The Joy of Killing

by Harry MacLean

  My thumb snaps the top up—clink!—and brushes down over the wheel—whoosh!—an orange flame leaps high and twirls like a manic dervish. Clunk! Perfectly executed. My hand flashes down over my jeans and whips back up with a flame. The fire dances blue and gold; in it I see a face of pain and a feeling of joy, even glory. I snap the Zippo shut and drop it in my pocket. The ecstasy of the moment will, I believe, lead the way to the terribly elusive clarity I seek.

  I settle down in front of the Underwood. I leave the light off. My fingers settle over the keys, my eyes remain on the golden orb, now only inches from the window.

  Yes, the cat with the tips of its whiskers flecked with Willie’s blood. Jade eyes, stepping back slowly. I tap it out, without watching my fingers, like Mrs. Roberts taught us. The feeling I had then, in the alley, was one of—what?—relief? Purpose? Newly found. Understanding, possibly, as to what must have happened. I turn away, the image torched into the visual neurons in my brain, but feeling incomplete: I want to imagine the story of Willie’s demise. I need to see it, not out of bitterness, but because I feel entitled to it, and to slip another piece into the ongoing puzzle of my life. I cast a final glance at the black cat, sitting back on his haunches, who was likewise casting a final glance at me.

  I DROVE FROM there to David’s house, a large structure built into the bluffs overlooking the Iowa River. I knew he had become moderately wealthy from expanding his father’s printing business into nearby towns. He showed up occasionally in the paper’s society columns. Thick hair now gray, a lock still falling over his forehead. Unable or unwilling to erase the sly smirk from his face. Other than my first wife’s funeral, I had run into him only once in this small town since his wedding, and that was at a cocktail party at the president of the college’s mansion, a few years before The Professor was published and I was still considered a leading light on the faculty because of my papers on human motivation. David had of course clapped me on the shoulder and said we must get together to “talk about old times.” Even then, before my theory of moral neutrality had fully matured, I felt little animosity or bitterness toward my old friend.

  I think curiosity was the reason I drove up to David’s house late this morning. Had he killed Willie? What did killing him feel like? How exactly had he killed him? I fully intended to do nothing about it; there was no particular value to Willie’s life, and David was simply acting out a scene in the play of his life, which he had not authored, as had none of us ours. So it was in a moment of relative ease and transcendence that I turned into David’s drive: I wanted only to understand what had happened, to hear the story of it, and, yes, perhaps to some degree to experience the act of it. I saw myself as neither cheerleader nor judge, only the interested observer.

  As I wheeled around the long curve of the sweeping drive, I saw a figure standing in the open door of a large brick garage. Hands hooked in his jeans’ belt loops, one hip slightly cocked. He watched in amusement as I pulled to a stop.

  I stepped out.

  “Good to see you,” he said, holding out a hand.

  “Likewise.”

  “How long’s it been?” he asked.

  “Since the funeral,” I said.

  “You still got the Chevy?” he asked, glancing at my rental car.

  “Same one,” I said.

  “I drove it at your wedding,” he said. “From the church to the reception.”

  “I remember.”

  That image stopped us cold for a few seconds.

  “Come on inside,” he said.

  “I just stopped by . . .”

  “You read about Willie’s gruesome end.”

  He turned up the walk and opened the door. It was as if Willie were a mutual friend, I thought. It had been over forty years since that day. Inside the house, a massive picture window scanned five miles up and down the river and from his lawn to the clouds in the sky. Leather couches and chairs, with a heavy Mediterranean feel. A large Oriental rug lay over gleaming oak floors. On the coffee table I noticed a gold cigarette box with his initials on top, and next to it a gold table lighter. David offered me a drink, and when I passed he stepped into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of beer. He walked to the window. Pointed across the river. “There’s our old neighborhood,” he said. “The repair shop. Our houses. All still there.” Judy Pauling? My mind went: Is she still there? And the postman? I saw David’s approach—get to the heart of things right away, show there’s no guilt, even regret over whatever had gone on forty years ago, or yesterday. I could have predicted it; whichever way the world turned, it never got the best of the guy. He would be smirking the moment they slid his body into the furnace.

  “Do you think much about those times?” he asked.

  “Now and then,” I said. “I remember smoking on the steps behind the repair shop. I remember Willie.”

  His eyes stopped to read me, search for a hint of dissonance, blame, regret, anything that could be a threat.

  “He lived a long, full life,” he said.

  I laughed. David’s cool cracked for a moment.

  “Funny?”

  “Willie leading a full life,” I said.

  David lifted the beer to his mouth.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “The paper said he was stabbed to death in an alley.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know everything in this town,” I said. “Who was it?”

  His eyes grew hooded, brushing off the smirk.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just curious.”

  He sat down on the couch. He reached for the gold box, flipped open the top, and offered me a cigarette. When I waved it off, he lifted a cigarette from the case. Pall Mall. Extra Tall. He fired the lighter, touched it to the tip.

  “Remember these?”

  “I smoked Luckies.”

  “LSMFT.” The smirk was back. “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” He smiled benevolently. “We did a lot of shit together in those days.”

  “A lot,” I said. “Not all of it cool.”

  “We were twelve, thirteen,” he said. “We got over it. You got over it. Look at you—college professor, famous author. I read your book The Professor, by the way. I loved it.”

  “Why would you kill him after all these years?”

  He took a slow drag, eyes on me. “Man, you go right at it, don’t you?”

  THAT DOESN’T SEEM quite right. The scene is missing something. It’s moving too fast. There was an odd feeling of living in the past. I felt my old attraction for him: the cool guy with his dark hair swirled back into a ducktail, who always knew what was going on. I remember resisting an urge to let go of the whole Willie thing. I think it went more like this:

  “I read your book The Professor, by the way. It’s perfect.”

  “Really? It doesn’t seem like your sort of book.”

  “Hey, man, he had it right. If the Professor felt he was entitled to kill his wife for fucking his neighbor, then he was. We’re all animals, you know? We do what we think is right.”

  “Did you read his memoir, The Joy of Killing?”

  He nodded his head. “The way I see it, you’re the Professor. The picture on the back should have been you.”

  Really? I thought, but said nothing. The smirk reminded me of the old days, when he always had the upper hand.

  “Well,” he picked up, “I loved the way the Professor handled those assholes who called him names like psychopath or sociopath. The more they saw he wasn’t bothered by what he did, the more pissed they got. He never felt bad about anything. He went to his death a happy man. I admire that.”

  I let that sit there. Seconds passed.

  “Are you a happy man?” I asked.

  That seemed to startle him. I sat down in the chair opposite him.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I was thinking about Willie.”

  “I don’t think Willie was happy.”
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  “I mean about what happened to him. Why it happened.”

  He took a long pull on the Pall Mall, let half the smoke out, pulled it in through his nose, and let it drift out of his mouth in a gentle stream. I half expected him to spit on the floor.

  “You think I killed Willie?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  He studied me carefully through the haze.

  “I figure that over time the stuff between you and him got to be more than you could handle, and at some point you realized the only way to reduce the feelings was to kill him.”

  “Like the Professor,” he said.

  “Kind of. It would erase a lot of bad memories, balance things out. Leave you free and clear. Happy, in other words.”

  “Even if I admitted it, no one would believe you.”

  “Why would I tell anyone?”

  He gazed out the window for a second.

  “Maybe you’ve got a grudge against me, from the old days.”

  I figured he would be worried about this. But, truthfully? I would have told him that whatever happened that day, years ago, I owed him no ill will. “No one wrote their own script” was a favorite line of the Professor’s, and I believed it. As for my wife, that never did bother me. I was in neutral on both counts. I was in neutral, period.

  “Like you said, we were kids. As for my wife, you got both of us out of a bad situation.”

  David thought about that for a second, then stubbed out his cigarette in a black marble ashtray on the end table. He stood up and walked to the window. Turned back to me.

  “It had to be done,” he said in a calm, almost flat voice. “Willie wanted money. He had photographs of me, from a long time ago, no one would have cared about anyway. It was just time. He needed to be gone.”

  “I get it, but why the alley? Why the knife?”

  David took a step back; now I could barely make out his features.

  “He wanted to come up here, and I couldn’t have that. I suggested the tavern. I got there a few minutes early and waited in the alley next to it.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “How?” He came forward, toward the table, stopping only a few feet away. I kept my seat. He turned to the counter and picked up an ebony-handled hunting knife with a viciously curved blade. His voice took on a harsh timbre. “With this. I heard him shuffling down the sidewalk with his cane. I let him pass by and then grabbed him from behind.”

  David’s arm hooked out about neck high.

  “I pulled him back into the alley. He didn’t struggle, didn’t make a noise. ‘Willie,’ I said into his ear. ‘It’s me, David.’ The cane fell from his hand. All he could say was, ‘I know.’”

  My host’s grip tightened the knife to his quarry’s neck.

  “I sunk the tip of the knife in the base of his throat and pulled up. I felt him begin to slip, and I held steady, and he fell against the knife which ripped up his throat and into his mouth. He was hanging there, his jawbone hooked on the blade, twitching. I jerked up once or twice, felt him loosen. I turned him around, watched the light in his eyes fade, and jerked the knife back out.”

  David was standing over the body, crumpled on the alley floor, with the blood-dripping knife in his hand. He was breathing hard. He looked up at me.

  “You looked like . . . you enjoyed it,” I said.

  His eyes were bright. “It felt good. Things were straight. I felt nothing toward him, only release in myself.” He carefully laid the hunting knife on the table.

  I could see the blood on his hands and shoes, hear the throttled croak of the lump on the floor. The crazily bemused look in David’s eye was disturbing. I stood up and told him I needed to use the bathroom. He looked somewhat amazed, like after all that, the beauty of all that, and all you can think of is you have to take a piss?

  I DROP MY hands to my lap. That’s pretty accurate, best as I can remember. Some of the dialogue might be a little off. Hard to think it was only a short time ago. My throat is dry. I need water to make it through the next few hours. I’m reluctant to break the spell. As for Willie’s death, it’s as I thought; it seemed to have a certain harmony to it, the way it came about. That’s not the end of the scene, though. The quiver in my chest tells me that.

  “USE THE ONE in the bedroom,” David said, motioning. “The one in the hall is torn up. Workers should have been here by now.”

  The bedroom is the size of my apartment. A four-poster bed of a mahogany frame covered by a silk canopy sits in the middle. Turkish rugs are scattered about. A small crystal chandelier hangs over a leather recliner and ottoman by the window. I pause. Walk by a wall of framed photographs on the way to the bathroom in the far corner. Just before I turn, I spot a picture on top of a heavy wood dresser. It looks like David, but without the lock of hair. His father. There is a flash of silver in the corner of my eye as it passes over the cluttered dresser top. Shiny. Flat, oblong. My eyes swing back to it. My feet freeze on the floor. I study the object in the mirror, from the back. A Zippo. The Zippo. I force air into my lungs, and it seems to activate a pulsing, gathering rage. The bastard stole it from me. He’s had it all these years, sitting here on his dresser, in a ceramic ashtray, along with his gold cufflinks and money clip. I reach for it slowly, as if I’m afraid it might crumble in my touch. My finger brushes the dent on the top corner, then my fingers grasp the metal and hold the object upright. The globe and anchor shine brightly. I needn’t turn it over, but I do. All these years, it could have been in my pocket; all the clinks and clunks it could have made. The reassuring touch on my thigh when I walked. I can see it sitting upright on the desk in my office, the sole symbol of sanity in my life, over the years. I feel empty from the life I’ve lived without it. There were the initials, just as I knew. R.L.M.

  The metal grows heavy and hot. I bring it in closer, consumed by the sensation of it in my fingers, when I hear a voice behind me.

  “I was going to give it to you,” a face in the mirror says. I knew you would come up here after Willie.”

  David’s eyes follow my hand as it drops to my side.

  “I was always going to give it back.”

  He was trying to manage a smirk, and it contorted his features. I grasp the Zippo tightly, then relax, then tighten. My mind is racing back to the last time I saw it.

  “The church,” I say. “My wedding.” The robing room in the church. I’m putting my tuxedo on, and my best man convinces me that the Zippo would look awkward in the tailored trousers. He appears to slip it into my jeans pocket, pats me on the shoulder, urges me to hurry up, we’re behind time. The scene had completely dropped out.

  “It never seemed the right time,” he said, the twisted smirk now replaced by a look of some concern.

  I slipped the Zippo in my pocket, felt the familiar heavy heat on my thigh. I felt strength from it.

  “You don’t mind if I take it now?”

  He tried a nervous smile. “No, fuck no, man, it’s yours. I feel really bad about it.”

  I take a step toward him, he tenses, steps back.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says. “We’re all right?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “Whatever happened to Judy Pauling?” I ask, as he moves aside and I angle toward the door. I pause and await his response.

  He looks at me nervously. “She teaches at Irving Elementary.”

  I smiled. “By the way, I brought something for you. A signed copy of The Joy of Killing. It’s in the car.”

  “That’s OK, man.”

  “You should have a signed copy. You and he . . .”

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  I reached for the door handle, twisted it, and stepped out onto the porch.

  WHAT STRIKES ME here, as I lay out the scene, is how clearly and cleanly everything is flowing. The protagonist is reflecting very little on what he’s seen or found, or what he’s going to do abou
t it. He’s moving with clarity and an easy sense of purpose. There is no doubt or hesitation; he knows what to do, and he’s going to do it. He is not ruffled or hysterical, or red-faced, or laced with anger or a need for revenge or payback. Impressive. Doing what comes natural, as they say. As for David, you can see the relief on his face. He’s never known his friend as a violent man, although he did wonder somewhat after reading his books. He has considerable hope that his friend will just drive off. He still has the aftermath of killing Willie to deal with.

  WALKING TO THE car, I felt the cool heat of a Midwest autumn breeze on my forehead. The leaf-covered stream twisting through the grounds has caught the light through the trees. You could ride a bike over the gentle hills of Iowa for hours on a day like this and only get stronger as you went. I opened the passenger’s door, reached in, and grabbed my briefcase from the seat. I turned back to the stone house. David was not in sight. The door was closed. I smiled slightly. The days of him calling the shots were gone for good.

  I pushed the front door open and stepped in through the front hall. David was sitting on the couch, where he was earlier, apparently waiting for me. “I’ll have that beer now,” I told him. He nodded somewhat glumly, as if the whole thing was foretold, and while he was in the kitchen fetching it, I set the briefcase down on a long side table. I reached in and pulled out a signed hard copy of the Professor’s memoir and laid it on the table. I scribbled a note on one of the inside pages, as I was often asked to do.

  I’d closed the book by the time he returned. He handed me the beer, an Old Style, as I remember. The neck was remarkably cold to my touch. I set it on the table.

  “Take a look,” I said, pointing to the book, startled for a moment by the gentle look on the Professor’s face.

  David flipped open the front cover, past a page or two, until he came to the title page and the Professor’s signature: “To my dear friend David,” it read, and then a space and the signature. He looked up at me, and I motioned for him to turn another page. He did, and on it is my handwriting: “To David, who taught me the ways of the world” and my signature.