25. The Killer

 Far as I know, mother never got a divorce. Somehow I can’t imagine her doing it, even if she’d been married to the Marquis de Sade.

It’s not that she enjoyed abuse, and certainly not marriage-- or men much, if at all. All of her life, people said her unwillingness to “suffer fools” would leave her lonely, would lead to her dying alone.

Nor was it a matter of religion. Even though she sent me to Catholic schools for as long as she could, she wasn’t a particularly pious person. I probably spent more time in church than she did. When I asked her to tell me what all the strange prayers meant, she didn’t know them. She said she’d forgotten them; I’d recite them as best I could. But I only frustrated her.

Sometimes I think if she’d been a bit older, a bit more aware when she met the man who penetrated her loins and disappeared before I came out, she’d’ve never been married. Sometimes I think something like that about the woman whose name I never knew and other women on this block, and still others I’ve met since leaving. But not Mrs. Littington.

If selling your body teaches you anything, it’s this: all possession is temporary. Few, if any, men learn this lesson because, well, they don’t have to. They can live under the illusion that once you’ve paid for something—spent money on it—it’s yours for all time.

Which is funny, because all marriage laws, contracts, vows and ceremonies were devised by men. And they’re all based on that same principle: A man owns a woman (As I’ve since found out, in a few cultures, the reverse is true.) for a period of time: “till death do us apart” or some period that’s finite simply because all lives are. He owns her, at least as long as he’s paying for food, clothing, a roof over her head and those and other needs of the children.

But since men forget that “The good men do is of’t interred with their bones,” they believe that their dominion continues when they’re gone. By the same token, they think that some relationship continues, as long as they’re spending money to maintain it, once the man decides—or the man and woman agree—to live their lives apart from each other.

To steal a line from one of the herd that never recognized me as one of its own, divorce is simply the continuation of marriage by other means-- usually, his means.

Maybe mother’d seen enough of this block to know that when a man decides he’s going to disappear, it’s best to let him go: Initiating proceedings would simply mean making some attempt to summon him back, however briefly, to her home, whatever or wherever that may’ve been.

And for what? So they could create a document saying that the previous one didn’t exist? Or that is was a falsehood or mistake?

In other words, I think mother was smart enough to know—though, to my knowledge, never articulated it—that a woman can’t use a man’s way to resolve a situation he, or one of his kind, created.

Of course, it’s brutally difficult to grow up as a boy when no one teaches you how to fight—and I use that word in the male sense—or to run or deny. On this block, it could’ve been fatal, as it nearly was for Louis Torre. In fact, if mother hadn’t kept me in the kitchen, in the presence of women, as much as she had, I’m sure I wouldn’t’ve made it back. And I’m sure I’d’ve never been able to come with the knowledge—not the belief—that I could come back, and that after doing so, I wouldn’t have to again.

Once we’ve buried mother, I won’t have to come back. There’ll be nobody who would recognize me now, and nobody-- except for that lady whose name I never knew-- who might remember what I was.

Actually, if any of them’d been paying attention, they’d’ve thought I’d died years ago. The certificate was signed; my name appeared in a newspaper column. But they never saw the body about which the police, the coroner and a funeral director had signed documents: more papers. According to them, my last moment on this block—on this planet—or at least the moment someone realized there was a dead body—was at 2:34 in the afternoon. The 18^th of June, 1992: The deceased, had he managed to sidestep his fate another six weeks, would’ve been twenty-five years old. No longer a boy, in the opinion of most of the world, but not quite a man, either. But well beyond either one, in terms of this block.

As far as anyone on this block knew, that body was mine. Anyone, that is, except mother. Anybody who’d remembered me, if she’d thought about it, would’ve been surprised that I was back on this block. Perhaps some of them,--and certainly any man, any male, if there were any left—would’ve said among themselves, “What was he doing here anyway?”

To tell you the truth, it’s a fair question. What would I’ve been doing in the basement of a house that’d been abandoned, where an old woman nobody ever saw but whom everybody knew was nearly deaf and lame, lived? Especially since, having been there before, I'd had no wish—no reason, really—to go back.

In that basement, I wouldn’t’ve known it was one of those cold, wet days that often follows an early heat wave but precedes the official beginning of summer. Or that anyone’d been waiting outside, or whether that person’d bothered to conceal his weapon. A weapon that somehow or another’d been used, after another weapon that may’ve been concealed. And, once inside, no one except for the person who used the weapon and the one on whom he’d used it would know.

Noone’d’ve found the body for days, perhaps weeks or months, had someone not phoned and claimed he’d heard “a disturbance” coming from the house. To this day, no one except the caller knows who made the call, but rumor has it that if came from another state.

So why did the police respond to it? No one’s answered that one, but rumor also has it that the killer rang the precinct. He—or she—has never been caught.

Here’s something even stranger: the police talked to my mother once, only for five minutes—about as long as it took them to conclude she’d had nothing to do with the killing. Mother doesn’t do that sort of thing, or ask it of anybody.

No one’d asked her to ID the body or to provide any information about my life since I left this block. There’d been no funeral, which surprised nobody since, for as long as I can remember, I’d told her I didn’t want one. There’s nothing I wanted less than to be laid out in full view (or at least in front of) gawkers and grievers. Especially when I couldn’t do anything about it.

As I’ve heard, the cops’ve never arrested anybody, and not long after the burial, they stopped investigating possible suspects.

All I know for certain is that I wasn’t there when it happened. But I could’ve given the constables enough information to make them suspicious.

I know of one thing that’ll lure a certain kind of man to a basement that isn’t his own. Actually, to be more exact, I know of one kind a person who can do that: one young enough to be a son, nephew or grandson. So while I may not know who the bait was, I know what it was and that it was switched, yanked away from him.

Maybe he never saw the pre-adolescent boy someone used to entice him. I also suspect—very strongly—that whoever led him down the stairs wasn’t his killer. He’d’ve known better; so would’ve the killer. How else would the killer’ve gotten the hammer and bayonet—and the man who fathered me—inside those concrete walls?