BECAUSE THE NIGHT
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mauled fingers, knowing he has to see, knowing what must be happening, but seeing instead his daddy sitting beside him in the whirling ferris wheel at Playland in the Bronx, whispering that everything would always be all right and he could go on all the rides and eat all the cotton candy he wanted and that Mommy would quit drinking and they would be a real family. Then the uniform man was saying “It’s a boy!” and he hears the sound of his own scream, and the uniform man was on top of him with his chisel, and then father was stabbing the uniform man with a knife and stabbing him with a needle, whispering, “Easy, Johnny, easy, beauty, easy, babe.”
The Time Machine pushed through days of sedative haze filled with the sound of mother weeping and Baxter the lawyer telling her that the money would always be there, and stern-looking men in cheap summer suits asking her where father was, and did he know a man named Duane McEvoy?
Mother’s scream: “No, you cannot talk to the boy—he knows nothing!”
Then Baxter the lawyer takes him to a horror triple feature in White Plains and tells him father is gone forever, but he will be his pal. Midway through The Curse of Frankenstein images of the whirling circular object hit him. It all starts to come back, and thoughts of the ferris wheel die, slaughtered by a Cinemascope and Technicolor replay of the Caesarean birth.
“It’s a boy!”
Johnny runs out of the theater and hitchhikes to Ossining niggertown. The same A-bomb Negroes and hungry dogs maneuver on the periphery of the area, but the block itself has burned to the ground. But it happened here.
No, it was a nightmare.
But it did happen here.
I don’t know.
Weeks pass. The newspapers attribute the Ossining fire to “heedless Negro children playing with matches” and express gratitude that no one was hurt. Johnny grieves for his lost father and listens in on mother’s phone calls to Baxter. She repeatedly tells the lawyer to buy the cops off once and for all, regardless of the price. Baxter finally calls back and tells mother that it is all set, but to be sure she should destroy everything belonging to father, including everything in his safe-deposit boxes. Johnny knows that there is nothing interesting in father’s study—only his guns and ammo and his books; but the safe deposit boxes are something he has forgotten to scope out. He steals the keys to the boxes from father’s desk and forges a note to the manager of the First Union Bank in Scarsdale Village. The old fart buys 392
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it hook, line, and sinker, chuckling over the twelve-year-old boy doing banking errands for his dad. Johnny walks away from the bank with a brown paper bag full of blue chip stocks and a black leather-bound diary that looks like a bible.
Johnny walks to the train station, intending to go to the movies in the city. A very un-Scarsdale-like bum tries to panhandle train fare from him. Johnny gives him the stock certificates. Once on the train heading toward Manhattan, Johnny opens up the diary and reads his father’s words. The words prove conclusively that what he saw on June 2, 1957, in Ossining niggertown was for real.
Since 1948, alone and with the aid of a Sing Sing Prison guard named Duane McEvoy, father had tortured and murdered eighteen women, some in Westchester County, some in upstate cities adjoining his favorite duck hunting preserves. The mutilations, sexual abuse, and ultimate dismemberments are described in vivid detail. Johnny forces himself to read every word. Tears are streaming down his face and the ferris wheel memory battles the words for primacy. The benevolent whirling object is winning as the train pulls into Grand Central Station. Then Johnny gets to the passages that prove how much his father loves him and everything goes crazy. The boy is so much smarter than me that it’s scary. Brains are everything. I’ve been able to keep Duane as my lackey for so long because the dumbfuck knows that I’m the one who keeps him from getting caught. When Johnny killed the rats and shot the dogs I saw him go cold almost overnight, and when I saw him go smart and wary and cautious too, I knew I was scared. I wanted to go to him and love him, but staying away makes him stronger and more fit for life. Johnny boy is like an iceberg—cold and 7/10’s below the surface. He’s probably afraid to kill human prey; too manipulative, too asexual. It’s going to be interesting watching him hit adolescence. How will he attempt to prove himself?
Johnny walks through Grand Central, openly weeping. Coming out onto 42nd Street, he throws the death bible into a storm drain and hurls a silent vow to his father: he will show him that he is afraid of nothing. Fall 1957. Johnny considers potential victims at Scarsdale Junior High. To fulfill his father’s legacy, he knows that they must be female. Beyond that first essential qualification, he sets his own criteria: All his prey must be