The Cleaner (25 page)

I’m shaking my head, gritting my teeth. My remaining ball is throbbing. “Whatever.”

“Number eight chickens are cheap.”

“Buy some, then.”

“You think I should?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Do you want me to buy some for you?”

“No.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Are you okay, Joe? You sound sick.”

“I’m tired. That’s all.”

“You need more sleep,” she says. “I have just the thing. You want me to come over?”

“No.”

“You don’t want me to see your house? Do you have gay things there, Joe? Do you have one of those homosexuals living with you?”

“I’m not gay, Mom.”

“So what am I supposed to do with this meatloaf? Throw it out, I suppose?”

“Freeze it.”

“I can’t freeze it,” she says, using a tone that suggests she’s wondering how I cope in life if I think freezing meat is the way to go.

“I’ll come around next Monday, Mom. I promise.”

“I guess we’ll wait and see. Bye, Joe.”

“Bye, Mom.”

I’m sweating. I’m also amazed she said good-bye first. I look down at the bucket. The smell of urine has gone. The water looks clear. I piss into it, my crotch throbbing.

Hanging up the telephone gets me remembering. When I came home from the park, I’m pretty sure I made a phone call. But to who?

Sally?

I get up and walk to the fridge. Her number is still there, but smudged across the paper are patches of blood. I came home. I was in pain. I made a phone call. I think I made a phone call.

I go back to bed. My testicle is gone and when I try to remember cutting it away, I picture first Melissa behind a doctor’s mask, and then Sally behind one. I wonder where I put it. Or they put it. Light and dark, sleep and consciousness, awareness of everything and then of nothing. I glide through this existence as best as I can, not bothering to count the hours in case they’re not passing by. Other times I am standing in front of Pickle and Jehovah—not even aware of having stood up and moved over to them—watching them swim and wondering if a goldfish had its testicle removed, would it remember?
My testicle is gone and so is my sanity. The former will never come back. I’m holding out hope for the latter.

My internal alarm wakes me at seven thirty on Monday morning. An entire week has passed. Just like that. I climb from bed and find myself walking better than I have all week. At the window I stare out my shitty view, which today is even shittier than normal. It looks cold outside.

I follow my normal weekday routine. I shower and shave, though it takes slightly longer. I make some toast. I feed my fish. My apartment doesn’t smell as bad as I would have thought. The bucket I’ve been pissing into looks like I’ve only used it a few times. When I go to make lunch, I find most of the food in my apartment has gone off. Still, I feel like I’ve gone through the week from hell and come out in pretty good shape considering. The stairs are awkward and I struggle to walk down them, but I make it without any blood appearing on the front of my overalls. The temperature has dropped by half since the last time I was outside. Gray skies above and black clouds far in the distance, none of it looks like it’s moving. I have to explain to Mr. Stanley why I haven’t seen him for a week.
Yeah, Mom’s been sick.
On the bumpy bus, what remains of my ball sac threatens to tear open. What I need is a man tampon. Or a time machine.

Mr. Stanley lets me off the bus. I hobble across the road and prepare to start another working week.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“I heard you were back at work,” Sally says, and her face seems to be torn between trying to look both happy and concerned.

I am downstairs in the holding cells, throwing a mop back and forth, trying to wipe up all the vomit and piss the weekend drunks have sprayed all over the place. Out of all the things I do here, this has to be the worst. Every month contracted cleaners come in to really give the cells an overhaul, but it’s amazing how painted cinder-block walls and cement floors can really soak up the smell, it smells like a zoo, if the zookeepers boxed the animals into smaller cages and never cleared away the shit. I’ve just spent ten minutes on one particular bad stain that I couldn’t say what its ingredients were, and know it will take another ten minutes to finish the job.

I take off the face mask that protects me from the God-awful smell. The cells, with their metal front doors and concrete construction, are damn cold to be in even in the middle of summer, and it’s not summer anymore, and the frigid air at the moment is making my ball throb.

“My mother’s okay,” I say, knowing she must have heard why I was gone.

“Sorry?”

“My mother. She was sick all week. That’s why I wasn’t here.”

“Your mother was sick?”

“Yeah. I thought you must have heard. That’s why I wasn’t here. Everybody probably knows about it.”

“Oh, sure, I get it,” she says in hush-hush tones, dragging out the
oh
and the
I,
making it sound like a conspiracy. As if we’re having an affair. “Your mother was sick. That’s why you had to take the week off.”

“Yeah. That’s what I said,” I say, and something in the way she sounds is wrong, oh so wrong.

“And she’s better now?”

“Sure,” I answer, dragging out the word and nodding slowly, trying to figure it out. Does she know what happened? Did this woman with an IQ of seventy show up at my house and operate on me?

“And how are you, Joe? Are you better now too?”

“I’m coping. Time heals all wounds—that’s what my mom says,” I say, wondering if my mom had a ripped-off-testicle kind of wound in mind when she said it.

“That’s right. Look, Joe, remember that if you need anything, if you want me to help with . . . your mother . . . then just let me know.”

Of course the kind of help I really need with my mother isn’t the type she would actually be able to offer. Still, if more people were like Sally, maybe the world would be a better place. The problem though is that she sounds like we’re both in on the big secret, the one where Joe woke up one morning in a park after having his testicle flattened in a pair of pliers and had to make his own way home.

“Joe?”

However, I can’t imagine there ever being a secret both
Sally and myself were in on. This is just Sally being Sally. Just trying to help me out with my mother the same way she helps me out by making me lunch. She’s just trying to get on the inside track to getting me into bed.

“Joe? Are you okay?”

“Always,” I tell her.

“Okay, Joe, but we need to talk about . . . about your mother being sick. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m worried about you. I’m worried that your mother . . . she may get sick again.”

“My mother is as healthy as an ox,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t worry. I have to get back to work, Sally.”

“Okay,” she answers, but doesn’t move. She stares at me and I end up staring at the floor, not wanting to make eye contact with her in case she takes it as a sign to start undressing.

“Can I ask you something personal, Joe?”

No.
“Yes.”

“Do you find murder fascinating?”

Yes.
“No.”

“What about the ongoing investigation?”

“Which one?”

“The Christchurch Carver.”

“He must be intelligent.”

“Why do you say that?” she asks.

“Because he hasn’t been caught,” I say. “Because he keeps getting away. He must be really smart.”

“I guess he must be. Does that interest you?”

I act as if I have to think about it, then slowly shake my head. “Not really.”

“Have you . . . looked at any of the folders? The photographs of the dead women? Anything like that?”

“I’ve seen pictures on the wall in the conference room. That’s all. The pictures are horrible.”

“If somebody forces you to steal because they’re hurting
you, then it isn’t really stealing. And the best thing to do would be to go to the police.”

I don’t know what leap she’s just made, but it makes no sense at all. She’s rehashing the sort of Christian morality bullshit that somebody has force-fed her. She’s no idea what we’re even talking about now. She could be saying that killing is bad, that vengeance belongs to God, that using his name in vain is bad, that selling your daughter into slavery isn’t frowned upon. All these things are in the Bible and for some reason she thinks we’re debating it. She could easily have just told me that drowning the elderly is bad.

“You’re right, Sally. If somebody was forcing you to do something you didn’t want to, that would be bad. The police help people when things happen to them,” but of course they don’t. I can vouch for that. I can even show pictures.

Then I start to wonder—is somebody doing something mean to Sally?

She seems to take that as some sort of answer to some half-formed dilemma going on inside her head, because she smiles, tells me she should get back to work, and leaves.

Sally disappears, but my paranoia remains, my earlier thought that she could have come to my house is enough to make me nauseous. If Sally did come to my house, then I might have to repay the favor. There are things she might have seen, things I might have told her that would mean a visit to her house in the middle of the night would be in order.

I sit on the bunk in the cell I’m cleaning and lean my forehead against the broom handle. Over the following minutes, I slowly convince myself that I’m going crazy. No way could Sally have come around to my apartment. If she had, she wouldn’t be able to shut up about it. She would be asking me how my testicle was. She would think that the very fact that she saw me naked meant we were engaged to be married. Sally is too dim-witted to have helped me, too innocent not to have
called the police, too in love with me not to have stayed by my side every minute of the week I was laid up in bed. She’s too many lots of things. And I can’t imagine Sally getting hold of any antibiotics. No, it had to have been Melissa. Which means she is still up to something.

Before lunch I spend twenty minutes in the conference room studying the information and swapping my tapes while I clean the windows and wipe down the blinds. I’m reading statements, studying photographs, making sure nobody is watching me. The sky outside the conference room window is getting darker, and as it does it feels like it’s getting closer, like the world is closing in on me.

I discover several local prostitutes have been approached in connection with the deaths. Hmm . . . interesting. Questions have been asked about their clients. Is there anybody who has a bizarre fetish? Somebody who enjoys perverse sexual acts? Somebody abusive with unusual requests? It’s a feeble and wasted effort. They’re hoping that at some point in my life I’ve vented my sexual aspirations on a whore. I’d never do that. I mean, I’d never do that and keep one alive.

The prostitutes have provided a list to the police. An extremely short list. Not many names and, so far, not many leads.

Before my workday ends, I successfully get four color photographs, one each of the four men on my list. Schroder and McCoy each have recent photographs in their files, but it’s a struggle to get current pictures for the other two—until I realize they’ve most likely been photographed by journalists and cameramen over the last few weeks. While I vacuum a room upstairs, I use the Internet and search through newspaper sites until I find pictures of a high enough standard I can print out.

When I leave work Sally offers me a lift home along with the chance to talk about my mother, and I decline. I forgo my usual bus, and stop at a bank and draw out some cash, figuring I’m going to need it over the next few nights. Melissa took all the cash I was using a few weeks ago, along with my
ATM card. Stepping into the bank is like stepping into a small nature reserve. With a few floor-to-ceiling potted plants brightly lit under the glare of halogen lights, and several small ones crammed into most available spaces, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were wild animals living in here. Standing in a line from the counter to the wall is a line of people I don’t want to join, but I have no choice. We stand waiting together without daring to make conversation because if any of us did, we’d look like freaks. Eventually the line shuffles forward a few times, and I make it to the teller. She is a tall, masculine woman with large hands who smiles at me a lot, but no amount of smiling would ever get me to sneak through her front door late at night.

From the bank I walk over the road to a supermarket, since most of the food in my house has expired. I walk around, allowing myself to limp slightly now that I’m away from work. It seems strange being here, as if I’ve slipped into a slice of life that I shouldn’t be allowed in, as if the supermarket for serial killers and men who have been assaulted with pliers is the supermarket down the road next to the deli. I stare at beautiful women as I shop, and I begin to feel ill. These women would laugh at me if I attacked them. They would call me Numb Nuts, or maybe even One Nut.

The girl working the checkout smiles at me and asks how my day is going. I want to unzip my fly and show her just how okay it’s going. I’m angry as hell. The left one was my favorite.

I climb on the bus and the bumpy bus ride threatens to tear my testicle open. When I reach home it takes me five minutes to climb the stairs. Much harder than climbing down them. I enter my apartment. The light on the answering machine is flashing. A sliver of sunlight arcs through the window as part of the sky clears up. At least the place doesn’t smell of disinfectant and stale piss. I can smell the food that has started to go off, though. I open a window before throwing out the old food and replacing it with the new. I sit down on the sofa and
try to relax, to regain some energy. Pickle and Jehovah swim for me after they swallow every grain of fish food in sight.

I push play on the answering machine, fearful of what Mom will have to say, but it’s the woman from the vet. Jennifer. And she has good news, and good news is something I haven’t had in a while. She tells me the cat has made a full recovery. The owners haven’t contacted them. She wants to know exactly where I found poor little puss, wants to know if I know anybody who wants a cat. Tells me to call her when I get in tonight. She’ll be at work until two o’clock.