Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So, some nights—too many nights—Carol crashed at the homes of friends or regular Johns. She’d put in her work hours, get a fix, and then knock on the door of someone she knew. If they let her in, she’d go to sleep, and then wake up in the dead of night and steal whatever cash she could find so she could buy her next fix. She expected her friends to put up with that, promising to pay them back, and the Johns she’d repay with blow jobs issued on the spot. After a while her friends stopped letting her in, and even the Johns insisted that, if she stayed, she had to sleep outside. But even that cost her blow jobs.

The week of February 8, 1990, Carol Miller ripped off one friend for fifteen bucks, fixed, and made her way to a John who’d actually sort of been a boyfriend for a few months the year before, before he’d gotten tired of her waking up, not knowing where she was, and then fleeing from him once she got her bearings. In fact, he appreciated and took it as a sign of caring that she got embarrassed when she sobered, but he’d suddenly realized one morning that he liked her better high, and that made him rethink what he thought about himself. So he called off their “relationship”, bought himself two pairs of Dockers in the same olive drab, and actually joined a bowling league. Nonetheless, when Carol showed up early in the week of February 8, 1990, this John unzipped, sat back in his rocking chair, unloaded himself down her throat, and then told her it was okay with him if she wanted to sleep outside under his porch. Not on the porch where she could be seen by the neighbors, under the porch where it would be like she wasn’t really there at all.

Gratefully, Carol Miller got down on her hands and knees, rolled under the porch, and curled up in the dirt.

And, when that tangy dirt smell permeated her brain, she just knew she was finally going to be purged. She was going to get off the drug, she was going to quit hooking, she was going to let Mother Earth herself show her the way.

Carol Miller sneezed. Then she smiled to no one but herself. What was it her grandma had told her when she was a little girl, what was that superstition? “lf you tell yourself something and then you sneeze, you’re sneezing to the truth of it—what you want will be.”

Lying there in the dirt under that porch, it was the safest and most secure that Carol Miller had felt in a long time.

A stone’s throw away, in Elsinore, Bill Suff was wooing Cheryl Lewis. Actually, he’d already wooed her and won, and now he was trying to sleep.

And Cheryl wouldn’t let him.

She wanted to make love.

She was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and not the sort of girl that men pay much attention to. A little too square, a little too squat, with teeth that came at you from all directions and red hair of a dark shade that always looked dirty even when it was clean.

But, Cheryl liked sex and she was free with it, and that attribute of personality made up for whatever she lacked in appearance. Sex was also a great way for her to connect with someone without having to talk, and mostly all she had to talk about was her life and how much she didn’t like it. Cheryl was a born complainer, and she was shrill about it, as most complainers are. “Whine” is not merely a concept, it’s a sound, the noise of a worldview gone small and sour, multilingual, multicultural, hell, multispecies. There is no animal that can’t whine.

But Bill didn’t seem to mind Cheryl’s negativity. He seemed to want to fix her complaints and the main way he did that was by ordering her around.

Weirdly, it worked. It wasn’t that she thought she was making him happy by doing what he asked, it was that he had her convinced that what he was telling her to do would make her happy. He really had her best interests at heart, and damn if they didn’t coincide with his own! This was truly a match made in heaven.

The only problem was that Bill wouldn’t make love to Cheryl. No sexual contact whatsoever. They’d known each other for a month now, and she’d moved in with him to get away from her parents, and she desperately wanted to show him just how warm and talented she could be, but he wouldn’t touch her. He even tried to make her sleep on the couch, but she crept into his bed every night as soon as he started to snore. Then she cuddled him. If she went too far, he booted her back to the couch.

He’d told her they’d be married, and she believed him, so that only made it more incomprehensible that he wouldn’t have sex with her. She just didn’t quite believe it when he insisted that there’d be no sex until she graduated high school and turned eighteen. Since they were maybe going to get married in just a few weeks, in March, in Vegas, did that mean Bill didn’t intend to make love to her on their wedding night? Was he really going to wait? Could he really resist? Could it be he wasn’t attracted to her? What kind of marriage would they have if that were the case?

“We’ll make love when it’s right,” he’d told her, “and then I’ll show you how beautiful it can be.”

He believed she was a virgin, and she let him believe it. She was not a good liar, but she lied when he put the question to her directly, lied in a way that she meant for him to see she was lying. It was okay to “pretend” things with Bill, that was the great and comforting thing about him: reality didn’t matter, reality didn’t exist for him—whatever he chose to believe, that became reality. Cheryl knew she wasn’t too bright, wasn’t too astute, but even she could see that Bill lived for his fantasies, and that meant that she could suddenly become everything she was not, everything she wanted to be. She might even find that, with Bill, she’d have nothing left to complain about. Wouldn’t that be something! So, yeah, Cheryl became a virgin again, and someday Bill would teach her all about love.

Meanwhile, she was more determined than ever to seduce him. She even thought that might be part of his game. He wanted her to play the virgin but he also wanted her to be a whore. No matter what she did, it was what he wanted. She was completely in his thrall, completely in his control, everything she did was right. And so there would come a moment, she was sure of it, a moment when his guard would be down and she would do something irresistible, something fetching and winsome—Bill’s first wife had been sixteen, Cheryl was seventeen, he obviously liked ’em young, so Cheryl would do something childish, something devilish, something to make him take her over his knee, and that would excite him—she knew it and the thought of it actually kind of excited her, too.

But one thing was for certain, when Bill and Cheryl first made love, she’d have to bleed. Instinctively, she knew he’d look, knew he’d want proof. He’d probably even want it to hurt a little, so he could be responsible both for the pain and for the pleasure that would take it away. Reality would momentarily intersect with fantasy, as it does now and again, and everything would have to be in its right place.

Cheryl had a friend at work, at the Circle K—she could talk to her about how to fake the blood. How hard could it be?

February 8, 1990.

Do you know where you were or what you were doing on that date?

I’d have to think a little to remember exactly where I was that particular year, but I know what I was doing that day without having to think at all That’s because I do the same thing every February 8, as the sun goes down wherever I am and the shadow fingers reach out for me.

February 8 is the anniversary of the deaths of my mother, brother, and best friend. I light candles to them every February 8, and, as I touch match to wicks, I close my eyes and I open my mind and I see the dead as they were in life. I make a new memory of an old one, of the last time I saw each of them, as I looked around at my mom and my friend in the backseat, as I turned and idly chatted with my brother in the passenger seat next to me. I think about their clothes, their eyeglasses, their posture, their skin tone, the expressions on their faces. Driving to Vegas that day was a time I actually took stock of them, actually listened to them, was actually concerned with how they were doing. For some years I’d been consumed with myself and my schoolwork and my creative projects, but this trip wasn’t about me, it was about my mom and her new life, and I wanted to understand her fears and peer into her dreams. I wanted to return the favor of strength for once.