by Daniel Perry
I laugh, but my older sister hasn’t been hearing Mom’s voice grow frailer each day for six months like I have, since the throat cancer was diagnosed. We moved her into a hospice yesterday — Dad’s been gone five years — and Claire came back three days ago, already too late to be much help. I stare at her until her eyes meet mine.
“How long has it been?”
She shifts them away from me.
“I was home for Dad’s funeral.”
“That doesn’t count,” I say. “You didn’t even come into the house.”
She sighs and it’s as fake as her straightened hair, which I know is naturally wavy like mine. “I’m thirty-six now, and I left when I was — ”
“Eighteen years.”
“I wasn’t welcome.”
“They wanted you to come back — more than anything else.”
She bends and with her free hand picks up a handful of small items from the floor: a cat ball, a thumbtack, a penny. With her fingertips she swirls them gently in her hand. “You know I couldn’t, Susan. Not after what I did.”
“All you did was leave.”
“That was enough. No one’s supposed to leave.”
She begins flipping through the papers.
“Mom said last week not to read it,” I say. “To just throw it straight out.”
“Don’t you want to know?” She asks, leafing some more. “I think it’s a story, or something.” She laughs. “What, was Mom a writer too?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“She loved those drugstore books,” Claire says, laughing again. “Do you remember how she’d rush out the moment she heard there was a new Sidney Sheldon?” She throws back her head. “Oh, man ...”
I look over my glasses at her.
“There’s nothing wrong with those books. I’ve read most of them, you know.”
“Oh, Susan,” Claire says, her voice thick with false empathy. “There’s so much family drama in the plots. Are there no real bookstores out here anymore?”
“Just the rack at the Price-Mart. Danielle Steele, Robert Ludlum ... they’ve got quite a few.”
Claire doesn’t respond, stooping instead to pick up more debris: a paperclip, two pieces of miscellaneous fluff. I wish she’d throw out something that would make a difference: the seven Parcheesi sets Mom somehow accumulated; the aquarium she never got around to putting fish in; Dad’s old typewriter. I look at Claire and then the bundle in her hand. “So?” I ask.
“So?”
“So what’s there?”
She grins and hands it to me.
“I knew you couldn’t resist.”
“It’s all mixed up,” I say, flipping the first two sheets. “It’s — ”
I shriek and drop the papers. The third one is spattered with a brownish-red blood stain where the writing breaks off. Claire gathers them up. She reads silently for a moment.
“They’re Dad’s,” she says. “Some of them are dated ... And they’ve all got the same title.”
I step toward her and read upside down: Apology. She rights that page and shuffles the rest and then she says, “I think I’ve got them in order.” She moves over on the box so that I can sit beside her, and like we did with our first Cat in the Hat books, we read.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1987
When Dispatch Doris radioed this morning, I was at Don’s, buying two donuts and harassing Marlene across the counter. When I finally got back into the car, the garbled voice was frantic. Karen Redburn had called in news from her husband Jack and the C.B. in his combine. Doris had been trying to get me for half an hour.
My cruiser was still rolling in Karen’s long laneway when she tapped the passenger window. She had on a yellow windbreaker and black rubbers, and a rooster tail stuck up from her close-cropped grey hair. This was bigger than her usual calls about drunk teenagers in the back of pickups, racing by swinging bats at mailboxes. I leaned over and unlocked her door.
“Gene Peterson’s, Fourth Concession,” she said, sinking in her seat. “Hurry.” I turned toward the road and pulled out. She didn’t say any more, which had been normal for her since her kids had left home. Sherry the Fall Fair Princess moved to Toronto to be an actress. Frederick bought a farm near Owen Sound. Asking after them was the only way to get her talking.
She mumbled, “They’re fine.”
“Jack okay?” I asked.
She nodded and we dropped into another silence. It lasted all the way to Peterson’s, where the hundred-yearold house had been bulldozed three years ago, after Gene died and stiffed his kids — all gone to Toronto, too — by leaving the land to the Redburns to grow soybeans. You’d never know now that anything else had been there. I parked over a culvert, my car bridging the ditch, and I opened my door and stepped out. I looked back at Karen. She shook her head and didn’t follow. I shrugged and lit a cigarette and waited for Jack, whose red harvester crawled along the back of the field and kicked up amber dust. As the machine drew close I thought of Gene’s kids, back for the funeral, and the shock they must have had at Bartlett’s Law Office when they learned they’d have no land to sell, no shared cottage to buy. Jack stifled the engine; the tines slowed to a stop. He climbed down the small steel ladder from the cab and called his usual greeting.
“What do you think?”
“About what?” I asked.
Jack squinted a moment in the sunlight. He glanced at Karen — still in the car, averting her eyes from her window — and then he exhaled loudly and stepped in front of the cruiser, where he pointed past the front tire, passenger side. With my eyes I followed his arm down to the stagnant water, where face-up James Arthur Sheehan stared back at me, two big holes in him, shoulder and gut — double barrel, vertical. I turned away and threw up. I hadn’t seen a stiff in a dog’s age.
“It’s a murder,” Jack said. “Isn’t it?”
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and nodded, thinking, “This isn’t happening.” The first murder out here, the Lovers’ Quarrel of 1883, fills a whole wall of the Currie Township Museum, and now, three days from qualifying for my pension, I was history, too. I returned to the car and Karen covered her ears as I called it in.
“So?” Jack asked through my still-open door.
“They’re sending some detectives,” I said.
“From London?”
I nodded.
“So an hour?”
“Thereabouts.”
“Then I can get another few rows off,” he said, turning and climbing back into the combine. First the motor came to life and then, with a grinding whirr, the header. As he drove away the rumble receded to a hum. I watched for half a lap, automatic as the thresher, before I realized Karen had been scowling at me the whole time, arms folded across her chest.
“Drive you home?” I asked.
“What do you think?” she snapped.
“NOT MUCH OF an apology,” Claire says, ready as ever to indict Dad.
I shrug. and ask, “Who says he finished it?”
She snorts. “That’s just like him — exactly how he apologized: heavy on the details without actually saying sorry.” But what Claire doesn’t know is that Dad became a different person after she left, and he did start apologizing — for everything, sincerely, and often for things I either didn’t remember or only remembered wiping from my mind. They all felt worse the second time around. I didn’t battle him the way that she did, though; the closest I ever came was the day she left home, and the You Should Have Talked Her Out Of This argument was a lot shorter than she’d like to think.
Claire stands and resumes gathering detritus from the floor.
“Where the hell was he?” she asks not to me, not to anyone in particular. I don’t know which night she means: the one where she wound up with Art Rummel grabbing at her or the one where she got into Scott McLaren’s van and disappeared. I answer anyway, and catch a wistful note in my voice.
“He probably got caught up reading.”
“Fuck off,” Claire
mutters. She looks back to the pages.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1987
Everyone knows Sheehan did the odd job for the Hammerheads. We know he chummed around with Reginald “Merlin” Giffen, too, a long-haired kook who’s lived on a side road for twenty years and fancies himself the baddest biker on the planet, writing one racist letter after another to the editor of the Seed-Tribune and signing them as president of yet another new “motorcycle enthusiasts’ club” formed from the same selection of riff-raff and scumbags he’s always run with, save for those who happen to be in jail at the time. He throws two blowouts a summer on his farm and gets his buddies fucked on the crank he cooks — the crank Sheehan bought a bit of every month to flip to college kids in London. It was double-dealing behind the Heads’ backs, but mostly, they didn’t care; mostly, they were up to their eyeballs in coke at Brutus’s, a strip joint east of Adelaide.
The buy went down the same way on the first of every month: Sheehan would park his rusting Firebird at the ValuGas in Waubnakee, where he cashed his welfare cheque, and from there I’d follow him to the Reserve, where he’d turn off for bootleg smokes. The Rez cops didn’t like us crossing the boundary, so I’d go one more block and wait in a laneway until he emerged again. I’d tail him all the way to Giffen’s, where the three leaning barns were always freshly painted with the latest M.C. logo. Sheehan would turn in, and I’d call Dispatch and ask for Bob Moore, my superior.
A week ago, I cornered Sheehan for the eighteenth straight month. There’s nothing else to do out here. “I’ve fucking got him, Bob,” I said into the radio. “Send me out some back-up.” Moore let out his usual exasperated breath and said what he always said, that Sheehan and Giffen were minnows and we should sit back, let them lead us to the bigger fish. I lit a smoke while he talked then and mouthed along with his usual parting words: “Get the fuck out of there before they spot you.”
This morning, though, Moore called me at the station and tore me a new one. City Vice hadn’t told him the whole story: Sheehan was deeper in with the Heads than we knew, and for the last year, had been informing in London. Moore had to yell into the phone for a long time — chain of command, shit runs downhill — but he’s got nothing. I did my job per protocol and I followed his orders.
This isn’t my fault, it’s his.
“AT LEAST HE suggests something went wrong this time,” Claire says.
“He tried, you know.”
“Tried what?”
“Tried to call you,” I say. “Must have been a hundred times.”
“Please don’t,” she says, and her eyes glisten. Tears form but they don’t break through. “I’ve moved on.”
“How?”
“I made my choice,” she says.
“And did you inform anyone of your choice?”
“I think he got the message.”
“Claire, you didn’t come home once before he died.”
She stands and sniffs and walks to the window, dabbing the corner of one eye with a finger. “I couldn’t have known what he was going to do,” she says, looking far beyond the glass. She raises the pages to the sunlight and scans over what we just read.
“Sounds like denial,” she says.
“It does,” I agree, but I’m not talking about Dad.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1987
I can tell now, this is going to get messy. I write the following to preserve the dignity of the force: I, Constable Tom Burford, am responsible for the death of James Arthur Sheehan.
Moore said as much when he called again this morning: “Giffen sees you last week, and next thing you know, somebody at Brutus’s says, ‘I don’t trust Sheehan.’ The Heads contact Giffen — first time in years — and Giffen says, ‘Yeah, I seen Sheehan, and Flatfoot with him. He’s a rat.’”
Moore’s right, this is on me. But today’s the day. I made my pension. I went to the bank and paid off the mortgage, and if I go before Elsa does my insurance is guaranteed, too. It only took thirty-five years. Thirty-five years and still a constable; I never was much of a cop. After a while you realize: you just need to stay long enough to retire. I wish it were under better circumstances, but effective immediately, I do.
“CONTRITION!” CLAIRE EXCLAIMS. She throws her head back and laughs.
I snatch the papers away from her.
“Honestly!” I glare and she quietens. “These are his last words!”
“Not quite,” she says with a smug smile. “We’re barely halfway.”
“Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?”
“So insensitive. It’s like nothing’s going to reach you.”
“Confessing he got some scumbag shot?” She scoffs. “That’s supposed to reach me?”
“He died ashamed, Claire.”
She shakes her head.
“No way. He was out anyway — he just wrote this to go cleanly. He must’ve been trying to keep something else hidden.”
She takes back the papers and flips nonchalantly ahead.
“How can you be so cynical?” I ask.
She comes to my side.
“Look,” she says.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1987
I shouldn’t have been where I was on Thursday. I should have disobeyed Moore and stayed with Sheehan. But after we got off the radio, I drove back to Currie and parked at Don’s, where Marlene was behind the counter finishing her shift, suffering Bruce Ferris as she counted her tips. He’s always the last of the seed company cap-wearers to leave.
“Your other boyfriend’s here,” he said, winking at her. “I’d better go. Happy birthday.”
He pulled the door and the bell rang.
Marlene gave the restaurant the once-over. All the seats were empty now.
“It’s your birthday?” I asked.
She adjusted her greying perm and smiled, revealing her crooked incisor.
“Sure is,” she said, then whispered, “the big five-oh.” Her husband died twenty years ago in a tractor rollover — two years after they were married — but she kept right on, getting up with the sun every day and heading to Don’s even when she wasn’t on the schedule. They hadn’t had children, she had nowhere else to go. With Moore clamping down, I didn’t either. I still don’t know why I did what I did next. I think I felt bad for her.
“Two coffees to go,” I said. “I’ll take you for a drive.” I held the door while she carried the Styrofoam cups and we walked to my cruiser.
“You know, I’ve never been in one,” she said.
“Not even the back?”
She dropped her jaw in mock offense. I laughed.
“Well, then. Happy birthday.” I put my key in her door like we were teenagers borrowing Dad’s car, she the Fall Fair Princess (1956) and I the football quarterback (which I wasn’t). I put my arm around her and peeled out even though I spend Friday nights giving teenage boys tickets for it — and never mind that I’m old and married. I’ve known Elsa since we were kids walking to the tworoom school on Main Street, the only road in Currie at the time. She still makes us dinner every night and brews tea in her housecoat before bed, but since our girls moved out I’ve probably said more to Marlene than to her. It was around the time that Claire took off that Elsa quit talking. But is this why I took Marlene out in the cruiser? And why we parked on River Road outside of town and necked like we’d just left the prom? I couldn’t believe it even as I did it. Marlene weighs as much as I do, maybe more, and I go to Don’s for donuts every morning. My right hand was in her curls and my left was in her leggings when Doris’s mangled voice interrupted.
“Tom, you’ve got to get out to Redburn’s.”
When I finally reached for the receiver, Marlene’s eyes filled with pain. She adjusted her waistband and sneered.
“Get a better offer?”
In one act, I disappointed both women I’d ever been with. I took a breath and pressed the button. I waited for the beep.
I FEEL MY eyes widen as I look at Claire, incredulous.
“He changed his story — he was cheating on her!”
“Cheated on her,” Claire says. “Once. And he didn’t even go through with it.”
“He would’ve.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Wait — you’re defending him?”
“It’s just not that important.” She shrugs. “And Mom’s forgiven him, obviously. You heard her last night, calling for him in her sleep.”
Mom’s rasp had barely been a whisper: Tom, we’re here. We’re all together. I’m coming, Tom.
“So they got over it.”
Classic Claire, washing her hands of both the issue and the debate — declaring victory by declaring fact.
Apparent fact.
Hypothesis.
“Okay, so Mom’s over it,” I say. “But when Dad died ...”
“Shot himself,” Claire says. “The asshole.”
“He was depressed! We didn’t see him for days, he locked himself in the garage.”
“Why didn’t you go in there and get him?”
“Why didn’t you?” I snap.
She opens her mouth but no retort comes out.
“I wasn’t here,” she finally says, softer.
“Of course you weren’t, Claire.”
She exhales before speaking again.
“So what happens next?” she asks.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1987
Elsa wheezes while she sleeps beside me, but she’s in my dreams, too, chain-smoking with half a sweater and ball of yarn on the couch beside her. She vanishes and Marlene comes next, eyes lonely as a wounded deer’s while the radio squawks, and then it’s Sheehan, his shaved head raining bloody pellets until his meth-mouthed wife joins him, blonde daughter on her hip as she was when she came into the station. They weep until Giffen shows, in his ratty grey ponytail, and his bushy moustache jumps as he laughs till I wake.
When Moore and I were partners — years back, in London — I arrested Giffen. He had been a Heads prospect since he was fifteen, tending bar at parties and repairing the clubhouse or sometimes helping a brother knock a woman around. I got him when he was pimping in Brutus’s lot, barking at a girl a lot younger than eighteen, and I cuffed him and flopped him on the hood of our cruiser. I wanted to look tough for Bob, who had two more years on the force than I did.