The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  I thought we were filling the jar so she could crush them mercilessly, or stick them with pins, or distill their glowing parts into some powerful, fluorescent poison with which she could coat her knife. But when it was dark, when about thirty of them were thick in the jar, she took off the lid and went running down the hill to the river, spilling a trail of bright motes that circled around her, rose up, and flew away.

  Soon there weren't any cats left for us—not because we had killed them all, but because after the fourth one, a tabby named Vittles, was found stabbed twelve times on the front steps of the general store, people started keeping their cats inside at night. Our hunts were widely spaced, occurring only about once every two weeks, but in between those nights Molly would come to the door for me and take me out to play in the daylight. We did the normal things that children our age were supposed to do, during the day. We swam in the river and played with her dolls and watched television.

  In late July Molly decided to change prey again. She took me through the woods, out to the kennel. I could hear the dogs barking in the darkness long before we reached them. They knew we were coming for them.

  The kennel was lit by a single streetlamp, stuck in the middle of a clearing in the woods. There was a little service road that ran under the light, out to the main road that led to General's Highway and Annapolis. I watched Molly stalk back and forth in front of the runs. The dogs were all howling and barking at her. It was two A.M. There was nobody around; nobody lived within a mile and a half of the place. The whole point of the kennel was to separate the dogs from the houses between June and September, so their barking wouldn't disturb all the wealthy people in their summer cottages. It was a stupid rule.

  Molly had stooped down in front of a poodle. I did not recognize it. It retreated to the back of its run and yipped at her.

  "Nice puppy," she said, though it was full grown. She waved me over to her, and then turned me around to take a piece of beef from the Holly Hobbie backpack she had strapped on me at the beginning of our excursion. She took out my lacrosse gloves and told me to put them on.

  "Be ready to grab him"' she said. She crouched down in front of the bars of the cage and held the meat up in the meager light. "Come on," she said. "Come and get your treat, baby. It's OK." She held on to one end while the poodle nibbled, and with her free hand she scratched its head. She motioned for me to come close beside her. It was the closest I had ever been to a poodle in my life. I tried to imagine the owner, probably a big fat rich lady with white hair, who wore diamonds around her throat while she slept in a giant canopy bed.

  "Just about ... now!" said Molly. I reached through the bars with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away, just a gentle tug. "Don't let it escape!" she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. The poodle gave me a What are you doing? look, and I very nearly lost my hold.

  It was an awkward kill, because the bars were in the way, and the poodle was a strong-willed little dog who wanted to live. It bit hard but ineffectively at my hands. It bit at the knife and cut its gums, and its teeth made a ringing sound against the metal. It snarled and yelped and squealed, and all around us the other dogs were all screaming. Molly was saying, "There! There! There!" in a low voice, almost a whisper. When she finally delivered the killing blow to the dog's neck, a gob of hot blood flew out between the bars and hit me in the eye. It burned like the harsh shampoos my parents bought for me, but I didn't cry out.

  On the way back I let her walk ahead of me. I watched the glint of her head under the moon as she ducked between bushes and hopped over rotting logs. I felt bad, not about the poodle, which I had hated instantly and absolutely as soon as I had laid eyes upon it, but about the owner, the fat lady who I thought must be named Mrs. Vanderbilt because that was the richest name I knew. I thought about her riding down to the kennel in her limousine with a china bowl full of steak tartare for her Precious, and the way her face would look when she saw the bloody cotton ball on the floor of the cage and could not comprehend that this was the thing she had loved. Molly got farther and farther ahead of me, calling back that I should stop being so poky and hurry up. Eventually all I could see was the moonlight on her head, and on the white bag she had brought for my gloves, promising to clean them.

  When we had gone about a mile from the kennel I heard a train whistle sounding. It was still far away, but I knew the tracks ran nearby. I went to them. In the far distance I could see the train light. I lay down in the middle of the tracks and waited. Molly came looking for me— I could hear her calling out, calling me a stupid boy and saying it was late. She was tired. She wanted to go to bed. As the train got nearer, I felt a deep, wonderful hum in the tracks that seemed to pass through my brain and stimulate whatever organ is responsible for generating happiness. I imagined my head flying from my body to land at her feet. Or maybe it would hit her and knock her down. She would, I imagined, give it a calm look, put it in the bag, and take it home, where she would keep it, along with my gloves, under her bed as a souvenir of our acquaintance. The train arrived and passed over me.

  I suppose I was too small for it to take off my head. Or maybe it was a different sort of train that did that to Charlie Kelly, a fifteen-year-old who had died the previous summer after a reefer party in the woods when he lay down on the tracks to impress Sam Corkle's sister. The conductor never saw me. The train never slowed. It rushed over me with such a noise — it got louder and louder until I couldn't hear it anymore, until watching the flashes of moon between the boxcars I heard my brother's voice say, "Soon."

  All Severna Forest was horrified by the death of the dog, whose name turned out to be Arthur. A guard was posted at the kennel. For the first few nights it was Sheriff Travis himself, but after a week he deputized a teenager he deemed trustworthy; that boy snuck off with his girlfriend to get stoned and listen to loud music in her car. While they were thus occupied we struck again, after two nights of watching and waiting for just such an opportunity. This time it was a Jack Russell terrier named Dreamboat.

  After that the kennel was closed and the dogs sent home to owners who locked them indoors, especially at night. Sheriff Travis claimed to be within a hair's breadth of catching the "pervert," but in fact he never came near Molly or me. She never seemed nervous about getting caught. Neither did she gloat about her success. She was silent about it, as she was about why she went around stabbing things in the first place.

  But she talked about her parents all summer. When I was not playing lacrosse, I was with her, sailing on the river in the Sunfish her grandparents had bought her in June, or soft-shell crabbing in the muddy flats off Beach Road, or riding around on our banana-seated bicycles. I envied her hers because it had long, multicolored tassels that dangled from the handlebars, and a miniature license plate on the back that read HOT STUFF. Floating in the middle of the river on a calm day, I dangled my hand in the water and listened to her talk about her parents; her father had been a college professor of history, and at night he would tell her stories about ancient princesses and tell her she herself had surely been one in a past life. Didn't she remember? Didn't she recognize this portrait of her antique prince? Didn't she recognize the dagger with which she had slain the beastly suitor who had tried to take her away to live in a black kingdom under the earth? Her mother, a cautious pediatrician, had protested when he gave her the bodkin, though Molly was grave and responsible and not likely to hurt herself or others by accident. "A girl needs to defend herself," her father had said, but he was joking. The knife hung on her wall, along with an ancient tapestry and a number of museum prints of ancient princesses, and she was not supposed to touch them until she was older.

  I listened and watched pale sea nettles drift by. Occasionally one would catch my hand with its tentacle and sting me. I wanted to tell her about my brother, about stories we had told each other, about our light-house game or our bridge game or our thunder and lightning game, or the fond wish we both had for a
flying bed of the sort featured in Bed-knobs and Broomsticks, except that ours would be equipped with a matter transporter, á la Star Trek, so we could hover over our favorite restaurant and beam up pizzas. But nothing could have made me talk, on that day or any of the days that stretched back to Colm's funeral. At the time I didn't know why I would not speak. I think now the reason my throat closed up was that I knew, that day in the funeral parlor, there was nothing I could ever say to equal the occasion of my brother's death. I should have spoken a word that would bring him back, and yet I could not, and so I must say nothing forever.

  Molly's birthday came in the first week of August. My mother took me shopping for a present. She spent a lot of time in the Barbie section, agonizing over accessories, but I insisted silently on my own choice: a Bionic Woman combination beauty salon and diagnostic station. It was not the gift I really meant to give Molly, not the gift from my heart. I insisted on it because I knew she would disregard it, and I could then play with it myself. Her real gift from me was a wide, flat stone, taken from the Severn, with which she could sharpen her knife. I wrapped it in the Sunday funnies. When she opened it she smiled with genuine delight and said it was her favorite.

  From her grandparents she got a Polaroid camera. Her grandfather, a man who had always believed in buying in bulk, gave her a whole carton of film and flashbulbs. In the evening after her birthday party we sat on my roof and she sent flashes arcing over the ravine, tossing aside the pictures that popped out. They were of nothing, and she was not interested in them. I picked them up and pressed them to my nose because I liked the developing-film smell.

  Later that night she came to my window, her backpack on her shoulders. I'd had a feeling she would come and so went to sleep fully dressed, right down to my shoes. To my surprise she removed my shoes, and my socks. While I sat with my feet hanging over the edge of the bed, she took a jar from her pack and scooped out a plum-size dollop of Vaseline, lathering it over my foot and between my toes.

  "We have a long walk tonight," she said matter-of-factly. I closed my eyes while she did my other foot, enjoying the feeling. When I put on my socks and shoes and walked on my anointed feet, it was like walking on a pillow or on my father's fat belly, when he would play with Colm and me, all the while yelling, "Oh, oh, the elephants are trampling me!"

  We went far past the kennel, three miles from our homes. We walked right out of Severna Forest, past the squat, crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the forest road. We walked past the small black community, right at the edge of the gates, where families lived whose mothers worked as maids in our houses. Molly led me into the fields of a farm whose acreage ran along General's Highway.

  "I want a horse," she said, standing still and eyeing the vast expanse of grass before us. In the distance I could see a house and a barn. I had seen the house countless times from my parents' car, when my mother was driving and I had to sit right-side up. I had always imagined it to be inhabited by bonneted women and bare-lipped, bearded men, like the ones in the coffee-table book on the Amish that sat in our living room and was never looked at by anyone but me. Molly started toward the barn. I followed her, looking at the dark house and wondering if some restless person was looking out the bedroom window, watching us coming.

  No one challenged us, not even a dog or a cat. I wondered what she would do if a snarling dog came out of the darkness to get us. I did not think she would stab it. I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being, and I knew that once she had finished with an animal class she would not return to it. She was storing the life force of everything she stabbed in the great blue stone in her dagger's hilt, and when she had accumulated enough of it, the stone would glow like the Earth glowed in the space pictures that hung on the wall in our third-grade homeroom, above the motto NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. When the stone glowed like that, I knew, her parents would step from it and be with her again.

  If the horse had a name, I never knew it. In the dim light of the stable I might have missed it, carved on the stall somewhere. The horse was a tall Appaloosa. Molly had brought sugar and apples. She fed it and whispered to it. It was the only horse there. The other stalls were empty but looked lived-in. Molly was saying to the horse, "It's OK. It's all right. There's nothing to be afraid of." She smiled at it a truly sweet smile, and it looked at her with its enormous brown eyes, and I could see that it trusted her absolutely, the way unicorns in stories instinctively trust princesses. In her right hand she held the knife, and her left was on the horse's muzzle. "Touch it," she said to me. "It's like velvet." I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress. When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. The horse did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, jerking the blade out of her hand and trying to hammer us with its hooves, which clattered against the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. The horse was trying to scream, but because of the wound it could make only spraying, huffing noises.

  I watched it jump and then stagger around the stall. I was still and calm until Molly took the first picture —I jumped at the flash. At thirty-second intervals another flash would catch in the horse's eyes. At last it knelt in a wide pool of its blood, and then fell on its side and was dead. All the time our surroundings seemed very quiet, despite the whirring of the Polaroid, and the whooshing and sucking noises of the wound, and the thumping. When those noises stopped I could suddenly hear crickets chirping, and Molly's frantic breathing, and my brother saying, "So soon!"

  Molly took me home and made me get in the tub with my pants rolled up. She washed the Vaseline from my feet, and the horse blood from my hair, and then she put me back in my bed, not an hour before the sun came up. I slept and dreamed of horses who bled eternally from their throats, whose eyes held perfect images of Colm, who spoke from their wounds in the voices of old women and said they could take me to him if I would only ride.

  A real live police investigation inspired Molly to lie low for a while. While Anne Arundel County police cars cruised the night streets of Severna Forest, we lay most exceedingly low; and even after they were long gone, we still did not emerge. The summer ran out and school started again. Molly mostly ignored me while we were at school, but she still came by occasionally in the afternoons, or on weekends. We sailed in her boat and once went apple picking with her grandparents, in an orchard all the way down in Leonardtown. Outside my bedroom window the leaves dropped from the trees in the ravine, so I got my clear winter view of the river, all the way down to the bay. In the distance I could see the lights of the Naval Academy radio towers, blinking strong and red in the cold. I would watch them and wait for her, my window wide open, but she did not come again until the first snow.

  That was in December, just before Christmas break. Earlier that evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the others there didn't. It was actually Sheriff Travis, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all these greedy little kids. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll that Molly had rejected. I was in my bed playing with my new toy when she appeared at my window.

  "Go down and get your coat," she said. "It's cold out there." I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got
home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted by an all-night flight from Lima. But almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, things he seemed incapable of saying at any other time of the year, drunk or not.

  When we left my house, there was already about an inch of snow on the ground. The storm picked up as we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents' friends dancing with each other, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died.

  I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly's shoulder. We were wedged close to one another, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, "Wake up, it's time to go." She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking the accumulated snow from my back and shoulders, and chased after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards before us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat.