But why then Climax!?
His gums were aching, which they always did when he hadn’t had a smoke for a few hours. At least that was a problem he could solve. As he reached for the desk’s top drawer, where he kept his spare packs, a familiar voice cut through the TV’s blather. He turned to the screen and there was none other than the Chronicle’s intern, Suzie Chalmers, standing at the sharply pointed prow of a speedboat. She was dressed in a dark blazer opening onto a white blouse, the short bob of her hair unmolested by the gusts of migrant smoke blowing in from the fire engulfing the densely wooded shore behind her.
“The fire is spreading rapidly,” she is yelling above the bluster of wind. “It appears to have begun somewhere in Hidden Cove. You can see behind me that it has already claimed several cottages nestled along this inlet on the eastern shore of Lake Mesaquakee.”
The camera pans past her to reveal what appears to be a medieval castle perched atop a granite ridge, its windows belching fire as if it were under siege. Just then there is a rumbling boom accompanied by a bright flare to the left of the screen. The picture goes all wonky and off-screen Suzie exclaims, “Jesus!” When the camera locates her again she is clutching onto the boat’s rail and gaping in alarm at a fireball just dissipating above the fringe of trees demarcating the cove’s perimeter.
“Did you see that?” she gasps at whoever’s holding the camera.
Cut to a shot taken over the bow of the speedboat, the picture bucking against the waves as it races towards a harbour full of boats set ablaze.
Then: a battered and charred sign floating in the water amongst sprouts of fire bobbing like tea lights.
elcome T
idden Cove Ma in
eed Lim Km/
The camera lingers barely long enough for Deacon to fill in the missing blanks before it’s panning upwards, centring itself again on Suzie at the speedboat’s bow.
“Moments ago,” she is saying, “the fire ignited the gas tanks in the marina behind me.”
The camera then zooming in on a large grey cylinder beyond the harbour, the picture focusing on the word imprinted in red over its shell: Propane.
“Suzie, I think—” the cameraman says, only to be interrupted by Suzie pointing off-camera and yelling, “A fireboat!”
Cut to:
A close-up of the fireboat, its water canon dousing the harbour as a commanding voice booms: “Vacate the area immediately.” The shot pans left and zooms towards its source: a fireman holding a megaphone pointed directly at the camera. “I repeat,” he booms again, “vacate the area immed—” his voice now drowned out by another explosion, the camera backtracking to the harbour, all but consumed by the bright white flash unleashed by the exploding propane tank. Flaming debris rains down, sputtering in the water around the speedboat and Suzie is screaming, “Go. Go!”
Cut to:
A tracking shot of the unbroken wall of flames that has become the shoreline, settling on a boathouse similarly engulfed, the crackle of its wood not quite enough to drown out a faint yap yap yap: a dog barking.
“Over there!” Suzie shouts and the camera tracks left, blurring momentarily as it zooms in on a swim raft, floating fifty feet from shore. A drift of smoke renders the figures huddled on top as vague outlines. One of them is that of a man standing, his hands waving, frantic, trying to get their attention.
Cut to:
The screaming face of a toddler. Suzie must be holding the camera now because it’s the guy—What was his name again?—she’d picked up at the Harcourts’ anniversary party who’s taking the jumper-clad child from his mother’s arms. He’s lifting him into the boat. The woman clambering after is a vision of finely rendered beauty wearing a skimpy nightdress so that it looks like she might have just stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. The man behind her, in boxers and plain grey T-shirt, is slightly older and a trifle dowdy faced. He’s coughing against the smoke and clutching a chihuahua to the paunch at his belly.
“Boy, are we glad to see you,” he says as he climbs aboard. “I thought we were goners.”
A terrific splintering of wood then jerks him, and the camera, towards the boathouse. Its roof is caving in and the camera holds it in frame as the boat circles away from the carnage, angling towards open water. The shot pulls back then to reveal the family sitting in the boat’s rear seats, the child squirming in her mother’s lap, the dog in the man’s licking at the child’s face, momentarily stemming the girl’s ire. The woman’s head is propped on her husband’s shoulder and tears carve thin lines down her cheeks. The man squeezes her leg, offering her the only words of comfort he can as a flourish of fire erupts through the windows spanning the cedar plank cottage now receding in the distance.
“We’re okay,” he says. “That’s all that matters. We’re all okay. We’re going to be okay.”
Now the camera is pulling back again, revealing the screen behind the news anchor’s desk upon which the scene has been cast.
“This remarkable footage,” the anchor is saying, “was captured by a second-year journalism student and her boyfriend earlier this morning.” Then turning to the screen where the petite reporter from earlier can be seen standing at the end of a dock.
“Melissa,” the anchor continues, “I understand you caught up with the couple at the young man’s cottage on Lake Joseph.”
“It’s where I am now. I’m joined by Suzanne Chalmers and Rance Harcourt.”
As she speaks, the frame widens to include the happily beaming young couple.
“Harrowing stuff,” Melissa says, turning to Suzie. “Tell me, how is it that you happened to be out on the lake at seven o’clock this morning?”
The remote was in Deacon’s hand and he clicked the TV off before Suzie could respond. He was pretty sure he knew the answer anyway.
Reaching then for the phone charging beside his laptop, swiping his hand across its face and seeing he had forty-three unread messages. The majority were from Rain and he thumbed through those until he reached the last five, all from Grover. The first time he’d called was at 4:43 a.m. that morning and the last at 6:23, the contents of the text he’d then sent giving Deacon every excuse to disregard the previous four.
Don’t worry about it, it read. I’ve sent Suzie. See you tomorrow at the funeral.
Fumbling a smoke from the pack in his hand, gritting his teeth.
On top of everything else, he’d missed the biggest damn story ever to hit Tildon.
The realization was accompanied by a flash of heat simmering at his collar, knowing that even if Grover had been able to reach him, he wouldn’t have made it past the blockade on the 118 where he’d be lucky to get a few quotes from Gerald Billings, Tildon’s fire chief, maybe a couple of snaps off the dock at Meeford Bay. He certainly wouldn’t have been cruising the lake at the prow of some speedboat, in the thick of things, rescuing supermodels off rafts, getting himself on the national news, grinning like it was the best damn thing that had ever happened to him.
He lit the smoke cursing his bad luck, though he knew it wasn’t really that, it was something else: his own damn fault. And feeling that, he again recalled what George had written, for hadn’t Del thought the same thing after the girl—Emma—had tripped over the chunk of asphalt he’d used to mark his range. Del had made amends by shooting an arrow at the cop and when that had failed, he’d fled. It was the same thing Deacon himself had a strong urge to do now.
With George dead, there’s nothing left for you here, he told himself. You ought to just get in your Jeep, head north on the 11, leave all this shit behind.
Nodding like it was a done deal even as his eyes again sought out Grover’s text, zeroing in on the last word with terminal abandon.
You can’t leave, not until tomorrow anyway. You owe George at least that.
And that thought offering him nothing except a tremble to his hand as he took
a drag off his cigarette.
What in the hell was he going to say at George’s funeral?
21
The following day, he left his apartment just after noon.
He’d dressed in the same outfit he’d bought for Adele’s funeral—a black pair of jeans and a black button-down shirt. He cautioned himself that it was too warm a day to wear George’s corduroy jacket but grabbed it off the hook beside the door on his way out nevertheless.
The service was set to begin at one.
From the end of the alleyway behind Main Street it was only a half block to the United Church on Dominion, but he wanted to get there before the pews were filled with prying eyes, like they had when he’d arrived at Adele’s. Those and the whispers from the congregation of (mostly) elderly mourners had followed him down the aisle, the urgency in their hush speaking volumes to Deacon about what they were saying: ten years and change not yet enough for them to see in him anything but a twelve-year-old boy wedged between the seats in his father’s Jeep, his family dead in the front and his face doused by a trickle of blood from the gash over his left eye so that when a man on his way to buy cord wood from Bergin had come across the accident he’d thought Deacon was dead too.
The wind had shifted in the night, blowing the inferno back upon itself and sparing Tildon the order that had evacuated Meeford Bay and Maynard Falls. The sky was a thin wedge of blue parting the alleyway’s ragged box tops and the only evidence of the fire was a thin film of grey powdering the slats of wood leading downwards from his door and the balustrade’s rail. The street’s asphalt was dulled by the same and a single set of footfalls imprinted in the ash led up the four cement steps towards the red-brick church’s front door. It was made of oak and arched at the top and had two black cast-iron rings bolted at shoulder height, all of which lent it a medieval quality at odds with the cheap plywood panels encasing the lobby.
Deacon eased the door shut behind him and crept up the stairs leading to the chapel, trying not to make a sound. The plastic slip guard covering the dusty grey carpeting crackled underfoot and checked his pace, stopping him altogether just before his head would have breached the top. He listened for any sign of movement. When he heard nothing, he abandoned all thoughts of stealth, taking the last six steps two at a time and striding past the coat area, even reaching out and knocking at the empty metal hangers on the rack, making them jingle and clang.
He paused again at the chapel’s open doors, absorbing the heady odour of old wood tainted by mildew. Dust motes flitted about the strained light filtering through the stained-glass windows. He rubbed at his nose as if he was about to sneeze, though it wasn’t that; it was an involuntary twitch giving expression to the sudden tightening he felt in his chest upon catching sight of the two silver urns on the sanctuary’s altar. There was a picture of George in front of the left and a picture of Adele in front of the right and one of them both in between.
In his, George’s mad flop of hair was wetted down and his beard trimmed and he was wearing a brown suit and a peach-coloured tie, what he called his “old fart getup.” In hers, Adele was wearing the white blouse with a Rorschach squiggle of purple and red lines on either breast that Louise had bought her one Christmas because, she said, they made her think of butterflies—her mother’s favourite motif—but which always put Deacon in mind of two eviscerated lungs.
He’d seen the pictures plenty of times before.
For the past five years they’d resided on the mantel over the fireplace in the Cleary’s living room, arranged the same as they were now. They’d been Louise’s idea. Adele had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and she wanted, she’d told her father, to preserve her mother the way she was. George had balked at the idea, countering that they had plenty of photos of Adele and himself and also of them together—“enough to wallpaper the damned kitchen,” is what he’d said. But Louise had already made an appointment at Pond’s Photo Shop a mere two doors down from the Chronicle and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Goddamned ugliest pictures I ever saw,” was George’s opinion on the matter.
In the weeks after he’d come home from work to find them adorning the mantel, he’d made a game of turning the photos to face the wall, Adele tsking every time she turned them back and Deacon trying to keep a straight face as she muttered under her breath, “It’s like living with a damn child!”
This, now, just one more memory amongst thousands to remind him of the life they’d shared together.
* * *
He sat down in the far end of the front left-side pew, one of the two Reserved For Family.
He was reading over what he’d written in his notebook last night, his ragged scrawl leading him from, I was twelve the first time I read one of George Cleary’s novels to From that day forward, I’d always eat my share of liquorice allsorts staring up at The Stray in the far-right corner of the bookshelf’s top row, thinking about how it’d be a shame if Ma burnt it up in the yard before I had a chance to find out what happened next.
He’d written through the night as a balm against thoughts of Dylan and the fire, filling the notebook to the last page, the pen’s ragged scrawl, by then, reduced to a series of fractured squiggles hardly decipherable even to himself. He’d stopped where he had because his hand was cramped and also because he wasn’t quite sure of how to tackle what came next. It was over thirty pages in all and when, finally, he’d crawled into bed it was with the grim certitude that he wasn’t any closer to figuring out what he might want to say than when he’d begun.
Sometime along the way, the mourners began to arrive.
He could hear Edward greeting each at the chapel’s door, his voice suitably hushed and reverent. That gave over to the no less venerable shuffling of their feet as they made their way down the aisle and the almost apologetic creak of wood as they settled into the pews. Shortly then, the organ. Its first breath huffed like a bear’s after a long winter’s sleep and this was channelled into a morose succession of notes: a funeral dirge ubiquitous in its solemnity and having absolutely nothing useful to say about the man it was meant to honour but, in the very least, providing perfect accompaniment to the ceaseless drone of those who’d come to offer their respects.
On and on they came until it seemed that half of Tildon must have been filing into the church. Closing his notebook, Deacon returned it to his jacket pocket and took The Stray from the pocket on the other side, setting it in his lap and looking down at the picture of his parents on the cover. And though it hadn’t been his intention in bringing the book, he mused that it was right they should be there too, having, as they did, given an old man new hope. The measure of satisfaction he derived from that was short-lived, for just then he felt someone bumping up against his side. Turning and seeing it was Dylan, wearing his dress blues. He was leaning in close so he could whisper something in Deacon’s ear, a gesture that for the people in the pews behind couldn’t have appeared to be anything but that of one family member offering another a few words to ease his grief. But that was the exact opposite of Dylan’s intent, hidden from all but Deacon because of what he alone knew and by the hush in the other’s voice.
“You look a little pale there, Deke,” he whispered.
Now, draping his arm around his shoulders in a firm embrace and lowering his voice quieter still.
“Buck up, son,” he said, “we ain’t hardly yet just begun.”
The reproachful alacrity in his voice was exactly as Deacon would have imagined had he been offering the same to a new recruit shaken by his first taste of war; Deacon feeling shell-shocked as Dylan withdrew his arm, patting him on the knee, and then scooching back towards his mother sitting in the aisle seat.
Eleanor Cleary had gained some weight since he’d seen her last, when she’d almost been a skeleton, the result of the chemo treatments she’d undergone for breast cancer the year before. Her cheeks were still gaunt though and she was wear
ing a black bandana to hide her thinned-out hair. There was a hand reaching out to tug at the back of it. Eleanor and Deacon looked up in unison and found Crystal standing in the aisle. She’d let her hair grow out and a frizz of curly red struck out from beneath the flop of a felt bowler hat, the same charcoal grey as her blazer and slacks, her outfit completed by a man’s dress shirt, its top three buttons undone and its tails hanging loose beneath the jacket: Anne of Green Gables playing at being Annie Hall.
The sight propelled Eleanor to unsteady feet, and she wrapped her daughter in a deep embrace.
“You made it!”
She kissed her on the cheek and Crystal kissed her back and then withdrew, holding her mom at arm’s length.
“Look at you,” she said. “We’re going to have to put you on a diet soon.”
Eleanor frowned and waved her off with a dismissive flutter of her hand, though she couldn’t have looked happier. The organ was then fading. Crystal helped her mother back to the pew. She sat beside her and craned forward, offering Deacon a sprightly smile and a finger wave, Deacon forcing a strained smile of his own as a hush fell over the church.
Reverend Stephens was standing at the pulpit, clad in a white frock and purple sash. Beads of sweat were already glistening over his brow and a straggle from his thinning hair was plastered to his forehead. His eyes were closed and he was raising his hands, signalling for quiet.
The service was about to begin.
22
Henry Mueller, Mesaquakee Lakes’ MPP, spoke first.
The Muellers were one of the oldest and wealthiest families in town. Because they were Catholic and their boys tended to be, as Henry was, blond-haired and blue-eyed, they were often referred to—only half in jest—as the Mesaquakee Kennedys. He set a whimsical tone as he spoke of George as one of the last of a dying breed: a man who always put the good of the community before his own needs; whose accomplishments were modest and who wouldn’t have had it any other way; a man who would be fondly remembered not so much for what he’d done but for what he’d stood for; a beacon for the people of Tildon, “may his light shine forevermore.”
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