LLAMA
Bentley Little
Measuring:
The leg of the dead llama was three feet two inches long.
And everything fell into place.
Three feet two inches was the precise length of space between the sole of my lynched father’s right foot and the ground.
By the time my wife’s contractions were three minutes and two seconds apart, she had only dilated 3.2 centimeters and the decision was made to perform a Caesarean.
My wife was declared dead at three-twenty.
The date was March 20.
I found the llama in the alley behind the bookstore. It was already dead, its cataract eyes rimmed with flies, and the retarded boy was kneeling on the rough asphalt beside it, massaging its distended stomach. The presence of the retarded boy told me that secrets lay within the measurements of the dead animal, perhaps the answers to my questions, and I quickly rushed back inside the store to find a tape measure.
* * *
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt bought a new Ford coupe. The license plate of the coupe, which Roosevelt never drove, was 3FT2.
My father voted for Franklin Roosevelt.
I thought I saw my wife’s likeness in a stain in the toilet in the men’s room of an Exxon station. The stain was greenish black and on the right side of the bowl.
I breathed upon the mirror above the blackened sink, and, sure enough, someone had written her name on the glass. The letters appeared—clear spots in the fog cloud of condensation—then faded.
In the trash can, partially wrapped in toilet paper, I saw what looked like a bloody fetus.
I left the llama in the alley undisturbed, did not tell the police or any city authority, and I warned the other shopowners on the block not to breathe a word about the animal to anyone.
I spent that night in the store, sleeping in the back office behind the bookshelves. Several times during the night I awakened and looked out the dusty window to where the unmoving body lay on the asphalt. It looked different in the shadows created by moonlight and streetlamp, and in the lumped silhouette I saw contours that were almost familiar to me, echoes of shapes that I knew had meant something to me in the past but that now remained stubbornly buried in my subconscious.
I knew the dead animal had truths to tell.
Weighing:
The hind end of the llama, its head and upper body still supported by the ground, weighed one hundred and ninety-six pounds.
My dead wife’s niece told me that she was sixteen, but I believe she was younger.
I have a photograph of her, taken in a booth at an amusement park, that I keep on the top of my dresser, exactly 3.2 inches away from a similar photo of my wife.
The photo cost me a dollar ninety-six. I put eight quarters into the machine, and when I happened to check the coin return I found four pennies.
My father weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds at his death. He died exactly one hundred and ninety-six years after his great-great-grandfather first set foot in America. My father’s great-great-grandfather hung himself.
A hundred and ninety-six is the sum total of my age multiplied by four—the number of legs of the llama.
The Exxon station where I saw my wife’s likeness in a stain in the men’s room toilet is located at 196 East 32nd Street.
I do not remember whose idea it was to try the pins. I believe it was hers, since she told me that she’d recently seen a news report on acupuncture that interested her.
I showed her some of the books in my store: the photographic essay on African boys disfigured by rites of passage, the illustrated study of Inquisition torture devices, the book on deformed strippers in an Appalachian sideshow.
She told me that if acupuncture needles placed on the proper nerves could deaden pain, wasn’t it logical to assume that needles placed on other nerves could stimulate pleasure?
She allowed me to tie her up, spreadeagled on the bed, and I began by inserting pins in her breasts. She screamed, at first yelling at me to stop, then simply crying out in dumb animal agony. I pushed the pins all the way into her flesh until only the shiny round heads were visible, pressing them slowly through the skin and the fatty tissue of her breasts in a crisscross pattern, then concentrating them around the firmer nipples.
By the time I had moved between her legs, she had passed out and her body was covered all over with a thin shiny sheen of blood.
When the retarded boy finished massaging the llama’s distended stomach, he stepped back from the animal andstood there soundlessly. He looked at me and pointed to the ground in front of him. I measured the space between the retarded boy and the llama. Five feet six inches.
At the time my father hung himself he was fifty-six years old.
My stillborn son weighed five pounds, six ounces.
Five times six is thirty.
My wife was thirty years old when she died.
According to the book Nutritional Values of Exotic Dishes, a single 56-ounce serving of cooked llama meat contains 196 calories.
This information is found on page 32.
The young man did not object when I took him in the men’s room of the gas station.
He was standing at the urinal when I entered, and I stepped behind him and held the knife to his throat. I used my free hand to yank down his dress slacks, and then I pressed against him. “You want it, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I made him bend over the side of the lone toilet, and although his buttocks were hairy and repulsed me, I made him accept me the way my wife had. All of me. He tensed, stiffened, and gasped with pain, and I felt around the front of his body to make sure he was not aroused. If he had been aroused, I would have had to kill him.
I slid fully in and nearly all the way out fifty-six times before my hot seed shot into him, and with my knife pressed against his throat I made him cry out “Oh, God! Oh, God!” the way my wife had.
I left him with only a slight cut across the upper throat, above the Adam’s apple, and I took his clothes and put them in the trunk of my car and later stuffed them with newspaper and made them into a scarecrow for my dead wife’s dying garden.
I hoped the young man was a doctor.
I realized the importance of measurements even as a child. When my sister fell out of the tree in our yard, Imeasured the length of her legs and the total length of her body. Her legs were twenty inches long. Her body was four-foot-five.
My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to my sister.
My sister died when my father was forty-five.
Requirements:
I was required to pay for the knowledge gained from my sister’s measurements.
My sister had two arms and two legs.
I killed two cats and two dogs.
My wife was Jewish. Before coming to the United States, her parents lived 196 miles from the nearest concentration camp and 32 miles from the city where Adolf Hitler spent his youth.
My wife was born in 1956.
I showed Nadine a book on self-mutilation, letting her look at photographs of men who were so jaded, who so craved unique experience, that they mutilated their genitalia. She was fascinated by the subject, and she seemed particularly interested in the photo of a man’s penis that had been surgically bifurcated and through which had been inserted a metal ring.
She told me that the concept of self-mutilation appealed to her. She said that she had grown tired of sex, that all three of her orifices had been penetrated so frequently, so many times in so many ways, that there were no sensations that were new to her. Everything to which she submitted was either a repeat or a variation.
I told her I would make her a new opening, a new hole, and I took her to the forest and I tied her to the cross-stakes and I used a knife to cut and carve a slit in her stomach big enough to take me.
She was still alive when I entered her, and her screams were not entirely of pain.
She kept crying, “God!”
My white semen mixed with her red blood and made pink.
I wanted to kill the doctor who killed my wife, but I saw him only once after her death, and it was with a large crowd and the opportunity did not arise again.
So I rented a small apartment and stocked the shelves with medical books and arranged the furniture in a manner consistent with the way I believed a doctor would arrange it.
The apartment number was 56.
I made friends with a young man who, save for the beard, resembled my wife’s doctor fairly closely. I invited the young man into my apartment, smiling, then I showed him the gun and told him to strip. He did so, and I made him put on the white physician’s clothes I had bought. I forced him into the bathroom, made him shave, then made him put on the surgical mask.
I had purchased a puppy from the pet store the night before, and I had killed the animal by slitting its throat, draining the blood into a glass pitcher. I splashed the blood on the young man, and now the illusion was complete. He looked almost exactly like the doctor who had killed my wife.
I had written out the lines I wanted the surrogate doctor to say while I killed him, and I’d typed them out and had them bound in plastic.
I cocked the pistol, handed the pages to the young man, told him to speak.
End Exchange:
DOCTOR: I killed your wife.
ME: YOU wanted her to die!
DOCTOR: She deserved to die! She was a bitch and a whore!
ME: YOU killed my son!
DOCTOR: I’m glad I did it! He was a son of a bitch and a son of a whore and I knew I couldn’t let him be born!
ME: That means that you deserve to die.
DOCTOR: Yes. You have the right to kill me. I killed your wife and son. It is only fair.
I shot him in the groin, shot him in the mouth, shot him in the arms, shot him in the legs, left him there to die.
In the newspaper article, it said he had bled to death four hours after the bullets had entered his body.
He had been a stockbroker.
I have clipped my toenails and fingernails once each week since my wife died. I save the clippings and keep them in a plastic trash bag that I store underneath my bed.
On the tenth anniversary of her death, on what would have been our son’s tenth birthday, I will weigh the bag of nail clippings and then set the bag on fire.
I will swallow ten teaspoonfuls of the ashes.
The remainder I will bury with the body of my wife.
I will use the information gained from the weighing to determine the date and manner of my death.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the date of my birth.
My initials are J.F.K.
Cataloging:
My store has sixteen nonfiction books containing information about llamas. There are five fiction books in which a llama plays an important role. All of these are children’s books, and three of them are Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle stories.
I have killed sixteen adults since my wife’s death. And five children.
Three of the children were siblings.
The llama has changed my plans.
The llama and the retarded boy.
I stare out the window of my store at the dead animal, at the retarded boy next to it, at the occasional gawkers who pass by and stop and whisper. One of them, I know, one of them over whom I have no control, will eventually notify the authorities and they will take the carcass away.
I cannot let that happen.
Or maybe I can.
For the presence of the llama in my alley indicates that I have done wrong and that a sacrifice is demanded.
But who is to be the sacrifice, the retarded boy or myself?
Neither of us know, and we stare at each other. He outside, next to the animal, me inside, with my books. Through the dirty window he looks vague, faded, although the llama still seems clearly defined. Is this a sign?
I don’t know. But I know I must make the decision quickly. I must act today. Or tonight.
I have measured the body of the llama and it is four feet ten inches long.
Tomorrow is April 10.