There was a culvert, I said. Right? You did see a culvert, like this was no fucking set-up.
I thought I saw one, he said.
What I want to know is you didnt plan this sort of outcome.
I dont know, he said. I might be a little bit out of my mind right now.
I’ll go and get help, I said.
Call 911, Dave said.
We didnt feel rushed because there was no chance of him being saved and it felt like the respectful thing to do was to give the body a moment of peace. He was obliterated. You could hear cars on the highway in the distance. Those Micmac men slamming the doors of their truck.
Okay let’s put him in the car, he said.
But I’d come around to the idea of not disturbing a crime scene. I’d remembered that. And when youre in a car and there’s an accident youre supposed to stay with the car. Although the car was fine.
I’ll just get some stuff out of the back seat, I said.
I opened the trunk and there was the shovel that we’d used to bury Bucephalus. We both saw the shovel, the dried mud on it. The moose walked off into the cherry trees and something in me imagined us burying Anthony.
Who saw us, Dave said.
Dave we’re going to bring him back to the police station.
No one saw us pick him up, Dave said. Just listen to this, Gabe. I’m a dead man if we bring Anthony in like this. I may get off with manslaughter, I might be out on probation, but I’ll wake up one night with a slit throat.
It made me think of David in a grotesque way, of the Hurleys gutting him and quartering him up. It felt, in some part of me, like the proper response. How it would be easy to transport a man like meat, for who would expect such a thing. A man in four quarters wrapped in gauze hanging from meat hooks in a shed in St Judes.
Then David’s pebble went off. Hello, he said. Hey. It’s good to hear you. We’re good, I’m with him now, do you want to talk to him?
He passed over his pebble. It’s Nell, he said.
Nell.
I’m in Santa Fe, she said. And I thought I’d give you a call.
David was silently saying No.
We’re in Newfoundland, I said.
Of course you are, she said. She sounded distracted but trying to focus, as if there were many things going on very close to her face. I have to meet Richard and get a box, she said, and then I’ll be on a flight to Deer Lake. I’ve got something to tell you.
She waited for me to say something, and what could I say.
It’s a little fucked up right now, I said. I know this is crazy as I’ve wanted to talk with you for weeks. But I can’t talk to you now.
Are you okay. Is everything okay with you and David. Did you have your talk? Is he like pointing a gun to your head?
We’re good, I said. What flight are you going to be on.
It all depends on Richard. I have to get this box for Arthur.
A box.
I can’t really describe it. I just heard about it and I thought it could help him. So I’ll call you later about when I get in. Because I’ve got other things I want to talk about. I guess I’m praying it’s okay between us.
Send me the details of your flight, I said.
I love you, she said.
I love you too.
And I did. I loved her and wanted to see her face. I closed up David’s pebble and tossed it to him. We’ve just killed Nell’s son, I said. Talking to her was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.
Grab his hands, David said.
And I did what he asked. We put Anthony in the back seat. But we couldnt get the doors closed without bending him. Which felt very wrong. So we took him out again and laid him down nicely and then David called 911. We shouldnt have moved him, I said.
NINE
THE CAR WAS CONFISCATED and we were driven back to Corner Brook by Randy Jacobs and another police officer from Saskatchewan. Randy couldnt talk to us as buddies because of the guy from away. It was quiet in the car, a new police cruiser that felt more powerful than our Matador. You could smell the power. I looked at David and he was staring at the back of Randy’s head. Randy Jacobs used to direct traffic at the base of Prescott Street in St John’s. I remember him working one winter when a truck from Thomas Glass lost its footing on the hill, and slid sideways, horn blaring. Randy stopped traffic east and west then stepped aside as the truck slid through the intersection and down to Water Street. We were in shock now, I guess, much like that guy from Thomas Glass.
They drove us down through Margaret Bowater Park and up to the hill where we went to school. That’s where the new police headquarters is, at the base of our education. Above us was the university, the campus where Nell had met Arthur Twombly; below us the hospital where Arthur Twombly now lay, where Nell had had a child, and now that child at the age of eighteen was being trucked back to that very hospital.
They walked us in and sat us down to a metal table in uncomfortable chairs.
Randy got us each a coffee, and then a new officer took us into a room and then I was asked to leave the room and follow a third man who was in plain clothes. He had a small folder with him and an expensive pen.
So you were hunting moose in Lady Slipper Road you won’t deny that.
We were attempting to poach, I said.
And you blew Anthony Hurley’s head off.
We were both questioned. We were questioned singly and then together. I was looked after by the officer from Saskatchewan and then a huge man from New Brunswick. Then Randy Jacobs came in and Randy told them that he’d known us since we were six.
They find it hard to believe, Gabe, that you guys drove down to Newfoundland and picked up a rifle at your parents’, loaded it and blew the head off the kid who had put David’s father in a coma. They find it hard to believe that was an accident.
Anthony Hurley wasnt driving, I said. It was Gerard who did the driving.
We didnt put that in the report. We didnt want any vengeance coming out of that report.
TEN
SHE WAS IN SANTA FE. She was with Richard. They were ordering something. Red turkeys darting in and out of a bramble. Behind a delivery window, some electric gadget tabulating the price of a meal. The sand over Los Alamos was falling away from the sky, allowing a new colour to slip in, a darkness that gave Nell and Richard a sense of their own short time, a bleeding off of the solid world that could be bought and sold, and a humbleness came over them both, a hunger too. They looked at their clinic menus. She had come for the box. As if in response to this need, warmth puffed out of the ground and while Nell had a chill to her shoulders, her legs felt like they were on a vent. All elements were inverted. Richard Text, as if to apologize for his distracted study of the landscape, turned to Nell and pressed the small of her back. His nails were long and he could not massage her. But she knew he was helpful and was not, in the bones, selfish. He was seeing a man from the research facility. A tank of lit goldfish in the clinic window resumed their fluid circle, and it was this movement that had indicated they had gone still.
But the warmth soon dissipated and Nell was cold. The red mountains lost their colour and dryness was overcome by the thought that sea fossils were in these rocks and they could argue for a long time and be right about the prevailing custom of the land. Nell and Richard too were changed. A scientist arrived with a black valise that carried a beaker of uranium in a nine-pound state-of-the-art machine and he left it on the chair beside Richard as though it too would pick up a menu and order. Someone had bought him the valise, and she wondered who had thought of him, if she could know that person.
So this box, Richard said, has instructions and you need a brain-injury specialist to attach it. You have your papers to transport nuclear material.
No, she said. She didnt have anything.
You won’t get through security without papers, it’s not hospital-grade uranium.
It would not survive the carry-on x-ray machine. It was too vulnerable for checked baggage.
There’s one last thing, she said. I might need to see a doctor.
NELL FLEW Albuquerque–Newark, Newark to Halifax and Halifax–St John’s and realized, from the action of her jaw, that she was anxious. Across from her on the plane a musician had bought a seat for her cello, and the airlines have a canvas strap to bind a cello in. She rented a car at the airport and stayed at the Newfoundland Hotel, the same hotel she had stayed in eighteen years before, when Arthur wanted an abortion.
She waited until the flight time and drove back to the airport and parked at arrivals. She asked a guard and Nell said it was an air force flight. An American flight. You’ll have to go to the silo out back just to the left of the doors. She walked out the doors that held artificial flowers and past the car rental lots and found a helicopter landing and three men in air force suits with white gloves holding their helmets on. They were waiting outside a security door. One of the men, a young one, maybe nineteen, took her inside and put a wand to her and she stepped through a metal detector and was told to see a man in a booth. The man was asleep. Hello, she said. And his mouth closed and his eyes opened. He was immediately alert. His arms flexed in a black short-sleeved shirt. She told him who she was. Youre for the American flight yes I have you here. It’s running late. It will be fourteen hundred hours. Please take a seat.
She went out to the coffee shop and had a bagel. She read a magazine. She checked her emails on her laptop. Then she went back out to the silo.
The jet had landed and was turning on the tarmac. It was a grey unmarked plane and the high whine of its jet engines took a while to shut down. For a moment it looked like it had changed its mind and was to take off again. Then a set of stairs was wheeled out and hydraulically manoeuvred and clamped onto the base of the jet beneath the cockpit door. Then nothing happened. About eight minutes went by while the ground crew refuelled from a truck on the other side.
Then the man from the booth came out and said, Come with me.
They walked over the tarmac and up the stairs. The door was opened now on its thick white hinges. And she went in. There were two rows of seats facing each other, like seats on a train, with a group of armed men playing cards. In each of the middle seats of the three back rows sat a man wearing a black hood.
Can you recognize which one, the man from the booth said.
I’m sorry. Recognize.
He laughed. Oh yeah, hoods. You want the Canadian. Which one of you is the Canuck?
The supposed Canadian, said one of the card players.
A man was putting up his wrists. They were handcuffed.
I’m here for a box, Nell said.
Her escort opened his mouth and he softly blinked. He was shorter than her. You dont want to talk to the Canadian.
One of the men playing cards, without taking his eyes off his hand, said the box was strapped in a seat just behind him. He kind of pointed with his elbow.
The man got the box and lifted it out and took Nell’s shoulder and led her back to the stairs. The three hooded men had their heads bowed.
She drove across the island, through the deep basin of the Humber Valley. She noted the cabins in Pasadena where, twenty years ago, she and Arthur had conducted their affair. She realized she was loyal. She hadnt known that. She’d been grateful to Arthur, that he took care of things. A deep side of her had missed her son. She should never have met Joe and had that little boy on the park bench. But again she would not trade that afternoon for anything. Yes she would. If she could not have to think about it. If she did not know she had traded it.
The windows were fogging up and the knobs to get the defogger on were confusing, so she wiped the windows with her sleeve. She remembered once, in the rain, when Arthur took her shopping. It was a day like this and she wiped the condensation off her passenger window. Dont do that, he said.
And she was shocked by his voice. It was a parental voice. That he cared about the Audi. He didnt want marks on the windows—the car’s air-controlled unit took care of condensation. She realized then that he did not love her.
The self, she thought, is more vicious than God.
She passed the junction where you turn off to get to the cabins on Grand Lake. She drove along the river, the yellow tractors to her left that were widening the highway through the old railbed. She pulled into the Mamateek Motor Inn that overlooked the Bay of Islands, and as she stood at the check-in counter waiting for her credit card to be approved, she turned her back to the nineteen-year-old clerk and stared out the seven-foot-tall windows and she might have been looking into the canal of her own birth, remembering nothing. The insane smoke of the mill, the march of white bungalows up to Crow Hill, the dynamited side of mountain making a fresh scar for the new highway that was being built night and day by those yellow tractors mounted with revolving high beam lights behind their own German wipers. The motel was marooned in a phalanx of city-edge growth, no longer on the main road out of town but in a detour and catering to the auto repair shops and furniture upholsterers sprung up to avoid municipal taxes, and on the hill beyond the golf course the three wide, squat schools, sitting like ancient Egyptian foundations uncovered and about to be restored in a nineteenth-century manner. She could not see Arthur Twombly’s house down in its wedge of green, but the hospital where he lay was smoking and, from its head, the shore road wound along the bay into Curling and Mount Moriah, wooded and undeveloped. She was going to see her son.
She phoned me and I was surprised at the sound of her voice. She was here. She was just a mile away. I was going to see her. We had a serious situation that was outside ourselves so we could be close.
How does he look, she said. Can you look at him.
Nell I love you, I said.
There was a pause and something digital that was shortening the pause on the phone. She said, Can I see you. There’s something I have to tell you.
Those were the same words she’d used to tell me about David.
I DROVE UP THERE and I was nervous. When I saw her I realized I was relieved she was here and yet I had to tell her about Anthony. In the flesh. I thought perhaps she’d send a person kitted out in sensory devices, while she stayed safe in another country experiencing Corner Brook through a computer lashed to the waist of an employee.
I held her and we kissed. And something soft came over her. She took a piece of paper from her pocket, paper you associate with reproducing machines. A black-and-white blur of a solar system. It reminded me of the time I’d first met her, when she took my picture on a dot matrix machine. But this looked like the solar system humanity will one day end up in, once we’ve discarded this one. It was an ultrasound.
I’m pregnant, she said.
ELEVEN
I TOLD HER about Anthony. The whole works. The idiocy that went on in the woods. It was a split second, I said. It felt like the end of living. That everything was dead. That I was in the land of the dead. It was atrocious. Nell was pretty shocked. She had come ready to make an introduction to Anthony. She was open to whatever that might entail. It had taken her eighteen years to realize a side of her existed that she had suppressed and now I was telling her the window was shut. Her hands were gripping the collar of her blue coat. Too tightly. Nell, I said. She was really gone somewhere, she was numb but her eyes were wild, her lovely dark eyebrows, and her shoulders looked like they were inflating. There was something demonic in her, and who can blame her.
She had to get out of the hotel. Could I drive her someplace. I was in my father’s car because they had impounded the Matador. There’s the funeral, I said. It’s actually going on right now.
She gave me a look, like, you asked for it. It was a bright warm day. My father said he’d come, I said. He’d known Anthony. He’d taught him in his last year teaching, before he retired. He liked Anthony. So we drove by the house and picked him up. Bu
t before he got in he tapped on Nell’s window. Hello, he said. She rolled it down. And he leaned in and put his arms around her. He knew how much I loved her. And he knew about Anthony.
Thank you, she said.
I’ll get in the back, he said.
I drove down Valley Road to take the shore road. It would be nice to have the water. Water’s soothing. My father kept it quiet, and I was impressed that he would let my world unfold the way it had to unfold. Nell looked tired and I found her sexy in that tiredness. She was pregnant. That was something to tell my father. I was impressed with hard work. I admired drive and it did not matter that much what the drive was trying to attain. But now the drive would be focused on having a child. Nell would be good at that and I wanted to be close to her. I had no idea, really, what Nell would be, but I was interested in seeing it happen to her. And when she saw me she was soft and put her arms around me. She wasnt going to shut me out. We had been practising a quiet faith together and that was still between us.
We passed the mill, something you dont see up close often. The thousands of cords of wood became individual logs. And then the quiet in the car became unnerving and my father helped out. My father is a quiet man, he thinks a lot and only says necessary things. He doesnt ever point out obvious things. And so it was a bit of a strain for him, but I appreciated it. He was telling us about a trip we all took when I was small. He was telling it to Nell. It was the time we drove across Canada. We were looking for another place to live. Gabe, he said, must have been about six. And we drove a little green Valiant with a camper trailer. The kids, Nell, they made these maps. Treasure maps. And when it rained they rolled down the window and crumpled up the maps and then held them outside to get a bit of rain on them. To weather them. They looked authentic.
Nell: Did you ever find a place you liked?
Nothing as good as here. Though I liked Victoria, he said.
That got us to the funeral home. The parking meters were shrouded in maroon funeral bags.
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