by Andrew Whitmer
January 20, 2000
To Whom It Should Concern:
I am going to kill Oliver Kenneth Aradoni. I’m going to cut off the son-of-a-bitch’s head and throw it in the Pacific Ocean. A dead girl demands it. She visited me in a dream, screaming about the meaning of life.
She said: “Ask him why he did it. Cut off his head, Charlie. Throw it in the fucking ocean.”
This happened. And it’s not ridiculous. Ollie is a pile of skin, alive against the rules of living. And this is not ridiculous. You know what’s ridiculous?
American Football. And most of the things that people do.
I know Ollie very well. I feed him booze and ask him questions, the son-of-a-bitch. The relaxed environment and good vibrations allow us to open up to one another, to develop our new friendship. We eat peanuts together. We throw the shells on the ground. We call each other motherfuckers.
And I give him looks of curiosity and concern, of companionship. We are reflections of each other, Ollie and I. Meaning is lost on us. Our faces are overrun with confusion.
Life has run us over. The things we used to know, or thought we knew, well, we don’t know them anymore. All we know now is that when you kill somebody, you don’t get to live like you used to, like the way a kid lives, or a young adult, or any silly goofball who falls into a good life—a life with a woman and some kids and a dog.
When you kill someone, every breath comes with a catch. That’s the rule.
He knows this. I know this. But he doesn’t know that I know this.
I have come to know the story of Ollie’s life. He is, as I said, a very sad pile of skin. His coughing makes him close his eyes and tilt his head, and he rubs his face and breathes away at the staleness in the air that follows him. I know his story better than anyone, even better than Ollie, because only I know the truth about the middle, and only I know the ending.
At the end, Ollie will no longer have a head. I’m going to cut it off, and then I’m going to throw it in the fucking ocean.
“Cut his fucking head off!” she said. “Throw it in the ocean!” she added.
And so I confess that I, Charles Bartholomew Williams, will be the lone and impassioned remover of Ollie’s head. In the unlikely event that his disappearance is noticed, I alone should be pursued in the name of justice. I doubt that anyone will care that Ollie is gone.
And that is the point. People should care. A life is a life, no matter how meaningless it may be. Somebody should come after me, the way I came after Ollie. The cause for good in the war with evil is fought with righteous murder—even for the sake of strippers.
I am a very motivated pile of skin these days. I’m looking for an answer to life’s deepest question, and Ollie’s going to give me his. And then will come the head, and then nevermind the body. It will be in the bellies of Wild Boars and Hawaiian Ducks, if they’ll have him.
So, about Oliver Kenneth Aradoni:
He was named after his Grandfather, who served in the Second World War, or, as it was explained to Ollie—The Big One. I asked Ollie, “Did your grandfather ever talk about it? About the war?”
“I asked him once,” Ollie replied. “I asked him if he killed a lot of people. I was pretty young, maybe twelve. He looked down at me and patted me on the head. He said, ‘Yes, Ollie. I didn’t shovel shit in Louisiana. I killed Germans. Now go play.’ He walked away, sipping his coffee. And I never brought it up again.”
It’s safe to say Ollie’s grandfather is followed by clouds of stale air. It’s safe to say he didn’t smile like an old goofball, at least not often. He was probably an awfully sad pile of skin.
Ollie played American Football. He was a punter for the University of Minnesota from 1994-1997. He studied Biology and punted footballs. In his senior year, he set a school record for punting average. Shortly after college, Ollie started a new life by changing his name and moving far, far away, where he worked to protect endangered plants, stare at birds, and feed the ducks.
He became Edward Bluff.
But he still goes by “Ollie.” I met him as “Ollie”—three different times, actually, once when he was in high school, once on December 23rd of 1999 while frequenting a topless bar, and once about a month ago, out here in the Hawaiian night. I met Ollie after a high school football game. Then I met Ollie again, without recognizing him, not initially, while sharing a piss in the men’s room at The Tea House of the Dancing Lady. That night, he said this out loud: “Pull it together, Ollie.”
And then I said this: “Long night?”
And now I’ve met Edward Oliver Bluff, who goes by “Ollie.” Edward is from Wisconsin.
Ollie grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio. He lived in a small, two-bedroom house on Route 2, which runs along the Lake Erie shoreline for miles. I also grew up on Route 2. Ollie does not know that.
Ollie currently resides on the Hawaiian island of Niihau, in an even smaller house, with a porch-swing and a fenced-in backyard. There is a difference between living and residing.
I met him a month ago, intentionally, and introduced myself as “Charlie”—new on the island, and a fellow caregiver of endangered plants and potential feeder of Hawaiian Ducks.
But the real story is that a murder victim won’t let me sleep. She sent me here looking for the meaning of her life, and to help me find my own.
“Charlie,” I told him. “Nice to meet you.”
“Ed,” he replied. “My friends call me Ollie, though.” But as far as I know, I am the only friend Ollie thinks he has. Ollie doesn’t know that I’m going to feed him to the ducks.
Ollie was an only-child. He is no longer an only-child. His only-parents, Gary and Mary, are both dead. Mary is presumed to be in Heaven. She was faithful and pleasant.
Gary is hopefully in Heaven, too. It’s good to hope.
“Dad had his moments, that’s for sure,” Ollie said. But I don’t know what that means.
Mary died of breast cancer when Ollie was fifteen. After her funeral, he began raising money for breast cancer awareness by selling pink t-shirts that said “Save Second Base” and everyone bought them because Ollie was very likeable and endearing. And it was likeable and endearing that he was trying to maintain a sense of humor though still in mourning.
Gary maintained a sense of humor, too. He laughed and laughed. And then he would put away a few bottles of something called Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and start throwing things. He liked to throw forks at Ollie. He laughed and laughed.
“Him and his Boone’s Farm,” Ollie said.
Ollie was awkward when he talked about his father. He peeled away at the label of his beer bottle, throwing peanut shells on the floor to punctuate his sentences. His eyes zoomed in and out of focus while his insides sloshed around with a hundred-some ounces of beer. He pantomimed the act of fork-dodging.
“What a motherfucker,” Ollie explained. And then he smiled.
And then I smiled. I was thinking about decapitation, a decent night’s sleep, and the meaning of life.
Because unlike his mother, Ollie is going to Hell. I am going to send him there.
Ollie has a tattoo on his chest, over his heart. This is what’s happening over Ollie’s heart, etched into his skin with ink: Carol, the Wild Thing from “Where the Wild Things Are” is smirking. Her yellow eyes are half-open. She is giving all possible onlookers of Ollie’s chest the thumbs-up.
Ollie got Carol shortly after his mother died. It’s his favorite story. Mary loved to read it to him, but Ollie always fell asleep before the ending. Kids do that.
Mary was an optimist.
“Mom was an optimist,” Ollie told me. “She had these letter magnets she’d arrange on the refrigerator in the morning. Most of them were bible verses, or, you know, some other motivational saying.” He slurped his beer, looking off at the empty picture frames hanging crooked from the kitchen walls.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well,” he thought quietly to himself for a moment. “The last one, and this stayed up for a long time after she died, the last one was ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ She thought it was funny. She thought it was corny and true. And it was, you know? I still like that one.”
I slurped my beer. Ollie threw a peanut shell on the floor. And I imagined the Aradoni family refrigerator. I imagined the letters on the door. Here is what I imagined they looked like:
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
I like it, too.
I like it a lot. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.
Ollie loves football. He’s never said that, at least not in the month I’ve known him. It’s the only subject, however, that makes him glow the way human beings are supposed to glow. He adores the game, and when he talks about it his eyes fill with light and his words have a flow of knowledge and strength, of remembrance of what it was like to be alive and enjoying it, what it was like to have his lungs filled with real air. He talks about high school football, about playing for Port Clinton High School.
He calls it Lake Clinton High School, which, according to him, is in Wisconsin. And he doesn’t talk about The University of Minnesota. He doesn’t want me to know who he really is.
I know exactly who he is.
His punting was beautiful. I am quite a few years older than Ollie, and I saw a lot of Port Clinton football in my years along Route 2. And I must confess, in addition to the premeditated murder and the beheading, that Oliver Aradoni was the best punter I have ever seen. I can still hear the thuds. The pigskins oinked on impact.
“I miss the game,” he told me. “I don’t know what it was, you know? People that never played, they don’t know. They don’t understand—they don’t. They take what’s there, what’s built on those fields, on those Friday nights, and they rip it apart. They tear it down as a stereotype, like it’s some worthless chunk of Americana, or something. And what’s funny to me is how right it felt, how right it still feels. Even now. Thinking about it now, I feel like I was part of something that mattered, you know—”
And then his words trailed off, and he leaned into his next comment, poking the table with his index finger.
“The poet James Wright is from Martins Ferry, Ohio,” he told me. “It’s a huge football town, really blue collar, right by the Ohio River.” He coughs a little, and thinks of a reason as to why he might know this. “I read about him in college, for a class, this one poem: ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.’ It put football in a negative light, sort of.”
Ollie shook his head and paused, throwing a peanut shell on the floor. And then he leans back into it.
“He more or less presents some unspoken societal problems it may be causing, or ignoring, rather, without really giving credit to the coping mechanisms out there, the break from all that shit.”
At this point, Ollie was glowing like a jar of honey.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s all about perspective, I guess. I just don’t know how you look out there and see young men growing suicidally beautiful, galloping terribly against each other’s bodies. But you know what, man, that’s what artists do. They just can’t leave anything alone. They have to complicate each and every one of life’s simple little joys. I mean, it’s fucking football, for Christ’s sake.”
A light shone through Ollie’s eyes, and he leaned in further for his next epiphany.
“Actually,” he said, seeming very pleased with himself. “You know what it is? James Wright? There’s a guy who never played a down. That guy never played a fucking down.”
The old punter reached for a handful of peanuts. “You know what I’m saying?” he asked.
“I hear ya, man,” I replied.
My mind wandered to thoughts of Ollie’s head nail-gunned to the kitchen wall, hung neatly and centered perfectly in one of the empty portrait frames.
Ollie is not suicidally beautiful, unfortunately. He buzzes his hair down to the skin every Friday, probably out of some warped tradition, symptomatic of his punter’s hangover. He is pale, and his beard grows patchy and dark—the idea being that Edward Bluff shouldn’t look like Oliver Aradoni. He is of average height, average weight, and average disposition. He is a blank-face, a pile of lines, of empty shapes—circles and squares, ovals and rectangles.
He gallops terribly against human beings. He kills pretty girls.
“Oliver Kenneth Aradoni,” the girl said. “He ended me. That guy ended me.”
Ollie is already dead. Know that: he is dead right where he fucking stands.
Here is how Ollie got where he fucking stands: He lied. A lot. He bought a plane ticket on Christmas Day, two days after his big crime, and flew to Honolulu. He used money his mother left him.
This is how it was explained to me, shortly after I agreed to pursue him: “The son-of-a-bitch fled to Honolulu! The son-of-a-bitch is slurping daiquiris and looking at the stars! The son-of-a-bitch killed me! GO GET HIM!”
He wandered around for a few days, boozing. “It just didn’t feel right,” he explained.
She sees it differently.
“He’s a coward! A coward and a killer!” is the counter-explanation. His explanation is told over beers and peanuts. Hers is told in the middle of terrifying dreams. She’s usually screaming. Her face is bloodied.
It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.
“Anyway,” Ollie said, continuing on about how he got to Hawaii, “I get to talking with this guy, and turns out he’s the ‘manager’ of some island I’d never heard of, and he’s in the city for the day making some orders and checking on some things or something, seeing a few people for Christmas. And we get to talking about the island, about Niihau. He goes on and on about the natives, you know, the simple lifestyle and the lack of technology, you know, and the natural beauty and this and this and this. ‘You’ve got to see it,’ he says. ‘The scenery and the wildlife are incredible.’ And so, and then it hits me—”
Ollie threw a shell on the floor.
“It hits me then and there,” he said. “And so I tell him how I studied biology, and that I was really interested in doing some field research. So, he loves the idea, goes on and on about how they love that sort of thing as long as I’m not a disruption to the people’s lifestyle. So here I am, kicking back and working at my own pace, living in this place for next to nothing. Can you believe it?”
I believe it, all right. I’m living it, for a month now, staring and grinning right into the face of a man I know for a fact is completely full of shit.
“You’re full of shit,” I said.
“Swear to God,” he replied, the son-of-a-bitch.
“Do you love it?” I asked, interested in his response.
“Yeah, man. Can’t beat it.” He stared into the floor. And I knew what he was thinking. He knows exactly how to deliver the story, but knows nothing about reality, about the people he’s known in it, about me, or how he and the world can ever possibly coexist. All he has are two categories of lifeless stories—stories about the life he can no longer honestly enjoy, and stories about the life he’s created, the one he doesn’t have imagination enough to somehow love.
“What about you?” Ollie is always eager to learn things about me. He gets sick of discussing himself.
“Me?” I asked, letting out an old man’s coughing spurt of laughter.
“Yeah,” he said. “How did you get here?”
There are two very different versions of the story on how I got to Niihau.
Here is what I tell Ollie: “Well, you know, I never married. I didn’t have any kids, and then I retired. And these days I chase simple dreams, you know? I wanted to go somewhere quiet and beautiful. I wanted to feed the ducks. Can you blame an old motherfucker?”
Ollie and I shared in each other’s quiet laughter and toasted to my story. “I hear ya, man,” he said. He tried to smile at the table between us. “I hear ya, Charlie.”
What Ollie hears is complete bullshit. Except for the part about marriage. I do have kids. I have a couple of daughters who I don’t know very well. Their mothers hate me and so do they. They’re in college—these things happen.
I worked for the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station on Route 2 for about fifteen years. Then a dead girl started visiting me in my dreams. She screamed and screamed and screamed. And so I left my job and came after Ollie.
And it’s because I like strip clubs, and it’s so I can find meaning in my life.
The Tea House of the Dancing Lady is in Sandusky. And every so often I used to go there. One night I was there and, as I said, I was in the restroom and heard this guy talking to himself.
“Pull it together, Ollie.” He shook himself empty. He zipped, buckled, and sighed.
“Long night?” I asked. He was shaky and drunk, but looked alright—a younger guy who’d had too much to drink but was trying to keep himself together. He splashed water on his face.
“I’m spending too much money, man. Too much money.”
“That’ll happen in these places,” I said, the voice of reason inside the Tea House of the Dancing Lady men’s room. It’s crazy the positions we find ourselves in sometimes.
“You said it,” he replied.
I found the young man back at the bar a few minutes later. I told the bartender to give me a beer and a shot, and to give one to my friend as well. He thanked me and said “Thanks, man, thanks.”
“Ah, don’t mention it. My name’s Charles.” I tipped my hat.
“Ollie,” he said.
Ollie bought me drinks sporadically throughout the rest of the night. He’d go up and visit the stage, come back, buy me a drink, go back to the stage, and so on.
And so on.
I just liked being there, you know, near the women. There was a line, it seemed, in strip-club etiquette that I didn’t feel alright crossing. On the safe side of that line, I sat still and kept to myself, outlining the women with my eyes.
I don’t think women are something you should be able to pay to touch. They are something to behold. Their imperfections are the furthest thing from it. Money doesn’t fit into that equation, not for me.
Ollie didn’t seem to mind. “They’re burning a hole in my pocket, man.” He shook his head and smiled. “That one’s unbelievable.”
“That one” was “Claire.”
I still have no idea what Claire’s real name is. Even in death, she offers me nothing I won’t pay for—a stipulation she died for, an idea her soul can’t escape. If you want something, there is a price to be paid.
I left Ollie that night sitting at the stage, staring up at the long-haired brunette. I took one last look at her. She was the Lord’s undying light. Her brown eyes caught mine between flashes of neon and cries of joy from the gallery. I looked at her and she looked at me. She was small. She was focused. She was full of hell.
I grabbed the door handle and her eyes moved back to Ollie, who stared at her like a dope. He was full of imagination and alcohol.
I left. I went home.
I fell asleep.
I dreamt on and off throughout the night. Half of them were back at the Tea House, alive with all of the wonderful things that happened there. I sat glued to my vantage point, waking, every so often, to shake my head and wipe the sweat from my forehead.
And then I saw a bed. I saw sheets tossed around in a mess. A great stink rose from the terrible carpet.
I woke with my chest on fire and my head swarming with hornets. I told myself things. These dreams, I thought, they’re just dreams. They’re just loosely connected thoughts and pictures. I threw water on my face and told myself this, over and over, calming myself back into a state of comfort. The buzz of the empty night softened my head against the pillow.
I was asleep again.
I was back in the scene.
The moonlight crept in through the window, lighting the front of a young man, splattered with red, breathing heavy over a girl. His fingers slipped alongside one another, wet with the things that he’d done.
A monster on his chest gave me the thumbs-up.
My body flung out of the bed and I found myself standing alone in my house, facing the window and staring blankly out at the dark and unknowable world, humming to itself out there in the blackness. My eyebrows were stuck chasing my forehead, and my mouth hung open, catching the cold air between lost thoughts. My tongue ran slowly along my teeth and I could taste something horribly unnatural about the things I had just imagined.
I cracked my neck and took a piss. I thought about my daughters, briefly, and mumbled a little prayer. I shook my head and leaned against the wall with one out-stretched arm. Life, as I had previously understood it, was once again coming over me. I ran my fingers along the reality of my bathroom.
These were just dreams.
I tried not to think about it the next day. Christmas Eve provided the advantage of scattered thoughts, including a general feeling of gratitude for what little life I had. I thanked Christ and wished him a happy birthday. I called my daughters and left them nice little messages. Christmas songs played from the radio and filled my small house; I sat by a fire listening distractedly, counting old memories in my head. The fire crackled and spat warmth into the air, fighting the Lake Erie wind creeping in from under the doors and through the windows. I smiled at old romances, at family members far, far away, and toasted to myself and better days ahead.
I drifted off into a comfortable sleep. My name is Charles Bartholomew Williams, and I swear to Christ Almighty this is what happened:
I dreamt I was standing in a football field. It was just me and no one else, alone in an empty stadium. I gleamed under the lights. A cool air went easing through me and I found myself in a different time, in a different season.
“It’s Fall,” I said.
“To make you comfortable,” a voice replied, roaring through the stadium’s crackling old speakers. I looked up into the press box, and there was the far away outline of a young girl. I could make out her long brown hair. I could tell she was naked.
There was a long silence as more cool air eased in and out of me. Finally, she spoke again, her words echoing throughout the empty stadium. “He killed me.”
The words blew down to me and dug in around my eyes, drying them and not letting me blink.
“What?”
“He killed me, Charlie.”
I tried as hard as I could to make out who was talking. She was an American Girl. And she was a blur to me.
“Who killed you?” I finally asked. “Who are you?” More silence came over the stadium. The air ran along the grass and bent the blades at a natural green slant, angled toward the press box. My hair blew in the same direction.
“My name is Claire. And I was murdered.” Her words echoed all around me. The microphone static suddenly grew loud and harsh as her breathing quickened and gave life to the empty stadium.
“THE SON-OF-A-BITCH.”
And the wind changed direction, violently, and my mouth was all of a sudden open and swallowing the fierce rush of stadium air. The echoes went streaking through my ears and bounced around my insides.
I blinked, painfully.
And I now stood face to face with a bloodied skull. Its still beautiful brown hair was clinging to its mangled surface in patches. One eyeball blinked through the mess, the other hiding, beaten and broken, behind clumps of slop and hair and dirt. Only half of her mouth made sense. But she remained, and she stood and she breathed. Her naked body gleamed on undeterred, somehow unblemished and standing strong under the lights of the stadium.
The dead American Girl had come into focus. She was right in my face.
Her perfume remained, and it swirled and conversed with her open wounds, pulsating a mere few inches from my still open mouth. The wind picked up again, and all of this dug into my pores and ran confidently up through my nostrils.
It’s a part of me now. It rides around on my blood cells. It itches under my skin.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” she said, and she spoke softly now. “Oliver Kenneth Aradoni. He ended me. That guy ended me.”
Then everything went purple, and the stadium hummed and spun into a single pop.
And I was awake.
I sat up in my chair, panting as I realized I was being haunted by the Tea House’s finest lady.
I spent the rest of the night staring wide-eyed into the fireplace. I thought about Jesus. And I thought about Claire’s mangled face and her pristine body. I thought about the stadium, about the cool air. I thought about Oliver Kenneth Aradoni.
I didn’t let myself fall back asleep that night. I decided to go for a drive. The steering wheel felt real in my hand and so I rolled on under the night immersed in highway details, running, I guess, from all of my terrible thoughts. I mumbled to myself about Jesus. I hummed Amazing Grace. I prayed for my daughters.
I spent Christmas Day hustling around Cleveland drinking coffee and giving money to the needy. Something was for sale on every corner all the way down Euclid. The city was split down the middle and stitched with t-shirt stands, hot dog vendors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. I yucked it up with all of them. I was genuine and polite. I prayed for a peaceful night’s sleep.
And I nodded off in my car.
Back in the stadium, I woke up with my back to the goal-post. I faced the length of the field, which narrowed as it rolled out in front of me.
Hands covered my eyes.
—“Guess who?”
So I slid down to Akron. The tires on my truck threw dirty snow up into the highway air. My bloodshot eyes stared out at the great white mess, staggering my blinking with the rhythm of the windshield wipers. I said things here and there, swigging big gulps of hot coffee and letting out long, fearful breaths.
I pulled into downtown around noon. Police cars zipped by confidently on top of their snow tires, making their rounds. I examined them in my rearview mirror as I parked the truck, my knuckles white and firm on the wheel. Five minutes went by before I let go.
Without meaning to, I leaned my head back and let the heat from the floorboards crawl up through my jeans.
My head buzzed and my eyes closed.
A neon sign blinked above the stage, and she glowed and moved under its electric hum. I sat with my hands on my knees, my chin tilted up and my tongue clamped nervously between my teeth. It was just us again, glowing with a fluorescent green under the stage lights of The Tea House of the Dancing Lady.
Music played. Claire moved around—still bloody, still beautiful. She waited for me to speak.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, my palms turned upward, curious, afraid.
She seemed uncomfortable, though, and calmer than before. The music faded, and Claire stopped to sit cross-legged on the stage, facing off to the side and showing me the better half of her face. She crossed her arms to cover herself.
Quiet tears rolled down through her scars. My chest rose and fell, and my skin itched from the smell of her wounds and perfume.
“Ollie has to die,” she said, at last. “You know what he did to me, Charlie. He cleaned that room to a high shine and got out of town. I don’t have any family, no friends in town. The Tea House won’t notice. This place is a revolving door of random girls. I was born a victim. I died a victim. And it seems there’s no Hell for an orphan stripper, and no Heaven either.”
She sat still, letting the tears channel through the divots and valleys etched into her face.
“There’s just you,” she said.
“Me?”
“You looked kind,” she explained. “I saw you leave the other night.”
Gears flipped in my head and functions slowly turned to this, my new understanding of reality. The compliment slowed my thinking.
“And Ollie? Why?”
“He looked kind, too.”
“He killed you?”
“With his fists,” she quickly replied. Her mouth hung open at the end of her sentence. More tears fell through the green light, rolling down her neck and toward her collar bone. She stared at the wall, the good side of her face still facing me, motionless and upset. “I won’t let you sleep. I’m sorry. You seem kind, but he has to die. He has to die or life had no meaning for me. I’ll let you sleep as long as you’re on your way to him.”
She sobbed and sniffled for a long minute. I had no idea what to say.
“I want him dead, Charlie. Cut off his head. Throw it in the fucking ocean. Find out why he did it. Ask him why he did this to me.”
And I listened to Claire with great concern. I found hope in her story. She had spoken to me more in the last few nights than anybody has in the last few years combined. She confided in me in a way my daughters never did, in a way they never will.
I hoped for Claire. I was actually filled with hope.
And so she led me straight to the motherfucker. And I’m going to get his head and a reason why. The meaning of life, for all parties involved, depends on it.
She pointed me to Hawaii. He’s out here, all right, thinking he’s found safety inside a ring of active volcanoes. But I found my way to Oliver Aradoni. He trusts me, and so does Claire, and so I find myself alive, now more than ever. I find myself alive with purpose.
Ollie has invited me to his kitchen table again this evening. I have known Ollie for a month. There’s a lot to know about the guy, but one question remains unanswered concerning Oliver Aradoni.
The question is “Why?”
And one question also remains concerning Charles Bartholomew Williams. An old man will find out if he is, or ever was, worth a shit.
One life will end. Two will begin again.
This will be it.
Sincerely,
Charles Bartholomew Williams
Postscript:
January 21, 2000
This is what happened on the evening of September 30, 2000:
I walked over to Ollie’s with a pistol holstered on my belt. I left a gigantic hunting knife on the front porch before entering the little square of a house.
I was not fucking around. A life full of meaning was waiting for me.
I entered quickly, and found Ollie, like I usually did, drinking at his kitchen table. I sat down across the table from him and aimed my firearm directly between his eyeballs.
Ollie chugged his beer. He let out a long sigh, belched, and smiled to himself.
“You saw this coming?” I asked, half-interested.
He thought on it for a minute, toeing through a pile of peanut shells scattered around the floor. He spoke quietly.
“This is America,” he replied. “This is me. Nothing surprises me, anymore.”
I sharpened my tone. “And why is that, Ollie?”
His sheepish grin faded behind his cheek bones. He blinked a few times and slid his empty bottle around the wooden table, avoiding eye-contact. His breathing, slow and choppy, made the room come alive with truth and vulnerability. “You know why,” he said.
A silence came over us, and I coped with it by closing one eye and perfecting my aim, right between his eyes. He stared calmly ahead, straight into the barrel. Ollie has been dead since Christmas. I just didn’t know he was aware of it.
He was so young.
And he spoke so softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was pretty sure that’s how you managed to end up on the island. I never thought I could outrun what I did. I guess I came out here to count the days.”
He thought for a moment. “Which, you know, is what I’ve always done. I counted days, man. Being technically alive goes without saying. But, yeah, all I did was count the days.”
He paused and thought to himself again, young and stupid, young and afraid. “And I dodged forks. And I punted footballs. And I killed that girl.”
“Claire,” I interrupted. “Her name is Claire.”
Ollie nodded. “And I got to talk to you. You were nice to talk to—it was good to get to say some things.”
He took a few more slow, choppy breaths.
“Please,” he suddenly said. “Please shoot me.” His face didn’t budge. It was held up by a stack of lifeless ovals and rectangles, held together by a pile of sad and meaningless skin.
I stared blankly, pistol steady in my hand and hot with potential. “Just…please?” He was toneless. He was empty. He was asking for the end.
And so I asked the question: “Why did you do it, Ollie?”
My skin itched, and I felt Claire’s presence eagerly awaiting an answer.
“Um,” he mumbled. “I got a tattoo on my chest because I loved my mother very much.”
“WHY DID YOU KILL THE GIRL, CHARLIE?!” I punched the table and steadied the pistol. Empty picture frames fell from the kitchen walls.
He looked at his beer bottle, and then he looked at me, and then he took breaths to ready himself to say the very thing that I had come to realize haunted Ollie more than anything.
The tattoo was the only thing he understood for certain about his time on Earth.
There was no answer for why there had been two world wars, no reason why his grandfather would rather kill than shovel shit. There was no answer for why his mother’s breasts killed her, no explanation for why his father threw forks at him.
He chose to study biology with his eyes covered, with the point of a blind finger.
Ollie had no idea why he so deeply loved kicking American Footballs, or, adversely, why James Wright did not.
And so why had Ollie killed a girl he had just made love to?
It took him a moment to calm himself. He took his right hand and covered his heart, and then, with his eyes still wet with tears, he said: “Why? You want to know why, Charlie?! You want to know why I did that?!” Tears ran like crazy down his cheeks. He sobbed and sobbed.
He was so young. And he was so sad.
“I don’t know! Okay?! I just don’t know! Why?! You want to know why?! Why does anybody do any of the things they do?!”
I pulled the trigger. And his brains went everywhere. And I did it because you can only play stupid at your own expense.
Dead girls need reasons why.
The sad pile of ovals and rectangles and skin leaned back in its chair, head tilted back and arms resting comfortably on the table. Bits of Ollie flowed around the floor and stuck to the wall behind him as discarded peanut shells began to float like rafts in the puddle below.
I walked outside to retrieve the knife. The early evening sun warmed my face and gusts of Hawaiian breeze whapped the back of my head. The air felt dry and stale, and it followed me back into the kitchen, where my skin nearly caught fire with Claire’s anxious itch. Ollie’s body, leaning back as if ready for the procedure, was set up perfectly.
She was ready for the show.
And there stood an old man, his knuckles turning white with the grip of an absurdly large knife, staring at the throat of his dead companion, and suddenly a great lack of fulfillment caught up with him, caught up with me. I sat down across the table from Ollie once again, and there I reflected on my own life, on the girl that needed me to remove this man’s head. And I thought about my daughters.
I was stuck, for the first and last time in my life, with nothing to say about anything, with nothing to do, and with nowhere to go. Cutting off Ollie’s head was the only thing to be done, because it would give meaning to poor Claire’s victimized life. But somehow, that thought had lost its luster. This consumed me as I stared at Ollie’s head, breathing the stale air all around me.
I dropped the knife. And I took out my pen and paper.
And I sat here for the next thirty minutes running my hands through my hair and saying things to myself out loud. I ate a few peanuts.
At a certain point, I found that the kitchen, Ollie’s body, and the entirety of my mortal disposition had become all at once insufferable.
So, I confess, again, that I did this, that I killed Ollie. I shot him right where he sits. But I didn’t cut his head off, out of respect to his mother—the only person in this equation with the capacity for reasonable love and understanding.
I’m not going to fall asleep again to find out for sure, but hopefully some record of Claire exists at the Tea House of the Dancing Lady, and hopefully some sort of respect can be paid to her by someone, somewhere.
What I’m going to do now is very simple.
I’m going to leave this letter with Ollie here, and then I’m going to the beach.
I’m going down there for an understated finale, one just between God and myself. The thought of it makes my skin itch and burn with rage.
I think the thing to do now is to strip naked and go for a swim. I’m going to let the Hawaiian sunset fall all over me, and I’m going to swim out into the Pacific as far as I can, until my arms tire and fall to my side. It’s going to end out there underneath the Lord’s undying light, and the great sea will swallow me whole and make me anew.
The stale air won’t be able to follow me. And I will leave this rock the way I found it—searching, always fucking searching, for a life filled with meaning.
Tell people that I think old goofballs are the people who have it all figured out.
I hope the sea makes me light-hearted and goofy.
Today is the first day of the rest of my life.
Sincerely,
Charles Bartholomew Williams
1964-2000
Andrew Whitmer is a senior in the English Department at Youngstown State University. Upon graduation, his tentative plans are to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. Andrew served in the Ohio Army National Guard for six years, and began writing while deployed in the now independent nation of Kosovo.