One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

love, in forthright, honest, inter-selfish pleasure, sex becomes a familiar joy which can be approached in any mood, and thus becomes not only more important—in that it is an affirmation—but also less important because it becomes such a part of life it is not any more or any less serious than any other part. When bodies are not used in this honest way, there is an accumulated pressure of anxiety which elevates sex to a position of false importance, like a starving man obsessed with visions of food. Such trivia as the careful timing of mutual orgasm becomes a ponderously serious thing, whereas alltrue lovers know that the times of love are like an endless shelf of books. Some endings are happier than others, but all the pleasure is mostly in the reading, in how each story starts, and how it moves, and how the chapters fit together, and what little adventures the people have before the book finally ends. Each is a journey, and each is a story, and if one ending is a little less apt than usual, the next one will very probably be better, and every so often you will find a masterpiece. The anxious ones seem to feel they have in their hands the very last book on the shelf. They chant the words in a dead monotone, lose the thread of the story, plow joylessly through all the pages thinking only of how it will end.
    I could put my hand on my schoolteacher and have her say, “Why sure!” or, “More beans or more franks?” or, “Go get your own can of beer.” She could bend down and kiss the nape of my neck and I would either get up and go with her on a walk, or go get more wood for the fire, or turn and pull her down. The anxious never understand what is wanted. The lovers always do.
    By the time we packed and started driving back down through the hills, I knew I had a prize more rare than I could have ever guessed, and marveled at my luck. The last bachelor suspicion had been leached out of my mind. I knew I had a woman who would last me all my life. We sang as we went down the winding roads. Neither of us can carry a tune. There is no sadness in the ending of a good honeymoon, but I understand there aren’t too many good ones. We knew ours had been good. There should be two classifications of couples. Married and really married.
    The only cloud on my horizon was so small I had to look close to see it. Her half-brother had taken time off from his summer job with a road builder in a neighboring state to come and give the bride away. It was the first time I had met him. I hadn’t liked the look of him, or his manner.
    But for Meg’s sake, I had to say I thought he was fine.
    Any professional lawman will tell you there is no such thing as a criminal countenance. There are murderers who look like earnest, dedicated young priests. There are simian professors, rodent-like bankers and Neanderthal ministers.
    But if you keep pressing the professional police officer he will often admit being conscious of a kind of almost imperceptible strangeness about a man with the innate capacityfor lawless violence. It is idiotic to use a word like psychopath. That is a wastebasket word, a receptacle for all those people in whom we detect a kind of strangeness with which we can make no valid contact.
    The police officer sees no specific clue. He suddenly has a hunch. The hunch is the result of an amalgam of many small impressions, any one of which would be meaningless taken by itself. For example, when a man is husky and has a lot of vitality, and dresses with great care and expense, and seems to have no strong opinions about any abstract thing, such as politics, and avoids anything that will require persistent effort, and is always enthusiastic about the next moment, but ignores next week, and hates to be alone, and has considerable surface charm and attractiveness, and is impulsive and unreliable, and likes to lead an active, eventful life, likes to exaggerate and dramatize, and lie about money, and make promises he forgets to keep, and has