Chapter 24

Born to Kill

“Don’t you have the kids this weekend?” Wayne asked.

Sheila Claxton didn’t have to think about it.

“No, they’re with their father.”

“So, do you want me to bring over those boxes?”

Sheila thought about it for a second. She remembered that Wayne had offered to bring some boxes over to her house. She had said something about needing them, and he promptly offered, as was his nature, to do the favor. And she thought for a second about the way he asked her about the boys. He already knew she didn’t have them this weekend. That fact had casually surfaced in an earlier conversation. But it was typical of Wayne to elicit information this way, pretending not to know something, triggering the answer. He wasn’t just inquisitive. He was playfully devious.

“Sure,” Sheila responded. “Yeah, Saturday night after work. Sure.”

Perhaps more than any of the other saleswomen at Conlin’s, Sheila was tuned into Wayne’s peculiarities. It wasn’t because she shared them. Sheila just had spent more time with him than anyone else. She didn’t try to mother him the way some of the others did, but Sheila, who was half a generation older than Wayne, wasn’t going to be his date, either.

Louise Lightener, who had hired Wayne, used to encourage it.

“He’s so nice. You guys should get together.”

“No, thanks,” she would always answer. Sheila would have nothing of romance with this complicated screwball. When one of her co-workers suggested that she and Wayne could be dates at a Conlin’s-sponsored barbecue, she just shook her head. She drove to the event herself, and when she pulled up to park, to her chagrin she could see Wayne running over to her car. In his hand was a single long-stemmed red rose, which he presented to her. She didn’t want to offend him, but something told her to be direct and specific.

“I don’t want to be with you, Wayne. I like you, but I don’t want to be your date, okay?”

Wayne pulled back, smiled, said he understood.

“No problem. No problem.”

All during the picnic, Sheila tried to avoid him, but he just kept popping up, getting her drinks, offering her something to eat.

Over the months that followed, Sheila succeeded in crippling whatever amorous intentions Wayne may have had toward her, and she became a chum. On a few occasions, she went out for beers after work with Wayne and Rick Mace. They were congenial times. The conversation often dwelled on work. Sheila and Rick bitched more than Wayne did about Conlin’s. Invariably, just as the good times started to roll, Wayne would bolt the party. He always left before anyone else, and he claimed he had to be in the house by nine o’clock. Everyone who had heard about this supposed curfew racked it up as another of Wayne’s oddities.

Among his coworkers at Conlin’s, only Sheila knew the inside story of how Wayne rationalized his social handicap. She learned it from Wayne himself on the night he brought over the boxes she was going to use for storage.

After he carried the bound stacks of collapsed, folded cardboard into the house, Sheila thanked him profusely, then offered him a beer.

“I don’t have Miller. How ’bout a Bud?”

“Sure.”

They sat down at the kitchen table and fell into a long conversation about people and work and just about anything tangentially connected.

“I wish Kris liked me,” Wayne said, turning sullen.

Sheila had heard this before, and she knew that Kris walked a different tightrope with Wayne. As a co-worker, it was easier for Sheila to tell Wayne in the flattest of terms that she didn’t seek a romantic relationship with him. For Kris, being the boss and not wanting to encourage Wayne in the first place, it was more a matter of steering clear—politely acknowledging Wayne’s gifts while simultaneously preparing to throw them out at the first opportunity.

Once, at a farewell party held at Kris’s for another Conlin’s employee, Kris had to confront the fact that Wayne now knew what she had done with the many things he had given her. Wayne dropped in at the party, and as he entered the house and stepped up into the living room, Kris shuddered. There, behind an easy chair in the corner, scattered on her dog Sundance’s bed, was the proof. She had given the trinkets from Wayne to her dog.

Kris watched Wayne as he said his hellos around the room, and she saw that his eyes then fell on the wicker dog basket. He could see that among the gnaw bones and dog paraphernalia Kris had tossed his gifts to her. He had bought them, it was now plain to see, for this golden retriever, the same dog he had befriended at an earlier Conlin’s barbecue by feeding it hunks of steak. Kris had told him to stop, but he did it anyway.

After Wayne left, Kris went up to Sheila and told her that Wayne had seen the stuff in Sundance’s bed.

“I feel bad about it,” Kris said. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sheila puzzled. “Don’t worry about it. Wayne should know better, you know.”

“I just feel bad.”

On this night, as Sheila offered Wayne a second beer, she chose her words carefully as she responded to Wayne’s moaning about why Kris didn’t seem to like him as much as he liked her.

“Well, Kris has a pretty hard job to do, with all of our personalities,” she told him, stringing the thoughts tightly together, hoping to form a convincing, but not depressing answer. “I think she really likes her work. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you, Wayne. She just has a lot of responsibility.”

“I can’t stand Doug,” Wayne said, his voice hardening.

“Aw c’mon, Wayne.”

“I can’t stand him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s conceited.”

“No, Doug’s not conceited. He’s very quiet. The only time Doug talks a lot is when he has been drinking, you know.”

“If he ever did anything to hurt Kris, I’d kill him.”

“Oh, Wayne, Doug’s really a nice guy.”

Sheila didn’t take him seriously. It was an empty threat, as far as she was concerned, and being the kind of talker who can keep a conversation alive, and heading toward positive territory, she led the conversation away from the topic. They drank some more beer, and as Wayne opened up more, becoming almost confessional, they found themselves talking about God. But they got on the subject only because Wayne had been complaining in general about how hard it was for him to get along with others in social situations. Somehow, in his mind, the two were connected.

“I don’t believe in God,” he said, swilling a mouthful. “I believe in past lives.”

“You mean, like reincarnation?”

“Yeah. I think the reason I have such a hard time dealing with people and being in crowds is that I haven’t been allowed to come back for all these past lives.”

“What do you mean?” Sheila wasn’t exactly disbelieving, but she wasn’t going to be taken in by any fantastic joke. “Not allowed to come back? C’mon Wayne.”

“No, I mean it. I mean, I was held up. I wasn’t allowed to have another life like everyone else. I wasn’t allowed to come back for all of the lifetimes that everyone else has had. To learn all of the lessons that everyone else had.”

Sheila had never heard this stuff before. She wasn’t buying it, but she listened.

“Why, Wayne?”

“I believe that in one of my first lifetimes, I did something bad, like kill the last extinct animal, and I’m being punished. I wasn’t allowed to come back.”

Sheila laughed. Was Wayne getting silly or what?

“I’m totally serious. I have this big gap. I missed out on many reincarnations. I was allowed to come back in 1955.”

It wasn’t funny anymore. Sheila could see this wasn’t Wayne’s garden-variety bullshit. He was dead serious, and he certainly wasn’t drunk. She felt a queer shiver. It was getting late, and suddenly the mood was wrong.

“Wayne, I have to work tomorrow and you have to leave now.” She could hear the abruptness in her words, and she was relieved when Wayne took the hint.

“Thanks for the beers,” he called to her from his truck as he backed out of the drive.

Sheila set her alarm and went to bed, but she couldn’t shake the new, creepy feeling. It wasn’t so much what Wayne had said, or that she had been alone with him in the house into the wee hours. What had gotten to her was a new insight: Wayne actually believed the stuff he had told her. There was no doubt about that, or that she had just gotten a glimpse of another facet of a very complicated Wayne, and had felt something cold come into the room.

Just two weeks after the Shook murders, Sheila threw a small New Year’s Eve party. She had recently moved to a duplex apartment, and she had borrowed Wayne’s muscle power to help her move. He was invited to the party, and he came, but she soon was sorry that he did.

Sheila’s two sons each had invited a friend to stay over, and after the four boys had gone off to bed, most of the other guests left. It wasn’t midnight yet, but a sudden heavy snowstorm had cut the evening short. When all but Wayne and Sheila and another man, a friend of hers but not a boyfriend, had left, the three of them sat down around the dining-room table to play Trivial Pursuit.

It was the kind of game Wayne was good at, and they played for hours. But Sheila wasn’t very quick with the rapid-fire recall of past trivia, and after a while she grew tired of it. By the time five in the morning rolled around, she was not only tired of the game, she was quite ready for both of her guests to leave. But she didn’t want her friend to leave before Wayne.

At an opportune moment, as her friend left the table to get another drink, Sheila followed him into the kitchen.

“Don’t leave until Wayne leaves, please,” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“I just don’t want to be here alone with him. Just stick around till he goes.”

Again, he nodded in the affirmative.

Back in the dining room, Sheila joined in the game again, and they played a little longer. Sheila and her friend appeared resolute, until finally, Wayne, who was becoming slowly but visibly agitated, got up from the table.

“Well, I’m outta here,” he said.

After Wayne left, Sheila’s friend said good night, too. That would be the end of it until two days later at work, when Rick Mace brought up the subject of her New Year’s Eve party.

“Wayne was asking about you,” Rick said. It was a teasing approach.

“What was he asking you?” Sheila wasn’t that amused.

“He asked if that guy was your boyfriend. He said he was at your party the other night.”

“No, he’s not my boyfriend. Wayne knows that.”

“Well, he said he was getting real pissed because the guy wouldn’t leave.”