by John Farrow
‘It’s your prerogative, or your mother’s if she named you.’
‘My what?’
‘Your— Never mind. She could name you whatever she wanted.’
‘She tried to. Name me. I was supposed to be Ozlynn, no R, that’s really my name but it’s not, know why?’
‘Nope. Still don’t.’
‘She was in labor she told me, and it was on the TV.’
‘Her labor was on TV? Your birth?’
‘No. You know, the movie? The wizard and the scarecrow and Dorothy and Toto and them. The Lion and the Tin Man. She could’ve named me Dorothy from that movie, but she chose Ozlynn. Lynn was my aunt. So Ozlynn. An Oz Lynn, that’s me. Except when she went to register me in for being born, the white man at the office put an R in front. My mom, she had to be fierce to keep the S out and the zed in, and keep an extra N, but she lost on the R in the end. They put it in. She didn’t fight that hard about the R.’
‘What you’re saying is, white people didn’t let you be Ozlynn. I can see that happening. It’s not right, but I can see it happening.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’m Rozlynn now anyhow. How I grew up. At school and that, I tell the teacher or the nurse or the doctor, don’t spell it with an S, please. They think it’s a white girl’s name. It’s not. It’s with a zed. They think I got it wrong. I didn’t. How many times, you think? Millions. Millions. Always it’s white people who won’t accept that what it is, is what it’s supposed to be. Why are they like that? White people always want to take the second N off my name. There’s two! N, N. Why is that so hard?’
‘I understand. You have a case.’
‘I’ll tell you why.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re white.’
They both broke up after that. They had a silly laugh. But Rozlynn still couldn’t explain to Abigail that she couldn’t write ‘I didn’t do it’, because no white cop alive over the next one or two hundred years was going to believe that, and she didn’t have time to wait that long. She’d stay silent forever instead.
iv
In summer she’d shoot with her dad. He didn’t call it hunting, he called it shooting when she went with him. Hunting is what he did on his own or with his buddies and usually in the fall for moose or caribou. With her dad she’d wander into the woods and pick on an old birch and be mean to it, or the two of them would pick out a hole a woodpecker pecked and see if they could shoot the hole. She was never good at shooting. Neither was her dad. She thought there was something wrong with his eyes. At noon, they’d unpack a lunch and he let her snap the cap on her first beer one time, but she was permitted only a sip. ‘Eighteen, you can drink. A little, not a lot. Before that, you don’t drink.’ She went along with that. Everything, it seemed, was going to happen when she turned eighteen, when everything was going to change. Rozlynn had not been in a hurry for that day to come. She’d rather wait forever and go shooting with her dad in summer and snowshoe the trap alongside him when the snow flied. She was starting to drink, though, and take pills, as that time drew closer. Not at home, but with her friends in the woods or behind the old school. They’d share gin or beer or pills or everything together and talk about the boys you could talk to and the boys you had to watch out for especially when they were drunk. Her boy cousins were on the watch-out list and her uncle was considered the worst of a bunch of bad men. ‘He’s got no conscience.’ He’d tried something with every one of them except Roz and they agreed it was because he was her dead mother’s brother. ‘That only means he’ll wait, because he’s my uncle,’ Roz explained, but nobody knew what she was talking about or, if they did, they didn’t believe her or understand. Her uncle wasn’t going to bother her like he did the others, they were sure of that. He was her uncle.
Which meant that even her girlfriends didn’t believe her when she told them something that was true.
At night in the prison, and often during the day in prison she thought about those best days in the woods with her dad, and she thought about him often and she daydreamed about walking the trapline with him even while sitting down beside the other inmates. At night, especially, she could smell the piney forest and hear the brook’s chitchat and the wind fluttering the leaves. It’s not like she forgot the tougher times, either. Like when they were out on the trap, and the blizzard was worse than the one they expected and they had to huddle up for the night, she and her dad, and in the morning, it was so blindingly bright in the fresh snow and so cold your limbs crackled. You couldn’t hear that sound but your bones felt like crackling, for sure. Or the time a wolf ate through his own leg to get out of a leg-hold and they had only the leg to see. Or when small animals, sometimes ones nobody wanted to catch, were caught but they weren’t dead yet. Her father didn’t like to use a knife or use a gun because it might score the pelt, at least that’s what he said when he was teaching her to use the wire to slip over their necks and then twist because he didn’t like to do it himself. Not close up. So she learned how while he walked away a short distance and then came back to do the skinning.
She saw that he was a gentle man because he didn’t like to strangle an ermine. She loved him for that.
When she thought back and relived those days, she could say that the duck hunting was tough, because she was always cold at that time of year and she wasn’t allowed to do any shooting herself because she’d been brought along with the men and the boys, too, so she had to help with the other chores. Which was all right except that she was always so cold and damp and usually bent up in a tiny wet blind waiting for ducks to land. Those might be remembered as difficult days and sometimes maybe she was sore about how things were then but thinking back she’d give anything to be there again, to be bunched up under pine boughs waiting for shotguns to blast away.
She liked it, especially in memory, because her father was there and she was with him.
What she hated about being on trial for his murder is what they did to him, what was said about him. Everybody assumed something terrible. He drank too much, they said, even though he didn’t, not really, and he played cards badly, but he was a kind man and a gentle man who would never harm his daughter. In court they said he kept his daughter out of school and forced her to sleep beside him on the trapline and in the duck blinds, that that was unnatural, and one day, they said, it was inevitable, her own public defender said, to help get her less time, the girl just snapped. Then she’d said, ‘I did it,’ but instead everybody involved in her case went around saying that her father was guilty. She hated that part.
He wasn’t guilty. He was dead.
He didn’t harm her. She killed him.
She devised a plan because of it. One day she’d be released. She’d go home. She’d kill her dead mother’s brother. Her uncle. To take revenge for her father being dead because of him. Then people would know that it wasn’t the father who was to blame. People will believe the corpse when they see one. Even white people. She doesn’t want to spend one more day in prison than necessary, especially not because of Flo because that will prevent her from finishing her job – clearing her father’s name by killing the man responsible for her killing her father. People will know then who was the guilty man, who was the innocent victim. She might even say so right out loud in court. But day-to-day, you can’t tell people those things. They’ll think you’re only talking. You have to show them first. Then they’ll listen.
After that, she will happily go back to prison, or go back and not worry about being happy, even if it’s not to Joliette, and dream her life away remembering her dad in the woods in the winter in the cold with the wolves howling and the tree limbs barking, partly in Cree like her dad imagined and partly like wild stray hungry mutts as she first imagined.
v
Late in the afternoon Doi and Rozlynn talked. They rarely chatted to each other without other people being included in the conversation, and of course Roz rarely chatted at all. They started out by washing their faces over the sinks across from the
toilet stalls and Doi just kept going with whatever she was saying. When they left the room they stayed together and when Rozlynn sat down, Doi served her a coffee and sat down beside her.
‘I think she’ll come see me now,’ Doi said, which caused Rozlynn’s ears to perk up. Usually, Doi yammering away was nothing more than background noise. You got used to it like you got used to so many things. But her ears perked up. ‘Don’t you think so?’ Doi asked, as if Roz might have an opinion that mattered to her. Then she answered her own question because in the end only her own opinion counted. ‘I think she’ll come.’
‘Why now, you think?’ Roz asked her back. She assumed that Doi was talking about her daughter again, but she had never before suggested that she might show up someday.
‘Because I wrote to her.’
‘You always write to her.’
‘No, but this time—’ Doi started to say something when she stopped herself. ‘What do you mean I always write to her?’
Roz didn’t feel like having that fight. She said, ‘I thought you did.’
‘I write to lots of people,’ Doi said.
She didn’t believe her but didn’t care either.
‘This time I wrote to her, I said we were eight in here. Now we’re only seven. I told her it’s dangerous in here. That Flo was killed. I could be next. That could happen. I won’t know why. Somebody, I’m sure it won’t be you, will strangle me with a wire around my neck if I don’t look out.’
‘Why won’t it be me?’
‘Don’t joke.’
‘Who said I’m joking?’ Rozlynn asked but Doi didn’t take her seriously, probably because she wasn’t really listening.
‘When she knows how dangerous it is, that I could die any day, she will come see me. Maybe. I thinks so, don’t you? When I write again, she’ll come see me, don’t you think?’
They were silent together because Rozlynn thought she’d better not say what she wanted to say and Doi wasn’t listening anyway as far as she could tell. Doi had said what was on her mind, that her daughter was coming because the mother might be in danger and her daughter of course loved her, so to her that made sense.
Rozlynn finished her coffee and then she said, ‘I did it.’
Doi wasn’t listening or maybe she didn’t want to hear.
Roz meant something by that. She meant that she had stuck a hunting knife into her father’s heart and that Doi had done what she was in here for, too. She had hacked her daughter with a hatchet. They weren’t ever going to be friends was what she really meant to say.
Doi said, ‘You and my Katarzyna are about the same age.’ Somehow, making that statement gave her the right to reach across and touch the hair on her forehead a moment. The touch of her fingertips felt so light. Hard to imagine, Roz was thinking, how someone can be so softly gentle one minute then go wield an axe. Although she could imagine it, and that was the hard part, why she and Doi could never be friends. She could imagine doing what Doi had done because she had done it, too. In her own way. That’s what she wanted to say to her, ‘You did it, too.’ But they were in a prison. In prison, you didn’t pick a fight unless you had a chance to win it. You watched what you said, even when you were someone who said hardly anything ever.
The guard was too close for her to have a chance of winning any fight anyway.
Rozlynn didn’t say out loud that Doi’s remark was true, that she and Katarzyna were about the same age. She just warned herself to be careful.
vi
‘You came back today at night,’ Rozlynn said.
In silence, they had sat in the interrogation room for five minutes. The guard inside the door made the only sounds, shuffling her feet from time to time and when she did that, both Roz and Émile Cinq-Mars looked up to see what was going on. Nothing was going on. Otherwise, Roz looked down at the desk and from time to time pawed the surface gently, then stopped abruptly, as though suddenly conscious of the motion, while the policeman in the room sat sideways to the table with his legs stretched out and seemed to stare at his shoes. Only that.
She wanted to stare at his shoes, too, his gaze that prolonged and intense, to see what was so special about them.
Then she spoke, stating that he’d returned, and Cinq-Mars straightened himself up, as if suddenly aware that she was in the room. Or that he was.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘I came back.’ Returning at night had not been a strategy. He had decided that commuting back to the city every day would be a drag. It would wear him out. He called the Chief of Police to coax him into springing for a motel room, then drove home to pick up extra clothing and things he’d need. Five nights a week at a minimum he’d sleep out in Joliette to save on travel. Established in his new digs, he went for dinner, then returned to the prison. His intention was not to keep the inmates off-guard, although that proved to be the result. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t be coming in around the clock, but we want to get this resolved fairly quickly.’
They sat quietly again. Cinq-Mars had yet to ask a question. He simply sat there and waited for her to talk. In the interim, he had a lot on his mind and matters to work through, so he wasn’t bored in the least.
The first question was posed by Rozlynn. ‘Can I go now?’
‘What do you think?’ he asked her back. His first question.
‘About what?’
‘The murder.’
‘I don’t think nothing about it.’
‘That’s unusual,’ Cinq-Mars said. And asked, ‘Don’t you think?’
She didn’t understand the question. She answered, ‘I think.’
‘But not about the murder.’
‘Nothing to think about.’
‘How come?’
‘What do I know?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘What you know.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You didn’t do it, I suppose. You don’t have to answer. I wouldn’t want you to lie.’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘We can agree on that. You’re not lying. How can you be if you’re not saying anything?’
‘You’re not neither.’
‘That’s true. But we know I don’t know anything. I wasn’t in the room. Why not tell me where you were when Doi cried out.’
‘Do a drawing, do you mean, like Abigail said?’
‘Abigail talks to everybody, I guess.’
‘She talks to me.’
‘Sure,’ Cinq-Mars said, ‘do a drawing.’
He waited while she sketched a map of the situation from her perspective the moment Doi cried out. It looked familiar.
‘Now show me where you were after Doi cried out, but after all the guards arrived and the corrections officer ordered everyone to stand still.’
Roz pointed to the stick-person representing herself on the page. She had drawn everyone with short oblongs around their waists to depict skirts.
‘That one is you,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed. ‘When the officer ordered that no one move—’
‘I still didn’t move.’
Cinq-Mars said something she did not expect. ‘That’s what I thought.’
They were quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘Can I go now?’
‘If you have something to confess,’ Cinq-Mars advised her, ‘now would be a good time for that. If you don’t, then sure, you can go now. Just one more thing.’ He looked at the guard by the door and she left the room. The two of them in the room waited for the door to click closed. Roz looked up at him, really for the first time. ‘Who do you think killed Flo?’
Rozlynn shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
‘Who do you think?’
‘I dunno.’
‘You can stay here a while if you want. Just sit here. Or you can go now. Up to you.’
She sat there a while not really knowing what to do. Then she said, ‘I guess I’ll go.’
Cinq-Mars walked her to the door where Rozlynn said, ‘Abi says you got a girlfriend. Abi thinks you’r
e in love.’
‘Abigail thinks a lot of things.’ He rapped two times on the door and the guard opened up. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Rozlynn. We’ll talk again sometime if you don’t mind too much. Good to talk to you today.’
He had listened to her breathing while they sat together. He didn’t think she exhaled a single guilty breath. Not that he could go by that. But he considered it a start.
Cinq-Mars decided to pack it in for the evening.
Rozlynn went back to her bunk and didn’t say anything to anybody about anyone. If she was still upset, she didn’t let on.
SANDRA
i
Detective Émile Cinq-Mars would not acknowledge even to himself that he chose his motel due to its proximity to a liquor store, but upon spotting the outlet he booked into the first accommodations that came up along an industrial and retail strip. Set back from the road, frontage for the premises included a communal porch, each unit outfitted with a pair of plastic Adirondacks. He could see himself taking his ease in the evening – and a good whisky, sipped slowly, might help the time slip away. A Laphroaig, being on sale, was selected. He was not always one for peaty, yet the peat-smoke of the brand suited his loner’s mood. A wee dram in the cooling night air was a welcome companion in this far-flung town called Joliette where he knew no one, and where he wanted to keep it that way.
Company arrived despite his wish. Uninvited. Unwanted.
A biker roared in, the so-called muffler on his hog calibrated to awaken the comatose. In case anyone had hit the sack early, he gunned it repeatedly after coming to a stop, then finally shut the motor and dismounted. He looked the part of an incendiary figure, beaded, bearded and shaggy-haired, large of belly and littered with metal. Cinq-Mars had a mind to go over and kick in his testicles, to see how much he enjoyed having a peaceful evening disrupted. Merely an idle fantasy, of course, as he’d not do that under any circumstance – a good thing, as another four bikers arrived out of a cloud of dust a short while behind the first.