Everyday Psychokillers (11 page)

I took the bus there after school and tried to do my homework in the tackroom. It was more or less private in there, if dim, and I thought of Gwen sometimes. Joe liked to post himself outside the tackroom on the cement breezeway, and if anything went on with him and Scott, I could hear it. I could see them in flashes through the spaces between the rough planks in the door. Joe was big, lumbering, dirty, stubbly, with black greasy hair and mean fumbly hands, fat, dripping, just as you'd expect. Outside the tackroom, he turned a manure tub over a cinderblock and sat on it, smoking cigars, scratching his tits, laughing and farting. Shoo, shoo, boy. Shovel that shit. Sometimes one of the old guys who hung around the barn would pull up a bucket and sit with Joe and they'd cackle together. Sometimes more of them pulled up buckets and there'd be three or four old men there, all older than Joe and skinny, in a circle of buckets, smoking and drinking beers, or spitting tobacco. A gaggle of vultures on desiccated cypress, like those gabbing Disney crows from old cartoons, laughing and mean.

Sometimes it is comforting to know that, given how many years have passed, even though Joe might still be alive somewhere, all those old men must be dead.

It's true that when Scott was off somewhere I'd sit in the tackroom with my homework, listening to the old men outside the door, but when Scott
was
there, we'd sneak into the hayloft and talk about his life while he hacked up bales of straw with a machete. We could look at the pond behind the barn with its enormous tree and the tree's rope for swinging. Idyllic, actually, with paddocks behind it and an inlet stream, except that a car was in the marsh near the tree, up to its windshield, looking like Kilroy-Was-Here. Also, the pond was home to the thickest, blackest, most white-mouthed and giant-fanged, angry, hissy water vipers I ever saw. I told Scott he was crazy to go in there, that I didn't like it when he went in there, that I'd never go.

I watched him stab at the straw or we'd look out at the pond from the loft and he'd say, “Three years left and I'm legal. I'll get a motorcycle and drive to California.” Or he'd say, “Well, things get too bad, I'll just go to Miami Beach. Sell Quaaludes for my cousin.” Or he'd say, self-deprecating, but at the same time like a certain breed of peacock, the tough boy to the nice girl, “Someday when you're grown up and famous, I'll come knocking on your door and you won't let me in. You'll say get my muddy footprints off your white carpet,” which was part clumsy innuendo, but part protective in a way I liked. It was nice for me to imagine being protected when at the same time I was sure my friends were on the edge of doom, that any moment I might have to rescue them from their parents, or each other, or themselves, same difference. With Scott, we played it both ways. We played he would protect me from boys, and we played I would protect him from being too reckless, I'd deride him for smoking, I'd try to find a book he'd read.

If you stuck each of us on a corkboard, a diagram of Scott and a diagram of me, and then stuck us with pins to mark our body parts and attributes, and graphed a timeline of each little history, I'm sure it'd be easy to see that in our promise we'd fail, that I'd fail him, and he'd fail me, that the whole arrangement was from a soap opera anyway. I don't know, it seems like we knew we'd fail, that we knew we were playing, and when we got earnest in our play, that was why.

One time he said, as if the prospect had been troubling him for some time, “Do you spend the night with boys?” I said, “No,” and he said, “Well, that's good. I'm glad. You shouldn't.” I had mixed feelings about that. I had mixed feelings about how he went on about the loose and wonderful activities of other girls my age. He'd explained about kissing. “You stick your tongue in and waggle it around,” he said, and years later, when I was kissing someone, I thought about whether or not that was what was being done: waggling. By the time the kiss was over, I dreaded the moment when the inconspicuous blob in the dark would become the face of a boy I didn't like, but had known would kiss me. I didn't want it to be Scott there kissing, but I wanted him there. I wanted to say, “You're wrong, Scott. It's more like stabbing.”

But mostly, in the hayloft, he talked about killing Joe, who really did beat him up pretty frequently, mixing in some kind of mind game to go with it. Dare you to hit me, that kind of game. Now I'll kick your ass, you fucker, you raise a hand to me. You pussy, why don't you be a man and hit me, you pussy. Brilliant and inventive chess-playing manipulations like the villains you see in thriller flicks. Joe was a big stupid man and he enjoyed familiar jokes. He was like a depiction of what he was.

Scott's mother was basically one of those loose girls Scott raised his eyebrows about and made secret gestures about and little wiggly motions when he talked about them, these skinny girls with teacup breasts and their designer jeans and airbrushed half-shirts, brown or blond hair hanging to the smalls of their backs, the ends tapping at their beadlike vertebrae when they walked. Colored mascara and lipgloss, thin little noses, sharp eyes, cocked hips, voices like shards of metal. Not to get too Oedipus, but I think his mother was one of those girls just a few years before she settled in with Joe, young as she was, if already haggard, dragging her son along.

When I think about it, I can see that Scott and his mother had features and postures and linguistic rhythms in common, but I could not see this at the time. I looked at adults and tried to see what they'd look like at my age, what kind of kid they'd be at my school. Or I tried to imagine what I would look like grown. Although when is that exactly? After puberty, I suppose, but before you gray and wrinkle, when you're not too fat or too skinny, and you have no strange hairdo and you're wearing, I suppose, a black unitard, and you also don't have any pimples or any bruises and you're not doing anything, or feeling anything, or having any ideas. What is the moment in your life when you look like you're done? Like a baked pie is done? Like you poke it and a roast is done? When you don't look like you have a history. When you are entirely imaginary.

At the time, Scott and his mother looked nothing alike to me, if only because I loved him, and I felt sad when he made it clear that he loved her when I couldn't imagine him coming from her, because she so constantly betrayed him. She brought him to Joe, for one thing.

She'd walk down from the house on her way to or from somewhere, swinging her car keys on their ring, which had all kinds of plastic trinkets strung on it—a pink boingy cord like a phone cord, a plastic troll doll with its rhinestone eyes and ridiculous blond hair, a yellow vinyl change purse with the kind of closure that opens like a mouth when you push the corner hinges between your forefinger and thumb and slaps shut when you let go. She'd sit on Joe's lap for a couple minutes, say something sassy, or say something like “Oh, you…” to one of the lascivious old men, and lean over, teetering on Joe's thigh, leaning into the circle of crows to slap the old guy's old bony knee. Her shirt would ride up and Joe would go squeeze, squeeze with his hand where she was bare. She was skinny, but a couple ripples of flesh collected there, like cords around her waist.

Away from the main barn in a run-in shed with its own stall door and its own little stretch of sand with sketchy bits of grass here and there, lived a chestnut stallion. The shed, almost buried in vines and heart-shaped leaves, huddled in the dark in there, and I never thought to look into the gap in the vines. It was so hot all the time that it made sense for the horse to stay in the shed all day and go out the back into his little paddock only at night in the cooler air. Once I was walking by, though, and the chestnut horse put his head out, over the door, through the gap in the foliage. I don't think I could have opened the stall door, it was so bound with vines. I felt I'd discovered an abandoned cottage deep in a forest. I liked that idea so much, of getting kidnapped and left at a cottage in the forest. And this one had a horse in it, and that's how I thought of him, this mysterious horse in his buried cottage.

This was not my mother's kind of horse—not sleek and quick and lithe like the Thoroughbreds she rode at the track, and not young like them, either, and she liked fillies, and she liked glossy bays. This horse was tall, but also densely built like a quarter horse, and a stallion, with the depth to his muscles and the thick crest of his neck that comes from testosterone. A bright gleaming chestnut, with a dignified white blaze that covered the flat front of his face.

When Scott wasn't around and the men laughed loudly outside the tackroom door and I couldn't concentrate on homework, or it was getting too dark and I was scared about the hand-sized spiders and cat-sized rats emerging, I visited that horse. He was a little wild, and fussy about letting me touch him. He stamped and snorted. He'd stretch his neck toward me as if he wanted me to touch him, and then think maybe he'd rather bite me, so he'd bite the air and then spin around and gallop out the back of his shed to the end of his strip of sand, then turn around and trot back, swinging his head. He splashed in his waterbucket, watching me. I'd stand outside the stall door, put my hands behind my back, stand quietly. I felt like so many books I'd read about girls and wild horses, boys and wild horses. The patience it takes to win the trust of a pure and wild creature.

At one point, I asked Joe whose horse it was and he said an Indian's horse, and that they called it, inventive as they were, Chief's horse. But in fact, Joe displayed a kind of admiration for the Chief when he talked about him. He said Chief was making a lot of money in real estate, and that's why he didn't come around any more—he was so busy making money. Joe scratched his bunchy ass and I pictured Chief looking exactly like Joe, but with smooth Seminole skin, with deep black hair clipped with alligator clips, feathers hanging from them. I pictured Chief like Joe, with his heft sort of encased in dignity, so that he held his weight righteously, so that suddenly, in the shape of an Indian, this grotesque shape of a man became beautiful.

I stood outside the shed where Chief's horse lived, and the day's heat settled away into dusk, sunk and scurried on the ground like stage smoke. If you stood there while the change took place, you could feel the heat sink around you and imagine having been covered in wet wool all day, and as the heat eased away, you could feel things again. You could hear again, too.

This is why, I think, even this many years away, dusk is when I feel any solid peace. All day it would feel hard to move through the air at all, like having to push through layers and layers of it every moment, and then this clarity came, and even the edge of a breeze, and I'd stand as still and quiet as could be, watching the horse feel clean for the first time since dawn, knowing that any moment I could leap if I felt like it, or I could walk, or reach my hand out. Even now I try to be outside in the dusk, and on days when the weather makes dusk a mere soup of night and day, rather than a palpable transition, it can feel like an action against me, like something perpetrated.

I stood with the horse's vine-covered door between us, just far enough from it that if he stretched his nose toward me he could touch me, but have plenty of warning if I moved toward him. At dusk, horses feel more acutely than any other time of day that they are prey, because every shadow is a leopard awake in the sudden air. For a horse to grow calm with me in such tentative moments made me feel, I suspect in retrospect, that perhaps I was not prey, which was part of the feeling I'd known all day. I closed my eyes, imagining Hiawatha running in silence through mountains and forests without breaking sticks, moving through fresh mulchy brush to meadows filled with purple flowers and ringed with pine. When I opened my eyes I opened them because I could feel Chief's horse breathing on my face. He breathed in what I breathed out. I breathed in what he breathed. I could touch my face to his face.

Don't you know it already? Don't you know that Chief also had a son, an extremely handsome young man of eighteen or twenty whose body was strong and lean, but which made him look ridiculous at their formica kitchen table in the morning, smoking a cigarette and rolling joints among the breakfast dishes when he should have been on his own, instead of bringing his thirteen-year-old girlfriends around the house and through the window of his bedroom, where they'd stay with him on the mattress on the floor at night, and then leave in the morning, scruffy, walking through the kitchen and out the door with his mother standing at the sink and making breakfast as if a girl was not walking behind her from her grown son's room and out the kitchen.

Chief's wife made herself refuse to turn around from the sink until she knew the girl was gone, and then she turned around to look at her extraordinarily handsome son as he practically perched at the formica table, smoking his cigarette, rolling joints, drinking the hot coffee she'd placed there at his elbow. Each morning, in fact, she heard the door to his bedroom open and she put water on to boil. She heard the girl mumble a few words through the wall and heard the girl barefoot along the linoleum hallway to the bathroom, the stiff blanket she'd wrapped herself in, still naked, brushing along the paneled walls. She listened to the girl use the water in the bathroom and sometimes use her son's toothbrush. Sometimes she was sure she could hear the girl yawn, even behind the running water, or make a creaky sound to herself as she stretched, letting the blanket fall for a moment, and then picking it up. She heard her son come into the kitchen and, in a movement so swift he was no more than a blur to her, she saw him take his seat, wearing jockey shorts and a string of white cylindrical beads that fell to his breastbone. In a movement so swift she'd be no more than a blur to him if he looked, she set the cup of coffee next to where she knew in the next moment his elbow would be. A boy who looked like that, sitting like that, doing that there, that trashy. She turned back to the sink just as swiftly and waited with the water running for the girl to go away.