Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

I think about it. In the dream sometimes I’m drinking beer or sometimes Coke, sometimes I’m driving a blue car or a red car, other times the house is different too, my house or her house or one of many other houses I’ve been in. My mom can be wearing a nightgown or a dress. Sometimes my goldfish are there and I’m sprinkling crumbs of meat loaf into the water for them. The ways I kill her are different. Only thing that never changes is me. I always wear the mask. Even when I put rat poison into her coffee I’m still wearing the mask.

“No,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?”

“Not really. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“And your mother? Does she know who you are?”

I think about it. Then half nod, then half shake my head. “She might do. She looks shocked. She’s wearing her Christmas look.”

“Her Christmas look?”

“Yeah. That’s what I call it. Her look of surprise. It’s a long story.”

“Well, we need to start somewhere,” Ali says. “How about we start with that?”

And that’s what we do.

I remember I used to believe in Santa Claus. My parents would always make a big deal about it. I’d wake up in the morning and the cookies and milk would be gone, there’d be soot around the base of the fireplace, and Dad would always tell me he’d heard Santa up on the roof and glimpsed a reindeer. I was always excited he’d been, but disappointed I’d missed him. Christmas Eve I’d always try my best to stay awake, and not know I’d failed until I woke up around seven in the morning with the sun breaking through my curtains. Santa had a way of sneaking into your house without anybody knowing he was there at the time. It’s something we have in common.

The Christmas that really stands out for me was when I was eight years old. At that stage the belief in Santa was over-though years later I would come to believe in people like Santa Kenny. Back then my mother was a different person. My father was too. I’m not really sure what my father was. He was different in a way even now I wouldn’t be able to identify. Whatever it was, I think my mother knew it too. It was a problem between them, and when there were problems Dad would always hang out with William-or Uncle Bill, as we called him. Uncle Billy wasn’t really my uncle, but Dad’s best friend, though a few years after that Christmas Uncle Billy didn’t come around anymore, as him and Dad and Mom had some kind of falling out. I think a lot of the time the problem between Mom and Dad was Uncle Billy.

I gave my mother a kitten for Christmas. It was a black-and-white, seven-week-old kitten I’d gotten from a friend at school whose pet cat had dropped a litter of them. I swapped a magazine for the cat. The kid didn’t tell his parents and I didn’t tell my dad, and if we had then it all would have gone very differently. The look on Mom’s face when she saw the little kitten is a look that has stayed with me forever. Her Christmas look. It’s where her lips peel back in a violent sneer and her teeth come forward like a shark. Her eyes open so wide it seems there is nothing left to hold them in. It’s the kind of expression where she has just looked deep into her worst nightmares only to find that every one of them is coming true. My mom never liked the kitten. At first I thought that made her a mean lady, a coldhearted lady, because everybody loved kittens. Everybody.

It turned out not to be so much that my mother wasn’t a kitten person. It was more that she wasn’t a dead-kitten person. She didn’t like them after they’d been sealed inside a wrapped cardboard box with a ribbon around it for five days. At eight years old I wasn’t a mind reader. All these years later and I’m still not.

I tell Ali and Ali takes notes. The prison chair is uncomfortable and I’m handcuffed to it, which is perhaps the only reason Ali is in here all alone with me. She either has trust issues or is well aware that the last twelve months have been lonely for me and that in ten minutes’ time, when they’d be mopping her up off the floor, I’d be telling the guards I’d had another memory lapse.

“Did you know the cat was going to die?”

“I never thought about it,” I say, and it’s true. I didn’t. I just thought it would be one nice thing I could do for my mother. It turned out it wasn’t. Turns out I’ve never done any nice things for my mother. Except get arrested. Her life really seems to be running smoothly now for her and Walt.

“You didn’t check on it? Or think it’d need food?”

“It had a name,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before even thinking about it. “His name was John.”

“You named the cat John?”

“It was dead, like my Grandfather John, who’d died earlier that year.”

“So you named the cat after it died? After your grandfather?”

“Who wouldn’t name a cat?” I ask.

She scribbles more down on her pad. “How did you feel when she opened the package and you saw it was dead?”

“I don’t know. Sad, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Wouldn’t anybody feel sad?”

“Sad or angry. But you’re only guessing, aren’t you, Joe. You don’t know what you felt.”

I shrug like it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does. I don’t know. It feels like she is trying to trap me somehow, and I don’t know in which way. Is this woman trying to help me? The answer comes to me a moment later. This isn’t about me. It’s about her. It’s about her career and the next step she will take along it once all of this is over for her. Maybe I’ll be the topic of a medical paper in her future.

“Joe? What are you thinking about?”

“The cat.”

“Tell me, honestly, were you sad?”

“Of course,” I tell her.

“Because the cat died? Or because your mom was angry at you?”

Because I’d swapped one of my favorite magazines for something that was now useless. That was the real truth. “Both. I guess.”

“You have to stop guessing, Joe. What about your father? What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“When he saw the cat. What did he do?”

“Well, Mom had dropped the box on the floor in front of her. It had tipped on its side and the cat had spilled out. It didn’t look anywhere near the same as when I had put it in there, plus now that the box was open it stank. My dad used the lid to scoop it back into the box and carried it outside and he buried it.”

“I mean what did he do to you, Joe?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Yeah, he hit me. Is that what you wanted to hear? He slapped me across the face so hard it bruised. It was the only time he ever touched me. He came into my room later that day and he hugged me, and he told me he was sorry, and he never hit me again. It was all so sudden I didn’t know what was going on. For a day I thought he was angry that I hadn’t given him a dead cat too.”

Amy doesn’t answer. I smile a little. “That was a joke,” I say. “The last part.”

She smiles a little, and she’s thinking that her PCJ-Prince Charming Joe-has just arrived. Only problem, as far as she can see, is I’m in prison for multiple rape/homicides. She knows, like we all do, that love does find a way. She’s thrilled because PCJ has a sense of humor-and that’s a plus. Women always bullshit about humor being the most important thing. They say it’s more important than looks. Hopefully it’s more important than history too. Women also dig scars, but my scar twists one side of my face into a Halloween mask, and sometimes I can still feel the heat of my skin burning from where the bullet tore the flesh open. I start to smile, but whatever moment is developing between us is suddenly lost when my eyelid becomes jammed when I blink and it looks like I’m winking. She frowns a little.