Image Decay

by Mark Lisac

  And then, Vietnam. On television. Night after night of young men in helmets marching or running through tall grass. Some marching or running to their deaths. Helicopters. Rifles and machine guns firing at targets the camera couldn’t see. Medics holding IV bags. Vietnamese peasants watching the grind of war all around them and hoping it would pass them by but knowing it would bring some of them to their deaths. Company and platoon commanders talking about writing letters to the families of young men who had died ugly deaths. One of them was sent to the parents of Grayson, whom he’d known since they pedalled tricycles down the sidewalk together and traded Donald Duck comic books. Grayson killed by mortar fire, body shredded—how badly and in how many places never known, because never seen other than by his platoon mates and medics. Only dead. Only remembered with the promise: “Someday, someone will pay.” But no one had paid. Not the bankers and politicians who had wanted to stop communism but whose sons had somehow got medical or student deferments.

  The only one who had paid was the girl lying in her own blood on the sidewalk. And the man who shot her had not paid either. Another criminal with a face unseen. He had gone into politics to make someone pay for Grayson but had somehow ended up in this place at the edge of the northern forests where Vietnam was only a word. Someone had to pay for something—if not for Grayson then for the girl. If he didn’t make someone pay for something, then what was he living for? To hand out cheques and make clichéfilled speeches? To build up one more year of pension service while he put off actually doing something? And now here he was, the momentary TV star for the government of a place he had barely heard of before he moved to it. Was television dissolving him too?

  He heard a crow cawing and brought himself back. The faint rumble and hiss of the blowout slid back into his awareness. He saw again the spruce and pine and underbrush growing out of the muddy brown dirt and wondered how he could have been staring at it all without registering what he was seeing. He felt sweat on his back and chest underneath his fleece vest and turned and walked back to the vehicles, listening to the crunch of the gravel and feeling his hiking boots slide a millimetre or two as they pressed loose surface stones down into the road’s firmer layer beneath. Tomorrow would be time enough to walk up to the barricade nearer the well.

  Back in Stratton’s car he didn’t talk much. Stratton told him that Cindy thought the session with the cameras had gone well. “Good,” he said, and looked out the side window at the treetops flitting by against the unmoving leaden cloud cover. At the edge of town, Stratton said, “You’ve got three choices for supper here—Greek, Chinese, or burgers.” Becker thought a couple of seconds and said, “Let’s try Chinese tonight, Greek tomorrow.”

  He stopped at his motel first to splash cold water on his face, thought about changing his shirt but decided not to, and read for nearly an hour before Stratton returned to pick him up and drive to the restaurant. They took a table against a side wall, cutting down the number of potential eavesdroppers around them. The meal was a touch better than he expected, the sticky and sweet sauce offset by vegetables that still retained some crispness. Stratton told stories about running fast-food operations, lowering his voice when he talked about the difficulties of choosing whose kids to hire.

  As they talked, the stations back in the capital ran tape from the roadside on their evening news shows. Morehead and Waschuk watched appreciatively, each in their own homes but both thinking the item had been a good first step. Jeffries saw both the performance he’d expected and confirmation that Becker was away for at least two days, then poured himself a scotch and opened his volume on the paintings of Gustav Klimt. Rabani half paid attention as he hurried through an unappetizing meal, and wondered what legal liabilities might emerge from the blowout. Ginny Radescu didn’t watch the evening news; she had a tuna salad before going out to the studio for her Jazzercize class. Jack Ostroski wasn’t watching either; he was holding his razor blade between a thick forefinger and thumb, slicing a new pocket for negatives in the matte where he’d stored the other negatives. This time he was not sure why photos of an old politician who had been turned into a figurehead were important. The prints were already reasonably safe under the linoleum in the back room. Roberto Morales did not normally look at the evening news but caught a bit this time as his sister watched while waiting for their dinner to heat up. He noted that the announcer said Becker would be staying at Broken Pines to monitor the blowout.

  17.

  THE NEXT MORNING DID NOT HAVE A MOMENT THAT COULD be called daybreak. A dull light gradually spread and partially bleached the sky from dark to light grey. The hazy sun looked more like the moon.

  Morales listened to the tool box bounce occasionally on the floorboard to his right. The dull metallic clanks of the wrenches and screwdrivers inside kept him company as he drove down the highway east of the capital. He didn’t like listening to the radio in the morning. The CBC was full of airy-fairy talk, and the private stations were too breezy and loud for that time of day.

  He wondered if she listened to the radio, and whether it would make any difference to how he thought about her. A real woman. Not like the girls he remembered from his childhood. Not like the hard-eyed women who hung around with his friends. Someone with more like the elegance and manners he remembered among his mother’s friends. Someone he would have grown up to deserve and have if Nicaragua had stayed the same, the kind of woman he had dreamed about during nights in the jungle. The full woman he deserved now that he was a man, but also the kind and measured one who might dissolve his unfocused anger and answer his questions.

  He left the highway and several minutes later turned the white truck into the Beckers’ driveway. The gravel crunched under the tires as he pulled up slowly beside the house. Usually he drove fast even in a driveway. Here he liked to be careful, non-intimidating. He noticed Arlene spotting him through the kitchen window. He took his time climbing out of the cab and looked at the screened kennel area where the four dachshunds greeted him with snarling barks, stepping from side to side in agitation. But they were used to seeing him by now and settled down quickly. He saw her open the back door. She came out onto the porch, walking to the edge, placed where she would be looking down at him and he had no reasonable way to get up to the same level.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Becker,” he said.

  “Good morning.”

  “I will finish scraping the last windows in the shed and repainting the frames today.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll get a cheque ready for you. I hope a cheque is okay.”

  “I’m sure it will be good,” he said. He kept looking at her. “I wonder if there is anything else to do here. Work is still not easy to find in construction.”

  “Sorry, we’re in good shape for the winter now. If something else comes up I’ll be certain to phone you. You’ve done a good job. And it’s nice to have someone around the house from time to time.” She smiled as she spoke. He smiled back.

  “I am happy to hear that.” He paused but saw her still smiling. “Señora, I am happy to see you sometimes too. I need the money for the work. If I did not, I would still be happy to come here just for your company.”

  He paused again, waiting for any response, not seeing any but not seeing discouragement either. “Do you think you think perhaps we could talk sometime? For a visit, I mean. Perhaps even after I finish the painting today?”

  She tightened the smile and let her eyes open further into a more quizzical, almost amused expression, and said, “Nothing better for you to do? Life can’t be that boring for a young man like you.”

  “Ah, there are things to do, but it is not a question of they are boring, it is a question of are they interesting. You are interesting.”

  “Surely you know younger women who must be more interesting to you.”

  “Not so many,” he said. “Not so interesting to talk to.”

  “We haven’t talked much aside from arranging what work to do around here.”

&
nbsp; He kept looking up at her, two steps higher at the edge of the back porch. “You have told me about the plants and trees growing around the yard. You have told me about your interesting plans for the shed. I can tell you would have many more interesting things to say if we talked together.”

  “It’s a little chilly out here today,” she said. “And I do have some things to arrange before driving into the city this afternoon.”

  “I thought only that with Mr. Becker away at that gas well you might feel lonely,” he said.

  “I’m never really lonely. If I start feeling that way I have friends to talk to on the phone and people to see in the city. Being a cabinet minister’s wife is a sort of job, just not a paid one.”

  He was hearing discouragement now but did not give up. Being discouraged had not been the way to stay alive the times he had knelt behind tree trunks and screens of leaves in the jungle with an AK-47 in his hands, listening for sounds.

  “But I do not often see you smiling like you were when I arrived this morning. You have sometimes seemed lonely. Women have told me I am good company. I have many stories to tell. Some are funny, unless you would rather hear the exciting ones. And I could make you coffee as well as I paint the window frames, even better I think. You would be happy with the way I make coffee.”

  She looked at him, looked at the dirt-streaked white pickup, looked into his eyes again, and said, “Roberto, I think you should just finish the work. I’ll bring the cheque out to you.”

  He smiled again, this time with less crinkle around his eyes. “It is a shame to see you here with no company, and never tasting my coffee.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “I always have company here.”

  He looked slowly down the driveway and around the yard. He looked back at her and held out his left hand, palm up, as if to ask who was always here.

  “Ricky,” she called. The Doberman loped up silently from its shelter outside the kennel area. It glanced at Morales and looked up to the porch. She pointed at Morales. Now the dog turned and set itself lower toward the ground. It didn’t growl or bark but its lips pulled apart slightly, showing teeth and watching the man with full attention.

  He did not like dogs but knew better than to move suddenly. He smiled again, looking up directly at her, and said, “I see now you have company. I am sorry if I can not match the friendship of your dog. I will finish the painting and go, unless you no longer think it is necessary.”

  “You can finish,” she said. “I’ll leave the cheque in your truck.”

  She waited until he walked into the shed. She told the dog to sit outside the back door as she went back into the house to write the cheque. Half a minute later she came back out, opened the truck door, laid the cheque on the seat and went back inside, locking the door after her. Ricky paced around the porch and sniffed at the grass verge of the driveway, looking up now and then as he heard the occasional sound from the shed.

  Morales finished before noon and walked slowly back to his truck, making a show of disinterest as the Doberman followed his movements, fully engaged. He turned the truck around in the space between the house and the shed and drove out faster than he had driven in, bits of gravel arcing up from the back wheels.

  “Bitch,” he thought. “Anglo bitch.”

  Arlene kept her gaze on the symphony foundation’s draft annual report as she listened to the truck rattling out toward the road. She had not been what she would call afraid but felt relief at hearing the young man’s departure. Attention from someone a good twenty years younger had been flattering. His presumption had been distasteful and his overconfident air concerning.

  She felt the pull of an easy thought—that his assumptions, or hopes, were just what a person could expect from a stranger, a brash newcomer to the province, someone who knew nothing about how it had been built. She remembered, though, that overconfident and negligent and even dangerous men could be found anywhere. Men like Anne Trimble’s husband, who had built a reputation as a leader in the oil industry for decades while leaving his wife at home for endless days and belittling her whenever she ventured an opinion. She had ended up shooting him five times with a .22-calibre pistol as he sat watching a hockey game and drinking straight scotch. He spent a month in hospital but survived because she had not had the sense to use at least a .38 and because a neighbour who’d been walking by had called the police and an ambulance. She had told the police the bloodied satin-finish upholstery on the couch could be replaced but she was sorry that good scotch had been spilled.

  Abusive or negligent husbands were one thing. A husband drifting in and out of a marriage like a figure appearing and disappearing at the edge of a heavy fog was quite another. Arlene thought again about what her husband had looked like on the evening news. He was calm, in charge, even handsome in his pallid way. She’d thought in the early years that she could see him running a ranch. Still could. He had the stubbornness. But he would never have settled down to a commitment like that, an attachment fixed to an immovable expanse of grass and earth. She wondered if that was how he saw her—a symbol of attachment to land and to its traditions. Was her fixedness too much to bear? Could someone who had moved here from another country ever fully understand what it meant to inherit a hundred and more years of a family’s presence in this one place? And if he could not attach himself to one place, what did that mean about his ability to keep attached to her, or to anyone?

  She pictured him again as he’d appeared on the screen last evening. He had probably appeared like a normal politician to others. She knew the half-attentive hollowness in his eyes. He’d been doing his job but also thinking about something else. Months after they had met, he told her what he had often told others during his university years but had increasingly closed up inside himself. She remembered the desperate diffidence in the way he had told her about his best friend’s death in Vietnam. He had said, as she was sure he had said many times when he was younger, “Someday, someone will pay.”

  Now there was no one left to pay. The old men who had insisted there was no alternative but to turn Vietnam into a blood-streaked swamp were already retiring from public view. The younger men who had almost magically come up with student deferments or safe National Guard service or medical excuses were already climbing high up the political ladder. She knew some people had found keys to the escape door. An American oil executive visiting her father during those turbulent times had come to dinner and told them, “None of my friends’ sons have been drafted.”

  She knew John used to have dreams. He saw his friend’s body being torn by a mortar shell. Sometimes the friend died right away and sometimes he lived for several minutes screaming or moaning. Once she had suggested he see a therapist to help clear the imagined memory. He had replied that it would do no good, that you could come to terms with a real memory, but an imagined one would always come back in different form. The dreams had faded. She hoped they were not coming back. She didn’t think about the possibility that Morales had his own nightmares. Now he had anger, too.

  He was driving back to the capital fast, tailgating and cutting close in front of vehicles that he passed. Nothing worked out the way he thought it would. He could picture a different life for himself and he could never find his way to it. When he reached the city he drove past his sister’s rented house and to the fortified house where his friends kept their drugs, their cash and their guns.

  The house was less than a kilometre away from the store where Alex Rabani built smokers and displayed them for sale. Alex was there a few minutes after noon when George pulled up and got out of his car to go for his weekly midday walk with his brother. Alex looked out the open door of what he considered his workshop and broke into a surprised light smile. He put his red plaid flannel jacket on over his pilled steel-grey work sweater and walked out to join his brother.

  They strolled down the avenue and turned left onto the street that would take them past the old churches. Anglican, Methodist, Greek Orthodox and, just off
on a side street, a dull yellow clapboard building that served as a Buddhist temple. George knew Alex liked the old buildings; they represented stability to him. George saw them as poorly attended historical survivors, abandoned ships on a beach where the tide was going out. Only the evangelical church in what had been an abandoned office building closer to the city centre was gaining congregants.

  Alex looked at the curled brown leaves hanging onto the old elms and Norway maples in the hard autumn air. He saw tradition. He looked at the fallen leaves littering the sidewalk and small yards, some of them flopping listlessly in a small gust, and he saw lines of movement. The thought of lines reminded him to tell George about his new book project.

  “It’s going to be called either Lines on the Prairie or The Country of Geometry,” Alex said.

  “I thought of it when I looked down the avenue in front of the store. The avenue bends a little bit as it goes east. Most of the other streets here go straight. Then I started thinking about curling. That’s what it’s mostly going to be about. Sort of a history of curling but I think I’ll visit some rinks and write about what I see there. I was already inside the Glenrock Club and watched some games. They have old metal signs on the back walls advertising Macdonald cigarettes. You know? The ads with the blond Scottish lass?

  “The signs were part of the overall atmosphere. They were a tradition, just like everything else in the rink. And there were all those regular lines. Everything on the sheets of ice is measured and exact. The boundaries are all straight lines. The targets are all perfect circles, just like the rocks. The rocks are all lined up fitting snugly together until they’re played. And then everything about the game is geometry. It’s all about angles, and keeping everything inside lines or on top of circles. I wonder if that’s why people like curling. Maybe what they really like about it is the order. Everything is where it’s supposed to be, even if the rocks sometimes go where no one expects. It’s probably not a coincidence that people like curling here on the Prairies. All those straight highways and secondary roads. All those flat horizons and farms divided neatly into sections and quarter-sections.”