Forty Two

June 2019

I am at a sports bar I frequent. I can barely pay attention to the Red Sox game on the screen.  Too much about the killing is coursing through my head, zigging and zagging helter-skelter. Thinking of one thing. Then another thought zooms in a different direction. Then another rocketing notion enters the highway from somewhere.  

After the Fireside in August 1974, I knew. I could tell myself ten times a day that it might have been a coincidence, but somewhere in my gut, I knew.  Becca says it might not have been him, but it has to be. I play back the time when he described his mo.  I’ve replayed it a dozen times since Las Vegas.  He’s blowing smoke out up into the air. 

“The first thing I do is I fuck them.”

I think he’s just blowing smoke.

After that night at the Fireside, I made calls to check if there had been any progress in the case.  Always met with a brick wall.  I looked in the newspapers for two months. Nothing. I even wrote a letter to the state attorney general asking if there had been anything new.  The attorney general, or whoever wrote the response, was so vague that I wondered if the office even had the case on its radar screen. 

Then I buried it all. 

If you bury something like that does what you bury morph into an infection that spreads and redirects your growth?  Even if you’ve buried it deep, and you yourself don’t even see it, do the sensors in your gut regularly acknowledge what’s been submerged. Is it inevitable that your evolution is altered, and you become an inferior iteration of who you could have been? And yet, you remain superficially unaware that you are less than you would have, could have, should have, been until you are whacked in the face with the truth. 

***

“Geez” a neighbor at the bar says to no one in particular. “That damn bat musta been made of particle board.”  

I look up at the screen to see what he is talking about.  A Red Sox player is walking to the dugout with half a bat in his hands. He goes to the rack and picks up another piece of lumber.  On the screen I see a replay of what occurred. A batter had swung at an inside pitch and the bat splintered in many pieces with the player holding only the bottom.   I see the batter with the vestiges of the bat in his hand.  My neighbor again says, “Particle Board” and laughs.

Particle Board. What if that is what happens?  

We start out with a sturdy foundation. Solid wood as our floorboards.  But then we do things that are reprehensible and irresponsible. Or we don’t do things that a responsible person should do.  Insidiously our solid floorboards transform. One plank at first. Then depending upon your level of irresponsibility more planks decompose. What we think is a sturdy foundation is subsequently composed of particle board. We wobble throughout our days and don’t know it. 

That was the case with the killer wasn’t it.  He no longer was who he could have been; he became an image in a funhouse mirror to all but himself.   Perched on foul, corroded, disintegrating floorboards that he’d bolted down himself, flaunting unconscionable behaviors that appeared to be right and righteous to someone unbalanced.

“After that, I slice the damn thing out. ”

We all have some planks of particle board.  The question is to what extent have we been teetering on rickety platforms.  And how industriously will we work to identify and rebuild what prior negligence has corrupted.

“Then I take all her clothes. All her clothes. I dump the body where it won’t be found. You deposit a body right, and after a while you would not be able to recognize your own mother.”

He blows smoke in the air and smiles at me.

He’s just blowing smoke, I think.

“I make sure to keep a souvenir.”

I am going to get this guy.   Replace particle board.  Restore my foundation.