Gray Matter (16 page)

He had shared their bed as long as he could remember. When he tried to slink off and sleep somewhere else in the house, he was beaten and reviled until, cowed, he returned. Many times they were tired and rose groggily in the morning, and he would fix himself breakfast from whatever kind of food was in the house and escape to school, or, during the summer, into the woods. But not this morning, a morning that should have been full of promise, of birthday giggles, of cake and candles.

Pa turned to face him, a crude expectation in his eyes and his rotten breath in Pauley Mac’s face. Shaking with fear and resignation and disgust, Pauley Mac knew that after he was done pleasuring Pa, Ma would expect her turn.

There was never any tenderness, not even when Pa shuddered and spurted, or when Ma twisted in the sheets. Instead, they cursed him as though he were to blame for their acts, as though all of the evil in that house flowed from him. He was worthless, he was dirt, he would never amount to anything. He would never have any of the finer things in life, and he had somehow kept them from having them, too. Nothing he could do was good enough. He didn’t even have the brains of a dog. Of a mouse. Of a worm.

Pauley Mac nursed his bruises and his cracked ribs, his cuts and his black eyes. He looked at his parents with terrible hate and with equally terrible longing, wishing that he could do something to earn their approval, so that they would love him in return. Or, at least, stop beating and cursing him. He knew that something vital was missing from his life, but he didn’t know the extent of the darkness inside himself.

That day, his tenth birthday, after he cleaned himself as well as he could with a cold dirty washcloth and dressed, he skipped school and went out and got himself the brains of a dog. He cracked open the skull of Old Bert, the neighbor’s ancient hound, with Pa’s machete. Then he scooped the warm soft tissue out with both hands, ate it raw in the woods, gagged, threw up, and ate some more.

It didn’t work. Even though he now had the brains of a dog, had literally made them part of his body, still his parents didn’t love him. He despaired, and lay trembling in the bed between them.

When he was twelve, he thought perhaps he simply wasn’t lovable, so he killed a boy who was popular at school and devoured some of his brain, choking down the torn, bloody pieces, willing himself not to vomit them back out. Then he tossed the body, with its head attached but half empty, in front of a train. It was splattered so badly, no one suspected that part of the brain was missing.

When he was sixteen, he dropped out of school. He came to believe that Ma and Pa needed to be closer to him in order to love him. A lot closer. So he killed them both while they slept in the bed with the sheets stained with come and juice. He told the sheriff that a man had broken in, murdered his parents, beaten him, and stolen the cash Ma kept in the lard bucket in the kitchen. The sheriff had his suspicions, but he also knew pretty well how Pauley Mac had been treated, so he simply told Pauley Mac to move on out of the county and preferably out of Tennessee altogether.

Schultz was gone from the diner. Pauley Mac finished out his shift mechanically and drove home in his pickup truck. He was depressed, and he blamed it on the bitch. It was Saturday afternoon. He didn’t work tomorrow, so he could spend the next day and a half in the cocoon of his home. He went into the dining room and played the electronic keyboard for a time, closing his eyes and letting his fingers wander over the smooth keys as beautiful music played in his mind. His depression lifted, and he spun and launched himself into the air, first from the bed and then from a kitchen chair, trying out his newly-acquired dancing ability.

He was not aware until hours later that he had twisted his ankle. When he did notice it, he couldn’t decide whether to apply ice or heat to the injury. He knew that when the twisted ankle first happened, the application of an ice pack would reduce swelling. Later, heat would relieve the pain. But where was the dividing line, he wondered. An hour? Three hours? Since he didn’t know exactly when the injury occurred—surely it hadn’t happened while he was dancing, since he was supremely graceful—he settled for applying heat. He wrapped his right ankle in towels dipped in boiling water and minimally cooled. Wincing at the heat and discomfort, he plopped heavily into a chair. The heat eased his pain and he slept, head lolled to the side, jaw hanging open.

The rest of the weekend slid by quickly. The cook’s death was a minor article on page twelve of the Sunday
Post-Dispatch.
Another one of those unexplained one-car accidents, no hint of foul play. Monday Pauley Mac was at the diner promptly at five in the morning, his ankle almost back to normal, just hurting a little when he put his weight on it a certain way. The bitch doctor came by about eight o’clock and bought a couple of rolls to take to the office. Pauley Mac couldn’t hang around her, though, because Millie happened to be in this morning. He stayed in the kitchen, a model employee.

Schultz didn’t show at all. No matter. Pauley Mac knew what his own next actions would be. After lunch, he went home and took a nap. Then he showered and ate an indifferent meal. At five pm, he was waiting, parked on a side street near the building where the bitch worked. She came out about a half-hour later, and he followed her home. She was easy. She didn’t even check the mirror.

The next afternoon, after his morning shift at the diner, he put on a pair of blue coveralls and drove over to the bitch’s house, where she lived with a son who was just about the age Pauley Mac was when he killed his first human. He wondered what it was like for the boy growing up with a head doctor for a mother. Probably about the same as growing up with Ma and Pa.

Why, thankee, son, that be right sweet of ya, ya worthless turd,
Pa replied.

He walked around into the back yard with a clipboard, just your friendly gas meter reader at work. It was tidy, with stepping stones leading to a round perennial garden surrounding a bird bath. The recent rain storm had filled the bird bath, and the perennials were up and growing. It was lovely now, but at the height of summer it would be spectacular. Pauley Mac remembered the time he had planted a few beans outside the back door of his house, scraping the poor soil with a bent spoon, watering the little trough he had made. When the bean plants were a couple of inches high, Pa had spotted them. He knew in an instant that they were important to Pauley Mac, so he stomped them to the ground and pissed on them for good measure.

Boy, you misrememberin
’
that. I done stepped on them plants accidental-like.

“Shut up, Pa,” Pauley Mac said as he picked the lock on the back door. It wasn’t as easy with gloves on as without, but he knew they were necessary. Inside it was cool and dark. Window shades were drawn on the kitchen windows. It looked and felt safe, and he had the urge to sit quietly for awhile, so he did. He dropped into a kitchen chair and closed his eyes. There were so few places of refuge for a man who carried the echoes of thirty or so murders in his head. Not that he regretted them or felt guilty. If he felt anything at all, it was that he was entitled to their skills, their lives. But it was like trying to cover yourself with a blanket that was too small. There was always a little piece of you sticking out, a foot, an elbow, hanging out in the cold nothingness.

He opened his eyes and inspected the kitchen. There was little clutter. A new toaster, still in its box, occupied a prime piece of counter space. Next to the stove sat a small microwave oven with the label proclaiming all of its features still stuck on the front glass. A single coffee cup stood on a drain board next to the sink. A dinette table and four swivel chairs, one of which he was sitting in, stood under a window. Pauley Mac rose and moved quickly through the kitchen. The lethargy had passed. He had his sense of purpose back. He knew what he was looking for, and it wasn’t in this room.

The only exit from the kitchen besides the door to the back yard led to a short hallway, only eight feet long or so. Other doors opened from the hallway into the living room, dining room, bathroom, and a multi-purpose room which could have been a guest room or study. The dining room was empty, but the living room had inexpensive-looking new furniture in it. He checked each room carefully, spotting what he was searching for in the study. But he didn’t enter right away; he wanted to spend more time in the house. The front door was in the living room, with no entry foyer. Immediately to the right of the front door was a staircase.

Sitting on the stairs was a cat, staring at him.

He had seen that cat before, and it had shed his blood. Dog felt the hairs on his arms and back rising, and a tension in his throat. He growled, low and menacing. At the sound, the cat spun away and ran up the stairs. Before Pauley Mac could interfere, Dog gave chase, taking the stairs two at a time. The cat disappeared into the bedroom on the right just as he lunged, barely missing the tail, which was fuzzed up several times its normal size.

Pauley Mac put a stop to the chase, because he had a reason for coming that wasn’t four-footed and furry. He wanted to frighten the bitch, let her know she was vulnerable, and give her a message that she should not use the computer again. He wanted to transform this safe haven into one of anxious checking of door locks, nervous starts at any unusual sound. He looked around upstairs. There were two bedrooms and a bath. Both bedrooms had the same kind of inexpensive new furniture he had seen downstairs. He wondered why everything was new.

He could not get much of a feeling of the type of person she was. Pauley Mac always liked to study people, although sometimes the only opportunity he really had was the look in their eyes when he drew back his machete. He knew he was different from others, or rather that others were different from him. He wondered what it would be like to fall asleep with only your own thoughts inside your head, rather than the babble of voices—voices like pinballs bouncing around inside his skull, careening from ear to ear, spinning down into that place just behind his eye sockets.

He went back downstairs and into the study. There was a folding card table in the center of the room, and on top of it rested a computer. He picked up the chair and smashed the computer, pounding repeatedly until he was sure it was unusable. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator. There wasn’t much inside, a few cans of soda, a package of lunch meat, but evidently someone liked ketchup, because there were two bottles, one opened and one unopened. He took the opened bottle and poured out a large pool of thick red sauce on the kitchen table. He dipped in a gloved finger and wrote the letters
“YUR RONG”
on the wall next to the table, coming back to load up his finger numerous times. One of his voices, a schoolteacher, chided him for his spelling, but he was used to that. Sometimes he wished he could get rid of Henry Wu. He should have been more selective.

Pauley Mac could read well, well enough to make sense of news magazines, which put him ahead of millions of other Americans. He had attended school, anything to get out of the house. He had dragged himself in when he was sick, so sick that he should have been in a bed with blankets piled high and his mother bringing him steaming soup.

But of course there wasn’t much chance of that happening.

He had even gone on holidays, hoping that Ma and Pa didn’t find out that he spent the day in the woods. But whenever he had tried to express himself in writing when he was a child, when he brought home carefully lettered paragraphs about pets or summer vacation, he was severely put down for it. Ma didn’t read, and neither did Pa. They simply didn’t realize what a banquet the written word presented to their son, because they didn’t partake of it themselves. They didn’t object much when he learned to read in school, but Ma found it threatening that he could take a blank piece of paper and make marks on it that she couldn’t decipher, and she made sure he knew about it. So Pauley Mac ended up with a strange dichotomy: he could read, but sweated and trembled whenever he had to write something, and what he produced was childish. He knew it was an emotional block of some kind, but he couldn’t break through it, especially not with Ma around him twenty-four hours a day.

Pauley Mac appraised his message, and was pleased that the ketchup seemed to add a threatening tone. He wanted to deliver a clear message for the bitch to back off, not to use her computer anymore, that she was headed in the wrong direction. And he especially wanted to frighten her, to let her know that he could enter her private space whenever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. That gave him another thought, another way to heighten his message. He went to the sink and rinsed the ketchup off his gloved fingers, then opened drawers until he found where the utensils were kept. It was a pitiful assortment. There was only one knife, an all-purpose one with a blade about eight inches long and a worn handle. He looked with disdain at the dull, nicked cutting edge.

Telling Dog to be quiet, he took the knife in his hand and moved toward the staircase.

“Here, kitty, kitty…”

P
J LEFT WORK EARLY
to pick Thomas up at school. Since the incident with Schultz in the hotel room, Thomas had been alternately subdued and angry. But he had coped amazingly well with the move, and even had his friend Winston over yesterday. The two of them had gone into the study to use PJ’s computer directly after dinner, closing the door. When Thomas came out for some snacks a couple of hours later, she had gotten a glimpse into the room. What she saw cheered her. Thomas and Winston were using a multimedia encyclopedia, and the screen was filled with colorful dinosaurs. Papers were scattered about, and it looked as if the boys were working on their homework together. Megabite was on top of the monitor, which PJ knew was warm and a coveted nap spot for the cat, with her front paws loosely dangling over the edge. Then Winston activated the dinosaur scene, and a triceratops began fending off a tyrannosaurus rex. Megabite pawed tentatively at the moving figures, a predator finding something in common with the two behemoths twisting and lunging on the screen.