Who Loves A Good Mystery?
I killed an 18-year old man in 1980. Was it deliberate? I don’t know. But I can tell you the taste of killing sticks to the roof of your mouth and sweetens your tongue. I salivate just thinking about it. Once you know you can kill, you add murder to your list of possible future actions. You want to taste those sugary juices again. You spend time wondering about the aftermath and whether you wanna get caught the next time you kill. I came close to killing another man, the first time in 1985 and the second in 1991. I couldn’t come up with a good way to hide the body and didn’t want to get caught so I put off killing that man. I sometimes wish I had killed him.
Wishing doesn’t make it so.
Last night, I told Lee about my hunger to kill again. He watched my Adam’s apple move up and down. I kept swallowing, trying to keep from drooling. He smiled insanely.
I like Lee because he has no hold on reality. He knows he lives in this universe but he doesn’t understand the concept of consequences. He just thinks that whatever he does happens in a vacuum. That’s why I keep Lee locked up at the house.
I had watched Lee sitting in the front bedroom window this morning. He stared at a cackle of crows flying from treetop to treetop in the woods outside our house. He laughed and called out to the crows as if he was caught up in their conversation, a bunch of chitchat about who was boss. He curled up on the ledge of the window. Or rather, he perched. He turned to me and grinned. I knew he thought he was sitting in a crow’s nest. I also knew he was probably pooping in his pants, oblivious to the fact that someone, more than likely me, would have to clean up the mess.
Lee sat in the living room this afternoon, his butt numb from sitting too long in front of the television. He’d just finished watching the movie, “The Nomi Song,” about a German falsetto singer named Klaus ‘Nomi’ Sperber who dressed and acted like Joel Grey from “Cabaret.”
Lee told me that Elizabeth Berkley, the former cute girl on TV’s “Saved by the Bell,” played the tart named Nomi Malone in the movie, “Showgirls,” but that’s the only trait the two Nomis have in common. Unless, of course, you consider Klaus Nomi a tart, too. From the little bit I’d seen of the movie, Klaus certainly had a unique talent but not one that anyone in dull Suburbia would come to appreciate.
Nomi lived in a subculture only slightly experienced by Lee, filled with drugs, punk rock and androgyny. When Lee lived in the Fort Sanders area of Knoxville in the early 1980s, his neighbors acted somewhat like Nomi’s unconventional friends. For instance, “Chi Chi,” a cross-dressing singer, lived with his sister/girlfriend next door to Lee on Laurel Avenue. Most of Lee’s Fort Sanders’ neighbors have gone on to conventional middle class lives. Some of them, like Rus Harper, still live the New Wave Bohemian lifestyle in the Knoxville area, singing punk rock at local dives. At least in Rus’ case, there was never the excuse of a bourgeois life to fall back to.
Lee and I roomed together one summer in Fort Sanders. We had run into each other at a party on Laurel Avenue. Our mutual friend, Vincent, sold drugs to pay for his master’s degree classes in geography. Lee acted as Vincent’s bouncer/bodyguard and greeted me at the door to Vincent’s second floor apartment, a popular hangout and easy place to keep a lookout for the cops. Right from the start, Lee didn’t trust me. He suspected me of being a nark, even though I was there to score some weed. I guess it’s the conservative clothes I wear – button-down shirt and khaki pants – the same type of clothes I’ve worn since high school. With the right attitude, you can get by with that outfit anywhere, from a corporate board room to the barrios of LA.
Lee still doesn’t trust me but he knows I feed him, clothe him and give him shelter. I take him on walks around the subdivisions late at night when we’re least likely to run into anyone.
He just looked at me. “Whatcha doing?”
“I’m typing.”
“You writing a letter to the cops?”
“No. I’m writing a story.”
Lee pushed a finger up his nose and dug around. He pulled the finger out of his nose and wiped it on the carpet. He ambled across the room to the television. “Why is the TV not on?”
“I turned it off so I could concentrate on my writing.”
“You fucking with me? I mean, what the hell difference does it make if the TV’s on or off? It’s just a piece of furniture. You don’t turn the lamp on the end table on or off just to concentrate on the TV, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Then turn on the damn TV. I wanna watch something besides a blank screen.”
I shook my head. “How ‘bout you go out to the sunroom, instead? It’s going to rain. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting sound patterns to play with coming off the roof.”
“What about we kill someone, instead?” Lee hooted out loud. “Yeah, why don’t we knock off the first person we see?”
“I like your thinking. But then how are we going to hide the evidence?”
“Man, that’s all you ever say. Fuck the evidence. People kill in cold blood every minute of every day. You think anybody cares about ‘evidence’?”
“I do.” I turned to the computer, trying to get back to the story about the Old Man of Scottsboro, an ancient fellow I met at the Blue Willow Café in downtown Scottsboro who’d delivered newspapers back when the first airplane landed in the outskirts of town between the two World Wars, whose Alzheimer’s disease had wiped out all short-term memory, leaving someone like me plenty of time to have a story repeated enough times that I got a few different angles on the history of the town and its people.
But Lee was right. It was time to kill again. I could taste yeast doughnuts and peppermint candy on my lips. I was salivating like a bulldog and beaming from ear to ear.
Should we commit a random act of violence or plan it out this time?
I walked out the front door and watched the first drops of rain plastering the fall leaves to the wooden porch. A woodpecker chattered nearby. The smell of decaying leaves filled my mind’s eye with the desire to bury something.
I hollered at Lee. “Hey, bud, it’s getting dark! Put on your shoes. It’s time!”
I put on a windbreaker and grabbed a pitching wedge golf club I kept next to the front door. When Lee joined me, I handed him his old raincoat and put the golf club in his hand. As we stepped outside, I picked up a small sledgehammer I’d been using to pound down some protruding nails on the porch.
Thunder rumbled across the sky. The rain picked up, roaring in the leaves around us.
Lee stomped his feet on the porch. “Yee-haw!”
I laughed. “You betcha. Now let’s go hunting.”
We followed a path out around the back of the house that led to the ridge of a wooded hill. From the large bald on top of the ridge, we could observe the neighborhood. Several subdivisions had sprung up in Big Cove over the past 10 years. Twenty-three, to be exact. Lee liked that number. I never told him that 23 was a number many numerology fanatics obsessed about. I just focused on the fact that so many subdivisions gave us plenty of random victims to choose from.
I pointed out a couple of golf carts that were making a beeline from the 13th hole to a shelter not far below us. Lee nodded and followed me as I ran down the hill. We could get to the shelter ahead of the golfers and hide.
Lightning struck a tree 40 yards from us. Lee let out a war cry and raced down the hill ahead of me.
I slipped on a rock and fell backwards on my butt. As I stood up, I realized I would not catch up with Lee before he started his attack. However, I wanted my kill, too.
As Lee ran toward the shelter, I changed directions and headed through the woods toward the second golf cart.
We reached our targets at the same time.
Lee walked around the shelter and waved his golf club at the driver of the first golf cart. The driver stepped out to greet Lee.
I jumped out of the woods and approached just as the driver of the second cart was coming to a stop. We nodded at each other while the driver stepped out of the cart.
Lightning struck the hill behind us again and lit up the shelter. The look of shock on the driver’s face stuck in my mind like a bad Polaroid picture as I swung the sledgehammer around and slammed it into the woman’s face.
Lee had already bludgeoned the male driver once, knocking the man unconscious. He looked at me and howled. I gestured at the vehicles. Lee nodded. We grabbed the bodies and set them up in the golf carts.
We hauled ass in the carts back toward the crest of a sand trap behind the 13th hole.
I stopped in front of the sand trap and set the woman down in the sand. I pushed the golf cart so that the right wheel rolled over and crushed her head and then shoved the cart over. Lee repeated the action with his man.
We walked down to the creek and washed off our tools, our blunt instruments, if you will. I took several drinks of water to wash down the taste of dessert in my mouth.
Lee pounded me on the back. “Evidence! What evidence? Man, oh man…who loves a good mystery, huh?”
I smiled and flashed my eyes. “Yep. Doesn’t get any sweeter than that.”
We stepped into the shallow creek and waded upstream until we got to the golf cart bridge. We carefully walked out on the bank and ran down the pebbled cart path through the pouring rain to the woods behind our house.
I let Lee into the house and took him to the bathroom to remove his wet clothes and get him to wash the poop that had run down his legs. While he took a shower, I returned to the computer to finish the story about the Scottsboro boy who had learned to fly a plane from a couple of barnstormers a few summers before WWII broke out.
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