Blood Men: A Thriller

Nice house. Nice street. A family street. Not a white-trash, let’s-rob-a-bank kind of street, but I guess those bastards can afford to live where they want.

The house is a single-storey dwelling painted one of those Latin-sounding coffee-color names. The yard smells of freshly mown lawn, small different-colored flax bushes have been evenly spaced out around the house, so even I bet they were measured out, some with red leaves, others with green. They’re surrounded by yellowy white limestone instead of dirt or bark, a tidy low-maintenance garden planted on layers of weedmat I imagine, the kind of garden Jodie wanted and the kind of garden we were going to have until Gerald Painter took all that away from us. There’s a silver birch tree out front with the roots climbing out of the ground and cracking the sidewalk.

It’s a brick home, a nice solid home, with a nice solid front door with thin pieces of glass striped down one third in from the left-hand side and one third in from the right-hand side, with a big matte-silver door handle on the right. The bell is a small black box with a white button that buzzes for as long as you hold it. I can hear it buzzing as the monster holds it down. He doesn’t let it go until we can see a shadowed image moving down the hallway toward the door, slowly and not quite in a straight line, all detail of the figure distorted in the strips of glass.

The door opens. It opens my future and this man’s fate, this man with the bruises on his face and neck that resemble the bruises on mine. His nose has a small bandaged brace over it. He squints and presses his face forward to get a better look, and we want to shove the steak knife right into his head.

His eyes widen as he recognizes me—not us—just me—and for some reason he can’t see the monster, because a smile, not the your-wife-is-dead-and-it’s-my-fault-fuck-you smile, but a sad, sympathetic smile, stretches out beneath the bandaged brace.

“Come in,” he says, before either of us say a word.

“Thank you,” we say, and he closes the door behind us.

“I kind of thought you might show up,” he says. He walks ahead of us, he’s limping slightly, and he veers toward the left and has to keep correcting himself. As far as hallways go, it seems okay. Photos that seem fuzzy to me, a bookcase, a houseplant, all boring shit unless you lived here. He leads me into the dining room which is tidy and doesn’t have any beer bottles anywhere even though he seems drunker than me. “Take a seat,” he says, and there are seats at a breakfast bar of the kitchen, and we take one. It’s a few degrees warmer inside than out and a set of French doors are wide open, the dining room flowing out onto a deck where there’s outdoor lighting and a gas barbecue and a picnic table that’s turned silver in the sun. There’s a Christmas tree in the living room tall enough to touch the ceiling and thick enough to hold what must be about five hundred decorations.

“You . . . ah, you thought I might, might show up?” I ask, trying really hard not to slur my words.

“Can I get you something to drink? I don’t have anything alcoholic,” he says. “I did, until my wife poured it all down the sink. Doctor’s orders of course. Not that it stopped me from trying. I’ve got Coke or Sprite but it’s not the same. Want something?”

“Why’d, why’d you think, that, ah, that I was going to”—I suck in a deep breath and exhale loudly—“to, ah, show up?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Painter is taking on a slightly blurry complexion. It’s as though he’s standing with his identical ghost, his ghost living almost exactly in the same place but off by a few millimeters, so it looks like it’s trying to peel itself away. When I rub at my eyes the ghost disappears.

“Yes you do. You wouldn’t”—I take another deep breath and can taste beer, and suddenly I really have to take a leak—“wouldn’t have said anything otherwise.”