“Run in and check, will you, Boyd?” said the big one. “Make sure they’re ready for her?”
The boy disappeared. The big one said, “You just sit tight now, missus.” He got out of the car and wandered further down the snaking driveway, where he lit a cigarette.
They had her now, trapped in the car, and could do whatever they wanted.
She had been to the hospital many times, and it never looked like this. What kind of fool did they take her for?
Nothing to the seatbelt. They didn’t give her much credit if they thought that would hold her.
The big one paced back and forth in front of a row of dumpsters. Not watching.
She had seen him moving his hand around on his armrest, working the locks. She snaked her arm between the driver’s seat and window. Pushed and tugged at whatever buttons and levers her fingers could find, and landed on a smooth bump the size of a fingertip. Pushed it, and heard the whole car release.
Those fellows were charming, and so full of themselves. Boys had been like that ever since Joyce was a girl, always nudging and pushing at her, this way and that.
She gripped the doorframe to pull herself up. The heat surprised her. The fellow on the tractor circled around a weeping willow. The big one stood with his back turned and his head bent, as if saying a quick prayer. Smoke rising from his head.
Just a few steps behind the car, where the grassy square ended, was a shallow ditch that led directly into the woods. Joyce stepped down and back up the other side. Got hold of a spruce branch for support, and hoisted herself into the low bramble and scraggly trees. She moved quick, stumbled to one knee, stood and brushed her slacks. Low branches tugged at her cardigan and whipped her legs. Her hand was stinging from the spruce needles. A downed tree tripped her to her knees, and something pulled across her forehead.
She felt for her glasses. The glasses were gone. No matter.
Perspiration blurred her eyes, drops of it rolling down the side of her nose and to her lips. She felt for her glasses again. Walked into another downed tree. A high one this time, it punched the air from her. Every breath became a stab in the chest.
But here was something like a path, a trail finding her. Just like it always found them, Joyce and Marty, out causing trouble on summer nights. Even without Marty she could find her way back. She’d catch a glimpse of the water and map her way from there. Or she’d hear the Chute or find the slope. Or find Spence, who was always out in the woods.
Once, she was lost altogether and it was nearly dark and she thought about calling out. Then she heard Spence, clear as day. Spence who came out of his mother too soon, walking along with his rod and tackle and belting out some old song. She asked where he had been fishing because they were nowhere near the brook. But Spence just kept up his singing, and she followed him like he was the Pied Piper. Only took a couple of minutes before he found the main road. Didn’t say a word. Singing, the whole time.
Marty nearly came out of his skin when he heard. “Bloody Spence. Did he touch you?” “No,” she said. Though he touched himself a bit, because he always did. She didn’t mention that to Marty, because Spence would have got a beating.
Joyce sank to the ground for a rest, the cardigan catching and hitching up the back. She reached to free it, and free her hair. The damp earth chilled her bottom. Her insides released and she wet herself. Couldn’t help it.
The woods were a tangle. But the sky calmed her, just to look up at the rich, deep blue. There was a song about the infinite sky, with its wandering clouds, and the singer wondering where the clouds go. The sort of thing children wonder about, or people who are just falling in love.
That was a pretty song. It came on the radio when she was in labour, and she felt herself carried away by it. Surprised her that a song could still do that.
When Herbert was born the doctor said to her, “I heard you at a dance one night, and the way you sang, you could talk a fellow into anything. Did you always sing like that?”
“I always tried,” said Joyce. She was near tears from failing to get the baby to latch.
“Well then,” said the doctor. “I’d imagine you’re responsible for a few babies born around here.”
A thread pulled hard up her throat and out between her teeth. Only a bit of spit or something. She stood, and put her hands on her knees to stop them shaking. Made her stomach settle.
That’s better.
There was sun coming through the trees, and a steady drone approaching somewhere beyond.
She had liked it when the doctor said her singing was responsible for the babies. The way he laughed when he said it. She liked to think how a song might make a fellow feel that life was stretched out in front of him and beyond. How he might feel it in his body. He and his girl dancing and carrying on and then back out into the night. Headed home to make the baby that’s been waiting inside her.
The overhead drone shifted to a lower pitch. The first morning arrival, banking for its final approach, buffeted by the headwind. The shift schedule gone to pieces. Men rubbing tired eyes. And what would become of all those young girls? They didn’t even know where they were.
Joyce started walking again, taking her time. The woods brighter now, with sunlight breaking through. All she had to do was find her bearings. A trail was sure to emerge, or a logging road or the railway line. She might get a glimpse of the radar station. Before long an arrival would pass overhead, and she could follow it to the tarmac, where the midday flights were running up their engines.
Her chest went tight, and she took a moment to steady herself. But nothing came up her throat. It was different this time. More like her body was excited, the anticipation wrapping around her. She stepped around a big tree trunk and caught a foot on the roots. But she wouldn’t fall this time. She kept on, headed into the sunny woods and looking to the vast sky beyond. Home was out there somewhere.
21
Carter and Terry check their bags and a small crate of artifacts. They exchange hugs with Andi and Red, who are returning Terry’s hatchback to St. John’s. Morris left this morning, driving west to visit family in Port aux Choix.
Terry asks to see their seat assignments and takes it up with the agent.
“Look at the size of him,” he says, pointing at Carter. “Can’t you find something up front? A bit more leg room?”
The agent taps at his computer and looks up at Carter. “Are you from here?”
“Oh, he’s very much a local boy. Very deserving of your best service.”
“I think you went to school with Nick Skanes?”
“You’re Nicky’s brother?” Carter spent enough hours at Nicky’s house to recognize the family look. The small eyes and downturned mouth with its little overbite. “How is he?”
“Divorced twice, five kids,” says the ticket agent. “But he’s fine. Lives in Florida, managing a condo unit.”
“That’s great.”
“So you can do something for our friend here?” asks Terry.
“Wish I could. We’re overbooked as it is.” Nicky’s brother stabs the keyboard again and sighs. “Oh my.” This sounds exactly like his mother, who used to make Carter sit in the kitchen to talk about school and future prospects and it’s criminal the government won’t do anything to help young people.
“It’s busy,” says Red. The lineup for security snakes halfway across the terminal, which is no bigger than a modest grocery store.
“Do you think they made this one ugly on purpose?” says Andi, looking around at the windowless room in its varying shades of brown. The renowned international terminal is walled off, a glimpse revealed by an open door behind the ticket agent.
“Now, listen up,” says Terry, gathering Andi and Red to him with a touch of their elbows. “Morris has to corral those ideas. Promise me you’ll keep after him, Violet.”
“He doesn’t like it,” say
s Red, acknowledging her given name.
“He needs it. He’s only got a few weeks. All his wild ideas aren’t enough. He’s got to nail them down. And Andi, you’ll keep working through those ideas you had about public engagement?”
“See how neatly he puts everyone in their place?” says Andi, as Terry strolls to the washroom. “The golden boy gets to have the brilliant, out-of-control ideas. His female colleague is supposed to hold his hand—”
“Or whatever else needs holding.” Red makes a stroking motion with a fist.
“—and my job is to make everyone like us. Public freaking engagement.”
Carter is flattered to be taken into their confidence, to be taken as an enlightened male.
“Do you think you’ll be back next year?”
“In Gander, you mean? Not sure,” says Red.
“I don’t know,” says Andi. “Plane crashes aren’t really my thing. I might transfer to Manitoba. I would, if it wasn’t for Harry.”
Carter is jolted by a pang of jealousy. Why Manitoba? Who’s Harry?
“I mentioned your French movie to my friend Bridgett,” says Andi. “I’ll show you what she sent me. I’ll forward it. It’s great.”
The legroom isn’t so bad on the plane. Carter is helpless when forced into small spaces. He’ll end the day with aching knees and hip flexors and a crick in his upper back no matter where they seat him.
Terry closes his eyes. Carter calls Isabelle before the order comes to shut off phones.
Sam has a new confidence, she says. She told him how a machine will take a picture of his heart, and it will show what’s going on. It makes complete sense to him. He trusts the machine. It’s the doctors that make him nervous.
“We looked it up online, how it works,” she says.
“Should he be seeing that?”
“It was his idea. We saw how the pictures come out. They look like ultrasounds. He loved it. Best machine ever, he said.”
Sam doesn’t fight the world, but he can be hard and mulish, denying what doesn’t please him. So how does an ordinary medical apparatus, one that could deliver very bad news, become the “best machine ever?” Does he trust it because it’s a machine, its workings fully explicable? Or does he have faith in the mystery of it, a device that can show him his own heart?
The plane rocks as the propellers catch and sustain a low note. Carter receives the email forwarded from Andi’s film friend:
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg! Still breaks my heart. First movie for a very young Deneuve, so that’s a thousand little deaths just watching her. Simple domestic drama. Gorgeous muted colours. They sing every line and for a second you think wtf, and then it just grabs you. The tragedy isn’t that love dies - happens all the time after all. It’s that we let it die so easily.
//////
Carter’s latest message to Jordan finally prompted a reply. Last night, as he packed his filthy outdoor gear.
In my job you find out pretty quick how bad people hate each other. It’s like something about music really sticks the knife in, you know? I used to work with these two old guys. Best friends, nicest guys you ever saw. Sang these gorgeous folk ballads. You’d die to hear the harmonies. Moved a ton of units on the festival circuit. Then one of them calls me up and says we’re going to remix the album, and when I get to the studio he means remix as in replace the other guy’s tracks. Literally erase the other guy and overdub the harmonies himself. He says I got to let him do it because the contract says he calls the shots. But the other guy got wind of it and he shows up, pounding on the door. I won’t let him in because I’m scared as fuck, and he’s screaming. I said no fucking way I’m doing this. Go hire someone else. I heard after there was restraining orders and all kinds of shit. I mean, these guys used to go hunting together so they had shotguns.
Terry, who appeared to be dozing, turns and says, “Do you still play music?”
“How did you hear about music?”
“The guy who checked us in, in Gander. I was chatting with him after.”
“I used to jam with his brother back in high school. Two or three times a week we’d be down in Nicky’s basement, because his mother didn’t mind. But I don’t play now.”
“My wife is from Bosnia,” says Terry, leaning into Carter as the plane banks left. “Her uncle was a violinist, and the family always said music saved him during the war.”
“Because he could play?”
“No, that’s the amazing thing. Several months he was in a concentration camp. Torture, almost no food or toilets. You’d probably want to die. But he was a tremendous student of Mendelssohn, and every day he played Mendelssohn in his head. Symphonies, violin concertos, piano, whatever. Beginning to end, note for note. All the instruments and notes. All in his head.”
“That’s amazing.”
“He swears he would have died without it. He used to talk about how all the great composers left him speechless, except Mendelssohn. He always felt as if he and Mendelssohn were having a conversation.”
“Did you ever hear him play?”
“I never knew the man. He died within a few years, before I met Anna. The camp ravaged him, I guess. But they always say it was Mendelssohn got him through it. Hours he would spend in his head with his music. Completely removed from his body.”
//////
The baggage area is dimly lit and Spartan, bigger but not so different from the little brown room in Gander. Arriving passengers negotiate the space with strained, end-of-day civility. Carter turns on his phone. He has no missed calls or messages. Nothing from Isabelle. But a string of emails stack up, all from Will:
Subject: article in Now Magazine
Late Singer’s Final Wish: ’90s Indie Band Completes Final Recordings From Vault
Subject: TV sync deals
For immediate release: Siege Fifteen Productions Reaches Extensive Licensing Deals for New Music from Infinite Yes
Subject: album preview
Siege Fifteen Productions invites you to enjoy an exclusive preview of “Legacy,” the new album by legendary indie cult band Infinite Yes, featuring previously unreleased tracks.
All the emails are copied to Isabelle.
Carter clicks on the link to his exclusive preview, which takes him to iTunes.
Legendary indie cult band. That’s a new one.
There is a man next to Carter, their elbows touching and jostling in the traffic. He’s unwrapping a sandwich. Terry lingers further ahead with his phone.
The first suitcase comes diving down the chute as the file opens:
LEGACY
Infinite Yes >
SONGS RATING AND REVIEWS RELATED
Name Artist Time
1. Umbrellas of Cherbourg Infinite Yes 4:55
2. 109 Minutes Infinite Yes 1:49
3. Ronnie and the Crystal Meth Infinite Yes 4:09
4. North Bay Infinite Yes 3:12
Carter stops reading titles. He shakes, deep in his bones. People are crowding around him, hustling through to get within reach of the carousel. He touches the first song, finger trembling on the screen, and hears himself. His Telecaster lays down a figure, Colin and Will kick in with a tempo that surprises the ear. He doesn’t remember this tune, but it’s a key and chord change he’s used before. He’s borrowing from himself.
The man with the sandwich hears it, too. He and Carter seem to be the only ones standing still as the luggage plummets from above, and hands reach to grasp. Worn and stale from flight, people stagger and strain to retrieve massive suitcases and body-sized duffels. The man turns his chewing face to Carter as a second guitar, a strange guitar, comes in at sixteen bars to set a melody. Then a voice, lower and brighter than Leah’s voice, begins humming along.
One more email appears.
Subject: A Survivor’s Final Triumph
For i
mmediate release: In her last interview before her recent death from cancer, the voice of cult favourites Infinite Yes recalls the emotional and psychological abuse that tore apart her band and marriage, and how she fought through fatal illness to achieve the triumph of a final Infinite Yes album.
The man with the sandwich is chewing in time and gently nodding his head on the second and fourth beats. It sounds nothing like Infinite Yes. He wants to ask the man what he’s hearing. The nice bit shifting A-minor-to-G, is that it? It could be the lazy slide of the tempo, before Colin leans in to pull it back. The slippery imperfection of it set against the churn of the baggage carousel.
Carter’s phone rings, interrupting the music. A call from Howley Park. He mutes the ringer, mutes email. Carter jacks up the music as the voice begins to sing.
The first line says something about a final afternoon. A body pushes through, bumping his shoulder. There is an announcement about belongings left unattended.
He has to know these songs before he sees Isabelle. Has to know them fully. But the sound is foreign to him. Leah has reimagined the music in a way that won’t let him in.
The man takes a huge bite of his ham and cheese, and pushes at his lips to fit it all in, head still working on two and four. Then it nearly falls apart. The momentum stalls, an A-minor hanging for a desperate moment. The man tries to swallow, twisting his face with the effort. Then Carter’s Telecaster rises to resolve the line. The strange voice starts singing about blood and betrayal and love’s final days. But it’s Carter building the song with a rush of sound and colour, pitching the band into a chorus. Carter and his guitar cracking open all the potential in a music he has played but cannot hear.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like many who grew up in Gander, I’ve always been fascinated by stories of the early days, when the town was a hub of international aviation and post-war prosperity.
The End of Music Page 28