Authors: Mark Nykanen
I introduce myself as Harry Butler. Harry is such an unassuming name, untainted by association. Tell them Ted, and they might think Bundy; John, and they might think Gacy. But Harry? If they’re young, they think of Potter; and if they’re older, Truman. That’s if they think of anyone at all.
“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I used to live here when I was a child, and I wondered—I know this is unusual—but I wondered if I could just come in and have a quick look around and see my old room. I’ve just come from my mother’s funeral, I’ve got her things out there,” and here I offer a feint to the van, “and before leaving town I wondered if I could see my old house. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, and I have so many great memories of the place.”
This is always a key point in the transaction: by implication, I praise their taste, and show that we share a fondness for the house. That’s what it’s all about at this stage, finding common ground. Keeping the moment gentle.
She is ever so attractive, in a dress of all things. You don’t realize how few women wear dresses at home anymore until you start doing this. I wonder if they’re Mormons, if I’ve come upon a coven of them. Now that would be sweet payback for all those freshly scrubbed missionaries with their neat haircuts and name tags who have violated my privacy over the years. It’s the dress that has me thinking. I know she hasn’t spent the day at work, I’ve been watching. It’s nothing extravagant, mind you, but the kind of frock—forgive me, but it’s true—that old June Cleaver would have worn.
I am wildly stimulated. I don’t know if it’s her, the dress, her pantyhose, or bald anticipation, but I have to choke down the desire to keep talking, to fill the silence with words. That would be a terrible mistake. It would make me seem much too eager, like a salesman, which of course I am: I’m selling myself and the whole notion of a lost childhood in these halls.
Some women have an especially sharp sense of survival, and have sent me on my way, and I know that if she says, No, I don’t think so, I’ll have to thank her for her time, turn around, and leave. I can’t force the issue, and I remind myself of this as her eyes cloud and her lips clamp tightly together. But before she can speak, I am saved by her husband. I see this the moment he ambles up, all geniality and king of the castle, a big jolly looking fellow who welcomes me and says he’s always wanted to go back to his own childhood home. Come in, come in, come in.
He gives me his meaty hand and leads me with practiced ease over the threshold. I hear the delicious click of the door closing. They’re finished.
It’s not difficult to subdue a family. You focus on the children, and let the worst fears of the parents keep their own panicky impulses in line. I have that Jolly Roger of a dad bind his son and daughter with duct tape, insisting that he do a fair job of it, or I’ll do it myself.
He does do a good job, particularly with the girl, and I detect more than a little veiled hostility in the way he wraps the tape around her mouth. He does it so tightly that I can’t help but wonder if she’s been mouthing off of late.
When he works on his wife, her dress gets bunched up around her thighs, and I can see the panty in the pantyhose. It lures my interest, but not for long. I can ill afford a lapse, and I never suffer one. Never.
Then it’s time for Jolly Roger himself to place his hands behind his back. I have the handcuffs out. I need only one pair, and I save them for this critical moment because once he cuffs himself, I can go to work on him, and then on to the other three as well; he has merely bound and gagged them, and so much more remains to be done.
“No way,” he says with a sneer. “You’re not putting those things on me.”
This is what I’ve been dreading, pigheaded resistance. It’s not unusual with big men, who despite all evidence to the contrary sometimes believe they’re mightier than a bullet. I’m sure he sees himself as a hero. I think he’s a creep. He binds his family, but not himself? What’s with that?
“You don’t have a choice,” I say as if to a three-year-old. “Not if you want to leave here alive.” And there is truth to that statement. I point the gun at his head. It’s an impressive weapon, and his wife, voice muffled, starts making
oompf-oompf
sounds and shaking her head frantically. I can tell that she’s run into his stubbornness before, and has no more patience for it than I. Her son takes her cue and follows suit. There’s a veritable chorus of
oompf-oompfs.
The daughter looks on hollow-eyed.
“The vote’s going against you,” I say with a smile.
Then I cock the hammer and thrust the barrel right into his face where he can see the muzzle and smell its blue steel breath.
“Your cooperation, or …” I shrug, and the barrel moves an inch or two, grazing his nose as I intended it to, though truly I am reluctant to use it.
“What do you want?” he demands. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this question of late. She asked me too, in a way that indicated she’d give me
whatever
I wanted. I laughed at her. I’ll kill him.
He’s still staring at the gun when I hand him the cuffs. I direct his hands behind his back, and he snaps them on, shaking his head.
“Hold still,” I tell him.
“What for?”
I slap the tape on his mouth. There, there’s his answer.
The dog sniffs his wife, then snorts grotesquely up her legs. The beast has a most appalling interest in her crotch, and June is squirming in real fright, as if she considers this part of the plan, that I would countenance bestiality.
I watch, and while I appreciate the added glimpses, I pull the dog off her and dispatch the creature with a bullet to the brain. This stills her eager snout, and their protests as well.
It’s growing dark as I back the van into the garage. I save June for last. When I begin to unbutton the back of her dress, she stars
oompf-oompfing
again. An hour ago she was willing to bargain with her body; now she’s acting like it’s the sacred trust. But just at the point when I’m really losing patience, she relents, resigned to her presumed fate. Perhaps she thinks I’ll spend myself on her, and spare the children.
Her arms slip out of the sleeves, and I raise it up over her head. This way I can take my time looking. Control top? Unquestionably, though you wouldn’t think she’d need it. L’eggs? Or No nonsense? No nonsense, I’m all but certain of it. And industrial gauge underpants with a bra that has all the appeal of day-old bread.
Her knees fall open, but no more than a foot because she’s still bound at the ankles, and will remain so because I have no interest that has not already been sated. I fold the dress and put it aside, lug her to the van and promise slow death to both of their children if any of them decide to start banging on the walls.
I spend the next forty-five minutes cleaning up the dog’s blood, her carcass, which I toss in the back with them, and scraps of tape. Then I vacuum over and over, and wipe down surfaces till neither fiber nor fingerprint can survive my diligence. I remove the vacuum bag and toss it into the back of the van as well. I put a new one in. They have vanished
without a trace.
I can see the headlines already. They’re as predictable as murder.
We have a long drive ahead, and I can hardly take a room for the night, so I pull into a McDonald’s drive-through and order three large coffees. It’s horrible stuff, but with a family of four trussed and bundled in the back, I’m hardly going to troll through this miserable town for a Starbucks.
They don’t shift an inch as I pull up and pay, and minutes later we join all the other headlights on the interstate. Fifty miles away, I pull into a rest area where I dispose of the vacuum bag and paper towels. It’s still too risky to dump the dog, so her ever stiffening, ever ripening corpse will have to accompany us even farther. All of them are lying back there in the dark. None of them move. They don’t dare.
L
AUREN
R
EED STEPPED OFF THE
bus and caught the walk sign as it started flashing red. She hurried across the four lanes of traffic, casting a wary eye at the impatient, early morning drivers lined up to her right. One of them gunned his engine. Idiot.
Bandering Hall towered above her, six stories of gray concrete, slab upon slab of faceless floors and tall windows, ugly and urban in the mode of most modern architecture.
Her coat felt too heavy, too warm, and she decided that she’d have to retire it for the season. Spring, fickle as it was in the Pacific Northwest, had finally settled in. She’d already moved her morning run from the indoor oval at the Y to the streets and parks of Portland.
Today was critique day. As she eyed the foundry’s exhaust fans protruding from the second floor of Bandering, she calculated that she could devote eight minutes to each student’s sculpture. That’s all she could spare, and that was figuring on no more than ten minutes for start time. Of course, some of them would wish for even less once the discussion of their work turned taut, but others would feel cheated by such miserly attention to what they considered their masterpiece.
Running late was not an option because the faculty meeting started at noon, and the chair wouldn’t brook tardiness. Those who tarried faced truly unpleasant committee assignments every fall.
She passed the elevator as its doors clunked open, and climbed the stairs to her third floor office, feeling the effects of her daily run. Routines, she’d found, were vital when you weren’t living at home, although where home was precisely had become a question with no easy answer. Portland, where she taught and rented a room in a fine old Victorian that had once been a B&B? Or Pasadena, where she kept her studio? And where Chad lived, she reminded herself, pleased to realize that his star was finally fading and that he wasn’t foremost on her mind anymore. He’d been her boyfriend for seven years. Seven
years
, and when she’d said to him at Christmas, “Look, I love you dearly but I really want to get married and maybe even have a family,” he’d bolted. Not physically. Emotionally. Backed out faster than a bank robber with a bag full of money.
Her studio was still in his house, but she’d found a small apartment nearby, all of which made the abode question so nettlesome: the room in Portland, or the one in Pasadena?
She unlocked her office and unloaded her shoulder bag before hurrying down to the student union in the basement of the adjoining administration building. She bought a tall cup of hot water for the chai tea that she stored next to her iMac, which had been sleeping all weekend.
As she sat at her desk, she jarred the computer screen to life. She glanced over to see her schedule neatly beaming back at her. Oh-no, she’d spaced on the writer who was coming to interview her in what? Eight minutes. That number had begun to haunt her. He’d said he was researching a book about contemporary sculpture, though she could not understand why: who would buy it? But she was flattered to have been called, hardly ranking herself among the foremost practitioners of her art. Hardly willing, in fact, to call herself an artist at all, preferring “sculptor,” and believing that if she ever did really,
really
good work, then she could call herself an artist. But she hadn’t, not yet, and her last show had been a disappointment to her, if not to the critics. She felt she’d been repeating herself, and for the first time a feeling of stagnancy had overcome her when she worked, a miasma as real as the smog that often enveloped her studio down in California.
She wondered briefly what the writer would look like, imagining an owlish man, a Mr. Peeps type, or a geeky twenty-something working wholly on spec on his first book, which would turn out to be his first big professional rejection a year or two hence.
What she most assuredly did not expect in the Ry Chambers who had spoken to her on the phone was a guy about six foot four with dark hair, thick as shearling, and a wedge-shaped torso sprouting from tan cargo pants that hung loosely around his hips because he had no belly to speak of.
His age? Thirty-five? Forty? Not any older. Not likely. No way, she told herself: no crow’s-feet.
She was standing, shaking his hand, looking into his eyes, looking away, then with a most unpleasant jolt remembering that along with the appointment, she’d overlooked something even more vital on an urban campus:
“The parking pass! I’m so sorry. I completely forgot—”
“Don’t worry.” He shook off her concern as he unfolded his narrow reporter’s notebook. “I found a space on the street. Just a few minutes from here,” he added, as if she needed additional consoling.
She did. She
never
forgot details like this. Except she had, and all she could utter was “Good-good. It won’t happen again. I promise. I don’t know how I did that …” She was starting to babble, could feel the nervous urge to blather, and forced herself to shut up, but then she popped off again, like a champagne cork that refuses to seal, that yields to all the fizzy pressure rising from below. “Do you want some coffee? Tea? I could get some. It’s right down—”
“No,” he interrupted her again. “I had a cup on my way here. I’m fine, really. Thanks.”
She felt her brow tense, and forced it to relax.
What are you doing?
Then she caught herself scratching her arm, another nervous habit.
“You’re writing a book? About sculpture?”
He talked readily about the project, his publisher’s willingness to risk a modest advance on a field so fallow of interest that the most well-known art critic of our time, the author Robert Hughes, who also labored for
Time
and public broadcasting, had barely bothered with it in his groundbreaking book about modernism,
The Shock of the New.
Ry Chambers mentioned the names of three other sculptors he’d already interviewed, all men, she noted to herself, and brought the conversation around to her: when had she started, and what was the nature of her early work? Before she realized it, she’d talked right up to the start of class, an entire hour, and felt acutely self-conscious for having monopolized the time. Had she asked him even a single question about himself? She didn’t think so, and when she told him the experience had left her feeling “bloated with self-indulgence,” he laughed, closed his notebook and said, “Good, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I’m interviewing you. I want you to talk about yourself.”