Blood Men by Paul Cleave Read Free Book Online

her here. All I know is that I have to hold her and tell her everything is going to be okay.”
    “It’s not going to be okay.”
    “What the hell would you have me tell her?” I ask, the emotion on its way, pissed off at Nat now—but of course he doesn’t know what to say or do either, he’s just trying his best. “That our lives are going to fall apart?”
    He doesn’t answer.
    Five seconds go by. “Shit, I’m sorry, Nat,” I say, and I exhale loudly. “I didn’t mean . . . I . . . hell, I don’t know.”
    “None of us know.”
    “I’m going to come and get her.”
    “Are you in any state to look after her? Think about what’s best for her, Eddie. Come and stay with us tonight. It’s for the best. Then, then tomorrow you can . . . we can, together, we can . . .” He doesn’t finish.
    “She doesn’t know yet, does she,” I say, my heart sinking even more.
    “We wanted to tell her. And we were going to, but . . . I don’t know. It’s not that it was too hard, it’s . . . well, we thought you’d bethe one who’d want to tell her. Diana and me, we thought it was best that way, if we were all together when we told her. For everybody.”
    “You did the right thing,” I say, and I can hardly breathe now, it feels like a golf ball is lodged down my throat. “I’m on my way,” I say, and I hang up then take the phone off the hook.
    My car isn’t here. Jodie’s isn’t either. I phone a taxi company and a woman with no patience answers the phone and snaps at me, asking where I am and where I want to go.
    I can’t seem to get any words out.
    “Yes? Yes? You want to go somewhere, don’t you?” she says. “Or are you wasting my time?”
    “Umm, I, I . . . I don’t know,” I say.
    “Weirdo,” she says, then hangs up. I take a moment to gather my thoughts before calling another company, and this time I’m able to put sounds to the names of the places.
    “Somebody will be there in ten minutes,” the woman says. “Have a nice day,” she adds, and I almost burst into tears.
    The taxi takes me into the city. The traffic is heavy; people are all following each other too closely and trying to change lanes. The driver gives me a funny stare, and I know the one, it’s the one where he’s thinking,
Is that the little boy, the one whose dad preyed on this city twenty and thirty and forty years earlier before and during and after he was born?
Henry the homeless guy is still outside the parking building, a sandwich instead of a vodka bottle in his hand, the Bible still in the other hand.
    “Spare change?” he asks. He’s dressed in clothes made twenty years ago, with a baseball cap made from recycled cardboard, and there’s something about him that suddenly disgusts me even though he never has before. I have the urge to kick him. I look away and move quickly past before I can give in to the temptation. I run up the stairs all the way to where my car is.
    I make my way out of the building, almost crippling a couple of other cars, almost clipping a couple of walls, driving perhaps too fast, perhaps even almost clipping a couple of people. I get onto the street and I’m two blocks away from the bank. I head in the opposite direction. Traffic is thick. I don’t see a single police caranywhere. I drive alongside the Avon where the grassy banks are heavy with food wrappers and empty drink cans, broken up by the occasional homeless person sniffing glue in the sun while working on his tan. The breeze is coming from that direction, picking up some cool air off the dark water. Traffic lights have broken down at a few of the bigger intersections, the orange lights flashing, drivers fending for themselves as they don’t know whether to give way or drive through.
    It takes me forty minutes to get to my in-laws. They look awful. They look like some creature came around and reached inside of them and ripped out every happy memory they’ve ever had. They give me tight hugs and tell me that we’ll all