A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  His son, the victim. Never protecting his interests, his emotions, his body. The fool. Didn’t he know what people could do to him? Had Marvin failed to teach his son the lessons of life the way his own father had taught him?

  Marvin doubled over and threw up lunch on his shoes and computer case. Coughing and spitting, he leaned against the wall and tried to focus on the store across the street. Memories, like shadows, obscured his vision: a wrinkled brow, a mouth twisted around soft sounds, hands shaking as they reached for him. He threw out his arm to ward off a blow that never came. A voice pierced the haze surrounding him.

  “Sir? Are you alright, sir? Do you want an ambulance?”

  A short, heavy woman wearing an apron stood outside the flower shop. She stopped speaking when he looked at her, but continued to wear an anxious expression. Marvin took deep breaths and shook his head.

  “No … no ambulance. I’ll be okay. Lunch. Bad lunch. Sorry.”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders and went back into the flower shop. Across the street, the man he had been following came out of the electronics store and headed up the block. As far as he could tell, the man had bought nothing.

  Nothing. What had he been doing in the store, then, if not buying some stupid machine or disk or something? Waiting for Marvin to leave, trying to stall for time, or perhaps making phone calls, alerting friends, setting a trap?

  Trapping Marvin, cornering him, leaving him no room to escape. Old wrinkled shirt flapping around him like the wings of an enormous bat, big gut pushing a dingy T-shirt stained with TV dinner sauce into his face, a steady stream of curses and insults floating on a spray of spit, beer and whiskey. Ripping up his drawings, smashing his models, throwing out the art book his teacher had given him because the nude paintings were disgusting. Naked pictures, so you want to see naked pictures? a voice boomed. Look at the real thing, here, look at it, touch it, what’s the matter, are you afraid? Are you a faggot, crying like a little girl? You want to see a real man, here I am. You think you’re a man? You think that art teacher’s interested in you? You think she’ll want to take you to bed? What, with that little thing?

  Marvin cried out and found himself sitting on the ground, knees to his chest, arms locked around his legs. He twisted his body to the side, trying to avoid the large hands he remembered reaching to tear his pants off. Kicking, flailing out with his hands, Marvin felt the haunting shadow over him though there was no one near to cast it.

  The laughter of school children brought him back into the moment. The students scattered before his glare. Adults hurried past, their gaze focused far ahead or at their feet. The taste of bile was bitter in his mouth, and familiar. Rage was a steady scream in his mind, blocking out thought, dragging up with it soft, moldy feelings of humiliation and impotency. Marvin cringed and ducked his head as he struggled to get to his feet, then staggered backwards against the wall.

  He remembered the man. The terrible man who looked so familiar, who had taken control of him, who made him so angry. The man was using him. Leading him on. Pretending ignorance, appearing to be oblivious to Marvin, while all the while he plotted, he planned, he harbored secret thoughts and hidden agendas on how he was going to use Marvin. He was going to drag Marvin like a child in tow all over the city. Day and night they were going to wander. And when Marvin was tired, the terrible man would lead him into an alley, pin him against the wall, and in the darkness he would strip Marvin, use him, leave him curled into a tiny ball of hurting flesh.

  Marvin saw the man far up the block, crossing the street. Picking up his case, Marvin raced after him. The light faded, shadows deepened. A voice followed him, growing deeper, more resonant with every step he took.

  Little faggot. Thank God your mother’s not alive to see you. She’d have wanted a real man. You don’t even know what a real man is, do you? No, no, I have to show you, don’t I? Teach you what to do to the girls, to that art teacher, when you get old enough. You’re too young to do anything, too small, too stupid. But you’ll know how to handle yourself by the time you’re bigger. I’ll teach you. Now. Like this. You’ll know how to get your way, same as I know how to get what I want. Quietly. Giving, like I give you food, and clothes, and a roof over your lazy ass. Taking, like now. Because I fucking well want to, you little bastard.

  Marvin screamed. Darkness closed in, smelling of whiskey and sweat. He lashed out, whipped the laptop case down over his head. The handle almost broke free from his grasp as the case smashed into something, but Marvin doubled his grip, pulled the case away, whipped it around and sent it crashing into the darkness again, and again, until the black shadow before him crumpled, allowing daylight to shine once more.

  Marvin let the case fall. Shouts and screams exploded all around him. The body of the man he had been following lay on the sidewalk with his brow cracked and dented, his mouth twisted around a stillborn howl of pain, his fingers splayed across the concrete like broken harp strings. Blood collected in a crack in the concrete and streamed towards the gutter. His head was turned too far to the left.

  The damaged body reminded Marvin of his father dying a long time ago in a hospital. A car crash had not left much besides blood and a shattered body. There had been a lot of coughing and blood, but not many words exchanged between them. What words there were had been couched in shallow whispers. The screams of people on the street replaced the sound of his father’s coughing. Marvin’s silence communicated as much now as his awkward consolations had back then.

  Marvin wondered what he had seen in this stranger to make him think he knew him from somewhere. The man, bloody and disheveled, was not at all like anybody he dealt with at work.

  Approaching sirens quieted the people around him. He wondered about Richard and how badly they would fight after he gave his son whatever he so desperately needed this time. Then the body’s intriguing arrangement of limbs and torso caught his attention. Something in the turn of the head, the flash of bone, and the color of the blood moved him, gave him an urge to take up his old water colors. What a composition the body might make. A rush of inspiration coursed through Marvin, making him shiver with excitement. He wished he carried paper and paint in his case instead of a computer. He’d have to make sure he packed at least a sketch pad in the future.

  Hands grabbed his arms, pushed him up against a car, frisked him, then bound his wrists in metal and shoved him into a car. Marvin ignored the voices babbling about rights and lawyers. He settled into the back seat and stared at his reflection in the armored glass separating him from the driver: an open-mouthed visage, blood splattered, sweaty, eyes opened wide to the details of a remote terror. What an interesting self-portrait that face would make, he thought. Suddenly, he needed to talk to his son. Long ago, Marvin realized, he had watched the world through eyes that could see what was real and true. Long ago, he had felt the world’s shapes and colors and textures move through him. He had released what he felt in his painting. But something had happened. He had forgotten how to see, how to feel. Now he had found the way to cut through the darkness that had clouded his vision. What happened? How had he forgotten such a painfully clear way to perceive the world?

  Marvin shook his head with regret. There was so much to talk about with Richard, now. Art. Childhood memories and experiences. Family secrets. There were things they could do together. The galleries and openings would no longer seem like alien, dangerous territories, now that his vision was clear. And his son would come to understand him, just like he was now beginning to understand Richard. Of course, they’d still fight. Painters and sculptors didn’t always manage to see the world in quite the same way. But at least they had a common passion, and a language and view of the world that would bind them together like the father and son Marvin had always wished they could be.

  With a sigh, he put his head against the car window and gazed out at the buildings flowing past. Brick and cement and glass caught the car’s stroboscopic flashing of red and white lights. He thought of blood and bone, a
nd his fingers twitched. So much inspiration, so much pain and chaos to paint. Marvin hoped the car would reach its destination quickly so he could start.

  THE SHAPE

  Denise rose from the suffocating nightmare shaking and drenched with sweat. Instinctively, she reached over to her husband’s side of the bed for comfort. She put a hand on his shoulder, felt the warmth of his flesh; the solid, weighty mass of muscle; the steady rise and fall of his breathing. She opened her eyes, desperate to dispel the fragile, clinging wisps of darkness clouding her awareness, eager to fill her vision with Brian’s solid presence.

  He was not there, though her hand floated in mid-air as if still resting on his sleeping body. She felt his heat on her fingertips and palm, heard the sighs of his breathing. Fright shattered the nightmare’s hold on her mind. The dream’s dark fragments rained into the shadowed abyss of her memory, cutting and slashing the walls of her wounded life. Tears came to her eyes. First the two voices in her head, and now this. All she could think of was that after all these years, she was finally losing her mind.

  Her hand suddenly fell through empty air. The sense of mass and solidity vanished like a heat mirage. The warmth of another body was gone, the sighs of breathing were silenced.

  She buried her head under a pillow and wept, as much over his evaporated shape as her madness.

  The scent of Brian’s sweat in the sheets roused her. Her hunger for him stirred, sharpening her senses. She wiped tears from her eyes, stared at the hollow impression of his body in the tossed bed sheets and mattress, then heard his voice drifting in from the living room. He was talking on the phone. His words were indistinct, running together to form a low, gentle rumbling punctuated by laughter.

  She knew he was talking to his sister Barbara. He never talked to anyone else in the same, intimate way. Denise drew the sheets and pillows over her head. No hallucination. This was real. Her need for Brian blossomed like a night flower that only blooms in the darkness. As usual, no one was there to see the bloom.

  Moments later, the thick but gentle voice that had started speaking to her weeks ago said as she lay rolled up in a numb, fetal ball: “What do you want?”

  What do I want, she asked herself, feeling Brian by the bed waiting quietly for an answer. He was always so patient with her, even when he had to ask her questions like what did she think she was doing. Nothing like what she was used to growing up.

  What do I want. How many times had she heard that whispered to her by that voice during the past few weeks? What kind of question was that, who would ask such a question? It sounded like a thing you would say to a petulant child, a child who was holding back an important piece of information or a special kind behavior for attention, or to get something special in return.

  Rage suddenly boiled up inside of her, blinding her with scorching pain. Who the hell ever asked her what she wanted, anyway? Nobody she could remember back home, not Brian, not anyone she knew. Denise threw the covers off, sat up, squeezed her eyes shut against the pain caused by someone pushing their way into her head. What did anybody care what she wanted? Who had ever shown any real concern? Someone just wanted to intrude, sift through her head, find the one thing that belonged to her and crush it. Now she couldn’t even keep her damned need for Brian to herself. Somebody wanted to pluck that flower, tear away its sharp-edged petals, crush the thorn-studded stem, and leave her with nothing. Less than nothing. Not even hope. “NOTHING,” she shouted. “FUCK you. I don’t want a GODDAM thing. Just leave me the hell ALONE. Get away, GET AWAY—” Her final words flew out with a scream that left her breathless, her face flushed, limbs trembling, her throat raw.

  She opened her eyes, shocked by what she had said. An apology formed on her lips. She was ready to beg; she knew she would have to beg, that Brian would make her because she had been so ungrateful to him, so hurtful. How could she have said—

  He was not beside the bed, or anywhere else in the room. The low rumble of his voice stopped in the living room. Floorboards creaked as he stood, walked towards the bedroom. He appeared in the doorway, naked, an erection rising through the thick, dark mat of his body hair like a solitary tree on a grassy plain. He held the portable phone to his ear with one hand, braced himself against the doorjamb with the other. His lips were slightly parted, as if he were holding a thought in his mouth like a marble so he could concentrate on what was happening. His forehead creased with a mild expression of concern.

  “I’m sorry,” Denise said, softly, her words tremulous. She held the sheets up over her breasts, pulled her legs up against her chest. “I was dreaming, I thought I was being raped, and you weren’t there, and I was so scared—”

  She stopped when he came to her. The muscles of his legs rippled; his penis bounced up and down, remaining erect. She licked her lips, thinking he wanted her to pleasure him. She stared into his hard, green eyes, hoping, praying that was what he wanted. Eager for the chance to please him, to make him happy like his sister never . . . would not … like she never could please her father or brother at home when she was …

  “Hold on,” he said into the phone he still held up against his ear. Then he slapped her, once, hard.

  Focused on the square, chiseled planes of face, trying to gauge the slightest change in his expression from neutral disinterest to active displeasure, she did not see the blow coming. The side of her face exploded with a sharp, fiery crack under his stone hand. The force of the slap threw her to the side, half way out of bed. She knocked down the lamp on the night table with a flailing hand, heard it crash and shatter as her own head bounced against the wood floor. She cried out in shock, turned, felt her hips slide down from the bed. A bolt of pain shot up from her knee and hip when they hit the floor.

  “Sorry,” Brian said, turning away, leaning into the phone. “You were saying?”

  “No,” another voice whispered to Denise. This was the cruel one, the one that had been cursing and insulting her, and its laughter bubbled at the edge of the word. “Fuck you.”

  Kristy reached over the diner booth table and passed a cool, delicate hand over the bruise on the left side of Denise’s face. She shook her head and asked, “How long you gonna take this shit, Den?”

  Denise moved her head back, out of reach of Kristy’s manicured fingers and sweet-smelling skin. She tugged at her stringy, unwashed hair and took a sip of black coffee. She hated to think how they looked sitting together: Kristy with her blond, bouncing hair and perfect makeup and business suit opposite a frail creature in old jeans and a dirty lumberjack shirt who might have been dragged out of a homeless shelter. How their lives had diverged since they graduated from college five years ago.

  “Look,” she said, waving away her old friend’s question with the burning tip of the cigarette in her hand, “I didn’t drag you downtown to talk about my marriage, Kristy. Some weird shit’s happening to me. I’m scared. I’ve been hearing these two voices for weeks, and they’ve been talking to me, asking me things. Stupid stuff, like telling me how healthy chicken for dinner would be, or how can I think I look good in a blue dress? And, all the time, what do I want. One of them really picks on me, calling me a little bitch, a cock teaser, other things. Thought I was talking to myself, being critical because I was depressed. Then this morning, I wake up from this shit-kicker of a dream, and I feel Brian next to me, only he’s not there.”

  “Lucky you. This ghost slap you around, too?” Kristy bit into a slice of toast for emphasis.

  “Not a ghost, not anything like that. He was there, and then he wasn’t. And that damned voice asked me what I wanted. I … yelled. Brian came in from the next room. I must have scared him, ’cause he hit me.” Denise bowed her head and stared at the semi-circle of the bite she had taken from her bagel.

  “Yeah, well, you always did scare Brian, Den. That’s probably why he married you; you intimidated him into a commitment.” Kristy dabbed the toast into the nearly raw yolks of her sunny-side eggs and rolled her eyes.

  Denise turne
d away from her friend’s sarcasm. The dripping yolk made her queasy, and the black coffee burned in her stomach. She took a puff of her cigarette, almost choked, and put it out. “I’m in trouble, here, Kristy,” she whispered, so that her voice was barely audible over the noise of silverware on dishes, waitresses calling out orders, and other people’s conversation.

  “Yeah, but do you know where your trouble started? Not in your head with voices and bodies that aren’t there. It started with him.”

  “But it’s not Brian’s voice, it’s not—” She froze. She smelled a man’s aftershave, something old-fashioned and tinged with sweat. It was familiar, frightening. She thought of Brian. She knew he was standing behind her, in the aisle, listening. She looked at Kristy for some sign of his mood. Something had made him leave his precious jewelry store in the hands of his assistant so he could look for his wife. He didn’t like any of her friends. They never came over to the condo. What would he say, what would he do?

  Kristy’s reaction would tell her everything.

  Kristy stared expectantly at her. Denise turned around suddenly. No one was there.

  “Do you remember your dream, Den?” Kristy asked, gingerly taking the coffee cup from Denise’s trembling hand and setting it down on the table.

  “No. I forgot it as soon as I woke up.”

  Kristy threw up her hands. “There you go. Forgetting, just like you did in school. Couldn’t remember your classroom numbers, your assignments, paper due dates. Blanked out on your brother’s name when you introduced him to me, could never find your mom’s phone number—”

  “It’s just a dream, Kristy,” Denise said, wiping a film of sweat from her forehead.

  “—forgot how your father used you, too, I bet, and how maybe that fuck of a brother joined in a few times, and how you let the guys on campus treat you—”

  “STOP,” Denise shrieked, pressing her hands over her ears and shutting her eyes.