TWELVE
CATCHING OUT
Lutie had fallen asleep in front of the TV. The noise of it was considerable: a mobile-mouthed man was instructing viewers to phone immediately, get two kitchen choppers for the price of one and he’d throw in a free garlic peeler. Act now, he didn’t have all night. The sense of urgency wasn’t what had wakened her, it was the doorknob rattling. She checked the clock beside the bed where Baz lay sprawled, restlessly sleeping. Past midnight.
Sol came in, met her eyes, and the smell of hard liquor wafted in on the cold behind him like he’d brought half the bar for a party. One hand was bloody, she noticed as he stepped carefully over the saltline and closed the door behind him. He unzipped his parka and the sound of smashed glass accompanied the movement required to toss it on the floor. Alcohol or blood, his shirt was soaked through. Without hurry, Sol crossed the room to the bathroom, flicked on a light, leaving smears of blood on the door jamb and switch. He half-shut the door, and after a moment, she heard water running.
Lutie stood up. She’d been dreaming of something bad, but she couldn’t catch the tail end of it now, just fleeting dread. She stood by the doorway, not looking in, staring at Baz sleeping, momentarily striped with acid light escaping from the bathroom. “You okay?” she asked Sol through the crack, even though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t.
“Yeah,” he said in response. “Just a cut.” A pause. “You wanna bring me the first aid box? It’s by the bed.”
The box was heavy, industrial-sized, and he turned as she stood hesitating at the doorway, kit in hand, but only briefly. One hand held a bloodied towel to his side. She tried not to look. It was her brother and it was a half-naked stranger in a motel bathroom a long way from home. Just another weirdness, she supposed, in a day full of it.
“Save it there,” and he motioned with his nose to the counter beside the sink. “Can you open it up? See if I got gauze in there and find some antiseptic.” The instructions that followed were to the point, accurate but unrushed, no sense of alarm. He’d done this before.
At his request, she looked for shards of glass still embedded in a series of shallow gashes across his ribs, and used sterilized tweezers to pluck them out when she found them. Then, with her help, he cleaned it all out, packed it with gauze, taped it up. Under his clinical eye, it didn’t seem so much about compassion and sympathy as straightforward housekeeping. He hardly winced at all, but that might have been the booze helping out, killing whatever pain he was in. “Did he eat?” Sol asked as she crumpled paper wrappings into the garbage.
“A little. He’s pretty upset.”
Baz had apologized for Sol’s behavior, over and over, before ranting about Sol’s apparent need to keep everything and everyone at a calculated distance. The anger was short and sharp and Baz hadn’t seemed to enjoy it one bit. He’d cut off abruptly, claimed the bed, fallen asleep more or less immediately.
Sol nodded. “Yeah, I guess he would be.”
“Your girlfriend called.” About four times, though she didn’t tell him that either. Three times before Lutie worked up the nerve to answer the phone under the chair, tossed or lost, she didn’t know which. Sol’s eyelid flickered, and his lips clamped shut. In the stark bathroom light, he was easier to read. Either that, or he wasn’t putting up the same kind of front.
“Any message?”
Lutie shook her head. “Just wanted to know if everything was all right. I said yes.”
Sol laughed, low, not really amused. “So, you lied.” She was standing closest to the kit; he handed her the antiseptic spray to put away.
“Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have answered, but Baz was asleep and I didn’t want the phone to wake him. I didn’t tell her who I was.” She felt Sol’s eyes watching her close the case, snap it shut. “What happened tonight? Where did you go?”
Baz stirred in the next room, a garbled mumble. Sol followed the sound, then he looked at Lutie, lowered his voice. “We’ll talk in the morning. You should get some sleep. What time is it?”
She told him, and then he surprised her by saying, “Some birthday, hey?” because she’d actually forgotten. Not the first day of the year anymore, but the next, and it was, indeed, her twentieth birthday. Her brother leaned against the vanity, looked terrible in the green light, bruised torso, now a bandage taped under his left side. Compact, well-made, none of Baz’s willowy grace. She didn’t see anything familiar, familial, in him, not like with Baz, except maybe in the way he could hold her stare.
“Yeah,” she agreed, hand falling to her side.
He paused just enough so she noticed. “I remember… I mean—” and he petered out. She held her tongue, her questions. She waited tables weekends, had for almost a year, and she could tell when people were drunk, when they were too far gone to hit edit. Not him; he’d had a few, sure, but just enough to loosen up. He was still careful, while other things moved underneath. “I guess I was eight? You were born at home, M’man didn’t make it to the hospital. Scared the shit out of me. I thought she was dying.”
It happened to be one of the few stories that Maman had told her about life before. That Lutie had come early and fast. Boys, they were lazy, Maman had said, took their time, gave you the opportunity to plan things out.
Sol fiddled with the clasp of the first aid box, though it was already closed. “Dad was there, made me help. First time I’d seen anyone being born. Baz, he sent outside. He wanted to stay.” A small smile accompanied that. “God, I’m so sorry, Lutie. This is so messed up.”
Understatement of the year, but Lutie wasn’t going to argue. “You tried to find that thing, didn’t you?”
He lifted the box, winced, switched hands. “In the morning. Get some sleep.” He accompanied her to the door, gestured to the bag of salt—did she want it? She shook her head. She’d slept without saltlines across her door for her whole life; she wasn’t about to start worrying now. The devil, or whatever it was, wasn’t after her anyway.
In her own shabby room, she slept for a few hours, awoke mid-morning, cursed the lumpy mattress, and stared at the water-marked ceiling until she could put off going to the bathroom no longer. She showered, but there was no hair dryer, so she dressed quickly, slapped on some makeup. Happy birthday, she thought.
Somewhere in the depths of all the things piled on the chair by the door—bag, pajamas, yesterday’s clothes, coat—her phone rang. Diving in, she answered it by the third ring, heard a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday to You”, sung badly. Marshall, and Bree, Karen and the Major in the background. One by one they wished her well, until only the Major was left, and Lutie sat down on the bed, near tears at the calm sound of his voice, made for the pulpit, for the confession box.
“Whereabouts are you now?” he asked.
“Ogallala, Nebraska. I decided to drive Baz back to Denver. I might be a little late starting classes, I guess.”
A pause, because the Major usually heard it when she was lying, or unsure. He didn’t always point it out, though. “That so. How are you doing?” Because that was the important part, of course. To him, anyway.
“I don’t know,” and that was the truth. “Baz got sick, so we stopped and now Beausoleil’s here.” It all came out in a rush.
“You don’t sound happy about that,” the Major commented dryly.
She didn’t know how she felt about it. He’d been there when she’d been born, remembered things about her that she’d never known. “He’s a hard-ass,” she said instead. “Really pissed off that Baz went out and found me. Reckoned I was better off not knowing, I guess.” She didn’t tell her father about the other part, how Sol had known where she was, known about the Major and Karen and all the rest, and never come knocking. How would the Major feel about that, she wondered.
“And how are you doing?” A repeat question. He wasn’t going to take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer.
This time, “The usual. You know.” He did know, of course, had experienced it first hand and for man
y years, how she was when her expectations were high and unmet.
“You giving him a hard time?”
She clenched her hand on her lap, hair dripping. “Maybe. About the same as he’s giving me.”
That brought a chuckle. “Should I be worried about you, birthday girl?”
Her heart ached and she wished she was in that stupid kitchen at CFB Shilo, not down here where the money was all the same color and crazy people spoke with lazy accents about things that doctors told her she should take strong drugs for.
“Hey, hey, hey,” the Major cajoled. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.” He held on for as long as it took.
Finally, Lutie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, knew she’d just smeared her mascara to shit. “Yeah, I’m good, I’m okay.” She sniffed. “It’s all just. Weird.”
“Birthdays were always hard for you,” he said and that surprised her. She remembered cakes and parties and friends with those pointy hats. In photographs. That’s what she remembered, the photographs of those things. Not really the other stuff, not like it had actually happened to her.
“They were?”
He chuckled. “Yeah. You’d always get sick, usually some kind of stomach cramps. You never wanted us to make a big deal about your birthday, but then if we didn’t, you’d get all mad.” He made it sound like she was cute when she was mad, when she knew she was anything but. “I always thought that it was when you thought about your Sarrazin family the most, and wondered if they were thinking of you.”
Why was he always so right? A hard guy to be around, sometimes, because of that. “I don’t know,” she said, equivocating. He didn’t have to know how right he was.
He did though. A laugh. “When are you going back to Toronto?”
If she said ‘I don’t know’ one more time, he would get into the car and drive down, so she took a deep breath and tried to sound reasonable. “Soon. A day or two, I promise. I just want to make sure Baz is okay.”
“Take it easy,” the Major said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Or on them.”
Not all their phone calls ended in her telling him that she loved him, but this one did.
It wasn’t that he was weak-willed, he was just tired. Staying mad took too much effort and that had always been a problem for Baz; he couldn’t hold a grudge to save his life. He stirred as Sol came in the door, cold blast of winter cutting through the room, shaft of precise prairie sunshine slashing the bed like a laser beam. Baz groaned, pulled a pillow over his head. Sol didn’t tell him to get up, he didn’t have to. Instead, he moved around the room like the Tasmanian Devil, opening drawers, sorting through God-knew-what on the table, emptying broken glass into the metal garbage can. Shit, he could even make the reading of a newspaper sound like a full orchestra tuning up. Reluctantly, Baz came up on his elbows, watched his brother study the city section of some paper he’d retrieved from a bus shelter or restaurant. Sol never paid for anything he didn’t have to, a vestige of their upbringing.
No anger, no matter how hard Baz tried.
Sol was all about keeping things close, and it wasn’t surprising at all, now Baz thought about it, that he’d done what he had. Was it really fair to be pissed at Sol for just being himself? He should have told me, even if it was the wrong thing to do. It was true, that thought, and it didn’t matter.
This morning, Baz felt more himself, less shaky and hot. After Baz had dressed, Sol insisted on taking his temperature, being all doctorly and Baz let him, knowing it was Sol’s way of apologizing.
“So,” Baz said as Sol flashed a light in his eyes, “am I okay?”
Sol’s mouth twitched an almost smile, making things worth it. “Honest answer?” A practiced basilisk stare beyond the light beaming in his eye. Inherently funny, because Baz had received the look a million times and it never did anything but make him want to bug Sol more.
Baz giggled, dipped his head away from his brother’s penlight. Sighing, Sol tossed it into the medical box. Baz wanted to say something, to let him know what he’d done, but Sol already knew. More important to me to say it than for him to hear it. But nothing came out, and Sol moved off to the desk under the window, picked up the book of songs, flipped it open with one hand.
Then Baz’s phone rang, still that bayou jangle, and Sol looked up from the book, same level stare that would give a WWF wrestler pause, but not Baz. Sol’s mouth twitched again, trying not to laugh, and Baz realized that he wasn’t going to change that ringtone, not for a long time. Sol turned the chair around so he could sit in it while balancing the book on his bent knee. “It’s her birthday,” he said before Baz had a chance to answer.
“I know that,” Baz lied. God, the stuff that rolled around in Sol’s head, only to pop out like one of those nickel gumball dispensers. “Might not be her. Might be a gig. I’m in demand, you know.”
“It’s her,” he thought he heard Sol say, but he was already answering and he knew it was her as well.
She said she’d come over in a minute and Baz used the time to tune up his father’s fiddle. It was a beauty, beat up and mellow, the bridge slightly flattened so that double stops were easier. Baz experimented with a few notes, and Sol’s eyebrows twitched. Strange, but Baz had never been able to figure out whether or not Sol even liked music, let alone music that would remind him of the swamps. Sol certainly gave no evidence of inheriting their father’s musical talent. He inherited other things, Baz thought, but sadly, because who the hell wanted to be a ghost buster when you could be a musician?
“Okay,” Baz said. “What’ll it be?” And experimented with “Happy Birthday to You”.
Sol flinched. “God, please, no. That’d mean we’d have to sing.” He got up from the chair, the book still in his hand. “You know any of these?” he asked.
“Nah, I looked through them. They’re all Acadian, or straight from France, maybe. Not anything Dad would have played.”
“Yeah, but the notes are all in his handwriting,” Sol mused, scowling at the book.
“Did you phone Robbie?” Baz asked and Sol didn’t answer, but there was a knock at the door, and Lutie was there, effectively changing the conversation.
Lutie, after accepting Baz’s birthday greetings, immediately turned to Sol and said, “How’s your side?” gesturing with one hand and Sol held her stare a long time before shrugging.
“It’s okay.”
“Did you change the bandage? Has the bleeding stopped?”
Sol got up, eyes glancing sideways at Baz first. He offered Lutie the chair and wandered to the bed, sitting as far away from the both of them as he could. “I’m fine.” The garbage had been taken out, Baz realized with a jolt, incriminating bloody evidence gone, something that his brother had done before Baz had wakened instead of taking a shower.
“So, what’d you do last night?” Another fight wouldn’t have surprised him.
Sol leaned against the wall, legs stretched out, a hole in one dirty sock, right on the ball of his foot, like he’d been spending his time grinding out things against rough pavement: cigarettes, bugs. He hadn’t come to Ogallala with a change of clothes, had probably expected to scoop Baz’s sorry ass, haul him back to Denver, and let Robbie nurse him back to health. He’d only come because Baz had called.
“Yeah,” Lutie said. “You said that we’d talk in the morning. Well,” she paused, dry low voice betraying no humor. “It’s morning.”
Sol stared at her, head cocked to the side. He looked both tired and amused.
She’s better with him than I am, Baz thought, a little wondrous, a little sad. Maybe even a little jealous.
“I wanted to see if I could find that thing last night. It’s a devil, for sure.” One hand held to his side, tucked under an elbow, protecting a hurt, avoiding Baz’s open stare of surprise. New. This was new, this was Sol sharing and Baz had the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to like it one bit.
“A devil?” Baz asked, like Sol had just explained that he’d gone down to the tracks
looking for the Easter Bunny.
The shrug. “Un petit diable. C’mon. You remember Dad and his buddies. You remember them talking about this shit.”
The fiddle was still in Baz’s hands, and he remembered it in his father’s hands, circle of porchlight, summer on the prairies, smoke and rum and laughter. Devil in the kitchen and in the woodpile, songs of crossroads. Music, not reality. “Not a ghost?” He heard the uncertainty in his own voice. “It’s like a ghost, right?” He stared at Lutie, who shrugged.
“I saw it down at the tracks, when you were singing. It was talking to you.”
Sol cleared his throat and Baz had the sudden swooping sensation of ambush, that these two were working together. “Whaddit say, cher?”
Baz kept his fingers on the strings, plucked out softly, adjusted the tuning a little. He’d thought Lutie was on his side. “It knows my name,” he said, after a long moment. “And it’s been coming around. Not just then, at the tracks.”
“Since when?” His brother’s voice was uncommonly gentle, and somehow that scared Baz worse than anger or accusation. “How long’s this thing been hanging round?”
Baz looked up at Lutie, smiled a little, but it came out wrong. It had been hanging around a long time, he knew, longer than he was willing to admit, to them or to himself.
Back to his tuning, which was easier, finding the pitch. “How do you think I found you, T-Lu? I made a deal,” and his fingers stilled, understanding. “I made a deal.” Softer, this time looking at Sol.
“What kind of deal?” Sol’s voice was strained, despite obvious efforts otherwise.
Baz took a breath, and it came out in a rush. “It gave me Lutie’s address. It said we’d settle up later.” Like a draft choice traded; could be nothing. Could be everything. “It knows my name, knows Dad’s name…”
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