“Do you have her number?”
“Yes, of course I do. I wouldn’t be able to call her otherwise. Are you bringing her to the wedding? Oh, Joe, I’m so pleased! It’s time you found a nice woman. I was getting worried, you know. And your girlfriend reminds me of how I was back then. She’s very attractive, Joe. Of course I’ll call her and invite her along! What a wonderful idea!”
“Okay, great, Mom, that’s great, but I also need you to tell her I got her message.”
“What message?”
“She’ll know what I mean.”
“Hang on, Joe, let me write this down,” she says, and there’s a clunk as she sits the receiver on the table and shuffles off. Nothing for about a minute and I become increasingly concerned she’s either gotten lost or has fallen asleep or has got distracted by the TV. I twist my head and look at Adam who’s grinning at me. He taps his watch and winds his finger around in the air. Wrap it up.
Scuffling as the phone is picked back up. Mom is back.
“Joe? Is that you?”
It’s not Mom. It’s Walt. “How are you doing, Walt?”
“I’m doing fine. Weather report says it’s supposed to be fine all week now, but you know what weather reports are like—they’re like fucking your sister in an elevator.”
“What?”
“Wrong on many levels,” he says, and he starts to laugh.
“I don’t get it,” I tell him.
“It’s elevator humor,” he says. “It suggests having sex with your sister is okay on some levels. That’s what makes it great. I used to repair elevators. Didn’t you know that, Joe? That’s what I did for thirty years. Boy, we’d tell that joke all the time. Though it wasn’t always your sister. It could be your brother, or your dog or your aunt.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Just for a laugh. We didn’t mean anything by it.”
“No. I mean why would you say it about my aunt?”
“People always need elevators,” he says, “aunts and uncles too.” I wonder where the hell my mother is getting a pen from. The moon? “Buildings get bigger, elevator shafts get longer, more wear and tear. I wouldn’t want to be doing it these days, mind you. Too complex. Too much technology. Back then it was all about cables and pulleys, now it’s all about electronics. You gotta have an engineering degree in rocket science. There was this one time, ooh, let me think, twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago when Jesse, he was this neat kid who got his arm caught in one of the . . . Oh, wait, hang on,” he says, then his voice is muffled as he holds his hand over the receiver, and then he comes back on the line. “Your mother is back,” he says. “Don’t tell her the joke,” he says, then disappears with his joke and with his Jesse arm story.
“Joe? Are you still there? It’s your mother,” Mom says.
“I’m still here,” I tell her.
“Now what’s this number I’m ringing?”
“You have the number,” I tell her. “For my girlfriend.”
“Yes, of course, I know that. I just want you to repeat this message.”
“I need you to tell her that I got the message.”
“I. Got. The. Message,” she says, writing each word down. “No, Joe, what’s the message?”
“That is the message.”
“You’re saying the message is I got the message?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Does that mean you got the message or I got the message?”
“It means I got the message,” I tell her.
“What kind of message is that?”
“I don’t know, Mom, it just is what it is.”
“It’s a stupid message,” she says.
“There’s more. Tell her I got the message, and that it’s happening tomorrow.”
“It’s. Happening. Tomorrow,” she says, writing it down in that messy scrawl of hers. I know what’s coming up before she even asks. “Wait, Joe, are you saying you got the message and the message is happening tomorrow? Or that you’re not getting the message until tomorrow?”
Adam is still grinning at me. Something here is amusing him.
“Just say exactly what I told you,” I tell Mom. “That I got the message and it’s happening tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she says.
“It will to my girlfriend.”
“Okay, Joe, but you’re really making this difficult,” she says, and I imagine she and my lawyer are going to get on great when he calls her. “I’ll talk to her first thing in the morning,” she says.
“No. Call her now, Mom. And if she’s not home and you call her tomorrow, then the message changes, okay? In fact, change the message. Tell her it’s Saturday,” I say, because if she rings tomorrow she’ll say tomorrow, which will make it Sunday. “You get that? It’s very important. You’re telling her I got her message and it’s happening on Saturday. This Saturday. Tomorrow Saturday.”
“I’m not an idiot, Joe.”
“I know that, Mom.”
“Then why do you talk to me sometimes as if I am?”
“It’s my fault,” I tell her.
“I know it’s your fault. Why would I think otherwise?”
“So you’ll call her now then?”
“Okay, Joe.”
“I love . . .” I start, but the phone is dead. “You,” I finish.
I hang up the receiver. Adam smiles at me. He doesn’t need to say how much he’s about to enjoy this, because it’s written all over his face. He walks me back to my cell. The sandwich is where I threw it, wrapped up, sitting on the floor opposite my bed. I was hoping somehow it would have disappeared.
“You remember the deal, don’t you, Joe. You remember there are two sandwiches.”
“I remember.”
“See? That’s good. Because lately all anybody hears from you is that you can’t remember anything. Pick it up,” he says, and points to the sandwich.
I pick the sandwich up and unwrap it. “Before you take a bite,” he says, “why don’t you go ahead and take another look at what’s inside.”
I take another look. Cheese. Some kind of meat that looks like it’s come from a part of the animal nobody could identify, or perhaps the animal itself couldn’t be identified. And in there the clump of pubic hair, tangled up and stuck to everything.
I put the sandwich back together. I think of Melissa and escaping jail, the books, the message. I think of better times from the past and think about the better times coming up.
“The deal,” Adam says.
The deal. I hold my breath and take the first bite.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Shooting The Cleaner at the casino fell through. The casino wasn’t happy with the story line. They didn’t like a TV show suggesting desperate people in desperate times would go into the casino with a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to bet everything they owned on red or black. Plan B all depended on how plan A went. There were two plan Bs. The first was to take the winnings and pay off the mortgage. That was the Plan B everybody hoped for. A fifty percent chance of doubling your money to make your life much better. A paid mortgage, a new car, some cool toys. The problem was it also came with a fifty percent chance of losing your money and making it a lot worse. That’s where the second plan B came into effect. That plan B involved heading into the toilets and taking a bunch of pills or slicing up your wrists or sticking a gun in your mouth.
The problem was the other Plan B happened more often than people would think. It wasn’t something the casino wanted people made aware of. It’s the sort of thing they would give low odds on if you could bet against it. They thought it wasn’t good for business. They were probably right too. Having posters on the wall of guys in suits throwing money into the air at the roulette wheel while pretty women laughed and smiled weren’t going to look good surrounded by posters of people dead in bathrooms with slogans saying Come roll the dice. So for the last month the casino has been saying yes and then last night they said no. The storyline is still going ahead. They have external shots of the casino. No problem there. And they have internal shots from a documentary shot five years earlier, and back then the casino signed a waiver to allow the footage to be used. Well, now it was going to get used in The Cleaner.