James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

I suppose I was too small for it to take off my head. Or maybe it was a different sort of train that did that to Charlie Kelly, a fifteen-year-old who had died the previous summer after a reefer party in the woods when he lay down on the tracks to impress Sam Corkle’s sister. The conductor never saw me. The train never slowed. It rushed over me with such a noise — it got louder and louder until I couldn’t hear it anymore, until watching the flashes of moon between the boxcars I heard my brother’s voice say, “Soon.”

All Severna Forest was horrified by the death of the dog, whose name turned out to be Arthur. A guard was posted at the kennel. For the first few nights it was Sheriff Travis himself, but after a week he deputized a teenager he deemed trustworthy; that boy snuck off with his girlfriend to get stoned and listen to loud music in her car. While they were thus occupied we struck again, after two nights of watching and waiting for just such an opportunity. This time it was a Jack Russell terrier named Dreamboat.

After that the kennel was closed and the dogs sent home to owners who locked them indoors, especially at night. Sheriff Travis claimed to be within a hair’s breadth of catching the “pervert,” but in fact he never came near Molly or me. She never seemed nervous about getting caught. Neither did she gloat about her success. She was silent about it, as she was about why she went around stabbing things in the first place.

But she talked about her parents all summer. When I was not playing lacrosse, I was with her, sailing on the river in the Sunfish her grandparents had bought her in June, or soft-shell crabbing in the muddy flats off Beach Road, or riding around on our banana-seated bicycles. I envied her hers because it had long, multicolored tassels that dangled from the handlebars, and a miniature license plate on the back that read hot stuff. Floating in the middle of the river on a calm day, I dangled my hand in the water and listened to her talk about her parents; her father had been a college professor of history, and at night he would tell her stories about ancient princesses and tell her she herself had surely been one in a past life. Didn’t she remember? Didn’t she recognize this portrait of her antique prince? Didn’t she recognize the dagger with which she had slain the beastly suitor who had tried to take her away to live in a black kingdom under the earth? Her mother, a cautious pediatrician, had protested when he gave her the bodkin, though Molly was grave and responsible and not likely to hurt herself or others by accident. “A girl needs to defend herself,” her father had said, but he was joking. The knife hung on her wall, along with an ancient tapestry and a number of museum prints of ancient princesses, and she was not supposed to touch them until she was older.

I listened and watched pale sea nettles drift by. Occasionally one would catch my hand with its tentacle and sting me. I wanted to tell her about my brother, about stories we had told each other, about our lighthouse game or our bridge game or our thunder and lightning game, or the fond wish we both had for a flying bed of the sort featured in Bed-knobs and Broomsticks, except that ours would be equipped with a matter transporter, a la Star Trek, so we could hover over our favorite restaurant and beam up pizzas. But nothing could have made me talk, on that day or any of the days that stretched back to Colm’s funeral. At the time I didn’t know why I would not speak. I think now the reason my throat closed up was that I knew, that day in the funeral parlor, there was nothing I could ever say to equal the occasion of my brother’s death. I should have spoken a word that would bring him back, and yet I could not, and so I must say nothing forever.

Molly’s birthday came in the first week of August. My mother took me shopping for a present. She spent a lot of time in the Barbie section, agonizing over accessories, but I insisted silently on my own choice: a Bionic Woman combination beauty salon and diagnostic station. It was not the gift I really meant to give Molly, not the gift from my heart. I insisted on it because I knew she would disregard it, and I could then play with it myself. Her real gift from me was a wide, flat stone, taken from the Severn, with which she could sharpen her knife. I wrapped it in the Sunday funnies. When she opened it she smiled with genuine delight and said it was her favorite.

From her grandparents she got a Polaroid camera. Her grandfather, a man who had always believed in buying in bulk, gave her a whole carton of film and flashbulbs. In the evening after her birthday party we sat on my roof and she sent flashes arcing over the ravine, tossing aside the pictures that popped out. They were of nothing, and she was not interested in them. I picked them up and pressed them to my nose because I liked the developing-film smell.

Later that night she came to my window, her backpack on her shoulders. I’d had a feeling she would come and so went to sleep fully dressed, right down to my shoes. To my surprise she removed my shoes, and my socks. While I sat with my feet hanging over the edge of the bed, she took a jar from her pack and scooped out a plum-size dollop of Vaseline, lathering it over my foot and between my toes.

“We have a long walk tonight,” she said matter-of-factly. I closed my eyes while she did my other foot, enjoying the feeling. When I put on my socks and shoes and walked on my anointed feet, it was like walking on a pillow or on my father’s fat belly, when he would play with Colm and me, all the while yelling, “Oh, oh, the elephants are trampling me!”

We went far past the kennel, three miles from our homes. We walked right out of Severna Forest, past the squat, crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance to the forest road. We walked past the small black community, right at the edge of the gates, where families lived whose mothers worked as maids in our houses. Molly led me into the fields of a farm whose acreage ran along General’s Highway.

“I want a horse,” she said, standing still and eyeing the vast expanse of grass before us. In the distance I could see a house and a barn. I had seen the house countless times from my parents’ car, when my mother was driving and I had to sit right-side up. I had always imagined it to be inhabited by bonneted women and bare-lipped, bearded men, like the ones in the coffee-table book on the Amish that sat in our living room and was never looked at by anyone but me. Molly started toward the barn. I followed her, looking at the dark house and wondering if some restless person was looking out the bedroom window, watching us coming.

No one challenged us, not even a dog or a cat. I wondered what she would do if a snarling dog came out of the darkness to get us. I did not think she would stab it. I had a theory, entirely unsubstantiated, that she was moving up the class chain, onward from birds to squirrels to cats to dogs and beyond, her destination the fat red heart of a human being, and I knew that once she had finished with an animal class she would not return to it. She was storing the life force of everything she stabbed in the great blue stone in her dagger’s hilt, and when she had accumulated enough of it, the stone would glow like the Earth glowed in the space pictures that hung on the wall in our third-grade homeroom, above the motto nothing is impossible. When the stone glowed like that, I knew, her parents would step from it and be with her again.

If the horse had a name, I never knew it. In the dim light of the stable I might have missed it, carved on the stall somewhere. The horse was a tall Appaloosa. Molly had brought sugar and apples. She fed it and whispered to it. It was the only horse there. The other stalls were empty but looked lived-in. Molly was saying to the horse, “It’s OK. It’s all right. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She smiled at it a truly sweet smile, and it looked at her with its enormous brown eyes, and I could see that it trusted her absolutely, the way unicorns in stories instinctively trust princesses. In her right hand she held the knife, and her left was on the horse’s muzzle. “Touch it,” she said to me. “It’s like velvet.” I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress. When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. The horse did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, jerking the blade out of her hand and trying to hammer us with its hooves, which clattered against the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. The horse was trying to scream, but because of the wound it could make only spraying, huffing noises.