Urge to Kill

49

Black Lake, Missouri, 1987

Marty had no idea what had awakened him.

He didn’t think he’d been dreaming. But suddenly there he was in his bed, sprawled on his back, his eyes wide open and staring into darkness. It was hot in the room, and he was sweating, the sheet thrown off him and half jumbled on the floor. The luminous green hands of the big alarm clock on his dresser said that it was a little past three o’clock. He could hear katydids screaming away desperately outside.

He stood up, the floorboard creaking beneath his bare feet, and through his bedroom window he saw a yellow glow seeping through the cracks in the barn and spilling out around the uneven edges of its closed doors.

Lantern light. Somebody’s out there.

Off in the distance a dog barked. Maybe that was what had awakened him. Marty couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that something was happening in the barn.

Wearing only his jockey shorts, he crept from his bedroom so he wouldn’t wake his parents. Either one or both wouldn’t take kindly to him nosing around the house at this hour. Between the two of them, he guessed it was his father out in the barn.

He saw that their bedroom door, usually closed at night, was open. From where he stood he had a view of the corner of their bed, and when he moved so he had a better angle, he saw that it was empty.

Something involving both of them must be going on.

His heart was beating fast as he made his way across the creaking plank floor to the porch door.

Here was something else not right. The door was unlocked.

He went outside onto the porch. There was a half moon tonight, sketched on by dark clouds. It gave enough light to cast a glow on the bare yard and rutted driveway, and to edge the ragged line of trees on the ridge beyond the barn. The katydids were louder, and it was hotter outside than in the house.

Marty stepped down off the porch and began walking toward the big barn with its vertical cracks of faint yellow light. He couldn’t hear his footfalls, and the dog was no longer barking in the distance. The only sound was the hopeless riot of the insects. Their ratcheting rasping was a mating call, Marty knew. Most of them would mate, and within a few days would be dead.

The barn’s big wooden doors were closed but for an inch, and the long rusty hasp stuck out like a handle, inviting Marty to open one of the doors and find out about the mysterious light.

Marty gripped the hasp’s rough surface and pulled the barn door open about two feet. It didn’t squeal like it usually did, and he wondered if someone had oiled the hinges.

He held his breath as he entered the barn.

Marty’s father hadn’t heard him and stood continuing his work on Marty’s mother, who was strung upside down so her nude body dangled from one of the barn’s main rafters. On one of the other rafters perched a small barn owl. Without moving anything else, it swiveled its feathered head and stared at Marty as if he was intruding.

His father was shirtless and wearing an old pair of jeans and his leather work boots. He was facing away from Marty, and between his spread legs Marty could see his mother’s upside-down face. Her eyes were open and her expression calm, though she seemed faintly annoyed by what was happening.

As Marty watched, his father raised the gutting knife in both hands and bunched his back muscles for strength. The knife descended and Marty’s mother’s insides fell out into a bloody pile between his father’s widely spread boots.

There were streams of blood on each side of Alma’s face now, and in her hair, but she held her calm expression. Marty saw that her throat had been slit and knew she’d been dead when he entered the barn.

His father continued his task, adroitly slicing here, occasionally hacking with the knife there, making sure the gutting was complete.

Then he stopped, stood very still, and turned around and saw Marty.

For a few seconds Carl Hawk looked embarrassed and ashamed. Then he looked angry and self-righteous.

Marty wasn’t exactly frightened. He loved his father too much to fear him. But what felt from the inside like a poker face must have betrayed him and shown his confusion.

“There wasn’t any choice,” his father said. He was very calm and spoke patiently, in the tone of voice he used when teaching Marty to tie fishing flies. He held the bloody knife at his side, its blade pointing down. “She come at me with that axe an’ tried to kill me.” He glanced at a rusty long-handled axe lying in the litter of straw near one of the empty stalls, then waited for Marty to look in that direction.

Marty did, and nodded, confirming that yes, he saw the axe.

“Woman tried to kill me, son. Hell, she’s been poisonin’ me for months, anyways. You know that. Told you about it last winter and lots of times thereafter. Goddamned roach poison! Guess she got impatient about my dyin’ so she took up the axe. You understand, once she killed me, you were gonna be next. She as much as said that. She went plain crazy. You understand?”

“I understand,” Marty heard himself say.

“We all do what we gotta do,” Carl Hawk said, “an’ then we live with it. That’s somethin’ I thought I taught you.”

“I understand,” Marty said again.

His father stood there, studying him; then he wiped the knife on his jeans and stuck the point of the blade in a nearby wooden support pole, near where a kerosene lantern hung with its handle looped over a long nail. Below the lantern a metal pail, shovel, and a tow chain hung from hooks.

“It’s done for now,” Carl said. “Let’s both of us go back in the house and see if we can sleep. Come mornin’ we’ll put the body down that old well back in the woods. The innards we’ll feed to the hogs.” He sighed and gave Marty a tight, humorless smile. “Then that’ll be that.”

Carl turned down the lantern wick, and the barn was in darkness except for what moonlight filtered in through the cracks and where the door stood open. He laid his hand gently on Marty’s shoulder and guided him outside into the warm night. They began the slow walk toward the house.

“It had to be done,” Carl said. “You know that, Marty. If it hadn’t, you and me’d both be dead right now.”

Marty didn’t answer.

“When she was finished on me with the axe, she was gonna go on back to the house an’ do you.”

His father’s boots made a creaking, leathery sound as he walked. Marty could barely hear it over the noise of the katydids. “You believe me, Marty?”

“I believe.”

“You okay?” his father asked.

“I can do whatever you say,” Marty told him.

His father stopped walking, closed his bloody hand tighter on Marty’s shoulder, then drew him in close and hugged him.

Marty hugged him back.