Community Property

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I said. "I didn't ask you for a weather report."

"Come on Liam," he said. "You can't bullshit a bullshitter. Your wife's life is ruined and she's going to jail. Jeff is in jail and will never practice medicine again. He supposedly burned down his own clinic. And poor Bert lost everything too. What do the four of us all have in common? You're pissed off at all of us. When Bert went down, I got suspicious by the way you weren't as concerned with his welfare as you'd normally have been. At first I thought that maybe you were having problems. But when Jeff's life hit the skids and your wife started having issues too, I knew it was only a matter of time before you got to me so I got the fuck out of Dodge. My mama didn't raise no stupid kids."

"Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I'll never be coming back to town for any reason ever. Tina can have our little house and everything else she can get her hands on. I'm doing something completely different now, but for what it's worth, I really am sorry about what we did. I'm not sorry I fucked Julie, but to be honest she wasn't really that good, she was just available. What I'm sorry for is betraying our friendship. The four of us grew up together. Lifelong friendships like that are very rare. I'm sorry I let that arrogant asshole ruin ours." And then he was gone.

I slammed the phone down and knocked it off of the table. I was angrier than I remember being in my entire life.

My first few months in Chicago were a whirlwind of activity I settled into an efficiency apartment while I tried to find a nice house in a suburb that fit with my new position. Every weekend was spent looking at houses. I still couldn't get Greg out of my mind. It got to the point where finding him became far more important than the other three had been. I'd hired two separated private investigators to track him down.

Finally after five months, three weeks and four days one of my PI's hit pay dirt. Greg wasn't very far from me. He was living in Detroit and working for a legal aid website. He was working under the name George Peters, that bastard hadn't even changed his initials.

He lived in a seedy apartment on the east side near downtown. His neighborhood was the kind where everyone minds their own business and a stray beating or two doesn't arouse any suspicion. Even if there is any suspicion, people just know to mind their own business.

I can still remember my elation as George aka Greg unlocked his door and stepped into his apartment.

"I hate this fucking place," he said to what he thought was the four walls. "Fucking bitch..." he spat.

"I guess this bitch wasn't as big of a whore as Julie huh Greg?" I said as I stepped out of the shadows and hit him with my stun gun. I bought the stun gun at the same Radio shack that I'd gotten the voice manipulator from. I'd had it ever since I first decided how my revenge on Greg should have been. Of course, I'd ramped it up several notches since then.

When Greg woke up he was sitting in a chair. There was a gun in his hand. He raised it and fired it at me. I jumped back out of fear and laughed as I heard the impotent clicking sound of the firing pin hitting nothing. Greg tried to stand up and was too woozy to focus. Then he noticed that both of his ankles were handcuffed to the chair.

"Do you really think I'd give you a loaded gun, Greg?" I laughed.

"What are you doing Liam?" he asked.

"Hi Greg," I smiled at him. My huge smile lit up the darkened room. He tried to move and couldn't. I held up the stun gun and let it spark. I handed him a pen. He looked at it and threw it down.

"Now Greg," I said. "The sooner we take care of this the sooner I can leave you alone."

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, looking at me suspiciously. I think the fact that I was wearing rubber gloves made him think I was going to do something nasty to him.

"Just have a few drinks with an old friend and explain to me why you needed to join in and fuck Julie," I said.

I handed him the bottle of vodka and he drank some and started talking about the first time he saw Julie back in college. After a half hour or so of drinking and talking and a couple of bottles of strong liquor he was in a pliable state.

"Look Liam," he asked, looking like he was having trouble focusing. "What are you going to do to me?"

"Nothing," I said. "You already did it to yourself. Your marriage is over. Your career is gone, just like the other guys. You have no life left. Only it's worse in your case. I didn't even do it to you. You did it to yourself."

"Yeah, I kind of did," he said. He took another drink and started to pass out. I unlocked the cuffs around his ankles and figured that after a few minutes the marks would fade. He had on heavy socks and the blood flow around his legs would get rid of the marks from the cuffs.

"Greg, wake up," I said. "I'm going to be leaving soon. You never told me about Julie and you never signed the paper."

"Where's the fuckin' pen?" he asked.

"Greg, it's in your hand," I said.

"Oh yeah," he said staring at it. He started talking about Julie then but he wasn't making any sense. He talked about how much Julie loved me.

He looked at the pen still in his hand and signed the note I'd printed from his work computer.

"All signed," he said, taking another drink. "Did I tell you how sorry I am," he said.

"Yep several times," I said. I picked up the gun and shot myself in the head with it. He heard the empty click and laughed.

"When you first gave me that gun I thought it was loaded," he said. "I was going to shoot you. I thought you wanted to hurt me. I was scared Liam."

"If you were really sorry you'd even things up," I said.

"How do I do that?" he asked. I pretended to take a drink and he reached for the bottle.

"Well you tried to shoot me," I said. I raised the gun to my temple and pulled the trigger three times. The click-click-click sound echoed through the room. We both laughed.

"So everything would balance out and be fair..." I said.

"If you shoot me," he said with a smile, taking another sip.

"Nope that's not quite right," I said. "You're the shooter. You had the gun." As I spoke I turned the webcam on his computer towards him and slipped the clip into the gun.

"I have to shoot myself," he said. I remained silent and just nodded my head. He picked the gun up off of the table and didn't notice the extra weight of the clip. Just as I'd just done he shot the gun quickly three times. The first one loaded a bullet into the chamber. I really don't know why the second shot didn't fire, but the third shot echoed throughout the room. The silence afterward was deafening. I looked around the room to see if there was anything that could link me to it. Even though I still had the gloves on I wiped down everything I thought I'd touched and left the room.

I knew that what I'd done had been wrong. All my life, I'd been a good guy. And all of my life people had treated me like a sucker. I hadn't killed Greg. He'd done it to himself. My original plan only called for the loss of his license to practice law. But he'd pissed me off so he got what he had coming with interest.

I left his apartment building and took the bus back downtown. From the bus station there in downtown Detroit, I took a bus to Port Huron Michigan. Port Huron is a little bit more than fifty miles from Detroit. From Port Huron I took another bus all the way back to Chicago. The weird route was just in case this was ever investigated. There's be no evidence that anyone matching my description ever went from Detroit to Chicago.

The Port Huron to Chicago route took over six hours by bus. I had a lot to think of on the way. I wondered if I was still the same person after what had happened. I always saw myself as being a good guy. Was I still a good person?

After all of the things I'd read and all of the movies I'd seen, I guess I was expecting to be filled with sorrow or regret. I guess I was supposed to be sad or distraught or sorry or something. But the truth is that I didn't feel shit. I didn't feel like tricking that shit stain of a man into blowing his fucking brains out was a great loss to the world. And to me personally it just made me feel relief. I felt like a really shitty chapter of my life was over.

When I got off of the bus in Chicago and took a cab back to my apartment I was singing inside. As I stepped into my apartment and looked around I laughed. I'd been here for months and had never unpacked. I guess I'd always known that this place was never going to be home. I had narrowed the field down to four or five houses, but I was no closer to picking one than I'd been a month before that. As soon as I closed the door I noticed that the phone had been ringing. Before I got to it, it had stopped.

I checked my messages and saw that in the two days that I'd been gone I had eight phone messages. Four were from Julie. Besides the prison phone number that I'd memorized, I noticed that the calls were at 6 pm and eight-thirty pm both nights. Julie was only allowed to make phone calls from six to nine each evening. If she called after eight-thirty it wouldn't really give her much time to talk.

There were also a couple of calls from Julie's parents. I loved them but I was tired of talking to them. Each call, no matter how they started always ended up with questions about whether or not I was ready to talk to Julie. Or they ended up with how much Julie wanted me back and how miserable she was.

The other two calls were both from the same number and I didn't recognize it. I called it out of curiosity. The voice on the phone was melodic and familiar. There was a tension in that voice that I'd never heard but it was still a voice that I had to talk to.

"Our last conversation didn't go as planned Liam," she said.

"I didn't know what the plan was, so that made it kind of hard to follow it," I said. She laughed.

"Liam, what I wanted to talk to you about was doubts," she said. "You know nuns are only women. They're not divine. They make mistakes and bad decisions all the time. They have to pray for guidance just like everyone else."

"Somehow, I have trouble seeing you making a bad decision," I said.

"Well, I did," she said. "And I made another one with you last time. I made two of them in fact."

"Wow!" I said sarcastically.

"Liam, for the past few years, I've been unsatisfied..."she began.

"I'd have thought it was longer than that," I said.

"You know what I mean," she said. "I just haven't been sure that I was making a difference. I haven't been sure that I'd made the right career choice, you know?"

"Is it like those people in the Peace Corps who go abroad to try to rescue and help impoverished people?" I said. "Then after they get over there they discover that they don't give a shit about impoverished people. Then they find out that they're stuck over there for a period of time and since they have the job and the suit. They just go with it."

"Well, it's not exactly like that," she said. "Liam, the first mistake I made was that I wanted to ask you a question that I should never have considered. I mean I thought that you were a happily married man."

"Mandy, I'm a happily unmarried man now," I said. "What was the second mistake you made?"

"Not asking you the questions anyway," she said. "But I never realized that I'd hurt you so badly, Liam. After I ran out of the restaurant, I spent the day talking to some of our old friends about you and everything you said was true. Liam, if you loved me that much why didn't you ever tell me. Don't you think I had a right to know?"

"Shit, Mandy," I snapped. "How could you not know? I fucking glowed whenever you were around. Besides, you seemed to have your entire life planned out and you never mentioned a place for me or for us. And from the way you talked about it. It seemed to be what would make you the happiest. When you love someone you want them to be happy. Watching you leave me to go to the convent almost killed me. But I wanted you to do what was best for you. Fuck everyone else, me included."

She didn't say anything for a long time and I realized that maybe my language had been a bit strong.

"Sorry about the language sister," I said.

"Liam, I'm not a sister anymore," she said.

"You're what?" I asked.

"Shut up, Liam. I need to ask you a question," she said.

"No I don't want to donate to the church at this time," I said.

"Strings, you idiot," she said. "Do you still want to be tied to me?"

"More than anything I can think of," I said.

Mandy came to Chicago to be with me and we've never looked back. It didn't take any time at all for us to be comfortable with each other and we knew that we were meant to be together. We never talked about our pasts so there was no need to lie to each other. She had hinted around that she'd seen some things in the church that she didn't like and wasn't proud of. She didn't elaborate, and I didn't pry.

By the same token I didn't tell her about all of the events of my divorce beyond the reasons for it in the first place. She didn't ask so I didn't have to lie.

We were married less than six months after we got back together. We haven't been back home because there's been no reason to until now.

"...listening to me?"

The words brought me out of my memory. Bert had sat down in front of me and was saying something.

"Sorry, Bert," I said. "It's a long drive. I must have daydreamed."

"I was just wondering something?" he whispered quietly. He looked around from side to side until he was satisfied that no one was listening to us.

"What were you wondering Bert?" I asked as I looked at my watch.

"Why I'm still alive?" he asked. "Don't look stupid about it. It took me a long ass time to figure it out too. I know it was you. It was all you. I thought about a lot of theories over the years. I thought about Karma. I thought about runs of bad luck. I thought about Justice and I realized that none of them fit. You destroyed Jeff's marriage. You burned down his clinic..." he stopped and read the shocked look on my face.

"I'm not going to tell anyone so stop pretending to be shocked," he said. "Besides except for you and me everyone's dead. You sent Jeff to jail and took his career away from him. For a guy as arrogant as Jeff, that was a death sentence. It wasn't quick and easy like Greg's death. Jeff's was long and painful and drawn out."

"Greg is dead," I said. "I hadn't heard."

"He supposedly blew his brains out in a flop house on the bad side of town in Dee-troit," said Bert. "But I have trouble believing that. He left a signed suicide note, got drunk as a skunk and drilled himself in the head. His fingerprints were the only ones on the gun or in the place. He even had a video on his computer of himself just casually scattering his brains over the walls. The cops ruled it a suicide and Tina verified that it was his signature. I got a chance to look at that video and although you can't see anyone, I think Greg was talking to someone and I think that someone was you."

"Detroit is a shit hole," I said. "Why the hell would I ever go there? Even the people who live there don't want to be there."

"Anyway, my question is why am I alive?" he asked. "You took my golf away from me. I can't even swing a fucking club. You took my nuts and my manhood away too. Without that I lost Elaine. Everyone knows that it wasn't me fucking Julie with the others that made her divorce me. I ran into her a couple of years ago. I could tell that deep down she still loved me more than that guy she married, but she loves her kids more than either of us. It's the math of love Liam. The sum of me plus her is greater than the sum of him plus her. But the sum of me plus her is less than the sum of him plus her plus their kids. So really you took Elaine from me too. I was too broken down and depressed to teach kids anymore so they gave me a job as a janitor. In a way you took my career away too, I'm just slowly wasting away. Why the fuck am I still alive, Liam. Are you that cruel? Why the fuck would you do all of that to your best friends over a woman who was never even yours? We were all fucking her before you ever met her. She belonged to all of us. The bitch was Community Property. She was never yours."

"Bert, you're giving me way too much credit," I said. "I'm a wimp. I didn't do any of the things you're giving me credit for. When I found out that my best friends were all fucking my wife, I just ran away. I left town to start all over again. And as far as Julie being community property, when I put my ring on her finger, she was mine."

He looked at me like I'd pissed on his head and called it rain. "I researched it, Liam. Maybe you didn't do it yourself, but I know how you did it. You went to the monkey wrench bar in the next town. You spoke to the bartender there who gave you the name of a man who for a certain price beat the fuck out of me. The guy wore a mask and even the man who hired him didn't know who he was. All it cost you to fuck up my life was fifteen hundred dollars. The guy claimed that the brother of some woman I was fucking hired them but it didn't add up. At first I was sure it was that new young secretary at the school. After all, I'd met her brother and he didn't like me. But it took a while for me to figure out that no one knew that I was fucking her, especially not her brother. She was hooked up with a guy who eventually married her. He was a friend of her brother's, so if her brother knew, she'd have been in trouble. She never would have told her brother and neither did I.

That only left two other women that I was fucking and one of them was married to me. Julie's brothers are all serving overseas in the military. So I thought about it. Who'd be upset about me fucking Julie? Then when the bad luck hit everyone in our circle except for you, I knew I had my man."

"Wow," I said. "All you need is a fucked up trench coat and you could be Columbo. I didn't do any of that. But it was a fun thing to listen to. What happened to you all was awful. It was terrible and it was tragic but it was just bad luck. Maybe the run of bad luck that you all suffered from was the manifestation of your guilt over what you all conspired to do to me."

"And you have only good luck, right?" he said. "Only good things happened to you. You got a better job making even more money in a bigger city. You ended up married to the prettiest girl in our whole fucking town and she loves you like crazy. She fucking walked out on God for you, right? Liam, luck and guilt both have a way of balancing themselves out eventually, and you're due some bad luck," he said.

"Only in the movies, Columbo," I said. "Well I have to boogie. It was nice seeing you again, Bert. Maybe next time I'm in town we could go dancing or play a round of golf."

I got up and left him fuming and cursing at the table. As I left the table, Julie stood in front of me. "Liam, I just wanted you to know how sorry, I still am," she said. "It broke my heart when I saw you get out of that car. Amanda is still beautiful and your little girl is adorable. It hurt me even more because she could have been ours. I guess I kind of messed up my chance to be happy, but more than anything else I wished that I'd given you and me an honest try from the beginning. If there's ever anything I can do for you to try to make it up to you, all you have to do is ask. I know you're married again and all that, but I'd do anything to make up for what I did."

I reached out and hugged her. "I forgive you Julie," I said. "Maybe it's time for all of us to put this behind us." I turned and started walking slowly out to the parking lot. I waved at Bert who was still sitting at the table cursing to himself.

I guess I should have been paying more attention. Before I got to my car I had been laughing inwardly at Bert. He deserved what he got. Fuck him. Someone grabbed me and threw me to the ground.