Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  Inside, in the front room, not one single thing was different from what I remembered.

  There was no sign of anyone or anything having been there since I had, and the air held that same heavy mildewed smell that was instantly familiar, the way it caught in my nose and stayed. I stood there for a moment, apprehensive, making sure my eyes had adjusted as much as they could to the darkness inside before I moved again.

  The smell in the back room was something else again, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed how completely it permeated the place the first time I had been there. Had it been too early in the year, the nights and the shadows in the back of the cabin still cool enough?

  Because there was clearly the smell of old meat — leave a fridge closed and unplugged for long enough and you’ll get a hint of what I’m talking about the moment you crack open the door.

  It’s the kind of smell that seems to stick to your clothes, and certainly sticks right there inside your nose like it’s never going to leave.

  I almost understood why I didn’t see her the first time — because I was sure it was a her: a small-framed women wrapped up tight in that mound of bedsheets and more visible as a human shape than as a human being. It was like someone had carefully rolled her in the sheets, like they were meant to be a shroud. I could see one hank of her hair against the bed, light-coloured and fine, and I could see the sunken skin of what I imagined was the side of her cheek, like she had been shrunk or freeze-dried or something. I could also see that she had been in the cabin for a while.

  There were patches on the sheet that were darker, almost black, and when I saw that, I turned around without thinking and pushed my way back out the front door of the cabin. I knelt down by the river, splashing the cool water into my own face, breathing hard.

  I sat down, watching the light on the water. That’s the other part of dealing with horrible things: the way your head, when it’s faced with the completely unacceptable, hones right in on something else instead, something that makes clear and absolute sense, something that distracts and holds your attention.

  You find your anchors where you can, throw the lines and hooks out and hope that, somewhere out of sight, something will hold.

  As soon as I stopped shaking, I gathered up my unstrung fishing rod and hurried back up the river to the car, certain then that I would never be back to that cabin, to that corpse in its back room.

  If anything, I went upstream faster than I’d come down.

  When I got back to the car, I kept driving in the same direction, away from St. John’s, taking the big loop down around the foot of the peninsula while I tried to get my head in order.

  Every time I thought about it, I kept seeing the body pressed up against the wall, and I also kept hearing the dry plastic rattle of the tarpaulin on the woodpile out back, like it was the dry rattle of air being dragged into someone’s lungs. I kept telling myself that I could just walk away and never look back, that I could just forget about the whole thing as if it had never happened. Never tell anyone. Never fish that river again.

  That’s what I told myself.

  Stupid me.

  Part of me that already knew that, as far as my head was concerned, she’d be right there in front of my eyes any time my brain took it upon itself to go back, daytime or night.

  Chapter 35

  Steak

  Fries

  Steak

  Fries

  That list is my own. I kept it anyway, even though it seems a bit like cheating. I think what I meant was that I could put anything that I liked on a list then. A post-Mary list that was its own little joke, the sort of thing I might have shared with her if she was actually still here, if she had simply gone out of town for a while and then decided to come back.

  The steak-and-fries list was exactly what I was doing in the world. I was doing what I told myself I wanted to be doing — but it was like a record skipping, over and over and over again, with me living safe right there buckled into the most regular routine I could find. A routine that was less and less satisfying with every passing day.

  The dreams were still there — the ones where I’m walking toward someone, and she turns around to face me and it’s Mary. Not someone who looks a bit like Mary, not someone I could confuse with Mary, but Mary herself. That same less-than-symmetrical smile, the same broad shoulders, and even though I haven’t reached her yet, I can feel that smooth skin of those shoulders under my hands.

  Sometimes, suddenly, it’s not Mary at all — instead, it’s her blond sister, her blond, slight, much-younger sister, and there’s something that I am supposed to explain to her, except I have no idea what it’s supposed to be.

  Sometimes her sister is wrapped up tight in a sheet in a cabin fifty miles away, and the thing is, Mary doesn’t even have a blond sister.

  Mary has never had a blond sister.

  That’s the worst dream of them all, the one I wake up from with every single muscle stretched absolutely taut, as if I’m trying to burst right out of the bed or right out of my body, and I just can’t figure out what to do.

  I’d wake up and wonder what it was all about, what it was all supposed to mean. Whether it meant something I hadn’t been able to put my finger on yet, but something that might come crashing into me at almost any time.

  I went back to the cabin on the Little Barachois again, even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t. Even before Mary left.

  I went back again, and again, and again.

  It’s not the kind of thing I could get away from easily.

  It got so I brought a chair into the back room, just a green, battered, hard vinyl chair with rust-bubbled rough chrome legs from the front room, and I’d sit with my back up against the thin wall between the two rooms and watch, and wonder how everything could change so slowly.

  I imagined that every time I went there, a little bit more of me was left behind in the cabin, just little physical traces like hair or skin weaving their way into the fabric of the place. And at the same time, that my brain was slowly etching thin lines of memory, like the fine tracks on a record, into my head in such a way that they would always be there, impermeable. Thin grooves, connected without ever touching.

  Each time, I knew that there was less and less of a chance that I could ever explain it in a way that would make sense to anyone else. Each and every time, I knew I was digging a hole for myself, and at the same time, I was dead set on digging deeper. Even though I should have known better. I really did know better.

  You don’t just sit in a room with a dead woman.

  You call the police.

  You tell them what you’ve found, and they ask difficult, probing questions until everything is settled and you’re dismissed, never really getting to hear the end of it all. Without all the answers, but with the clear-cut satisfaction that the police know the exact and whole extent of your part. They only need you to give them your pieces of the puzzle, and then they go out and get the other ones, the ones that belong to someone else. The someone who’s to blame.

  Because that’s their job, finding whoever it was who picked up some hitchhiker and killed her, or whatever.

  The truth was that I found it strangely comforting to sit back there in the near-dark, in that familiar room where nothing ever changed.

  Even with the smell, which I noticed less and less.

  Safe in a spot where everything was always exactly what I was expecting, where everything just behaved.

  Sure, there might be a new place in the cabin where water found its way in or something, and occasionally there were signs of mice that hadn’t been there before, but I found that one of the things I could count on was the constancy.

  I could tell you that I gave her a name, that body huddled up against the wall, but that would be particularly creepy. I can tell you for certain that I didn’t, not even somewhere in the back recesses of m
y own mind. She wasn’t a Lisa or a Heather or anyone else.

  She was just someone to listen.

  And what I did was talk.

  Not so much to her as at her. That was the best part — at her, because there was no chance of it ever being anything more than that.

  I would sit back there and talk about anything, about the garden and about what Mary had been doing with it, even about things as simple as how I’d meant to tell Mary how much I liked it out there in the space in back of the house, how she’d made it into a small, quiet haven hidden away in a noisy city.

  The fact was I had forgotten to get those words out to Mary herself for so long that, when I did remember them, they just didn’t feel like they’d be right coming out of my mouth any more. It was as though the words would sound particularly flat and forced, as if there was some part of it that I was actually trying very hard not to tell her.

  In that cabin, I’d talk about the weather and about work, about the people I liked and the ones I didn’t — and I even talked to her about the lists.

  I really didn’t talk to anyone else about the lists.

  After Mary was gone, I brought them upstairs to the study. I’d been looking at them for years. I’d go down to where the workbench was, haul a box or two out of the narrow space that always had its share of spiders and those armoured little sow beetles that look like leftover trilobites waiting for eventual, overdue fossilization.

  I’d been collecting lists for as long as I had been working in the front end of the store — as soon as I got out of shelf-stocking and into cleaning. First, a few screwed-up balls of paper, twisted tight as if they were hiding secrets or something, so I began picking them up and unrolling them, trying to make sense out of the code of “coffee, coffee filters, deodorant, and bagels.”

  The more of them I had, and the more I looked at them, the more intriguing they were. Different kinds of ink, different kinds of paper, and all those different kinds of handwriting. Completely unconnected to one another, and completely connected as well — because everyone writes them.

  I was finding messages, messages that were in my control, enough in my control that I might be able to solve them.

  Everyone jotting stuff down so they wouldn’t forget, making memory solid and measurable so the cat wouldn’t run out of kitty litter and there would always be dog treats to get the dog back inside when he was running around with his eyes almost rolled up into his head, barking frantic at the entire neighbourhood and not listening to a single word.

  Enough bread and baggies to make a small fleet of school lunches.

  Something for dinner, whether you were going to eat it while having a conversation or while you sat there with your wife, not even speaking, pushing your fork around like a small piece of heavy equipment focused on its own minor construction project.

  I had it all in my hands, if I could find the way to make sense of it, if there was a kind of Rosetta stone that could unfold those mysteries.

  I explained that to the woman in the sheet on the cabin bed. I explained all about how I had a couple of banker’s boxes full of them by then and never threw any away, no matter how trivial, and about how that had grown into trying to figure out what the list-writers were all about.

  What made them — what made anyone — tick.

  No one in the cabin told me how stupid it was to be doing that, and no one laughed.

  When Mary laughed at you, you knew all about it. Mary laughed and you knew where you fit in the world — and you didn’t feel very high up in the scheme of things, let me tell you — because you knew exactly what she thought about whatever it was you were doing.

  I don’t hold that against her — really I don’t — because it’s not like she could help it or anything. It would be like blaming someone for having a snort at the end of their laugh — everyone knows someone like that, someone who has a little air-backwards kind of hurking snort, and that’s just the way it is. Pointing it out would hurt, and, at the same time, would end up changing nothing.

  It’s just that Mary’s laugh, well — it was a laugh that could hurt.

  In the cabin, I didn’t have to worry about laughing. Laying it all out may not have made the whole thing make sense, but it made it make sense to me.

  I must have had fifty or more notes saying “don’t forget milk.”

  Another fifty or so that could prove there was a segment of society that actually liked boxed croutons. Rows upon rows of lists smoothed out and grouped together, evidence of patterns and routes as plain and distinctive as the whorls in fingerprints.

  Then, every once in a while, I’d sit back and think about what someone else would make about that little slice of my own life — if they were to take the part where I was sitting in a crumbling cabin, what kind of person would they decide I was?

  Then one day I came up out of the river valley, up over the gravel shoulder and across the empty road, and looked back toward the gravel pit. I saw just the blunt nose of one of those plain-looking black Dodge Chargers, the kind that can belong to anyone at all, but also the kind that the police use for their unmarked cars. Just sitting there, jutting out of the trees a little, no hubcap on the front wheel that was facing me. They’d always been more interested in going through the house than they had been in seeing where I was going. But sometimes even the police must get it into their heads to try something new.

  I took my time getting my stuff into the trunk, listening to the broken-up birdsong that starts up just before the light begins to fade. When I finally did get in the car, I rolled the window down so I could smell that particular heavy river smell, did a sweet, sudden little signal-less U-turn, and headed right back up the road toward that Charger.

  You can keep your eyes looking straight ahead, and your peripheral vision can still let you know if there’s someone sitting there in the driver’s seat. There wasn’t. Maybe it was someone just heading down across the road to the pond — I’d been down there myself before; it was a spot where the beavers had dammed all the outlet brooks and brought the water way back into the trees, killing them off, the pond now edged almost all the way around with greyed dead spruce. Not bad for trout — beaver ponds can be pretty good — but I’d been chewed up ferociously by flies when I’d been in there last, and I hadn’t gone back.

  Probably just someone fishing, I told myself.

  But you can’t be too sure. Or too careful.

  Chapter 36

  Can. Tire

  $20 gift card

  Plunger

  photos

  Painting sheet

  eggs

  ham

  potato salad

  Sheer curtains

  Another note from Joy Martin of Signal Hill Road. I knew the handwriting right away, especially with the ornate, stylized M on the top of the notepaper. Green and gold around the letter, and, besides, I watched her leave it on the stainless steel backspill of the checkout, back where the bags are, in the ten-items-or-less lane. She had just three: ham, eggs, and potato salad, the only things off that list that she was going to get in my store. But I didn’t care about them: they weren’t the ones that mattered.

  The paper came from the kind of notepad that someone gets you for a present when they don’t know you well enough to think of anything more complicated, more involved than something that uses the first letter of your last name. Not really the kind of thing you could ever imagine buying for yourself.

  My heart sank at the end of that list, with the curtains. For more than a year, I’d been taking the short hike up and around to the back of her house — on and off, at least once a week, anyway — and I wondered if it was something that I’d done, if she’d seen anything, if those curtains were the result of something she’d glimpsed out her back window.

  I remember thinking that it certainly wouldn’t be the same — not if the curtains went where
I thought they were going. Too little of the real world shows through the gentle scrim of sheers; it’s too much like romantic movies from the 1950s and not enough on the hard edge of things.

  I imagine by then that I knew every single pair of underwear she owned, better than if I’d been going in and making my way through the dryer in her basement. Each time, the same — just a glimpse or two before she closed the curtains upstairs, almost always the last part of the evening. I knew by then that she liked her underwear to match, and I knew that, more often than not, she spent most nights working her way through the kitchen, waiting for things that didn’t happen.

  I don’t know if that had more to do with her imagination, with an idea that someone just might arrive, or whether she’d actually been led to believe that someone was going to be at her door any moment. I think it was a combination of the two: watching her try on a bra-and-panties set in purple, and then take them off for far-more-familiar black, I wondered if the underwear she put on was a crucial part of finding her confidence, or a crucial part of losing it. It was summer by then, and I was still leaning on a maple tree up above her backyard, feeling the rough ridges of the bark through the back of my shirt against my spine, the dark coming later, the leaves reaching down.

  You think stupid thoughts, sometimes. Like you should be coming to the rescue and arriving at her front door with a bunch of flowers. Like trying to bullshit your way through an evening pretending to be a friend of a friend who someone had tried to fix up with her. Things that have no chance of ever working, but that seem like a noble, movie-star kind of thing to do.

  Knowing it was stupid the whole time, but imagining it anyway, so that when she changed from purple to black, there was some small extra possibility rattling around in my head that I could actually feel the warm close weight of her breasts in my hands.

  Everything crucial is always about the possibilities, not about the realities. If I hadn’t realized that by then, I would have been an absolute idiot. You have to be pragmatic: when one possibility changes, when it shuts down, well, you have to find another.