In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  Albert had his heels hooked over the lowest rail. His knees shook.

  “I saw those plastic fish and birdhouses. They’re junk.” Tom held up the jackfish, turned it around. “You need to have a place down by the dock.”

  “Can’t,” Albert said. There was a whine in his voice. “That’s their property. They aren’t going to let me sell on their property unless they get fifty per cent.”

  “Greedy.”

  Albert’s cheeks both had red spots on them. “You want a birdhouse or not?” He climbed down from his stool and picked up the birdhouse with the yellow roof. “This one’s for yellow warblers.” His arms and legs were so long that they gave him the look of a puppet. He put down the yellow-roofed birdhouse and picked up the one with the green roof. “This is for juncos.”

  Tom took the one that was supposed to attract yellow warblers. He thought it unlikely that a bird would move in. Once Tom had paid for the birdhouse, Albert was all smiles. They might have been old friends.

  “You must have a lot of money. You never argued about the price.”

  “Sarah O’Hara said you’re honest and can be trusted. She said you don’t cheat people.”

  Albert looked pleased and preened a bit, his prominent Adam’s apple bouncing up and down. “Like a tipple?” he asked. He disappeared and came back in a couple of minutes with two chipped china teacups with an ounce of gin in each. “Just like the queen mother,” he said. “The sun is over the yardarm.”

  “To the queen,” Tom said and sipped. Albert raised his cup and also took a sip. His hand was shaking.

  “You see this?” he said, looking at the way the gin sloshed about in his cup. “I carve, I build birdhouses, and my mind settles and I relax. And when I relax, the shaking goes away. The doctors can’t explain it. My mother always said that I was a nervous child.”

  “You handled things well the other morning. Lots couldn’t have helped like you did.”

  Instead of the compliment calming him, the reminder made Albert’s hand shake harder. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and, using it as a lever, got the cup to his mouth so he could drain off the gin.

  “Doesn’t make any sense about Angel,” Albert said. “When she was little, she and her friends used to come around to watch me carve. She’d be in the city and she’d come back here and she always wanted to see the new birdhouses. I’d give her a cold glass of goat milk. She liked that.”

  “Did she come over lately?”

  Albert ducked his head and for a moment he looked like a crane standing at the edge of the water. Two long skinny legs, short body, long neck pushed forward, beak of a nose. “No, she’d got too grown up. I heard her singing last summer on Friday nights. Kids get to a certain age and they don’t want their friends seeing them with old people.”

  “You lived in Valhalla long?”

  “Came out to the colonies on an adventure. Going to conquer the Great White North. Hunt polar bears. Pan for gold. I was lots of places. Ended up here.”

  “Were you on your first circuit when you saw me? You usually do three, I think.”

  “First,” Albert said. “Every morning, three circuits. I like to do them in the dark. I’ve got this disease and people sometimes laugh when they see me jogging.”

  “You didn’t see anyone?”

  “Nobody, but I wasn’t looking. Sarah’s usually the first at the dock. Early riser. Says she doesn’t sleep well.”

  “It was still dark, but did you hear anything?”

  Albert shook his head. “I’ve thought about that lots. You didn’t make any sound, walking in the mud. I just saw you because you moved. Somebody stands still, you could walk right past them. How’d you see me?”

  “You moved.”

  “See. I told you. Your eye will catch movement, even if it can’t see what’s moving.” He hesitated. “You think it was an accident?”

  “Probably. That was good gin,” Tom said, handing the cup back to Albert. “Where’s the nearest place I can get a bottle?”

  Albert looked like he might not answer the question, but the purchase and the praise had overcome his reticence. “I’ll tell you, but we don’t want any trouble.” As he talked, he began to twitch. First his hands, then his left shoulder, then his feet. He looked like he was getting ready to jig. “Ask at the store. Under the counter. Bring a bag to put the bottle in. It’s government stuff. The boaters don’t want local. He makes plenty off those people. You don’t tell them I told you. You don’t want to get on their bad side. You do and they won’t sell to you and you’ve got a long drive to get it.”

  Tom looked at the old Volvo station wagon that was in the other half of the workshop. No rust on it and spotlessly clean. Even the tires had been washed so well that there was no dirt or gravel between the treads. He hoped Albert didn’t shake when he was gripping the steering wheel.

  The billy goat followed him to the gate and waited until Tom had put the loop back around the post before returning to its harem. Tom lingered for a moment, studying the whirly trees, the riot of colour. The birdhouses on the fence posts had carved and painted birds entering or leaving. No real bird could get inside.

  He went home for his rucksack, then went to the store. Horst was asleep in the overstuffed easy chair behind the counter. His breathing was heavy, laboured. Tom wondered if the store gave him a reason to live, a reason to get out of bed. Without it, what would he do? Lie in bed all day long straining to breathe?

  Karla came out of the back. She leaned on the counter and her breasts pushed forward. “Hiya, handsome. Come for another look?”

  “A bottle of rye,” he said.

  She never blinked. “You’d have to drive to town for that. No off-sales here. We’re dry. You could get Frenchie to pick up a bottle the next time he’s in town.”

  “I brought my own bag,” he said and slipped his rucksack onto the counter.

  “You’re a cop,” she said. She stepped back from the counter and straightened up. It was as if she had been onstage for so long that every move was calculated for its effect.

  “Was. Past tense. Besides, even cops get thirsty.” He shifted to look at her sleeping husband. Karla was younger than Horst by twenty years or more. She tinted her hair and her lipstick was laid on a bit heavily, but otherwise, she was quite attractive. For a moment, they looked at each other as if they were contemplating more than a purchase, then looked back at Horst.

  Behind his back, in soft whispers, the waitresses called Horst the devil. When Horst was awake, he watched the waitresses, noting the time it took for customers to get their menus, to get served, for the dirty dishes to be picked up. He wrote it all down in a black hardcover book. The devil’s book, the waitresses called it, a book from which he read them their sins when he paid them at the end of each week. They were relieved when he fell asleep in his big chair. When he was asleep they walked softly, picked up dishes carefully, were as silent as an order of nuns. For them and, Tom thought, for Karla, a good day was a day when Horst’s head drooped, his pencil slipped from his fingers and he slept for hours at a time.

  “He was my manager. He was going to make me famous. Made a few people nearly famous. That was after he left the asbestos mines and took up promotion.”

  “Those are nice pictures of you on the board,” Tom said.

  Behind him on the wall was a corkboard maybe six feet by four feet, covered with photographs and newspaper clippings. In the centre were a dozen framed pictures of Karla. He went over to study them. “You haven’t changed much.” In the pictures, she was ten years younger and ten pounds lighter, wearing a buckskin outfit. She was holding a microphone and there was a band behind her. They were all wearing cowboy hats. In most of the pictures, she was with different singers he didn’t recognize but who had scrawled their names at the bottom. “You still sing?”

  She blushed with pleasure. �
��I get the occasional gig.” She turned toward her husband. “I can’t leave him for long, and he has a hard time travelling. I just do overnighters, maybe two nights. I still get bigger gigs, but it’s not like it used to be.” She smiled and preened a bit at the memory.

  “Maybe I’ll get to hear you this winter when there’s dances. There are old dance posters on the bulletin board outside the community hall. It says Cindy Lou, but it looks like you.”

  Karla left him to sell bread and cheese to a boater. As Tom waited, he studied the pictures that were pinned on the bulletin board with golden-headed tacks. A lot were of fishermen holding up their catch. Big fish pictures. Big smile pictures. Buddy pictures; boat pictures. But there were also a lot of pictures of the waitresses while they were working. Most were snaps, but others were posed. From the way they were posed, he assumed Karla was behind the camera, giving instructions on how to show their best side.

  Karla tiptoed back, looked to see that Horst was still asleep, then reached under the counter and pulled out a mickey of rye. Tom opened his rucksack and she slipped the bottle into it. As she did, she leaned close, and he was overwhelmed by her perfume. She whispered, “Sometimes he pretends to be asleep, but he’s really watching what goes on.” He paid her five dollars over what he’d have paid in town, then gave her a wink and left.

  When Tom walked over to Ben’s, he was sitting in a metal lawn chair. It had been painted bright orange. There was a three-sided shed with a shanty roof. At one end there were the remains of last winter’s woodpile. Beside the woodpile, there was an old stove and an oil burner. A snowmobile. The back wall of the shed was lined with shelves made from lumber that was now grey with age, and on the shelves were paint cans, small tools, an odd assortment of boxes. The grass was cut and the edges had been trimmed neatly. The house had been recently painted white with a yellow trim. Karla had said there was moss covering the roof, and it was true that there was a little moss where a tree overhung one end of the house, but if she thought that was a mossy roof, Tom wondered what she thought of his place.

  In front of the remains of the woodpile was a blue plastic tub, upended, and on it was an empty beer bottle with a finger-sized plastic cowboy doll jammed into the top. Brown glass from broken bottles was scattered over the ground. Ben picked up a stone and lobbed it at the bottle. It went wide and glanced off the stove wood.

  “Cowboys and Indians,” he slurred and laughed. Behind Ben was a garage sheathed in tin. A small maple tree had grown against it and helped provide shelter from the unrelenting sun.

  Tom put the mickey of rye on the table. “You want something stronger?” he asked.

  “Beer,” Ben said. “I don’t drink that stuff.”

  “Is it okay if I get a glass and water?” Tom asked.

  Ben pointed toward the door.

  Tom went through the screen door and looked around. There was a living room to his right, a kitchen to his left. He got a glass out of the cupboard, poured water into it, got ice out of the freezer, then went back to the door. Ben was slumped in his chair and looked like he might slide out of it onto the ground at any moment. His arms hung like heavy weights. If the earth had suddenly opened up and threatened to swallow him, he wouldn’t have tried to escape. Tom went back out, opened the mickey of rye and poured himself a small drink.

  “To Angel,” he said and held up his glass.

  Ben stared at him, shook his head. “She wouldn’t want that kind of toast,” he said. “We promised each other we wouldn’t drink.”

  “She came back to stay with you.”

  “Her mother got a new boyfriend. Always a new boyfriend. She didn’t like that.” He looked to the side for a while, studying the ground. “Angel used to like this song,” Ben said, and he began to sing a song Tom didn’t recognize. He had a deep baritone. “We sang it together.”

  There was a swing at one end of the porch. Ben waved at it. “She used to sit there and play my old guitar.”

  “When did she come back?”

  “Lots of times,” Ben said.

  “A runaway?” Tom had spent time chasing runaways. They would run away time after time, and sometimes they’d say why they were running, but mostly they wouldn’t.

  “How,” Ben asked, “can you be called a runaway when you’re running to a place where people love you?”

  Tom didn’t know how to reply to that. He’d dealt with a case where a girl on a reserve ran away after being raped by a group of guys at a house party. They thought she’d been uppity because she wouldn’t have sex with any of them. She made it to Winnipeg and moved in with people she knew from the reservation. The city cops picked her up and a judge sent her back to the reserve, where she was raped again.

  “You’re still doing deliveries?”

  “Not the good stuff,” he said. He grabbed his head with both hands, as if to hold in desperate thoughts. “You got to stay in with the right bastards, you know. That’s the way it works. You’re in and then you’re out. She wanted a new guitar. A good one. I couldn’t afford it.”

  “You got a picture of your granddaughter? I never got to see her.”

  “Inside, in the living room,” Ben said. Tom took that as permission. He went back into the house. There was an old-fashioned dining table and four chairs, a matching hutch, a couch with a plaid blanket thrown over it. The room looked like it was seldom used. Everything had been recently dusted, and Tom wondered if it had been Angel who had taken a dustcloth to everything. An Axminster rug in a dark wine colour with an intricate pattern added a touch of elegance. It was worn at the edges, but the fringe had been combed straight. On the dining table there were a dozen pictures of a young girl. He went over to get a better look. Pert, Karla had said. Big smile. There were pictures of individual family members. Tom slipped a small picture of Angel into his pocket. It was in a shiny tin frame.

  When he came out, Ben was snoring. Tom put the bottle of rye into his rucksack and spilled the whisky he’d poured for himself onto the ground. He pulled a patio umbrella over and set it so it would keep the sun off Ben when it moved farther east.

  Tom went back to the store. While he waited to be served, he studied the pictures on the corkboard. Horst had woken up and Karla had disappeared. Horst, Tom knew, would make him wait. That was fine with him. The pictures all had names on the bottom. Cindy, Joan, Barbara, Louise. He skipped from picture to picture. There were lots of pictures of Tracy—Tracy with her hip out, her chest out, Tracy bending over. There were multiple pictures of Cindy, Joan and Louise but just one of Barbara. She was holding a tray of dirty dishes. No pictures of Angel.

  Not the good stuff, Ben had said. Not the good stuff. That meant Frenchie was hauling the good stuff.

  Everybody, Sarah had said, is just trying to make a living. As friendly as she was, he sensed that she didn’t want him disrupting the way things worked. He stopped at the ice cream counter for a chocolate ice cream cone and swore it would be his last.

  “How’s your day going?” he asked the young woman behind the counter.

  “Good,” she said and attempted a smile. “What’ll it be?”

  “Chocolate. Single scoop.” As she took the scoop out of the water bucket, he said, “Did you know Angel?”

  She froze as if he’d given her an electric shock. Her smile disappeared and he thought she might start to cry.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” Her name tag said Barbara, and he recognized her from the photo. “I’m sorry.”

  She quickly wiped a tear off her cheek and looked around.

  “It’s okay to grieve,” Tom said.

  She dug at the chocolate barrel and put the ice cream in a cone.

  “Miss Karla says no tears, no frowns, only smiles. The show has to go on. Just like when she’s performing.”

  He handed her a toonie and six quarters and she gave him the cone. She took a dee
p breath and forced a smile at the next customer. He stood to one side and looked at the other employees. They were all smiling, but they made him think of clowns in the circus with their smiles painted on. There wasn’t much of a living to be made here. The summer season was short. It would be a struggle to stretch the summer money from the end of August to the next June. Cutting pulp in winter. The guy driving the road grader had a good job. Government pay. The post office would help support the store over the winter. There’d be the hunters in September and October. Commercial fishing was unpredictable. Everybody shot their own meat or got a licence and had a neighbour or friend shoot it for them. When he’d been in Valhalla in the winter, there’d been deer hanging from the trees in two people’s yards. When the owners wanted meat, they came out with an axe and chopped a piece off.

  Tom went back to his place and started lifting shingles off the northeast corner. The lower ones were held together by nothing but layers of paint. When he pulled them off, they crumbled in his hands. It was none of his business, he told himself. Lots of things go wrong and nothing is ever done about them. If Angel had been the daughter of one of the boaters, the place would be crawling with uniforms.

  None of his business, he said to himself, but he took out the picture of Angel and stared at it as if it could reveal her secrets. Kids kill themselves all the time, one way or another. Being young is dangerous. He’d helped haul broken bodies out of wrecked cars. He’d helped pick up what was left after drug overdoses, got young fools to hospitals with stab wounds, broken bottle wounds, broken face bones, helped drag for bodies of kids who fell off things, out of boats. Motorcycles missing curves left few bones unbroken. He and his colleagues all played tough, but no one ever got used to it. They’d all go home after dealing with an accident with dead kids and hug their children.

  Pert, cute, beautiful in a way. In the photo her smile lit up her face. Albert had said that when she was little, she had played music on anything. She had rhythm. For people in places like Valhalla, music was a way out. Poor kids, working-class kids had boxing, athletics, hockey scholarships for boys. There were no places waiting for her, or kids like her, at college or university, no daddy lunches where places in medical school or dentistry were allocated and reserved. A way out.