by Howard Engel
I looked back towards the bridge. That was when the beam of light caught me. The glare blinded me and I heard the sound of the bullets cutting through the branches of the trees before I heard the echo of the shots bombarding off the face of the escarpment. I turned the shot-gun on them and let them have one blast. When I stopped running I was at an intersection of depressions. The one I was in turned east, the larger one, like a track for oxen, moved south-west. That was roughly towards the new canal, and gave me the feeling of doubling back on my pursuers, so I took it. It went low, lower than the other stream-bed, and the longer I followed it the more it seemed like an abandoned road or trail.
By now the track had continued in a gentle curve moving in the direction of the old canal. At the same time it was cutting deeper into the ground, giving me complete protection on both sides. My feet slipped in and out of muck and tripped over stones as I went. By starlight I could only see a few feet ahead at a time. For some reason, I trusted this trail. I kept moving. There was a dark round spot ahead. I was almost on top of it before I could see that it was the handsome entrance of a tunnel. I could make out a curve of well-matched stone blocks over the arch. From where I was standing, it looked enormous, although it couldn’t have been much more than about twenty feet high and fifteen or sixteen across.
It hit me at last. I’d been walking along the old right-of-way. Now the old canal was crossed by the black iron bridge I’d seen, but at some earlier date, the tracks went under the canal.
I moved in, holding to the middle and trying not to think of the creatures of the night that used to haunt my bedroom when I left my clothes in an untidy tangle on the chair when I was a kid. The tunnel curved gently, continuing the arc of the graded trail. The middle was mush. There was no sign of ballast or railway ties anywhere, and the place smelled as dank as a sewer. It seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of a mile until I saw an arched section of magenta light ahead of me. It got bigger as I slushed on. It must be the glow above the foundry that had located off the St. David’s road. In fact, I could hear the distant thump of drop-hammers through the night.
Once out the other side, I turned north for just long enough to let the embankment over the tunnel reach a reasonable grade. As soon as it looked no steeper than about forty-five degrees, I scrambled to the top. To the north I could see the present line of track with the steel bridge almost shining in the dark. That’s where I’d last seen the boys. There wasn’t any way that I knew of for getting to where I was faster than the way I came. I had the old canal between us now. I was kneeling on one of the oddest pieces of man-made engineering ever made: the spot where an abandoned railway tunnel passes under an abandoned canal. I’ll have to think of that spot again sometime when I think that Grantham is moving into the twenty-first century too quickly.
Half-way down the embankment again, where I’d half slid, half fallen, I heard a distinct rattle among the sounds of slipping feet and stones. I moved my feet quickly before the rattlesnake of my nightmare struck at my unguarded ankle. I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t see anything, and whatever it was it was gone without another sound. Over my shoulder I could see lights from the flight locks and I could hear the faint hum of motors. Beyond the other-worldly twin locks with their regular light standards lifting the buff planes out of the darkness, I could make out the pale glow of Papertown on the other side.
I kept hiking along the ghostly railway track, knowing that it would eventually lead me back to the main line from which it had separated years before I was born. I kept pushing the pace. “Before I was born,” as though that’s a measure of anything. It was like my asking when I was six if the ocean was over my head. The universe was divided into what was over my head and what wasn’t. Not a fair division at all unless you happened to be six. Ahead I could see the present canal’s surge tank. It looked like a gigantic car muffler on end. It must have stood two hundred feet in the air. Right beside it ran the railway right across the new canal. The bridge was down so it was easy over and home free for Papertown.
FOURTEEN
“What do you mean, ‘Can I put you up for a few days?’”
“Just that, Martha. I’m on the run. If I show up at my office or at the hotel, somebody’s going to lean on me pretty hard. It’s just for a few days. I know you’ve got a spare room.”
“Yeah. You fixed it so that it’s been spare ever since …”
“I’ll pay rent, Martha. I don’t mean to take advantage.”
“That’s the story of my life: nobody ever takes advantage.”
“I’ll keep out of the way. I never cook in my room.”
“M’yeah. I know the type. Taco chips in your briefcase, milk cartons on the window sill.”
“No. Honest. I’ll fill up your refrigerator for you. Nothing in the room but me. You’ve got my word on it.”
“Benny, you don’t seem to realize that I’m a maiden lady and maiden ladies don’t invite strangers into their homes without at least three weeks rent up front. And even so, on this street, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Thanks, Martha. You’ll never regret it.”
“M’yeah. I regret it already. How soon will you be moving in?”
“I’ll hail a taxi and be right over. Bye.”
“Tonight? Cooperman—” I pretended I didn’t hear her and hung up.
Martha Tracy has more things to do with her life than keep a rooming-house. She’d lost a paying guest once when I started digging up the past. But in the main she’d been helpful to me in my work six or seven times. Nobody knew this town the way Martha did. She worked for Scarp Enterprises, a big real-estate firm. She knew where all the bodies were buried in Grantham and who buried them. I’ve had more free advice from Martha than I like to remember. She lived in the western part of the city in a house that backed on the tracks that came from Hamilton and were on their way over the Eleven Mile Creek bound for Niagara Falls. I noted the neglected privet hedge as I went up her walk to the green porch.
“Well, you didn’t waste any time, did you?” Martha gave me a heavily leaded smile and pushed open the door farther to let me pass. “I’ve got the kettle on,” she said. Martha doted on instant coffee. Sometimes she got her hot water from the chrome kettle, but often from the hot-water tap. She was blonde, stocky and met the world with a Churchillian jaw.
“Martha, I’m not going to tell you about the trouble I’m in. The less you know about it the better.”
“Library chasing you for fines again?” She dropped into a kitchen chair as she passed a mug to me, and then straightened the hang of her housecoat. She regretted her gag about the library and moved the conversation to the practical matters of towels, the availability of hot water, the broken bottom step and the quirky radio that suddenly increases in volume when you least expect it. I gave her some money which she put into a drawer bursting with coupons.
“Martha,” I asked, after I’d emptied my mug and cleaned the ring on the white enamel table with a dishcloth to show my clean living habits, “what is the biggest engineering project now going on around town?”
“You mean us or the other wheelers and dealers?”
“Not Scarp. I mean a big government contract going to Bolduc or to Bagot Cement.”
She lifted a red-marked palm from the table and leaned her cheek against it, while staring out the back window to the maple tree by the railway fence. “Bolduc is building the new fire hall on the Queenston Road end of St. Andrew Street. As usual they are building condominiums in about six different locations around town. But nothing big, nothing special.” I returned the dishcloth to the sink. “Cooperman, have another cup of coffee and don’t jump up and down like that. You make me nervous. Let me think. You want bigger than that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Something with government money in it. Something with rights-of-way that need buying.”
“Now you’re making it easy. The Feds have called off the work on the canal, so that lea
ves the province. What they are up to is this: a new major superhighway is going to be built to help the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. As it is there are so many switchbacks and traffic circles on the last part of the trip from Toronto that half the potential audience for the plays ends up in Lewiston or Niagara Falls, New York, wondering what went wrong.”
“I know that road. You have to double back to the Skyway bridge to make connections with the road to Niagara-on-the Lake.”
“Well, the province,” Martha said, lowering her voice just perceptibly, “in its wisdom, is going to build a four-lane divided highway from the Niagara end of the bridge all the way to the Festival theatre without getting hung up in the traffic of hamlets like Virgil and Homer on the way. It’s big money and Bagot and Bolduc are the only local developers big enough to handle it.”
“That sounds like the one I’m looking for. When it’s finished the festival will be able to run all year round and the sale of fudge along the main drag in Niagara-on-the-Lake will double our sugar imports.”
“Don’t knock it, Cooperman. My brother-in-law works in the bar at the Prince of Wales Hotel. Think of what he’ll make in tips alone. What’s going on, Benny? Dirty work at the projected crossroads?” I didn’t want to do my guessing in public, so I dodged the question and showered some thanks in Martha’s direction. “What am I here for?” she said. “Don’t leave a ring in the tub if you love me and don’t tell any of your friends that phone after ten at night that you’re shacking up here. Now, let’s have a little drink to make it legal, Cooperman. I’ve been thinking about you lately.” Martha unscrewed the top of a bottle of Crown Royal, the last of the Christmas bonus, she said, and filled two tumblers well beyond my limit. I knew there’d be a price to pay for dropping in on Martha like this, but it seemed steep only when she’d pulled the cork of a second bottle. This time it wasn’t a brand I was familiar with. When I stopped coughing, I told her I wanted to go to bed. She looked at me to be sure of my meaning, then she got up and reappeared with a pair of pyjamas, which she poked at me. I had the tact not to ask where they came from. After all, I was a guest under her roof. Who was I to judge? She gave me some clean towels, a wash-cloth and told me to leave my shoes and pants outside the door and she’d see what she could do for them.
“Your shoes look like you’ve been running through a sewer.”
“In a way, I was. I’ve been playing games over by the old canal. You know where the Showers is?”
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Patrick Oliver Tracy, my grandfather, ran lock eleven and the Homer bridge for nearly thirty years. Where’d you get your feet wet?”
“I found a tunnel running under the old canal.”
“That’d be the old Great Western tunnel by lock eighteen. There’s a road tunnel between sixteen and seventeen. I’m not sure whether it’s still there. I haven’t been out that way since I was a kid. But, hell, I’d wear my Wellingtons if I went anywhere near there. You’ve got to be careful. My cousin got a bad bite looking for the road that Laura Secord took trying to warn the British of some coming battle or other.”
“What bit him?”
“Her. Iona Tracy. Iona Lloyd she is now”
“Martha, what bit her?”
“Massasauga rattler. She said it was a yard long. Got her on the leg above her boot. You can’t be too careful.”
“You mean there are rattlesnakes down there?”
“One of the few places in the whole province. You get them in the Niagara gorge too and up on the Bruce peninsula.”
“Martha I’m going to bed.” And I did that.
* * *
Next morning I got up to the sound of bacon frying in a frying pan. I’d heard that sound before, in fact I’ve been hearing it all my life. The world’s chief occupation it sometimes seems to me is the baiting and setting of bacon traps. Sometimes I can walk around them, sometimes I can jump over them, and sometimes I fall into them like a tiger into a tiger trap. I wondered how I was going to meet this challenge as I moved stiff legs over the edge of the single bed to the uncovered floor. In the no-nonsense bathroom I tried to simulate a toothbrush with the washcloth. In my head I was making a list of things I would need if I was going to stay clear of my room at the City House. I owed my mother a call for missing Friday night dinner. I wanted to talk to Nathan Geller again about his miraculous telephone conversation with his missing brother.
When I was looking as fit as I could manage in shoes and trousers sponged into passable condition by my landlady, I joined Martha at the kitchen table. “I hope you aren’t one of those morning talkers,” she said, stifling a friendly “Good-morning” before I’d got my mouth open. I drank reconstituted orange juice and tried to outstare the crisp rashers on my plate. I chewed on some cold toast and watched Martha spread peanut butter on hers. In the end I ate the bacon. I always do and I always pay for it before the month is out. Like the time I nearly got drowned under a swimming pool’s nylon cleaning net, after eating bacon out Pelham Road a few years ago. I know these things are related.
When Martha disappeared into her bedroom, I phoned my Ma. It was early, too early to bother her under normal circumstances, but I knew she would be worried about my skipping out on Friday night dinner. It was one of the things I should have mentioned when Geoff, Len and Gordon extended their kind invitation to join them at the gun club.
“Hello?”
“Ma, it’s Benny. Sorry to wake you so early, but I wanted you to know that I’m okay.”
“You’re okay, Benny? That’s fine. Goodbye.”
“I knew you’d be worried when I didn’t show up last night.”
“What time is it?”
“Time? Well, it’s just after eight. Eight-thirteen.”
“Benny, you shouldn’t call so early. I was up till all hours last night with Chopin, George Sand and Paul Muni. I love that music. Chopin wasn’t Jewish was he, Benny?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That would explain the nuns at the end all right.”
“I’m sorry about last night, Ma.”
“No, I liked it. It’s one of my favourite movies.”
“I mean about missing dinner. I was held up, couldn’t get away. I know I should have called.”
“To tell the truth, your father asked where you’d got to. You usually come over. We had a nice brisket and roast potatoes. Your favourite.”
“So, you weren’t worried?”
“No more than usual. Should I have been?” I heard a yawn come over the wire with the words.
“Course not.”
“There you are then. Well, if that’s all, Benny, I’ll turn over and see if I can get back to sleep on the other side. I don’t want to hear the phone ring until the crack of noon. Goodbye, dear.”
After I put the phone down, I picked it up again and called for a taxi, then watched for it out the front curtains. Martha’s living-room was full of overstuffed furniture. A television set held pride of place on a fumed oak tea-trolley. Above the small fireplace was a huge portrait in oils of a bearded man who looked like he thought he was a somebody in the last century. He watched me watching for the taxi. I picked up a copy of Time magazine from under the trolley: “Should Germany Rearm?” I replaced it.
When the taxi came, I had him drop me at the station, where I rented a car. I folded the receipt in half and placed it carefully in my wallet. There’s nothing so impressive on a progress report as an expense with a matching receipt. I’d forgotten to get one from the cab. That dampened things. I started wondering, as I drove the small Ford up the gentle incline to St. Andrew Street West, who exactly my client was on this Saturday morning. I thought I’d better confirm that one way or another right away.
The congregation of B’nai Sholem worshipped at the corner of Church and Calvin, a fact that amused several of my Protestant friends. It was a textured red-brick building with twin garlic-shaped cupolas on top that failed to make it look like a postcard view of the Kremlin but m
ore like a double dollop of Dairy Queen soft ice-cream. There was a wide stairway on the Church Street side leading to an open double door. I’d parked the rented car three blocks away with the cars of others in the congregation. The local reading of holy scripture didn’t prevent members of the shul from driving on the Sabbath, but simply it forbade parking within sight of the synagogue.
I felt a little bogus as I went through the doors into the back of the synagogue. I hadn’t ever been there without my father, and felt both shy and foreign. I borrowed a yarmulka from a cardboard box on a card-table near the door. Although I knew most of the men seated in the pews arranged around the bema, as I took a place in back, I felt all of twelve years old and sitting between my father and Sam (with my mother up in the balcony behind the brass rail with the women).
The place hadn’t changed much since my bar mitzvah. The long pews were stained the same walnut brown as the wood trim of the cream-painted walls. The skylight still showed symbolic beasts painted in a reedy style in faded yellow and green on the four sides of the rectangle. The ark at the front was closed and covered with a winecoloured velvet curtain. On the bema, Mr. Hecht was auctioning off the privilege of opening the curtain and carrying the Torah from the ark to the bema, a privilege for which the merchants of St. Andrew Street often paid big money. I’d seen some highly competitive scenes between several of the leaders of the Jewish community as they fought it out for the right on a hot Saturday in the autumn during the high holy days, while the rest of the congregation took side bets on who’d give up first. At the back, on the same wall as the ark, Rabbi Meltzer could be seen sitting at an old-fashioned slant-top school desk. Under the lid he kept his bound copies of the books, so that he didn’t have to pull out the Torah scroll just to establish the correctness of a citation or conduct a bar mitzvah lesson. The big moment towards the end of preparations for a bar mitzvah was the day when the student got his first chance to read from the scroll just as he would on the big day itself.