by Matt Lennox
— I know where to go, Dick.
Stan could see Speedy in the back seat of the car. Stan looked at Dick. Dick lifted his hands and held them palm out.
Then Dick got one of the detachment’s 12-gauge shotguns out of the trunk. He loaded it. Stan could see that his fingers were fumbling slightly. Dick left Speedy in the back seat, and then he and Stan went into the bush, backtracking the way Stan had gone before, taking deep steps through the snow. It was slow going. Up ahead was the shallow fold of the creek. Beyond that was the rocky slope. He watched the high feature for movement in the breaks between the trees. Dick thrashed through the snow behind him. He’d unholstered his pistol again.
They came to the creek. Stan slipped going down the bank and put one leg up to the knee into the freezing water. Dick hauled him back out by the shoulders.
— Look, said Dick, pointing.
Fifteen feet downstream there were fresh tracks coming crosswise down the slope above the creek. Right at the bank the snow was cloven away to the mud beneath, as if someone else had stumbled and fallen. The tracks resumed on the other side, heading to the road.
— He was in a hurry.
They stepped over the creek where it narrowed between two rocks. It was hard work climbing the slope past the creek, and they would be long in reacting if anyone appeared above. At the crest they leaned on tree trunks, sucking wind. Fifty yards across open ground stood the back wall of the shed. Nothing was moving.
They looked at each other and then set out across the field, moving abreast through the snow. The feeling had gone out of Stan’s foot where he’d put it in the water. They stopped to study the tracks through the snow that Speedy had left as he fled. They watched the shed and the campers. They could see an import hatchback parked a little farther down the laneway. They came around the shed to the laneway and saw the van. There was an array of tracks in the snow. There were ejected 9mm casings, maybe six or seven of them, and three spent shotgun cartridges. They saw the buckshot holes in the side of the van.
— Airplane, said Dick.
— What?
Down past the store they could see the flat white surface of the bay. There was a small airplane, maybe a Cessna, sitting on the ice just below the drop-off, almost obscured from view by the spruce.
— None of this can be any good, said Dick.
Drops of blood lay in the snow, pink and oddly delicate, tracing a path around the van to the man-door in the shed.
Before there was opportunity to track the blood, they heard the Airstream door open up. A bearded man came out on the step. He had a detachable aviator’s headset around his neck and he was bent under the weight of a duffle bag. The man was holding Arlene by the wrist. She was lurking in the doorway just behind him, wearing a slip and a jacket and snow boots. Her face was vacuous and makeup was smeared down her cheeks.
— Oh, said the bearded man. Fuck.
Dick pointed the 12-gauge and told the man to drop the duffle bag and to come down off the stoop with his hands plainly visible. The girl too.
— How many other people are in that trailer? said Dick.
The pilot looked at Arlene. She just stared at the ground.
— There’s nobody, said the pilot. There’s just us. Can we talk about this?
— You’re goddamn right we can, said Dick. I’m very interested to know what you have to say.
Stan covered with his.410. Dick had a couple of plastic cable-ties tucked in his hat. He used these to bind Arlene’s wrists and the wrists of the pilot, who stiffened angrily. He told them how there was some crazy asshole with a shotgun sitting in the shed.
— What are you boys going to do about that, is what I want to know? said the pilot.
— Stanley, said Dick.
But Stan was already moving to the man-door, seating the.410 into his shoulder and laying his finger along the side of the trigger-guard. He passed through the door frame and blinked to get the brightness out of his eyes. He saw the blood spotted across the floor. Something was hunched against the locker in the corner.
He crossed half the distance and the thing moved and it was Leland King, sitting with his legs forked out in front of him. He had a sawed-off shotgun across his lap. As Stan came forward, Lee made some effort to move the shotgun. He appeared to be incapable of fully lifting it. He just braced the stock against the wall beside him and hefted the barrel up on one knee. He held it for a moment and then he lowered it and let it slide out of his hands altogether.
Stan moved up and shoved the shotgun away with his boot. He heard Dick call after him from outside and he turned his head and shouted that he was alright. Up above, the trusses were creaking quietly. Lee had not bled through the hole in his jacket but he’d bled down his jeans onto the hard-packed dirt around him. He was pale as candle wax.
— Lee, said Stan.
Lee’s eyes were fixed not on the old man but at a point in the middle distance. He spoke in a dry and cracked voice: One time I guessed I knew something.
— Tell me where the boy is.
— I guessed I knew something. But I wasn’t right at all.
— Where is he, Lee?
— I was wrong about it the whole time. Everything. Maybe you think you can understand that. But you can’t.
Lee lifted his hand and grasped the edge of the locker door. He was able to pull it open a few inches and then he dropped his hand back onto the ground.
Stan reached the.410 forward and hooked the foresight on the door and pulled it open. The door was heavier than it looked. He thought the boy was dead until he saw the eyes blinking on either side of the broken nose. The boy’s mouth moved.
— You can’t understand it, said Lee.
— I can understand it. All of it, pretty clear.
The man on the ground shook his head: No. There’s nothing clear.
— He’s alive, Lee.
Where he goes, I won’t see him.
But already the old man was turning away, calling to his friend outside. What remained for Lee was that which lingers through the smallest, loneliest hours. Rising, stirring, stepping out of the dark, calling his name.
It had always been there.
The new year came and there was a great deal of talk in town and there was talk through the months that followed and the talk was inflated and inaccurate and everybody claimed ownership of some stake in it, somebody they’d known. A vast number of persons claimed to have witnessed the robbery itself. Or at least to have heard it. Or at least to have known somebody who had witnessed it or had heard it. In the retellings, there were thousands of gallons of blood spilled out at the defunct marina on Indian Lake. There was a battle among the perpetrators and a war with the police that lasted half a day. Spring came and the snows receded and the leaves budded pale on the trees and the birds returned and the days grew long. The scope of what people talked about began to swell beyond the limits of the town, which itself had begun to fade back into the ordinary once again.
On the face of the headstone was her name, Edna Eunice Maitland, and the years she’d lived, and an engraved epitaph:
That bells should joyful ring to tell
A soul had gone to heaven,
Would seem to me the proper way
A good news should be given.
Beside the epitaph, there was a simple depiction of a stand of birch trees and a path winding among the trees and out of sight. Patterns of light and shadow shifted on the stone from the tree above, which was not birch but white ash, newly flowered. She was three years interred in the earth and beside her was the plot the old man had arranged for himself in times to come. In the fall, Mary had dug a small flower bed in front of the headstone and planted hyacinth bulbs in the soil and they’d bloomed well.
Now that the good weather had arrived, he could come to visit more often. There was much to tell her and only standing there could he say it. Not that words were necessary. Mary’s health, Frank’s health, the news from the last letter he’d received-two we
eks ago-from her sister in Toronto. Emily would be there come September and she said how she would go to visit her great-aunt every few weeks. That was worth telling. Very much. And how today when he left the cemetery he was going to pick Louise up from school and go out to the stand on the west side of Indian Lake to see what birds they could name. In the cab of the truck he’d brought along the 10x42 field glasses. He did not think when they got there that he’d even cast a glance at Alec Reynolds’s property to the north.
There was more. He looked away from the words on the stone, the image of the birch trees and the winding path.
There was the house. Sold not three weeks after he’d had it listed. A young couple from the city with two kids, looking for a summer cottage. They’d spoken of the view and of the flower garden in the dooryard, despite the weeds that had grown in it. And they asked him if they could buy the piano in the front room. He told them no. The piano was not for sale. But they could have it free for the asking.
He’d found a place in town. A small townhouse on the end of a row. It backed onto a long grove of trees on the edge of the golf course. He could take the dog walking. He could leave the house on Echo Point for what it was, timber and stone and nothing more. He thought he could.
He also thought about the affairs over the last several months, but he did not dwell on them as much as he had expected he would. Frank had congratulated and thanked him in a civic ceremony, but had almost nothing to say about it in private. They had, however, gone fishing a few times-just the two of them, and at Frank’s invitation-after trout season opened in April. Dick Shannon, who’d also been part of the civic commendation, had put in his retirement paperwork a week later.
The incident itself-the robbery at the National Trust and the bloodshed that had followed-wasn’t something that could be put to rest simply by awarding civic commendations, or by telling and retelling it in newspapers and on the national news. The incident defied categorization. Sometimes what came back to Stan was sitting at the roadhouse with the man who’d called himself Colin Gilmore, Gilmore leaning back against the bar, saying, You think up some more questions if you want, before he got up and disappeared. The truth was, Stan hadn’t known what to ask the man then, or what to say to him. He didn’t know any better now.
And Leland King, who’d survived, had nothing to say. Nothing by way of explanation, nothing in his own defence. Maybe Lee thought the world had finished listening to him a long time ago. He was probably right.
Lastly, there was the question of Judy Lacroix, whether she had or hadn’t taken her own life. Nobody would ever know, and nobody could ever make it right. But it didn’t trouble Stan as much as it had in the fall, even though he still thought about her. And he still thought, every day, about her uncle Darien, turning at the bottom of the hangman’s rope. He knew that Darien Lacroix would be his to think about, no matter what, for as long as he had thoughts in his head.
But he’d done what he could, and that had to stand for something, in his own heart if nowhere else. He’d even had supper on two occasions with Eleanor Lacroix and Tommy Spencer. Eleanor was pregnant.
The breeze stirred and moved the hyacinth blossoms and turned the water that had run from his eyes down the seams of his face cold. He lifted a hand and rubbed back the tears and he told Edna so long for this week.
He walked back down the gravelled footpath to where his truck was parked in the lane and as he came close to it, Cassius sat up in the bed and looked at him. He opened the door and got in and turned on the truck. He was about to put it into gear but he didn’t. He got out again. He went around to the tailgate and lowered it and told the dog to get down. The dog hopped down and stretched and then looked at him.
Stan closed the tailgate and walked up to the passenger door and opened it.
— Get in.
The dog looked at him.
— Get in, you stubborn bastard.
The dog whined once and then sat back.
— Look. I can’t lift you any more.
It took some coaxing and patting the seat before Cassius stood back up and reared and jumped and scrabbled his way into the cab. He got up onto the seat and turned around and looked at Stan for further guidance, unaccustomed as he was to the front of the truck, but Stan only closed the door and came around and got back in the driver side and closed his own door. Then he put the truck into gear and carried on with his afternoon.
To look at the sky above the cemetery, you might think it had never been any different.
FIVEJUNE 1981
It was the slow onset of a summer evening when he watched the announcement on the evening news. He was sitting in a restaurant at the Pine Tree Motor Inn in Marten River. This, the first evening of his journey. He was eating a hamburger and french fries. The news came on the black-and-white television behind the counter and the newsman first said good evening and then he said Terry Fox had died that day in the early morning hours. The woman behind the counter did not stop what she was doing, cleaning silverware with a vinegar-soaked cloth. On the television a nurse at a B.C. hospital gave a statement. Then a doctor spoke and then they returned to the newsman and to other affairs. The woman behind the counter went to rub a spot off a glass cakebell.
Later that night, Pete lay in the back of his car listening to rain drum on the roof. He’d parked at the edge of a farm field and it was very dark outside, but for a purple stutter of lightning. He found he was listening for some sound or sign of something. Maybe for the radio to come on spontaneously.
Many nights, now, he lay awake. He’d very nearly suffocated, between the broken nose and the tape over his mouth. The back of his throat had filled with blood. Sometimes he had nightmares: the sledgehammer falling above him. The nightmares came and went and he woke gagging for breath and clawing at whatever part of the sheet had fallen over his face.
But this night on the farm field outside Marten River was different. He was not disturbed at all. He just was. And maybe he was awake to consider that.
The girl said her name was Veda and she was a few years older than he was. Whatever she was travelling with was packed into a nylon World Famous knapsack with leather straps. When he first saw her, he thought she was good-looking. When he saw her close up, he saw how her fingernails were chewed down and ragged. Her legs were long and brown. She was wearing tennis shoes.
He met her in a laundromat in New Liskeard. The radiator in his car had cracked earlier. It could be repaired that day but it was going to take a few hours. He was anguished at the hole the repair made in his wallet. Then he gathered some clothes to wash. It seemed premature to be doing laundry this early into the trip. He’d only set off from home at noon yesterday.
He saw her when he came in, loading clothes into a washing machine. Then she went out of the laundromat without looking at him. Half an hour later she came back. She was carrying a big soft drink cup. The only other person in the laundromat was an old woman dozing by the front window. He’d caught a slight reek of cooking wine when he walked past her.
The girl set down her soft drink and took her clothes out of the washer and loaded them into a dryer. Then she was looking at him. He looked back down at his book. When she’d loaded the dryer she moseyed over his way, chewing on the straw in her soft drink cup. She came with casual boldness, as if they’d been familiar all along.
— It’s fucking hot outside.
— I know it, said Pete.
— Listen, can you tell me where the bus station is?
— I don’t know. I’m not from here.
— Well, isn’t that my luck.
She dragged over a plastic chair and sank down into it. She did so as if suddenly exhausted, as if she’d just climbed a hill. She sat with one leg over the armrest. Hesitantly, Pete introduced himself.
— Hi, Pete. I’m Veda.
— Veda …
— You say it like you never heard it before.
— I don’t know if I have.
— Well, my dad was a home
town kind of a guy. But my mom, she’s a woman of the world. It’s the kind of thing she knows about.
— Veda. Okay.
He liked the way her name sounded.
They made conversation for thirty minutes, waiting on their clothes and then lingering after their clothes were finished drying. She spoke a little about university in Montreal. He could tell she was making tracks from something, but what this was, he couldn’t put together yet. She’d apparently arrived in New Liskeard yesterday afternoon, when he was still on the road to Marten River. He had the sense she was out of money.
— I’m going back to Hearst for awhile, said Veda. Going back home. It’s my dad’s place and it’ll do till things get back on track. Dude, if I had a tail, it would be between my legs. Put it that way. Anyways, where are you going, Pete?
— I’m going west.
— And how long are you going for?
— However long they’ll have me.
— Sounds like quite a move. But hey, dude. Shit like that I can respect. Anyways, if you’re going west then it seems you’d be going through Hearst on your way. Six hours from here.
— I get the feeling you’re proposing something.
— I won’t fuck with your radio.
— Okay, said Pete. You can ride with me.
They left New Liskeard early the next morning. He picked her up at the campground where she was staying. Veda packed her tent into her knapsack and got into the car.
— I’m going to say what ten billion girls have said before me. You seem like a nice guy. We get on the road, in your car, don’t turn evil on me, okay? I’ve got an eight-inch switchblade in my bra and I’ll stick you if I have to.
They had breakfast at a gas bar on the edge of town. It made him think of the Texaco. With everything that had happened, it had been necessary for him to stay on at the Texaco for some months longer than he’d intended, once he’d been able to resume working again. His last day at the Texaco had been the twenty-fifth of June. Duane had walked him to his car, smiling his townie smile.