Blood Sports (25 page)

“Love you, too,” he mumbled.

“Hugs and squishies! Have fun!”

“Bye,” Tom said.

“Catch lots of fish!” She seemed to be picking up enthusiasm as the phone call drew to an end.

“Bye, Mom.”

“Kisses!”

An endless period of smacking sounds, like deranged dolphin sonar, and then dial tone. Tom handed the phone back to Jer.

“She’d be easy to get rid of,” Jeremy said. “Give her enough money for a really big bender and then beat her to death and dump the body in an alley.”

The back of his neck prickled – not from the threat, but the casualness of it, the comfortable way Jer said it, as if he’d thought about it, considered his options and knew exactly what he wanted for dinner or which socks he was going to wear.

“I’m doing everything you say,” Tom said.

“We’re going to have a long day tomorrow,” Jeremy said. “Get some rest.”

He could hear Jeremy breathing, but Tom couldn’t tell if his cousin was asleep or not. Tom raised his hand and held it in front of his face. He couldn’t see it. His own breathing sounded like an overheated dog panting.

Trees scratched the window. Just a few days ago, he’d been so bored, he thought he was going to die if he stayed in the hospital another minute. Tom wished he was back. He wished Paulina was lying with him, thrashing around and hogging the blankets. He wondered what she was doing right now. He wished he could talk to her. She had a way of cutting through the bullshit that made
things clear when his brain was fogged. He tried to imagine what she’d say about this: lying awake in the dark knowing that in the morning you were going to bury the rotting bodies Jeremy had dismembered to fit inside the coolers.

“People aren’t that tough,” Jeremy had said. “It’s like de-boning a chicken. All you need is a little elbow grease and a decent carving knife.”

Left to ferment in an abandoned house, the bodies in the coolers had sloshed and rattled when Jeremy and Tom carried them to the truck. Tom didn’t think he was going to make it through tomorrow. Couldn’t imagine it. But Jeremy. Jeremy wanted him to clean up his mess. And Tom wanted to keep breathing. He didn’t want to be a problem that Jeremy would have to solve with kitchen utensils.

A trickle of a stream ran behind the shack. (Sunshine almost always) A John Denver song from the radio alarm looped in Tom’s head. (Makes me high) They used a dolly to bring the coolers down the path to the edge of the stream. Long grass slithered against their dark green hip waders. The thick rubber gloves made Tom clumsy as they manhandled the dolly into position. Jeremy opened the drainage plugs on the coolers. Brown sludge oozed into the stream, heavy trails that sank to the bottom. The sweet stench of rancid meat had a metallic undertone. Flies whined in the cool morning air.

Jeremy unlocked the first cooler. Deflated clothes covered humps of bones. How long did it take a body to liquefy? Something that burned his nose hairs and smelled vaguely like his mother’s home perm solution had been used to speed things up. Jeremy snapped a pair of tongs like castanets before he pulled the sopping
clothes out of the cooler and dropped them into an open garbage bag at his feet. He held up a black balaclava, paused, and then smiled at Tom as if he was posing for a picture, as if he’d caught a fish he was particularly proud of.

While Jeremy burned the clothes in the wood stove, Tom pounded the bones into fragments. They’d placed them in a thick sack and Tom wailed on them with a sledgehammer. The sun was high. Jeremy kept feeding wood in the fire. The heat in the shack was ferocious. Tom shed his gloves, shirt, hip waders – everything down to his shorts. He paused, dizzy. He caught Jeremy staring at him. Sometimes his cousin stared too hard. Tom used to think it was the coke, because he’d seen Jeremy stare at a rug or tree bark with the same intensity, like he had X-ray vision and you harboured a bomb he was going to have to diffuse. Tom lifted the sledgehammer and pretended not to notice. Jeremy snapped back to the present and fed more clothes in the fire.

Tom thought of Paulie to get through the rest of the afternoon. Little things, dumb things they’d talked about or done. A few days ago, they’d had a long, meandering chocolate discussion in front of a hospital vending machine, trying to decide what candy bar to get. She didn’t like cream-filled chocolates, but she could stand the nutty ones. She liked caramel, but not chocolate-covered caramel, which she said was overkill. They’d ended up with a bag of Doritos and Tom had fallen asleep on them and squashed them into crumbs.

“Is that my fault? You put them away. You have to find them yourself.” The woman rolled her eyes, smiling lopsidedly, half-turned
and leaning against the pay phone under the Carnegie stairwell, inviting Tom to participate in her telephone fight with a guy who was currently screaming through the receiver. “Well, then, you’re going to be late. Baby, I’m not a fucking psychic. I can’t make your keys fucking levitate to you so don’t yell at me. Stop yelling.”

Tom heard the people in line behind him shuffling impatiently, clearing their throats loudly, hinting at Not Psychic to hang up.

Not Psychic turned away from all of them. “Baby, I can’t do anything. I can’t.”

After waiting in line for so long, Tom realized he was going to have to make a phone call or look like a total doorknob. He didn’t have anyone to call. Jeremy wouldn’t take his calls since the blow-up with Chrissy, and his family was staying out of it. Tom could phone the Kingsway Motor Inn. See if his mom was home yet or still hiding out with the rehab boyfriend. He didn’t really want to talk to his mom. He was tired of the pointed, hurt silences and the unsubtle hints she wanted Tom to see a shrink. Maybe she was trying to help. Maybe it wasn’t punishment for having secrets that made her nervous. He wondered what she would do if she knew everything.

Someone pelted Not Psychic with an apple core. She glared behind her, her eyes shifting, studying them as she continued to argue with her boyfriend. But she finally took the hint and wound down, saying she’d be home with pizza slices.

Tom pulled a matchbook out of his pocket. The motel clerk patched him through to his room and the phone rang and rang and then was sent back to the front desk.

“You want to leave a message?” the clerk said, sighing, and from his tone, obviously hoping the answer would be no.

“I’m staying in room 220 with my mother,” Tom said. “Did she leave a message for me?”

“No,” the clerk said.

“Oh, okay,” Tom said. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” the clerk said, hanging up.

Paulina was gone. Tom waited by the desk, wanting to leave but also wanting to see her. He waited and waited because he had nothing better to do and nowhere better to go. He considered asking the other volunteers when her next shift would be, but then he thought better of it. He scribbled a note for her. Tom, here. Just checking in to say thanks for bringing me to
VGH
, for hanging out. His phone number, in case she didn’t run away, screaming.

“Does she know you?” the guy taking Paulie’s place said.

Tom nodded. “We went to high school together. We were in band.”

“What kind of band? Speed metal? Punk?”

“High-school band,” Tom said. “She was a flutist.”

“Man,” the guy said. “You think you know someone.”

The Kingsway Motor Inn was two stories high. Age had stripped the stairs of paint, revealing grey, grease-stained concrete that was black in the middle where everyone walked. A waist-high iron railing rusted all along the edge of the covered walkway. Dotted with the grey skeletons of plants, terra cotta planters now served as neglected ashtrays.

They had moved into the corner room on the far side of the motel the night they left Jeremy’s condo. Tom knocked on the door, just in case. She didn’t like to be surprised. The room was empty. His mother used to leave him notes telling him not to worry, that she was out with friends. He never thought he’d miss being called honey bunny, sweetie, doll face.

As it touched the horizon, the sun broke through the rain clouds, flared orange, and then faded. Tom leaned against the railing. He almost convinced himself he wasn’t watching for her. He brought a chair onto the walkway. Put his feet up on the railing. He smoked a joint, waiting for the soothing effect to kick in, for the blunt.

She hadn’t even left the phone number of the rehab boyfriend. He had no way to reach her. He resented the rising panic he felt, the pictures in his head of her body in an alley, washed in rain, lifeless eyes turned to the sky.

He wasn’t a kid. He could leave. He could get up and walk out, and she could take her passive-aggressive bullshit and eat it. Because that’s all it was. Bullshit. He wouldn’t do what she wanted so she didn’t want anything to do with him.

Let her cool down, he’d told Jer.

Jer with his head lowered, beer in one hand, sullen and silent.

His mother and her sudden need for space: days and days of not seeing her, worrying the way she wanted him to worry.

Jeremy was entirely capable of making their lives history, a sentence on D72 of the newspaper tucked in between the robbery gone awry and the car crash that held up traffic and killed a family of four. And she wanted to press assault charges.