The Joy of Killing by Harry MacLean Read Free Book Online

over in my mind and toss them in various bins, depending on the likelihood of their reality. I sometimes switch them around. The story of Judy Pauling ends up in the “very likely” bin most times, although I wouldn’t swear to each and every detail. Same with the story of my best friend screwing my wife. Now, Joseph was a different situation. Just because I hadn’t thought of him—the drowning—for all these years means nothing. We never returned to the lake after that summer. I hadn’t been back until today, and I might not even then have remembered Joseph had it not been for the odd look on the caretaker’s face. I know Joseph drowned; whether I saw his body in the woody tangle on the shore is another matter. In most instances, the truth really doesn’t matter. I would have split from my wife whether or not my friend fucked her. Joseph was a tall, scrawny kid, but not someone you would try to push around. I liked him, although we didn’t hang around a lot. I had a crush on his older sister, which didn’t help me in his eyes, although I never even held her hand. Sally. I had forgotten her, as well. She had black hair but the same green eyes as Joseph, her only sibling. I saw her afterward, at a small gathering at their house. She wouldn’t look at me.
    T HE TRUTH OF a few things does matter. But the images always seem to be in shards, never linked, never whole; like the remains of a shipwreck, bits and pieces of which wash ashore over time, as the ocean gives them up. Some might clear for a time, and you think that’s how it was, and then the next time it’s blurry around the edges, and the blurriness spreads until the scene crumbles and fades like a photographic image taken out of the fixer solution too soon. Or the scenes run awry, the images mix and blend, and never stand in a straight line, where you could say this is the way it happened, never where there is a beginning and an end. It’s nothing you can fix by attention, I’ve learned that. Nothing’s ever there completely at the same time, for you to study and arrange in proper order, like a jigsaw puzzle. If you concentrate on the gray fedora, on the words out of the detective’s mouth, or your mother’s stiff-legged stance, or you remark on the thick tension in the room, in an attempt to move the story forward to the next instant in time, you’re going to be disappointed. The first detective reached into his coat pocket and slowly lifted a dark object from it while keeping his eyes on me. It was a black wallet, and it looked familiar. It was thin and had worn edges. The detective held it out in front of me like a dead fish and asked if I’d ever seen it. I looked away.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    The detective waited for me to look back.
    â€œYou’re sure? You’ve never seen this before?” I took another look at it. It was my friend’s. On the back was the imprint of the rubber he carried in the slot behind the money.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    He knew I was lying; everyone in the room knew I was lying. Carefully, the detective laid the wallet on the glass coffee table.
    S O, YOU SEE the confusion: the look of aversion on Sally’s face, the stinking fish wallet on the glass table, my wife’s face as my friend was fucking her, the smell of the lake water at the gathering, as if to remind us Joseph had been in the lake overnight, even the crackling hiss of the door opening at the front of the train car.
    A dark form in the yellow light was moving down the aisle toward us, touching the top of each seat to steady himself. Maybe heading for the rear door, which was supposed to be locked, but which I knew from experience usually was not. Maybe it was the preppie I had seen on the platform. Blazer, rep tie, penny loafers. Perhaps he had spoken to the girl in the station; maybe he knew her; had done this with her before. I reached for the girl’s coat and pulled it