Everyday Psychokillers (23 page)

But when they returned, the hovel was corded off with crime tape, sirens spun and reflected in the low grassy river, and a sheriff stood in the doorway, and he held his hand on his rubbery hip and stood there as Drusilla had stood there the day before. You could see through the crook in the cop's elbow that she'd hung herself from the roof inside, and the baby hung next to her like a bundle of onions. It was the first death they'd seen that they hadn't caused, and Lucas and Ottis stood stunned. The sheriff said they'd taken Becky and the boy into juvenile care. So they wandered back into the brush, toward the train tracks, and slept there.

Next day Ottis was no good, he was just batty, paranoid, bumping into stuff, whacking his head on trees, waving a torch around in the daylight, and Lucas felt pissed, and lost, and annoyed. He'd have scalped Ottis if the man had stopped flailing around the landscape long enough to swipe him. They found an old barn and Ottis set it on fire and that fixed his mind on something for a while, and by the time the thing was a stinky smoldering pit Lucas knew what they had to do. Basically what it came down to was they had to rescue Becky and then get on with it.

So that's what they did. Threw rope up to her tower. Ottis held it still and Lucas, like a monkey, feet together and fists together shimmied up the rope and they lowered her down, bump, bump, her butt bouncing down the wall, clinging to her orange suitcase with both hands and both knees. “Get my brother,” she said at the bottom. “Get my brother. Get my brother,” until they stuffed a sock in her mouth and rescued her the rest of the way.

The next stretch of time was what they wanted it to be, really. They held up little grocery stores here and there as they moved along as a sort of shifting family unit, where sometimes it was Lucas feeling like a dad with two kids, and sometimes Lucas feeling like a husband with a dumb brother, and sometimes Lucas feeling like a man with two lovers. It was good, though, and for some time nights were peaceful, and he didn't even feel bored, and the water in the bottom of his brain was more like a bath than a sloshing puddle. They were fugitives, but it didn't feel like you'd think being fugitives would feel. It felt more like going where you please.

Toward summer, though, Ottis was wandering off more and Lucas really started feeling like Becky might be an actual human woman next to him. When the weather was clear they'd take a blanket into a field and make a little fire, cut up some food and cook it out there, eat it, sleep out there, and one of those nights Lucas found himself one time pointing at the stars and making shit up about them for her, pretending he knew constellations, pretending he was telling her a bedtime story. “That one's the one that's shaped like a wild pig,” he said. “And you can see there how it's after that snake. It'll grab that snake up and whip it around till the teeth fly out of it. And that's all those stars around it is, teeth.” Becky's eyes shone, and he felt like he'd made her eyes with his own hands.

Then she said, “I want to see my mom.”

“You know you can't,” Lucas said. “You know she's dead.”

“I want the house then.”

“That ain't a house. It's nothing. It's shit.”

“I bet it's mine,” she said, beginning to look ugly. “Let's go,” she said. Then she stood up, holding a corner of the blanket. “Let's go. Let's go,” she said and made a move to start walking. Lucas put a hand on her elbow and she turned around and hit him. Years later, when he was telling this part to his jailer he said he grabbed the cooking knife and struck her like a snake, and in his mind that's how he saw it, was the snake striking back at this wild pig. When he left, her limbs were strewn in the field, her trunk there like a lump, like a stump.

After this he and Ottis went off variously and their various endeavors became confused. It was during this time that, among other people, Lucas might have killed a runaway girl who was found naked except for orange socks, but he might have been killing someone else at that time. Sometimes he felt like he killed a girl with orange socks, and sometimes he felt like he might not have. By the end of his trial the girl's name was Orange Socks. He might have had her mixed up with a suitcase.

Around sometime after that it got confused with Ottis, too. They were around each other sometimes, and sometimes not, it was hard to remember, but it was also sort of fun for Lucas to act like he remembered and then like he lied and so on. Alone in his dark cell, Lucas felt sure he saw one bald lightbulb in the ceiling, and as he looked at it with his one good eye, sometimes the bulb seemed to tell him to speak, and so he'd speak.

Around sometime after Becky was when Ottis was probably swiping Adam Walsh from the mall and traveling with his head along the Indian River, nibbling on the edge of the wound he'd made.

Once, in the good days, the train carrying Ottis and Lucas passed an orange Volkswagen Bug going way too slow along a country road that ran along the tracks. They laughed at the driver as they rattled by. That slow guy in the dumb bubble car. They scooped dirt and straw from the traincar and threw handfuls at him, and shining intellectual Ted Bundy looked up from his dreaming for long enough to roll his eyes at the two grizzled old giggling men dangling their legs from the open door of the traincar. All over the continent, psychokillers are zigzagging, criss-crossing one another's paths, lugging bodies, heads, or limbs from place to place, or zooming gleefully from wherever they've last left some.

Composite Psychokiller

The rest of the part about CiCi and Ted, which you know, you know what had to happen, is that it went like this: I'm sitting in Ted's basically vacant living room with its idiot brown shag carpet crushed and left from two presidents ago, and there's one crummy outlet in the room, with the little TV plugged into it and its bent antennae with its wads of foil, that's in the room with me, the cord sneaking out its ass and into the wall. I'm part way across the room in one of the lawnchairs I pulled in from the balcony to sit in and watch the stupid TV. My butt is an inch from the floor. My neck hurts from looking down at the TV. Ted's not home. CiCi's not home.

I've parked my horn at school and run from the bus stop. I've run past the triplex, past the Catholic church, which looks like a miniature abstraction of a Spanish castle, and past the sprawling Methodist church, which looks like it's made from the sprung innards of seven pirate ships, and through the parking lot that the Methodist church shares with the little park. I've run past a kid throwing sand on the sparkling chrome slide and then there's the merry-go-round, the minimal playground version that has no animals whatsoever, just a piece of warped plywood painted red that's balanced on a rusting axis. I don't stop but I remember: there's a little kid, pretty much a baby, with pants pooched out so you can tell they're covering diapers. It's young enough that it's still androgynous. It can be anything. The baby's sitting on the merry-go-round, wearing crochet booties with white pompoms. It's sitting next to a pair of red sneakers, these two little vessels. Another kid, a girl, she's maybe five or six, is pushing at the dumpy merry-go-round with all her might. She's barefoot. They're her empty sneakers. She's holding the edge of the merry-go-round and shoving at it. It creaks a little, moves with a jolt and the baby teeters, but doesn't quite tip over, and then it sticks again, so the girl leans back and tries pulling to unstick it. Then she turns around and tries shoving it the other way. She's shifting around, trying hard, but nothing will move. I run past them. I run through the gathering of eucalyptus trees that bust through the earth like the half-skinned hands of zombie giants, the texture of gore without blood. Then I slip through a flapping corner of the chain-link fence that separates the park from Ted's apartment complex.

I forgot not to lose my breath so I stop and pant. I wonder about my hair. It feels bunchy. I'm sweating. I should not have run. I'm a mess.

But when I knock at Ted's door there's no answer. It's not locked, so I go in. I figure they're at the store, they're picking up dinner. CiCi is so constantly hungry. I'm worried, but only in a distant way.

I bring a lawn chair in. I stick it in the living room and watch the TV. I don't remember what was on the TV. Something. Something that's probably still on.

CiCi comes in, and I leap up from the chair like I was doing something wrong. She's storming. She's furious.

“Hey, sweetie,” she says to me, and storms on into the kitchen, where, as I mentioned, Ted's amateur bug collection is nailed to the wall, slowly accumulating layers of dust and grease. The butterfly's wings are ragged. The grasshopper has no wings. No single beetle has retained all its limbs. Any time you look, there's part of a bug, some unidentifiable fragment of a desiccated bug on the linoleum in there. Sometimes a whole pin falls out and the entire bug is there on the vast floor, a lost little planet impaled on its useless axis.

I stay standing on the carpet. I can hear her messing with the refrigerator. I turn off the TV but immediately go back to my position. I am afraid, somehow, that if I move, something will go terribly wrong.

CiCi comes to the threshold and leans there in the doorway with her canvas bag. She's eating a sandwich made of two flopping slices of bread and four slices of bologna, still stuck together and looking like a stiff tongue.

“Sweetie,” she says to me. “Angel. Honey.” She's shaking her head. “Baby, I'm gonna go. I fucking hate that guy.”

She puts the sandwich down on the counter on the other side of the wall. I can tell because her hand comes back empty. She finishes chewing. She walks over to me. There's no way I'm moving. I am certain I will die before she reaches me.

“It's not about you,” she says. “I mean, I love you.”

She hugs me. I can smell her. She kisses my head. I'm gasping.

She backs up and doesn't look at me, slings her canvas bag over her shoulder, and takes off, out the door.

Later, Ted comes home. He's really sad. For the next couple months I go by to see him after school, still, sometimes, when I don't go with my mother to where she works. He's always sad.

One time I go by and he's not home and the door to his apartment is locked. I go back to the triplex. My father is in Miami. My mother's asleep in the living room.

I think about waking her up to ask her, Do you know where Ted is? But I figure I basically know. He's walking along the beach. It's sunset, you know, the way it always is if you believe the postcards. There are rows and rows of cardboard boxes. People are living there, a whole community of people on up into the dunes, crouched in their boxes, pulling sandspurs from their feet. Ted's walking by, in silhouette, in a line with the bikini girls like bucket-headed flamingoes, in a line like a chain of daisies, like elephants trunk to tail but spindly like dolls, like animated mannequins, and he's this one odd link. Sometimes a bent lump of a figure emerges from a box and scurries up to him, and he sells it Quaaludes.

A psychokiller, I should make clear, is not a regular murderer. A murderer has a vendetta, a nice specific personal thing against his victim. You can think, oh, if this or that hadn't happened, if there wasn't that last straw or whatever. As a potential victim you can imagine that if you just hang out with decent people…

Also, he's not a mass murderer, because a mass murderer wants to go out with a bang. The psychokiller wants to survive. He wants to
live through
it again and again. Serial is a big part of it, the single that splits, that doubles and keeps doubling. He lives through again and again, wrecking and wreaking havoc. It feels cellular, biological, and only in addition to that is it diseased.

Also, he's a psychokiller because of psychology. Because people say, “It's his psychology,” which makes it sound scientific and therefore comprehensible, but also makes it entirely
his
, his personal little psychology, not mine. His abnormal psychology keeps him from being human. He's inhuman, is what people like to say. He wants to kill your psyche.

Of course, he is extremely human. He has a personal thing against
a lot
of people, against exactly what so many of them represent.

I think Ted was not a psychokiller because he was too aware of his own melancholy. I'm not sure how he felt about living through, how much he cared about that part. I don't think he saw himself enough as a victim to actually play out the perpetrator part. He was half-there, though. He was always
almost
a psychokiller.

There are a lot of them, a barrage of psychokillers. There are series of them, uncountable multitudes, masses, each with his own pristine and identified psychological structure. Herman Mudgett, for example, who changed his name to Holmes and built a one hundred room castle in Chicago. Holmes, king of his castle, of his home. Each room contained a mechanical torture device of his own invention. How could it not be a map of his mind? How tidy, how utterly conceivable. The pale bones of a psychology.

When you look into it, it's so playful, so
easy
. Dean Corll, the paint-sniffing Candy Man. George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. Edward Gein, the taxidermist, the guy who puts on skin like a costume, like an identity. His dining bowls made of skulls. His retarded assistant, Gus, the graverobber. How simplistic, how contained. Gacy the Clown, the Good Neighborly Democrat who performed at birthdays and stuffed dead boys under the floorboards at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. A ranch house, I think it was. Terrifically American.

Dahmer, who loved stomach sounds, gastric noises, imagine his ear to your body, imagine the unconscious biological mechanics of being alive. The guy who consumes what he views as both the opposite of himself and the epitome of desirable, valuable. The guy who consumes reflections of himself.

The one from that movie with the seven deadly sins. Or all those guys who only like blonds, or whores, or girls who remind them of Vietnam.