Everyday Psychokillers (8 page)

Heat accumulates. I can't say it enough. It might not immediately feel hot, but when it keeps on, you get so heavy with it, it's like wearing that many layers of clothing. It gets so it feels like you're encased, cocooned in heat, mummified. Several times a day I'd get overcome with sleepiness. It had to
do
something, I swear, all that heat, it had to
stunt
us somehow, all the effort it took to move through it, pushing through layers and layers, the sheer intensity of attempting to move through the world, of taking it in through pores so bent on seeping, your skin so obviously a permeable membrane, and too much two-way molecular traffic.

The skin on the horse's cannon bones hung in flaps from the blistering, in sheets like the bark of eucalyptus trees. The goopy disinfectant ointment that covered the wounds turned from yellow to red in the heat, dripping. Dirty sand clung to me. I was in such a daze, leading him in the sun that I almost forgot him and I walked under a low branch where he couldn't follow, so he balked and we had a little tangle. It hurt, but mostly I cried because I was so mad and frustrated and so strangely sleepy and I couldn't pay attention to anything. I kept pissing off my mom. I didn't know what to do, so she sent me to the pool to cool off, to get ahold of my mind.

So when Gwen told me about Adam it wasn't like Ted and the bugs. Gwen wanted to make it a really good reason that I couldn't go where I wanted to go. Like if my mother hadn't been so busy and so exhausted she'd have told me no because it was dangerous, and not because she was busy and exhausted.

When our skin was wrinkly and we still weren't cool, I followed Gwen to her camper to change into dry clothes. The whole thing tipped a tiny but measurable bit when we stepped on the corrugated foldout steps. Inside, Gwen lifted the vinyl bench seat in the dinette and got out a road map. We stood over the map, dripping. Her suit was white with giant orange blooms, the kind of suit that has a brassiere built into it, and underwear built in under a skirt-flap that hides the tops of your legs when you wear it. She showed me the Turnpike and Fort Pierce. It wasn't the same as Ted, who brought out the bugs, I'm pretty sure, so that I could watch him proceed.

The way Gwen used her voice and her hands, it was so tentative. She showed me as a sort of geography lesson, but a geography we were discovering together: here's where he was playing with toys at Sears, here's where they found his head in the canal. Four giant flies, two of them the kind with green heads, were flying in the tiny kitchen space. I slapped one when it landed on the plastic table and the table shook on its one bolted leg. “Good one,” Gwen said, still studying the map, trying to decide something about it.

I looked with her, and it was an amazing thing that map showed me, I remember: the dot on the map that meant us was smack on the beach. I had no idea. We must have been on the inland side of the black dot for me to have missed it. I knew kids went to the beach a lot, but I didn't know the beach was right there. I thought maybe other kids had a lot of time, like the whole family would pack up the car and a basket of ham sandwiches and spend a lot of time driving there. We'd been living in that town over a year and never been to a beach. Maps hung like window shades over the blackboards at school, but no one ever pulled them down.

Gwen set the newspaper on the little table, folded so the current article about Adam faced up, and compared the information it held to the map. She leaned over it like a detective, with that same look on her face, working to put incongruous pieces together. The paper said “spawned.” It said Adam had spawned an all-out manhunt, that they were looking for a psychopath who could strike again. Years later he spawned a TV movie and a TV series. He spawned a variety of investigations and a variety of laws and charities. Years later, in college, in my dark apartment, reading my biology textbook on the living room floor by the light of a candle lantern, I came to a section about marine animals that “broadcast spawn,” and in the mindflash it took read the phrase as
spawning broadcasts
, I thought of Adam, and then I skipped directly to a memory of health class at that middle school before or after they found Adam's head, I don't remember, the class that warned about pregnancy, when they said Yes! You will get pregnant the first time and Yes! You will get pregnant even if he, as they say, removes himself prematurely and Yes! If you sleep in a bed and sperm is anywhere on the bed you have to know that sperm will live on a sheet for forty-eight hours and sniff you out and wiggle up you while you're sleeping. After which Mrs. Brodie—whom I can see now was
so
nervous in front of a chalkboard when she liked to be standing at the sidelines of the blacktop track, who couldn't bring herself to teach the dance unit and had two girls from the high school come over for extra credit to do it while she sat with her whistle in the bleachers and listened, with all of us, to incessant repetitions of “Let's Go to the Hop,”—set the textbook spine bent on the desk and said with a put-on-wry-frankness, “You have all gotten your periods, right? Raise your hand if you still never got your period. Good, then. We'll skip that. We'll move on to psychology.”

There's a reason, I thought, studying on my floor in college, in the anonymous cavelike dome of space created by the candlelight, something to do with being a little kid in the seventies, I thought, that while my grandmother's been dead for years and years and I rarely think of her, let alone anything particular about her, I remember every pattern of wallpaper in her ridiculous apartment. No wonder, I thought, remembering, no wonder there's this kind of serial perception. I remember the overlapping golden splotches like sunspots, the interlocking metallic squares of glued-on sand, the tiny farm animals suspended in red-and-blue plaid, and I remember the pattern in her green lace shower curtain, the shapes that let the opalescent liner show through in cut-outs that looked like miniature hamburgers, and the bedspread in her bedroom with millions of pointy white flowers, and the blanket I slept under when I stayed there, with its scattering of yellow stars on vacant white fuzz.

No one else could have done it, they say in the article. If we're dealing with a criminal, they say, someone with a criminal mind, he might have
shot
the boy or something. And I say
him
, they say, because dismemberment is not something females are noted for. So what we're dealing with is a psychopath, they say. Or else he wouldn't mutilate him. What we're looking for is something that looks like a pattern.

That's what I think of Adam Walsh.

I did, I adored Gwen, and I believe that brief as our friendship was she adored me, too. For a few weeks out of the few months my mother worked at Sandpiper, I'd chatter about how I wanted to learn how to play a piano. Really I was talking about a friend from school, a girl I liked a lot who played the piano and was always saying she'd be a concert pianist, and I liked how she could say that word “pianist” and not feel foolish when she said it.

At the end of the summer, my mother quit that job for one at a stable that seemed better. Gwen visited the triplex a couple times and one time she brought a present for me: a plug-in, three-octave Casio organ. Still, she remained an aristocrat to me. Even with the bathing suit, which I managed to imagine was like what the Queen of England must wear, for modesty, when bathing, even with the Casio and its bossanova rhythm button, it was meant to lead me to a Steinway on a stage. What funny circus songs it made. What a tinny, broadcast version of sound. I can't see Gwen born in a broken East End flat or what have you. I see her only in her castle, a round and rosy princess clever enough to jump and land on a spongy green pillow of a hill, and to tumble along with her teacups to the stable, to pack up her pony and go.

What's left of the people who move through your life and make you who you are? There's no knowing them, especially when you are a child, and you follow your folks, and you're tied to their backsides. You know the one where the mommy says to the little kid: you can go anywhere you want, just don't cross the street. Anywhere I want! thinks the kid. Years and years and around and around the block she goes.

Imagine, it's sunset over Gwen's box on the beach. She's watching rosy waves lap the cardboard. Behind the box, behind her back, between the dunes and the sun there are giant blond girls wearing sunglasses made of plastic mirror and bikinis that glow. Their skin is dark: there's no telling what color it is in the distorting light. They're sparkling with the residue of sand. Behind the box, legs with minds like flamingos are on parade. They're in silhouette like cutouts, like paper-chain dolls. Like they aren't real. But worse, they're as good as real.

It turns out, right at that same time, back before it turned out he was a racist homophobic homosexual cannibal serial killer, back before that, when he was only collecting mannequins, Jeffrey Dahmer lived on Miami Beach. He was living there while I was talking with Gwen in the four-foot pool and the camper dinette. The beach belonged to the city, and I don't know if any of the kids went there except perhaps the ones who ran away to sell Quaaludes, who said, “I'm going to ditch this town and go to Miami Beach to sell Quaaludes,” and when they never showed up back at school, I supposed that's where they were. We were the suburb of a suburb of a city minor to that city, a suburb so malformed it was more like a nub than a limb, the Siamese twin of the real suburb that was little more than a tumor off a child's shoulder. Miami hung like a mirage outside my vision and informed everything. People came from there, beaten by it, and went back when they were beaten more. I don't know how long Dahmer lived there. I don't know if he'd been, say, one box away from Gwen. I don't know if what they mean by Jeffrey Dahmer lived on Miami Beach means on the beach like in a box like Gwen, or in a room, an apartment, or anything.

It used to be almost every night, and this was as a little, little girl, not a wracked pubescent thing worried about shopping centers, but little and sugar-faced, I'd fall asleep to my made-up stories about someone coming in the bedroom window and taking me away. Sometimes I let the half-dream turn the wrong way out the window and I'd be bound, legs up like a bug in the checkered backseat of my father's Maverick, but only the masked intruder was driving. It could get dark, if I let it, with knives and arrows.

But I could make it evolve, if I let my mind move in just the right way, into a long dancing thing where the long dark hands dropped me through canopies of leaves and into a dewy forest, with a mossy stone cottage and sixteen girls like me in their cotton nightgowns. We played around the cottage and we had a camp-fire. Long flowery vines trailed behind us that might have been our hair, because we might have been
becoming
the woods. Behind each of us, in the past, in a kind of comforting back-room place in each girl's mind, a gauzy white curtain billowed over the bed where long dark arms had stretched and lifted us like so much air, each girl from each human family. The idea of parents lay in shadows behind the curtains, like a warmth in our stomachs hours after a meal of forest stew, but there were no real parents, and when we looked at one another we knew it was good to let them stay far away, wherever they were.

One time I did, I asked my mother, “Will someone kidnap me?”

She was brushing a horse, or wrapping a leg, or fluffing bedding in a stall. She said don't worry, silly, no one will. She said people want ransom and we don't have that kind of money. Which of course made me want it even more. To be special enough to be stolen anyway.

Lifted like a teacup. Through the night and the clouds, through canopies of leaves, to the mossy clearing. I could run around the cottage with the girls, and we were strung together with our chain-linked flowers, you know how you can take one stem and thread it through a split in the stem of the next. Or I could simply let go of my place on the chain, slip inside the tidy ivy-covered cottage into a little wooden room, and sit by the little window on a little wooden chair, with my chin on my hands on the sill, watching the girls in their nightgowns, a flighty parade of winging moths and fireflies traipsing around and around the cottage as I watched.

 

 

The horses run around and around the track. At the track, the highest compliment you can pay a horse is to say it's a machine. That horse is a real machine, you'd say.

I mentioned that man from Indianapolis who drained the Everglades, how he loved racing cars. There's a breed of psychokiller that drains its victims of blood, a whole genre. I mean not just vampires, but people who like to let all the blood out even if they're not going to do anything with it when they're done. It's hard to tell whether it's about breaking something open or about letting something out. There's also a breed of psychokiller that likes how bodies are like machines. The horses run around and around the track until they break down; you break them as babies, and then they go until they break down. That's how they say it, breaking.

There's a machine called a hotwalker. There's also a job called a hotwalker. It's the name for the person who walks the horse after he's exercised. The hotwalker cools the horse down. The machine called a hotwalker is a post with arms that come out of it. There's a motor in the post. You attach a horse to an arm. The hotwalker rotates and the horse walks along in a circle. If you attach a horse to each arm, it looks like a merry-go-round. When they're not running, they're in stalls or in the grid of paddocks.

Either way, at the track or at the farm, the horse is in a box, or moving in circles, one or the other, all life long.

My Brother Is a Sailor

Fresh blacktop wound among the gray-blue buildings where Chris lived. On the highway, on the way to her house or from her house to church or back to mine, we'd see packs of vultures circling the carcasses of raccoons the size of hounds. Hopping, flapping, scavenging, red-headed vultures. They'd put their whole featherless heads inside the animal's body and when they pulled out again you couldn't tell if the red was just the bird's own featherless skin, or if it was the animal's insides. Sometimes, on the highway, people got so grossed out they'd run over the birds with their cars. Maybe they aimed just to chase the birds away, but vultures are practically deaf and practically blind. They hunt by smell. When vultures made the endangered species list, cars were named a main source of their trouble. Sometimes a car really swerved to get one, rode right along the shoulder and then zoomed away, hit and run. There's all kinds of roadkill on the highway, alligators, even, and long black snakes like scraps of blown-out tires. Vultures' wings are regal, their faces glossy and raw. It's no accident that Isis takes the shape of a vulture.