My Wholly Heartbreaking Heretic
Danielle Peterson
Copyright 2012 by Danielle Peterson
Chapter One
“You ever spent time in the South? You sound like you have,” said my elderly client. I seem to remember that his name began with an R. Ronald? Let’s go with that.
I murmured an affirmative, although I was far too preoccupied with easing the vacuum tube out of his television to elaborate any further. Yes, I, Young Master Toupinier, (disinherited)heir to one of the largest sugar plantation in the American South, reader of law, and immortal, spent several years in the late 1960s and early 1970’s repairing televisions. What can I say? I grew weary of law, and of mill ownership, and of law again, and then…oh, lots of things. Dozens of lifetimes of occupations and jobs and careers. I even plied my expertise with the human viscera as a surgeon. It all becomes so awfully tedious after a while.
But one of the few pinpoints of felicity in my long summer has been the steady advancement of technology. I am “that guy”, the one who religiously buys every iteration of the iPod and the PlayStation-hell, I’ve even bought a Zune or two. My fascination with said devices was sparked back when records were still made of shellac and could be broken like plates. I learned how to repair televisions after Ma Bichette and I split up in 1966 (I recall that I saw The Naked Prey at the cinema the day after she left) citing that she was “tired of looking at your melancholy face everyday for the past twenty-five years, Rémi, I just need a change.” Don’t cry for me, however, as I was just about fed up with her nonsense as well.
I could wax poetically for pages and pages about my reflections on what it’s like to go from grainy black and white to high definition, but I am sure you get my drift. It’s the bee’s knees (oh, I love that absurd idiom and I wish it would come back into style), to say the least. But really, that’s all rather incidental to this particular story. It did not matter what I was doing at the time, the time being the autumn of 1970.
I am certain that you picture me in some sort of garish leisure suit or something, but you can just go right ahead and stop yourself. I wouldn’t be caught dead (ha) in something so ungainly. Instead I weathered the fashion chaos in a uniform of all-American blue jeans and perfectly mundane work shirts and T-shirts. You cannot truly appreciate a cotton T-shirt until you’ve worn a cravat day in and day out for several decades.
I moved to Reno after we separated. No particular reason why I chose Reno; I had never been there before. I don’t remember my exact thought process, I probably just chose the city at random from a map or some such. I am not a big gambler, I get my thrills elsewhere, but the desert and the dry heat were a nice change. After a hunt I would retire to the vast wilderness of sand and stone with nothing but my turmoil and a case of Hamm’s. There, ensconced safely in an empty womb of silence and ethereal, torrid heat, I could vent properly. I’d put down a few six-packs of beer (remember pull tabs on cans?) in rapid succession and before I’d know it I’d be hollering to all the gila monsters and scorpions how it wasn’t worth it, how no love, no matter how divine, could be worth it. Ah well. C’est la vie.
Back to my story.
This fellow, Ronald, he was a right old bastard. First thing he said to me was that I looked like his son. Second thing he said was that his son was a dirty pinko who wasn’t welcome at his home anymore. What can you say in response to that? I’m sorry I look like your communist son? I try not to mix business with murder, as it tends to require me to skip town sooner than I would like, but I started to get that itchy trigger finger, so to speak, and Ronald only continued to rub me the wrong way.
Even though it had been a good fifteen years since color broadcasts began, Ronald had stubbornly held on to his black and white set. That alone caused me no grief; to each their own, but by this time vacuum tubes were already starting to get phased out. I tried to explain to Ronald that he might want to just buy a new color set as opposed to having to get the burnt out tubes replaced every few months. He dismissed my suggestion, not with good grace or even indifference, but with sheer indignation that I would dare to suggest that he do something new. Then he conjectured that I was a homosexual because I smoked (and still do smoke) Benson and Hedges cigarettes (when you can’t die there’s really not much motivation to not smoke). He was really starting to grate on my nerves, but while I crouched down on the floor, fixing his relic of a television set, he decided to ask me about my travels in Dixie.
“You ever been to Georgia?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied as noncommittally as a could.
“Where abouts?”
“Oh, all over,” I said tersely, trying to communicate that my work required concentration.
“I’m from Bibb County. Ever been to Macon?”
I smiled despite myself. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“Sixty-one,” I answered, but didn’t specify that it was 1861 when I was last there, not 1961.
He then proceeded to bitch about the late President Kennedy, and how that he was a communist and a traitor. Ronald was obsessed with communists, even more so than the average person was at the time. His diatribe morphed into a lecture about how FDR was a communist, how Eisenhower was a communist sympathizer (which is a completely different thing, I guess) because he refused to authorize a nuclear strike against the North Koreans, and how pretty much everyone but himself was a stealth Marxist.
I tuned in and out of his soliloquy. The repair itself didn’t take too long, but it was rather slow going because I was attempting to calculate how long it would take local law enforcement to piece together that it was the television repairman who was slaughtering residents.
While the vast majority of all aspects of life have gotten considerably easier and accessible, getting away with murder gets harder and harder every year. Which is great news, of course, for most people, but it is a imposing annoyance for myself. First it was fingerprints I had to worry about leaving behind. Then it was DNA evidence, or hair, or fibers from my clothing. Now there is a security camera on every wall and streaming webcams and it makes me nostalgic for simpler time when my hunts could be dismissed as a werewolf or gypsies or something other than the epic serial killer that I am.
Whenever I can, I dispose of the body. I realize that this is deplorable, as it gives families no closure and perpetuates false hope that said victim is alive, but I’m a selfish monster who feeds on the living to continue my own miserable existence, so what do you expect? Some kind of cage-free, organic, fair-trade heart market? It’s an ugly business, and as I mentioned in the previous volume I try to assuage my culpability by selecting ‘worthy’ meals, but I never do feel good about it, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Ronald was a prime candidate though. He lived alone; his wife had run off with some communist, (oh, now years after the fact I get that I should have suggested that that was why his ‘son’ looked like a communist) and based upon his disposition, which was remarkably abrasive, I guessed that he didn’t have guests coming by unannounced. Granted, an unpleasant personality and propaganda-induced paranoia doesn’t really warrant a death sentence, but the new moon was about ten days away and I needed to make a selection.
“You’re not planning on stealing my tube there, are you?” he pressed me.
I had absentmindedly put the kaput vacuum tube in my toolbox. “Well, no, but there’s not much you can do with it. It’s burned out.” I pulled it out of the toolbox. “It’s trash. I suppose if you want to collect garbage, by all means, keep it.”
He snatched the vacuum tube from my hands. “Don’t you tell me what’s trash and what’s not! What I do with my own property is none of your business!”
A tentative glance around his home demonstrated that nothing was trash to this man, no matter how burnout out or rusted or obsolete. A common enough affliction among people who lived through the Great Depression (not myself, however, I move around far too much to accumulate many permanent possessions). I shrugged and handed him the contested glass tube. I always found them attractive from an aesthetic point of view; a beautiful little sculpture of glass and nickel and tungsten and science and progress. I even like the tidy little prongs at the bottom. So symmetrical.
He gently held it between his fingers. I snapped my toolbox shut and rose. I was forming a rudimentary plan in my head for next week, namely that I would kill him in his bed in the wee hours of the morn, abscond with his body in the trunk of my car, and then carve him up in a remote canyon in the desert that I had appropriated as a makeshift butchery. With any luck his neighbors would presume that he had been crushed by a pile of garbage.
Ronald pulled out a wad of dirty dollar bills from his back pocket and carefully counted out my fee. I did not need the money. You would not believe how much interest a person can accrue over the years. But just because I didn’t need it, didn’t mean I didn’t want it. It was not greed so much as a pleasant reminder that I am competent at playing television repairman or farmer or whatever I was amusing myself with in that particular ‘life’.
I had a rather dull car at the time, as to befit my status as a tradesman. It was a light blue Ford sedan with a mismatched passenger side door in a darker blue hue that had been presumably salvaged from a junkyard. It had a radio though, which was all I required, and that evening after leaving the job I got bucket of chicken for diner. My typical evening schedule was downright boorish when compared to smart diner parties and gentleman’s clubs (actual clubs, not bawdy houses). I would watch television and drink beer and fall asleep on the sofa most nights, not even bothering to sleep in the bed. I was not seeing anyone and was enjoying the lone wolf lifestyle to some degree. I hadn’t heard so much of a peep out of Ma Bichette since we split, other than the compulsory notifications of address changes that we exchanged. In the last note she sent me, about a year previous, she said that she would be without a fixed address for a while. As far as I was concerned, she could do whatever she wanted. I had a nice little suburban nest with a beige and brown sofa in a plaid design, an icebox full of grape Nehi, a brand new color TV on which to watch the golden age of ridiculous-premise sitcoms, and a rather impressive record collection. I didn’t need her.
But we are doomed and blessed to be together. Forever. Whether we like it or not. Sure, we are allotted breaks, but we must always rebound into each other’s bloodstained embraces.
Her avenue back into my life was innocuous enough. A postcard that encouraged me to remember the Alamo. I do, albeit rather vaguely, and as I stared at the glossy photograph I must have sighed before I even read the back of it, for there was no one else on this planet who would bother to send me a postcard. I flipped it over.
Mon canard,
Look here, huh? Full of tourists! Mostly whiny little children and old people. What’s
happened to this country? Being on the road is fun though, I am getting all kinds of
ideas and meeting all kinds of people. I will be coming by in the middle of August
for a you-know-what. I need to discuss something with you as well.
Kisses
That is verbatim, by the way, although translated from French. One of the few possessions that I have held on to continuously for the past two centuries has been a battered steel lockbox with all of the correspondences she sent me. Not that her writing is terribly insightful or anything, nor do I like to reread them through the glasses of nostalgia and sentiment, yet I cannot bear to discard them as I have with so very many other things.
I wandered back up my driveway from the mailbox on autopilot. I wasn’t love struck or moon eyed or anything as maudlin as that by her announcement that she would come flouncing back into my life. My mind was at war with itself. One side was the omnipresent faction that existed only for Ma Bichette; the part of me that could not wait for her to show up at my pleasant little ranch-style home and then have her live out a humdrum tableau with me like I have always wanted. On the other side, however, was the nagging notion that this was only going to end in more heartbreak and frustration for me, as it has so many times before.
That apprehension was not a new suspicion by any means, but I felt it more keenly this time around. I had a nice little life here, and I didn’t want her to obliterate it. But, alas, I also cannot deny my attraction to her either. She does…things to my brain, I guess would be the best way to explain it. I’m not particularly proud to admit it, but it does go a long way in untangling the mess of decisions I make.
Red was her color du jour, it would seem. Ma Bichette drove a stark red Mercury Cougar that couldn’t have been older than year. She emerged from it late one August afternoon, the sound of the door slamming shut resonating throughout the neighborhood. She wore a short red dress, a shade lighter than her car, with a sharp line of white piping running up the side. Her hair was set in spiral curls. Different from the last time I’d seen it, but it was a nice look for her. Modern.
I glared at her in consternation from the porch. I had decided that this was not a reunion. This was a meeting between two people with mutual interests. It was not a rekindling of a fire that would burn eternally. It was not, I affirmed to myself as she winked at me from the curb.
“Mon canard!” she shouted at me. “It’s nice to see you again!”
I nodded. It was so nice to see her again. She hasn’t aged a day since…How beautiful she is. “Did you have a nice drive?” I asked. What a terribly mundane thing to say. We had been to Hell and back together and I couldn’t think of anything more interesting.
She slapped her palms against the trunk of her car. “Can you get my bags?”
I paused. We hadn’t even exchanged much more than a dozen words and she was already making demands. Gentleman that I am, however, I hurried across the lawn to assist her.
Ma Bichette grinned at me as I approached. “Rémi,” she said, but I shook my head.
“Please, I go by David these days,” I reproached her.
“David,” she repeated thoughtfully. “That’s okay, I suppose.”
“I’m glad you approve,” I said sarcastically.
“Well, hello David,” she said and kissed my cheek. Softly. Her touch managed to make me feel warm, even on that scorching hot afternoon. “Help a lady with her bags?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
She smiled and opened the trunk with the keys. “Just get the leather one, that one has my clothes, and that big white one,” she said as the trunk rose. “All the other stuff can stay in the car. I won’t be here but a few days at the most.”
I relaxed instantly. So she wasn’t planning on reconciling with me, which would be something that I seriously doubt that I would have had the wherewithal to resist. “What’s so important about this one?” I asked, as I pulled the white one out from under a blue train case.
“It’s full of cash,” Ma Bichette answered plainly.
“Ah, of course.” I hefted the baggage out of the trunk. “Help yourself to vault, did you?”
An unnervingly crafty expression fell upon her features. “No, of course not. Why do you assume that?” She reached in into the trunk and snatched up the train case.
“You’ve threatened to do so on many occasions. And what else would you be doing with a suitcase full of cash?”
“So I must have acquired it through criminal channels?” she asked in mock indignation.
“No, no,” I replied. “I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason you are barreling through the highways of America with a suitcase full of cash.”
“Oh mon canard, you always know how to make me smile.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me how you got your apparent well-gotten gains,” I said as we walked to
my door.
Ma Bichette nodded. “That’s what I came to talk to you about. I’ll tell you after we eat.” She hesitated. “You have got it, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I had gone back to Ronald’s house two nights before in order to harvest his heart. It wasn’t even necessary to conduct my typical elaborate body abduction. His bedroom had been a virtual rat’s nest of old newspapers and books. It was a minor miracle that he hadn’t died in fire yet, especially considering he had a habit of smoking in bed, judging by the overflowing ashtray next to his bed. After smothering him with a pillow and removing the heart, all I did was gently knock over a pile of newspapers and set it ablaze with my brass Zippo. There had been a report on the local news that morning about the totally accidental house fire, complete with a curt little reminder from the fire chief to not sleep in a bed surrounded by a metric ton of newspapers. Sometimes you get a freebie.
Said heart had spent the last few days soaking in a marinade of virgin olive oil with a touch of balsamic vinegar (just enough to give it a tangy taste, not enough to overpower the mellowness of the olive oil), as well as some rosemary and garlic. It’s an old recipe of my mine and I know that Ma Bichette fancies it. It’s great roasted with some potatoes, but the weather was obliging so I planned to barbeque it that night. The richness of the oil-based marinade pairs very nicely with fresh greens, so I had a head of butter lettuce and some spring onions and tomatoes in the icebox. Couple that with some chilled white wine and you’ve got a supper so nice it’s possible to forget it’s beasty roots.
Now that we had gotten the (un)pleasantries out of the way it was time to shift all of my nervous energy to another problem, although this one was not so much of a mortal sin as it was awkward. Did she plan on sleeping with me? Where should I set down her bags? In the guest room or in my room? She was walking in front of me, and I couldn’t help but to observe, very dryly and scientifically, her perfectly perfect legs. I tightened my grip on the handles.
Ma Bichette opened the front door and graciously welcomed me into my own home. I dropped the suitcases on the living room floor. Let her figure it out. Either way was okay with me. I’ve learned that I can’t control everything, and when I do try to control things it goes badly. Very badly.
She glanced around my living room. “It’s so nice to be inside a proper house,” she announced, and set the train case down on top of her other two bags. “I’ve spent the last, oh, damn near a year, travelling around and sleeping in camps and communes and ashrams and all manner of filthy places,” she said and then plopped down on the sofa.
“What on Earth is an ashram?”
She shut her eyes, tired from the long day of driving. “Dirty. There’s chickens running all over the blasted place, thinking they own it.”
“You’ve dealt with livestock before,” I said, and sat next to her. I ached to put my hand on her leg in a nonchalant manner, like I had countless times before, but I wavered and instead put my hand on my own leg.
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it. It’s the second-half of the twentieth century, people shouldn’t be mucking about with chickens anymore. People should be in space. Which is where I am from, by the way.”