Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  At the time, Scott and his mother looked nothing alike to me, if only because I loved him, and I felt sad when he made it clear that he loved her when I couldn’t imagine him coming from her, because she so constantly betrayed him. She brought him to Joe, for one thing.

  She’d walk down from the house on her way to or from somewhere, swinging her car keys on their ring, which had all kinds of plastic trinkets strung on it—a pink boingy cord like a phone cord, a plastic troll doll with its rhinestone eyes and ridiculous blond hair, a yellow vinyl change purse with the kind of closure that opens like a mouth when you push the corner hinges between your forefinger and thumb and slaps shut when you let go. She’d sit on Joe’s lap for a couple minutes, say something sassy, or say something like “Oh, you…” to one of the lascivious old men, and lean over, teetering on Joe’s thigh, leaning into the circle of crows to slap the old guy’s old bony knee. Her shirt would ride up and Joe would go squeeze, squeeze with his hand where she was bare. She was skinny, but a couple ripples of flesh collected there, like cords around her waist.

  Away from the main barn in a run-in shed with its own stall door and its own little stretch of sand with sketchy bits of grass here and there, lived a chestnut stallion. The shed, almost buried in vines and heart-shaped leaves, huddled in the dark in there, and I never thought to look into the gap in the vines. It was so hot all the time that it made sense for the horse to stay in the shed all day and go out the back into his little paddock only at night in the cooler air. Once I was walking by, though, and the chestnut horse put his head out, over the door, through the gap in the foliage. I don’t think I could have opened the stall door, it was so bound with vines. I felt I’d discovered an abandoned cottage deep in a forest. I liked that idea so much, of getting kidnapped and left at a cottage in the forest. And this one had a horse in it, and that’s how I thought of him, this mysterious horse in his buried cottage.

  This was not my mother’s kind of horse—not sleek and quick and lithe like the Thoroughbreds she rode at the track, and not young like them, either, and she liked fillies, and she liked glossy bays. This horse was tall, but also densely built like a quarter horse, and a stallion, with the depth to his muscles and the thick crest of his neck that comes from testosterone. A bright gleaming chestnut, with a dignified white blaze that covered the flat front of his face.

  When Scott wasn’t around and the men laughed loudly outside the tackroom door and I couldn’t concentrate on homework, or it was getting too dark and I was scared about the hand-sized spiders and cat-sized rats emerging, I visited that horse. He was a little wild, and fussy about letting me touch him. He stamped and snorted. He’d stretch his neck toward me as if he wanted me to touch him, and then think maybe he’d rather bite me, so he’d bite the air and then spin around and gallop out the back of his shed to the end of his strip of sand, then turn around and trot back, swinging his head. He splashed in his waterbucket, watching me. I’d stand outside the stall door, put my hands behind my back, stand quietly. I felt like so many books I’d read about girls and wild horses, boys and wild horses. The patience it takes to win the trust of a pure and wild creature.

  At one point, I asked Joe whose horse it was and he said an Indian’s horse, and that they called it, inventive as they were, Chief’s horse. But in fact, Joe displayed a kind of admiration for the Chief when he talked about him. He said Chief was making a lot of money in real estate, and that’s why he didn’t come around any more—he was so busy making money. Joe scratched his bunchy ass and I pictured Chief looking exactly like Joe, but with smooth Seminole skin, with deep black hair clipped with alligator clips, feathers hanging from them. I pictured Chief like Joe, with his heft sort of encased in dignity, so that he held his weight righteously, so that suddenly, in the shape of an Indian, this grotesque shape of a man became beautiful.

  I stood outside the shed where Chief’s horse lived, and the day’s heat settled away into dusk, sunk and scurried on the ground like stage smoke. If you stood there while the change took place, you could feel the heat sink around you and imagine having been covered in wet wool all day, and as the heat eased away, you could feel things again. You could hear again, too.

  This is why, I think, even this many years away, dusk is when I feel any solid peace. All day it would feel hard to move through the air at all, like having to push through layers and layers of it every moment, and then this clarity came, and even the edge of a breeze, and I’d stand as still and quiet as could be, watching the horse feel clean for the first time since dawn, knowing that any moment I could leap if I felt like it, or I could walk, or reach my hand out. Even now I try to be outside in the dusk, and on days when the weather makes dusk a mere soup of night and day, rather than a palpable transition, it can feel like an action against me, like something perpetrated.

  I stood with the horse’s vine-covered door between us, just far enough from it that if he stretched his nose toward me he could touch me, but have plenty of warning if I moved toward him. At dusk, horses feel more acutely than any other time of day that they are prey, because every shadow is a leopard awake in the sudden air. For a horse to grow calm with me in such tentative moments made me feel, I suspect in retrospect, that perhaps I was not prey, which was part of the feeling I’d known all day. I closed my eyes, imagining Hiawatha running in silence through mountains and forests without breaking sticks, moving through fresh mulchy brush to meadows filled with purple flowers and ringed with pine. When I opened my eyes I opened them because I could feel Chief’s horse breathing on my face. He breathed in what I breathed out. I breathed in what he breathed. I could touch my face to his face.

  Don’t you know it already? Don’t you know that Chief also had a son, an extremely handsome young man of eighteen or twenty whose body was strong and lean, but which made him look ridiculous at their formica kitchen table in the morning, smoking a cigarette and rolling joints among the breakfast dishes when he should have been on his own, instead of bringing his thirteen-year-old girlfriends around the house and through the window of his bedroom, where they’d stay with him on the mattress on the floor at night, and then leave in the morning, scruffy, walking through the kitchen and out the door with his mother standing at the sink and making breakfast as if a girl was not walking behind her from her grown son’s room and out the kitchen.

  Chief’s wife made herself refuse to turn around from the sink until she knew the girl was gone, and then she turned around to look at her extraordinarily handsome son as he practically perched at the formica table, smoking his cigarette, rolling joints, drinking the hot coffee she’d placed there at his elbow. Each morning, in fact, she heard the door to his bedroom open and she put water on to boil. She heard the girl mumble a few words through the wall and heard the girl barefoot along the linoleum hallway to the bathroom, the stiff blanket she’d wrapped herself in, still naked, brushing along the paneled walls. She listened to the girl use the water in the bathroom and sometimes use her son’s toothbrush. Sometimes she was sure she could hear the girl yawn, even behind the running water, or make a creaky sound to herself as she stretched, letting the blanket fall for a moment, and then picking it up. She heard her son come into the kitchen and, in a movement so swift he was no more than a blur to her, she saw him take his seat, wearing jockey shorts and a string of white cylindrical beads that fell to his breastbone. In a movement so swift she’d be no more than a blur to him if he looked, she set the cup of coffee next to where she knew in the next moment his elbow would be. A boy who looked like that, sitting like that, doing that there, that trashy. She turned back to the sink just as swiftly and waited with the water running for the girl to go away.

  One day, I went to the stable and the chestnut horse wasn’t in his little cottage, and he wasn’t in his scruffy run. I looked all around the stables in the paddocks and in each of the stalls to see if he’d been moved. No one was riding him around the farm. I circled the pond and crossed through the field that wasn’t fenced and followe
d the inlet to where it bumped into the fence marking the farm next door. If he’d broken out, he was gone.

  Then I went back to the tackroom and I had to stand at the edge of the circle of old men on buckets, looking at Joe where he sat, holding court on his overturned manure tub. I had to stand there, bracing myself for a hole in their blithering, waiting my turn to speak. For a while, it was as if I weren’t there, and this is what happened in the circle as I watched:

  In the center of the circle was a blond-haired girl about six years old. She wore overalls with an appliqué bucking bronco on the chest. She sat on the cement in the circle of men, arranging an assortment of sticks and pebbles into pretend drawings. She’d scoop the sticks and pebbles into a pile and then dole them out into an arrangement, then scoop them into a pile again and start over.

  A man wearing spectacles stood across from me in the circle, next to Joe, a little behind him, over Joe’s shoulder, sort of. He was younger than any of the men. He wasn’t balding at all, or graying. He wasn’t fat, and he wore clean brown trousers and a tucked-in shirt with a collar. He leaned against a stall door, and same as in the barn at Sandpiper, the stall doors in this barn had bars. Chief’s horse’s cottage didn’t have any bars, which is why he could hang his head out through the vines and over the door, but the stalls in the main barn had bars, and the man leaned with the bars behind him. The man had a pretty big camera with the strap going from his shoulder and across his chest. The camera stayed at his hip and he put his hand on it. This is why, when I looked at him, I framed up the image of him so squarely. He was on this side of the stall bars, framed by the doorframe, with his round head, his round lenses, and the camera strap slashed across his torso like a black banner. His hand on the camera was outside the image, behind Joe’s shoulder. His other hand hung next to his thigh, as if it were limp and useless.

  Joe bounced around on his manure tub, imitating people riding horses bareback, and the old men on buckets rocked and laughed. “Next time we have a show,” he said, “Next time we have a show, we should have a wet t-shirt class,” he said. “Right after walk-trot-canter.” He held his hands in front of his chest, cupping imaginary boobs, his cigar sticking out between knuckles. The blond girl tilted her head a little and I could see her eyebrows pull together with concern, and she pursed her mouth a little, but she didn’t look up. She was only half playing with her sticks. “We should have a topless class!” one old man announced, the lightbulb burning brightly above his pate. At this, the blond girl looked at him, aghast. She took a deep breath and shook her head, squinting her eyes in disbelief at the old man.

  “You can’t say that,” she said. “You don’t say that.”

  The whole gang found it immeasurably funny and bowed and bobbed in communal hysterics. Except for me, of course, and the girl, who looked dizzy, and the man with the camera, who took his eyes off the girl for a moment and looked at me. A kind of thread of understanding emerged between me and the man—we glanced at each other and I could almost see strings of tension form across the circle between us, looping around the girl, but invisible.

  Joe rocked on his tub and then stuck his hand out toward the girl. “C’mere, girl,” he said. The girl stood and took three shallow steps toward him. I could see one of his knees on either side of her. “I hear you have a little nigger friend,” Joe said to the girl. He kept his eyes on her, and then he leaned to one side and let his fingers touch the ground by his foot, where a pile of ash from his cigar had accumulated. He took a pinchful of ash and quick as a snake, he took the girl’s chin in one hand and with his ash-covered fingers, he smeared soot along each side of her nose and cheekbones, one side, then the other, and then put a smudge across her forehead.

  “Think you’re a nigger? Now you’re a nigger,” he said.

  “Look, she thinks she’s a nigger now!” said an old man.

  The old men threw their heads around with laughter and in the noise the man with spectacles let his stoic face show anger for a tiny moment, as he broke the string that held him to me, took the stunned girl by the hand and led her into the dark corridor of the stable.

  Joe shrugged with mock good humor. The men’s cackling ebbed, and Joe looked at me as if he’d just noticed my presence. There was a hole in the noise, my moment to speak.

  Joe said, “What do you want?”

  I said, “Joe, what happened to Chief’s horse?”

  So you know what had to happen with the Chief’s horse.

  One day the Chief came out of his bedroom for his breakfast and one more time he saw the tail end of the thirteen-year-old girlfriend scooting out the kitchen door behind his wife’s back, and he saw his glossy son demeaning himself and demeaning the kitchen table with the drugs. “Get out of the kitchen with that,” he said.

  “What, it’d be better in another room?” said his son. “There’s no good table in my room. I’d have to do it on an album.”

  “Your smoke spoils your mother’s food,” said the Chief.

  “Hah,” said his son, his necklace like even grinning teeth. “So that’s what spoils it! Just joking, Ma.”

  Chief said, “Get it out of the kitchen or get out of the house.”

  Chief’s wife let the dish she was washing settle under the suds, and stood there with her hands under the water.

  “Dad, it’s pot,” said her son. “What, you want me selling Quaaludes on Miami Beach?”

  Chief’s wife stayed at the sink but she took her hands out of the water and turned around. Now they hung at her sides, dripping on the linoleum. Her son’s back was to her, and he was still sitting at the formica table, intent on rolling a joint, getting it to balance tidily on the little pyramid of completed ones he was accumulating. She could tell from his hands how deliberate he was making himself be. She looked at her husband, who stood on the other side of the table with his back to the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He wore bluejeans from the day before and his leather belt with the fancy buckle she’d given him, and he too was bare-chested. His plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off was tucked in his back pocket like a mechanic’s rag, like the shirt of a man who was not selling real estate. He almost filled the doorway. Only small shapes of negative space surrounded him. Sometimes when he walked through a doorway he held onto the moldings above his head and stretched as he walked through it, and now he stood with his arms just resting up there, as if he might stretch but had been stopped in mid-gesture, as if by a photograph, except he was thinking so fast his eyes moved. She thought she could see him becoming two-dimensional. Something was being sucked from him as he stood there.

  In a very quick motion he undid his belt and slid it from its loops, and with the grace of a great cat tamer he stepped with it toward the table, snaking the belt like an omega in the air and let it strike the table. Coffee sloshed, and the stack of joints bounced once and then scattered. A small glass of juice tipped onto a plate of toast. Chiefs son looked at his father and sunk there, for a moment, and in the same moment he rose, with the power of his body, shoving the table, and the table struck Chief at mid-thigh. Chief was shocked, and still, and his son didn’t look at him. Chiefs son kept his eyes on the tabletop, and kept shoving until Chief took a step back and was pinned, between the table and the wall. Then, Chiefs son fled out the kitchen door. Then, Chief’s wife remained standing for moments long enough to count, looking at her husband truncated between the table and the wall.

  “Assholes,” she said.

  Chief arrived at Joe’s mid-morning and used baling twine to string two bottles of whiskey at his hips, one on either side so they wouldn’t bump into each other. No one was around, and he hadn’t come by in so long that he walked around the stable, looking into the dark stalls, noticing which horses he knew and which he didn’t. Most of the barn was painted white, and parts of it rubbed off to show gray beneath, but some whole sections of the walls were painted yellow, or pink, or light green, like a whole stall door, or most of the area between one stall and the next. Bored horse
s had chewed the wood between the stall bars over the years, and it looked almost as if the doors had been carved that way, to imitate waves or something, like a fancy border, like trim. The sun was intense against the bright barn, and made a great contrast between the bright light outside and the dim dusty air inside the stalls. You had to go right up and really stare to find out if there was a horse in there. Sometimes there was and sometimes there wasn’t. They were denser shadows in the shadows.

  And it was so quiet, except for the low noise of such large quiet animals shifting their weight in the heat, and other scuttling noises that could be bugs or small animals, or a sideways breath of wind pushing dead baish or a piece of palm frond down the cement corridor. You could hear buzzing noises that were disorientingly mysterious, that could be biologic dragonflies, or could be the electrical hum of a fan. While Chief was standing outside the vine-covered shed, fitting a bridle onto his horse, a little pickup truck with a kind of scrap-wood homemade cap on the bed pulled up and a weird little fellow with spectacles and a camera around his neck got out and looked around a little. He asked Chief if anyone was around, and when Chief said no, he drove off.

  Then Chief got on his horse and rode away, bareback.

  He rode off the farm and along the sand and pine trail on the side of the road across from the canal. This was a long, dark hallway of a road, with paths of sand and pine along the clumpy pavement, and eucalyptus trees among enormous evergreens dangling armfuls of long generous needles as lush as muffs, so high and soft they looked blurred, rubbed, as if in watercolor. When you drove in a car down the road, light flickered though the trees in beams, and any time of day felt like driving through blurry strobes. But trotting wasn’t fast enough for that effect, and Chief was busy arranging his bottles around his waist so they wouldn’t bounce and he could still lift each to drink. Chief’s horse felt a little scattered at first, a little dizzy almost. First the dark stall, then the jangling haze surrounding the bare bright area around the barn, then the sudden shade of the pine-lined road. It’d been a long time since he felt anyone bouncing around on his back. He was excited to be out and annoyed with the reins, but as soon as they reached the main road, Griffin Road, the light hit like a sword, stunning him for a moment, and within seconds, the heat fell with such force that he backed off at the feel of it and then settled in under its weight, bearing it like a boa constrictor.