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

Augusts of my youth, whatever thing is rattling around down below. Perhaps Joseph’s father has come back to force his son’s name onto mylips, his image into my eyes. What could I say? Sally, I would like to know about, but to ask about her would be to ignore Joseph, to point a finger at the hole where he should have been. She finally looked at me the afternoon of the wake, I remember. Her eyes green and cold as the lake water. We left the lake house the night of the gathering, although it was only the beginning of the second week of August.
    I scan the words on the page on the table to the right of the typewriter. It seems like the word “wallet” should have two “t”s, to give it a bit more snap, and I decide I will spell it that way from now on. I remember working to figure out what the thing meant, lying there like that. How the detectives got a hold of it, what they were doing with it here.
    â€œIt belongs to your friend David,” the detective croaked, leaning a few degrees forward, as if to intimidate me.
    The crease in his cheek, running from his left ear over his jawbone, was clearly a scar. What had confused me was how it seemed to hide in a fold. He caught me staring at it; the scar was like a prop, I thought; he uses it to distract people, to gain an advantage. I stubbed out the Lucky in the glass ashtray, glanced at the red and black bull’s-eye on the flattened pack on the table. Three or four left. I felt myself wrap up, sink inside, deeper, leaving only enough behind to nod and murmur. I could hang out in this numb space for a long time, and there was nothing my mother or the cops could do about it. A few months earlier my mother had become so disturbed over my behavior that she had taken me to a psychologist in Booneville. I saw him four or five times, and he ran a large taperecorder on his desk as I told him stories about what a tough guy I was at school. Somebody stole a cigarette from my locker, and I beat him up. Or all the things I had done with girls. I figured he knew I was bullshitting him, but it gave him something to report to my mother. Your youngest son lives in a fantasy world. He has difficulty telling the difference between what he dreams up and what’s real. I denied having imaginary friends, but I almost had him convinced that Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger had stayed at my house over last Thanksgiving. Convinced enough that he asked my mother about it after the session.
    I STAND UP , and the chair screeches back. The sound zips up my back, as if it were somehow related to the bats winging across the face of the moon or the rattling, scraping noises struggling up from below. A wind has come up; the jagged oak leaves are trembling; the branches are rising and falling, dancing. For a moment the moon seems almost hidden in the stars. I take a step toward the door. The old boards underfoot creak.
    Willie Benson. All those years I hadn’t heard that name. And now, standing here in the small space of my little warren, the name simply materializes, with no fanfare, as if it really wasn’t strange at all. Maybe I could have told you “Willie” if you’d asked. Maybe. But never the last name. The detective had said it, and now that I think about it I remember reading a newspaper article that the guy had gone to jail. So I had known it at one time. David told me Willie could get us girls. Even at twelve, we talked constantly about girls and sex. We listened slack-jawed as one of David’s friendstold us in detail about how he fucked his sister. We hung around a small engine-repair shop run by a good-looking middle-aged guy who smoked a pipe and delivered mail. He told us about women he screwed on his route. We followed him one Saturday morning. Halfway through his route, he walked up the steps to a small brick duplex, leather mailbag over his shoulder, and was greeted at the top by a young housewife wearing a yellow see-through skirt and a