by Lucy Corin
After the hotel, she’s drained, and raw in every way. Her eyes hurt. In his red convertible she can feel the air on her eyeballs. The sun is getting low in the sky and it creeps her out. She makes him stop at the bus station, and she takes the key from her little white purse and unlocks her stuff and it looks damp and sort of rubbed-out. She puts her purse in the canvas bag and looks at it lying on the bottom of the bag, with her tennis shoes. It’s a cheap thing, with cheap gold-tone-plated clips that attach the strap to the body.
He drives her all the way back from Miami. “No way you’re taking a bus, babe, not on my watch.” He shows her how there’s cocaine in a little tube in the glove compartment. At a stoplight, he taps a tiny amount into his palm, licks his finger, dabs his finger in it, and puts his finger in her mouth to rub it on her gums, above her front teeth. He licks his palm and says, “See how it gets all numb? You like it?” When they pull into Ted’s apartment complex, CiCi is ready to jump out without saying another word to him. She’s careful, of course, to have the guy pull up to this one side of the building, the side without the balconies, but she still feels like she can imagine Ted watching them pull up. The guy stops the car, but then he takes hold of her elbow. He says, “One more thing, CiCi. Really. Look at me.” He takes the mini cassette recorder from the pocket of his linen blazer. He pushes the rewind button with his thumb, and then he pushes play. CiCi listens. At first she can hear only the hushing mechanical sound of the cassette tape moving. Then she can hear herself breathing. She can hear her own noises. “Give it to me,” says the man on the tape. She breathes and breathes, and sometimes she makes little vocal breaths. For a while she sounds like herself, but then she starts sounding like anyone. She sounds like any animal. The closer she listens the less she is listening to herself.
“Now don’t be mad,” the guy says. “I’m showing you this for a reason.”
“Let go of my elbow,” CiCi says.
“Now listen to me,” he says, leaning, and lets his hand slide down her arm to her wrist, which he holds. “Listen to how you sound. Listen. And don’t you tell me you weren’t in heaven, girl.” She listens to the sounds on the recorder and they might not even be the sounds of anything alive anymore. They’re the sounds of a river in wind. They’re the sounds of a door, opening and not-quite-closing on bent hinges.
So then she gets out of the little red convertible and climbs the stairs past seven identical doors to seven apartments. She imagines maybe lying on a couch and watching TV, thinking that might be what she can imagine herself doing, but then she remembers they have no couch and the TV is so crappy you have to lie right next to it so you can adjust it every second. As soon as she steps inside the apartment everything looks incredibly dingy. She thinks about what it was like watching Bundy at his trial, smooth in his suit, passionately defending himself, wild with fiery intelligence and demonic arrogance. When she sees him through the glass doors to the balcony, and he rises and strides inside to greet her, her Ted looks dim. The limp curls in his hair, the blurry charcoal color In a comic, black hair looks dense and sharp blue-black, with windows drawn on to show you how shiny it is. Ted’s hair looks washed-out, like a comic left in the rain, and then dried out, and then left in the rain again. His square hands are like blocks of wood. When he leans in to kiss her hello, the pores on his nose look big. Mostly, his place is crappy. And then when he finally returns with her dinner and they spread it out on the balcony floor—because they have no table to go with the two chairs and there’s three of them anyway, there’s CiCi, Ted, and me—when they spread out the dinner, the lettuce is weak and frayed, exhausted in her sandwich. Her french fries are splayed on the flattened white bag that carried them. There’s no sign of the potato they came from. They came from millions of potatoes. They’re Humpty fucking Dumpty. But lots of Humpties, lots of Dumpties, tossed together, strewn and heaped.
You know how they say in the Old West how Indians didn’t want their pictures taken because they thought it would steal their souls. Then there were all those famous photos of the chiefs who went to Washington and dressed up as themselves and had their portraits done in exchange for this and that trinket or reprieve for their tribe. This is history. CiCi said, don’t they have those pictures in your history book at school? I said yes they did. Men who looked like beautiful women with skin the color of eggplant. “Well, it does,” said CiCi, ignoring Ted, who kept trying to catch her eye. “It steals your soul.”
One time, and this is before CiCi lived in the apartment even, when she’d get angry at her parents and slip out, take a bus or a train as far as she had money for, and then hitchhike the rest of the way, just show up like that, or maybe call ahead from a phone booth, this one time, Ted and I were playing Scrabble, leaning on our elbows on the kitchen counter when CiCi arrived, and even though we were happy to see her, she was so pissed off about how empty the refrigerator was she made us stop our game and go to the grocery right then.
Off to the Price Chopper, with the high school boys loping through the parking lot behind lines of silver carts that undulated like the many segments of enormous centipedes. Inside the grocery, any time of the day or night it’s bright with aching buzzing, with perpetual fluorescence. Any time, someone is mopping or pulling cans and cans of green beans from the bowels of box after box, and aisle after aisle is never completely filled or empty, and never half full in exactly the same way. The whole place is in motion, and the whole goal is to keep it in motion, like a spinning top, like anything orbiting.
It’s a public event, a kind of performance. Part of the show is not preparing for the show. Your actors are imbeciles, so you toss them onto the slippery linoleum and watch them bumble, grumble, and glide. And part of the show is pretending to show how the show works, how the way the cans get stacked is some kid stacks them, and you get so caught up with the cans you never think about the beans themselves. And there’s nothing behind the scenes except more and more boxes and a little smoking lounge by the bathrooms, behind the swinging doors. It’s amazing that the thing keeps going. It’s ugly and stupid but it goes and goes.
I pushed the cart behind CiCi, careful to keep it from nicking her heels. She sent Ted off like a satellite, for slices of orange cheese and refrigerator biscuits. At the checkout counter we had a crooked, wiry bag boy, but then another bag boy, a bigger one with better skin, told him to get on cart collection and he took over, handling the groceries and looking at CiCi so hard he put anything in any bag on top of anything.
Ted said, “Watch it, Beaver,” and flicked the boy’s earlobe as he walked by. The boy looked like he’d been punched. We returned to the apartment with bags and bags of stuff.
“I’m taking a bath,” CiCi said. She’d been hitchhiking all day, after all. “And when I get out of the bath I want those groceries put away, and if anyone gives a crap that I’m here, maybe somebody will be making some goddamn food.” Ted and I looked conspiratorially at one another, and when we heard the water going into the tub we went back to our Scrabble game, reaching around the groceries in their wilting bags.
The water went off and we heard CiCi step in, and then the water went on again for a little bit, and then it went off again. Then she said, “Crap!” and splashed around a little. Then she said, “Hello out there, somebody bring me the good shampoo!”
Ted was working on a word, so I dug through the bags until I found the shampoo, and then I stepped into the bathroom to deliver it to her.
It’s very hard to explain how beautiful she looked in the bathtub, how I’d never considered that I’d open the door and find her in the tub, actually bare. Her eyes were closed, and she slumped in the water so that her ears were submerged. I knew she was hearing only water-noise, that she might not even know I’d come in. The tiles surrounding the faucet had come off and Ted had patched the area with duct-tape. Mildew climbed the walls and the shower curtain. CiCi’s skin shone, and the water had silver edges where it met her knees and her breasts. Her hair enfolded her face
and fluttered in the water around her shoulders. Her wet eyelashes looked deep and black, when usually they were warm and rusty. I averted my eyes. I put the shampoo on the corner of the tub as swiftly and quietly as I could and slipped out of the bathroom.
She was so much lovelier than I could imagine myself being that I felt ashamed for having ever felt like she was for me, or of me, or like me at all.
They say one main thing about psychokillers is they have no boundaries, they get mixed up with self and other, is the way they put it, they’re so essentially self-loathing is the implication, that they’re killing all signs of themselves and their various personal traumas. People say this, or hear each other say it, or say it to each other in the face of the news or the psychokiller flick, and they shake their heads and say it’s simply monstrous, it’s incomprehensible.
But it’s hard to make anything of that when you feel it yourself: you feel no boundaries, you feel self and other, it feels incomprehensible, and even though it feels dangerous, it feels like empathy, and it feels like love.
It’s hard not to see yourself as part of the species, and the species has divided the world into a food chain that’s not about food, it’s about the chain, it’s about this perpetual looping serial cycle where you’re consumed and consuming, you’re beaten and beating, your eyes are swimming through pools of tears and the tears are swimming in the puddle of your eyes.
I’m not saying love is death. I’m not saying sex is violent. I’m not saying a psychokiller loves. I’m not saying love is crazy. I’m not saying love is doomed, that you’ve fallen and so you just can’t help it, that it’s got you by the balls and chain or that you’re driven, or it drives you, that you’re compelled, or it compels you, that it’s a creature inside you that wants to be set free. It’s not fair to do these things to love, but it’s been done. It was done way before you ever arrived on the scene.
There’s something wrong about a place that makes you have to decide this every day, to decide between items identically described and absolutely opposite. What’s evil is to make them indistinguishable. To have made you ask yourself daily if you are one or how it could be, if you are not, that you are not. Psychokiller. Every day.
The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How it Was for Him and Ottis Toole
In a one-room wooden hovel on the scrubby edge-land of the swamp, lived a shriveled woman with knots for knuckles and shreds of hair. In the center of the hovel on the dirt floor she’d placed the sawed-off stump of an enormous tree, and on the stump she placed her husband, who’d lost his legs to whiskey and a train at night. She’d stomp around the man on the stump, teasing him with gruel she held in a bowl under her arm. She’d wave her spoon at him. “I’ll poke you with my spoon!” she said. The man was gray all over, with the posture of a cutworm, and ribs sprung like gates.
In the corner of the hovel in a bed of straw she kept her boy Lucas, and the boy, dressed in dresses for humiliation, caught rats there for her. The old woman liked to hold the boy down with her knee on his chest and lower the rats in and out of his mouth. She liked to put rag curlers in his hair. “I have nothing to do! I am old! There’s no food!” she said.
One day Lucas was hunting in the moonlit swamp and he tripped over his skirt and accidentally sliced his eye with his knife. He ran blind with blood and dirt to the hovel, but the old woman was humping a stubble-faced stranger in the straw as the legless old man writhed on his stump in fury. Lucas saw, and the cut eye withered on the spot and dropped like a berry in August, and then Lucas used his knife to slay her. He took violent revenge, mimicking with her empty body what he’d just seen done to it in life.
The old man watched from his stump, and for once he balanced, still, watching, carnage, carnage, but when the boy was done, and the hovel was quiet, and Lucas rested, panting and bloody, with his head in his arms, and his arms on the wall, and his back to his father, the old man uncurled, leaned over the edge of his stump, lifted his wife’s abandoned spoon from the dirt and threw it with the force and accuracy of an arrow from a crossbow. The spoon struck the base of Lucas’ head and stuck, quivering, handle in, bowl out. For a moment he felt pinned there, impaled on the wall face first.
In a daze, Lucas wandered outside with the spoon handle deep in his neck, and wandered into the rain with his head hung, wobbling with each exhausted step. In the swamp, the shadows and bodies of all the living things eased in and out of one another, and animals called like whistling fireworks. Turtles with glowing green and orange warpaint rose and sunk in the water. At first he stumbled over cypress knees, and scraped against the great gownlike trunks ruffled with lichen, but soon his pace settled into the drumming rhythm of life under the canopy. Step by step the spoon loosened until it dropped and sunk into the swamp, but Lucas continued to wander in the dark, his head bent forward, his chin bobbing along on his chest.
Rainwater collected in the hole the spoon left there, and filled the base of his brain before closing up.
In another part of the swamp, in a similar hovel, lived a gap-toothed boy named Ottis, who had been seduced by his elder sister Drusilla and her long dark hair. But Drusilla was fickle, and as often as she’d coo in his ears she’d yank them, and when her affections were elsewhere, with bottles, sticks, or strangers, dopey Ottis waddled outside and practiced firemaking, mesmerizing himself with the heat and the glow. How he enjoyed setting fires. When Drusilla finally tired of Ottis entirely, she clubbed him good on the head and he set out on his own, and across the swamp, although Lucas kept quiet about his various crimes against his mother’s body, neither boy proved able to avoid the dungeons for more than months here and there, so busy did each become collecting adventures along the railways and highways that shuttled to them numerous hapless travelers.
One winter day in the mild rain they met: Lucas, the one-eyed incestuous necrophiliac matricidal practitioner-of-bestiality stood on line for bread at a soup kitchen in the city, and there next to him waiting for bread stood the gap-toothed pyromaniacal cannibalistic paranoid schizophrenic pedophile Ottis, who took a marble from his pocket and popped it into Lucas’ shriveled socket. The two became fast friends, and set off riding train cars, making havoc, hacking the limbs from hitchhikers, fornicating with the live, the dead, each other, and so on.
Years later and weary with their travels finally, Ottis fixed on a sudden longing for his sister, so the two stopped at Drusilla’s, and there she stood in the hovel doorway, a baby on her hip, a boy of maybe nine behind her in the shack, and her black hair gray. “You can fix the roof,” said Drusilla, “and you can sleep in the chicken house, but then you’re out because there’s nothing here and nothing shared is less than nothing.” Surveying the yard then, following the sweep of Drusilla’s arm showing nothing, Lucas laid his good eye on a tumbly girl of perhaps eleven but round all over, kneeling in the soggy yard with her round ass and her round breasts, and the marble in his socket beat for the idiot girl. She wore a sundress, red with white polka dots like Nancy in the comics. Dirt and water soaked the skirt where her knees pushed it into the swampy earth. The girl was round, stubborn, dumb, but prone to fits of rumbling giggles which erupted when she was confused, as she was when Lucas fucked her with the chickens that afternoon and with that he felt completely fallen for this girl.
In the morning he and Ottis tromped around to a few houses, asking for odd jobs, but everyone around was a peasant and they found none. They broke into one house and swiped a styrofoam package of pork chops that was defrosting in the sink. Ottis put it in his pants and then they went back in the brush, built a fire, cooked it, and ate it on sticks. By that time it was dark again. Lucas said, “Ottis, we’ll be on our way tomorrow, but I want that Becky along,” and Ottis said fine, it’d be good to bring the girl.
But when they returned, the hovel was corded off with crime tape, sirens spun and reflected in the low grassy river, and a sheriff stood in the doorway, and he held his hand on his rubbery hip and stood there as Drusilla had stood there
the day before. You could see through the crook in the cop’s elbow that she’d hung herself from the roof inside, and the baby hung next to her like a bundle of onions. It was the first death they’d seen that they hadn’t caused, and Lucas and Ottis stood stunned. The sheriff said they’d taken Becky and the boy into juvenile care. So they wandered back into the brush, toward the train tracks, and slept there.
Next day Ottis was no good, he was just batty, paranoid, bumping into stuff, whacking his head on trees, waving a torch around in the daylight, and Lucas felt pissed, and lost, and annoyed. He’d have scalped Ottis if the man had stopped flailing around the landscape long enough to swipe him. They found an old barn and Ottis set it on fire and that fixed his mind on something for a while, and by the time the thing was a stinky smoldering pit Lucas knew what they had to do. Basically what it came down to was they had to rescue Becky and then get on with it.
So that’s what they did. Threw rope up to her tower. Ottis held it still and Lucas, like a monkey, feet together and fists together shimmied up the rope and they lowered her down, bump, bump, her butt bouncing down the wall, clinging to her orange suitcase with both hands and both knees. “Get my brother,” she said at the bottom. “Get my brother. Get my brother,” until they stuffed a sock in her mouth and rescued her the rest of the way.
