Drummond, behind me in the aisle, keeping his eye on me for reasons he keeps to himself, asks me if I’m talking to him. I grunt and tell him that he’d know if I was talking to him.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Figure it out,” I spit back at him and look to the TV.
Clive is no longer on the floor. The noise, the buzzer or whatever it was, must have woken him too. I lean forward, searching the room for signs of where he might be but there is nothing. A few moments later static erases even that.
Regardless of how many times I rewind it, I never see Amy come to say goodbye to her uncle, on to bigger and better things, thanks for your help etc. etc. I don’t see her kiss him on the cheek, her face scrunching at the smell of the lighter fluid he didn’t have a chance to wash out of his hair, interrupted as he was by the buzzer. A quick splash in the bathroom, a change of clothes, and the remote, he remembers hidden somewhere, under his pillow or between the socks in his top drawer. No need to record this, he thinks, and clicks off the camera in the chandelier. He’s not the sentimental type, that’s for sure, this Clive, or maybe it’s just that he prefers to leave some things to the mercy of his memory. Terrence, at the top of his list, not a single frame to record the time they spent together, and Amy too.
She comes in carrying two suitcases with a knapsack on her back. She leaves them by the door and takes one step forward so that she is standing in the exact same spot that Curtis had stood only a day before.
“You’re leaving.”
He is both surprised and relieved (and also, surprised at how relieved he is).
“I just wanted to say goodbye and to thank you for all you’ve done.”
Clive smiles, his favourite niece come to bid him adieu. He doesn’t have the words to express the joy he feels so he holds out his hands and she hurries across to him. They embrace and she gives him a kiss on the cheek. She can’t believe how close she is to crying but the odour of something in his hair stems the flood.
“What’s that smell?”
“Lighter fluid.”
“Huh?”
Clive laughs a short burst.
“I had a visitor.”
To ease the look of concern on her face he tells her about Clayton Farber and Lester Mann, and by the end of it Amy is more concerned than ever. He goes on and tells her all he knows about Terrence and Curtis, and Trisha Mann, leaving only one detail out of the telling, so that by the end of it she knows more about them than almost anybody. Still, she’s concerned and now confused, and angry too. Clive sees this and offers her a drink, one for the road. She shakes her head. Clive goes to the kitchen to fetch a bottle anyway and the missing detail bubbles up to the surface of all that anger and confusion.
When Clive returns she asks, “What about the gun?”
Clive hands her a glass and even though she doesn’t want it, she takes it. He fills hers before doing the same with the other and both drain their drinks in one gulp.
“Did he say?”
“Who the bullet was meant for? He did, when he came to visit me while you were in The Pool Room with Curtis. He said a great many things besides. He was here for over an hour. He never stopped talking, curled in my lap on the couch, telling me things he’d never told another soul, wanting forgiveness perhaps, or my blessing, and something else too: something the old can’t give the young, the same way the young can’t understand how it feels to grow old.”
“So?”
“Yes?”
“The bullet?”
But Clive wasn’t far enough gone for that. Another couple of drinks, another dose of lighter fluid, and he might have opened up, told her what Terrence had said. Still having the full use of his faculties and, knowing like I do, that it wasn’t yet the time to speak of such things, he filled her glass again.
“One more for the road.”
And this time he meant it. After she was done he took her glass and kissed her on the forehead, then, his hand on her arm, he led her back to the door, ushering her out and refusing to say another word beyond goodbye.
twenty-six
Leaving her uncle’s Inner Sanctum, Amy rode the elevator to the main floor. Too early for even the early crowd, she found the bar deserted except for the woman who had let her in, sweeping up in preparation for the people that would start to trickle in around five, not really there for the show but filling the tables nonetheless. She set her bags on the floor and went behind the bar to call a taxi. The dispatcher asked about her destination and Amy replied that she hadn’t figured that out yet.
She waited in the parking lot and when the taxi arrived she told the driver to take her to the bus station. After the short drive she watched him unload her bags from the trunk and thought about asking him to wait then thought better of it. Stowing her bags in a locker, she checked the schedule and bought herself a ticket for the 7:05 to Vancouver, certain that three hours and change was plenty of time to do what she needed to do.
The walk to The Mann Building took her a little over five minutes, the bus station being at the edge of the downtown core and The Mann Building being directly in the middle of it. To get from one to the other she had to cut through Victoria Park. In my report, I would call it the birthplace of Native gang violence. It’s small, by inner-city standards, with a field on one side big enough to play a fair game of football on or, as it were, to hold two large tepees and a healing circle of a hundred disenfranchised Natives, and a fountain on the other. The two sides are separated by a partition of cedars so that it’s possible for the people on the fountain side, walking their dogs or eating their lunches on a bench, to be completely unaware of what is happening on the field side, be it a game of pick-up or a protest rally.
In the days when my report was the most pressing thought on my mind, before age and infirmity took precedence over everything else, I would often sit on the lip of the fountain and stare across at the cedars, trying to see what I could between the cracks in their boughs. Spots of colour if someone was walking by on the other side, but otherwise nothing beyond whatever bits of light could get through, so that it seemed like anything could be going on over there. These spots of nothing that could hide anything, I was certain of it, were crucial to the report I was supposed to writing. Knowing this, but not what it meant, made me miss three deadlines and earn the ire of Mathers, who thought I was just being lazy. So I sat there and stared and finally, when I thought there was no longer any chance of it, the answer came to me, and I wrote my report in five feverish days. When I was done, I looked like Hell and smelled like its sewer. My teeth hurt from not brushing, and my eyes were blurry for a week after so many hours in front of a screen.
I mention this because Amy had to walk through Victoria Park to get to The Mann Building. And also to say that I understand why she strode so urgently past the fountain, forgetting even the pain in her foot, such was the certainty that she felt, and that I would feel a short time later sitting not five feet from where she passed. Lost in a bubble where time had no purchase and the world was something inhabited by other people, or seemed not to exist at all, she never took her eyes off the tallest building in Regina. She strode through the park and down Scarth Street then hurried across 12th Avenue, looking neither left nor right, the gap in traffic appearing between one stride and the next easily explained by the certainty of her movements and the sight of the revolving door on the far side.
She emerged from the door into a lobby as big as the field in Victoria Park, the lack of anything to get in the way of all that space meant to impress how luxurious nothing could be if one knew how to apply it. The clap of her heels on the marble floor was the only sound she heard as she crossed to the security desk and to the guard sitting there (a man I know, in form and deliberation, to be like a fieldstone used to prop open the door in a deserted barn; a most unpleasant fellow who taps a pen on his teeth and who scratches under his armpits an
d grunts in a sexual manner whenever a pretty woman asks him a question). Not waiting for the guard to finish his business, talking on the phone or checking marks off a list like he did every hour, she told him that she needed to speak with Lester Mann. If the guard was a little slow in hanging up the phone or setting his clipboard on the counter, it didn’t detract from the urgency of her purpose but was there only to remind her of how little the rest of the world mattered. Putting the phone to his ear, again or for the first time, the guard dialled. Shortly, a person on the other side picked up and he spoke a few words, muttered low as was his habit, then turned back to Amy and asked her what it was concerning.
“Terrence Bell.”
So exact, so precise, the way she spoke, that the guard floundered for a moment, unsure of how to relay what she had said; not at all confident that he had it in him to repeat it in such a way that Lester Mann’s secretary would understand its exactitude and precision. And feeling the need to convey this — an odd sensation for such a slovenly and ill-tempered fellow who muttered low and grunted and sometimes spoke in gibberish to people who asked him questions on the street when he was certain that it wouldn’t get back to his boss — he cleared his throat and sat up straight and repeated what she had said. After a brief pause, there followed instructions, equally concise. He hung up the phone and told Amy that a car would be waiting for her out front.
Without a thank-you or a goodbye, Amy strode back through the lobby. As promised, a car was waiting at the curb, as black and as shiny as the suit worn by the man standing at its open rear door. She slid into the back and sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Given her state, she didn’t ask the driver if it was normal for people looking to speak to Lester Mann to be ferried about in such a manner. It was, in fact, a question that he was used to, it being his job to ferry people of suitable unimportance to and from The Mann Building where his boss had his office, and where those wishing to speak to him were told to come by his secretary, even though Lester Mann hadn’t set foot in the tower that bore his name for two years. After a short drive, the car pulled up in front of a door behind the stadium, painted green with the Riders’ insignia on it, a large S superimposed over the head of a stallion, so that it looked the same as the emergency exits on either side of it. In perfect synch with her shoes touching the ground, the door opened and a man, dressed the same as the driver but younger and bigger too, held it until Amy was through.
Concrete stairs led up between bare concrete walls. Amy waited for the man to walk past, leading her to the stairs. When he didn’t she glanced back to where he stood with his back to the closed doors. He didn’t say anything or even clear his throat and she took his silence to mean that she was on her own. The momentary tremor she felt upon confronting the steps was quickly forgotten under the click of her heels. As she climbed, the cut on her foot began to feel like it had grown teeth and was chewing on itself.
By the time she’d crested the summit, ten floors up, it felt like they’d gnawed their way to the bone. Had she been someone with lesser resolve, she might have been gasping and clutching at the handrail, unnerved by the way she’d been treated, overcome by a feeling that it was all done to ensure that Lester Mann would have the upper hand when they finally met. As it was, the only thing she did to mark her ascent was to run a finger over the glaze of sweat wetting the triangle dipping below her neckline, thinking that a touch of glisten wouldn’t do her any harm. Down a short hallway another man, enough like the others that nothing more needs to be said of him, held open a door. It was steel on the outside but wood panelled on the side facing in, and Amy, without any idea of what she was going to say now that she was here, stepped through it and into Lester Mann’s inner sanctum.
twenty-seven
Lester Mann did not call this, his real office, The Inner Sanctum. That would have been too much of a coincidence for this telling to bear, there being enough of them already to populate several greater fictions. He called it The Stable, in deference to the team he’d bought when Mann Stadium was just a rough sketch he’d made on airline stationery. When I first heard the name he’d given it, I thought it spoke of herds of young fillies quartered there to satisfy the needs of the young stallions romping on the field below. I have since learned from a number of aging stallions, now put out to pasture, that I was mistaken. To a man they told the same story: the only way to get to it was the elevator descending from the helicopter pad on the roof and nobody, save Mr. Mann’s immediate family, was allowed the use of his helicopter. I knew this to be untrue but I said nothing to counter their fantasy, not wanting these stooped-over, pot-bellied former stallions to feel any less of themselves than they already did, their prime having been spent playing ball in a league that required them to seek employment in the off-season, building houses and toiling in the oil fields, or, if they’d thought ahead, teaching high school gym.
‘Stable’ was a moniker of convenience. It was the first word that had popped out of Lester Mann’s mouth after he’d led a select group of business associates, along with his wife and his daughter and son, out of a private elevator during the stadium warming celebration happening on the field and in the stands. Mrs. Mann, a stocky woman who spent ten months of the year in Malibu but who remained as white as a lily, scolded him when he said it, telling him that people would get the wrong idea.
“Let ’em,” he countered, his voice tinged with enough venom to make her fade into the background while he showed off The Stable’s many wonders.
The centrepiece was a wall of glass overlooking the field that, at the touch of a button, changed from clear to opaque so that his team could see when he was happy with their play and also when he was not. A full list of its other wonders has filled the gaps between advertisements in Modern Architecture and other publications of a similar calibre, along with full-colour photos and celebrity tours. Anyone who’s been to my house — a one-bedroom bungalow with a kitchen too small to bother cooking in and a yard that I keep long so that the neighbourhood dogs have a little privacy when they’re doing their business — knows my feelings about such contrivances. I won’t waste energy here trying to summon the necessary verve to do it justice except to say that Amy, being young with all the expectations that youth implies and having a certain dollar figure in her head as she stepped into the main room of The Stable, took a sharp breath in, making a sound that was near enough a gasp that Lester Mann, walking towards her, knew that she’d tell him anything he’d want.
“Lester Mann.”
Amy took his hand with the tips of her fingers, her own skin feeling rough against the silk of his.
“Amy.”
Lester Mann nodded, gleaning that she’d withheld her last name for a reason and making a mental note to find out why that was. Releasing her hand, he drew her attention to the other man in the room, a simple case of giving him a brief glance, so that he could start the conversation on his terms.
“My son Robert.”
Robert, leaning on a stool by the marble bar, turned the other way.
“Forgive Robert for being impolite. He has recently undergone a great, personal tragedy and he isn’t his usual self.”
Robert harrumphed and shook his head, a gesture that made her certain that, personal tragedy or not, she was seeing him for the man he really was. A man not unlike the boys she’d beaten in her rise to World Junior Nine-Ball Champ. Most of them had also came from wealth and were good looking to a fault, with fine tailored suits and handcrafted cues costing more than she could save in a year; boys who, when they lost, also harrumphed and shook their heads as if her winning had been a trick of the light that when viewed from a different angle, that of the future, would reveal her as the charlatan she was.
Not at all like the men she’d faced when she’d made her run at the World (no longer Junior) Nine-Ball Championship. Those men were more like the one she now felt reluctant to turn back to. Some were from wealth but many were just l
ike her. They saw pool as a way out of lower-class obscurity, the road to, if not riches, then a sort of limited fame: their only hope of making something of their lives beyond the nine to five and the siren call of screaming children. When they lost they knew that it had been their failure, and afterwards they clenched her hand and looked her steady in the eye as if to say that the next time they met they’d take the shot they didn’t think necessary to win but that they now saw was the turning point. They’d left her feeling like she was made less by winning, that she was only there for them, was part of their story. It was this feeling that she brought to her next game so that she never won two in a row.
Staring at Robert, her past and present colliding in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d found her old scrapbook under her bed, she realized that he looked familiar. She thought that he really could have been one of those boys she’d faced, all of whom she’d imagined lounging in the luxury of their father’s homes, never seeing the shots on the table, the ones who won games because they didn’t have to. But no, she hadn’t met him; she’d seen his photo in the newspaper.
He was Trisha’s father, she remembered, feeling sick with the thought.
News of the kidnapping had settled around her as it had with everyone else. Still no word, people would say when they met in cafés or on the street, at work or across backyard fences, and for days it was all there was to say. Somewhere in there she’d picked up a newspaper, discarded on the bus, and had taken it home and read it while drinking a take-out coffee that had cost her almost five dollars, a third of the money she had in her wallet, left over from the last twenty in her account. On the front page was a picture of Trisha’s parents, Robert and … she couldn’t recall the mother’s name. Both looked shell-shocked, ambushed coming out of their house by the photographer. There was no news of Trisha, the article had only mentioned her once. The article was mostly about Robert, how he had overcome adversity, alcohol and gambling addictions, to become the second richest man in Saskatchewan, falling short of only his father. Amy had learned along with everyone else that the internet gambling company he owned was worth $390 million, shy of his dad’s fortune by a plump billion, and also that he had a sense of humour: he’d named his company Boondoggle.
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