Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Read online

  “She wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t?”

  “My sister … wouldn’t carry out her end of the deal. Ethel and I had done it right there with everybody watching. It was just mechanical, you know? No … ejaculation or anything. So we made my sister leave the hut and she went and told Ethel’s folks the whole story. The whole thing came down on my back. Ethel’s family, my own family … I got the shit beat out of me with a willow switch, those damn things cut like wire … and my old man set fire to the brushhouse and burnt up my new football …

  “Was that the only time she told on you?”

  “Well—three years later. This girl came to visit her. Our folks were gone … somewhere. The girls went swimming and I hid in Debra’s closet. When they came into the room to change out of their wet suits I burst out of the closet and threw myself on this other girl …”

  “Raped her?”

  “I didn’t ask permission.”

  “Did you use force?”

  “I pushed her down on the bed and pried her legs apart, but after that there was no problem.”

  “Your sister didn’t do anything?”

  “To stop me? I think maybe she pulled on my shoulders a couple times, I don’t remember too well. She did threaten to tell if I didn’t quit. And I didn’t quit.”

  “And this time there was ejaculation?”

  “I’m not sure about that. But I had an orgasm.”

  “And did your sister tell?”

  “I don’t think so. At least I don’t remember any … retribution. I think I talked her out of it, but I’m not too clear on that part.”

  “And the girl you raped, did you have any more to do with her?”

  “No. I never did, now that I think about it. Actually she died a month or so later.”

  “Died? How?”

  “Drowned.”

  “What were the circumstances? Would you like a glass of water? You seem to be sweating a lot. Maybe you’d like to go on to something else. We can get back to this later …”

  He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve. “No, I was just trying to remember the … uh …”

  Circumstances, yes. The pond always filled up during the rains and then seeped out during dry spells. Silt and dried leaves collected on the bottom and over the years matted into bluish evil-smelling gray-blue muck. Snapping turtles loved it, that was their environment. Poke them with a dry stick and they chomped it right off. Chomp off a finger too, or whatever else might be hanging down in the water. Which was the reason Danny never went swimming here. He got just as wet, though, sweating in that stuffy closet until they came padding into the room naked. He jumped out and yelled ROOOOWWWFFFF! and the girls went rigid with shock. He didn’t intend to rape her but the sight of her downy little pubic tuft sent his mind into a spin. Before he knew it he was looking down at her head lying on the rumpled covers, noticing the droplets of sweat glistening in the fuzz of her upper lip. Her front teeth stuck out and impressed two shiny dents into her lower lip, her thick lashes looked like they were covered with pollen, the white skin around her eyes was dusted with freckles. She had blue-green eyes and thick dark-red hair, and would probably grow up to be a beautiful woman. Trouble was he didn’t want anything to do with her afterward. She wanted it, though. Debra told him about it a week later, he was asleep when she came in, pulled up the sheet and slid in beside him. “Colleen wants to come home and stay all night with me. (Rubbing his stomach.) What do you think? You want her?” “Nahh.” “She says she’ll tell if you don’t. So what do you think, Danny?” Debra had shifted the emphasis as her hand circled lower. “Do you want HER, Danny?”

  He let out his breath in a long sigh. “Let’s go on to something else.”

  “All right. Was Christina anything like your sister?”

  “Not physically. Temperamentally, maybe.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They had the same hangups. Christina had gone through a marriage ceremony with some guy and this bothered her. At least she said it did, thought she didn’t want the house and she didn’t want the car and didn’t want him, so it was just fear of cutting loose as far as I could see. When we tripped together she kept reading me off the contents of her brain and asking, ‘Is that normal?’ I liked turning on with her; it was like sinking into a warm mist, endless billows of cotton candy, and late in the high, about the seventh or eighth hour, she managed to turn everything into golden honey; everything that moved left bubble tracks in space. Always warm. Alone, I get a complete neutrality of temperature. The first time she went into my head she said never again, all those tiny turning wheels, but she came in again, many times; we fucked on the mirror’s surface and made it spin; she’d wear my shell and I’d wear hers, then we’d get wiped out together and there’d just be the One sitting up in the tower watching this beautiful scene below.”

  “Why did she leave, finally?”

  “Well … to get this divorce. At least that’s what she said. The last I saw she was walking off into the woods … she was gonna hitch-hike to town and catch a bus. I never got a card. I figure she took a job to pay her lawyers and got lost somewhere in the big machine.”

  “Do you have any regrets about losing her?”

  “No. I told you, nothing bothers me.”

  “What did you do after she left?”

  “Now you’re going to find out that it did bother me. Okay, I scored a half-kilo of Nigerian weed and spent the next month stoned out of my skull. Thinking of Hesse’s Journey to the East and the cat who thought all the others had lost the way, only to discover at the end that he had strayed. Waking up in the morning and the woods turning gold and brown and red and acid-purple, and there I was in an angry snart, getting meaner by the day. I tried to work it off. Built approaches to the bridge. Built a rock and sand garden, bought an old truck for seventy-five dollars to haul in the material. And each evening at sunset I lit the pipe and blew my troubles away. And the days were getting short, so each day the pipe came out sooner. Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and—surprise! Some grass left in the pipe from the night before. Meanwhile I was getting tangled up in my possessions, the bridge, the lagoon, the cabin, which I had enlarged to a two-room and added a stone fireplace. And a lean-to in which I stored my tools. And a dog, for Christ’s sake. A goddam cockleburr of a stray yellow dog that I couldn’t shake loose without killing and finally decided well if he’s content to live on the leavings of a vegetarian I won’t stand in his way. He couldn’t understand the vegetarian bit, used to kill rabbits and squirrels and drag them up to my door then I’d fling them off into the ravine until finally he quit offering me first bite. Used to leave them at the edge of the clearing where they’d ripen until my nose found them. The loyal sonuvabitch. I preferred live squirrels and rabbits, but he had a dogged nature. I carried him off in the truck and he found his way back in two days. I carried him further and it took three weeks. I’d like to say that my heart filled with warmth when I saw him at the door, gaunt and slat-ribbed, but my mind went ahead and I saw the same scene transpiring again. Still, I’d had to kill a dog when I was a kid, a brindle sheep-killer, and I couldn’t go through that scene again. So the dog stayed. A man and his dog. Holy shit. The dog had me. My possessions had me. My books had caused me to build a bookcase for them, and my Zen garden had caused me to acquire a truck—or had the truck acquired me? Anyway this piece of paper linked us in a common bond of ownership nnd I got a metal filing case to keep the title in. The record player required electricity, so there was the monthly tab from Union Electric and the meter reader with his platitudes—and in order to avoid driving twenty miles to pay the bill, I found it desirable to pay by check, which involved banks, checkbooks, stubs, monthly statements, notices of overdraft. Charges, countercharges, numbers, counting … In two years I’d descended from a clean-eyed noble savage to a harried civilized man. Last winter I sank even lower. I bought a quadriphonie sound system. I wore insulated boots in the snow, where before I’d walked in sandals. Ins
ulated underwear. A bathroom with sunken tub, tiles. I installed a gas heater which stank up the cabin with its fossil-fuel smell. I kept the fireplace for a visual turn-on. By February I’d gotten tired of the bleak forest, so I went to Mexico. Vera Cruz, and a tourist girl who was … strange. I could not relate to her, although my body did. She wanted the key to serenity and I told her, lose yourself, but she wanted to enjoy life, this object-thing that she possessed …”

  “Why do you stop?”

  “Something’s happened to my memory. Jo-Anne … I think that was her name. I also recall the name of our hotel in Vera Cruz, the Bolivar. In the square beside the Parochia, I saw her with a group listening to the mariachis—powder-blue skirt and hips swaying to the music, and myself riding a cocktail of peyote and grass, and I went up behind her and lay my hand on one of those hips and asked in a phony Mexican accent, You wish a guide, senorita? She turned and seeing my brown hair and eyes said no, then did the double-take. I asked, ‘Are you with anyone?’ She glanced toward a short stocky soft-looking man and said no. And then we walked along the breakwater—”

  “Lose it again?”

  “God, yes! We must have been together for weeks, but it’s gone now. I remember a scene in a grass hut, no it was adobe with a thatched roof somewhere down the coast, and we were smoking that giggly stuff I got at the bar in Vera Cruz; already rolled and cleaned and selling for a peso a joint. Did that come before her acid trip or afterward? All sequence is destroyed. Did I do it myself, or was it the medicine, the shock treatments, or some other damn thing?”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Where are you now, Jo-Anne? She doesn’t answer.”

  “What do you remember about her?”

  “I remember the smell of her flesh, kind of a mingling of milk and butterscotch and sweat. And the chipi-chipi rain outside, endlessly dripping, and the smell of wet clothing and wet hair, hers, because she liked to walk in the rain …”

  “Nothing else?”

  “A flavor of sadness, of nevermore, all of which is unaccountable in my memory. I don’t know how it ended. Sadly perhaps, or maybe it simply ended. I remember standing at the airport in Vera Cruz, and we were both looking at the jungle and saying goodbye to it, so I guess we left on the same plane.”

  “Were you alone when you got back?”

  “Well yes. Dog was there, also beer cans, rubbers and scotch bottles, evidence that my brother-in-law had taken advantage of my absence, though I had told nobody I was going. He came to see me two weeks later. He’d put the home place up for sale and had a buyer and needed my signature on the title since it had been left equally to my sister and me. The place where I grew up. I said no, I didn’t need any money. He did, needed it bad. He always needed money. None of this was particularly real to me then. I’d come back with a kilo of the Vera Cruz grass, and had been turning on every night and sometimes during the day. The very idea of selling land, or even owning it, seemed ridiculous. He got emotional as I recall, but I didn’t really believe anybody could take money seriously. I pushed aside my dream-curtain to point out that the land earned me sufficient money to live on, and if I had the cash it would all go in one huge round-the-world blast, or else I’d just have to reinvest it in something. But even the talk of money made me chuckle softly to myself and left him looking a bit queer at me…. My sister came later, a very unsubtle chick, and she tried to use psychology on me, but the whole thing floated up in the air and had nothing at all to do with me. I was meditating on sound at the time. In the end she said, ‘You’re going to get in trouble, you know. People are talking about you.’ ‘They talk about everybody,’ I said. ‘They’ve got nothing else to do but fuck up the sweet and gentle vibrations with coarse human speech,’ I said, ‘so why not just shut up and listen.’ ‘Listen to what?’ she asked. To the vibrations.’ I described them to her, the two-minute cycle, the five-second cycle, and the little fibrillation within that, all the multiple variations of the anahat nadam. She left after sitting an hour trying to listen, and I was vaguely aware that she was crying because after all, she couldn’t hear anything, so there must be nothing to hear. Spring. I scattered my seeds in the nearby countryside, along the river and railroad tracks … unfortunately I also planted a few down the ravine, so I could keep track of their maturation and know when to go out and make the harvest. Also grew vegetables—lettuce, radishes, corn, beans, peas, et cetera down the ravine from the dam, got a cow for the milk, constructed a front porch on the house and carved Polynesian pillars …”

  “Why do you stop?”

  “End of the line. In May the dog died. I put up a stone and chiseled an obit. Then I put the date, May nineteen. You’ll see the same date on the sheriff’s report, because that’s the day I got busted, so if you need any more you can get it from the official records.”

  “I feel we’re beginning to get somewhere.”

  “Everytime I start sweating we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Just one more thing. I understand you got violent when the sheriff took you into custody. What was your reason for that?”

  “My reason?”

  “Yes. What was your emotional state?”

  “What was my emotional state when I got popped? Dear, they locked my hands in bracelets and threw me into a cage of steel. I felt like some huge glop of protoplasm had crawled on me and DIED. I couldn’t talk to the blob because it couldn’t see, it couldn’t feel, it couldn’t bleed. Because it’s dead, man, dead, dead, DEAD!”

  “But how did you feel? You must have known, logically, that you couldn’t defeat three armed men. What was your motive?”

  “I didn’t have one. I was set aside. The beast took over.”

  “Was it the first time?”

  “Well I dunno actually. I’d have to think.”

  “Will you do that? I’ll leave the recorder in the staff room for you.”

  He watched her rise and start sliding papers into his folder. He felt sorry the interview was over. “You just want cases where I stepped out and left it to George?”

  She gave him a long, upward-slanting look. “George?”

  “I was thinking of Heirens. He used to slide out and let George do it. Whatever evil business had to be done.”

  “Evil? Had to be done?”

  He felt an odd, light flutter in his stomach. “I mean in Heiren’s case it was slicing up little girls. I never felt that particular compulsion but I’ve had some beauties. You want those?”

  “Just the ones which compelled you to act. Okay?” She slipped the folder under her arm and smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

  Four

  In the daytime the closed wards are quiet. At night the silence deepens to a congealed stillness. Spotlights shine through the honeysuckle hedge which hides the chain-link fence. Silver trapezoids hang still, unmoving. Day connects to night, and night connects to day, like dying elephants marching in a circle, pulverizing time into dust. And Daniel Bollinger, patient, white, male, age 27, stands at the window and tries to grasp some part of this endless circle, to fix his mind-body in time and space …

  Evil, evil, how do we define Evil? I built an altar on the old tree stump down behind the barn, devoted to the worship of truth and beauty. Debra cut the throat of her white rabbit and stained the altar with blood. If Abraham was good when he prepared his son for sacrifice, then where is Evil?

  ….What do we do with it now? he asked.

  Eat it, she said. She touched her finger to the blood which matted the fur of its neck, touched it to her tongue. Her arched lips wrinkled. Pfagh, she said, spitting.

  Danny looked at her, then at the rabbit. Wasted, he said, then picked it up and threw it in the ditch, watched it bounce, flop, tumble loosely down the bank, come to rest at the bottom. He envied the way it flopped, not caring. He slid down the bank and poked it with a stick. It didn’t care. Dead was not caring.

  A breeze came through the barred window and struck his face, warm and fragrant. Something is happening, somewher
e. Somebody is screaming, somebody is dying, their agony is carried on the night wind, the invisible wind that blows through the hospital, the dark wind that tells you the soul-snatchers are working late. Killer rays whip unseen across the ground, secret fears bubble to the surface, swell into pistules which burst and spray and infect the Un-diseased. And I, which am I, standing here in thoughts of death?

  Death was part of life on the farm.

  His nose led him to the spot. The sheep lay on its back, throat torn open, flies carpeting the nose and mouth. It was beginning to bloat, and Ole Brindle had already torn open its belly and dragged out the intestines. Danny picked up a stick and started beating the dog, while his throat burned and tears stung his eyes. God damn you! You fucking bastard!

  Bury it, said Debra, so Dad won’t know.

  Squawking sound down at the chicken house, flutter of white wings sailing up into the top of the box-elder tree. Then a loud squaawk! squaawk! as Ole Brindle trotted out with a pullet in his jaws.

  Dad stood on the porch, wiping chicken fat off his chin, his Sunday dinner shattered by the commotion. He turned, his eyes cold: “Get the rifle, Danny.” Eyes misted, Danny walked across the cracked linoleum. The housekeeper’s eyes were full of tears, Debra’s merely watchful. He climbed on a chair and took the rifle down from the top of the china cupboard, remembered shells, took the shells out of the drawer.

  Dad opened the bolt, snick-snick, crammed in the little brass cartridges, closed the bolt, flicked it on safety, handed the gun to Danny. “He’s your dog.”

  He walked down the path, the gravel hard under his bare feet, rifle heavy in his hand. Out behind the chicken house, Ole Brindle snuffled, snorted, stretched out flat with the chicken under his front paws. He looked up and yawned, teeth stained red, downy fluff of feathers around his mouth. Dan pulled back the hammer and sighted down the octagon barrel. He brought the front sight up into the notch, centered it in the middle of the curly forehead. The dog got up and ran forward, licked his hand. Danny slapped his head and said, “Down, down!” The dog cocked his head, lay down with his long jaw resting on his paws, looking at Dan with a quizzical expression. “You dirty bastard,” he said, trying to work up his rage. “You chicken-killer.” he growled, remembering how Helen had caught a young rooster that morning—threw the bright yellow grains on the ground, grabbed the rooster by his feet and swung him around, once, lay him flat on the ground and stepped on his head—then flung the headless corpse, watched it bounce, flop, spraying blood all over the woodpile. Danny had looked at the head and watched the eyes, blink … blink.