He said, “I see what you’re doing.”
“You’re a perceptive man.”
“Why didn’t you call the cops?”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“Your need makes you transparent.” He steepled his fingers, brought them to his lips. “So what do we do now?”
“You tell me your story.”
“And you process my behavior and feed it back to me.”
“I listen.”
“Why should I tell you my story?” “Why did you kill your family?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s barbaric, illegal, immoral—”
“Insane?”
“Did you think you’d get away with it?”
“I already did, dipshit.” He laughed. “They’re dead.” He put his face in his hands. “My parents had outlived their usefulness. They disgusted me. They smelled like rancid milk.”
“How do you feel right now?”
“Like I’m wasting my time. If you’re looking for credible motivation, Melville, you won’t find it here.”
“Every lie is a victory for you, isn’t it?”
“You want to make sense of this so badly, you’ll believe anything I tell you so long as there’s an element of horror and remorse. Am I right? You want the world to make sense, but it doesn’t.”
“It does if you bother.”
“Most times nobody knows why they do anything.”
“Most times they don’t want to know.”
“Don’t you go to the movies? This is the twenty-first century, Wylie, the Age of Unreason. Kill someone in the morning; go to the theater at night. No reason, no resistance. Action is its own motivation. It’s kind of funny if you think about it.” Delreese pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of a shoulder holster, said he bet I wasn’t planning on this, and I told him he was right about that, and he told me he had nothing to lose, and I told him that I did. How on earth had I missed the signals? Had his lips narrowed while I blinked? Did the pitch of his voice rise, not in deceit, but in anger?
He said, “You know what’s easy, Wylie? Lying to someone who wants to be lied to.” He aimed the pistol at my heart and asked me if I was a religious man. I told him I was not. He said, “Too bad for you then. You don’t get saved.”
“There’s no salvation for you either, Delreese. Every child knows that this is our only life. Every pig knows it. Every snake. Just people like you who don’t.”
“People like me.”
“People who feel that the world has let them down, who can’t imagine existence without their own presence. Dishonest people.”
“The only honesty is a lie well-acted.”
I told him to put the gun away and let’s talk. I said it like I was soothing a feisty dog.
Delreese picked up the Marlins baseball, lobbed it across the room, fired the pistol at it, and put a bullet through the window. “I suspect we don’t have much time now.” He pointed the gun at my face. I squeezed my eyes shut. I tried to breathe deeply to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest. I trembled and held onto my chair. I thought about my father waiting for me on Sunday, sitting with the cigarette-smoking attendants on the shady bench outside the Clover House lobby, tapping his foot, chewing his lip, trying to remember why the hell he was sitting there, and I understood that without me around to fight for him, the health-care system would swallow him up, strap him to a bed in some shadowy ward, and let him waste away. When they told him I was dead, would he know who they were talking about?
Delreese said, “Cat got your tongue?”
I thought if I could talk, maybe I could save my life, but in order to talk I’d have to think; only I couldn’t think; I could only remember. I saw my brother Cameron and me, and we’re six and on the floor in the den with Oreos and milk watching The Lone Ranger. Dad’s snoring over on the couch, and Mom’s out on the patio smoking up a storm and reading another Harlequin romance. This bad guy from the Cavendish gang has the drop on the Lone Ranger and tells him to nice-and-easy-like take off his mask, which looks like my father’s eyeshade, and which, of course, he will never do, even though I kind of want him to myself, which is sort of a betrayal, I know, and the Lone Ranger pretends that someone’s behind the bad guy by making these not-so-subtle head and eye gestures that arouse the desperado’s suspicion, and then the Lone Ranger says, “Get ’em, Tonto,” and when the bad guy turns and fires, the Lone Ranger jumps him, grabs the six-shooter, and knocks the bad guy out with a single punch.
Delreese said, “I call this game Meet Your Maker.” He laughed. “Ten Mississippi,” he said. “Nine...”
Cameron changed the channel and told me to stop crying. I told him I wasn’t crying, but I could taste the tears on my lips. Bugs Bunny aimed a pistol at Elmer Fudd, pulled the trigger, and a flag popped out of the barrel of the gun, unfurled, and said Bang! Bugs gave Elmer a big wet kiss. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face, just the back of her head. I knew I wouldn’t hear the gunshot, wouldn’t feel a thing. Everything would be over before I knew it. What would be the last thought I thought, the last picture I saw?
“Five Mississippi.”
What I did remember about Mom was her silence, her ratty chenille robe, and her pink Deerfoam slippers. When she thought I was lying, she’d tell me to stick out my tongue, said that if I was lying it would be black. It was always black, even those times I was sure I wasn’t lying. She’d wash my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap or spoon horseradish on my tongue. Cameron called her The Beast. Cameron, my twin, who looked exactly like me, people said, but was somehow more handsome, who always knew what I was thinking and could make me laugh at the drop of a hat, who fell into a life of drug addiction and robbed my parents blind, died in room 201 at the Pirate’s Inn in Dania, beaten to death by his playmates with a studded mace and a stone war club. He was twenty-four.
I realized that Delreese had stopped counting, and I waited and thought maybe I was dead already, that this dark stillness was life after life, that I’d already been shot, that I’d been wrong about death too, and Willis had been right after all; there is no pain, no past, no present, no future, just the everything all at once, just a floating toward a resplendent and cleansing light, so I opened my eyes to see it, to let it wash over me, and I saw Delreese, who must have been waiting for this moment, with the black barrel of the gun in his mouth, saw him smile and wink. I reached for his arm, and he squeezed the trigger.
Boozanne, lemme be
by Vicki Hendricks
Miami Beach
I never needed “stuff,” so it was easy to live — till Boozanne come along. Most stuff is just to impress women, and I didn’t need them either — till Boozanne. I had a cute face — like a puppy dog, I heard — but being 4’10", I was too short for normal chicks, too tall for a dwarf. I didn’t try to fit in. I could afford a handjob now and then. Did me fine. Keep it simple was my motto. When Danny DeVito retired, maybe I’d head out to Hollywood, but for a young guy like myself, the deal I had going was almost as good — till Boozanne messed me up.
Ma had always told me, if you’re gonna steal a VW, might as well steal a Cadillac. Well, Ma had that wrong. A VW would’ve been the right size for me. But when I got outta prison for stealing the Caddy, I gave up car theft altogether. My home was gone. Ma had passed on, bless her soul — Pop was never around. Being broke and alone, I hitched down to Florida, remembering how warm it was that winter when Ma and me took vacation, my best memory as a kid. I met Weasel in Miami, and he’s the one told me about this gig. It fit me perfect, even better than a VW.