Girls (36 page)

After four of them, I opened my eyes. I had put a gray-blue puckering hole in the enamel of the stove. I had placed a round in
the wall behind the stove. I’d heard a ricochet off the frying pan. And the last one had disappeared. I wondered if it had gone into the cork rim of the chalkboard or into Strodemaster. He was crouched in front of his burning breakfast, with his hands on his ears. We could line him up with me and Rosalie, our hands in front of our eyes, I thought, and make that joke about monkeys not doing something. I smelled the cordite as well as the garbage now, and of course the burnt bacon in the greasy pan. I smelled the stink of my sweat. He wasn’t moving, and I was still in the firing stance.

We’d been taught in the MPs to startle people in rooms we broke into by shouting in those up-from-the-navel sergeant voices to stand still, put your hands on your head, et cetera. I didn’t have any strength today. I needed the audiovisual effects, I told myself. I hadn’t known, walking through his door, what I would do. I think maybe I was trying to kill him. I pretended to myself it was all a part of my plan—the door kicked in, the shots fired, the attention he would give me now.

He was still crouched, standing up at the stove, and his face was really a series of funny faces. He looked like a man pretending to be a clown in a spattered blue bathrobe.

I said, “Turn it off. And close your slovenly bathrobe.”

He said, “Jack.”

My ears were still full of the shots. I could smell the used loads and I could smell his last night’s sausages. And I was certain I could smell the rot I had smelled here before. It was Janice. We were standing in her. I let the pistol come up and I squeezed off again. The solid sound of the round striking into the floor at his feet, the spray of wood and linoleum splinters, made a strong argument.

I said, “Tighten your fucking bathrobe, goddamn it. No. Wait. A man shouldn’t dress like a boy. Don’t tighten it. Take the fucker off.”

He slowly stood. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He took his bathrobe off and held it out. I pointed to a chair and he dumped it. In a voice that sounded tinny after the shots, he said, “What’s wrong, big guy? Why the gunplay? Why the anger? I understand I got you into a search you didn’t want to be part of—”

“You lied to me two or three—I think it was three times,” I said. “Archie got me into it, not you. You wanted me
out
of it. That must be a compliment. I don’t care. I heard it and I heard it, and then I used what’s left of my brain to think about it. You. Archie thought it would help me out if I did something about getting back a missing girl. You were talking to him, and he made the suggestion. You were supposed to be so eager to find her, you had to say yes. Jesus, what’s not to say yes to? A broken-down campus cop who takes a week to find his dick in the men’s room. Right? So you came to me and asked me and then as soon as you had an excuse, like when I stuck as much of my body as I could in front of a bunch of arms and legs, you came crying over to turn me free.
That’s
the part that’s the compliment, you fucker. That anything about me worried you. That you actually thought I could
do
anything. See anything. Hear anything.

“But you’re finally so goddamned convinced you’re smarter than everybody. Than the little girl you fucked and killed. Than her parents. Than half the law-enforcement officers in a couple of counties. Surely smarter than me. So you had to repeat the lie about who engaged my useless services. But you know, Professor Strodemaster, sir, Ph.D., even a poor dumb fuck like me sooner or later hears it when a wormy, phony, arrogant cocksucker lies and lies and lies.”

I saw spit pop out of my mouth. I heard my voice climb higher and higher. I did not forget I had a round left in the cylinder.

“And you sliced her apart here. And what’d you do after? Did you can her in her juices? Freeze her crotch so you could take it down to remember her by?”

He shook his head and gripped his glasses over the ears like they were coming off. He looked down an inch or so with a sorrowful face. “Jack, boy,” he said. “You’re talking to a fucking associate professor of physical sciences with tenure for life and an NSF grant in his package. We don’t do dismembering. The guys in biology do that. And
they
don’t do it to people. This is fucking college life we’re talking, Jack. You and I are employees of a
school.
The worst cutting up gets done is at parties, unless they’re scoring on one another’s wives. I’m a wronged, innocent associate professor, guy. I’m also your friend. Remember? And here. Consider this. I heard this, and I believe it to
be true, seeing how punchy you’ve got. We are both of us men whose wives walked out. We’re both wronged. Are you hearing me, Jack?”

I always admired how some people could open their mouths and talk. They could talk and talk. But I didn’t think I wanted, now, to hear about my dreams, and especially not from Strodemaster. I tapped him on the soft part of the temple with the gun.

I said, “What’d you do, butcher her in the kitchen? Clog your septic up with her body parts? That’s why it stinks like that. You used some kind of scientific knife thing and you cut off her arms and legs first, and then I guess her head. Her head next? Did you slice off those tiny nipples? Didn’t you at least let her wear that sad little sexpot brassiere when you cut her up?

“You know,” I said, and I tapped him again, at the bridge of the nose, kind of hard, “sometimes they notch people up with their gun sights and then they go absolutely crazy a little and shoot up a tenured-for-life associate professor’s house. They let them bleed to death on the kitchen floor, where the girls got sliced and diced.”

I lifted my foot in its hard boot and I ran the lug sole down his leg, from the knee to the instep inside the loose tongue of his boot.

He vomited onto his boots and it spattered onto mine. I didn’t move back. I’ve had worse on my feet from drunks and speed freaks and I was taught to see it as a tactic. “Barf and run,” we used to call it.

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, knocking his dirty glasses off. They fell into the vomit. He left them there, though he reached for his face a couple of times as if to adjust them. His face looked incomplete, a little younger. I felt like I could see it better. But I couldn’t read it, and I was glad. I didn’t want to understand his thoughts.

I’d raised a welt on his nose and a little dark streak on his temple. His leg was probably red down the shin, and that would hurt for a good part of a week. I thought at first the tears were from his vomiting, but he was crying for real.

“I could never hurt that child like that,” he said, snuffling. “Cut her
up?
”

“Well, I haven’t met that many killers,” I said, “and I never was
smart enough to figure people out. That’s why it took me so long with you. What is it, you get off better with little girls? It’s some kind of psychological thing with you? Or was she one of those secret-rebellion kids who’s a miracle in the sack? And you of course were the super father physicist local community guy with the prick that was tenured for life and you were instructing her in whatever she couldn’t get in the preacher’s house. Holy shit, Randy. Did I leave any of it out?”

“Oh yes,” he said. He moved to the wall and stooped the way nearsighted people do. He picked up the chalk at the end of its red string and he faced me. He erased the map lines on the board with the side of his arm. Vomit and mucus ringed his mouth. His eyes looked soft and unfocused. He pointed with the chalk to the chalkboard and, peering in, made an
X
in a circle in the upper left-hand corner of the board. “Let this represent the emotions between us,” he said in a pleasant and even eager voice.

“Jack,” he said, “she was both a child and an adult. She was a woman. She was. Truly. The emotion is a difficult one to name, but not to feel, and we felt it. I’m trying through this crude iconography to suggest the flow of emotional power—” He made an arrow point from the
X
to the right of the board. “Here. This might represent the field of power that flowed from her house to mine and, naturally—” He made an arrow that moved back to the
X.

“Let me add this for clarity,” he said. He circled a
Y.
“I’ll be
Y
,” he said. “Understand?

“Now.” He made a crude drawing of a house under
X
and another, sloppier, under
Y.
Below them, he crosshatched an area. “The corn-field behind our houses. We’ll assume the snow.” He looked up, smiling a boy’s shy smile. “I don’t know how to indicate the snow.”

He looked back at the chalkboard. “No,” he said. He wiped with his hand and forearm until most of his marks were gone.

“Try it this way,” he said, drawing a box with a rectangle in it. “Let
X
represent the bed.” He chalked an
X
into the rectangle. “
Y
, of course, is the house around it. And these”—he stabbed sharp small marks around the rectangle—“are tears. Not mine. I was the father,
and the father never weeps. Well,” he said, looking at me with a friendly smile, “not that they know of, eh? She wept, Jack, like a baby. I comforted her, of course. That was what I did. But remonstrations, condemnations,
confessions!
She wanted us to confess. I think it was a momentary lapse to childhood from the small adult she’d become. I’ve seen it happen before. Children are
like
that, and we
understand
them.

“Jack, I urged her to be silent. To consider our pleasures, our friendship. We really shared a lot. We were silent, though. It was one of our conditions.”

I saw her sad mouth and the eyes that wanted so much to be happy. I saw her in the underwear her mother would call vulgar, and I closed my eyes against it. When I opened them, I saw Strodemaster bending to his board. But I couldn’t help seeing him roll her face into the bedclothes and lean on the back of her head until she suffocated. Or take her jaw in one large hand and cover her forehead with another, and jerk, so that her neck snapped and her eyes emptied out. Or, maybe, shake her and shake her and shake her and shake her until she simply broke.

He said, “Are you understanding all of this?”

He continued to lean down toward the chalkboard and study it. He slowly shook his head. With his forearm, he wiped and wiped.

“I don’t think I’ve made this clear,” he said. He looked at me and smiled sweetly with embarrassment. “And I’m the one they call a master teacher!”

I stepped toward him and my hand was up.

His face changed. When he spoke, his voice sounded thicker: “You can kill me, Jack, if you need to. But I have to tell you. It looks to me like something about this turned you on. Like you were with me for a while. Their little titties and their hands in your mouth.”

“I wouldn’t be you.”

“No, you can hit me all you want. I’m just tell—”

I used my left hand like a stiff board and I didn’t hit him all I wanted, maybe, but I hit him. I slapped his face. I was imagining how Mrs. Tanner would do it if she could. Left side, right side, left side,
right side, left side, right. His face jolted. I was angry enough to do some damage.

“I don’t want to hear from you anymore how I’m your twin maniac brother. Because I am not a bad person. I am not, goddamn it. I am not a bad man.”

He had stumbled against the chalkboard, then moved forward to lean against the kitchen table. His feet were back in his vomit now. His smell had begun to rise. His face was bright red, with white spots on it from my palm and fingers and knuckles.

I said, “I want you to say now where she is. You can tell the state police about your love and then the terrible accident that happened when you were naked with but not meaning to fuck a fourteen-year-old girl who you killed without meaning to kill her. Your lawyer will tell you what to say so nobody believes you but you get off with time served and a free psychiatrist for life.”

“I wrapped her,” he said. “It was a sign of respect.” He turned toward the chalkboard but then faced me again. “I wound her in a sheet.”

“You buried her?”

“Of course.”

“Where?”

He pointed. The sleeve slid on his arm, and I saw strong muscles move. He was pointing toward the barn.

“In it?”

“Behind it.”

“In the ground?”

“In the snow above the ground. I’d have buried her properly, come spring.”

I saw her sad face come rising as the snow melted around her.

“You’ll have to show them.”

“I will.”

“First you have to walk to her mother’s house. Her mother and father’s house.”

“Not and talk to them.”

“Jesus, Professor, I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable or
anything. I will not hesitate to fucking kill you. Putting your ass down would solve all kinds of problems, I want you to know. So just let’s do this.”

When we went down his back steps, we had his neighbors watching us. I guess they’d heard the shots. In little towns, they tell each other the news, and we had people in coats over bathrobes and nightgowns, pajamas or work clothes, on their porches or standing in their front walks when we covered the short distance to the Tanners’. Strodemaster was ahead of me, not wearing his glasses, wearing his dirty white T-shirt and holding his hands in his trouser pockets. He stumbled once because he stepped on his bootlace.

We went up their drive and I told him to stand in front of their back door. I reached around behind him and knocked. I wasn’t careful about keeping distance between us. I knew if he moved on me, I would hurt him. It would hurt me, too, but I didn’t care and I wanted to break him up and he knew it.

I only wanted the Reverend Tanner to open the storm door and hear me say, “Bring your wife.”

He moved. She came slowly to the door and her husband held her from the side and from behind.

She looked down the steps, and she looked. The feeling was of a focus being tightened and held. She finally said, “Oh God.” It took her a long time to say. What I hated most about that minute or two was that I couldn’t be in the kitchen and hold on to her.