In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “You weren’t just dodging? You deserted?”

  “That goddamned Sarah. You’re thick as thieves with her. She’s got secrets of her own, you know. Her husband disappeared and was never found.” He was angry, and the anger made his face turn red. Each time the tractor’s motor paused it was like a dying man’s heart threatening to quit.

  “Got into an airplane and went to the West Coast I heard.”

  “That’s one story,” Johnny said.

  “Went through the ice.”

  “There’d been this Odin woman who’d been hot for him. Gossip had it that people thought he was going to leave with her. Everybody was talking about it. Like she’d turn up in a plane and he’d hop aboard. Sarah might have heard the rumours, went to confront him. She always carried her three-oh-three.”

  “But what of the dog and sleigh?”

  “He loved that dog. It was half-wolf. He never went anywhere without it. He’d raised it from a pup. He’d never have left it behind.”

  “All the more reason to think he went under the ice.”

  “It was shot. By the time it washed up on the shore and was found, there wasn’t much left but bones and skin. The skull had a bloody big bullet hole in it.”

  Their shadows were faint and small. The tamarack forest on the far side of the road was dark, thick, impenetrable. They heard a truck approach, then it passed and the driver honked his horn once to acknowledge them, then disappeared into the village.

  “He could have shot it if he couldn’t have got it on the plane. Rather than leave it.”

  “He’d rather have shot his wife and kids than that dog.”

  “You’re sure about the skull? You saw it yourself?”

  “No, but a friend of mine saw it. Sarah took what was left and buried it. Maybe in the graveyard where her husband’s tombstone is. You could always dig it up if you’re interested enough.”

  “No,” Tom said. “It wouldn’t prove anything. How would anyone prove that it wasn’t just a wolf skull? Lots of wolves killed by trappers.”

  Johnny laughed out loud, and the sound was bitter, disillusioned. “That’s the way it is, isn’t it? There’s what we know and what the law knows. You just have to keep under the radar. Don’t have anything to do with those top folks. Frag an incompetent officer and they throw you into the brig for life. But incompetent officers can send you off to be slaughtered and it’s just fine. They say it’s for country and democracy. It’s all crap. It’s for oil and business. Little people like us don’t matter.”

  “Some of the time,” Tom said. “Some of the time little people matter.” But he was trying to think of an instance where a person from Tuxedo or River Heights in Winnipeg did harm to a street person or even a working-class stiff and felt the full weight of the law, and he couldn’t. Money hired high-priced lawyers. Money smoothed out anything. The question always was: How much do they want? Tom often thought that the whole legal system was a version of The Price Is Right.

  “I’m not running anymore,” Johnny said. “I’m tired. I’m too old. Turn me in and my wife and kids will be on their own. Will you be real proud of that?”

  “No,” Tom said, “I wouldn’t be real proud of that. I just want to know about Angel so guys like you can’t make me out to be a child molester and murderer.”

  “Ask Wanda. Maybe she was using her for bait. There are women who do that. They start to fade. They aren’t so popular anymore. They take their daughter to the bar. They want to keep the party going. Fuck the mother. Get on her good side. Maybe she’ll set you up with the daughter.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “There are worse things. I don’t do them. I take care of my wife and kids. I drive carefully. I live carefully. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I don’t do stupid things anymore.”

  “You don’t like Sarah.”

  “She bulldozes people. You think you’re her friend? You get between her and whatever she wants and she’ll run right over you. You aren’t special.”

  “The American military has a long memory. Even deserters got amnesty but you're still here. Any chance you helped burn down a recruiting office, did some serious harm during a protest? Something like that?”

  “You don’t need to tell me. I keep track.”

  “Three dollars a day for the screw jack,” Tom said, “and you and I won’t do any more speculating.”

  “You’re a prick. This is blackmail.” Johnny’s voice had a sense of injustice, not just now but built up over the years, culminating in a deal gone wrong.

  Tom had first heard that tone of voice when he was a teenager. He’d secretly given some of the people who slept in the alley behind their apartment sandwiches or leftover food, sat down to hear what they had to say. Their stories were litanies of injustice, of lives gone wrong, but always running through the story was that it was someone else’s fault. There was a whining that lay beneath the tales, and after a time, he quit being sympathetic. But when he mentioned it to Anna, she said, “Don’t be so superior. You’re father hasn’t abused you, he hasn’t kicked you out. You can come here nearly anytime you want.” That had softened Tom’s judgment, but his father had no sympathy for “riff-raff.” He said, “I made my own way in the world.” “Respect,” Anna said. “Do what you need to do to get respect.” Henry said, “Nobody owes you anything. You have to earn it.” One time, he’d seen Tom looking out the hallway window into the alley and come to see what he was looking at. There were two young men and a young woman doing drugs. “Make the wrong choices and you end up there,” he said with contempt. “Make the right choices and you end up here.” Henry slammed the window shut.

  And after he’d started working as a Mountie, what he’d seen occasionally before, he now saw every day. The unkempt pushing grocery carts full of their belongings. The overdoses. The violence fuelled by drugs and desperation. But the stories hadn’t changed. There were constantly changing haggard faces with matted hair. Everyone had a sad story, except it was the same story told and retold. After a while, he quit listening to the excuses, and he quit caring about why the perp had shoplifted, done a B and E or mugged a senior citizen, and people quit being individuals and turned into reports. And when he went to court, they were there, like pieces from a terrible shipwreck, but he had to quit caring, couldn’t rescue them all, just a few now and again. When there was hope, he made an exception, but as often as not the exceptions were just better con artists, had better-practised stories, turned out like Morning Dawn. And he thought about his father and his rigidity, his making no exceptions for anyone, and he wanted him not to be right. One of Tom’s colleagues had said early on, “You should have become a preacher.” It wasn’t a compliment but a warning about weakness.

  “It’s just business,” Tom said. “It’s what I can afford. I’ll come back with my truck and pick up the jack.”

  There was a movement at the house, and Tom saw it was a woman come to see who Johnny was talking to. She watched them for a moment and they both watched her, and then she went inside.

  “She worries all the time,” Johnny said. “About money. About the kids. About what is going to happen to me after she’s dead.”

  “That’s too bad,” Tom answered. “There are times when people go into remission.”

  “You think you’re smarter than us,” Johnny said. “You stay here, you’re going to find you’ve got to get along. You’re going to need people to do you favours and help you out.”

  “I don’t think I’m smarter than anyone.”

  “Of course you do. I thought I was when I arrived. You don’t know yet what you don’t know. I came up here from the big city to nowhere and thought I knew more than these hicks. I didn’t know nothing.” As he leaned forward to stare into Tom’s face, the tips of the trees looked like they were catching fire from the sun and would burn up the earth. He clenched his left hand, but it wasn’t to make a fist so he could fight. It was like he was trying to hold everything tight and not let it go. />
  “You’re friends with Siggi,” Tom said.

  “Better to be friends than enemies.”

  “His tomato business hasn’t been doing too well lately.”

  “You’d need to ask him about that. You want me to dig you a basement, blast out rock or tree stumps, I can do that. I can haul rock and gravel for you. You leave Siggi alone. He hires local. He pays decent. Are you going to hire anyone? Are you going to pay good wages? When my wife got sick, Siggi paid the hotel bill for me to stay in Winnipeg with her when she had chemo. Are you going to do that?”

  “No,” Tom replied. “I can’t do that.”

  He’d got his screw jack, but Johnny had let him know his position in the community vis-à-vis Siggi. Tom wouldn’t be hiring. He’d be looking to be hired. And he had no money to give away.

  Tom turned on his heel and went to Sarah’s to apologize. Sarah was cleaning and splitting small pickerel and saugers outside when he arrived.

  “That’s all right,” Sarah said, cutting the head off a sauger. “You didn’t puke on the floor. You didn’t want to fight. You didn’t break anything. You’re a better drunk than most.” She was working on a board with a diamond-shaped hole in it. The board was set over an old oil drum that had the lid cut out. She flipped the sauger onto its back, slit its white belly and scraped out the insides, pushed the guts and head through the hole, scraped the blood off the board and pressed the blade against the edge of the hole to clean it.

  He told her about his visit with Johnny but left out the part about her and her husband’s dog.

  “Johnny can be difficult,” she said. “Don’t be too hard on him. While he’s been up here, his mom and dad and his sister have all died and he’s not been able to go home. It’s sort of like he sentenced himself to prison.”

  “Me too. You too, I guess.”

  “We can leave. He can’t. Lots of things he can’t do. Can’t take his kids to Disneyland. Can’t get on a plane that lands in the US.” She held down the sauger, ran the stubby-bladed knife along the spine, flipped the fish over, repeated the motion, severed the backbone and left the two sides attached at the tail. She threw the fish into a plastic tub of salt water.

  “Ingvar drove by, said you two looked like an old dog and a new dog trying to decide who was top dog. That right?”

  “Sort of,” he agreed.

  He hadn’t thought about it that way. Being exiled. The Vikings had practised outlawry. Once you were declared an outlaw for a set number of years, if you didn’t leave the country, anyone could kill you without penalty. There was nothing romantic or chivalrous about it. People you’d offended would gather up servants and relatives and ride en masse to kill you as you worked in your fields or slept in your bed. The outlawry was usually for a set term, maybe three years. But for Johnny, it was for a lifetime.

  “We didn’t have to stay here. McAra was good with engines. We could have moved to Pine Falls,” she said grimly. “He could have got a job at the pulp mill. No, he couldn’t do that. Having to report to work every day at the same time. Not going hunting when the spirit moved him. Being ordered around. Too much like the armed forces.”

  He thought about that as she cut off the heads of more fish and scooped their guts into the barrel. The heads made him think of severed arms and legs and ripped-open stomachs in mangled vehicles, and he pushed away the images that had crowded forward.

  When Sarah was finished, she scraped off the board with the edge of her knife and pushed blood and scales into the barrel. She brought a hose over to wash the board and used a stiff bristle brush to clean it, finishing off with Javex.

  “Three days in salt water, then I hang them out to dry. Makes good hardfish to chew on in the winter.”

  “No tapeworm?” he asked.

  “The salt and drying kills them. People have been known to get worms deliberately to lose weight, then take a pill to kill them off.”

  He didn’t know if she was making it up, so he didn’t reply.

  “I’ve done thousands of these. At one time, we depended on them during the winter. Now, it’s just habit. Help me with this.” He took one side of the barrel, and they lifted it onto the back of her truck. “I’ll take it out to the gut pile. The maggots and the bears will clean it up.”

  He watched drops of sweat gather on Sarah’s forehead. It was too hot to be working. He wiped his face with his hand and wiped his hand on his pants.

  “Do you lend out your books?” Tom asked, thinking about the long winter ahead.

  “Yes, but I take your first child as a hostage until the books are returned.”

  “Deal,” he replied. “But you’ll have to feed her, put up with her, listen to her. Do you speak French?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “If she’s annoyed, she’ll only speak French to me. When I started learning French, she switched to Mandarin.”

  “A clever child. Communication with an intelligent child is always difficult. Usually, though, it’s adults that choose to speak their native tongue so kids can’t understand. She sounds like she might be worth knowing.”

  “What would you do with her?” And he wondered if salvation could be found in the middle of nowhere, if whatever he’d done wrong as a father could be washed away, along with the metal studs, the hair dye and the chains, and for a moment he tried to imagine what she’d look like without them. The tattoos and the scars would always be there. If she came to Valhalla, she’d probably have all the kids in town in the community hall practising kick-boxing, and they’d all be wearing black and metal and sporting tattoos.

  Sarah used the hose to wash the blood and fish scales off her hands. The scales flashed rainbow colours as they spiralled to the ground.

  “Teach her a skill she doesn’t know anything about. Shoot a rifle, hunt moose, anything that would allow her to compete with you.”

  “You’re supposed to be on my side,” he said.

  “Often kids’ problems get solved by parents sorting out their own lives.” With that, she drove away to put the brined fish into the ice shed and the guts in the swamp.

  He wondered if she’d read that in some self-help book. His shrink had said the same thing. “If you won’t do the hard work of therapy for yourself, do it for your kids.” “I don’t have my face covered in studs, I don’t spend all my time playing computer games,” he’d replied defensively. But, now, away from it all, his heart lurched as he asked himself if his wife and kids had become perps to him, had become no different than the people he confronted, handcuffed, pushed into the back of a patrol car, wrote reports, endless reports about, and he didn’t want to think about it, so he pushed it away, pushed it away and locked it up.

  He went to the store to get a can of fruit cocktail. After searching through the cans, he went over to Karla and said, “Everything is past its due date. Haven’t you got any stock in the back that is newer?”

  “We’ve got what we’ve got,” she said.

  “This stuff should be off the shelf.”

  “Nobody’s forcing you to buy it,” she said. “Best-by date doesn’t mean food’s gone bad.” She pressed her lips together, narrowed her eyes at him and gave her blouse a hitch.

  “I’ve seen the girls get supplies from the back room.”

  “Those are special orders. You want to give me an order, Frenchie will shop for you. Cash only, in advance. There’s a fee for the service.”

  “In advance?” he asked.

  “We don’t want people ordering lobster and then changing their mind.”

  “I wasn’t asking for credit.”

  “That’s good. You want to see our accounts? Overdue. Overdue. Thirty days. Ninety days. A year. The Odin group sells vegetables and fruit for cash. People run out of cash and then they come to us.” Her voice was stiff with the injustice of the situation.

  He put the can of fruit cocktail on the counter and rummaged for cash to pay for it.

  “I heard,” Karla said, “that the Odin has offered you a d
eal on your property.”

  “Millions,” he said. “They want to build a golden temple on it.”

  She didn’t appreciate his sense of humour. “They think that property belongs to them. They don’t have millions. Not unless they find their treasure. We know how they operate. They’ll do you a favour and get you obligated. Like they’ve already sent over an attractive young lady to offer you fresh produce. Straight from the garden. Just so you can try it out. And they’ll suggest you go there to pick out what you want. And there goes another of our customers for fresh produce. They don’t have a licence. No expenses. They work for board and room and anything they need. Not want. Need. We bring in produce and it sits on the shelf. We need to cook with it or throw it out. People want us to stock canned goods, but they drive four hours to the city, load up at a case sale and don’t buy what we’ve got.”

  “Make a deal with them,” he said.

  “They won’t sell to us. We’ve tried.”

  “Do they ever have visitors? They’ve got extra huts.”

  It was like the skin on her face shrank, tightened over the bones of her skull. As if all the injustices she had ever suffered had come like a swarm of wasps to sting her. Normally, Karla filled up the store with herself, with her energy, her broad smile that had long ago become automatic, her cheerful greetings to those she thought might benefit her, her bustling about, but now he was seeing everything that wasn’t in the emporium: the customers who weren’t in the chairs, the metal framework no longer new, the ice cream window with no one on the other side of the screen, the yellow real estate sign rusted on one edge, the rough planks of the walls and the shelves haphazard with empty spaces.

  “Visitors?” She said the word so that it sounded angry and hopeless at the same time. “They’re One, didn’t you know? And there’s no way of knowing if their visitors are One or not. Maybe they pay with cash, but how would anyone know? They have guests and our cabins aren’t always full.”

  Her face seemed desperate with the unfairness of it all. “They don’t follow the rules,” she said. “We pay our licences and our taxes. We hire local. They hire nobody. They just take and take and take.” She shut her eyes for a moment and clenched her hands. “They wanted Jessie’s property, and I heard that they’re going to start a Viking theme park. Compete with us for sports fishing. There’s the tall guy with the beard—Jason. He’s got plans. They’ve got connections. They’ll push us out of business.”