When it came to me in two stark words—kill him—that day became the happiest I could remember, and my memory seemed to extend as far back as my boyhood, better than those blissful moments I knew as a child. Maybe the intention had been in my mind, unspoken, all that time. I laughed out loud when I uttered it. It was the simplest solution on earth, like swatting a fly or squirting bug spray on a roach, or bringing a hammer down on the skull of a sworn enemy. Like shutting a door forever.
I was happy the whole day. I couldn’t stop smiling, and after a while I was glowing with satisfaction, serene, restored to health, imagining Frank dead at my feet.
He had haunted me as a threat, but he had never loomed large as a physical presence. He was smaller than me, potbellied, pinheaded, and pale. His size was exaggerated somewhat by his strong body odor—people who smell seem bulkier than they are—but scuttling and insectile, bug-eyed and obvious one moment, and gone the next, but always somehow present, even when I couldn’t see him, like an infestation in the timbers of a house, an inescapable stink.
In my anger and despair I had not seen his behavior as fully human. He reacted the way a rat or a roach might, the creature surprised as it nibbled in the murk and then flashing away before I could stamp on it. In the Zambian mine we’d had biting flies that fastened to any bare skin—neck, wrist, ankle: Frank was like that, predictable and persistent, he was vermin, feeding on my blood. Frank always maintained that in our passion and essence we are animals, just as predictable and vicious. I was now persuaded of that, of Frank’s belief, despising him as he despised other people, for being animals.
He was not a person, he was a problem, he was a pest, the virus he’d always been, sickening me—cruel, without a single redeeming feature. He had no humanity. Not evil—evil is a spooky peasant word, implying dark magic, damnation, the baffling superstition of organized religion, wickedness as power. I was so thrilled by the title Flowers of Evil when I was in high school and read the jet-black poems. But later I saw evil was just simpleminded horror cooked up to scare you, and that Frank was dangerous in a different way.
Lacking in sympathy, Frank was easier to explain. Something was missing in him that normal people possessed—that I had myself. He wanted to destroy that thing in me, happiness perhaps, or at least contentment. I saw that from early on he had wanted to displace me. In my attempt to dismiss these thoughts, I had run away. I supposed at the back of my mind I knew I’d have to defend myself and that ultimately I’d have to dispose of him before he killed me. If I didn’t, he’d pounce; yet now he’d succeeded in cornering me.
Had he been an obnoxious stranger, one of those awful men I sometimes saw jostling on city streets, looking for trouble—or someone more passive, dangerous when roused—I would not have cared. But he was my brother, with his pestering letters and threats, pressing me for answers, always with the implied threat of jail, or a lawsuit, or my eviction from the house that was rightfully mine. Brotherhood made him my worst enemy.
Gnawing at me, in the solitude and helplessness he’d imposed on me, never letting up, he’d had the persistence of a hungry animal. In the previous months, during which he was hounding me—one of the coldest springs in years—a family of raccoons climbed each night to the roof of the house, just above my bedroom, and clawed at the cedar shingles, attempting to get inside for warmth. They tore the shingles away from the insulation and tar paper and chewed the battens. Although they were unable to break through to the attic, they damaged the roof and exposed the seams between the planks and allowed snowmelt and rain to leak through and stain the ceiling again, sketching more wicked imagery.
Again I saw Frank’s face in those stains, an evolving face, merciless and more determined to destroy me. I saw Frank in those raccoons. I heard him clawing at the roof above my head, the scrape of splintered shingles, the crunch of teeth against wood, the slushy grind of chewing. Frank, whom I had not seen for months in the flesh, was now a menacing noise.
He was the ache in my brain, too; a cramp in my muscles, a griping in my guts, he was not human. He was a sinister sound that wouldn’t go away, a sickness infecting my body, weakening me and keeping me awake. He was flat and dark, shadowy, disembodied most of the time. I imagined him two-dimensional, like a tick fastened to my flesh, wishing to be engorged, fattened on my blood.
I had moved into the smallest of the upstairs bedrooms to avoid the worst of the roof noises, the chewing and the leaks. Yet there were stains on this ceiling, too, a new version of plunder and persecution, fiendish faces, claw marks; and still I couldn’t sleep.
“You could stay with me, at my apartment,” Gabe had said, when I hinted at my distress, but I spared him the details.
Gabe’s offer sounded tentative; he knew Frank was the problem, and he was working on a case with Frank, so there was a conflict. I knew it would be inconvenient for him to come home to me every night, after a day conferring with Frank. And anyway I was a grown man; I could figure this out. There had to be a good answer.
My never seeing Frank, my only sense of him as a chewing animal—his repeated demands, the letters I’d stopped opening, the bills I could not pay—all this kept me from regarding him as a whole person, or a person at all. He was an obstacle, he was a rock to be removed, slag to be flung aside.
Inspired by the stains (stains I regarded as prophetic, omens to be seized and understood), I saw Frank as an infection. In my mind I simplified him and made him small. He was teeth and claws, he was a greedy appetite, he was a yellow stain, he was a bad smell. He was not a person. I needed, for my sanity, to be rid of him, so that I could go on living.
And then that day like a liberating whisper—as though remembering something I’d forgotten, a fabulous secret revealed again—it came to me, Kill him, words vivid in their simplicity. The sky was clear, my room bathed in sunlight.
I didn’t at first consider how I’d go about it, I only knew murder was the perfect answer, and it kept me smiling as something programmed and deliberate, not an act of passion. I wasn’t angry, I didn’t feel vindictive, I felt righteous. With this intention in my mind I experienced a sense of exaltation and power that made me confident and quieted me. I was suffused with a refined sort of joy, the intense peace of veneration, as though I was beholding something beautiful and incandescent, the holy glow of the empty space I’d be creating, the hollow on earth that had once been occupied by Frank.
I would be deleting him from the world, ridding myself of him and all his buzzing conjectures—his threat, his nuisance, his smell. Though the precise definition did not come to me, only the vision, I saw in its radiance that my killing him was an act of purification.
The thought of being punished for it never entered my mind—far from it, what I expected from this calculated act was a reward: everything would improve afterward. I had a further justification. Long ago, when we were still students, we’d set off across the Great Marsh on the Cape, and attempting to swim across the wide black creek, Frank had struggled and sank. I had saved his life. Ever after, his life had belonged to me. And because of that, if I wished, I could end it. The world would be better off, and so sweetened that, soothed anew by its fragrance, no one would miss him.
“Dad!” Gabe said the next time I saw him. I’d driven to his apartment, not to tell him what I was planning, but to share my mood.
“Give me a hug,” I said.
“No—wait—stand back,” he said, admiring me. “You look great!”
“I’m fine.”
“I was worried about you,” he said, and hugged me. “It’s wonderful to see you.” He held me by the shoulders. “To what do we owe this transformation?”
“A new serenity of mind.”
“I’d love to know your secret.”
“If I tell you, it won’t be a secret.”
“So Frank’s not a problem for you?”
“You’re fishing,” I said. I knew that he was asking on Frank’s behalf and that whatever he found out from me he’d tell Frank, his patron now.
“Because Frank knows how to be provocative.”
Being cautious, so as not to be quoted, I remembered my conversation months before with Chicky, how Chicky had asked similar leading questions; and although he’d disparaged Frank, I had not said anything that would incriminate me.
I found myself telling Gabe, as I had told Chicky, “You said it, not me,” to remind him that I could quote him to Frank.
In this exchange I guessed that Gabe now knew he’d said too much to me, that he knew Frank well enough to realize that Frank was both untrustworthy and untrusting. If I ratted on Gabe to Frank—though I never would do such a thing—Frank would bring it up to him, and Gabe would deny it. But Frank wouldn’t believe him, Frank didn’t believe anyone because, being a habitual liar, Frank believed that no one told the truth. Liars are chronic doubters and deniers.
“Whatever it is that’s put you in a good mood,” Gabe said, “hey, I’m not asking, but it seems to be working.”
His saying that concentrated my mind, gave me the resolve to imagine myself in the half-light of Frank’s office on a late afternoon, standing before him with a pistol as he sat in his leather chair, his hands raised, palms facing me as though to protect himself in my firing at him, too terrified to speak, gibbering perhaps, looking utterly helpless as—absurdly—he used his hands to stop my bullets.
This back-and-forth with Gabe caused the wronged and resentful face of Chicky Malatesta to appear to me. I realized that in him I had a brother, someone with the same hatred, and like a true brother, someone I could unburden myself to, perhaps the only one I knew. He was a man who’d said to me with grim conviction, I’d like to kill him, all the while flexing his fingers in strangulatory gestures.
Although he’d doubted himself (It would make me feel great—for about five minutes), I had no such hesitation. I knew that Chicky and I were equal and like-minded; we were damaged and indignant, and we knew we had a punishment for Frank, to prevent further damage to us, and to save anyone else Frank might wish to victimize.
I’d said nothing to Chicky at the time; I’d been overcautious, fearing that he might report anything I might say to Frank. I had suspected that he was trying to provoke me. But on reflection I saw how wounded he was—he’d been hurt physically and financially. I could now reveal myself. It would ease my pain to have a fellow conspirator, a brother in the best sense.
“Chicky Malatesta,” I said, after this reverie.
Gabe smiled, looking startled at the name.
“How do I get in touch with him?”
“He’s in the database. He was one of Frank’s clients a while back.”
“How do you know that?”
“Frank needed some muscle. He brought me in when Chicky got obstreperous about the billing.”
To ask why or to inquire further would have raised Gabe’s suspicions, so all I said was “He’s a good mechanic. I can use someone who can fix things.”
Checking his phone, Gabe said, “Like a lot of guys in your generation, Chicky isn’t on e-mail. Frank wrote him letters and scanned them to me, so we’d have a paper trail, in case he acted. He was, like, uttering threats.”
“I always knew him as a friendly guy,” I said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
Gabe was still consulting his phone, not reacting to what I said, swiping with his forefinger, looking down with the sort of preoccupied insolence that Frank practiced to seem enigmatic. Finally, he said, “Here it is—West Littleford, near the Winterville line—last I heard he was living with his relatives.”
He gave me Chicky’s address, and a parting hug.
It was the Italian section of town, a district of squarish, shingled three-decker houses, set close together, their narrow yards fronting the street, the melancholy uniformity of the earnest working poor. There was little to distinguish one house from another, except in the colors of the paint on shingles. I was abashed to think that I lived in the same town and never came here. Like Frank, I lived in the nice part of Littleford.
I found the house easily and saw that it was in need of painting, conspicuous on the street for being in bad repair, some shingles missing, broken windows duct-taped, an old sofa with burst cushions on the porch. Chicky had not exaggerated his being cheated by Frank and suffering a loss of income. He’d told me he was living with his in-laws, and it had sounded grim; this weather-beaten house was the proof. The names Bocca/Malatesta were inked in block letters on a label by the door.
Knocking, I heard a dog roused inside, a sudden and insistent yapping, and then a curtain tugged aside on a small glass pane in the door, and a pale mournful-looking woman pushing her tangled hair away from her eyes.
“I’m looking for Chicky.” I spoke loudly, because the door remained shut.
The woman opened the door, releasing odors of scorched tomatoes and fresh basil and dog fur. “He’s gone.”
“When are you expecting him?”
“You didn’t hear?” She looked at me with imploring eyes and whispered, “He passed.”
The dog yapped just behind her, and a man inside the house called out in a complaining but incoherent shout.
“I’m so sorry to hear it. Can we talk?”
“On the piazza,” she said, slipping out and indicating the ragged sofa pushed against the porch rail.
She moved slowly, bent over, wheezing in sadness, her hands folded under her chin, as though in prayer.
“I’m Cal.”
“Roberta,” she said. “His wife.”
“When did it happen?”
“It was sudden, but the doctor said we should have expected it, being as it was related to his case.”
“I saw him in . . .” I tried to remember. It was at the donut shop, before Mother died. He’d recognized her medicine in the pill container—heart medicine. “It was about five months ago.”
“He passed last month. Just before his birthday. He would have been fifty-nine. That’s not old!”
She began to cry, her face contorting, her lips trembling. She was in poor health herself, heavy and slow, her sorrowing like an illness, making her short of breath, asthmatic in sadness.
“We were in high school together. He was in my brother Frank’s class—Frank Belanger.”
“That bastard’s your brother?” Roused by anger, Roberta twisted her face at me and seemed healthier, stronger in her ferocity.
“Yes. That bastard is my brother.”
“He screwed Chicky so bad.”
“I know. Chicky told me.”
“He lost his job. The settlement was so cheesy we had to sell our house. This is my parents’ place. They’re on disability.” Her voice trailed off, she rocked a little, also like a kind of mourning. “He’s your brother! He should be in jail.”
Her face fixed on mine, her eyes astir, glaucous in grief; she crossed her arms, holding herself, needing to be comforted.
“He should be dead,” I said.
“Yes—God forgive me,” she said. “But I don’t believe in God no more, because Chicky should be alive. There’s no justice. Good people always get screwed. It’s not fair. Bad people like your brother—they get all the breaks and go on living.”
She began to cry again, lavishly, gagging a little, her face freakish, ugly in her misery, tears smearing her cheeks and gleaming on her chin.
“Bad people also die,” I said.