In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  THREE

  Daniel waited in the driveway and studied the truck. There were slight gaps where the windshield didn’t fit snug and they could be seen from ten feet away. The bed itself had come loose near the cab and had been welded back to the chassis. The brake lights simply didn’t work anymore. But Daniel had the papers from the mechanic for the safety, paid for with a bottle of whiskey and an hour in the mechanic’s shop sipping it from the bottle. He spat on the gravel and then went over to the truck and checked the box again, the clamp marks where his livelihood had recently been bracketed to the metal. Daniel couldn’t even pretend that he’d never lost the thing as the rear-end of the truck had been raised to account for the weight and without the welding unit the tail-end of the vehicle jacked skyward as if he were racing it at some kind of demented backwoods drag circuit.

  He wiped sweat from above his ears. His shirtback clung to him. They’d left the ball in the bed of the truck so he fished it out, turned around and started back toward the house. Stopped halfway and looked up at the pale blue sky. Tendrils of white trailing one lone cloud. He bounced the ball on the driveway with both hands.

  When Daniel heard the front door open he snapped out of it and cleared his throat. He palmed the ball in his right hand and held it out at his side. Madelyn came out to the drive and tried to snatch the ball away. Daniel faked and then held it high enough above his head that she couldn’t reach it. The kid told him to shoot. He looked to the net and tried to take a shot and it was disgraceful. All the mechanics of it were wrong. The ball missed the rim entire and clipped the one edge of the backboard and ricocheted to the side.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Madelyn was laughing as she passed him for the truck. Daniel went into his pocket quick, got her hand as she passed and put a ten-dollar bill in it. She went by without a word and without looking at what she got and stuck that hand in her jeans pocket. Madelyn climbed the back fender and swung her legs over one at a time. She sat on the box and waited, stared off down the county road.

  Sarah left the house with the keys hung from a foreknuckle on her right hand. She blew a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and looked at Daniel.

  “She’ll have had enough before you’ve even got there,” Daniel said.

  “I know it,” she said.

  “I’d come along, but I gotta see that man out in the hills.”

  “You think he’s the one who took the truck.”

  “I’ll know before long.”

  “You got wheels?”

  “Gotta walk down to Murray’s after. He says he’ll lend me his car.”

  Sarah let out a little grunt and then leaned in and put her arms around him and kissed him on the neck. She whispered in his ear and the fine hairs of it stood up. She unhooked her arms from around his neck. Got into the truck and shut the door and rolled the window down.

  “You ready, kiddo,” she called.

  Madelyn got down from the box and waved over top of it to Daniel.

  “See you after,” he said.

  He went to Sarah’s door and waited for her to clear the frame. She tried to pull it shut but it wouldn’t close snug until he leaned hard against it with his shoulder. He gave it another dig and then he looked up at his wife and tried to smile but couldn’t get it right. He backed up to let them go and stared down the driveway for traffic though there was none. Never was.

  “Hey,” Sarah called.

  He turned.

  “We’ll be back soon. Don’t wreck the place.”

  “No promises,” he said.

  Daniel was about to start his walk for the house but Madelyn called for him.

  “Dad,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  She had her hand up and was pointing at the knuckle side. He lifted his own and saw a band-aid worked loose from his one finger. Wander of red down the length of the digit.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Just a scratch.”

  The girl sat back. The truck rolled down the grade and he’d covered his one hand in the other as they left out. Sarah had an arm behind Madelyn’s seat and was looking over her shoulder to the road. The girl had her eyes on him yet. He waited until they were reversed into the lane and then he made for the house. He heard the transmission gear up to second but he did not see them go.

  Daniel showered and he stood in the bedroom for some time before he dropped the towel and let the air at his nethers. He found underwear in the drawer but no jeans. So he went to search them out wearing an old pair of cargo shorts. Found himself in the basement looking for the light switch. He’d set up a heavy bag there with duct tape covering the dried and cracking leather. The tape had worn out and been retaped and it wound over itself now, layered crooked throughout. Daniel walked by the bag like it wasn’t there and found his jeans in the dryer and made for the stairwell. When he passed the bag again he pawed at it with his left hand and the jeans slipped off his shoulder. He put them down and threw another light jab and then a hard jab and felt the heft of the bag under his raw knuckles and then he threw a one-two and stung the bag with a straight right and sent it spiralling counter-­clockwise. Spackling of blood on the old tape. He shook his right hand out and looked at the bruising there, the little tears in the skin. He stopped the bag and held it still. He backed up and threw a half-assed one-two and then whipped his right leg wide and drilled the leather with his shinbone. Sound like a nail being hammered in the hollows of the place. Daniel felt off-balance some, so he reset and then threw another right round kick. Turned his hips better. The support beam where the bag had been bolted shuddered and sent rumblings through the house. He stutter-stepped to throw a high left kick and rotated hard on the ball of his right foot and there his shinbone dug deep where a man’s head might be. Daniel finished the rotation with his hips and shoulders facing right and his leg came back quick and he stood at the ready again. He drilled the bag with a few more low kicks and they felt better and better and his hairless shins had gone red but they didn’t sting enough to bother him. Weird sensation in the skin, atop nerve-endings he’d long quieted in training rooms and in the cage.

  Daniel took up his jeans and shut off the light and went up the cellar stairs in pure blackness. Then he was out in the lit corridor. He shut the door behind him and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead. He went into the kitchen and sat in his shorts at the table and looked around the small house. There were fissures in the ceiling plaster and wind whistled through the sideyard door and the core-rotten window frames above the sink. The stove had been old when it was put in fifteen years ago and Sarah washed her dishes by hand in hard country water that had to run for a few minutes before the brown-red tinge of rust and seepage cleared out of the stream. He studied the old fridge with its lever-handle and yellowing corners and then he noticed that the fridge magnets held nothing there except for a few handwritten notes. No envelopes for their bills. Daniel looked around for just a minute more and then he got up from the chair. Flung his jeans onto the living room couch as he went by. A few seconds later he came past the other way wearing a sweatshirt and his sneakers and he left out through the kitchen with the screen door swinging wild and slapping back against the jamb.

  Daniel ran over uneven ground with knots of hard dirt and tallgrass and he heard his heartbeat up in his ears. He went up a gradual rise and passed a stand of elms. Near them a weather-worn cross, stabbed into the earth. He’d not lived there long enough to know who or what lay under that ground but he thought about it long after he passed. He made his way out toward the treeline and it did not come quickly and when he got there his chest ached. He slowed and stopped long enough to grab hold of the low-hung limb of a fir and his hand came back sticky with gum. Daniel was about to turn and make his way back but in the shadow at the forest-edge he saw something move behind the tree columns. A shape there. A second later it was gone and he didn’t know if it was an animal or just a trick of
the brain. He took one step onto needle-strewn soil that rarely felt sun and that one step was enough to turn him around.

  Daniel found his pace on the open field and headed home, left a trail of little dustclouds to settle in the grasses. The house that he went to sat lonely, penned in by dirt road and fields and the forest beyond. The kitchen side door swung free, as he’d left it. Moved on spent hinges by a chill easterly wind.

  FOUR

  Sarah took Madelyn into town through a series of winding concession roads. They came to a spot where the lanes dropped into a deep valley and Sarah didn’t slow. They went down into the dale and Madelyn had her right arm braced in the window frame. The trees on either side of the road were naked now but in other seasons the limbs of those trees would be so thick with foliage that they’d bend almost double and set the valley in shadow. Branches sometimes fell down onto the road in wild summer storms and in the winter ice and snow would build in the drop and send drivers sideways into the bracken at the road-edge or over wind-hewn snowbanks into frozen marshland. Madelyn had been likewise warned about that deep valley when she was younger, to not play there with her friend that lived on one of the bordering farms. Daniel and Sarah told her that it was dangerous. The schoolchildren who lived on those farms told her it was full with ghosts for all the travellers killed there. Madelyn knew every copse and hollow.

  In the town they drove from place to place. The truck sat in parking lots outside of rectangular buildings of painted brick. Worn-out flags flew the metal poles out front. Later yet, the truck sat crooked at curbside in front of banks and hockshops. Sarah went into those buildings with papers in her hands and came back with more papers and she propped a ledger against the dashboard and wrote in columns there and then put the papers away and then they went somewhere else. Madelyn waited inside of the truck and listened to music on the radio or slouched in the seat and fiddled with dials and levers. Popped the door-latches and then slapped them back down again. She read for a time from a book she’d brought. Kept her head low when she saw anyone she knew.

  At one enormous corner building Sarah parked the truck and got her papers in order. It stood tall enough to shade half of the block. Built of heavy brownstone, windows framed in oak. Madelyn set the book down.

  “You want to come in here?” Sarah said. “Take a look around.”

  Madelyn nodded and Sarah waved her out on her side and they both got out of the passenger-side door. They went across the sidewalk and up the rock steps, each wide enough to lay down on. Madelyn followed Sarah through the open doorway onto battered planking that creaked under their weight. The main floor was one massive room with a cathedral ceiling and row after row of shelves. All manner of bizarre and indescribable things set alongside cheap trinkets and items broken and obsolete. There were tarnished lampstands and light fixtures beside novelty coffee mugs and ashtrays. Old stereo equipment and speakers. Packaged popguns and rudimentary toy trucks and cars. Boxes of action figures with arms missing and teeth marks in the plastics. Ceramic plaques with prayers etched on them. Ships in bottles. An entire suit of armor standing upright in the aisle. They walked down the one side of the store and passed a series of glassed-in countertop displays of baseball cards and comic books. They came to a cash register where nobody stood and Sarah rang a bell and waited. Hocked jewellery close by, necklaces laid out on doilies and wedding rings fixed into the slots of a velour cushion. Madelyn had already started to wander. A woman came out from the back room and she had white hair and her glasses were too big for her head. She stepped small and quick, blinking all the while to better see who was there at the counter.

  Sarah spoke to the clerk for some time and the old woman nodded and then went to the back room and there was some commotion and something clattered to the floor and the woman could be heard cursing soft from somewhere in there. Madelyn had gone down the length of the shelf opposite the counter. Rows of porcelain dolls stood there, some near three feet tall. All were dressed in their finery and some had dolls of their own and they were glass-eyed and curly haired and wore shiny little shoes with metal clasps. Madelyn reached out slow and touched one of them on the cheek and then pulled her hand back. She looked down at her finger and then after a moment she reached out again and touched the doll’s dead glass eye.

  When they left the store Madelyn held a paper bag in her hand, the open end folded over on itself. They got in the truck and Sarah scribbled in her ledger one more time and then closed the book and slid it onto the dash with the pen clasped to its cover. Then she turned to Madelyn.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now, what do you want to do? You want to go down to the docks, get some fries?”

  Madelyn had the little bag held tight against her hip.

  “Maddy?”

  Madelyn looked up.

  “What’d you get?”

  The girl took the bag up and handed it over. Sarah opened it. Reached in and came out with a small folding knife. Handle of real wood. It looked like a toy but when she flicked the blade straight it was good steel.

  “You aren’t gonna make me take it back, are you?” said the girl.

  Sarah closed the knife over. Put it back in the bag and set the bag on the dash.

  “That’s a conversation we’re gonna have later,” Sarah said.

  They’d reached the northern limits of the town and met the two-lane highway that began there and led west and then south toward the city. They were to cross straight through and head home. Instead, Sarah took the truck slow through the intersection and then turned east. A lone man on a chopper passed them going the other way and he wore his leather kutte and club colours. After that there were no more vehicles travelling that barren stretch. The road hadn’t been assumed by the county and it ran through marshland and granite bluffs and over a narrow concrete bridge settled in swamp that led to places remote and sparely populated.

  “Do those bikers live out here?” Madelyn said.

  Sarah didn’t look at her.

  “There’s good people here. Good and bad. Like everywhere else.”

  By and by they found a wider carriage road with men repaving the lanes section by section. They passed a sign that marked Wahta Mohawk territory. The men stood by and watched the truck go. Slow on that winding throughway with forest on either side. Sarah let off the gas for a stretch, observed the rusted and part-hidden street signs until they neared a break in the treeline. No marker for that road. There she turned and drove the truck hard over buckled asphalt. A quarter-mile in and they were travelling on nothing more than dirt and packed clay.

  Sarah parked the truck at the side of the road and told Madelyn to stay put. She got out. There was a steel security gate between two lengths of stone-laid wall with no visible end, lines of razor wire bracketed to the flat top slabs. An intercom system had been built into the stone beside the gate. Sarah looked up higher and then searched the near trees. Sure enough she saw the glint from the lens of a small security camera set there to watch the road. She walked up and pushed the call button on the intercom. Nobody answered so she hit it again. After that she just pushed the talk button and went at it.

  “Anybody home?” she said. “I need to talk to Clayton.”

  She let go and looked over at the truck. Madelyn had turned to kneel on the seat. Watched Sarah through the back-glass of the cab. Sarah eyeballed the gate and the camera for a minute more. Then she started back toward the truck. She’d not made it three feet before the intercom crackled.

  “Who’s there?” the intercom said.

  Sarah took a deep breath and then turned and went back to the gate. She pushed the button.

  “You know who it is,” she said. “You can see me, Clayton.”

  She backed up some and waved at the camera. The intercom clicked again.

  “Alright. Come in,” Clayton said.

  The gate unlocked and started retracting into the actual stone of the wa
ll where the intercom was set.

  She pulled up on the open lot beside three other cars and a custom-built two-ton truck with a gunrack fixed to the cab’s back window. Three sets of levered hooks but they held nothing. She had her fingers on the doorhandle awhile before she got out.

  “I won’t be long,” she said. “You don’t get out of this truck for any reason.”

  Madelyn nodded.

  “Let me hear it.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Sarah laid a palm on the top of Madelyn’s head.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” she said. “Jesus.”

  Sarah got out of the truck and walked across the lot toward the house. Two stories of brick and timber with a narrow front porch, enough space to stand or sit between the outer walls and the wooden railing that ran the length of the decking. And there a man did sit, watching her with his feet flat to the planking and his hands in his lap. He wore jeans and boots and a brown leather jacket and he had scars on his face that could be seen plain. Still, he had a handsomeness to him. Light brown skin. Black, black eyes. Hair cropped to stubble.

  “Hey, Wallace,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said. “Been awhile.”

  Sarah had first met Wallace King when Daniel moved their family up north from the city, to Daniel’s father house. Wallace was born and raised on the island reserve and during high school he billeted with Arthur and Daniel through the winters, instead of taking the ferry to the mainland and riding another hour to school by bus. That was nearly twenty-five years ago. When Sarah met Wallace he had a wife and twin sons on the island. When he’d made enough money he moved them into the town of Marston, on the south side. The family still lived in that house but Wallace hadn’t for years.