Blood Men: A Thriller

My mother was the kind of woman who, when shopping for groceries, would stray from the list she had made and add what was on special, even if we already had plenty of the same thing at home. We’d have cupboards full of paper towels and flour and tins of food that wouldn’t fit in the pantry. Meat wasn’t excluded from this list—the freezer was always full, the exact quantity within its depths an unknown. I took a piece of meat from the freezer knowing it wouldn’t be missed. I hid it in the garage one morning before school, wrapped in an old rag and stuffed inside an empty paint container with a twisted lid. It thawed out while I studied at school and while the dog went about using up the rest of his barks. When I got home the steak was soft and felt fresh. My dad was at work, my mother was on the phone to her sister, and my own sister didn’t have any intention of shifting from in front of the TV. The dog was barking from two doors down. It was loud and consistent, but painful-sounding too, the barking of a dog who didn’t understand why it was suffering but didn’t know anything else.

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.