Blood Men

chapter eight

I was eight years old when I had the urge to kill my first animal. I was nine before I finally did it. It was about a month before my dad got taken away. I don’t know what created the urge. I think it’d been there all along, sleeping deep inside me, hidden-then one day woken.

The police showed up at the house on a cold July day. The sun was out but had lost the battle to winter; the air was so icy cold, the mist that formed in front of your face when you exhaled could almost be snatched up and broken in two. It was the kind of day you didn’t want to get out of bed for. The trees were bare and the leaves had turned to slush on the ground, slush that would stick to your shoes, then get left behind on the carpet inside. It was a Wednesday morning. Usually the most exciting thing about Wednesdays was that they weren’t Mondays. Of course this Wednesday started out a whole lot different. It began with me standing at the window in my school uniform watching the police cars pull up, sure they were there for me, that somehow, in some way, somebody had found out it’d been me who’d killed the neighbor’s dog. I watched the cars come to a stop and men spill into the driveway, and I thought about running, just heading out the back door and jumping the fence, only I didn’t know where I’d go. No, rather than run, I would lie.

The police surrounded the house. They came up to the front door. I was crying when my mother answered it. I had moved into my bedroom and was standing behind the door, listening, shaking. The men came inside and spoke to my dad. I didn’t understand what was going on, why the police were coming to take my dad away for something I had done, and as hard as I tried to tell them the truth, I was too scared to say the words.

I came out from the bedroom in time to see them put handcuffs on my dad. I cried harder. I wanted to confess but didn’t. I didn’t understand at the time, but the police had come for an entirely different reason-a reason that involved the niche my father had carved out for himself, one that included a list of prostitutes and a very specific hobby.

I didn’t go to school that day. Instead my mum’s sister came to sit with me and Belinda while Mum went to the police station to learn what was going on. She was gone all day. A year later, after she was dead, her sister didn’t want anything to do with me or Belinda ever again.

I don’t know what kind of dog it was I killed in that month before Dad got taken away. It was certainly big enough, and dark enough, and most of the time angry enough. All it ever seemed to do was make noise. It’d howl at the moon and bark at the sun and growl at the breeze. The barks were high-pitched yaps that kept on coming, one after the other, scratching into my head like nails. The growls were low and threatening, scary, and the howls were long and painful. My neighbor never did anything to shut it up. Most times my neighbor wasn’t there. He’d leave this dog of his chained to a rusty old stake hammered deep into the backyard. If the dog was lucky he’d sometimes get food and if he was extra lucky then sometimes he’d get water for company. Neighbors would open windows and doors and yell at the dog to shut up, but the frequency dropped off over the years as they gave up. In the summer the yard was hard-baked dirt, cracked into jigsaw patterns, and in the winter it was dark with mud and cold with frost. The dog was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and one or the other during the months between. I didn’t know who to hate more, the dog or the owner, and in the end I hated them pretty much equally. The dog was hardwired to bark at things, and my neighbor was hardwired to treat the dog badly.

The urge grew slowly. I’d be at school staring at a math problem then suddenly I’d think about him, that dog, and I’d think about how great it would be if that dog could be divided into two. I’d get that thought a few times at school, and I’d get it plenty more times at home, and the thought never made me sick. At night I’d shake, my hands twitching as the dog barked, wondering why my dad didn’t go and do something. Of course I didn’t know it-but my dad couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t draw any attention to himself.

The urge kept growing. It reached a point where it was never far from my thoughts. It affected my schoolwork. My marks were slipping, my homework was suffering-if things didn’t change I’d end up leaving school when I was fifteen and spend my life bouncing between being unemployed and unemployable. It seemed to me that the thing standing between me having the life I wanted and the life of cashing unemployment benefits was that dog. No matter what angle I attacked the problem from, I knew that as long as that dog barked I had no real future. I had to stop thinking about it.

Day and night this desire to see the dog dead grew stronger inside of me, gestating, becoming a deep-seated need that was ruling my life.

I told the urge I didn’t know how to kill a dog.

The urge, one night, found a voice and whispered back. It told me it was easy. It told me everything was going to be okay now. Then it told me how.

My mother was the kind of woman who, when shopping for groceries, would stray from the list she had made and add what was on special, even if we already had plenty of the same thing at home. We’d have cupboards full of paper towels and flour and tins of food that wouldn’t fit in the pantry. Meat wasn’t excluded from this list-the freezer was always full, the exact quantity within its depths an unknown. I took a piece of meat from the freezer knowing it wouldn’t be missed. I hid it in the garage one morning before school, wrapped in an old rag and stuffed inside an empty paint container with a twisted lid. It thawed out while I studied at school and while the dog went about using up the rest of his barks. When I got home the steak was soft and felt fresh. My dad was at work, my mother was on the phone to her sister, and my own sister didn’t have any intention of shifting from in front of the TV. The dog was barking from two doors down. It was loud and consistent, but painful-sounding too, the barking of a dog who didn’t understand why it was suffering but didn’t know anything else.

It took me only a few minutes to prepare the meat, another twenty seconds to walk to the neighbor’s house. I walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, the piece of steak wrapped in plastic and tucked into my schoolbag. I knew nobody was home, but I had a story planned in case somebody was, one of those “my ball went over your fence” kind of stories people hear every day in every neighborhood all over the world. Nobody answered. The dog was barking like crazy. I went around to the side gate and the dog lurched forward on his chain, lunging forward over and over, the chain snapping tight on his neck, strangling him as it pulled him back. Sometimes it’d pull him off balance and he’d fall over, but he kept on getting up and charging forward again.

I took the steak out of the bag and threw it at the dog and he caught it in midair. He ripped into it immediately. He paused after a few seconds, took a step back, then sniffed at it, his suspicion of this last meal obvious in the way his jaw moved as if searching for what was wrong. It was the dog’s bad luck to be as hungry as he was, his bad luck to have an instinct tell him he needed to eat because he never knew when his next meal would come. He lunged back into the steak and, even as blood dotted the short fur on the side of his mouth, he kept chewing. The steak disappeared in only a few bites. Then the dog started running in circles. He carried on barking, but the barks weren’t as loud, and soon they turned into yelps. Still he kept running.

I ran too.

The police were called the next day. The dog had died that night. Its owner had come home from a hard day of ignoring his dog only to find it lying in the backyard, quiet, its muzzle bloody-and in death the dog was shown a mercy it was never shown in life: it was taken to a vet. The vet took one look at the blood, opened the dog up, and went searching for answers and found plenty of them in the form of fishhooks and nails and thumbtacks that I’d squeezed deep into the steak. The police went up and down the street, knocking on doors, knowing somebody in our neighborhood had done it-hearing very quickly, I imagine, from the neighbors that everybody in the neighborhood had wanted to do it. It came down to who turned the fantasy into a reality. They came to our door and spoke to my parents, and I was scared then, but not as scared as I was when they came for my dad. They asked to speak to me and my sister, and I stood there with Belinda and told my parents and the police that I’d seen nothing, and the police thanked us all for our time and moved on to the next house.

Nobody ever questioned it. Not ever. Not even my mum. I was sure she’d notice the missing steak and figure it all out. I thought she’d call the police and they’d take me to a room somewhere and leave me alone until I pissed myself and cried and confessed. But she never did. Nobody ever did.

Four weeks later my dad was arrested. A month after that my neighbor got another dog-he probably figured my dad had killed the last one so this one would be safe. And it would have been safe too if it hadn’t barked as much as the first one. He only had it a month before the same thing happened. The police came up and down the street and learned the same amount of nothing they’d learned the first time. My neighbor had had his fill of dead dogs by then and didn’t go about getting another.

I have no idea why this story is in my mind as I drive home, or what it means. My psychiatrist way back then would have gone through entire prescription pads keeping me medicated if he knew. Seeing the way that dog died-that frightened me. I vowed that day as I ran home that I would never, ever do that kind of thing again. I made the same vow the second time too-and that time the promise stuck. I never told anybody about the urges. Certainly I never told my wife.

Sam is asleep in the passenger seat. The school holidays have begun and I don’t know whether it’ll be easier on her not going to school next week, or harder now that her mum is dead. I don’t know if the distraction of the classroom would have been a healthy thing or not. I don’t know how I can look after her during the weekend, during the holidays, during the next ten or more years until she moves out of home and begins her own life.

When I get home I’m hit with the expectation that something will be different. It’s as though all that happened today was a movie that’s rolled to the end, the gunmen only actors, the wounds on my wife manufactured with stage blood. If not that, then at least Jodie will be here somewhere, released from the hospital-on the way to the morgue somebody found her breathing and they saved her. I expect the police to be here, to tell me they’ve caught the men who did this. I expect life to have moved forward.

What I get defies all my expectation-everything is exactly how I left it. Nobody has been; nobody is here, even the poltergeist who visits at night to mess things around hasn’t shown up. I step inside and between the time I left a few hours ago and now, nothing has altered other than the angle of the sun. It’s got lower in the sky, barely coming through the living room windows now, picking out dust floating in the air, and the temperature has cooled-but that’s about it. Mogo is somewhere else, outside somewhere, doing whatever it is that crazy cat does. Sometimes the voice from twenty years ago tells me there is a solution to getting rid of that cat. I wonder if Mogo senses that. I wonder, now that Jodie isn’t here, whether Mogo will ever come back.

Sam wakes up when I carry her inside, but falls back asleep within about a minute. I get her tucked into bed and head out to the living room. I turn on the TV but the next news bulletin is still over an hour away. I tidy up the kitchen, putting the phone back on the hook, packing everything into the dishwasher, killing time, killing time-rinse a plate and-bang-another distraction but only for a split second before my world comes crashing back down. Doing the housework seems the wrong thing to be doing-but what is the right thing? It turns out the right thing is throwing a couple of dinner plates really hard into the wall. They both shatter. A small tooth-sized piece bites into the wall and stays there, the other shards raining down on the floor. I pick up a glass and it follows the same trajectory. Next thing I know half a dozen of them are down there, a cocktail of broken glass and ceramic shards, and I tip out the cutlery drawer and add to it before sitting down and leaning against the fridge.

Sam is standing outside the kitchen. There are tears on her face and her teddy bear is tucked against her chest.

“Did you and mummy have a fight?” she asks, looking at all the broken dishes.

“No, baby.”

“Then why did she go?”

I get to my feet and hug my daughter before taking her back to bed. I sit with her until she falls asleep, and I sit with her for a bit after too. I don’t know how to make it through the weekend. Don’t know how to plan the funeral. Don’t know how to plan my future with Sam. The truth is Sam’s the only reason right now I’m not picking up one of those shards off the kitchen floor and fishing for the veins in my forearm.

I clean the kitchen up, watching my wife reaching out over and over, the man behind her raising the gun, then I go back a few minutes earlier and watch us in the bank, I watch the men coming in behind her, different pairs going in different directions. I stand up and fight them, taking the guns off them, struggling with them, six gunshots and six gunmen all lying dead on the floor. People swarm around me and hug me, they recognize me, but the gene my dad gave me doesn’t scare them, in fact it excites them. The serial killer gene just saved all their lives.

Another time I grab Jodie and pull her back from the action, locking us into a nearby bathroom until they’ve gone. Then I watch as the men come in and the security guard takes action and he grabs the first guy, twists him toward the others, guns going off, the bad guys all shooting each other as smoke and blood fill the air. Then I picture us at lunch, laughing, planning, the time slipping away and suddenly we’ve missed our appointment at the bank, disappointed but alive.

I picture getting a flat tire on the way to work this morning. I picture work piling up and me unable to get away. I picture a power cut, an earthquake, somebody choking on a piece of chicken at the restaurant, a car accident right outside work. I picture ringing Jodie and telling her I can’t make it, that it’ll have to be next week, and Jodie tells me what a pain in the ass I am and it’s obvious she’ll be pissed at me all weekend. I picture Jodie in the living room right now getting Sam ready for bed. The TV is on. Sam is asking for some cookies. Jodie is saying no, and Sam is getting upset. I picture reading Sam a bedtime story, something about elves and princesses, then Jodie and me sitting up watching TV, my arm around her, holding her, rubbing her shoulder and then she touches my thigh, I kiss her and then. . she is gone. Dead. Her body bloody and empty lying on the road as the black van speeds away.

The phone rings. I stare at it but don’t want to talk to anybody. After eight rings the machine picks it up. Jodie recorded the outgoing message. Her voice in the silent house does two things simultaneously-it makes me think she’s still alive, and it makes me think her ghost is here. Two completely opposite things-and it does a third thing too-it makes me shiver.

“You’ve reached Eddie and Jodie and Sam, but we’re all out or pretending to be out, so please leave a message after the beep.”

The machine beeps. I’ll never change that outgoing message.

“Ah, hi, Edward, it’s John Morgan here, umm. . I’m calling because we heard about what happened, and, um. . all of us here at the firm are feeling for you, we really are, and, and, ah, we wanted to cancel the Christmas party tonight out of respect-I mean, none of us want to celebrate anything at the moment now-but the place is already booked and paid for and most of us were already here when the news came in. Okay, I guess that’s it. . well, there is one more thing, and I hate to ask, but this McClintoch file you’re working on, it really needs to be wrapped up before the break, you know what it’s like, and nobody else can really step in and take over because you’ve invested so much work in it, and we’d end up chasing our tails for the week, so, umm, what I’m saying is I need you to. . no, wait, I mean I’m asking if you can make it in next week to get it completed? After the funeral, of course, I mean, there’s no way I’d expect you to come in before then-unless of course you really wanted to, say, if you needed work to distract you or something. Thanks, Edward. Well. . ah, see you later.”

He hangs up and the line beeps a couple of times and I delete the message. I hate my job. Sometimes I can sense the people there wondering about me, trying to figure how many people I’ve killed, or how many I’ll one day kill, accountants inside all of them crunching the numbers.

I slump in front of the TV. I have to wait until 10:30 for the news to come on. It opens with the bank robbery. The anchorwoman looks like she’s just come from modeling at a car show. She has only two expressions-the one she has for bad news, and the one for happy human interest stories. She composes herself with her bad-news face and recaps the highlight of the day, then says, “Some of these scenes may disturb.”

There are images from the security cameras. There is footage of the “after” by the camera crews that arrived. And there’s cell phone video footage from people too panicked to act but courageous enough to film what they could. The angle it’s shot from reminds me of the teenagers in the hoodies, and I’m pretty sure this is their footage, and I wonder how much they got paid for it, how excited they were about it all. It shows Jodie being dragged out of the bank, and even though I know what’s coming up, I still pray for it to go differently. Then it shows me coming out, chasing the men, five of them in the van, the sixth one with the gun, and late-night news being what it is these days where standards have relaxed enough where you can say “fuck” without being bleeped out; you can also see your wife getting shot too, because the footage doesn’t stop, it carries on as ratings are more important than and certainly more profitable than ethics, so the country gets to watch the blood spray from Jodie just as I got to watch it today, they get to see her knocked down, they get to put themselves in my shoes and see what I saw without feeling what I felt, and then they get to see it again in slow motion, the cell phone capturing everything in cell phone detail-not high quality, but high enough.

It goes back to the anchorwoman who, to her credit, appears momentarily uncomfortable by what the network aired. When she goes to speak she stutters over the first word. Thankfully for her career she recovers, and she’s able to offer up other details before segueing back to footage from the bank. There are sweeping shots of people in the street staring at the scene, shots of the police scouring the area, a nice, tight-cropped shot of me holding my wife, and no shots anywhere of the men who did this.

Then, when there is nothing left to show, it cuts to the people nearby when it happened-“we heard gunshots and ran,” “we didn’t know what to do,” “seemed unbelievable it was happening right here,” “we were almost killed.” Then come the interviews from people who were inside the bank. I recognize some of them. “They came out of nowhere,” “it was so scary,” “those poor people, my God, those poor people did nothing and got shot anyway.” A photo of a man comes up, he was the bank manager, he was fifty-six years old and had worked at that branch for nine years. It shows the bank teller whose life apparently I saved, her name is Marcy Croft and she’s twenty-four years old and has worked at the bank for nine weeks, and she’s shaking as the cameraman zooms in on her, and she says “He was going to kill me. I know that as sure as I know I’m never working here again. And that man, oh my God, that man distracted him and saved my life, and his wife, his wife. .,” she says, and she breaks down in tears and can’t finish but the camera doesn’t break away from her, it focuses on her pain and relief and the country watches her cry for another ten seconds before it goes back to the anchor.

After the interviews a picture of my wife that I have no idea how they got-maybe from her work somewhere-comes up. Both victims have families, pain, and despair filling the spaces these people left. Then there’s me again, covered in blood, being led away from Jodie’s body. Edward Hunter, twenty-nine-year-old son of a serial killer. The anchorwoman mentions it.

The footage turns to a live feed from outside the bank. There’s still yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the slight breeze. The spot where Jodie was killed has tape around it, and she’s been moved, and I have an image of her lying on a steel slab in a morgue, pale, grey, and blue and broken beyond repair, no longer covered by a sheet. The reporter has his sleeves rolled up, indicating he’s had a long day at work. He speaks for a bit, talking about me.

“And Jack Hunter, of course, was arrested after murdering eleven prostitutes, isn’t that right, Dan?” the anchorwoman asks, the feed going back to her, her serious face on display.

“Sure is, Kim. Of course that’s only eleven prostitutes that he admitted to.”

“Has there been any speculation that Edward Hunter may have been involved?” Anchorwoman Kim says.

“At this stage the police aren’t commenting on that, however from what I’ve learned it does seem unlikely. I think for Edward and Jodie Hunter, and for the rest of these people, it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time. As soon as we know more down here in Christchurch, we’ll let you know.”

Kim flashes her second expression at the screen, and then the image taken twenty years ago appears, of me in my school uniform by my father’s side. I almost throw the remote at the TV. The story gets to the climax-or, in this case, a punch line. The van was found. It had been stolen. No trace of the money. No trace of the people in it. The six men scattered into the city.

I turn off the TV and sit in the darkness, wide awake, angry, hurting, and alone.