“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like a great plan. It really doesn’t.”
“And if you’re planning on killing him,” she says, “don’t you want to be acting all crazy when you’re doing it? People aren’t going to be looking for a schoolteacher, Charlie. They’re going to be looking for a madman. Come on, it’s a plan. We’re not going to come up with anything better.”
I don’t like it. “Staking out my house with stakes. I dunno. It sounds like a bad joke.”
“We take hammers and stakes to threaten him and we use wire to bind him if that’s all you want to do. We need to go to a hardware store, Charlie, and we also need to swap cars. We can’t sit outside your house in your car. Think about it.”
I am thinking about it. It’s all I’ve been doing. “I’m still not so sure about the stake thing.”
“I thought we’d moved past it.”
“I wasn’t even aware we’d agreed.”
“Well, we’d better start agreeing on something, Charlie, because we don’t have all day.”
“Okay, okay, so assuming we do this. What happens?”
“First of all you have to let me come with you,” she says, even though I haven’t even said yet that I’m going. “We can go back to my house and get my car.”
“I can get your car and I can get the tools. You stay here while I’m getting them.”
We discuss it some more and I feel like I’ve just agreed to do something I totally don’t want to do, and I have a slight feeling that this is exactly what Jo wanted. I tie her back up and head outside, then go down to the manager’s office and pay for another night’s accommodation. He looks at me like I’m crazy. I tell the guy not to bother cleaning the room though I don’t think it was really on his to-do list. I drive to Jo’s house. It’s surprisingly hot, and because the air-conditioning in my car is faulty I have to roll the windows partially down. In the distance rain clouds are starting to move in. I keep my Honda below the speed limit. When I get to Jo’s house I just keep on driving because the garage is open and her car is gone. Has Cyris been here? How did he know to come here? Has he been following me? No, because if he was following me, he’d have broken into our motel room last night and stabbed us a few dozen times.
I take a left and start putting distance between me and Jo’s house. I turn on the radio to listen to the news. Nothing new has developed. Disappointed but not surprised I turn the radio off and stare out at this world I’m driving through.
I know this world. I live in this world. Yet it has become a stranger to me.
It’s starting to rain when I pull into the parking lot of a hardware store. It’s a large single-storey place made completely from concrete, the sort of one-piece slabs constructed on the spot. A line of wheelbarrows is parked out front, along with garden sheds and patio furniture. Nothing small enough to pick up and run away with. Nothing exciting enough to make an impulse buy. In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon the large store is close to empty as I make my way up and down aisles. I start in the gardening section, but the garden stakes are too big and would fill our hands with splinters. I move to different sections where I buy rope, duct tape, a craft knife, a chisel, a broom handle, and a small saw. The last thing I select is a large wooden mallet. It feels like I’m shopping at Vampires RUs. The guy at the counter looks like he missed his calling as an undertaker. His skin is stretched tightly on his skull with black smudges of some long-suffered or soon-to-arrive illness beneath his eyes. He says, “Raining out there, huh?” in a tone that suggests it’s my fault. I pay in cash and he forgets to tell me to have a nice day.
I drive back to the motel and carry the purchases into the room, first making sure nobody is around. The room is stuffy. A faint taste of perfume lingers in the air. Cheap perfume. The type of perfume you find lingering in the air in cheap motels. The earlier scent of bacon and eggs has disappeared. I close the door and untie Jo, who smiles at me. She seems to have come a small way toward forgiving me. The unsent letter in the back pocket of my pants feels warm.
“You didn’t get my car?”
“It was gone,” I tell her.
“Charlie. .”
“I’m not making this shit up, Jo. It was gone. I’m not saying Cyris took it, all I’m saying is it wasn’t there.”
“But you think he took it, don’t you.”
“If he did, then. .”
I stop talking. Jo stares at me. “Then what?” she asks.
“Then nothing.”
“You’re unbelievable,” she says.
“What?”
“You’re trying to tell me that if Cyris did steal my car, then he knew where I lived, which means you’re saying you did the right thing by kidnapping me.”
“I’m not saying that at all,” I say, but it’s what I’m thinking.
“Let’s just get this done,” she says.
We pull the tools out of the plastic bag and line them up on the floor. I didn’t buy any top-of-the-line gear, just the basics. I lay some newspaper down for the mess, then we cut the broom handle into four pieces. On the last cut Jo slips on the saw handle. It twists and flexes and the blade snaps into half a dozen pieces.
“Sorry.”
“It’s not like we need it again,” I say.
Jo holds the first stake on the ground while I chip away at the end with the chisel and mallet. I manage a sharp but not very sculptured point. I repeat the procedure on the second and get the same result. The third and fourth don’t work out any better. I try not to think about how this must look to an outside observer.
The sawing and chiseling is hard work and soon the sawdust sticks to our wet faces and hands. I want to take a shower, but I don’t want to leave Jo by herself.
“Some arsenal,” she says, looking down at what we’ve achieved. “Can you think of anything we may be missing?”
I look at what we have. Don’t see a gun. I point this out.
“What about garlic or holy water?” she asks.
I’m not sure if she’s joking and I start to wonder whether she’s missing the whole point here, but perhaps I’m missing it too. That’s why I’m looking at four wooden stakes and a mallet. Jo sits on the edge of her bed and watches me pack up the mess.
“We should try and get a few hours’ sleep,” I suggest. “We don’t want to fall asleep while watching my house.”
Jo silently nods. “That’s just what I was going to suggest.”
“Um, I’m sorry, Jo, but I need to tie you up. .” I say, my voice trailing away.
“I’m not going anywhere, Charlie.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Then why do it? Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then you’re not tying me up, okay?”
If I don’t tie Jo up I won’t be sleeping either. I let her use the bathroom and then she makes it easy for me by not struggling as I tie her to the bed. I lie back on my own bed. The alarm clock looks forty years old. It’s big enough to think it may be powered by a mouse running on a wheel. I fiddle with the buttons and set it to give us three and a half hours. Assuming we can sleep.
My body molds into the previous outline of thousands of other people who may or may not have known what love is, but probably came here to experience a fifteen-minute imitation of it. I turn on the TV and am given the menu for porn or wholesome family TV. It seems every motel these days has religion and sex only a fingertip away. I flick channels looking for some news and come up with nothing.
On Sunday night I was a schoolteacher with a simple life and complicated students. My head is starting to throb and I raise a hand to the lump. It’s still the same size as yesterday. Maybe it’s never going to go away, maybe it’s going to be like a badge of honor-or in my case a badge of dishonor. I think about untying Kathy from the tree and how grateful she was for it. I think of Cyris and how dead he looked. We left him there, just a body of evil trapped inside human skin with a bad name and a poor haircut. We left him with every intent to go to the police. We left him in the dark to come back.