Heart of Ice

What she didn’t say was that they’d be driving, a grueling eighteen-hour drive from their small house in Portland. Mrs. Barton packed up Michael and Sarah early—before daylight. It was cold before the sun came up and Michael complained about it to his mother, but she ignored him. He tugged on Sarah’s blanket and swiped it from her somewhere in the mountains between Oregon and California. Later, he would feel bad about many things in his life, things that deserved major regret, but nothing compared with stealing the blanket.

Nothing seemed as rotten as taking that little piece of comfort from his baby sister.

Adriana Barton took the kids to the Denny’s across the street for breakfast because the park wasn’t yet open at that early an hour. Outside of ordering pancakes and bacon, she said nothing. Michael had seen his mom sad like that before. He knew that it had something to do with the fact that she and Sarah’s father weren’t getting along. Hadn’t gotten along for a long time.

“Mommy, don’t be sad,” he said. The words were practiced. He’d said them over and over whenever his mother cried.

“It’s OK, baby, you’re my big little man,” she said. “Always look out for your sister.” Her response was equally canned. No feeling. No warmth. Just a rote don’t worry.

But as much as she appeared to be an automaton as she slid deeper into the booth, blank-eyed, cold, Michael would later remember those simple words as the last words of substance that his mother would ever utter to him.

They parked the family’s dark blue Subaru in the Tigger parking lot. Michael could remember how cold he felt that day as they waited for the tram to take them to the gates, past the floral portrait of Mickey Mouse. He could feel the push and pull of the moment. His mom was sad, almost broken. His heart told him something was wrong with her, but all he really wanted to do was to get down to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

He gripped the hem of Adriana’s coat as she pushed Sarah in a stroller and they snaked through the long line, first under the bridge, then inside the funny smelling mix of children and chlorine that filled the entrance to the ride. And then down, down, down into the magical world of rubber pirates, barking dogs, and gold-painted treasure.

“Are you OK, ma’am?” a girl asked, snapping Michael’s mother out of a stupor as she sat in the boat at the ride’s conclusion.

“Fine,” she said.

As Michael Barton entered the archway that proclaimed Adventureland it was all coming back to him. He felt his heart work overtime, his breathing accelerated.

He gripped his own son’s hand and looked over at Olivia and the baby, pushed in a rented stroller. He wondered if it had been the same stroller that had once held his sister, so long ago.

Across from the kiosks that sold pineapple spears and coconut milk in coconut shells loomed the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House.

It looked more real—at least in its design—than he imagined, but more fake, at the same time. It also had a new name. It was now named Tarzan’s Tree House, for the animated movie. The Robinsons, it seemed had long since been evicted. Gone. Over.

He wished it had been the same for his memories. He thought they’d been vanquished. He remembered how he stood with his sister by that steel and concrete tree while his mother nervously tapped on the shoulder of a woman waiting for her brood to come down the bamboo staircase of the attraction.

“I have an important call,” she said. “Will you watch my children? Here.” She didn’t even wait a beat. There was no time for the woman to say yes or no. The crowd was thick, almost impenetrable. But Michael and Sarah’s mother found a little fissure among the throng and in a second, she was gone.

Gone forever.

Before he and Sarah ended up at the Anaheim police station, he remembered hearing someone talking in a low voice over by the pineapple kiosk.

“The woman’s been behaving strangely since she got here. She looked crazy, depressed.”

A young man in a safari costume joined a group of colorfully attired Disney workers huddled by the river ride.

“God, do we have to drag the damn lagoon? Can’t we just drain it? Why do the suicides always come here? Why can’t they jump off the log ride at Knott’s, or something?”

He didn’t know what “drag the lagoon” meant, but there wasn’t anyone to ask. His mom was gone.

How to do it? Why do it at all? The triggers that brought him to the place in which he’d find himself fantasizing about doing evil, doing harm, came at unexpected times. During mundane moments. Always uninvited. When working the ketchup dispenser cleanup detail at McDonald’s as a teenager, he found himself caught up in a memory of the first cat he’d ever killed. He hit the pump multiple times to empty it, in nearly a manic performance that brought glances from those closest to him in the fast food restaurant.

The red of the condiment was blood.

“Hey, easy on that, Mike,” a pimply-faced crew chief called from the other side of the counter while another worker, a girl, looked on with utter distain. “The dispenser is stainless steel, not titanium.”

“Oh, right,” he said. Inside his uniform, his heart was a drumroll. He hoped no one could see the excitement that he’d experienced looking at the ketchup. He was thinking of the blood, killing the Hansens’ cat.

He felt an erection grow and hurriedly excused himself. He flipped the RESTROOM BEING CLEANED sign into view and did what he needed to do to relieve the excitement.

The excitement that he hated more than anything. Why, he often wondered, had his brain hardwired unspeakable violence to an animal to his sexual organs?

It wasn’t all the time. After all, he did have the occasional girlfriend. He wasn’t a weirdo in bed. He didn’t strangle a girl as he made love to her. He wasn’t a killer.

And yet, the compulsion came to him. One time, when he was mowing lawns to make some extra money for college expenses, he flashed on catching a particularly annoying dog. It obviously hated him, sneering and barking whenever he arrived at the house to cut the lawn and weed the garden. He thought of burying it in the center of the lawn, up to its furry little neck, and running over it with a weedwhacker. The idea shifted to something even bloodier. The riding mower. It would be decisive, sending a red, bloody spray from the point of impact over the patio, onto the lawn furniture, arcing on the glass doors to the living room. The thought excited him, as always, but he suppressed it. He wished it away. He even prayed it away.

Then dormant, he’d go.

But the cycle was relentless. For a time, he thought marriage or fatherhood could abate it completely. And it did. He never acted on the compulsion to harm another human being or an animal. That wasn’t to say the thoughts didn’t come to him.

He thought of killing the loan officer at the bank when he and Olivia were applying for the financing and things were looking a little dicey. Credit scores out of college were always in the five hundreds. They jumped through some extra hoops and prayed that late payments on a big screen TV were not as big a deal as the jerk had insisted. Killing him would be good. But, he reasoned, what guy didn’t fantasize about killing someone who stood in the way of his future happiness?

The loan came through, and the man’s life was spared.

Another time the neighbor’s dog barked until all hours. It was the kind of barking that came only when he was desperate for sleep. If he hadn’t been so mad, he’d have laughed at the irony that the dog that barked incessantly didn’t seem to keep his owners awake. He could have pumped a couple of slugs in the mongrel’s head and they’d probably not even stir. But he didn’t do that. He simply opened the gate on the chain-link kennel and the dog ran out, chasing whatever it was that he had to chase.

Problem solved, compulsion to kill and torture gone.

He’d done some reading about his own psychological makeup, but he never really saw himself in the label of antisocial personality disorder. He wasn’t so messed up that he was a narcissistic person. In fact, he was too good for that.

Michael Barton never wanted to eat anyone, so he wasn’t Jeffrey Dahmer. He didn’t capture and torture girls like Joel Rifkin. He didn’t stalk young women, a la Ted Bundy.

Yes, he wet the bed into his teenage years. Yes, he tortured a few animals, but they were only animals, and he knew it was wrong. Yes, there was a slight sexual charge that came with the rush of what he was doing, but he could function normally, too.

Michael had his problems. He knew every one of them and how they matched up to evil, but he wasn’t like