The Joy of Killing

by Harry MacLean

  He bent over the page, then flipped back to the previous page.

  “It’s the same handwriting,” he said.

  At that, I reached around to my back pocket and touched the handle of the kitchen knife. I drew it out slowly. I slipped the blade around and under his neck. I pressed in slightly and pulled until I felt it slip into the flesh. David turned his head toward me. His face was draining. His right arm jerked out.

  “The Zippo was the only thing I ever cared about,” I said. A weak smirk crossed his face, and his head turned back down. I jerked the knife again, this time more gently, until it gave way into the throat. Blood pumped in huge spurts across the table, strange gurgling, grating sounds rose from beneath my hand, then a blustering noise from my own throat. Everything—the Professor’s face, my hands, even the weed still hanging from David’s mouth—was a bright crimson. Red liquid far and wide.

  I FEEL A cold draft. It means someone has opened the downstairs door. Which means someone is on the stairs. I rise and walk to the door, slide the little bolt, and jerk it open. Nothing, just as before. Still, I feel the cool air. The outside door, I think. Someone is downstairs. I walk to the rear window and look out. No sign of anything, or anyone. I relax.

  The stars have settled over the trees. Clouds are shimmering slightly in the reflected moonlight. How many scenes in your life like this have you missed? I think. The unseen beauty of nature. Like today.

  It hits me: I am a murderer, after all. Like the Professor, I now know the feeling of taking a human life. Although it didn’t happen the way I would have wanted. Clean and clear without emotion or need or hate or guilt was how it should have been. But I had slipped out of neutral. The remnants of the rage reverberate through me, now. Poison left behind, as I said earlier. And that is, I guess, an unfortunate byproduct of clarity. If you wipe the screen clean, you must accept the truth of what then appears. And I will, I’ll adjust and move on. There’s been so much progress already tonight, and yet more to come. I sense that if—when, I mean—the rest of the road is run, adjustments in the emotional content will occur as naturally as the quiet after the storm.

  I have no recollection of what happened after the killing; how I got cleaned up—I must have been splattered in blood—or when I left the place. The knife: I must have taken the time to wash it and put it back in the briefcase. Driving away from the house, out of the city, turning onto the road up here—I don’t remember any of it.

  Given the track of my life, I must wonder if the story of the killing is true, in whole or in part. For images to spring like that fully formed from nothing and in perfect sequence is quite stunning. To sit here in this room for hours without the slightest hint of the killing scene in the living room of David’s house. The recall of it in such exquisite detail should heighten its veracity, I would think. I can’t help but smile at the thought that the smirk is finally once and for all wiped from David’s face.

  But how did it get so out of control? I hadn’t gone up there with violent purpose. None at all. I had gone there with some questions, to be sure, some questions about the Aqua Velva Man’s violent demise, although I doubt I intended to stir up that nest of devils for the simple reason that David, untrustworthy to begin with, would tell a story that would only make him look good and me weak. If you care about nothing, then you can move through life a free man, unencumbered by mordant emotions, embracing all things, all people; if you quit trying to care about something, that is, and yes, I was there, close to there, thanks to my second wife, and I was happier for it. Today was unfortunate from that point of view.

  The Zippo.

  Long buried deep in the subcutaneous layers, its power never diminished. The motherfucker stole it from me. BANG, the flash of it had hit me, and all plans and intentions shot out the window. It was the singular unmatchable beauty of the chrome case, its built-to-last-forever wheel, the movable steel hinge, the image of it hanging in the long pants pocket of a gyrene stumbling up the sands of some godforsaken island in the Pacific with a rifle clutched in his hand in the face of seething Jap fire. The clink-clunk of it lighting a few Army-issued weeds in the foxhole after purchase on the atoll had been obtained step by bloody step.

  There are some critical parts missing, I realize. The rip in my thigh, for example: How did it get there? I pull the torn jean flap back and see the ragged gash, almost completely crusted over now. However it happened, it happened today. I press it hard until pink fluid oozes out around the edges. I close my eyes as the pain shoots into my groin. I suspect the knife slipped from David’s neck and sliced into my leg, or maybe he grabbed the hunting knife off the table and slashed back in desperation.

  Do I feel bad about the act? you might ask. No, I don’t. No guilt or regret. Joy neither, because as I’ve explained the rage poisoned the beauty of the act. I understand the source of the rage: the Zippo. Now sitting on the table in front of me, right next to the Underwood. Not a drop or smear on it either. A totally unexpected find, incapable of being conjured up by the unstable mind. I tap the silver case once, twice. That, goddamn it, is real.

  CLICKETY-CLACK CLICKETY-CLACK clicketyclackclicketyclack. The steady rhythm fills my head and brings me around from my little warren to the scene in the semidarkness of the second-to-last seat in the last car, where the boy and the girl are gathering themselves after their intimate revelations to see what still might lie ahead for them, both sensing as the roaring iron horse gallops down the shivering rails that time is drawing close and yet the stories are not all told. The boy feels it; the girl feels it for him. The girl has admitted to feeling responsible for her brother’s death—what could be worse than that?—although she always knew it, has lived with the images of it; whereas the boy, if he is to go forward at all, must plow new ground, or, a better image might be, lean over and peer down into a deep well.

  THE GIRL, NOW as clear-eyed and mystical as when she first appeared, leaned forward encouragingly. “There’s something else,” she said barely above a whisper.

  The boy knew the time had come, but he didn’t know where to begin. Images crowded against each other. Fragments spun and stopped. Colors blurred and cleared.

  FINALLY, THE DOORBELL rang.

  “One Saturday morning two detectives came to my house,” he began, and the smile faded from the girl’s face as she allowed herself to absorb his words. “They claimed they found a wallett in this guy’s room. An old queer my friend David knew, who said he would get us a girl if we came to his room. His name was Willie. They showed pictures of him and asked if I knew him. It was David’s wallett, and I figured it must have fallen from his pocket when we were . . . when we were in Willie’s room.”

  The last words created images of Willie’s place: the soiled curtains puffing in the damp wind, the carved-up dresser with the bottle of aftershave on it, the thin, grubby mattress, Willie’s plain brown shoes on the naked wooden floor. The girl shifted slightly in the chair.

  “The only reason I went along with it was because Willie promised there would be a girl for us. David said he had met her, seen her naked and played with her tits. Or I wouldn’t have gone. I trusted my friend.

  The slightest nod back.

  “I told the two detectives that I’d never seen the guy in the photo, but they knew better. My mom knew better. I had to lie. They kept holding the wallett up in front of me. ‘It’s your wallett,’ they said. ‘It has your name in it. We found it in his room.’”

  I told her about the first cop with the river scar on his cheek and the other cop with the small ears. The first cop repeated it. “On the floor,” they said. All I could do was shake my head. “It’s not mine.”

  I described Willie, his sharp black eyes and sallow skin, the almost invisible lips, and the sickening smell of the aftershave, as best I could. He told us the girl worked at the state fair and guaranteed she would be over in half an hour. But since he was doing this for us, a favor, he would like a little something back. My friend David was sitting in a chair
next to the bed, and he smiled at Willie, and then at me.

  “He said he would like to look at us a little. He was staring at me. David nodded. I didn’t move, and he nodded again. ‘Just pull your pants down,’ the man said.”

  I studied the girl’s face for a reaction of disgust, or even curiosity, like a freak show. Myself, so far I felt emboldened by the words. I thought for a moment she was going to reach out and pat my hand, or say something encouraging. I froze, and she must have seen it because she held still.

  I AM SLIGHTLY shocked by the growing clarity of the images. They seem more like photos in an album buried in a steamer trunk in the attic of an old house. Black and white, with serrated edges, pasted in a line across stiff black pages. Not quite square. In the next image, the boy is bending over the bed. On the edge of the picture is the arm and bare leg of a man. In the next, the man is holding his dick. The boy’s face is sideways on the bed, his eyes closed.

  I describe the pictures to the girl. She seems undisturbed.

  Going across the black page, the image is of the man settling in on top of the boy, sallow flesh on white. The boy’s hand is grasping a chunk of the nubby bedspread; his head has turned the other way, facing the wall, so you can’t see his eyes. Eye glasses lay askew in the dull light. One row down, on the edge of the page, the image shows the man on top of the boy, his head tilted back, hands flattened on either side of the boy’s head.

  The next photo is curled up, and I have to press the corners flat and hold it down by the edges. The boy is half twisted out from under the man, his face wrenched in determination.

  Now standing, his jeans up, the boy is holding his glasses in one hand and looking across the room at the door. The photo has a white crease down the middle.

  I take one deep breath, then another. My forehead is hot. The girl waits.

  The last square is empty; two slots where the corners would be inserted, crusty patches of ancient glue. I press a finger onto the stiff paper, then brush to the right, where the last photo lies flat on the page. The edges are stained brown, but the image in dead center is clear. The boy is bent over the handlebars of his green-and-white Schwinn, his feet pressed back hard on the pedals, water streaming back from the corners of his eyes. On his way to the swimming pool, I told the girl.

  THE WINDOW WHIPS open. Bangs against the wall. Autumn has fled; the wind on my face is now warm and moist, a summer wind, like the one blowing on the morning of Joseph’s drowning, like the one rousing the curtains in Willie’s apartment. The moon settled low over the waters, is growing pale, on its way to one of those see-through discs that hang low in the sky in first light. Now that the screens have been scrubbed free; now that clarity—if not understanding—has arrived. The wallett had been mine; the detectives that morning had surely insisted on it. I may well have thought otherwise at the time, may well have already reconstructed the scene in Willie’s room the way I first told it on these pages. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing really matters. This scene now, the one I just saw, is as close to reality as necessary. It could have been longer, it could have been shorter, but that’s what happened.

  I looked in the girl’s eyes. She had absorbed the story, me, so deeply into her being—her eyes are open to the depths—that she cannot separate a response to it, to me. Neither one of us said anything, for there was nothing to say; the story, the images, have disappeared into our shared being.

  I RISE AND walk the few steps to the window. The damp wind has already moistened the leaves, for the close ones glisten in the paling light. I look down the shore of the lake, to my right, where the cove is, where the canoe would be if I could see around the point. Joseph’s short life was spent the way it was meant to be spent. The cold lake water took him down and gave him up. Nothing could have saved him. Sally survived that day because her father the caretaker would have killed himself over the loss of her, too. She’s known that for a long time, and she came tonight to tell me so. Seeing now that even a broken life is sometimes better than none.

  The story of Willie and David isn’t quite so easy, of course. In the girl’s eyes there is no intimate reaction to it. She sees the scene as the natural flow of events, as something to be accepted and not emotionally responded to. My fear of that day fooled me, I see that now. I must have believed that feelings of shame, and worse, perhaps self-hatred, or immolation, would become who I was. I could say now that I was wrong, that I would have been able to handle it, but I couldn’t have known that then.

  Even now, in the clarity of early morning, I don’t hate Willie, I don’t blame him for what became of my life. He was seeking happiness the only way he knew how. Like all of us. As for David, I should say the same, but I would perhaps wish him some sort of conscience for what he did, some sort of pain for having betrayed a friendship for whatever it was he was seeking.

  Would I have come to this place of clarity, if not understanding, without the girl on the train? I doubt it. Each thread had to be woven into each other just the way it was. The story of her brother, the sad beauty in her exotic eyes. The conductor and the crying baby. Her breasts: I wanted them so badly for my own that I would have done or said almost anything. I remember not long after telling the story of Willie’s room that my hands ached for them and only by force of will—and by clutching the Zippo—was I able to hold them still.

  The Zippo disrupts this new narrative somewhat. The fact is, after all this time, I am a murderer. I killed David. Out of rage. Thus cheating myself of the joy of the act itself. It makes me question the Professor and his theory of moral neutrality. I don’t think the hawk crunches the squirrel’s skull in his claws for the fun of it. He does it because nature so decrees it. He does it out of a primal, biological need. To survive. I killed not out of need, or even for pleasure, but to release the rage.

  I hold the Zippo up and examine the bottom in the light. “Made in Bradford, PA.,” it says in somewhat crude letters. One of a hundred or more that day, probably. I imagine a young woman in the PX in Honolulu holding it steady in her hand while she attaches the Marine Corps emblem on one side, and then turning it over and etching in the initials of a soldier on the other.

  So, it would appear in the end of my life that I did care about something. The murder points out the perils of it, you see.

  THE GIRL TAPPED the window. “Look,” she said. On the far horizon was a thin band of gray. Dawn was creeping up on the stars, for the moment still swirling in blue-black.

  “Did you see your mother again?” I asked.

  Her eyes turned back to me. In them I saw no hesitation, no challenge. The few hours on the train have given her a look of acceptance, if not peace.

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  I leaned in a little.

  “She came to the funeral. She sat on the far end of the very last row, by herself. I turned around, and saw her in a black dress. You could see her eyes through the veil. I looked back after the last hymn, and she was gone.”

  She folded her hands. “That was the last time.”

  I glanced out the window; I could see the engine ahead of us on a curve. It seemed to be pulling away.

  “Did you ever see Willie again?”

  “No, never.”

  The whistle gave two long blasts.

  “David?”

  I wanted to tell her of this afternoon. But I didn’t want her to see me with blood on my hands.

  “He stole the Zippo,” I said. “He was the best man at my wedding. He stole it in the robing room after I put on my tuxedo.” I passed on the part of him fucking the bride.

  Her eyes lit up a little. “How did you get it back?”

  “I took it from him,” I said flatly.

  Her eyes held questions.

  “I took it back.”

  I looked square at her. She was startled by the violence she sensed, and I saw I was right. I looked away, back out at the plains where in the nocturnal dimness the power lines were slicing the sky into rectangles.

  I
FEEL THE breeze wash over my face. I close the window and latch it tightly. Time is drawing nigh, as they say. The halo effect around the moon is fading. The top edges of the clouds hovering close by are reflecting a pink sheen. Darkness is my friend. My muse. My collaborator. I feel gratitude for its very existence. Like my winged friend, I doubt I could go forward into the dawning day.

  I return to the typewriter with some sense of urgency, to bring the narrative up to date. I turn on the light switch, but it’s dead. I type ahead anyway in the waning light of the moon. Did I truly murder David this morning? All of my senses tell me so, and there’s the knife lying on the floor. I reach over and pick it up. A smear of blood lingers on the blade close to the sticky handle. I slash the blade through the air and feel a remnant of the rage jerking through my muscles. I see then: the rage is just another feeling, like love or hate or fear, and if you would walk clear and clean into this life you need to be willing to experience it like any other feeling; it has its own charm, its own joy, because of its singular power, and the ability to release it through action, like popping a balloon. You may not seek it out, like you would other emotions—well, we know some do—but when you experience rage you should accept it for its own sake, and the satisfaction that can accompany the sensation of it.

  There is no sound coming from the typewriter. My hands are on my lap. I’m finished with the narrative, the one I will leave behind anyway. I pull the last page out and stack it on top of the others, now a good inch or two high. I address it to the Professor’s agent and suggest he may want to consider publishing it, as a companion to the other two books. A trilogy. Nonfiction, of course, for cross my heart as I sit here now I believe this to be the best version of events possible, and therefore the truth.

  So, there is someone here. I’m pleased to see that. It will be a good feeling to take with me. I would say good-bye to the girl on the train, if I could. I would tell her I’ve loved her all these years, from the moment she asked me to kiss her. We spoke very little after telling our stories. We drifted off in each other’s arms as night fled and a bleak dawn crept across the empty plains. We pulled into the Chicago train yards in a wintry morning light. The locomotives were coal black against a lightly falling snow. A string of brightly painted wooden cars rolled slowly past the window. I spotted the trainman in the caboose at the end and waved like a kid. The girl smiled at this and laid her head on my shoulder.