Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  “There are a couple of things I need to take care of first. Probably this weekend.”

  “What do you need to do first?”

  “Housekeeping stuff, mostly. I also have to tell an old boyfriend, so he hears it from me instead of someone else.”

  “That’s considerate. You haven’t spoken to me about an old boyfriend.”

  That’s right. I haven’t. Never told you about Sean Morrissey or Tommy Bangles, and I like to think that helped you. If there was ever a knock on your door late at night, that might have helped you.

  I don’t know if such a thing ever happened. I like to think it didn’t, but who knows? Maybe the consequences of what I have done with my life have been rippling out for years, and I just don’t know about it. I’m like some faraway shore.

  “It’s a bit complicated,” I told him. “But after I’ve done that, I’m telling Guillaume.”

  . . .

  For several minutes, Yakabuski had been trying to place her. Recall a face. A meeting. Sean Morrissey’s girlfriend. She would have been known.

  He had seen Morrissey only two months earlier, at a bail hearing for Patrick Kelly. Morrissey was in the gallery with some lawyers, and they had spoken in the hallway during a break.

  “You testifying, Yak?” Morrissey had asked.

  “I’m on the list. Doubt if I’ll be needed.”

  “Patrick will be sprung by then?”

  “That’s not what I was thinking.”

  Morrissey laughed. He seemed in good humour, dressed in a woollen suit cut fashionably thin, a full-length overcoat thrown just the right way over his arm, so the coat and suit seemed to flow together. His father used to have a walking stick with diamonds inset into the head. Augustus Morrissey. King of the Shiners. Smart men tried never to get within striking distance of that stick.

  “You think Patrick is sleeping in jail tonight, Yak?” asked Morrissey. “I thought you knew this town.” And he laughed one more time, walked away to join a small throng of lawyers, all huddled with smartphones in their hands, staring intently at the screens.

  Kelly was freed fifteen minutes after court had resumed and was out of the cells thirty minutes after that, which might have been a record for the Springfield courthouse. Yakabuski saw him walking down Dominion Street when he went to get his car from a parking lot, shortly after 3 p.m.

  He was the last cop to see him. Kelly missed his first court-ordered visit to the police station two days later and a bench warrant was issued, but there had been no sighting of him since. Sometime that spring, Yakabuski guessed, the racketeering charges against him would be stayed. The lawyers had worked out a plea arrangement for Kelly, in exchange for his testimony against Morrissey, but never had the chance to present it to him.

  Sean Morrissey’s girlfriend. Killed in a squatters’ cabin in Ragged Lake. Yakabuski tried to make a connection between the two facts. But he couldn’t. There seemed no possible trail that would connect them.

  He turned the book back to the weak light coming from the cabin window and continued reading.

  . . .

  I didn’t bother phoning. Didn’t get in touch with Tommy. There are old women who are more spontaneous and unpredictable than Sean Morrissey. It was 10 p.m. on a Friday night, and I knew I would find him exactly where he should be if the world were spinning properly — the back table of the VIP lounge at the Silver Dollar.

  The club was crowded when I walked in, but I had no trouble cutting across the floor, most people stepping aside long before I reached them, some even pointing at me before I had passed. Being rude like that. As usual, his table was crowded: dancers with mesh shawls pulled tight across their chests. Men with leather jackets also pulled tight across their chests, three-quarter length, so you couldn’t see the handguns tucked into their pants. Two were wearing full colours — Popeye, with the Springfield patch underneath. The table was strewn with quart glasses, rock glasses, shot glasses, ashtrays, coins, folding money, smartphones, showbills, wicker baskets of chicken bones, metal trays of congealed cheese, cigarette packs, disposable lighters, balled-up napkins. At the head of all that mess, before a spot at the table clean and polished, nothing more than a rock glass and a napkin, sat a man in white linen pants and a collared shirt, his hair long, framing his face with the perfection only a two-hundred-dollar haircut can give a man, his teeth whiter than the skin of the youngest girl at the table, his skin more unblemished.

  “Hello, Luce.”

  “Hello, Sean.”

  We went to his office. Whether out of kindness — to get me away from the stares and snickers of the people at the table — or because this was the best way to conduct our business, I am not sure. Sean had been kind in the past, though, and I was rather counting on it happening at least one more time.

  “So, I’m here, Sean. What do we need to talk about?”

  “Such a hurry, Luce. I would hope you would want to see me. It’s been a while.”

  “This is not where I should be, Sean. According to the courts, this is definitely not where I should be.”

  “We didn’t get much of a goodbye.”

  “Really? That’s why I’m here?”

  “No. I already told you — there are people worried about you, Luce.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “What you may say one day to the cops. Or to a crown attorney. Or to those doctors you’re seeing, who have to report certain stuff when they hear it.”

  “That’s not happening, Sean. And it won’t happen. You have my word.”

  “Your word? Have you gone crazy, Lucy? Tommy thinks you have.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Then why are you talking like a crazy person? What good is your word, Lucy? Think about what you’ve seen down here. And then you disappear for, what is it now, six months? If it were anyone but you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.”

  “Are you telling me you can’t control your crew? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “It’s not about control. It’s more a problem of instinct.”

  “What are you talking about, Sean?”

  “Some people see you as a problem right now. These are not the kind of people who spend a lot of time thinking about their problems. Problem: go away. That’s how they like to handle things. It’s their natural instinct. They don’t understand why you’re still walking around.”

  “Really? Then tell them they have nothing to worry about. I spend all my waking hours trying to forget them. I never want to remember them. They have no problem with me.”

  “Yes, I tell them that. But you know what, Luce, I must be losing my gifts of persuasion, because they’re not buying it the way they should.”

  “That doesn’t sound right either, Sean.”

  “I know. I agree. So I did what you always did and thought it through, thought about it logically, step by step, and I suppose there is one other possible explanation for what’s happening.”

  “Which is?”

  “Maybe I don’t believe it either, Luce.”

  I suppose if anyone ever reads this journal they may think badly of me for what I did next. For what I had planned to do the minute I walked into the club. But no person can be bigger than who they are. I read that somewhere. I think it may be the truest thing I ever read. If Sean Morrissey could save me, how could I not use him? If my unborn child could protect me, how could I not offer her up?

  So after staring at each other for a long time, I told him. His eyes grew wide as I talked, the way I was hoping they would, the way they needed to grow if this was going to work. I had been right. He couldn’t do it. He was not that sort of man.

  “Is this true gen, what you’re telling me, Lucy?” he asked when I had finished.
/>   “You want photos?”

  “Some people would. We still might be able to reach an understanding here. It doesn’t have to be as bad as you’ve probably imagined it being. If this is a lie, you’re going to get caught out real quick. No hope for you, then.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “Well,” and he moved some papers around his desk, smiled, shook his head in an I’ll-be-damned sort of way. “Congratulations.”

  He kept me in his office the rest of the night, telling me, as though I needed to hear it, that it wouldn’t be safe to leave the room. Like I had never seen a problem disappear behind the Silver Dollar. Kick-marched to the river. Two in the back of the head. Problem drifted away. The Springfield has been getting rid of problems like me for centuries.

  So I did what Sean told me and stayed in his office. I knew nothing would happen to me there. It was unthinkable. Sean’s office.

  My problem would be getting out of the club.

  A half-hour before last call, he came in and said Tommy was the problem. Everyone else had bought into it. No one wanted to go as far as they needed right then to get rid of me. Some of the old boys, with family connections going all the way back to Peter Aylin, thought it bad luck. Plus, I wasn’t in witness protection. I wasn’t an urgent problem. The reason for bringing bad luck down on their heads, it wasn’t clear to them.

  Everyone except Tommy.

  “Well, it’s Tommy,” was all Sean would say when I asked him about it. “That boy is nothing but instinct.”

  “Would he really defy you? Openly defy you?”

  “Not tomorrow. But this is all new, Luce. What you’re telling us. He could say it was a misunderstanding. He was drunk and didn’t get the memo. Something like that.”

  “And that would work?”

  “Tommy would walk through a burning building for me, Luce. Yes, that would work.”

  We didn’t say anything for a long minute. Then he said, “Come on. I’ll take you home tonight.”

  . . .

  We parked in front of my apartment building, Sean looking at it with disdain. He lives in a penthouse downtown. When I first met him, he was heading a stickup crew from Cork’s Town, Tommy Bangles his right-hand guy. He looked like he could have played in a rock ’n’ roll band. Leather pants, a smile that opened doors quicker than Tommy’s feet. Sean Morrissey was the only guy I ever knew who told the Popeyes to fuck off. Told Papa Paquette he was sick of being ripped off and he could take his vig and shove it. Sean and Tommy hanged the first crew that came looking for them from the chain-link fence around the Nosoto Projects. The second they nail-gunned to an abandoned garage across the street from the Popeyes clubhouse. Paquette reached an accommodation with them after that, and overnight Sean became a folk hero to every criminal in Springfield, a local boy who did business with the Montreal bikers, the Buffalo bikers, but didn’t bother looking like them, dressing like them, or pretending to be interested in anything that interested them. A man who kept his own counsel. Just like Johnny. And just like Johnny, most of the time I had not a clue what was in his head.

  “It took some jam walking into the club tonight,” he said, after he had finished surveying my apartment building. “Did you know Tommy was coming to get you tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “Well, some jam, Luce. You always had that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t be thanking me too quickly. We need to come to our understanding now.”

  I stared at him but didn’t say anything.

  “This has bought you some time, Luce, but that’s all it’s bought you. No one will come looking for you right now. You have my word on that. And you should be good for a few months afterward. I wouldn’t stretch it much past that.”

  “You think they would still care? It would be nearly two years by then.”

  “Yes, I think they would still care. It’s crazy, Luce, everything you know. I don’t want to think about it myself. So don’t be sloppy. You’ve done this before.”

  “What about you?”

  “I can handle Tommy.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh,” and here Sean looked at me strangely, this man I had lived with for nearly a decade, this man who took me in when there was no more Johnny. In a voice that had gone as flat and dead as a late-night radio signal skipping over the arc of the planet, he said, “I’ll be looking, too, Luce. No more favours, I’m afraid.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute, and then he added, “Stay gone, Luce. Take your man and stay way gone.”

  . . .

  We went to Strathconna Park the next day. Guillaume spread the red blanket carefully on the grass to avoid the crabapples, which were overripe and pulpy by then, end of the season, fruit that now oozed a dark, acidic juice that stained anything it touched. For a long time, we sat on the blanket and stared at the river. Not saying anything. A couple of kayakers were making their way down the middle channel, although they had to cut through ice to come ashore.

  I think Guillaume knew what I was going to say before I said it. We had worn warm sweaters and he held me a little tighter while I spoke. When I was finished, he said, “How do you feel?”

  “I feel good. It depends a lot on how you feel.”

  “I feel good.”

  The grass was long where we sat, the city work crews not bothering to come to the park anymore. There was the smell of musk in the air, and we could see our breath when we exhaled.

  “It’s going to be quite the change,” Guillaume continued. “I’m trying to picture how it will work. Us taking care of a baby.”

  “We can make it work.”

  “We probably can. We can make anything work, I bet.”

  Guillaume stared at the kayakers and didn’t say anything for a while. There must have been a hundred thoughts racing through his head right then, and I clung to him a little tighter, trying to get a read from his body on how he truly felt, how much of a good thing this was.

  Finally, he said, “Those kayakers seem so determined. I was that way once. Just like them. You wouldn’t have recognized me, Lucy. Some days I wish I were still like that. Then I wonder if that is a smart thing to wish for.”

  “Probably not. Why do we have to be determined about anything? Life should be simpler.”

  “I agree.”

  “I don’t want to be determined. I just want to belong somewhere. Be left alone. That would be enough for me.”

  Guillaume nodded and kept staring at the kayakers.

  “I feel the same way. I wish the world was better prepared for this baby, but we’ll be all right.”

  “Don’t you mean you wish we were better prepared?”

  “No, I mean the world. I love you, Lucy. Like nothing I’ve ever loved before. Having a baby with you is a good thing. How could it not be? I just wonder some days if the world is set up to let good things happen.”

  “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Really? Have you never thought about it before, Lucy? How difficult it is to do the right thing in this world? Why can’t we live in a world where if you try to do the right thing, that’s what happens? All the time. You get what you deserve. Never want to hurt anyone, run scams, fight wars — boom, that’s what you get. Why is that so difficult?”

  I sat on the blanket and the blood rushing to my head almost made me black out. The adrenaline and fear of the past few months released with a waterslide whoosh through my body, my next move coming to me in a flash of light and memory. So obvious.

  “Do you want to disappear, Guillaume?”

  “Love to. Know a place?”

  “You know what? I do.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The tree-marker was the first to see it. Before sound had travelled up the bluff. Before the grey jays had been spooked from the trees. Smal
l sparks of light on the eastern shore of the bay that reminded him of his dream of fireflies. Several seconds passed before the sound reached them. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Yakabuski put down the journal and walked to the window. The snow had started falling in thick white flakes, the crisscrossing winds on the bluff pushing it around so the flakes formed small funnels that spun for a few seconds before falling apart. The light had formed patterns below them — a bright, bracelet-like ring by the shoreline, one flickering point of light to the east. The sound was now constant. Like a bird tapping away at a dead tree.

  “Where would that be?”

  “The survival school,” said the tree-marker.

  . . .

  They came fast off the bluff, racing their snowmobiles through the forest, the spruce and balsam losing distinction, losing shape, becoming dark shadows that scampered beside them. They were briefly airborne when they hit the level land by the bay, then they were rushing past the fishing cottages, the Mattamy, Downey standing on the front porch with a rifle cradled in his arms, Yakabuski motioning for him to stay there, not motioning to the tree-marker, and so the boy kept following.

  It took them only a few minutes. They parked a hundred yards from the survival school. Buckham was hiding behind a snowdrift fifty yards in front of them.

  “Stay there,” yelled Yakabuski, and then he looked at the tree-marker. He should have told the boy to stay at the Mattamy. In his rush to reach Downey, he had not stopped and given the boy instructions. He sat beside Yakabuski now, on his haunches, hiding behind a snowmobile, staring at what could be seen of the survival school. No obvious fear on his face. More curiosity.

  “I maybe should have told you to stay at the Mattamy.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You hunt?”

  “Sure. Not bird so much. But I hunt.”

  “Ever fired a handgun?”

  “No.”

  There was no sense sending the boy back. Yakabuski had already decided that. There could be someone with a sniper rifle and a decent scope inside that building and they had just been lucky getting into position. The boy looked at him, waiting for the next question.