His face brightened as he watched her laugh. “Come. I’ve found an amazing score,” he said, taking her hand in such a princely manner she giggled even more. “I’d like you to have it.”
Hand in hand, they walked back out of the pit. She allowed Helmut to help her. She leaned against him. She felt like she was floating. Tendrils of her hair lifted and danced around her face. The sky kept pulling upwards, the clouds racing along.
When they got back to the vehicles, Helmut helped her back onto the gravel, then walked over to his truck and reached down into the bed. When his hands came up he was holding some kind of animal. She took a step back but it didn’t move. Its tawny fur glittered in his hands. It was a coyote. A taxidermed coyote.
“You’re crazy,” she laughed and he smiled. He could tell she liked it.
The strange, rigid little creature was in a standing pose, its matchlike legs sticking straight out, its head cocked to one side as if it were intensely interested.
“Here, you have it,” he said, handing it over.
She turned it over in her hands, caressing the thick, glossy fur. In the course of her life she’d received many gifts yet somehow, she’d never felt any of them belonged to her. Most of the time they’d seemed more like hints than gifts, hints of what she should want, how she should be, and now here was this useless, bizarre thing; here was this odd broken man standing in the dump with a bandana around his face, giving her a coyote and somehow it felt perfect; it felt final. It felt like what life was actually like. The wind whipped her clothes against her. Yellow dust devils lifted and swirled along the road. Yes, she thought. This is how life is.
“Thank-you, Helmut. I love it.” She could see her own shadow on the bright gravel in front of her. Her thin silhouette with her hair blowing all around, the coyote in her arms with its legs jutting out, looked just like the shadow of a young girl whose boyfriend had won her a prize at the county fair. She smiled. When she was a child, she’d imagined that love looked something like this: boys winning prizes for girls at fairs. In her Spartan room, in her secret fantasies, she’d imagined going to the fair herself; she’d imagined wearing jeans and lip-gloss with her hair untied and a handsome boy handing her a prize. She closed her eyes and felt the wind ripping at her clothes and pulling at her hair and she imagined that pieces of herself were sloughing off and pulling away, memories and dreams and desires, and she wondered if death happened all at once or a little at a time.
When she opened her eyes again, Helmut was eyeing her curiously. “You have come to ask me something,” he said.
She straightened her shoulders and met his eyes. “I have.”
He nodded but said nothing.
“Things are happening quickly now. I don’t know . . . how long I have.”
He leaned against the tailgate and looked down at the ground, nodding slowly all the while.
“I’ve been thinking that, after a certain point, there is really no sense prolonging things. After a certain point, it benefits no one.”
He kept nodding slowly and looking at the ground. He said, “These are difficult choices to make.”
She took a deep breath. She was thinking of herself, but also of Matt Campbell. Of Michael. “I’ve thought of a way that you could help me. Something you could help me get.”
When Annika returned to the cottage, she went upstairs and sat down on the bed. She placed the coyote beside her then took out the gun that Helmut had given her. She turned it over and over in her hands.
Its cold, grey weight felt foreign to her. Each time she turned it over, it seemed as if someone had handed it to her anew and she was surprised and surprised again by its smallness, its gravitas; it might have been a child’s toy but for the weight of it.
Annika was no stranger to guns. She’d used her father’s shotgun and the rifle on the farm, just never one like this. She shivered and placed it on the bed beside her. It lay heavy on the quilt, pressing down. Already, its presence cast a pall over the room: the sound of the waves seemed muffled; the light seemed strangely dull even though the sun was still shining outside. Even the cat would not come near. She called to him: Zebedee, Zebedee, but he would not come. He stood in the doorway, watching.
It made sense, did it not? she asked herself again. She was dying anyway. Was it a sin if she was dying anyway? She didn’t know but the idea of Michael, or Matt Campbell or whoever he was congratulating himself when the payment came in, taking his wife out to dinner, maybe; buying himself a new coat, maybe; it was too much; it made her sick to even think about it. She would end it, she thought; she would end it in such a way that Matt Campbell wouldn’t see a cent. She remembered that about the contract: that she could void the whole thing with one final act, by making one final choice, and she was dying anyway.
He’d made it come back, she thought bitterly, working herself into a rage. If illness had spiritual roots the way Marion said then it meant that anger could cause it, that stress could cause it; and he’d come down here and lied and made love to her like he meant it then hollered like a maniac on the phone and now the cancer had come back. Suddenly she felt sick. The world narrowed then widened. She hated being angry all the time. She was so, so tired of being angry.
She picked up the gun again, and thought, for the first time in decades, about Jesus. Gentle Jesus whom she’d loved as a child. She remembered how she used to imagine that Jesus was secretly on her side, even when her parents condemned her, even when they said God was angry with her decisions, she’d always imagined that Jesus, with his soft expression, with a lamb on his lap, would forgive her. Would He forgive this? Could He? The anger she felt towards Matt Campbell was unlike other angers she’d felt before: it was colder, foreign somehow; there was a metallic taste to it, like blood or the air before it rains, as if the cold metal of the gun were already in her mouth.
She closed her eyes. When she’d left home, her parents had told her she was choosing a life of sin; yet she’d never really believed them. Even when she’d proclaimed to be an atheist, as she had for many years, she’d secretly held to the belief that the spark she felt inside was sacred somehow, that the voice in her heart, the voice that wanted to run and live and see and love was not the voice of sin but of life itself; she’d once felt so very sure of this.
But her life had only gotten lonelier; one choice had led to another to another, and now here she was with this final choice; here she was alone with this ugly task, alone with this cold metallic anger. She looked at the gun: its short blunt muzzle, its lack of ceremony, the extremes of its logic seemed an insult to everything she’d been through. Was this the consequence, then, of her rebellion? This ugly, final act? It’s your choice, Anni, they’d said. You’ve chosen. You chose. And what if all her life she’d chosen wrong?
She stood, suddenly. She wasn’t ready. She needed to think. She held the gun away from her at arm’s length, then walked slowly over to her dresser and placed it carefully in the top drawer. After shutting the drawer, she backed away and stood in the middle of the room, aware of the pain in her stomach, the lightness in her head, the storms of anger and confusion that were tearing her up inside. She was dying and did not know who to turn to; she was dying and did not know what to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Matt lied to his mother about where he was going next. She looked so tiny and hopeful standing there on Al’s doorstep that he couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. Instead, he hugged her to his chest and told her that he planned to go straight home, that he was going to sort things out with Jen right away and she didn’t need to worry: Jacob would always be a part of her life. He shook Al’s hand, then climbed into his car and headed for Las Vegas. He was going to see his father.
He drove through the desert, annoyed at himself. Here he was almost forty and he still didn’t have the guts to be up front about his Dad. Somehow, even after so many years, visiting his father still felt like he w
as betraying his mother. It had been like that growing up, every second weekend this impossible choice: choose one and betray the other; there was no right or wrong, just guilt on either side.
Still, it had been a long time since he’d seen his father and the fact that his old man was parked relatively close by seemed gratuitous. There was a chance that his father would help him out. While the state of the old man’s finances was unpredictable at best, when he had money, he tended to be generous. Of all people, his father would understand what it was like to screw up your life, he thought.
Matt drove all day then, towards evening, he crested a rise and there it was: Las Vegas sprawled in all its glory across the desert floor below.
Las Vegas. He’d been to the city several times for stag parties and once for a wedding, but he’d always flown; he’d always been whisked through the glittering airport half-cut from high balls on the plane, shuttled from one air-conditioned venue to the next in a blur of casinos and hotel bars surrounded by his friends. Driving in alone felt different. It felt strange, frightening somehow. He could feel all this space around him, the dryness, the improbability of the place. There was no river, no farmland or obvious organic reason for it being there, just a city plopped into the middle of the desert like a dream turned inside out and pinned down at the corners; its inner wants, its deep desires bulging skywards; the roads from a distance like silver veins, pulsing beads of mercury like the vivisection of a dream.
Arizona Charlie’s was off the main strip, out on the Boulder Highway where the city fanned out into the desert. His father and his father’s lady-friend, Ginger, were staying in the RV park, waiting for the weather to warm so they could continue their trek up to Alaska. The RV park was a huge flat area with small patches of lawn interspersed between the rows of hulking, white RV’s. Each site had a picnic table on its mini-lawn; there were a few ash trees peppered about for shade. In the center of the lot was an office building with a concrete swimming pool surrounded by struggling palm trees.
A high, chain-link fence separated the park from the surrounding neighbourhood of low, ranch-style stucco houses. When Matt pulled in, the first thing Ginger did was warn him not to go outside the fence. “It’s right dangerous. Drugs. Gangs,” she said. “You’ll get yourself shot at.” She was younger than his father by a couple of decades and she had a kind of sloppy attractiveness: large breasts that always found a way to brush against you, big heavy-lidded eyes with black mascara clumping in her lashes, wide hips and skinny legs and a splayfoot way of walking.
“I’ll be careful, Ginger,” Matt said and smiled. Ginger was easy to get along with. She was not a complicated person. He always felt bad for liking her as much as he did. She squeezed his shoulder. “Glad you’re here, kid,” she said, then toddled back inside to watch her programs, leaving him and his father out on the patch of lawn as the air cooled.
His father sat in a lawn chair in a pair of swim trunks with his hard, round belly like a ball in his lap, his gnarled feet in flip flops held out in the same splay foot way that Ginger had. He held his glass out to the side, the ice cubes clicking softly as he waxed philosophical: “If there’s one thing I can tell you after being around the block a few times, it’s this: when it’s over, it’s over.”
“It’s not over,” Matt said. He held the rum in his mouth. At the very least, his father mixed a decent drink.
“There’s no sense in prolonging the drama. It only makes it worse for everyone. Especially the kid.” Matt’s anger flashed in a kind of reflexive allegiance to his mother, but then he sighed and let it pass. Who was he to throw stones? He sipped his drink and sat in the long twilight while the blue light flickered in the pop-out section of the RV where Ginger was watching her shows. They were both proud of the pop-out, how much extra room it gave.
He watched his father’s little white dog snuffle around in circles. It was pegged to the patch of lawn with a tent peg. His father patted his lap and it popped up and sat there, leaning against his father’s hard belly and looking at Matt with a ridiculous smug expression on its pointy little face. “Montmorency here has been enjoying Las Vegas. Ginger took him to have his hair done.”
“Great,” Matt said. “I’m glad to hear that Montmorency is having such a grand old time.”
His father chuckled and stroked his thick grey mustache. The ice cubes clicked. The sun went down and the bleached pavement turned a pale purple. Matt sat out in the cooling air while his father went in to fix more drinks, then came out wearing a Broncos sweatshirt. “So, shoot straight with me here son,” he said, handing Matt a glass. “Is there someone else in the picture?”
“No.” He held the glass to his forehead to let the cold seep into his brain.
“Oh come on. You’re saying she just up and left you? She’s got no job and a little kid to look after and you’re saying that she just wakes up one morning and bang! She decides she’d be better off on her own? I don’t know, Matty. I’ve seen enough of these things to know, there’s always someone else.”
“I told you already. The stress. The house.”
His father chuckled. In the distance the strip had begun to glitter on the paling sky and it was beautiful in a lonely way.
“So, was it you or was it her?”
“Jesus Christ, Dad.”
His father stroked Montmorency, then bent and kissed him on the head. Sirens rose up in the clear, cool air. Matt sighed. “I made a mistake, okay? It was a onetime thing.”
“Ahhhh . . .” his father nodded and looked away at the glittering skyline. “And Ms. Mistake, what’s her story?”
“She’s a fucking nutjob is what her story is,” he spat vehemently. “She keeps calling me. She just showed up at the house. Jen doesn’t know anything for sure but she suspects. Jen’s always been crazy jealous, right from the start. I even look at another woman and she’s mad.”
His father nodded. “Ahhh.”
“It was rough at home,” he elaborated. “I mean, we hadn’t had sex in a long time, maybe even a year, so I was on edge, you know how it is, and then I went out of town for a couple of days to look into this investment because I needed to figure stuff out, and maybe I had a few too many and I got talking to this woman . . . She was attractive and had all these great stories...” he trailed off. He’d pushed it away, those three dream-like days in the fog. He didn’t like to think about it, couldn’t think about it without this tidal wave building, threatening his very existence. “But it was a mistake,” he added quickly. “I got back to her place and I knew it was a mistake right away. Her place was this crazy hovel in the middle of nowhere. She had a cat named Zebedee for Christ sakes,” he was speaking quickly, loudly, he didn’t know why. “And it’s not a habit, you know what I mean? I mean, I guess I could have confessed to Jen but it didn’t make sense. What makes more sense: ruin my marriage for a onetime mistake or just vow never to do it again? Anyway, I thought that was the end of it, and then this woman showed up at the house.”
“Well,” the old man said, “There’s no sense in getting all tied up about it. You figure out what you need to do and go from there. Can’t change the past.” He took a sip of his drink then held it in his mouth and nodded slowly. “Can’t change the past, even when you want to.” They were quiet for some time then he said, “Gotta keep the wife and mistress separate. Never involve the family.”
They sat in the dark. The ice cubes clicked and the strip sparkled and winked and the cars went by and the stars came out and there were long silences and more drinks and then it was time for bed. His father patted him on the shoulder and said quietly: “If there’s one thing I learned it’s this: you gotta keep the sex dirty and the fights clean.”
Matt woke to find Ginger watching TV in the pop-out and his father making eggs. “I thought we could go out for a little fun,” his father said. “Hit up a buffet. Play a game or two. A father-son thing, you know.” He was already dress
ed for the occasion in a yellow golf shirt and khaki pants, his grey hair slicked back.
Matt had planned to ask him for a loan that morning then get back to Seattle right away and deal with his own life, yet it didn’t seem to be an option with the old man standing over the frying pan, looking at Matt with his hopeful face. “Sure,” Matt said. “That sounds like fun.” They dropped Ginger off at a mall with a wad of cash and she waddled off uncomplaining, then they drove the rest of the way to the strip and parked the car.
His father hustled him along the crowded sidewalk, holding onto his elbow. “In here. In here,” he’d say as they allowed themselves to be funneled into the casinos with their flashing lights and glitter and sound. They’d get drinks and his father would stuff bills into Matt’s hand and say let’s play and let’s drink and let’s eat and Matt drank the drinks and ate the food and dutifully lost money at the slots.
After several such stops, he wandered into a gift store to look for souvenirs for Jen and Jacob, remembering how he used to like it when his father brought back souvenirs for him, T-shirts from all the places he’d been to. He’d always been so proud to wear them at school. He found two T-shirts with glittery letters on the front. I HEART LAS VEGAS they said. His father came over and whistled, “Tighty whitey. Nice one.”
They continued along under the awnings, the giant signs reeling above them in the blue. They were arm in arm now, leaning into one another. There were a lot of families with kids, Matt noticed and he wished Jen could see it. One time, when he’d come down to Vegas for a stag, he’d asked Jen and Jacob to come along with him and she’d gotten angry and said, “It’s no place for a child,” but if she could see it, he thought, if she could see it, then she’d change her mind. So many families. Him and his old Dad.
They sat and drank martinis and watched the roller coaster at the New York, New York do the loop de loop over the sidewalk. They watched the people screaming as they twisted and roared on the track above them.
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