I didn’t at all want to see those kids suffer. They’d done nothing wrong. They were trying to have fun. Plus hurting them wouldn’t help the swingset, anyway. Nor had I ever been much of a sadist. So maybe I didn’t choose anything at all. Maybe it only seemed like a choice. Sadness it was and would be either way. I lowered the bat.
* * *
—
As the sadness took me over, though, my muscles relaxed, and my vision clarified. Like I had with all the swingsets I’d previously murdered, I’d started by swinging at the legs of Feather’s, and now I could see how this had been a mistake. The legs, for some reason I couldn’t make sense of (they were in tall grass, which, sure, must have offered protection from the sun, but also meant greater exposure to moisture, and thus—at least I’d have thought—deeper rust), were far less corroded than the overhead crossbar. They wouldn’t even dent, let alone bend. All I’d managed with the bat was to shake up the frame, chip off some paint flakes, rattle the swing chains. It would have been better to have attacked the crossbar from the very beginning. It might, I thought, be better, to attack the crossbar. It could, I thought. It will be better.
But even jumping, I could barely reach the crossbar with the bat. I had to tip the swingset onto its side. I knelt in the grass and searched with my hands til I found the taut chains that fixed the legs to the anchors—two chains per leg—which anchors went who-knew-how-deep into the ground. I pulled at one chain to no avail, then another, then a third, with the same result. At this point someone passed me the ax. I didn’t know who, much less where they’d gotten it. An unsleeved arm reaching down from in between a couple of the child-wall’s frontmost torsos—that’s all I was able to see of the ax-bearer.
I got on my feet and started to swing.
Each chain took more effort to snap than the last. The sun had gone red and was rapidly setting. Sweat blurred my vision. To repeatedly hit one strikepoint became as much a matter of luck as aim, and I was getting weak, plus I might have drunk alcohol—kids were handing me cups, and much of what I swallowed didn’t taste quite right (at the time, I thought I’d gotten paint in my teeth). After freeing the two back legs from their chains, though, I saw, with relief, I didn’t need to free the front two. I dropped the ax, put a shoulder to a leg, pushed forward and upward, and knocked the thing down. The applause hurt my ears. Kids shouted my name. I began to attack the crossbar with the bat.
* * *
—
Why I picked up the bat again instead of the ax had nothing to do with helping the swingset. Unlike the eight I’d already murdered, each of which had nagged and cajoled me to destroy it, Feather’s swingset hadn’t uttered a single word to me. I’d been led to it by a group of seven boys who’d watched me murder the Blond family swingset—murder #8—through the glass back door of the Blond family’s house a week or so earlier. I hadn’t known they were watching til the murder was through; I’d thought the house was empty. Then they all came outside, and the Blonds’ youngest son, eighth-grader Ron Blond, high-fived me and said he’d always hated the swingset. “It made me depressed, and made me want to puke,” he said, “but now it just looks like a sculpture or something. Like maybe like it’s kneeling. Or was kneeling when it died. Yeah, more like that. Like it fell asleep kneeling and died or something. I’d have kicked your fucken ass when I saw what you were doing, except then I didn’t because I changed my mind since first of all you had that bat with you and I could fuck you up later when you didn’t have the bat I thought, and second of all it made me want to puke anyway, and now thirdly I don’t want to kick your ass because the swingset looks as useless as it is and always has been for years, I’m saying, except it isn’t depressing is what I’m saying because it looks like it knows it. Or knew it. That it’s useless. It doesn’t look forgotten, like I’m supposed to feel guilty. We could throw it away and not feel bad. We could just leave it sitting there and not feel bad. It doesn’t matter either way now. We won’t feel bad. And I don’t want to puke. So I won’t kick your ass. That is what I’m saying.”
“Ron Blond digging deep deep deep,” said Rory Riley, who was one of those giant-eyed, cute-mean, small kids in overpriced clothing who gets to be a bully because pretty girls convince stronger kids to look out for him. “Whatever, though, whatever. Main thing is it was choice and you should do it again.”
All of them agreed I should do it again, and they wanted to know when I would do it again. I said I couldn’t say for sure; I’d have to find the right swingset. I left off explaining what that might entail, partly because I wasn’t sure what it entailed (although the eight swingsets I’d already murdered had each, as mentioned, asked me to help them, I’d begun by then to wonder if, given that my gate was sometimes, perhaps even often, closed, it wouldn’t be kinder on my part to go ahead and murder swingsets that appeared neglected even if they didn’t ask me to help them, i.e. kinder to assume they wanted my help and would have asked for my help and yet, because my gate was closed, were unable to ask for it), but mostly because I knew I’d sound crazy.
The boys said they’d scout around Wheelatine for prospects.
One of the boys, eighth-grader Chuck Schmidt, lived in “Old Wheelatine,” Feather’s part of town, which was mostly composed of disused corn- and soybean fields owned by old Germans holding out for bigger bids from property developers. Schmidt’s mom, the day after I’d murdered Blond’s swingset, saw Feather have a stroke in the checkout lane at Dominick’s, and she rushed to Feather’s place to drive his wife to the hospital. Mrs. Feather died in the car of a heart attack. That same afternoon, Schmidt biked to my house with Rory Riley in tow and told me all about it. “Their only kid got killed in the Nam,” Schmidt said, “and Feather’s stuck at Sheridan for at least a few weeks. He can’t even walk. The swingset’s right there, all rusted and ugly and sixties-looking, in a yard surrounded by farmland. We’re the nearest neighbors and we’re half a mile away.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Better to wait til Thursday,” Schmidt said. “My parents’ll be downtown for a Sox game, and plus we should spread the news around, too.”
“Leave that last part to me,” Rory Riley said, winking. “I spread news well.”
“No doubt,” Schmidt said. “You are choice at spreading news.”
I never learned what the news was. Nobody told me. It may have been, “This Thursday, Belt will wreck a swingset,” but it may have been, “Belt will wreck a swingset with a bat this Thursday.” With a bat is how I’d always done it, after all. It was how the seven boys had seen me do it at Blond’s. And til that arm reached out to hand me the ax, I’d never even considered not using a bat. I’d felt it was okay to use the ax on the chains only because the anchors had been getting in the way of the murder, but to use the ax on the swingset’s frame—to use the ax to do the actual murdering—might, I felt, be somehow cheaty, and would definitely render the murder less elegant.