Everyday Psychokillers (28 page)

Not long after the finding of the head of the body of the son of the charismatic Walsh there's the TV movie made of it, and soon enough John Walsh has his own show, called
America‘s Most Wanted
, and you can help catch criminals and save a child. It's all about tips. How to phone them in. Not long after, there are all kinds of puns in the paper about how it's America's most wanted show.

They can't resist allusions to Adam and Eve. How he's God's child. America's child. How something corrupted him. Got him kicked out of the garden so to speak, but this time off the earth and into heaven. They mix a lot of metaphors. They don't know what they're talking about.

I cover the roots of the vine sprouts with dirt and primp them, so they stand tidily in their starting line. The four boys face me through the chain-link, ankles buried in the sand so it's as if they have no feet, which they do not seem to mind at all. If they noticed that
I
have feet they'd surely think Wow! Feet! I wish I had some. If they thought anything at all. They're pegs in their sandbox, bowling pins, watching me, dumbstruck, because I play with a dog, I have feet, I'm digging in my garden and they are amazed. It is as if they are not standing in a sandbox, as if sand is not something one can dig. I dig in the garden with my trowel and take a sprouted root from my bucket of vinelets and they can't believe it. They stand with their buckets, three of them, three buckets, the kind that nest: a big red one, a medium yellow one, a small blue one, each with a white faux-rope plastic handle. One boy doesn't have a bucket, but he has the little shovel. It's as if what they hold in their paws are not little plastic buckets and a little plastic shovel. They are so separate from one another. They're like the four limbs of a person who's been dismembered and all that is left on the scene are the limbs, the members, if you will. If the boy notices he has a shovel he might think there is nothing to do because there is not a bucket there in his hand with it. And what are the three boys to do without shovels? And what would go there in the shovel or in the bucket except perhaps that dark wet earth in that lady's yard? “Whatcha doin?” says one.

“Planting,” I say, angry.

“Whatcha doin?” says one, or perhaps it is another.

“Digging.”

“Whatcha doin?” one says.

“Gardening.”

“Whatcha doin?”

“What do you think?”

I say that one more angrily than I believe I am capable of saying anything to a little kid. They're a bit struck. They are waiting for something. They know something is different, but they do not know that this latest response, this noise sausaging through the chain-link is a question rather than a statement, and they don't know what to do.

Then they remain silent. They don't speak and they don't move and they don't look to one another for any ideas.

Then one says, “Whatcha doin?”

“Guess,” I say, this time kindly. “What do you think?” I say.

But they can't do it. They cannot make the connection. The fence has cut them off, and they can't get past it, not even in their minds.

I'm watching them, and I can't help it. I think of the collection of bugs, those boys pinned there in their box. I watch them through the fence and sometimes I watch them from my house, through my window. I'm watching them, willing them to make the connection, and I'm thinking things through. They're the bugs and they're Ted. They're both. It's awful. But watching them is helping me with whatever I'm doing in my mind.

Their small sister—you can tell because she wears a bow—is sitting in the grass outside the box, stabbing the ground with a stick.

Thinking about the boys, one thing I think is about a film I saw, a contemporary film with a contemporary setting. It starred and co-starred a young man and a young woman. The young man was a writer and the young woman was his girlfriend. Of course whenever there's a writer in a movie there has to be a scene that lets you know he's writing this one special thing, and that there's only one copy of it, although that doesn't seem to concern anyone. I mean no one in the movie ever says, “Hey, why don't you make a copy of that?” So once you know there's just one copy you know something has to happen to it, and in this version, what happens to the manuscript is the girlfriend's on the bow of a ferryboat, flinging pages into the water as the young man cries helplessly from the dock, watching the pages flap, scatter, and sink. It's torture for him, he's in agony. Can't she see what she's doing? That she's flinging bits of his soul into the wind, into the water? How she's killing him, how the pages are like bit after bit of his body? How he might as well throw himself into the ocean as well?

People love that story. They love to watch it. Even now, when there's never only one copy of anything, the scenario persists. It's not like the guy lives in war-torn Nicaragua and can't get to a xerox machine. He lives in Seattle, or New York. People don't care if it makes sense. They really want to believe there's that one copy, this representation of a man's mind, this symbol made of symbols. But just
one
, so that something can seem to be at stake. So there could never be another.

Are you one-in-a-million or just one in a million? Are you like everyone or are you some exceptional individual?

In fact, some time before I saw that movie, back in the city, I went to see a play, because that actress I mentioned was in it. It had one of those manuscript scenes, too. In the play I think she was the evil young wife of the young writer-man instead of the evil girlfriend. Sometimes it's simply evil fire, some personified phenomenon that's destroying his only copy, but this time it was the young wife. Feeling neglected. In the play, my actress was high on a ladder, behind the representation of a window, flinging the pages of the manuscript into the audience. They had a fan blowing, secretly, to help the leaves waft and spin. Some nights, she explained to me, as the director had explained to her, the pages she threw were blank, and other nights the pages were actually copies of the play itself. Because of alternate interpretations, she explained. You can come to see the show both ways. Because each way there's a meaning, but different. On good nights, people in the audience scrambled to collect the pages.

I remember watching the play, thinking of psychokillers. Afterwards we went to dinner. She hummed while she read the menu. She was feeling warm and affectionate, happy about herself in the cozy red light of the restaurant. I realized she was humming that Broadway song “My One and Only.” I looked at her, thinking of her history. I thought of how she'd been fucked, all the ways I knew she'd been fucked. I saw her eyes all tired and dried-out, jellyballs in her head, plugs to keep her from spilling her guts. I saw her as a piece of biology.

Another thing. About the boys. Before or after that last thing about the boys in the sandbox. One more thing. Still summer, though, flies still flying madly around the house, spazzing against the glass or ecstatic between panes. Possibly, although who can tell, they're the very same flies that, in mere months, will be walking, trudging across the carpet, still hoping they'll find the way out. So one more thing about the boys.

Grandparents have come to visit. I hear the long car pull into the driveway, and from my window I watch them stumble out. It's the father's parents. I can tell by the gestures, all around, who shakes which hand and claps which shoulder. The way Claire hangs back with the golden retriever, how they both kind of hover, trying to decide what's best to do, doing little half-bows. They guide each other inside and I can almost hear the dishes through all our walls, clanking through theirs, then across both driveways, and then through mine.

In the late afternoon I go outside for some reason, I don't remember. Mail, garbage, primp the plants, I don't know. I'm curious. All day their grandfather was rocking in a chair on the porch, the dog sleeping with his tail agonizingly close to getting clipped. Then the boys came out. Four or five of tfiem, maybe more. The girls were inside somewhere. Baking cookies, I'm sure. The retriever scuttled away and the boys surrounded him for a bit. At one point the old man used his cane and stood up and moved around there in front of his chair with the boys around him and then sat back down. A couple of the boys went inside. The rest sat on the porch steps, looking into the palms of their hands.

The boys see me in the yard and rush up to the fence and push their faces on it. “Look! Look!” say the boys. One, two, three, four, they each hold up what they have, and what they each have is an Indian head coin. Each boy holds each coin in the frame made by a fence link. Grandfather has dispersed his collection. Now I know. I realize that somewhere in his history, something just like this must have happened to Ted.

Now I can see how the old man stooped in the center of the hopping boys, and how the boys look and look at the heads he holds for them. They don't know if they're allowed to touch, though. The grandfather feels a surge of youth for a moment, he is so pleased with his grandfatherliness and he hobbles in a circle around his cane. He raises his free fist in a feeble gesture of power. I finally get it. He's showing the boys how the Indian danced around with a tomahawk and how he'll chop-chop you. Then he gives them the coins.

I'm thinking about what we inherit. I'm thinking of Adam's body capped off with an Indian head, this double anonymity. It's all so horrible I want to die.

On the side of the Christians' house that faces mine there's a small window in the nutcracker of the roofline. Sometimes kids peek from it. I can see it from my living room. They hop and I see them, blurry in a fragment of time, as they see the world.

One afternoon, it's deep autumn. Outside, dusk's revving up for a good glowing show. The sandbox is covered with a blue tarp. The flies are walking across the wood floor and my shaggy poodle is walking behind one. Next door in the window in the peak there's a face, and it's a girl. Twelve, thirteen.

I can see her behind layers of smudgy fingerprints and I know what happened. I can tell from her face exactly what happened, and later, when I meet her, it turns out it's basically true.

Her folks split, died, what have you, and Claire's her aunt, her father's sister. And it turns out Aunt Claire was actually not always religious, particularly. She ran away from home at, indeed, thirteen, and found sanctuary with acquaintances of acquaintances and was converted and married off fairly immediately. Claire's brother stayed where they beat him and beat him and he grew, warped and dented, and then there was this girl he met, and then this baby they had, and then these mishaps, these accidents, these ways he always meant to be wise and was not. Next thing, smoke is huff-puffing from the chimney next door and inside Claire's whispering to her husband by the flashing fire in the wooden living room, “My brother will never shape up, he's not fit, he's not fit,” and she stutters and paces. She's wringing her hands and yanking her hair. She's a bit broken. She's practically ruined.

So one day I'm in the yard with my dog and the husband steps up to the fence like he's about to lean an elbow on it, but it's not that kind of fence. He puts both hands on it, on the metal pole that goes across the top. His nose is just above the pole and his hands are one at each ear, like a puppy, but pockmarked. Then he has the conversation with me that makes no sense until I see the girl's face in the window.

“Well there,” he says grinning, pulling his features broad across his narrow face. “Well there, it looks like if all goes well we'll have some help around here with the kids,” he says. It's like he wants a cigar. “Turns out the father's in jail and we can get her out of that terrible home,” he says, or something just like it. I don't know what he said. I can't do his voice. He's so awful I can't listen. I can't even look at him when he talks. I can't do any of those encouraging motions with my eyes or my hands that you do to show someone you care that they're talking. But he doesn't believe he's not good, you know. He can't picture it. So that's what he says, basically, and soon thereafter, there she was. In the window. At the peak. A wide smudge behind the frosty panes, luminous. Alicia, like Alice, but lighter, and not down a rabbit-hole and underground, here on earth. A dreamgirl. Not her dream, though. Mine.

For one thing, she pet the retriever, and the stiff old thing hobbled after her in awe as she shuttled the kids in and out of the house for play in the yard, or packed them into the van for church. He sat at attention at her heel when she stood on the porch at the door, lined the children up and, one by one, pulled their sweaters over their heads and their boots from their feet until the last one toddled or tumbled over the threshold and into the house, sockfooted, and Alicia lifted the monstrous mound of candy-colored clothing and disappeared after them. Stiff and wasted as he was, the dog followed her for weeks until he felt absolutely sure, or as sure as a dog can be, that she wouldn't just leave for good at any moment, after which he posted himself where he could be sure he could see her, and lay there with an ease I believe was as new and inevitable to him as loving this girl felt to me.

Believe me, I knew how she was an accumulation. I know it's her, repeated through my past. It's what makes her make sense, though. It's what makes her right. I can see them receding, the girls, one behind the other, the way a row of girls might look in an ancient Egyptian painting, and I've seen paintings like that with a carriage pulled by a row of four horses: they draw the carriage and a horse in profile, then they draw the horse behind the horse, and you can see it in outline behind, just the tracing, this bare rendition of perspective, and then they draw an outline and another outline behind that. It's like looking in a mirror facing a mirror, those drawings. It looks like a vibration.