The Joy of Killing (2 page)

Her tongue darted around in my mouth like a butterfly, and my fingers responded by squeezing her breast. She turned slightly in the seat, to face me. I shifted to release my right hand, which was caught between my hip and the seat. It rose in the air and settled lightly on her left breast. Both hands now pressed in. A soft sound rose from the girl's throat, which I took as encouragement. When my fingers found a nub of flesh, I tugged on it gently, and it stiffened. My dick bent hard against my zipper. I gave both nipples a twist and felt a tremble in her body.

A child screamed from somewhere in the back of the car. A loud crack and a whoosh of air blew in from the front. I saw a shadow moving slowly up the aisle. The conductor. Coming this way. The door hissed and shut and the loud clicking-clacking faded. The form stopped beside us, the round hat with a gold badge blocking a circle
of dim light. I could see through his wireless spectacles professional, unfriendly eyes, which came to rest on me. A scrawny finger pushed the spectacles up his nose. I waited for him to say something, but instead his eyes shifted away and up to the rack across the aisle, over my seat. He reached up and flicked my stub from the clip and turned and placed it in the clip over us, next to the girl's. He moved on, rolling with the sway of the train, like a sailor on a ship.

The light in the car now seemed a murky yellow, except for a sharp reading light on at the very front, and the only sound was a soft snoring somewhere behind us.

“I guess you're stuck here, with me,” the girl said.

M
Y HANDS RISE
from the typewriter and settle onto my lap. I look at the scene more closely, at the man standing in the aisle, the conductor, and I notice his gold watch chain traversing his blue vest, from west to east, like a river of gold, and I think perhaps I've added it in, this small glitter. Was it really there? It doesn't matter, and I've long since lost the ability to sort out those things, what is true or not, or what is real or not. If something happened or not. I've painted in the gold chain on the blue expanse, and there it will be, there it will stay, and if I were to view the scene again, it will appear as always having been there. Sitting here now, I believe that to be the truth. Simply because things become more apparent over time doesn't mean they weren't always there. You just didn't see them. Perhaps I've added the spectacles along the line, and the ticket punch in his hand. But not the girl. Not the girl. She lived that night with me on the train, and she loved me, for those few hours
at least, and she has provided me with great sustenance and solace over the years. To see her now, to hold her face in my hands, feel the heat, to march through the garden and into the water with her in my heart would be my final desire, and why I am writing now, to etch her into my brain so that even faltering steps or timorous fear can't erase her. If anyone examined my brain, they would think as they watched the scene, what a lucky boy he is, the way he just stumbled into this play, and, really, he handled it fairly well, for the little that he knew, and he must have gone on to great things, with women and otherwise, so smooth he seemed, and they would be amused at the scene with the conductor, and find themselves erotically pulsed by the drama.

In some ways, I prefer that boy to the man sitting here at the wooden desk, in the small room at the very top of the stairs, looking out into the sky and the dark clouds sailing over the water, pondering and preparing, which is why I bring him back, bring them both back, for times like this. It's how I've stayed reasonably sane over the years; for I am able sometimes to freeze a single frame of that journey in my consciousness, and let it be all there is.

I work on the narrative of that night, clicking and clacking, picking and pecking, watching the words float on and off the page, remaining sufficiently present to finish the story. To achieve some elusive sense of completion, and, as well, something to stand as my last will and testament.

T
HE DOOR AT
the front of the car closed behind the conductor. The light seemed to dim. I turned to the girl with some apprehension,
but she was smiling seductively at me. As soon as all was still, her hand tugged gently on the bottom of her sweater. Then her fingers disappeared. Paused, twisted, rose, paused, twisted. She was undoing the buttons on her blouse. Her tongue caressed her top lip, as if to make absolutely clear to me what was happening, and her eyes radiated like lures for the hare on the edge of the forest. Unsure of what to do or say, I could only watch. Her hand reappeared and rested on her lap. She tilted her head, and I leaned in to kiss her, and this time she was quite gentle. She opened her eyes, slightly glazed, and in an easy, whispery voice I would remember the rest of my days said, “They're yours.”

I felt a little strange, perhaps because it was me she was offering her breasts to, or perhaps it was her boldness. I glanced about the car, then looked closely at the protrusions of her dark sweater. Hesitate any longer and she might change her mind, I told myself. My left hand rose and nudged its way under the sweater. One finger and then two slipped under the edge of the blouse, touched the unseen flesh, brushed over her ribs. The fingers spread open a fraction and began slipping upward, until the tips reached the place where the thin flesh over the bones turned to substance, strangely firm and spongy. No bra. My hand trembled. Her fingers touched my cheek. My thumb slid around until her breast was caught in the semicircle of my thumb and forefinger. I squeezed ever so slightly and felt the mound rise. My heart clenched—this was happening, the girl, her breast, my hand, and God only knew where it was leading, although I knew where I hoped it would.
The nipple
. My hand moved up a little further until the second and third fingers were also
touching it. Finally I believed her: I could do with them as I pleased. A flush of blood hit my groin.

I caught the sweaty perfume, and I kissed her neck and tasted a flowery bitterness. My thumb pressed down on the nipple, and it disappeared in the mound, only to spring back, harder, like a pencil eraser. Her back arched slightly, and the nipple bumped into my thumb. I pinched it gently, and she pushed up a little more. I gave it a twist, and she murmured something in my ear. I felt her other hand on my neck, pulling me in closer, and sensed the desperation in her. She whispered again: “Please.” My dick pushed so hard into my zipper it hurt. My hand spread wide, thumb moving across the space to touch the other nipple, my little finger still pressing into the first one. I tugged them both gently. Her lips were against my ear. I felt the heat of her whisper.

“Harder.”

Damn. I always thought nipples were delicate. I twisted one, then the other. I pinched the very tip of it, and, hearing, feeling nothing, pinched it even harder. Her chest shook, and I heard the same word again, so I pressed in harder until my nails met each other through the flesh. Her body froze in position, her breath released, and strange, foreign sounds came from her. A shiver went through her body. A low moan brushed my ear.

I
ROCK MY
chair back, close my eyes, and think that with the clarity and finite complexity of the images that come into my mind, unbidden or otherwise, I should have been a painter, because there was little else I could do with them; the images came and went as
they pleased, often to my delight or amusement, but often otherwise, to my distraction or distress. There was the time in my early thirties when I met Shelley Duvall at a reception for the film festival in Des Moines. As we were talking, I became quite taken with her long, white neck, graceful as a swan's, and suddenly from ear to ear a thin red line edged across the middle of it, half an inch above the clavicle, as if someone had just flicked the tip of a straight razor through the flesh. She kept on talking, unaware of the cut, so precise was it, until tiny red drops appeared just below the line, and her head began to wobble a little, and still she kept on smiling and chatting. I could not bear to watch her head tilt like that, fearing it would eventually topple off, and as the red drops began to slide down the slender neck I disengaged—her hand was resting lightly on my forearm, and had been for at least a minute, which in these sorts of things is a long time—mumbling something lame and turning to walk away, leaving her hand still poised in the air where my forearm had been, a smile freezing on her slightly surprised face.

I haven't seen that image in awhile. As sharp and bright as the day it was born, if not sharper, and almost as frightening, in its red and white, Valentine's Day cleaved beauty. I feel a twinge of annoyance. The image of Shelley in red skews me off track and reminds me of how little influence I have over the stuff in my head, and how I have often felt the intrusions only as a burden, only recently beginning to see it—this story, the one of the girl on the train—as a path to freedom. I glance at the keys on the typewriter, and then at my fingers, as if willing them to rise and tap out something perceptive or perhaps enlightening. I hear strange
sounds from the floor below, like a toy rattle being shaken back and forth. And then it stops. This morning I searched every room in the four-story house—it's an old place with lots of out-of-the-way crooks and nooks—and as darkness grew close I bolted the doors one by one and ascended the flights to the small room at the top, with a window overlooking the lovely garden and the high stone wall and the lake beyond. The moon, I notice, seems stuck in the lower right corner of the window. I lean a little to my left and see that it's caught between two limbs in the tall oak, whose great branches arch out like veins in the sky. Images, you see, can mutate with time or remain as crystal clear as the instant they were born. Shelley doesn't particularly bother me, mainly because she's fixed and her head no longer wobbles, but there are thousands of others, if not thousands of thousands, some seen some not seen, that arrive and depart as they please, and you can either adjust and weave them into whatever else is going on in your reality or disengage yourself from them—no easy task, I assure you—or if you can do neither, pray that they dissipate in some harmless way that doesn't leave you stranded. Many of them, it seems, involve either sex or violence, or sex and violence. I should say that the night of the reception I ended up having sex with Shelley. I came just as the thin red line across her neck split open. The image of the girl on the train is, as I said, really a hundred thousand images, or more, and sometimes I can stop the progression where I please, and start it again with the flick of an eyelash, and each time there is something new, a taste, a look; the light in the train might be more yellow-diffused than in the past, or it dims occasionally as the train
rocks from the edge of one wheel to the edge of the other. The passing lights of the farmhouses and crossings and occasional highway cars streak together into a blur against the black outside. I doubt I saw much of anything that night, so consumed was I by my other senses: the creaking footfalls of the conductor as he makes his way up and down the aisle, the smell of garlic from the dinner basket of an elderly couple up ahead, the insistent rhythm of the clacking of the wheels, and the stale, cigarette-stained air that ripples when someone opens one of the doors, (when the clacking is so loud you don't notice the fresh air until the door crashes shut) and the varied smells of human beings in some sort of repose after their efforts at living another day have come to an end.

I
SOUGHT TO
remove my hand from beneath the sweater gently, but the girl pressed it against her breast. I wanted to tell her how amazing it was I had finally met her, how much I loved her for it, she was so much more beautiful than I had ever imagined, and her skin was so smooth, under my fingertips. She put a finger to my lips.

Suddenly, lights were flashing by in the window, white lights on top of warehouses, lights encircling silos, and flashing red lights on white cross arms, and yellow lights in house windows, and the train whistled three loud blasts, and I thought that nothing of this night could survive the sort of glare that crossing into the outskirts of a Midwestern farm town like Toledo would bring, an unfriendly, grim bleakness that would bust up anyone's dream, ruin the sounds and smells of it, and I was thinking of what I might say to ease the transition when there was one long, loud blast of the whistle and
the rocket darkened, shook from side to side, and shot forward. I wondered what happens now; maybe we cuddle like this for the rest of the trip, and maybe—although, seriously, I doubted it—maybe I could at some fortunate moment slip a hand
below the waist
—a place unknown to me, and truthfully a place I found a little scary to even imagine. At no time yet in my life had I even come close to it, and even in my fantasies I seldom got that far—an image of a girl, like the one in my arms, standing in front of a mirror in pink panties, where you could just make out the crease in her bottom, was a favorite and far more than sufficient. As if sensing this, the girl raised her face to mine, allowing her eyes to darken even deeper, saying in better form than words that this story was far from over.

My finger caught the edge of the lower lip and pulled it down a little, and in the dimness I could see a little indentation in the middle. I leaned into kiss her, and I could feel the spot with my tongue. She caught my finger in her lips and sucked gently. I felt her tongue circle my finger. My throat constricted. Her hand tugged at my belt buckle, and the prong easily sprung free from the leather. I thought of touching her hand, guiding it away. I was embarrassed, for myself, over the bulge in my pants. Her fingers wrested open the top button on the slacks and then tugged the zipper down. The flaps spread open. Her hand slid down and then back up my dick. She tightened her grip, and it occurred to me that what was happening might be just a hand job—just a hand job!—and I felt my throat relax a little. Still something to brag about back at school, if I wanted to. Slowly she lowered her head onto me, and I felt her tongue probe around the perimeter, as if looking for something. I
twitched, and she dropped all the way down. The blood rushed in my ears. I lay a hand on her head. I felt the tip of my dick brush the back of her throat and her lips pull at the very base of it. Too much, I thought. I'm a goner. I let my fingers sink into the hair. If I intended a signal, she missed it, for now she lifted all the way up until her lips were barely touching me, pausing long enough for the cool air to brush the skin, and then descended slowly, a millimeter at a time.