Everyday Psychokillers Page 5

  I knew, of course I did, that it’s not a matter of how many doctors it takes to screw the lightbulb, not when part of the lightbulb’s face falls from the stretcher on the way out of the ambulance. But I was caught up in the drama. I was learning how to participate.

  Julie, actually, had been best friends with Rhonda, not when she died, but for most of the year before that, the year before I came. Julie told me about how at the funeral this girl Shari, who was Rhonda’s best friend when she died, and also the girl whose house Rhonda had been walking home from when the van hit her, this girl had thrown herself at the foot of the grave when they were about to start putting the ceremonial dirt in it, and clung there at the edge while Rhonda’s mother held her shoulders. Julie told me, when we were lying on her pink bed, talking about it, “It was weird of her to do that. I think it was wrong. I hate that fucking bitch, too.”

  Shari helped Rhonda’s mother go through Rhonda’s room, and Shari was there when Rhonda’s mother found cigarettes in her closet and pot in her sock drawer. Julie said she’d asked Shari about a couple things, like some pictures, and some letters she was sure Rhonda’d saved, and a couple things Julie had given her when they were best friends, just dumb little things, some safety pins with colored beads on them, particular little macramé bracelets, and Shari said she’d looked, but didn’t know what Julie could be talking about, she just hadn’t found those things in Rhonda’s stuff.

  Sitting on the curb with CiCi, I was thinking about trying to tell that, but of course I couldn’t figure out how to tell CiCi because, among other things, I was the asshole in that story, and in the face of it, how could I tell her what I really wanted to say, which was that Rhonda did really mean something to me, and that I had lost something real?

  There was a particular half-dream feeling that happened to me sometimes at school, but also in my dreams and also in ridiculous places like grocery stores and parking lots, where I felt sure Rhonda was near, because I thought I saw the movement of her hair somehow, but I couldn’t tell if I was following her or if she was following me. If you think of the story where the bear goes around and around the tree looking for the monster, and follows his own footprints. Or better, if you think of binary stars, how they revolve around a common, invisible source of gravity that doesn’t exist without them. Imagine us: we’re walking around the school, and the crowd dissipates, so it’s just us, circling the school, until it’s like the school itself dissipates and it’s just us, walking. We’re walking in smaller and smaller circles. Soon, it’s like we’re bound, front to back, like we’re simply layers of one person, doubles, each each other, which is what it means to be moving in the tiniest circle imaginable, which is turning in place, which means, basically, alone.

  I sat on the curb, holding the little paper package for Julie’s birthday, listening to CiCi suck at the last of the ice with her straw, and I felt panic. I couldn’t picture anything coming out of my mouth without bats flying from between my teeth and getting in her hair. I started to feel unable to experience time, there on the curb. I had no idea how long we’d been sitting, silent except for the rattling of the ice in her plastic cup. I couldn’t tell if maybe time was passing for her, but not for me. I couldn’t say a thing. It didn’t matter what. I couldn’t say, “So, CiCi, how ya been?”

  Then Ted came out, and we all got back in the car. Even with the windows down the heat made the air feel solid, and the air came in like a single force. Even when we got back to Ted’s apartment, I couldn’t say a thing. Ted said, “Why are you being so crappy?” and CiCi chattered about what they might want to eat for dinner, why didn’t he keep anything in the house, how they could make hamburgers but he didn’t have bread of any kind and she didn’t want to go back in his dumpy car in the fucking heat. Then he took the new baggie of pot from his front pocket and put it on the kitchen counter, and I realized I was supposed to go home, so I did. A different day, I might have felt gracious, making a knowledgeable exit like that, but that day I didn’t. I felt heavy and empty at once. I walked to the triplex, carrying my paper bag with the empty box in it, suddenly feeling dumb for having bought a gift at a head shop. It wasn’t even almost dark out yet. One boy was still spinning on his back on the sidewalk in front of the sprawling church. I felt as if a round furry animal, an animal like an otter, was curled in my stomach. It had eaten away just enough room to curl up and sleep inside me there in my belly, wet and silent.

  Years later, a psychokiller named Leonard Lake filmed himself, it turned out, cutting up a bunch of girls. It turned out, in fact, that he’d been at it for decades. But before they knew any of that, when he was, as they say, initially brought to the stationhouse for questioning, Lake said, “I want to take this aspirin I have here,” which they let him do, and then he died almost immediately, right there, where they were asking him questions, and it turned out the aspirin was a cyanide pill he’d been carrying in his shirtpocket.

  The world is enormous. You leave your womb where you are not a stranger, and then you leave your mother’s arms where you are not a stranger but there is no mistaking that you are also not part of her; you are not a tumor and you are not an extra limb. Then you leave your house and your school, and you must walk through the world anonymous.

  If you are not doomed and ruined and can make it through childhood, then maybe you can stop moving, get yourself known about town as they say, draw eyes toward you. A ghost breaks through time because it’s remembering, or it breaks through because it’s remembered. Everyone’s asking, “Where am I, exactly? What has become of me?” The question bounces between live bodies and dead ones. A ghost is afraid of disappearing into history. It has pain and no body at all.

  Box on the Beach

  For a while, my mother worked at a lay-up stable for racehorses, a place where they put horses that have, as they call it, broken down. Broken horses rested there, at Sandpiper Farm, after or instead of surgery. When they recovered they’d head back to the track for more. When they didn’t recover enough, they’d go up for sale to people who wanted to jump them, hunt them, hack them, or breed them. Horses that went to butchers didn’t make it to Sandpiper at all.

  The entrance to the farm was a brick bridge over the canal with four white plaster horses, the size of small ponies, or truly enormous dogs—not life-sized but not exactly not-life-sized either. This made it difficult, when you looked at them, to tell how far away they were, exactly. These were plain horses, not rearing like the statue outside the rodeo or trotting fancily like the ones up Griffin Road on the signs for rich farms, not tangled with tack, jockey, and whip in silhouette like the emblem for the racetrack. The four white horses stood, identical, each on its own pedestal, all feet solid on the ground, square, they call it, the pedestals set at each of the four corners of the little brick bridge, two horses facing cars arriving and two facing cars departing, as if set to draw and quarter any car that came through. You couldn’t look at them and tell which breed they were supposed to be, or what kind of activity horses were meant to engage in behind the gates.

  Usually, it’s very important for a stable to identify what kind of horses it’s working with. If the sign has its letters made out of rope, for instance, you can bet they do Western. People who do English or racing just don’t use rope like that. Four white horses, like ghosts of any actual horses, posted there on gargoyle duty, but vacant of any features except what you might call horseness.

  The other thing about the statues changed the whole scene because all the horse statues were damaged, each one. Plaster had crumbled away from a couple legs, exposing the cable framework beneath. In fact, not one horse had a head. The plaster construction must have placed a seam there, at the top of the neck where it joined the jaw, because all the heads were gone, and pretty smoothly, right there at the top of the neck. Truly couldn’t have planned it better for a lay-up stable, and I laughed the first time I noticed the layers of irony and stumbled through trying to explain the joke to my mother before giving up.r />
  I knew it was funny, but I didn’t know how to tell it. It wouldn’t be worth it with an adult, and there were no kids around. I liked making kids laugh, but I’d never be able to make a kid see what was funny. Sometimes when kids laugh and laugh, when they keep at it long after the joke is used up, I know they’re just doing it for the physical high, and after a while it’s to see how long they can go, and when they’re doing it with their friends it’s almost a competition. Still, sometimes when a kid keeps laughing, what’s going on is the joke is becoming increasingly complicated. The joke isn’t over, the kid is watching it unfold in her mind, so she keeps making laughing sounds to go with it, because the joke’s not over yet. She’s giggling, watching connotations skitter and ripple like the arms of a balled-up octopus unfurling in the water, sending waves and tousling little fishes.

  I loved the joke. It was easy to see what the horses must have looked like whole, easy enough that you’d have to look twice to notice the missing heads, because no one wants to see anything headless, really, so your mind makes it up. You know how sometimes a person missing a few fingers or even an arm can be around people all day or for years and no one will notice, because the person can hide the absence the way a magician can redirect your attention, but also you see what you expect to see, and by a certain age, most things are exactly what you expect to see, as long as you’ve been a clever enough child to catch on. The sign for the Western stable is written in a motif of ropes. Written in a motif of snakes and you might never notice, because snakes are close enough to ropes. Paint a Stetson rakishly over a capital letter, and even if it’s plain writing you might think it’s written in rope. Usually you’re right, because if you look at it in a nice way, people want to communicate clearly and they know how hard it is, so they keep it simple.

  But look at it more accurately and they simply have no imagination. Eyes are trained. You have to be extremely innocent or extremely wise to see anything at all after a while.

  So it was easy to see the horses as whole and I wondered how they got mangled. I pictured Joe, who owned Sandpiper Farm and was one of several Joes who owned stables in the area. He was forty maybe, maybe younger, just getting gray at the temples. His father’d died and Joe lived on the property in the ranch-style house that was about half the size of the barn but still pretty big, the kind with excellent wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere except the kitchen, and a big bulbous TV in its own wooden piece of furniture in the sunken living room, and a big sliced-stone fireplace in the center of the whole house, a giant enormous support column you could walk all the way around and see from all sides, with a fireplace on one side and a wood-burner on the other even though it never got cold enough to need heat. Like they went on vacation in the Tetons, came back and built it to match the lobby where they stayed. Also shiny candelabra-style light fixtures dangling from the center of every room or room-area, and attached to dimmer switches that dotted the walls near all the doorways.

  Joe lived in there with his mother, who waddled around bitching about her heart attacks and wouldn’t come off the back stoop when she hollered down to the barn for him and he hollered back, “Use the goddamn phone, Ma, that’s why I put a goddamn phone down here!”

  And one night Joe was drinking and drinking beer from cans in the sunken living room, and several empty cans rolled around on the dusty-rose carpet by his easy chair, one or two drooling a little of that last sipful, that mixture of drink and spittle they warn you not to drink, backwash it’s called. He eyed the TV but only half-watched. He felt squirmy because a long day walking in and out of air conditioning can make your stomach lurch and lurch. His mother toddled to the top of the two steps that separated the dining room from the living room, and she watched him as if he didn’t know she was there, which he did, and she did—it was mutual pretending. She stood on the living room stoop with her hand on her hip in a nightgown that looked a lot like her house-dress, toting the rolling pin she always carried, even when she wasn’t baking. She used it to gesture with, like an enormous prosthetic index finger she could wag.

  “Blah, blah, blah!” she said.

  That was the last straw for Joe that night, and he pulled an axe from under his easy chair and waved it at her. They waved their instruments, and ran around the sliced-stone fireplace making beating motions and hacking motions in the air. Then Joe’s mother slipped craftily out of the circle, and as Joe ran around the fireplace one more time, she opened the front door to the house so that when he came around he’d fling himself right out the door as if by centrifugal force, like a thing on a string when you whirl it and let go. Which he did, and Slam! She slammed the door behind him.

  I imagined how funny and appropriate it would be for Joe to wander around outside drunk with his axe and end up writing the sign for his business, seeing the four white horses glowing in the moonlight, quivering there, coated in white glaze, and Joe giggling at his drunken cleverness, hacking at the plaster legs until he realized that even he wouldn’t get the joke when he sobered up. He’d merely have ruined his statues.

  Headless horses, posted at the farm’s entrance to guard or greet, but without eyes and without minds. It kept me going for hours as I walked horses, one of millions of little items to let my mind run around with as I walked—and there was always a horse that needed walking there. So many weren’t ready for turn-out but needed some light in their lives, a few minutes to eat grass at the end of a shank, to feel their hips sway, to get their circulation going, to look around, to smell something other than the barn and their particular little box within it.

  Or a horse was colicking, which was terrifying, and I walked him to keep him alive. There are all kinds of colics, minor gassy colics, and terrible bowel-wrenching colics. Often it happened to horses that did get turn-out, because the earth was so sandy that sand would collect in their bodies as they grazed, accumulating in their intestines and coating their stomachs. If you didn’t get there in time a horse could lie down in his stall to writhe. He could get cast, as they call it, get stuck there, upside-down like a bug, and break a leg flailing against the wall trying to get up, or he could twist his guts and die while you watched. You had to get him out of his stall and keep him moving. It was your best hope.

  Sometimes it happened in the night. We’d get a phone call and rush over. We’d take turns, walking the horse up and down the drive, from the barn to the brick bridge with the four plaster horses. A couple times a horse stopped walking and tried to lie down on the pavement and I’d holler at him, or push at his rump, or scream for my mother to come help me get him going. I’d watched a horse go into shock. I’d watched him do what they call the dead spider, watched his legs go straight into the air and then curl up, watched him jerk like an electronic toy. I’d watched his eyes roll back and his lips turn blue.

  The occupation of racing, which they’d come to by birth, was against these horses, and the sand was against them, and the heat, too. Some horses went non-sweater, especially horses from up north. At first they’d sweat and sweat, but the sweat couldn’t cool them because the air was so full of water that it wouldn’t evaporate. After a while their glands or what have you simply gave up and shut down. They’d pant like dogs. Their hair fell out. These horses were swollen with heat, constantly breathing heavily, practically unable to make themselves drink, though in fits they’d toss their buckets, splashing themselves with water. We used baling wire to attach box fans to the bars on their stalls, and these horses kept their heads in the hot breeze, exhausted all day.

  I found non-sweaters the most difficult to watch, perhaps because their bodies weren’t broken in any visible way. They didn’t all have bumps or scars or hobble. They were simply beaten, and not even so much by racing, or by work or humans. They were beaten by living in the air available for them to breathe. It broke my heart to see them, trying to breathe, trying to drink, and to eat. It broke my heart to watch the hope that surfaced in the evening when finally they got a sense of what it might feel like to be a
real animal, with a real mind, and ideas, and an ability to move through the world; they’d feel so light for a while, I could see them feeling light. Little personalities would rise up for a few hours.

  One of the non-sweaters had this cat that lived in her stall. The cat would actually sleep on the horse’s back during the day, and who knows if the horse liked the cat or was annoyed by the cat, because in the day they were both too exhausted to do anything. But in the evening the cat would come to take a drink of water from the horse’s bucket and the horse would knock it in, and I swear the horse was happy and laughing that the cat fell for it every day. It was devastating. Because as soon as the sun came back that horse who made a joke would be mindless again.

  Series after series of medical events, horse after horse.

  When we’d get a call in the night, about colic or anything else, what I mean is we’d get a call from Gwen. My mother’s job was assisting Gwen, who managed the barn for Joe. Gwen, seventy-two, shaped like a plum, worked all day shoveling shit and shuffling horses from stall to paddock and back, bandaging and medicating. This was a forty-stall barn, with forty horses, all on special regimens for recovery. It was insane work. There were no hours, for one thing. She woke up and worked until the work was done, and that could take twelve hours or it could take more. Horses shit and hurt themselves every day of the week, and there is never nothing left to do: a pile of mending, or tack that hasn’t been oiled for months, or a kicked-in stall door or tractor to fix.

  It’s hard work the way fruit picking is hard work, but it’s also hard work the way cement laying is hard work, and you get knocked over and stepped on and cut yourself and fall. It’s also hard work the way teaching school can be hard work, when you love the little creatures and then you have to send them into a world you know they didn’t choose and you know is bad for them, or you merely send them home and it’s the same thing, you send them off to be wrecked by people. And it’s intellectually hard work because you have to learn the horses’ bodies and medications and the various arguments for various courses of action. It’s hard work because you have a boss and the horses have owners and trainers and vets, all of whom are often assholes, because any time you’re dealing with beauty you attract assholes.