The End of the Pier (7 page)

“He doesn't spend summers with me.” Dr. Hooper's dark eyes were on the piece of pie.

Maud could sense that something here was wrong, so she merely said “Oh” and wiped her hands down her apron sides. Yes, there was really something wrong, for Dr. Hooper's hand shook as she raised her coffee cup. Then she said, not to Maud but very quietly to her piece of pie, “He doesn't live with me; he lives with his father. His father has custody.”

Maud returned the pie to the display case, looking at, and then away from, Elizabeth Hooper, who was clearly upset. Maud licked her lips and tried to say that she couldn't imagine that someone like her, who went to so much trouble to see her son, could not get custody. God, look at Shirl. Well, that wasn't fair, she guessed; Shirl actually did put up with a lot from Joey and had raised him all by herself. . . .

And Dr. Hooper once again seemed to be reading Maud's mind, for she said, “I could have had custody; I didn't want it.” She had affixed a stamp to a postcard and now brought her balled-up fist down on it. Then she looked at Maud with a thin smile. “I'm a child psychiatrist, and that's how smart I was.”

Dr. Hooper hitched her bag over her shoulder and collected her check.

H
e looked down at the drawer of knives he held on his lap and thought of the loneliness and emptiness and the ones who had caused it, and were still causing it, and that it was only right they should have to pay.

It was an ordinary kitchen drawer with a white enamel front. He had pulled it out by its ridged aluminum handle so that he could sit with it and hold it like a baby or a pet. He was sitting on the green slat-backed kitchen chair, his long hands resting either side of the drawer, looking down at the knives, different sizes, different shapes, and the cylindrical, tempered-steel sharpener he used to keep them carefully honed.

Now, he picked up the butcher knife, ran his thumb lightly along its edge, and had to suck the droplet of blood that made a tiny bubble even with so light a stroke. He remembered he had been in a bit of temper when he'd drawn that one swiftly from side to side down the sharpener. He tried the paring knife, the cleaver, the cook's knife, the hook-bill of the knife for dismembering chicken, the two utility knives. The serrated bread knife he didn't bother with. It was no good to him.

His mind was a black well you could drop a body in, and because it was so deep in this blackness, the sound at the bottom would be no more than the splash of a small rock. A well, a vault, cellar, cavern—empty of light.

Not even as much light as he had been able to see when he was very small under his shut bedroom door after his mother had gone. Just a strand of light. He would crawl out of bed and lie facing the door, his eyes seeing nothing under it but that strand of
light, could not see his mother, had thought she was gone forever. He would lie there willing her to come back, thinking the sheer force of his will, his concentration, would make her return to his room, that he would hear what had been the indistinct and distant clap of her slippers down the hall growing more distinct, coming back and stopping at his door again. But he figured his mind must not be strong enough, that there was some weakness there, for she didn't come back.

He would lie there on his side, then, looking at the band of light under the door. If he didn't do this, the dark would swallow him, for even if his eyes adjusted to it the things in his room—lumpy chair, bureau, hump between bedposts, posts themselves—would be barely distinguishable, without definition, and melt back into darkness from mere staring to bring them out of it. His best friend back then had been terrified of the Thing in his closet at night, a Thing he'd described as a monster with teeth like panes of glass that he could feel shatter when the monster bit into his throat.

But he,
he
had never been afraid of a Thing in the closet; he had been afraid of the closet itself, of the darkness and the loneliness. For they always came together. The loneliness was not quite as bad in the daylight hours, because he was out of the house doing something. He could feel it, though, always, even then, as a dull ache; for although he was around others, he never felt, being around them, what he needed. What he needed was intimacy.

Everyone needed it, of course; he was no different from anyone else, except that his need was consuming. Loneliness drove him to desperation. He wondered why the doctors left it out of the list: sex, hunger, thirst. Would he kill someone for a glass of water, for a can of beans, for a good fuck? Sex? Why, sex had hardly anything to do with it.

His hands once again returned to the sides of the drawer; he looked through to the larder, looked at the spigot slowly dripping
water (he'd have to fix that washer), and thought, reasonably, as he'd never been dying of hunger or thirst, he couldn't say what that would make a man do. And, of course, when it came to sex, he supposed they weren't actually talking about
killing
for it. He frowned. But, then, didn't animals . . . ?

Looking down at the knives that speared back the reflected light of the bright bulb above, he shook his head, trying to clear it. In his childhood room there had been such a light; it would sway slightly above his bed until his mother pulled the metal cord. Sometimes she would lie down with him and he wouldn't even care about her breath, heavy with whisky and cigarettes. No, he wouldn't care.

God knows he had tried other ways to get what he needed. To get rid of the loneliness and find the intimacy. Even the word seemed warm and slightly liquid. If only his speech hadn't been tangled, stupid words hitting, bashing, mangling one another in their rush toward friendship, toward intimacy; and if that hadn't made the women look down, look away, even step back, almost as if (now the face that turned to the drawer had to smile) . . .

As if he was holding a knife on them.

•  •  •

He hated that he had to show them the knife, that they had to know that they were going to die, for although it didn't completely spoil the end, it made it sad, much more difficult. But there was no other way, for they had to see what they'd done and what they were guilty of. How strange was the often held idea that just before the moment of death, in the moments of dying, the expression in a dying person's eyes grew remote, clouded, shuttered. That a shade snapped down, or curtains suddenly pulled to.

To him, it was just the other way around. It was the moment when the shade snapped up, the musty curtains suddenly opened to let in the light. It was the moment of profoundest and deepest intimacy. There was no holding back.

And he had tried, always, and gently, to explain this. Although his holding them had to be rough (how else could he keep them still?), his voice had been gentle (which in itself was a small miracle), and the words had flowed from his mouth like syrup, smoothly. Naturally, they fought it. Some women had incredible strength.

He was sorry that they couldn't, by an act of a merciful God (but, then, there was no God, not really), simply die in his arms peacefully. Yet, if they had, would they have understood? Would their minds have been full of
him
and the fear of the dark? Or would they be thinking about some other person, some lost place, a long, green meadow full of sunlight? They would not be thinking of
him.

He drove the paring knife into the chair arm so hard the blade broke from the handle; and realizing he'd done this without meaning to, that the loneliness had driven him to this, he started to weep, wiped his sleeve along his eyes, placed the broken knife carefully on the table.

Taking the drawer out, smoothing his thumb along the knife-edges, childish fits of rage—he knew the signs. That the loneliness, the need for intimacy were overwhelming him again and he would have to do something.

But they hadn't screamed.

It had surprised him that they hadn't screamed. Probably because he had been just an old, sad face for the most part, and then, after he had explained and pinioned them and brought out the knife, any scream had been locked in their throats, frozen there, choking them. Yet he had usually had to clamp his hand over their mouths because of the pleas, the whimpers, the “no”s (no no no no no no) that he was loath to hear.

Except Tony. Antoinette. When he brought the knife from under his jacket, she'd looked at him and laughed. Laughed fit to kill. (Now he bowed his head in shame for that lousy pun.) She was something, wasn't she? Had it angered him she'd laughed? Hadn't
taken his reasons seriously? Of course not; he wasn't childish. He had laughed with her, out there in the woods. It had been good to laugh; the idea that that last long look of understanding might be one of pleasure was infinitely preferable to the terror later in the eyes of Loreen Butts.

But her laughter had run down like an old car sputtering to a stop when he'd held her against the oak tree. Carefully and slowly he'd explained he wasn't going to rape her; it wasn't sex he was after. It was closeness.

Understand?

Tony had looked at him wildly, her eyes wild over the top of his hand where he felt the hot breath coming.

And then slowly she nodded.

Is that what you want? You want me to fuck you? You want sex?

The look in her eyes changed to something sly and knowing. Again she nodded.

That's what you want, you can have it, of course. Die happy.

To his astonishment, as he stood against her still with his hand over her mouth, she took her own two away where she'd been dragging, clawing at his, and ripped the top of her cheap rayon blouse down with one hand; the other yanked at his fly. He was hard as a rock.

With her head she was trying to nod toward the ground.

You want it on the ground?

Swiftly, she nodded her head, three, four times.

He held the knife to her throat, lowered her to the ground, where she squirmed, panted, and he spread the fingers of his hand and heard her begging for it. He was enthralled; he was fascinated. He brought the knife down from her throat, held the cold steel across her nipples, which excited her even more, and he looked down at his hard cock and shoved it in . . .

Stupid bitch.

Stupid bitch.
It might have worked, she might have got hold of that knife if she'd waited until he was pumping away, if she'd
waited until he came, if she'd
pretended
to come too, again and again and again . . .

That's the way he thought of it later, after he felt her go for the knife, after he raised it, brought it around, and slit her throat.

Oh, redemption.

H
e was out there somewhere.

He was as much out there as the black slab rocks that marked off Swain's Point, rooted in the dark like the massive pines that surrounded the boarded-up fishing lodge at the end of the Point.

As Sam drove the potholed road that circled the lake, checking the cabins through screens of shrubbery and openings through oaks and pines, he could sense that presence.

Sam was almost positive that it was no vagrant, no passing stranger, who had tied up and knifed Eunice Hayden, which was what everybody had believed and gone on believing for four years since her murder, probably because they didn't want to believe it could be somebody they knew.

The trouble was that Eunice Hayden had not been exactly a model of deportment, there at the end of her short life. No one could understand this: how any child of Molly and Wade Hayden could turn out like Eunice, when all of her childhood Eunice had been straight as a plumb line, and as rigid and strained, like a child in a black bonnet in a Gothic picture. Wade Hayden had been postmaster for twenty years, and his wife, Molly, was always the first person people called on if there was any money to be raised in a good cause, for the church or the library or the school. Molly could be depended on to go out and get it, could look out of her flinty eyes and make you feel completely responsible for the cracked bindings on books or the short supply of pews. And Eunice's father, Wade, people were always saying, was as honest as the day was long. Sam had always wondered why
they said it. How would a postmaster display his dishonesty? Shortchange you on stamps?

As he drove slowly, catching the occasional shifting blue light of a television, he tried to put these ungenerous thoughts out of his mind. The girl was dead now. And her mother, Molly, was dead too; she'd died, people thought, from the shock of it, six months later. Molly, Sam knew, who looked as tough as a washboard, had always been ailing. Still, the cold-blooded murder of her daughter certainly had hurried death along, he was sure.

So Wade Hayden had had to retrace the same dirt pathway to the same graveyard and the same tree under which his daughter had been buried, maybe even treading in the same footprints, his own, in which the dust had barely had time to resettle itself.

Of course, the family had come in for their share of questions. One always had to look to family. Wade and Molly had been in Hebrides, they said; Molly had gone shopping while Wade did some pinch-hitting for a friend of his at the Hebrides post office, which wasn't much of a post office, he'd often told people, being only a one-man, one-room PO, with hardly enough business even to warrant the one man. Wade would say this with obvious pride in his own position as La Porte's postmaster: even though La Porte was a smaller place, still there was so much summer business it warranted two men. So Wade had an assistant. He was always glad to help out over in Hebrides whenever the postal clerk (as Wade called him) needed a relief person. That's where he'd been, while his wife had been doing some shopping, and they'd been there for the whole of the afternoon, or at least three hours of it, the three hours during which their daughter had been murdered.

•  •  •

So they'd come in for their share; only it was hard for Sam to lean on the bereft parents the way you might on someone not family, the way he'd leaned on Bubby Dubois and Dodge Haines.