Lynn leaned forward and took from her mother’s forgetful fingers the last burning rind of a cigarette. She stubbed it out, lit another, and transferred it from her own lips to her mother’s. Em accepted it with an abstracted smile and patted her daughter’s wrist. So much brightness, Gus marvelled, blinking rapidly. There is scarcely room in the world for darkness. His eyes were watering. (It must have been the cigarette smoke.) He had to turn away.
Em stirred, returning to them, and poured more tea and gin all around. “So,” she said, as though summing up a long peroration. “The sun just keeps on rising and setting.”
“Are you always so contented?” Gus asked, mesmerized.
Em raised an eyebrow. “Contented?” She pondered the word, turned it around in her mind. “I guess so,” she said. “But then, I’m lucky. I’ve got Lynn here. Terrific kid. And I’ve got me a good franchise, I’m hooked on cars, and I rather like working my butt off.”
“I guess I’m lucky too,” Gus said. He pulled out the pictures of his wife and children and displayed them. “I guess the problem is I haven’t been doing the right things to make them happy.”
“The little ones are real cute,” Lynn said. “And who’s this one?”
“That’s Kathleen. She’s sixteen now.”
“Same as me.”
Gus was shocked. He had not thought of Kathleen as someone old enough to roam unleashed in the wide adult world, old enough to chat with sleazy men who would look at her body, who might not be as self-disciplined as he himself … as self-disciplined as one could wish.
“Well,” he said, suddenly anxious. “I really should be moving on. I’m heading for Winston.”
“Already?” Em’s voice was full of regret. “The decent ones always leave soonest. And I made a whole pot of tea.”
“Just one more cup?” Lynn suggested.
“Well …” It was not every day that he met someone with whom he could discuss the turning points of the soul. This was not something a man should toss lightly over his shoulder. Another cup, a few more minutes, how could it hurt? A simple matter of courtesy. A statement of thanks.
Perhaps he had more than one cup. Perhaps Em was not overly precise about the quantity of gin added. When Lynn suggested a round of three-handed bridge, he thought it would be a good way of sobering up before he drove on.
Over bridge, further chapters of past history were exchanged. Confessions and aspirations were aired. I suppose, Em mused at one point, that I should ensure things are taken care of for Lynn, if anything happens.
Heck yes, Gus said. I get nervous with anyone who hasn’t. It’s like driving with brakes that don’t work.
And so, between the second and third rounds of bridge, an application for $25,000 Whole Life was filled out and signed. They played a fourth round to celebrate and drank more tea and gin. They became more intimate.
“I never wanted to cheat on Therese,” Gus said. “But somehow, I don’t know, it was always happening before I realized it.”
“Past tense, I notice,” Em said. “Men always believe they’ve reformed.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “something happened today.”
“Don’t tell me,” she laughed. “A miracle.”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe not,” she said. “But you shouldn’t be too harsh on yourself. No one has brains in the glands. Universal problem. Me, I’m just beginning to learn. Getting hooked on do-it-yourself sex. So much less trouble, especially once you’ve got the hang of building up a good library of fantasies. You may notice, Gus, that I’ve been casting my bloodshot eye over your body. Memorizing. I’ll try you out tonight.”
Gus spluttered with nervous laughter, not sure whether to take her seriously. Her sardonic eye held him, unwavering. Blushing, he said, “Can’t think of a nicer person to be a fantasy for. Hope I work out.”
“Don’t you just love him?” Em asked Lynn. “I mean, I can almost bring myself to want him around over breakfast. Always a danger sign with me.”
With dry gallantry, Gus reached for her hand and kissed it.
“Hey,” Lynn said. “I found him.”
Gus kissed Lynn’s hand too. “Do you know, I’m still a virgin?” she sighed.
“Enough of that,” Em said. “My two of hearts trumps your king, Gus.”
“Congratulations,” he said. “You win me.”
“Lucky me. Must be time for coffee, before we all yield to temptation. And we don’t want the RCMP pulling Gus over for a breathalyser test.”
“Oh God,” he said, looking at his watch. “I think I’d better call Therese. Tell her I’ll be a little late.”
But he did have a signed application in his briefcase. He was on legitimate business. He could explain — though perhaps he would skim the main points, edit a little. He dialled his home number and let the phone ring twelve times before he gave up. It was very late now, all the shopping centres closed. Perhaps they had gone to a friend’s house. Anxiety set in. He saw ambulances, bottles of clear fluid suspended high over hospital beds, plastic tubing. He drank his coffee black, embraced Lynn and Em chastely, took off like a drag racer.
He kept to a steady speed, his anxiety sobering him. I am changed, he kept telling himself. Everything will be different now. He had a deep conviction, not susceptible to proof, that he would never forget this day.
And he was right.
The house was in darkness. There were two sealed envelopes on the kitchen table, both bearing his name, one in Therese’s handwriting, the other in Kathleen’s.
He opened Therese’s letter first.
There was no salutation.
I am sorry, I cannot take it any longer. I never know where you are, I never know if there’ll be enough money. I’ve always lived with that and I could go on living with it. But I will not live with your women phoning here in my own house. Don’t try to find me. The children and I will manage.
Therese.
Then he opened Kathleen’s letter.
Dear daddy,
Please don’t let this happen.
I’m not supposed to write to you but I’m going to run back in the house and leave this at the last minute. We are going to Tante Marthe’s in St Hyacinthe. I’m not supposed to tell you that. I love you. Kathleen.
He called Therese’s sister immediately and asked for Therese.
“She won’t speak to you,” Marthe said.
“Let me speak to Kathleen then.”
“No one will speak to you,” Marthe said, and hung up.
Gus dialled her again. “Tell them I’m leaving immediately,” he said, before Marthe could cut him off. “Tell Therese I’m coming to see her. Tell her I love her, tell Kathleen I love her … tell Sylvie …” He went on intoning his litany of loves even after the line went dead.
He was completely sober now. He was back in his car and driving east again. Of course I deserved it, he admitted to himself. But she does not know about the change. He would explain. He would iron things out. He would perform, and willingly, any penance she required.
He had no map of Montreal and when he reached it, in the wee hours of the morning, he could not remember exactly how to find St Hyacinthe. How many years — eight? — since he had gone with them on a visit to Marthe? He spent a frustrating hour getting lost in the centre of the city before he found an all-night gas station and obtained a map. He got lost again in St Hyacinthe. When he finally found Marthe’s house, it was four in the morning. He rang the doorbell, at first gently, and then when no one answered, loudly and repeatedly.
Marthe’s head appeared at an upstairs window.
“Go away,” she said, “or I’ll call the police.”
“Are you going to make me sleep in the car for the rest of the night?” he demanded.
“Yes,” she said.
Miserably he tried to make himself comfortable in the back seat. He dozed and had a horrible dream of a slaughterhouse where bloody carcasses passed by on a conveyor belt. Inside e
ach one, like a pea in a pod, was someone he knew. His wife, his daughters, La Magdalena. A man in a black welder’s mask was pushing a button and a mechanical cleaver was slicing the carcasses one by one. Gus lunged for the man who was pushing the button. The man turned — it was himself. He could not switch off the slicing machine. He woke in a sweat.
It was 5:00 a.m.
He began to drive aimlessly around the streets but he had to stop. Too many visitations. Instead he walked, arguing with his accusers. You can’t let it get you down, Reggie said. And Therese: It’s no use, it will never be any different. La Magdalena appeared. You really should let Felicity know, she said, that I’m grateful for the use of her cottage.
At a phone booth he stopped and dialled the answering machine at the Montreal number she had given him. Just to have something to talk to. But this time the tape did not speak. Instead, Jean-Marc, jolted from a nightmare, invited him to come around for coffee.
24
The question, possibly of interest to you, and certainly to me, is why did I do it?
Kathleen says I did it because I thought it was the Old Volcano come round at last.
“And from where,” I laugh, “do you get that fantastic idea?”
“From your dream,” she says. “The dream he woke you out of. The one you told me about.”
“Oh Kathleen, Kathleen.” I shake my head fondly. Show Kath leen an inkblot and she sees the return of a prodigal father.
“The mountain that shakes,” she persists. “The Old Volcano.”
An ingenious interpretation. At times Kathleen astonishes me. Oh dreams, Felicity will laugh. What cannot be construed?
In fact, it was one of those chaotic and senseless dreams that pick up the day’s trivia and thoughts and memories the way blue serge picks up lint.
In the dream I am tuning a grand piano with a recalcitrant high C. Nothing works. After each adjustment of the pin, I play the scale. Once: good. Twice: off pitch already. As though truth may only be attained for seconds at a time.
Exasperated, I climb onto the sounding board itself, nesting down into the ribcage of strings, the better to get at the faulty pin. With the speed and illogic of dreams, the piano is a raft crossing a choppy sea, there is a fellow passenger, and both of us, when the boat beaches abruptly, are thrown onto the sand.
Climbing. That is the next fragment I recall. Round and round and up, a corkscrew mountain, both of us looking for something but we don’t seem to know what. Sometimes I am leading, sometimes he. In the apple orchard at the top, three women stand in a cart. One is Felicity, and one is Hester. I do not recognize the third. This is Dolores, Felicity says. She reaches out her hand to be helped from the cart. Our fingers are touching, I am reaching up to her, she is floating down toward me like a cascade of apple blossom, she rains perfume, I seem to be drenched. And then an earthquake speaks inside the mountain and we are all of us hurled into space.
Free falling. We flail about in a dark trench waiting for the all-clear bell, but when it rings a voice moans: Lost; it’s hopeless. Over here, I call. The all-clear bell rings again. This way, I say into the receiver, and give directions.
“That’s not the way he was at all,” Kathleen says. “He never felt lost, he was an eternal optimist. You always try to make him out as a helpless bumbler.”
“When I dreamed the dream,” I laugh, “I hadn’t even met your father. You think he’s in the air, you think everyone breathes him in.”
“And he certainly wasn’t involved with that woman, that Dolores Marquez, the way you think,” she pouts. “I know that for a fact. Aunt Marthe’s right, Jean-Marc, you have a dirty mind.”
“What?” I laugh, dumbfounded.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Felicity wasn’t his type at all. Not at all!”
“Kathleen!” I am not shocked, not really. “Have I ever laid a finger —?”
“Oh, not on me!” she screams. “Not on me!” She slams down the lid of the piano I am working on, narrowly missing my hands, and runs from the house. It’s natural. The strain of the disappearances is telling on us.
It would be so easy for me to take advantage of her. Like father, like son, the Old Volcano would guffaw. A hundred years or so ago, he dressed up in Felicity’s memories and seduced her. Oh Seymour, she cried, what a great big history you have! All the better to impale you, my dear, said he, as he wolfed her down.
But I am not the Old Volcano.
I am a chronicler of clues and memory.
25
“People see smoke,” said Leon, “they assume fire. They see dreadlocks, they assume black, not Latin. Good camouflage.”
Felicity raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you’re not black?”
“You see? It works.” In the tavern darkness, the whites of his eyes shone like milk glass. “My real name is Angelo,” he said, “and I’m here without papers. But I’m lucky.”
“Why are you lucky?” Felicity asked.
“I was once here legally. Went to high school in Connecticut, so I don’t sound foreign. Most of us have to pretend to be Puerto Rican to get the sweatshop jobs.”
“Most of us?”
“Yes.”
“I meant: Who is us?”
Leon looked uneasily about him and rolled a cigarette. “I’m talking too much,” he said. “Like a starving man in front of food. Can’t handle temptation.” He lit his cigarette and inhaled. “You’re dangerous. I can taste my need to trust you. Deadly.”
Felicity drank her beer. “Nothing has been logical since I woke this morning,” she sighed. “Not one single thing.”
“Oh logic.” Leon — or Angelo — shrugged. “I’ll give you a course in Advanced Logic. Lesson One: He who trusts least, lives longest. Lesson Two: A day without a deportation or a death is a good day.”
Felicity doodled in spilled beer with one finger. She drew a thin line between herself and Angelo. She drew barricades. Fortifications raised themselves around her, grey columns: shafts of stale cigarette smoke lifted themselves up, were sucked into the cheap glass lampshades. Currents eddied in many directions. She could feel an undertow. She hooked her feet around the chair legs, bracing and battening down, anticipating headwinds, funnel effects, freak tides.
“Who telephoned me this morning?” she asked.
They stared into each other’s eyes, neither blinking. An era passed. “What the hell,” Angelo said at last. “What you did for Dolores — you must be all right. And I hear you’ve had a taste of the opposition. So here goes.” But he finished his cigarette and lit another from it and finished that, like a horse balking at an impossibly high jump.
“The phone call?” she prompted. “Who was it?”
“Sister Gabriel. She’s legal, an American citizen, which makes her omnipotent. Under divine protection, you might say.” Now that he had begun, he talked at a breakneck pace as though there might not be time to say everything. “She used to teach school and deliver babies and such stuff in the Guazapa region, but got kicked out.”
“And what …?” Felicity paused. She felt queasy, stirred by a compulsion to ask as well as an enormous reluctance to do so. “What does she … what do you … want of me?”
“For now, a tiny thing — though who knows what is tiny? It could always end up costing your life. A mysterious accident, they happen all the time. Or they could disappear you.” He watched the effect of his words. Her eyes did not waver from his, but they gave away nothing. “Or possibly I won’t ask anything of you,” he said. “Depends on my courage too, whether I can take the risk. We’re afraid of everyone, including you.”
“Afraid of me?”
“How do I know you’re not with la migra?”
“La migra?”
“The immigration people. Always decent. Infallibly polite and sincere when they ship us back to our deaths. One stray comment, one moment of misplaced trust, and I’m done for. If I’m sent back …” He drew his finger across his throat and she saw the slash, smelled so
mething foul, like shit. She wrinkled up her nose in shock.
“That’s the smell of fear,” he said.
“How do you know this would happen?”
“It’s already happened to my father and younger brother. My younger brother was a mistake, they meant to get me.” He sucked in smoke, made a decision, recited a biography as though rattling off something distasteful, rote homework. He was the son of a reasonably prosperous businessman in Morazin province. His father had dreams for his sons: an American education, business or law school, entrepreneurial energy, the vanguard of benign reform. And then last summer … “Nothing daunted my father,” he said, “but it wasn’t easy times for a business. He wanted my help for a year before I came back here for college. So I went back home, I made the deliveries for him … had to drive to the craziest places … a sewing-machine business —”
“My God,” Felicity said. “There was an article last year … I clipped it, I have it in my —”
“Quite possible, he loved to —”
“But they said that you … Trog said you smuggle cheap labour across the border for your own factory —”
He laughed sourly. “Is that what they said?”
“A parts factory in Medford.”
Angelo looked alarmed. “I did work there,” he said. “Two jobs back. They’re unpleasantly close on my tail.”
“And last summer?” she prompted. “When you went home?”
“Home from green, green Connecticut,” he said bitterly. “I can’t believe how green I was. Spouting American high-school idealism, liberty and justice for all, the whole fantasy. Incredibly stupid of me. You go away a few years, you forget.”
The usual story, Angelo said. The knock at the door in the middle of the night, the disappearances, the bodies found in a ravine the next day. Except that Angelo was out on a village delivery run.
“Why do you think it was you they wanted?”
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