Elizabeth and After

by Matt Cohen

  He took the tape out and popped it into Lu-Ann’s VCR which he still had though her parents had called to ask him to return it, and suddenly there was Fred. Fred without his clothes, looking more like Fred-the-old-bald-bear in his catching outfit than any other Fred. Fred in what Fred must think to be Fred in all his glory. Then Fred and Chrissy. It wasn’t exactly a movie, even a dirty movie. Just a bunch of screw scenes strung together. Sometimes it seemed Fred was handling the camera, other times the camera must have been set on the tripod. Every scene had the same basic plot line though with certain very unexpected variations including some with a very unhappy Chrissy. There was no doubt that living with Fred was even worse than having to chase him around asking for a job.

  Ned watched the whole video, every frame, though there were at least a dozen times he paused it, checked on his uncle to make sure he hadn’t miraculously risen from his drugged sleep, and looked outside in case a posse of vengeful Freds was descending to rip away from him this unexpected item which he was very sure Fred Verghoers, would-be reeve, Allnew manager and midnight cowboy, would definitely prefer had not fallen into Ned Richardson’s hands.

  FIVE

  TWENTY-NINE. IT WAS SIX A.M. ON THE first of October so he had been twenty-nine years old for exactly six hours, the “exactly” because, as his parents had often told him, after a long procrastination, much of it on the kitchen table, he’d popped out just after the cuckoo clock Elizabeth’s mother had given them for a wedding present began to signal midnight. He has always liked the timing of his birthday: “The way sunset is to the day, October is to the year,” his mother had told him once. “October is the magic month.” He had enjoyed that, the idea that his month was the magic one. The month with the dying light, Indian summer, heat in the afternoon, turning leaves, the increasingly heavy frosts, the first snow, even Hallowe’en, the party at the end.

  October 1, six in the morning and still pitch black. Carl made coffee then started on the waffles. As a birthday treat from the birthday boy he had promised Lizzie that they could go to the beaver pond with the camcorder he’d started bringing home weekends so that when he started renting it out from the store he’d be able to tell the customers how to use it. This new item was Luke’s idea of a way to perk up business: “We’ll have the whole township needing one every time there’s a birthday party.”

  Two hours later Carl and Lizzie were lying on a soft fragrant mound of rust-coloured needles beneath the huge pine at the southern edge of the pond. As the mist came off the water’s surface Carl scanned the lake with the camera. Lizzie was curled into his side, asleep, her legs drawn up to her belly and her hands tucked between her knees. Carl aimed the camera for the beaver den, turned the zoom control on to bring it closer. The dark slick crown of a beaver’s head broke the surface; the water rippled as the beaver crossed the pond in their direction. Carl switched on the power and the camera emitted a high-pitched grating noise. Up came the beaver’s ears. Angry red triangles. Carl had them in the centre of his focus. Lizzie stirred against him. The beaver’s head rotated. Dark eyes glittered. Hoarse scare-the-enemy breathing rasped across the water. Then the beaver’s body convoluted, snapped forward; Carl had to jerk the camera to keep the creature in the field of vision as the broad tail slapped the water and the beaver submerged. “Got it,” Carl said but just as he spoke there was a crash in the underbrush, only twenty yards away, and before he could swing the camera around a summer-fattened buck leaped into the air, twisting, disappearing into the trees.

  When they got home Lizzie took the cartridge out of its plastic case and loaded it into the VCR while Carl made hot chocolate to drink in front of the TV set. The tape began with images from the night before. Lizzie, familiar with a camcorder because Fred had one, had taken the camera on a tour of the outside of the house, starting with the front door, which had been nailed shut in some previous era and had no steps, then walking around the back, the landscape bouncing as the camera jiggled in her hand. The camera climbed the back wall of the house, then whizzed up to Lizzie’s bedroom window. That was where she had tried to use the zoom feature. There was a good shot of white paint peeling away from the wood siding and of the geranium on Lizzie’s window ledge. Down the siding again, across the lawn to the garden. A brief duty tour of the small vegetable patch, most of it already levelled by the first frosts, then on to the real attraction for Lizzie: the wooden cross she’d spent hours making, then hammered into the earth over Marbles’ grave after Carl had finally decided it was better to inform her Marbles had been killed—in his story by a car—than to have her spend the whole summer searching. All this time the only sound had been that of her feet in the grass, a passing car, a few giggles. Now she spoke, her voice tinny and faltering: “Here lies the noble cat, run over by a brutal stranger. In this ground I sank this cross. But, brutal stranger, I would have driven a stake into your heart until your blood came out all over you. Yuck. Well, something anyway, I don’t know.” Meanwhile the camera lens had dropped so that the image was of Lizzie’s feet, shifting uncomfortably as she spoke, her shoes coming together as her voice trailed away. “I’m going to shut this thing off until I can find Ashes. He better not be dead.”

  The tape started again in the kitchen. Carl was holding Ashes up to the camera. “I’m Carl,” Carl said. “This is Ashes. We’re in the kitchen here and we’re hungry. As soon as the oven gets hot we’re going to put the chocolate brownies in.” Carl’s face got bigger as he walked towards the camera. “Move it over there, honey. Let me hold it while you pour the brownie mix in the pan.”

  “What if I spill it?”

  “You won’t. But if you do, I can make a movie of you cleaning it up.” Suddenly Ashes’ head filled the whole frame so that it went dark briefly, followed by an image of the table with a big blur in the centre.

  “She licked it,” Lizzie said.

  First thing in the morning Carl had taken the camera to Lizzie’s room. Lizzie had her pillow locked in a bearhug. Ashes was curled up and lying on her back. Lizzie made Carl rerun the footage of the cat. She said, “Well, I love him, but not as much as Marbles. Marbles will always be my favourite cat.”

  “Good thing Ashes doesn’t understand you,” Carl said.

  “He knows about Marbles. But I promised to love him a lot, just the same.”

  By the time they’d finished watching the video it was lunchtime. Carl went into the kitchen to make a salad to accompany the French toast Lizzie insisted on for her Sunday lunches, and when he went back into the living room she was sleeping, her face smooth and opaque. As he put a quilt over her she murmured, “Rub my back.” Ever since she was an infant he’d put her to sleep that way, rubbing her back in slow circles. His hand had covered her whole back and he’d barely touched it as he circled. Now her shoulder blades, once like stunted chicken wings, were sheathed and surrounded by the wiry muscles that propelled her along the monkey bars or sent her sprinting so fast that Carl had to strain to keep up. “More,” Lizzie said, and then started mumbling as she often did as she fell asleep, words from her dreamworld language, then she was gone.

  That night Carl woke up. Or maybe he hadn’t yet slept. These days it was hard to tell. For a moment he lay still listening for Lizzie’s breathing. For the last week she’d had a cold and Carl found himself checking her all through the night, the way he used to when she was a baby.

  His bedroom was directly above the kitchen. He was still listening to Lizzie when the refrigerator went on. At first a smooth hum, then a gradual rocking that evolved into an insistent humping rhythm. The other night Ray had come to visit and they were playing cards in the kitchen when the refrigerator got so excited it actually started to travel across the floor. “Got the devil in it,” Ray had croaked. “One of these nights it’s going to get all worked up and blow its own motor.” “Me too,” Carl had said, and Ray had wheezed, “Me too too” as they started to laugh at the absurd spectacle of themselves, two aging West Gull boys whose big night out was playin
g cards and drinking beer in the kitchen of the old Balfer place.

  Carl was lying on his back and slowly became aware that his skull was throbbing, a deep painful pulse that with every heartbeat pulled at his wound. He swung out of bed, gathered his clothes from the chair and went downstairs to the kitchen. Once on his feet, the pain drained away. He made himself coffee, had a piece of bread with jam which he ate standing up. Soon it would be time to wake Lizzie to get ready for school but right now the sky was still dark and through the kitchen window the only sign of the morning to come was a yellow October dawn that lay weakly across the horizon.

  Dressed, Carl put on a pair of heavy socks and his boots. Then he took his hunting jacket from the hook beside the door and went outside.

  The wooden steps creaked with frost as he stepped down to the driveway, but though the sky was clouded over, no snow had fallen overnight, and the ground and road were bare. Carl crossed the driveway to his truck. He had only intended to take his gloves from the front seat but now, opening the door and seeing his keys in the ignition, he climbed in and sat behind the steering wheel. He turned on the motor and eased out of the driveway onto the blacktop.

  Down the road a couple of miles there was a swamp. If the swamp froze hard before the snow, Carl was intending to take Lizzie there on weekends to teach her how to skate. Past the swamp he followed the sideroad that curved back towards the highway. Where the road climbed there was a sweep of sloped land facing southwest. Light shone from the barns of the fortunate farmers who worked these sun-powered fields; they had already started their milking and as the sun rose it turned their corn silos into giant silver obelisks. “All that money,” Carl said aloud. “Luke Richardson will find a way to screw you.” And as though at this iconic time of day it was necessary that every sentence uttered be a prophecy, Carl noticed as he came to the highway in front of the biggest and richest farm—one with three silos all to itself and a brick house adjoined by the ultimate local sign of wealth, a fence of green pressure-treated lumber surrounding an in-ground swimming pool—one of Luke Richardsons election signs was hammered into the centre of the expanse of lawn.

  He turned onto the highway, possessed by a sudden unwanted vision of the sun coming up to greet Luke Richardsons stepping out of every single house in the township, all at once, big grins on their faces, hands outstretched and waving.

  When Carl got home he woke up Lizzie. She had her arm around Ashes and when she sat up the kitten leapt to his shoulder and started licking at his face with his sharp sandpapery tongue. He made Lizzie’s lunch while she ate breakfast. Then he drove her into West Gull. When she got out of the truck and started walking towards the school, with her colourful little yellow-and-blue plastic lunch pail matching the yellow-and-blue school, something in Carl’s stomach gave way. He started the truck up again and drove slowly through West Gull, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. That black and unpredictable feeling in his gut had grown to fill his whole body.

  A few minutes later he was sitting in Fred Verghoers’ office at Allnew. Fred was leaning back in his swivel chair behind his desk, at one hand a computer with a Screensaver of a rabbit running across a field, at the other a telephone console with a panel of lights that were busily blinking.

  “So here you are,” Fred said. “Come to pay a return visit? Should I get Anne-Marie to bring you a coffee?”

  “Gave it up,” Carl said, “ever since I went into training to beat up the shitface who knocked me on the head a few weeks ago.”

  “What were you planning to do to him?”

  “Well, I don’t really have a plan. Just thought I might drive over to his office, ask him to step outside, see what happened.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t step outside any more. Maybe he’s getting a bit old for that.”

  “I was wondering about that, too,” Carl said. “But most likely he still thinks he’s a pretty big boy. Though he does prefer to work in the dark and from behind. But I don’t think he’d like to say that to my face.”

  “Well,” said Fred, “there’s a lot of different things people could say to each other’s faces. And there’s a lot of different things people could do to each other or with each other behind each other’s backs.”

  “I was wondering about that, too,” Carl said. “I figured he might think I owed him one.”

  “What are you doing here, Carl? Why did you come back? You still trying to get yourself killed?”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I’m not threatening you, Carl. See my little tag here? See my election signs all over the township? I’m building a life, Carl, and it’s going to work. What are you getting done? You going to spend the rest of your life down at the Movie Barn, renting out jerk-off kung fu movies? You’re just asking for it, Carl. You always have been. You figure you’re such a fighter and maybe you are. You can scare a little kid like Ned Richardson. But steal other men’s women and take them out for a quick screw, is that what a big man does? Fuck you, Carl, we’re even.”

  Following Carl’s birthday there were a few nights of sharp frost that cut down the remaining garden and left clouded skins of ice on his windshield. Then came a week of cold rain. The evening it stopped the sky was blue-black with an angry red edging in the west. Carl left the Balfer place about seven. He was dressed in a pair of grey slacks he’d bought at the shopping centre and under his ski jacket he wore the new blue shirt Lizzie had given him for his birthday. For the occasion he’d even got rid of his bandage, and with artful combing the remaining swellings and scabbed dots left by his seventeen stitches were almost invisible.

  When he arrived, shrub-surrounded spotlights were shining on the huge white house. Tonight it looked like the unsuccessful bastard offspring of a colonial movie-set mansion and the Acropolis.

  Carl had just stepped out of his truck and was patting the wrinkles out of his pants when Moira arrived. Except for awkward moments at the R&R, it was the first time he’d seen her since the night they’d spent together after he got back from the hospital.

  “My turn to say I just can’t do it,” she’d told him over the phone.

  “Your choice.”

  “I just can’t be casual about this kind of thing. I’m not the come-and-go type.”

  “No need to explain. You’ve been great.”

  “I guess I should wish you a good life or something.”

  “Don’t have to,” Carl had said. “See you around.”

  And now here she was, dressed like some kind of university girl, dark wool coat, dark dress, stockings and high heels. Her nice smile, her almost pretty face that wasn’t quite turned towards him, so he couldn’t tell if she’d been expecting him.

  “Hey,” Carl said. “Nice surprise.”

  At the R&R she had that brisk way of talking fast but friendly that was meant, he supposed, to combine professionalism with letting him know her heart was protected by chain mail. The last time, left alone with him for a moment, she’d asked him first about the Movie Barn, then Chrissy’s health. Before he could answer McKelvey had returned and Moira drifted off leaving Carl saying to himself that, all things considered, both times Moira had come to his house it had been on her own initiative and without an invitation.

  Moira glanced at him appraisingly. “Surprise for me, too. Look at you. Dressed like a real blade.”

  “Blade? Never heard that one.”

  “Everyone says it. Means kind of a sharp guy but I wouldn’t ask you to carry my wallet.”

  The front door was a massive wooden slab with a slit window that would have been the perfect place to conceal a machine gun. Beneath was a wide brass nameplate:

  LUCAS & AMARYLLIA RICHARDSON

  The doorbell, a dark green glass button illuminated from the inside, set off a two-toned chime. “You’d be doing me a favour,” Luke had said to Moira about the dinner, as if he was planning to call her father if she refused. Carl was standing passively, his mouth turned and thoughtful. Maybe Luke had got the wrong impression at
Carl’s place, and now had brought them together to deliver some unwanted advice. When Luke opened the door, his eyes went to Carl first, and he smiled, a big relaxed smile that made his face crinkle into a friendly cartoon. He turned to Moira, cartoon smile stretching wider, eyes flicking nervously away from her in that way some men have of pretending you aren’t there because they know they aren’t allowed what they’d like: to swallow you right up.

  “Evening, Moira.” His arm curved around her, barely touching, and he ushered them in. “Italian marble,” he said as she wiped her feet. “You ever get a windfall, all you have to do is ask Madame Amaryllia to redo your front hall.”

  The Richardson living room was all soft pastels and looked to Moira as though it must have come out of one of those decorating magazines at the R&R: peach wall-to-wall broad-loom, white laminate endiables, a pink marble fireplace with a neat pile of birch logs stacked beside it waiting to join those already crackling away inside. Luke led them to a battleship-sized sofa covered in apricot-rose leatherette with tasselled cushions in the corners. A Gordon Lightfoot song filtered discreetly through hidden speakers. Luke stood in front of them asking what they would like to drink, his fancy black Italian loafers winking from the peach shag like kinetic amphetamine eyes.

  A few minutes later, Amy appeared. Moira had met her a few times with her parents but they had never really spoken. Amy was squeezed uncomfortably into a red-sashed satin dress that made her look like an overcooked sausage left on a barbecue so long that its skin was about to split. Beneath her lacquered hair, her face was swollen and inflamed and with each step she seemed about to collapse. Moira struggled to rise from her oversized cushion.

  “Please,” Amaryllia said. She pushed Moira back with a tiny touch of her thick hand. Moira fell into place. The woman had little concrete blocks for fingers. “Did you get something to drink?”