The Joy of Killing

by Harry MacLean

  Somebody must have stolen the lighter. I would never have left it anywhere. It was always either in my pants pocket or on top of my wallett on the dresser. I think back to the day I realized the Zippo was missing. The first day of my honeymoon. My wife and I were eating breakfast on the deck of our cabin overlooking the water in a coastal village. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the percolator on a side table, slid a Marlboro from the pack, and reached for the Zippo, like I had a million times before. Gone. I patted all four pockets, in growing concern. My new wife thought it was funny at first, but not for long. I tore through all of my luggage, and then hers. Then the entire cabin and the rental car. The ground around the cabin, the stone path down to the dock where we had walked the evening before. The shallow waters.

  On the day of the canoe trip across the lake I had left the Zippo in my jeans, hung over the chair in my room, the one halfway down the hall at the bottom of the stairs. I had found the lighter in the pocket when I returned to the house the night of the drowning; the night, I suddenly realize, I had almost drowned as well. The water had turned freezing, and the black wind was slapping crests of water into my face. I could not tell which way the shore was, but I paddled anyway, kicking and flapping my arms. My right leg cramped up, and I cried out. I tried to straighten the limb, which was now locked up against my chest. I lifted my head up and swallowed the cold lake water and began coughing. You might not sink down under the water and drown, I remember thinking, but you’ll grow weak enough and drown from the water in your lungs if you can’t get any air. Found floating face down with a life jacket on. I fought panic. Kicked my leg straight, kept my arms still, my face up. The pitch black suddenly turned to a dark gray. I had hit the edge of the squall. “Where the hell are you?” I yelled. I turned over on my back and floated. A scream sounded, and I turned over and saw a shadowy figure on the beach waving frantically. A girl.

  Sally screamed her brother’s name. I can hear it now, taut with anger and relief. “Joseph!” And she was walking into the lake toward me, I can still see her red bathing suit, raven hair now wild in the wind, reaching and crying. The life jacket must have given me away. (Who could forget Joseph’s contemptuous flinging of it away?) And then the brown hair, not the straw-colored mess she was expecting. She called my name. She tugged on my life jacket, backing up, until my chin scraped up on the sand. “Where’s Joseph?” she demanded. “Where’s the canoe? Where’s my brother?” I could only shake my head. She screamed for her father.

  I am stunned by the clarity and detail of the images in the narrative. Her pale skin, panicky anger in her voice, the rough scraping of my chin on the sand. The ice cold of the water in my lungs. I feel a rush of pleasure; the plan so recently formed and implemented seems to be working. The time spent here with the girl on the train, reexperiencing that night, is stimulating the images of the past to coagulate and seep through the less-than-porous membranes into the present. But this scene has a different texture than some of the others, such as the one in which Shelley Duvall’s head begins to wobble on her swan’s neck. More concrete. I can smell the lake water, feel the cramp in my right leg. I am short of breath as I sit here now. My hand shakes like one of the oak leaves on the branches now tick-ticking against the window. I would suspect that such images are more likely to reflect something as it actually happened, and that therefore in my own way and time I am approaching reality, or at least clarity. In an attempt to move it forward, I return to the moment Sally called out for her father and I was trying, without success, to bring my knees up under me on the sand. The reel is stuck. I haven’t any images of the last minute in the water with Joseph in any unblurred, stable form, ones that I could rely on and say that’s the way it went down. I fled or I didn’t. I left him to die or I didn’t. Which is the point of it all. But I am getting closer, the images more trustworthy, I believe. I straighten my back, sit forward on the chair, roll my shoulders back, close my eyes, let my hands rise and float over the tiers of keys, and wait for the rest of the piece to play out in my head, and from there through my fingers and onto the letters, like a classical pianist.

  MY MOTHER WRAPPED me in a beach towel and rubbed me from top to bottom. When I finally stopped shaking, she put me in a tub of hot water. Then she hustled me off to bed, tucked me in, and shut the door firmly behind her. The doorbell rang a short time later, and I heard the sound of male voices. The bedroom door opened and two deputies stood there in brown pants and shirts and gold stars on their chests. I told them what I remembered; the canoe tipped over in the storm, Joseph and I got separated. Joseph wasn’t wearing a life jacket. I didn’t actually see him disappear. Joseph had been steering. I couldn’t remember the name of the girls, or the camp. The deputies left to continue the search, and as soon as the front door closed I got out of bed and went to the window and watched them get in their cars and drive off in the settling darkness, red lights flashing without sirens. It was then that I heard the motors of the boats on the lake. Peering, I could make two white lights a ways out on the water. Too late, I thought. He’s gone.

  I lifted my jeans from the back of the chair, slipped my hand in the left front pocket, and pulled out the Zippo. In the right pocket I found a crumpled half-empty pack of Luckies. I tugged a weed gently out of the pack, held both ends, and pulled it straight. I whacked it gently several times on the Zippo, put the firmer end in my mouth, and glanced out the window over the black water. Joseph and I used to smoke in the woods. He ate mints so his parents wouldn’t smell it on his breath. He left lip marks on the end of the weed and coughed after every drag. He was always impressed with my handling of the Zippo, like when I snapped it shut in a way that left a dead stillness in the air.

  I watched the lights of the boats heading in opposite directions. My hand with the Zippo tried a new move I had seen flashed by local hoods outside the town roller rink. You whip the Zippo down and across your thigh to pop the top open, and like lightning you whip it back up your thigh so the wheel rubs your jeans and strikes the flint. The flame magically comes to rest at the very tip of your weed. You snap it shut. (Clunk.) All without looking. It didn’t light the first try, so I pressed the wheel down harder on my bare flesh, and then a third time even harder, until it caught fire. The smoke bit into my lungs, and my eyes watered. I pulled the chair up to the window and sat. I drew again, then released the smoke slowly in the direction of the lake. I tapped the weed on a tin ashtray on the window sill. The chugging of the boats faded into the distance.

  I READ OVER the last few pages. It’s the best version I’ve got, I think, and a hell of a lot more than when I sat down here a few hours ago and thought of Joseph for the first time in well over twenty years. The hole in the middle of the story will fill in eventually on its own, better if I don’t stare at it. I could use a smoke now. After all these years. I notice the boy in the chair by the window doesn’t seem to feel particularly guilty over what happened. You think he would, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong. Survivor’s guilt. But he sits and smokes and looks out the window, certainly feeling something, but I’m not sure what. Mindlessly, I pat my pocket for a pack of weeds. God, it would feel good, just to have one in my fingers, the crinkly feel of it between my lips. The whip-snapping of my hand and the lighter popping open in flame. Suddenly, I could feel it, I could hear it. I stood and patted myself down again. I grabbed the briefcase and rifled through it. Thank God I had lost it after my father died. It would have broken his heart. In a way, the war was the end of his life. He let go of whatever lay ahead of him, accepted with finality and without regret that it couldn’t compete with what lay behind, and settled into a long, slow demise. The more demanding my mother became, the blander he got. He would pretend to acquiesce in her rages, but really—I could see—he didn’t care. The only thing he insisted on was his Saturday-morning golf game. That Saturday morning, he was out the back door with his clubs on his shoulder seconds after the front door had closed behind the detectives, and before my mother could say a
nything. So, then it was the two of us. I sat in the chair and waited, willing to get it over with. But she went silent. Finally, I got up and headed out the back door and got my bike from the garage. I kicked the stand back, threw a leg over the bar, and headed out. In those days, I roamed all over town, from the highway on one edge to the railroad tracks and stockyards on the other. Even the back roads to the cemeteries and sewage-treatment plants and power stations and the water tank, and back down the main street, past the movie theater and ice cream parlors and barber shops. To the swimming pool, where I remembered going after the incident in Willie’s room.

  This day, the day of the detectives’ visit, I parked my bike outside the pool, went inside, and picked up an old suit in the lost and found. I paid my dime, got a towel, and went in the locker room. The suit was several sizes too big. There was a mother and her three kids at the baby pool and two girls splashing and screaming in the big pool. I walked to the deep end, held my breath, and tumbled into the water. I sank to the bottom and grabbed the drain, and slowly let the bubbles out, and watched as they rose to the surface. I tried to imagine what it felt like to be trapped underneath, the pain, the panic, and to see if there was acceptance in the final moments. At the last second, before my lungs burst, I let go of the drain and shot to the surface. One arm swung out ahead and pulled through the water and my legs began kicking and I flattened out on top and my other arm swung out and pulled out and down and I felt the water rush over my face. I turned and opened my mouth and sucked in a lungful of air. To my right I heard the girls splashing and laughing, and I kicked harder and ripped my shoulder through the water and brought my hand up fiercely and reached out and pulled. Whatever happened that day began fading. I dropped my head into a turn and pressed my feet against the wall and shot out like an arrow.

  I’VE BEEN LOOKING out the window as I type. Hitting the return bar without thinking. Mesmerized by the steady rhythm of the click-clicking of the keys. Suddenly, my fingers seem to forget where the keys are. They hover uncertainly over the keys. It was Mrs. Roberts in eighth-grade typing who insisted that you were not to look at your fingers or the keys while you typed. Look at the paper you were typing from, look at the door, the floor, anywhere but at your fingers. And so I’d always done it that way, until something apparently interrupted the flow of impulses from my brain to my fingers.

  I stand and feel an ache in my legs. I’ve been here for hours, since those moments on the porch with the caretaker, in the dimming light. The drive up had been by habit, like typing, amazing because I myself had never driven here before. I was on the edge of town before I realized where I was heading. I made the turns without thinking. Came to a stop at the grocery store in the center of the tiny town and asked the elderly woman behind the counter where the caretaker lived. She gave me an odd look, like I was an unwelcome ghost from times past. But she said nothing. It didn’t occur to me to buy any food or water, and now it’s well into the blackest hours and I still feel no pangs of hunger. My mouth is dry. I hold my hands out in front of me, stretch my fingers wide. I had worn a wedding ring in my second marriage, although the absurdity of it was apparent to me, and to her as well, I think, from the very beginning. It was what you might call an “arrangement.” It suited us for different reasons. Music was her life; every other need or drive was subsumed to the cello. Even in a movie, or a play, she was practicing or writing a piece in her head. So there was only a certain amount of her present at any one time. You can see the fit with me. To the best of my memory, we never said we loved each other. Neither of us wanted anything from the other, except to be present at predictable times. In the beginning, the lovemaking was frequent and wild, but with little genuine feeling, like good pornography. Our true intimacy was the unspoken belief that we were living honest lives without the artifice and deceit so necessary in most relationships. Neither of us cheated on the other, there was no need to. Nothing to run from, nothing to worry about losing. It was there, until it was no longer. It was our belief, I think, that without need we might experience a deeper form of freedom. It was our own form of a lie, of perhaps simply a shared delusion, I see now. It allowed us to live without fear, which is no different than living to avoid any feeling.

  I SHAKE OUT my hands, drop them to my side. Physically, I was in excellent health. Lean as a lodgepole pine from forty years of almost daily swimming. A full head of graying hair. A sound heart and lungs. My interest in sex had faded some in the past several years, which makes me highly suspicious that there was in fact a woman in my bed this morning. A dream must have lingered a little longer than usual; splinters and flecks of past times formed something slightly new and different, which led me to believe it was real. There had been the wine glass, though, with what looked at one moment to have been a coral lip print on it, and there had been the newspaper with the story of Willie’s murder. I had thought of calling the police department for information, or even the newspaper, but decided it was foolish to draw attention to myself. Who knows what the detectives had left in their files? My name. My juvenile mug shot, from my arrest for shoplifting. The detectives, my detectives, were far too old now to be working this case. I suspect they were behind Willie’s conviction and imprisonment that I read about several years later. It mentioned a felony in the article, which I had slipped into my briefcase before leaving my apartment. Five to ten years, probably out in two or less. I did see one of the detectives again. I was giving a reading from The Professor at a bookstore downtown—the owner was a former student of mine—when I looked up from one of my favorite passages—the Professor addressing the jury after it imposed the death sentence on him and inviting the members to attend his execution—and was startled by a face in the second row. The scar had faded as the skin had crumpled over time, but you could still see it, the way he was holding his head. And the look in his eyes: time hadn’t softened the intimation that he knew more about you than you did. He was wearing a replica of the cheap coat and tie, although now there was a little more bulk to him. He was almost bald. He caught me looking at him, and the barest of smiles crossed his face. It was a smile of encouragement, I wanted to believe, of admiration for having pulled it off, after all. I was rattled during the rest of the reading, and during the questions I could feel his eyes on me, watching my every gesture as if it might confirm what he knew, or perhaps discern any hint of guilt or shame over what had happened thirty or so years earlier. I worried that he was going to come up to me afterward and say something, or buy a book and stand in line. “To my favorite detective,” I would write. But by the time I made it to the signing table, he was gone.

  I REACH FOR the sky and feel the tightness in my shoulders. I bend over and touch my toes, the white tips of my Keds, and feel the rush to my head. I straighten up. The blood draining from my head leaves a red halo around the moon. The red against the white is startlingly beautiful, a fitting image of the night as it has gone and is yet to go. I unlatch the window again and push it open, first a few inches and then all the way. The night chill on the late September air has sharpened. I take a deep breath and feel the cold spread through my lungs and into my bloodstream and through my heart to my limbs. If I had walked through life like this, I think, I would have awakened to the missed dimensions. Your mind as clear as the night sky, with a point of light banishing concerns and fears and allowing an unblemished clarity of sight and feeling. Let the fangs of night’s creatures pierce your flesh, let assaults and insults and murders and attempts pile up on you, let failures seek to define you; your vision would be microscopically clear through the depths of your soul and out through the farthest reaches of the universe. By accepting all emotions, you would be the captive of none. As sadness wraps its cloak around you, you pull it tighter, seeking the full warmth of its embrace. Love you cherish the way you might an ancient brandy, knowing that when it’s finished the sense of loss will bring you some comfort. You fear nothing, because you see everything. You’re one of those glass globes that spins in the sunlight—
and reflects the light back into the universe, untouched and unaffected.

  A shadow in the corner of my eye, a ruffling of a wing over my hair. My visitor is excited by the blood moon, I see. I lean out for a glimpse and spot a speck in the round light encircled in crimson. I slowly pull the window shut and turn back to the illuminated darkness.

  I feel good, neither hunger nor thirst nor fatigue. But I know, from the rhythm of the night so far, if nothing else, that this epiphany, this feeling of acceptance and understanding, will not last. The euphoria is momentary; it will succumb readily to the next image that burbles its way into the clearing. Something from somewhere for some reason of its own will intrude and unsettle the peace. It always comes back to the story of the girl on the train, as it must.

  I SLIPPED THE Zippo in my pants pocket. The weed was oddly unsatisfying. Stale, like cardboard. I blew the smoke against the window; it bounced off the glass and dissipated in the darkness. The girl watched me quietly. She extricated the pack from my shirt pocket and knocked a weed out. She thwacked it against the face of her watch several times. She put the weed between her lips and reached for my hand, which she held lightly by the wrist. She leaned forward until the burning end was a millimeter from hers. She brought the red glow closer, glancing at me through the smoke, and the two ends touched. She puffed once, twice, then the end of her weed flamed brightly. She leaned back. Then started coughing.

  I laughed. “Amateur.” Pulled deep into my lungs, and blew one then two then three perfect rings, which floated slowly, delicately past her face. She poked her finger through them, one by one. Smiling, she brought her cigarette up to her mouth.