I, Zorn: Part One (Lordy's Love Whip)

I guess I ought to say a little more about myself before I get to my fellow weirdos. I don't like talking about myself if truth be told. The last guy who made me do it got a foot jammed up his butt. I stuck my bare foot so far up his croup, we had to be driven to the hospital where they mistook us for conjoined twins. The dude was a cop who stopped me on the highway. He interrogated me, forced me to talk about myself, so I responded with my foot. I tickled his tonsils with my toes all the way to the hospital, my knee shaping a bump under his ribs.

There's a reason I don't like to talk about myself. The reason being: I get confused. I mean I start to get confused when I talk about myself. I start to think I'm someone else. I've been told I have multiple personality disorder or some version of it. Some days I'm convinced I'm a large, aggressive Haitian woman named Marie Therese Duvalier. This gal Marie is an accomplished Santeria priestess and lives in a log cabin up near Anchorage Alaska.

For those who don't know, Santeria is a bona fide American religion, a blend of African spirituality and Catholicism, too bad for African spirituality. Marie is a Santeria priestess who earns her keep by rolfing loggers and mountain men. Rolfing is a type of deep tissue massage invented by a bony, antisocial invert named Rolf. Rolfing has nothing to do with Santeria but Marie's good at it, can rolf your muscles to warm mush in minutes.

Sometimes I wake up naked on the floor at dawn convinced I'm Marie Therese Duvalier. Other times I wake up with a loud whinnying sound, convinced I'm a Mexican-Irish migrant laborer named Hernan Calderon O'Hanlon. This guy Hernan masturbates horses at a West Texas stud farm. I mean that's how he earns his living. Sometimes thoroughbreds don't mate like they should so the females have to be artificially inseminated with jizz jerked off the males. The job sucks like a bionic porn star but someone has to do it so that's what Hernan does.

I become Marie and Hernan when I'm confused and I get confused when I talk about myself so that's why I don't like to do it, but I guess I'm going to have to, here. A man's got to introduce himself before introducing his friends, you dig. And you folks out there ought to have a fair idea who you're dealing with. I don't want to be accused of misrepresenting myself to the great unwashed. I do aim to keep it brief though. I'm not here to put myself on display. I'm here to present a bunch of weird genuises and their whacked out stories.

I was born back in nineteen hundred and forty two and that's the tragedy entire, in a nutshell. If I hadn't been born I wouldn't be here wishing I'd never been born. My mother was Native American, a Lakota full-blood from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. My real father, also Lakota, died when I was two, murdered by agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Five years later a weird-looking preacher came to the rez, a white man named Gilson Reilly. He came to civilize us heathens with the support and approval of the Feds, same shit different century.

This guy Reilly was a hellfire and brimstone type, preached up a storm in the local church. He'd stagger around the pulpit foaming at the mouth and gibbering in tongues while we sat in the pews weeping with laughter. The sermons ended with him thrashing about on the floor, pissing and farting as his voice rose to a shriek. The man looked and sounded like an albino buzzard but my mother married him anyway. It's taken me fifty years to forgive her for that. It wasn't her fault if truth be told. She pretty much lost her mind after my old man died. His violent extinction caused a meltdown in her head and left a void that Gilson Reilly filled.

Next thing I knew, we were in this shitty little Texas town named Howaxahoochee, stuck in a shitty little house by the railway tracks. By 'we', I mean Reilly, my old lady and myself. I was eight when we moved there and sixteen when I finally left, eight years of pure hell, worse than the Hell Reilly talked up in his sermons. The abuse began soon after we moved there and didn't stop till I slaughtered his sorry ass eight years later. When I say 'abuse' I'm being euphemistic. Torture is what it was, the kind you work with whips, chains and branding irons.

It wasn't just me catching hell. My old lady caught her fair share. She even asked for more, hoping to spare me some. But Reilly was pretty democratic with his affections, an equal opportunity sadist. My old lady tried and failed to escape with me a few times, which only made things worse. A month after my sixteenth birthday I walked into the living room and found him muttering over his bible with one hand in his crotch. He used to let me walk around the house then, figuring I was too cowed to escape.

Your mother's gone, he said, she ain't comin' back. Gone, I said, gone where. He laughed high-pitched and catarrhal, his fangs showing yellow. Gone, he repeated, she ain't comin' back. I knew then that he'd killed her. I was sure of it. I didn't know where she was or how he'd done it but it didn't matter. What mattered was the weird light in my head, between my eyebrows. I went down to the basement and found the clown suit I'd seen there once. Then I went up to his room and found his shotgun. He never figured I'd be brazen enough to do that. I didn't either. I'd sneaked into his room once years back and he'd found me and damn near killed me.

But I wasn't afraid anymore. My head was like a butcher's freezer, my thoughts in arctic suspension. I walked into the living room in my new clown suit, shotgun in hand. Whut the HALE you think you doin' boy, he asked, his lipless mouth twisting in a snarl. I proceeded to show him. Show him what I was thinking. I took my time with it, really savored it. I used the gun to hold him in place while I trussed him up like a turkey. Then I dipped a sock in gasoline, jammed it in his mouth and went to work.

I used everything he'd used on us but I singled out the branding irons for special application. That and the flogging knout he liked to call Lordy's Love Whip. I see it now as I saw it then. Reilly screaming like the pope in that Franis Bacon painting, his eyes bugging blue-veined, gasoline spit dribbling from the sock in his mouth. His scalp seemed to whiten as I worked him over, fine lines of blood forming in dark filigree. I was the happiest I'd ever been and I wept in spasms of orgasmic release, hot salt tears running into my mouth gaped open in soundless laughter.

Reilly kept nodding out through the night but I roused him with the smelling salts he used before his sermons. Everything works in your favor when you have a purpose. It was near dawn when I finished with him. I'd started on him an hour past sundown and worked steady through the night. I should've been exhausted but I wasn't. I was shaking with nervous energy, my vengeance burning white in fulgent crucifixion. The wall behind him was bare when I began. It looked like a lurid expressionist mural when I got done, its surface streaked and blotched with bits of flesh, bone and blood.

I stared at that mural a while, entranced. Then I struck a match and set fire to the sock in Reilly's mouth. The house was a ball of flame when I left it an hour later. My old lady's corpse was in there somewhere but I didn't look back. I walked out of town with Reilly's money in my pocket and a bag over my shoulder. The bag held some of my essentials and sandwiches I'd packed for the road. It also held Lordy's Love Whip, the flogging knout I'd wielded all night in ecstatic catharsis.

I hitch-hiked to Dallas and took a bus north. Five days later I was in South Dakota, heading into the Pine Ridge reservation. I stayed on the rez for the next three years fully expecting to be apprehended by the state police. But the cops didn't come and I remained in hiding as I studied with a medicine man named Theodore Running Wolf. Under Running Wolf's guidance I discovered abilities I never dreamed I had. Psychic abilities and spirit powers that'd lain dormant, awaiting their summons.

I awoke one morning under a blue Dakota sky and found Running Wolf standing over me. You got to go, he said, it's time. The cops, I said, they're here. No cops, he said, you're done learning. Time for you to head out. Head out where, I asked. He gave me a strange look, his old man's eyes bright with sapience. You know where to go, he said, and you know what to do. I'd ask you not to do what you're gonna do if I thought it'd make a difference. But it ain't gonna make no difference. You gonna do it anyway. It's what you was born to do.

I left the rez that same day with a knapsack on my back. The sack held everything a drifter might need. It also held Reilly's flogging knout, the one I'd killed him with. I wandered the country over the next six years locating my victims and flogging them dead. I say 'victims' but they weren't victims. They were monsters of Reilly's ilk, wife-beaters and child-torturers every last one. I never had any trouble finding them. I could tell who they were just by looking. You'd be surprised how many of them there are in this country, new ones sprouting up every day.

I flogged them dead with Lordy's Love Whip and left no trace. If you check police records you'll see their faces under Missing. Serial killers tend to slip up at some point, but I never did. My crimes were bloody but always perfect. Perfection is hard to achieve when you're flaying grown men dead but I did achieve it. I said I was a genius and it's true. I'm a born genius with pronounced shamanic talents and I used those talents to deadly effect, just like I was supposed to. Old Running Wolf had been right as always. This shit was my personal telos, my raison d'etre. It's what I lived for, what I was born to do.