The Butcher and the Wren(2)
He abandons his bedtime ritual and hurries down the stairs to the basement where his guests are staying. He can immediately hear Katie’s low moans turn to fearful yelps, and her petite frame physically recoils as he approaches her.
“You need to be cognizant of the fact that you are staying in someone else’s home,” he says, looking her straight in her muddy brown eyes.
She is hopelessly unremarkable. Brown, lifeless hair sticks to her neck with old blood like crude glue. Her aesthetic is entirely trailer park, though she’s desperately tried to hide it. The slightly mouselike aspect to her teeth could be considered charming if she wasn’t such an unimaginable twit. When he approached her in the bar, she was regaling Matt with an anecdote about her high school cheerleading days—a pathetic tale that seemed far-fetched considering the shape she is in now. He adjusts the ligatures that hold her to her chair and checks that the IV bag is properly hydrating her system. No kinks in the line, and the bag is still almost full.
“Matt is being respectful. Be more like Matt, Katie.” He smiles wide and gestures to Matt’s silent and motionless body slumped in the chair beside her.
They both know he passed out, likely from shock, during Jeremy’s previous visit down here. Katie begins to weep loudly, and he rolls his eyes. She is testing his gentility, and he is becoming significantly more disgusted by her desperation. He stands quietly in the dark by her side, pressing play on the portable speaker between the two chairs. “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins fills the space. He grins to himself. Finally, a decent sound.
“Ah, that’s more like it.” He sways to the music, and he gives Katie the opportunity to collect herself.
By the end of the first chorus, she starts wailing. Without hesitation, he grabs the pliers behind her chair, and with one swift motion rips the putridly pink nail clean off her left thumb. He pulls her screaming face to touch his own.
“Another sound out of you, and I start pulling out teeth. Understood?” he threatens.
All she manages is a nod, and he tosses the pliers in the corner. With a wink, he makes his way upstairs.
He didn’t grow up with a lot of mercy. He didn’t grow up with a lot of anything at all. His father was a tough man but a fair one, expecting a certain level of submission in his home from both wife and son. If Jeremy caught him at just the right time, he learned lasting skills and lessons through his father’s careful instruction. As an aircraft machinist in the city, Jeremy’s father maintained various pieces of aerospace equipment. Although it didn’t require formal education, Jeremy was always proud that his father worked with planes and eager for a glimpse into one of mankind’s most significant inventions. But at the wrong time, he was met instead with cruel degradation.
Despite his father’s volatility, Jeremy looked forward to his arrival home from work every day. They didn’t do much together, but that’s what he appreciated. After spending all day with his mother, he would relish the comfortable silence hanging between them as they watched something on television before bed. His days were mostly filled with a heavy dose of neglect sprinkled with some overly attentive moments from his mother, as if she couldn’t regulate her affection. She was always far too much or far too little.
A steady respite from the unpredictable whims of his parents, books always held Jeremy’s focus. By age seven, he hadn’t entered school yet. As neglectful as she could be, every few days, his mother would bring him to a library off St. Charles Avenue. They always went on weekdays, while his father was working. Jeremy didn’t understand at the time that his mother was dragging her only child to a library so she could carry on an affair with one of the librarians, but he did absorb the lessons in deception that these trips afforded. He learned early on to never tell his father that his mother left him alone to wander the stacks while she retreated to a back room with Mr. Carraway. More importantly, he taught himself to steal. He brought home books in his coat or backpack, never relying on his mother to check them out. Jeremy is fairly certain now that the employees had simply looked the other way out of pity, but at the time he felt like he was pulling off a weekly heist.
Now and then, Miss Knox, one of the librarians, would attempt conversation with him. One day, daring to ask directly if everything was okay at home, her voice trembled with concern. He hadn’t responded and instead asked her for a book about lobotomies. He had recently become entranced with this archaic medical procedure and its most ardent practitioner, Dr. Walter Freeman. Over the weekend, his father had been watching a rerun episode of Frontline called “Broken Minds.” It was a brutal look into the mental health system and highlighted a method of lobotomizing patients diagnosed with any number of ailments, especially schizophrenia, by severing the presumed circuit or network of circuits that they believed to be responsible for the patient’s atypical behavior.
Dr. Freeman’s prefrontal lobotomy captivated him the most. The nickname “ice pick lobotomy” was an exceptionally provocative moniker. It conjured up images of an immaculate surgeon, twisted with the desire to explore the mentally ill mind. Later in 1992, when he heard the term carelessly tossed around in the news as a method serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was using to subdue his victims, he was disgusted. Dahmer was so feebleminded that he thought he could make his own zombies by injecting cleaning products and acids into his victim’s brains. He was imbecilic. To call what he was doing a “lobotomy” is like calling what Ted Bundy was doing “dating.” Jeremy could practically hear Dr. Freeman rolling over in his grave.