The Axeman's Jazz

“Sonny, don’t say anything! They can use it against you later.”
    “They can’t touch me. I’m a doctor.”
    Oh, brother
. “Cindy Lou, what’s going on? That doesn’t sound like Sonny at all. Are you sure he isn’t a multiple?”
    “He’s starting to break.”
    “What makes you say that? He sounds like some other person—like…”
    “His dad.”
    It dawned on her that that was right. “Yeah.”
    Cindy Lou shrugged. “Well, why not. His dad’s an asshole. Come to think of it, all doctors are assholes. Now that you mention it, we’ve all got a little asshole in us. Why not Sonny? Damn right it’s not like him. That’s what he keeps under that golden-boy routine of his. If he’d let it out more…”
    “Oh, don’t say it.” She was getting cross.
    Into the megaphone she said, “Sonny, I feel like you need to talk. I promise I’ll get all the help I can for you when this is over.”
    “Skip, you know this is no way to treat a doctor. Get me out of here now. Get me a limousine to the airport and a ticket out of here.” He paused, thinking. “To the Bahamas.”
    “Let Alex go.”
    “You know I can’t let Alex go.”
    “Sonny, why’d you write the letter?”
    “I wish to God I’d never written the damn letter! Jesus, I wish I’d never done it!” The arrogant Sonny was gone.
    “Why’d you do it, Sonny?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Cindy Lou pinched Skip. “Don’t answer. Let him think about it a little bit.”
    The quiet was killing. The air was thick enough to squeeze.
    Finally Sonny said, “I thought I ought to.”
    “Okay, okay,” said Cindy Lou. “Let him think about what that means.”
    Skip didn’t know much about Cindy Lou’s fancy theories of “splits” in non-split personalities, but this was familiar ground, this she had seen before. And it did seem like something split, every time she saw it. It was a more elaborate version of that weird thing that made experienced criminals forget to wear gloves, brag in bars about wasting somebody, tell you they didn’t mean to do it before you ever accused them. And half the time the thing they didn’t mean to do, the crime they described in detail, wasn’t the one they were being questioned about.
    It was the mechanism that makes a man park his car outside his girlfriend’s house on a day he knows his wife’s going to be in the neighborhood. It was the urge to confess, the part of not just every criminal, but every human being, that wants to be caught.
    In a few minutes, Cindy Lou said, “Ask him about the Axeman.”
    Skip said, “Why the Axeman, Sonny? You could have written some other kind of letter.”
    “I grew up with the Axeman.” His voice was very soft. “My grandfather told me about him. It was like the bogeyman. He’d say, ‘If you don’t be good, the Axeman’ll get you.’ And sometimes … sometimes when I wouldn’t go to bed he’d put a sheet over his head and say, ‘The Axeman cometh!’ ”
    “And then what?”
    “Then we’d roughhouse. He’d tickle me and I’d laugh a lot.”
    “It was true, wasn’t it, Sonny?”
    “What?”
    “The Axeman got you.”
    Sonny didn’t answer. They waited about ten minutes. Finally Skip said, “Did the A stand for Axeman?”
    He said something she couldn’t hear, that no one could hear.
    “What?”
    “I didn’t mean to do it that way. That wasn’t what I wanted. But it happened the first time and I had no choice. Do you understand what I’m saying? After that the Axeman existed. I had to let—”
    “You had to what?”
    Once again he didn’t answer.
    “Why did it happen that way the first time? If you didn’t want to do it, why did you?”
    “The goddamn lipstick broke!” He sounded furious, and once again Alex made some kind of involuntary movement.
    “The lipstick broke? You meant to write something else?”
    “I already told you.” This time he spoke in a conversational tone, not trying to be heard; sounding sullen.
    “No you didn’t.”
    “I told Missy.”
    Skip looked at Missy. She shrugged, obviously had no idea what he meant.
    “She doesn’t remember.”
    “I told her.”
    “Tell her again.”
    He shouted the word as if to be heard in Baton Rouge, and the anguish in it seemed that of every lost soul since the dawn of madness. “Atonement!”
    The sound was like a diamond rubbing against a diamond, harder on the soft evening than a footfall on a flower; primitive and ugly and inevitable. Yet the feeling of that tiny