Blood Men

by Paul Cleave

  I drive out to the prison, passing a couple of malls on the way where traffic is spilling out from the parking lot onto the road, Christmas shopping in full bloom now, people pushing carts full of groceries. There’s a billboard twice the size of a bus staked into the ground on the edge of the city advertising a brand-new subdivision, calling it the suburb of the future. I wonder what that means. I wonder if the billboard means Christchurch is stuck in the past, or that the new subdivision will resemble something out of The Jetsons. There is smoke drifting up from the fields, farmers burning off waste. Large irrigation units are watering crops under the hot sun.

  Sam’s bag is still packed in the backseat, full of goodies of death that I have to return to their rightful place. If Curious Schroder had taken a peek, things might have turned out very different.

  I don’t phone ahead this time. I park the car in the same spot and the same woman I spoke to yesterday is here today, the same smile-a smile that could make beached whales roll back into the water-falters when she recognizes me.

  “I’m here to see my father,” I say, as if there could be any one of a hundred reasons.

  “He’s been waiting for you,” she says.

  “But. . I didn’t phone ahead.”

  “Must be a miracle,” she says, but she’s wrong. I don’t know what to think about my dad figuring that I’d show back up. Mostly it pisses me off that he’s arrogant enough to think it, and I suspect perhaps arrogance is the wrong word since he was right.

  “You listened to the voice,” he says, once the guard has escorted me down to the visitors’ room. It was the same guard from yesterday and he gave me the same rules as yesterday, reinforcing the no-yelling one twice. There are fewer people in the visitors’ room, which should make it seem bigger, but somehow it has the opposite effect. Fewer people makes it colder, stagnant, far more depressing, it makes it seem the walls are closing in and I can only imagine what the cells must be like. The Carver isn’t anywhere to be seen. Nobody pays me any interest.

  I sit opposite him. He’s different from yesterday. Younger, if that’s possible-as though all this is rejuvenating him.

  “Let me ask you something,” he says. “You think being an accountant gives you the credentials to know what the entire sum of a man is?”

  “What?”

  “See, twenty years in here, I have them. A man is made up of many parts,” he says. “There are things within his core. They are shaped by his family, his friends, shaped by the blood that runs through him. Of course the events shape a man too. Those in the past, and those unfolding in front of him. I am the sum of many things,” he says. “You, your sister, your mother, they were part of me, as well as my own family, growing up. But it wasn’t enough to make me complete. I thought it might be, I mean, when I first met your mother and when our family began, I thought it might be enough. But it wasn’t. You and me, we’re made up from the same components.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I say.

  “You’re my son,” he says. “You can’t deny much of what is inside me is inside you too.”

  “You’re wrong. I can deny that because it isn’t true. You, me, we’re nothing alike.”

  “Why’d you become an accountant?” he asks.

  I lean back, unsure of his point. “I don’t know,” I say, shrugging.

  “Want to know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re going to hear-after all, it’s why you came out here.”

  “Then why ask,” I say, shaking my head. “Just spit it out.”

  “It was to make me proud. You wanted to be an accountant like your dad.”

  “Wait. .”

  “What for? So you can deny it.”

  “Wait. . you were an accountant?”

  “You were nine years old when I was taken away. Don’t try pretending you have no idea what I used to do for a living. You’re just like your old man,” he says.

  I don’t answer him. I don’t even want to think about it.

  “And the voice confirms it. My darkness and your monster-they’re as similar as we are.”

  “This is crazy,” I say. “You’re crazy. I don’t know why I came along. I hate myself for showing up yesterday. I’m going to go,” I say, but don’t make any motion.

  “You came here to learn,” he says, “not to dismiss everything I say.”

  “No. I came here because. .,” I trail off, suddenly unsure.

  “Because you want answers. Everything that’s happened over the last week. . You’re hearing the voice, aren’t you, Jack? It’s come back.”

  My dad smiles. It’s the same smile I remember when I was a kid, and part of me, one small part of what makes up the whole of who I am-at least according to my dad-wants to hug him, wants to cry against his chest and ask him to make everything better.

  “You’re here to ask for my help,” he adds.

  I lean forward and the guard seems about to say something, but stops when he sees I’m not leaning forward for a hug or punch. I lower my voice. “You said it was a good thing the cops had no idea who killed Jodie. What did you mean by that?”

  My dad glances up at the guard, who is openly staring at us, then my dad leans in too, and suddenly we’re pals, we’re whispering secrets-let the good times roll.

  “It means what you think it means.”

  “I think it means that you’re insane. That you couldn’t care less about what happened to my family. Or even to your family.”

  “No you don’t,” he says. “It means what it means.”

  “Which is?”

  “It means those men are still out there, awaiting justice, and there isn’t any reason it has to be police justice.”

  “Except for the law,” I say.

  “Did the law step in to save your wife?” he asks. “Does the law warm up the other side of your bed at night? Does it give your daughter somebody to look up to? Make her school lunches and tuck her in at night and tell her to have sweet dreams? Is the law there to hold your life together, is it there to hold your daughter’s hand and tell her everything is going to be all right? Was it there to stop the blood dripping out of Jodie’s body when she hit the road?”

  “Shut up,” I say. “I don’t want you talking about her like that.”

  “Twenty years ago, son, you weren’t ready to kill that dog, but the darkness, your monster, made you do it. You killed that dog and the police came sniffing around with their questions. The darkness tries to make you impulsive, son, and twenty years ago your darkness got me arrested.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “It was that damn dog. You killed it, and you invited the police into our neighborhood. Do you remember you wrapped the steak in a plastic bag? You did, and when you gave the steak to the dog you dropped the plastic bag. The bag was from home, son, and it had my fingerprints on it. They matched the prints found with the prostitutes. The police got warrants to search houses in the street because they knew a killer lived there. They came with their questions and then they came back with more. They searched the garage, son. They looked for the mix of sharp things you put into that steak, and they found them. But they found other things too. Other. . mementos.”

  “You kept things from the victims?”

  “Small things. Earrings, mostly. Sometimes a necklace. I couldn’t help myself. They came looking for fishhooks and nails and they found souvenirs of my women.”

  “You were. . wait, you were caught because of me?” I ask.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he says.

  “Honestly, I don’t know if I care whether it was my fault or not,” I say. And it’s true. Am I glad my father was caught and could no longer kill? Yes. Am I upset he was taken away? Absolutely. I think about what it means. On one hand I’m a hero. I saved future victims. On the other hand I betrayed my family. If I hadn’t listened to the voice, if I hadn’t killed that dog, my sister, my mother, they’d still be alive. I killed them as surely as I kille
d that dog. Last week I sacrificed Jodie to save a bank teller. Twenty years ago I sacrificed my family to save other prostitutes. What does that make me? Does it make me a trader in death?

  “Son, I’m not blaming you. You couldn’t know, and you were too young to control the darkness. Since that dog you killed, how many times have you heard it?”

  “Why are you telling me any of this?”

  “The men who did this, they have something inside them too, not a voice like we have, but something that makes them different. Each of them must have some criminal history,” he says. “Think about it, it’s obvious.”

  I think about it. I think about what Schroder said last night, our nice friendly chat about people getting locked away and let right back out, our nice friendly chat about what a huge revolving door prison is these days.

  “They’ve all spent time in jail,” he carries on. “Had to have. I’m betting some of them, if not all of them, probably met in jail. That’s what jail is, right? For me, it’s my home. I’ll never see outside of these walls again, but for these men it’s a place to learn new skills, make new friends.”

  I stay silent, but continue to listen.

  “Jail takes people in, it educates them in very, very dangerous ways, then it spits them back out into society. Most if not all of Jodie’s killers have walked in and out of these doors for various crimes.”

  “And you know who these people are, right? It’s why you’re telling me. You want me to find these people to satisfy your darkness.”

  “I think we can help each other out,” he says.

  “No way. This is bullshit,” I say. “I’m not helping you out.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing, son? Or would you rather let them go free? The voice can be a bad thing, son, but it can be a good thing too. You can use it to make the men who did this pay for what happened.”

  “To satisfy your darkness?”

  “No. To keep you sane. If you can’t control it the way I could, you’re going to hurt good people.”

  “Hang on a second. Are you saying you controlled it all those years?”

  “Of course. I gave in to it as well, in a way, but I controlled it. That’s why I never killed anybody who mattered.”

  “You killed eleven prostitutes,” I say. “How can you say they don’t matter?”

  “They don’t.”

  “They do.”

  “Compared to what? Compared to my own family? My friends? Our neighbors? They didn’t matter compared to anybody else I knew. Once you can control it, it’ll keep you from hurting good people. It’ll keep you from going off the rails and losing your daughter. The monster won’t go away now, not if it’s taking the steering wheel and making you do things. If you can’t control it, you’re going to be more like your old man than you ever thought possible. We’re blood men,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Other people, they’re attracted to looks, or money, nice jobs, all the hollow things in this world. Other men are attracted to tits or ass, women are attracted to smiles and eyes. Your monster, my darkness, they’re attracted to blood. It makes us blood men.”

  He stands up, and suddenly I realize that this meeting, if that’s the word for it, is over. I stand up too. Dad reaches over and grabs my hands.

  “No touching,” the guard says, and when Dad doesn’t let go, the guard comes over and separates us. “That’s enough for today,” the guard says, stamping his authority on us.

  Dad walks away. “I love you, son,” he says, but he doesn’t turn back to say it. “No matter what happens now, remember that.”

  I don’t know how to answer him, so I don’t. I walk away too. And it’s not until I’m in the parking lot that I look down at the folded piece of paper in my hand.

  chapter twenty-three

  I haven’t seen my father’s handwriting in twenty years. He used to help me with my homework. We’d lie down on the floor in the living room with the TV going but the volume mostly down, discussing why bees collected honey or how seven wouldn’t divide into twelve. He’d write things down for me, he’d read over my assignments and jot down ideas in the margins, other times he’d take notes out of whatever books I was searching through for answers. He has this elegant printing style, where the letters don’t bleed into each other, each one separate, easy to read, easy to recognize even after all this time. He always wanted me to be the best that I could at school. Those days come back to me, the smells of my mum baking something, or cooking dinner, the TV going, laughter, warm weather, a dog barking, school uniforms, life.

  Another car pulls into the parking lot. It’s a rundown Mercedes, the type that isn’t old enough to be classic, but nowhere new enough to be cool. There’s a long scratch running along the bottom of the passenger side. A guy, maybe around twenty, steps out of it, his dreadlocks bouncing.

  “Hey, bro, what up?” he asks, tilting his head upward as he does so. I immediately hate him. His T-shirt is full of holes and has I ATE AT THE BLEEDING BUDGIE all in capital letters across the front of it. No picture, no further explanation, maybe there’s a punch line on the back, but I don’t look. He realizes his mistake in speaking to me because I ignore him. He shrugs and heads in through the glass doors.

  The air in the car is so hot it almost curls the paper my dad gave me. I wind the windows down but it doesn’t help. I read it over a couple of times and think about what it means.

  LISTEN TO THE VOICE. SHANE KINGSLY. 23 STONEVIEW ROAD.

  I drive home, but the only voice speaking comes from the radio. The news comes on but the announcer ignores the bank robbery and doesn’t mention anything about the men being caught. I end up pulling in behind another slow-moving truck so I take a different way home, getting caught instead at a set of roadworks where the street has been ripped up and there’s dust and dirt in the air. There are exposed pipes and wiring and machinery but nobody around, the workers off for the Christmas break, the roadworks now in limbo until sometime next month. Tiny bits of gravel shoot out from beneath the tires of the car ahead of me, hitting the windscreen but not chipping it. My cell phone rings. I recognize the number.

  “You went to visit your dad again,” Schroder says. “Want to tell me why?”

  “He’s my dad. I don’t need a reason other than that. And I certainly don’t need to give a reason to you.”

  “You sound different, Edward.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You sound like you’ve been thinking about things, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like the kind of things you’ve been thinking.”

  Somehow I think Schroder is the kind of guy who might like what I was thinking-problem is I can’t share with him. “Are you ringing to tell me you’ve caught the men who killed my wife?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “I thought so. So why are you calling, other than to bust my balls for visiting my dad?”

  “To remind you not to get any bad ideas.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I think you do. I think you’re so lost right now you’re turning to your father for advice, and trust me, he’s the last person you want to be turning to.”

  “I keep thinking if you spent less time worrying about my life, you’d spend more time on catching the people who ruined it.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Edward.”

  “To who? Nobody knows who I could do anything stupid to anyway!” I say, and I hang up. He doesn’t call back.

  Back home I sit at the dinner table and smooth the piece of paper out, pressing it flat against the wood, pushing my fingertips and palms onto it as if ironing out the wrinkles. My house is still empty. No shadows, no presence, my wife even less here today than she was yesterday. I have a name and an address and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. Not once did I even think of giving that information to Schroder when I was on the phone, and weighing it up now I’m glad I didn’t. It wasn’t Schroder’s wife who got killed. Does that mean I’m
listening to the voice?

  I listen for it now. There’s nothing.

  I can’t go through what I went through last night. Can’t drive to this man’s house and. . and what?

  Let me help you.

  And there it is.

  “No,” I say, and the word sounds empty in my empty home.

  We can do this.

  “No.”

  Then let me do this for you.

  I go online and search for Shane Kingsly. He shows up pretty quick, he’s made the news on and off his entire life. Nothing big-not in the taking-a-life way of being big. He’s done plenty of shitty things. Plenty of theft convictions. He has some assault charges, and a couple of drug possession charges. Not all the statistics are here to tell me how many years he’s spent in jail on and off. His last sentence was for two years after he held up a service station with a shotgun. It doesn’t say when he was released from jail, but it must have been early for being a model prisoner-which I guess is easy to do when there aren’t any service stations or shotguns in prison. This man was one of the six, but he wasn’t the one who planned it. Is this the man that killed Jodie? He may well be.

  When the phone rings it’s my father-in-law.

  “When are you coming to pick Sam up?” he asks. “She misses you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” I hear myself saying. I’m on automatic now. “I’ve been busy. I’ve been at the police station all morning.”

  “Do they have. . any news?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you okay, Edward? You sound weird.”

  “I’m fine. Can I talk to Sam?”

  “Sure. Hang on a second.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Hello, honey. Daddy-Nat and Gramma taking good care of you?”

  “We’ve been putting up a Christmas tree,” she says. “They let me help. It was so cool. Will Santa bring something for Mummy this year?”