4 Mr. Mom

Peggy came home with her two children. Just what I didn’t need—another house full of kids. She promised they’d behave. Well, sure! She beat the crap out of them and expected me to do the same. I couldn’t. How could anybody beat a kid that was five years old? Or any kid?

She sat around for a while, then took a full-time job waitressing. Now I’m Mr. Mom, dusting the furniture, cleaning the shitter and baby-sitting. It felt bad to take Peggy’s kids to the movies when my own divorced kids in Spokane were doing without.

We started having big fights again. Things got so bad, I would walk out the back door as she walked in the front. I just didn’t want to confront her anymore, except in bed. We still had good sex, but otherwise it was over. The ghosts would wake me up in the middle of the night and I’d find my hands around her neck. I realized that I got a big rush out of killing that girl and wouldn’t mind doing another one. This was crazy thinking and I knew it.

I had to get away from Portland and this house before I lost it completely. I was already crazy. A freak. I had nightmares about killing an innocent girl, woke up screaming from guilt and shame, and a few minutes later I would fantasize about doing it again.

In March, two months after the killing, I headed south on I-5 for a construction job in Sacramento. Approaching Rogue River, Oregon, I was thinking about kidnapping women for sex and maybe even killing again. I tried to push the idea out of my mind, but it jumped right back in. I thought about my old girlfriend Nancy Flowers that lived up in the woods, not far off the interstate. I’d met her at a truck stop at Mile Marker 161 in Oregon and stayed with her a few nights. She was forty-four—nine years older than me—good-looking, divorced, a swinger. She advertised herself to magazines and sold photos of herself in the nude. But I got her for free. She’d showed me where she kept her collection of pictures and her loose cash.

As I drove, my mind ran wild with the possibilities. Maybe she wouldn’t make me welcome. What difference did it make? If she gave me trouble, I might grab her and put her away for good. Then I’d take her money. I was pissed at the world anyway. I tried to think straight, but I couldn’t. I was starting to be afraid of what I’d become.

The closer I got to her house, the harder my penis got. I thought about enslaving her for a few days. I felt her presence as I approached her door. I felt her softness as if she was already hugging me.

I knocked, and nobody answered. I found her spare key under the rock where she kept it and let myself in.

The place was empty. I smelt something a little off, like a rat died in the walls. I could feel a woman’s presence. What the hell happened here?

I drove to the little market at the Y-junction and asked where Nancy was hanging out. They told me her ex-husband and another biker had paid her a little visit. One raped her while the other beat her to death with a crowbar. She died in the living room. A few weeks later the rapist ran his mouth and one of his friends ratted him out. They were in jail awaiting trial.

As I headed south, I thought, What a bummer. I might have killed Nancy myself if she’d been home. Everybody’s dying all around me. I’m seeing death everywhere. Where do I turn? What the hell, I killed Taunja Bennett and got away with it. I could kill anybody. It’s up to me. It was a heavy thought.