The Laughterhouse

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Six years ago he saw a man die in prison. Others died while he was in there, most from natural causes, many from drug overdoses, a few from beatings. People would smuggle contraband into the cells all the time. There was a big market for drugs and needles, cigarettes, food, or a hip flask of vodka or gin. They’d smuggle in cell phones, they’d bring in magazines full of pictures of naked women, and on one occasion that he remembers a magazine about landscaping. On this occasion somebody smuggled in a roofing nail.

The roofing nail got handed off to one inmate and jammed all the way into another. Nobody knows how it came from the outside world to the inside world of this man’s head, traveling through his ear canal on its way to a home run. The attack was quick and nobody saw it, but the dying lasted long enough for the guy to scream and to thrash his legs about on the floor as they all stood around watching. Nobody tried to help. Nobody showed much emotion. It was like watching a football match where you weren’t invested in the outcome. The guards came over. By then the guy had stopped moving. They picked him up and rushed him to the infirmary and Caleb never saw him again after that and nobody really much spoke about it. He was just a guy nobody really knew and death didn’t change that about him.

Looking at the blood on the floor, and the death jitters of a man fighting for life, that was the first time Caleb accepted he would feel nothing watching others die. When he killed James Whitby, he felt something. He felt anger and relief, he felt disgust and he felt euphoria, he felt pure hatred, he felt like he could murder the world.

Watching the man in jail, he felt nothing. It was a good thing. It was something he could use. He knew he would need it when he was released from jail, and it’s come in handy.

But right now what he is feeling is anger. He’s going to miss out on the judge and the bitch mother and the emotion is rushing back. He isn’t sure where to go. Since seeing the pizza boy jumped on, he has spent one hour driving aimlessly, then another hour parked out near the beach where he used to live when he first met his wife. Since then he’s been driving aimlessly again, listening to the news. The reporters have dropped the Gran Reaper handle and replaced it with his real name. They say to be on the lookout for Caleb Cole, that he’s considered armed and dangerous and if you see him to call the police.

Obsolete Octavia is asleep, a small snot bubble growing and shrinking from her left nostril as she breathes. Katy Kitten is asleep too.

The lights ahead are red and he sits at them with his foot on the brake, listening to Octavia breathing and waiting for the bubble under her nose to pop when a purple car with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door pulls up next to him. The music is nothing more than thumping bass, and the two boys in front can’t be much more than sixteen. They look over at him, the one closer raises his eyebrows and gives one sharp nod, his head going up first and then down, his eyes fixed on Caleb the entire time, then the driver guns the engine so loudly that Cole’s car shudders and Octavia wakes up and screams. Then the driver guns it four more times before the light turns green and they take off, the passenger leaning out the window and screaming “asshole!”

“It’s okay,” he tells Octavia, only it isn’t, because she’s crying hard now and her face is turning red and she seems to be running out of air just as quickly as the country is running out of hope for its future. Katy is murmuring from the backseat, the drugs wearing off.

He drives through the intersection and pulls over. He knows the one thing that may help the situation. He opens another jar of baby food and shovels a spoon toward Octavia, who manages to get it into her mouth and swallow it all while still carrying on. Soon he’s going to be dealing with a fat baby. At least it hasn’t crapped itself today. He finishes off the bottle, then realizes he’s left the plastic cup back at the slaughterhouse. He has nothing to give Octavia, and it takes her two seconds to realize the same thing and the crying gets louder. He looks in the backseat and sees nothing, then checks the glove compartment. There’s a small bottle of water in there that’s half empty. He unscrews the lid and takes a sniff-it smells okay, it could only be a few days old. Or it could be a year old. He tosses it back. Octavia is throwing her arms around, really starting to wind up.

He starts the car. Like with Jessica, the movement and engine noise calms her. He knows this area. There is a dairy a few blocks from here, he drives to it and pulls up outside. He locks the car and runs inside and buys a small box of orange juice and runs back out, telling the owner to keep the change. He punches the straw into it and hands it to Octavia who, in an instant, forgets all about crying as she stares at it, making a smacking noise with her lips before sucking on the straw.

“Good?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer, but stares at him while drinking. Her eyelashes are clumped together and look like starfish appendages.

He starts the car. Katy is moving around a little more. The doctor will be waking soon too. He can’t keep driving. He needs to make a decision and he has to find a location. Somewhere the police won’t think to look, which means a location that has no relevance to him. Somewhere abandoned. Somewhere he can get some sleep and refuel on energy and where he can think about Mrs. Whitby and the judge and how he can get them. There have to be plenty of abandoned places in Christchurch. There are industrial buildings shut down because people have gone bankrupt. Empty houses in every neighborhood where people have packed their stuff together and gotten the hell out. He can’t just pull over at a park somewhere and sleep in the car.

He passes a liquor store, one he used to come to on the way home from work sometimes when he’d pick up a bottle of wine to share with Lara over dinner. He slows down, trying to remember the last time he was here but he can’t, not specifically, all he can remember are images of the years of different visits. Why would he remember? It’s just a liquor store. He hasn’t even thought about this place in fifteen years. There are four cars parked out front. He drives past, slows down, does a U-turn, and parks on the street. All the cars are empty, all the people inside the store. He takes the knife and steps out of the car and runs to the closest one, a purple one with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door. He crouches down and slides the knife into the back tire, and then crawls along and slides it into the front one. He doesn’t move around to the other side, but he does start to carve the word asshole on the hood. It’s more difficult than he would have thought-he can’t form the curves in the s, not with his fucked-up hands, so it ends up looking like a backward z. He gives up halfway through the e when he sees people getting ready to exit the shop.

He carries on driving. It dawns on him that he isn’t driving as randomly as he first thought. That’s why he knew about the dairy. It’s why he recognized the liquor store. He’s been homing in on the house he lived in back when things were the way they were meant to be. The house was sold not long after he went into prison. None of the money went to him. The mortgage was big enough as it was, and what was left went into funeral costs and lawyers’ fees. He came out of it with nothing. All the furniture was sold. His clothes, his possessions, everything he owned was sold or dumped and back then he didn’t care. It was just stuff. His family was dead, and who really cared about your TV or favorite sofa finding a new home?

His house comes into view, only it’s not his house anymore. Last time he saw it, it was, but last time was from the back of a police car. His hands were cuffed behind him and his hair was still damp from the shower and there was blood under his fingernails. He knew he would be going away but he also thought he’d be coming back-he didn’t know then that the policeman he’d hurt was dead.

The policeman. For the first few years he used to think about him all the time. Sometimes he’d scream out at night, other times he’d wake up in a cold sweat, lean over, and throw up on the cell floor. When he had access to the Internet in jail, he used to sit in front of the computer with his fingers over the keys ready to type that cop’s name into it, but he never did. He didn’t want to know if he had a family, if he left behind children. It was too hard. Reason he stopped trying to kill himself was because of that cop-Caleb knew he himself deserved to be punished for what he did, like everybody else. Killing himself fifteen years ago-no, he owed the cop more than that. He owed it to him to suffer, but now he has suffered enough. Like Jessica and Lara and his unborn son, that cop died because Dr. Stanton stood up for the wrong man.

He has no idea whether the people in his house are the ones who bought it fifteen years ago. The fence is new, the roof has been painted, and the garden looks nothing like it did back then, a few of the established trees are still there but the other ninety percent has been ripped out and replaced. However the essence of the house is still the same. There are lights on inside. He wants to knock on the door and ask to take a look through. There are memories locked away within those walls, small moments from his life, insignificant days that will come back to him. For a moment, even if only for a second, the world would feel quite okay.

“Where are we?”

Katy’s voice pulls him out of the thought. He turns around and watches as she wipes her eyes with the back of her knuckles the same way Jessica used to when she fell asleep in the car whenever the drive was longer than thirty minutes. She leans forward and entwines her other hand with her sister’s, who is still asleep.

“Go back to sleep,” he tells her, keeping his voice low.

“I’m not tired. Where’s Melanie?”

“She not here.”

“Where is she?”

“Melanie was a good girl so I let her go. She didn’t keep talking, and she was quiet when I told her to be and she didn’t keep asking questions.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“You’re off to a bad start, Katy,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not very good at being quiet.”

“I’ll be quiet once I know where Daddy is.”

He rolls his eyes. Jessica used to be the same way. It was always quicker just to answer her questions. “He’s in the trunk.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want him back there with you.”

“Why?”

“Because there wasn’t enough room.”

“He could have sat in the front seat and Octavia could have sat back here.”

“I didn’t want him in the front seat. I wanted him in the trunk, and that’s where he went.”

“He could have fit back here too.”

“You’re not listening to me,” he says.

“Is that your house?”

Maybe it’s not quicker this way. “Do you know what quiet means?”

She nods.

He nods too. Then he sighs. “Yes, I used to live here.”

“With your wife?”

“Yes.”

“And your daughter?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Until a bad man took them away.” She bites her knuckle and sucks on it for a few seconds, then pulls it away but rests it on her lower lip. “Are you a bad man?”

“Yes,” he says, but he’s not a monster.

“Did you hurt Melanie?”

“No.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to hurt Octavia?”

“No.”

“Are you going to hurt my dad?”

“Yes.”

“Bu. . bu. . but you can’t,” she says.

He tries to feel something for this kid, some empathy. Is he that far gone that he feels nothing? He searches, he really searches, he wants there to be something, and there must be if she reminds him of Jessica.

Only he’s not that man anymore.

Katy is starting to cry so hard that she has to cover her face. Stanton starts banging from the trunk of the car. The bastard is awake. Katy looks up, her eyes are red, and yes, he does feel bad for her. None of this is her fault. Her father brought this on her, but she is a tool, a tool that is a means to an end.

He would be best to remember that.

“Daddy,” she cries out.

“Shut up,” Caleb says, the words low and harsh. “If you say one more word, just one more, I’m going to hurt you. Okay?”

She goes quiet. The banging in the trunk gets louder. Last thing he needs is to be driving around and have somebody hear it. He looks at the knife with the flecks of purple paint on the end of it but leaves it on the seat. He gets out of the car and pops the trunk. Stanton is still bound, and he stops kicking against the wall when Caleb looks down at him.

“You keep doing that,” he says, repeating the speech to Stanton that he just gave a few seconds earlier, “and I’m going to take it out on your remaining daughters. I’ll do to Katy what was done to mine. I’ll do everything to her that was done to mine. Then I’m going cut them into tiny pieces and jam them down your throat. You get my drift?”

The doctor mumbles something for a few seconds, and then nods. Caleb slams the trunk down. One of the neighbors is staring out the window at him. Derek Templeton, fifteen years older and fifteen years fatter than the last time he saw him. Once he helped Derek install a kitchen. They did most of the work but had to have the countertop made by professionals. They used plenty of power tools and hammered everything into place and the process was a mess but the end result was fantastic. Derek bought them pizza and beer and they sat outside on the deck with their wives and made a toast to good times. Right now Derek has a look on his face that suggests he can’t quite believe who he’s looking at. His waves are slow and jerky with no arm movement, all side to side from the wrist, the wave of a man confused by what he’s seeing. Caleb finds himself waving back, the human instinct kicking in, both men reacting to it, each of them moving like marionettes.

Caleb lowers his arm. Derek stops waving. They stare at each other from across the street like gunslingers ready to draw down on each other. Then Derek disappears. Caleb gets back into the car.

He doesn’t even know why he came here. Part of him, at least subconsciously, must have been aware of where he was driving. He supposes he was hoping the house would be as he left it, the furniture would have been returned, every surface covered in dust, the smells of his wife’s perfumes and the scent of her body clinging to the air. The house would be empty but inviting him back to a part of his life long since gone. Whatever piece of him thought he could return home couldn’t have been any more mistaken. The past is the past, you can’t change it, and Caleb Cole knows that better than anybody.