Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  “It’s one of those two things,” she says, “but I don’t know which.”

  I don’t know what the correct response is, either in words or in emotion. I don’t know what to start faking next. Should I thank her, say something insightful, or should I start flopping around on the floor like a fish?

  “The problem is you acted like you were mentally challenged,” she says.

  “I didn’t act retarded,” I say. “That’s just how they saw me.”

  “The problem was with them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it was with me. They all looked down on me, though. They pitied me for some reason. I always knew that, I just never knew why. Maybe they look down on all janitors the same way because we aren’t as cool as them.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “How would that have gone? Excuse me, Detective, but why do you think I’m a moron? That wasn’t going to happen. They always made me feel inferior around them all,” I say, and Slow Joe is gone now, and Fast Joe is here, Smart Joe, and Smart Joe is on a roll. “Maybe that’s why they saw me like that.”

  “That’s another big insightful take on things,” Ali says.

  I don’t answer. The problem with Smart Joe is that sometimes he can be too smart for his own good.

  “I want to learn more about you,” she says. “We have the weekend. Everything you say to me is confidential. I’m working for you and your lawyer, not for the prosecution.”

  “Okay.”

  “But if you say something that makes me believe you’re lying, then the session ends and I don’t come back, and I get up in court and I tell the jury exactly that. So basically, Joe, though I’m working for you, I’m also working for the truth. You have three days in which to be honest.”

  Three days in which to not get caught out lying. I can manage that. Or, if things go to plan with Melissa, I won’t need it. “Okay,” I tell her, knowing as far as honesty goes, we’re not really off to a great start. “So where do we begin?”

  “I want to talk about your past.”

  “My past? Why?”

  “In this dream you have, do you ever take off the mask? Does your mother ever recognize you?”

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  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 favori
te 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.

  “It gets stuck,” I say. “Since the accident.” I reach up and tug it down and it stings a little bit and then starts working again.

  “You call it an accident?”

  I shrug. “What else would I call it? I didn’t intend any of this.”

  “Then by that logic, people who get cancer could call that an accident.”

  “But I don’t have cancer,” I tell her.

  “Okay, Joe,” she says. “If you didn’t intend it, and if you really can’t remember what you did, why were you carrying Detective Calhoun’s gun, and why did you try to turn it on yourself?”

  It’s a good question. An annoying question that has been put to me a few times now. Thankfully it’s one that comes with an easy answer. “I don’t remember that either,” I tell her.

  “Joe-”

  “It’s true,” I tell her, and I touch my free hand back up to my eye. The doctor warned me it would catch occasionally for the rest of my life. I don’t know why or on what, and he didn’t seem in a real information-offering mood. He seemed more interested in who he was treating, and how he was going to tell the boys about it that night at the bar.

  Her expression relaxes a little. “Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I’m awake.”

  “Let’s move on,” she says. “Did you ever try giving your mother another pet?”

  I scoff at the thought. “No. She wouldn’t have appreciated it.”

  “I meant an alive pet, Joe.”

  “Oh. Well, no, the same thing applies.”

  “Did you ever kill any more animals?”

  “You’re implying I killed John,” I tell her.

  “You did kill John.”

  “No, the cardboard box and lack of air killed John. Me being eight years old is what killed John. It was an accident.”

  “Like your scar is an accident.”

  “Exactly,” I say, pleased she’s beginning to understand.

  “You still haven’t told me, Joe, whether you killed any other animals?”

  “Why would I?” I ask, but yes, I have killed other animals-I’ve done it to get what I want from people.

  “Okay. I think we’re pretty much done for today,” she says, and she starts to shuffle her pad back into her briefcase. It’s a similar model to the one I used to carry my lunch and my knives and my gun around in, and for a moment-for a brief second-I wonder if it’s actually mine.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not being forthcoming, that’s why.”

  “What?”

  “The animals. I asked you twice and twice you avoided the question. That suggests you don’t really want my help.”

  “Wait,” I say, and I try to stand up, but the handcuffs keep me down.

  “I’ll think about coming back tomorrow,” she says.

  “What does that mean? That you might not come back?”

  “I have to decide whether or not you’re faking everything you’re saying. Whether you’re telling me what you think I want to hear. Not remembering what you did to these women, I don’t know, it might be a little hard for me to buy. I’ve seen it before. I could be seeing it now. Problem with the insanity plea is you seem very aware of what you’re saying.”

  I say nothing. It seems saying nothing works better for me.

  She moves to the door and bangs on it.

  “Wait,” I tell her.

  “What for?”

  “Please. Please, this is my life we’re talking about here. I’m scared. There are people in here who want to kill me. I have no idea what the fuck I’ve done over the last few years, I’m lost and I’m scared and please, please, don’t go. Not yet. Even if you don’t believe me, I just need somebody to talk to.”

  The guard opens the door. Ali stands there staring at me and the guard stands there staring at her.

  “Ma’am?” he says.

  She looks at the guard. “False alarm,” she says, and she moves back to the table. The guard manages to multitask a shrug with an eye-roll while closing the door.

  “Do you want to see more of me or not, Joe?”

  Ideally, I’d like to see as much of her as I can. If it weren’t for the handcuffs and the guard outside I would make the effort to see every inch of her.

  “Of course.”

  “Then play it straight with me, okay?” She sits back down. She leans forward in her chair and to her credit she doesn’t interlock her fingers-at least not immediately, not until after she asks “Are you going to stop playing games with me, Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go back to your childhood.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. My mom and dad were normal.”

  “Your father killed himself,” she says. “That’s not normal, Joe.”

  “I know that. I meant, you know, the family dynamic was normal. Dad would go to work and mom would stay at home and I would go to school. The only thing that changed was we all got older.”

  “How’d you feel about him killing himself?”

  I shake my head. This isn’t a subject I really want to talk about. “Are you serious? How do you think I felt?”

  “Are you checking for answers, Joe?”

  “No. Of course not. I was angry. Upset. Confused. I mean, the guy was my dad. He was always supposed to be there. He was meant to protect me. And he just, you know, just thought fuck it and ended things. It was pretty selfish.”

  “Did you get any counseling at the time?”

  “Why would I get counseling?”

  “Did your father leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why he did it?”

  “Not really,” I say, but that’s not entirely true. I have this dream sometimes, which, sometimes, I think might actually be a memory rather than a dream. It was the Uncle Billy factor. I came home to find Dad and Uncle Billy in the shower together nine years ago. I don’t know if my father would have killed himself if I’d given him the time to really think about it. I think he would have. Better that than living with mom’s anger. His suicide was less a suicide and more of his only son nud
ging him a little closer to heaven. I think that’s where he wanted to go since I heard him saying oh God, oh God over and over before I opened the bathroom door. It was the less painful solution for everybody involved. And not painful for me at all. Of course, that might just be a dream. .

  “You sure? You look like you’re remembering something.”

  “I’m just remembering my dad. I miss him. I always miss him.”

  “Some professionals would call what your father did a trigger.”

  “What?”

  “A trigger. It means an act that forces you to behave differently. A triggering event.”

  “Oh. I understand,” I say, not so sure I do. I didn’t shoot him. I tied him up and stuffed him into his car and put a hose running from the exhaust and through a gap in the window. At least that’s what Dream Joe does sometimes.

  “I want to talk more about your childhood.”

  “Because you think there are more triggers?”

  “Possibly. Your story about the kitten-”

  “John,” I interrupt.

  “John,” she says. “Your story about John makes me think there are going to be other triggers. Tell me, Joe, do you like women?”

  “Joe likes everybody,” I say.

  She looks at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, and I’m sure she’s about to tell me off for referring to myself in the third person. I used to do that when I was a janitor and it worked well. Here, I’m not so sure.

  “What’s your earliest traumatic memory?” she asks.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Something to do with women,” she says. “Your mother, possibly. Or an aunt. A neighbor. Tell me something.”

  “Why? Because that’s what the psychiatric textbooks say?” I say, a little too quickly, but I say it that way to stop my mind from traveling back to when I was a teenager.

  “Yes, Joe. That’s why. I know what I need to hear from you, and I get the strong impression you also know what you need to say. I’m going to give you sixty seconds to tell me something that happened to you when you were young. Trust me, I’ll know if you’re making it up. But something happened and I want to know what.”