Night Prey

from Fort Polk to Hannibal, Missouri, for the sole purpose of ripping her.
    And he’d done that. He’d banged on the door and she’d opened it, a Camel glued to her lip. She’d asked, “What the fuck do you want?” and he’d said, “This.” Then he’d stepped up into the trailer and she’d stepped back, and he’d stuck the knife in just about her belly button, and ripped up, right up through her breastbone. She’d opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out but blood.
    Koop had touched nothing, seen nobody. He’d grown up in Hannibal, just like Huck Finn, but he hadn’t been any kind of Huck. He’d just been a dumb-shit kid who never knew his father, and whose mother gave blow jobs for money after she got off work at the bar. On a busy night she might have four or five drunks stop by, banging on the aluminum door, sucking them, spitting in the sink next to his bedroom, spitting and gargling salt-and-soda, half the night gone. She’d drag him downtown, respectable eyes tearing at them, women in thigh-length skirts and tweedy jackets, pitying, disdaining. “Bitches; bitches ain’t no better’n me, you better believe it,” his mother said. But she was lying, and Koop knew that for sure. They were better than his mother, these women in their suits and hats and clack-clack high heels. . . .
    He’d been back at Fort Polk, sitting on his bunk reading Black Belt magazine, when the battalion sergeant-major came by. He’d said, “Koop, I got some bad news. Your mother was found dead.”
    And Koop had said, “Yeah?” and turned the page.
     
     
     
    WHEN KOOP HAD been in Korea, he’d learned from the hookers outside the base that he had a problem with sex. Nothing worked right. He’d get turned on thinking about it, but then the time would come . . . and nothing would happen.
    Until, in his anger, he smacked one of the women. Hit her in the forehead with a fist, knocked her flat. Things started to work.
    He’d killed a woman in New Orleans. He thought of the murder as an accident: he was pounding on her, getting worked up, and suddenly she wasn’t fighting back, and her head was flopping a little too loosely. That’d scared him. They had the death penalty in Louisiana, and no qualms about using it. He’d run back to Fort Polk, and was astonished when nothing happened. Nothing. Not even a story in the newspaper, not that he could find.
    That’s when he’d gotten the idea about killing his mother. Nothing complicated. Just do it.

    AFTER THE ARMY, he’d spent a year working on the Mississippi, a barge hand. He’d eventually gotten off in St. Paul, drifted through a series of crappy jobs, finally got smart and used his veteran’s preference for something a little better. A year after that, he’d picked up a woman at a Minneapolis bookstore. He’d gone for a lifter’s calendar and the woman had come to him. He’d recognized her immediately: she had the wool suit and the clack-clack high heels. She’d asked him something about exercise; he couldn’t remember what, it’d obviously been a pickup. . . .
    He hadn’t thought to take her off, but he had, and that had been better than pounding on hookers. There had been a quality to the woman, the nylons and the careful makeup, the well-rounded sentences. She was one of those women so distinctly better than his mother.
    And they were everywhere. Some were too smart and tough to be taken. He stayed away from that kind. But there were also the tentative ones, awkward, afraid: not of death or pain or anything else so dramatic, but of simple loneliness. He found them in a Des Moines art gallery and in a Madison bookstore and a Thunder Bay record shop, a little older, drinking white wine, dressed carefully in cheerful colors, their hair done to hide the gray, their smiles constant, flitting, as though they were sparrows looking for a place to perch.
    Koop gave them a place to perch. They were never so much wary as anxious to do the right thing. . . .

    KOOP PICKED UP Jensen when she left her office, escorted her to a Cub supermarket. Followed her inside, watching her move, her breasts shifting under her blouse, her legs, so well-muscled; the way she brushed the hair out of her eyes.
    Her progress through the produce section was a sensual lesson in itself. Jensen prowled through it like a hunting cat, squeezing this, sniffing at those, poking at the others. She bought bing cherries and oranges and lemons, fat white mushrooms and celery, apples and