In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “What are you doing here?” Travis asked.

  “My place,” Tom answered, waving his hand at the house. “I just moved in.”

  “The locals say you found the body.”

  “I put up the sticks and the rope. Sarah O’Hara put the tarp over it. A nervous wreck called Albert Scutter helped. The tall guy with the beard, Joseph, has been keeping an eye on things”

  “We’ll need a statement.”

  “Of course.”

  Tom thought Travis might ask how Myrna was doing, or Joel, and was relieved when he didn’t. He was even more relieved that he never mentioned Sally. Tom had heard that after he moved out, Travis had hit on Sally. Knowing him, he’d have thought he was doing her a favour. He hoped she hadn’t slept with him.

  “An accident?”

  “Probably. No bruises, no blood.”

  “Your DNA on her?”

  “I had to roll her over. I thought maybe CPR.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, she was cold. No pulse.”

  “Is she cute?”

  “It’s hard to be cute when you’re dead. I’ve never seen her before. Sara O’Hara says she’s Ben the transfer guy’s grandkid.”

  “Mother?”

  “Winnipeg, I think. I don’t know. I just moved here six weeks ago.”

  “Mind your own business?” Travis said.

  “I’m busy. I’ve got a house to fix up.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Ask Sarah O’Hara. She knows all the details.”

  Travis hadn’t appreciated that Tom hadn’t always dotted his i's and crossed his t's, that he sometimes let people go with a warning or a lecture. Tom always said he didn’t want the paperwork, but they both knew it wasn’t just that. “Soft,” Travis had said, and they all knew that he meant weak.

  “Somebody will come over and get a report.” They both turned to look as a pickup truck and a hearse arrived at the scene. The truck, Tom assumed, was the local medical examiner, who needed to say she was dead, and then leave.

  “Okay,” Tom said and turned on the saw.

  Travis watched him for a moment longer than necessary, then got back into the car and went to join the new arrivals. Travis once arrested a kid for stealing a donut but gave a warning to the mayor for driving drunk. His rules were flexible at the upper end.

  Tom turned off the table saw. A table saw was nothing to be using when he was upset. He liked his fingers and intended to keep them. He went inside and poured himself a rye. He had one drink straight, then took the second one outside and sat in a Muskoka chair that had once been painted green. Now the wood was silver and the nailheads rusted. Green paint still clung in places where the wood was rough. He sipped his drink and watched the routine through the trees. A few people had gathered to watch, but they stayed well back and out of the way.

  A female constable came over to take his statement. He didn’t know her. They sat facing each other at the picnic table, which had been worn grey by the weather. He wondered what Travis had told her about him, because her questions were sharp, nearly accusatory. She had the grim look of someone wanting to prove she could do her job. Women on the force were always having to try to prove themselves.

  The driver of the hearse sat with the back door open, smoking a cigarette, then went over to the café.

  The forensic team set up a tent to keep away prying eyes and people with cameras, then checked the body—or he assumed that they checked the body; he knew the ritual—collected anything and everything on the body, around the body, and put it in bags. And when all that was done, put the body into a bag, then put that into another bag for transportation.

  There had been no signs of trauma, no wounds, no obvious broken limbs, just a kid face down in a water-filled rut, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a kid with a grandfather who didn’t know anyone important. They’d make it quick, and curse the paperwork. Drunk probably, drugged maybe, taking god knows what, anything from meth to bath salts, gasoline fumes in a plastic bag, lots of ways to end up face down in a puddle.

  They’d cut her chest open, making cuts under her young breasts, then down to her crotch, cut out her insides, take slices for analysis, check her lungs to be sure she drowned, use a Black+Decker saw to cut off the top of her head, take out her brain, take more samples, end up cremating it or putting it back inside and sewing her up. Dead, dead, dead, he thought, deader than dead, no magic to breathe life back into her, ask her what she saw before everything went black. Did she float over her body, looking down, watching calmly? Did she walk into a tunnel of light? Did she see her grandmother waiting for her, ready to take her into her arms, saying it was all determined before you were born, fifteen years was all you were given, maybe next time you’ll get a long life, get to grow old, have kids and grandkids, have a husband, a house, an education, holidays where there are palm trees, maybe you’ll be white, whiter than white, with blonde hair and blue eyes?

  He thought of Myrna then. She wasn’t handicapped by the colour of her skin, had lived in a decent home, had a doll carriage and three dolls, one of which wet herself and needed to be changed. Her mother loved her, at least at first, certainly until she grew breasts and an attitude and wanted someone to blame for indecipherable crimes. They’d given her birthday parties, skating lessons, dance lessons, piano lessons, French lessons so that later in life, if she wanted, she could have a job in Ottawa, get back some of the tax money her parents had paid. They tried to make up for the overtime they both worked, for the times the house was empty. There were no odd uncles with roving hands. He wondered if they had tried too hard—was that why she painted her lips and fingernails black, dressed in leather, professed to love another woman? Was it to challenge her parents, force them into an admission of guilt? Finally, Sally said, “Enough. I didn’t sign on for this.” But things might have worked out if he’d agreed to tough love, kicked Myrna out, out there with the feral cat, turning up at the patio door from time to time with crazy eyes, hissing at any approach.

  He slipped on his sunglasses. Macular degeneration ran in the family, his mother had said, even though his mother’s family had dark hair and dark eyes. Her dark eyes were no protection from the sun’s summer glare or its blinding reflection on the snow in Manitoba. She resented the fact that her darkness gave her no benefit, because when she was a girl in Iceland and had been sent to a farm in the summers, she’d been badly treated. A black-haired Icelander among the pale blond.

  A slight breeze had sprung up from the lake. It wasn’t strong enough to cool him off, but it drove away the mosquitoes. They sheltered behind objects. Later in the summer, if you accidentally brushed against a branch, clouds of them would rise out of the spruce trees. He looked around the property he’d bought from Jessie Olason. There was a time when he’d have rushed at everything that needed to be done with the property, but depression sapped energy and he worked in fits and starts. He had made a list, ranking the tasks. He’d taped the list to the fridge door, but even then, because he was so easily distracted, he sometimes just did whatever caught his attention.

  Jessie’s husband, Oli, had been dead for five years by the time Tom met her and looked at the house, and she’d obviously not been up to doing much physical work. She’d been gaunt, fragile looking, her clothes too large, like she’d shrunk inside them. She’d left behind a yard filled with wooden planters that were falling apart, full of soil and weeds; two wooden picnic tables; some outdoor chairs that might be salvaged; an ugly, slightly off-kilter bird bath made of beach stone and concrete with a cross in the centre. To one side of the yard there were six small graves with wooden crosses that were rotted at the bottom, tipped this way and that. They were nearly buried in weeds and the brown needles from the spruce trees. They were the graves of pets that had been company for a couple without children or, he expected, maybe loyal hunting dogs for the husband. People left
so little of themselves behind, and what they left, unless they kept diaries or wrote a lot of letters, was unfathomable.

  When he looked east, through the brown, scaly trunks of the spruce, the far shore was a low dark line. Some days it sat above the water, floating in the sky like some mystical place, a mirage of some sort, and other days it wasn’t there at all. You never knew what to believe, he thought, when what you looked at was always changing.

   Chapter 4

  The Ford Place

  The basement suite Tom moved into after his split with Sally smelled of mould. When he mentioned it, the landlord had shrugged, handed him a spray bottle of Javex and said, “There are no cockroaches, no bedbugs. You wanna go upper class, you gotta pay more.”

  A previous tenant had left a plaque that said, “May your house never be big enough to hold all your friends.” The unit had been too big, because he could have provided seating for four and the only one who ever came to see him was his daughter.

  He was in the apartment two months when one day Myrna came pounding down the stairs. She was nineteen and working on a degree at the local university.

  “The judge and jury have decided on solitary confinement for the accused,” she declared rather dramatically, standing in the doorway. You could tell she was a theatre major. He was lying on the couch in the room the landlord called a living room but was really a rectangular basement space made of two-by-fours and cheap wallboard.

  Myrna strode across the room to look at his bedroom, with its four concrete walls. He thought it might have originally been meant to be a cold room for vegetables and preserves. “Shit, why don’t you chain yourself to the wall? I can get one of my friends to come in and whip you. Would you like that? She’s a very attractive blonde. She wears leather. She’s just a little older than me.”

  “Bugger off. I’m depressed.”

  “See a shrink. Take Mom with you. You both need help. She’s got all these guys hitting on her. They figure she can’t go without sex.”

  “I tried. She wouldn’t go. There’s no point in going to a marriage counsellor by myself.”

  She sat down across from him on one of the two chairs with gold plastic seats and gold-coloured legs. She’d dyed her blonde hair black, had shaved the left side, and had so much metal hanging from her face that he hoped she never went too close to a large magnet.

  “Have you heard from Joel?” Tom asked.

  “Joel’s screwed. Forget about him. He’s lost in computer game space. He’s in Vancouver, pushing boxes out of Best Buy and trying to make it big on the comedy circuit.”

  “In Vancouver? Why not stay in Winnipeg?”

  “He wants to be as far away from his mother as possible.” She sighed dramatically. “He took the bus to Vancouver and is surfing couches. The last I heard. With no altruistic goals. You brought up a kid without a social conscience. If it was me, I’d be out there saving the Great Bear Rainforest.”

  “Hey, I made you two a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches,” he said in his own defence. It was true. After Sally said no more catering to any of them, when she made supper, if any of them weren’t at the table within five minutes of the food being put out, she threw their share into the garburator. Whenever Myrna or Joel wandered in late, he made them and their friends grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches.

  “What do you think of my outfit?” Myrna got up and turned in a circle. Black leather boots to the knee, a three-inch-wide belt with metal spikes, black blouse, black leather vest, black cargo pants. Chains everywhere.

  “Gorgeous,” he answered.

  “Liar,” she said. “You hate it. Mom hates it. But it’s me. At least right now it’s me. Tomorrow I might become a jock. Or a preppie.”

  “Go preppie and get a job.”

  “Look who’s talking. I’ve got a job. The tips are good. I’m paying the rent. I didn’t come here to talk about me. I’m not living in a mouldy hole. I’ve got a window in my bedroom.”

  He shrugged and opened a beer.

  “Keep doing that and you’re going to get a gut,” she said. “Old men with beer bellies aren’t sexy. Empty calories. Why don’t you go fishing? You used to love fishing. You even forgot my birthday that time because you were going fishing.”

  She was right. He had. However, her saying so didn’t make him feel guilty. She’d used it before.

  He told her there was a cold bottle of beer in the fridge, but she sniffed and said she only drank red wine. When she was eighteen, she’d talked regularly about craft beers, the flavours: a hint of chocolate, mint, leather. She’d even worked for a while promoting a small local brewer.

  “I may,” she said, “follow Joel to BC, but it’d be to the Okanagan. They make great wines there, and artists are appreciated.”

  With that, she turned, posed for a moment as if getting ready to go on stage and ascended the steps. Others would have just climbed the steps, but she ascended.

  After she left, he felt better. She cared enough to come see how he was doing. He knew she was right, of course. He needed to rise out of the darkness of the basement apartment into the sunshine. But his leg, from the hip to the ankle, had been operated on three times. It now had more metal in it than Myrna had on her whole body, and he had developed a morbid fear that the screws and pins and plates would not hold. The surgeon had reassured him that he’d walk again, that his leg would regain its strength. It was the shrink who said that his focus on his leg was irrational, a kind of self-punishment for what had happened. He’d understood that intellectually, but it didn’t help.

  When Tom was young, the landlady of the apartment block where he lived with his parents befriended him. Anna Kolababa had taken Tom with her to many of her family gatherings, and that’s where he’d met her cousin who couldn’t stop asking, “Why me, why me, what’s special about me?” And he’d name the different members of his platoon who were all killed in a variety of ways, and he’d go outside, away from everyone, and stand smoking one cigarette after the other until his wife would take him home.

  In the month following Myrna’s visit, as winter closed down the light that came through the one basement window, and there was no solace in watching television or reading, he started to think about what she had said, about fishing, and about a village he’d gone to five years before because a commercial fisherman’s boat had overturned in a squall on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg. It had taken three days to find the fisherman’s body. What had stayed with Tom was an image of the village, Valhalla. It was nearly at the end of the road, a place where you had to stop because there was nowhere else to go.

  He’d gassed up the truck and put a couple of jerry cans in the back, threw in a sleeping bag and canned soup and beans, a can of corned beef, bottled water to make tea, a pot and kettle and a two-burner Coleman stove in case he got stuck or trapped by a blizzard. He always had an emergency kit with matches and candles and a collapsible shovel. He checked and double-checked the weather. The forecast said clear with drifting snow. He had a sack of sand over each of the rear wheels.

  He took the highway north, gassed up twice to keep the tank full. The paved highway turned to gravel, and after two hours, the gravel turned to frozen mud with a coating of packed snow and ice. The houses became farther and farther apart, then open fields and clusters of houses and the occasional village big enough to have a gas station and a grocery store and a main street banked with plowed snow. The stretches of undisturbed snow became larger, the side roads narrower, the sections of cleared field fewer until they stopped altogether, the forest gradually becoming unbroken, darker.

  He listened to the CBC and watched for the reflection of ice. The wind was cold but the sun shining on the snow was blinding at times. He didn’t want to spend his time digging his truck out of a snowbank, the snowbanks that were growing higher the farther north he went. Eventually, it was like driving in a tunnel. The day was clear, intense blue
sky. If he’d looked at the sky, he might have thought it was summer, but when he looked down, there were snow ghosts swirling across the road.

  At the crossroad to the village, a red Jeep had missed the turn and was sitting nose down in the snow. The road, having thawed and frozen, was a sheet of ice. He didn’t attempt to stop or turn, but took his foot off the gas and let the truck slow nearly to a stop before touching the brakes. He leaned out the window and backed up in the centre of the road. Before he stepped out of the truck, he put on his leather chapka with its fur lining, pulled down the flaps and tied them under his chin. He pulled on gauntlets that went well up past his wrists and were meant to keep the snow from filtering inside and wetting his hands and the leather. The driver of the Jeep was standing beside her vehicle. She was wearing a round black fur hat and had already pulled down the inside flaps. Her red hair fell over her shoulders. She was dressed for the road in a knee-length brown parka and brightly coloured beaded mukluks. Her breath swirled from her mouth in the freezing air and already her cheeks were pink with cold.

  He opened up one of the bags of sand, got out his shovel and spread sand behind the Jeep’s wheels.

  “I don’t know you,” she said, clearly puzzled to find anyone coming to Valhalla at this time of year.

  “It’s mutual,” he replied. She was young, pretty. He wondered where she was going with the snow drifting, the roads icy, the temperature around twenty below, but it was no time for chit-chat.

  He wondered what was under the snow, what would happen if he stepped onto something unstable and his foot twisted and a pin snapped and he couldn’t pull himself free. Would she take his truck, bring help before he froze in place like a sculpture marking the turn? He could have asked her if she knew what was under the snow but decided against it, took his shovel and dug down until he found solid footing.