by Brad Smith
He wasn’t sure what he had expected that day. He hadn’t allowed himself a reunion scene in his mind. He hadn’t debated on the merits of a hug over a handshake and it was just as well, because in the end there had been neither. He himself wasn’t much of a hugger; he preferred to keep the world at arm’s length, and a long arm at that. Still, it occurred to him that he had waited too long, that it was quite possible that she never thought of him at all anymore. It would be the natural progression of things, to think less and less of someone gone from your life as the years passed. But with Carl, the opposite had been true. She had always been in his thoughts.
He’d been looking forward all week to dinner. The last time he’d had a meal with her she had been ten years old. Coincidentally, he had taken her fishing that day and they’d caught a dozen or so lake perch off the pier. Carl had fried them up back at his place and the two of them sat at the picnic table in his back yard to eat. Afterward they had walked downtown for ice cream cones. It had been a good day together, just the two of them. They had talked about Madonna and school and boys. Things of that nature.
It had been a hundred years ago.
It seemed as if there would be no more conversations about Madonna or school or boys. Or anything else, for that matter. At some point he would have to consider throwing in the towel. In two months he had seen her twice, and not at all since the trial ended. Maybe it had been too late all along. Or maybe if the outcome of the trial had been different she would have been more willing to see him. He had no idea if that was true either. He’d had the chance to be a father at one time and he didn’t do it. Some things, you only get one chance.
Frances had been right – he and Suzy had been a disaster together. If they had stayed together it would likely have meant the death of both of them. They split and Suzy didn’t make it anyway, probably because she was slightly more crazy than Carl. Or maybe it was just the roll of the dice. When she’d overdosed Carl was still in Talbotville, living with a woman named Colleen and her two little boys. They were building the new highway to Rose City that summer and Carl worked on a paving crew. He’d been straight for over a year, other than beer and a little pot on the weekends. Suzy was living in town too, but they rarely saw each other. She was running with some wannabe biker types who frequented the Royal Hotel across from the train station. Carl found out later that Suzy had only started doing heroin a couple of months before she died. The last time he saw her had been at the Sunoco station at the west end of town. She was putting gas in a rusty Mustang convertible. The top was down and a skinny guy with greasy long hair was sleeping in the tiny back seat. Carl had filled his pickup and they talked for a couple minutes. She said she was heading for the city but she didn’t say what for. She was thin and wasted, her pupils huge and her eyes restless, refusing to settle on him. She was dead within the week.
He’d shown up at the funeral home and John Rourke, mad in his grief, would have made a scene if it hadn’t been for Frances stepping between her father and Carl. She’d told Carl he was welcome to stay, although there wasn’t a lot of conviction in her voice when she said it. She was just doing what she could to stop a physical confrontation. John Rourke was a big man, and cruel to a point. Even though Carl and Suzy had been apart for five years, John had always blamed Carl for his daughter’s drug use. Frances had never suggested anything of the sort. Suzy was always going to be Suzy, with or without Carl.
Carl didn’t stay at the funeral home very long. He hadn’t been part of Suzy’s life when she died, and he’d never really been a part of the family, even when they had been together. He had talked to Kate that day, and the memory even now was as fresh as any he could lay claim to. She had been wearing a yellow dress, with a matching ribbon in her hair. She was sitting in a chair twenty feet or so from her mother’s casket. Carl remembered that she was very composed. Her eyes were dry. He didn’t feel as if he was her father and he wondered afterward if she felt that she was his daughter. He doubted it.
It was decided that Kate would live with her grandparents and Carl saw little of her after that. John was hostile to him on the odd occasion that he would stop at the farm. Carl was riding the hardtail at the time and the Harley itself seemed to raise the old man’s ire. Carl ended up moving to Whistler for two years to build condos for a guy he’d gone to high school with, and from there to Montana with the same builder. By the time he made his way back to Talbotville, Kate was a teenager. They talked occasionally, usually when running into one another in town.
He’d been drunk the day she had tried to tell him about being attacked by Joseph Sanderson III. She never actually said she’d been raped, probably because she couldn’t bring herself to say the word out loud. But she was trying to tell him something, and Carl had been hammered after shooting pool at Archer’s all day. He wasn’t listening to her and finally she just left.
And never came back.
Draining the second beer, he saw his line jump and he grabbed the pole. He pulled in a largemouth bass, maybe three pounds. He was surprised that there were largemouth in the creek. Fifteen minutes later he caught a fat, lolling carp, and then nothing else.
He decided to follow the creek further along. From the rock cut it swung back to the southwest and then straightened, flowing from the west. After a mile or so he came upon the town line, a gravel road with an aged concrete bridge under which the creek flowed. He kept going, into a hardwood bush, recently logged, the tops of the oak and ash and maple lying every which way on the forest floor. Good firewood going to rot if someone didn’t cut it up and haul it out.
The sun was falling when he reached the next side road, the Irish Line. He could see the yellow variance signs posted from a fair distance up the creek and when he got closer he realized he was looking at the proposed site for the landfill.
It was good farmland, black loam mixed with the clay, and it was planted, at least the acreage in front of him, in soybeans. It would be the last crop ever on these fields, if Hank Hofferman got his way. The creek grew marshy here where it ran along the edge of the concession before angling off to the south. Looking toward the Irish Line, Carl could see the burnt-out shell of the McIntosh house in the distance. He had heard about the fire; the cops had been pretty quick to declare it an accident.
It would be dark in half an hour, he realized. As he turned to go, he saw a van pull up on the side road. After a minute a man wearing a tweed cap got out, carrying a paper in his hand. The man wore khaki pants and a leather coat and he was as thin as a sapling. He obviously had not seen Carl. He walked into the field across the road, and moved directly to an abandoned gas well along the creek bank.
Carl was headed that way and he kept going. Not wanting to startle the man, he made a point of coughing loudly when he was twenty yards away. The man turned.
‘Hey,’ Carl said.
‘I’m not trespassing, am I?’ the man asked. He was maybe seventy, Carl saw now. He wore brown horn-rimmed glasses and he had tufts of gray hair growing from his ears. His voice was a deep baritone, slow and measured.
‘Not as far as I’m concerned,’ Carl said.
‘You one of them that’s putting in the landfill?’
‘No,’ Carl said. He held up his pole. ‘Just out fishing.’
‘Lee Cumberland,’ the man said. ‘I drilled gas wells all over this area.’
‘Carl Burns.’ Carl shook the man’s hand.
The man held out the paper. ‘One of my old maps. There’s a number of old wells on this land they’re buying up. They put in a dump, all that goes to waste. Thought we had an energy crisis in this country.’
Carl glanced at the map, a faded foolscap with the roads and boundaries marked. He could see the line of the creek snaking through.
‘Somebody ought to think about that,’ the old man said.
‘Somebody should do a lot of things,’ Carl said.
‘You got any idea how many old gas wells there is around here?’
‘I don’t,’ Car
l admitted.
‘Neither do I. That’s my point. Nobody does. This here’s a county map, only goes back sixty years or so. There were no records before that. Hell, there might be fifty, even a hundred gas wells on this concession alone.’
‘Does the county know about it?’ Carl asked.
‘Damn right they do,’ the old man said. ‘Because I went down there and told them. They didn’t want to hear about it. They’re a bunch of damn ostriches down there, they’ll issue permits for anything. Same as when they put up those sow barns. County turned a blind eye and a couple years later one of their manure lagoons overflowed and contaminated a creek off the Fourth Concession. Were you around here when that happened?’
Carl was in jail when that happened. ‘I heard about it,’ he said.
‘Well, they never learn, do they?’ the old man said. ‘Now they’re going to let this landfill happen. Make any sense to you?’
‘Not a bit,’ Carl said.
‘I’d like for somebody to tell me when it was that common sense became obsolete.’
Carl looked at the sun, falling below the tree line to the west, and he nodded to Lee Cumberland, an old man out reliving his well-drilling youth. ‘Well, I’ll see you.’
The old man, returning the nod, seemed a little put out that Carl wasn’t more interested in what he had to say. But he held his tongue as Carl turned to follow the creek downstream, making his way in the failing daylight. After a time he heard the van start up and then pull away, tires crunching on the gravel road.
By the time he reached the river Carl was back to thinking about Kate. He didn’t know what to do about her. Maybe there was nothing to do. Once the addition to the warehouse was finished, he knew he should head back to Dundurn. Back to installing security systems, back to pool at Shooter McGraw’s. Back to Julie. Maybe in time he would figure out what it was he was missing and she would welcome him back into her bed.
Walking up the river bank, he could see the River Valley Farm produce truck parked down by the warehouse. The lights were on in the farmhouse and Frances would be inside. Perry would presumably have trudged home. Carl thought he would stop and say hello to Frances. If he couldn’t delight her, he could at least mildly surprise her. As he approached, though, a familiar-looking blue Land Rover pulled into the driveway and parked. A man got out. About forty or so, he had longish hair and a beard and wore a leather bomber jacket and khaki pants. He was carrying a bottle of wine and as he got out of the car he popped a breath mint into his mouth. Watching, Carl realized why the vehicle was familiar. It had almost run him off the road a couple of months earlier, the first time he’d visited Frances at the farm. The bearded man was the driver that day too. Carl waited until the man walked around the house toward the patio out back. Then he crossed over to the machine shed, got into his truck and drove back into town.
THIRTEEN
Kate started spending time at Shoeless Joe’s during the day. She’d stop in for lunch a couple of times a week, then stick around for an hour or two, hanging out at the bar, talking to whoever was on shift. She was still using crutches and her knee didn’t feel much better than the day of the surgery, two weeks earlier. She was taking physiotherapy three times a week, but it only seemed to aggravate the joint. The lack of progress was discouraging.
On a rainy Wednesday she arrived around one o’clock and ordered the fish and chips special and a pint of Guinness. The place was quiet, the patio outside deserted due to the weather. Sasha was working the bar. She’d been all alone, reading the newspaper, when Kate walked in.
‘So what’s been happening?’ Kate asked when she brought the draft.
‘Summer’s over and business is shit. Nothing’s happening.’
‘So make something up. I’m bored to tears.’ Kate had a drink of the stout and looked at the bottles behind the bar, the glasses lined up, the limes and lemons and olives in their bowls. She liked working there, the order of things. ‘You know I could help out here a few hours a week. I could work the bar.’
‘I don’t think you could,’ Sasha said. ‘With your insurance, I mean. I think either you’re off work or you’re not. They have people checking up on that.’
‘So I’ll do it under the radar. You won’t even have to pay me.’
‘And what happens if you injure yourself?’ Sasha asked.
‘Like if I pull a muscle lifting a shot glass?’ Kate asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus. You’re so anal.’
‘Your fish is ready,’ Sasha said, looking toward the kitchen.
As Kate was eating the front door opened and a guy came in out of the rain, his collar turned up and a leather laptop case beneath his arm. Kate glanced at him and went back to her haddock. Sasha carried a menu to the man, who took a seat by the front windows. Kate could hear her talking to the guy. When she came back to the bar, Kate pushed her plate away and asked for another Guinness. Sasha brought it and leaned close.
‘You know that guy who just walked in?’
Kate didn’t look over. ‘Should I?’
‘He was asking about you.’
The guy was Peter Dunmore. Wet as a drowned rat, his collar up, his face hadn’t registered with Kate. Carrying her beer, she made her way on one crutch to his table and sat down across from him.
‘Hi, Kate,’ he said, closing the laptop.
‘Peter, right?’ she asked.
‘Right.’
‘Peter, who told me he was going to do a big piece in the newspaper after the trial. Right? Peter, who called me at home twice with follow-up questions.’
Dunmore exhaled heavily, said nothing.
‘I have that wrong?’ Kate asked.
‘You’ve got it right,’ Dunmore said. ‘For what it’s worth, I did write the piece. The paper decided not to run it.’
‘Why not?’
Sasha arrived with a bottle of Coors Light for Dunmore. He ordered a club sandwich and Sasha took the menu and left.
‘Why not?’ Kate repeated.
‘Because he was acquitted.’ Dunmore shrugged. ‘They said they would have run it if he was guilty.’
‘He was guilty,’ Kate said. ‘Is guilty.’
‘Not in the eyes of the court.’
‘And not in the eyes of the Times either.’
Dunmore shrugged again. The gesture was already getting on Kate’s nerves. ‘My editor said we didn’t want to give the impression that we were piling on after the fact. He’d already received a lot of negative publicity.’
‘As opposed to the positive publicity that a serial rapist deserves,’ Kate suggested.
‘I didn’t say that.’ Dunmore took a drink of beer, barely a sip.
Kate glanced toward Sasha, watching from the bar, her curiosity running rampant, no doubt. ‘You were asking about me?’
‘Yeah. I saw you there. Thought it was you.’
Kate considered this. ‘But you were aware that I worked here?’
‘I did know that. Yes.’
‘So this is not a coincidence. You being here.’
‘I stopped for lunch,’ Dunmore said. ‘People need to eat.’
‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘But not necessarily here. What do you want from me?’
‘From you?’ Dunmore asked, surprised. ‘Nothing. I thought I owed you an apology. I mean, I told you I was going to write the piece.’
‘But you did write it.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Then your paper owes me an apology. And I don’t want it. So there you go.’
Dunmore sipped from his beer. ‘I could buy you lunch.’
‘I had lunch.’
‘Well, I could buy you a beer.’
‘That would make everything better.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Then buy me a beer.’
He gestured to Sasha at the bar, indicating Kate’s glass. He looked at the crutch, on the floor beside the table. ‘What did you do to your leg?’
‘Tore my menis
cus.’
‘Ouch. Did you need surgery?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
Of course you didn’t, Kate thought. You don’t know anything about me.
‘It must be painful,’ he said.
‘Not as painful as some things,’ she told him.
Sasha brought the fresh Guinness with the clubhouse. Kate finished one beer and started on the other while Dunmore began to eat. He kept glancing up at her while he did. After a time Kate quit looking at him. She wished she hadn’t accepted the beer; now she was obliged to sit with him until it was gone.
‘I’m going to hang on to my files,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘In case anything else comes up.’
‘What does that mean?’ Kate asked. ‘What’s going to come up?’
He backed off. ‘I’m speaking hypothetically.’
‘Are you really?’ Kate asked. ‘What’s going to come up?’
Dunmore took a drink of beer and shook his head, as if chastising himself for saying too much. ‘It’s just … I heard something from a cop. Might be bullshit. You know what cops are like.’
‘Tell me,’ Kate said.
Kate drove directly to the courthouse from the bar. Prosecutor Grant was not there but as the receptionist was explaining to Kate that she wouldn’t be able to see him without an appointment, he walked through the door. He told her to come into his office.
‘Do you want coffee?’ he asked.
Kate declined. She leaned her crutches inside the door and sat. Grant went behind his desk and glanced at a computer screen there, scrolling quickly through his e-mails.
‘What did you do to your leg?’ he asked while he read.
She told him, providing more detail than she had with Dunmore a half hour earlier. Grant, finished with his e-mail, leaned back from the monitor as she told it.
‘Did you at least score the run?’
‘Out by a country mile.’
Grant smiled. ‘So how’s it going?’