“Well, it’s your choice, Carl. You take it or leave it. There’s a lot riding on it. Your new boss is going to make a hell of a name for himself. And I need the money, so I want to make this work. And let me ask you, Carl, how much are you making on this? Huh? You wouldn’t be doing this unless there was a little something in it for you,” I say, holding up my hand rubbing my fingertips against my thumb in the We’re talking about money gesture.
“Fuck you, Joe.”
“And you want Calhoun back, don’t you?”
“Gentlemen,” my lawyer says, putting his hands out. “Can we stay on point here?”
“I’m not a cop anymore, Joe,” Schroder says. “You know that. I can’t organize a deal like that.”
“You’ll find a way,” I say.
Schroder shakes his head. “You just don’t get it,” he says. “God,” he says, throwing his head back and looking up at the ceiling. “How the fuck could somebody so stupid have gotten away with it for so long?” He looks back at me. “I must have been stupider than I thought for not arresting you sooner than I did.”
“What are you going on about?” I ask.
“For me to make what you’re asking happen would involve the police. If the police are involved, then there is no deal, because they’re going to know you led us there. And if the police are involved, then that doesn’t help Jonas Jones, does it?”
It takes a few seconds for what he’s saying to sink in.
“He’s right,” my lawyer says, and fuck it, he is. They both are.
I shake my head. I could waive the deal, and just agree to show the cops. It just means no money. If I have to, then that’s what I’ll do. I have to do something to be outside tomorrow twilight. That’s all that matters.
“You two need to figure out a way to make it happen,” I tell them, “and it needs to happen before the trial starts.”
“Joe—” my lawyer starts.
“We’re done here,” I tell them.
“You’re so fucking stupid,” Schroder says.
I stand up. The one thing I hate is being called stupid.
The one thing I hate even more is looking stupid. My wrist is still cuffed to the chair and I’m almost pulled back into it. “Guard,” I shout out, and I bang on the table. “Guard!”
The guard opens the door. He gives me a really unimpressed look. I tell him I’m done here. He comes in and takes off the handcuff.
“Make it happen,” I tell Schroder when I reach the door, and I’m escorted back to my psychiatrist.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“She called me the following day,” I tell my psychiatrist, and I’ve switched from Joe Escape Artist back to Joe Victim, and that’s fine, because Joe Victim gets a much prettier view. “I thought she was going to wait for the weekend, but she called me after school. First she spoke to my mother and told her she wanted me to help around her house, and in return she would pay me. My mother thought it was a great idea because it meant that was less time I would be spending around our house. So I went there and mowed her lawns. Then it turned out she wanted the garage painted, inside and out, including the roof. So that became the project for a few weeks. Only it wasn’t the only project. She kept calling me day after day to go around there until . . . well, until she grew tired of me.”
“Tired of you?”
“Tired of me.”
“Grew tired of you doing the chores?”
“Not exactly,” I say, and I look down at my cuffed wrist, at the arm of the chair, at my feet and at the floor. The view might be prettier for Joe Victim than it was staring at my lawyer ten minutes ago, but looking into the past is ugly. “She grew tired of me about two years later.”
“Joe?”
I look up at her. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” I ask her.
Slowly she’s shaking her head and she’s trying to hide the disgust on her face, but she’s not doing a great job. She pauses, taking a few breaths before continuing. “Are you trying to tell me your auntie kept your secret in exchange for sex?”
“I’m actually trying not to tell you about it,” I say. “But yeah, that’s what happened. Like she said, she was lonely. She hadn’t had a man around the house for six years.”
“She blackmailed you.”
“What else could I do? If I didn’t do what she wanted, she would go to the police. She would tell my parents. She said she would tell people I had raped her if I didn’t go along with it. So I had to keep going back. I mean, the only thing I could think of was to kill her. And no matter what you think of me, I’m not a killer. At least I don’t want to be one.”
“Was it the first time you’d ever had sex?”
“Yes.”
She keeps staring at me as if she’s about to ask me how much I enjoyed it, and if it went anything like this, followed by her taking her clothes off and bending over the table. “Tell me about it,” she says.
As much as I want her turned on, I don’t really want to tell her about my auntie. “Why?”
“Because I asked you.”
“About the sex itself?”
“Tell me about your auntie. About leading up to what happened.”
I shrug. Like it’s no big deal. Like being forced to have sex with one’s auntie is as trivial as talking about the weather, although marginally more entertaining. But it is a big deal. One that for a long time had stayed bottled up inside of me. After my auntie died and we were going through her house, after I saw the crossbow, and after mom packed everything away, I felt sick. I actually went to the cemetery she was buried in that night, and I found her grave and I took a shit on it. For me it was a form of closure. It was a way of saying good-bye to a woman who made me feel bad about myself, good about myself, and then bad about myself all over.
“I had just finished painting the roof,” I tell my psychiatrist. “It was a hot day. Back then summer was always hot days and blue skies—at least that’s how it seemed. These days we’re lucky to see blue sky twice a week,” I say, and my earlier thought was right—auntie rape is as trivial as weather watch. “I got burned pretty bad up on that roof. I’d been working for my auntie for four days. The Big Bang happened on my fifth, which was our first Saturday together. I was up on the roof and—”
“You call what happened the Big Bang?”
“What would you have me call it?”
“Carry on,” she says.
“So my auntie came outside and called me down. I went down there expecting her to tell me that suddenly the garden needed doing or a lightbulb needed changing, or that I wasn’t painting the roof as well as she wanted, and when I got inside she reminded me why I was there,” I say, and I can still remember it, can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she was wearing lots of makeup too. I can almost feel the sunburn and smell the aloe vera she would rub into my skin later that same day. She told me to sit down on the couch and I did and she handed me a drink of lemonade that she had made that tasted how I imagined cat piss would taste if you carbonated it and threw in a slice of lemon. Then she sat down next to me. She put a hand on my leg, then told me not to flinch when I flinched. Then she told me she had another job for me, and that if I said no, I’d be going to jail. She put one hand in my lap and one hand on the back of my neck and told me to kiss her. I didn’t know what to do. She pushed her face into mine and I’d never kissed a girl before, and it tasted like cigarette smoke and was wet like coffee, and I still remember that my thought was to try and bite her nose off, but before I could think how, she was straddling me. I tried falling back further into the couch, I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. She said if I pushed her away again she would tell my parents what I had done and that I had raped her.”
I tell the psychiatrist this and I can feel my face going red, as if the sunburn and shame from then is finding a way back into my life.
“And in the bedroom,” the psychiatrist says, “your auntie was in control?”