The person who told him made nothing of the nod. Maybe it only indicated that this was nothing uncommon, that his father often came home drunk, that his parents often argued.
But this argument had an atypical ending, because Billy’s father had concluded it by taking a handgun from his desk drawer and putting three bullets into Billy’s mother and, in remorse or anger or God knows what, blowing out his own brains.
The boy knew whose fault it was. It was his, his and his sister’s. While they were crossing the last barrier, their father was murdering their mother, then sinning against the Holy Ghost by taking his own life.
As he remembered it, the ensuing days and weeks passed in a blur. While the authorities tried to find a relative who could take them in, Billy and Carolyn went on living in the house where their parents had died. No agreeable relative emerged, and the two were of an inconvenient age, too young to be on their own, too old to be placed in foster care. The officials shuffled papers and forgot about them, and they stayed where they were. Carolyn did the shopping and prepared the meals, Billy cut the grass and raked the lawn and shoveled the walk.
A week after the tragedy, they resumed sleeping together.
“All we’ve got is each other,” she told him. “What happened’s not our fault. I’ll tell you something, it was going to happen sooner or later, and if we’d been home that night we’d have wound up dead, too. The way he drank, the way he got when he drank? And the way she provoked him? ‘Man Kills Wife and Self.’ If we had been home, it would have been ‘Man Kills Wife, Two Children, and Self.’ That’s the only difference.”
He knew she was right.
All they had was each other, and they loved each other. Socially, they withdrew further into themselves. For a year or two, this was unremarkable, a natural consequence of the family tragedy they had endured. Then, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she announced that a boy had asked her on a date and she had agreed to go with him.
“People get suspicious. ‘What’s wrong with her that she never goes out with anybody?’ They think I’m pretty, I ought to be interested in boys.”
“Let them think you’re a lesbian.”
“Believe me, some of them already think that. I’ve had some long looks from a couple members of the sisterhood, and one of them asked me if I’d like to come over and watch the last round of the LPGA at her house. Why would anyone want to watch golf, whether it was men or women playing? And why would I want to go over to her house anyway?”
“I wish you didn’t have to go out with some guy,” he said.
“You’re jealous?”
“I guess so.”
“I’m not going to let him do anything, Billy. But I think it makes sense to go out with him. And you’re going to have to start going out with girls.”
“Or they’ll think I’m a fag?”
“Or a retard.”
“I don’t care what they think,” he said, but of course he did. Later he told her he wished they could be where nobody knew anything about them.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said.
They put the house on the market and sold it, rented an apartment in a college town a few hundred miles away. She’d been given her mother’s maiden name as a middle name, and now she dropped her surname, and they lived together as William Thompson and Carolyn Peyton. She built up a collection of identification in that name, and enrolled at the college, and a year later so did he. The money from the house, supplemented by their earnings from part-time jobs, covered their tuition and expenses, and they had both always been good students. He took an accelerated program and they graduated together, four years after they’d sold the house.
Neither had made a single close friend during those four years. Neither had gone out on a date, or shown any interest in a member of the opposite sex. All they wanted was to be together, and they were confident their feelings were not going to change.
They got married. “We could just say we were married,” she told him. “When does anyone ask to see a marriage license? And I already feel married to you. More than married to you. But I want to do it all the same.”
“And have kids?”
“A baby with two heads,” she said. “That’s what you get if you sleep with your brother. Remember how kids used to think that? I’ve done some research, and it doesn’t necessarily work out that way. There’s a chance, though, that there might be something abnormal about the child.”
“I don’t really want kids, anyway.”
“Neither do I,” she said, “but that might change, for one or both of us. If it does---“
“We could take our chances,” he said. “Or adopt.”
“But for now,” she said, “all I want is you.”
And so they got married, and Carolyn Peyton legally changed her name again, back to Carolyn Peyton Thompson. And, as man and wife, they moved to the city where I came to know them. They went into business together, made a success of it, bought a house, and, well, lived happily ever after. They postponed the decision about children until they realized it had resolved itself; they were a complete unit now, they had been a complete unit from that first kissing lesson, and a child would be an unwelcome extra presence in their home.
Legally married, they came to feel less as though they had something to hide. So they were more inclined to make friends, more prepared to play an active role in the life of the community. They were, in everybody’s eyes, a decent and charming couple, attractive and personable and very much in love. And you could see at a glance that they belonged together. Why, they even looked alike. If you didn’t know better, you’d take them for brother and sister.
#
“And that’s it?” said the soldier.
The priest nodded. “More or less,” he said.
“More or less,” echoed the doctor. “Is it more or is it less? Never mind. Lust, eh? Well, I suppose it was lust that got them started, but it sounds to me more like a love story than one of unbridled sexual passion. It’s not lust that keeps two people together for---what did you say? A decade and a half? No, that’s how long they were married. He was thirteen when she gave him his first kissing lesson and thirty-six or so when he told you about it, so that’s twenty-three years. If there’s some kind of lust that lasts for twenty-three years, I’d like a case of it sent to my quarters.”
“And I’m not sure where the sin comes in,” the soldier said. “Unless the incest itself is the sin, and I suppose your church might call it that, but I don’t know that I would. Whom did they harm? And where’s the dissolute life to which sin’s presumed to lead? They became model citizens, from the sound of things. They had a secret, but what couple doesn’t have a few secrets, and who’s to say they do them any harm?”
A snore came from the old man seated by the fire.
“My sentiments exactly,” said the doctor. “What I can’t figure out is why the fellow had that conversation with you. Incidentally, is it all right for you to recount it to us? You told him you’d consider yourself bound by the seal of the confessional.”
“As you three don’t know the people involved,” the priest said, “and as I’ve changed their names, I don’t feel I’ve violated a confidence. The Church might see it differently, but I’ve long since ceased to be bound by what the Church thinks. My own conscience is clear on this subject, if on few others.” He turned to the policeman. “You haven’t said anything,” he said.
“It’s a good story,” the policeman said. “There’s one question that occurs to me, though, but you may not know the answer.”
“Ask it.”
“I was wondering,” the policeman said, “whether anybody ever gave that girl a paraffin test.”
The priest smiled.
#
On the eve of their wedding (the priest continued) Carolyn cooked an elaborate dinner. Afterward they sat with cups of strong coffee, and she said she had something to tell him, something she was afraid to tell him. “If you’re going to mar
ry me,” she said, “you should know this.”
From the time she was eleven years old, she said, their father had taken to coming into her room while she was sleeping. He initiated a pattern of sexual abuse which progressed gradually from inappropriate touches and caresses while she slept, or feigned sleep, to acts which required her to be awake and an active participant. For the last three years of the man’s life, the repertoire included sexual intercourse, and the man did not use a condom. She lived in fear that he would make her pregnant, but he managed on each occasion to withdraw in time, depositing his sticky gift on her belly.
Toward the end, though, he seemed to be considering impregnating her, and more than once said he wondered what kind of a mommy she’d make.
She hated him, and wanted to kill him. She hated her mother as well. Early on she had told the woman that he was coming to her room, that he was touching her. The woman refused to take it in. He’s your father, she was told. He loves you. You’re imagining things.
And so, on that Saturday night, while her father sat in front of the television set in a drunken slack-jawed stupor, she got the handgun from the drawer where he kept it, thrust the barrel into his open mouth, and pulled the trigger. When her mother came in to see what had happened, she leveled the gun and shot the woman three times. Then she wiped her own fingerprints from the gun, placed it in her father’s dead hand, and curled his fingers around it.
Then she went off to meet her brother, and arrived just a few minutes late. And, having just committed a double murder, and sure she’d be found out and sent to prison, she blotted it all from her mind and gave herself over to a last night of joy and consummation with her beloved brother.
But of course she was never found out. The murder-suicide scene she’d staged was good enough to pass muster, and no one ever took a good hard look at her alibi. Her friend, Sandy, kept her secret; it wouldn’t do to let out that Carolyn had been out cavorting with a boyfriend, nor would Sandy’s parents be comfortable with the knowledge that their daughter had facilitated such deception. So why not keep that little secret? Carolyn surely had enough tragedy in her life, with her father having killed her mother and himself. She didn’t need to have her sex life exposed to public scrutiny.
Nor did Billy’s alibi get much attention. He crawled into his tent after taps and crawled out of it at reveille. Case closed.
And so, on the eve of his wedding, William Thompson learned for the first time that his father was not a murderer and that his sister was.
The following day they were married.
#
“And lived happily ever after,” said the doctor. “A curious business, incest. More common, it turns out, than we used to think. No end of fathers, it turns out, lurch into their daughters’ beds. And they’re not always hillbillies or immigrants or welfare cases, either. It happens, as they say, in the best of families. As for brothers and sisters, well, what’s that but a childhood game carried to its logical conclusion?”
“Playing doctor,” the soldier said.
“Quite so. It must happen often, and who’d ever report it? If the two are close in age, if there’s no force or intimidation involved, where’s the abuse? It may be forbidden, they may be transgressors, but what’s the harm?”
“I wonder how often they actually marry,” the policeman said.
“Not too often,” the doctor said. “I can’t imagine marrying my sister, but then I can’t imagine fucking her, either. Truth to tell, I can’t imagine anyone fucking her.”
“If you had a better-looking sister. . .”
“Then it might be a different story,” the doctor allowed. “Speaking of stories, that’s a good one, Priest. How did it turn out?”
“I don’t know that it did,” the priest said. “Two years or so after our conversation, Carolyn gave birth to a daughter. I christened the child, and she certainly looked like her parents, for all that you can tell when they’re that small.”
“So they rolled the dice,” the soldier said. “Although I suppose someone else might have been the father. Artificial insemination and all that.”
“Or else they’d have been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool,” said the doctor, “and that’s dangerous, but not always disastrous. On the one hand you’ve got the Jukes and the Kallikaks, those horrible examples they tell you about in high school biology class, and on the other hand you’ve got all the crowned heads of Europe.”
“When we have more time,” the policeman said, “you can tell me which is worse. Any more to the story, Priest?”
The priest shook his head. “I was transferred shortly thereafter,” he said, “and lost track of them. I hope things turned out well for them. I liked them.”
“And I like your story,” the policeman said. “Lust. I could tell a story about lust.”
The others sat back, waiting.
#
I’m not much of a storyteller (said the policeman) and I don’t know much about sin. Not that I’m free from it myself, but that I was not trained to think in those terms. My frame of reference is the law, the criminal code specifically. I can tell you whether or not an act is lawful, and, if it’s not, I can correctly label it a violation or a misdemeanor or a felony. And even then my classification will not apply universally, but only in the jurisdiction where I lived and worked.
Determining what is or is not a criminal act is difficult enough. Determining whether or not an act is sinful, well, I wouldn’t want to touch that with a stick.
Lust. . .
When I was still a young man, I was partnered with an older man named---well, let me choose a name for him, as the priest chose a name for his young couple. And I ought to be able to come up with something a little more distinctive and imaginative than William Thompson, don’t you think? Michael Walbeck, that’s what we’ll call my partner. Michael J. Walbeck, and the J stands for John. No, make it Jonathan. Michael Jonathan Walbeck, and everybody called him Mike, except for his mother, who still called him Mickey, and his wife, who called him Michael.
She was a beauty, his wife. Her hair was a heap of black curls that spilled down over her shoulders, and her face was heart-shaped, with dark almond-shaped eyes and a lush mouth. Walbeck was jealous of her. He’d call her eight or ten times a day, just to make sure he knew where she was. As far as I knew, Marie never gave him cause for jealousy, outside of always looking like she just hopped out of bed, and like she was ready at a moment’s notice to hop back in again. But he didn’t need cause. He was just a jealous man.
Meanwhile, he was running around on her. Here he was, talking about how he’d kill her if he ever caught her with another guy, and how he’d kill the guy, too, and at the same time he always had something going on the side, and sometimes more than one thing.
You’ve heard of guys who go through life following their own dick, and that was Walbeck. He said himself that he’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’m not entirely certain he was exaggerating. He’d roust hookers and let them off in return for a quick blow job---it’s safe to say he wasn’t the first cop who thought of that one---but his real specialty was the wives and girlfriends of criminals.
That’s a little harder than getting a hooker to go down on you, but not by much. The first time I saw Mike in action, we had busted a guy who was cooking crank in his double-wide out on the edge of town. That’s methamphetamine, also known as speed, and it’s about as tricky to make as chili con carne. And cooking it’s a felony in fifty states, and we had this poor bastard dead to rights. His rights were what Mike was reading him, as a matter of fact, but he stopped in midsentence when he got a look at Cheryl.
I don’t know if she was his wife or his girlfriend, and I don’t remember her name, so for all I know it could have been Cheryl. Doesn’t matter. She was a blowsy girl, and in a few years she’d be a real porker, but now she was in her early twenties and she looked hot and sluttish. She had a wrapper on, I remember, and it needed laundering, and you could pr
etty much tell she wasn’t wearing anything under it.
“Nice looking girl,” Walbeck told the mope. “You know, I wonder if there’s a way we can work something out.”
The guy got it before it touched the ground. “You see anything you like,” he said, “it’s yours.”
“She’s got to do us both,” Walbeck said. “Me and my partner here.”
“You got it.”
“Eddie---” the girl said, whining.
“Shut up,” he told her. “Like you’re gonna miss it?”
“She’s got some shape on her,” Walbeck said. “She does us both, including we get to fuck her in the ass.”
“No way,” the girl said.
“I said shut up,” Eddie said. “You do that, I get to keep the stuff.”
“The crank.”
“The crank and the money both. You don’t confiscate nothing, and I walk, and for that you can fuck her anywhere you want. Cut a hole in her chest and fuck her in the heart, all I care.”
“Eddie!”
“Deal,” Walbeck said. He asked me if I wanted to go first. I shook my head and waited outside with Eddie, who professed not to care what was going on inside the trailer. I noticed, though, that he lit one cigarette off the butt of another, and smoked as if he wanted to burn up the whole cigarette in one furious drag.
“He’s a prick,” he said. “That partner of yours.” I said something to the effect that nobody’d forced him to go for the deal. “Oh, it’s a good deal,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. She ain’t gonna miss another slice off the loaf, and who gives a shit about her anyway? But he’s still a prick.”
Walbeck was in there long enough for Eddie to smoke three cigarettes, and he was zipping his pants as he came down the trailer steps. “Nice,” he said, grinning. “I can see why you keep her around. You’re up, partner.”
You pass in a situation like that, you make trouble in your partnership. Like if you bend the rules for a storekeeper on your beat, let his suppliers park illegally when they’re making their deliveries, and he slips you a few bucks out of gratitude. If one partner takes it and the other won’t accept his cut, how are they going to get along?