The Dead Janitors Club (10 page)

    Poop stains, both large and small, had been laid on poop stains that lay on poop stains that lay on older poop stains. I was fairly certain that if I dug down about four layers worth of poop, I would find fossils from the Miocene epoch embedded within. Newspapers covered the floor in areas, and the atmosphere was thick with the musky foulness of stale air mired in mold spores.

    On the wall above the couch hung a large American Indian dream catcher. I wanted to joke that they should have tightened the netting on the dream catcher, but I didn't, more out of shock rather than respect.

    I couldn't even find the spots on the floor that might have been blood. I looked over at Oliver questioningly. He was clearly embarrassed about the way his sister and her husband had been living and was still taken aback.

    "I haven't been over here in years." He shook his head, repulsed. "This place was my parent's house…it never looked like this."

    I checked out the bathroom and found the blood stains to be rather mild, though present on the floor as well as the faucet and counter. I went back to Oliver, feeling bad for him. He was still stammering and trying to make excuses for his family. I could relate—I had always disenfranchised myself when it came to my family's Mormon antics.

    "We don't have much money," Oliver offered. "I have some cash… and my mom sent me over with a blank check, if that's okay…"

    "How's two hundred dollars?" I asked, figuring for the amount of work that looked to be involved, it was more than fair. I would be out of there in twenty minutes, tops.
Ten bucks a minute sounds reason
able for my time
, I thought. I wouldn't even be there long enough to contract a pulmonary hemorrhage from all of the black mold.

    Oliver was shocked that it would cost so little, and I was feeling more than a little magnanimous when I pulled my bunny suit on.
There's no reason I can't brighten people's day
, I reasoned.
Make them feel
a little better about their misfortune and make a little money doing it.
It was a business model that anyone could be proud of.

    I set my crate down outside and quickly scrubbed the bloodstains out of the two top stairs. I moved down to the bottom platform, where the stained slats of wood had been joined together over a block of concrete. I scrubbed at the stain, which was roughly the size of an average footprint, but it wouldn't go away. I scrubbed again, using more elbow grease, but to no avail.

    I realized that it would take more work than I wanted it to, so I moved on, cleaning up the bathroom instead. From there, I worked backward, scrubbing at the stains on the carpeting while Oliver went to tend to the couple's two dogs.

    My furniture-stripping brushes were no match for the coarse animal hair that littered the flooring, and as a result, I was scrubbing away at stains that weren't moving. Frustrated, I renewed my attack on them, but it was like burrowing through a coal mine with a dental pick, and the stains wouldn't budge.

    Outside, I called Dirk, angry with the reluctant mess, stripping off my black gloves, and splashing my sweat onto the concrete sidewalk. He didn't have any answers for me, and I could detect from his voice that he didn't really give a damn. After all, he wasn't the one doing it.

    I turned my attention back to the wooden platform with a renewed sense of determination. If nothing else, at least I would wipe that goddamned stain out.

    Twenty furious minutes later, I realized that it wasn't the stain that wouldn't come up, it was
the blood
, bubbling up through the slats. She hadn't died of a broken neck down there on that wooden platform; she'd died of blood loss, and it was all leaking from beneath that platform like a gigantic pustule.

    I pulled back the carpeting from the platform as best I could, what with a large bookshelf overloaded with Time Life readers, seashells, and broken trophies weighing the space down. Sure enough, the blood had leeched from the platform and into the insulation of the carpeting, not bothering to come to the surface and be visible but rather hiding, just waiting to fuck me over.

    If I was going to do the job right, I was going to have to move the bookshelf, remove the carpeting, remove the bloodied strip of carpet tacking with its rusty, tetanus-infused sharp nails, scrub the concrete, and soak all the blood out of the flooring.

    Maybe Oliver would let me off the hook? I dared to hope. He came in from the backyard, and I explained the situation to him. I could tell, as soon as I did, that the situation wasn't going to go my way.

    He fumbled for the nicest way to tell me to "go fuck myself" and, unsurprisingly, found the words. With his help, I set in and unloaded the large bookcase. Its shelving creaked under the sudden absence of weight, yet it couldn't quite find its way back from being bowed and at the verge of collapse for so long.

    We moved the crap (in the human sense) on top of the other crap (in the animal sense) and were still only barely able to slide the heavy bookshelf out of the way. It threatened to splinter into a million tiny pieces, which wouldn't have surprised me, given how the day had shaped up.

    But as we moved it as far as we dared, I was able to use the safety razor to cut away the carpeting. It was a small basic blade, though, not suited at all for cutting carpet. Dulling all too quickly, the blade forced me to hack my way through the carpeting in a spite-filled performance. All the while, Oliver stared awkwardly at me, his goofy fat face reminding me that I needed to eat more healthily myself.

    After I shredded the carpet away from the platform, removed the insulation, and dried the concrete flooring underneath, I borrowed a flat-head screwdriver from the couple's garage to pry up the tack strip, handling the thin wood and bunches of sharpened metal gingerly. I couldn't imagine that some tin-pot housewife from the suburbs and nourishing an animal fetish was riddled with AIDS, but I could believe that feces + rust + blood + dirt = something nearly as bad.

    Five hours after I started, I had the rest of the blood soaked up and had made considerable progress on the bloodstains leading to the bathroom. The inside of my suit was filled with sweat, while the outside, formerly a sheer white, was a mixture of browns, yellows, reds, and blacks. It looked like a United Nations meeting.

    On the front walk, I stripped off the suit, and there was an audible splash as my abundance of sweat hit the sidewalk. It reminded me of the sound that brainlike gelatin surprise had made on the previous job when it took a swan dive off the dustpan. I was further repulsed to discover that some of the animal hair had found its way inside my protective suit. I picked off what I could and searched in vain for its entry point.

    Wiping my soaked and reddened face, I felt I'd give almost anything for a glass of water but, despite my desperation, wouldn't take one from that house.

    Oliver was grateful, and paid with cash. He even laid an extra twenty-dollar bill on the top with the caveat that I didn't give it to my boss.

    "That one's just for you," he winked.

    The money didn't look like much in my hand, and when it came back to me in the form of a paycheck, it felt like even less.

    Dirk had decided that since apparently we were going to be busy, it wasn't fair that part of his cut of the business went toward business expenses while I walked away with a clean and clear half of a half. So he decided that since I was more a vice president in the company than an independent contractor, I should get a third instead.

    Five long hours of work in the sweltering heat of the near summer, working by myself, and I'd made roughly thirty dollars (not including my sweet tip, of course!) for cleaning up serious biohazard. Migrant workers did better than that. Minimum-wage, pimple-faced whiners pushing a button on a cash register made more than that.

    Somehow, some way, I had to do something about that.

I've nearly died twice in my life that I can recollect. The first time was my own ignorant fault—I'd gone down to the local beach with my good buddies Matt and Billy, when I was fifteen or sixteen, to shoot guns. You probably couldn't shoot guns off at the local beach, but remember I was only fifteen or sixteen and blissfully unaware of technicalities such as being "tried as an adult for manslaughter."

    We weren't shooting the guns at anything in particular, just firing off rounds into the nearby sand dunes to feel tough. Matt had scored the guns, a heavy revolver and a small jumpy pistol, for the day from his boss at work. Why on earth anybody loans guns to children is beyond me. Then again, this was Eureka, where Skoal sales are directly proportional to visiting hours at the batteredwomen's clinic.

    I'd taken control of the revolver, not liking the way that the recoil on the smaller semi-automatic was slicing into the webbing between my thumb and index finger. The revolver felt good to me, true Old West style—a real cowboy's choice. My parents were staunchly against guns and had done a fine job of insulating me from the seductive charms of a loaded weapon in my youth but had damned me into a curiosity about them that would prove dangerously innocent when I finally got to interact with one as a teenager.

    Having been taught a fear of guns, rather than a respect for them as a tool for making beer cans explode, I'd never learned about such modern contrivances as a "hair trigger." For those as oblivious as I was, a hair trigger can be achieved by cocking the hammer at the back of a gun, thus vastly cutting down on the amount of pressure required to fire said gun.

    Of course, naïve me, upon seeing the trigger ratchet back with the cocking of the hammer, I was certain that I'd broken the boss's gun. And so I turned it toward me, scared shitless that I'd done something wrong and could somehow correct the issue by looking down the barrel. I will never forget the blast of warm wind that licked my skull as the bullet whizzed past, racing up into the wild blue yonder.

    In the act of turning the gun toward myself, I had tapped my finger on the hair trigger. The gun went off, missing me by closer than my mom would ever want to know about. After that, I put the gun down and stayed away from its kind for a long, long time.

    My second brush with death wasn't nearly as much my fault, and that made it so much more intense. I was out with Matt again; this time he and his girlfriend and I had rented a patio boat. I was an intelligent man now at eighteen, no longer the foolish lout who played with guns.

    I'd called in sick to work that day so the three of us could spend a leisurely day zipping around a large lake a few hours northeast of Eureka. (Ironically, Matt had gotten me a job at the same fast-food restaurant where he worked, and my manager was the one who'd loaned Matt the guns so long ago.)

    Matt enjoyed playing captain, and I was more than happy to let him, lackadaisically hanging my feet into the lake water as the powerful engine pushed the medium-size boat through the water. She was raised off the water on the port and starboard sides by twin steel pontoons, pointed like ancient torpedoes that kept the flat-panel boat deck off the water.

    I was enjoying my time and as carefree as a boy ought to be in the halcyon days of summer when May winds cede regime to the sun's unwavering stare. In a typical moment of dumbassedness, I decided that it would be hilarious if I attempted to go to the front of the watercraft and spread my arms aloft, à la
Titanic.

    This whimsical pursuit works far better if you are on an illfated ocean liner and supported by the confident arms of Leonardo DiCaprio and not a 250-pound oaf at the stern of what is essentially a piece of carpeted plywood raised on pontoons that is blasting through the water at twenty-nine knots (roughly thirty-three miles per hour).

    Matt, being the intrepid captain manning the wheel, noticed that my large ass was weighing down the front of the patio boat and we were, in fact, starting to take on water. He attempted to slow down, but as our inexperienced collective was quick to learn, there isn't a "slow down" on a patio boat, only a "stop."

    The laws of thermodynamics being what they are, I of course continued at the present speed straight off the front of the ship and through the motherfucking air, arms still spread like some messianic jackass. I am a resilient swimmer. (Thankfully, my mother did not hold the same opinion about swim lessons that she held about guns.) So I was able to turn my folly into an efficient dive that, from a viewer's perspective, could almost have been considered graceful.

    Now, this is the part that sucks. Left to my own devices, I would have surfaced cleanly, swum back to the boat, had a good laugh about it all, and maybe capped my day off noshing on a delicious peanutbutter sandwich heaped with strawberry jam. Instead, I encountered that wholly unpredictable foil, bad luck.

    Matt, you see, was concerned that the now-slack boat might drift over me, and I would hit my head on the bottom and possibly drown. The road to hell is littered with good intentions, and eager to induce some good intent, Matt decided that the smartest course of action would be to drive the boat over me. I had disappeared beneath the surface, and he was hoping that I'd dived deep enough to avoid the undercarriage of the rented patio boat. I hadn't.

    I surfaced, eager to share a laugh at my expense with my two friends just as the shadow of darkness that was the patio boat began its pass over me. The whup-whup splashing sounds of the churning propeller blades were omnipresent in the air space afforded me by the sleek gray pontoons lifting the flat-bottom boat off the water.