Blood Men (14 page)

I turn off the interior dome light, then open the door. There are Christmas lights up on some of the houses, and in most of the windows you can see bright lights coming from make-believe trees. I lean against the car, then pull away from it when it sways behind me. I move around to the passenger door and open it and grab out Sam’s bag. I carry it by the strap, walk across the grass out the front of the neighboring house, then the strap on the bag unthreads because I’m holding the wrong one, the bag opens, and everything spills out onto the lawn, jangling and clanging against each other.

“Shit.”

Shit.

I crouch down and pack everything into the bag, careful not to get cut. I keep looking around for anybody watching, but nobody is, at least not that I can see. Everything goes back in okay, even the hat, which for some reason I’ve forgotten to put on. I grab it out and prick my finger on the knife.

“Aw, Jesus,” I say, shaking my hand, then sucking the cut on my thumb. It’s not much, but it hurts. I stand up and take a few more steps forward. I stare at the house, wondering why it’s different from when we drove past two minutes earlier, then realize I’m standing in front of the wrong one. I’ve led us the opposite way.

We turn around and head past my car toward the correct house. I don’t know what the next step is, I wait for my companion to fill in the blanks, and he does, because my monster is a real team player. He takes over and leads us up the path to the front door. I lean against the house while he puts his finger out and rings the bell.

Nice house. Nice street. A family street. Not a white-trash, let’s-rob-a-bank kind of street, but I guess those bastards can afford to live where they want.

The house is a single-storey dwelling painted one of those Latin-sounding coffee-color names. The yard smells of freshly mown lawn, small different-colored flax bushes have been evenly spaced out around the house, so even I bet they were measured out, some with red leaves, others with green. They’re surrounded by yellowy white limestone instead of dirt or bark, a tidy low-maintenance garden planted on layers of weedmat I imagine, the kind of garden Jodie wanted and the kind of garden we were going to have until Gerald Painter took all that away from us. There’s a silver birch tree out front with the roots climbing out of the ground and cracking the sidewalk.

It’s a brick home, a nice solid home, with a nice solid front door with thin pieces of glass striped down one third in from the left-hand side and one third in from the right-hand side, with a big
matte-silver door handle on the right. The bell is a small black box with a white button that buzzes for as long as you hold it. I can hear it buzzing as the monster holds it down. He doesn’t let it go until we can see a shadowed image moving down the hallway toward the door, slowly and not quite in a straight line, all detail of the figure distorted in the strips of glass.

The door opens. It opens my future and this man’s fate, this man with the bruises on his face and neck that resemble the bruises on mine. His nose has a small bandaged brace over it. He squints and presses his face forward to get a better look, and we want to shove the steak knife right into his head.

His eyes widen as he recognizes me—not us—just me—and for some reason he can’t see the monster, because a smile, not the your-wife-is-dead-and-it’s-my-fault-fuck-you smile, but a sad, sympathetic smile, stretches out beneath the bandaged brace.

“Come in,” he says, before either of us say a word.

“Thank you,” we say, and he closes the door behind us.

“I kind of thought you might show up,” he says. He walks ahead of us, he’s limping slightly, and he veers toward the left and has to keep correcting himself. As far as hallways go, it seems okay. Photos that seem fuzzy to me, a bookcase, a houseplant, all boring shit unless you lived here. He leads me into the dining room which is tidy and doesn’t have any beer bottles anywhere even though he seems drunker than me. “Take a seat,” he says, and there are seats at a breakfast bar of the kitchen, and we take one. It’s a few degrees warmer inside than out and a set of French doors are wide open, the dining room flowing out onto a deck where there’s outdoor lighting and a gas barbecue and a picnic table that’s turned silver in the sun. There’s a Christmas tree in the living room tall enough to touch the ceiling and thick enough to hold what must be about five hundred decorations.

“You . . . ah, you thought I might, might show up?” I ask, trying really hard not to slur my words.

“Can I get you something to drink? I don’t have anything alcoholic,” he says. “I did, until my wife poured it all down the sink. Doctor’s orders of course. Not that it stopped me from trying. I’ve got Coke or Sprite but it’s not the same. Want something?”

“Why’d, why’d you think, that, ah, that I was going to”—I suck in a deep breath and exhale loudly—“to, ah, show up?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Painter is taking on a slightly blurry complexion. It’s as though he’s standing with his identical ghost, his ghost living almost exactly in the same place but off by a few millimeters, so it looks like it’s trying to peel itself away. When I rub at my eyes the ghost disappears.

“Yes you do. You wouldn’t”—I take another deep breath and can taste beer, and suddenly I really have to take a leak—“wouldn’t have said anything otherwise.”

Painter is a man in his mid to late forties with a shaved head and dark eyes that don’t seem to focus well. He takes a seat at the kitchen bar, sitting slowly, exhaling heavily, and holding on to the bench at the same time. There’s a microwave in view behind him with a clock that doesn’t match my inner perception of time because it’s telling me I’ve already been here five minutes and I’m sure only one has passed.

“Since the . . . robbery, I’ve had problems,” he says. “Something in here,” he says, and he taps his head, and I realize the shaved head is fresh, “got broken. I mean, the doctors had bigger words for it, but if you ground those words up and put them in their simplest form, that’s what they’d say. I can’t walk straight. I reach for something and I miss. I take a piss and it goes all over the floor. I’ve got this ringing in my ears that won’t stop, and sometimes for no good reason I’ll just start to cry. It’s permanent too. They had big words for that also, but it didn’t matter how they tried to tie a goddamn bow on it, the gift was the same either way. Got this for life,” he says. “Can’t ever work again. Can’t drive. Can hardly ever go into public. Don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll lose my house, that’s for sure. I got insurance for what happened to me, but it doesn’t cover shit. But hey, look at me, bitching about what happened to me, what happened to me ain’t worth a damn considering what happened to you. To your wife and the bank manager.”

I put the bag up on the counter.

Open it, open it, open it.

We open it. My bladder is going to explode.

“You gonna say anything?” he asks.

“What do, do you . . . want to hear from us?”

“Us?”

Us? Did I say us?
No. I didn’t. “I said me.”

“You said us.”

“It was a, a mistake. Tell me. What do you want to hear?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you were expecting me,” I say, focusing really hard on the words.

“Not really expecting. Hoping, I guess, is the word.”

“Hoping? Why?”

“I don’t know why, not really.”

“Tell me.”

He spends a few seconds exhaling, grimacing at the same time. He can’t keep his hands still. “I can hardly sleep,” he says, “and when I do, there are always dreams. I didn’t see anybody die, but I know they did. I saw them after, you know, after they were shot. I saw your wife, I mean, I didn’t see her die, and I was still unconscious when they took me away, but I see her dying anyway. The reason I didn’t see it for real was I messed up and let them get me without a fight. I mean, they could have killed me instead, right? I’d rather have died trying than . . . than this. I dream about them, you know. About the men who did this. I dream about the ones who died. Your wife comes to me at night, in my dreams.”

“What does she say?” I ask, genuinely curious. She hasn’t come to see me yet.

“She tells me there was nothing I could have done.”

“You believe her?”

“No.”

“You’re pathetic,” I say, but the words aren’t mine. “Fucking pathetic.”

“I know,” he says, and tries to fight back tears.

“Stop crying.”

“I’m not crying,” he says, choking on the words.

“Jesus,” I say, slowly shaking my head, but I’m sober now, no longer in danger of throwing up. “You could have stopped them,” I say, my words forceful now, clear.

“You think I didn’t want to? Ah shit, it’s not fair, I mean, six of them, all with guns, and what the hell do I have?” he says, wiping at his eyes before the tears can fall. “Certainly no weapon of any sort. The bank gives me a uniform and that’s it. I mean, that’s not exactly a deterrent against professional bank robbers. Shit, I can’t even keep the damn skateboarders off the front sidewalk. I wanted to do more, I wish I could have done more, but . . . ah shit . . . ,” he says. “Are you . . . are you here to kill me?”

“Is that what you want?”

“I . . . I think so.” His hands are clenched and shaking. Tears are running down his face. “I . . . I don’t have the courage to do it myself.”

All those memories earlier today that weren’t memories, but more like reels of film of different scenarios that rolled through my head, they play out again, and in each one there is nothing this man could have done. One unarmed man against six men with shotguns. Each time he tried to protect us, one or more of the guns would put him in his place, his chest and head exploding into a ball of blood. “You could have saved my wife,” I hear myself saying, even though I know it isn’t true.

I reach into the bag and pull out a serrated steak knife. He doesn’t seem as thrilled about dying as he did five seconds ago, but he doesn’t move or try to fight me.

He cries harder. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “It should’ve been me, it should’ve been me who died.”

“You’re right. It should have been.”

“I . . . I wanted to do it myself,” he says, when we stand up and move closer to him. “But I couldn’t. I was too scared. I heard who you are and I wondered if you might come, if you were anything like your dad.”

“Edward the Hunter,” I say. I thought my hand would be shaking, but it isn’t, it’s firm and we hold the knife firmly and our nerves are steady. “I can’t fight my destiny,” I say.

“Please, just make it quick.”

“We will.”

“Thank you,” he says, but I’m not so sure he means it.

I head for outside, my hands shaking, the bag in one hand, the knife tucked away inside it. In the end I didn’t use any of the other supplies. Next time I’ll travel lighter.

I’m still in the doorway when a car pulls into the driveway. It’s similar to the one already parked there—same color, a bit smaller, equally as foreign. The passenger door opens and a little girl climbs out, and at first I can’t make sense of it. The headlights have blinded me, it’s dark out, so in that moment I think the little girl is Sam. No real reason for that—I’m at a stranger’s house, Sam is at her grandparents’, Sam will be in bed with Mr. Fluff ’n’ Stuff, curled up and asleep and dreaming of her mother. But the thought comes anyway, this little girl runs up to me and yells, “Daddy,” before she comes to a dead stop, staring up at me and then staring at the cartoon character bag in my hand.

The headlights turn off and the engine dies and the driver’s door opens. A woman steps out—Painter’s wife—and has noticed I’m
standing here, but hasn’t taken a good enough look to realize I’m not her husband.

“I thought maybe once we get her to bed, we might want to take a . . .,” she says, approaching me, and then, like her daughter, she comes to a complete stop.

“Who are you?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.

“I was just leaving,” I say.

“Oh my God,” she says, and the recognition is there now. “Oh my God, is that blood on your shirt? What have you done to Gerald?”

I don’t answer her.

She picks her daughter up and cradles her. I take a few steps toward the driveway and she backs toward the car.

“Gerald!” she yells.

He doesn’t answer.

“What have you done with my husband?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“What did you do to him?” she repeats. Her body pushes against the car and she jumps as if she forgot it was there.

I circle around her and she turns, watching me the entire time. The night is cooling off and clouding over. “Nothing,” I repeat.

“It’s okay, honey,” Gerald says, coming to the door. “He didn’t do anything to me.”

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. About as okay as I’ll ever be.”

“Are you crying?” she asks him, then she turns to me. “The blood on your clothes . . .,” she says, and trails off.

“It’s my wife’s blood,” I say and slowly begin negotiating a path toward my car.

“I know who you are,” she says. “It wasn’t his fault!”

“Honey, it’s okay,” Gerald says. “It’s really okay.”

“I know it wasn’t,” I say, and these words are mine now, clear and sober, they come from me, and when I get past the wife she puts her daughter on the ground, and the little girl runs over to her daddy and hugs him fiercely.

“Who’s that strange man?” she asks.

“It’s why I came here. To tell him I know it wasn’t his fault,” I say.
I turn toward Gerald who’s holding his daughter tightly. “It wasn’t. I know that now.”

I turn back to the wife. Some of her anger drains away, but she says nothing. Gerald keeps crying. Sobbing heavily now, tearful, deep sobs that make me angry, remorseful, and a whole lot of wanting to leave. I tighten my grip on the bag and continue toward the street. I hold it tightly to make sure it isn’t going to spill open like before.

The woman stays against the car but keeps watching me. “It wasn’t his fault,” she says.

“I know.”

“You know that now,” she says, “after being here,” she says, her eyes going to the bag for a quick second. “But what about before you got here? Did you know that then?”