Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  First call is to my lawyer. It’s getting late and it’s a Saturday, but I have his cell number. He picks it up after a few rings. I can hear conversation and music in the background.

  “It’s Joe,” I tell him.

  “I know,” he says, and I figure he probably has the prison phone in his caller ID. I figure I’m lucky he even answered. Could be the ball is still falling when it comes to my luck-after all, I wasn’t shot this afternoon. From here on out I’m going to be living the good life.

  “Did the deal go ahead?”

  “You’ve held up your end of the bargain,” he says. “Of course it’s going ahead. Once the body is identified the money will be transferred into your mother’s account. I have the details. Your mother is. . well, she’s quite something,” he says, which on one hand is exceptionally accurate, but on the other hand doesn’t sum her up in the least.

  “How long until they identify the body?” I ask him.

  “You’ve got a break,” he says. “Five years ago Calhoun was chasing a rapist in his car,” he says, and I wonder if that’s the way most rapists get caught. “There was an accident. So now Calhoun has a metal pin in his leg. Pin has a serial number on it. So if the body you led them to has that same pin, then the money will be cleared. Jones is going to have a vision in the morning. It’s too late tonight and too dark and he wants a buildup. Autopsy will take place tomorrow afternoon. Funds will be transferred tomorrow night. Monday morning your mother will have them.”

  “What time are you coming in tomorrow?”

  “It’s my day off tomorrow,” he says. “It’s Sunday.”

  “But we need to talk about the trial. It’s our last day,” I say, more desperate now since Melissa hasn’t set me free, so maybe the luck ball isn’t falling that much at all.

  “Well, we’ll see what happens. If I can make it I’ll make it.”

  “And I need you to spot me two hundred dollars,” I tell him.

  “Good night, Joe,” he says, and hangs up.

  The prison guard is still leaning against the wall. He’s playing a game on his cell phone. I make the second of my two calls listening to the theme music and then to the explosions coming from the guard’s direction. My mother answers after the first ring, as if she were expecting the call.

  “Hello, Mom. It’s me.”

  “Joe?” she asks, as if it could have been one of any amount of people ringing and calling her mom.

  “It’s me,” I tell her.

  “Why are you calling? It’s Saturday night. Date night. We’re about to head out for dinner.”

  “I wanted to-”

  “You can’t come along, Joe. It’s date night. Why would you try to ruin date night?” she asks, sounding annoyed, and I can picture her on the end of the phone frowning at the wall. “It’s our last one before the wedding.”

  “I’m not calling about date night,” I tell her.

  “Why? You’re too embarrassed to be seen with your mother on a Saturday night?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what?” she asks, no doubt the frown now being joined by, rather than replaced by, a look of confusion.

  “I’m calling about something else.”

  “About the wedding?”

  “No. Remember how I called you last night?”

  “Yes. Of course. You called about your girlfriend,” she says. “I’m so glad you have a good woman in your life, Joe. Every man deserves a good woman,” she says, sounding happy again. “Do you think you’ll get married? Is that why you’re calling? Oh my, I’m so excited for you! Perhaps we can have weddings on the same day! Just think about it. It’s so fantastic isn’t it? Oh, oh, how about if Walt is your best man? By golly, that’s a great thought!”

  “I’m not so sure that’s going to happen, Mom.”

  “Because you’re embarrassed to be seen with me. You know, Joe, I didn’t raise you to be this way.”

  We’re getting off track-but of course my mom has been off track for at least thirty years. “Mom, did you call her?”

  “What?”

  “Did you call my girlfriend? Did you tell her that I’d gotten the message?”

  “What message?”

  “Did you call her?”

  “Yes, of course I called her. That’s what you asked me to do. She didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “The message,” I tell her, “the message in the books.”

  “What books?”

  “The books you brought in for me. The books she gave you to give me.”

  “Oh, oh those books,” she says, and I hope the force of everything flooding back to her knocks her over. That way she’ll break a hip and the wedding will have to be postponed. “Did you enjoy them?” she asks. “I thought they were okay. Not as good as TV, but nothing ever is. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a book after seeing the movie on telly and been so disappointed. I just wish authors could get it right. Don’t you think so, Joe?”

  I don’t answer her. I can’t spare the energy, because I’m using all of my strength to have an out-of-body experience. I’m trying to figure a way to reach my arm down the phone line and put my fingers around her throat.

  “Joe? Are you still there?” she asks, and then she taps the phone against her hand-I can hear it banging once and twice, then a third time, and then it’s back and her lips are against it and I’m still trying to reach her with my hand. “Joe?”

  “You read them?” I ask.

  “Of course I did.”

  “But you’re a slow reader.”

  “So?”

  I face the concrete wall. I wonder how far I could bury my forehead into it. “So when exactly did my girlfriend give them to you to give to me?”

  “When?” she asks, then she goes quiet as she’s figuring it out. I can picture my mom standing in the kitchen on the phone, dishes behind her, cold meat loaf on the counter, using her fingers to count off the days. “Well, it wasn’t last month,” she says.

  “So it was this month.”

  “Oh Lord no. No, it was, now let me see. . it was before Christmas, no, no, wait-it was after. Yes, I think it was after. Probably around four months ago, I suppose.”

  I tighten my grip on the receiver. The other hand curls into a ball. I can’t hear my mom choking. “Four months?”

  “Maybe five.”

  I close my eyes and lean my forehead against the wall. It’s painted-over cinder block, so it’s cold and smooth and easy to wipe blood off.

  “Five months,” I say, and somehow my voice stays level.

  “No more than six,” she says.

  “No more,” I say. “Mom. Listen to me. Very carefully. Now, why the fuck didn’t you bring those books to me straightaway?”

  “Joe! How dare you speak to me like that! After all I’ve done for you? After raising you, looking after you, after squeezing you out of my vagina!” she shouts.

  And sixteen years later I was being squeezed into my auntie’s one. I figure between them both they owe me some Goddamn consideration.

  “Six months!” I shout, and I don’t even make the decision to do it, it just starts happening, my hand starts crashing the receiver against the wall. “Six months!” I scream back into it, only it’s just shattered plastic holding a string of wires and components. I smash it against the wall again. All I have now is a disconnect signal and a blossoming headache. I don’t get to speak into it again because then I’m being tackled. I’m on the ground and my arms are being pulled behind me. I’m being shouted at to stay calm. I shout six months again, and then the guard puts his knee in my back and I’m punched really hard in the kidneys, so hard that I almost throw up.

  He rolls me onto my back. He’s been joined by a second guard.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  They drag me to my feet. It’s Saturday night. Date night. I’m not taken back to my cell. Instead I’m taken in a different direction, through two more sets of doors that are buzzed open from a contro
l booth somewhere. We’re watched by cameras in the ceilings. I haven’t been in this direction before, but I’m pretty sure I know where it heads. It’s solitary confinement-and my first thought is it has to be better than what I’ve had so far, then my second thought is that this has actually worked out pretty well. Not the part where my mother fucked up, but the part where I fucked up and broke the phone. I’m going to be safe here. Caleb Cole can’t get me here.

  The cells are wider apart. All the doors are closed and there’s no sound coming from within any of them. There is no communal area. Everything is darker. Even the cinder-block walls seem to be a different shade of gray. The two guards march me to the end of a corridor and then we wait as a cell door is buzzed open. None of us make conversation along the way. A piece of my soul is still back at the phone, trying to figure out a way to get to my mother. The second guard disappears.

  “Sleep it off,” the original guard says, and he shoves me into the cell. He takes the cuffs off. “Don’t forget you owe me two hundred bucks,” he says. Then the door is slammed behind me. There is no light. I have to walk slowly to find the edge of the bed. I lie on my side. My stomach is starting to make noises again. The darkness of the cell is going to make it all very awkward if that rumbling continues.

  For the first time since being in jail I start crying. I let my face sink into the pillow and I wonder whether things would be better for me if I just buried my face into it and went to sleep and hoped the Suffocation Fairy will come and take me away.

  I wonder what Melissa is doing right now, who she’s doing it to, and-as the pressure in my stomach builds-I wonder if she even thinks of me anymore.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  It’s cold but dry and Melissa is relieved that the weather seems like it’s going to do its part. It’s Sunday morning. People are sleeping in. Some going to church. Some hungover from the night before. Kids are climbing into bed with their parents, kids are sitting in front of TVs, kids are playing in backyards. Melissa remembers that life. She and her sister on Sunday mornings snuggled in bed with their parents. Her sister’s name was actually Melissa. That’s where she got it from. Her own name was Natalie. Was being the key word. Melissa and Natalie watching cartoons and eating cereal and, on occasion, trying to make breakfast for their parents. Once they set fire to the toaster. It was more her sister’s doing, really-she was the one on toaster duty, whereas Natalie was on cereal and orange-juice duty. Her sister had put jam on the slices before toasting them. Something caught fire. After that their parents made them promise not to try making breakfast for them again, at least not for a few more years, and that’s a promise they would keep.

  She misses her sister. They used to call her sister Melly-though Natalie would call her Smelly Melly whenever she was trying to annoy her. Which was reasonably often. Melly was younger. Blond hair in ponytails. Big blue eyes. A sweet smile that became sweeter as she started a journey through her teens she wouldn’t finish. Everybody loved her. One day a stranger loved her. He loved her and killed her and then stuck a gun into his mouth and killed himself. The guy was a cop. They’d never seen him before. Don’t know how his life and Melly’s life shared the same orbit. But they did. For one brief painful afternoon they did. There was no meaning in it. It was-for no better summation-just one of those things.

  She struggled with the loss. Eventually that loss killed her father. Life carried on. And life was strange. It was a policeman that had killed her sister, yet it was policemen she started to become fascinated by. Not obsessed-that would happen later-but in the early days it was just a fascination. Her psychiatrist at the time put it in terms she was too young to understand. She didn’t understand how she could like the very thing that had hurt her so much. So her psychiatrist, a Dr. Stanton, had explained it more simply-he had said she wasn’t becoming fascinated with the police because it was a cop that had hurt her sister, but because the police represented justice. She got his point. After all, it was the police she loved, not individuals who raped and murdered young girls.

  It was only a handful of years between the events of losing her sister and it becoming her turn to share an orbit with a really bad guy. It felt like her family was cursed. This time the bad guy was a university professor. She was studying psychology. She wanted to know what made people tick. She wanted to be a criminologist. Then came the bad orbit and the curse, and she shared the first half of the same fate Melly had shared. The other half she would have shared too, she was sure of it, but that’s when Melly came to help her. From the dead she could hear her sister’s voice telling her to fight back. And she did. She did all the things Melly wasn’t able to do. She fought back and she’s been fighting ever since. So much in fact that she got to like it. Like it a lot. And it didn’t make sense. She hadn’t studied psychology enough to understand it, and she didn’t think Dr. Stanton would be able to explain it either. Dr. Stanton was at least right about something-she didn’t become fascinated with policemen because it was a cop who killed her sister, because if that had been true then she would have become fascinated with professors too. What did happen is after her own attack her fascination with the police became full-blown obsession. She would hang outside the police station. She would follow some home. She would sneak into their houses. She knew it was crazy. She knew it made her crazy, but there it was. She was fascinated by policemen and by the men they looked for.

  She started calling herself Melissa back when she heard her sister’s voice, but she doesn’t hear it anymore. That’s because Melly wouldn’t approve of all that she’s done. She knows that, because Melly told her. It was the last thing her sister told her from beyond the grave. It was in a dream. Melly said she didn’t approve, and Melissa told her that men were bastards. All men. Melissa pointed out some are better at hiding it, but all deserve to be treated like the pigs they are. Melly didn’t have a response for that-unless disappearing forever was a response, which Melissa suspects might just be.

  She still misses her.

  In the process of following the police, she began to learn good ones from bad ones, and there were a few bad ones around. And then she met Joe. She didn’t follow him because he was a cop. In fact, she didn’t follow him at all. He was a janitor. That much was obvious. Then a year ago she ran into him in a bar and they started chatting, and the rest is history.

  She misses him.

  Her obsession with the police ended that night, and her obsession with Joe started. Joe, a man she should hate-a man similar to the man that took away her sister, similar to the man that raped her-and she’s obsessed with him. She’s in love with him. There is something wrong inside of her, something terribly, terribly wrong. She knows it, she’s felt it every day since the police came to her house and spoke to her parents, the day she hid at the end of the hallway where she could just make out snippets of conversation that included the words dead, naked, policeman, suicide. If she asked Dr. Stanton to put it into layman’s terms, he would tell her she was fucked-up. But knowing you’re fucked-up doesn’t solve anything, not when you like how it feels, and Melissa likes how it feels. In fact she’s come to like it a lot. It makes her feel alive. If the bad shit in her life hadn’t happened, if Melly were still around, would things have turned out the same? Would she have found another way to become this person?

  She has asked herself this question a thousand times, and she’s no closer to answering it now than she was a year ago when she first met Joe.

  There are a few cars parked out front of the hardware store, but for the most part the store feels deserted. She hasn’t been into a hardware store since she was a kid and her dad came here a few times the way dads do when they’re planning on fixing something around the house or building a deck. It’s been a while, and while hammers and screwdrivers all look the same, the power tools all seem to be made of brighter colors than the last time she was here, some of them going as far as looking like they were made in the future. She’s wearing the red wig, but not the pregnancy suit. She isn�
��t real sure where to look, but a bald guy with moles littering his arms and neck helps her out, and a few hundred dollars later she has what she wants.

  The next stop is town. She parks outside the office building, getting the same parking space as yesterday evening. She goes inside and takes the lift up to the third floor, feeling too lazy to use the stairs. The environment may not thank her, but her calves do. The office is just how she left it. Why wouldn’t it be? The drop cloth is still playing curtain, but there’s enough ambient light to see. The gun is exactly where it was left. She gets it down and rests it on the bench they made then goes to the window. She gets her hardware-store purchase out and quickly browses the instructions. The device uses a laser to measure distances. She points it over the road where Joe is going to be standing, but can’t see the red dot of the laser pointer and can’t tell where she’s pointing. She gives it a minute and is about to give up in frustration when she suddenly spots it in the shade of the back door to the courthouse. She follows it to the spot where Joe will be standing tomorrow and locks in the distance. With the elevation, it’s almost forty yards.

  She takes the tool and the gun and heads back down in the elevator. She puts the gun into the trunk. Traffic doesn’t increase over the next hour. It never does, no matter what the hour on a Sunday morning. The temperature doesn’t increase much either. Maybe one degree, if that. She drives with the heater on and the radio on. She’s listening to Bruce Springsteen. He’s singing about a guy who went on a killing spree with his girlfriend in the fifties. Things were simpler back then.

  Driving the car is easier when you’re not eight or nine months pregnant, but she puts the suit on now. She pulls into the parking lot of the gun store and goes inside. The guy who helps her is in his forties, has thick glasses and eyebrows reaching across to shake hands with each other. His name is Arthur. Arthur seems a little in shock. He seems to think she’s going to give birth to a redheaded baby right there in the store. He looks like a friendly guy that the world hasn’t beaten up. She tells him what she needs. A box of ammunition. Plus a bullet puller for taking apart bullets and a bullet-seating die for reassembling them. She tells him they are for her husband. He nods thoughtfully, probably thinking the husband was planning on shooting himself rather than face what was balancing a fine line between staying in her womb and spilling out of it onto the floor. He gets the items for her and she pays in cash.