Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Out here, in the emptiness, a mist had settled on the ice, looking deceptively ready to embrace. The offering was of a bigger picture view, unhindered by foliage and buildings. There where no skyscrapers here, just the orange, yellow and white dots of light from the other side of the lake and the dark shadowy company of the tree lines and the gentle rolling hills.

  Even the far away movement and shimmer of orange—growing fire at the Redfield cottage—seemed like a pleasing and deliberate light show. Zeb’s Book of the Dead would be eaten, the paintings too. Everything his father had worked so hard in his life to purchase would be chewed up and turned to dust. And the BMW coupe in which Zeb was currently struggling to keep his life would be ruined.

  Carving a slipshod trail away from the edge of the water, The Druid and Zeb were a tangled mess of arms and grunts inside and on top of the BMW 630Ci’s hood. It was desperation. From both of them. Both knew exactly what they were battling for.

  His thoughts were sparse and runaway; revving the car like he was, only managing to get up a bit of speed with the wheels spinning on the ice like they were, didn’t leave him with faith that the car could take such abuse forever. That was just a snippet in his head. Another snippet was the madness of the Druid once again threatening to get her hands fully around his throat and squeeze him until he was dead.

  Zeb yanked backward from the pawing of the Druid. His arms pushed at her, and she lost her hold on him. He managed to get his arms free and he cranked the steering wheel, simultaneously pressing down on the brake in one solid motion.

  The car, wheels locked and sliding on the ice surface of the lake, veered left and tilted. It was enough to allow the Druid to tumble forward, out of the empty windshield casing, and roll helplessly to rest on the ice.

  In the driver’s seat of the Ci, as it came to a rest, Zeb let the clutch pedal out again, trying to have the car gain a footing on the ice. But he didn’t realize he had placed the stick in third gear instead of first. The car stalled and he placed his foot down on the clutch again and readied to turn the key. As he looked out the window at the Druid getting to her feet, he heard something: cracking ice. At least it sounded like cracking ice.

  Zeb pulled the latch and pushed open the door. He fell from the car in his hurry to escape it—imagining a descent into the water while still inside the metal and plastic coupe.

  The Druid was on top of him, and the cracking turned to a roar. There was a pause in their struggle as a loud snap came. There was a crunching sound in their ears. Both looked at the car, only a dozen feet away, and it slipped below the surface, sending giant crashing pieces of ice-glass up into the air.

  Cracks spider-crawled out like a web and some of them approached the Druid and Zeb. They widened like little canyons of frosty white, evolving in just a few seconds instead of millions of years.

  The two figures pawed with frozen hands and bleeding fingernails on the surface but couldn’t get away. Desperation was caught in Zeb’s throat and he saw the eyes of the Druid, focused but empty. The ground beneath them split like an eggshell. Knotted together, they were both swallowed whole.

  <> <> <>

  The Druid felt the same thing as before when he was pulled under the surface of the water.

  Then, it was a bitterness. It was hatred.

  His girls were dead. His second chance with them was snuffed out. And pulling the other driver down with him, was just an impulse, something that wouldn’t solve anything, but felt like it could make amends.

  Now, it was identical, but amplified. It was the same with Zeb, a transferred weight of so many deeds. When they both fell into the cold water, it seemed right. It seemed like time to collect his dues.

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  Oliver once told a room of dinner party guests that the main difference between a man and a woman is how each handles a crisis. He told the room of business associates that, facing any crisis, small, large, indifferent, a woman will always panic, she will react by doing the most unreasonable thing a man in the same situation could possibly imagine. Of course the room of guests, all holding glasses of wine and tiny hors d’oeuvres prepared by Sadie herself, had all laughed. But Sadie hadn’t laughed.

  The thought of that dinner party was a dank cloud in her brain, muddled by a coming headache. Sadie had driven for hours, stopping only for a restroom break and a bag of potato chips, and now she was starting to realize the insanity of her drive. The booze was trying to come out of her by then, and she was tired. Was this little jaunt unreasonable, Oliver? No doubt about it, no need to take bets. He’d have seen this as a complete over reaction, as nothing but unreasonable. Why couldn’t she have just waited for the morning flight out of Vancouver International, he might have asked—if he had been here. Why did she need to throw the pedal to the metal and come all this way? In the middle of the night, no less.

  She just needed to. That’s all she knew. She needed to get as far away from Darren Knoll as she could, as far away from everything that wasn’t home, and that was final. Call that unreasonable, Oliver, she thought as she rounded a blind corner on the icy roadway. Thoughts of Sebastion William were smeared across the corroded insides of her alcohol-tainted brain and all she needed was to get a hair-width closer to her little boy, to just feel a little closer to him.

  She was wearing her maroon blouse, the one Oliver had gotten her for a birthday. Her coat had been thrown into the backseat along with her suit case, her purse, and her briefing case. Greasy chip crumbs were sitting in the seams of the rental’s gray passenger seat and the snow was coming down heavy across the windshield and the road in front of her. But it wasn’t a torrent. It didn’t feel like a blizzard, didn’t feel threatening at all. Still, she had decided that, unreasonable or not, this drive had done what she had needed it to. She felt better now, with some distance. Calmer, closer to home. She would pull into the next town and get a room for the rest of the night.

  Mom and dad had brought Sadie and Sissy out this way on a summer trip one year—one year when life with Pop Sammy at the Redfield hog farm was still serviceable. They had piled into the extended cab of dad’s farm truck and towed a borrowed camper behind them through the mountains, heaving it up the inclines with a motor that sounded ill and then letting it glide down the slopes while the girls threw their arms out the window and mom fretted about the closeness of the road’s edge. Sadie had never seen anything more majestic, more awe-towering than those mountain peaks, decorated in skiffs of white. On that vacation they had stopped in a town nestled in the dagger-surround of the mountains, way down inside them like the tonsils inside an open mouth that faced the sky. The town had been Revelstoke and, on this night, in the snow-blinding haze, she was sure she had seen a road sign for it back there somewhere. But her head was muggy, still befuddled by the wine, and memories of Darren Knoll’s not-quite-right lips. It was like they were still touching hers—

  In the vanishing moments between thoughts of Darren Knoll and those mountains impeding on Revelstoke’s mouth there was the screech of metal against metal—her car hit the other and spun madly out of her control. She was absolutely certain that none of it was really happening. Then the overwhelming spark of thought was that her life was over, that her car was grating against the other one in a painfully slow recreation just to torment her for the rest of eternity. This was hell, she thought, this endless spinning, payment in full for leaving her little boy...and a part of her accepted that in a flash as the cars, torn, twisted, and tied together, descended into the murky shaken foam of the river.

  Was this what Sicily had seen at her end? This kind of endless whirling? Was this what mom saw? At her end, when all she could do was down pills to escape?

  But somewhere under the flood of the surging current a loud pop in her ears focused her sight upwards and drowned out all thought of her distant family remembrances. The passenger window burst in its crumpled doorframe, and like an angel rising from dark ash, Sadie was pulled up and out of the car in the tiny dot-storm of glass
particles, greasy chip crumbs, and the cello-foil bag they had been in. She managed to climb free of the car, the skin of her legs and hips torn and bloodied on the now jagged window frame of the blue rental. With water in her ears and pushing on her from all sides, she rose to the surface and, miraculously, was saved.

  At the edge, bracing against the frigid water that clung to her, she reached out a hand for the other driver who had also managed to climb free of the wreck. In that second, when she saw his wet face in the darkness, her guilt eased, despite the gnawing temperature. But then she saw his arm raised out of the water. It was a messy stump. His hand was gone.

  And then she was pulled violently under the water.

  She never learned of the two little daughters in the back seat of the gold Thunderbird.

  <> <> <>

  John Merridew did not have a chance to use his information to its fullest extent, to the extent that he was itching to use it. It ruined a marriage and sent Sadie out the front door of the Redfield family home in the city of Vaughan. But Oliver’s trysts with the underage imports, even the accusations that he might have hit them in a drunken rage, never amounted to the same kinds of indictments that had followed Big Teddy Redfield to his grave a few years earlier.

  The idea that Oliver might go down in history the same way his own dad had might have scared him enough to back down from Ol’ Johnny. Or it might have been that he truly did worry for his only son—suddenly alone at the age of nine, all parents absent, all bets off. Foster care, as Caeli might contend, can’t provide the kinds of opportunities that Zeb might have otherwise been accustomed to.

  Either way, Merridew had sewn the whole deal’s lips to its ass-end when he didn’t lay down and falter under whatever insider trading or skimming allegations Oliver had hovering over his head. He let Oliver know how it was going to be when he brought Daniela to Charlemagne Lake. And things fell apart. As things do.

  <> <> <>

  Days after she left, craning a disbelieving ear into the basement den’s tan telephone receiver, Oliver had heard from the authorities at Eagle River that his wife’s rental car had been found near the scene of an accident. Despite storm warnings in the area, she had been out on the narrow mountain roads as the wind had lifted and the snow had begun to make driving dangerous. While nearly all logging truck drivers had decided against trying that mountain pass, she had not. And her blue car had collided with an oncoming vehicle in the early morning hours. Both went over the guard rail. Not to worry, though, Mr. Redfield, a passer-by called for help and your wife was found at the edge of Crazy Creek, with only bruises and cuts. And a bout of shock from the cold.

  In a flurry, Oliver had flown out to Eagle River but only to find that his wife had checked herself out of hospital. She was gone.

  He came back to Vaughan defeated.

  He never mentioned the trip’s purpose to his son.

  He stopped spinning the Yellow Brick Road album on the downstairs turntable.

  <> <> <>

  Like before, the Druid’s hands were around Zeb’s neck. Her eyes were open, not stinging like his in the harsh cold of the underwater world. It was darker down there, next to black.

  Zeb could see only the white parts of the Druid’s eyes—like the headlights of a car. Her grip tightened. He felt himself going insane. Caught in his ears was the roar of the car descending, somewhere behind him. The sounds gurgled, loud, like they were inside his head. It was falling, so was he, and the water pressed against his lungs. His arms strained, not at the Druid, but above him. The push-pull of the car’s descent had pulled them under a sheet of intact ice and his hands banged against it. There was no feeling left in his hands, and little elsewhere in his extremities. Only a burning in his lungs, like a fire. Like the fire in his parents’ summer home, consuming him from the inside out.

  His mind blew outward like a tired piston firing after a long winter under a cold hood. Memories came like knots in a length of rope, all tied together and, oddly, all one in the same. They were dull, though, like whiskery lumps of the rope felt in the dark. But memories are a bit washed out, aren’t they? Like watercolor paintings done from sharp color photos—a little sloppy, pale in comparison, and overlapping in all the major details. Funny how a painting looks more like what it’s supposed to—or what you think it’s supposed to—the further away from it you stand.

  He saw Caels in shorts—on a hot summer night. There were no wolves but her neck was long, slender and tanned. She was a bird, free and happy, wings spread. She was in the Madagascar of his imagination. And she was peaceful there, with all her haunting dreams behind her. She had found something new—maybe some one new. But she had found something again; that much was solid. That much he felt among the brush, undergrowth and heat-haze of his Dream Island of Madagascar. He knew it, could see it clearly, like a blue smear on the polish of an oak finish.

  Zeb was going mad. The Triplet Pines! his brain said. Where had that name even come from? Caeli and the Pines. They’re here. Caeli, who loved Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah so much that she would put the song on repeat and play it over and over and over until Zeb was crazy with it in his head, Caeli who always got the shivers after she ate, beautiful green-eyed Caeli. The triplets stood with Caels at their feet and her slender neck, browned by the glare of an imaginary sun was them—or at least one of them. Another was Jackson—oh Jackie-O, Captain Jack! Where are you now, El Capitano?—strange combination of sidekick and mentor. The third pine, the last, well that one was Zeb. Or was it Sebastion?

  Maybe none of them were Zeb. Maybe all of them were. Was one his mom instead? Or maybe Oliver?

  Oh Madness! The three pines were uprooted. Like people, they walked on roots of stiff blackness, dank earth spilling and breaking off in moist and spongy clumps, like wandering hunks of core falling back into the hole where they were born. Spider-web light, an intricate pattern of it made by science and time, framed the view as the Triplets turned and walked away, hand in hand, down a road where he was sure he had only seen two before...

  He had managed to pull in some air before they went under but it stung. The look in those eyes held him. In his head he heard Helpless and that melancholy drone of the harmonica.

  Those eyes wound around him.

  The harmonica washed out and like a muscle spasm recanting, he recited bits of that poem in the back of his thoughts, thoughts which where already convoluted and full: The tick-tock mock...Of that grandfather clock...One day will cease to even talk...And the steady commands...Of its laden hands...Will turn, then rest...‘Pon where it stands.

  Still that stare held.

  —And the steady commands of its laden hands—

  The water turned a gaudy orange from deep blue-black.

  —Will turn, then rest—

  His mind was empty all except for those fragments.

  —How now, Brown Cow?—

  It was that nonsense question of Caeli’s. His body was frantic and pulsing, but going quickly numb.

  —Always Smilin’, Purple Lion. That was the answer he should have given her. That was the answer that he always gave her. But not that last time—

  Malin’s eyes were still there, still pot lights in the dark. His troubled thoughts swayed. No it wasn’t smilin’. Or was it? Maybe it was Still Tryin’, Purple Lion? How could something he once knew so well be so hazy? So distant?

  After moments of struggling with that battle, after an eternity spent thrashing in the ice water of the lake and staring at Malin’s stolen face, he finally closed his eyes. His lungs burned and his throat ached. His older wound, where the bullet had pierced him, was a sharp stab. His heart had slowed down to a set of spaced-apart lurches. How many new hours or days had he earned from such a slowdown? Enough to make up for all those lost ones?

  Still Smilin’, Purple Lion? Still Tryin’, Purple Lion?

  No, it was neither of those, he thought, drifting to a warm state in his body and in his head. It was not even close to either. This is l
udicrous. This is insane. It was Just fine, Clementine. Just fine. There are no purple lions...

  The Druid’s relentlessness won out.

  There are no purple lions...There just aren’t.

  Fighting for air, Zeb lost the battle.

  It means we’re all dying in the sun.

  He exhaled.

  Alldyinginthesun.Alldyinginthesun.Alldyinginthesun.

  And there was nothing but water to breathe in air’s place.

  <> <> <>

  There was the sight of his mother’s stove, a view through a set of dark bars, a view of his father waving from the back of that neighbor’s boat. The sound of Caeli crying from a nightmare shimmered like a reflection off water. Beneath it was music, a whole symphony, messy and playing on top of itself. He thought he could hear Sgt. Pepper among the notes but couldn’t be sure.

  Everything went sallow, the pulse of an atomic ending. It was frameless sight with the empty white he knew from before. It couldn’t be touched, he remembered, only known.

  He reached out.

  And he found the white dissolving near his fingertips. Behind it was depth. It became a stark steel sky illuminated by unseen bulbs behind.

  He was running; running towards it, running away from it. It was in all directions, met at a line of horizon by the white-padded ground. His lungs felt empty, he could not get enough air into them. He turned his neck and behind him, against the backdrop of isolation-gray, he saw the face of a man he recognized from before. The face was not Malin’s, it was not his father’s. It was the face of David Langtree, rising above his flapping maroon shirt. David was chasing after Zeb, following a trail left by bare feet in the frigid powder. And Zeb would come to know his name soon.