Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  Lifted like a teacup. Through the night and the clouds, through canopies of leaves, to the mossy clearing. I could run around the cottage with the girls, and we were strung together with our chain-linked flowers, you know how you can take one stem and thread it through a split in the stem of the next. Or I could simply let go of my place on the chain, slip inside the tidy ivy-covered cottage into a little wooden room, and sit by the little window on a little wooden chair, with my chin on my hands on the sill, watching the girls in their nightgowns, a flighty parade of winging moths and fireflies traipsing around and around the cottage as I watched.

  The horses run around and around the track. At the track, the highest compliment you can pay a horse is to say it’s a machine. That horse is a real machine, you’d say.

  I mentioned that man from Indianapolis who drained the Everglades, how he loved racing cars. There’s a breed of psychokiller that drains its victims of blood, a whole genre. I mean not just vampires, but people who like to let all the blood out even if they’re not going to do anything with it when they’re done. It’s hard to tell whether it’s about breaking something open or about letting something out. There’s also a breed of psychokiller that likes how bodies are like machines. The horses run around and around the track until they break down; you break them as babies, and then they go until they break down. That’s how they say it, breaking.

  There’s a machine called a hotwalker. There’s also a job called a hotwalker. It’s the name for the person who walks the horse after he’s exercised. The hotwalker cools the horse down. The machine called a hotwalker is a post with arms that come out of it. There’s a motor in the post. You attach a horse to an arm. The hotwalker rotates and the horse walks along in a circle. If you attach a horse to each arm, it looks like a merry-go-round. When they’re not running, they’re in stalls or in the grid of paddocks.

  Either way, at the track or at the farm, the horse is in a box, or moving in circles, one or the other, all life long.

  My Brother Is a Sailor

  Fresh blacktop wound among the gray-blue buildings where Chris lived. On the highway, on the way to her house or from her house to church or back to mine, we’d see packs of vultures circling the carcasses of raccoons the size of hounds. Hopping, flapping, scavenging, red-headed vultures. They’d put their whole featherless heads inside the animal’s body and when they pulled out again you couldn’t tell if the red was just the bird’s own featherless skin, or if it was the animal’s insides. Sometimes, on the highway, people got so grossed out they’d run over the birds with their cars. Maybe they aimed just to chase the birds away, but vultures are practically deaf and practically blind. They hunt by smell. When vultures made the endangered species list, cars were named a main source of their trouble. Sometimes a car really swerved to get one, rode right along the shoulder and then zoomed away, hit and run. There’s all kinds of roadkill on the highway, alligators, even, and long black snakes like scraps of blown-out tires. Vultures’ wings are regal, their faces glossy and raw. It’s no accident that Isis takes the shape of a vulture.

  You could see Chris’ housing development from the highway, panoramic, these ashen buildings with the blacktop looping them. Each house came with a patch of that coarse grass I mentioned. Some houses came with garages. Some garage doors came with basketball nets. Every time I visited, the day was gray, the air misty or filled with drizzle. On the quiet streets, any time you looked up there’d be a jogger in sight, but just one, as if once the jogger had gone so far, they let another one out. The moment the jogger disappeared ahead of you, if you turned there’d be another loping into sight. The joggers ran almost in slow motion, each sneaker sending a symmetrical spray up around itself as it hit the pavement, which seemed always to be under a skin-thin layer of water.

  The first thing to know about Chris is how Chris practiced at the piano for hours every day, working on pieces for performance competitions. Inside the gray-blue house, white carpet went wall to wall and remained so clean I never saw it without track-marks from the vacuum. Their sunken living room—not so expansive a room as the one I saw in the house at Sandpiper, but sunken just the same—struck me as an inverted stage. A red oriental-style rug lay over the white carpet, and on the red rug stood the baby grand piano, making a kind of bullseye.

  When I was over, Chris only had to practice for an hour. White leather sectional sofas lined the half-walls in the living room, almost invisible, but I was sent down the narrow hallway to where there were three doors, to the three bedrooms in the house, and into Chris’ bedroom with the door closed behind me while she played. I sat at Chris’ desk, listening to a Brahms intermezzo or a little Tchaikovsky nocturne. The pieces wobbled after me down the hall and hovered on the other side of the door, shivering. I listened to them and sat at her small white desk, looking at the dense air out the window. The house squatted at the bottom of a dead end, and Chris’ bedroom window looked out the front, over a low hedge with orange berries. I watched one robotic jogger and then another move down the blacktop. One by one, they materialized, ran toward me and rounded the circle of pavement in front of the house. I watched each jogger’s head move along the hedge with the orange berries, like it was bouncing along a conveyor belt. The circle of pavement hung like the bulb at the bottom of a thermometer. I watched each jogger approach, and then I watched each run away, imagining mercury rising. Their fancy running shoes carried them like vessels along the dark watery pavement. I watched the rhythm move in and out of synch with the piano. The more closely I watched the shoes, the more the piano sounded broadcast, and far away. Electronic, almost.

  Chris had pink stationary on her desk, in its own flat box. She had a coffee mug filled with sharpened pencils. There was a cartoon printed on the mug. A cat with a banjo, singing about eating mousies. Bite they little heads off, nibble on they tiny feet.

  Chris never saw where I lived, never set foot in a triplex that I can imagine. We didn’t have a piano for her to practice on, and also she couldn’t miss church, which she had to go to three times a week, even when she wasn’t in trouble. Usually she was in trouble. It was hard to keep track, she was in trouble so much, and being in trouble meant being placed on “restriction,” her mother’s term. A lot of times she was on restriction for violating another restriction. It was as if she’d done one bad thing a long time ago, something like talk back to her mother, something they’d both forgotten. Now it was what they talked about, basically. They discussed and clarified the various terms of her restriction. We were on the phone once when her mother wanted to discuss the terms. Chris hid the phone behind her back and I heard them, not actual words, but the tone and cadence, as if through walls. It sounded like a nice talk, like a girl and her mother maybe talking about some nice thing they were going to do together. There they were making sure they both knew what Chris wouldn’t be doing, and it sounded like they were making plans.

  It was hard to find things to restrict, too. There was a television in the kitchen, a little black and white one on the countertop that her mother watched with the sound off, but Chris was never interested in the TV anyway. So it wasn’t ever TV restriction. And also Chris didn’t have a radio because there were so many stations she wasn’t allowed to listen to because of God that she didn’t bother to have a radio, so there wasn’t the radio to restrict. From what I got, it was usually restriction from me: from me specifically, or from the phone. That happened a lot.

  Chris practiced, and Chris’ mother stayed in the kitchen, not cooking. She wiped the countertops, or sat at the little table and worked on the church phone tree. She pulled the telephone from the countertop to the table and made calls from a spiral notebook. She made lists in the notebook with her pencil, listening with a separate ear to her husband coughing in his sick room, which I think is what the garage was actually used for. A door in the kitchen that could have been a pantry seemed to go to the garage, and the car always sat in the driveway. Chris’ mother posted herself there, in the dark kit
chen, between him and the rest of the house. A sort of borderline. She was a very thin woman.

  The second thing to know about Chris is about church. Her mother drove us in the gray station wagon. Her father didn’t come. Chris glowed, walking into church with me, showing me what to do. She held my elbow and led me around. She showed me to people, and showed people to me. When we rose for communion and moved in line like a bunch of ants, I kneeled next to Chris at the foot of the stage and crossed my arms over my chest as she’d demonstrated, to let everyone know I hadn’t been baptized. “Bless you, bless you, bless you,” said an old man in a cape, moving down the line, his feet inches from our hands, and then basically “Bless you anyway” is what he said when he got to me.

  At pancake breakfast we’d see this private-school boy she liked. Something to fill all that time at church, I thought, get wrapped up in a boy. But he was nice to me, respectful, polite, careful to show he knew I was important, that I knew Chris better than he did. His pretty head hobbled there, too large over his shoulders and body. He called her Christy. Everyone at church called her Christy. I called her Chris of course, hoping it came off like I had some special name for her and some special knowledge of the whole underworld of her soul. Still, Chris spent so much time talking about whether or not Rick had almost kissed her that I hated him, almost. She talked about how impressed people at school would be if they knew a cute boy like that wanted to kiss her. “I have to go, I can’t talk,” she’d tell me on the phone at night. “I only get fifteen minutes phone time and Rick might call.” It didn’t seem right to hate him, though. All he did was eat pancakes and constantly almost kiss Chris, but then become afraid of God. I didn’t know I could hate him with perfect reason simply for making her babble like an idiot.

  Chris and I became best friends as soon as I tested into those classes I mentioned—although already we liked each other, just from American Industry, a course in which students from all five academic levels learned how to use a drill press to make candlesticks out of two-by-fours, as later in the school year in American Business we’d learn typing and how to fill out a time card, and later in American Homemaking, we’d learn about cake mixes and how to sew a pillow out of two brand new washcloths. Once I passed the test I could walk with Chris from class to class, and among other things, this eased the loss of Rhonda, who I continued to follow in my dreams, but no longer searched for each time the bell rang.

  We didn’t wear makeup. Chris wasn’t allowed to and I didn’t want to. She couldn’t wear designer jeans because of God, and I couldn’t wear designer jeans unless I paid for them. Together we were angry at the girls with their trays of thirty shades of eyeshadow who so easily let boys turn them into fools, which is of course one reason her fascination with Rick annoyed me so much. It’s a powerful kind of friendship, the kind built on what feels, for a series of strung-together moments, like actual shared ideals. It teeters on this lovely line, twelve, thirteen, that cusp where you both are balanced for a moment, about to do everything you ever thought was idiotic. I didn’t want this balance upset. You run around the school thinking you’re making all these very important decisions, deciding what kid you’ll be in the social order you think kids set up for themselves when really it was already in place. And the world too, as you step out of your home, feeling autonomous, this is when stuff in the world that is not your fault at all really slams into you, really starts letting you know where you stand, how it’s gonna be, and exactly which way, this way, or that way, you’ll be wounded. With Chris, it still felt like we had a choice.

  So that fall it was Chris and me. After Thanksgiving, though, I knew not to expect to see her outside of school, simply too much church. Plus, I found myself feeling off-put by her, because as the holidays neared she got giddier, although not because of Rick. In fact, she rarely spoke of him in those weeks. This, then, is the third thing to know about Chris, about how starting after Thanksgiving she couldn’t stop talking about her brother coming home and she was constantly dippy, only half paying attention to anything. She kept wearing a blue-and-white t-shirt that said, “My Brother is a Sailor” with a drawing of a guy in a sailor cap with one of those pirate-ship-style steering wheels. The guy on the t-shirt was laughing.

  The last day of school before break she didn’t even say goodbye to me, or I’ll call you, or anything. The bell rang and she scooted out the door, doing that half-run half-walk that little kids do around the edge of public pools to protect themselves from the lifeguards. I watched her dart through the crowds of kids moving through the breezeways toward the busses, and I felt stunned. Maybe she thought I was ahead, I thought, and trying to catch up with me. I wanted to think she was trying to move toward me, but I saw her hips shifting like mad, her arms stiff, crossing her books to her chest, and I knew she was moving away from me, that I was nowhere in her mind.

  She was fleeing toward her brother. Like her bus was going to take off any faster if she got there first, I thought, angry. I did, I wanted to think he was so great and she missed him so much, but even from behind, as I glimpsed her twice or three times and then she was submerged in the flood of kids, I knew the look that was on her face—that torn one kids wear half walking and half running at a public pool. Running will impress their friends. Running will get them in trouble. They want to go fast but they still believe the stories about how you could slip and knock your head and drown and die. All this creates a look on the face, transparently self-conscious and self-absorbed. When you grow up you can see that same look on people’s faces on city streets and in airports, particularly. It’s mothers with children, absolutely convinced that their stress is absolute. It’s the same look you see on businessmen, terrified they will miss their next meeting. It’s panic that shows on their faces.

  As soon as I pictured that look on her face, I stopped. I didn’t want her near me. It’s dire need that shows in a face like that, something that shifts from foolish to extremely dark, and then it’s a haunted mansion she’s rushing for. “Don’t go into the haunted house!” I cry at the girl on screen, but she is separated from me and I cannot grab her elbow and turn and run with her the other way. It’s a black hole, it’s a pit of fire. She’s mesmerized by the snake and now who’s charming who.

  Meanwhile, as they say, at my house, in the muggy little apartment, my mother says she can’t bear or afford to have a fir Christmas tree in the tropics, it would be ridiculous. She brings home a little ficus in a wicker basket, and we decorate it, sort of having fun, but sort of sad, really. Christmas happens.

  A couple days later, my father, who is usually in Miami, working, going to school, comes home dazed: the window to the car is busted and someone stole his duffel bag in a riot. My mother wakes from where she’s been napping and comes to the kitchen, where he’s already begun to tell me about it.

  “Ha to them, though,” he says, about having his duffel bag stolen. Only underwear in there, and the ones I’d turned pink in the laundry, too, the ones he was so mad about. And also Ha to them because our car had that purple plastic sun-guard stuff on the window which was bubbling, and now insurance would pay for a new window that’d go up and down easier, so Ha to them, my father says. My mother stands in the doorway with the hood of her bathrobe over her head, which makes it hard to see if she really has a face.

  I imagine him running from the building where he works, which I imagine because I have never seen the building where he works. I imagine it tall and brick, and I imagine him coming out of it as it collapses into a tidy mushroom cloud in the midst of the rioting. He emerges from the dust with his hands holding his wind-breaker, or a newspaper, something dumb and flimsy like that over his head. He’s pudgy, crouching, and when he reaches the car there’s glass on the seat, but he slips in, amid flying debris, and flailing fists and sirens, and drives away through the mob. I’ve seen films of the mob that mobbed the Beatles, so I imagine it like that, except with appliances bouncing off the hood of the car and then when he gets away from all the bodi
es mashing against the windows fireballs are streaking down the highway, passing him on either side, but kindly staying in their proper lanes.

  I know the riot has to do with race, I know it’s a Race Riot, and I’ve seen footage of the Civil Rights movement, so I imagine the rioting races and firehoses and people in formation, marching down 1-95 with their fists raised, and police in their welders’ helmets tottering behind beautiful German shepherds. I know it has to do with persecution, and I’ve seen footage of concentration camps in WWII, so I imagine my father’s Rabbit zipping and bounding over mountains made of overexposed skeletal bodies.

  Perhaps I am able to imagine it this way because what I notice, in the kitchen, is that while my father is tired, he is not frightened. He’s merely enduring it. He’s endured the riot like he’s enduring not having money, because he knows he’ll finish school and pay his debt, and then there will be some money where before there was none.

  What is it when you do not become frightened when human rage is raging all around, when parts of buildings, scraps of architecture, pieces of history, you know, are spewing through the air? How can it be inevitable that you will pull into your crappy driveway with a busted window and missing duffelbag and there’s your blond-haired wife, sleeping in the living room and your brown-haired girl with a book at the formica table in the kitchen, listening to music turned very low, glowing from a one-speaker radio? Somehow you knew it all along.

  If you look it up and read about it, with those particular riots, what they say is that it was about how Officer Luis Alvarez shot twenty-year-old Neville Johnson in an Overtown video arcade. There are several amazing facts about this incident, as the story goes. For one thing, Neville’s nickname was Snake, and that’s how I remember him, as Snake, no lie. He was a tall narrow man with a very youthful face, is how they describe him. He was wearing orthopedic shoes with the toes cut out because he’d just had corrective foot surgery in which (and here I’m practically quoting) his large toes, bent and crooked, were (for reasons that remain mysterious to me) broken and then reset. A kind of goofy Snake, then. He had what they called a passion for Pacman, if you can imagine such a thing, and was standing there at the game machine with his toes hanging out when Alvarez approached him. Alvarez saw what they call a bulge in his pocket.