The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  Actually, death waits for right before the beginning of a hockey game, an Anaheim Ducks game that I was supposed to attend. It had been well over a month since I had seen or heard from Dirk, and it was showing in my bank account. I couldn't afford rent at the frat house, so I hadn't paid it in two months, and I was still allowed to live there only because my drinking prowess was needed against the Chi Sigs up the block. Chris wasn't faring much better.

  Having quit BevMo two weeks after "starting" the crime scene business, I was definitely at Kerry's mercy. My credit card payments had come and gone unpaid, and I was a shoo-in for debtor's prison. I no longer even had enough money to go out and eat, let alone take Kerry out on dates. Instead, I sat in my closet all day counting broken dreams and subsisting on expired bologna sandwiches and warm, flat soda. (That last part isn't entirely true, but it frames the context nicely.)

  I was stuck in a new sort of prison, a type of hell that I wasn't sure I deserved. Around the frat, I was starting to develop a reputation as a user, a freeloader who talked a big game about a six-figure income. Feeling cheap, dirty, and nearly bereft of hope, I was tempted to start searching for another job. I still had faith, though, that somehow, someway, I was meant for this line of work.

  Kerry and I had scored her parents' season tickets to see the Ducks take on the New York Rangers on March 14, 2007, in what was promising to be one hell of a game if you're the hockey sort. I had donned my J. S. Giguere goalie jersey and Ducks hat for the trip down to the Arrowhead Pond when my phone rang.

  "Hello?" I mumbled, not recognizing the number on the caller ID.

  "Jeff, it's Dirk," said the voice. I waited curiously, wondering who the hell Dirk was. "We've got one," he eventually said when I failed to answer.

  "Oh, Dirk!" I said, the name having finally clicked. (In case you're wondering, his name's not really Dirk. Who forgets a name like Dirk?)

  "Can you be at my house in fifteen minutes?"

  Another silence, this one was shorter.

  "I'll re-give you directions on how to get here." We never had bothered to get together for any sort of training, and now it was too late.

  * * *

  I arrived wearing my crisp, black polo shirt, smelling of newness. I had a jacket as well, one of those SWAT-style jackets in black with an "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners" emblazoned patch on the back, but it was warm enough yet, even in late March, to forgo it. Plus, the jackets cost $150 each, and since Dirk hadn't told his wife he'd ordered them, he preferred if I would keep it on the down low.

  Kerry had been a split decision on the news of my first job. She was relieved that she wouldn't have to pay the bills entirely but annoyed that I was missing the game. I would be damned if I irritated two women that evening, so I left the jacket in my car.

  Dirk was loading his milk crates full of brand-new crimecleaning supplies into the back of his extended-bed 2500 Chevy Silverado. His crates were black, mine were red, and the truck was gray. The color scheme looked like what I thought a crime scene might. I loaded my crates next to his and nodded, nervous but trying to look upbeat.

  "Do we know what we're getting into?" I asked.

  "Nah, the guy, Martin, didn't say. It's out in Riverside, though."

  I maintained a positive outward appearance but groaned inside. Riverside was a dump. It was a dirty, dusty area from which the poorer people commuted to work cleaning houses for the poor people in Fullerton who were out cleaning houses for the rich people in Laguna Beach. Riverside made Fullerton look like Bel-Air.

  It wasn't so much the poor part that got me, though; it was the knowledge that at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday, the freeway would be a parking lot. There was no chance I was going to even make part of the game. It was an hour drive to Riverside without traffic, so with traffic it was going to be misery, and I was already beginning to have butterflies about the mission ahead. Serial-killer leanings or not, this was real.

  The most blood I had ever seen was when I was younger and my dad made me take down my tree fort, claiming it made the backyard look like shit. (Plus, at fifteen, I may have been too old for a "secret" tree fort.) I was pissed about having to rip apart the rotting planks attached to the overhang that I called my fort and was yanking at the nails angrily, forcing the crescent head of the hammer to act as leverage in prying the long lumber nails toward me.

  One of the nails slipped out too easily, though, and the hammer careened around, completing its arc when its sharp claws stabbed into my forehead. The blood rolled slowly across my vision, dropping down like one of those grand theater curtains, and I was sure I had cracked open my skull like a hatched egg. Death was surely upon me.

  I must have been shrieking, because I heard my father's voice below me, annoyed. He insisted that I climb down from the fort by myself, because there was no way he could come up and get me on the rickety ladder that barely supported my weight. I couldn't believe his ignorance; his eldest and most handsome son was going to be worm food in a place the worms couldn't possibly reach.

  Neither of us was in the mood for rich irony at the moment, though. The blood had washed out my vision completely, so I carefully put my hand out where I remembered the rusty metal ladder to be, perched against a beam. Descending slowly, the wet red drops plunking down onto my hands, I wondered how much blood was in the human body and how much was left in me.

  Guiding me into the house, my father was careful to keep me from dripping onto any carpeting or laundry between the bathroom and the back door, taking his time, unconcerned. I was melodramatic as hell, though, and crying out for last rites, which was a Catholic ceremony, but you couldn't have told me that at the time.

  With a washcloth soaked in cool water, my dad absorbed the blood off my face, restoring my sight. With the first glances of my newfound vision, I looked upward, marveling in the beauty of colors that weren't red. It was as if I'd never really seen the world before. (Like I said, I was melodramatic as hell. At that age, my parents had voted me most likely to be a homosexual.)

  As I glanced at my wound, I expected the puncture to be raw, exposed, and jagged, a bloody chasm with hints of white skull and pink, pulsating brain peeking through the punctured head vein. Instead, I was disappointed to see only a tiny ripple where the skin of my forehead had been nudged aside barely, resulting in something more akin to an acne scar.

  "Where's the rest of it?" I wondered aloud, hoping for some complicated answer about impacted contusions and how sorry my father was for making me take down my childhood playhouse.

  "That's it. Cuts on the head bleed a lot even when they're not serious," my dad said, matter-of-factly.

  I was robbed. I felt like that kid who didn't get his BB gun on Christmas. Although technically I was doubly robbed, because I never got a BB gun for Christmas either. My parents didn't like guns.

  * * *

  We finished loading up the truck, adding a wet-dry vacuum and a broom, just to be safe. Dirk gave a quick kiss good-bye to his wife while I gave a long kiss good-bye to my hockey tickets, and we were off.

  I could tell the traffic would be bad right from the outset. Lines of traffic snarled around the block, all cars impatiently awaiting entrance to the California 55 freeway heading north. We had a lot of time to kill but surprisingly little to talk about, both of us just exclaiming that we were glad to get a call, me especially.

  "The first of many," Dirk said optimistically.

  "The first of many," I agreed, daring to dream that it might be true.

  I stared out the surrounding windows of the truck as we crept down the freeway, our brand-new tools loaded in back. I was in awe of the vehicles traveling next to us, purposeful, oblivious. They were full of dads and moms and teens and poor Mexican day laborers stuffed into rusty trucks, all headed for home. None of them knew anything about Dirk and me, where we were going, or what we were in for that night.

  We finally made our way onto the 91 freeway heading east, and the traffic picked up a bit.

  "Do you thi
nk you're going to puke?" Dirk asked, smiling.

  "No," I said, suddenly uncertain. "You?"

  "Nah. I've seen these things before, as a sheriff…course I never cleaned one up before," he added, suddenly uncertain as well.

  The traffic let up further, as if God had cleared a path, special for us, understanding our divine purpose. Dirk geared down on the accelerator, nosing the large truck forward faster. I picked up the handwritten directions detailing how to get to the scene of the crime, consisting of a lot of off-ramps and streets I had never heard of before.

  Suddenly the truck lurched slightly as we ran over the shredded remains of a big rig's tire, left torn in the road. Dirk yanked the wheel hard, sending the Silverado barreling into lanes of traffic that I didn't have time to hope were clear. I expected a flash of memories—me eating ice cream, my first love, me eating more ice cream, me wondering why my first love said I was too fat to date—but the memories never appeared. Instead, we ended up on the side of the road under a freeway overpass littered with trash, a twin line of tracks behind us, the skid in the dust barely visible in the waning sunlight.

  "The tire's flat," Dirk said.

  I thought he meant the piece of big-rig tire we had run over, until I noticed that my section of the cab had an unnatural lean to it. It was like God had airmailed a loogie from heaven.

  "Shit," I said, cursing in front of Dirk for the first time and not caring how he took to it.

  "Shit," he agreed. He hopped out and took the long way around to survey the damage on my side. I clambered out—my fresh, black shirt cool from the air-conditioning that had been blasting inside.

  The outside of our large tire had ripped almost completely away from the rest of the rubber and hung down over the rim like a black bib.

  "What now?" Dirk asked, unsure.

  "We change it," I guessed.

  "I've never changed a tire before." Dirk shrugged.

  I couldn't believe that I was in the presence of the first forty-oneyear-old guy who had never changed a tire.

  "I think it's underneath the bed," he said, referring to the spare helpfully.

  We both searched around for what I imagined the jack looked like, but we could find only a piece of it. With frustration and night setting in, I climbed under the truck, the dust settling a thin, dirty haze onto my new shirt, but found no conceivable way of freeing the spare tire from its locked mooring under the truck. The only car I had ever owned was my sissy little red Cavalier with its sissy little quartersized spare tire that any idiot could put on.

  With our special, expensive, blood-detecting flashlights illuminating the phone's buttons, we dialed for a tow truck, Dirk now cursing up a storm.

  "Make sure you tell them we're in a dangerous area…the tow truck will come faster," I said, but Dirk was in no mood to take suggestions. Cars whipped along the expanse of freeway beside us, late workers racing home to those warm meals, slowing only to laugh at us as they passed. Dirk called Martin next and assured him that we were still coming, failing to mention the holdup of the tire.

  "Maybe Martin has a truck," I postulated after Dirk had hung up. "Maybe he knows how to get the spare tire down."

  Dirk shrugged off the idea coarsely and, still not open for input, squatted to survey the pieces of jack we had to work with, mumbling to himself. I wiped the dust from my shirt and arm hair in vain, and wished I had my jacket.

  Like a bald, chubby MacGyver fumbling with the pieces of tire jack, Dirk was able to jerry-rig a metal pole that would access the bolt securing the tire housing.

  An hour later, no tow truck yet in sight, we had the new tire on and the old one taking up space in the bed, next to our crates. Dirk canceled the now unnecessary tow truck, and we rolled on in the darkness toward a scene we could only guess at.

  * * *

  The street signs of this particularly rural area of Riverside were handmade and impossible to see while driving at night, so once again our heavy, silver blood-detecting flashlights came in use as we stopped at each intersection and climbed out of the truck to read the murky print. I could imagine banjo-strumming inbreds hiding in the dark and eyeing my crotch like it was a plug of Skoal and some Lotto tickets. After we had passed his house twice going forward and twice in reverse, Martin called us and directed us through his gate at a little before 9:00 p.m.

  He was taller and older than I imagined, a mostly bald white guy, most likely not inbred, standing barefoot on his gravel driveway in jeans and a white undershirt. Light blazed out of the front door ajar behind him, illuminating him and making him look angelic: our savior.

  "I…I…I…don't know what happened, really," he rambled on, his composure fading in and out. "I went to the store…my wife was sick…has been sick…and well, I wasn't gone very long, but she got ahold of the shotgun, and she took her head off."

  My first crime scene was going to be an old-lady shotgun suicide. I felt like I had swallowed a brick. I couldn't think of a more visceral introduction to my crime scene experience.

  Tittering with awkward uncertainty, we followed the barefoot Martin across his yard and into his house. The exterior of his faded yellow stucco, ranch-style house looked foreboding among the pale, moonlit "Hoovervilles" of Riverside. It was a low, one-story spread that took up a fair length of land in the rural country. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled its presence.

  Approaching the front door, a heavy wooden French job, I felt eerie and voyeuristic. Normally I would never see the inside of this home, and in that moment I realized what I liked about working in porn. It wasn't the act itself but the ability to see in past the window blinds and beneath brassieres and up dresses. It was like having superpowers, like x-ray vision or invisibility.

  I could walk where others could not, enter where others could not, and do both with impunity. It wasn't the fucking I liked but the power to watch others do it without repercussions. This was an odd epiphany to have at that moment, but I knew that once I walked through the door, my life was going to take on an odd slant, and I anticipated future philosophies of the sort.

  I had mentally prepared myself to mentally prepare myself once I got in the house, figuring that I had the time it took to walk from the front door to the bedroom to center my chi or whatever the hell it was that people did to focus for the unpleasant and the unknown. So when I entered the living room and saw the mess, I wasn't ready whatsoever.

  Blindly I had assumed that she had killed herself in the bedroom or the bathroom, but no. The view from the front door was unmistakably red and unbelievably pulpy. My eyes may have bugged out, but my jaw stayed firmly in place, as did any bile in my stomach. If I was going to throw up, it would have to catch me by surprise.

  My not throwing up was an important contribution to the team effort, as we were supposed to be conducting ourselves as if we did this all the time. I stepped from the front door across the foyer and down into the carpeted living room, which was streaked with red rivers fanning out in every direction.

  She had been sitting in a recliner in the once-white room, next to a little table holding her eyeglasses, her pills, and her TV Guide, the three now streaked with a melon-colored, flesh-toned sponge that could only have come from an exploded brain. Similar streaks, in various sizes and distributions, were etched across the wall behind her and onto a framed pastoral scene of a deer or two. Funny, it wasn't the pink color I was expecting, and yet when I saw it, it was unmistakable, even in dime-size flecks.

  The recliner had been hit hardest. Blood was soaking into the fabric, pooling in the corners and accumulating around more chunky red pulp. Starburst like, it had spread from there to stretch out and touch a couch up against the adjoining wall.

  I turned to face Dirk.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  "Yeah…"

  "Do you want to do this?"

  "…Yeah."

  I followed him out of the living room and into the dining room, where the old man had taken a seat at the dining room table.

/>   "She was in a lot of pain," Martin said, and it took me a moment to realize he meant before the shotgun blast.

  "It's a bad time, I realize, what with it being so recent," Dirk said, "but it's important that we start tonight to make sure that the stains will come out."

  "I understand."

  "The cost for us to clean all this up is $750, because we're going to have to take the carpeting and the recliner and the table and everything on the table near her, if that's okay…"

  "Probably also the picture," I said softly in my most sincere voice, not quite sure about the correct way to extract money and justify the cost to the grieving.

  "I can't pay that."

  "We can work with the price…"

  "No, no, no," Martin said, his lips and face tightening to reveal a momentarily stiffer, more youthful man, a military man with wellhoned reserve. "Look, I'm sorry to call you out here. I know you drove a long way. Just forget it; I'll clean it up myself. I was a pilot; I've seen this stuff before."