The Joy of Killing Read Online Free PDF Page B

spoke to my mother. The second detective was younger, with a thin mustache and motionless eyes. He took off his dark brown fedora and held it in one hand as my mother stepped back and opened the door for them. The way it plays now, the first man, with the glasses and fleshy face, pulls a wallet from his coatpocket and opens it to show a gold badge, although that might be one of the images that has bled in over time. The girl on the train happened because I can remember the smallest detail of it, such as the raw look of her mouth when she finally lifted her head from my lap, although as I’ve said, I don’t doubt a few details might have dropped in; perhaps the ticket punch in the conductor’s hand, or the baby crying.
    I would stand on the bank in the sun, dripping wet, and feel the warmth of the summer wind slowly drying the drops on my skin, and you might think that in an unprotected moment like that something from the past might slip through. Maybe it was the power of the adolescent mind to believe that once you get the rock out of your shoe the pain was over. Maybe I was so happy in those days at the lake that the past simply didn’t exist. After lights-out, I would bend the gooseneck lamp down low to the bedside table and in the glow of it masturbate to a girl in one of the magazines I’d brought from home. Unimpeded in the slightest by images of whatever had gone before. This place, the bay, the house, the pathways along the lakeshore, with its evening-long lingering sunsets, had seemed separate and safe from the outside world of remembrance.
    It’s early autumn now, a time we were never here. The days are shorter, and the evening winds are sharper, and the moon sits higher in the sky. The edges of the oak leaves are just beginning to turn. A boy drowned in the lake one summer. His family lived a couple of houses down, closer to the bay where we swam. The canoe tipped over a ways out and the boy disappeared. I can see his face now—straw-colored hair, freckles—and even remember hisname. Joseph. Not Joe. Joseph. From the porch we watched the boats dragging the lake; we were sent to bed when it was still light, and I could hear the motors chugging as I drifted off. The next morning I was scared to go to the lake for fear of seeing Joseph in the water, but he was found washed up in a woody tangle half a mile down from our little bay. Blue and with his eyes stuck open, we’d heard. I’d almost forgotten the incident until early this evening, when the caretaker and I were standing on the porch in the failing light. He was holding the large set of house keys, flicking one after another on the brass ring, and at one point his eyes locked on me. I remembered Joseph then. The caretaker was his father.
    I STEP BACK, allowing the oval window to again frame the night scene. The moon has split the lake with a bright golden stripe. I sort through, as I have for the past several weeks, the threads of cloth to find the one connecting to the gray fedora. The first time the hat appeared, I think, was, during the wedding ceremony for my first marriage. A woman standing to the side of the altar was singing “Amazing Grace,” and one of the notes must have sounded like our old doorbell, because suddenly the door opened and there the detective stood, in his hat and ill-fitting sports jacket, solemn eyes appraising the situation. The scene rolled on for a few frames—my mother backed up a step and turned and called over her shoulder to my father, who was in the den—until I sensed the looks of both the minister and the bride. My friend, the guy who would fuck the bride a few years later, held out the ring for me to take and slip on her finger. Everyone was smiling, so I smiled, too, in spite of thefading image in my head, which I finally managed to obscure by focusing on the small projections on the front of the bride’s wedding dress.
    â€œC OME BACK ,” I murmur. I sit back