The Kind Worth Killing (8 page)

He was doing what I hoped he would do, working his way down the rope to get a better grip. He ducked his head partway into the hole and shifted forward on his knees. “Don't fall in,” I said. It was something I had planned on saying, to make him feel more safe.

“How far down is it?”

“Not that far, I think.”

Chet made a couple of whooping sounds into the well that echoed back up.

“Let me hold on to you.” I had planned this as well, wanting to get him used to having my hands on his back. I didn't want to just try and push him in and have him rear back suddenly and fight me.

I grabbed the fabric of his overalls with both fists, just as he said, “I got it. It's coming up.”

I conjured all the strength I had and shoved as hard as I could. He tried to lift his head but it was in the hole and he banged the back of it on one of the layered stones that lined the well. His whole body tilted forward, falling, and for a moment I thought I was going to go down the well with him, a possibility that hadn't even occurred to me. But somehow he managed to jack his legs out and stop his forward progress. I rolled to the side, listening to his surprised scream. One of his heavy
boots was jammed between two of the flat rocks that lined the well entrance. “Jesus,” he yelled. Then: “Help me.” I heard a clattering sound as something struck the bottom of the well. His glasses, I thought.

I stood. One of my fingernails had snagged on his overalls and torn. I only noticed because I had reflexively shaken my hand and flecks of blood had spattered me in the face.

“Lily, God, help me.”

I crouched near where his foot was lodged between the rocks. It was pretty clear that it wasn't going to hold him, and that he would fall anyway, but I took hold of the edge of the worn sole and shoved it forward. Chet made a grunting sound, then I heard the sound of scraping followed by a loud crash as he hit the bottom of the well. I expected to hear him yell some more but he was quiet. There was only the sound of falling dirt and debris still pattering down the well, plus two crows cawing at each other on the other side of the meadow.

I pulled the penlight I had brought out of my back pocket and twisted it so it turned on. It didn't produce a very powerful beam but it would be strong enough for me to see into the darkness of the well. I thought my hands would be shaky but they weren't. I felt focused, and lost in my own brain, the way I felt when I was reading a good book and the afternoon disappeared. I peered over the edge and pointed the beam of the flashlight down toward the bottom. I was so sure that Chet would survive the fall and would be begging me to help him up. I had been prepared for it. Instead, he lay still at the bottom of the well, on his back, his legs against the side, and his neck at a funny angle. I stared at him for a while. My penlight beam was weak and the well was filled with shifting dust, but it didn't look like he was moving. Then I saw an almost unnoticeable shift and heard a low sigh that could have come from Chet or could have come from something settling in the disturbed well.

I stood and walked the few feet to my low pile of heavy rocks that I'd been collecting. I selected the largest, a jagged hunk of gray stone with a vein of quartz running through it. I had to carry it with both
arms so I gripped the penlight in my teeth. Waddling like a penguin I came back to the well, straddled it, and bent at the waist. Pointing the penlight into the darkness, I lined up the rock as best I could and dropped it straight down toward Chet's head. I didn't watch the rock after I dropped it but I heard the noise it made when it struck Chet's head. It was a sound like a watermelon cracking open. If Chet had still been alive after the fall he wasn't anymore.

My arms ached from carrying the rock and I stayed crouched for a moment. A crow watched me from his perch on a dying maple tree on the outskirts of the meadow. I wondered if he could smell the death in the air, and thought that he probably could. He dipped his head, ruffled his black wings. I felt like he was welcoming me to a special world.

After turning the penlight off and returning it to my pocket, I pulled the stake out of the ground, dropping it and the greased-up rope into the well. Then I walked back and forth from my pile to the well and dropped about six more large rocks down toward Chet. I would cover him more later but figured that it wouldn't hurt to get a head start on the process. I would have kept going but the light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadow and the surrounding woods losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray. My initial plan had been to return to the apartment above the studio, and start packing up Chet's things, bring them back through the woods to the well and dump them in. Then I would cover everything over with rocks and re-cover the well hole. But as I walked back through the blackness of the woods, my penlight's beam only carving out a small patch of forest floor in front of me, I decided that I could pack up Chet's things now, and move them to the well in the early morning. I knew that my parents would sleep late.

I was very familiar with the small apartment above the studio. It was one of my favorite places when it was empty, but I hadn't seen it since Chet had moved in at the beginning of the summer. I had been worried that he would have a lot of stuff that I would need to pack up, but he didn't. He was still living out of a large army-green duffel bag that was spread open by the single bed. I began to search the place using the penlight,
then realized I could simply turn the lamp on. On the off chance that either of my parents looked out their bedroom window toward the studio they would hardly be surprised to see a light on in Chet's apartment. In fact, they'd be more surprised if there wasn't a light.

The lamp cast dim yellow light across the whitewashed walls and the wide, bare planks of the floor. There was very little furniture in the studio apartment, just my beloved beanbag chair, looking deflated, and two upholstered chairs, each with rips in its fabric, foam coming out. The chair with the pastel sprigged print was another of my favorite reading spots. I was glad to see that Chet had used it to stack some books. It meant he hadn't been sitting in it.

There were some clothes scattered around the cot, a couple of T-shirts and a pair of white underpants. I used one of the T-shirts to scoop the underwear off the floor and put both in the duffel. A stale, itchy smell of body odor came out of the half-filled bag, but the apartment didn't smell as bad as I thought it might. Mainly turpentine and ash. In the center of the floor was a coffee can nearly filled to the brim with cigarette butts. I picked it up, and tried to think where to put it, then realized I could dump it in the duffel. Chet would not be wearing his clothes anymore.

From the bathroom I grabbed Chet's toothbrush, a nearly empty tube of toothpaste, a white crystal stone in some packaging that said it was a deodorant, a bright green bottle of Pert. I left behind the sliver of hairy soap in the dish. From the kitchen—really a corner with a sink, a few cabinets, and an electric hot plate—I grabbed two packages of ramen noodles and a large plastic bottle of Popov vodka. I dumped the vodka down the sink and left the bottle in one of the cabinets. I suddenly worried that I was leaving my fingerprints all over the apartment, that I should be wearing gloves. But I would have time tomorrow to wipe things down. Besides, if things went the way I thought they would, then no one would suspect that Chet had been killed. It would simply look as though he had taken off. It was hard to imagine that anyone would miss him.

After filling the duffel, I zipped it closed and lifted it, making sure I would be able to carry it in the morning. It was heavy but manageable. All that was left of Chet's in the apartment were his painting supplies. There were four canvases, three that were leaning against the wall, faced so that I couldn't see what they looked like. The fourth canvas was still on the easel. It was in the early stages, just a few blocks of color over some pencil marks, but I could tell that it was of the swimming pool at the back of the house, and that a figure had been sketched in the corner of the pool. There were no details but I knew it was me. It was a pretty small canvas, not a lot bigger than a normal TV screen. I took it off the easel and twisted it so that its fragile wood frame snapped, then I put it on the floor, and stacked the other canvases on top of it. I barely looked at them but they all seemed like finished paintings. Abstract splotches of color with, here and there, something that resembled a figure. I could have painted them.

The easel was Chet's, since I was pretty sure there had never been an easel in the apartment. It was small, with three telescoped legs supporting it. I collapsed it and folded it into itself till it was the size of a small briefcase, a block of stained wood with a handle to carry it. I added it to the pile of paintings.

I looked around the room, thinking that I had gotten everything. Even if something was left behind it would merely look as though Chet had left it himself.

My finger throbbed where I'd torn at the nail. I looked at it closely. The blood had clotted, turning brown and sticky, and I didn't think that I had splattered anything in the apartment. Suddenly, I wanted to get out of there, and be back in my bedroom. And I was hungry. Unless my parents had gotten to it, there was leftover shepherd's pie in the fridge.

I set my alarm for six the next morning. But when my owl-shaped clock whoo-whooed I was already awake, out of bed, and half-dressed.
I'd slept some, but it was the kind of sleep where you are aware of every squeak and click and scrape that old houses make, where you think you haven't slept at all and then realize that the strange thoughts in your head were actual dreams, and that the pulled curtain is glowing slightly, that dawn has broken.

It took three trips to bring everything from the apartment to the well. I brought the duffel bag first and that was the hardest. I had to drag it for a while when it got too heavy to carry. The meadow was covered with a cool dew that dampened the bottoms of my jeans. I peered down into the well before dropping the duffel in. Chet was still there, buried under the rocks I'd dropped on him. A few clumsy blackflies batted around his body. On the next trip, I brought the three larger canvases. They weren't heavy but they were awkward, and I had to break one of them to get it down the well. On the last trip, I brought the small backpacker easel and the painting that Chet had started, the one of me in my pool. After dropping them down the well, I grabbed the rest of the rocks I'd been unearthing and dropped those in. It was satisfying, especially as I watched all evidence of Chet disappear under a pile of rocks. I had used an old rusty trowel to pry some of the rocks loose. It was still in the meadow and I used it to dig up clumps of dirt, dumping them down the well until it looked as though there was nothing down there except dirt and rocks. I knew it wasn't perfect but I was satisfied.

The last thing I did before leaving the meadow was to drop the rusty trowel down into the well, then replace the cover. Using my already filthy fingers I swept some of the long, dried-out grass across the cover to try and camouflage it. I circled the area before leaving it, an eye on the ground to make sure that nothing had been left behind, but there was nothing, not even a cigarette butt. Chet was gone from the world. The morning was quiet, just the rising hum of bugs, and the cawing crows that were the true owners of this meadow. I cawed back at them, like I sometimes did, and wondered what they thought of me.

Back at the house I showered for a long time, scrubbing at my fingers to get at the last of the dirt. The hot water humming over my body made me feel both powerful and safe at the same time. When my mother opened the bathroom door and said my name, I jumped and nearly fell, my foot squelching along the bottom of the shower.

“What's wrong?” I said.

“Nothing, darling. Daddy and I were wondering if you wanted to go get breakfast at Shady's?”

“Okay,” I said. “When?”

“Soon as you're out of that shower.”

We used to go to Shady's Diner more often. It was my father's favorite and probably my favorite, too, especially for breakfast. I got the French toast with a side of extra crispy bacon. My parents sat across from me in the booth, their shoulders touching, even sharing a fruit bowl to go with my dad's corned beef hash and my mom's omelet. Thoughts about Chet crept into my mind all during breakfast, then they would disappear when one of my parents said something to make me laugh, or when I was thinking about how good my food was. My stomach felt like a hollow bowl that I could fill forever.

“You're hungry, Lily,” my mother said.

“She's a growing girl, almost a woman,” said my father.

Breakfast was a good time, even when my parents ruined it by asking me again if I wanted to skip another grade. Some of my teachers had recommended it at the end of the school year and I had already said no at the beginning of the summer. My mother had kept bringing it up, so I punished her by refusing to go to art camp in July. I knew that the two weeks when I was away was something she looked forward to. I was surprised that the subject came up again, but it didn't last long and it didn't entirely ruin breakfast.

I didn't hear anything about Chet for a week, and began to worry, wondering if it was unnatural that I hadn't said anything about it. So one day during lunch, my father nowhere to be found, and my mother in a silent mood, I asked what happened to Chet.

“Chet left. Didn't you know that?”

“Where'd he go?”

“God, Lily, I don't know. Someone else's couch, I guess. He never said good-bye, ungrateful prick.”

That afternoon I wandered out to the apartment. It looked as though my mother or father had been in and straightened it out a little. The cot had been stripped of sheets and the trash bucket in the kitchen area was emptied. I sat on my chair for a moment, even though I didn't have a book. The windows were open and a cool breeze, the first we'd had for a while, came through into the apartment. I'd been waiting for two things since killing Chet. Waiting to get caught and waiting to feel bad. Neither had happened yet, and I knew that neither would.