Cube Sleuth (15 page)

“Just—”

“Fuck off. I’m serious.” She eases herself up and limps to my bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

I know something’s up. I knew it when she wouldn’t let me kiss her. I tiptoe to the bathroom. I turn the doorknob enough to see that it’s locked. Nothing in my apartment building works, and I know that if I push hard enough, the door will open. I used to walk in on Nancy while she was peeing just to torture her.

I push the door open. Helen stands with her shirt lifted above her bra, her hand tracing her bruises. She snaps toward me, her eyes wild. “Get the fuck out!” But I’ve already seen. She has six or seven lacrosse-ball-sized bruises on her left side. Not the kind of bruises you get from a fall. I bet if I had gotten a closer look before she pulled her shirt down, I’d have been able to see that her bruises were shaped like fists.

She lunges forward to punch me. I don’t flinch. “Who did that to you?” I already know the answer.

Helen stares at me, her rage melting into contrition with each delicate breath.

“I’m gonna kill him, Helen. I might literally kill him.” I crouch down and dig under my bed for my little league bat.

“You don’t get it.” Her voice is uncharacteristically sweet.

“What’s to get? He beat the shit out of you, and I’m gonna crack his hick skull open and see if there’s actually anything in there.”

“He didn’t beat me up.”

“Oh, was it just some new karate where you ram your torso into the guy’s fists?”

“I fucked him, Bobby.”

I roll onto my back and glare up at her, gripping my bat.

“I went to see him. I wanted… He’s rough. I needed that. You can’t…” She sits on the bed and pats the bruises through her shirt. “In the middle of it, he got carried away. Guess he wanted to get back at me for leaving him.”

She sounds so matter of fact that
I
want to punch her. “I could be rough if I knew that’s what—”

“It doesn’t work if I have to tell you. It just has to come out.”

I pace in the living room with the bat in my hand. Helen sits on my bed in silence. My rage builds. Rage because Theo cracked my girl’s ribs. Because she isn’t my girl, never was and never will be. Because I’m not good enough for her, can’t satisfy her. I feel small. “Are you back with him now?” I stand in the bedroom doorway, patting the bat in my left palm.

“We’re done for good. Don’t do anything stupid.”

She doesn’t say she’s sorry. I stare at her and understand that she isn’t sorry. She has no loyalty to me, so she can’t really betray me. She doesn’t love me. And I don’t love her, because I’m not hurt. Just jealous.

One thing Helen and I have in common that doesn’t involve the R-word is that we don’t need anyone but ourselves to punish us for our sins.

“You can leave now.”

“Bobby.”

“Look around and get whatever’s yours.”

“Bobby.”

“It was fun while it lasted, but I’m glad it’s done. We can stop using each other as Ron-fillers now. I’m not Ron. You’re not Ron. I’ll always be Ron’s friend to you. You’ll always be Ron’s girl to me. I deserve a beating worse than yours for trying to steal you from him, even if he’s gone. I’m despicable. And you’re a piece of shit. We deserved each other, and now we deserve to be alone.”

“Bobby…”

“If I get arrested for what I do to Theo, you better testify for me. You owe me that.”

“You’re all talk.”

“Hope so.”

“You come at him, he’ll shoot you. Bat versus gun isn’t a fair fight.”

“I better get a gun, then.”

Helen smirks. “Bobby, can we…?”

“Get your stuff and get out. You have ten minutes. I’ll help you find it all if you can’t bend down.”

Helen’s face contorts like she’s about to cry. She ducks into the bathroom.

I throw her shirts, bracelets, and DVDs into a trash bag and leave it by the door.

I lie on my couch absorbed in the final act of
Old Boy
when Helen drops her overnight bag beside the trash bag. She stands by the door with her arms folded and watches me cover my mouth in shock as I find out why the movie’s protagonist, Oh Dae-su, has been locked up for fifteen years.

Helen steps beside the TV. “Can we talk a little?”

“Go home. I’m watching this. You should rent it and watch the ending. It’s blowing my mind here.”

She moves in front of the TV. I sit up and pause the DVD. She kneels in front of me and looks up at me like a little girl. “Don’t let me leave like this. We’re friends. We need each other.”

I let a tiny smile sneak through my scowl and I pat her head. “Is Theo right-handed or left-handed?”

“Right. Why?”

“So I know which hand to break.”

* * *

Alone in my apartment, I watch the credits drag across the screen.
Old Boy
is about the destructive power of revenge. By the end, the main characters are ruined in body and spirit. With a bat resting at my feet, perhaps that’s a message I should be contemplating.

But I don’t dwell on it. Instead, I think about the scene where Oh Dae-su uses the claw end of a hammer to extract one tooth for every year of his captivity from the man who kept him locked up. I then replay the scene where Oh-Dae-su defeats more than a dozen men at once with the same hammer.

I decide to strike while the jealousy is hot; attack Theo before I lose my nerve. Besides, I’m lonely now. What better do I have to do?

* * *

“If you ever touch her again, I’ll cut your hand off.” Resting the bat on my shoulder like a home run hitter, I turn and walk toward my car.

Theo’s neighbor’s porch light comes on. An old man in pajama bottoms with a hairless potbelly waddles onto the porch, shotgun in hand. A pony-sized Rottweiler hunkers down the steps in front of me.

Theo shouts after me, “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead. I’m gonna find you and blow your head off! I swear to fucking God.”

I make eye contact with the old man as he levels the shotgun at me. I duck into a thicket of trees and run like hell.

Even though this old man might shoot me or his dog might swallow me whole, Theo’s threat is what scares me. I went overboard with his hand, and he owns a lot of guns. What the hell was I thinking? His hand will be in a cast, his bones held together with pins and screws, and he’ll spend his recuperation plotting my demise.

I make it to my car, surprised by my incredible speed. As I start the engine, a shotgun blast screams from behind me and blows a crater in a nearby tree. In my rearview mirror, I can see the old man marching toward my car, shotgun raised. His pony dog is far ahead of him, almost to my rear bumper. I peel out in a wide circle that momentarily puts my tires in a ditch on the other side of the road, then speed off before the old man can get a look at my license plate.

And to think I was afraid of cougars, monkeys, and emus.

* * *

Driving home, my brain fills with different scenarios of how Theo will kill me.

I walk to my car one day and find the windows smashed. I take out my cell phone to call the cops and Theo pops up from behind a parked car and blows my head clean off with his shotgun.

I get up in the morning, groggily brush my teeth. I open my shower curtain and find Theo aiming a pistol with a silencer on it at my throat. With a quiet
peowww
, the bullet slices through my neck and comes out the back, breaking the bathroom mirror. Theo watches with a crazed grin while I lie there gurgling, hands over my throat, blood flowing between my fingers.

But unless the old man did somehow see my license plate, Theo knows nothing about me but my first name and that I was Ron’s friend. I don’t think he even knows I worked with Ron.

The only way he can find out my whereabouts is by beating them out of Helen. That is, unfortunately, a distinct possibility.

Unless he finds Ron’s blog and it mentions me.

Or the Not For Mixed Company website.

Shit. He’s gonna find me. And I’m gonna die.

The sunlight burns my eyes when I fling open the door to the outside. I run past the adjacent office building, huffing and puffing. I picture my personal trainer jogging beside me with a disappointed frown.

As soon as the bridge comes into view, I see all the lanes in both directions filled with stopped cars. I see an ambulance trying to wedge its way onto the bridge. A half-dozen onlookers stare over the rail, their faces too small to see their expressions. I follow their line of sight down to where Eve’s mangled body lies across the rocks in this shallow part of the Schuylkill. Blood and tissue droop from Eve’s temple onto the rock beneath her head. I see a flash of the three-dimensional stains inside Ron’s Jeep.

I climb down the steep bank and enter the river under the bridge. The water comes up to my knees. The current is very strong and I fall twice before I reach Eve’s body. I refuse to accept the idea that she’s dead. You couldn’t get her brain back into her head with a shoehorn, and I’m crouched over her feeling for a pulse.

My pants are covered in mud, my hands in blood. My clothes are soaked through. I want to cry, but can barely breathe. I take off my dress shirt and drape it over Eve’s face.

Cops and EMTs with a gurney scurry down the steps of the bridge as I sit down on a rock beside Eve’s fresh corpse. The cold river water, the same color as the leak in my apartment, pulses through my pants and tries with every surge to pull me into the stream. I sway forward again and again to keep myself upright.

My thoughts disconnect.

My body grieves but my mind tells me to be relieved.

I knew something terrible was going to happen; I should just be glad it happened through Eve and not directly to me.

It’s not like she wanted anything to do with me anyways; I haven’t even lost a friend.

My mind tells me that I should feel triumphant. This is the I-told-you-so of a lifetime. Everyone was wrong except me.

Eve dies three months after Ron’s death, a month after I smash Theo’s hand, and less than a month before I get my Five Years of Service Award.

However, several important things happened between the day I have batting practice at Theo’s and the day Eve takes her final walk across the Fayette Street Bridge.

Let me get you up to speed.

The day after I use Theo as a piñata, I tell people at work that the bruise on my cheek came from my encounter I had with a mugger. I saw the mugger taking an old lady’s purse from across the street. I walked toward them yelling “Stop!” in the hopes that he’d run away. Instead, he ran right into me, purse in hand, and elbowed me in the face. He made off with granny’s loot.

I figure that if I fail comically in my story, people will be more likely to believe it. It works. The pats on the back from friends make me uncomfortable. One person calls me a demi-hero, a term I hope will catch on.

My mom rewards me for my heroics with Duncan Hines yellow cupcakes. To the despicable liar go the spoils. The guilt I feel eating them doesn’t diminish their deliciousness. You wouldn’t think that cake named for its color instead of its flavor could be the culinary delight that it is.

Helen has left me a bunch of voicemails since I kicked her out of my apartment, begging me to give her another chance. In one message, she sounds like she’s crying. It tickles me to see this side of her. I feel powerful. She texts me I LOVE YOU twice a day for a week. I don’t respond.

When she texts with THEO TOLD ME WHAT YOU DID. YOU’RE DUMB AND CRAZY, BUT THANKS, I text back YOU’RE WELCOME.

Unless Theo calls the cops or gets some friends after me, I won’t have to deal with him until his hand heals. It took mine hand six weeks to recover; Theo probably had emergency surgery and will need twice as long. After a week, I stop taking my bat with me to my car, stop jabbing the bat into the shower curtain before I open it.

In the lonely days after banishing Helen, I think about Nancy a lot. Helen cheating on me with Theo helped me fully understand how much I hurt Nancy. I understood the betrayal, but now I know the true pain of being cheated on: the unshakeable notion that you’re not as good as the person your partner turned to for whatever you lack. Since you’re unlikely to get an honest answer from the cheater about this lack, you start to doubt everything about yourself:

I’m too short, too balding, too pale, too plain, too paunchy. I’m not muscular. I’m not social enough. I have hairy toes. My breath stinks when I wake up. I get pimples on my back and butt. I have an overbite. I don’t know anything about politics or current events. I curse too much and say inappropriate things in delicate situations. I’m moody and reclusive. I lie too easily. I avoid confrontation, take the easy way out. I don’t make enough money. I have poker debt. I have a temper. I have no direction in life, no ambition. When people tell me about their problems, I drift off unless the story is really, really interesting. I have a wandering eye. I’m much nicer to women I want to sleep with. I make fun of people too much. I sleep too much. I masturbate too much. I’m lazy. I fart all day long. I’m too picky about food. I’m allergic to dust, cat hair, dog hair, pollen. I’m lactose intolerant. I have chronic migraines. I repeat my jokes to as many people as will listen. I think I’m better than other people. I haven’t prayed in years, unless I need something. I never go to church. My vocabulary is too small, particularly for an editor. I’ve never traveled outside the continental United States. I don’t speak any foreign languages. I have a weak chin. My hands are veiny. My voice is scratchy. I don’t know how to smile in pictures. I’m claustrophobic. I’m cranky when I’m sick. I don’t clean my apartment enough. I never give 100% to anything. I can’t write. I talk too fast. I wear the same four outfits over and over. I’m a quitter. I do everything I can to avoid the consequences of my actions. I’m a terrible amateur detective.

Thoughts like these will stick in your mind the way gum sticks to hair. Nancy had it worse than I do because she gave me years of her life and all the sacrifices that go along with a relationship; I was only with Helen for a few weeks.