He began with the upstairs bedrooms, working his way through the closets, bureaus, and trunks, looking for those things that always piqued his interest. By the time he'd made his way back downstairs, he knew a bit about the house and who occupied it.
Berthalou Irby, 67, female Cauc, widow of farmer Everette Irby, lived here with their only child, a retarded forty-one-year-old daughter named Imogene. Mrs. Irby had kinfolk across the river in Tennessee, and a sister in Bella Latierre, Louisiana, where they had gone to visit. He gathered they would not be coming back within the week.
Counting insurance, farm proceeds after sharecropper deductions, Social Security payments, medical disbursements, certificates of deposit, bonds, and other income sources, Berthalou Irby was getting by on somewhere between sixty-five and seventy-five thousand dollars income per year, one tenth of which she tithed to the Holy Trinity Church of Waterton.
The heat had been turned down and the house was like a tomb. He kicked it up to roasting and removed his clothing, careful not to track excessive dirt on the fine antique rugs. He'd already decided not to trash the house, his usual MO, for a variety of reasons—all of them self-serving.
Nude, he took his massive fighting bowie, and went in and took a steaming hot shower.
Once, during a period in which he was institutionalized, he'd heard a conversation about a motion picture in which somebody is stabbed while taking a shower. He was not a stupid man, and a thought tried to enter his head to the extent that such a scene was now ready to be played in reverse should an intruder enter this bathroom. But the thought was too close to normalcy and he rejected it as superfluous.
He realized this house had pleased him, bringing him from a bad to good mood almost instantly.
Nude but for his bata-boots, the heat feeling wonderful on his body, he ventured down into the basement to find the best treat of all—Mrs. Irby's food pantry! The larder was incredible. This woman liked to eat.
The canned goods alone dumbfounded him. He stood, awestruck, trembling with pleasure at the gold mine of edibles.
One wall of the large cellar was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling Ball mason jars of canned foods, every jar with a neatly printed label. No art lover walking through the MOMA or the Tate or the Louvre ever thrilled at the beauty of a masterpiece the way the beast filled with appreciation at the colors and textures of such a display of food. No cocksman ever eyed an eighteen-year-old starlet with more unbridled desire than Chaingang felt as he lusted for munchies.
The beauty and diversity, the symmetry and promise of pleasure, the sheer size of such a display—it was beyond anything in his experience.
What a picture it would have made, the gigantic fat slob of a killer, mother-naked except for his combat booties, standing in front of the rows of waiting food: baked apples and applesauce, stewed tomatoes and potatoes, green peppers and green beans, corned beef and beef roast, chow-chow relish and piccalilli, cabbage and cauliflower, lima beans and pinto beans, baked beans and black bean soup, ham and pork sausage, grape jelly and apple butter, blackberries and peaches, pears and juice, peas and carrots, asparagus and broccoli, okra and squash and turnips and corn—everything cannable from chopped beef in gravy to Mrs. Irby's chili!
He selected his dinner with the confidence of a gourmet, his mind taking each item through chopper, blender, pressure cooker, jar lifter, funnel, ladle, food mill, water-bath canner, strainer or colander, into those beautiful capped and dome-lid jars.
Back upstairs, still nude, he cooked everything in a huge metal pot, black beans and beef stew, brussels sprouts, corned beef and cabbage—all simmered together, filling the kitchen with smells so rich, he almost fainted. He found a container of whipped cream in the freezer and ate a jar of baked apples with topping as he waited for dinner to cook.
Folding his tarp into a huge napkin and hotplate, he ate directly from the big cooking pot, ladling great slurps of food into his maw and swallowing it down without seeming to chew it. Devouring it—inhaling it—absorbing the food directly into his life-support system.
Afterward, belching expansively, he searched for beer or whiskey. Found cooking wine and tried some but spit it out. It was bitter. Baby mouse wine. Finally he located and prepared a rich cup of coffee, making it with three heaping spoons of Maxwell House and a preposterous amount of sugar.
After double-checking his security, he turned two of the smaller lamps on in the house, ones that would not change the dark exterior appearance of the home, and he flipped through a couple of magazines, yawned, went into the downstairs bathroom and defecated. Tried the old woman's bed. Didn't care for it. Went in and plopped down on the retarded daughter's bed and was sound asleep within thirty seconds, snoring like a pair of chainsaws.
In his untroubled slumber a three-headed dog named Cerberus came and stood guard, watching over him while he slept. Man's best friend at the Gates of Hell.
The sturdy old home had been built back in a time when carpenters were artisans who took great pride in their craftsmanship, and in what they did for a living, rather than simply working to earn a living. The home was relatively soundproof, so he did not hear the light patting of raindrops on the roof over the second floor. But as the curtain of heavy rain drew nearer, the beast came awake just as thunder crashed in the field beside the farmhouse.
Pleased he was not sleeping out in the thunderstorm, he immediately fell back into deep sleep, waking up two hours later, at early dawn with the rain still falling. There was no way he was going to leave this warm house. He went back to sleep again, and slept until midmorning.
It was a gray, rainy day, and he was enormously pleased to remain where he was for the time being. He spent the day lolling about nude, giving the house and its contents a thorough investigation. From time to time he would go down into the basement to bring up more mason jars of canned food, and fix himself snacks. By afternoon the kitchen was filled with empty jars everywhere one looked, and he busied himself for a time washing out the jars and packing them away in cartons he'd found in the basement. When he left, he would rearrange the shelved goods so that things would not appear to have been tampered with.
He spent a few minutes gazing out the windows at the wet, heavy sky and the muddy fields. There was no traffic whatsoever. His huge belly full, his body rested, he turned on the television set with the sound off, and became tumescent while watching a young actress on one of the soap operas. He started to masturbate, but it seemed like too much trouble and he stopped, realizing that he was going to have to have a woman very soon.
After a while he turned the sound up on an obviously rigged game show, thinking what enjoyment it would give him to rip the host's heart from his fatuous body. The monkeys jumped up and down and squealed with excitement, and he shook his huge head in amazement.
He was not a fan of movies or television, but on occasion he would watch TV, invariably transfixed by the spectacle of the monkey people and the small, strange window through which so many of them experienced the world.
Was this really what they did each night in those cozy, snug homes in the suburbs? He was perpetually fascinated by the monkeys ... by their life-styles and Weed Eaters and miniature golf courses and county fairs. They were as remote a species to him as he was to the normal man, and he could drive through their clusters of tract homes at night and be vastly entertained just trying to imagine what their tax-paying, lawn-tending lives were like behind those ornate front doors.
He had no frame of reference for “family.” No sense of common bond. No remembered childhood pleasures of the hearth and home. To his mind these gibbering, monkeylike fools were as alien as visiting other-worlders. He'd sometimes drive stolen vehicles through the suburbs of whatever city he was in, captivated by the warmth of the lights in those darkened homes.