Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  “What’s that?” Chief of Police Kenneth Harms said the officer asked this Snake.

  “That’s a gun,” Harms said the Snake told the officer. Then the Snake, who was, they point out at this point, black, made what they call a quick movement and then Alvarez, of the often Hispanic police force (which is exactly how they put it) shot him in the head.

  After a while everything starts to sound like a euphemism.

  On the first of three days of streetfighting that may or may not have done what’s called escalate into rioting, several hundred Miami blacks set several police cruisers, as they say, ablaze, and, as they say, sprayed another with bullets, looted several stores and trapped two detectives inside the video arcade where the shooting, you know, occurred. Crowds milled around, burning police cars, touching off—these terms kill me—disturbances. More cars got set ablaze and buildings afire, crowds quickly spilling into streets.

  A man tried to break into National Freezer Co., and the police told him twice to stop it, but he didn’t, so they shot him. They rammed a car into Georgia Meats. And a thirteen-year-old boy was shot in the leg. And a guy got hit in the head with rocks. People took microwave ovens, pots and pans, cuts of steak, and a penny gumball machine.

  They say Snake’s friends say that Snake was not a troublemaker. Then an employee (of somewhere) says, “It would be different if he was the type of kid who robbed or stole, was loud or vulgar.” He says, this employee, black, scratching his beard, quote, “He was the kind of kid who would walk up to you and say ‘Yes, ma’am.’“

  Unrest (read vampires) had abated by about ten p.m. but earlier, hastily-called backup units reported that they were what was called under heavy attack. Crowds hurled bottles at officers, flattened the tires of their cars, overturned one police car and set two, you know, afire. A van driven by an NBC television crew was struck by chunks of asphalt. “We were just driving and looking for some stuff to film,” said Ed Garcia, holding, we presume, his camera.

  On the second day, Snake died. On the third day, rioting died down.

  In the kitchen I tried to put myself into the riot. I gave myself an Afro, pulled with a rubber band into a puffball on the top of my head. I gave the rubber band two green plastic beads the size of marbles, translucent like marbles, which made me younger, a little kid basically. I had a gigantic mother, who lived with me in Miami, who’d pushed the brown couch over so its back was on the floor, and shoved it against the wall of our apartment that had windows. We sat on the back of the couch and leaned against the seat, the cushions flopping over our heads like mushroom caps. We hunched like mushrooms under there, my mother like an enormous soft mushroom with the couch cushion over her head. I looked up at her and listened to glass breaking above us, and watched it sprinkle like rain, like falling stars, like fairy dust.

  Then we hear a pounding above the pounding of the riot, and my mother pulls my head into her lap, because someone is beating at the door. I can peek from the folds of her body just enough to see the glint of an axe split through the cheap wood, and then the whole door tumbles in and there he is, my giant father, like the woodsman to rescue us. I can see him, and he’s diagonal. He’s wearing a red bandana that disguises the blood on his forehead. He wipes the sweat from his brow on his white athletic wristbands which stand out against his skin like bandages, or like handcuffs. He spies us and dives for us, sliding through the sparkling slivers across the linoleum. It’s like he’s sliding through water. The slivers spring into the air and fan around him. Then he’s with us, wrapping his arms around my mother, who still enfolds me, and the axe is raised above us like a flag. We huddle behind the couch.

  My parents are whispering. The noise outside has politely receded enough that I can hear the hum and throb of their voices through all that flesh and all those cushions. Molecules in the flesh and the cushions have politely parted enough that I can feel wisps of their breath. They’re measuring their breath. They’re wise, I can tell from the humming sound of their low voices, the deep, patting, hovering thrumb. It’s like when you’re in bed late at night and you can hear them, walls away, clanking dinner dishes, chatting. They’re making this whole other world that they know, they’re making you hear that it’s there. This whole certainty they have, you can hear.

  “Girl,” says my father, and we shift positions so we’re huddled all facing each other. “Girl, I think you know what you have to do.” It’s dark out. I can see, just over the couch, out the window, the highway rushing by. The red-and-white blurry lights of cars and fire are moving so quickly they are one strand. It’s like the highway has cut our apartment at the waist, like it has us lassoed.

  “It’s not right for you to be here, girl,” says my mother. They’re both sad. They’re welling up. They’re being strong. Above the sofa, above the highway, the sky with its many stars forms a glittering stripe.

  “This is no place for a fine girl like you,” my father says. He hands me his axe. “This is so you can cut through what you must cut through,” he says.

  My mother finds within the folds of her body a bundled kerchief that smells of salt and honey. “This is to feed you, like you didn’t know,” she says, nudging me with her elbow to make me smile. She binds the kerchief to the axe, shows me how to settle it onto my shoulder, and then the two of them guide me through the shattered glass and splintered door. With a wave, I’m down the dark hall and gone.

  Meanwhile, in a relatively tidy part of the suburb of a city that’s a suburb of the real city, in the blue-gray house with a grill in the driveway, and all the matching houses around it and dark new pavement that strings them together, Chris’ gaunt father with his awful breathing and his sunken gray chest is sitting at the table with her mother, caving in. He’s wearing brown trousers with no shirt. His undershirt is hanging over the back of the chair, sweated through, and you can see he’s humiliated, just sitting there in his own kitchen on a stool. He’s ashamed because he looks nothing like a man who wore an oxford to work for thirty years. He’s the color of a cutworm, smoking.

  His wife, only slightly less gaunt, stirs honey into her tea and conducts with the spoon in slow motion: Christine, you have phone restriction. You are restricted to your room or to that piano, your choice.

  He’s embarrassed because he’s not even punishing his own kid. He’s embarrassed by his sailor son, who is like a giant to him and is afraid to slap him on the back, who can’t really look right at him and gets shifty after a couple minutes and heads down the hall after his sister, toward the three tiny bedrooms. Chris’ father creeps back into his room in the garage. He can hear his wife vacuuming the white sunken living room. He’s holding an aluminum bowl in his lap to catch the enormous globules of slow-moving mucus that he produces. Even when he’s coughing, he can sense the vibrations and the high hum of the vacuum.

  So Chris can’t pick the piano, because her mother is in there vacuuming, and back in her room, her brother, who was a science-minded child, is not looking at photos with her, he’s seeing what will fit into her vagina and what simply will not. For a while, he fixates on a narrow, blond-headed doll.

  In retrospect I know what it means when she comes back to school as if bent, dull for months. After Christmas she never mentions her brother again, and I am so relieved she’s not going on about how funny and good-looking he is that I forget to ask how it was. But she’s lieing annoying anyway, snapping at me for any dumb thing, and I avoid her more. I’m starting to make friends with girls who I know are into all kinds of fucked-up things, girls who carve the initials of rock stars into their arms with razors, girls who think I’m really wise because I listen to them so carefully and am amazed.

  I’m relieved when Chris doesn’t care what we do for a 3-d project on the Wild West, doesn’t care what costumes we wear for the Manifest Destiny Debate, whether we use magic markers or ketchup for blood when we do the part about wounded knees. Chris doesn’t care if we stand together in line for lunch, if I told Julie before her, if Rick might
kiss her after Wednesday night service when they can slip behind a car for a moment, in the parking lot, when his parents and her mother are working out the details in the phone tree, bathed on the church stoop in holy stained glass light. Slowly, we’re merely project partners on everything because we’re used to it, and we don’t even try to get her mother to let us do anything. I start doing other things. At some point, we make it official: in American Business I type her a letter saying I guess she’s figured out that I’m best friends with Julie now. She types one back that is gracious. It says she will always love me like a sister but some things are just not meant to be in the end, and, because everything happens for a reason, sometimes you have to make the best of it and move on.

  I’m thinking of the joggers going in circles, their sneakers like little boats, this pretend travel, this machinelike activity where the point is to move rather than to go anywhere. Battery-run. It’s a kind of death. These feet in shoes like coffins, like boats along the wet black roads.

  I’m thinking of how people disappear, and how I wanted to tell CiCi about Rhonda because I wanted her to stay.

  I’m thinking of the red vultures’ heads, moving in and out of roadkill. And those girls cutting themselves. The parrots. I will break up with you first. I will puncture my own skin.

  I’m thinking of Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper. If you look into it, most towns have one, a ripper or a strangler or a slasher. This one was a nipple digger, collector of these organic buttons, these sightless eyes.

  I’m thinking about how psychokillers are on a quest for another orifice. Penetrate this boundary. Penetrate that. X marks the spot. Bullseye. Fucking euphemisms.

  Chief’s Horse

  After Sandpiper, my mother worked at a training stable breaking babies, which is what you call teaching a yearling to wear a saddle, wear a bridle, carry a jockey, and run. Then she fell, broke her arm, and took a job at another place owned by another guy named Joe. It was dumpy, a cheap twenty-stall boarding stable that didn’t even identify itself as Western or English, because no one taught riding there. It was humiliating but it was the only place she could find to hire her with her arm.

  Ted didn’t get why she kept going barn to barn, getting jerked around and hurt. She said since she was a girl she’d been taken with it: the wild horse, the warrior horse, the white horse galloping through sand with the flowing mane, the winged horse, the magical unicorn, the thrashing mustang, all of them, any of them. Ted said it was all about gambling, was she blind or what? She said You’re one to talk.

  I got it, but I didn’t know how to say it. Something that great, that rich and deep, something that reached all through history. And you can touch it, you communicate with it, you can get on it and ride away. I’m certain a place in him understood. I mean not the horses exactly, but in his own way he had it too, that same desire for something divine.

  At this place, which we just called Joe’s place, some horses hadn’t left their stalls in years. You could tell which owners never came because usually only Joe’s stepson cleaned any stalls for the boarders, and Joe’s stepson hated Joe. I knew because I went to school with him. When Scott did stalls, mostly he scooped out a couple scoops and threw a little bedding on top, so the floors just rose and rose, like the mattresses under the princess and over the pea, but soggy with filth.

  Scott’s mother might have convinced Joe to hire someone to help out. I think she had occasional grand impulses toward mothering, although I could be making that part up, wishing in a way. Joe could have been less of an asshole than I thought, but this is much less likely. So three days a week Scott was supposed to clean the barn. My mother did the rest. Plus, she rode some of the people’s horses for them, exercised them, taught them stuff so they’d be easier to sell.

  Scott was fifteen, still in seventh grade, and despite the stalls, I liked him a lot. He was an extremely good-looking kid, with dark floppy hair and the wry, angular face that boys from across the tracks always have in movies marketed to girls. But he had a minor lisp and he couldn’t read and he skipped school a lot, so he’d been left back. Joe didn’t pay him, just said, “Do it or I’ll kick your ass.”

  I took the bus there after school and tried to do my homework in the tackroom. It was more or less private in there, if dim, and I thought of Gwen sometimes. Joe liked to post himself outside the tackroom on the cement breezeway, and if anything went on with him and Scott, I could hear it. I could see them in flashes through the spaces between the rough planks in the door. Joe was big, lumbering, dirty, stubbly, with black greasy hair and mean fumbly hands, fat, dripping, just as you’d expect. Outside the tackroom, he turned a manure tub over a cinderblock and sat on it, smoking cigars, scratching his tits, laughing and farting. Shoo, shoo, boy. Shovel that shit. Sometimes one of the old guys who hung around the barn would pull up a bucket and sit with Joe and they’d cackle together. Sometimes more of them pulled up buckets and there’d be three or four old men there, all older than Joe and skinny, in a circle of buckets, smoking and drinking beers, or spitting tobacco. A gaggle of vultures on desiccated cypress, like those gabbing Disney crows from old cartoons, laughing and mean.

  Sometimes it is comforting to know that, given how many years have passed, even though Joe might still be alive somewhere, all those old men must be dead.

  It’s true that when Scott was off somewhere I’d sit in the tackroom with my homework, listening to the old men outside the door, but when Scott was there, we’d sneak into the hayloft and talk about his life while he hacked up bales of straw with a machete. We could look at the pond behind the barn with its enormous tree and the tree’s rope for swinging. Idyllic, actually, with paddocks behind it and an inlet stream, except that a car was in the marsh near the tree, up to its windshield, looking like Kilroy-Was-Here. Also, the pond was home to the thickest, blackest, most white-mouthed and giant-fanged, angry, hissy water vipers I ever saw. I told Scott he was crazy to go in there, that I didn’t like it when he went in there, that I’d never go.

  I watched him stab at the straw or we’d look out at the pond from the loft and he’d say, “Three years left and I’m legal. I’ll get a motorcycle and drive to California.” Or he’d say, “Well, things get too bad, I’ll just go to Miami Beach. Sell Quaaludes for my cousin.” Or he’d say, self-deprecating, but at the same time like a certain breed of peacock, the tough boy to the nice girl, “Someday when you’re grown up and famous, I’ll come knocking on your door and you won’t let me in. You’ll say get my muddy footprints off your white carpet,” which was part clumsy innuendo, but part protective in a way I liked. It was nice for me to imagine being protected when at the same time I was sure my friends were on the edge of doom, that any moment I might have to rescue them from their parents, or each other, or themselves, same difference. With Scott, we played it both ways. We played he would protect me from boys, and we played I would protect him from being too reckless, I’d deride him for smoking, I’d try to find a book he’d read.

  If you stuck each of us on a corkboard, a diagram of Scott and a diagram of me, and then stuck us with pins to mark our body parts and attributes, and graphed a timeline of each little history, I’m sure it’d be easy to see that in our promise we’d fail, that I’d fail him, and he’d fail me, that the whole arrangement was from a soap opera anyway. I don’t know, it seems like we knew we’d fail, that we knew we were playing, and when we got earnest in our play, that was why.

  One time he said, as if the prospect had been troubling him for some time, “Do you spend the night with boys?” I said, “No,” and he said, “Well, that’s good. I’m glad. You shouldn’t.” I had mixed feelings about that. I had mixed feelings about how he went on about the loose and wonderful activities of other girls my age. He’d explained about kissing. “You stick your tongue in and waggle it around,” he said, and years later, when I was kissing someone, I thought about whether or not that was what was being done: waggling. By the time the kiss was over, I dreaded the momen
t when the inconspicuous blob in the dark would become the face of a boy I didn’t like, but had known would kiss me. I didn’t want it to be Scott there kissing, but I wanted him there. I wanted to say, “You’re wrong, Scott. It’s more like stabbing.”

  But mostly, in the hayloft, he talked about killing Joe, who really did beat him up pretty frequently, mixing in some kind of mind game to go with it. Dare you to hit me, that kind of game. Now I’ll kick your ass, you fucker, you raise a hand to me. You pussy, why don’t you be a man and hit me, you pussy. Brilliant and inventive chess-playing manipulations like the villains you see in thriller flicks. Joe was a big stupid man and he enjoyed familiar jokes. He was like a depiction of what he was.

  Scott’s mother was basically one of those loose girls Scott raised his eyebrows about and made secret gestures about and little wiggly motions when he talked about them, these skinny girls with teacup breasts and their designer jeans and airbrushed half-shirts, brown or blond hair hanging to the smalls of their backs, the ends tapping at their beadlike vertebrae when they walked. Colored mascara and lipgloss, thin little noses, sharp eyes, cocked hips, voices like shards of metal. Not to get too Oedipus, but I think his mother was one of those girls just a few years before she settled in with Joe, young as she was, if already haggard, dragging her son along.

  When I think about it, I can see that Scott and his mother had features and postures and linguistic rhythms in common, but I could not see this at the time. I looked at adults and tried to see what they’d look like at my age, what kind of kid they’d be at my school. Or I tried to imagine what I would look like grown. Although when is that exactly? After puberty, I suppose, but before you gray and wrinkle, when you’re not too fat or too skinny, and you have no strange hairdo and you’re wearing, I suppose, a black unitard, and you also don’t have any pimples or any bruises and you’re not doing anything, or feeling anything, or having any ideas. What is the moment in your life when you look like you’re done? Like a baked pie is done? Like you poke it and a roast is done? When you don’t look like you have a history. When you are entirely imaginary.