In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “I’m sorry about your sister.” It seemed lame, weak, but he hadn’t known her, only the cold feel of her body as he’d rolled her over, only the image of her hair in the mud and water.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “I found her.”

  “Did you try mouth-to-mouth?” Derk said it contemptuously, insultingly, making it sound like Tom had done something wrong, or hadn’t done something right.

  “You’re dealing. Did you give her anything?”

  “I sell spices. Haven’t you heard? Your colleagues have a mistaken idea about me. They’ve stopped me many times. I offer them cinnamon, thyme, oregano. They keep asking me for things I haven’t got.” He drawled the words, and although he didn’t sneer, his hostility was evident in the exaggerated way he spoke.

  With a jerk, he sat up, pulled the lounger into an upright position, dragged it around to face Tom and said, “You still a cop or what?” The words were choppy, angry, demanding. He’d lost the exaggerated drawl.

  “Just wondering what happened to her.”

  “You’re still a cop. You’ll always be a cop. You’ve got the look. I’d have known you were a cop from a block away. The way you stand, the way you look at people.”

  “Don’t you care what happened?”

  Derk leaned forward, his arms on his knees. He waved one arm to take in the village. “You see this? You think this is a sad place? This is good. There are lots worse.”

  Tom looked out at the buildings, at the boards of the skating rink that now contained nothing but bare ground and scraps of paper. The nets were still in place, waiting for winter to begin again. Two boys were kicking a soccer ball into one of the nets while a third practised being goaltender. The houses, exposed by the relentless sun, were diminished, appeared to have shrunk in the suffocating heat. From where he sat, he could see Rose sitting on the steps of the trailer where she and her husband and two children lived. She was holding her baby and trying to comb her little girl’s hair at the same time. The heat in the trailer, he thought, must be suffocating. Her husband was sitting on a white plastic chair drinking a beer.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked again.

  Derk shut his eyes, took a long drag from his cigarette, tipped his head back, pushed out his lower lip and blew smoke into the air. “I’ll find out.”

  “And then what?”’

  Derk opened his eyes and gave a half smile. “I’ll find out. Before you do. You don’t belong here. You don’t know the games. You don’t know the players.”

  Derk was right, of course. He might have moved away to the city, but he was still part of the community. He knew how the pieces fitted together. He knew what people had done and with whom, still had a map of events long past, was wound in an intricate pattern of memories. Tom wondered if anything here could be unravelled and understood. He felt the way he had when confronted with his parents’ photograph albums and indecipherable conversations. The memory overwhelmed him with such a sense of hopelessness that he wanted to go back to planing wood, but he remembered Angel’s clay-smudged face in the circle of light from his flashlight and her cold hand, and he thought, I won’t take the blame for that. Silence was often more than many people could stand, and confronted with it, they had to fill it up by speaking, so he sat there, half in and half out of the shade, and waited.

  Wanda poked her head out the door, disappeared inside, came out with a bottle of beer and plunked herself onto a chair on the other side of her son. She was wearing shorts, and the tattoo of a dragon wound up her right leg. She had three gold anklets on her right ankle. She’d obviously been drinking, for she smiled at nothing, her mouth open, and looked like she might tip sideways. She held the beer bottle upright delicately, making sure that no beer spilled.

  “Move over,” she said to Derk. “We want some shade, too.”

  Derk didn’t stand up but lifted himself enough to take his weight off the lounger and pushed it back underneath himself. When Wanda was settled, she looked closely at Tom.

  “You’re the cop,” she said. “I’m Wanda.” She reached out her hand, but Derk was between them and they were too far apart for their hands to reach. Tom held out his hand and they did a fake shake.

  “Yeah,” Derk said, answering for Tom. “He’s going to bust us for something. Defiling the landscape maybe.”

  His mother didn’t quite get it, but she laughed anyway, tipped up the bottle and took a drink.

  “Isn’t that right? Defiling. Betcha didn’t know I’d know a big word like that. Being a goddamned Indian and all.” For a moment, the smiling mask disappeared and his voice was sharp with anger.

  “He’s smart,” his mother said. “He should go to college.”

  Derk tipped his head back and took a deep breath, pursed his lips as he let it out. When he spoke again, he’d gotten his control and sarcasm back. “Meth one oh one. I’d be a genius in the chem lab.”

  “How’s Ben?” Tom asked, ignoring Derk.

  “Sleeping,” Wanda said. “I gave him a pill. They knock me out for four hours. He’s not used to them. He’ll sleep longer.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “Yeah. Right in this house. My mom was alive then. Aboriginal. I’ve got treaty.”

  “And Orkney.”

  “How’d you know? Ben musta told you. We’ve got relatives in Scotland. Maybe they live in a castle. You never know. You wanna beer or you on duty?”

  “I’m on duty.”

  “That’s too bad.” She leaned back and looked at the sky for a moment. “You wanting to know about Angel?”

  The sun beat down on them. Tom wiped away a trickle of sweat that ran down the scar on his forehead. Bees buzzed, flitted from flower to flower in the remnants of Betty’s garden. Derk closed his eyes again. Wanda was lost in thought.

  They might have been a family relaxing together in the shade, sharing each other’s company out of the harsh glare of the sun. It could have been Sally and him and Joel, except Joel was blond and would have been in shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band on it.

  A bee flew right up to Wanda’s face and she swatted at it. The bee startled her into speech and she said, “She was a good kid. No trouble. Except when she’d run away. Then we’d have to go find her.”

  “She ran away a lot?”

  “Just now and again. She’d hitchhike here. She liked the country better than the city.”

  “She liked country and western music?”

  “Yeah.” The idea pleased Wanda. Her face lit up. She looked away, into the distance, remembering. “Yeah. She was always listening to C&W on the radio. Watching the big stars on TV. She was going to start a band. We didn’t have no money for lessons. But the music teacher at her school gave her lessons. Got her singing other stuff. Said she was talented.”

  “Hick music,” Derk said. “She was better than that.” He didn’t open his eyes. The book he’d been reading fell off his lap and landed face up. It had a picture of a schooner in a storm on the cover.

  “Moby-Dick?” Tom said, surprised.

  “Yeah. So what? You think I’m too stupid to read?

  Tom, not wanting to get into an argument, turned to Wanda and asked, “You moved around a lot?”

  “Yeah. Coming and going. But she didn’t want to leave this school. The music teacher was teaching her a lot. She had friends.”

  Derk lit another cigarette. His face was pale from spending too much time inside. The tension was in his eyes. It was like he was trying to pull all the skin around them tight. Every so often, he’d jerk his head slightly and take a breath.

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Derk said. “He’s a cop. He’s no friend of ours. He works for the big shots—you know, the ones in the mansions, the judges and lawyers, the ones who like their stuff delivered to their back door. The kind you deal with on the back porch and stand in front of in court.”

  “It’s a rotten system,” Tom agreed.

  A slight breeze moved th
e tips of the grass, but the promise of relief was short lived, for the breeze disappeared as suddenly as it had come and the heat pressed down on Tom’s skin without mercy. He shifted his chair closer to Derk to take advantage of the shade.

  Derk laughed out loud. “You want to work for me, Mr. Copperman? You could have your own route. You’d make a great deliveryman.”

  “Street dealers. They’ve got a flat learning curve. They don’t understand why they keep getting busted. They end up in the river.”

  “No law against oregano. You got a goal. You make so much, you quit. Don’t be greedy. Make your stash, then start going to church. Start sucking up to the legal crooks.”

  “People like you end up in a body bag.”

  Derk laughed, and his voice was high, preadolescent for a moment. “Slipping sideways. A moving target. Don’t fight for a crowded corner. Everybody wants to sell in the same place. Out here I ain’t got no competition for cardamom.”

  “If you start making a lot, competition will appear. They’ll find what’s left of you in your burned-out car.”

  “You saying I need protection? You want the job?”

  Tom smiled at the audacity of the offer, even if it was insincere. “I’ve got plenty of work.”

  “Grow spices and you don’t need to live in a shack in the bush,” Derk said. His eyes had brightened, shone. He ran his tongue over his lips. He was enjoying himself. “You got a piece of property here. You’ve got an old barn on the other side of the lake road. Jack a little hydro. Use propane. Operate all year. I’ll take all you can grow. Fresh herbs. Fresh spices.”

  “Jail’s not a good place for ex-cops. I might meet a con I’d put in there.”

  Derk laughed out loud. His laugh was high, brittle. He rocked back and forth on his chair. It was the most animated Tom had seen him.

  “You staying around?” Tom asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe a day or two. You never know. Duty calls. Day or night. Like the postal service, through rain, snow or sleet, we keep moving our feet.”

  Tom stood up, did another fake shake with Wanda and left. What a bloody disaster, he thought. Wanda. Derk. The one person who had been staying clear of disaster was Angel, and now she was dead.

  When he got home, he turned on the planer and started to pick out wood.

  What the hell. What the hell, he thought, but he wasn’t sure what he was helling about. Everything, life. If he called Myrna to ask about Joel, she’d say why hadn’t he called to find out about her, that he’d always paid more attention to Joel than her, even though she’d done her best to help him when he was living in that crummy place where the toilet always plugged, and he never appreciated the effort she’d made. For being so young she was amazingly shrewish at times. If he gave her hell back, she’d switch to Mandarin. When she’d buffaloed them with French, he had, in self-defence, taken French classes, and, she, in a fury, had started to learn Mandarin.

  At a parents’ night, her homeroom teacher had smiled broadly and said, “Myrna has an ear for languages. She’s a natural polyglot.” Tom wasn’t sure what the hell that was, so he looked it up when they got home. He gave up on the French.

  AIDS. Joel couldn’t have AIDS. He never had much time for girls in high school because he was always on the computer, but he never showed any interest in pink shirts, holding hands with other guys, ballet—whatever the signs were, he didn’t show them. He wasn’t on any sports teams, but then, he was skinny and had an astigmatism and eye-hand coordination problems. They’d played catch when he was small, but it was never more than underhand lobbing of the ball. They’d gone to the local park in summer. Sally had been back catcher and Tom pitcher. Joel and Myrna had taken turns being batters. Myrna hit the ball most of the time. Joel hardly ever. Joel joined the computer club. Myrna took kick-boxing.

  He shut down the memories, forced them back behind doors in hallways, went back into his house and looked through his notepad for Myrna’s number. He sat there staring at the pad. If he called, she might think it was an emergency. She had read everything she could on depression and was convinced that one day she was going to come home from school and find him hanging from the living room light fixture. She said that she imagined him dead in various ways—hanged, shot, drowned, immolated—on the way from school to prepare herself for what she might find. He’d promised her that he wasn’t going to kill himself, but he promised himself that if he did, it would look like an accident.

  Nagging, nagging, like little hooks pulling at his head, what Sarah had said in one of their conversations about his kids. Myrna and Joel—lucky he had them. If he were lucky, they’d be here with him; maybe he wouldn’t be here, maybe he’d be someplace else, someplace with them going to college, or starting out in serious jobs, starting a career, something that made him feel secure instead of wondering where they were, who they were with, what they were doing and, at the same time, not wanting to know.

  He turned on the planer again, then turned it off and went to the store. He got the phone from Karla. He had Joel's number on a scrap of paper in his wallet. He made the call, but when the phone was answered, it wasn’t Joel.

  “I’m calling for Joel Parsons,” he said, and the voice at the other end said, “Not here, man, he’s moved on. You chasing him for money?” Tom explained that he was Joel’s father and that he had money for him. “Maybe try the Laugh Tracks. It’s hot. Good food. Stand-up. He thought he had a job doing tables there. Maybe not.”

  “If you see him, tell him to call his father at this number.” Tom gave him the number and assured the voice that he had money for Joel. “I’ll tell him,” the voice said, then hung up.

  Once Tom was out of the hospital and at home recovering from his accident, he was lost. Sally had to go back to work full time and resented it. “I didn’t sign up for this,” she said. He could cook and mash potatoes, fry an egg, make sandwiches. He’d looked up recipes on the Internet. Easy meals. Breakfast and lunch. On schedule. He got the kids to do the laundry. Sally usually made supper. She said she couldn’t eat pizza every night. He encouraged Myrna and Joel to bring home friends and bought a half dozen computer games to keep them occupied. He made endless toasted cheese sandwiches, bought cases of soft drinks, thinking that if they were at home with their friends, he knew where they were. Sally said they couldn’t afford it. Keep them busy. They didn’t have his overtime anymore and his disability wasn’t the same as his salary. Even when he and Sally were both working, they’d lived pretty close to the line.

  When he asked the shrink about the kids and the disaster of their lives, the shrink had said, “Relax, they’ll survive. Kids are amazingly resilient. Get your own head straight. Lots of times kids have problems, their parents get their own problems fixed and the kids’ problems go away. They ask for help, give them what you can. You can’t give what you haven’t got. Right now, you need it for yourself. Capiche?” And Tom had nodded, and his mind, loosened from the constraints of facts, was led into strange paths, wondered if the shrink was Italian, though he didn’t look Italian, and he thought about Italian restaurants where he had eaten and Italian shoes and a deli with crescent-shaped cookies. When this happened, he lost touch with where he was and what was going on, so out of touch that time passed without him realizing it. The shrink kept talking, but Tom heard nothing of what he said and was surprised when he finished up the session by saying, “You can’t rescue everyone.”

   Chapter 18

  Message from the Foggy Coast

  The agitation had come back. In the city he had walked for hours, sometimes entire nights, stopping in all-night gas stations, cafés, brooding over bitter coffee, avoiding the eyes of other wanderers, people who couldn’t bear being with themselves alone. He wondered what nightmares drove them into the empty, darkened streets but did not ask, for each huddled in his or her own cone of silence, not even breaking it when a waitress came by to refill a cup. The impersonal maze of streets and back lanes provided anonymity, but here in Valhal
la no one went on casual Sunday strolls over the dirt roads. The boat people seldom ventured onto the roads, because they were afraid of looking like they were prying.

  He’d walked for half an hour when he saw a man he recognized from the funeral reception. He was sitting on a woven willow chair in the shade of three birch trees that grew in front of his house. He had on a large grey hat with a wide brim. His upper body was large, out of proportion to his legs, and, where they showed below his short-sleeved shirt, his arms were thick and muscular. Sitting as he was, his chin tilted up, his arms on the armrests of the chair, he might have been a ruined god. He had a cane hooked on each arm of the chair. There were two chairs with a willow table between them. There was a small yellow bungalow with brown trim behind him.

  Tom hesitated because there was no acknowledgement, no wave or raised hand. He went over anyway and introduced himself.

  “They call me Mindi Miner,” he replied and eyed Tom warily. “You came to the funeral with McAra’s wife.”

  “She helped me when I found Angel’s body.”

  “Middle of the night. What were you doing out in the middle of the night?”

  “Dawn,” Tom said, realizing that there wasn’t going to be a handshake or an invitation to sit down. “Bad leg,” he said. “I can’t stand in one position for long.” Without waiting for an invitation, he sat in the chair.

  The sky was bleached by the sun until it had hardly any colour.

  Mindi snorted. “That’s not a bad leg. I’d like to have two of those. These are bad legs. The mine roof fell on them. I guess I was lucky. Three others died. They didn’t get us out for two days.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “Capitalism at work. They were going cheap on the supports. Not spaced close enough. Keep mining costs down. Profits up. Bonuses for the bosses.”

  “Same story over and over.”

  “In the world war they called the farm boys who went into the trenches the Expendables. In the mines, they treat the farm boys the same way.”

  “You lived here long?”