The Matter of Sylvie

by Lee Kvern

  Corporal Lloyd takes off his RCMP parka, and the cardamom scent of baby, the Wild Turkey reek of Jimmy lingers in the dank air, poles apart, but innocent all the same. He hangs the parka on the back of the chair across the aisle, orders two Comforts. The judge finishes his drink, nods at the paramedics, slides out of his chair, joins Corporal Lloyd at his table. Lloyd checks his watch—11:55, technically morning still—he raises his glass.

  “Dobroho rankoo,” Lloyd says.

  “Yes, a good morning,” Judge Wade says, his case heard, done, adjourned already. The judge jangles the ice in his glass; the two of them knock it back in one toss. Lloyd feels the velvet liquid burn smooth down the back of his throat; smooth the hair of last night’s dog. Seventeen hours into his twelve-hour shift, the fatigue hits him like a narcotic; Lloyd’s muscles relax into the Southern Comfort.

  “What can I do you for?” Judge Wade flags down the waitress, orders a couple more. Lloyd wipes his palm over his tired face.

  “Coffee,” Lloyd says to the waitress.

  “Dead on my feet,” he says to the judge.

  “Long night?” the judge asks.

  “Longer Wednesday and not done yet.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A court order for Jimmy.”

  “Wildman?”

  “Widman,” Lloyd says. “Jimmy Widman.”

  Jimmy’s been up in front of the judge’s bench, mostly mild misdemeanours involving vagrancy, public drunkenness, urinating on a government building—specifically, Doris Michelchuk’s courthouse—he’s no stranger to Judge Wade.

  “What’s the order for?” Judge Wade asks.

  “For Ponoka, Michener, doesn’t matter. I need him declared incompetent, incapacitated, whatever the legal term is.”

  The waitress sets the drinks down, Lloyd’s coffee. Lloyd watches the judge savour his Comfort, then Lloyd pours his into the coffee, two for the price of one.

  “Not that simple, Lloyd. He needs to be referred by a GP, then assessed by regional health, interviewed by not one, but two psychiatrists, then . . .”

  “He needs a way out, judge. He’ll be dead before anyone gets to him.”

  The judge looks him in the eye.

  “Fleck boys?”

  Lloyd nods.

  “What’s that stuff Widman drinks? Wild spirit, Kentucky turkey? Hundred-and-one proof ? Serious heemno—that’ll kill anyone.”

  Lloyd shakes and nods his head at the same time, agreement and disagreement on his weary face.

  “He’s got other things going on, Wade.”

  He’s watching the judge, but he’s thinking Sylvie, the unfinished matter of Sylvie.

  Judge Wade pauses, orders another Comfort from the passing waitress. Lloyd waves her off.

  “Bring me a fresh napkin,” the judge says to the waitress.

  Judge Wade offers him a cigar. The two smoke in silence. Lloyd looks around the dark room, the coffee and Comfort enough to give him a lukewarm buzz, but not enough to transport him out of the mounting discomfort he feels deep in his intestines. Doesn’t matter which way Judge Wade falls; it’s all dread or dead. He puffs on his cigar while the judge scribbles something on the fresh napkin.

  Wednesday, October 1987 » Lesa, age 31

  Having left Carstairs, gotten the heck out of Dodge in the hurry that she’s in, Lesa’s got an urgent, pressing purpose on her mind that she didn’t know she had prior to this morning. Sylvie. She fumbles for a cigarette from her silver case. She’ll save the half-joint for later when she really needs it, when she pulls up once more in front of her mother’s house, something she’s not looking forward to. The car lighter pops out, Lesa lights her John, realizes she’s no player, never was. She can’t really believe she went as far as she did. Not that the idea hadn’t occurred to her before, the pure exhilaration of an appealing stranger. At times the inclination to simply let go, let fly, is stronger than she is, exaggerated now by her father’s death. Life is short. But she’s certainly never acted on the impulse. The near miss with Mr. Green makes Lesa doubt her ability to fly straight. She’s got to stop this moving away from things: herself, her estranged mother, the memory of her dead father, her distant boyfriend. She needs to find something to move toward.

  She’s driving too fast to notice the animal running across the six-lane highway playing Frogger with the slow-moving John Deere tractor, the duelling semi trucks hauling Safeway and Co-op fighting for supremacy in the fast lane, two ordinary citizens in nondescript cars, the farmer in a Ford pickup and the front grill of her mother’s Toyota.

  Lesa catches the mottled grey-brown thing out of the corner of her eye too late. She broadsides the animal in broad daylight. The animal bounces off the front of the car so that Lesa sees the coyote slowed in the space of time that feels like the prairies themselves: wide, open, expansive, but is actually a mere second split into one hundredths. The animal’s ochre coat is the same colour as the surrounding flatlands, the dead wheat. She sees the coyote’s eyes go wide, dark suddenly, out of the blue into the blue of the anything-can-happen prairie sky. The aberrant U-curve of its body as it arcs heavenbound makes Lesa feel sick in the pit of her belly. She slams on the brakes. The maroon New Yorker that has been riding her ass for the last ten kilometres fishtails around (God, please don’t let it be Mr. Green), narrowly clears her back bumper, then runs so close alongside she could reach out and touch him, like a long-distance phone commercial, were she the passenger of this vehicle and not the hazardous driver.

  In the rapid space of a single heartbeat, Lesa loses her cigarette, stops breathing, afraid that if she so much as glances away, then the two cars will become one, another Highway 2 North headline in tomorrow’s newspaper. Deadline. She’s not interested in dying. She maintains her steely grip on the steering wheel, steals a glance at the driver (thank you, God, not Mr. Green), his eyes the same as hers, the coyote’s—harshly attentive, wide awake to the potential precursor of their own wakes. The man doesn’t take his eyes off her, that acute recognition of the erratic line between life and/or their next breath.

  The New Yorker drifts impossibly past. The driver slides in front of her, brakes hard as if she’s only playing at this! A terrifying game of alpha driver at the giddying speed of one hundred and forty kicks/clicks an hour. Surely he saw the flying coyote? Lesa stands on her brakes so as not to hit him. The driver’s middle finger pointing not up but horizontally out his open window. Lesa understands the double sexual affront of his gesture.

  She pulls the car over to the side of the highway, shuts the ignition off, glances into the rear-view mirror. No other cars in sight. No in-flight coyote either. Her heart beats rabid, canine. The polyester plastic smell of burning velour alerts her to the lost cigarette in the back seat of the car. She stretches back, can’t quite reach the smouldering butt, so climbs over the console to the passenger seat, but still can’t manage; her hands, her breath, her heart are erratic, trembling with wasted adrenalin. She pushes the passenger door open intending to access the burning cigarette from the back seat, steps out onto the side of the road, the sharp stilettos of her super boots dig deep into the soft shoulder, throwing her off kilter.

  She wavers uncertainly; her widespread arms floundering like a marooned angel in that loose chasm between heaven and hell, the ability to right herself, or pitch headlong down the steep embankment? Lesa sucks in the lingering exhaust from her mother’s car as Murphy’s law kicks in. She pitches headlong into the deep ditch, executing a flawless somersault not unlike the side rolls she learned on the Smoky Lake girls’ volleyball team in 1973. The year she turned seventeen. The year the perversity of the universe kicked in. The year her father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

  Lesa rolls helplessly to the bottom of the ditch, her fire-retardant cape wrapping her arms round her body tight, like she’s been straitjacketed.

  “Fuck,” she yells to no one in particular, fights to free her arms, lies in the deep trough breathing shallowly, staring up at
the razor-blue sharp of the sky above, her whole body quaking. She feels suddenly foolish for: her foul mouth, her Storm getup, her straitjacket cape—ironic, she thinks, given that she’s headed up to Michener—her expert roll, Mr. Green. The blond stubble of last season’s wheat pierces her skin like infinitesimal arrows, like Saint Francis or Saint Sebastian—one of them God’s glorious guardian of birds, animals, the environment—the other poor bastard shot full of arrows. She doesn’t know which one to be. She lies in the midst of highway litter, discarded Coke and beer cans, and cigarette butts, her cigarette alight in the back seat of her mother’s car.

  Sitting up brusquely in the trough, Lesa shakes her head to clear the no-see-em flies she sees, then spots the grounded coyote not two metres away in the same sad trench.

  The animal is inert, motionless, dark blood pooling around its mouth, possibly from its torso. She doesn’t like the angle of the coyote’s spine either. It’s dead. Of course it’s dead. What did she think? That you could broadside an animal at that speed and have the animal lope miraculously off into the woods to heal itself ?

  Her eyes well up. She’s killed a living thing. Makes her think, illogically ill timed, of her saltwater fish, her prized Clown and Puffer that jumped ship and/or aquarium in her Vancouver apartment. Why? she thought at the time. Why would they do that? They had real curling plankton, authentic seaweed imported from the Philippines waving in the gentle current of their carefully filtered water. Bubbling mermaids and sunken ships with likelife barnacles, Sweetlips and Triggers and Groupers et al., a one-foot spotted Eel. Even so, the two fish jumped, thinking perhaps that the glass or water was greener on the other side. She found them behind the tank when one of her three illegal (they live in a pet-free apartment zone) miniature Dobermans was nosing around; the Clown and the Puffer dehydrated, not necessarily respiring, but not dead yet either.

  She couldn’t tell in the initial hysteria of discovery, so she put them in a gold transparent mixing bowl filled with salt water she retrieved from the tank. Not wanting to put them straight into the tank itself, in case cannibalism set in the other fish. She never could come to terms with the primordial nature of nature. She set them by the kitchen window, barely able to force herself out the door to the casino on Davie Street. Hoping that when she came home at 3:00 or 4:00 AM after a long meaningless night of pit-bossing, she’d find not only her sculptor boyfriend present for a change instead of at his art studio, but the fish miraculously revived from their misplaced adventure.

  She found neither.

  She sits in the present tense in the ditch, watches the lifeless coyote all blurry and watery in her vision. Can’t stop herself from thinking about all the other living things she has inadvertently killed: the black squirrel that landed with a definitive death thud at her feet, that her ankle-height Dobermans tore limb from limb fighting over the unfortunate rodent. Or the neighbourhood canine she nicked while shortcut-alley driving too fast in Vancouver, but the dog lived anyway. Lesa sees it from time to time, the dog’s unwieldy three-legged hobble along the front side of the street. Neither one of them frequents the back lane anymore.

  She can’t quite believe this holey kismet-knit sweater is hers. She’s such a lover of animals, of life in general. Surely the kindred spirit of Saint Francis? She’s done this through her rushing about, her own rash stupidity, never taking the time to think things through, her reckless, high-wire ways. And here again speeding down the highway this morning like a maniacal woman desperate for redemption from the past, the present tension between her mother/lover/sister/brother. Her uncertain future rolled all into one garbage-filled trough on the side of Highway 2 with a dead coyote in it.

  Wednesday, July 1961 » Jacqueline, age 27

  The doorbell rings at 10:45 PM. It’s not her husband who some-times >misplaces his keys, nor is it the kind constable from next door, but his wife, Mary-Lynn. Jacqueline does a cursory glance at the state of her living room before she opens the door. She’s tucked a peach-coloured bath towel around Nate, who is slumbering heavily, snoring lightly on the chesterfield; the broken wicker basket full of newly dirtied clothes, the splash of vomit on the carpet almost dry and only faintly odorous. The washed Lego spread out across the bookshelf and on top of the muted television drying. She opens the door.

  “Come in,” Jacqueline whispers.

  “I’ve come to see if everything is all right, I heard your husband—” Mary-Lynn says.

  She doesn’t make a move to enter the house. She sees sleeping Nate.

  “Isn’t home.” Jacqueline finishes the sentence for her.

  From the flush on Mary-Lynn’s normally pale face, Jacqueline knows that her husband’s truancy is now public information, and by tomorrow will be all over the neighbourhood. She can’t stand the idea of every wife on the block indignant on her behalf, she imagines, because who could side with her husband in such a case? No, it’s not on her behalf she truly cares about, but the children’s. Her husband wasn’t there for his children, and that betrayal is far worse than any woman he may have slept with. The chickadees, two-note refrain of Be-there >where her husband is concerned died a long time ago, years before this afternoon. In truth his presence fades with each child they have. She can’t think about the swirling baby in her uterus, it makes her anxious, nauseated.

  “Thank you for your help this afternoon with Nate and Lesa,” Jacqueline says to steer the conversation away from her husband.

  She knows she should be used to his absence by now, like half the other RCMP wives on the block, Mary-Lynn as well, but she’s not. She’s twenty-seven, young enough to still want her husband despite his duplicity. And there are times in this life that simply you need someone.

  “It’s the least I could do, considering,” Mary-Lynn says and looks down the quiet, dark street at a flash of lightning.

  Does she know about the reckless hug? Jacqueline wonders. Did her husband tell her that too? No, she will not feel shame for that—it was need, honest-to-God, down-on-your-knees need. Regardless, her face burns. She can’t look Mary-Lynn in the eye.

  She’s enormously thankful for Mary-Lynn, who ran through the neighbourhood this afternoon after the man in the station wagon sped away, gathering Nate and Lesa for her, alerting the other mothers. Jacqueline is also acutely aware that none of the mothers came over afterward, nor called. And tomorrow when news of her absent husband reaches them, if they offer nothing, not sympathy, not indignation, then she will be fine. It’s what she expects anyway.

  Mary-Lynn stands stiffly in the doorway.

  “Are you sure you won’t come in?” Jacqueline asks.

  She knows Mary-Lynn means well, in spite of her standoffish nature. Otherwise why else would Mary-Lynn be here at 10:45 at night? Notwithstanding, she has to admit, it’s a little like receiving solace from the Queen, distant and cold, however well intended. Besides, she doesn’t want pity from her or any of the other mothers in the neighbourhood. She wants to put Sylvie, who is still wandering about the house, to bed and sleep for twenty-four hours straight in the hope that when she wakes up, this will all be a remote memory, a faded nightmare.

  “I don’t want to wake your children, it’s late. I wanted to make sure you were all right,” Mary-Lynn says and turns to go down the steps.

  At the bottom, she pauses and looks back at Jacqueline.

  “God looks after us all,” she says, and when Jacqueline fails to respond, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m tired,” says Jacqueline, “so God-forsaken tired.”

  Jacqueline feels the metal burrs she collects beneath her skin so her children won’t have to.

  Wednesday, February 1973 » Lloyd, age 40

  Lloyd’s the first to spot Constable Pete as he bursts into Neville’s lounge, standing a moment at the front door to adjust his vision to the darkened room.

  “Over here, constable,” Lloyd says. The paramedics, the waitress, the bartender, the security guard, several other patrons pause briefly
to stare at Constable Pete, then go back to the important business of imbibing and selling.

  Pete sprints across the room. He’s out of breath, covered in snow and cow shit, straw and calf blood, reeks to some low manger.

  “Jesus, Saint Peter, you could have cleaned up a little.” Lloyd waves his cigar in the air to cover the stench of heemno.

  Judge Wade smiles, doesn’t offer the constable a seat. Constable Pete stands uncomfortably in front of them. He’s bursting with something.

  “Well, Pete, what is it?” Corporal Lloyd asks.

  Pete can’t speak for breathing.

  “I ran over,” he says. “Didn’t want the inspector to see the car here.”

  He tries to catch his breath; it’s a full twelve country blocks from the detachment to Neville’s in the frigid cold.

  “Inspector?” Lloyd cocks his ear to one side, his face paling despite the full bloom of Southern Comfort.

  Yes, he’s off duty but in full uniform in a licensed lounge. Good thing he left the cruiser parked at the courthouse, an unplanned alibi, if it comes to that.

  “He got wind, I don’t know how—but he knows. He’s on his way over here now.”

  Lloyd stands up, light-headed, almost falls back into his chair, stops to butt his cigar out in the overflowing ashtray.

  “No, go, get out.” Constable Pete motions toward the back door of the lounge.

  “Shchastluvo,” the judge says, hands him the napkin.