by Matt Cohen
Moira nodded towards her glass. The sherry she had asked for, hoping to impress Luke with her ladylike choice, was making her tongue feel as though it had been coated with cough syrup. She turned to Carl. This had to be the strangest way to see him again. She had helped Lizzie select the shirt at the SuperWay. Thick blue cotton, meant to go with jeans, it was wrong with those slacks. He obviously wasn’t back with Chrissy. No woman would have let him out of the house like that. She tried to imagine describing this scene to Lucy: three fat fruity leather cushions away from a man she’d slept with, a man who might or might not be getting back with his wife, a man she might or might not like, and all she could think about was whether his shirt went with his pants. Also, to tell the whole truth, when she’d helped choose the shirt she’d wondered if she’d ever be unbuttoning it.
While they worked their way through their drinks Luke told them about the various places they’d had to search out to buy their furniture and carpet. When they sat down at the table, Luke explained that the made-to-order chandelier was of such splendour and weight that in anticipation of its arrival a special steel beam had been put in the ceiling during construction of the house.
From the moment they entered the dining room Carl had been eyeing that chandelier. Seven separate circles of lights, tiny pointed Christmas-tree-style bulbs shining on what must have been hundreds of pounds of crystal and silver. So bright you could hardly keep your eyes open. In fact, the whole room was done up like some sort of fake castle. The ceiling was at least sixteen feet high and aside from the chandelier and the gigantic feast-sized table with its high-backed chairs done in throne-red plush, was the extraordinary panelling on the walls, brilliantly varnished cherrywood with a bright flaming grain. Luke caught Carl running his fingers along it as they came into the room. “Full-inch tongue-and-groove,” he confided. While Amy lowered her head to recite grace, Carl calculated. The panelling was just above his eyes, say six feet, and the room was so large there’d have to be at least seventy running feet of panelled wall. Which made, Carl figured while eating shrimp on crushed ice with what seemed to be red hot-dog relish, somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of cherrywood.
After the shrimp Luke carved the roast. It reminded Carl of a hunk of meat at a restaurant buffet, grilled and channelled on the outside, the insides glistening with blood. Luke was standing over it, sizing it up as he went along, using a cordless electric carving knife that gave off a high buzz as he shaved slices onto the platter. Meanwhile, Amy carried the conversation; whenever she slowed down Moira would dutifully chip in with a question. Carl had been concentrating so intently on the price of the panelling that he half-missed Amy describing her brother’s farm, where their beef came from, but he did hear her say that some cows were so valuable people were offering to pay him five thousand dollars for just one of their eggs. “Sight unseen,” Luke Richardson put in. “If I could sell real estate that way I’d be rich.” Then he was doling out slices of Amy’s brother’s five-thousand-an-egg beef onto the plates and passing them around.
There was wine, too. French from France, Luke explained, and then Moira cut in to say she’d been to France on a tour. The only images Carl had of France were the Paris he’d seen in movies, especially the Eiffel tower, and the wine bottle on the table which showed a château fronted by a row of trees.
“With your parents?” Luke asked.
“Other kids,” Moira said, and Carl found himself grinning at Luke’s discomfort at the unthinkable thought of ball-cap-wearing gum-chewing teenagers spending their parents’ money roaming around some foreign country where they didn’t even speak the language.
“You ever go to France?” Moira asked Carl. She was right across the table from him. Luke and Amy were at the ends. The whole thing was out of a bad television show. “Did you?” she asked again. As he was trying to decide what to reply he felt the pointed toe of her shoe against his shin.
“My brother went to France about the cows,” Amaryllia said. “He was on a tour, too: cheese and beef. There was a whole group of farmers and they all came home pretty happy and twice as big as when they left.”
Luke Richardson was looking at Carl, eyes open wide, as though challenging Carl to match that. “My mother went to Rome and saw the Pope,” Carl said. “She asked for a special prayer to stop my father’s drinking.” There was a silence during which Luke Richardson laughed without making any sound and Moira looked down at her plate. Carl remembered there had been a big silver crucifix in the front hall.
“Just kidding,” Carl said. There had been a first weak Scotch and water, then Luke Richardson had refilled his glass, just as tall but without the water. He wanted to go outside, get some fresh air. Amy started talking again, this time about how she had travelled to Toronto and stayed in a hotel while she was choosing fabric for the curtains. With her brother’s wife. They even took her sister-in-law’s dog, a pedigreed Irish setter that knew how to use kitty litter. She shopped in Toronto all the time. She was Greek. She had some sort of passport problem and couldn’t shop in New York. Her brother didn’t like her going to Montreal because of the French thing. Which was okay in France but not at home.
“I went to France with my high-school choir,” Moira said. “We spent two years having raffles and selling cookies, then we went to this little town where they had choirs from all over the world.” She looked at Carl and added, “But I’ve never been to the West Coast.”
Luke started serving out the beef and Amy went to the kitchen because she’d forgotten the horseradish. For the first time since coming into the house Carl looked directly at Moira. “Help,” she mouthed.
“I wanted to show you this one.” The moose head, so big the rest of the body must have been attached on the other side of the wall, was stuffed and mounted on a giant heart-shaped plaque. Moira stood and stroked its nose as though she were about to feed it a lump of sugar.
“I tell him this whole place is a zoo,” Amy said. They were in another oversized room, this one windowless with mahogany panelling that rose to within a couple of feet of the ceiling, where it was topped by a trophy shelf. “My den,” Luke had announced. After admiring the moose, Carl and Moira sat down on a black leather sofa—across from them, on its twin, were Luke and Amaryllia. From side by side on the big living-room sofa to sitting opposite in the dining room to side by side again in Luke’s den: it seemed to Carl this dinner was an agonizingly slow dance designed to turn him and Moira into a couple. Or maybe they were to be the victims in some weird fairy tale Luke had concocted, one of those grim Grimm fairy tales where the children get eaten or turned into repulsive animals. If so they were in the right place. Except for a wall given over to gun racks, they were more or less surrounded by a taxidermist’s paradise. Beside Luke, a stuffed dog lay with its head in its paws, its mournful brown eyes permanently tilted towards his master. On the desk, on the arm of another chair, on the tops of two of the gun racks were stuffed squirrels and chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, even a skunk. From the trophy shelf hung wood-backed antlered buck trophies; the moose head above the fireplace, the one Luke had pointed out, had a huge spread of antlers that seemed ready to turn into wings and carry the moose crashing to freedom.
“There I am with it.” Richardson pointed to a picture of himself standing beside the fallen moose. He was holding his rifle by the barrel, its butt on the ground, and in his fringed leather jacket and wide hat he seemed to think he was some kind of old-time buffalo-hunting pioneer instead of a smalltown businessman who’d hired a booze-soaked farmer to lead him through some second growth to an animal all past and no future. “And there’s the butcher at work.” A picture of William McKelvey kneeling beside the moose with his knife buried in its guts, grinning to the camera with that after-killing look he often used to get, his mouth stretched wide and his eyes calm, as though for a few pacifying moments the life he’d just taken filled some gap in his own.
“Looks just like you,” Moira said. “I didn’t know
he used to look like that.”
“Thanks.”
“Just his eyes.”
Since dinner Carl had been drinking bourbon, trying to go slow but pushed along by Luke, who kept refilling the heavy cut-glass tumbler that fit so comfortably in the palm of his hand. Luke began to recount hunting trips with William McKelvey, different times Carl’s father had driven game towards him, the stag he’d missed because he’d fallen asleep waiting and woke up only when it crashed by, sporting a rack of antlers that would fill the back of a truck.
Suddenly Luke stopped. Carl was beginning to have the feeling he’d promised himself to avoid for ever, the thick dulled feeling he got when he’d had too much to drink. Luke Richardson was peering in at him, as though he knew how uncomfortable Carl was. Carl’s wound was pulsing.
“Hell of a thing at the store,” Luke said, his voice sympathetic, the same voice he’d had that first day when he came into the restaurant where Carl was eating his eggs.
Friend wanted. Someone to trust. Someone to take this drink from my hand. Someone to take this body from this house.
Now Carl remembered Chrissy telling him Luke was seeing Doreen Whittier on the side. “He takes her to the Fireside Motel in Kingston every Thursday for lunch. They get a room in a corner at the back, overlooking the squash court. Ellie Dean told me; her cousin works there. Sometimes they go to the lounge after to drink cocktails. Ellie went to check up one time and Luke spotted her at the door, made her come in and have a drink with him and Doreen. Said they’d just been doing the banking. Ellie made up some story about how she always stopped there to give herself a treat on the way home from the shopping centre.”
Carl pushed his hair back. He wanted to be sober, to be sharp, to see into the centre of Luke’s game.
“I was glad you could come tonight,” Luke said. “You know, your father meant a lot to me. I always felt bad that things went down for him. And by the time it came to me I should be doing something for him it was too late, he wouldn’t accept anything from anyone.”
His own man, his father always said about people he respected. Not Luke Richardson. He was just another of the geeks he took hunting. “What were they like?” Carl had once asked about two men his father had taken on a canoe trip. “Like the rest of them. Blind, deaf and stupid.”
Luke continued, “I was fond of your mother, too. A fine woman.”
On the one hand Carl was sober again. Luke’s concern had taken care of that. On the other his thoughts were still somewhere else, in that familiar place his mind had gone in those alcohol-soaked months after his break-up with Chrissy. He remembered living in an underground universe, a blurred rubbery world where everyone had mysterious subterranean tunnels connecting their minds together, so that while on the surface everyone appeared to behave with so much calculation and propriety, underneath they were really just moles stumbling about, butting and clutching at one another. He wasn’t that drunk now. Only drunk enough to remember. Only drunk enough to wonder what exactly was going on with Luke, who was now telling him about a time he’d met Carl’s mother in a Kingston men’s store, trying to choose a present for William McKelvey.
The idea of Luke Richardson and his mother doing something ten or twenty thousand years ago laid siege to his mind again. But whatever his mother had wanted, even blind and at the bottom of a dark tunnel, it couldn’t have been Luke Richardson, so he turned back to the conversation; Luke was saying how he’d told Elizabeth that what every man really wanted was a sweater so warm he could have coffee in the morning before making a fire.
“A sweater. I’ve got a dozen sweaters like that. Amy says I have so many luxuries I don’t even know how to appreciate them any more.” Between the leather sofas was a coffee table spread with hunting magazines along with a silver tray of liqueurs Luke had brought out. Amaryllia had taken possession of a snifter filled with a thick yellow fluid which she kept replenishing; yet with every sip her mouth pursed and she recoiled slightly, looking down at her glass as though it had just dealt her a nasty surprise. That would be, Carl couldn’t help thinking, how she looked when she kissed Luke.
“It must be fun to be so rich,” Moira said. “I wouldn’t mind being rich, so long as I didn’t have to work too hard.”
“You’ve got it, Moira. That’s the important thing. You can’t ruin your life over money. Your dad knows that.” Luke lifted his glass. “I have a little money, it’s true, but the thing that makes me different—you know what it is? Not hard work. This township is filled with people sweating their guts out and getting nowhere. They’d be better off sweating less and thinking more. But they don’t. And I do. Because what I’ve got is savvy. You ever hear of that word? You must know that word, Moira, you went to France. It comes from the French savez. You knew that, right?”
“We just went there to sing,” Moira said. “I didn’t actually take language lessons.”
“Neither did I. But I got the savvy thing. Having savvy is knowing what’s going on, and what’s going on is what I like to know. What do you think about that, Carl?”
Luke’s big head had been pointed towards Moira for a long time. Carl had been admiring Moira, the way she seemed to be able to face it down without either striking out or retreating. Maybe it was the navy dress. If she’d arrived at the Balfer place wearing that navy dress, he wouldn’t have known what to think.
“Sounds good to me,” Carl said. Though it didn’t. Everyone knew Luke Richardson had money not because of some French word but because he was born with it, and that he’d used what he’d been born with to screw people out of whatever they had.
“What would you do if you were in my position and you had all my money?” Luke’s eyes were on him now. It reminded him of something McKelvey liked to say: “Every now and then you get a chance to shoot.”
“I’d do something about Fred,” Carl said.
Luke looked into his bourbon. “I guess you would.”
“He’s running against you for reeve, isn’t he?”
“That was his plan,” Luke said softly.
“Fred’s the problem.”
“Carl. I’ve heard that tone of voice from you and from your dad. You touch Fred and you’re in jail for ten years. Do you believe me?”
“I believe you,” Moira said.
“I know you believe me, honey. It’s your friend who has me worried.”
Carl pushed himself up from the sofa. In the corner was a big pile of LUKE RICHARDSON FOR REEVE signs, just like the ones already scattered through the township. “What did you mean when you said ‘that was his plan’? Is something supposed to happen to Fred?”
“That would be ugly,” Luke said. “You know, Carl, you can’t see this because of where you’re sitting, but Fred’s a pretty interesting human being. Probably a lot more complicated than you give him credit for. In fact, Fred’s the big winner. Though he doesn’t know it, Fred Verghoers is going to be the next reeve. I’ve decided to withdraw from the race. I’m going to go down to Kingston and call a press conference. Pulling out because of health reasons is what I’ll say. Amy will be right beside me, a tear in her eye. Then I’ll announce that Fred has my full support. Hand on my heart.”
Now Luke had his big smile. Somehow, without seeming to, he’d managed to gobble everything down.
“You see, Carl, it’s better not to fight. If I let Fred beat me, then it’s not going to look so good on me, is it? And if I beat Fred, which I could and I would, well, everyone’s going to think it’s the senator’s nephew whipping the young lad and trying to grab everything for himself, and no one likes that. What’s more I’m going to have Fred against me—and you know better than me how unpleasant that is. So I’m going to use my savvy. I’m going to step aside to let Fred win. And Fred’s going to be my man.”
“How’s that? He might have beaten you anyway.”
Luke wagged his finger. “Nope. He wouldn’t have. Because, like I said, Fred has his complications though he likes to keep them to himself. But I�
��ve got something on Fred. Something no one knows. And when I say I’m going down to Kingston to be on television, our little Freddy will be so scared of my going public he’ll be the one having the heart attack. That’s why, when I withdraw instead, Fred Verghoers is going to love me.”
There was something about Luke Richardson’s voice, its smooth deep purr. That’s how he’d be with Fred. He’d tell him he was letting him win, then Fred would owe him.
“You know what I’ve got on Fred?”
“You tell us.” Amy had woken up.
“Something very interesting. Very unusual. Something our Fred has been trying very hard to keep secret. Something that must never leave this room.”
“Spill it,” Amy said. You wouldn’t believe the way she talked to Luke Richardson, Carl thought. She had a voice like an outboard motor. But Luke just smiled and put a big paw on her shoulder.
“Steady now, girl. Here it comes: Fred beats up on Chrissy. Sent her to the hospital over a month ago. Three broken ribs. Got copies of the X-rays in the office safe.”
Carl started up, as though he himself had just been hit. He saw Chrissy’s face at the dance, heard her saying “Not so good,” remembered the way she’d sometimes insisted Lizzie be back by dark. “Jesus,” Carl said.
“What I’ve got on him,” Luke said, “is that if he steps out of line I’ll let you at him. You can bury him alive. Let the birds eat out his eyes. Whatever you want. But not until I say so. Because like I told you before, you touch Fred without my permission, you’re in jail for a long time. And Lizzie’s not going to like that, is she?”
“I’d better go,” Carl said. “If you haven’t fired me yet, I have the morning shift.”
Luke’s big hand came up. “You will get fired if you leave before we talk about deer-hunting season. I don’t suppose your father ever took you hunting?”
Carl could only half hear Luke. He was picturing Fred in his swivel chair, comfortably leaning back behind his desk, his voice full of contempt. Fuck you, Carl, we’re even.