Paul Cleave - Blood Men

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.