Next time, he promised, and returned to his truck. Thirty years ago when he’d bought it, it was a beat-up, old workhorse, and he’d used it as such. He still had a toolbox in the back full of carpenters’ tools, but the truck was no longer a beast of burden. It was mint: a refurbished, spit-shined, cherry-red, 1949 pickup. He didn’t take it out as much as he once had but something about Ms. Deschamps had decided him to bring her home in it. She’d loved it.
And I love her. The thought sent a stab of terror through him. “Where in the hell did that come from?” he asked aloud. It reminded him of the selling-her-a-house comment he’d made. There wasn’t a whole lot of ways a woman could take that. It was a wonder she didn’t run screaming down the street.
Marshall buckled his seat belt and resisted the urge to sit in the truck in front of her house just to be near her. He felt as if the day he’d seen her in the square he’d woken up, like Rip Van Winkle; that, until then, he’d been sleepwalking for twenty-five years. This rush of life was heady. With a cold fear that threatened to turn into panic he knew, if Polly were to vanish, he’d fall back into that self-induced coma. Or worse.
Marshall stomped the starter button so hard the old truck virtually leapt to attention. Did he think if he swept her off her feet and up the aisle quickly enough, by the time she found out what membership in the Marchand family entailed, it would be too late?
And how long could he keep lying to her? He found lying to Polly almost physically painful, even when done by omission.
Telling the tragic tale of Elaine’s dog and the freezer, he had omitted little things, like the dog hadn’t actually jumped into the freezer; its paws were taped together and its little muzzle taped shut so it couldn’t bark.
Details like that.
Like how he wrenched the freezer drawer off its runners and saw the little creature, jaws rimed with frost, shivering on a bag of frozen peas, eyes big, paws together, silently begging not to be killed.
That was a long time ago, Marshall thought. Things changed.
In a sudden rage he pounded the steering wheel. “Damn it, things change!” he shouted.
MINNESOTA, 1973
Ronald “Butch” Dafoe. Killed six family members. 1974. Now this guy is one mean son of a bitch. You look at old Butch, and the rest of us seem like the boys next door. Six! I thought three was bad. Looks like I’m Snow White. Okay, I can sort of see doing it. Here’s old Butch kid. Dad is always whaling on him. Mom’s a doormat. His dad tells him not to take any shit off the kids at school but heaps shit on him at home. Heaps shit on the mom and the other kids. Yelling all the time. Huge fights. Four brothers and sisters. So Butch turns out to be a chip off the old block. He starts hitting back, and it works great. Gets him all this stuff, this boat, and his own room, and stuff. Dad kind of secretly respects him. I mean, he’s been preaching this Butchie’s whole life, right? Now, not only is Butch not getting the tar smacked out of him, but his dad is paying him to be cool. Big money, too. I can see where Butch might think he earned that money, what with getting whaled on and listening to screaming matches and whatever. But after he gets used to that for a while, he thinks, Hey, I could get more. These fucks owe me more. Way more. First thing is, he’s got to kill the old man. No biggie; he’s been hating the bastard forever. Then, probably Mom should bite the dust, too. She watched his dad beat up on him when he was little, so fuck her. The little kids. That’s harder. But why not? I mean, who is going to look after them? Not our Butch. Hell, he’s doing them a favor. Shoots them in their sleep. I think he’s sorry about the little kids. You know, like when Dad had to kill a kitten we had because it got sick and went blind, and he felt sad about that.
But he got over it.
13
Dr. Kowalski had grown old treating Dylan. A few years with Butcher Boy, and the psychiatrist’s sandy gray hair was thinning, the incongruous red beard flecked with dull white hairs.
Dylan had grown, if not wiser, then more cunning. He figured he’d learned more than Kowalski had. For one thing, he’d learned that Kowalski was not so much treating him-as if there were any treatment for boys who ran with axes-as exploiting him. He also realized that the thinning hair and graying beard had little to do with the fact that Dylan was a murderer, or even a poor tragic boy in juvie, and all to do with the fact that Dylan still wouldn’t remember.
As the doctor’s decline became more pronounced, he’d taken to looking at Dylan with piercing need. Every boy in Drummond knew that look. They saw it on the faces of the “girls” who wanted to love them and the users who wanted to fuck them. It was so sharp in the faces of the boys whose folks came to visit that it hurt to look at them. Gangs of kids stared hungry like that when he and Draco peddled the drugs they’d scored. When that kind of naked hunger manifested, Dylan’s hackles rose. Either the beast was fed or there was trouble.
In the ward, in the yard, trouble could be met with fists or knives. Fists and knives wouldn’t work with Kowalski.
They’d work, Dylan thought with a half smile. They’d just cost too much.
Kowalski was still lusting after his New York Times best seller. That first day Dylan hadn’t known if that was good or bad. Now he knew. It was life and death for Kowalski. Life was when people thought he was a big deal; death was shrinking delinquents in the middle of Piddlesquat, Minnesota.
The “hook,” Kowalski had told him in an unguarded moment, was when Dylan, like Kafka’s cockroach boy, had metamorphosed into a hideous beast. The climax would be when Dylan remembered his transformation and spewed it forth for the delectation of his brilliant and kindly doctor. Right there in Dylan Raines’s brain was fame and fortune. And the little psycho fuck wouldn’t fork it over.
Dylan smiled, slumped down until his butt was nearly off the couch and his head at a sharp angle to the backrest, widened his eyes, and stared vacuously at the psychiatrist.
Kowalski knew the Ward C boys called the warren where his office was located the Rat’s Maze. What he didn’t know was that he was their pet rat. They conducted experiments on him. The result of one such experiment, conducted over a period of six weeks with four Ward C boys, was eye movement. The conclusion was that narrowed eyes excited the doc-not sexual excitement, Dr. K. wasn’t AC/DC-but the way a cat gets excited when it sees a bird. The doctor saw a challenge and it goosed up his energy. Avoiding eye contact bored the shrink, and a bored head examiner was a bad thing. He’d start in with the do-you-smell-your-own-shit routine. The way to piss him off most effectively was the idiot stare. All the boys had perfected it.
Maybe Kowalski’s book should be about mental retardation brought on by psychoanalysis, Dylan thought.
He could have given Kowalski what he wanted, or a facsimile thereof. Under the guise of getting him to remember, he had been forced to study his crimes as assiduously as other boys his age were made to study English, science, and math. He knew exactly what he had done, how he had done it, how long it had taken, where the blood spatters were, and how many steps there were from one body to the next. There probably wasn’t a felon in America who knew as much about himself as Dylan did.
But he wouldn’t remember it.
He would remember his mom and dad, weekends at the lake cabin. He would remember school and his friends. His last best memory was of his mother’s lips pressed like butterfly wings against his forehead the night she died, the tiny gold cross falling from her robe onto his cheek, the fresh-out-of-the-dryer smell of her nightgown, how cool her hand felt when she held his chin and spooned the cherry-flavored flu medicine into his mouth, the tired smile as she said, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”