by Lou Allin
She picked up silverware and linens in the kitchen, then passed the nurses’ station. Cherie was on guard, a curly blonde sparkplug who never missed flagging the slightest change in her charges. “George’s skin is getting worse. Our doctor hasn’t a clue. I know you took him to Vonnie, the skin specialist, only last month.”
Belle paused, nuances of worry on her forehead. “He said it was bullous dermatitis. Nothing serious.”
The nurse snorted in contempt. “Another kind of bull. That’s Latin for blisters. A description, not a diagnosis.”
“Ouch. Guess I shouldn’t have taken Spanish.” Belle nodded, appreciating the woman’s sharp eye. “Even my father said the man was senile. Vonnie must be in his eighties.”
“We need every specialist we have up here, but sometime I wonder.” She turned as a frail man in a walker lurched by, his bum crack exposed by pants that hung on him like a scarecrow. “Here, Jim. Let me tuck you in, my man.”
In the bright, private room with easy-care linoleum, Belle found her father in his gerry chair, the jailer designed to keep him from falling but also from walking, since he wouldn’t cooperate with physio attempts. She doubted whether the trade-off was worth it, but he enjoyed his television, magazines and newspapers, and especially his food. Every meal her mother had placed before him had been the “best”. He wore a clean blue sweatsuit and Labatt’s slippers on his feet, an ironic touch. He was a teetotalling Methodist, but Belle and her mother had made up for that with their mutual predilection for scotch straight up.
He brushed a shaky hand through his thick mane of white hair, cheeks pink with a fresh shave. Staff knew when the family would be visiting and made the extra effort. He tapped his watch as if to coax the hours to pass more quickly. Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune defined his evenings. “Late. I thought you weren’t coming.”
She arranged the bib and food. “Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor earthquakes nor tsunamis can stop me.”
As he dug in with a will, she winced at the large black blisters branding his mottled hands. Suppressing an urge to roll up his pant leg to check further, she turned instead to her sandwich, making sure he stopped now and then to drink water.
When he had finished ten minutes later, she let him attack the pie, carefully mashed. “Remember Gary Myers?”
“Of course. Of course. One of those blond German lads you favoured. Were you trying to recruit your own Wehrmacht?”
She smiled at the quirkiness of his memory. Sometimes sharp, recalling Dunkirk with his Churchill imitation, dull some mornings when he forgot having breakfast and wanted another. Who had been her troopers? Wertman. Gall. Erhart. Stretching from Grade One to university. Was she a Teutonic magnet or vice versa? Then she explained what had happened.
“We never know when the grim reaper is going to come calling. Only the good die young, your sainted mother aside. Gary, now. I could see you wondered about that boy. Why he never came around again.” He tapped his temple. “But parents know.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You never mentioned it.”
“None of my business. My cousin Ab’s daughter, Tracy the vet, she lives in Lethbridge with a female dentist.” He waved his hand. “Asked Ab about it. That’s what he said. None of his beeswax.”
Belle sat back in wonderment at a curiously twenty-first-century attitude for a man alive during the Twenties. “Tracy? I guess that wasn’t a topic for discussion while I was growing up.”
He gave a low whistle. “As a kid, you sure were confused about The Children’s Hour. Your mother was at Massey Hall the night it showed at the screening, so you had to come.” He had been a booker for Odeon Pictures in Toronto, and they’d seen four new releases every week together once she reached Grade One. “You cried because Shirley MacLaine was so sad.”
The large clock on the wall was sending her a message. She turned with reluctance to a more alarming subject. “Cherie says your blisters are getting worse. Let’s see.” She rolled up his pants and nearly gasped in horror. Huge, watery black sacs covered his lower legs.
“They don’t hurt. Not one bit.”
“A saving grace.” She tried not to shudder. Was he merely being brave, or was some more pernicious condition festering, like diabetes?
Making a note to tell the nurse to have the doctor check her father on the weekly visit, she left the nursing home. Something was very wrong here. For once she wished she lived down south with a lion’s share of specialists . . . or in the States, with money up front and no waiting.
FIVE
It’s all still a nightmare, but I can’t wake up,” Mutt said, sipping coffee on her deck. A slight breeze ruffled the needles on the huge fir that loomed twenty feet above the railings. The poplars and birch in the greenbelt to their right wore a bright cloak of new leaves, but he didn’t seem to notice. His handsome face was battling the signs of stress. Circles had appeared under his dulled eyes, and his hand shook. “When I saw him on that table . . .”
She leaned forward. “I’ve never had to do that. Must be painful.”
He shook his head, his dark curly hair close around his neck. “I write about this stuff. I tried to be objective, but it’s different in real life. His face was untouched. Almost serene, pink from the sun. The illusion of warmth. I wanted to touch . . .” His voice broke off.
A minute passed. “What about his family?”
“I had to call his mother. She’s in a retirement community near Hamburg. Even three Valium didn’t do the job for me. Maybe I should have driven down, but I didn’t trust myself on the highway.”
Like her, Gary had been an only child. Belle tried to recall his parents, seen at a distance at concerts and plays. He’d never introduced her, a bad omen. His father had been a lithographer, his mother a housewife like most women in Scarborough of that era. Gary had inherited his father’s blond hair and his mother’s chubbiness. “And his father?”
Mutt drained his cup. “Liver cancer. Didn’t make it past fifty. Gary connected the condition with his work, all those toxic chemicals. Of course, they didn’t know in those days.”
“Did you get any more information from the OPP?”
“I took a taxi and picked up the truck at the impoundment lot.” He gave a bitter laugh and drummed his fingers on the table. “An empty bottle of scotch on the seat.”
“I don’t believe it.” This was turning into a B-movie.
“Cheap stuff, too. MacKay and Whyte. Gary wouldn’t drink that on a bet. It was his only splurge. Glenlivet or nothing.”
Belle winced at the trashing of her bargain brand. “Did he usually carry alcohol along when he was working?”
Mutt shrugged. “I wouldn’t deny that if he stayed over in the tent, he might enjoy a few toddies around the campfire, but leaving an open bottle on the truck seat? No way.”
“Reminds me of Tom Thomson.” A friend of the Group of Seven, Canada’s foremost pantheon of painters, he had drowned in Algonquin Park.
“A famous mystery,” Mutt said. “There was a theory that he had been murdered by a local and that someone else lay in his grave. When a skull was unearthed, it showed signs of a bullet. Then the skull was identified as an aboriginal’s. Some said the family had relocated Tom. No one knew where, or they weren’t telling. I wrote a short story about it.”
“I know it’s tempting, but let’s not get carried away.” She imagined that with his crime writing, he juggled forensic possibilities on a regular basis.
Mutt stuck out his jaw, a faint stubble giving him the appearance of a high-priced model, probably through neglect, not affect. Belle preferred men clean-shaven. “The booze doesn’t make sense.”
She shifted to another subject. When her mother had died in Florida, Belle was fast on the scene with twenty garbage bags for her closets, burying her grief, as women often did, by turning to chores. By the following week, someone who needed them was wearing her mother’s stylish clothes. Mutt would have his own sad duties arranging the evidence of a soul. “Are you
going over to the Ministry to clean out his office?”
“This afternoon. He was only there a few months, but someone at Brock might be able to make sense of his elk research, if I can put it in order. Shame to throw it away . . . along with his life . . .”
He turned aside, and a hand brushed his eye. Then his broad shoulders straightened.
“Do you know much about zoology? And what about your own book? Don’t you need the time for that?” Did it make sense for Mutt to get involved in the research? Maybe a mission would ease his pain.
“Minored in it. An odd combination, but it gave us a connection. And as for my book, let it go for the moment. Nothing’s worse for an author than forcing a story.” He paused and frowned at a fresh thought. “Gary was especially excited about something lately, something that bothered him. We talked on the phone nearly every night.”
Belle shook her head, trying to remember what Gary had told her about his studies. Survival rates, was it? “A new disease? Or maybe someone poaching the herd?” Despite the ruinous penalties, which included heavy fines and confiscation of vehicles, the North was full of people who regarded the bush as a free supermarket.
Mutt walked to the edge of the deck, his velvety black hair stark against the pillowing cotton clouds in the distance. A raven warbled and swooped past. A marauding group of crows, smaller but dangerous, cawed shrilly from the tops of a high cedar, likely protecting their nests from the larger bird. “It was a white elk. A calf he found.”
She blew out a breath. “Sounds rare. I wonder if it was an actual albino or just a hybrid. I’ve read about moose with pale fur. Did he tag it? Take pictures? He must have carried a camera.”
“It was dead, that’s all I know. He said he had to make a few calls. Get someone to look at it.”
“So he was carrying the body around? My God.” The idea made her shudder, which explained why she was no scientist.
“Not carrying it áround.” He looked at her with an amused turn to his lips, as if she lived on another planet. “He brought home specimens whenever possible. It wasn’t gruesome to him.”
“I guess not, and there’s an ancient deer head in the woods that I am fond of. But surely no one would shoot a baby elk. There’s no meat to speak of, and it makes a poor trophy.” Then again, dogs and cattle and even people were shot every year by overeager hunters. Maybe it looked like a wolf to them.
“He didn’t mention any wounds. Died from natural causes, I suppose. But he wanted it documented.” He sat back down in the chair and crossed his legs, Noel Coward-style. North of Sudbury, it might have earned glances. But he was an author, and a theatrical side helped the mystique. More than that, he was adjusting to a savage loss, and he had trusted her with his heartache.
“How, uh, long were you and Gary together?” she asked. Perhaps she shouldn’t have intruded, but once Mutt had left, how could she fill in the gaps?
“Seven years. Wasn’t there an old film about that? Marilyn Monroe? Gary said you liked the classics.”
“The Seven Year Itch.” What else about her had been dinner-table conversation?
He stretched out his left hand, where a simple gold band gleamed. “Gary was the sentimental one. He insisted on a ceremony. Gladioli in every colour of the rainbow, even cinnamon. Four of our friends in tuxes, including two women. A string quartet. Catering by Mildred Pierce. And down the aisle to Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. Kind of an inside joke. But it was quite the occasion. Even if my family didn’t come. All of them were conveniently in Europe.”
“It’s a lovely song. Gary had a beautiful tenor voice, too.” They were mourning two different people, a boy and a man. “How did you two meet?” she added, her prying on a forward roll. It seemed that he wanted to talk about their life.
“Over a bag of garbage, oddly enough. The annual initiative to clean up the hiking trails around the Niagara escarpment.”
“Sometimes I think half the world’s out to trash the planet, and the other half’s cleaning up. It’s a stasis.”
Mutt cleared his throat and looked at his watch. Men’s styles were getting larger every year, a metallic command centre. A present from Gary? “I’m due at ten with the truck at the Ministry to clear out his office. If you’d come with me, that would be great. I don’t know my way around town.”
An hour later, they turned off Route 69 into the Ministry of Natural Resources on McFarlane Lake Road. The complex lay in a low valley of emerging boreal forest punctuated by the occasional conifer. Mutt parked in the lot, and they headed to the main office.
A tall, older admin assistant looked up from her computer. A metal sign on the desk gave her name as Marj Brousseau. On the walls were advertisements for environmental initiatives, hunting and fishing regulations and topographic maps. Taking their names and shaking hands, she responded to their inquiry with a sad smile, as she removed her slim, wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed the bridge of her aquiline nose. Tumbling strawberry-blonde hair streaked with grey was gathered at the back of her neck by a colourful paisley scarf. “I didn’t know Gary long, but he was a nice fellow. Serious about his job but with a good sense of humour. What a terrible accident.”
Mutt swallowed, shuffled his feet as he looked at a poster of duck species. “We came to clean out his office, Ms. Brousseau. If you can—”
“Of course. It’s Marj. I’ll call Dr. Rosaline Silliker. She’s our supervisor.” She punched in a few numbers.
Minutes later, a tall, dark chestnut brunette around forty with short, artistic curls entered the office, her arm extended from a tailored silk suit that brushed her mid-knee. Her legs were muscular without being overbearing, as if she worked out in Pilatian control of each group. “Thanks for coming so promptly at this sad time. We’ll miss Gary. His research was critical to the survival of these local herds. He had such a commitment to bringing back the elk, both for tourism—”
“And hunting?” Belle added, one corner of her mouth rising. She’d visited the Ontario Fur Managers website last year in connection with a trapper in her woods. Despite the occasional garbage raid, she and her resident bears had crossed paths many times without incident. No question that encounters were on the rise since cancellation of the spring hunt, a hot button that pitted gun-toting Northerners against Torontonians who had nothing but the odd raccoon or skunk to bother them.
“Animals are a resource. We’re here to keep them renewable. Farther north where jobs can be scarce, outfitters rely heavily on the traffic, and a few family lodges have suffered.” Rosaline’s tone was pleasant, but with a tinge of a bureaucratic lecture. The Ministry attracted criticism trying to please both sides, but Belle suspected that money was the bottom line.
Following her down a long corridor, they came to an office crowded with two battered oak desks, filing cabinets and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One shelf held toothy skulls of small mammals, rabbit, porcupine, a weasel. A few jars of formaldehyde held mysterious objects, which Belle wasn’t sure she wanted to examine. Mutt coughed as a musty smell tweaked their noses. At one desk, a young man of about twenty typed information into a computer spreadsheet. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, the sleeves cut roughly to reveal an eagle tattoo on one arm. A mop of buttery hair, the kind that made mothers spit on their fingers and tamp cowlicks into respectability, gave him a pleasantly boyish look.
“Dave Watson,” he mumbled, as they introduced themselves.
“Dave’s a master’s degree intern at Shield University. He can tell you what belonged to Gary.” Rosaline looked around with a helpful smile. “Do you need a cart or dolly? How about some boxes?”
Dave seemed rather cool. Busy though he might have been, he didn’t offer to shake hands and offered no commiseration about their friend. Shortly after, a handyman arrived with packing material and a flatbed wagon. Working slowly and carefully, Belle and Mutt emptied Gary’s file cabinets. “What about the books?” Mutt asked.
Dave looked up and pointed out two shelves. A bibliophile, with he
r mother’s Pauline Johnson’s first editions of poetry as a prize, Belle watched Mutt touch them like old friends, the last remnant of a life that ended halfway to the finish line. Ruminants of the Boreal Forest; Introduction to Zoology; North American Elk: Ecology and Management; Mosses, Lichens and Ferns of Ontario; piles of The Canadian Journal of Zoology and The Canadian Field Naturalist as well as her own favourites, Peterson’s Animal Tracks and Stokes’ Nature in Winter.
In another cabinet Dave indicated, Mutt turned up several plastic baggies with dry brown shapes. He wrinkled his nose, but Belle had no reservations about examining them. Similar to moose droppings and virtually odourless, thanks to a meatless diet, these pellets someone would dissect in a more complete analysis.
On Gary’s desk was a silver-framed picture, face down. Mutt turned it over to reveal himself in star quality from a Toronto studio. With a rising colour to his cheek, he tucked it under his arm. Then he asked, “Do you know what he was working on recently, Dave?”
“Naw. I’ve been out in the field the last two weeks.” He didn’t look up from his computer, presenting merely a hunched back. “Listen, if you can finish, I need some quiet in here.”
Mutt and Belle exchanged eye rolls and gave the office another scan. Mutt opened a deep cabinet and found a few more files. Then he reached over his head onto a seemingly empty shelf, fumbling at first with a quizzical expression, then retrieving a strange object. “This is weird. Is it yours, Dave?”
Dave turned with a sigh and grunted. “Do I look like a garbageman?”