Smiles

Harry liked to kill people. He tried not to like it. Aside from the moral aspect, which didn’t bother him in the least, he knew that it was not a healthy thing to do. When faced with their own mortality, his victims reacted violently. In their denial and refusal to cooperate, they bit, spit, scratched, fought and vomited. And, since the human body is covered with all kinds of bacteria and can pass on all kinds of diseases, after each incident, Harry bathed with an antibacterial soap and had a manicure. In fact, that was one of the first things people noticed about him... his hands. They said he had the hands of an artist, and that made Harry feel good. He also saw his doctor at least twice a year for a check up.

Harry killed his girlfriend’s brother, Jake. His girlfriend’s name was Susan. She was blonde and petite with slightly bucked teeth. Harry found kissing her a uniquely sensory experience. When their teeth touched, it sent shivers across his jaw and made a rasping sound through his ears. He killed Jake while Jake was drinking a beer and watching a Chicago Cubs game on the Super Station.

He killed his doctor’s cousin, too. They had met briefly in the medical building parking lot, which was why she allowed him to open the car door for her a week later while she was shopping. He killed a librarian at lunchtime while the man was at work shelving books. Harry killed men, women, the old and the young, strangers and people he had gotten to know. After he killed a woman who ran an animal shelter, his girlfriend asked him if he had a hobby. “Well... sort of,” he answered. They had just taken a shower together and were towel drying each other’s hair.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Just something that makes me feel good.”

“Really?” She licked her lips waiting for more information. “Don’t tell me you collect matchbooks or bottle caps?”

“No. I like to see how many people I can get to smile.” Harry laughed a shallow, embarrassed laugh. Susan laughed. They both laughed then made love on the bathroom floor.

Susan was twenty-three years old when Harry killed her brother. He met Jake in college. They rowed varsity crew together. Harry was the number four in the varsity eight. Jake was the number five. Harry got to know the back of Jake’s neck real well. Susan was the tomboy kid sister. She came down with the family one weekend to watch them race. Jake teased her and poked fun at her. She had shiny eyes, skinny legs and that cute, slightly bucked tooth smile. When she hugged Harry after the race, he knew he wanted her.

Harry and Susan lived in a very rural area across the street from a halfway house for the severely handicapped. They never saw the “guests”. The van always drove into the garage to pick them up and drop them off. When the van drove past the house, Harry could only see the small, white helmeted figures sitting in the back. He often wondered what it would be like not to know that you didn’t know. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a living death and he felt very sorry for them. But he had no desire to kill them. He thought about it, but their lack of awareness even made thinking about their deaths pointless.

Harry was at war with the large black raven that had usurped his front yard. Each morning when he walked out to pick up the morning paper, the raven stood near it and squawked. It didn’t hop away from him. It didn’t fear him. Although it objected to Harry’s touching the paper, the bird left the newspaper alone. It never tore through its yellow plastic bag to pick at the contents the way it did the black garbage bags on Thursday mornings when Harry left them by the side of the driveway. Whether Harry took the bags out the night before or just moments before the garbage men arrived, the raven always managed to tear two or three of them open and scatter garbage on the lawn. Harry felt the bird was taunting him.

As a child Harry had buried his dog out in the back yard beneath a tall black cherry tree. The next morning, the crows and ravens had gathered, like the scavengers they were, around the fresh earth. They stood there, posed with expectancy and looking at the turned earth the same way the large black raven looked at Harry every morning... waiting.

Susan and Harry’s house was built on a slope. The back of it overlooked a narrow river that the state stocked with brown trout. The house had a wood patio on stilts. On balmy summer nights, they would sit out on the patio in the nude and drink red wine and eat dark chocolate and make love. Sometimes Harry would pour a little wine in the hollow were Susan’s collar bone met her neck and gently lick the intoxicating liquid into his mouth and she would laugh and lock her legs around him and pull him to her.

Susan was a scrub nurse in the operating room of a small, private cancer hospital for the terminally ill in Danbury, Connecticut. Frequently she returned home tired and stressed out and would tell Harry about her day and about the lives that she and the operating team had saved or lost. Susan often liked to talk about the times she held a beating human heart in her hands as it pumped “life-giving blood” to the helpless person lying on the operating table. It seemed to mesmerize her. (Harry had tried it once and only found it messy.)

Harry was born the middle of five children. His father worked in a steel mill and was a weekend binge drinker. He would drink Friday nights and all day Saturday. By Saturday night he was so drunk that nothing mattered to him except the dripping water faucet in the kitchen. Years after the old man died, Harry still dreamed about those nights watching his father stand by the sink with a paper towel in his hand waiting for the next drop to fall. And when it did, the old man would swear and wipe it up. Then he would swear again and get another piece of paper towel and stand there like one of the crows over the fresh grave poised and waiting with a ubiquitous smile on his face.

Harry’s mother was the family disciplinarian. She used to whip him and his brothers and sisters with a Rosary in one hand and whatever else was handy in the other. “No point in waiting for your father to come home,” she would say. “You’d probably forget what you were being whipped for by then.” She used to pray as she whipped him, each Rosary bead having its own moral lesson. And she would smile knowing that what she was doing was for their own good. When Harry was thirteen years old and too big for her to whip anymore, she enrolled him in a five-year academy for Catholic boys. According to his yearbook, he was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” because of his scholastic ability, poise and “engaging” smile.

#

Harry killed a young woman he met in a Starbuck’s. She was reading a book on personality disorders that she had checked out from the local library. She was twenty-four and had hair almost as black as the raven’s feathers. She said her family was Hungarian, but Harry thought she must have had a lot of Gypsy in her – dark eyes, dark hair, thick eyebrows. She had been married for ten months and couldn’t understand her husband blowing hot one minute then cold the next. She told him how her husband wore the same torn boxers to bed every night and how he gave her flowers only after he had slapped her around for some perceived infraction of the house rules that he never seemed to totally explain. Harry told her that she was obviously a concerned, dedicated and loving individual. He said that he sensed in her a “desperation to understand.” She smiled. They went for a walk to a nearby gazebo. Some endings are longer than others. After he killed her, he hugged her as he drove around for several hours before disposing her body in the State Park. A hunter tripped over her rib cage a year later. The scavengers had spread her bones over a square acre of the woods.

#

Susan booked a bare-boat charter for them out of Key West for the first two weeks in August. They always took their vacations around her schedule. Harry ran a little marketing company. Since he was his own boss, he could take off whenever he felt like it. Susan was wedded to her hospital schedule. Harry didn’t complain. In order to keep the stress levels in their operating room staff down, the hospital administrator gave his people several vacations each year. Susan liked to get away from the area and that gave Harry the chance to travel around the country and meet people.

The day Harry killed Jake, he told him that he loved his sister. Harry was supposed to be in Cleveland at a marketing meeting. Jake was sitting in front of a large-screen TV sucking at a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He had stopped exercising after college and was getting fleshy around the jowls.

“That’s great,” Jake said. “She’s had her eye on you for a long time. It’s about time you noticed.” Harry was standing to his right and slightly behind him. “I was afraid you’d met someone else. She’s a good kid. I’d hate to see her get hurt.”

Jake was an honest man working far below his potential. He was a communications major who had been sidetracked into his family’s hardware business when his father died. Someone needed to take care of his mother and little sister and he had been elected by default. To his credit, he worked hard at something he really didn’t care about and loved to hear Harry talk about his marketing adventures. Jake’s life had settled into a predictable pattern of baseball and Pabst; football and Pabst; and basketball and Pabst. Sometimes he broke character and drank Grand Marnier and watched “Wild On...”

Once, several years before, Harry had talked Jake into a road trip to Chicago just to ride the EL and go to a Cub’s game. The Cubs were playing Pittsburgh. They had seats in the front row of the Mezzanine on the third base side of home plate and during the seventh inning stretch, everyone sang Take Me Out To the Ball Game. Then after the game they bar-hopped around Wrigley Field before stumbling back to the car and driving home.

Just after Harry told Jake that he loved his sister, someone blasted a home run out on to Waveland Avenue. The sound of the bat hitting the ball, the roar of the crowd, and the TV camera panning the distant image of now deceased Harry Carry on the side of one of the buildings brought back the memory of that perfect road trip. Jake looked at Harry and smiled.

Harry didn’t kill people because they deserve it or out of any sense of power. He never judged the people he killed. He was not remotely concerned with their problems, their joys, their hopes, or their dreams. He was not interested in making their deaths dignified, brave or beautiful. He killed them because he was good at it and because when it was over he felt a deep, dark sense of satisfaction in that abstract, secret place that only he and the raven knew about.

#

The boat they chartered was a 42-foot cutter-rigged sailboat with two headsails and a main sail. As they cruised along, they trailed a 12-ft. Zodiac tender. This allowed them to anchor well off the coral reefs then motor back in the tender to snorkel amid the brightly colored reef fish. On their first morning, Susan climbed up the companionway wearing nothing but a brightly colored head wrap.

“Where did you get that?” Harry asked.

“Jake gave it to me years ago,” she said. “I’ve been keeping it in the bottom of my lingerie drawer. I thought it was about time I got around to wearing it.”

“It’s pretty,” he said.

Susan loved snorkeling in the nude. She could hold her breath forever and she was fearless. The fish loved her, especially the rays. She would come up underneath them and gently stroke their bellies and they would cover her and rhythmically caress her breasts with the languid movement of their wings. It would make Harry jealous. It was almost as if they were dancing underwater with her.

After swimming, they showered off with fresh water heated by the sun, toweled each other dry, then lay out on the foredeck and slowly massaged suntan lotion on to each other. Later that evening after dinner, Susan read a book with her back to Harry as he sat at the chart table watching the gentle rise and fall of her shoulders.

The next morning they found a leak in the fresh water system and had to put back to Key West for repairs. While the charter company fixed the leak, Harry took Susan shopping along Duval Street. He bought her a diaphanous pastel sundress and she bought him a royal blue Hawaiian shirt with large white orchids. After shopping, they went to the Hemingway house, Robert Frost’s house and walked hand and hand through the cemetery where the men killed on the U.S.S. MAINE were buried. Later they went to a beach where Susan suntanned topless and Harry took great joy in touching her body in public. Susan had an exquisite body. For a small woman she had wide shoulders, strong shoulders and skin so smooth that it almost looked like satin. She had large breasts, but not pendulous. However, her back was truly amazing. It was well defined and the muscles on either side of her spine stood out like thick cables leading to the top of her buttocks.

“Having fun?” she asked.

“You can’t imagine,” Harry answered.

Susan rolled over and faced him. “Do you ever think about Jake?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” he answered. “Why?”

“I was just wondering if we would have the same memories of him,” she said.

“How could we,” Harry answered. “You grew up with him. I only met him at college.”

“I know, but after,” she said. “I wonder if you and I would have seen the same person. You know... things that might bother me about him you might have thought were cute and funny.”

“Cute is not a word that I would associated with Jake,” Harry said.

“You know, I used to be jealous of you and Jake,” she said.

“Why?”

“You used to do so much together. You guys were real pals. He was my brother. We could never be pals.”

“Susan, the day you came down to college to watch us race, Jake told me how much he loved you and how much he cared about and worried about you. You were a very lucky young lady." Susan sat up on her knees and pushed him back on the sand. Then she leaned over and kissed Harry long and deep.

#

One of the things Harry liked about vacationing in any kind of resort area was that he get to meet a lot of really nice people. It was easy. Everyone was having so much fun they naturally wanted to share it with whomever they met. Harry learned that people loved to talk about the things that intrigue them the most. All he had to do was act charming and pretend to be honestly interested in whatever interested them: Louisiana -- “That has to be the strangest dog I have ever seen. What’s it called? A Catahoula Cur? Never heard of them. Tell me about them...” Kentucky -- “That’s a mighty nice buck you’ve got on the wall. What did you take it with? Black powder? You mean like Hawkeye and Daniel Boone? Isn’t hunting that way difficult?” Connecticut -- “A teddy bear museum in Bristol? How did that come about?” He also learned that a nice car helped. People were more apt to talk to someone who drove a nice car.

In the Keys, snorkeling in the nude with a woman who has a body like Susan’s went a long way towards attracting a variety of people. Harry thought people were funny. When he met them halfway, they took him the rest of the way themselves. Once people heard that he and Susan were snorkeling in the nude, by the fourth day, they had their own little nudist colony a half mile offshore. People came, snorkeled, stayed a day or two then moved on. With the extra entertaining, the trading supplies and the pot-luck dinners between boats, by the end of that first week they were running low on various staples. Rather than weigh the 500-pound Danforth anchor that kept them moored in the deeper water off the reef, Susan suggested that Harry take the tender and motor over to Matacumbe Key to pick up some supplies.

Matacumbe Key was one of those wonderful post card places with white buildings and green tropical foliage that hung out over the incredibly blue water giving the Key the appearance of being a sparkling jewel floating in a perfect sea. While he was shopping, Harry ran into Kara.

Kara was a stunning, waif-like young lady with shoulder length straight blonde hair, big blue eyes, thick lips and thin arms and legs. She was one of those free spirits who frequently traveled through the tropics, bumming a ride from sailboat to yacht to sailboat, living off the kindness of strangers who are having much too much fun to question the where and the why of their young and beautiful guest. The moment Harry saw her, he remembered her. She had been crew on board a big catamaran that had rafted up to them for a couple of days earlier in the week.

“You look like a sailor in search of a ship,” Harry said as he walked up behind her by the papaya display.

“Oh... hello,” she said.

“Shopping for the Raymonds?” he asked. The Raymonds had chartered the big cat.

“No. They had to go back to Baltimore,” Kara said. “So, until I find my next berth, I’m kinda land locked for the moment.”

“So are you headquartered around here?” Harry asked.

“Headquartered?”

“Yeah. Do you work for the charter company?”

“Work? No. I just bum rides to wherever,” she said.

“I mean you’ve got a place to stay and all that?”

“Not yet,” Kara said. “I can usually find someone to let me sleep on their couch or share a bed with. And if I can’t... well, these are the Keys. Sleeping outside isn’t all that bad. Even the rain is warm.”

“Look, if you need some money, I can give you enough to get a motel room for a couple of nights,” Harry said.

“Oh, I never take money,” Kara said. “I mean, how could I possibly pay it back?”

There was a pause as they both handled the papayas. Finally, Harry turned to her. “Look, Susan and I have that boat for another couple of days. We also have a spare cabin. If you want it, it’s yours. No strings.”

“Thanks for the cabin. I’ll take it. And don’t worry about the strings. I’m used to strings. Here, let me help you carry your groceries.” She smiled.

Harry killed her as they motored back to the boat. When he touched her, she didn’t fight or scream. She just closed her eyes and smiled as if she expected it. Near the edge of the reef, he took off her clothes and put on her mask and snorkel to make it look like a diving accident. Then he dumped her gear into the water and watched it float away with her body.

When he got back to the boat, Susan helped him unload the supplies. When he handed her one of the grocery bags, she stopped and sniffed at it. “That’s got to be a popular suntan lotion,” she said.

“What does?” he asked.

“Who helped you load the Zodiac?”

“A couple of kids on the dock,” Harry answered.

“Figures.”

“What does?”

“Remember that young girl who was here with the Raymonds.”

“The one who looked like she belonged in a Calvin Klein ad?”

“Yeah, her. She used to slather this stuff all over her,” Susan said.

“I hadn’t noticed,” Harry said.

#

They spent the next day snorkeling. The coral was ablaze with color and the fish mirrored the turquoise, the reds, the purples, and yellows glaring and muted. Finally, exhausted by the beauty, they retired to the bow of the sailboat and lounged under a white canvas awning. Surrounded by throw pillows and letting the tropical breeze play its whispered symphony across their bodies, Susan stretched languidly and asked, “Do we really have to leave?”

“We don’t, if you don’t want to,” Harry said.

“Do you mean that?” she asked.

“Sure. We could sell the house, buy a boat. I can do my job from anywhere. You would only have to work if you wanted to.”

Susan was wearing a kind of pastel sarong that hugged her hips and stretched across her legs. The gentle breeze blew the thin fabric against her, outlining the symmetry of her figure. “They have hospitals down here, I suppose,” she said.

Harry laughed. “Good ones, I hear.”

“You know what I mean,” she said reaching over and gently nudging his crotch with her bare foot. Harry began to massage her toes.

“What have we got to lose?” Harry asked. “We’ll meet all new people, face a bunch of new problems, new challenges. It would be fun.”

“What about my mother?” Susan asked.

Susan’s mother had found God. Well... not God personally, but a man of God who ran a small church in east Tennessee. She had moved there to be near him, selling her home and her car. Before she left, she had them listen to several of her pastor’s audiotapes hoping that both Susan and Harry would suddenly get the call and follow her to grace and glory. She reminded Harry of his mother.

“You know your mother won’t be happy until we’re both baptized in the Nolochucky and move to east Tennessee with her,” Harry said.

Susan laughed then suddenly became very serious. “Do you remember Jake’s funeral?” she asked.

Harry had been one of the pallbearers. Susan had the flu and threw up three times, twice in the church and once at the graveside. Susan’s mother was inconsolable.

“If you hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done,” Susan said.

“What do you mean?”

“The way you took charge. The way you were there for me, for mom, for Jake.”

“Why don’t we get married?” Harry asked.

“To whom?”

“To each other, of course.”

“Do we have to?”

Harry stared at her. She was being perfectly serious. “No.”

“Then let’s not,” she said.

“Why?”

“We have it perfect now. Let’s not spoil it.”

Tears welled in the corners of her eyes. She inhaled and caught her breath twice. She was going to cry. Harry reached out to touch her, but she pulled away and stood up and hurried around the deck to the companionway. She disappeared below. In the main cabin she turned on the small, portable TV to cover the sounds of her sobs. Harry let her be.

#

With Susan below, Harry rolled over and leaned against one of the big, flouncy pillows and watched the cathedral-like clouds scud across the surrealistically azure sky and disappear along the edge of the sun-bleached awning. The boat rocked at anchor... languidly moving like a living and breathing thing. Cradled by the soft pillow and caressed by the gentle tropical breeze, Harry fell asleep and dreamed.

He dreamed he was walking along a dirt path flanked by jungle on either side. The path rose and fell with serpentine precision and every now and again the leafy canopy of the blue-green vegetation rustled overhead as the warm breeze worked its way around the leaves. And as he walked down that path, he thought about Jake, the librarian, his doctor’s cousin, Kara and all the others. Every now and again a face he couldn’t place flitted through his memory like a postcard that’s thrown across a desk only to get lost amid the other mail. Was that one mine? he thought. Or did I just read about it in one of the tabloids? How many of mine have they found? How many are there? At the end of the path there was a black hole, a spot devoid of being, an ancient emptiness that he looked into. Whatever was in there was separated from this world, existing in and of itself. Dangerous. Passionless. Isolated.

When he awoke, he was cold. Dawn was breaking over the horizon and Harry was covered in dew. He yawned, wiped his face and sat up. Susan was sitting on the cabin top with her back against the mast watching him.

“You sleep so soundly,” she said.

“Do I?”

“Like you haven’t a care in the world.”

#

The next day they headed for Dry Tortugas. Susan wanted to see it. They would have to charter the boat for another week, but after killing Kara, Harry was in no hurry to leave. Susan manned the winch that brought the big Danforth anchor on board while Harry raised the sails. With the sails up, they cruised along the Straits of Florida racing the porpoise that danced in the small wash of their bow wave.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, Susan spelled Harry at the wheel. In that pristine setting, Harry just sat back and stared at her. Bronzed from the sun and with the oil glistening on her body like a thousand jewels, her hair blown by the breeze, she was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Harry felt like a god.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Something from the bow. I hope I tied the anchor down properly.”

“I’ll go check.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’d hate to lose it out here.”

Harry stood up and walked down to the bow. Susan was right, the anchor was loose. The line looked fouled around the winch and the mechanism that locked the anchor to the deck was open. He knelt down and started to study the knot around the winch.

“What’s the matter?” Susan shouted. When Harry didn’t answer her, she attached the self-steering vane to the wheel and came forward.

“Didn’t you see that the anchor was fouling around the winch?” Harry asked.

She knelt to examine the tangle of ropes. “It’s not jammed,” she said.

“It’s not?”

“No. It just looks funny,” she said.

He began poking at the coil of rope around the winch.

“Be careful,” she said.

“I’ll be careful,” he said.

“Here.” She shifted her weight towards him and tied a length of rope around his waist.”

“What’s this?” Harry asked.

“It’s a lifeline,” she answered.

“You take good care of me,” he said.

“It’s a lifeline,” she repeated. “Your lifeline.” The way she said it made Harry look up. The line that went around his waist was tied securely with some kind of surgical knot. At least, he assumed it was a surgical knot since it certainly wasn’t a sailing one. But what really raised the hair on the back of his neck was the other end of the line. After making a couple of coils near his feet, it disappeared into the Gordian knot on the winch.

“This winch isn’t fouled, is it?” Harry said.

“No. And it’s not tethered to the boat, either,” she said. “When I release it, the Danforth will pull you over the top of the safety lines and into the water. It’s got to be at least a thousand feet deep here.”

“I can untie the rope,” Harry said.

“Sure you can. But you’ll be down 700 to 800 feet by the time you do. If the pressure doesn’t kill you, how are you going to get back to the surface before you drown?”

“Why are you doing this?” Harry asked. Suddenly a wave of panic engulfed him. His stomach contracted and he felt as if he had to go to the bathroom.

“Because it’s what I do,” she answered.

“Excuse me?”

“Death has its own grace and beauty. At the hospital, I help the terminally ill find that nobility on the operating room table. I help them die with a kind of honor. Their families never see them waste away. At the most, they see their deaths as a release from the pain and the pretense of getting well. They no longer have to lie to themselves or pretend to be fooled by all the doctors. In a very real sense, I’m helping all those left behind survive.”

“Why this? Why me?” Harry asked, the bile rising in his throat.

“Because it’s been perfect,” she said. “Can you imagine any life better than this?” She opened her arms wide, sweeping in the idyllic panorama around us. “We are all going to die. No one gets out of this life alive. But now, you have the chance to die at the perfect moment. If you go on... everything else will be down hill. We’d always be trying to recapture this sense of peace and contentment. But now we have it. YOU have it. And this is my gift to you. Perpetual perfection.”

Susan lunged over and grabbed the free end of the anchor release. She was faster than Harry. She pulled it and backed away as he reached out for her. He heard the anchor drop and splash. He heard the rope hiss over the top of the safety line. He panicked and clawed at the rope around his waist. He felt his fingernails tear. He had no chance. The 500-pound anchor would take him down too fast. He would be dead before he could get the knot untied. Susan would report it as an accident. She would say the anchor released while he was working on it, and the line fouled his foot or arm and pulled him in. They would never find his body. No. She wouldn’t know why the anchor line was untethered. She would tell the Coast Guard that he must have untied it himself while trying to fix the snag.

Yes. Everyone would consider it a tragic accident. Harry stopped fumbling with the knot and accepted the inevitable. There was nothing he could do. The authorities would tell Susan how sorry they were, close their notebooks and go away. Harry nodded several times as the last few yards of anchor line ran out of the boat. He was very proud of her. He couldn’t have planned it better himself. It was perfect. Harry savored the moment, and in the last heartbeat before he was yanked over the side and into the warm tropical waters somewhere south southwest of Key West, he looked at Susan and smiled.