Sociopaths In Love (5 page)

Erica moved closer to Walt and tried to take
his hand but he, more or less, slapped her away. Eventually the
figures were only a few feet away and Erica could start to make out
some of their features. There were three guys and a girl on the far
left. The two men on her right wore black t-shirts with nothing on
them and blue jeans. The next guy in line wore a white t-shirt like
Walt and the girl had dyed black hair and wore all black, the
layers so indistinguishable she could have just been wearing a
jumpsuit.

"Walt," the second guy to the right said,
holding out his hand.

"The Boys." Walt took the hand and shook it
vigorously. He wasn't exactly smiling. He looked crazed. "This is
Erica. Erica this is –" He went from right to left. "Jask, Blake,
Shump and . . ."

"Dawn," Shump said.

"She with you?" Walt said.

Shump laughed and said, "She's with all of
us." He put his arm around the girl's shoulders and pulled her
close to him.

"Good to see you again, man," Blake said.
"Got a good night planned. Let's go grab some beer."

For a moment, Erica felt stupid for
worrying. This was just a get together of blue-collar mid-western
males. Something she was familiar with.

Then she followed them into the barn.

Shared Interests

The light was so harsh it
took her eyes a moment to adjust. She didn't know what she
expected. Something sparser. Maybe something to do with cars or
woodworking. Something more normal. And there
were
cars in there, which is what she
noticed first. A silver Mercedes and a black BMW.

The second thing she noticed was what she
thought was a dead dog, suspended from the ceiling by a chain,
dangling over a rusted barrel with a fire going in it. Whatever it
was, its fur had been burned off and the whole barn smelled like
burnt hair and cooking meat. The odd effect it created was
something like nausea with an underlying hunger.

On the back wall was a pile of maybe ten
naked human corpses. Erica had seen concentration camp footage.
That's what this made her think of except they weren't all skinny.
In an effort to look away from this, her eyes took in everything
else in the barn: piles of watches and jewelry, piles of clothes,
vases and artwork, prescription bottles, liquor bottles, laptops,
cell phones, other things of relative mundaneness, the
obsessiveness of the themed piles and the quantity of items
contained therein the only things lending an air of peculiarity to
them.

If Erica had let her fear subside during the
brief walk to the barn, it was now back with a raging
certainty.

She hoped this wasn't what Walt meant when
he'd said the Boys were people like them. Because, so far, it
looked like they were murdering thieves.

"Looks like you guys've been busy." Walt's
eyes scanned the contents of the barn. "Got anything good in the
pile over there?"

Blake shook his head. "Nah. We let em get
too old. Gonna have to end up just burning them all. Feels like a
waste."

Jask and Shump each had one side of a big
red Coleman cooler. They set it down and opened the lid. Jask
reached in and started passing around the cans of cheap beer. Erica
opened hers and took a big drink. She thought it might calm her
down. If something didn't calm her down soon, she was pretty sure
she would run screaming from this place and she wasn't sure she
wanted to know what would happen to her if she did that.

"What've you been up to?" Blake asked.

"This and that," Walt said.

"Been in one place long?"

"Nah. I've bounced around.
But we're headed to Dayton, Ohio. Might stick around there a
while." This was the first Erica had heard of this. She
thought,
Dayton
fucking
Ohio?
But, oh well, it would seem like the big city compared to
Shitsburg, Missouri.

"Dayton, Ohio? Why the fuck you want to go
there?"

"Passed through late last year. Not sure.
Felt something. A certain vibe."

Blake smirked. "The I-don't-give-a-fuck
vibe?"

Walt shrugged.

Erica felt something unspoken pass between
them. It made her think of something rotten.

Shump and Jask came back carrying green lawn
chairs. The old school kind with the scratchy plastic belts woven
together.

They all sat down and kept
drinking their beers. The men seemed to drink theirs much faster
than she did hers. She kept glancing at Dawn thinking, Erica wasn't
completely sure, that since they both had vaginas they'd be able to
talk. Blake and Walt seemed to do most of the talking. Erica
half-listened for clues as to what exactly she'd gotten herself
into or even just something that could explain or rationalize what
she sat in the middle of. But, unless they spoke in some kind of
code, they were talking about the most common shit imaginable.
Mostly it seemed like they were talking about other people. Again,
it was mostly Blake and Walt doing the talking, Blake taking long
chugs from his beer before wiping the condensation on his
fingertips through his already damp hair. Jask and Shump sat next
to one another and mostly nodded or smiled like they were just
happy to be around the other two men.
Toadies
, she thought, and felt a
moment of prideful relief that Walt was not a toady. She concluded
the girl, Dawn, must be on something. Dawn took small sips of her
beer and lit cigarette after cigarette, letting the ash get
ridiculously long before taking a drag from it. Of course, Erica
wondered how she must look to Dawn. She felt so tired and odd it
probably seemed like she was on something, also. And she still had
the paint on her face that she kept forgetting about. There
certainly wasn't any attempt to bring her into the conversation. If
Walt and the Boys were of a certain kind of person and Walt had, in
her, recognized some kindred spirit, she would have thought there
would be some attempt to reveal to her what was shared and inherent
between them all. That, if there
was
something to take away from the
conversation, was the only thing she would be able to manage paying
attention to. Dawn stood up and walked toward the entrance of the
barn. Erica watched the musical shuffle of her hips until the
darkness swallowed her. She reached into the cooler for another
beer. She opened it and sat back in the chair. Her head spun. She
closed her eyes to try and lock into some part of the conversation,
telling herself she should at least try to join in. After all, they
weren't going to be here very long so she didn't really need to
worry about embarrassing herself but, the harder she tried to focus
on it, the less sense it made. Now it seemed like they were all
talking at once and at first she thought they were talking in a
foreign language but, if that were the case, it was one she
couldn't even identify. It sounded like an ancient language made up
of hisses and breaths. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on
the man sitting across from her and at first she thought they'd all
turned into reptiles and that the barn had been replaced by a cave.
Then she thought,
No, this is
home
. Then:
No,
not home. Very far from home
. And while it
was true that she was, technically, right now, as far away from her
home as she'd ever been, she felt like the distance her brain was
trying to convey was somewhat more glacial, something having to do
as much with time and mental state as distance. When she finally
blinked away the image of the men as ancient monsters, they were
brought back into focus, standing, all pounding their beers. Again
she saw this thread of normalcy and had to remind herself they were
surrounded by dead bodies, stolen merchandise, and a dog dangling
over an open flame.

"We've gotta take off," Walt said. "You
girls stay here and guard the fort."

Erica tried to say something but her mouth
wouldn't work and she followed them out into the night, the air and
the lack of acrid smoke clearing her head somewhat. She lit a
cigarette as the guys piled into the van and shot down the gravel
lane. It was immediately quieter and Erica felt a pang of
loneliness until she heard a sound to her left and turned to see
Dawn shuffling around the barn.

"You get high?" Dawn asked.

No
, Erica thought but said, "Maybe." Because, well, at this
point, how could it hurt?

Serve the Self

Only a few feet away from the security
light, the night was considerably more palpable. Erica followed
Dawn deeper into the back yard. The other girl moved with tired
resignation. Erica imagined her doing everything slowly. Perhaps
this was why Erica had thought she was on something. Since she was
following her with the purpose of smoking pot, it was possible she
was just one of those people who'd smoked so much pot for so long
she was incapable of moving faster. Perma-stoned.

Dawn stopped and stared at something. It
took a moment for Erica's eyes to adjust to the low light. Dawn
stood in front of a stack of furniture taller than either of them.
She scratched her head and took an exasperated breath, her
shoulders slumping even farther.

"Blake said he wanted me to get the fire
started while they were gone. We should have brought some beer with
us."

"I can help."

"Probably better do it now. Once we smoke
I'm not going to feel like doing anything."

"What do you need me to do?"

Dawn pulled her hair back and banded it into
a sloppy ponytail. She pointed a few feet in front of her. "The
fire pit's over there." She pointed at the pile of furniture. "This
is what we'll be burning." She put a cigarette in her mouth and
offered Erica one from the pack. Erica took it. Dawn slowly lit
both of them, taking a moment to look into Erica's eyes as she lit
hers. Leaving the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth,
Dawn took a drag, put her hands on her hips, and exhaled smoke from
her nose. The smoke hung virtually unmoving in the thickness of the
air and she said, "I don't see a point in feeding the furniture
into the fire piece by piece."

Dawn walked to the fire pit and circled the
wide perimeter, her eyes downcast, looking for something. Erica
stood in the same spot, listening to the softly muted sounds around
her while watching the other girl lazily search amidst the ethereal
drifts of their twin plumes of smoke. Dawn came back carrying a can
of lighter fluid, the cherry of her cigarette glowing out from her
black lips.

With her free hand she pulled the cigarette
from her mouth and said, "Would you mind going back to the barn and
seeing if you can find a dry piece of paper? Newspaper or
something."

Erica didn't want to be in the barn alone,
even for a second, but said, "Sure," anyway.

She took a few steps and Dawn yelled,
probably as loudly as she was capable of yelling, which wasn't that
loud at all, "And could you grab me a beer? Thanks."

Erica thought she'd probably grab one for
herself, too.

The cold blue light spilled from the barn
and, even before entering it, she thought about the horrors
contained inside, clinically spotlighted under that clear stabbing
glow. She tossed her cigarette, took a deep breath, and went into
the barn. She thought she would dart in, get what she needed, and
dart back out. The smell hit her once inside and she stopped to
look around for paper. She spotted a stack of newspapers to her
right, noting it before her attention was drawn to the pile of
corpses against the back wall. Again, staring at them, she was hit
with a certain feeling. She didn't think it was fear, exactly. She
wasn't really afraid of anything happening to her. Theoretically,
she supposed, nothing could happen to her that she didn't want.
Unless Walt or one of the Boys wanted to do something to her. She'd
have to ask him how that worked. Maybe she could ask Dawn, if Dawn
was one of them. Or did it cancel each other out? If one of them
wanted to do something to her and she didn't want it to happen, was
it still possible for it to happen? What she felt wasn't because
she was afraid of ending up as one of the people in the pile. It
was more like thinking this was what those people had been reduced
to. How they'd ended up. When a person wakes up in the morning and
works hard or just simply exists, she doesn't imagine herself
stripped and decomposing in a barn in the middle of nowhere along
with a bunch of other naked and rotting corpses. And, Erica
thought, maybe that was where the despair came from. It was like,
since there wasn't a single dead body, they were further purged of
identity. Like a psychopath or a serial killer would most probably
use a single body for some sick or disturbing purpose, but these
were just piled there, useless, something to be gotten rid of.
Which possibly begged the question: Why did they die in the first
place?

Another thought struck her.

Nothing was keeping her here. She didn't
know how long Walt and the Boys would be gone but her car was right
out there and, even if Walt hadn't left the keys in the ignition,
she was sure she could become sufficiently lost in the woods in a
short period of time. So lost they would never be able to find her.
And, after all, this was Missouri, and they were near St. Louis,
not exactly the Canadian tundra or something. She wouldn't have to
wander that far before she found some sign of civilization.

But she knew she wasn't going to leave.

You're here because you want to be here.

She didn't know how comfortable she was
about accepting that thought. Accepting that thought was to somehow
accept a shred of responsibility for everything that had happened
up to this exact point in time: the death of Granny, the dead dog
burned to blackened bone and sinew, the pile of nameless rotting
corpses lying in a black puddle of ooze, and . . . and
whatever was going to happen.