Blood Men

chapter fourteen

The media called my dad “Jack the Hunter.” They played the angle up and seemed real excited about the symmetry it suggested. He was a modern-day Jack the Ripper with almost a perfect name for it, the best, in fact, unless of course in the late nineteenth century the real killer’s name was Jack Ripper.

Before he was caught, there was no name for him. There wasn’t really much of an interest. A prostitute would go missing and nobody would care. Another would go missing two or three or four years later and nobody searched for a connection. Then some of them showed up. Somebody somewhere figured out that prostitutes over a twenty-five-year period were dying in bad and similar ways. The media told the country about it, but they had no catchy title. They called him the “Prostitute Killer,” and the articles were small and easy to miss. Then came the arrest, then came the statistics, then came the connection to a name in history from the opposite side of the world and my dad became the worst kind of celebrity.

I’ve never visited my dad. We may share the same name and DNA but that’s all. I spent nine years of my life being Jack Jr. before going by my middle name. Sometimes when I was in trouble at home, Mum would call me Jack-son. She would save that name for when she wanted my dad to deal with me. I was his son and his responsibility, like when I failed a subject at school or cut the hair off my sister’s favorite doll. Belinda would call me Jacky in the times before our lives changed, and kept telling me I looked like a girl.

My last memory of Dad is that shy, humble smile of his, flashed at me from the back of a police car, his head twisted toward us, not a hint of shame in his features, almost a look of relief in some ways, as if he didn’t have to hide his true self anymore.

I’ve seen him a few times since, but only on TV and in the papers. Nobody has taken a photo of him in about eighteen years, not since he got snapped dozens of times being led from the back of a van to the back steps of the courthouse. Only reason I knew he was still alive was because nobody has ever rung to tell me otherwise.

I don’t know whether you have to phone ahead or simply show up, but once I drop Sam off I use my cell phone and call directory and ask for the number. A minute later I’m on the phone to the visitation department. I ask for directions and compare them to a map that’s about ten years out of date but does the job.

It’s a thirty-minute drive from my in-laws’ place. I take a shortcut out behind the airport where the roads are narrower but have a higher speed limit. There are cars parked up off the sides, the front windscreens facing the runways on the other side of the chain-link fences, people inside them watching for hours on end the planes come and go. I head down a highway enclosed by pastures, the road edged with fir trees and wildflowers. There are large transmission towers growing out of the fields and shrinking off into the distance. The road markings are all faded from the sun and worn from constant traffic. Mailboxes stand to attention every kilometer or so where gravel roads twist off from the highway between fields of gorse, winding their way toward large farmhouses built to capture the sun.

The prison is hidden out of sight beyond fields of trees, well away from homes that escapees would visit within minutes of being on the run. The complex is a mixture of several buildings, several wings, all made up of concrete blocks and interconnected with more concrete blocks, the whole place with an industrial feel, as if inside are not the condemned, but men welding steel and creating the machinery that runs this city. Just concrete and steel everywhere, and wire too-plenty of razor-sharp wire tying the look together. A couple of guard towers up in the corners, unarmed men up in them staring down, ready to sound the alarm at the first sign of trouble. Behind it all the tall skeletons of cranes at work, dust in the air kicked up by heavy equipment, engine noise from the bulldozers and cement mixers carrying for miles. There’s a long wing with scaffolding erected near the end and workmen busy on extending it, big burly men covered in grease and sweat who all possibly live within the walls they’re creating.

The visitors’ entrance is far more modern, like the entrance to a three-star hotel. There are large glass doors that seem as though they could be opening into a well-furnished foyer. The entire thing has the fresh look of renovations, and I wonder about the reasoning behind it. I’m not sure how it looked in the past, but the last few years have seen plenty of add-ons and updates to accommodate the new and the aspiring criminals this city is producing. Already some of the large open grounds out here have been zoned for more buildings, more cells, more inmates, and the grounds immediately nearby are already being converted. There have been editorials in the papers lately suggesting they build the concrete walls around Christchurch City and save some time; some even think we should take the biblical route and fill those walls up with water. I never believed them. I never knew Christchurch was really this bad-but now I know it’s worse.

There is a landscaped garden with a lush lawn heading toward the glass doors. I’m not sure what image they’re trying to sell here, but the whole thing seems very corporate. The doors open and it’s air-conditioned inside, which is a relief, because the parking lot with the asphalt has to be over forty degrees. A woman watches me from behind a reception counter with Plexiglas separating her from me. There are two men back there with her also. Three video surveillance cameras stare down at me from different angles within the room.

“Can I help you, sir?”

It’s like a bank in here, large potted plants, chairs everywhere, the counter with the smiling woman. If six armed men burst into this room I don’t think they’d get far. For the hundredth time today I wonder where those men are, and know they’re about as far away from this prison as you can get.

“Sir?”

The visitor’s entrance may be fresh and friendly, but the woman behind the desk is not. She’s in her forties with the kind of steely look that could scare half of the inmates straight. “Ah, yeah, I’m here to visit somebody.”

“Name?”

“Mine or his?”

“Both.”

“Ah, I’m Jack Hunter,” I say, hating the sound of the name, and saying it because that’s the name my dad will have given them. “My dad is. .”

“Jack the Hunter,” she says, and she flinches away from me, just a little, but enough to notice. “Hang on a moment,” she says, and she buzzes for one of the guards. “Take a seat.” I do as she says in case she stands up and throws me into one.

It takes a couple of minutes for the guard to appear. He’s older than me and a lot bigger and looks as if he can’t wait for me to say the wrong thing.

“This way,” he says, and I follow him.

“No touching,” he says. “No yelling. No passing any objects. That’s pretty much all you got to know, but you break any of those rules and you’re out of here. You get me?”

“No touching, no yelling, no handing over anything. I get it,” and I wonder if the rules are the same for everybody.

The corporate image disappears. We head down a concrete hallway to a heavy metal door, passing an office on the way full of video monitors showing images from the prison. There are a few guards there, and one of them comes out and pats me down and passes a metal detector over me. It beeps a few times and I have to leave my keys and wallet in a tray. The original guard leads me toward another door. It’s buzzed open, and then we’re in another corridor. Another metal door. Another buzzing sound. The guard opens the door and takes a step back. “In there,” he says, and then he follows me inside.

I was expecting a row of phones with a thick piece of Plexiglas between them, covered in palm prints and scratches. Failing that, it’d be an interrogation room, my dad handcuffed and shackled to a chair. Instead it’s a large room with about a dozen tables. There are plenty of other prisoners in their orange jumpsuits talking to family members. One of them I recognize, a man very much like my father. I’ve seen him scattered over the pages of the papers, his face always on TV. He’s sitting opposite a woman and a man in their midsixties-perhaps his parents, because the woman is an older, female version of him. The man is the Christchurch Carver, and the media made the connection quicker with him and hyped him up as the city’s most infamous serial killer-even though he has maintained his innocence. The Carver looks up at me. He’s got a scar running down the side of his face and an eyelid that’s all twisted and doesn’t seem to fit right. He smiles and his broken eyelid droops.

A door at the opposite end of the room opens, and my dad comes through, a guard right behind him. For a second I’m back in time, watching his smile, then I’m further back, Dad throwing a ball with me, hugging me at night, putting a Band-Aid on my knee or removing a splinter, and back then Dad was the best dad in the world. When I was eight years old I even bought him a coffee mug that said the same thing. The mug lied. The memories lied too. He walks over toward me, but before he can reach out the guard following him reminds us of the no-touching rule-which is perfectly fine with me.

“Hello, son,” he says, and I wonder if he rehearsed what his first words would be to me. I don’t answer him. I don’t know how. “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown,” my dad says, and he sits down and I keep standing.

“You thought I’d still be a kid?” I ask.

“No. Not at all. Take a seat, Jack.”

“It’s Edward these days.”

“Not to me.”

The thing that strikes me the most is how much Dad has changed, but at the same time how much he is exactly the same. He has to be in his midsixties at least, though I’m not sure of his exact age. He could almost be seventy. He looks seventy, if that’s anything to go by. He was as large as life when I was kid-perhaps that’s because he was out there taking everybody else’s. He was a bigger man, certainly, but in jail the weight has slipped away from him, and my memories are old, and the combination of them means the man sitting ahead of me is not the man who raised me for the first third of my life. The time here has not only taken his weight, but also his hair. He’s bald on top with a ring of grey hair around the edges, and sideburns that don’t seem to match. He hasn’t stopped smiling since the moment he saw me, his lips peeled back, showing teeth that are slightly crooked that I don’t remember being crooked. His jaw is covered in stubble, his eyebrows longer now, hair sprouting from his ears and nose. But his eyes, his eyes are the same. Warm, friendly, smiling blue eyes that look at me with tenderness, and the wrinkles to the sides of them, the small wrinkles that appear when he smiles are the same, and Dad could be a hundred and ten years old and you’d still know him by his eyes. Is this me in the future? Is this the face I will one day have?

“It’s been a while,” I say, finally coming up with something. I sit down and the guard takes a few steps back and tries to pretend he isn’t listening to what we’re saying while Dad’s guard wanders off to the other side of the room.

“You got no argument from me,” Dad answers. “It’ll be twenty-one years next winter. That sure does count as a long time.”

Fact is, it’s the longest time anybody has served in this prison. Your run-of-the-mill murders get you ten to twelve years with parole. Less if you find Jesus. But Dad strung himself together a collection of ladies that was too long not to go answered for, so the wheels of justice ground in a new direction for him and he became the first person ever to be given “life” where “life” actually meant he’d never step outside of these walls again.

“I have a granddaughter,” he says. “Did you bring a picture?”

“No,” I answer, even though there is one in my wallet. I don’t want this man seeing her. I don’t want this man being part of her life, and by the time she ever has to learn of him he will hopefully be dead.

We stare at each other and I offer nothing else. I hardly know what to say. I always thought I would. I thought I’d scream at him, and suddenly I’m finding there’s something to be said about being with your dad again after all this time. Maybe I didn’t stop loving him at all way back then.

“I’m sorry how it turned out,” he says, and he spreads his hands magician style, as if he thinks his words carry more weight if he can prove he’s not hiding anything up his sleeves. “With your mum. And especially with Belinda. I loved that little girl. It almost killed me what happened to her.”

“You talk about her as if she was somebody you met,” I say. “She was your daughter. My sister. And you were out there taking away other parents’ little girls who were doing the same thing.”

“True,” he says. “Very true. But I still cry at night. I cry for the little girl I lost. I cry for the woman she never got to become.”

“You never got to see who she did become. She gave up everything for me. She did your job and she did Mum’s job and in the end it killed her. She’s dead because of you. Mum’s dead because of you.”

“I know.”

“You know? That’s it? When you cry, is it from remorse or from guilt?”

“Always from both,” he says. “Always.”

“I doubt that. I think you cry because you got caught. What do you want?”

“I wanted to see you. I’ve always wanted to know how you are. I try to keep track as much as I can, which isn’t much. If it hadn’t been for Jodie, I’d never even know you were. .”

“What?”

“Married,” he finishes.

“What do you mean about Jodie?”

“She told me she’d never tell you, but she came to visit me. Twice.”

“Don’t you dare lie to me, Dad. You start lying and I’m out of here.”

“It was eight years ago-the year before you got married. I think twenty-two is pretty young to get married, to be honest, but she didn’t come to see me about marriage advice.”

“And I don’t need marriage advice from you,” I say. Especially now, I think. “Why did she come to see you?” I ask, my stomach twisting into knots.

“The first time was to meet me. To see what I was like, maybe to see how life could have gone for you if you hadn’t met somebody like her to keep you happy.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Mum couldn’t make you happy? You make it sound like it was her fault you killed those people, that if she’d been a better wife then. .”

“That’s not what I mean at all,” he says, holding up his hand to stop me.

“Then what?”

“It was a poor choice of words. Son, I never meant any of this to happen.”

“You didn’t? Thanks, Dad. That’s wonderful to hear. I wish I could repay you for those kind words. Maybe if you ever get out of here we can hang out together, maybe go bowling.”

“The second time,” he says, ignoring me, “she was pregnant.”

My stomach tightens. I hate the idea of her sitting out here, facing my father, exposing her deep-down fears, telling him she was scared that the things he did would run in the family. I hate the idea she exposed Sam to this kind of evil. I’m immediately angry at her for that. Angry at her for coming here, angry at her for dying.

“She was a real nice kid, and I didn’t hold it against her for hating me. I’m not kidding myself, I’ve got no friends in this world, and I’ve done nothing to deserve any, and anything she had to say to me I’d heard before.”

“What’s your point, Dad?”

“Dad. I like the way that sounds.”

“Enjoy it over the next two minutes. You’re never going to hear it again.”

“I want to meet my granddaughter.”

“Out of the question. Why did Jodie come to see you the second time?”

“I have a right to see her. She’s blood.”

“No. She’s nothing like you and she’s nothing to you. Why did Jodie come back?”

“She came to tell me you were a good man and I didn’t deserve to have you as a son. She told me I would be a grandfather and would never meet my grandchildren. She told me I had ruined a lot of lives, but yours wasn’t one of them. She said she was fixing the damage inside of you that I’d done. She wanted me to know you were a good man and were going to make a great father. That was her gift to me, Jack. You were one lucky man meeting her, and you did the right thing by getting a ring on her finger as early as you did.” He leans forward. “But you are different. You’re my son, and she sensed it in you.”

“Shut up.”

“I really am sorry about what happened to her, son. A waste, such a waste. I have some idea what you’re going through, and it’s hard, son, it really is hard, and no matter how hollow it sounds, it’s true when people tell you that time does help. It doesn’t heal, but it helps. You will move on, and you have Sam, and if she’s anything like Jodie then you’ve got a beautiful little girl to look after.”

“I know, I know,” I say. “If it weren’t for her. .”

I trail off, and neither of us fills the silence for a few more seconds until Dad leans forward and looks me right in the eye. “Have you heard it yet?” he asks.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, leaning back.

My dad leans back too, imitating me, but then he crosses one leg over the other and taps his fingers on his knee.

“When you were a kid I used to take you and Belinda to the park. You remember? There was a fort there you’d always play on. Had a tire with chains on it that had been turned into a swing. There was a pole you could slide down. There was bark everywhere, and bars you could climb, ropes and chains you could hang from.”

“This going anywhere?”

“There was a merry-go-round there too. You two used to play on that thing so fast that when you came to a stop and stood up, you’d fall over, dizzy as hell, clutching onto the ground as if it were moving, trying to keep it still.”

“What is this? Some kind of father-son moment that you saw on TV and are trying to emulate?”

“One day, when you were eight,” he says, “when we were there, there was a man there too, walking his dog. It got off its leash and ran over to the fort where you and Belinda were riding the merry-go-round. You came to a stop and spilled off it, and the dog, it was all excited and tried sniffing Belinda. She got scared and she ran.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It ran after her and tried to bite her, and she kept running and trying to watch the dog all at the same time, and she got off balance. She ran right into a tree and knocked herself out. Got her forehead grazed up. You remember what you said when we were carrying her back to the car?”

“Not really.”

My dad leans forward, and in a lower voice, he tells me. “You said you would kill it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Six months after that, the dog a few houses down from us that always used to bark, you remember that dog. .?”

“Not really.”

“It was the same dog from the park. This big black dog with a lot of bark. That dog got itself killed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a long time to be angry at an animal,” Dad says.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think I noticed the steak was missing?” he asks, his voice low now, and I hadn’t noticed but I’ve leaned in close to him. “I told your mother I’d taken it. She never knew it was you who killed that dog. But I knew. Is that when you first heard it?”

“You’re delusional.”

“I think it probably was. You might have heard it earlier but didn’t know what it was. It would have taken a while to build up the courage. I first heard it when I was the same age,” he says. “This voice that was different from me, these thoughts that weren’t mine. They told me to do things that I didn’t want to do. I refused-in the beginning. Then I gave in, hoping it would shut the voice up. Soon the voice was the same as my own, and in the end I couldn’t even tell the difference.”

“You’re sick,” I say.

“I know. That’s what I said twenty years ago. Hell, I’m not so unreasonable that I know hearing a voice isn’t right. But right or wrong, I heard it. I don’t blame you for never coming to ask me about it, but. .”

“I should never have come here.”

“When you killed that dog, it was because you were hearing a voice of your own.”

“I didn’t kill any dog.”

“What happened after that?” he asks. “Did you keep hearing the voice, or did it disappear? Have you been giving in to it all these years? Are there graves out there waiting to be found?”

“I’m nothing like you.” I begin to stand. He reaches across and grabs me, and before the guard can say anything he lets go. I sit back down.

“The darkness. That’s what I called it,” he says. “I know you’re listening to it, but you also have to control it. If you can’t, it will take you to places before you’re ready. It doesn’t care if you get caught-it just wants to see blood. You have to rein that voice in, need to come to an understanding with it and, if you’re hearing it now, and I’m sure you are, then you have to find a way to stop it from overtaking you.”

“I have no darkness.”

“It never goes away,” he says. “At night I can hear it whispering, but I have no outlet for it here. It’s faded some over the years, sure, but it’s still there, no denying that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To protect you,” he says, “from the same thing that happened to me. Please, son, let me help you.”

“I call it the monster,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can stop them, and Dad slowly nods, and for an awful moment I think my dad is going to smile, and say something sickening, perhaps a that’s my boy, but he doesn’t. The warmth goes out of his eyes and he stops nodding.

“That’s a shame, son. It really is.”

“I never knew what else to call it. I figured you had a monster, and when you went to jail, it came to live with me. Came to live inside me.”

“Not my monster,” he says. “You proved that by killing the dog before I went to jail. You have your own darkness. I wish I could help you more, and I would, if I was out there with you. Son, word around here is that the cops have no idea who killed Jodie.”

I stare at him blankly.

“She didn’t like me much, but I could see she was a good person. She was a good wife, I bet, and certainly a great mother, and I owe her for what she did for you. What happened to her-that’s a shitty thing. A real shitty thing. Yet if you ask me, the fact the cops haven’t caught anybody, that’s a good thing.”

“What?”

“It’s a good thing, son. Think about it.”

“What are you on about? How the hell can you say that? What are you? What in the hell are you?”

My dad leans forward in his chair then slowly pushes himself up. Both guards come over. “It was good talking to you, son.” He starts to walk away.

“Fuck you!”

“No yelling,” the guard says, and puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off. The Christchurch Carver looks over and watches.

Dad turns back. “Go home and think about what happened to your wife,” he says. “And take some advice from your old man. .”

“Save it,” I say.

“It’s okay to listen to the voice,” he says, then he disappears through the doorway.