The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  “And the Democrats will just be standing by when they walk into your house or blow up city hall. They’ve cut defence spending until…”

  Frank closed his eyes again. Sleep was slow in coming.

  The next morning, he sat down at the table and wrapped his hands around the warmth of his coffee cup, determined to try and talk sensibly with Mrs. Pearson.

  “They’re just inventing enemies, Mrs. Pearson. Making up a threat because it suits their ends, which is getting the right people back in office.”

  “Invented enemies didn’t blow up the twin towers,” Mrs. Pearson said primly.

  “American foreign policy started the…”

  She interrupted him, waving her hands dismissively.

  “We’re bringing them democracy, Frank.”

  And night after night, the voices continued to whisper their fractured sweet nothings into Frank’s ears while he tried to sleep.

  Until Thursday.

  Thursday, Mrs. Pearson was quieter than usual. Quieter, after Paul came by to visit and two Dorset soapstone carvings left with him, jogging heavily in his jacket pockets with each step. Mrs. Pearson said wistfully that she had owned the walrus of the pair for more than sixty years, and that its absence would “leave a little hole in my heart.”

  She went to bed early, and Frank took the opportunity to do the same. About one a.m., Mrs. Pearson turned her radio on, and the house filled with soft and angry words.

  Around three in the morning, Frank suddenly thought he heard the front door open with a slow, drawn-out squeak. And then he was fully awake.

  “You rat bastard terrorist,” Mrs. Pearson shouted from the other end of the house, and then the shooting started. Frank heard two quick blasts, and then another.

  By then, Frank was on the floor next to his bed, wondering who Mrs. Pearson had shot. He stayed there for a moment and then crept down the short hallway towards the living room.

  The front door was wide open, and the living room was full of grey-blue gunpowder smoke. Frank saw Mrs. Pearson sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, the shotgun between her knees.

  Up over the front door, there were two gaping holes in the gyprock. Frank would remember thinking she must have had the choke cranked down tight on the shotgun, because all the pellets had stayed tight together, making the smallest holes possible. If she’d hit someone, he thought, she’d leave a hole the size of a grapefruit. A chair he knew she had never liked was blown apart, vomiting stuffing and springs. It looked like it had been shot at very close range.

  The air was sharp and sulphurous, and he wasn’t sure what Mrs. Pearson could see, settled in the dark corner like a chubby spider in a web, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Pearson – it’s me, Frank,” he called, loud enough to be sure she heard.

  “I like you, Frank,” Mrs. Pearson said distractedly, “so it will be all right.”

  She leaned back in the chair, and both of them could hear the sound of sirens in the distance, growing louder as they rapidly approached the house.

  “You should put the gun down, Mrs. Pearson, before the police get here. You wouldn’t want to get yourself shot.”

  “We’d better get our stories straight here, too, Frank.”

  The sentence came out hard, like a command. Frank could imagine the way her face would be set in straight lines, over there in the dark, the way her face would bulge outwards hard below the cheekbones when she set her jaw.

  “Let’s say there were two of them, all in black, and they sounded like foreigners. They were foreigners, actually,” Mrs. Pearson said. “And they were out here for a while, digging around, because we heard them. They got a bag of stuff, we don’t know really what. And then I scared them off.”

  Mrs. Pearson opened the bolt of the shotgun, and he heard the click as she pressed in a fresh shell. Then she bent over and set the gun down on the floor.

  She looked up at Frank, and he thought that she was smiling.

  “My goodness,” she said, clapping her hands against the side of her face in mock dismay. “It will take ages to figure out everything they’ve taken. We’ll be finding stuff missing for months.”

  “There weren’t any…” Frank started.

  Then Mrs. Pearson reached out one hand towards Frank, who was still standing just inside the living room door, confused, and held a finger in front of his lips, a single, wrinkled, gently shaking finger. He could see her face more clearly now, and her words came slowly.

  “Frank, sometimes it’s what you choose to know,” she said as she pulled her hands back towards herself, palms upward. “Let’s just say I’ve bought you and me a little more time.”

  Better Than This

  WATCHING FROM THE WINDOW IN THE kitchen, Margaret saw the car as it slowed down on the road, saw it as the turn signal came on. Her hands were flat against the front of her jeans, the palms unconsciously rubbing up and down along her thighs.

  Two people in the car, and Margaret Hennessey knew who they were – Alicia and Dan, the Forrestals, reservations for the next two days – and she had already tried out their first names, speaking them softly in front of the bathroom mirror and watching the way her own lips moved.

  Margaret’s farmhouse was tucked back into the side of a forested hill, triangular wedges of spruce running upwards and surrounded by the brighter greens of birches and maple, and out in front of the house, there was a long, close-cropped field running down to the road. It was midsummer, and outside the grass was already mostly brown, dead straw, a nest of earwigs curling around each other under the unused child’s slide. The front door was open in that way that suggested hot, airless, still nights – open as if trying to invite in any possible current of air. Two dogs – big, black dogs lying in the shade cast by the corner of the house with their muzzles on their front paws, also watched the car stop at the top of the long gravel drive from the road.

  Dan got out of the car quickly and came around the hood, around to Alicia’s side of the car even before she had her door fully open.

  The dogs were up and at the end of their chains in an instant, barking furiously, their collars pulled deep into their necks, hanging half-leaping forward and gasping as if the chain could break at any moment and let them hurl forwards. Margaret strode down the hall and out the front door quickly, snapping a dish-cloth at the barking dogs.

  “Down!” she said sharply, turning to the couple. “Don’t mind them. More show than anything else. They’ll quiet.”

  She could see the Forrestals were shaken, and it made her want to reach out to protect them – the bare, almost-empty look that flashed across both their faces, the way they edged closer together and Alicia reached out and took Dan’s hand.

  The couple stayed that way even after the dogs had flopped back down in the dust, panting. They were meekly holding hands as they walked into the house behind Margaret. Newly married, Margaret thought as the couple followed her inside, their faces still soft and unformed. The thought made her smile, remembering.

  Through the front door, it was possible to look in and see all the way up the stairs. The door was on the left side of the house, a bay window on the right, and the front of the house – wood shingles – was thick with old white paint, coat after coat. The old windows were covered with aluminum storms, the aluminum weathered and grey. Over the second floor, a high, peaked roof of green asphalt shingles, the pitch of the roof too steep to climb or to even stand on.

  Deep in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotian apple country, the farm was boxed in on both sides by long rows of apple trees, tended in that careful way that makes each tree look hobbled – the top suckers clipped away carefully every year, so the tree stays low and fans out strong, crabbed lower branches. Easier for the pickers in the fall when the apples get heavy and bright red, but a kind of trimming that leaves their silhouettes low-shouldered and hunched, branches reaching for the ground.

  The trees also had a way of standing like a fence, like
tired sentries with grass growing up between their feet, regimented lines that stood between each orchard and the next running down the length of the valley. The farms were spread out along both sides of the road, but not across from each other – their presence assumed, rather than seen. There were neighbours who were near enough to call for help – and ready, too, ready the way they had all been when they rushed to the big dairy barn near Gasperaux as it burned hot and fast early on a spring morning, the cattle all lowing at first, and then, awfully, all silent – but also far enough away that a passing wave of the hand on the way down the road counted as socializing. Her husband Jack’s family was even nearby, the closest geographically a quiet brother named David who lived up behind them on North Mountain in a trailer on family land. But even the family kept to themselves.

  It made the white farmhouse with the perfect trim like a kind of gingerbread prison.

  It left her wanting to go anywhere, even to get out to the crumbling shoreline club at Evangeline Beach – Margaret loved even the idea of that, the thought of seeing anyone else she knew, the idea of a night among people, any other people. She seized every chance, even going to the Top Hat in New Minas with Jack when the strippers (“the peelers,” he called them) came to town. Just to be out – to drink rye and to laugh and to sparkle and flirt – Margaret could remember a time when she did just that, before they were married, when they would wake up beside each other and wonder just how the hell the car had gotten back into the driveway, and which one of them had actually been driving.

  When the sheets were a knotted turmoil, when the nights were panting and desperate and eager, and there was a reason to want to be far away from everyone.

  But things settled. Settled onto a straighter road, she thought, and then right down into the wheel ruts.

  She was better than this – she told herself that, over and over again.

  Better than this, and she should never have wound up here in the first place, married to an orchard and a tank-sprayer, married to a man who was flat on his back, asleep on the couch at nine o’clock almost every night, a short row of Alpine beer cans next to him on the carpet.

  In her mind, they were supposed to work the place together, and she saw herself striding down between the rows of trees in something as romantic as a gingham dress, the sleeves pulled up past the elbows of her long arms, the laundry flapping out behind her on the line like signal flags. In her mind, it was supposed to have been noble and romantic, the sort of nobility that comes from working together to downright pull success right out of the ground with your bare hands.

  And there had been a clear shot at that, at least at first. She had worked the orchards, until it became obvious that the only time Jack actually needed help was at the harvest, and then there were plenty of migrant pickers to hire for that.

  “Look,” Jack had said, working on the tractor, wiping oil from his hands and turning towards her. “I drive better than you, and there’s really only driving. The pickers’ll stack the bushels.”

  “But I want to help,” Margaret had said.

  “Well, then help by staying out of the way.” He might not have meant it to feel like a slap.

  The pickers came first for strawberries, then zucchini, then the cherries and plums. They came last for the apples, lots of apples, and for a few brief weeks the valley would be full of people twisting the fruit off stiff woody stems, and seeing how many bushels they could get paid for in a single, cold-breathed fall day.

  She had even tried winter logging, up on the long hill, cutting hardwood to sell cut into junks, and for big softwood for the mill, but she just wasn’t strong enough to keep up, to keep pressing the big sawlogs chest-high up into the rick behind the tractor. And then Jack had gotten Bill Preston from down the road, a quiet bull of a man, and Bill didn’t even have to wait for Jack to put down the saw: he could lift the big, snow-covered eight-foot lengths into the rick all by himself almost every time.

  Then she and Jack had tried miniature horses, brie fly and expensively, ending up worse off than when they had started. Then they bred black Labrador retrievers. That had all died off – and pretty quickly, too, as quickly as the last two litters of puppies when the power failed for two days in a March ice storm, their mothers disturbed and wandering away from the puppies, walking out of the kennels and around the dog runs, the dogs shaken by the noise of the clattering, ice-covered trees.

  Soon there was just the house, the occasional liberation of shopping for groceries. The nights were too quiet, and the days were worse.

  The tourist cabins had been one last desperate throw of the dice – Jack had built them without even complaining about the cost of the materials. Three small cabins in a line down one side of the field towards the road, but they had been her idea, and then suddenly, her responsibility, too. There was something about the cabins, about the way they all lined up evenly below the house. It was all right, Margaret thought, when there were people staying there, when there would be cars or minivans in the three narrow driveways, when there were lights on at night. Otherwise, they looked oddly out of place, even though Jack had planted them as evenly as if they had been three more trees in the orchard.

  He had done the framing for the concrete, had put up the stud walls and the gyproc, talking all the while to his green-bubbled level, lips barely moving. She had plastered and picked out paint, hung wallpaper, put down the floors and finished the trim. And for a while, it was like they were working together – but only until the three low buildings were finished. They shouldered the box springs and mattresses in together, painted the outsides of each cottage, and one night they sat on the floor in the cabin furthest from the farmhouse, drinking beer. Margaret looked across at Jack, and for a fleeting moment saw a glimpse of the boy she had fallen in love with.

  “It looks good,” Margaret said, reaching out toward the newly-painted wall with one fingertip.

  “This one could actually work,” he said, grinning. “We should celebrate.”

  She was surprised how much she had missed his touch, how exquisitely good his hands felt on her bare hips – and she revelled in reuniting with her big, strong, eager boy.

  But then, like a door slamming, things returned to normal, returned to worse than ever.

  When winter came, he was out the door almost without speaking at seven in the morning, leaving the farmhouse as cold as it was when he got up. She would make her way down to the kitchen wrapped in a housecoat to light the kitchen stove, to try and coax some heat from newspaper and thin slivers of kindling. Once the fire was going, always a little smoke coming back into the room, she’d sit on a kitchen chair and draw her feet in up under her, under the edge of the housecoat, and wait until the metal of the stove started to warm the room and nibble away at the delicate frost flowers on the inside of the window glass. Then she would stand in the porch and smoke furiously, short, sharp breaths of cigarette smoke, hating every puff, absolutely unable to stop.

  Spring, when it came, was a relief, even though the snow kept coming back – snow in April, again on the first of May, snow on Margaret’s birthday, eight days deep into May when the first of the apple blossoms might appear in warmer years.

  No one rented the cabins until the end of June, and even when they did, it was somehow disappointing: one evening, the yard in front of the cabins would be stuffed with kids and noise and the smoking barbecues, and the next, it would be empty again, as if someone had pulled the plug and all the noise had been sucked like water down the drain. They’d be gone, and Margaret would look out the window and imagine that the swings on the swing set were still moving back and forth, so sudden was the change. It felt like they had built a way station on the highway, less a destination than a place where visitors stopped on an urgent journey to someplace else.

  July was slow, August was practically still. Then the Forrestals arrived.

  She took their credit card and gave them the keys in the small office she had made out of a desktop in a narrow close
t by the stairs, thinking it was funny how being alone so often could make you notice so much about other people. Like the way Alicia would take a half-step sideways towards Dan as a matter of course as soon as you spoke to either of them. To Margaret, it didn’t seem that the Alicia was possessive, as much as it seemed she was sheltering behind the slender, dark Dan.

  Alicia’s eyebrows were so blond they were virtually invisible, and it gave her narrow face an almost permanent look of puzzled surprise. She was willowy in the way that makes you think of fine hands folded, protectively praying in front of someone’s chest. Dan was a good counterpoint – not a big man, really, but solid and dark-whiskered, as if he had to shave twice a day. They were from Halifax, just over an hour’s drive, out of town for the weekend.

  Walking out to the middle cabin, Margaret hoped they wouldn’t mind that the dishes didn’t match, that the glasses and silverware were a collection of remnants scratched up and bought cheap at yard sales and church bazaars, that the magazines were year-old Maclean’s and decorating magazines with a thousand ideas for inexpensive quick-fixes.

  The Forrestals drove down behind her slowly as she walked, making a short and formal procession, and there was a fleeting moment when she wondered what they thought of her legs. Just for a moment, really, a distracting thought as if a black fly had buzzed too close to her ear. Then the engine of the car was off, and Dan was pulling luggage from the trunk and Alicia was opening the door.

  “I can pack you a lunch tomorrow,” Margaret said. “if you want to go exploring.”

  “That would be nice,” Alicia nodded, and Margaret was only three strides back up the drive when she heard the door of the cabin close, and the snick of the doorknob turning inside, setting the lock.

  In the morning, it was homemade white bread and roast chicken, heavy with mayonnaise and wrapped tight in Saran. No apples yet, but fleshy yellow plums, the kind that burst sweet and wet on your lips with the first bite. The fruit rich for only a few days, going past quickly when the skins turn transparent and the flesh goes soft.