killer on the road.

He did a long, slow circle around the house, now and then glancing in a window.  When he came around the add-on bathroom, he could literally smell the water, vividly, like it was calling to him, lighting on his nasal hairs, but he could also catch a whiff of the sewage, but not terribly so.  No not so much.  But the water.  And you might think him insane, our part hound-dog to actually smell water, but I tell you it just depends on what else is in the air.

The nose can ferret out such things when the breeze is still and the only sounds and smells are coming from between the hills, around the house.

Then she, seeing him before he came full in front of the window, was looking at him, but not seeming to really imply anything-that Marlboro beauty that you either immediately recognized or just never noticed.  He paused, froze in his tracks for a second, thinking for a few seconds she would react, but she never did.  He was like a fly under a microscope to her, or maybe less than fly, at that.  He was scenery, maybe, like a part of the flora and fauna, no more a remarkable part of the place than stray animals that might wander out from the scrub growth at the edges of the yard.

He prayed for a moment, just a word to God, though part of his mind had leapt through the window already, before that, and part would want to go later.  But he could feel his own stupid feet, as if they were trying to press down into the ground, like burying themselves under their own clumsy weight.

He felt cool on his lips, then realized his mouth was opening, and he was breathing heavily through his open mouth, pulling great gulps of air that were cooling his lips and tongue.  And oh he needed water, now, his tongue feeling like it had been dipped in sand.  This much brought him fully back to himself.

He gathered himself up and walked on, slow like before, perturbed now, but with his prior resolution intact.

Approaching another window, before the porch ahead, he began to hear something beating, something insistent, fervent, as of some kind of wild native dance.  He listened, wondering what could it be, the haphazard formless drumming.  Sometimes the beats would overlap, like there were many different beats running at the same time, almost like a construction crew at work on different parts of a house at the same time, hammering here and hammering there at the same time.

Hammering everywhere.

It was a couple in the window, under blankets, asleep in there bed, with maybe the younger down the hall just getting ready for bed, causing him to pray, pray for himself, pray for her, pray for her beauty, pray for her sanctified breasts and bared back, as of a refrain from a hymnal, whispering in his ear, or was it his own thoughts?  And the other two, asleep, almost laughably so, with a sound like shoes in a laundry machine, shoes being spun, banging against the sides of the metallic drum of the machine.

There was a pain through his temple, immediate, sharp.  He flicked two fingers, as if to reach toward the pain and knead his flesh, but he relented, and moved his shoulders ahead towards the side of the porch.

He sat on their top step, those woods people, and waited, the pain coming and going, the birds flitting around, grasshoppers popping through the grass.

He was thinking he would pose them all after he did what he wanted, pose them like they were sleeping peaceful, sleeping as if hungry for rest, with a kind of lazy gusto.

They would look like they were sleeping.