Savage Love Read online

  1910, Sellwood, Oregon

  They lived now in a two-storey clapboard house on Umatilla Street within sight of the Willamette River, rented two rooms on the second floor to lodgers, kept a garden, laying hens and a cow, and were noted for their exceptional aloofness. The old man worked at the M & H Foundry on 13th Street that manufactured parts for the Sellwood Car House and other railroad concerns in Portland but had suffered a stroke some time before and was only kept on as a sweeper out of charity and fear. He could no longer speak except in garbled syllables, the left side of his face drooped, his eye leaked, and evenings he sat on the porch in a wicker rocker with his hands on his knees, his fingers picking at the fabric of his trousers, his eyes bearing outward at some inscrutable distance, seeing what no one else could see. Only the new motor cars puttering by in the street seemed to excite in him a special admiration; Sundays he rode the ferry to Portland to look at the electric street lights whose fierce and mysterious flame fascinated him, though he could never explain why. And yet there was still something furious and wilful in his look that gave men pause.

  Good Luck always sat inside at the window where she could watch him, her face hidden by the chintz curtains, reading the newspaper with spectacles by an oil lamp or knitting or mending for the lodgers, for which she charged extra. She wore starched shirtwaists with pearl buttons up to her throat and black skirts and walked with the aid of two vine-twisted mahogany canes with elk-antler handles. The canes and the boots she wore — handmade reinforced Spanish calf-leather boots that laced up to her knees — were the only luxuries in the otherwise spare and spartan house. The boarders were Miss Adeline Frick, a schoolteacher, and Francis Ward, a law clerk, both of whom were anxious to move on for reasons they could not specify aside from the prevalence of bad dreams in that house, the cold, silent and remote atmosphere, and the aura of threat which seemed to clash with the manifest fragility of their hosts.

  One evening late in the summer, a stranger knocked. Dinner was on the stove, the boarders were not yet in for the night. The stranger showed her a badge, said he was a policeman from Helena, Montana, that he wanted to speak to them of an old case about which they might have information. He was wearing a suit and a fedora with the brim neatly snapped down at the front. He carried a carpet bag, which he left on the porch by the rocker. He was robust but limped, dragged a chair to the dining table but sat awkwardly, one leg unable to bend at the knee, and dealt out newspaper clippings like a deck of cards, yellowed clippings, curled like leaves, from Arco, Leesburg, Bannack, Dillon, Butte, Virginia City, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, dating back as far as the 1870s. The clippings were full of sensational stories: a disappearance here, charred bones discovered there, mutilated corpses, mining camp massacres, isolated homes burned, dismemberments, cannibal rites and ghastly, inhuman practices. The old man crouched at the head of the table, his puttied face sad as a clown’s, gnarled, scarred hands on his knees, apparently oblivious or worse, not present at all, but seething inwardly, on the half-cock with no one able to pull the trigger. In fact, he heard everything. He thought, You stop and you die. But this was the inner voice of a will that had lost the power of action without great forethought and deliberate steps. He was thinking how best to rise from his seat and repair to the cellar, where he kept his guns. His eyes rose to meet Good Luck’s gaze, which remained opaque, her epalpebrate eyes sinister, the pox scars splashed across her face like stars. Once he had spelled them out with a book in the candlelight. Alwaid, Etamin and Thuban.

  The policeman was maybe thirty but youthful, excited by knowledge, not caring so much for justice or punishment but wanting to be the one who put the puzzle together. In Spokane in 1874, he said, a derelict nigger, who confessed to a dozen acts of arson and mayhem, had been charged, convicted and hanged before a Baptist minister from Butte came forward with a tale that seemed to exonerate him. The preacher had met a vagrant couple, the girl crippled in both legs, the two of them giving off an appalling and horrific odour of otherworldly malevolence, a whiff of the demonic, as though they had ridden together from out of the Land of the Dead, where, as he thought, they had no doubt returned. The stranger had conversed with the preacher; the girl had no words, it seemed. The stranger gave the preacher a parable, grisly enough to scare him half to death, into a haunted and impeccable silence. The preacher’s exact words were, “He drug me to the Gate of Hell and let me look inside.”

  The young policeman’s notebooks tumbled out of his pockets onto the table, the pages dense with pencilled interviews, transcribed reports, rumours, legends, theories. He had uncovered numerous sightings of this identical couple, a man with a crippled girl, from Arco up to the Salmon River and thence to the old post road connecting the Oregon Trail to the goldfields of Montana; from Butte, where the preacher had met them, to the Boise gold diggings; and on into Washington, chance sightings mostly, fleeting and from afar, the couple caught drifting just at the world’s periphery, but the two of them together so peculiar, enigmatic and uncanny that they remained fixed in memory long after the mundane had faded. It was as if they existed within the order of dream, more real than real, though the trail they left was clear and palpable enough. He had himself examined boxes of bones. And yet no one knew them.

  The policeman watched Good Luck press herself up from the table, gather her sticks and limp to the kitchen to tend the dinner. His cheek twitched in a half smile of barely repressed triumph. The old man grunted and signalled for a notebook and pencil. His hand trembled as he carved the letters on the ruled page. “Did ye bring a gun?” he wrote. The policeman unlapped the tail of his coat to show his holster and the pistol tucked inside. The old man strained to see. “It’s a Colt, military issue,” said the policeman. “Forty-five-caliber semi-automatic, loaded with hollow points, seven in the clip.” The old man grunted again, satisfied. “How did you get yer wound?” he wrote. “The Battle of the Malalag River, 1905. We were clearing the Cotabato Valley. A Moro sniper blew up my knee. How did you know?” The old man couldn’t answer. He wanted to talk about the cornfield when the Texians marched in to plug a gap in the line with their bodies and succeeded, not some skirmish with ill-armed savages in the god-fuck Philippines. Good Luck pushed a serving trolley through the kitchen doorway with a coffee pot and cups and dinner plates, cutlery and a water jug. The old man hunched over the notebook, licked his lips and wrote again, hesitating over the letters. “What do ye intend with us?” The policeman was at the old man’s elbow now, craning his neck to read the words, his fingers reaching to tilt the page to the light. Good Luck set a cup at his place, but he took no notice. Then she snatched the butcher knife and plunged it into his throat, searching for the artery, a freshet of spermy red blood bubbling out. The policeman gasped, but the old man had an iron grip on his wrists, and for a fatal moment he could not but gaze unapprehending at the hand that gripped the knife and the knife handle and the current of blood staining Good Luck’s shirt sleeve. And then the light began to ebb like water going out, he felt unutterably defeated by things, he had grasped the secret but in the instant of his dying it escaped him, in the instant of his death he guiltily remembered spying on his mother naked before the washstand mirror, in the instant of his dying he was embarrassed.

  The old man dragged the policeman’s body into the pantry, not bothering about the incarnadine smear of blood he painted across floorboards. Good Luck poured coffee, and he field-stripped the pistol while they waited on the return of the boarders. He released the magazine and pulled back the slide to check the chamber, then he depressed the take-down plug under the barrel opening and pushed out the slide lock. He cocked the hammer with his thumb and pulled the slide back and off the receiver. Then he put it back together, chambered a round and drank his coffee. He killed Francis Ward and Miss Adeline Frick when they came like lambs through the front door. He laid their bodies side by side under the dining table, then collected the newspaper clippings and notebooks and burned them in the firebox of
the cookstove. He brought the carpet bag inside and turned it upside down, searching for more paper evidence, but found none except an envelope with five postcards of naked women, which he also consigned to the fire.

  Now he was exhausted and confused. His mind ran away from his body the way it had when he was alone and starving to death under the sheepskins that long-ago winter. He wanted a horse, he thought. Two horses, a mule, tack and grub. But where would they ride? He was a soul inside a corpse, hard clay, difficult to convince of the necessity of action, all used up in the events of the last hour. He wasn’t defeated, he told himself, only indignant at the puny nature of flesh, this squalid frame for the implacable hunger that dwelt inside and through which he was connected to every other living thing. The mother voice sang in his head. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy. He recalled a blue girl on a glistening hill. He examined Good Luck’s face for a sign but found there only the same old terrible resoluteness of spirit, wordless and endless. He wanted to speak, but speech failed. How alike they had become in the expanse of time.

  He tucked the Colt inside his waistband then staggered into the kitchen pantry, retrieved their stocks of kerosene and coal oil, and doused the floor. He lifted the chimney off the lamp at the dining table, turned up the wick and threw the lamp. We are purified in the fire, he thought. Redeemed from seethe and scorn, he thought, and preserved from the corruption of memory. With the hot tongues of flame licking up the walls and smoke rippling across the ceiling, they supported each other to the ground-floor room where they slept, leaving the door ajar — nothing to keep out, he thought, nothing to fear. They lay together on the counterpane. He clutched the pistol in his right hand. He thought he would not need it. In the strange light, her lips seemed to contort as though she laboured under a compulsion to speak, but he knew that she would not. And we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow.

  Crown of Thorns

  When Tobin was eight, he fell in love with his babysitter Aganetha, the awkward one with the large, damp eyes, floppy, uncontrollable bosoms and a soot-coloured hairwing she kept pulled down over her face to hide her acne. One night, waking up to pee, Tobin spied Aganetha and his father embracing in the rose arbour at the back gate. Aganetha’s sweatshirt was rucked up at her throat, her bra askew, one breast dislodged and bright as a second moon. The scene was enveloped in silence, lit by a real moon hanging over the garden like a Japanese lantern or a breast. Dormant, dither, delft, dreadful, death and dalliance — d-words from his book droned through Tobin’s head. Seeing the breast flattened against his father’s hand, Aganetha’s pale flesh bulging like putty between the rough, muscular fingers, Tobin thought, She must be cold. Then his mother was standing just behind him, in his bedroom by the back window, her fingernails chill talons digging into his shoulder. He thought, he made a connection, never to be obliterated from memory: My mother’s hand on my shoulder is just like my father’s hand on Aganetha’s breast. He wet his pyjamas right down to the floor.

  Aganetha disappeared from Tobin’s life. He thought of her as a kite, but the string had snapped and she was drifting away from him. His parents never mentioned her. He thought, She is the only person I ever loved. She is my beginning and my end. His mother, if anything, seemed warmer, more attentive, toward his father, but in an anxious, frenzied, hysterical manner that he later described to his therapist as a theatre of martyrdom. See, she seemed to say, I am the perfect one for you because I will bear anything, tolerate every betrayal and vice. To Tobin, his father seemed ineffably distant, cruel, cold, powerful and perverse. Both his parents were so involved in their private drama that they had no emotion to spare for Tobin. He thought, he told the therapist, he was having a happy childhood.

  With Aganetha gone, life seemed like a dream to Tobin. He did not know why anything occurred or what was real. He began to wet the bed. It just happened, he explained to his mother. Someone else was controlling his bodily functions. Erections were inexplicable and usually accompanied some act of cruelty. He got erections when he threw rocks at the neighbour’s puppy Squiggles. He got erections when he found his mother weeping in the rose arbour. He got erections every time he passed through the rose arbour. One day he threw himself against the rose arbour, impaling himself on the thorns, an image of the Jesus he had seen in his children’s Bible. When the blood came, he had an erection. He remembered Aganetha’s breast in his father’s hand and had his first orgasm.

  He was suddenly twelve and enrolled in a special school. He couldn’t understand why he was there. He told the school counsellor about his love for Aganetha, whom he assumed was dead, murdered, yes, by his father, with the help of his mother. He knew where she was buried.

  “This explains why you keep digging up the rose arbour,” said the therapist, reading from his notes.

  “I don’t know why I dig there,” said Tobin. “I am controlled by outside forces, my mother and father, I think. They have a remote control transmitter and there is a chip embedded in my skull. When I dig in the back garden, I feel peaceful.”

  “Why do you stick pencils in your penis?” asked the therapist.

  “That’s easy,” said Tobin. Then he fell silent. Then he said, “There is a button. If they press that button, my head will explode and I’ll be dead.”

  “Do you think your parents love you?” asked the therapist.

  “Absolutely,” said Tobin.

  *

  After the special school, there was an away school, then the incident with the school nurse’s kitten, the fires, another school, the Internet pornography ring featuring first- and second-graders in the school washroom, shoplifting, juvenile detention. In group therapy at the Cedar Vale Centre, Tobin met a depressed girl named Rose who was addicted to several drug groups and had dabbled in prostitution. She was overweight, her breasts swung like giant pods beneath her sweatshirt, she had lank black hair and a crucifix tattooed on her forehead. She taught Tobin to hold his breath till he fainted. Nights, Tobin dreamed he saw his father kissing Rose in the rose arbour, kneading her chubby breasts with his clawlike fingers. He showed Rose a photograph of his father. She said she might have known him, or someone just like him, a double.

  Tobin said, “I can hold my breath till I’m dead.”

  “Have you ever been kissed?” asked Rose. When he did not answer, she asked, “Have you ever made love?”

  At which point Tobin fainted.

  He bought a crown of thorns plant with his pocket money and kept it by his bedside. He changed therapy groups and avoided Rose, even when she wept and threatened to kill herself. His new therapist asked him what he made of the fact that his family name was Thorn. Tobin held his breath until he passed out. Seeing himself in the men’s room mirror, in the ghastly glow of the strip lights, he realized he was beginning to look like his father. They had the same sinister leer, the same feminine belly, the same hermaphrodite penis. This realization gave him an erection. He felt suddenly powerful. He felt an overpowering urge to find Rose or to dig a hole. But Rose had mysteriously left Cedar Vale. No one could explain it, but he took it as a sign of love.

  Years seemed to pass. Tobin (Thorn), along with his crown of thorns plant, moved back with his parents. The house had an antiseptic air, something like a barracks or a prison, much like Cedar Vale Centre. His mother and father rarely spoke to Tobin, or anyone else for that matter. They locked him in his room at night. Their lives seemed shrouded in a dense, greasy fog. They moved awkwardly around the house in synchronized patterns like automata. They wore matching cardigan sweaters with deep pockets. At night he could hear them weeping. The backyard was pocked with unfilled holes, the rose arbour upended, the roses dead, their arched stems prickly in the moonlight like the backs of prehistoric monsters. He looked for jobs involving excavation. He found himself attracted to backhoes and barbed wire. He wore a cardigan sweater with deep pockets. He thought how everything repeated in his life, beginnin
g with the moment when he fell in love with Aganetha. There were remnants of yellow plastic police tape in the backyard. When he came home, there had been a pile of letters in an unknown handwriting. He dared not open them, but he fondled them and got erections. After he got an erection, he would wet the bed. His erections were signs that a higher power was controlling him. The mysterious envelopes prompted him to write letters to the newspapers accusing the staff of Cedar Vale Centre of murdering Rose and concealing her body on the grounds. He also mentioned the alarming disappearance of a girl named Aganetha some years before. He fell in love with the music of Kurt Cobain. When the police came, he remembered the psychologist from before.

  She said, “You know your parents say there never was a babysitter named Aganetha.”

  Tobin (Thorn) said, “Without Aganetha I am nothing.”

  At the cemetery where he found work, Tobin met a woman named Dolores. She was typical of the women to whom he found himself attracted — melancholy, shy, sexually demanding, lonely, and possessed of large breasts. She lay down beside a headstone (a rose engraved in granite) and invited him to have sex with her.

  After he fainted, she said, “Are you a virgin?”