The Joy of Killing by Harry MacLean Read Free Book Online Page A

up over her shoulders and then up over her head. I peered into the dim orange light. The train rocked to the right, and the face in the aisle picked up a glimmer. It was the woman a few rows behind us, with the crying baby. She couldn’t care less about what was going on here. Her eyes passed right over us.
    â€œAll clear,” I murmured, letting my hand drift down to the girl’s hip.
    I GLANCE OUT the oval window and consider the time. The sky seems to be blackening. I close my eyes. Images of violence slip through the loose weave at strange times, like this. After my wedding, I walked my bride from the steps of the church to the waitingChevy, being driven by who else but my best friend, the very one whose wallet the lead detective had so forlornly lay on the glass table in front of me, the very one who would later fuck the bride. As he came around the back to open the door, I pictured myself slipping a gleaming ice pick from the inside of my tuxedo jacket and thrusting it smoothly into my bride’s back, between her ribs, and then pulling it out so quickly no one could tell. A whuff of air escapes her as she lowers her head, and I realize I’d hit a lung. She glances around, as if a bee had stung her, and her body hesitates a second, and I smile back. Little beads of blood finally begin appearing, one by one, through the tiny hole in the taffeta. It’s for that image—the bright crimson on the pure white—that I’ve done it. It’s not a desire to inflict pain, or to punish or humiliate, or even to injure or kill; it was simply a matter of curiosity. The feeling as you pulled the pick out, and you would know from the sight of it that life was irrevocably altered, and you couldn’t go back to the second before you shot your arm out, when all was light and future and happiness—I wanted to know what that moment felt like. To be free of all responsibility for the rest of my life, to be able to watch it play out like a film, to not give a shit. How can you truly know life without taking one?
    So, this murderer comes peeping in on me at moments where I’m blinded by the whiteness of my bride’s wedding dress, or Shelley Duvall’s smooth neck, and leaves behind an image of a crimson river streaming through the snowy whiteness. There’s little to be done about it. In the backseat of the Chevy, my bride turns to me for a kiss, and I oblige.
    One time I came a little closer than usual to living out the fantasy. Several years after the wedding, on a vacation, we stayed in a friend’s guest cottage in a fishing village on the Maine coast. There were two single beds, one on either side of the room, and the second night, after we’d drunk two bottles of wine, we separated to the individual beds. Laying there, alone in the single bed, I imagined slipping from bed, walking quietly into the kitchen, and picking up the long thin knife I’d used to filet the salmon. I imagined running my finger down the blade, raising a drop of blood, before walking over to where she lay. The urge became so strong as I lay there, listening to her breathe, that I had to mentally paralyze my legs and arms so I couldn’t get out of bed and walk to the counter where the knife lay. I felt no hostility toward her; I wasn’t angry at her—this was at least five years before the “betrayal.” All I really wanted was to experience the shock on her face when she realized what was happening, when she felt the knife release and the blood stream between her breasts and down her stomach, the moment she saw my eyes and every dream of life vanished from her head.
    I LEAN FORWARD in my chair. The typewriter seems a forbidding object—cold metal skin, worn gold letters, an array of knobs and levers, a ribbon soaked in ink—for tasks and times such as this. Yet, we are not alone, I know that. The winged creatures creasing the yellow-orange moon, the lingering spirits of the