Psycho Save Us (6 page)

But she had. 
Just as she had connected to the feeling that emanated from the white man in
Olympic Park who had been bursting with excitement over proposing to his
girlfriend, so much so that Kaley had caught it like she were a sail and his
enthusiasm the wind.  It carried her, and filled her.

Echoes…

Her thoughts
were carried by those dark currents.  Directionless and without origin, but everywhere
and altogether paramount.  Sometimes they were like voices, but with tangible
weight.  The sounds were heavy and weighed her down.  Other times, they were
light whispers carrying in a cavern.

Somewhere in the
cave, Shan was crying.  Kayle struggled weakly, but the current was too strong,
holding her fast and carrying her deeper.  She wanted to fight the current, to
try and swim against it, but she could not summon the strength to do so. 
Somewhere in her unconscious mind she could feel the bonds holding fast against
her wrists and legs.  Still, Shan was crying, but her voice didn’t echo like
all the other sounds.  Her voice was very, very close, and didn’t carry.  But
still there were others.

Echoes…

“Seasons don’t
fear the Reaper…nor do the wind, the sun or the rain…we can be like they are…”

That singing
again.  Who was doing it?

More
uncertainties crept in.  Those were the most terrifying things of all.  Was she
awake or was she asleep?  Was this real or was this imaginary? 
Parts of it
are real
, she decided. 
The parts that are the worst
.

There was the
sound of a baby crying.  Crying loudly.  It sounded like it was pain.

Kaley’s eyes
opened.  She was pretty sure the world she was seeing was real this time.  But
she could still feel that dark current moving around her, threatening to carry
her with it.  She could still feel the movements of the shadowy bodies that
swam beneath its surface. 

She was on a
floorboard, seated between two heavyset men, one white and one black.  She
looked up, saw the white man looking down at her.  He smiled and then looked
away.  Her kidnapper actually
smiled
.  “Where’s…?”  She wanted to ask
where Shan was, but her words wouldn’t work.  The current surged with that
smile, and took her voice away.  That smile washed over her like a thick
sludge.  She could taste it in her mouth, its rotten smell invading her
senses.  She could feel it in her mind.  In that smile, she could feel the
pride of earning something and yet being humored by the notion that someone
else had to suffer for it.  It was the smile of thinking about tasting the
goods before they were sold.  It was the murky, messy smile of a mind that had
never learned to pick up after itself, and had left litter out in the streets,
cluttering avenues of thought and morality.

It was the smile
of the big, bald white man.  Him with the red bear tattooed on his right arm. 
It was the smile of his lust.  His lust in all things.

The
smile echoed…

And it carried
her away, dislodging her from whatever fragment of reality she clung to. 
Deeper, again the current carried her deeper.

Kaley had
learned all about lust.  She had known about it long before she got her first
period.  Her cousin Tyrese had taught her all about it, though he never knew it. 
It was Christmas, they had traveled to Memaw’s house—her Nan’s nan, in the last
year of her life.  Ricky, Kaley’s ex-stepdad-to-be, wasn’t even her mom’s
boyfriend back then.  Shannon was inside her mother, but nobody knew it yet. 
Kaley was very small.  She drank a lot of Coca-Colas that night.  Her bladder
had warned her that if she didn’t get to a bathroom very quick, she would need
a mop.  Kaley hustled to the bathroom at the end of the hall, but it was
occupied, locked.  She found a paper towel roll in the kitchen and went
outside, in the dark, all alone.  Out there was Tyrese and his two older
brothers.  He followed her, though she hadn’t known it at the time.  She hadn’t
known it until she got out in the woods and dropped her pants and squatted. 
She had been cleaning herself up when something hit her.  It was the charm.  She
felt…curious.  Curious about someone else.  She felt wanted, too.  Emotions that
she wouldn’t understand until she was in her twenties had swirled and
coalesced.  She pulled her pants up quickly, because something else made her
shiver, and it wasn’t the cold December wind.  Kaley remembered turning around,
looking back towards the house with the lights on, and seeing Tyrese’s
silhouette there.  He was twelve years old at the time, and he was coming for
her.  He didn’t even know it yet, but he was.  He thought he was just curious. 
He thought he was only going to see how little girls peed, maybe see what their
plumbing looked like.  “Hey, Kaley,” he said.  He might as well have screamed,
“I’m here to kill you!”, because she gasped, stood, and ran.  She couldn’t go
back to the party because he was in her way, and he would stop her, talk to her
cousin to cousin.  Tyrese would laugh and convince her there was nothing to be
afraid of.  And Kaley would believe him.  She would doubt her charm, just as
she usually did.  In that moment, she knew she couldn’t let that happen.

That night,
Kaley ran from him.  She ran deeper into the woods.  She came out onto another
street and got lost quickly.  Later that night she would get a mean spanking
after the cops were finally called and found her wandering blocks away.  Mom
demanded to know why she’d done it, but Kaley hadn’t told her.  In truth, she
hadn’t known, either.  How does one explain a premonition that they doubted had
really happened themselves?  Kaley felt stupid, and part of her had determined
to never make herself look that stupid again.  She now realized that that night
had been the beginning of her new, sanity-saving programming, the programming
that told her not to listen to such stupid “feelings” again or else she would suffer
more humiliation.  For proud girls like Kaley, saving dignity was everything,
and that placed her at constant odds with her charm.

She had listened
to her charm back then.  It had probably saved her. 
I should’ve listened to
it tonight
.

Echoes…

There was that
crying baby again.  Someone really needed to
do
something about that
baby.

Now, her dream
became displacing, and she had no idea of where she was or what she had been
doing.  She wasn’t even sure this was a dream.  Kaley suddenly realized she needed
to be some place, she knew that inherently.  But where?  She had forgotten.  It
was important.  It was
vital
that she get there.  Yet, what good was
being there if she couldn’t even recall what she needed to be there
for
? 
So she remained.  She remained where she was, with neither the ability to
choose nor the will to choose.  She remained.  Deep, deep within herself, there
was the ghost of panic haunting her.  She felt constricted, and she always
would.  She knew it.  On some fundamental level, she knew that she would always
be
confined
somehow.

And then, all at
once, she saw him.  The smiling man.  Pale.  Pale as bone.  Pale and
black-hooded, and with kind eyes.  He smiled across at someone else.  He was
torturing somebody, and he was delighted.  It wasn’t the torture he was
enjoying, though.  Her charm told her this much.  Her charm, or the
fancifulness of her dream.  No, he was enjoying…freedom?  Yes…yes, that was
it.  He was free and he hadn’t been for a while.  But he was free now and
loving every minute of it.

Then, she saw
it
.

Oh God
, she thought. 
He’s
going to kill everyone
.

She parted her
lips and groaned, “Please…please, we have…we have to go…we have to run…far
away…from him…”

The big bald
white man glanced down at her.  He smiled again, and she felt the wash of
lust.  “Shhhh.  Just relax.  It’ll all be over soon.”

“We have…to
go…please…you don’t understand…he’s…”  Her eyelids felt so heavy.  So very, very
heavy.  “He’s…he’s going to kill…and the imps…he’ll bring the imps…and the
chains and the…the…briars…”

Somewhere in the
car, someone’s phone rang.

And someone
was…singing.

“Come on,
baby…don’t fear the Reaper…baby take my hand…don’t fear the Reaper…we’ll be
able to fly…don’t fear the Reaper…baby I’m your mannnnnnnn…”

2

People
found out about Spencer Adam Pelletier when he was thirteen years old.  He was
still in the fifth grade, having failed two years in a row despite having
breezed through all previous four grades with straight A’s.  During that time,
he had been the kind of kid who was prone to acts of kindness, sharing his
lunch with poorer kids and sometimes just giving his lunch money away to the
kind of kids that didn’t eat at all and had to keep pretending that they’d lost
their lunch money every day, or that they just weren’t hungry.

Teachers had
commented on just how terribly good Spencer was in all things, and found it
refreshing to talk about a child who was so giving.  He never mocked other
kids, and stood up for those that were getting made fun of.  If he couldn’t do
anything about it himself, Spencer made sure to tell a teacher.  He actually
did this three times in a row in his third-grade year, enough to be put on a
school poster.  Beneath his face had read the words
BULLYING IS NOT ACCEPTABLE: BE
LIKE SPENCER, IF YOU SEE SOMEONE TREATED UNFAIRLY, BE SURE TO REPORT IT
.

Before he was
ten years old, many kids were already calling him a narc.  But that was fine,
because Spencer enjoyed it.  You see, long before anyone else in the world or
in his family found out the truth about Spencer Adam Pelletier, he’d found out
about himself.  He hadn’t been doing the right thing because he found it
moral.  No.  Not at all.  He’d been doing the right thing because he liked the
look on the faces of those who thought they could get away with something when they
suddenly realized they were
not
going get away with it.

That’s a slight
distortion.  Spencer didn’t just like seeing this look on people’s faces.  He
relished it.  He relished it the way a person well-versed in tantric sex will
relish the build up to the finish, with almost no attention at all paid to the
final squirt at the end.  And, like a person versed in tantric sex, it took
practice to become good at it.

Spencer
understood that there were all kinds of people in the world.  That there were
those who were born with a certain powerful or beautiful body type, which
allowed them to look down on others and society gave them the okay to do so, no
matter how many anti-bullying campaigns were launched.  Other folk were prone
to kind acts because, being bullied themselves, they could empathize with those
who were pushed around.  It was a survival mechanism:
We should band
together
. 
United we stand, divided we fall
.

But no matter
which of these personalities a person happened to be, no matter what their body
or personality type, they will almost always do what they do because of a
perceived consequences and rewards system.  And Spencer understood that system to
be based off of what a person believed they could reasonably get away with.

And
that’s
why few people understood Spencer Adam Pelletier.  Turning in a bully was never
about getting a pat on the head or his face on a poster.  Quite the contrary,
Spencer had perceived those “rewards” as
drawbacks
to what he liked
best—chopping people down.  Chopping down a teacher off her moral high horse,
or chopping down a mob boss in B cellhouse of the prison rotunda’s east wing. 
There was never any reward for that.  In fact, there was almost always
punishment for it.

But another facet
of Spencer’s personality that his mother and father would come to find
disgusting was his blatant masochism.  He thought pain was funny, interesting,
and, quite frankly, a turn-on.

An understanding
of this concoction was what was essentially missing when folks tried to suss
out why Spencer did what he did to Miles Hoover, Jr. in the school library
during his second repeat of the fifth grade.  And why things had only escalated
thereafter.

Presently,
Spencer sat in a new stolen Ford Aerostar minivan outside of Pat’s Auto—he’d
ditched the Tacoma thirty minutes and six miles ago because he figured Mac
would give the po-pos his description as well as the truck’s—inhaling deeply of
his last Marlboro and exhaling ostentatiously, thinking back fondly on Miles
Hoover, Jr. 

In those days,
he’d been quite the angel, and undoubtedly his parents’ favorite amongst their
three sons.  Fast-forward fifteen years, he was a murderer on the loose and his
brothers, Brian and Collin, had become a lawyer and a nightclub owner,
respectively.  Brian Pelletier was working on cases for old people who had
undergone hip replacement surgery and now needed to sue their medical providers
for giving them artificial hips that had been recalled, Collin was battling cancer
while facing low customer turnout in a bad economy, and Spencer was waiting on
lights to flick on in the windows of a chop shop.  O, the paths we take.