‘I don’t want the police here.’
‘He’s dead, Alex. A cold corpse.’
‘They can’t get an ambulance up here in any kind of time.’
‘They’ll send a plow if there’s an emergency.’
‘What does he need an ambulance for?’
‘Because he’s dead.’
‘They’ll send the police with a plow.’
‘Alex,’ said the big man in the black leather vest, ‘no police. No ambulances. Nothing with a siren.’
He’d appeared on the landing and stood with his arms crossed over his chest, staring at Alex. Then he turned and stared at Wrists.
Wrists scrunched his face, swallowing something he meant to say. Then he did a funny thing. He spread his fingers wide at the big man and said, ‘Poof.’
Wrists turned to Alex and said, ‘We don’t need an ambulance.’
‘What are you going to do,’ asked Alex, ‘pack him in the van? Up on top of the drum hardware? Where are you delivering him to?’
‘It’s Rodney Levermann,’ Wrists said. ‘What’s he going back to?’
Wrists walked down the stairs. People in the crowd tried to ask or start conversations or begin questions and he pushed past them with his shoulder and walked out the door.
‘Where’s he going? Hey, somebody go talk to him.’
‘I’m getting the phone.’
‘Nobody’s phoning anybody. Everybody, just chill out. I’ve got to think.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Alex. Rodney is dead. He’s dead and all you can think about –’
‘No one is phoning anybody until we get this figured out,’ said Alex Main.
Audrey sat against the wall with her arms wrapped around her knees, and beside her Hector Highwater smoked a cigarette down to the filter and lit another. His forehead lay on his wrist where he’d landed or placed it, she thought. He put it there for softness on the cold step. The cigarette smoke made her mouth dry and phlegmy and she wanted to hack and spit.
She looked around for the skinny silver-haired man in the cowboy hat she’d talked to the night before. She felt like he’d know what they ought to do. But she didn’t see him anywhere.
Downstairs, the door opened and Wrists came inside. He walked up the stairs carrying a steel toolbox in one hand and a crowbar in the other. He must have gone out to the shed, thought Audrey. He walked past the knot of people standing around Rodney’s body.
‘Hey, Wrists,’ said Alex. ‘Wrists, hold on.’
He pushed through the crowd up the stairs and they watched Wrists walk to the top of the landing, then to the double ballroom doors. He pushed the door open with a shoulder.
‘Hey, Wrists,’ shouted Alex. ‘Shit.’ He ran up the stairs, two steps at a time. They all followed him. Audrey stood and followed the crowd up the steps to the open ballroom door.
In the ballroom, Wrists stood on top of the stage. He knelt and opened the toolbox. He had a framing hammer and the crowbar. He put his weight on a bent knee and set the crowbar tooth on the floor at the seam of two boards.
‘Hey, Wrists, come on, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do. Don’t fuck around, it’s a distraction,’ said Alex Main.
‘You’re the one doesn’t want any cops,’ said Wrists. ‘Doesn’t want any cops or ambulances.’
‘Wrists, what are you doing?’
‘Well, Alex, I apologize, but I’m going to pull up a lot of these floorboards.’
‘The hell you are. Why on earth?’
Wrists raised the hammer and Alex took a first two running steps toward him. He ran and Audrey jumped, tackled him in the midsection like he was a running back, and the two of them sprawled onto the ground. Alex threw her off, startled, and got to his feet, but she was up first, and she reached and bunched her hand in his shirt, and before he knew what was happening she hit him in the face with a closed fist. She’d never hit anyone, and the jolt of his solid cheek shocked her arm up to the shoulder. His head snapped back and he staggered to the ground. Her hand throbbed in hot pain right to her collarbone and someone grabbed her from behind and pulled her arms around behind her.
‘What the hell?’ muttered Alex from the ground, holding his cheek.
She meant to say something but had no words. Someone else worked their arms behind her and separated her from whoever had held her originally, and she stepped away, her hand pulsing in bright pain. She didn’t turn to see who either of these people were.
Alex looked up at her from the ground, eyebrows up in bafflement. ‘I just need a second to think is all,’ he said.
‘Like I say, I apologize,’ said Wrists. He lifted the hammer and hit the crowbar’s tooth into the stage, one swing. Stood and, leaning, pried up one of the floorboards. He pried it up at one end, then further into the middle of the board, then further until he could bring it up whole. He stood holding the long pine floorboard, painted black on top, bright pine on the sides and underneath, staring at the floor, thinking.
‘Dick,’ he said, ‘I need you to go to the shed out there. There are a couple of sawhorses. Bring those up here. The sawhorses and the circular saw. It’s up on one of the shelves, and there’s an extension cord hanging on the pegboard, I think I saw.’
‘Sure thing, Dallas,’ said Dick Move.
By the time Dick brought the saw and sawhorses, Wrists had pulled up several armfuls of narrow floorboards, exposing the thicker blond two-by-ten floor joists underneath. He plugged the saw into the orange extension cord and Dick ran it over into the wall. The blade whirled up, loud, and Wrists cut into the joist, spitting sawdust out behind him, sawed out a two-foot length of wood. Dick brought the sawhorses up onto the stage and they laid a long thin floorboard across them. People smoked and stood or sat quietly, and Audrey wanted to sit down on the floor but didn’t. Koop went to the bar and picked out a bottle of whisky.
Wrists laid floorboards across the sawhorses and cut. He cut them into seven-foot lengths, eyeballing as best he could without a tape measure, which he laid down on the stage. Koop brought the bottle through the crowd and people drank from the mouth while they watched Wrists work. When the bottle was empty, he went back for another. The air filled up with sawdust, the smell and the dust up in their noses and settling on people’s shoulders and heads like snow.
He laid four of the cut floorboards flush together and three of the thicker joist lengths perpendicular across these. Made a pencil mark on either side of each joist and then cut these with the saw to the width of his four floorboards. Laid them back across at rib intervals, then found short nails in the toolbox and started to nail it all together.
‘What do you want for runners?’ asked Dick.
‘Let’s cut some longer stretches of the floor joists,’ Wrists said, and Dick nodded.
They pulled up more floorboards and people watched, taking the bottle from Koop when he brought it around. Alex Main sat on the floor watching and took the bottle from Koop for a long pull. His cheek already turned red. Audrey didn’t sit down on the floor like she wanted to, and she took the bottle from Koop and the whisky was hot and made her mouth water.
They cut longer lengths of joist from the floor, two six-foot pieces, and laid these flat-ways on either side of their project, then hammered them into the ribs. They each took an end and flipped it over, the runners on the bottom now, sitting on the sawhorses. A simple sledge, with high sides. Or a coffin on sled runners. The same thing, Audrey supposed.
‘Dick, Hector. Let’s go get some firewood out there on the lake.’
‘Sure thing, Dallas,’ said Hector.
§
The sun went down at six and they carried chairs down to the beach while the last blue light pulled back behind the easternmost black peaks. Chairs and stools from the mezzanine and ballroom. Folding chairs from the third and fourth floors, a couple of rolling desk chairs from Alex’s office, wooden dining chairs. Two teenagers carried a loveseat from the parlour. They sat in their chairs wrapped in sweaters and
blankets.
Wrists pulled the sledge by a length of rope looped around the front-most slat. He walked forward across the ice while everyone on the shore stayed quiet. He leaned forward, pulling the sledge, leaving a flat, wide wake pressed into the snow behind him. The lean and the wake showed them the weight, wrapped up in white bedsheets, bound up with grey gaffer tape, at the shoulders, waist, hips, knees. He must have done the wrapping alone, away from everyone: no one had seen him at this task.
In the middle of the lake the pyre waited, a dark mound against the grey surface. Wrists and Dick and Hector had carried wood from the shed out before the sun went down, back and forth, each with an armful stacked up chin-high, and then they laid out a bed of split logs and cross-hatched the top with kindling and stuffed the seams with splinters. Now Wrists was there and he knelt and struggled the sledge with its burden up onto the pyre. There was a red jerry can, which he uncapped and lifted, splashing everything in gasoline.
‘Somebody should say some kind of prayer,’ said Dick Move on the shore. ‘He’d have wanted a prayer.’
‘Rodney was the only guy I knew could find something useful to say in a circumstance like this,’ said one of the women with the Bettie Page haircuts.
‘Amen,’ said Hector.
Wrists backed away from the pyre and crouched. Then a flash: a sparkler candle, spitting sparks. He tossed it forward and white-yellow light burst up ten feet. White and yellow and orange in the deepening blue-grey night. Wrists backed slowly away from the blaze, then crouched, watching. The flames made yellow edges pulse around his black silhouette.
Audrey stood at the lakeside with her arms hugged around her shoulders. She stood shivering and then turned around to see Alex Main carrying a couple of wooden chairs. He set them down close to each, and he had a thick wool blanket that he flapped out and spread over the chairs. His chin was red where she’d hit him. Red like the knuckles she’d hit him with.
He stood beside the chairs, waiting. She looked at the chairs and the quilt and then back out at the fire on the ice.
‘Fine,’ said Alex Main. ‘Freeze standing there.’
She sat down and he sat down next to her. Pulled the blanket over her shoulders. She could feel the heat of him underneath the itchy fabric.
The fire burned and burned and the people on the shore watched the flames or stared up into the sky or spoke in hushed voices to the closest person until a crash raised everyone’s attention, when the ice, softened from the heat, gave way under wood and body weight, and the pyre dropped into the cold water. A huge hiss choked out the flames, and steam and smoke billowed into the grey-and-blue night.
Her breath caught and she choked it and sat up as straight as she could, blinking, not looking at him beside her, even though she felt him staring.
She watched Wrists walking toward them, away from the steaming hole in the ice. He closed the hundred yards and stepped off the ice onto the snow-slick rock beach without breaking stride. He walked past the crowd in their chairs without slowing or looking at anyone. Up the beach and between the arms of the Crash Palace. They sat wrapped in blankets and sweaters and then someone stood up, and they folded or lifted their chairs and followed Wrists into the building.
‘I guess Koop will be busy tonight,’ she said.
He nodded and the quilt around her moved with his shoulders.
‘He’ll need a hand,’ she said.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Alex said.
They sat together under the blanket, staring out at the steam rising out of the hole in Two Reel Lake.
‘This was their last stop,’ he said after a while. ‘The road gets plowed out, you’re going to drive them back to Calgary. Take Dick to work. Take Wrists back to his ex-wife and his daughter. What then?’
She didn’t know, she realized. She imagined standing somewhere in Calgary, handing the van keys back to Wrists. Her Honda Civic somewhere in the airport parking lot still, covered in snow. Her unopened termination letter from Moose Leg at her parents’ house in Canmore.
She thought about the drive up Highway 11 to Two Reel Lake. About all the side roads she’d passed on the way. A whole alternate series of overlay worlds, little gravel-covered portals like from science-fiction or comic books, trap doors into secret places. All she’d need to do was get the Honda Civic up here. She’d already learned how to make Caesars and Manhattans. Get her baby up here and make Caesars and Manhattans to keep the tank filled.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘I hadn’t thought that far.’
‘Well, don’t think about it now.’ ‘Okay,’ she said, and didn’t.
14
DECEMBER 2009
SUNDAY NIGHT
Yellow eyes watched her through the window. The little kitten sat outside in the night, on its haunches on top of the rain barrel, watching Audrey through the glass.
‘Kitten. What are you doing back out there? How’d you manage that? Come inside. Come on.’
She walked slowly toward the glass, made each step as gradual as possible. The kitten stiffened and stood. Audrey stopped and waited. The kitten looked over its shoulder, then back at her. It padded across the barrel lid to the window. Audrey reached out and touched her index finger to the cold smooth surface. The kitten swung up a paw. It bumped the tiny grey pad against the glass and could not close the last distance to Audrey’s fingertip.
Audrey tapped her finger and the kitten mirrored her movement. ‘Hold on right there and I’ll go get the door. We’ll get you back inside.’
A coyote walked into the circle of window light and stopped a few feet behind the rain barrel. Rusty brown fur shot and mottled grey, its tongue hanging out of long, scruffy jaws. Audrey stared, stiff, her finger still pointed into the windowpane at the little kitten. The coyote leaned into its feet and walked toward the window. Audrey smacked both of her palms loudly on the glass. The kitten scampered backward. The coyote lifted itself up to the barrel top on its front paws, opened its mouth, and shut its jaws around the back of the kitten’s neck. It turned around with the kitten dangling from its teeth and walked back across the snow, out of the window light into the dark. Audrey stood with her palms flat on the cold glass, her mouth open, watching the bushy tail disappear into the night.
She pulled herself up the stairs two at a time, grabbing the brass bannister for another limb of force in each step. Around and up each landing into the dark top of the building.
The case at the back of Alex Main’s office was locked. She jiggled it back and forth. She turned and shoved paper off the desktop. Found a brass letter opener. She dug at the lock with the tip and nothing happened.
She wrapped her hands around the office chair and lifted, hoisted it up by the arms. She put it on the desk for balance and got a better grip around the stem between the seat and legs. Lifted it and took a breath. She bent her knees and then threw the chair up out of a lunge and it did not fly like she wanted, but it hit the window hard enough and the glass shattered. The pane cracked and split and the chair and long sharp glass shards fell down on the ground. She squeezed her eyes shut at the impact and didn’t flinch, still forward in the momentum of her throw. Stood and waited a moment after the crash had finished and she was not cut. No shards stuck in her arms, no shrapnel cut her cheek or forehead.
She took a leather-bound ledger off the desk and used the spine to smash out the teeth of glass still standing in the cabinet walls.
The rifles were not locked or chained, and she took the longest from the centre. Heavy and solid, smooth wood and cold to the touch. Too heavy. She put it back and took a slimmer one, a shorter barrel, less mass in the stock and body. She raised it up into her shoulder. Shut an eye and looked down the barrel. Felt the trigger. She pulled back the bolt and the chamber was empty. She leaned the rifle and looked in the cabinet. She opened drawers in Alex’s desk where she knew she’d seen them, and found a cardboard box of bullets. She loaded three brass rifle rounds into the magazine.
Out
side on the ice, snow blew into her face, lifted up off the lake, and flung into her cheeks and eyes. The thick low sky screened and limited the moonlight and she squinted into the dark. No details, only shapes: where the far shore stood above the lake, where the sky zippered in and out of the treetops. She carried the heavy rifle forty-five degrees across her chest like an oar. Her feet sank into drifts as she walked out across the lake. The sharp snow crust bit her ankles and calves when she lifted her feet out of the snow. She stared ahead into grey and paler grey shapes. She watched for the eyes. Was there enough light for them to reflect?
If she were incapacitated they would know. A wrong step and a twisted ankle. If she fell or sank, they would understand, no matter how far off they were. They’d slip out of the dark and pour down and over in a flash. Oily fur and strong stringy muscles, bright teeth, sudden in the dark.
She knelt on the ice and laid the rifle across her thighs. The cold shot up from the ice into the balls of her feet and knees and into and through her. She held the cold wood and metal tightly against her chest and shivered.
It walked into her peripheral vision from behind. Strolling twenty yards to her left. She lifted up off the ice, the muscles in her thighs shaking. She shook from the cold and the size of the world behind her. Just the one. It just rolled right up to the window and closed its jaws. A mother might pick up her baby by the little scruff where the coyote had bitten. Audrey raised the rifle and she was shaking and had to lower it back down for the longest, deepest breaths she could manage. The coyote stopped and looked back over its shoulder at her. She raised the rifle up to her cheek.
Squeezed the trigger and the barrel jerked, stock kicking back into her shoulder socket. Yellow light sudden in the dark, and the bang crack burst and whipped back from the hillsides. Straight back into the ball of her shoulder, yellow light flashing through the backs of her eyes, and her feet slid out from under her. She fell hard on the ice, the yellow thunderclap and burst of pain all the same sensation. The coyote bolted and she heard yelps behind and the sound of paws running in the snow. She turned, ears ringing white after light splashed on her eyes, and they were running in different directions. Three four five. From behind her. Paw prints in the snow, scattered where they’d wheeled and turned ten feet behind her. The crack-back echo in her ears. The coyotes howled and she lifted herself onto her knees. She pulled back the bolt and the shell kicked out, flew hot past her cheek. A hard smack in her shoulder, harder on her hip, a bruise blossom throbbing on the bone ball. She shook, and yowling echoed off the valley bowl sides out and back. She stood shaking and coyotes ran across the ice fifty yards from her. She put the stock in her sore hot shoulder and the barrel down her squint sight shook widely in her hands. She followed the running coyotes with the barrel eye squeezed and could not grip the shake tightly enough. Yowl crack snap echoing off the hills.
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