Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  She glances at her watch. It’s only a little past eleven. In this eleventh hour she was—once again—with her father, moving through the dark tunnel, terrorized by the flaming Medusa head, fleeing, fleeing into a void, a scream rising in her throat. She wakes up, gasping for breath as the images flitter away on blackened wings. The dream is hateful. If dreams exist to protect sleep, why, she wonders, do some destroy it?

  Lydia rises, pads into the dark living room, pushes through the double doors into the dining room, and into the kitchen, a route implanted in memory. She fetches some water, drinks it, goes back to bed and falls into fitful sleep.

  When the early morning sun streams through the east window into the living room—before six, a crazy hour—Lydia opens the old trunk in the second bedroom where she knows her father, like his father, kept the tools. She removes pliers and shears—ancient but functional. The old stepladder behind the kitchen door sends a shiver of memory through her; she can barely stand to touch it, but she drags it into the living room, opening it under the rafters. What she’s about to do feels mad. Is mad. But so be it.

  She pulls the big switch in the second bedroom to turn off the electricity. Tools in hand, she climbs the ladder, which wobbles, the rungs seeming to crack under her weight. A sudden lightheadedness threatens to overwhelm her. It’s not the height, it’s something more visceral. Terror. She is looking down on the electrolier that once, thirty-nine years ago, she once looked up at with disbelief. It is peculiar and ugly, a Victorian confection, a brass crab with five glass pincer feet—the light bulbs, which she should have removed first. Feverishly now, perspiring though the cottage is morning cool, she hacks and pulls at the electrolier’s wires and fastenings and soon—sooner than she imagined—she is done. The reviled lamp crashes to the floor in a glassy explosion.

  16

  Sometimes, most often on sleepless nights, at the turn of the millennium when the Internet was fresh and new, Dorian would enter Paul’s name into a search engine, heart in mouth, to see if his name or face would emerge on screen. Of course none did, not his Paul Godwin. His Paul Godwin lived only in memory well out of reach of AskJeeves and Dogpile and Google.

  He hardly knew what he was expecting to find. A death notice? A missing person’s report?

  And then, during one search, on a rainy Vancouver night in 2003 when he was living with Mark, his Paul Godwin materialized in an anecdote contained within an oral history of Upper Canada College: Paul ran away from school in grade eleven and went missing for six weeks. He wound up in Mexico and lived with a prostitute. Yes, a prostitute, a woman—as described in the book—with a parrot and superb collection of knives. He travelled by thumb and had no trouble in those more innocent days getting through U.S. customs. And he had no trouble getting back through U.S. customs on his way to Los Angeles where his adventure ended at a relative’s in Brentwood with a phone call made to his anxious mother.

  By the time he read this online, Dorian knew Paul had attended Upper Canada College. But Paul never said. At Eadon Lodge, after Dorian introduced “cousin” Paul, the usual getting-to-know-you conversations ensued, incorporating the question, where did you go to school? Some unextraordinary Toronto high school, the name of which Dorian’s long since forgotten. Why did Paul not tell the truth? Was it because the fashion of the day was to present yourself as a proletarian? It was only later that Dorian reckoned that Paul was running away—again—and this time probably didn’t want to be found.

  Dorian considers this as he checks the flight tracker widget on his laptop. Mark is flying in for the week. The plane is halfway to Alberta, scheduled to land in Winnipeg on time, 4:33 this afternoon. Lovely. Dorian’s been a good boy these last many weeks—well, goodish—but he has to admit to himself he is missing more the domesticity of life with Mark than he is having his pipes cleaned regularly. But what else will they do together—or apart—while he is here?

  He has forgotten how destinationless this corner of the world can be. No chic boîtes at the end of the road. Gimli has some weekend festival thingy. Mark might want to attend that, Dorian not at all. He’s avoided the town, though he’s shopped across the highway at the Sobey’s. A deep distaste fills him when he foots it across the parking lot and glimpses the town shimmering in the summer heat like some poisonous prairie Brigadoon. But he can hardly tell Mark why he wants to keep his distance.

  Something happened on the fifth day. Or maybe it was the sixth. It doesn’t matter. And it wouldn’t have mattered, would have been forgotten, but for what happened later.

  Where were the others? At the beach, probably. The cottage was unoccupied when he and Paul straggled in from the Petit Trianon to root around for something to eat. It was past noon, the heat of the day dissolving the cool of the interior. Dorian remembers his head pounding with hangover, his annoyance with Briony for tidying up the kitchen, for putting away the bread and jam and cereal and the instant coffee, his need for an aspirin. With the others nowhere in sight, Paul eased his hands past the band of Dorian’s shorts, nuzzled his neck and murmured an invitation to shower together. Tenting, he found Paul leading him by his third leg toward the bathroom—this new bathroom that Bibs had installed only a few weeks earlier.

  It was another one of the dreaded what-ifs that would flutter along his consciousness long afterwards. What if he had stepped into the shower with Paul? What if they had been together in the cubicle, oblivious to all but themselves, the noise of beating water their shield?

  But it was the only time Dorian refused Paul’s invitation. He didn’t say why, but he and Paul each knew the reason for his resistance. Someone might come in and find us together.

  “You shower,” he said, pushing away Paul’s busy fingers. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

  Dorian was allaying his hangover with a very large glass of Tang and a piece of toast, sitting at the dining room table, when his ears pricked to heavy footfalls on the front steps outside. Perhaps it was his being lost in a hazy reverie of sex, his attention resting on Paul over the wall singing in the thrashing water, that a heavy rap on the side of the door sent a shock down his spine. Through the screen, he could glimpse sunlight glancing off a figure in T-shirt and jeans on the stoop. But outside looking in, the figure, Dorian knew, would see only darkness, unless he pressed his face into the screen—which he did. Dorian, who had frozen, hoping the guy would go away, was forced to acknowledge his presence. Somewhere in those few seconds, the shower stopped and Paul stopped singing. As Dorian called out to the stranger, “the door’s open,” he heard Paul behind him open the door from the bathroom and water drip drip drip along the floor.

  But for the events that would later overtake them, Dorian would have recalled the scene as provocative, porn-ish. The guy who stepped into the cottage was about their age, maybe a year or two older, with dark lengths of spaniel hair touching his shoulders and a Sgt. Pepper moustache. He was brawny in an effortless-looking sort of way, Marlon Brando muscles straining below the stained T-shirt, but it wasn’t those raw charms that caught Dorian’s attention. It was the smell wafting off him—earthy, sweaty, feral. His skin, where it was exposed, glistened with sweat. Dorian saw his small dark eyes light in a strange way as they travelled over his shoulder to a place above and behind him. Dorian turned his head slightly and realized Paul was at his side, naked, towelling himself off, indifferent to the stranger’s presence. Jesus! It was over in a moment, but in that moment the guy had their measure, his eyes darting between them, a scowl twisting his lips.

  “I’ve got a delivery, bulk soil and sod,” he grunted. “Where do you want it?”

  “Have you got the right address?” Dorian asked.

  “Yeah, man.”

  “It’s probably for that hole where the outhouse used to be,” Paul remarked.

  “Right, of course, Lydia mentioned something about it. I guess … dump it next to … you’ll see a sheet of plywood on the north side of h
ere, covering the hole,” Dorian addressed who he’d forever after think of as the Dirt Guy. “You should be able to get the truck in, I think. You’ll have to manoeuvre around those three big rocks, though. You brought it in a truck?”

  “No, I brought it by bicycle.” Dirt Guy yanked a paper from his back pocket and thrust it at him. “I need a signature.”

  “We’re not the …” Dorian began, a prim response halted by an impatient glare.

  “If you’ve got a pen, man, I’ll sign it,” Paul said, wrapping the towel around his waist.

  Dirt Guy had a pen.

  “You know Lydia’s going to want us to fill that hole—some deal with her father,” Dorian said when Dirt Guy departed and they could hear the sound of a truck backing into the yard.

  “Maybe,” Paul said, shrugging as Dorian dropped another piece of bread into the toaster, “we can get out of it somehow.”

  The Dirt Guy was one of only two outside witnesses to Paul’s stay at Eadon Lodge. He remembers saying to Lydia later that day, when she remarked on the appearance of a pile of soil, that it had been delivered earlier. The details didn’t matter and Lydia didn’t ask. None of it was worth thinking about at the time.

  But later the Dirt Guy became, for Dorian, a figure of feverish paranoid speculation. He would be their nemesis. The man’s hard eyes and deprecating glance haunted Dorian’s imaginings for years afterward; he grew into a figure of almost occult prescience and lordly judgment. That night, that horrible night at Eadon Lodge, when Paul was a cooling corpse and he, Dorian, was sick with grief and fear, he told her about Dirt Guy. She worked reason on him. She had taken control. Why would this Dirt Guy have any reason to go to the police? Why, Dorian, why? But it didn’t matter. He grew possessed by the thought that he would, that he must, given that Paul’s disappearance was now the sole preoccupation of the nation. That everywhere in 1969 and 1970 they were looking for Paul. What had become of Paul? Where is Paul?

  Back in Rosedale, at Pastis, in early 1998, when Dix is dining with Dorian in advance of her trip to Palm Beach, the Internet is still largely a novelty to most. The conversation that began with Dorian’s seemingly innocent question about Dix’s children has turned to the early days of her search for her missing son. Dorian is by turns frightened and sickened and relieved by what he learns. Dix is stirred by half-buried memories and the interest of the handsome man across the table. The void left behind by her son’s disappearance never completely closed. Of course, it wouldn’t. She’s a mother. Dix, for a short while, didn’t find Paul’s absence worrying. It was the ’60s, hitchhiking was the vogue—until the Tate-LaBianca murders created a distrust of vagabond youths. But by early days of autumn 1969, when Paul didn’t return to Toronto to resume his studies as he promised he would—and he didn’t phone—she grew increasingly anxious. She went, of course, to the police.

  Or did the police come to her first? She can’t quite remember. The police found the conjunction of Rory’s death and Paul’s absence interesting and would have liked to have brought him in for questioning. They had no proof of foul play and the coroner ruled Rory’s death an accident, but a whiff of suspicion lingered in some quarters.

  None of this Dix tells Dorian, and Dorian only learns of it later from a friend who was a UCC old boy. What he wants to know, even though he can barely stand to know, is what Dix did about her missing child. As in the movies, what happened next?

  “Well, the police were no help. They didn’t judge someone Paul’s age, of sound mind and good health, to be missing. They presumed he went off of his own accord. So, after I got in touch with his friends and relatives, anyone I could think of who might know his whereabouts, I hired a private detective. Someone in Rory’s firm recommended him. He had a good reputation, apparently. But he had little success in finding my son.” Dix’s mouth forms a grim line. “In fact, he … I can’t recall his name now … believed Paul never crossed the border into the U.S.”

  Dorian asks sharply, “Why?”

  “No record, for one thing.”

  “But, Dix, in those days, to cross into the U.S., all you needed was—”

  “Yes, but they still took note of your coming and going. I argued with him, the detective. I was certain he went to Woodstock. That’s where he said he was going and I … I had no reason to think that wasn’t true. I wasn’t convinced U.S. border security was very diligent.”

  “And the second thing?”

  Dix looks blank.

  “You said you had another reason your son might not have crossed into the U.S.”

  “Ah.” Dix sips her Chablis. “The detective—Tony, that was his name. I just remembered—found a truck driver who made an identification. This driver picked him up somewhere around Vaughan and dropped him off in Barrie.”

  “Barrie,” Dorian repeats dully. He can feel a flush of perspiration along his skin. Barrie is sixty miles north of Toronto.

  “There was no reason for Paul to go to Barrie or stay in Barrie. I knew of nothing connecting him—or us, our family—to Barrie.”

  “Maybe he was coming back to see you. Didn’t you say you had a cottage in Muskoka? You can hardly avoid going through Barrie.”

  “But he’d only just left me to come back here, to Toronto. And if he were going to our cottage, he didn’t arrive. If he got as far as Barrie, he must have continued on to somewhere else. He had taken his backpack, the one he had used in Europe earlier. He was hitchhiking, as you kids did in those days. So where did he go from Barrie, if Tony is at all right about Paul not going to the U.S.?” A kind of raw grief breaks through her voice, startling Dorian. “Not east. If you were going to Montreal or Ottawa, you wouldn’t go by Barrie, would you?”

  “You might,” Dorian responds hesitantly. “Sometimes you take the ride that’s available and make compromises.”

  “Did you hitchhike in those days?”

  The question catches Dorian off-guard. No. No! The idea is grotesque. Paul had hitchhiked and look what happened. “No,” he says, “I never did.”

  The trail vanished there. No one came forward to say they saw Paul anywhere between Barrie, Ontario, and the Shell station west of West Hawk Lake where Dorian picked him up. But someone, or some few, had. Did Dorian ask him about those rides? Who picked him up? What had they talked about? He only remembers asking Paul if anything, you know, like, happened—did anybody try anything? And Paul smiled and said no, though afterward, Dorian wondered if someone as unrestrained as Paul didn’t have an adventure en route and that someone along the Trans-Canada Highway remembered him and would come forward. The notion that some man—or some woman—out there in the vast hinterland of northern Ontario might recall Paul jabbed his waking thoughts for years until, finally, it seemed there was no one to come forward, there was no investigation.

  Only Dirt Guy—and one other guy—resolved into an identifiable witness. And where was Dirt Guy now, today?

  17

  Lydia runs the cloth over the shotgun and watches the dust fall in lumps to the floor next to the Victrola. Whoever cleaned the cottage for her mother in June missed that item. Fear of guns? Afraid it might go off? Perhaps. It did before, once. But the rack in which the gun (COOEY MODEL 84 MADE IN CANADA, she reads on the side of the receiver) rests is difficult to reach if you’re woman, and though Lydia is five feet, seven inches, she uses a kitchen stepstool to reach it. She wants badly to clean the tops of the frames of the portraits of her great-grandfather and great-grandmother farther along the wall—assuming they’re as neglected by Marion’s cleaner as the shotgun—but she would have to climb onto the old sideboard to do so. The urge to clean is like a virus in the blood. She will end up doing it. But first, she steps off the stool, wipes her brow with the back of her hand, and studies the shine.

  It was Paul who observed that the shotgun seemed to be pointing at Great-grandfather Eadon and made one of those Freud-would-have-a-field-day remarks,
which raised Alan’s hackles—Freud’s pseudoscience violating some dialectical materialist canon, apparently—a harbinger of unpleasantness to come. This came soon after Paul and Dorian arrived at Eadon Lodge with Paul asking for a cottage tour. She remembers something playful and charged in those early exchanges with Paul. She felt immediately drawn to him, but not unaccountably: He was beautiful. And he conveyed such a lively curiosity about the artifacts his eye happened upon in this museum of a cottage.

  The shotgun, for instance. This gun that so shattered their summer idyll. Lydia never saw it off the wall, never saw her father carry it or oil it, though she mightn’t have paid attention to him doing so. She never saw him shoot with it, though a box of shells rested at the back of the old desk drawer. She had an idea her father once hunted with his father, but he hadn’t since boyhood, had he? She must have asked her father about it, when she was very small, with a child’s curiosity, but she couldn’t remember his reply then. She can’t remember it now. The shotgun by the time of Paul’s visit was simply another expression of the masculine taste that governed Eadon Lodge. Deer antlers projected from one wall. A First World War helmet and a regimental sword decorated another. Boy’s-bedroom pennants of places visited left few spots blank. There were flags, many flags: the Red Ensign, Union Jacks, a Stars-and-Stripes with forty-eight stars.

  “Do you shoot?” Paul asked her, his dark eyes a dizzying thing.

  “No,” Lydia replied. She was charmed that he asked, her, a woman, without seeming to condescend. She remembers this—the charm. Not silky, it felt. Sincere. She remembers, too, Alan snickering, as if the notion of women with guns were absurd.