You’ve been meaning to take him up to High Falls anyway, he told himself, High Falls being the best swimming hole around.
Maybe they’d pick up some KFC—Tawyne’s favourite—and an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen. He’d bought him a fishing rod from The Bait Shop in town and had already wrapped that up with the pocket knife René’s grandfather had given him on his eleventh birthday. He could arrange to borrow Roy’s canoe, and after Tawyne opened his presents they could take a paddle downriver so he could try out his new rod. When they got back to the falls they’d climb onto the jumping ledge. The only way to get there was up the side of a rock face, some fifty feet steep.
“Are you really going to jump from there?” Tawyne might say once they’d reached the summit.
“Just watch me.”
“But there’s a tree in the way.”
It was an old pine—a white, René thought—anchored to the cliff ten feet above the water, its tip rising three feet past the highest ledge, meaning you had to take a run if you had any hope of clearing it. And there was no better feeling than clearing that old pine: the world suddenly became a yawning chasm swallowing you whole.
Tawyne wouldn’t jump from there, not that first time.
Hell, you were fifteen the first time you jumped.
But there were plenty of other ledges to jump from. The shortest was five feet. He could start from there, work his way up.
By the end of day, he’d be jumping from twenty, you can bank on that.
After finishing at the cliff, they’d swim back across to the falls. Just off from where the main stream gushed into the river there was a little basin hollowed out in the rock. Overflow collected in it, forming a natural whirlpool. They’d sit in there, soaking leisurely amongst the froth until their time was up.
The cigarette was down to the nub by the time he’d imagined that, though he couldn’t remember taking more than two puffs. He butt it in the ashtray on the kitchen’s fold-out table and took out another cigarette, reducing that to ash while replaying his plans for Tawyne’s birthday.
It was shaping up to be one helluva day.
* * *
That feeling lasted about as long as it took him to take a shower.
The trailer’s water heater had gone the month before. He’d been showering in his grandfather’s house ever since. He usually only did that after work, but it was already twenty-one degrees according to the weather network app that had come with his phone—its forecast calling for a high of thirty-two with scattered clouds—and he figured a little cold water might do him a world of good. Still, the first blast hit him like an ice storm. The shower barely had enough room for him to stand in, much less get out from under its spray. Wasn’t anything to do but clench his teeth and suffer through it. He lathered himself up and rinsed, then turned the water off and reached for the towel that hung on the rack over the toilet.
He walked out of the bathroom naked, as he was often inclined to do, sometimes going so far as to stand in the kitchen and drink his morning coffee before getting dressed, letting the fresh air get at the drips his towel had missed. He bought his grandfather Maxwell House Dark Roast by the kilo, and every few days René filled a Mason jar from the can he kept in his fridge, making his morning fix with the percolator he heated on the trailer’s propane stove. It barely filled his travel mug beyond half, but the coffee was boiling hot and strong and didn’t suffer much when he topped it off with milk. That morning there were only sprinkles left in the bottom of the jar.
There’d be a pot on in the house, he told himself as he walked to the kitchen table.
He fished a cigarette from the pack and picked up his lighter, flicking the dial, the flame crackling against the tobacco and him studying it.
A fire, he thought. You can’t light a fire at High Falls.
It was half the reason he’d wanted to take Tawyne up to his grandfather’s fishing shack in the first place.
Simmering the bass or pickerel they’d have caught in a little butter, bubbling in a fry pan heated over the open flames, roasting marshmallows, listening to the soft wood crackle and pop and watching embers cast aloft, dancing amidst the night sky’s sparkle, him and his son all alone together, might as well be the last two people on earth.
Them laughing.
The thought had barely passed when his bare foot was lashing out, striking the plastic garbage can beside the table. It shot across the room and hit the couch at the trailer’s far end. The lid popped off on impact, a geyser spray releasing from within—old coffee grinds peppering the back window all the way to the ceiling, the rattle of rib bones from last night’s dinner hitting the glass, a sour cream container splattering its remains over the back of the couch, the garbage can toppling, spewing wadded up paper towels stained with barbecue sauce and an old fly strip clung fast to a milk bag, a pickle jar spilling its juice as it spun, skittering, across the floor, the mess making him madder still.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, holding it in for the count of five.
But counting down from five and grabbing those wolves by the tail hardly put a stutter in the rage coursing through him now. His eyes flashed open, scanning about the trailer, looking for something else to smash. Ever since the spring had set in, his grandfather had taken to picking the wild flowers that grew along the fringe of his backyard and arranging them in the vase on the trailer’s kitchen table, replenishing those when the old ones had wilted. This day it was tiger lilies, set against the backdrop of a fern.
He was just reaching for the vase when three sharp knocks sounded at the door, enough to stay his hand. And then his grandfather’s voice, asking, “Everything alright in there?”
René was breathing hard, impossibly so, his chest heaving, tendrils of spit fuming at his lips. Another knock then, the rap of a knuckle that wasn’t sure if it really wanted an answer.
“René?”
No more than a whisper, his grandfather’s head pressed to the door, listening for signs of a violence yet to come, so that when René jerked it open, the old man startled back. He was carrying a wrench as big as his forearm. His hand tightened against its tempered steel as if he was expecting René to have at him, but only for an instant, then it relaxed again. If he noticed his grandson was naked, he made no sign.
“You alright?” the old man asked.
René nodded, though the grit to his teeth told a different story.
A vehicle was passing by on the 118. It was a black SUV—a Navigator—pulling an Airstream behind. The latter was thirty-five feet long if it was an inch, the gleam of its aluminum making the old trailer home his grandfather had salvaged from Bailey’s Auto Wreck, and in which René had lived ever since he’d got out of jail, seem no better than a cardboard box.
René watched it until it was out of sight and let his eyes wander back to the old man. He was biting his lip, studying the younger with the same look he used to have when he was wrestling with the crossword on the back page of the local paper, so intent on the puzzle that it seemed to René like he must have thought the very secret of the world was hidden within. When René was in his teens, the delivery person would give out a honk to tell his grandfather the paper was there, and he’d drop everything he was so eager to check the answers for last week’s crossword and to get a start on the next.
But that had been years ago.
Though he still got the paper every Wednesday, the delivery person no longer honked and the crossword on its back page remained blank. It had always been a mystery to René what could have been so important about a damned crossword to inspire such devotion and, more so, what had changed in the meanwhile. Seeing that look again on the old man’s face—staring at him as if trying to work out a deeper meaning to the violent clatter he’d heard a moment ago and the sudden appearance of his grandson at the door, naked and looking like he was about to tear his head off—struck Ren�
� suddenly shy. His hand meandered towards his groin as if he meant to cover himself but reconsidered, his fingers idling their time, scratching at the hair that grew in a channel from his pubis to his belly button.
“What’s up?” René asked.
“You got a moment before you leave?”
“Roy’ll be here any minute,” René lied, knowing that his boss wouldn’t arrive to pick him up until eight, and here it was not even seven.
“I thought—”
“What’d you need?”
“An extra set of hands. Won’t be more’n two ticks on a dog.”
“You mind if I get dressed first?”
The old man levelled the cockeyed grin at him that sometimes made René think he was a tad simple.
“Well, I sure wish you would.”
* * *
An hour later, René heard a honk from the driveway.
He was standing under a Ford Tempo up on the hoist in his grandfather’s garage, holding a muffler in place while the old man ratcheted the bolts back into its bracket.
“That’ll be Roy,” he said.
“Go on, then,” his grandfather urged, his tone about the same as if René had been a teenager begging off to go hang out with his friends.
“Won’t kill him to wait another few seconds,” René said.
“I got three in. It’ll hold.”
René eased his grip, waiting to make sure his grandfather was right. The muffler sagged a quarter inch but held and René turned towards the door.
“Try not to work too hard,” the old man called after him, which was what he always said in place of goodbye.
When he came out, Roy was angling his Silverado towards the road. He caught sight of René and waved and René held up his hands, showing off a filth of rust and grease.
“Let me get washed up,” he called as he hurried towards the trailer.
He doused his hands with the No Name detergent beside the sink and scrubbed them with a Brillo pad, rinsing the grime off both together. He took his lunch box from the fridge where he’d put it the night before, and habit had him reaching for the travel mug on the counter, stopping short, remembering there hadn’t been any coffee that morning. He left it where it was and snatched the pack of smokes off the table along with his lighter, casting a long last look at the garbage strewn over the couch and the floor on his way out.
The Silverado was parked at the end of the driveway when he came onto the porch. The pickup’s left blinker was flashing, like Roy was thinking about maybe leaving him behind.
René set off at a jog.
Roy was thumbing at his Galaxy S7 when he reached the passenger seat. He was wearing what he always did when the temperature hadn’t dipped below zero: a plain blue T-shirt, torn at the collar and spackled with white paint, and a pair of jeans worn through at the knees. He must have been looking for a song because the moment René shut the door the opening of Mötley Crüe’s “Helter Skelter” blared out of the stereo and he cast René a playful grin as he turned onto the 118, knowing his disdain for ’80s hair-metal bands.
The truck picked up speed, and by the time Vince Neil was screaming about riding a slide in an endless loop, René was nodding off.
He was snapped back to it by Roy shouting above the wailing guitars, “You look tired!”
René rubbed at his eyes and leaned forward, casting a furtive glance at the empty cup holder where his coffee would normally be.
“Damn fly kept me up half the night,” he shouted back.
“A fly? Why didn’t you just get up and swat it?”
“You think I didn’t try?”
“It disappeared whenever you got up?”
“Every damned time.”
Roy was shaking his head and grinning again.
“They’s tricky alright.”
3
“So you remember him?”
Grover Parks, the Chronicle’s managing editor, was standing in the doorway of Deacon’s office. He was wearing his usual white button-down shirt and grey slacks but had forgone his standard V-neck sweater and tie in deference to the air conditioner being on the fritz (the “cooling specialist” he’d called in had told him it wasn’t worth the cost to repair, and Grover hadn’t yet reconciled himself to the task of writing a cheque for a new one, going on two weeks now). His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he’d even left his top button undone, the day already creeping towards thirty degrees and the office beginning to feel like a slow cooker set to high. Curls of white prodded from within the cleft below his neck, the same as the ones lathered on his chin, their ivory sprouting, it seemed, in stark defiance against the ebony of his skin.
“Hard to forget a man like Ronald Crane,” Deacon answered.
Ronald Crane was the CEO of Crane Enterprises, a property development firm out of Toronto. Three months previous he’d bought the Meeford Bay Resort, and his assistant had called the Chronicle to enquire about some local ad copy for the newly rechristened Rustling Pines Mature Living Community. The way Bill Churly, the paper’s sales rep, had told it, he’d asked her what she was thinking, and she’d answered, “Nothing too extravagant. Construction’s still two years away. A quarter page maybe. Just a teaser.” Bill told her that was certainly doable, then spent the next fifteen minutes explaining to her why that’d be a mistake. By the end of the call she’d agreed to the deluxe package: four full-page colour ads to run prior to each of the summer holiday weekends to capitalize on what Bill rather euphemistically called the Chronicle’s “peak circulation.” As a bonus he threw in, at no extra charge, a profile to be written by one of the paper’s “journalistic professionals,” and a couple of weeks later Deacon drove up to Meeford Bay to talk with Mr. Crane and to take a few snapshots.
Deacon had pulled into the resort’s parking lot and parked behind a black Escalade. By the time he had opened the Jeep’s door, Mr. Crane was stepping from the SUV’s rear passenger door, speaking in a rapid gibberish Deacon guessed was maybe Russian or Ukrainian. The cherub pudge to his cheeks defied his age, in his midfifties Deacon guessed, so that it almost looked like a baby’s face had been glued over top of his own. He had a thin stubble of bleach-blond hair over which was propped a pair of aviator sunglasses and was wearing a brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and open-toed sandals, for all intents and purposes the living embodiment of summer, which was maybe a bit of a stretch, it then being the middle of March. He choreographed the end of his call to coincide with the moment he was reaching his hand out to Deacon, saying, “Do pobacˇennya,” into the phone, and tossing it blindly up and over his head, his assistant scuttling to get beneath it. She was a pretty twenty-something brunette, wearing a bright red open-bloused tux, the tails of which reminded Deacon of one worn by a Ringling Bros. lion tamer in an old movie he’d seen on late-night TV. All she needed was a top hat and whip to complete the costume, but Deacon didn’t have time to ponder that—the moment she’d snatched the phone out of the air Mr. Crane was giving his hand a double pump.
While they shook, he smiled at Deacon with enough teeth to rival a used-car salesman at the end of a lean month, and he forsook the standard greeting to ask Deacon if he was hungry.
“I’m okay,” Deacon answered.
“You sure? We picked up some sandwiches at—” his assistant filling in the name—“The Hungry Bear”—without even a stutter to say he’d misplaced it.
“Salami this thick.” He held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “And fresh baked bread, just like my grandma used to make. Best goddamn sandwich I ever ate. You sure you don’t want one?”
“I’m fine.”
“Diane, fetch him a sandwich.”
Then, before Deacon could protest again, he’d grabbed his arm and hastened him towards the water, all abuzz about the twelve tonnes of sand that was, at this very moment, on its way from St. Vincent or
St. Martin, he couldn’t remember which; an island somewhere in the Caribbean anyway.
“It’s the whitest sand you ever saw,” he opined, and his plan was to use it to rejuvenate the algae-encrusted beach confronting Deacon now.
Diane appeared with his sandwich, but Deacon hadn’t more than peeled back its wax paper to see that it was roast beef before Mr. Crane grabbed his arm again and led him on a whirlwind tour of the grounds, seeing in the falling down log cabins and the dank black water of its lagoon his own personal paradise. He carried his extra weight more like helium than lard and moved with the frenetic pace of a squirrel hiding nuts so that it was all Deacon could do to keep up with his stride. He talked about as fast as he walked, and by the time they were circling back towards the driveway, Deacon’s hand was cramped from the nine pages he’d filled in his notebook using the cryptic shorthand he’d learned from Grover.
When they reached Deacon’s Jeep, Mr. Crane shook his hand again and asked, “You get what you need?”
Deacon replied that he had, and without further ado Mr. Crane spun around towards the Escalade, snatched the cell phone out of his assistant’s outstretched hand, and said, “Dobryj den,” as he brought it to his mouth. As Diane closed the car door behind Crane, she turned towards Deacon, offering him a sprightly wink and smile, the glint in her eyes so bright that it seemed to have burnt itself into his retinas.
And it was the possibility of seeing her again that was on Deacon’s mind when he asked Grover, “Why?”
“They’re saying he’s the man found burnt up in that van last night.”
That had Deacon sitting bolt upright.
“What?”
“No official confirmation but the van was registered in his name.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Globe and Mail broke the story five minutes ago.” And then before Deacon had a chance to reply, Grover was ducking back into the hall, calling over his shoulder, “Scooped again, eh, Deke? Don’t you worry, you’ll get ’em next time!”
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