“You be good to yourself tonight,” Albie had said, a funny hitch in his voice.
“Yes, I will,” Ursie said.
“And get yourself in here tomorrow. Don’t be like your auntie. Don’t let me down, you hear?”
No, neither Ursie nor Bryan had any intention of letting anyone down.
As the night descended in wave after wave of softened, retreating light, Ursie kept shuffling, murmuring as she did, and Bryan, head still down, nodded in agreement to her whispered commands. He had decided he needed to take a drive back out to Ledge Road and Flacker’s place that evening, to catalogue the way the light fell as true night approached. He’d take the notebook, sketch a map of angles and instigations. Forget his original scheme. It was a fool’s game. He could see that now. Flacker wouldn’t chase him. But no mind, that afternoon, Bryan conceived of another, better plan as he realized a potential goldmine of explosives was right under his nose in the miner’s shed. It was simply a matter of choosing his time and finding a way to distract Flacker. That would be the crucial move. He’d need to set more than one fire under the fellow, something Flacker couldn’t ignore. He would need to distract Flacker into his undoing. And then there were the little Magnuson kids to consider.
The sound of Ursie’s shuffling called up an image for Bryan: Flacker, the Nagle brothers, and a couple of fallers squabbling over a card game at The Landing, a fellow rushing out after the Nagles as they careened toward the car owned by that other fellow, the one with the accent. The faller who’d lost the most dared to follow the Nagles, bellowing complaints behind them that went unanswered (unless you could call hawking gobs of spit an answer) while Flacker sat there with his mean grin.
Don’t look at me, he all but said. I ain’t got your money.
He made a snarling point of pulling out his empty pockets for the others, upending a slim wallet, as if he’d just fallen to Earth, not a penny to his name. If a thread of friendship between Flacker and the Nagles had been evident to these new-to-town fallers, they might have stripped him, but Flacker had mightily pissed off GF in only the third hand, so that a well-used buck knife appeared beside him on the table and had gone on to threaten the foul-tempered Brit more than once. Why would anyone believe they were in cahoots?
But Bryan knew the Nagles and their nasty friend acted as Flacker’s temporary bank. The thought descended upon him that intercepting Flacker’s potential withdrawals, or more accurately, the Nagles’ deliveries back to Flacker, might jumpstart some seriously good trouble, at the least create a little distracting traffic long enough for Bryan to do his own damage. Money knocked everyone off course.
No shit, Sherlock, he heard his old friend Dean say as if he were crouched beside Bryan and Ursie in that hot kitchen.
His pen itched in his hand.
Just do it, Hana Swann whispered, clear as could be from beside the screen door, causing Bryan’s head to snap up. His eyes scanned the kitchen for her, catching only one out-of-place object, his father’s letter.
Bryan had almost forgotten that letter, which remained unopened on the kitchen counter. Ursie, riveted by her cards, certainly had. But as he considered that square white envelope, his father’s familiar hand, Bryan realized he didn’t need to prize letter from envelope and decipher that scrawl to hear the hiss and spittle of that new, foreign greed of their father’s. He could feel a corresponding heat rise within him, a heat not unlike the one Hana Swann engendered, and catching himself, suddenly felt like rejoicing. If a few unread lines on paper could steam him, here in the simple kitchen beside his sweet and steady sister, what might a single anonymous, incendiary note do to the bomb that was Flacker? A concerned observer, who had information—cheap information—that would reveal Flacker’s enemies, reveal an angle that had eclipsed Flacker’s notice. That alone, that lapse, might be enough to cause the violent row Bryan needed as distraction. He had a notebook. He had a pen. The sketches of a plan taking shape in neat lists. So simple. Even she’d have to admit that. He’d sell Flacker his own destruction.
Flacker, Bryan had discovered during his pot pickup and deliveries with the Nagles, ran a full-scale illegal substance enterprise. Not only did he make meth, he’d jerry-built a still from a couple of dirty pots and vile car radiator condensers to produce a searing moonshine he sold in cloudy milk jugs to kids from the reserve. The reserve had an alcohol ban in place, but no one really enforced it. Even so, the kids didn’t have to go near town where they might be seen. Instead they’d carry their milk jugs into the woods or down by the old school or behind the defunct lumber train depot and drink until they were flat-out numb, even at times paralyzed. “Razed,” they said, as in, “Oh, fawk me, I’m razed.” Moonjuice, Wildwood Mash—these were refined compared with Flacker’s home-burnt brew, which was just two steps away from antifreeze. It addled those kids, took away their sight and gave them endless gut pains that if they were lucky they could relieve by massive bouts of vomiting as they began to sober up. Give ’em a week (or even a couple of nights) to recover and back they’d go.
It’s not that we’re stupid, we all could tell you that. Screw that.
No, take any one of the kids from around here and set him down in a leafy city neighborhood with all the advantages and see what he can do. Guarantee you, you’d see right away the difference between your average coddled suburban kid and one with innate smarts. No, ignorance is not a choice here. But what else do they have? Most of the kids aren’t getting away, and those who head up to Flacker’s know the world conspired against their kind so long ago it’s like they’re at the bottom of a murky, shit-filled trench, and they might as well splash about until they drown as wait around for someone to outright crush them.
As soon as Ursie went to bed, Bryan put the truck in neutral, coasted out to the paved road, and drove back out to Flacker’s place. It was not quite midnight and sitting in his truck below the old sawmill, he catalogued the stealthy parade of loping kids, customers all, heading up from Ledge Road. He could hear the dogs begin even before the kids started to navigate the speargrass up into Flacker’s tin yard. Flacker would likely have a jug in hand by then. Maybe he’d even be sneaking up on the kids, ready to give them a little thrill with their razing, the sight of him with all the knives hanging off his belt, his scarred belligerent face suddenly visible in the eerie blink of dry lightning that could not land and scorch him. Oh, no. You want to talk crazy. Let’s talk crazy. Or worse, maybe he’d send that Cassie Magnuson out, half-dressed in a T-shirt and thin panties, a jerry-built woman to match the still, shaking so much that bills would be fluttering from her stained hands and she’d have to search for them on the ground. They’d have to leave her like that, crawling and whimpering. They couldn’t risk getting caught up in sympathy for her. No one knew what Flacker might do if he caught you down on the bare earth with his half-naked property.
Then there was the meth, of course, but Bryan had only glimpsed that operation. Flacker’s meth had different routes to buyers. Bryan knew the Nagles and their cohort, that nasty Brit, were into all sorts of bad deals with Flacker these days. Bryan got the idea too that they were now entrepreneurs of a different sort, peddling drugs they devised and concocted and barely tried themselves before hawking them without a second thought. A gang in Winnipeg was involved, a planning of a complex route of transportation under way, the famous highway an overland express.
He waited a while before he left the truck to stalk a single kid, too high or foolhardy to know he shouldn’t visit Flacker’s alone. Bryan whistled quick and low, and the boy turned, his hands already flying up to protect himself from Bryan, who, with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up, was near-invisible in the gloom. What wasn’t invisible was the bright white folded square he forced into the boy’s hand.
“Make sure Flacker gets this,” he said. “And don’t say a word about where you got it.”
Twice more in the space of an hour, Bryan passe
d notes to spaced-out kids. Two of the kids ran headlong to Flacker as if their lives depended upon it, as if he’d set up a test for them. One simply wedged the note as a tiny scrap within the bills he gave Flacker and fled as Flacker began his count, leaving half his purchase unclaimed. Luckily for Bryan, the kid had no sense of direction or maybe he didn’t want to encounter Bryan again. He fled on a trail a distance away from where Bryan crouched. Not two minutes later, a volley of shotgun blasts rang out over that far hill, right on that poor kid’s tail, and Bryan didn’t move an inch, thinking of the messages he’d sent, written in black block print:
THEY’RE CHEATING YOU, ASSHOLE ASK NAGLE ABOUT WINNIPEG IT AIN’T JUST YOUR MONEY HEADING NORTH
Bryan might have been risking his own life out there that night as much from the weather as from Flacker. Long black clouds streamed overhead as if the heavens were racing above him, and between them, at steady intervals, lightning cascaded, randomly, it seemed, the way he himself struck out, again, again, until with a kind of luck, contact was made. He stayed for far too long that night without knowing why he couldn’t leave until finally the lightning made purchase on a far-off hillside with an orange flare that seemed to spring from his own heart. It was as if someone had screamed, a single, sudden renting in the black night that clamored painfully, then disappeared, only to reappear in sharp orange bursts so abrupt and disconnected he wondered if he was imagining them. Each time another appeared, he seemed to come more awake, as if the fire were burning away his own confusion, until finally he was standing straight, upright on Flacker’s land, the full plan gloriously illuminated before him. Fear left him then, but not discretion. He waited, past the hours of Flacker’s visitors, past the swollen early morning dark when even on that ridge you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. He waited out the deep silence until the night perched on the cusp of dawn and other creatures began a rustling in the false dark. Then Bryan began. He’d walked those trails a hundred times on his way to feed the little Magnusons. He knew, too, the route the Nagles took when Flacker had commanded they arrive without even his cousin Mitchell knowing. And he knew Flacker, too. He did. The Big Man had his own divining spots, places he’d claim to survey his property and listen for any insubordination. Bryan crept from one to another, crisscrossing Flacker land, almost as if he were impregnable to Flacker evil, setting up markers that only a man who felt vulnerable might seek out. It was almost light by the time he crawled, his back stiff from crouching, into his cold truck, putting it into neutral and pushing, until he could hop up into the cab and coast down the narrow lane below Flacker’s now-doomed land, starting the engine only once he reached the end of Charlotte Road. The engine surged as if it, too, were experiencing a new sort of elation.
He could have sworn he heard Hana Swann’s laugh right beside him.
“Ah, yes, Bryan,” she was saying in that bell-like voice, “You finally do something. Be better than your father. Be like the real man.”
CARETAKING
The animal shelter where my mother worked had its own crematorium and its own executioner, a fellow my mother and her staff had nicknamed “Hannibal,” who volunteered for the duty with a suspicious cheeriness. But my mother was a fan neither of the crematorium nor Hannibal. Bones were important to her. If a body, even that of a stray, went straight to ash, she reckoned, it disappeared, and almost immediately, my mother would begin to question whether the animal was really dead or if, perhaps, it had gone missing in another way. It became an extended loss, one that never quite ended. So, whenever she was personally involved in retrieving a dead animal, my mother insisted upon wrapping the body in an old blanket from the Tried and True Shop’s donation box and bringing it home. She kept stacks of those blankets in her closet office, which consequently smelled like old people, as if she’d been harboring geriatric refugees. The blankets’ colors had long faded into withered grays and dusty browns, into pale pinks and yellowed parchment—flesh tones—and they’d been worn so soft and thin, it’s doubtful they’d ever again provide much warmth. They were mere gestures of blankets, but that was all my mother and her lost creatures needed. She’d arrive home with oozing bundles in the trunk of her car and I’d have to help her slide them onto an old blue tarp, which I’d drag past the back deck and our own dogs’ camp, well beyond the vegetable plot, to a scrap of land beside my father’s tool shed, where my mother had once let a cousin park a tractor he’d hoped to restore until my father had the rusted pieces hauled away. My mother would follow with a shovel, and I would dig another grave while she chose a long flat piece of amber-striped mountain shale as a marker.
The evening of Hana Swann and Keven Seven, my mother arrived with a full stinking trunk, the heat acting as an accelerant on the stench so that I had to wear one of my dad’s old red handkerchiefs tied over my nose and mouth while my mother perched a respectable distance away with her latest piece of mountain shale, calling out instructions until I lifted the shovel and paused, and she quieted.
“We’ll have supper soon,” she said, as if the activity she’d instigated was whetting my appetite.
“Don’t go looking at him either,” she called back. “He’s one of the ones that got torn apart.”
Any groans I attempted were masked by the sound of the phone ringing in the house, and my mother took off running. My father’s calls almost always arrived at suppertime, a time I was sure he’d chosen to keep the conversations short, and although my mother pretended she rushed to keep the phone from disturbing Uncle Lud, she wasn’t fooling anyone. The phone traveled with her all the way to the basement, where she’d tuck herself into a corner or the tumbledown davenport like a schoolgirl before returning, sighing, upstairs.
“Your father sends his love,” she said when, chore finished, I came inside.
Of course, he hadn’t.
For years, my father, like Trevor Nowicki, had gone up north for work. Early on, he still had his first good job with Suncor as well as sharing with Uncle Lud the task of caring for their widowed, demented mother. Their sister, Joyce, divorced Toby (infertility, drunkenness, affairs, temper tantrums on both sides), and Joyce and her second husband, an actuary, moved to Edmonton for a finer life. But Uncle Lud had stayed on, scraping out a living on what was left of the farm after they’d sold most of their mother’s legacy. He possessed, as my mother frequently mentioned, two graduate degrees. My father, who’d gone up to the mining college, couldn’t see that they’d done him much good. He tried to get Lud on at the mining offices, but Uncle Lud wasn’t interested. Lud had toiled for the government as a social worker and taught grade seven once, as well, and he said that was about enough bureaucratic oversight for one lifetime. Until he got sick, you’d never know what job he’d have the next time you saw him—machinery repairman, drywaller/electrician, mail carrier, bookstore clerk—but through everything he still maintained the tiny herd of dairy cows he’d inherited, and persisted upon producing a pungent white cheese (much prized by his neighbors) that he simply gave away.
My father was just the opposite. He’d found his way early in a molybdenum mine, seeing, as he liked to say, the future there, although he’d easily made the shift over to oil and gas. You couldn’t even breathe the words “oil sands” around our house for fear he’d hear a smidge of criticism in an exhale. A long-standing black mark against him as far as my mother’s relatives were concerned. All of them possessed epic and mostly cogent rants against the latest enterprises up north, not a one of them seeing that bitumen-rich sludge my father’s way—a glorious national resource: “Only Saudi Arabia has more!” My father wore his love for his work in his wide-legged stance and raised chin, his steady prideful gaze. My parents had met in a library, tussling over a math book both of them wanted, and although my father had lost the book, he eventually convinced my mother first to date, then to abandon her own studies and marry him. Unlike Trevor and Junie Nowicki, they had realized what kind of reception my mother, half-Kitselas herself
, would meet back in his small town, and the two of them acknowledged early on that theirs would be an unconventional marriage in this one regard: they’d live apart. He bought the nicest house he could afford and, for at least the first years, drove endless hours to spend every break he had with her.
Whatever hopes my father nourished for me had thinned long ago. Always he seemed surprised by the look of me, a throwback to my mother’s BaBa, not a sign of her own father, another part-white fellow, not a sign either of my father’s kin save my height and my nearsighted eyes, which like his and Uncle Lud’s were neither blue nor green nor brown but shifted between the three, depending on the light. He was hard with me, my mother maintained, because he worried I’d never find a real place in life, that like Lud, I’d be swept away by stories that weren’t even those of my kin. Yet, unlike Lud, I wouldn’t have an all-white skin to shield me. My father never seemed to understand his world was not the only one, and my mother had long since stopped trying to inform him. Instead, she pushed me toward the Mining College and dreamed along the way that my father and I would recognize each other, that we might one day work side by side the way he’d once hoped he and Lud would.
I once thought Uncle Lud had no taste for company work, but the truth is he and my father had had a disagreement, an irreconcilable breach. It happened about the time the late, infamous Wiebo Ludwig was first put in jail for bombing company equipment. Uncle Lud didn’t know Ludwig, didn’t know if he was guilty or not, but he’d had the same problems with his few dairy cows that Wiebo Ludwig had had—miscarriages, misshapen calves, unexplained illnesses—and he sympathized with the man’s frustration. My father fully believed Wiebo Ludwig a madman, and had Uncle Lud not been his most dearly beloved brother, they might even have come to blows. As is was, he bore the hurt while making his disappointment clear. But when Uncle Lud’s illness became clear, my father began to sit with him again, sweet black coffee in hand, to talk about the missing world they both still knew well, a childhood world they tended, a place where neither of them could be proved wrong at this late date, where they could simply be brothers. It wasn’t until Lud’s illness took this last sweep downward that whatever pieces had fallen together, whatever grief and guilt my father harbored ballooned unbearably, and his visits home were canceled, one after the other.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 10