Paul Cleave - Blood Men

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.”