Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die

by Charles Runyon

  The walnut stock lay sweat-greasy against his cheek, the sights wavered as the gun barrel swung to-and-fro. He felt Debra’s presence and turned, saw her standing at the corner of the building, one grimy foot pressed down on the other. “You want me to do it?”

  “He’s my dog.”

  She said nothing, waiting. Ten years old.

  “Don’t watch.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just go away, willya?”

  “Make me.”

  He swung the gun. She lifted her chin, thrust out her round chest, nubbin-breasts pushing out the floweredprint fabric made from a hog-pellet sack. “Go ahead. I don’t care.”

  “I will.”

  “Do it. Shoot me. You’re afraid.”

  He let the barrel drop, pointing at the ground.

  “Go up and see what he’s doing.”

  “Go up and see for yourself.”

  “You could talk him out of it.”

  “He’s your dog.”

  The crack of the rifle was loud, loud. Something tore apart inside him.

  Killing is wrong, killing is evil.

  The general who pinned the medal on him had shaking hands, small eyes sunk in pockets of fat. Danny smelled the sourness of old booze under the breath sweetener, saw the liver spots on the general’s hands, thought of his father.

  He listened carefully to the citation, the naming of names:

  “While serving at a waterpoint in the region of Pleiku … unit attacked by mortar fire … at great risk to himself despite serious wound, went forward under fire to save his commanding officer and then refused evacuation …”

  “You’re a credit to the army, Derringer.”

  “Thank you sir, the name is Bollinger.”

  The general frowned down at the mimeographed sheet. Dan stepped back, saluted, about-faced, and marched back into formation, wondering why he couldn’t remember any of his heroic deeds. Maybe Derringer did it. He sent the medal to Debra, and she put it in her box of keepsakes, along with Mama’s ring.

  Darkside,

  Sunnyside …

  I am the lady of the dark tower.

  Die, witch!

  Debra died beautifully, her eyes closed, fine-featured face smooth in rapture. She held her slim body rigid, tipped, tumbled off the crossbrace, fell turning through the slanted beams of dustmotes dancing in the sun, dress whipping up around her hips, into the pile of mouldy hay. He looked at the dark hair curling around the edge of her panties and felt his heart thump in the base of his throat. Her eyes were open, deep sunk and placid, studying him. She didn’t bother to move …

  The twelfth summer of our lives …

  Dan walked to the window of the staff room, tapped on the glass, and spoke through the slot at the bottom. “Dr. Bodac left the tape recorded for me …”

  “Mama could never accept the fact that we were of different sex. She knew it, yes. But her mind was always slipping a cog, like when she’d call us Tweedledum and Tweedledee, usually when we were fighting over something. You know the thing, it goes:

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  Resolved to have a battle,

  For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

  Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

  “Then we’d have to know which of us was Tweedledee and which was Tweedledum. She was into nursery rhymes, the kind that have a moral. Georgy Porgy, puddin’ and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry. This was to get us to eat our Cream of Wheat, as I recall. But I would always get lost in wondering what kind of freak George was to go around kissing girls, which seemed kind of useless to me at that age. In later years I wondered what kind of girls these were who cried, but then I figured he must’ve been doing something else to ‘em which the person who made up the poem hadn’t observed. I never actually found out how you made a girl cry by kissing her, but it always sorta teased my mind …

  “Before the bathroom was built we shared a galvanized tin washtub behind the big pot-bellied stove in the living room. The heat had stained the wallpaper yellowish-brown, and cracked and split it until it looked diseased. Dad sat in the old rocking chair with his belt undone at the waist, sock feet up on the hassock, heavy shoulders bulging out of the arms of his undershirt. You could call it ivory but it was more like deadfish white. And because it was hard to heat water on the old wood cookstove—Mama had only this one five-gallon stewpot, covered with black-and-white pebbled enamel—you ever surf? Never mind, it has nothing to do with the story, just thought I’d ask—anyway we bathed together because of this problem …”

  Danny strips off his shirt and pants, hanging them on the chair behind the stove. Debra is already in the tub. She’s darker of complexion than him, noticeably feminine only in the delicate cast of her features. Her shoulders are thin, the little aereoles on her chest no larger than dimes, the nipples irregular little bumps like grapenuts. Danny dips out a handful of cold water and throws it on her back. She shrieks, Dad rustles his paper and growls, “Goddamn it, Danny, you’re gonna get a whack!” And Debra, her lips peeled back in a savage snarl, reaches out and grabs his little spout and yanks, hard—

  “Well, these were the happy years. They ended pretty suddenly when we were ten. Mama went out to an Eastern Star meeting one night and a drunk ran head-on into her car. We got to the hospital in time to see them pull the sheet over her head. The man who killed her was there in the receiving room, his pants leg was torn and one ear was covered with a bandage, he was dribbling and drooling and saying; Jeez, i din’ see her she pulled over on my side’—And Dad was lookin at him like he was a dead fish. I didn’t see the first blow, it’s like when you get a break in the film, all of a sudden wham, the guy was flying out of his chair and across the receiving room, then he’s sliding down against the wall and Dad’s movin in and again, Wham! his jaw slewed sideways and then a couple ambulance drivers and cops got hold of him …

  “They asked Dad if he would’ve killed the man and he just sort of slid his eyes to one side and smiled with the corner of his mouth. They tried the guy for manslaughter and I think he got six months suspended. I didn’t understand all this at the time, I remember Debra wouldn’t eat, and one night at the supper table she started something about what Mama had told her that day. And Dad turned pale and got us all in the car and drove us up to the graveyard. I remember it quite clearly, there was the wind blowing softly in the old section where the slabs were tilted out of plumb. I thought Mama would be happier there, but she was in the new section where people paid their rental and got the grass mowed over their corpses. Myself I’d just as soon have the grass long …

  “Anyway Dad made Debra read the name on the stone, and she did, and then he said she’s dead, you’re never gonna see her again, and he got down and picked up a handful of dirt and said. This is what she’s turning into, Dirt. And Debra looked up at him with her stony face and said: ‘She isn’t.’ Well I knew what she meant, there was a hunk of meat there in the grave that had once belonged to Mama, but it didn’t anymore. After that Debra would sometimes get a feeling, whenever certain things would happen, that Mama was there. I would look at Debra and she would be looking at me, and it was like when you step on a thistle, you get this sudden shot of electricity running through you. Or we’d see some kids blowing dandelion fluff and we’d look at each other and remember that Mama had told us that if you blew it all away you got your wish. Mama always did it, but she would never tell us what she wished …”

  Elizabeth turned off the tape player and strolled into her kitchen. She took a bottle of Smirnoff down from the top cabinet and got a pitcher orange juice from the refrigerator. She mixed the drink and carried it back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and lifted her feet onto the coffee table. She sipped the drink, her eyes fixed out of habit on the blank gray square of the tv screen, wondering why she was spending so much time on one patient. Others had worse problems, Wanda had gotten hold
of a mop-handle and injured herself internally. Beatrice was accusing the hospital of stealing her two children. She’d forgotten the fire—again. And Chauncey de Pugh reported that he dreamed of cutting off her right breast. Why the right one, Chauncey, and not the left?

  Possibly because Danny has not yet been destroyed. If I can save only one … but why this one? Boredom was at least a partial answer; with nothing else to do she had driven by his ward and picked up the tape. Jeff had been on vacation for two weeks and she missed his light touch, his love-play without commitment …

  Indifference? A loaded word. Call it amnesia, he doesn’t see me when I’m not there. Like Danny and the girls who came to see him. Was it his indifference that turned them on? Possible. The things we want most are those we can’t have …

  She reached out and turned on the tape recorder.

  “… There was this game I used to play, Sigurd and his magic sword. I carved one out of wood and I used this old lamp that had a spearpoint on the end of it. I had my room across the hallway upstairs—this was after the church lady told my old man he’d have to make us stop sleeping together. We were, I dunno, about twelve. I used to go in my room and wrap this sheet over my shoulders, and put on boots, then I’d go to her room and throw open the door and charge in, like I was a viking come to rob and steal and rape and burn. She never liked the part she had to play in these. So every now and then she’d wear the spear and the cape, only it didn’t work out very well. She didn’t have the equipment for it. I just got a flash of something we used to do when we were about seven, eight, somewhere in there, I suddenly got the realization that we were different, you know. We didn’t know what sex was, she used to hang her ass over the manger and piss in the stall, and I could stand down below and see what was happening. I guess ever since then the toilet has been a sort of aphrodisiac for me, we grew up confusing shit with sex, don’t we? Well I guess it’s related somehow. Because our first scene was out there in the outdoor toilet behind the honeysuckle hedge. God, I always get that odor in my nose, honeysuckle and a kind of deep pungent odor of shit—not a sharp smell, not a stink if you take my meaning, but just a deep rich mouldy fragrance mixed with wood ashes, because the hired girl—or the housekeeper, whoever it happened to be—always put ashes down the hole to keep down the smell and the flies. Anyway you got it, shit, sex and honeysuckle. I was laying around the house reading books and she was, I dunno what. Anyway I hear Debra come out of her room and go down the stairs, and every footstep it’s like coming right down my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I knew what I was gonna do, I guess if we hadn’t got that load of sin laid on us a year ago when they had the church revival then we wouldn’t have stopped sleeping together, and taking baths together, and she wouldn’t have gone through all those changes by herself. Anyway when I heard the door hinge on the old toilet go screeek! I got this feeling of helplessness. Something just got hold of me and dragged me off the couch and shoved my ass out the door and into those honeysuckles. I could see her in there with her panties down to her knees just sitting there thumbing through the old catalog that laid there, then she just sort of stopped and listened and said, I know you’re out there, Danny. She always knew. When I got hit in Nam she was on the phone to the Red Cross all night, and it wasn’t till the next day that even our own battalion Headquarters knew we’d been creamed. So anyway … oh yeah, the toilet. Well if she’d wanted privacy she should’ve locked the door, there was this wooden block with a nail driven through it and if you turned it you couldn’t open the door from outside. So I opened and she’s just settin’ there looking at me, sort of passive. I couldn’t talk because of this lump in my throat. I just wanted to get to her by the shortest route, so I pulled off her … ah, shit. I think I’ll skip the sordid details. You know how people fuck, and that’s what we did, Danny-and-Debra, brother-and-sister, getting it on in the old toilet. I didn’t know there was anybody within miles, the old man had gone to town and I didn’t figure he’d be back until around midnight, lushed out of his skull. He’d been doing it for a couple years, ever since Mama died. Whatever it was that held him together just came unraveled. I try to picture how it was for him when he got back from Korea, I guess when you gotta clench up your courage all at once when you’re like eighteen, you get ready to die and from then on your life’s just like one final long drawn-out primal scream, because once you look at death your eyes lock and you can’t ever get your eyes off it. You know what I mean?

  “Anyway I felt this breeze on my bare ass and Debra’s got a kind of fixated stare. Then this big hand grabs my shoulder and I’m jerked out, thrown through the door and out on the grass. And the old man’s walking toward me with his eyes looking liked boiled eggs, and he’s got his fist doubled up and it looks like a cured ham coming at me. He hit me once and I went down thinking, No no man, this can’t be, but then I thought of all the other kids that got beat to death by their loving parents, and I also thought of how the old man’s been pouring down the lush lately, and I see this kind of mad-dog look in his eye that tells me he’s like I was when I got marched out of the house, he can’t help himself any more than I could. I guess the next blow must’ve knocked me out because the next thing I’m laying there and Debra’s got my head in her lap and she tells me to go to the barn and hide in the haymow, the old man’s sleeping now and probably won’t remember anything when he wakes up. So I did, and that night she brought my supper up; she’d told him I’d gone over to visit my cousins; she gave me my supper and then she said, Let’s do it again …

  “Didja ever hear such a sordid damn story? I know it sounds like a lot of things happened to me but thinking back I guess my main problem was boredom. I just got so damn bored with the people around me, they coasted along in the same old groove and when somebody died they just grabbed a tighter hold on life. I guess it’s like that little bird, if you squeeze it too hard you squeeze all the juice out and then it’s like death. Jesus, I’m getting dry, don’tcha think the damn hospital could spring for a jug of wine to go with these interviews? The touch of your sweet lips would do as well, my love. Did you ever give head? You know what I mean. Go down on your old man? I think I’d better get back to the ward now, before they turn out the lights …”

  Five

  Elizabeth glanced into the side mirror as she drove between the rose-granite columns guarding the entrance to the state hospital. A blue sedan peeled out of the traffic stream and fell in behind her. She noted the rack of lights and horns and sirens on the roof and thought: What now, Shurf?

  Her eyes felt gluey; she’d had another drink before going to bed, and the dull musty horror of a nightmare still lodged in her brain. At eight a.m. the air was already steamy, the sun a sickly reddish-yellow embryo floating in a globular haze. Her lungs felt stifled; she’d worn a navy dress with zippered front, the cleaners had shrunk the damn thing and she’d failed to notice it when she put it on. She pulled into her reserved parking space and opened the glove compartment, setting the controls which would activate the door locks and set the alarm system. Foolish extravagance, but she had a weakness for electronic gadgetry.

  Pulling her keys from the dash, she got out, closed the door and tested the handle. She saw the sheriff’s reflection in the glass as he got out and walked toward her, his boots crunching on the limestone chat. He looked tired and snarly, with gray half-moons under his eyes. He wore a blue-steel revolver clipped to his belt and nosed down into his hip pocket. That’s against the rules, she thought—but decided not to mention it. Another infraction was coming to her without going through the administrator. She decided to skip that too.

  “You still can’t see Bollinger,” she said, turning.

  “I didn’t come to see Bollinger. I thought you might ask him a couple questions for me.”

  She sighed. “I’m trying to establish an atmosphere of trust. If I come on as part of a police interrogation …”

  “You were just supposed to see if he was able to stand trial.”

  “
Yes, well, we can’t just look at his eyeballs and report on his mental condition.”

  He stood looking down at her, frowning and biting his lower lip. “When do you think you’ll be finished?”

  “He’s scheduled for staffing next Wednesday. If he’s ready for release, you’d have him in three days.”

  “Three days after Wednesday is Saturday.”

  “Then it probably won’t be until Monday.”

  “Sh—!” He whirled away and walked to his car with his head down, looking in neither direction. She watched him bend over and reach through the window, noting the way his tan gabardine shirt moulded the thick strong wedge of his back. She wondered why he aroused her hostility. Possibly she was picking up the feeling of the patients. Three women sat on the steps leading to the beauty shop, looking sullenly in his direction. A man walked past on the sidewalk, glanced over his shoulder and hurried on with his head down. Didn’t the sheriff stop to think that he was the Charon of the dark waters, the man who had brought most of them here?

  Now he was walking back, carrying a manila envelope, unwinding the red string which held the flap. He shook out two glossy eight-by-ten photos and held them out to her.

  At first she didn’t recognize the objects pictured. One looked like a pile of dead leaves, the other like torn burlap—but then she made out a grinning jaw, a curving rib cage laid bare by tattered decaying flesh. She felt her stomach churn slowly as she handed the photos back to him.