The Killing Hour

CHAPTER THREE

I pull up the driveway. A dozen or so of the paving stones wobble beneath the weight of the car, stones I wanted to cement back into place but never got around to doing so. I come to a stop in front of a garage with freshly painted black doors and shiny new handles. The house is fawn with black trim and a black concrete tile roof. I painted it. The garden is full of small shrubs surrounded by dark brown bark. I helped plant them. There are a few weatherboards at the bottom of the house that have rotted more since I last saw them. I never got around to replacing them. I wonder who will do it.

I kill the engine and sit with my hands on the wheel and tell myself I’ve done the wrong thing by coming here, and I agree with myself too, but that doesn’t make me start the car up and back out onto the street. I should. I should back out and never come back. Catch a plane somewhere. Things might look different from a pilot’s point of view. None of my problems would fade as we climbed toward the sun, but they wouldn’t get any worse. Most bad decisions you don’t know are bad until you look back at them, but occasionally you know it when it’s happening-and last night and today have been full of exactly those.

Staying is wrong. Leaving is right.

I stay.

I get out of the car. I walk toward the front door. I feel like I’m not really here, that this is all part of the same dream I’ve been having all day. I reach out and trail my hands along the weatherboards of Jo’s house. The wood is hard and smooth. It’s real. It’s no dream. When I reach the door I suck in a few breaths and bite down on my lip and give myself a last chance to leave, but don’t take it. I knock. My hand doesn’t pass through the wood. I don’t wake up.

Jo comes to the door. She has a smile that disappears when she sees me, and I feel an immediate sense of shame and rejection. She lets one arm fall to her side; the other she keeps up high on the side of the door frame blocking my entry. Her greeting toward me doesn’t include the word hello. She has this look on her face that suggests she has just eaten a bad piece of chicken. I can smell freshly brewed coffee.

“Hey, Jo, can I come in?”

“Oh my God, Charlie, what happened to you?”

“I need to talk to you.” She looks me over, studies the wounds on my face. The last time she saw me I also had wounds on my face. I guess I’m a wounds-on-face kind of guy. “Are you alone?”

“Have you been in a fight? You’re still hitting people, huh?”

Hitting people is why we broke up. Maybe I’m a hitting-people kind of guy too. “Please, I just need to talk to you. Are you alone or not? Can I come in?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t. . I don’t really want you here, not looking like that.”

“Come on, Jo, it’s important.”

She takes a few seconds to weigh up just how important it could be, then decides it’s important enough. She steps aside. “Come in.”

When I’m in she closes the door and leans against it as if to block my exit. Jo’s a few centimeters shorter than me, a couple of years younger, but twice as mature. She has hazel eyes, soft until she frowns at me, which she’s currently doing. The tanned skin of her face is sprinkled with light freckles. Her hair has been cut, stopping just above her shoulders. Her body is toned and athletic from her visits to the gym. She looks better than the last time I saw her, six months ago.

“So no How are you doing, Jo? or You look nice, Jo, or I’ve been missing you?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to hear it.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Look, I’m sorry about what happened.”

“I know,” she says. “You said that six months ago.”

“And I’m still sorry. I didn’t mean to. . you know. . it just happened. But you look good. I like the new haircut.”

“I haven’t had a new haircut, Charlie. So let me guess why you’re here. You have a new girlfriend and got jealous and decided to try and beat up the next guy who looked at her wrong.”

“Come on, Jo, it wasn’t like that with us. You know that,” I tell her.

“That’s exactly what it was like.”

“Bullshit. That guy at the bar was out of line,” I tell her. “He got what he deserved. You should be thanking me.”

“And I would have thanked you if you’d just gotten me out of there. But you had to make a point,” she says. “You could have been arrested. Or worse. You could have been seriously hurt.”

“He touched you,” I tell her. “Guys can’t just go into bars and touch whoever the hell they want.”

“I get that, Charlie, I told you that. But what you did-that scared me. You just kept hitting him over and over until I managed to pull you off. There’s something inside you that scares me,” she says.

“Ah, come on, Jo, don’t say that.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“At least it probably stopped him from doing it again.”

“And that’s your job now, is it? To go around teaching people a lesson?”

I knew this was going to be the kind of reception I was going to get from Jo. Six months ago everything had changed. It was a night out for dinner. Date night. When you’re married or have been with the same person more than a few years, then date nights become few and far between as life and work get in the way. We had Thai. Then we went to a bar for a few drinks. I had a gin and tonic. Jo had the same. There was a rugby game on TV and a bunch of people were caught up in it, getting loud, and when you get loud bunches of people watching their team lose, you’re always going to find the occasional asshole or two. In this case that asshole put his hand up Jo’s dress as she was coming out of the bathroom and he was going in. She shoved him away and he called her a bitch. I didn’t see it happen, but she told me. I’d never hit anybody in my life, but I hit him. I marched into that bathroom and Jo came with me, not to help me, but to stop me. I walked up behind him to bang his head into the wall, but he sensed me coming. He turned, pissing all over himself and over my feet, and took a swing at me. He got me in the cheek and split my lip open. His next punch got me in the chest. I stumbled back, and he came forward and slipped over in his own piss. Then I leaned down and hit him. The problem, as far as Jo sees it, is I kept on hitting him. One punch, I was defending her honor. Two punches was teaching him a lesson. But it turns out a dozen punches is ten too many. She had to pull me off him. We got out of there before anybody else came into the bathroom. We got out of the bar and nobody stopped us. We got back to our house and she didn’t say a word on the way home. We sat and waited for the police to arrive, only they didn’t. The assault didn’t even make the news. The following day she asked me to move out. The person I’d shown her the night before wasn’t somebody she wanted to spend her life with. It wasn’t somebody she wanted to help bring up the children we used to talk about having. I’m pretty sure the person I was last night isn’t somebody she’d want to spend her life with either.

“I’m in serious trouble,” I tell her.

“If it’s serious, go to the police.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m smart,” she says.

“I know.”

“You don’t think I can understand?” she asks.

“That’s why I’m here. I need somebody to understand.”

“So you argue that you want my help, then argue against telling me?”

“I’m only arguing against going to the police. You’ll understand soon enough.”

“Understand what?”

“Can I have some of that coffee?” I ask, nodding toward the coffee maker.

“Will it get you out of my house any quicker?”

“Technically it’s still our house,” I tell her.

“If that’s. .”

“But yes,” I say, interrupting her. “It’ll speed things up.”

While she pours me some of the coffee she’s just made I stare at the magnetic poetry on the fridge door. I make a square and a triangle with random words, but I can’t line them up to make sense of the last twenty-four hours. She pours a coffee for herself too, then we walk through to the lounge. It’s warm from the afternoon sun. I sit on the sofa and lean forward. I’m frightened that if I sink back and relax the sofa will swallow me. I look around the room to see if anything has changed, but it’s mostly the same. The only difference is what isn’t here-no photographs of us. Nothing to show I ever existed. All those memories have been packed away. Thankfully there aren’t any photographs of her with anybody else to have replaced them.

“Well?” she asks.

“This is difficult for me.”

“Difficult for me too, Charlie. You think I want to spend my Monday night with you?”

“You have other plans?” I turn to face her and immediately I’m annoyed at the pang of jealousy we both heard.

“That isn’t the point.”

“Okay, okay, just give me a few seconds,” I tell her. I stare down at the coffee table, at the small nicks and scratches that have built up over time. Some of them I remember happening, others had happened well before Jo inherited the table from her grandmother. “I was on my way home,” I say, and I keep staring at the table, wishing that was the whole story just there-that I was on my way home and nothing bad happened. I was steering my Honda around the sweeping bends of the empty highway. The road was dark with half circles of light spilling across from the streetlights. I had my window down to enjoy the summer breeze. The air was warm and dry. The mercury was hovering around the shorts and T-shirt end of the thermometer. The highway was bordered by pastures. Thin wire fences stopped the large willow and oak trees, the poplars, the patches of knee-length grass and the thinning creeks from escaping. Cows and sheep and horses were standing vigil, all unaware that day by day technology was slowly making their homes smaller, that day by day their future as hamburgers and juicy steaks was getting closer. I was coming home from my parents’ house. Mom had been convinced there was a mouse in the house, and equally convinced that my dad wouldn’t be any use in finding it.

“It happened when I turned off the highway toward home. It was so. .” I shrug. “I don’t know. If it wasn’t for the news and the blood. I don’t know. I guess I would think it was all a dream. But I guess it’s more that I’m just wishing it were one.”

Jo leans forward. She looks concerned. I pick my coffee up, but can’t bring myself to take a sip.

“What blood, Charlie?”

“I went around the corner and that was when she stepped out in front of me. I didn’t even see her at first. In fact I almost ran her over.”

“Who did you almost run over?”

“Luciana. Luciana Young.”

Jo’s mouth falls open and she leans back. All the air seems to rush out of the room. She says absolutely nothing. She doesn’t ask if I’m joking, because there’s no way in hell I’d come around here and make something like this up.

“Luciana Young from the news,” she says, and she says it as if there was another possibility, as if I were talking about the Luciana Young who lives a few blocks away who wasn’t murdered during the night.

“Yeah.”

“So. . so you were with her last night? And the other woman too?”

I look down at my coffee cup, unable to look at Jo, but I know she’s staring at me.

“You killed them?” she asks.

Last night as I turned the corner, my headlights washed into the pasture opposite, lighting up the same bank of trees they always light up. The trees looked like large deformed fingers pushing through a farming landscape. Twisted and broken, they were the sort of thing Salvador Dalí would paint, along with some melting clocks and a naked woman.

“Charlie?”

“No,” I answer, “of course not.”

“You ran her over?”

“No.”

“What happened?” she asks, and she sounds scared, scared because I’m crazy and making this up, or I’m crazy because I’m not. She sounded the same way when we finally started talking that night six months ago when we got back home, the night I still think of as Date Night.

The moment I saw Luciana I tugged on the wheel and jumped on the brake, swerving my car around her. In my rearview mirror I saw a woman drowning in the glow of my brake lights. All that red skin, red clothes. . if I ever see that sight again I’ll understand it for what it really is-a premonition.

“No, I didn’t hit her, but I pulled over. It was obvious something was wrong. She climbed into the car. She was panicked. I wanted to go to the police. You would have too if you’d seen her. If you’d heard her.”

“Then why didn’t you? This isn’t making any sense, Charlie.”

“We didn’t go to the police because her friend was in danger.”

“Kathy,” she says.

“Yeah.”

Luciana’s dress was shredded above her chest as if she’d been repeatedly clawed by a big cat. There were several cuts over her chest that looked like tiny canals, and a red sea was welling up over the edges. Her face was smeared with dirt and her eyes were full of desperation. She had to be desperate to jump into the first car that came along. Her blond hair was matted with twigs and leaves, stained with soil and blood that in the weak light of my car looked like oil. There was a line of blood on her leg. She wore a bandanna necklace that had been a gag. When she closed the door the interior light blinked off and we were plunged into darkness. Monday’s darkness.

“You’ve. .” was all she could say before breaking into loud sobs. She collapsed with her forehead pressed to my arm. Her skin felt like wet clay. She was shuddering, choking on her sobs and the beginnings of small words. I was half out of my seat belt when she pulled away and doubled her efforts to speak.

“You’ve. . got. .”

I put my hands on her shoulders and told her to take a deep breath. It worked. I kept staring at the blood on her that was becoming more real by the second. This was actual blood. Like that B negative or O positive stuff that drips out of dead people. It gave her credibility, so when she pointed out my side window with hands that were bleeding and shaking and told me her friend Kathy was out there being held by a crazed lunatic I had no reason not to believe her.

I tell this to Jo.

Jo shakes her head. “Why didn’t you call them on your cell phone?”

“Because I still don’t have one.”

“What? You never replaced it? You’re kidding.”

I shake my head. I’m not kidding. When that guy in the bathroom got his second punch in six months ago into my chest, it actually connected with my cell phone. It didn’t survive the impact, and I didn’t replace it. I was sick of being tied down to a phone. Sick of seeing people everywhere I go spending any free second they have to send a text or check an email.

“There was no time to get the police. I moved the car so I was out of sight of the trees,” I tell Jo. I twisted my body and pocketed my keys then told Luciana to stay where she was. She asked if I had a weapon. All I had was whatever was in the trunk. That turned out to be a car jack, a spare wheel, a bike rack, a tire iron, and no shotgun. I settled for the tire iron. It was cold and heavy and boosted my confidence.

The night was twenty degrees, but each of them cold as I strode from the car. I wanted to be Action Man, but I felt more like the actor nobody recognized in an old Star Trek episode-Crewman Random who went away with Captain Kirk, but never came back. I actually thought about that guy in the bathroom as I strode into that field. I thought about it because that was the first and only time I’d ever hit anybody. I thought about it because it was his fault I didn’t have a cell phone and, by association, anything bad to follow by me not being able to call for help would be his fault too.

Monday was twelve minutes old when I stepped into that field. It was about to become longer. Elastic hours. Even now, sitting opposite Jo, they’re still stretching.