by Lou Allin
Driving was an exercise in horror. Several times she nearly took the ditch, whimpering in misery. A Dietrich tape added an ironic touch. According to her daughter’s biography, Marlene had suffered the torments of hell with poor circulation in her legendary legs and several broken bones from falls on tour at seventy. Then a duo of Marlene and Rosemary Clooney began to sing, “Too Old to Cut the Mustard.” Belle joined the heavenly chorus in total agreement, gripping the wheel, her mouth a rictus.
When she levered herself out in the driveway, she knelt and retched bile for several minutes, then wiped her mouth with snow. Reacting to the tension, every disk played a piano of pain, though a special sonata was reserved for the left lumbar region. She crawled up the stairs, meeting Freya’s nose as she opened the door. The dog’s black eyebrows contracted in surprise. “It’s OK, girl,” she moaned. “You’ve seen me like this before. Remember the lawnmower? Go out and do your thing.”
On all fours, Belle padded a minimalist tour of the house, lurching to her feet to flick on the lights and furnace, knowing that the gas blasted only the air, unlike the woodstove, which baked every fibre of the frame. Juggling wood chunks was an impossible joke. Even going up to the master suite faded from her options. She ransacked the main floor bathroom cabinet for the muscle-relaxant from the mower incident, then added a small handful of Tylenol Threes from an old root canal job. Folly to add a glass of wine to the pharmaceutical mix, but perhaps a light Chablis . . .
She let her clothes fall on the floor and yanked blankets from the linen closet. Her last duty was filling Freya’s dishes. Then slugging from the Chablis bottle, she retreated to the pasha chair in the TV room. Though the water bed might have felt comforting, dropping through gravity over the round bolsters into its warm, undulating depths, with no way to rise, she’d be found as a skeleton, or worse yet, dog food, through no fault of Freya’s. Wearing the cotton batting of pain suppressant, for once she didn’t feel like eating. Maybe some cream of mushroom soup later, though the thought made her gag.
Dozing, the television screen a dark eye, she awoke around nine in a dreamy fog. Forgetting her injury, she sat up, then dropped onto the pillows with a screech. In younger days, she’d have been on her feet the next day. Not now. Would she have to miss work? Impossible with Miriam gone. But she’d think about that Monday at 6 a.m. Right now she was buying life a minute at a time.
Swilling down more pills, she rested for another hour. Then, marginally human, she was contemplating the pain payment in exchange for the soup benefit when the phone rang. With a hint of guilt, she ignored it, knowing that her father might have suffered a crisis. Old people were creatures of twenty-four hours, hearty one day, arranging a poker date with St. Peter the next. Minutes later it rang again, and she crawled to the kitchen to answer on the tenth try.
“Rosanne’s fine,” Jack said in an oddly hollow voice.
She forced herself to sound cheery. A man laced with surgical sutures didn’t want to hear whines about aches and pains from a middle-aged shemale who’d overextended herself. “Great. Miriam left in a panic. I was glad she didn’t drive.”
She heard a clearing of throat, then a sound like a fist hitting a wall. “Mimsy never turned up in North Bay. There was no reason to go. Nothing was wrong with Rosanne.”
“But the call. Her professor.”
“Rosie doesn’t take psychology this semester. I called her roommate. Guess who answered. Jesus, I made up some hell of a story to keep her calm.”
Belle looked across the frozen lake to where a luminous full moon was rising over the hills of bare trees to the east. Tympanic groans of the shifting ice shuddered through the glazed windows, a thin barrier between nature and nurture. Through the mental fog she tried to concentrate, recall those last hours. It had happened so fast, and she’d been talking to Dorothy, copying the property information. “The bus. Did you check—”
“Who knows if she got on? See, she rushed to the apartment and packed a few things. Took the taxi to the depot. I called there first after talking to Rosanne. A bunch of women her age left at six, headed for a religious conference in Ottawa. No way she stood out.”
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“All’s I know is that she didn’t show up anywhere at the hospital or at Rosanne’s apartment.”
“She couldn’t have disappeared into nowhere.” Images of a film with that theme flashed through her magpie mind. The Vanishing, a French classic remade with snaily Jeff Bridges skulking in the background while Keifer Sutherland searched for his girlfriend who’d gone missing at a gas station stop. Or a serial killer, hardest to find because he chose victims at random, then moved to another city. What police were unearthing at a pig farm in British Columbia was predicted to be the gruesome remains of perhaps fifty prostitutes working Vancouver’s street scene. She shook herself back to reality. Something was terribly wrong, and once again, she was powerless.
“We’d better call the police.”
Sweat from the pain broke out on her forehead as her mouth curled in frustration. Kneeling, her back hunched, she tried to keep a straight train of thought. “From what Steve used to say, forty-eight hours is their minimum waiting time unless a child is involved, or there’s a clear danger, like someone with Alzheimer’s gone missing.”
“Your voice sounds slurry. Now’s no time to go on a bender.”
“I’ll . . .” She hesitated, working an embarrassingly uncooperative tongue around her front teeth. “Explain later.”
“OK. I’ll get a taxi and go to the bus station. Maybe someone did—”
“It’s an idea, but the employees have probably changed shifts.”
“I’ve got to do something, Belle. These stairs are murder, though, and the kid next door and his family are away at a hockey weekend in Gravenhurst. What a mess. It’s not Strudel’s fault.”
“You can hardly walk, Jack.” She groaned as she leaned against the wall, remembering that if Big Syl was telling the truth, Dumontelle had already made one attempt on her life. Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity for a final coup, with her unable to reach the shotgun in the rafters? Time to circle the wagons, rally the troops, damn the torpedoes. “Half and half.” Make a whole.
“You want me to pick up cream?”
Jack and the poodle arrived around midnight in a taxi. “My last forty bucks. Who cares?” he said, hobbling with a crutch to the deck and climbing one painful step at a time. The driver followed with a duffle and a bag of Performatrin puppy chow, placing them in the hallway and giving a wary eye to Freya, who was watching his every move as she switched her tail to avoid the poodle’s jaws. Then spinning up the incline to the road, the cab pulled away into the night.
“Pardon me for not helping,” she said from an L-shaped position as she tried to hold the door. “I screwed my back.”
“Been there myself. Tried any Robaxicet? Hey, one piece of good news. The dog’s pretty well housetrained,” Jack said as she offered sheets and blankets, directing him and his ingenue to the couch downstairs and telling him not to flush paper because of the septic system. Thank God, each floor had a bathroom.
Meanwhile the poodle made Grand Prix fifty kph turns of the house, snatching wood slivers from the pine kindling and kacking a neat foam pool onto the linoleum. Freya at her side, Belle returned to the TV room for a fitful sleep, waking when the noisy furnace blasted hourly, inviting a mammoth propane bill. One eye lifted to watch the moon weave circuits through the cedar tops. Only four Tylenols left.
Twenty-Five
Sun was streaming in the window when a gentle nudge shook Belle’s shoulder. “I wanted to let you snooze, but something’s funny downstairs.”
She rubbed gritty sleep from her eyes and pushed off the blanket, her cold, stockinged feet dangling like dead lumps from the ottoman. After the medication and the wine, no food and little water, her mouth tasted like the bottom of a litter box. “I could use a laugh. What’s the poodle doing?”
Though
he wore typical male striped pajama bottoms, Jack’s muscular chest was bare, and he scratched one pectoral Rambo-style where a few errant hairs twined. “Not Strudel. Burpy sounds. And the toilet isn’t flushing. I cleaned up best I—”
“Isn’t flushing! Mother of Mercy!” Belle snapped awake as a charge of fear galvanized her aching body. She scissored herself up, the pain in her back a dull gnaw, and scuttled like a stricken dwarf to the basement, where a four-inch circular hole in the floor in the laundry room was gurgling ominously and threatening to overflow. A wet drain, pulse of the bowels of the living house. “Come outside, Jack. Time to dance.”
After shrugging into their clothes, they made tedious, three-legged plunges through waist-high drifts to a hillock of snow, Jack using a shovel for a crutch. With her direction, he began clearing the plywood top of a metre-wide round cement well tile sunk into the ground. “The house drains into the septic tank under the stairs, then flows into this chamber, where a pump sends the effluent into the field bed near the road.” Braced by her, Jack had the snow cleared in minutes. Then he removed heavy stones from the cover. Using her arms and shoulders with caution, she helped him shove it aside. Holding their breath, blinking at the fumes, they stared into a frozen hell.
“I can’t even see the pump. God knows how it’s been working at all,” Belle said with a grim expression.
“Six feet to the ice,” Jack said. “Maybe I could lean down and whack the mother with the shovel, but that might damage the mechanics or cut an electrical cord.”
Sweat was forming on his brow. The effort was costing him. “That’s what plumbers are for,” she said, limping to the house.
The Yellow Pages had solid coverage of specialists in pump and septic freeze-ups. She sighed as she hung up. “Nauss called all staff back from vacation. Apparently with that weird thaw on Wednesday, frost came out of the ground, and it’s fear of flushing all over town.”
With disgust, Jack was sniffing his clothes. Septic fumes were not only toxic, they loved to infuse fabric.
“Here’s the plan. Nothing goes down the drain. I have empty paint cans in the storage room downstairs. Bring one for me. If this isn’t resolved fast, neither of us is in shape to be making trips to the old outhouse. We may have to stay at the apartment.”
Nothing like a second crisis to overshadow the first. Over a hasty breakfast, eaten in the TV room for mutual comfort, they discussed strategy. “Miriam was supposed to meet Celeste Monday at noon for some paperwork,” Belle said, smearing no-name cheese spread on her English muffin.
Jack gestured with his coffee cup. “And you know what that sweetheart is going to think. That Mimsy’s run off.”
“Right. So tomorrow night we call the police. For now we sit on it. Or on the paint cans. What else are we good for?”
Around noon, “Men With Pressure Hoses” opened to a rapt audience. An hour later, they had blasted and removed the ice. “Your pump’s shot,” the young gofer called from a ladder in the well. “Have to go back to town.”
By five, the work was done, and the cripples wandered out for the sequel. The boss was rubbing his bald head while all peered at the murky levels, slowly roiling amid a feeble hum. “She ain’t draining that fast. Could be your bed up there’s plugged.” Were his pouchy eyes accusing, or was she imagining it? That pristine septic field the requisite one hundred and fifty feet from the lake had been babied from day one. A replacement might cost ten thousand.
Writing a cheque on the credit line for $1280.40 with the knowledge that she could be in the same fix by midnight, Belle heard the old timer’s backup plan. “If the levels don’t fall by tonight, get Herby out to haul a temporary holding tank into the yard. You can pump up, get sucked every couple weeks, then dig your new bed in May when the ground thaws.”
Get sucked. And a heavy snowfall was predicted. As they both rested, Jack whistling at the centrefold of the Playboy she’d brought to the hospital, Belle began rubbing her right hand mindlessly. When he got up with her reluctant blessing to test the toilet, she saw blood seeping through his sweatpants. “You’ve pulled the stitches. What are we—”
“No biggie. VON’s coming at seven to change the bandages. I gave them this address.”
Her appetite rarely failing her, Belle managed to stand for brief periods, leaning her pelvis against the sink in order to prepare carrots, potatoes and onions to make an oven stew with an excellent Chianti, mashies on the side.
“Hey, I should propose marriage,” Jack said, digging in. At the narrowing of her eyes, he added, “You never said dick to Mimsy about our—”
“About our what?” She wiped her mouth demurely. The gravy was divine.
Arriving shortly after dinner, courtesy of the Victorian Order of Nurses, a smashing brunette of thirty with bee-stung lips and high cheekbones, expressed horror at Jack’s wound. “Mr. MacDonald,” she began, “you—”
“Call me Jack. Did you hear the one about the bear who comes into a Yukon bar and orders a sour toe—”
“I can’t imagine what you have been doing, but you are not, absolutely not, to leave this house for at least four days. The report said you lost a lot of flesh and nearly bled to death. How do you expect to heal?” She unrolled the bandages with a vengeance as Belle sat quietly reading an Ellery Queen magazine, near enough to eavesdrop but not too close to the carnage.
“Guess the babe just got out in time,” Jack observed later as he did the dishes while snow started to accumulate on the deck, quickly covering the barbecue. The wind picked up and visibility across the lake dropped to nothing as the tiny lights of the distant First Nations reserve winked out in the white blast.
Fixated on the full sink, Belle watched him pull the metal strainer, holding her breath as the whirlpool vanished. Then she picked up a flashlight from above the fridge. “I’m going out to peer down that damn well chamber.”
“The water went down fine. Geez. You checked it two hours ago when you did a wash.”
Heading for the coat closet, she called, “I know. But I want a shower. Call me obsessive compulsive. Which I am.”
Minutes later she returned with a weary smile. “Draining nicely. Nirvana, here I come.”
And minutes later again, she was moaning in bliss under a torrent of hot water, turning gingerly to let it gently massage her back. Thanks to stretching exercises, her muscles were beginning to ease. Buffeting the house, the vampiric wind chanted empty threats at their snug cocoon. Sweet of Jack to let her wash first. Both smelled like they’d been wading Paris sewers in search of Jean Valjean. Les Misérables indeed. Lucky to have a sewer, period. She turned off the water and scrubbed her arms and body with a bar of peppermint soap with defoliating apricot kernels, feeling her pores unclogging by the thousands. Then, while she lathered her hair into a Pert passion of suds, the world went black.
Twenty-Six
Belle didn’t want to remember how she’d slipped tackily into bed after an unsuccessful rinse with President’s Choice spring water, nor how she’d groped in the dark for flashlights, candles and Coleman lanterns, along with a camping stove for the morning.
“Glad you took the first bath,” Jack said in the flicker of lamplight as they sat at the kitchen table in Sunday’s dawn, consuming oatmeal laced with honey and the last drop of cream. His face sprouted a healthy growth of whiskers.
Feeling like a pariah, she scratched her left hand, where an angry patch had replicated itself. “No jet pump. No water. Even the phone’s dead,” she said. “Frankly, I’m afraid to look out the door to the yard. The predictions said forty centimetres, and for once, they were right.”
“I loaded the last piece of wood from the wheelbarrow.”
A roar from below announced Ed, driving up from the lake on his snow machine. Hailing them, he stopped in front of the basement patio doors and thumped slowly upstairs, his round face pinked with cold. “Battery’s shot on the truck, so I can’t plow you until the juice rises. Probably won’t see the town guys until mid
night anyhow. Lucky it’s a weekend, eh?” he said. “How about that bloody Ontario Hydro? And they want to privatize it?”
After Ed had shovelled a narrow path to the tarped wood crib on the deck before he left, Belle confronted the paralyzed meter. Usually it was racing circles like a demented greyhound, slurping dollars by the minute. Now she wanted to press her lips to the cold glass to apply the kiss of life. Adversity gave a person character. Any more of that liability and she’d have to rent a U-haul.
As she cleared snow from the crib, she heard a yell from the house. “Woopeee! We got us powah!”
Jack had the phone in his hand when she came in. “It’s as good as forty-eight hours since Mimsy disappeared. I tried to dial the police, but the damn thing’s out. Do you have a cellphone?”
“Doesn’t work by the lake with all these hills behind.”
Late the next morning, having hired a lad down the road to shovel the deck and unbury the van so that Ed could plow out, Belle dragged herself into the office and arranged a lumbar support pillow on her chair. Modern treatments were encouraging moderate activity with back injuries instead of bed rest. Nothing in life lately was moderate. She hunched at her desk sipping coffee, her gut churning from stress, talking again to Uncle Harold’s picture. “Bad to worse, Pal Hal. Miriam’s gone. Jesse doesn’t answer her phone. I hate to let you down, but maybe I can’t handle this any more.”
Celeste breezed in at the stroke of noon, lugging a briefcase along with her Palm Pilot, which she set up conspicuously on Miriam’s desk. She unwrapped four sticks of gum, built a sandwich, and chomped in multiple bites. “So where is she? There are papers to sign. As soon as Route 17 is plowed, I’m out of here.”
Stalling uselessly for time, her hand willing the phone to ring with Miriam’s gruff voice, telling her that she’d been abducted by Sudburga, the legendary local lake monster, Belle took a long breath and gazed out the window at an enterprising pigeon carrying half a chocolate doughnut. Even blizzards couldn’t stop a true entrepreneur.