Bloodman (20 page)

Jake thought about the text that covered his skin, about the Canto, about the men of blood that Dante had described. The violent, the viscous, the dangerous. Kept in a lake of fire and blood where their screams echoed and their souls were tortured. Was his old man talking about them? “All you seem to be telling me is that my father may or may not be in the early-to-mid stages of Alzheimer’s—”

Sobel shook his head, held up his hand. “If this talk about the blood man is just a misnomer for something—or someone—that he’s afraid of, it could be that he’s just over-compartmentalized his life in order not to have to face whatever it is that’s scaring him. And he
is
scared, Jake. The man inside is hiding from something.”

“He’s been doing that since my mother died.”
Skinned
, the little voice hissed.

“That was the summer of ’78, right?”

Jake nodded. “June sixth.”

Sobel made a note on the chart. “Jesus, how time flies. I’m sorry about your mother, Jake. Besides having a killer backhand, she was a lot of fun. Elegant. Every woman at the club was jealous of her.”

“I remember that. Living with her was like living with Jackie Kennedy. She could make an egg-salad sandwich and a Coke look refined.”

“Could this have anything to do with your mother? Her…accident was never solved, was it?”

Jake shook his head.

“So could it?”

Jake shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. No. All of the above. I’ll figure it out.”

“If all of this is tied in somehow, maybe your father is afraid of something out of his past. Maybe it’s just a flashback to her death. Bad memories coming back.”

“I don’t think so. After my mother’s death, Dad never talked about it. Never seemed to react.”
Liar
. He sat in front of her car every night with a bottle of booze and wept until he fell asleep.

“The memory is a peculiar place, Jake. It functions under different basic tenets than the rest of the mind. Maybe he is being plagued by ghosts you don’t know about.”

Jake thought about the blank bloody face that he had splattered on the hospital room wall and realized that Sobel had to be partially right. “Maybe he’s had a real struggle,” the psychiatrist added. “Maybe his accident wasn’t an accident at all.”

“Are you saying that he burned off his hands on purpose?”

Sobel’s head clicked from side to side but the grimace refused to be shaken loose. “
On purpose
is a little strong. Sometimes we do things for reasons we’re not aware of. Maybe your father wanted to leave the house. Maybe a part of him knew that it wasn’t safe for him because of exactly the same reasons you cited—he opened the fridge and saw sod and keys and he couldn’t understand why they were there. The rational part of his brain realized that the environment wasn’t good for him. Maybe he had an accident so he could leave. And maybe the blood man is just his way of lumping his feeling of insecurity into a neat package. I think that something has your father very frightened. Something he’s calling the blood man.”

The receptionist was jammed into her office chair, scowling over the Day-Timer, crossing out appointments with a red marker, the phone pressed to her ear. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. O’Shaunnesy, we have to recalibrate with the storm. I don’t know when we’ll be back but you will be at the head of the line. Of course. Of course. At least four days…”

Jake nodded a thank-you as he walked past her desk.

The little girl was still folded into the lotus position under the coffee table and by now the two-foot-by-five-foot surface was armored with a layer of candies, laid out in a brightly colored mosaic. From beside the receptionist’s desk, Jake saw the wrappers at an angle, a shelf of color. The girl was staring straight ahead, her hand dipping into the bowl like a metronome counting time, not missing a beat. As before, one candy would be placed in an empty slot at the far upper-left-hand corner of the table, the next somewhere in the middle, as if she had a pattern laid out in her head and was merely illustrating it for her mother—but the woman was still engrossed in her shitty book.

Jake’s head swiveled as he passed the girl, scanning the pattern on the table. The mother didn’t lift her eyes from the novel
and the little girl kept dipping her hand into the bowl and laying out the candies as single pixels in a digital image.

Jake was almost on top of her when he stopped.

She had laid out a copy—a nearly
exact
copy, limited by the size of the surface she had to work on and the colors at her disposal—of the cover of her mother’s book. Jake froze in midstep. Two beautiful candy people embraced, a cubist mansion in the background, a tree line behind.
The Bluebloods of Connecticut
spelled out in cursive sweets.

Each candy was a component.

A speck of color.

A single pixel.

Like Chuck Close’s work.

“She does that all the time,” her mother said in a thick Long Island accent.

Jake looked up, saw the book folded in her lap. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

The mother shrugged. “I s’pose. I try not to get annoyed but it’s hard sometimes. She’ll do this with anything. Playing cards. Scraps of paper. Dead leaves. Thumbtacks—but I try to keep her away from them. She even does it with bits of food. Can’t give her no Froot Loops or nothin’ with color or she’s makin’ pictures of faces and stuff. When you scrape dried raisins off the car seat for the fifth time in a week it gets old real quick.”

Jake was trying to listen but the image of the Chuck Close painting back at the beach house wouldn’t leave him. He saw the sliced-out eyes, the pixilated image of his father’s face staring out of the huge canvas. He thought about the dreary little paintings stacked up in the studio, random nothings that seemed meaningless and incomplete. He thought about the whole often being greater than the sum of its parts.

And suddenly he knew what the canvases stacked in the studio were.

46

He tried to get Jeremy to explain the man in the floor, to describe him in some concrete way, maybe even to summon him. But when he had pressed—really pushed the boy—he had run to the middle of the living room, jumped up and down, and screamed, “Bud! Bud! Bud!” over and over until Jake had finally picked him up and told him to forget it. And for some reason this made Jeremy even more frustrated, more angry, as if jumping up and down in the middle of the living room
was
the answer.

Jake and Kay spent the morning photographing the paintings in the studio. Kay held the digital recorder and Jake flipped through the paintings, holding them up one at a time—just long enough for the camera to capture it—then he moved onto the next. Jake knew that when the video was finally viewed, it would look like a meth addict’s homage to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But he had spoken to the lab back at Quantico and they had software that could isolate each individual canvas and apply it to its place in an overall pattern.

They worked fast, some minutes capturing up to forty canvases, others barely getting ten. By the end of the first hour they had cataloged 1,106 canvases. By the end of the second hour, another 897—a sizeable dent in the process.

“I need a sandwich,” Kay said, her arm up on the camera, bent at the wrist, the word
L-O-V-E
inked across her knuckles.

“And a Coke,” Jake added.

Jake didn’t want Jeremy in the studio proper where the studies of the faceless men of blood looked down from everywhere, so he had been relegated to the studio’s small entryway, doing a pretty good job of entertaining himself with more Hot Wheels mayhem. Kay had found a Patti Smith album in one of the milk crates under the ancient freezer-sized oak stereo and Jeremy was using the soundtrack to his full advantage, little imaginary car-accident victims meeting their maker to “Redondo Beach.”

“You want a coffee, Moriarty?” Jake asked above the music, and walked over to the entryway. He stepped in. “A big coffee?”

Jeremy laughed. “I don’t like no coffee, Daddy. I like milk and apple juice.”

Looking at his son now, sprawled out on the tiled floor of the entryway with his cars shining like metallic insects, he could see the machinations the boy’s mind was going through to forget what had happened that morning. The part that frightened Jake was that his son refused to talk about it. What was he afraid of? Was it the same man in the floor that had his father spooked? Was it a communal hallucination or was it something more tangible? The answer was easy in coming: hallucinations couldn’t finger-paint a skull over your son’s face in blood.

“So let’s get some lunch,” Jake said, to Jeremy and Kay’s applause. “You guys are easy to please.”

“That’s us,
easy-peasy
!”

“Well,
Mrs. Easy
—” he said, winking at Kay—“and
Mr. Peasy
, how about some tuna sandwiches?”

Jake looked at his watch and saw that they had about an hour before Kay and Jeremy headed back to the city, and he wanted to catalog as many of the paintings as possible. They headed inside, Jake carrying Jeremy in his arms, Kay with the camera and tripod over her shoulder like a spear-bearer. Kay flipped off the lights.

The outer edge of the storm had made landfall and the sky was gone in a mass of gray and white that misted the coast with a solid shower. The grass was already saturated and the falling water pushed by the wind that had fired up etched shifting patterns in the rolling chop of the ocean. Jeremy laughed as Jake ran through the rain, swearing in Moriarty-friendly language that made him sound like a crazed Yosemite Sam.

Jake held the door for Kay, his hand protectively covering the back of Jeremy’s head. Wind ripped into the house and dust devils and papers swirled in mini funnels. The wind slammed the door for him as he jumped inside after her.

“I don’t want to be here when Dylan rolls in, Jake.” Kay took the camera off the tripod.

Jake put Jeremy down in the kitchen and dried his hair with a fistful of paper towels. “I say we have some sandwiches, then hit the road. Who’s with me?”

Jeremy shot his arm into the air in a Fascist vote and Kay nodded, grinning brightly. “What about the case?” she asked.

“F-U-C-K the case,” he said. “We are
leaving
.”

Kay’s T-shirt was wet and clung to her body and her nipples earned her a happy stare from Jake. “After a quick nap, that is,” he added.

“All right, coffee, Moriarty?”

Jeremy shouted, “I said I don’t drink no coffee!”

“Oh, yeah. Forgot. Sorry. I must be thinking about some other little boy I know.” He bent down, kissed his son, and sent him out of the kitchen with an affectionate pat on the bum. “You go play with your cars and I’ll make us some lunch.”

Jeremy ran to the living room and plopped himself down on the multicolored tapestry of intertwined rugs. He fished in his pockets, then threw his cars down like a handful of Yahtzee dice. Within seconds the casualties were piling up amid three-year-old dinosaur roars.

Jake washed his hands and pulled out the loaf of Wonder Bread from the Kwik Mart. He thought about Mallomars. And about what had happened to his mother three-quarters of his life ago. About his old man, terrified to the point of hysteria, screaming about the blood man, fastened to the bed frame so he wouldn’t open up his painter’s tool box and do any more portraits in the medium of dementia. Sobel, sounding a little too much like Vincent Price when he spoke of his father’s terrors, the academic nod of his head somehow giving his old man’s fears more weight than Jake wanted to allow. There was Madame and Little X, Nurse Macready, Hauser and his impromptu hurricane task force. His mother’s Benz, already in the science lab in Quantico, having her honor compromised by the best of modern forensic investigative techniques—being forced to give up her cherry after a third of a century. He thought about the goddamned lighthouse over Nurse Macready’s shoulder in the photo and about the isosceles puddle of black blood in the corner of her kitchen. About the beautiful people of Connecticut, laid out in candy by an autistic girl in a psychiatrist’s office. He thought about the approaching hurricane and about Jeremy’s creepy new friend, the man in the floor, who he wouldn’t discuss. There were the five thousand or so canvases—an obsessive-compulsive’s jackpot—stacked up in the studio. He thought about his wife’s cello and about Jeremy’s Hot Wheels. And he knew that he wanted to get away from here. To go as far and as fast as he could and not look back, not come back, not ever think about the stinking place for as long as he lived.

But he had a son to feed and he concentrated on that, the simple act of mixing a little tuna with mayo and adding a smidge of salt and pepper. He would have liked to add onions and some celery but like his old man had often said, you can only eat what you kill. So it was going to be boring tuna, a glass of milk, two Cokes, a quick nap, and it was off to the city in an ancient car with—

“Kay?” he said, simultaneously glopping a scoop of tuna salad onto a square of cancer bread. “We don’t have room for your cello. It won’t fit in the car and if we lash it to the roof rack, it’ll get soaked.”

“F-U-C-K the cello, Jake,” she said. “I just want us to get out of here.” She stood on the other side of the counter, the T-shirt clinging to her little frame. Beneath the white cotton the calligraphy of her skin moved as if it were a separate living creature. Jake knew how she felt about the instrument—it was the only material item she cared for—and if she was dismissing it so easily, he knew that she wanted to get out of here.

“It’s supposed to be airtight, right? I’ll duct-tape the seams—maybe that’ll help. It’s one for all—”

“And all for one!” Jeremy hollered from the living room.

“That’s right, Moriarty. Lunchtime. Come wash your hands.”

Half an hour later, Jeremy was down for a nap and Kay and Jake had packed up everything they were taking. They had a bit of downtime before they woke Jeremy for the trip home.

Kay had changed into a dry shirt with
Motorhead
spray-painted across the front. She wore no bra and her breasts were sliding around under the fabric with her movements. She looked at Jake and asked, “Would it be insensitive of me to ask for a round before we hit the road?” Then began peeling off her clothes.

Twenty minutes later they were knitted into a knot of limbs on the damp sheets. The pheromone smell of sex was thick and the air was electric with the rattle of rain on the window.

Kay had popped another blood vessel in her left eye and Jake knew she’d be wearing sunglasses to rehearsal for the next few days—it had become an accepted side effect of their sex life and with the people who knew them well, she passed it off as an ocular condition. She usually dealt with the occasional bruise or ligature mark on her neck with high collars or big necklaces. The fact was, the sex set off the endorphins in her brain like nothing else she had felt since her drug and booze days. She realized—they
both
realized—that with their determination to leave their mutual addictions behind, they had stumbled across a new one. One that didn’t involve needles or pills or alcohol or chemicals; a natural high from the ancient blood-powered sex machine between their ears. Their sex life had simply become a replacement for their old addictions.

She was facedown, stretched out like Supergirl, her hands cuffed up through the oak spokes of the bed. “Thank you, baby, I needed that.” Her handcuffs clinked and as Jake kissed the back of her head she pushed up and into him with her bum. “Now uncuff me so we can get the fuck out of here.”

There was a crash somewhere off in the house.

“Daddy!” Jeremy’s voice screeched in the bright shatter of panic.

Jake jumped off of Kay, grabbed his pistol from the nightstand, and pounded down the hallway.

He threw the door to Jeremy’s room open.

Jeremy was gone.

There was a brief instant of complete and absolute silence in his head, as if the circuitry had just frozen in place. He stared down at Jeremy’s empty bed, trying to will his son into it. There was a thick surge in the atmosphere as if the house had been zinged by a bolt of lightning and Jake felt the electric hammer of fear slam into his chest. There was an audible pop as the hot wallop of his resynchronization appliance overloaded his heart. Then silence covered him like a blanket of wet sand.