He gave her a slightly shamefaced smile, but she thought what he was mostly ashamed of was how stupid the plan had been in the first place.
“Well, you can probably guess. Couple of teenage boys, hormones so high we got horny when the wind blew. We were going to tell those girls that if they’d, you know, fuck us real good, we’d let them go. If they didn’t, we’d have to kill them. And they’d fuck, all right.”
He nodded slowly.
“They’d fuck to live. BD was right about that.”
He was lost in his story. His eyes were hazy with (grotesque but true) nostalgia. For what? The crazy dreams of youth? She was afraid that might actually be it.
“We didn’t plan to kill ourselves like those heavy-metal dumbbells in Colorado, either. No way. There was a basement under the science wing, and Brian said there was a tunnel down there. He said it went from the supply room to the old fire station on the other side of Route 119. Brian said that when the high school was just a K-through-eight grammar school back in the fifties, there was a park over there, and the little kids used to play in it at recess. The tunnel was so they could get to the park without having to cross the road.”
Bob laughed, making her jump.
“I took his word for all that, but it turned out he was full of shit. I went down there the next fall to look for myself. The supply room was there, full of paper and stinking of that mimeograph juice they used to use, but if there was a tunnel, I never found it, and even back then I was very thorough. I don’t know if he was lying to both of us or just to himself, I only know there was no tunnel. We would have been trapped upstairs, and who knows, we might have killed ourselves after all. You never know what a fourteen-year-old’s going to do, do you? They roll around like unexploded bombs.”
You’re not unexploded anymore, she thought. Are you, Bob?
“We probably would have chickened out, anyway. But maybe not. Maybe we would have tried to go through with it. BD got me all excited, talking about how we were going to feel them up first, then make them take off each other’s clothes…” He looked at her earnestly. “Yes, I know how it sounds, just boys’ jack-off fantasies, but those girls really were snoots. You tried to talk to them, they’d laugh and walk away. Then stand in the corner of the caff, the bunch of them, looking us over and laughing some more. So you really couldn’t blame us, could you?”
He looked at his fingers, drumming restlessly on his suit-pants where they stretched tight over his thighs, then back up at Darcy.
“The thing you have to understand—that you really have to see—is how persuasive Brian was. He was lots worse than me. He really was crazy. Plus it was a time when the whole country was rioting, don’t forget, and that was part of it, too.”
I doubt it, she thought.
The amazing thing was how he made it sound almost normal, as if every adolescent boy’s sexual fantasies involved rape and murder. Probably he believed that, just as he had believed in Brian Delahanty’s mythical escape tunnel. Or had he? How could she know? She was, after all, listening to the recollections of a lunatic. It was just hard to believe that—still!—because the madman was Bob. Her Bob.
“Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “it never happened. That was the summer Brian ran into the road and got killed. There was a reception at his house after the funeral, and his mother said I could go up to his room and take something, if I wanted. As a souvenir, you know. And I did want to! You bet I did! I took his geometry notebook, so nobody would go leafing through it and come across his plans for The Great Castle Rock Shoot—Out and Fuck Party. That’s what he called it, you know.”
Bob laughed ruefully.
“If I was a religious fella, I’d say God saved me from myself. And who knows if there isn’t Something… some Fate… that has its own plan for us.”
“And this Fate’s plan for you was for you to torture and kill women?” Darcy asked. She couldn’t help herself.
He looked at her reproachfully. “They were snoots,” he said, and raised a teacherly finger. “Also, it wasn’t me. It was Beadie who did that stuff—and I say did for a reason, Darce. I say did instead of does because all of that’s behind me now.”
“Bob—your friend BD is dead. He’s been dead for almost forty years. You must know that. I mean, on some level you must.”
He tossed his hands in the air: a gesture of good-natured surrender. “Do you want to call it guilt—avoidance? That’s what a shrink would call it, I suppose, and it’s fine if you do. But Darcy, listen!” He leaned forward and pressed a finger to her forehead, between her eyebrows. “Listen and get this through your head. It was Brian. He infected me with… well, certain ideas, let’s say that. Some ideas, once you get them in your head, you can’t unthink them. You can’t…”
“Put the toothpaste back in the tube?”
He clapped his hands together, almost making her scream. “That’s it exactly! You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Brian was dead, but the ideas were alive. Those ideas-getting women, doing whatever to them, whatever crazy idea came into your head—they became his ghost.”
His eyes shifted upward and to the left when he said this. She had read somewhere that this meant the person who was talking was telling a conscious lie. But did it matter if he was? Or which one of them he was lying to? She thought not.
“I won’t go into the details,” he said. “It’s nothing for a sweetheart like you to hear, and like it or not—I know you don’t right now—you’re still my sweetheart. But you have to know I fought it. For seven years I fought it, but those ideas—Brian’s ideas—kept growing inside my head. Until finally I said to myself, ‘I’ll try it once, just to get it out of my head. To get him out of my head. If I get caught, I get caught—at least I’ll stop thinking about it. Wondering about it. What it would be like.’”
“You’re telling me it was a male exploration,” she said dully.
“Well, yes. I suppose you could say that.”
“Or like trying a joint just to see what all the shouting was about.”
He shrugged modestly, boyishly. “Kinda.”
“It wasn’t an exploration, Bobby. It wasn’t trying a joint. It was taking a woman’s life.”
She had seen no guilt or shame, absolutely none—he appeared incapable of those things, it seemed the circuit-breaker that controlled them had been fried, perhaps even before birth—but now he gave her a sulky, put—upon look. A teenager’s you-don’t-understand-me look.
“Darcy, they were snoots.”
She wanted a glass of water, but she was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom. She was afraid he would stop her, and what would come after that? What then?
“Besides,” he resumed, “I didn’t think I’d get caught. Not if I was careful and made a plan. Not a half-baked and horny-fourteen-year-old boy’s plan, you know, but a realistic one. And I realized something else, too. I couldn’t do it myself. Even if I didn’t screw up out of nervousness, I might out of guilt. Because I was one of the good guys. That’s how I saw myself, and believe it or not, I still do. And I have the proof, don’t I? A good home, a good wife, two beautiful children who are all grown up and starting their own lives. And I give back to the community. That’s why I took the Town Treasurer’s job for two years, gratis. That’s why I work with Vinnie Eschler every year to put on the Halloween blood drive.”
You should have asked Marjorie Duvall to give, Darcy thought. She was A-positive.
Then, puffing out his chest slightly—a man nailing down his argument with one final, irrefutable point—he said: “That’s what the Cub Scouts are about. You thought I’d quit when Donnie went on to Boy Scouts, I know you did. Only I didn’t. Because it’s not just about him, and never was. It’s about the community. It’s about giving back.”
“Then give Marjorie Duvall back her life. Or Stacey Moore. Or Robert Shaverstone.”
That last one got through; he winced as if she had struck him. “The boy was an accident. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“But you being there wasn’t an accident?”
“It wasn’t me,” he said, then added the ultimate surreal absurdity. “I’m no adulterer. It was BD. It’s always BD. It was his fault for putting those ideas in my head in the first place. I never would have thought of them on my own. I signed my notes to the police with his name just to make that clear. Of course I changed the spelling, because I sometimes called him BD back when I first told you about him. You might not remember that, but I did.”