Unhappy Business

Here is a man. He is lying on a thin mattress in a windowless room whose cinderblock walls have the patina of leaves in need of pruning. The room is small, no bigger than an outhouse, complete with a metal toilet anchored to the concrete wall like a spile driven into the trunk of a maple tree. The man has lived in this room, or a room like it, for twenty-one years and in that time the space has become for him a metaphor for life: that, ultimately, we all must live with the stink and shit of what we create. Stink and shit are consequences. And consequences will pursue a man relentlessly, all the way to his deathbed, extracting its due till the bill is settled.

Not that the man is a philosopher. This man in this small room of consequences, with its near-dead tint of green seemingly etched into the walls, a spackled engraving, is a killer. He’s not the run of the mill killer driven by jealousy, rage, or money, but he’s a serial killer; a killer devoid of empathy or remorse, completely unmoored from the range of normal human emotions. He was officially diagnosed as a sociopath by no fewer than three independent psychiatrists prior to the trial that ended in his being sent to death row, to this tiny, coffin-sized room.

Here is a man, once known as Clyde Olin McGhee, whose forebears had come to these parts with hopes of eking out a better-than-subsistence-level existence. That was before Oklahoma was a state and only a promise, and folks from Virginia to Florida, and from Louisiana to Ohio, made their way into the territory to forge their fortunes. Clyde’s four sets of great grandparents made good on their aims early on, but as the good times lapsed into ever worsening lack and deprivation, a cloud of anger and self-loathing took root, setting down deep tentacles in the soil that fed Clyde’s family tree. The McGhee line, in particular, became synonymous with meanness, trouble, and intemperateness.

Clyde’s grandfather sowed the wind but the generations following reaped the whirlwind. Clyde’s father and aunts were tyrants, meting out pain to their children for the slightest infraction. It wasn’t merely welts from a switching; there probably wasn’t a kid among their peers who hadn’t experience that. Such punishment was normal when Clyde and his cousins were growing up. Rather it was the too-often broken bones, the fractures and concussions, the bruises and closed eyes. And it was the concentration of these things in one family.

Since their own behavior stemmed from how they were raised, the elder McGhees would not be convinced that the way they reared their children was suboptimal. They could not understand that every excessive reaction to a broken rule, each beating, leads inexorably to the diminution of the ordered self and the deflation of anything that is life-giving or life-affirming. Their accumulation breaks one down, annihilating completely and utterly the emotive faculties and killing the spirit.

Here is a man who, as Clyde, experienced this death of the spirit years ago at the age of 14 when he failed to hear his father calling him from beneath the belly of the ’49 GMC 100 the man was working on. It was his father’s expectation that Clyde always be close in case he needed him for anything, and he had also told the boy on more than one occasion that sitting under his mother’s apron was no place for a man. A man’s responsibilities lie outside the house, he’d say. For him, there was always something to be mowed or raked or hacked or sawed or chopped or tinkered with or lifted or moved or planted or harvested, and it was a man’s job to do it. It was his contention that a man ought only to be indoors is if he’s eating, sleeping, shitting, or he’s got a tool in his hand to fix something.

When his father saw through the front screen door that Clyde’s nonresponse was due to his apparently watching television, he flew into a rage. He nearly pulled the door from its hinges as he bounded up the stairs and into the small living room. Clyde, already on the edge of the sofa out of a nervous habit of always being prepared for what his father might do at any given moment, leapt up and was about to utter a defense or a plea. The old man, still holding an adjustable wrench in his hand, swung it at the boy before Clyde could speak, however. The wrench connected with Clyde’s right jaw and there was a loud but muffled crack. It sounded like a walnut being crushed in the grip of a nutcracker beneath a bed pillow.

Clyde gave up a few teeth as if he were a clam producing pearls, and his legs began to crumple under him. His father assisted him on his descent with a kick to the area of Clyde’s waist and right buttocks, which had twisted in his direction when he struck Clyde. This propelled Clyde leftward and downward into a solid wood end table. Clyde’s forehead struck the edge of the table hard and he lost consciousness. When he awoke three days later, head wrapped and jaw wired shut, Clyde was no longer a fourteen-year-old boy. Something in him had changed.

Here is a man lying on thin mattress in a small, windowless room, his stomach churning the remnants of his last meal. He is going over in his own mind the genesis of what landed him in McAlester at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, thinking back to the time his father might have killed him had his mother not intervened to stop the attack. He is rethinking how it all led to his first kill, the one that only he knows about.

***

In the days after Clyde woke up in that hospital with his jaw wired shut, he could not speak. And as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, and his jaw and fractures healed, still he said nothing. It was as if he had been robbed of his voice and the words in his head were walled off from being expressed verbally. This latest attack from his father had left him utterly changed. Where he had once found solace in being able to escape into the world of his comic books or to fantasize a future when he would no longer be under the thumb of his tyrant father, his interior world now was nothing but complete darkness, a black hole that had swallowed any remaining essence of the boy named Clyde.

Clyde’s father escaped justice with the lie that the boy sustained his injuries in an accident, but his guilt over time seemed to slowly eat away at him from the inside, an infestation, like termites feasting on Foxtail palms. As the months turned into years, Clyde’s father’s guilt emboldened his mother, who, in deliberate strides, took back a small portion of the power that her husband had stolen by always pointing back to the time he forever changed their only child. Still, until Clyde turned twenty-one, and despite being diminished as a physical threat, the old man would abuse his wife and son verbally. That was the year Clyde’s father was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer, the oncologist having told him that he’d probably been living with the disease for quite some time, perhaps a couple years. The prognosis was not good; he would probably not live another full year.

It was only ten months before the old man was on his deathbed. Clyde and his mother were there by the old tyrant’s side, not out of any altruistic sense like they cared, but more out of disinterested familial obligation. The medical professionals being unable to do anymore to extend his life, they sent Clyde’s father home for hospice care. The once burly and towering tornado had been reduced to nothing more than a soft breeze in the thick humidity and unbearable heat of a Tulsa summer. The loss of body fat and the desiccation of muscle and sinew left the man a gaunt and decrepit pre-corpse. The smell of death was present long before the man ceased breathing. The air was fetid and piss and shit wafted on the air like biological agents, attacking the olfactory sense in what seemed a growing radius around the trailer.

As he lay dying, Clyde and his mother cared for the old man better than he had cared for them. They regularly wiped his body with a warm rag, changed his catheter, emptied and washed his bedpan, and wiped his ass when he needed it. Though he was frail, he was still able to lift a spoon to take his soup or otherwise feed himself, but it was Clyde or his mother who brought him the food he consumed. And despite the recent years of an absence of physical violence, neither Clyde nor his mother believed he deserved their care. The old bastard was still meaner than a junkyard dog in those years, and still he could hurl insults as easy as hellos.

Not that Clyde’s father was entirely comfortable, of course. Cancer is a butcher worse than history’s worst monsters. Still, Clyde wanted the old man to feel all the tortures of Dante’s inferno. No punishment was beyond Clyde’s imagining over the years. That he had concocted several plans and put pen to paper to catalogue them all was known to only himself, and he secreted these murderous ideas in a hole in the floor of a shed that sat behind the trailer.

Ideas have consequences, but only when acted upon. In the eight years since his father had broken his jaw and Clyde became someone else, in the time it took for the boy to enter adulthood and be considered a man, this man Clyde could not bring himself to the point of acting. To the extent that he had a conscience, it did indeed make a coward of him.

But here before Clyde the old man now lay, buffeted on all sides by a raging killer, a barely living thing to be plucked prematurely from this world. His father had been sent home to die, so Clyde killing him now would go unnoticed if done properly. Leave no visible marks on the body, he thought, and there won’t be an autopsy. And in the act, Clyde surmised that perhaps he could appease and quiet the growing darkness within him, force it to retreat. For that black thing, deep-rooted in his core after so long, ominous and foreboding, had become a burden, a dense fog that blotted out the bright light of hope that he had known years before. Clyde just wanted to turn back the clock to a time when his psyche was not sunken in such overwhelming blackness.

The plan, though, would need to be executed swiftly—Clyde didn’t want the old bastard dying on his own—but it would also have to happen when his mother was either not around or when she was otherwise distracted. It’d already been over two weeks since his father had been sent home for hospice care, so Clyde determined on the morning of day nineteen that another twenty-four hours would not pass with his father still alive. That took care of the need for swiftness part of any plan. Taking care of his mother only necessitated slipping the woman a couple of her valium pills, which he crushed and then added to her post-supper gin and tonic. She was out within an hour. Clyde didn’t even take the effort to move her from the divan to her bed, where she would not be in the same room as he and his father. He just let his mother’s sleeping body lie where she fell asleep, confident that she would not awake to disturb his dark aims.

Every movement he made was deliberate and thought through with the aim of making certain no red flags would be raised when his father would be discovered dead the next morning. Hours before, he turned off the morphine drip that was making his father’s last days more comfortable. If he wanted the bastard to suffer, the old man couldn’t have a strong opioid like morphine coursing through his veins. Clyde knew it would take several hours for its effects to begin wearing off, and the time was now well beyond that. His mother would be out for several hours more. There was plenty of time to act.

Careful, then, to do things right, Clyde worked ever so calmly, carrying his large frame out of the small trailer to retrieve parts of an unremarkable plan. Then back in and into the kitchen. He had been careful to glove his hands when dealing with the plant, knowing how toxic it was. The old folks called it poison Hemlock and many a person through the years had fallen terribly ill just mishandling it, either mowing over it unknowingly and breathing it in or mistaking it for parsnips or parsley. Clyde had read up on the plant and knew it was found all over the area, on roadsides or along the banks of ponds. He had long thought it might be a perfect murder weapon, too, and had noted it among the various plans he concocted. Had even tested its efficacy on one of the many feral cats that wandered the family’s property. It had worked as his reading had suggested.

Clyde had soaked the plant in some of his father’s gin, which the old man still drank to help numb the pain of the cancer ravaging his body. And when the man started to rouse from a morphine-induced painlessness that was subsiding, Clyde was there with relief. Already, he noticed the face-stretching grimace that hinted at felt pain. Clyde knew one of the first things the old man would ask for was a shot of gin.

“The hell are you looking at, boy?” The utterance was just above audible and came out dressed in a combination of mucus and hoarseness, like a serrated knife through the rind of a watermelon.

Clyde only stared at the man in response.

“Where’s your mama?,” the old man inquired.

As Clyde’s eyes went to the sofa and he gave a nod, the old man turned slightly, his face screwed up in acknowledgement of pain.

It was then that the demand came, unadorned, non-pleading. It was straightforward, like the thousands of times it had been spoken before. As if, by now, they were just mere formality.

“Get me a drink, will you?”

At which time, Clyde rose, walked a few steps to the kitchen of their ramshackle home, and retrieved the already prepared shot of gin, along with a bottle that contained just enough for a second shot should the first prove insufficient.

As he moved to get his father the drink the old man demanded, Clyde could hear the man cursing his life, his wife, his only son, berating now even their care for him during his final days. Hateful son of a bitch, Clyde thought. And in that moment, all he really wanted to do was bludgeon or torture the man to death. The result of either of those methods, however, would not go unnoticed. Be patient, he told himself.

Clyde returned with the drink and made sure to adjust his father’s bed so that the old man was sitting upright rather than lying down. He figured, in the event of an accidental spillage, he could bring himself to doing the old man in with his bare hands, but he couldn’t be sure that that would not also leave noticeable evidence of foul play. Better to successfully get the drink in the man and not in the bedsheets or on the floor.

Clyde handed his father the filled shot glass, careful to help the old man cup his hands around it. If he’d had the strength, his father would likely have snatched the glass from Clyde. That was just the way he was. The metastasizing cancer and the drugs, though, had weakened him such that his wrenching power was reduced to that of an infant. Apropos since, like an infant, his protests, even at that moment, echoed through the ramshackle tin box like so much whining.

“Again with the staring,” Clyde’s father accused. “Back up and give me some damn room.”

Clyde said nothing and took a single step back.

The old man considered the gin in his glass, then considered his wife asleep on the sofa, and for a moment Clyde thought he sensed suspicion in the man. Then the old man said, “Weren’t for her, I would never have acquired a taste for this stuff. Always thought it smelled like pine trees or Christmas.”

Clyde had heard some variation of this tale a hundred times. Apparently, his mother’s love of a nightly gin and tonic was the catalyst for a gin-drinking father. Clyde often wondered what kind of beatings he and his mother would have endured had his old man been under the influence of anything besides gin. Perhaps the blows would have been less brutal, the frequency less often.

His father downed the shot, and the heat of it blazed a trail down his esophagus. The old man gritted his teeth and scrunched his face as if in some great agony.

“Why am I feeling pain?,” the old man asked. “Is my morphine drip on?” He turned to consider the beeping machine and other medical equipment that had been brought in, but he didn’t know what he was looking at. Only his wife and son had been advised on the use of what the old man was now looking at.

Clyde’s answer to the question was simply to step forward and rejoin with a shake of the bottle with the remaining poison Hemlock-soaked gin. To which his father simply responded by extending the shot glass for a refill, which Clyde gladly did, never more obligingly that in that moment. The old man uttered more curses and inanities, which Clyde ignored, then finally swallowed the gin in one swig.

Clyde retrieved the shot glass from his father and took it to the kitchen where immediately he gloved himself and washed it and the gin bottle. The other items, including the Hemlock, had already been tossed into a barrel in which trash was regularly burned. He went out into the yard and tossed the shot glass, the bottle, and the gloves he wore to handle them into the fire.

Clyde returned to the small living room and to his father’s grating, though diminished, berating voice. The old man was saying something again about pain and morphine, but Clyde silently shushed him, a single index finder raised to his lips, and stared the man in the eyes. The look must have been menacing because his father’s stifled complaints ceased.

Clyde then took the same index finger he used to quiet his father’s protestations and, his eyes still locked with the old man’s eyes, drew it across his neck, an unmistakable gesture that said, You’re dead. The old man’s eyebrows furrowed, and he attempted to say something, only it came out an incomprehensible stammer.

Then there was the sudden realization on the old man’s face that the pain he was experiencing was somehow related to that gestured threat. He looked to his wife mere feet away on the divan. Earlier he had assumed she was asleep, but now he thought, Is she dead? Does the boy aim to kill us both? He tried, weakly, to rouse his wife just in case his earlier assumption was right. No response was forthcoming. There was not the slightest movement from her. The old man returned his gaze upon Clyde, who had moved closer now and seated himself in a chair at the foot of the bed. He positioned himself as if he were about to watch one of his favorite screen actors, Vincent Price, deliver scares in some beautifully horrifying scene. He was not, of course, but the show about to begin would be no less thrilling to watch.

Clyde’s father had a look of pleading on his face and tears had begun to pool in the corners of his eyes. Unfortunately, the poison was already starting to work. Clyde could see from the foot of the bed the dilated pupils, a first sign. He stood up and leaned forward and stared once more into those eyes. Within minutes the old man began to tremble. Clyde planted himself again in his front row seat to watch the show.

The trembling old man looked at Clyde and, struggling, managed to spit out, “What did you do?”

Clyde didn’t answer. He only cocked his head at the inquiring angle that dogs give when a human addresses them. He watched as the poison paralyzed his father, making it more difficult for him to breathe. Though the trembling and the obtruded breathing seemed to go on for some time, only a handful of seconds had passed. Then all the old man’s muscles seemed to lock up. The trembling slowed and the look of anguish on his father’s face made Clyde smile. It wasn’t a big smile. It was the kind of smile one gives as a thank you for the kind of cliché compliments that are the cachet of social convention. No teeth. No brightness in the eyes. Only a slight upturn at the corners of the mouth.

The pleading in the old man’s eyes was desperate now, beyond frantic. He reached for Clyde, something Clyde had not expected. Clyde rose again, reached forward, and took his father’s hand into his own, then came around the foot of the bed up next to his father. He then lowered his head to his father’s right ear and said, “Beware the Jabberwock. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.” They were favorite lines of his from a nonsensical Lewis Carroll poem.

Clyde dropped his father’s hand and stood erect. He fixed his eyes again on the eyes of the old man and watched the light remaining there burn out. It was like watching the flickering of a faraway star in the night sky inexplicably disappear. Was there ever a light there in the first place?

***

Often when he remembered killing his father, the man in the small windowless room on his way to death thought, And that was that.

His first kill, however, did not give Clyde the catharsis he had sought. He remained just as emotionally vacant and soul-death black as the day he woke in a hospital room with a bandaged head and broken jaw. He had been sure his father’s death would restore some balance to his world, but he had been wrong. Or at least he had been partially wrong. The man eventually convinced himself that he only needed to kill others like his father. Perhaps if he punished enough bad people, his own brokenness would be made whole.

Here is a man who eventually realized that broken people are often created by other broken people. If the latter cannot repair themselves, how shall the former fare any better? The beaten wife abuses her children, the molested child becomes a tyrannical sadist in adulthood, and the emotionally neglected boy or girl becomes the loveless mother or father. And the cycle begins again. It was a revelation the man had come to too late, unfortunately, for soon he would be executed. And his own death, while it would in some sense free him his own darkness, could not balance the scales for those still living.

Here is a man upon his bed of death, whose final thought is focused on a single reality, a lament really: Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.