Beck

by Mal Peet

  “Ain’t you gonna say nothing first?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  Bone straightened. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Well, you know what? I can’t think of a single prayer appropriate to the occasion. You?”

  Beck said nothing.

  “Take his legs,” Bone said. And then to Lonnie, “I’m sorry, pal. I guess you’d know we got no choice.”

  WHEN THEY WERE nearing the lights of Windsor, Bone said, “When you got us tied up, kid, run like hell home and tell Irma to get her ass down here. And bring the keys to the Ford, okay?”

  But there was no need. The truck was waiting on the quay and Irma climbed out of it. Beck didn’t recognize her at first; she was wearing a heavy jacket, trousers, and a man’s cap. Beck threw her the bow rope and she looped it over a bollard, and when he jumped down from the stern she went to him and put her arms around him without saying anything. Then she saw the awkward way Bone was climbing off the boat. She ran to him. “What happened?”

  “We got heisted. Lonnie’s dead. I’m hit in the arm. Ain’t gonna kill me. I’d kinda like one of them hugs, too. But leave my left arm out of it.”

  Beck stood watching them embrace. After a while Irma looked at him past Bone’s shoulder. She had tears in her eyes. “You okay, Beck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He did well tonight,” Bone said. “Real well.”

  Irma let go of Bone and stepped away from him and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Listen,” she said. “Lew’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Fran called me —”

  “Who?”

  “Lew’s housekeeper. Said she was upstairs, heard Lew answer the door and then shooting. After a while she goes down and Lew’s lying dead in the hall.”

  “Christ, Irma. When was this?”

  “She called an hour, hour ’n’ a half ago. I’ve been down here an age, baby, terrible things going through my head, wondering why you was so late back. Wondering if you’d come back.” She was crying and angry with herself.

  “Hush, honey,” Bone murmured. “We’re okay.”

  She shook her head. “It’s over, Bone. We gotta get out.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I’m done in, hon. Let’s get back to the house and —”

  “No,” Irma said. “It ain’t safe. Besides, we gotta get you to a hospital, fix you up.”

  “You crazy, Irma?”

  “Doc Bergman, then.”

  “All right. Bergman. And hope the son of a bitch is sober.”

  Beck stood silent and watchful. He didn’t understand what was happening but knew it was bad. He felt the cold hands of some implacable clock move into a darker hour.

  Now Irma turned to him. “Beck, honey? Get in the truck.”

  Irma drove. Beck sat between them. It was a squeeze in the cab because there were two fat items of luggage on the floor and Beck and Bone had to fold up and put their feet on them. Beck closed his eyes for a minute and wondered how sitting there made him feel safe, despite everything.

  “So, tell,” Irma said. “What happened over there?”

  Bone told her.

  Twenty minutes later, Irma pulled up alongside a quiet suburban house. She left the engine running and helped Bone up to the front door, which eventually opened. Beck sat in the truck. The moon was gone and snow began to fall, fine as salt, mesmeric. Beck fell asleep.

  He woke up when Irma got back in the truck and jacked the engine into gear. They drove off.

  “Irma?”

  She fumbled for the wiper switch. The blade staggered across the glass.

  “Is Bone okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s gonna be fine.”

  “We going home?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Irma?”

  She said, “Bags under your feet? The smaller one’s yours. Got most of your stuff in it.” She took her right hand from the wheel and dug out something from the pocket of her coat.

  “Here. There’s two hundred dollars. Divide it up, put it in different pockets, the bag, your boots. You listening? Don’t ever let no one see it all at once.”

  Beck stared at the roll of bills. “What’s it for?”

  “Take it. You gonna need it.”

  Headlights came toward them and Irma cussed and steered over to the right. “Now,” she said, “you still got that gun you think I don’t know about? Well, throw it out. Black boy with a gun is a shortcut to hanging. Go on. Open the window and throw it out.”

  He did it. And said, “Irma? I think maybe I killed someone tonight.”

  She said nothing for some time. Then glanced sideways at him, reached over, and briefly gripped his hand. “You’re a good boy, Beck. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

  It felt to him like she was saying good-bye.

  A little later she pulled the truck into a parking lot in front of a long, low building with lights along its frontage.

  “Where are we?”

  “The train station,” Irma said. “Now, listen, Beck. Here’s what you gonna do. You gonna go in there and find the men’s room, okay? Anyone try and talk to you, you just walk on by. You get into the men’s room; you clean yourself up. You got blood on your hands and the sleeves of that jacket and Lord knows where else. Anyone ask, say you work in the slaughterhouse. Then find a cubicle and change your clothes. There’s fresh in the bag. Then what you do is go to the ticket office and buy a ticket on the first train outta here. Far as I recall, there’s one going to Toronto in an hour or so. Get that one, unless there’s one earlier.”

  “We’re going to Toronto, Irma?”

  She closed her eyes wearily. “We ain’t going. You are.”

  His throat was full of ice. He had to squeeze the words through it. “I wanna stay with you and Bone.”

  She looked at him now. “I know you do, honey. But you can’t. Those men over there tonight and the men who shot Lew gonna come looking for us. I won’t have you caught up in it, Beck. It’d just bust my heart if . . .”

  “I can handle myself, Irma.” A sob broke in his throat.

  “Go.” She reached across him for the door handle. “Go!”

  His thoughts scrambled for a handhold. “We could run off together. Like we was family. Like you and Bone was my . . .”

  She rolled her eyes. “You saying I look old enough to be your mother?”

  To Beck, she did.

  “Enough, now. You do what I say. You put as much distance between yourself and trouble as two hundred dollars’ll buy you. If you’re careful, it might get you all the way to the West Coast. People say Vancouver’s a good place, even for coloreds. Head for there.”

  “Please, Irma.”

  Her eyes were wet but she brought one hand down on the steering wheel, hard. “Get out of the goddamn truck.”

  He did, dragging the bag. She slammed the door, had driven thirty yards when he wrenched open the driver’s door panting, so she had to brake. He leaned in and put his head on her lap, choking despair.

  She took one hand from the wheel and hesitated before resting it on his cheek. “Lord,” she said, “you sure know how to make things difficult.”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  “That’s good, Beck. Fear’s what keeps you alive. Now head for Vancouver, like I told you. Who knows? Me and Bone might end up there, too.”

  He looked up. “You promise?”

  “I can’t even promise myself to stay alive right now, honey. Now git.” She pushed him away. “Git!”

  Her foot hit the gas so hard she left nothing but the smell of rubber and a hole in his heart. A howl rose up in him but he pushed it down into the same place the rest of the howls lived. And a determination formed in his head right then not to fall for the ruse of kindness again. It led to nothing but pain.

  BECK WOULD DREAM the burning tree for the rest of his life. More often and more clearly than being robbed of his money. More often and more clearly than the hobo who’d emerged from a hea
p of sacks on the freight train out of Regina and said he would eat him raw.

  He would dream the road, too. Tarred, shimmery, undulating, unending. Walking was like rolling it backward with his feet and staying in the same place. The same limitless field of pale-green wheat to the right of the road. The same limitless field of pale-green wheat to the left of the road. Winds making tides in both. Purple-gray mountains ahead of him, distant as heaven.

  He’d been lost within himself, so when the rumble came he thought, hoped, it was a vehicle going in his direction. He turned, preparing himself to flag it down and be disappointed when it didn’t stop. And saw, above the pale horizon, that the vast sky had filled with oceanic night. Black waves, immense, capped with gray spume, collapsed and folded into each other with implacable slowness. In the darkness beneath them, forked crackles of brilliant light fingered the earth. The air groaned.

  Beck stood in the narrowing space between the sunlit world ahead of him and the dark chaos behind. For a few moments, it was a kind of calm; then the wheat writhed, flattened, and hissed. A wall of wind, unstoppable and full of ice, hit him, knocking him to his hands and knees. His hat whirled away. His clothes fought to follow. He crawled off the road into the wheat, grabbed handfuls of it to tether himself to the earth, buried his face in it.

  The ice hammered him for an eternity that lasted less than a minute then raced on across the prairie, hooshing through the wheat like a beaded curtain. A deluge followed: rain so heavy and thick it seemed to have no air in it. Beck was drenched in an instant. The earth in front of his face liquidized and spat at him. He forced himself, panicked, to his hands and knees, fearing he would drown. It was like kneeling in a waterfall. He lowered his head, gasping at the sparse air below his body. He endured; the rain ended as suddenly as it began.

  Beck lifted his head.

  The black sky had lowered itself onto the plain. There was only a narrow zone of dim green light between it and the earth. The air smelled sour and brassy like old coins. A couple of hundred yards away, Beck saw the ragged silhouette of a small stand of trees, one of those inexplicable lonely copses that serve to make the vast prairie seem vaster still and more empty. He had no idea what horrors the storm still held and doubted a bunch of trees would do much to defend him. But anything was better than lying in the open, vulnerable as a worm. As if to confirm this thought, the sky rumbled again like the warning in a dog’s throat. He clambered to his feet.

  He was within fifty yards of the copse when a jagged flash of light exploded just above his head, making him deaf. He lost consciousness and found it again; in the short shocked interval between the blast of light and sound he found himself sitting on his arse, bleating terror. There was a glimpse of a burning jagged break in the darkness just before the blinding light erupted again and made everything invisible. Beck threw himself forward onto the ground and hid his face in his hands, hearing, as he did, an almighty crack that faded into a loud and angry hiss. When he dared lift his face he saw that the tree nearest him, the one standing slightly apart from its fellows, had been split vertically from crown to heart and was on fire.

  Because the furious light had turned his vision green, the tree seemed to Beck to be burning underwater. Too stunned to move, he watched it blossom flame, watched its burning halves slowly separate like lowered arms. He flinched at the next godclap of thunder, but it was more distant. The storm had overtaken him, traveling westward in pursuit of its angry business at a speed he envied. Behind its huge and almost straight black tail the sky resumed blueness as if nothing had happened.

  He approached the stricken tree. Its twigs and smaller branches flared and crackled. Little flames, quick as lizards, ran up its black and riven trunk. The same wind that fanned the fire turned Beck’s sodden clothes heavy with cold. He came within range, turned his face and chest to the heat but could not control his shivering. After a minute he unshouldered the old army rucksack and emptied the water out of his boots. He peeled his clothes off, wrapped himself in his blanket, and wrung everything out as best he could, holding his shirt spread out to the fire. Whispers of steam rose from it but he knew it would take time. So he went into the copse and gathered whatever sticks he could find, improvising a little fence close to the burning tree. On this he spread his wretched clothes, shivering as much with shock as cold.

  He reached into the old rucksack. His bread was mush. He squeezed it in his hands to get most of the water out of it, turning it into a sticky ball, and ate it with a bit of cheese speckled with mold.

  He stood and watched the tree burn. Now and again a flame would find a vein of sap and flare up. All the time, the tree muttered and pinged and groaned as it died. When the wind finally eased, the tree stood flickering and blackening inside its smoke. After a while, Beck lay down on his side and curled up. He slept fitfully. When he could no longer ward off consciousness he got to his feet. Part of his fence had collapsed. His clothes were warm and damp. He dropped his blanket and began straightening his fence when something made him turn. Ten yards away, standing in the wheat, a woman wearing a man’s work clothes was watching him.

  GRACE MCALLISTER was a troublesome woman from a long line of troublesome women. Her grandmother had been a fierce but respected speaker at the gatherings of the Siksika, Assiniboine, and Cree peoples at Saamis, which the white people translated to Medicine Hat when they took the land. She had been awarded the name Straight Speaking.

  When Straight Speaking had a second daughter, she named the child Alsoomse, meaning “independent.” Despite this prediction, she was outraged when Alsoomse, in 1885, aged only twenty, met and married a railroad surveyor named Donald McAllister. Straight Speaking did not attend the wedding, a meaningless ritual conducted in a tin church. A year later, McAllister was promoted and recalled to faraway Winnipeg. Straight Speaking never saw her daughter again. Alsoomse (or Alice, as she was then known) died of tuberculosis in 1904 when her daughter, Grace, was ten years old.

  Outwardly, Don McAllister was a precisely rational, reserved sort of a fellow. His colleagues and even his few friends frequently used the word dour to describe him. In fact, he was like the locomotives he served: a logically engineered machine powered by fierce and elemental heat. McAllister’s firebox was love. Amorous and unquenchable love for his wife, devoted and protective love for his child. When his work took him away from them, as it too often did, he felt their absence as a hot ache in his chest. When Alice died, this ache became a pain that he could sometimes subdue but never overcome. It etched itself into his face. By the time he was fifty he looked at least ten years older.

  Stunned by grief, it took him some months to discover that his half-Siksika daughter was being tormented by the other girls at her new school. This angered and dismayed, but did not surprise, him. He had known that, behind his back, other men had referred to Alice as “McAllister’s squaw.” So he took Grace out of school and hired a tutor. He himself taught her mathematics, geometry, and geography. This arrangement saved him the additional pain of separation. Now, when he went on trips to inspect track laying and bridge building he took Grace with him. He persuaded himself that his reasons were educational.

  McAllister had insisted that Alice teach both him and their daughter her native language. He struggled manfully to wrap his Scottish tongue around its pronunciation and master its slippery verbal constructs. Grace grew up effortlessly bilingual. After his wife’s death, Don instituted the custom that at mealtimes he and Grace would speak only Siksika, even though there was no Siksika word for fork (when it meant an eating implement) or dessert. These difficulties made Grace laugh. She thought up her own words to fill the gaps.

  On McAllister’s visits to Canadian Pacific projects, the civil engineers, the workers, even the melancholic Chinese laborers, were amused that the stern supervisor of works always had his young daughter in tow. Over time, the way these and other men looked at her changed, and McAllister eventually noticed. At seventeen, Grace was a beauty. Her father decided it wo
uld be better not to expose her to the crude attentions of working men — and better that such men were not distracted from their work. Thereafter, when he went on tours of inspection, he reluctantly left her at home, in the charge of his cook and his housekeeper.

  Don McAllister had three analgesics for the pain of bereavement: his work, in which he immersed himself obsessively; his increasingly anxious love for his daughter; and alcohol. At home, in the evenings, he drank steadily and calmly, always going up to bed before his speech and his legs failed him. In rough prairie hotels and hostelries, in canvas encampments, he would eat dinner, spend two hours writing up his reports, then crawl inside a bottle, always careful to leave a finger or two of whiskey for the morning to steady his hand when he shaved. He also smoked heavily. These habits inevitably exploded the same little genetically laid mine that had killed his father and his uncle. In March 1913, while he was struggling to open an umbrella outside his office on Portage Avenue, a blood vessel in his brain burst. Mercifully, he felt nothing when his face hit the sidewalk.

  A month after his death, Grace took off the black taffeta mourning clothes and took stock.

  She was eighteen years old, and an orphan. She was unmarried, though not a virgin. Several men had courted her and, despite her father’s jealous watchfulness, she had been to bed with two of them.

  Grace was an educated woman at a time when few Manitoban women were. After college, she studied law in the chambers of her father’s solicitor, George Chapman. Several aspects of this study quietly enraged her. Her father had left her a surprising amount of money, plus valuable shares in the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. And the house.

  So she was also rich.

  Her wealth made her independent but also vulnerable. The second of the two men she had slept with was Chapman’s son, James. He, like most men of his time and class, had assumed that by consenting to sexual intercourse she was consenting to marriage. Despite Grace’s wealth, intelligence, and beauty, James also harbored a feeling that he would be doing her a favor by marrying her.