Everyday Psychokillers

by Lucy Corin

  Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls

  Lucy Corin

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2004 Lucy Corin

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Parts of two paragraphs, (from the Black Caesar chapter) were lifted, sometimes word for word, from a passage on pp. 12-13 of the C.L.R. James book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage 1989, second edition revised). Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of The Estate of C.L.R. James, Copyright © C.L.R. James 1936, 1963, 1980.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-981088-99-9

  eBook Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How it Was for Him and Ottis Toole” first appeared in the Ecstasy issue of Fiction International.

  For helping me write this book, thank you: Marianne Wegner, Melissa Malouf, Kristin Bergen, Suzanne Bost, Dani Rado, Sharon Cote, Steve Germic.

  Thanks also to the English Department at James Madison University, especially Karyn Sproles for finding research funds, and thank you Corina Quinn for the work on Bundy.

  Alison Bond, thank you for being my agent. Cris Mazza, thank you for introducing me to FC2. R.M. Berry, Brenda Mills, and Tara Reeser, thank you, thank you, for doing so much more than I hoped or expected.

  for Emily

  CONTENTS

  Venus

  Bound

  The Myth of Osiris, Civilizer of the Earth

  Following Rhonda

  Box on the Beach

  My Brother Is a Sailor

  Chief’s Horse

  The Palm of His Hand

  The True History of Black Caesar, the Runaway Slave Who Became a Pirate

  Christine Falling

  Flight

  The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How it Was for Him and Ottis Toole

  Composite Psychokiller

  Between Then and Now

  Nefertiti

  Confession

  Afterthought

  Venus

  In the life of every girl I know, at one time or another, in school, in a museum, she’s shown a replica of the Venus de Milo. For some girls, Venus is a translucent projection, for some a plaster doll. The girl stands near the statue with her best friend, and somebody is explaining how Venus is so beautiful, and how, to this very day, she’s the most beautiful woman in myth and history combined, that she is beauty and love. Then the grown-ups wander away and the girls look together. The girl’s friend has a long blond braid like Rapunzel, and the girl loves her friend’s braid. Sometimes she imagines climbing the braid up a stone wall to her friend, and sometimes she imagines her friend chopping off the braid, securing it to the iron leg of the potbellied stove in her tower, and climbing down to her.

  The replica of Venus glows before them. They’re a little bored, and the girl’s friend is wrapping her braid around her neck. It’s hard to see if Venus has nipples.

  “Someone’s knocked off her arms,” the girl says to her friend.

  “I could do that,” says Rapunzel.

  Bound

  It’s enough years that I ought to have been made adult by now. Still, I’m thinking of rows and rows of boxy classrooms, the long right-angled mazes that formed our school. Covered walkways lined and connected them, the roofs held up by iron beams painted light garden green, rust bubbling through the paint. We walked from class to class outside, passing the brick-orange doors, the blinded windows, and the rows of lockers between. Even outside, even vacant, the place smelled of layers and layers of sweat from so many bodies for so long. The walkways formed a grid, and in the squares a specimen of carefully planted crabgrass grew. No one stepped in these courtyards. In the yearbook, there are photos of kids posing together, standing on the crabgrass as if they did this all the time, but really we kept to the classrooms, the bathrooms, the lunchroom, the walkways.

  When it rained, water gushed through drains and poured from the roof at once, splashing with a force that sprayed us as we traveled from classroom to classroom. When it rained, animals came out and bobbed among the stones in the rain-filled gutters.

  The town’s canals, clogged with slime, contained animals, too: weary alligators, wart-covered ducks, and cottonmouths, these dense, coiled, folded, constantly pissed-off snakes, what they call pit vipers in science books. They have litters, you know, snakes. Like kittens. But when it rained and the animals in the school gutters came, our animals were clean, quick lizards, shining pink worms, and these great round frogs the size of softballs, green-gray and roly-poly. Roiling with youth. Still, there isn’t a name for the kind of place it was that says how mean it was.

  The first few days of school arrived hot, hot. The students felt soggy, full of themselves because the schoolyear had been delayed three days for the teachers’ strike, and the teachers felt ornery because their jobs still sucked. They’d been busy striking and suddenly here they were, children, or kids, or whatever you’d call them because the words children and kids had not been designed for what sat and sprawled before them, this creature with many heads and many limbs, all sad and noisy.

  I’m thinking of Mrs. Brodie and what looking at us must have been like for her. I’m pushing my memory until I can believe I’ve pushed it into hers. I’m thinking of how grown she seemed.

  Mrs. Brodie was not married and never had been, and she sat in her office in the basement under the gym and copied names from a green-and-white-striped computer printout into her attendance book. She copied fifty names for each group of girls she shooed around the track, three hundred names each quarter. Sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. Her office window looked into the locker room, and fifty girls crowded there: white girls, Hispanic girls, Seminole girls, and black girls. Only one black girl was in sight, though, because the locker room was split in two parts and, except for Cassandra, the black girls gathered in the back part, the part Mrs. Brodie couldn’t see. Cassandra, who took ballet after school, stayed in this front section, undressing and dressing with the girls she knew from her academic classes—Rosana Hernandez and Traci Guppy, Becky Wampole and Paula Cassle. Mrs. Brodie had taught these girls for sixth grade gym, too. They were nice girls, no trouble. Cassandra was the only black girl in those classes you get invited to test into based on the bubble-tests everyone takes. Not a single Seminole had tested in. Cuban kids got in sometimes.

  Mrs. Brodie’s office window framed the locker room and for a moment, as she glanced up from the names, she could imagine it without the noise, or perhaps with a single piano somewhere behind curtained doorways. I can tell by the look on her face as I imagine her. For a moment, they could all be Degas girls, changing into tutus, girls in mid-gesture, accidentally graceful in moments when they forgot to try so hard to be graceful, occasional girls who worked to subvert grace, accidentally graceful. Mrs. Brodie didn’t know Degas, but that’s the kind of image she was having. You can witness this grace, half-grace, lopsided grace, particular grace. You don’t have to have a name for it to see it.

  Rosana and Traci and the other girls tied their sneakers and skittered around like water bugs, but Cassandra took her time. Lockers lined the room, and benches lined the lockers
, and Cassandra sat on a bench with her back to the center of the room. She wore a simple white bra with no lace. All business, that bra. She took her time arranging her gym shirt on her lap before swooping her arms into it and then over her head with the gesture of a super-stylized yawn, performed by a dancer. She was a weighted shape in the room, like a pin balanced still and upright in a frothing teacup.

  Around her, girls worked in busy pairs, pulling each other’s jeans off and comparing the depths of the marks made by the seams that ran from their waists, down their thighs, and then, on the legs of the most fashionable, picked up again for a bit at midcalf. After class, they’d be hopping and pulling the jeans back on, then doing backbends over the benches to zip up, girls half-dressed, yelling and singing over one another, standing in groups with their hips jutting and their hands turning at the ends of their arms. Cassandra was like negative space in the room of shifting bodies.

  Here it was, the third day of gym, and the first Mrs. Brodie’d made them dress out. She sat in her office and copied the names, putting check marks next to the girls who’d brought money for new uniforms—girls who were new to the school, or who’d grown a lot, or who’d lost theirs over the summer. One of the new girls had pitched a fit yesterday, wanting to know why any old pair of shorts and tee wouldn’t do, and didn’t she know that some peoples’ parents couldn’t just shell out thirty bucks any time. She copied the name down, drew a little star next to it to signify non-payment, and then the noise from the locker room changed. It went from a looping, pitched sound to an intense, low, breathy grumble. Mrs. Brodie shoved herself out of her office and through a mass of girls clumped around one of the iron support beams. Even the black girls had come from the back room and glommed onto the clump, and Traci and Rosana were there in the clump, and Becky and Paula were there, too. The girls were like trees, they were so hard to move through, and they were leaning forward against one another. It was like trying to push through the layers of an enormous cabbage. Plus, the cabbage was making this terrible noise, throaty with anger, and shaking. One girl had grabbed another girl by the front of the shirt through to her bra and flung her against the beam. The girl lay crumpled on the locker room floor, her head bleeding, and the girl who’d flung her stood over the body, hands on hips, and with enormous thighs.

  In the locker room, the clump made a sphere in the center of the room, and the iron support post pierced it like the axis of a model planet. The planet was situated in space flung with empty clothing—pieces on the cement floor, slipping like surrealist clocks over the edges of benches, clinging to half-open locker doors. Cassandra, the only girl in the room outside the clump, sat with her back to it, on the wooden dressing bench, facing the lockers. With an even, pressed motion, she took the earrings out of her ears and zipped them into a compartment of her handbag. Then she put the handbag into her bookbag, put the bookbag in her locker, closed it by lifting the latch and helping it drop, and secured it with her combination lock. She sat on the bench in her red-and-white outfit and waited for further instructions.

  With Cassandra you could never tell if she was stuck-up or shy. I felt this, and as I’m thinking, I’m thinking Mrs. Brodie must have felt this, too, if she thought about Cassandra. Cassandra seems clear to me. Look at her and it’s like she knows everything and knows better than to look, and knows better than to tell.

  I don’t remember if that girl’s name was really Cassandra. Seemed like it.

  Outside, it rained great spoonfuls of rain. A group of boys pulled round frogs from the splashing gutters. They threw some of the frogs at the walls of the building, and they placed some of the frogs on the walkway, took a running start, and leaped on them. Frog stomping, or frog popping they called it. The new girl—I was the new girl—the one who didn’t want to buy a gym outfit—had run from the locker room when that one girl picked up that other girl. I’d run out of the locker room and now I stood with my back to a light garden green I-beam post, fingering a patch of rust, feeling the sound of the rain thumping on the walkway roof and the spray each shift of wind sent over. I watched the boys stomping on the frogs until the ambulance came and paramedics strolled in with a stretcher and out with the girl, who I heard went to the hospital in a coma, but after a while heard nothing about, ever again.

  That’s where I went to school. Then I went home. I lived with my mother and my father in a stucco triplex behind an office supply store, and next to, on one side, a vacant scrub-filled lot and on the other a dirt parking area that served a funeral home and a little wooden house-turned-secondhand-store that seemed to specialize in hubcaps and ladies’ hats from the twenties. I hadn’t known the word triplex until we moved into one. Our apartment was third of three, farthest in from our quiet-street-off-a-busy-street, and a couple doors from a stucco Roman Catholic church that looked like a blunt sandcastle made by a kid with a castle-shaped bucket. A couple blocks away, a sprawling Methodist church with arches like ribs shared a parking lot with a small public park, and in it eucalyptus trees shaded picnic tables, their flaps of bark hiding scorpions.

  That afternoon I walked home from the bus stop in the rain and sat at the kitchen table with a towel on my head, feeling like it’d been a long time since I did something like have a strawberry fight, or glue cardboard and toothpicks to a matchbox to make a little carriage for an imaginary person. I hadn’t played for a long time. What for adults becomes conversation I suppose, or art, or sex.

  In the spring we’d moved from states away. Then the summer: shove, shove, through the heat. Then the teachers’ strike, and for three days, while my mother was at work and my father was in the city, I sat in the apartment on the sticky carpet, watching mildew collect on the cardboard covers of record albums that leaned against the wall in the living room, listening to the radio for clips of news between commercials and songs by singers I’d never heard before. A bedsheet hung over the window for curtains, and light struggled with the giant orange flowers. Everything glowed in an extremely weak and filtered way, and I waited for the end of the strike so I could go to school and find my new life.

  By three days in, once school had started, I found a girl who was in all my classes, and although I didn’t know how to talk to her, by that third day after the three days of waiting through the strike, I knew to follow her from class to class so I wouldn’t get lost. Then a girl got slammed against the beam in the basement of the gym, and I felt a bit clonked on the head myself.

  My mother was asleep in the living room when I came home, wet. I changed into one of my father’s enormous undershirts, put a towel over my hair, and put my clothes in the dryer in the kitchen. I spent the afternoon at the kitchen table with a box of fine-tipped magic markers, filling index cards with intricate patterns I thought were perhaps African, perhaps Navajo. Aztec, even. Something ancient and obscure. In movies, kids are constantly casting spells accidentally, reading from a dusty abandoned book, pronouncing sounds that make words they don’t know. I must have looked like a funny little monk, with the green-and-brown towel draped over my head, bent over my work in the dim afternoon, drawing rows of circles and zigzags, tiny coils and dots. I could accidentally cast a spell, writing in a language of symbols I’d copied from someplace in my unconscious mind, my encoded memory. You don’t know what you’re saying. People say that to one another on soap operas. I could have been thinking of that. But actually, as I remember it, I filled the index cards with colorful patterns and thought about the girls and their blue jeans in the locker room. Like Victorian girls pulling the strings of one another’s corsets. Like Chinese girls, foot binding. Intimacy and mutual betrayal at once. I knew it, if not in so many words. I knew enough to be frightened.

  Then I opened the back door, and put one and then another card under the gutter waterfall. I watched the colors separate from each card like a ghost from a body, swirl for a moment, and then disappear into the grass. I imagined being a piece of paper that small under that much pounding water. Back inside I patted the cards dry with
paper towels and admired how nicely muted they’d become, how soft.

  Twelve, thirteen. Those years. Between home and school I walked to the bus stop along a canal lined with eucalyptus trees. What complicated trees they seemed to me—the texture of the bark, how springy and skinlike, how papery and velvety, like a pony’s muzzle, how reddish, and softly gray, ragged, folded, dusty, and taupe. I was a little afraid of eucalyptus trees. Anything could hide in the layers and sloughing bark. Some of the trees were wrapped with stringy vines thicker than my arm, but the leaves I liked a lot because they smelled so nice. Some days, I did not want to go to school so much that I put eight or ten leaves into my pockets thinking I’d crack them and smell them any time I felt bad through the day. They dried out quickly, though, and the smell was distant once the leaf dried. I’d want to take the leaves into the bathroom at school to see if I could get any more scent from them—the urge was strangely strong and embarrassing—but in the bathrooms girls smoked cigarettes, or they gathered in circles and one girl would hyperventilate and another girl would grab her around the waist from behind and lift her until she passed out. There’d be a circle of girls to spot, like we’d learned in gym. One time I went in and the bathroom was smoky but empty, except then I saw a girl squatting in the corner by the row of sinks. She had a tourniquet around her arm. I panicked and rushed out.

  The bus stop was on the main road, called Griffin. In real life, a griffin has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. They are hounds of Zeus who never bark, with beaks like birds, who guard gold. In this place where we moved, yellow panthers lived on the edges of the civilization, and eagles did, too. And a pelican, one of the birds you might see any day, poking around in a pond or a marshy pasture, has a thick claw on the end of its beak. So it seemed possible until you saw the road itself. Griffin Road was one long straight line, one of perhaps ten identical gridlines that crossed the entire peninsula, speeding past a few orange groves with a few strip malls, slicing the land from the beach in the East to the West, where it turned into an unmarked sand road that disappeared into the Everglades.