by ed. Pela Via
I couldn’t say what woke Lassiter. Perhaps, in ascending to a higher plane of existence, Sissy’s soul paused momentarily at his ear to hiss:
. . . sssss—avenge me!—sssss . . .
He sat up, stiff-backed, a vampire out of its coffin. He looked at us, smiled faintly, rubbed a hand over his sleep-puffed face and then, without saying a word, he stood and went downstairs.
The moment stretched forever. Then Lassiter let go a shriek like a man who’d just suffered a hole punched through the dead center of his heart.
Things tended to get very distinct in moments such as these. A pristine clarity settled. A butterfly perched on the patio screen. Its wings opening and closing. Lassiter’s shoes thundering up the steps. Gail sliding behind me, her fingertips light on my hip.
That butcher knife stabbed into the cutting board. The shine down its blade a stem of fine white fire.
It’s like this: the world is always spinning. But you don’t necessarily feel it move, do you? Until one day it stops dead on its axis and puts it to you: Well, my son, how bad are you? How bad are you, really?
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Three Theories on the Murder of John Wily
by J David Osborne
There were three fights, two broken plates, a miscarriage and a bathtub full of moonshine at the wake of “Little” John Wily. They didn’t call it a “wake.” They weren’t really sure what to call it, so they just called it a “reception,” like it should have had invitations printed in cursive on whalebone.
John’s dad took it the worst. Started just after the funeral, at the beginning of the reception. He’d dusted off a slide projector he’d found wedged between a four wheeler and a toolbox in the garage and set it in the living room. Projected on a tarp that his father had stretched to cover the bay windows, the red-faced and snuffling crowd had been subjected to photos of the recently departed as a child: smiling and squinting under the sun, in a bathing suit, by the pool. Sitting in his underwear, enraptured by the television. Holding a fish. Holding a deer. On the four wheeler now gathering dust.
The police had closed the book on John’s case, not officially, of course, because officially it was only three days after the murder, after an unknown gunman torched John’s car and left him in a clearing in the middle of Pocahontas, Oklahoma, with a belly full of buckshot. But it was as good as closed: tire tracks had been analyzed, the clearing had been combed by latex-gloved hands, and witnesses, most of them floating in and out of a haze of methamphetamines, had been questioned. Nothing turned up. No one was going to pay for John’s murder. When John’s dad came around the station for the next few weeks, around five every day after he got off work (because you can’t just stop, can you?), the detective, a balding man with a paunch and an affinity for Japanese-themed tattoos, would roll up his sleeves, revealing bright orange koi and white-faced geisha girls, and he’d thumb through a coffee-stained manila folder, turning the pages, humoring the weathered man holding his leather face in his hands. Then he’d set the folder down and shake his head and listen as the old man rambled and cursed.
Time passed and so did John’s dad.
Though no one was ever officially indicted for the murder, John Wily was from a small town, and small towns talk. His death wormed its way into every conversation, between talk of the weather and whether or not the Pocahontas Bulls had any shot at state and what Mrs. Rita thought about the lawn ornaments crowding her next door neighbor’s lawn (she hated them). By the time the talk had reached folks like that, though, the reality of the situation had dwindled, and the conversation was usually short, something like, “Did you hear about the Wily boy,” followed by a “Yep” followed by, “It was drugs, they say,” followed by a “Yep.”
You’d find the good gossip downtown, where the streets stop having names or numbers, where grass and power lines fight for dominance, and where every person takes fifteen minutes to answer the door. If you were to sit down with them, in their living rooms, with their grooved couches and scratched endtables, if you were to offer them something and they were to put it in a pipe or tinfoil or a lightbulb and inhale and you had the patience to sit back and wait for their brains to come back from Shangri La, they might give you a few theories on what happened to “Little” John Wily. Theories might be different, sure, but they’d all start out the same:
“John Wily was a fucking asshole.”
Theory 1: The Angry Father-in-Law
John Wily met his wife, Angela, at the Shady Pines apartment complex pool. He had just dived into the water with his cell phone in his pocket. He cursed the dead thing and threw it in a trash can by the Coke machine and put a dollar in and that’s when he saw her. He pressed the wrong button but didn’t care. He sat in the pool chair and smacked his best friend Tamer Reynolds in the arm and pointed. They said “damn” under their breath and watched her take her shirt off and rub the oil around her sunflower bikini, over her fishbelly skin.
Tamer jumped in the pool and John skipped over the hot white concrete to where Angela either was or wasn’t looking at him from behind big insectoid sunglasses. He opened his mouth, the words spinning like a slot machine in his head, each one slowly coming to a halt to form the perfect first phrase, that pickup line that would set the alarm off and all the red lights and have him lugging his big bucket of quarters up to the change girl, but before he could muster the oxygen, Angela said:
“I’m gay.”
And this forced him to regroup. He played with the strings on his swim trunks. He ran his hand through his buzzed hair. He fingered the cross on his neck. Then it came to him, bright and clear like it was from God. He got closer, till he could count the rivulets of sweat squeezing around the faint hairs on her belly, and said, “Why are you gay? I could lick it better than any dyke, swear it.”
Had she chosen to hit him, or mace him, it would not have been John Wily’s first time. He spent the better part of sixteen spraying himself with mace, every day, usually just after breakfast, with the intention of immunizing himself. Though it didn’t make him immune to mace, it did force him to wear glasses, which he refused to do most days, instead choosing to squint and fumble and nearly kill himself on the highway. Still, when he said things like what he said to Angela, and when he was inevitably maced, he insisted that it didn’t hurt too bad, that he was used to it.
Angela, however, had a rather fucked up background. She was from a family whose claim to fame was two appearances on national television, first as contestants on Family Feud (they lost) and second on Cops (her uncle asked an undercover cop to “beat his bishop”). Her father, a bearded construction worker with six teeth and about as many IQ points, beat her and worse on the regular, and her mother was too busy collecting Star Trek memorabilia to care. So whether it was the permissive environment or the years of incest, Angela found John Wily to be cute rather than creepy, interesting rather than radioactive.
Angela’s father was not happy with the two dating. John, for all his pervy talk, turned out to be a fairly traditional courter, taking Angela out for dinner and ice cream and for rides in his dad’s canoe. His dad, for his part, loved Angela almost immediately, and set about to showing embarrassing home movies which John smiled and sat through because even though he wanted to run away from the grainy footage of him putting macaroni in his pants, the magnetism of Angela’s off-white smile and the smell of her cherry blossom perfume kept him firmly rooted to the vinyl of his father’s couch, staring at her, watching the blue reflect in the wetness of her eyes and wanting to kiss her and be alone.
The first time John Wily met Angela’s father he offered John a beer, which John accepted. The two cracked their tabs and talked for a few moments, back and forth, John looking at the pictures of Angela and her siblings as children on the wall, and once Angela’s dad had the information he needed, i.e. that John didn’t have a job and didn’t plan on getting one, the judgment was passed, and he showed John Wily his shotgun and told him not to see his daughter
anymore.
The threat was not taken lightly. Angela’s uncle, the same one caught on film asking for a handjob, had gone to jail for life recently for shooting his own son in the back of the head. Spilled his brains all over a box of Cheerios, the kid face down in his breakfast, for what, once again, no one is sure.
Assuming that crazy ran in the family, John went to the pawn shop with the painting of the frog on the bricks and pointed through the smudged glass at a tiny twenty-five nestled in a coffin of foam. He failed his background check and the hairy man of indeterminate origin behind the counter told him “Congratulations, you passed,” and took his crumpled dollar bills. John left the pawn shop and called Angela and told her to pack her bags.
The last night in her room, toeing the crumpled McDonalds wrappers and tissues and magazines across the sticky hardwood floor, Angela hugged her yellow pillow and cried. She touched faded Polaroids she’d taped to her wall. She opened old toy boxes and board games and read through old diaries. She stood over her father’s snoring body for seventeen minutes, playing with her hands and eyeing the K-bar he kept on his endtable. After she stuffed her last pair of jeans into a pink backpack she closed her door and took a deep breath. Her hand inches from the door, she turned back into the foyer and marched into her father’s room and threw her arms around the old man’s neck. She hugged him and cried and in his sleep he patted her on the back and told her to go back to bed.
When he woke up that morning her father tried to call her, once or twice, but she wouldn’t pick up her cell phone. He called AT&T and had her removed from his phone plan. He went to work and tuned cars. He went to the range and unloaded. He drove to John Wily’s apartment complex and drank malt liquor from a brown bag. He watched the young man drive up, walk to his door, disappear. He repeated this routine for several weeks. He was fuming with an odd mixture of confusion, hatred, and jealousy that is usually reserved for young lovers. And we all know how impetuous young lovers can be.
Theory 2: The Cold-Blooded Killer
Tamer and Little John started selling meth as soon as they dropped out of high school. The money was good and they made a pact with themselves, lying in the back of Tamer’s green pickup, droning and mumbling in a cloud of potsmoke, never to use the stuff, to become victims, flunkies. And they didn’t. They sold a lot, Tamer more so than John, and they became the most popular folks in “that” part of town, but they never once touched their lips to a pipe. Once, after selling to a particularly eager group of addicts, John was not able to escape before the tweakers lit up, the smoke swirling in the glass of the lightbulb like magic in a crystal ball, their eyeballs white with ecstasy. The smoke floated and the room became hazy, and he ran out the door and sucked in the night air, the smell of wet dirt and diesel, and his head was spinning and he was sure that he’d gotten a contact high. He ran full speed down the road to Tamer’s house, where his best friend cooked him pierogies and calmed him down and convinced him to keep selling, that they were partners and he needed him.
There was one thing that John could not be convinced of, and that was selling to black people. He wouldn’t speak to them, barely even look at them. He approached Tamer one sunny day, fingering the cross on his neck, and nodded his head at the two black children handing his friend two twenties stained with blue ink:
“What are you doing?”
“Selling.”
He squinted his mace-induced squint and said, “Meth is a white man’s drug.”
Tamer sighed. “With that attitude, it always will be.” He patted the kids on the back. “Enjoy, guys.”
They pedaled away on their bicycles.
Little John Wily’s racism potentially got him killed on a cool day in late autumn. He was at the convenience store picking up the usual: Red Bull for him and water for Angela, who was coming down off of a wicked meth binge (she had no equivalent abstinence pact regarding meth, a habit that was a holdover from her other, slightly more fucked-up existence pre-John).
He got distracted in the candy aisle, trying desperately to decide whether he wanted the peanut butter cups or the almond bar, and when he looked up at the counter, his place had been taken by a muscular young black man in a white T-shirt and jeans. The young man was listening to his CD player and halfheartedly making conversation with the clerk when John Wily reached him, the candy bar dilemma forgotten, and shoved the pack of gum and the Dr. Pepper off of the galvanized metal counter. The soda bounced and fizzed wickedly inside the plastic. The gum clattered into the corner. John Wily looked deeply into the black man’s eyes and said, through clenched teeth. “Always me before you. Always.”
The young man plucked the headphone buds from his ears and inclined his head towards Wily’s mouth. “Come again?”
Wily reiterated his maxim.
Now, in the great karmic wheel, the magic forces of comeuppance occasionally work in our favor. We all want to see shit like this punished, but the sad fact of the matter is that a good man calls the police, leaving it up to a bad man to lay down a righteous ass whipping. Such was the case with John Wily: Tom Miles was not a good man. At that moment, in fact, he had a whore in his car, a raven-haired former video-store clerk named Mary, upon whom he had bestowed a purple shiner hours earlier, for running down the street, banging on doors, attempting to stop cars, begging someone, anyone, to save her. He would kill her later in cold blood, pinning her down and injecting her with enough heroin to flatten a moose. But that day, through no fault of his own, Tom Miles did the right thing: he dragged John Wily to the back of the store, which doubled as a bait shop, and began drowning him in the minnow tank.
Wily was saved by the clerk and his steel bat, with which he delivered a swift blow to Tom Miles’ legs. The pimp stumbled away, cursing and holding his thigh, and John Wily caught his breath and dried himself with paper towels from the bathroom’s automated dispenser.
People say Tom Miles might have come back for Little John. The evidence is solid: the clerk ended up dead a week later, and when Tom was eventually arrested, it was for a triple murder. He’d driven a father, mother, and daughter into the middle of nowhere, shot them, and torched their car. They call that, I believe, a modus operandi.
Theory 3: The Best Friend
The night Tamer Reynolds met John Wily, they stole street signs and lights from a railroad crossing. Tamer dropped the first set, the giant amber bulbs shattering on the asphalt, so John got the second pair, handing them down gently, hooting loud at the moon. They were inseparable. They drank and harassed women at strip clubs. They smoked pot and sold meth. They kept their mouths shut both times the cops kicked in the door, neither of them eyeballing the hidden panel in the floorboards.
They raised hell. They rigged a taser to a car battery and pressed the coils to the fiberglass of sedans, leaving big black burns in the sides of Chevys and Toyotas. The fuses fried, they’d be free to slim jim the lock open and steal the money or food or TVs that rich people tended to leave in their cars.
The meth dealing was easy. The tweakers showed up, handed them the money, left with their stuff. They didn’t worry about police surveillance. Tamer had friends in very high places, or low, depending on whether you were talking status or morality. Big men in dark sunglasses would show up and joke around for a few hours with him, just shooting the shit, and John would sit in his leather recliner, smoking a cigarette and laughing when appropriate.
John’s problem was that he was an idiot. He shacked up with Angela, the two of them spending all day screwing and watching courtroom reality shows, and soon he was getting crazy ideas. Angela was happy in and out of her meth haze, and she loved John enough that sometimes she’d let him hold her for hours. But John was sure something was wrong, as though he were in tune to some cosmic disturbance that no one else could tap into. Angela told him he was crazy.
He asked Tamer to ask his connections if he could front him eight grand worth of product. Tamer asked and was approved immediately; his credit with the rednecks was good.
>
John sold all eight thousand of it, and quickly. Almost doubled his profit. Then he refused to pay the money back. He didn’t buy a bus ticket, didn’t think about catching a plane. He simply dropped the money into a bank account (it took him a while, but he found a bank that would have him) and sat on it. And wouldn’t budge.
Tamer came around and tried to talk sense into him. The rednecks were pissed. The rednecks were gonna kill him. John shook his head no, he wasn’t going to give the money back yet. He’d pay them, he promised. But the money was his for now, until he and Angela could get a better life. He’d make a down payment on a house. He’d buy a car. They’d start a life, there in Pocahontas, and those rednecks would just have to wait. “Besides,” he said. “They ain’t gonna kill me. I been to that guy’s house. He loves me! We shot the shit for hours.”
The redneck who loved John Wily sent two men to empty several hundred rounds of ammunition from an M-16 into his apartment. He also sent two men to see Tamer, whom they informed had to “take responsibility” for his friend’s debt, or face the consequences. The consequences were hinted at with a broken toe and some work done to his face. Tamer showed up at John’s door, bloody and yelling through cracked teeth, but John wouldn’t be swayed. That shoulder-shrug mentality, that he didn’t care what happened to his best friend, broke Tamer Reynold’s heart.
What happened next occurred within a day or so of John’s death. He woke up that morning by himself and poured a bowl of cereal. He opened his front door to have a cigarette (because Angela didn’t want the house smelling like smoke) and nearly tripped over a small package from UPS. He opened it on his couch, still smoking his cigarette, and removed the videotape from inside.
He pressed play. The footage came on, grainy. He saw Tamer, saw his ugly bruises looking grayer in the camera light. The camera spun, and there was Angela, sitting in a chair, playing with her hands. The camera rocked and then was still, making a slight noise as it slid into a tripod.