidence? Blind luck that Rodney had chosen to enroll in the very same university as the kid whose brother he helped to inadvertently kill? In another city fifty miles removed from where no one knew of the connection which bound us? Perhaps, but no, I do not believe it. Not so much and not anymore. The reason for this was because of what I found in my basement not a month ago. I share this house with my wife and our twin two-year-old girls. New Dumfries is the town we now live in, the same New Dumfries my parents moved me from all those years ago. We have been here four years now, the clinic I opened the reason and choice.
What I found was a collection of ball bats in a bag behind the furnace. They were not new, these bats. They were old, used. They were stained as well, with little chunks of God knows what sticking to the ends.
This was not my bag; one I do not remember purchasing. This means next to nothing of course, as I have lost more time than I care to remember (or not remember, because really, how would I know?) as the days of my life progressed. Not large amounts in the scheme of things, no, but enough if I am to be honest, the incidents growing with some regularity at about the time we moved back here. This is what scares me now, when I look back over my life, especially since Jason’s death. I think of that split a lot, that feeling I had the moment he died. It led me places I never thought I would go; the library, for one, and its research rooms for another. I wanted answers, you see, definitive and concrete. Did I get them? Depends on how you look at it.
Broken down, Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome is when one twin steals from another without knowing they are doing so. Blood for instance, where one twin, usually the bigger of the two, hoards much of the supply, thereby ensuring his identical brother or sister is born smaller. Intriguing, no? Perhaps when I finish putting it in perspective, then.
I was the bigger twin; what my mother always told us. Keeping in mind TTTS, what if such a thing could continue outside the womb? Insane, right? Of course it is. Does that make it any less plausible?
What if at the moment of Jason’s death—what if I did the very same thing I did when we were still inside our mother? And what if instead of absorbing his blood, I took on his soul? It would explain some things. Like how I can miss weeks at a time but everyone I come in contact with during that time admits to noticing nothing out of the ordinary about me. How can that be? Unless someone more than a little like me…someone who might be identical to me in almost every conceivable way…
Also, remember how I told you that Jason liked animals—that he loved them?
I graduated a veterinarian for God’s sake! A vet! Does one need any more proof? Okay. Last bit of information and then I will go. And this is the part which has been keeping me up at night; the stuff that turns my stomach so cold I can sometimes taste it at the back of my throat. The baseball bats, of course—the means by which Jason died. Can you imagine the anger one would have as that happened? The rage it would create the instant before you died? I know I can, being as I was the one who was there. But it’s the tapes which are freaking me out! There are two of them now, both of them in the bag of bats and both of them marked WATCH ME. I did not put them there, and only one had been in there when I first found the bag. I know who it is. Deep down, I really do. But do I want to talk to him? That is the question, and the one which begs it all. In the end, who am I really: the shadow of a boy long past gone or, quite simply, my own fractured self?
Does it make sense to you, how my life appears? Would you tell me if it did? Seriously, I am running out of options here. I mean, when I start to think I feel him moving around up there, what’s a man to do? Seriously, what does something like this say about a person? What can it?
I love my daughters and my wife. If anything, I will always have that.
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Size Matters
Go big or go home. This is what I remember most about my father. He was other things as well, but that motto is what sums him up most whenever he enters my mind.
“Jimmy? What the fuck?” Nicky
said.
From the couch I respond—holding up a hand now a couple digits shy of what used to be the norm.
Nicky’s face contorts in an instant, the concern I’d seen as he came through the door gone and replaced by a rage that matched my own. It was Dad-rage, round and bold, minus any type of middle ground. Go big or go home indeed.
“Bastard said it was you, Nicky. What I owed for the guns fuck-up. Said I should be grateful you were letting me live at all.”
Nicky stood there breathing hard, clenching and unclenching his fists. His father’s son alright. A sight Nicky and I had been privy to many times growing up, receiving end or otherwise.
“And Lime was there?”
“Big man did the deed himself. Couple of prospects holding me down as he did.” Buck Lime was the man in question, Nicky’s second in command. You really sure about this, Jimmy? I mean, Nicky’s the only family you got left.
I was sure then and I am more than sure now.
I take a drag of my smoke and then chug the rest of my beer. The hand hurts doing this, but the loss of bone would be worth the price of admission once things played themselves out. If Nicky was the reflection of our father then I was the personification of our mother: methodical, patient, and aware of all the angles presented in any given situation. It’s how I got to where I now stood—number three in terms of position in spite of my age. Only reason I wasn’t one better was because of the very same thing, and that Nicky and Lime had come up together, thick as goddamn thieves, each of them present when Dad first formed the Club. I was about to usurp this—to show that cooler heads would always prevail.
“I didn’t sanction this, Jimmy. I want you to know that.” I was counting on Nicky going there. Angles, you see. Angles. Angles. Angles.
“Your call, bro,” I say and hold my hands up and out, little runs of blood still seeping from my bandaged left hand. Nothing more needed to be said, not then. Nicky’s anger would take care of the rest. It would get me to where I wanted to be. A sit-down called by Nicky himself.
The deal was mine and mine alone. Ever since I found out it was them and not McNauly who’d taken out Dad. For months I’d been working on Buck, planting the idea of running the show inside his meathead brain. It didn’t take much. Not at first and certainly not now. Nicky on the other hand—I would need to give something up in order for what I wanted to come to pass. The last two fingers of my left hand seemed as good a tool as any.
Bold moves. Big things. This is what it takes to lead, Jimmy.
I believed him. We both did. Thing was Nicky took his belief a little too far. Chose to believe his little brother incapable of the rage he lived with on a daily basis as well. He was wrong. So very fucking wrong. And for it he was about to be sent home. Him and Lime both.
Going big now, Dad. Get ready for some guests.
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In Preparation
Could it be covered up?
This is the question I asked myself as I stood over her lifeless body, my chest a heaving mess, her face the very same. I have done many things in the fifty-six years I have been alive. Things I am proud and ashamed of, and things I’m sure I can no longer recall. I have loved and lost, I have cried and laughed. There has been heartache and pain coupled with the death of a child and a disdain for the world we’re born to occupy. Happiness has been there too though, and joy, along with the security which comes from the middle holding strong. I have had an average life is what I’m getting to, no greater or worse than any other once you divide it down.
For twenty-five years I have held the same job and for five more I’d been married to the same woman who up until yesterday continued to share my bed. Her name was Martha—she who was my rock.
It was she who turned me; Martha who succeeded for more than twenty years at keeping the beast within me at bay. I was a serial killer, you see, or am, depending on how you choose to look at it. In all the years we shared a life she never knew of my extra-curricular activities. I want that to be known. And I want this on the record, the one I’m sure too soon will come. How could she not know? No doubt some will say this once everything is said and done, and precisely because of that is why I am writing this—what any would call their last confession.
I have always been a narcissist, but a selective one at that. I feel I am above the self-admiration associated with such people. I am self-centered though, and of that you may be sure. I will not shy away from this part of my disorder, nor have I ever. It is who I am, nature undenied.
Like any good sociopath I have many tics and behaviors. Throughout the years I have learned to suppress many of these while mimicking others; what society has deemed the norm. This was not easy, not at first, but in time I managed to stick and hold the landing. My lack of empathy was hardest for me fake, that and remorse, which up until sometime yesterday I’m pretty sure I’d yet to feel. Martha was the one who saved me—which I think I’ve already alluded to—Martha who helped me find the middle I’ve as well already mentioned; her face, her beauty; her kind, kind soul. She was one in a million, my Martha, a woman so selfless I am still having a hard time believing she is gone.
In 1981 she was to be my sixth victim. Instead she became my wife—a woman who bore me a child and then helped me bury that same child eighteen years later. I have never recovered from Donavan’s death. I admit this freely and without shame while acknowledging that his death was most likely the tipping point which brought the killer inside me back out to play. It was the hollowness I felt inside, you see, this slick feeling which seemed to coat the lining of my stomach. It angered me, threatening my way of life. Did I say anger? I meant fury. Livid. And beyond unfair that he had been ripped from us—that we had taken the time to raise and nurture him, teach and believe in him, and then when his life was at the ripening point…his wings…spread…that cancer would intercede and cut him down to a shell of what he’d been. I’d have killed him myself if I thought I could have gotten away with it. Looking back, I believe right then is when the monster inside me awoke. And no, the irony is not lost on me—I’d now had someone ripped from me just as I had ripped from the lives of countless others. I do not deny this, nor do I embrace it. It is only the narcissist in me, a trait I think I’ve explained.
“Can I help you?” Those four words were the first she had ever spoken to me. She had strawberry-blonde hair back then, cut in a bob, and a series of freckles which rested across the bridge of her nose. With light-green eyes and lips I wanted to slit, she was bending down to pick up the oranges I dropped on my way out the door.
I had been in the grocer not for groceries that day but because of her; weeks earlier, as I was making my way home, she had found my eye. I followed her, discovered first where she worked and then that her name was Martha. I thought she was to be my next victim, one who like the others would scream as I ripped the flesh from her face and then her face from her skull. This changed however—changed instantly—in the moment she looked into my eyes while passing me the oranges I’d fumbled near the door. There was something between us then, a spark, different from anything I had felt before. Her touch, as she placed her hand over mine, was soft, gentle, honest, arousing in me something beyond the sexual, outside the primal. I was fascinated, spinning. The woman whom I had wanted to maim and rape and kill had somehow affected me on a level I was unaware I possessed. Had she broken through with just a touch? Was this all it took, really? I didn’t know; not then, nor now. But both are things I have thought long and hard about as the years wore on, challenging myself to find an answer which would somewhat satisfy. I am sorry to say I still have found nothing save Martha herself; her being and her grace.
She tamed me, really. For lack of a better word, she neutered a stone-cold killer with a bat of her eye, the touch of her skin. The sociopath smitten, my desire to sever her neck from her shoulders became a thing of the past, dissolving, replaced by a need to know everything about her—but by choice, hers, not force, mine. This was the key—that sh
e could stir in me something other than the tendencies which had ruled me since before the summer of ’74.
It was all I could do not to fumble for words. Oranges up, I asked her out. With a smile she agreed and the rest, as they say, is history. A good history, if I do say so myself. We had our ups and downs, yes, all married couples do, but for the most part it was a happy time, a time where I actually felt and was no longer pretending as I once had—my mask in place for the world to see. It was genuine what I was feeling, you see, which I’m sure is the reason why my need to kill went dark. It had been replaced by the love of a woman who stood outside the sum of her parts—a wife who was true to her man, her life and her marriage, and was of the type who put her needs behind all others, her husband’s especially.
And I know you are thinking sexual and for the most part you’d be right, though this was not always the case, as the emotional aspect of our lives had its quirks and spurts as well. Where Martha was open and engaging all the time, I seldom was. She worked at me however, worked hard, and because of this I have over the years become quite the conversationalist—people no longer staring as they once did whenever I laughed at a joke being told during a party. She refined me is what I am saying, teaching me everything I should have been taught by parents who should have taken the time to love me.
But the sex! My God! The sex is what destroyed me. As free and giving as Martha was outside the bedroom, it was when we found ourselves within that she truly knew no bounds; her selflessness amplified. “Come,” she would say, whispering into my ear. “I want you in my mouth.” When she would say things like this…they filled me…that she wanted me…that I would never again have to take. This was part of it as well. How I think she put to sleep the more dangerous parts of what I was before we met. Her appetite for intercourse so large and so unabashed that it enveloped me, quashing any thoughts or needs I might find in the arms of murder. Martha did this unintentionally though, and I want that to remain clear—she had no idea as to what she was bottling as she soothed and sucked and fucked. She was only pleasing the man she knew of then, not the man I’d been before.