There was a Canada goose in the bathroom, drinking fire retardant from the tub. It looked huge. I shook Toby at the goose, for its own safety, and it waddled down the hall into the kitchen, slipped, and then got scared and hopped on the stove and one-footed it up to the fridge where he opened his wings and lurched his shoulders and dove into the blue air. He fell like a stone then crested and gathered himself and rose again, banking over my head to give a long-necked rather joyous honk through the vacant space where Cuba used to be. I made Toby watch him. Then I remembered the definition of a pathetic fallacy. Why did she have to use the word pathetic.
The kitchen cupboards sagging from the wall like a sad black accordion.
I stood at the metal sink where so many of our conversations had occurred. I tried the tap and clean water blurted out. It rinsed off a bright patch of stainless steel that looked like a leaf made of pewter. It offered a leaf of hope, as though all this massive damage was minor repair.
The melted handles of screwdrivers. A burnt hammer. My father’s wrench, the only tool in the sunroom not damaged. Men with a machine out back.
Our chest freezer, hanging in the crotch of a seared fruit tree. Must have blown out the roof. My gold. The fire department was lowering it on a cable encased in yellow plastic, a winch from the front of a short fire truck. Hey, I said. The freezer was smouldering, like an airplane engine, or a bank vault from an airplane. Something heavy that had flown a distance. Three men guiding a hose to hose it down.
The lid and hinges fused shut.
There’s things in it, I said.
Youre not going to want to eat anything that’s in this.
It’s not a perishable, I said.
We waited until they could handle it. Then they cut through it with a chainsaw for metal. They ripped open the lid vigorously. They enjoyed the destruction, but then a waft of what was inside. A sticky coating of blue plastic and then chunks of cooked meat. Caribou. Men were walking away from the stink.
I got a thing stored in there, I said.
I hoisted out the chunks of caribou. They were desiccated and warm. Then in the bottom I saw the gold. It was one bright turd of gold, but it looked hot. The gold had melted together and formed a bar. A nubbly bar like a dumbbell. An eight-pound dumbbell.
Can you tell if it’s hot, I said.
A fireman reached in and picked it out. They hosed it down. Water against the gold, like a panhandler. Then the adjuster came around to the back and caught what I was doing. Nothing surprised him.
It was the arc welder, I said to the adjuster.
No, apparently a woman was out here burning a love letter.
Forensics had tested the skull. Probably raccoon. This from a guy in a blue police jacket. There had been a raccoon living in a false wall, he said.
ELEVEN
NELL’S JOURNAL was not dated but I could tell from the scenes described that it covered large swathes of life. You could read the print on the charred pages. Some of it. Some of it you had to guess at. I went to the post office and asked what I should do about our mail. That was you, he said. As if I’d torched the building. He rerouted our mail to a general delivery address. Then I thought about our phone, and that I’d have to do the same thing because the phones were destroyed. But then I realized the telephone message system still worked. In some ways your life can be utterly ruined but all the systems for that life stream on. There is, in selective corridors of tragedy, a brute force that persists.
I crossed Roncesvalles and went online at the library. Roncesvalles was named by a man from the area who had fought a war in Spain. I emailed Nell. I told her about the apartment. I tried to be composed. I said, gently, Where are you. I left off the question mark, that’s what made it gentle. I told her about the freezer and her journal and that if I didnt hear from her I’d have to read it, though it was an idle threat as the journal was hardly readable. Then I went online to check Nell’s stocks. She was involved in numbers and something in my head thought that, with an unreadable journal, perhaps I could understand something of her disappearance through the rise and fall of stocks. They were stocks chosen by David Twombly. Since IKW had gone private I hadnt had the guts to get back into the markets. I had made a windfall through David and put it into this bar of gold. But I keep a fantasy list, and thankfully I’m way down. What I had been doing was following my hunches. But to think one has independent hunches, as David told me, is to be fooled into believing there is no machinery in the world devoted to persuading us we have original thought. So what I had decided to do was to drum up my hunch and then act on its opposite. This too had failed. For often we are drawn to the dark side (David’s advice again). We prefer the bad. And in finding my hunch and then bidding on its opposite, I had done what I have done with friendships and occupations my whole life: chosen the thing I thought would be bad for me—or good for me—both in an attempt to open up a bright wing of Gabriel English. But this never leads to a new appendage, or at least the new work is no alteration of your essence. We’re creatures of routine, and the only way to jar ourselves from the repetitive nature of our actions and thoughts is to find new people in new places and live there with them. This was a revelation, this sense that fate was not ordained, but that our lives pan out in what can be called fate with hindsight, only because we are not awake enough to derail the replicating mechanism’s role of keeping us safe for a very long time.
I WOKE UP at the hotel and not in our apartment and I made coffee with one of those coffee satchels that looks like a diaper. On the table I had lined up Toby with my father’s wrench, Nell’s diary and the nubbly bar of gold. It was all I had left in the world. I called the front desk for messages but there were no messages. Then I remembered my home phone. Anyone calling would not know that the phone had died. There was a message from David.
David had spent the last two days glued to his pebble, working all his connections to get his no-fly status revoked. At times the appeal worked, but then, each time he arrived at his terminal, the airport computers refused him. The tone of his voice was patient rage. He had to see me, he said. So I called him back and said meet me at the Inter Steer.
I ate a bison burger at the all-day breakfast and talked to two Caribbean vendors I often saw in there. They were eating veal parmigiana sandwiches and playing backgammon and drinking coffee from a big aluminum thermos they had brought in themselves. They asked me how much their cars could fetch. They spoke a lot about money, how much they made, who paid well and where paid well. Getting paid bores me, so I thought of Nell and where she might be. But a bit about being paid filtered into the Wyoming, and I remembered that Nell had said she was paid the most when she worked at the pueblo casinos in New Mexico. I’d shouted at her and she didnt need to be shouted at. She needed to think about what to do and she needed help. She’d called a cab to the airport and asked the cab driver what airlines flew into the States. She would have got out at Terminal 1 and wheeled her carry-on to the American Airlines desk. They had an early flight into O’Hare and from there a connector to Las Vegas. Not that she knew anyone there. But she had been destroyed in the heart. She had worked for these American casinos, she knew the security systems. She would have gone there as a neutral site to think about things, about what to do. The plane passing over the Nevada desert, stippled with coarse bushes. She had no checked baggage. She just stepped into a cab and told him to take her to the Desert Fox casino. She had breakfast of black beans with one sunny-side egg and a tortilla shell with chilies. It reminded her of Santa Fe. This breakfast summoned up Santa Fe and her life with Richard Text. Then she walked into town as the sun built up a little nest to the east, past the Bellagio fountains but the fountains werent on. She wondered what time they began. A concierge explained that they were broken. Just a pool of still water. Lights shone on the water, and there was something quiet about the fountain, you knew it should be churning. All that money was for the water to dance. It made her uneasy and she went back to the Desert Fox and realized s
he was still hungry so she ordered room service. She did not turn on the television, and she kept the curtains open. She had asked for a floor high up. She was standing there, looking north, at the rim of the Canadian border, wondering why she was choosing such a small thing to do with her life.
I hooked up with David Twombly at the Inter Steer, a romantic place. He was used to private clubs, but was willing to slum it. The Polish car thieves were flipping through the mechanical jukebox pages. They were nocturnal men, who worked in pairs in the wealthy neighbourhoods, scouting out luxury cars and breaking into houses for car keys and driving the cars down to Lake Ontario where they rolled them onto shipping containers destined for Dubai.
We ordered the big Polish beers with the red and blue labels, Zywiec. The back of David was lit up by the cheery pockets of light from the jukebox. It was like someone had shook him out of a box of wine gums.
Driving into the sun at the speed limit. It got David riled up for some kind of action and yet here he was, stymied. The thought of the Hurleys made him slap his shaved head. He rose from his seat slapping his skull. He was going to have to drive his convertible there. How long a trip is that, he said.
A good three days, I said.
Youve done it, he said.
The last three summers.
Then I told him my place had burnt down. I told him the whole story and he enjoyed it, the place exploding like that fascinated him. He forgot it was my place, it was just an entertaining story. I said I was staying at the Days Inn.
You can stay with me, he said.
The hotel’s fine. Theyre paying for it.
Then he asked about Nell, if she’d shown up, what the last thing we’d done together was. He seemed to think there might be evidence in finishing touches.
I sense my wife will return, I said, without saying where she’s been.
Nell is not your wife.
Me: She’ll return as if no time has elapsed, and that might stick if she keeps a calendar and smudges off seven days.
David: If she folds time to the week and returns at least on the proper night.
Me:As though that window of time was something only I experienced while she continued on in the chronological world.
That’s the type of mindfuck, David said, women are capable of.
Now that’s bad. I touched the table with the tips of all five fingers. What youre saying.
David was echoing some deep resentment towards his ex-wife.
Hang on, he said, we’re at the Inter Steer, yes?
I agreed we were. I agreed that the Poles were going through a hard time. They had lost both a Pope and a heavyweight champion.
And how bad are you, David said. If you had to name a percentage.
One of the car thieves was making a slit-throat gesture to a song choice.
I’m half bad, I said.
We’re all half bad. It’s a seesaw battle like most elections. I like to let my badness reign in a place like the Inter Steer.
I said, Anyone can rationalize a lapsed week.
He ordered a plate of kolbasa sausage and it came with two slabs of dry rye bread. You know the Hurleys.
It’s been twenty years, I said.
You know what happened twenty years ago?
I stared at him.
Nell Tarkington came to town.
David said it like the start of a western. Then I noticed he was wearing a pair of blue pants with a yellow stripe. Cavalry pants. To Corner Brook, I said.
And met my father. Twenty years.
He did it as a newspaper headline, and I nodded to that.
You know the full extent of Nell and my dad.
The words full extent made my muscles below my ears prickly. I knew the full extent, pal.
What can be fuller, I said, than having a child.
I’m just making sure you know everything.
I’m the type of guy to forget facts like that.
But the image of Nell with a child bloomed in my head. Mother Nell.
Keep talking, I said.
You know this.
I hate it when you pause over delicious facts.
He went back to chewing his sausage. Did I want to strangle him. To press his big bald head in the vise of an arm. There was a lot of work in his cheeks as he chewed. A burnished indent, fleshy. Rough and soft and a variety of colour, plum, ash, pink. A crevice and those fangs of flesh, as though he’d gone through some aboriginal ceremony of cutting, a slice with a surgical blade, seasoned and weathered.
I grabbed the hand that was holding the fork. Youve got the kind of cheeks, I said, a gay man might have.
And David was surprised. Then he opened his mouth and laughed. You could see the chewed sausage in his mouth. He was like that god who eats his children, an articulate thug.
She was eighteen, David said. He wrenched free his hand. My father’s child, Gabe, you think about that the next time I talk about women and mindfucks.
Were these reasonable points of cause and effect.
The Hurleys, David said, adopted him.
Me:The Hurleys.
Old man Hurley.
I used to meet him, I said, on the Humber River, fishing. Loyola Hurley. The Hurley boys in a van with a moose bar. The plumbing company, we called him Cake.
Cake thought the kid was Joe’s. He loved kids.
And so I told him that Nell had mentioned this. That Nell’s son, with Dave’s father, had grown up with the Hurleys.
The very ones that nailed my father in a van with a moose bar.
You say moose bar with a certain vitriol.
There’s got to be a premeditation.
You mean a cause and an effect. Between your dad in hospital and Nell disappearing.
A connection. They rammed him intentionally.
But David had told me, on the phone, that it was his father’s fault. Randy Jacobs had told him that. I guess now David wasnt so sure. Gerard Hurley. We both knew him, we’d gone to school with him. Gerard had sold hash and was the first to use the metric system. The reason he used it was he could make more profit from cutting kilos into grams than pounds into ounces.
Me: And you think Nell would know.
Why disappear.
And I said I’d been thinking the same thing, only in my Wyoming state. It felt strange, I said, to be speaking it out loud to someone else. It made it more like an episode of a science fiction series.
Your Wyoming state. You want to elaborate on that.
I told him about Wyoming and then how death came in waves. When we were eighteen some of us were killed. Then recently friends were being killed again, cancer, the army, accidents. It felt like if you could get through the eighteen-year barrier you’d be okay for another eighteen years. The assassins come to the door in eighteen-year cycles.
Her Twombly son raised by Hurleys, David said. My half-brother. Anthony’s eighteen now. Stick that in your Wyoming.
I can do the math.
He’s a mixer for North Star Cement out by the Humber River.
You probably know his entire work history, I said.
And he did. He’d asked Massimo Sythe if he could use the IKW toolbox. From the toolbox he knew that Anthony assisted Loyola last winter stringing new wire through old outlets and that he’s used a pneumatic staple gun and he’s torched on roofs on Cobb Lane. What else. Anthony’s operated a backhoe when the men were on a lunch break. He’s taken apart the electric components to stoves and decoupled the coolant in freezers.
You know this, I said, because my youth was the same. You witnessed my youth.
Information, Gabe. Sales receipts, surveillance cameras, CPP contributions, vacation pay. Anthony is in the construction business.
I had applied for manual labour jobs because that is what my brother put down on the applications at manpower. I’ve mowed lawns and painted creosote fences and mixed plaster and combined gelcoat with hardener for fibreglass countertops. David did none of this. He’s never cut cords of birch and sharpened
the chainsaw’s teeth or french-polished rocking chairs and sold wooden figurines at the craft shop up on the highway. When I was thirteen I took over my brother’s paper route with a hundred and seventy-four customers and I operated the trap shoot and sold a salmon I’d caught at six in the morning for twenty dollars to a man who saw me trying to fit it in the pannier of my bicycle. I’ve collected rifle cartridges and sold them as scrap metal just as I’ve sorted through my mother’s cash register at the Bank of Nova Scotia and replaced the pre-1967 quarters and dimes that have a high silver content. Dave made money by supplying code to machines.
This work has made us the people we are, and now the new work has created Anthony Hurley, a presence in the world that was causing David’s world to warp and revolve around his. Though one could argue it was not the work but the domestic background of Anthony Hurley that was offering a form of blowback.
One of the Polish men came over and it broke the narrow focus David had. The man was carrying a travel chess set in both hands. We will play, he said, for those shoes.
He was pointing with his chin to David’s shoes. He was standing too close and I had to get up and breathe something that didnt have David’s breath in it. I’m going to drive down, he said. You could come with me.
Me:Why would I do that.
For the drive. Your apartment’s burnt down, Nell is gone. It’ll clear your mind, he said.
I left him in his cavalry pants with the kolbasa on his fork, to play chess and keep his shoes.
But as I walked home I knew that I needed to get away. I hadnt gone to Cuba, in fact Cuba had come to me. Cuba had tried its best to crush me in bed. I needed a breath of air and one island was as good as another. And true, there is something masochistic in me that desired to be close to the man who had deceived me. Who had pretended to be my friend. No, that’s not right. He was a friend. He was wrestling with the facts. Or perhaps, as I’ve suggested, David Twombly was oblivious. Perhaps the affair with Nell meant nothing to him now, and he addressed me without any feelings of superiority. This all fascinated me, and I had no sense of pride or manly indignation. Those were old-fashioned positions to be jostled with in twentieth-century books. No, the truth is I did feel like ramming the barrel of a shotgun down his throat and pulling heavily on the trigger, but I also enjoyed resisting that urge, and coddling a restraint. This is not a book my father will enjoy.
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