The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  During dinner, I tell Nina and Kathleen about my possible crewing gig at UNM and the B-roll I’ll shoot in the desert for the Chuckettes.

  “We could do some shooting up north past Bernalillo, maybe.” My eyes meet Nina’s, and I catch a flash of gratitude from her. We both know that’s where she expects to find the abandoned mine.

  So, we can kill two birds with one stone. Me exploring the desert with my camera, her combing it for a corpse. I just hope she’ll be satisfied with whatever she finds—or doesn’t.

  We plan it out. She’ll be in Arizona for the first four days, staying at a B-and-B and visiting her birth mom, while I camp out in the UNM dorms back in Albuquerque. After several hours e-mailing back and forth with various harried admins, I’ve figured out how to get the summer-school lodging rate prorated.

  Then Nina will drive back to Albuquerque, and we’ll spend our last three days in the comfort of a nice, clean motel, checking out tourist attractions like the Meteorite Museum, Los Alamos, Chaco Canyon, and all the shooting locations of Breaking Bad.

  Have I memorized the New Mexico tourism site? Indeedy. “I’m obsessed with the Manhattan Project,” I insist.

  Kathleen’s face lights up. “You’re the first kid I’ve ever heard say that.”

  I’m not faking my enthusiasm. The more I read about New Mexico and the more images I see online of crumbling pink hills and blazing blue skies, the more I want to go. I want to know about the ancient Anasazi people who lived in Chaco Canyon. I want to see the sun-burnt pueblos to the west of Albuquerque, and the town of Tucumcari to the east, with its dinosaur statues and twinkling neon. I want to stand on the desert floor and look at the night sky. To me, raised in this gray, flood-prone town, the place might as well be Mars.

  I want to get out, even just for a week.

  I can see my excitement reflected on Nina’s and Kathleen’s faces. They, too, are imagining how it would feel to stand on a plain and gaze up at thousands of stars.

  Maybe, if I can get Nina involved enough in my obsessions, she’ll forget hers. Maybe meeting her birth mom in her birth state will click some loose piece into place for her, and her nightmares will end. Maybe the cops will catch the Gustafssons’ killer. Maybe, after that cave turns out to hold nothing but sand, we’ll edge close to each other in its warm darkness and she’ll kiss me.

  That sounds like the last scene of a cheesy indie flick. I can’t dwell on any of those possibilities, can’t let them sprout into spindly hopes. But—maybe.

  I spend hours with Nina surrounded by road maps, laptops, and glossy brochures. Prof. Sandoval connects me with my taskmaster-to-be, an intense student producer named Sasha Charney, who asks me to promise I’m “not one of those slacker interns who spend the whole shoot smoking behind the van.” I promise I’m a good worker bee. I set up our road trip blog. I help choose a motel. I buy a snake-bite kit.

  And I tell my mom.

  She takes it better than I expected. In fact, she’s 100 percent behind the whole UNM part, especially when I tell her the dorms have resident advisors to nip keggers in the bud. “You should meet kids your age with common interests,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like you’re so alone here.”

  But when I tell her about the Nina factor, she says, “I thought that girl stopped being nice to you.”

  “That was just middle school.” It’s just like Mom to remember my lowest points as well as I do. “We’ve been hanging out.”

  “Hanging out or…?”

  “It’s not like that. We’re just friends.” And I smile like I’m fine with that, but I know she knows I’m not.

  We meet downtown for a dinner of crappy Vermont Mexican—Nina, Kathleen, my parents, and I—and it’s one of the most awkward meals of my life. Kathleen does all the talking. She congratulates my parents on having a well-read, articulate, thoughtful, non-date-rapist son, while my dad’s eyes glaze over and my mom goes beet red (though I can tell she’s proud).

  As soon as he can, my dad excuses himself and goes to talk politics at the bar, where all his friends and cronies hang out. My mom and I exchange glances.

  I know my dad isn’t treating Kathleen Barrows like she has a contagious disease because she’s gay. It’s because she’s rich and smooth and confident, all the things that make him feel small. Who’s she to judge his kid?

  It’s still painful to watch him. When the check comes, he practically leaps on it.

  My mom has stayed quiet through the meal; she’s shy in public. But I’ve seen her sizing up Nina and Kathleen, missing nothing.

  When we get home, she says, “You still like that girl more than she likes you.”

  My whole face burns, and I want to yell at her, “Who put you in charge of making sure I don’t get hurt?”

  But it’s not her fault she wants to shield me from harm like an anxious hen on an especially thin-shelled egg.

  “I want to go on this trip,” I say. “I want to go with Nina, yeah, but it’s not about her. We won’t even be together for most of it.”

  Like always, Mom sees right through me, probably because she’s the only one who bothers to look. She touches my face before I can flinch. “I want you to be careful with that girl.”

  “Not an issue.”

  Not in the way she means, anyway. I don’t tell Mom about the deer rifle and the ancient .22LR I plan to stow in a box in the Legacy’s trunk—one a present from my dad, the other my own purchase. Insurance against anyone hurting either of us, just in case.

  My mom’s eyes go softer. “There was something about the way you looked at her. It reminded me of how I used to hang on every word Ed said to me.”

  My dad—my mom married him at eighteen, after he waltzed in like a hero and promised to rescue her from her strict family. He played Prince Charming for the first few years, anyway.

  My throat goes tight as I say, “Different thing. Trust me. When it comes to Nina, I’ve adopted a policy of benign neutrality.”

  It feels good to say it out loud, even if I can’t say everything: that I’ll do my best to protect Nina from her obsession, her nightmares, but I won’t be pulled in.

  “I don’t know,” Mom says. I can feel her relenting, giving in to the plan. “Nina seems like a nice girl. Smart. Polite. Only, there’s something cold in her eyes.”

  We have permission, and soon we have a solid itinerary. Reservations at B-and-Bs, dorms, non-seedy motels. A start date: June eighteenth.

  The woods turn into walls of green, tangles of ferns and maple saplings. We cram for finals, and it rains for eight days straight. Basements flood, then roads. Culverts and brooks no longer exist.

  I’m still hoping against hope for news from Schenectady about the Gustafssons: an arrest, a mug shot. Something to convince Nina her dream killer didn’t do this, so we can have our road trip unhaunted by her fears.

  But there’s nothing. And she keeps asking me to take her out to the range and teach her to shoot.

  I’m leery of giving her the means to kill. Not because I think she’d pull the trigger on an innocent, but because of the look she gets in her eyes when she talks about Dylan Shadwell. And because my policy of benign neutrality forbids me from confessing my disagreement with Nina on a major point: I don’t believe he killed the Gustafssons.

  Oh, sure, he could have. No denying he was in Schenectady that day. But since when do serial killers travel thousands of miles to pick victims at random? They have hunting grounds, patterns, profiles. They don’t drive for hours so they can boast about killing defenseless sixty-something suburbanites. That’s hired hit man behavior.

  So every day I check WRGB, hoping to hear that the sweet-looking Gustafssons had mob connections or stumbled on a massive meth ring or something. I revisit the pre-disappearance article about the animal abuse scandal at Mr. Gustafsson’s slaughterhouse, which describes how he escorted some scruffy protestors off the property last fall. It seems far-fetched to say they targeted him, but who knows?

  I keep telling Ni
na we’ll have our shooting lesson soon. The rain stops, leaving our town a sea of mud. Finally, a week before school lets out, I drive Nina up the hill to my house, knowing we’ll have the backyard to ourselves for a few hours.

  I can’t put it off anymore. And I want to make sure of something: that she’s not lying to me when she says she’s never held a gun.

  A little voice in the back of my head has been whispering, What if she went to Schenectady a second time that weekend?

  So, in the backyard, I pass her my little .22LR Sidekick. “First rule: don’t point it at me. Or you. Or anyone.”

  Nina’s reaction is almost too convincing. She clasps my disco-era revolver with both hands like it’s a viper that’s slowly winding itself around her arm.

  “It’s not loaded,” I say, relieving her of it.

  She scowls and kicks a clod of mud. “I can do this, okay? It’s like driving. You just need to give me time.”

  “I’m not sure why you need to do it.”

  I try to say it as gently as I can, but Nina still gives me a full-bore glare. “You believe in protecting yourself with guns, right? Better safe than sorry?”

  That’s the standard local reasoning for having an arsenal. People hunt, of course, but plenty of guys around these parts also think they need an AR-15 to fight off the bloodthirsty, crack-happy invaders who are itching to come up from the city and slaughter their sons and rape their daughters.

  I can’t remember the last time anything like that happened in real life—and Nina’s paranoid enough already.

  “Safety and prevention are the name of the game,” I say lamely. “That mainly means, when you have a gun, you need to keep other people safe from you—understand?”

  She nods too quickly. “I’ll do everything by the book, Warren. I just hate how scared I am of these things. I want to know I could use one if I had to. Do you understand?”

  Nina leans toward me on her toes, her eyes gleaming, and I feel the force of her yearning to be strong, unafraid. No longer an easy target when she’s driving those Arizona highways alone.

  And I say yes.

  We start with my .30-06 hunting rifle, because it’s easier to hit things with. I tell her to pretend she’s competing in the Olympic Biathlon. That steadies her, though she’s still wide of the target. I show her how to hold and load the revolver, but save shooting it for our next session.

  The next day, the mud’s a little drier, and Nina looks so tense about shooting that I say, half as a joke, “Get down and give me twenty.”

  She just looks at me.

  “No, I’m serious. If you carry weapons, if you wanna protect yourself, you have to be strong in other ways, too.”

  “Like you. Arms of steel.” She does a few halfhearted jumping jacks.

  “How ’bout this—let’s run a mile. Get the blood flowing, and you won’t shake as much.”

  “I always hated PE. But okay.”

  We take a narrow two-mile trail that winds up a mountain and down again around the pasture, with jutting rocks and fallen trunks in the way. The first time we run it, Nina quits after a few minutes and stands panting and repeating, “Hate PE.”

  But she picks up the Sidekick like a tool this time, not a vicious animal.

  On our third day of training, she runs nearly a mile and walks the rest, complaining about the mud. We start with the rifle and move to the Sidekick, and she pings two bottles.

  On the fourth day, I start doing push-ups, and she gets down and imitates me with her knees in the grass.

  “You need arm strength to aim.” I take her to the woodshed and show her how I split the logs my dad and I hauled out of the woods last fall, bringing the ax down in one quick move.

  She tries it, and the log bounces under the blade and rolls away. She groans.

  “Fast,” I say. “Decisive. Merciless.”

  On the fifth day, she runs the mountain part of the track without stopping and breaks two bottles with the rifle. She gets the ax stuck in a log and says, “Dammit,” hair plastered to her forehead.

  “Be patient.” Maybe we need Eastern wisdom. I teach her to slither out of a chokehold, something I remember from a long-ago karate class. We end up jabbing each other in the ribs and laughing hysterically.

  We take a brief break for finals, but then school’s done and we can use the whole long afternoons. Nina says she’s started jogging around her neighborhood in the mornings.

  “I can tell,” I say. She can run the track without stopping now. One day she beats me to the end, though I swear I stumbled on a tree root.

  Day by day, her aim is improving, and she starts to look natural with the rifle on her shoulder or the Sidekick in her grip. It gets hot for a few days, and she wears tank tops that show me the definition of her biceps.

  “You look kick-ass,” I say before I can stop myself.

  Nina doesn’t answer, just swings the ax and moans when it sticks in the log. “I’ll never master this. Never.”

  She aims the rifle at bottles, breaks them. We work toward twice around the track. I add obstacles to it—orange crates, a muddy trench, a rope strung between the pines—and start calling it a Death Race. This actually makes the run harder for me than for Nina, who weaves and skips with no problem.

  On the day she splits a log straight down the middle, she grabs me and does a victory dance. “I’m a woodsman! I can split firewood!”

  Her hands on me feel different—less fragile, more sinewy. Embarrassment makes me pull away.

  “Well, you’re not a sharpshooter,” I say later after she shatters a Nantucket Nectars bottle with the Sidekick. “But if something big, like a bear, gets close enough, you’ll have a chance.”

  She nudges me in the ribs. “I’m tons better, and you know it. Thanks to you.”

  To hide my blush, I go and start setting up more targets. Yesterday my mom watched us practice and then invited Nina to dinner. After the meal, I saw less of that fear for me in Mom’s eyes.

  “What does your mom think is the deal with us?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  Nina stands in the grass, her bare arms wrapped tightly across her chest. “What do you mean, the ‘deal’?”

  “Doesn’t it bother Kathleen that we’re going to be, like, sleeping in the same room?”

  I know it would bother my mom if she could bring herself to ask about our lodging arrangements in Albuquerque. Not only is she too embarrassed, but she seems to assume it’s Nina’s mom’s job to guard her daughter’s purity.

  Nina just grins, probably because she can see the pink sneaking over my face. “Two rooms would cost a fortune. Anyway, they all have twin beds. My mom made sure of that.”

  “So, what does she think?” I can’t stop myself. “That we’re friends, like, platonic for all eternity? Hasn’t she given you the third degree?”

  God, Nina won’t look away from me. She must think my discomfort is funny.

  “No,” she says. “My mom gives me the annual Planned Parenthood lecture and trusts me not to be stupid. The only one giving me the third degree is you.”

  Is Nina still just at the lecture phase where Planned Parenthood is concerned? Or has she…been there? I try to balance a bottle on the fence, but it slips from my shaking fingers. I haven’t seen her with other guys, except occasionally talking to David Chang in English, but what do I know? I’m a pathetic virgin.

  “And your mom’s not worried that, um, I’ll…act like a dick?” Chasing the bottle in the tall grass gives me an excuse not to look at her.

  “What does that mean?”

  I shrug. Nina likes me for the same reasons her mom does: I’m non-creepy. Trustworthy. The nice guy who uses his words and isn’t physically threatening.

  “Are you saying my mom should be worried you might jump me or something?” Her accusing eyes are pinning me now.

  I sigh. “No.”

  “You act like that makes you sad. That I trust you and she trusts you.”

  It doesn’t make me
sad. I don’t want to make Nina feel fear, just something. Whatever she felt when she gave me the note in silvery-purple ink.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Nina says behind me. “My mom’s not like yours. She told me about the birds and bees when I was so young you’d freak if you knew. She doesn’t care what we do as long as it’s safe and I’m safe, and she says you’re an ‘ethical and responsible young man.’ Yeah, stop groaning. This is worse: she won’t stop talking about how great it is to see me finally ‘interacting with a male.’”

  I don’t stop groaning.

  “Uh-huh. It’s like you’re an alien species. Anyway, I told her we’re friends. Friends who just happen to have a mutual obsession with Route Sixty-Six, Indian pueblos, meteorites, and fictional meth labs.”

  I set the bottle back on the fence, not blushing anymore, and look Nina in the eye. “Friends.”

  Nina’s brows come together. Then she steps forward and clasps my right hand tightly, like we’re soldiers on a mission.

  “I haven’t forgotten how you helped me in Schenectady,” she says. “You didn’t believe me, but you acted like you did.”

  Something hard and cold sinks in my chest, sucking the breath from my lungs. I hoped getting strong was helping Nina fight the nightmares, distracting her. But she has to go and bring him into this. And I see the question in her eyes: Do you still not believe me?

  I don’t want to answer it, so I let other words rush out and distract her. “Hey, Nina. Remember that animal-rights debate in Civ class last semester?”

  She looks perplexed. “Yeah.”

  “You talked about slaughterhouses—I remember. How they should be better regulated. When you were researching for that debate, did you ever happen to read about that case in New York, with the guy who flayed the calves?”

  She shudders. “I read about a few cases like that.”

  “Well, the one I’m thinking of happened at Mr. Gustafsson’s slaughterhouse.”

  “His slaughterhouse?”

  I go on impatiently, “Where he worked. Remember the news reports? The commenter with the conspiracy theory? Anyway, months before he went missing, there was an article about the abuse that mentioned Mr. Gustafsson. People were asking why he didn’t report it sooner. I’m just saying—maybe his name was already in your head. Maybe that’s why you thought he was in danger.”