8 SURVIVAL SKILLS FOR TROUBLED YOUTH
Dad’s fans were fawning freaks and creeps and they came in every size, shape, scent, and flavor. “Paparazzi,” Mom called them, “albeit without the charm and social skills.” She kept her distance. I did too. But as time wore on and my isolation grew, I became more open to them.
Theory is, small towns take care of their own. Just don’t deviate from community norms, like coming out LGBTQ or having a working serial killer in the family.
Mom and I had lived in Hillsdale all our lives, yet the town turned on us so fast you would have thought our hands were bloody too. It wasn’t what anybody did, more what they didn’t. Like look at us. Speak to us. Include us. Unless they were looking to punish us. We were plenty popular then.
When I wasn’t being shunned, I was baited, a pint-sized stand-in for the Brittle Butcher. Pariah for some. Quarry for others. Threat to all.
It wasn’t fair. Dad hadn’t killed a single soul in Hillsdale proper. The closest he’d come was a good two hours away. Kyle Keegle. Easton, Pennsylvania. Number twenty-four. Keegle was the collector of vintage milk bottles I mentioned earlier. He displayed them in the windows of the café he owned. The bottle Dad used to kill Keegle had an etching of Hopalong Cassidy on it. Hopalong Cassidy had been a movie cowboy who liked to drink milk. Dad bashed in Keegle’s head and tore up his throat with the busted bottle.
My father’s fans were my saving grace, the closest to what I might call friends. Infamy by association can be a rush. Fat Donald. Ellie Forehead. Sammy Gummy-gums. Five-Chin Joan. While I never did learn their actual names, they were the only people at ease with me or, more correctly, the idea of me. Mostly, they didn’t hate me.
The autograph seekers who’d come by Loony Scoops were the first I’d dealt with since leaving Hillsdale. Caller number three was in the same boat. I didn’t resent them. Didn’t welcome them, either. But I was curious. What had earned my father their morbid loyalty after all these years? Did every killer’s kid put up with this crap?
“Who called earlier?” Cori asked, as I finally made it up to our bedroom.
I hung back by the doorway, options open. “Wrong number.”
She eyed me with skepticism, dog-eared the page of her paperback—The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. She read a lot of books like this. Don’t know why. She was the most highly effective person I knew, excluding my mother. “You’re still keeping things from me,” she said.
“You’re better off not knowing.”
“If you can’t trust me . . . ”
“You don’t want to know what I know.”
“Please, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you need to see someone.”
“I’m seeing you. Nice view too.”
“Don’t be cute. You know what I’m saying. A therapist. Someone.”
“I suspect Dr. Cutcheon is retired by now.”
“Thank God.”
I dropped onto the bed beside her. “What is it you think I’m hiding?”
“I never want to feel threatened by you again. Do you understand?”
“But I wasn’t. I was just showing—”
“Because if you do, if you ever dare . . . you have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“So what was that at dinner then? It was like you’d shut the lights and a different person switched them on.”
“It was nothing.”
“Not from where I stood. It was funny, silly even, but then . . . I don’t know.”
“I’ve told you, I got into a lot of fights as a kid. That’s why Mom sent me to Cutcheon. She worried I’d get hurt or, I guess, do the hurting. She didn’t want me living my life like that.”
Cori took my hand, wove her fingers through mine. “You’ve never made her sound quite so motherly before.”
I played it down. “Yeah, well, she had her moments.” Left unmentioned was my boyhood affinity for violence. Peas in a pod was how my mother put it, aligning me with Dad. “She did her best, except when she didn’t. Anyhow, the crazy look was Cutcheon’s idea.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Say what you want, Cor, but without her, I doubt I’d be here now. She gave me some pretty good tools.” I did not elaborate, explain how Cutcheon encouraged me to embrace what she dubbed my “pseudo-psychopathic persona,” to revel in the defense of my father even should his actions be worthy of no defense whatsoever. My glory lay in my commitment. “She didn’t want me looking for fights, just that I be ready to fight. That’s how the look came about. People expected me to be this violent little bastard, but that didn’t mean I had to be. Cutcheon’s idea was to raise expectations to the extreme, to raise the red flag that I wasn’t only violent, but one crazy, rabid, insane motherfucker.”
“You looked the part tonight, I tell you.”
“These assholes, they’d come along, figuring that punching me out would make their reps. I’d stand there, let them mouth off. I wouldn’t so much as peep. I’d just give them a sneak peek at the damage I might do—an advance screening of the badass that raged within. You want to talk about rage? Hell, Cor, it was in every fiber of my being. And I’d show them too. The worst kind of violence. Unpredictable and unrelenting. A bone-shattering kind of violence. None of it needed to be real, only that it could be. Movie psychos had nothing on me. I wore menace the way other kids wore Yankees caps.”
“And this look, it worked?”
“Most of the time, yeah.”
“And when it didn’t?”
“It was about self-discipline. As long as I made the effort to keep my emotions in check, I earned Cutcheon’s gold star.” I did not tell Cori that, more often than not, I preferred to take a beating than to set my alter ego free. My fear was that the make-believe scary fuck would turn out to be the permanent me. Because there were plenty of times my discipline faltered and the make-believe scary fuck was me.
Some equate passivity with weakness, but passivity has been my greatest strength. By the time the good doctor was done with me, I accepted pain and confusion as willingly as I might have allowed the Lord Jesus Christ himself into my life had Mom sent me to a preacher instead of a psychologist. I summed it up in terms Cori would appreciate: “Dr. Cutcheon helped rebuild my self-esteem.”
“With a badass look? I’m not so sure, Rob. It’s hardly Psych 101. Sounds closer to the Bible. All she taught you was to turn the other cheek. With an edge perhaps, but . . . ”
“What you saw tonight was nothing.” By the time Mom left me in Worcester, I stacked right up there with any whack-job who ever sliced and slashed. I had the deranged posture down pat, every pore hell-bent and hairy. Glassy eyes, fevered twitch, spastic fists, stutter clotted with drool. “A piece of work, I was, all right. You should’ve seen, Cor, I could turn jerks into chicken shit with no more than a fistful of allusion.”
“Not to mention your wife.”
I shrugged. I was fresh out of sorry.
“Think I can’t see through you?” She rolled to her side, looked me in the eye. “You’re so full of shit. You were just as happy when that stupid look didn’t work, weren’t you? Am I right? Scaring people was fun, but I’ll bet you liked beating them up even more. I mean, the way you talk about it, the words you chose . . . scary fuck . . . spastic fists . . . hair ripped from scalp. You didn’t pull that out of thin air. That comes from memory.”
“I’m not like that anymore.”
“You were one tough little bastard, weren’t you?” She fluffed her pillows against the headboard. “Question is, when will you stop being this tough little bastard—this Bobby Dickens kid?”
“Is that how you see me?”
“To be honest, not until tonight.” Forgiveness was imminent. Her sleepshirt fell open; she did not cover up.
“Funny thing was, you know, through it all, everybody looking at me cross-eyed, expecting I’d be some kind of monster . . . All I ever expected was to die.”
“You remind me of my father. He’d get this look sometimes.”
“Your father? You remember? Weren’t you a baby when your parents died?”
“Was I?” She played with her hair a moment, fingers twirling butter into gold. Her hand strayed idly to my chest, then lower, and the conversation dangled.
I played it cool, perhaps a bit too proud of my newfound candor, smug in the knowledge I’d atoned for my misstep, when she grabbed my t-shirt by the collar and bunched it tightly, her fist at my throat. I did not resist. She had cause to strangle me. Instead, she straddled me. With the ruthless finesse of a SmackDown diva, she yanked the shirt from my back and over my head, taking my nose and ears with it.
“The strange thing is,” she said, her negligible weight shifting to my crotch, “what you just told me, I find comforting. It’s good to know you can protect me.”
“I could. I would.”
“As long as it isn’t you I need protecting from. You should know, I can be a tough little bastard too.”
“You weren’t so tough tonight.”
She slapped a hand to my mouth and squeezed till inner cheek met inner cheek. “What about now?” she said, and raked five fingernails across and down my chest. I could have turned the tables. Easy. But jeez, this version of my wife worked for me too. And the view of her from my back, well, it was always something to behold. Believe me, for a depresso once destined to a life of one-night stands, I counted my blessings, no pun intended.
She assessed the art she’d carved into my flesh, pondered the need for a touch-up or two. Best I could tell from the angle, my chin glued to chest, it was the letter C rendered in five parallel and slightly bloody furrows.
“You’ve explained how you frightened me,” she said, absently retracing her penmanship with a finger, “but you haven’t told me why.”
“You said I didn’t scare you.”
“So?”
“I don’t like to be underestimated,” I said.