Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  The chaplain seemed to sense this, and said goodnight, but nothing more. Baz watched the tail lights leave the lot, and then pulled the hat onto his head, cold.

  He should have phoned, but wasn’t that the story of his life? No cell phone for a reason, so he wouldn’t have to make excuses. Wasn’t silence better than lies?

  Better than the truth, for sure: Hi sweetheart, sorry I’m late, but I had to show the ghost of a little girl the way to her dead mother. Knew you’d understand.

  That was one way to ruin a perfectly good relationship. Another, Sol argued with himself as he tried to be as quiet as he could coming up the un-shoveled steps, would be to tell Robbie nothing and let her assume he was an uncommunicative jerk, which he probably was. Plans for a quiet entrance were destroyed by the yapping of the damned dog, and Sol cursed under his breath. Robbie had gotten the puppy because Sol worked so many unpredictable shifts, to keep her company, for protection.

  To screw Sol up when he tried to sneak in late.

  He’d gone for a couple of beers with Wayne after they’d filed their reports, after they’d sat with the father for a few minutes—Wayne had handled that, because for all his crassness, the big man was much better with living people than Sol was—and Sol had resisted plunging headfirst into a bottle, for once. Like Sol, Wayne worked in Denver but lived in Aurora, and had insisted on The Boneyard, which wasn’t the kind of place where you wanted to get completely pissed, not that and keep your wallet or your teeth.

  Once inside the house, Renard stopped barking, tail thumping against Sol’s leg, and was rewarded with a rough stroke to the head and a MilkBone from the cupboard as Sol helped himself to cold leftover spaghetti straight from the fridge. He didn’t heat it up; the microwave’s beep was loud and a hot meal was not what he deserved at this late hour, anyway.

  After a minute of eating standing up, leaning against the counter by the sink, looking out the window into the snow-spackled darkness, Sol put down the bowl. He didn’t turn. “I’m sorry,” he said. The words came out hoarse, and he didn’t recognize his own voice.

  Robbie sighed, padded over to the sink on bare feet, put both arms around him, resting her head in the hollow between his shoulder blades.

  “Come to bed,” she said finally, words muffled against his back.

  Sol took a breath to make an excuse, and suddenly felt all his clenched forward motion dissipate. He was more than merely tired; he was without reserve, bottom of the tank. Turning, he bent to kiss her, and she accepted it without question. There might be recriminations tomorrow, but Sol couldn’t think beyond the next minute.

  They stood entangled for some time, Sol taking what Robbie offered, hands on her face, her hair, down her shoulders and back, slipping off her robe, hiking up the big t-shirt she wore to bed when Sol wasn’t coming home. All extraneous, unnecessary things were left on the floor, and Sol carried her to the bedroom, where he took strength and comfort from her in equal measure.

  FIVE

  TEN LETTERS

  Lutie knew the Major would call her brother, because Baz hadn’t seemed like a deranged psychopath, and that’s the only thing that would have truly prevented her father from allowing him access. Her foster parents were so damn reasonable, that was the problem, and they saw no reason whatsoever to deny Basile Sarrazin. Probably thought it would do her some kind of good, given her past.

  She thought she was doing a decent job at suggesting she didn’t want contact, though. Through the closed door, she’d refused dinner, then refused a conversation later in the evening. The room was small, the smallest of the four bedrooms, and her mother had set up her sewing machine and craft table in the corner. The guest room, when all was said and done, like a line had been drawn in the middle: one side, craft central; this side, the last vestiges of Lutie’s childhood—stuffed animals, a CD player, an old iPod and some cheaply framed certificates for academic excellence.

  Bree knocked and was let in, but the minute she said that Baz was cute, Lutie threw her out. She’d brought a couple of carrot muffins, though, and those held Lutie’s hunger at bay.

  Sleep was hard, when it came. Full of dreams, nightmares almost.

  Cypress shaggy with moss, and heat, so out of place in this cold, desolate land, and water. Movement in the water, sinuous sideways movement. Snake. Night heat sonorous with frog. Not knowing where to put your foot, sinking up to her ankle, then her knee, and she woke with a start, sweaty in the electric heat of the over-hot room.

  In the morning, Karen was waiting for her in the kitchen, armed with coffee. She looked like she was doing the crossword. Lutie knew better and pulled up a chair. The Major was already out, and Bree was still sleeping.

  “Ten-letter word for a sympathetic feeling,” Karen said, making no pretense of looking at the half-completed grid. The Major always skipped the puzzle page, but her mother was made of trickier stuff.

  Lutie swallowed a comeback that involved profanity. She was too old for that, too careful. Instead, she busied herself getting milk from the fridge.

  “Dad’s dropping Marshall off at the rink, but he said he was going to give your brother a call.” Her brother Baz, not Marshall. Deliberate, not dodging anything. God, these people she’d ended up with.

  “Let him,” Lutie murmured, sipping the coffee. “Knock yourselves out.” She returned to the table. Avoidance got you nowhere in this family.

  “Luetta,” Karen said softly. “He came all this way.”

  “If he’s looking for puppies and rainbows, he’s gonna be disappointed.”

  Her foster mother’s eyes crinkled at the corner, and Lutie knew she’d been thinking exactly the same thing. “He’s not the one to blame, if it’s blame you’re looking to hand out. He was just a kid, too.”

  Lutie laughed, low. “You always had a thing for the motherless kids.”

  “Evidently.” She got up, rinsed her mug in the sink. “Listen, you don’t have to do anything, Lutie. The ball’s in your court. I’m just saying that he’s lost his dad, and he’s reaching out. We have no control of the timing of these things. You want to look back on this and feel like you did the right thing. A little bit of compassion could go a long way.” She emphasized the word. Ten letters.

  Lutie nodded. “I know.”

  The phone rang and Karen answered; Lutie could tell by the tone of her mother’s voice that it was the Major. A soft, golden warmth, and Lutie knew what was required: she needed to step up. Knew that she would step up. Because that’s how I’ve been raised. We don’t leave people behind, and we’re there when we’re needed. Instead of compassion, she felt a kind of proud resistance.

  Also ten letters.

  Karen gave her the phone so the Major could tell her himself. They didn’t pass the buck in her house, either. “Lutie,” her foster dad said. “How’d you sleep?” There was laughter in his voice.

  “Not bad,” she returned.

  Something in her voice caused him to pause. “All right, then. I’m meeting Baz in a few minutes and I’m planning on inviting him to service tomorrow. We’re having him over for lunch after.” Not asking her, telling her his plans, and letting her decide how she wanted to play her part.

  Lutie took a deep breath. What, was she going to go back to Toronto, just allow this interloper to hang out with her family? Like leaving the house with the back door open. “Sure. Tell him that I—” Dammit. “Give me his number and I’ll tell him myself.”

  “That’s my girl,” and he meant every word and for the first time, Lutie thought she might cry.

  The bar was so generic as to be almost a stage set, and Baz had the weird feeling that people were watching, had bought tickets for the big Saturday-night show. Lutie spotted him immediately, came over stiff-legged, a puffy down coat so white it smarted same as a slap. She moved like she was mad, and the only reason Baz knew this was because he’d had a fair bit of experience with pissed-off women. She shed the coat over the back of the chair, the faux fur trim dangling like a dead
animal she’d brought in from the traplines.

  Baz had just sat down himself; he glanced up at her and smiled, recognizing the nervous hammer in his chest. “Hey.” He turned around the plastic menu stand in the middle of the table. “What’s good?”

  Lutie raised dark brows, slanted, defining. A beautiful face, in its way, similar to their mother’s, what he remembered of her. He only had one photo, and in it his mother had looked tired and angry.

  She shrugged like she was indifferent, but Baz knew indifference was impossible. “Probably nothing. It’s a pub.”

  This bar had been her suggestion: grab something to eat for dinner, have a beer. Someplace neutral, she might have said, someplace that wasn’t her kitchen table.

  He ordered wings; she had the nachos. A beer came; she had a soft drink.

  He opened his mouth to apologize, but she was already talking, almost like she didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. “You don’t see him, do you?”

  Baz closed his mouth, quickly. “Pardon?”

  As though he’d just failed a pop quiz, his sister shrugged slightly, eyes glancing to the side, staring at nothing. “Never mind.” Eyes back to him, intent. “How’d you find me? I don’t go by Sarrazin.”

  Actually, he’d prepared for this question, because he couldn’t really tell her the whole truth without explaining about ghosts and railways and whatever that thing had been that had given him her address. “I hired a private detective.” Which was kind of the truth.

  “Really?” and she meant, ‘it was so important?’, but she didn’t say that. Baz could still tell, though. Her voice warmed up. She wouldn’t mean for him to hear that, but he did.

  “Your last name’s Cyr,” and he pronounced it correctly; it had been their mother’s name after all. “I figured that out.”

  This time, she smiled back, took a sip of her drink. “You’re a musician, the Major says,” and he liked how she was being careful with him, calling her foster father the Major, like anything else might hurt him: father, Dad. He didn’t think it would, but just the fact that she’d thought of it was a sign. He could hope, anyway.

  Baz nodded. “So was Dad.” He smiled again, shifted. “My Dad, your father. Aurie. Fuck it.” It was possible to overthink these things.

  Lutie’s eyes narrowed. The food came, and Baz had never been less hungry in his life. The wings were coated a toxic orange, reeked of vinegar and he wrinkled his nose at the smell, picked up one anyway.

  Something in his gesture made Lutie laugh. “You know, I don’t remember much about Louisiana, but Maman always said you ate like you had worms. Those are the two things I remember about you—that you could eat like a pig. And that you could sing.” She stopped there, and they stared at each other and Baz didn’t know where to start.

  He shrugged, tried to appear modest. “I don’t sing so much anymore. I play the fiddle, mostly.” He sucked one finger clean of BBQ sauce, going for an air of nonchalance, but couldn’t manage it. “What else?” he asked, because his own memories of back then, of the swamp and the bayous, were not much more than hers, he suspected. Baz had been given the one photo; Aurie had taken everything else, her clothes, her cookbooks, their marriage certificate, left them in the house, and burned the whole thing down, signifying his intention to never return. Baz remembered that, could call up the chemical smoke, the petals of blackened paper, oil seeping in rainbows across the salt marsh.

  “Not much,” she said.

  “Me neither.” He picked at the celery sticks and baby carrots, swirled them in the blue cheese dip. “Sol remembers more.”

  The nachos didn’t look much better, were smothered in pale orange sauce, not cheese, bits of dried parsley scattered like birdseed. Baz had played his fair share of gigs in places like this, and avoided the food whenever possible. “Want some?” she asked, pushing the plate towards him, noticing his stare, maybe.

  He shook his head. She wasn’t asking about Sol, or their father. Concentrating on him, not wanting to know more than that. It was enough. Baby steps, he cautioned himself.

  “Tu parles?” he asked, wondering if that might get her going. “Un peu?”

  She shook her head. “Nah. We moved around too much. The McGregors don’t speak—”

  “What was she like?” Baz hadn’t even known that question was in him, that it was coming. He was as taken aback as she was.

  One moment, thinking seriously about his earlier language question, the next, eyes blinking in surprise, and he knew—dammit, he knew—that she didn’t like surprises.

  “What do you think?” Lutie threw back. “She was nuts. Crazy.”

  “I don’t remember her like that,” Baz murmured. Wrong, God, he’d gotten it wrong again. And was about to make things worse. “Strict, maybe. Proud.”

  “A cold distant bitch.” The words seemed to be hurting her, because she flinched. “Probably should have been on Thorazine, talked to herself all the time, dragged me out with her day and night. Never made it to school, only ate when someone took pity on us. Moved all the time.”

  Why didn’t Aurie try to find you? Baz almost asked, then thought better. She didn’t know the answer to that question, didn’t know about ghosts and black things in the night with lungs like rusted out mufflers.

  “You were lucky, you got out,” Lutie continued, and there was the anger, right there.

  Baz chuckled a little, but sadly, and he hoped that she understood, or remembered, that you just had to laugh sometimes. “Mais, chère, she was the one that left, no?” He swallowed, then kept going, quickly, because he knew every word cut her. “Alors, je suis désolé, mais—neither of us got out, T-Lu.” Abruptly, he thought of Aurie, coming home dead drunk, sobbing. And the expression on Sol’s face by the rails a week ago, tapping his fingers against the ground in farewell.

  Of his mother, how he imagined her from the one photo, so fair she was like sun on snow—of his mother floating in a tub filled with blood, golden hair a halo.

  Neither of them. None of us.

  She only wanted the one drink, and that was probably enough, Baz decided. They split the bill, and she dropped him off at the motel. He said he’d take the shuttle bus out the next morning, no need to pick him up. As he had with her foster father the night before, he watched her pull away, and had no idea what he was hoping to accomplish.

  Sunday morning found Sol in Hershey, Nebraska, still running on the caffeine consumed during a double shift, a full twenty-four hours since his last sleep had ended. The Hursts had lived in the small town, ten miles west of Bailey Yard along the old Lincoln Highway. The faded gray road followed the tracks westwards, away from and between the low convergence of the North and South Platte Rivers, a crotch of mud and grass, lack of water counter to Sol’s experience and one of the many reasons he liked Nebraska. Land won here, not water.

  The couple had lived in a little clapboard house built at the turn of the last century and re-painted in heritage colors to match other up-and-comers in the neighborhood. Mrs. Hurst had evidently taken a lot of care, had read magazines about antiques and decorating, probably had watched home and garden channels, had learned how to trap tole paper scenes behind glass, how to scrapbook.

  The lock was nothing for Sol’s fast hands, but he checked once over his shoulder; neighbors were probably nosy around here, doubly so when the house was a crime scene. Not hearing anything above the clack of the nearby tracks, an endless line of boxcars and tankers, grain hoppers and piggyback trailers, Sol lifted the police tape with one finger and crouched under, shutting the door behind him. Better to be quick, because he would have a hard time explaining his presence here, with or without a Denver County EMS ID tag. The house was immaculate, except for the bloodstained couch and the scent of iron.

  No unearthly cold, no lingering spirits here. Everything as it should be.

  Maybe this had been just as the police had described it: a murder-suicide, Paul Hurst offing the missus, misery brushed over with Benjamin Moore pain
t. But. He crossed his arms, shook his head. Two people, heads cracked open with a blunt object, maybe a brick, maybe a club—it had bothered him when he’d first scanned the report in Denver, and it bothered him here in the couple’s living room. Sol had cleaned up plenty of suicides and not one of them had involved the victim hitting themselves on the head with a blunt object.

  He went upstairs, glanced at the boxes scattered around, half unpacked. Still packed. Online records had indicated that they’d moved here two years prior, but the place looked as though they’d just arrived. No sign of the Christmas just past, no tree, no decorations other than a few cards on the mantel. Sol went into the bedroom, queen-sized bed unmade, curtains drawn. Books everywhere, stacked against the wall, in bookshelves, on the desk beside the computer. He looked at the desk more closely—a drawing of a boat, a blueprint, a sailing manual. On one bedside: Around the Caribbean by Sail; Voyage of the Kon Tiki; Photographing the Tropics. He went back out into the hallway, stared at the boxes again. Not unpacking, he thought. Packing up. They were going on a trip. Sure Christmas was stressful, but why commit suicide when you had a trip coming up?

  He found an open diner on Hershey’s main street, where he bought time on a computer with internet access, thought about the Hursts, how perfect their lives seemed. Things, he knew, were rarely perfect. Sol made a few phone calls from the payphone at the back of the diner, dug around a bit before he pieced together the information he needed: the Hursts had bought a sailboat with two friends who lived in Miami; they were getting ready to leave on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. They were the nicest couple ever, can’t believe that Paul wanted to kill Aileen.

  Perfect couple, perfect house. He ordered lunch, the blue plate special, something with a pork chop. The couple did seem damn nice. Maybe it was something to do with the house’s location? Right across the street from the tracks, after all. The other deaths had occurred in the yards proper, in and around railcars, not in a house. Same general MO, though, just a slightly different location.