Guitars and Other Instruments: ie. Guns

            It’s surprising how knowledge can change your perspective. Now, dear friends, let’s proceed to learn how to differentiate functions and dispatch our myopic mindset by exposing ourselves to all the possibilities. Oh God. AP Calculus is quite obviously rendering me delusional. No. By knowledge I’m not referring to concrete facts and logarithms. By knowledge I mean my awareness of the fact that four members of the Clutter family are going to die. Spoiler, this is not. Before gnawing my eyes, please do read the very accessible summary on the back of In Cold Blood. I hadn’t read it before I delved into the text. I just thought that, well, duh, six people die, and the whole novel would be a mystery as to who it was. But it isn’t. The summary specifies who died and who exactly went to jail. I now think of the Clutter family and, quite frankly (and pathetically) I’m sad to know that Dick and Perry were the killers. I thought Mr. Clutter would pave a gradual road from sanity to inevitable madness.

            Maybe the former were unjustly convicted? One can only hope. (Yes, because everyone obviously hopes it’s the deranged father that ends up encasing his entire family in a bloodbath and not the two convicts.) I think that’s just my morbid side.

           

            Mr. Clutter is what appears to be an okay man, save for the fact that he is obsessively self-controlled and opposed to drinking and smoking. Any stimulant, really, and he proceeds to fire anyone he sees involved in any of the like. That just made me harbor some dislike for the man, probably because it seems like a pretty ludicrous thing to do unless the worker is a raging alcoholic who is the Hulk personified. And so it is so astounding and thought-invoking when his daughter, Nancy smells smoke everywhere and narrows down her options to her dad. She voices her concerns to her best friend: "Why do I smelling smoke? Honestly, I think I'm losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it's as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette.” And I just can’t seem to fathom just why it is Mr. Clutter, hater of anything smoke and alcohol would resort to doing such a thing.

            Like Mr. Clutter whom never smokes or drinks (or so we think), Perry,  “the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee.”

           This seemed kind of ironic to me, given that he was in a café. From now on, I’ll go to ice crap shops even though the idea of frozen dairy makes me hyperventilate (Not really.) Either way, Perry was in the café and the narrator says that “now, thanks to a letter, an invitation to a "score," here he was with all his worldly belongings: one cardboard suitcase, a guitar, and two big boxes of books and maps and songs, poems and old letters, weighing a quarter of a ton,” and I fell in love. The man’s possessions rendered me speechless. A guitar happens to be my favorite instrument and one I play daily, books are my ever-present companions, songs are my transportation to peace, and poems and letters are just pure poetry that hypnotizes. And the guy travels. I can imagine his cardboard suitcase slathered in quotes and postcards, and drawings from all over the world, pure culture emanating from that sole entity. Too bad he turns out to be a killer.

           

            Or does he? Tun Tun Tun. Another thing that captured my interest, apart from his obvious great taste for the finer things in life, was when I read that “only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its [Olathe, Kansas] boundaries again.” Why? What is it about Olathe, or any place actually, that would significantly make a person swear never to come back to it? It irks me.

           

            But what irked me, or rather, astonished me, the most, was when the reader got an inside look into the other ‘instrument’ he and Dick had:

            “Another sort of instrument lay beside it - a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, brand-new, blue-barreled, and with a sportsman's scene of pheasants in flight etched along the stock. A flashlight, a fishing knife, a pair of leather gloves, and a hunting vest fully packed with shells contributed further atmosphere to this curious still life.”

            Curious, indeed.