Sex and Murder

by Douglas Allen Rhodes

  Confusion stole over the captain’s face, so I broke the suspense.

  “Hello, Lieutenant.”

  His head snapped around to face me, and his eyes narrowed, glowering with hate, rage, and finally, recognition, all in the split second of time he had before the head of the croquet mallet I held slammed into his face, knocking him unconscious.

  He came to a little over two hours later. I’d stripped him and bound him hand and foot so that he lay humbled, naked and helpless before me on his basement floor. He looked around, unsure of where he was and almost passed out again from the pain of his crumpled nose. With well-trained endurance, he steadied himself. Slowly, he brought his gaze to bear on me, uttering one single blood-rasped word as he did so—my last name.

  In response, I kicked him in his face, putting him out again. I helped him back to consciousness by throwing a bowl of icy water in his face. The shock of it, coupled with the burn it brought to his wound, tore a scream of pain from his throat. I laughed.

  “Welcome back, Lieutenant.”

  He stared at me but said nothing.

  “You’re no doubt surprised to see me.” I paused, letting my words hang for an ominous second. “You shouldn’t be.”

  I motioned for Angel to come and stand next to me. The captain followed the direction of my hand with his gaze and watched Angel walk obediently over to stand beside me. She gave him the most perfect scared little girl look I’ve ever seen. Then, just when his mind must have started to rationalize her as being my victim, too, she screamed bloody murder and ran at him. He yelped and flinched into the most protective position he could manage, waiting for the inevitable onslaught on his shattered face. Angel stopped just short of barreling into him and started laughing, using that mean-spirited laugh that fuels years of adolescent nightmares.

  I chuckled and continued. “This is Angel. She’ll be helping me kill you.” I let the words hang again, enjoying the melodrama. “Before we do, though, she wants to know why it is, exactly, that I hate you enough to brutally torture your wife to death….”

  He began wailing, and Angel kicked him in his gut to get him back to a manageable whimper.

  “…and then do worse to you. Maybe you can tell her.”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he sobbed quietly, resting his head on the concrete floor.

  “No?” I laughed, the sound harsh. “Maybe you could tell her how you went behind my back and out of your way to keep me from being promoted. Or how you spent your days finding new and better ways to demean me in front of the Squadron. Or maybe….”

  I stopped short, the reality of what I was actually saying sinking in.

  How pitiful.

  Like some asshole who’s still brooding over his high school enemy years after graduation, there I was, rehashing worthless events from my past. At that moment, I realized how far beyond it all I should be, how little any of it truly mattered. I disgusted myself.

  During my moment of epiphany, the captain regained control of himself.

  “Fuck you, you worthless shitbird,” he spat. “I treated you like you deserved. You were never fit to hold a real Marine’s dick—”

  Angel cut his tirade off. She lost her temper and, growling ferally, she leapt upon him. He screamed, first in horror, but then in pain as Angel gnawed on his stomach and chest, biting and tearing away bits of his flesh until blood flowed into her mouth and over her face. Greedy, she gulped it down, licking her lips and smiling a blood-red, toothy grin.

  The captain began chanting, “Omigod, omigod, omigod,” and wept.

  “Better watch how you talk about me, Johnny,” I told him.

  Angel scurried back, dog-like, to crouch beside me, the captain’s blood running down her chin and onto her white blouse.

  “She’s pretty protective of me,” I said.

  Angel nodded in an I’m a Good Girl kind of way and hugged my leg. I patted her head then picked up the croquet mallet I’d hit the captain with earlier and spun it in my hand.

  “Y’know, Johnny,” I said. Stopping the mallet from spinning, I tested its weight. “I thought this would feel different. I thought killing you would be a pleasure unlike anything I’d felt before.” I swung the mallet threateningly, letting it pass within an inch of his head. “But, you know what? It isn’t. I realize now that you don’t mean anything to me one way or the other. You simply don’t matter. Hell, if I’d have figured this out before, your wife would still be alive and you wouldn’t be about die.”

  I paused and stared off into space.

  “Oh, well, Johnny. Too bad, huh?” I smiled down on him and showed him the mallet. “That means it’s time to kill you, John; it’s time to die.”

  I pulled a golden lieutenant’s bar chevron from my pocket and pushed the steel points into the captain’s forehead, releasing twin trickles of blood.

  “No!” He wailed as I drew back the mallet. “Wait, don—”

  With all my strength, I brought the mallet down on its golden target. The head hit squarely, and I felt the captain’s skull dent in. Without waiting to see his reaction, I swung the mallet again—brought it down on his head repeatedly, pounding his skull until it splintered and broke beneath my attack.

  I hit him two more times to make sure that he was dead. Tossing the mallet onto his corpse, I turned to Angel.

  “Well?” she asked. “Was it what you wanted?”

  “Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

  She saluted me and scampered off to find the shower, leaving me alone with one dead man and a thousand ghosts.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I sold my new minivan to some guy in Virginia for two hundred dollars, a turquoise ring, and two pounds of weed. Angel and I spent three nights holed up in a hotel in Lynchburg, mainly relaxing, often fucking, but for the most part we spent our time smoking weed and watching TV.

  I hadn’t been to Lynchburg in years, not since I’d attended Liberty University back in the fall of ‘93, and so I’d decided, after Havelock, that we should take a little time off there, just for old times’ sake.

  Now, the importance of what Lynchburg and Liberty are might escape some of the less spiritually minded. See, Lynchburg is the hometown of one Dr. Jerry Falwell, Baptist power monger and former head of the Moral Majority (if all that fails to ring a bell, then think of the movie The People Vs. Larry Flynt—Jerry was the preacher who sued Larry in the movie). Liberty is his bastion of power in the secular world, his factory for producing the Religious Right’s wunderkind. Even his church doesn’t hold Jerry’s heart like Liberty does.

  I went there for just short of one semester before I was kicked out (pressured out, really) for buying beer for some guys who were too scared to go down to the black section of town to get it themselves. It was a crazy scene, Liberty. We had a twelve-thirty curfew. No drinking allowed, no drugs, and no non-Christian music of any kind. Shit, we weren’t even allowed to smoke, and there was certainly no sex permitted.

  We broke the rules a lot.

  I decided to pay the campus a visit. Now, you might think that I was planning some bloody college murder spree, but I wasn’t. You might also think I was planning to do in Dr. Falwell himself, but I would never do that—he’d be far more powerful as a martyr. I had a more personal reason for wanting to see the place.

  Long ago, when still young enough to think good of life and people, a group of friends and I stole some lumber and tools and built two tree houses (actually more platforms than houses) in the woods behind the university. It took us about two weeks to finish, but I remember that when we had and we stood back to admire our work, I felt good. I experienced pure pride, the kind that can only be found in those rare moments in time when you pour yourself out completely and your sacrifice comes back in just the way you’d hoped. It’s something so rare that anyone who experiences it never forgets it.

  I wanted to see my tree house.

  I told Angel that I had some private business I needed to take care of alone. She p
outed at first but then came around, announcing that she also had some private business of her own that needed looking after. Out of curiosity, I asked what it was.

  “Whoring.”

  I didn’t try for more.

  I left at around six in the evening and sought out the railroad tracks (across from the Wal-Mart) that border Liberty’s campus. Following them into the woods, I discovered a vague, path-like area down a steep hill and leading into the center. We’d set the tree houses back deep into the woods in such a way that they were almost invisible until we came right up on them; but I was sure I could still find my way to them.

  It turned out I couldn’t. My memory of the woods was very seriously lacking in specifics and, after half an hour or so of searching, I’d gotten no closer to finding the tree house than when I’d first started.

  Frustration welled up inside of me. I had no way to know if I was looking in the right area or, for that matter, whether the houses were even still there or not. I searched on for about fifteen or twenty minutes more to no avail.

  About to pack it in and go back to the hotel, I spotted them about twenty yards off and hidden really well. I ran to them, covering the distance in seconds, and stared up in disbelief.

  They still stood. This one monument to a being I had once been still stood, untainted and perfect before me. I looked up at the two beautiful platforms with their small log bridge running between them—and I felt good.

  It started to rain, and I shimmied up the first platform’s tree. We’d built the whole thing with inaccessibility in mind so we’d left off a ladder or stairs. I reached the top, hot and sweaty and, regardless of the rain, exhilaration coursed through me. I stood there without moving for quite some time, the rain growing stronger by the minute. When I could move beyond the sheer thrill of standing there once again, I looked around the platform, taking it all in. It was then that I noticed them for the first time.

  They were everywhere, crisscrossing over the entire structure like so many scars of youth. They shared their stories with me. Little messages, initials, fuck-yous, small drawings, a hundred little engraved reminders of the souls who’d passed that way. Souls who’d shared, for the briefest of instants, communion with my own.

  The rain really came down hard by then, soaking me. I peeled my T-shirt over my head and threw it to the platform floor. Reaching behind me, I drew a flip knife from my back pocket and snapped it open. I began to carve in a clean space of the wood. I wrote my name and then I wrote: RIP 2000. Next to it I wrote: Robert Parker lives.

  I closed my knife and let it slip from my fingers to the forest floor below. Slowly, I sat down with my back against the tree’s trunk and cried, hard and true, mourning the loss of more than I’d ever known I had.

  * * * *

  I never returned to the hotel. A part of my life ended that day, perhaps the final part of what once had been me, and I passed beyond my larval stage, barreling irrevocably towards my final form. Angel had been tied to that newly dead part of me in a most intrinsic and incurable way. I had to leave her behind. I wanted to be rid of her, to be free of an affair that smacked of all the old emotions God had stripped me of when I’d forfeited my soul.

  Still, I didn’t want her dead (or maybe it was more than just my will). I’d left almost all of our traveling money behind so I knew she would have more than enough to get by for a little while. Angel was a very resourceful girl. I expected to never see her again, and it wasn’t until years later that I did—but that’s another story altogether.

  * * * *

  With no car or cash, I began an aimless trek across Virginia. I had no idea what was next in store for me, but I knew the answer lay somewhere on the road.

  I started out by killing two young Lynchburg University students when they picked me up hitchhiking on the highway outside of town. Taking their Volkswagen Beetle and seventy-five dollars in personal cash, I traveled east for the ocean.

  Along the way, I stopped off in a small burg by the name of Evanswood and killed all the night shift gas station attendants in town (it was a little after one when I arrived), at least all of them that were working that night.

  That little escapade netted me close to fifteen-hundred dollars, a shotgun, and a tank full of gas. I got to worrying about the Bug attracting attention or being identified, so I stopped two towns over at a decent-sized mall and ditched the car.

  Since I was going to be walking a bit, I bought a nice leather-and-canvas duffel bag to carry the shotgun in. I also bought a change of clothes and some weed (both at the same mall). Hungry, tired, and covered by a thin skin of dirt, I trekked my way across town to a Best Western and rented a room.

  The clerk, a small woman in her mid-thirties with nice looks and a body that had held up pretty well over time, greeted me. She wasn’t a beauty queen, but she possessed that rare spark of womanhood, the one found only in truly strong women, which speaks to senses more subconscious than physical.

  I chatted her up for a few minutes while we did the paperwork for the room and ended up asking her out for the evening. After she good-naturedly turned me down, I walked to my room and collapsed, filthy and exhausted, on the bed. I fell asleep within seconds.

  The next morning, after a shower and a change of clothes, I called a cab and left for the town’s bus station. I bought a ticket to Virginia Beach at the counter and a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle at the newsstand.

  I kicked around the station for a few hours, idling until departure time. While I waited, I rolled and smoked two good-sized joints. When the time finally came for the bus to get under way, I boarded, took a seat near the rear, and started reading my book.

  I was immediately impressed. The subtlety of the satire was perfect. Vonnegut was able to express the deepest and most compelling of truths about people in the space of a single sentence. Using only those words that were most necessary, he caused me as a reader to come to a hundred conclusions on my own. Beautiful. Unfortunately, it was also rather short, and I ended up with at least a couple hours of bus ride still ahead when I finished it.

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t, so I took to staring out the window at the Virginia countryside. Passing trees, hills, and the occasional valley spilled into view.

  A feeling crept over me, an intuition of sorts, a paranoia I knew all too well—I was being watched.

  I felt it first on the back of my neck, a subtle raising of hairs, like so many little antennae, the faint pressure of a gaze that had lingered too long. Never having been a creature of subtlety, I turned to confront my unwelcome observer, only to find my gaze met by a pair of steely, mean little eyes. Behind them sat a thin gentleman, his attire immaculate and conservative. He was balding gracefully and wore small, round, wire-rimmed spectacles that seemed complimentary to his soft features and gray suit.

  Without flinching, he met my gaze and didn’t lower his eyes for an instant. My observer gestured to the seat beside him, dipping his head in invitation.

  I accepted.

  “Hello, Mr. Parker,” his crisp, British accent greeted my arrival. “I am Gregory Pummel.”

  “Hi, Greg,” I responded, noting that he winced at the shortening of his name. “Something you wanted?”

  “Well, now, actually there is. First, however, let me state once more that my name is Gregory, not Greg. It’s a small thing, a trifle actually, but if you pronounce it otherwise again I will do my utmost to kill you.”

  Let me tell you, there’s a quality to the human voice, possessed by everyone but rarely used by anyone, which at once relates both unequivocal honesty and absolute sincerity. It’s an intangible thing, impossible to explain but real nevertheless, which leaves no doubt in the mind of those who hear it as to the veracity of the speaker. Every word Gregory spoke was intrinsically imbued with that very quality.

  “That having been said, Mr. Parker—”

  “Rob will be fine.”

  “Very well. That having been said Rob, let me applaud you on the stunning
array of work you have been producing. I tell you, I’m seldom impressed by the upstarts these days, but you, well, let’s just say that you are creating quite a stir in the Community.” He smiled reassuringly in the way that wolves always do. “Yes, indeed, quite a stir.”

  “Well, that’s good to know. Mind telling me what community you’re talking about?”

  “Not at all. Actually, that is why I am here; to tell you of the Community.” He paused then and made a perfunctory scan of the bus to ensure that our limited privacy was still intact. “Let me begin by informing you of the one fact most germane to this discussion: you are not alone.”

  He paused dramatically.

  “I am sure that at some point during these last few months you have wondered about that fact, asked yourself: Am I the only one? Perhaps it was while you were relishing in the ecstasy of the extermination; perhaps it was while you lay with a woman in the quiet moment following climax; perhaps it was during your morning constitutional; regardless of when it occurred to you, I am sure that it has, in fact, occurred. Has it not?”