Snow Falcon

by Harrison, Stuart

  ‘Karen?’

  ‘My wife, you remember Karen White? We’ve got a couple of kids.’ Carl gestured to a framed photograph on his desk, then his expression fell. ‘Shit. That was dumb of me. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Michael assured him. ‘You have a nice family.’

  ‘Thanks.’ An awkward moment passed and Carl said, ‘You mind if I ask about your wife? I mean, have you seen her?’

  ‘We’re divorced now.’

  ‘You had a little girl though, right? What was her name?’

  ‘Holly.’ A picture of her as a very young child sprang to mind. He didn’t even know if the picture was accurate. She would be almost ten years old now, and he had no idea what she looked like. He was aware that Carl was watching him, no doubt trying to decipher what he was thinking. Silence enveloped them, and when Michael didn’t volunteer any other information, Carl moved on.

  ‘Karen would’ve come in to say hi herself but she’s tied up with some meeting. Something to do with school. She’ll be sorry she missed you.’

  In fact, Michael barely remembered Karen White, though Carl spoke like they were old friends. ‘I expect I’ll see her around,’ he said vaguely.

  Carl appeared momentarily puzzled. ‘Anyway, you probably want to get down to business.’ He pulled out some papers from the folder. ‘Everything’s pretty much as I told you when we talked on the phone. There’s the house of course, which needs some work as you’d expect after being empty for so long, but it’s not too bad. I had someone go out and take a look for you. The roof needs fixing in a couple of places and it could use a coat of paint, but nothing serious. Then there’s your dad’s store. As you know, his insurance covered the mortgages when he died, so the house and store are both freehold.’

  Carl flicked over a page and looked down a column of figures. ‘The money your dad left has been sitting in an account since he died. The taxes have had to be paid from it over the years, but there’s still a decent amount.’

  Carl paused and looked as if he were about to say something, and Michael knew that Carl had to be curious about why he’d never touched the money, or why he hadn’t sold the house and store instead of just leaving them empty all those years. Evidently though, Carl decided to let it pass.

  ‘Of course, you won’t get big city prices here, but after you sell you should have enough to get you started again.’

  Michael got up and crossed over to the window, where he looked down to the street.

  “Actually I’ve got some good news for you,’ Carl said, getting up to join him.

  Down in the street a snowplow was stopped at the side of the road. A truck pulled up and a guy got out and started talking to the man who looked to be in charge of the plow. Nearby, a woman with two young children pulled up in a big Ford and started taking bags out of the front seat. The deck of her truck was covered in a layer of snow. Michael could remember when, as a boy, it had been forty below here in February, and the snow five feet deep.

  “Michael, did you hear me?”

  He realized he’d missed what Carl had said. ‘Sorry. Good news?’

  ‘That’s right. Things’ll get better for you now. You’ll be able to put all this behind you. I know it’s easy for me to say that, but take my word, in a couple of years it’ll seem like a bad dream.’

  ‘I appreciate the sentiment,’ Michael said, uncertain what Carl meant.

  ‘Hey, we’ve known each other for a long time. I think that counts for something. That’s why when I heard from you, I started putting this thing together.’ Carl flourished the papers in his hand. ‘I didn’t say anything before you got out, because I thought it would be kind of a nice surprise for you.’ He handed over a sheet of paper. ‘The guy wants to move here and set up some kind of business. I told him this was perfect for him. He could get the house and the store. His first offer was way too low. I told him that right off, but I got him up to what I think you’ll agree is a fair deal.’

  Michael looked over the figures finally understanding it was a sale agreement on the house and store.

  ‘So where will you go anyway?’ Carl asked. ‘You must have thought about it a lot.”

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ Michael said.

  Carl frowned and reached for the agreement. ‘Where is it? I checked it myself.’

  “I mean I’m not selling.’

  Carl stared at him. ‘I don’t get it. You won’t get a better price, Mike. But I suppose I could talk to him again.’

  ‘No, I mean I’m staying here, Carl.’

  Carl took off his glasses and stared hard at the lenses while he polished them with a handkerchief he took from his pocket. His smile remained frozen on his face, but it looked forced. After a minute he looked up. ‘You mean you’re planning to live here? In Little River?’

  ‘Yes. Actually it was Heller’s idea.’

  ‘Heller?”

  ‘He’s a psychiatrist from the hospital. He arranged it all with the parole people.’

  Carl started to shake his head. ‘Michael, I think I ought to counsel you to think about this. I’m speaking as your friend here, not just your lawyer,’ he added.

  Long seconds passed in silence.

  ‘This is a good offer.’

  ‘It isn’t the money.’

  Carl spoke carefully, as if Michael hadn’t understood. ‘I just assumed you wouldn’t want to stay around here. I mean, it’s lucky you didn’t sell everything when your dad died because real estate was down then. Right now there’s enough to start somewhere new.’

  Luck, Michael thought, had nothing to do with it. Back then the last thing he’d wanted was anything that had belonged to his dad. He wouldn’t have cared if the house and store had just fallen apart.

  ‘What would you even do?’ Carl went on. ‘You were in advertising weren’t you? I mean, there’s not much call for that kind of thing around here.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll find some kind of job I suppose. It doesn’t matter what.’ The fact was, he hadn’t considered the practicalities of his situation too much. Heller was right. He needed to be here, he needed to reconcile his life, and after that he didn’t know.

  ‘You’re turning down a good offer, Michael. It might not be so easy to get a job around here.’

  ‘You mean because I’ve been in prison?’

  ‘It’s not that. Jesus, there’s other people around here who’ve had their brush with the law. But this is a small town. People live here because they like to feel safe and to know their kids are safe. It isn’t like the city. What happened was in the local papers, Michael. People don’t forget something like that.’

  Michael was taken aback. He knew people must have heard about him, but it was a long time ago. Nevertheless, Carl was as good as telling him that he wasn’t wanted in Little River, because people viewed him as a threat. Carl’s welcome home, old friend act was nothing more than a front. He’d expected Michael to sign the papers for the sale and leave as quickly as he’d arrived. Michael smothered a mixture of hurt and anger and headed for the door.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said tightly.

  ‘What?’ Carl protested. ‘You’re surprised by that?’

  Michael didn’t answer. Perhaps he wasn’t surprised. Perhaps a part of him even wondered if people were right to be worried about having somebody like him living in their town.

  ‘I think you’re making a mistake, Michael,’ Carl warned as he left.

  Carl’s secretary glanced up from her screen and then quickly looked away.

  CHAPTER 3

  The house was situated off a country road a couple of miles out of town. An unpaved track wound down between the trees, full of potholes, and at the moment inches thick with snow. At the bottom there was a clearing surrounded by woods, and a quarter of a mile beyond it was the river from which the town took its name.

  Michael turned off the engine and let the silence settle over him, emphasized by the pinging of hot metal. Just then the su
n found a break in the cloud and lit the mountains, chasing a shadow down across the snow-covered slopes and the forest all the way to the clearing. The house was suddenly awash with light, and for a few moments it was as if somebody had thrown back dusty curtains in an old room. It was a two-storey weatherboard place with a porch running along the front and side, and despite the paint flaking like burst blisters it looked solid enough. He absorbed the feeling of being there again and felt a shadow of the past behind him. The sun vanished as the cloud closed over again and plunged the landscape into grey. The sky seemed low, pressing down, and the house all at once appeared desolate.

  Inside the air was dank and unmoved, and the walls felt cold to the touch. Michael wandered through the rooms, pulling sheets from the furniture. He thought it might have altered after his mother died, but it remained largely the way he remembered it. Upstairs he went into his mother’s room. The bed where she died was still there. She had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills late on a Wednesday afternoon, when she knew his dad would be home as always around six. Their lives had revolved around long-held routines; for years the only night he came home late was Thursdays, when he habitually stayed at the store to do the paperwork.

  It was during the first summer break after Michael left for Washington State. He’d found a job, which meant he only came home for a weekend. He remembered telling his parents he might not get home again before the start of the fall semester, and he could still see the shock of disappointment in his mother’s face. Something behind her eyes collapsed, and he knew she’d been counting the days until he came home. She never wanted him to go to college. He couldn’t imagine how she and his dad would get along together alone, but the truth was he couldn’t wait to be free of the claustrophobic atmosphere of this house. After he left for college he never wanted to come back again, not even for the summer break. He could’ve found work in Little River if he wanted, but instead he got something in the city not far from the campus. It was an excuse to stay away.

  The night Michael’s mother died, his dad had come in around eleven, inexplicably breaking the routine of a lifetime. When he found her she was unconscious, and by the time the paramedics had arrived she was dead. There were rumors that he’d discovered her earlier but had gone right back out again to make sure the pills had time to work. When Michael asked him where he’d been, his dad said he was at the store and couldn’t explain why he’d stayed late. The question had remained unanswered in Michael’s mind ever since.

  As Michael stood in the doorway of the silent room, he thought everything that happened there had figured in his own decline. He knew now his mother had been mentally unstable. Maybe he’d inherited a fragment of that in his make-up. Heller asked him if he felt guilty about her death, if he thought his leaving had been at the root of it, but that would have been too neat a package.

  After the funeral, Michael never saw his dad again. They stood side by side at the grave like the strangers they’d always been, and afterwards he could find no words to express how he felt, only a bright anger that he kept wrapped tightly inside. He didn’t shed a tear for his mother, but years later he found himself sitting at his desk, tears coursing silently down his face after the call that informed him of his dad’s death. This was a man from whom he’d always been remote, whom he hadn’t laid eyes on for twelve years, a man whose funeral he ultimately refused to attend.

  The present merged with the past. The silent, shrouded room teemed with memories, awakening the old familiar turmoil. He’d sworn he would never screw up the way his parents had, that he would make a happy home for the wife and children he’d imagined he would one day have. Now he had a daughter he didn’t know, and her mother had probably told her that her dad was crazy and once had threatened to kill them both. Heller said it was in the past. There was nothing wrong with him. Michael wondered if the people of the town would be convinced of that. Or if he was convinced himself.

  ‘Welcome home,’ he murmured.

  CHAPTER 4

  Little River woke to a dusting of snow that looked set to continue falling for at least the rest of the morning.

  Susan Baker pulled back the curtains to her bedroom window. ‘Hell,’ she muttered under her breath. Down in the clearing at the front of the house a patch of frozen earth showed brown and bare where Bob was thrashing about as though he were having a fit. She rapped hard on the window pane and the dog stopped what he was doing and looked around, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, appearing deliriously pleased with himself and completely stupid.

  ‘Jamie!’ Susan called. ‘Bob’s out there rolling around in something dead. He’s not coming back in this house until somebody cleans him up, and it isn’t going to be me.’

  Before she turned away from the window she looked across the trees toward the house in the clearing about a quarter of a mile beyond. All she could see was a wisp of smoke rising and the top of the roof. She wondered about the man who’d moved in there just a few days ago, and if the things she’d heard people say about him were true. He was supposed to have killed somebody once. The details were sketchy, but she’d already heard two versions. In one he’d killed his wife, and in another he’d killed several people including his own daughter. According to the rumor mill he escaped spending the rest of his life in prison because he was eventually declared mentally incompetent.

  Susan didn’t like the apparent relish with which some people spoke about it, but she couldn’t help but be concerned when the guy lived right next door to her. Bottom line was she had to think about Jamie. No smoke without fire. It was one of the many annoying clichés her mother used to comment on life, and even as it popped up in her mind Susan grimaced.

  ‘God, don’t let me start turning into my mother,’ she said, feeling a pang of quick guilt as she turned away. She resolved that to make up for it she’d call her at the weekend.

  When she went through to her ten year old son’s room, Jamie was still in bed and showed no signs of moving. She shook him by the shoulder and he turned over to look up at her sleepily. His hair was getting so long it was almost in his eyes.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ He shook his head. ‘Bob’s rolling in something outside. Did you go down and let him out?’

  They could hear the dog barking and Jamie’s eyes went to the window. He nodded.

  ‘Then you better get up and clean him up before you go to school.’ She pulled back the covers and headed for the door. ‘Breakfast in ten minutes.’

  The heating had been on for an hour and downstairs in the kitchen it was warm. Susan turned on the radio while she made coffee and cracked eggs into a pan for Jamie’s breakfast. The weather report said a front was coming and she wished she didn’t have to drive to Spokane later. Through the window she could see the track that rose through the trees toward the road into town. At the moment it was only lightly covered with snow, nothing her Ford couldn’t handle with ease. Sometimes during winter she had to call Hank Douglas from down the road to come up in his tractor and dig out her access road for her.

  Jamie came in and went to the refrigerator to help himself to milk for his Cheerios.

  ‘Want some hot chocolate?’ she asked him.

  He nodded, then Bob came to the door and jumped up against the window, slobbering all over the glass and Jamie went over to let him in.

  Susan shook her head. ‘Uh uh. Not until he’s cleaned up, okay?’ Jamie turned to her and pointed back at the dog, making an exaggerated shrug.

  ‘No way, buddy, you heard me.’

  He pointed again and frustration flashed in his expression. It was clear he was telling her there was nothing to clean up, which she had to admit was true; whatever it was he’d been rolling in outside must have been frozen enough that it hadn’t got caught in his fur. But Susan never let an opportunity pass by and she knelt down in front of him.

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  Immediately he frowned and went back to the table. He was getting wise to he
r, she thought. He knew when she was playing dumb. He’d worked out it was a ploy to frustrate him to the point he’d just talk without even thinking, and he wasn’t falling for it. She watched him pick at his eggs listlessly, his expression morose. Now who was fooling who? He knew how to get to her, but she turned away, resolving to stay firm. Doctor Carey had told her often enough she had to be tough.

  ‘Make it too easy for him and he’s got no incentive to speak,’ Carey had reasoned, which she knew was good advice, but then he wasn’t Jamie’s mother. She was the one who got a lump in her throat every time she put Jamie on the school bus in the morning. He looked so small and alone and she just wanted to hug him, to tell him everything would be okay. Being tough wasn’t such an easy thing.

  Outside she saw Bob run across the snow in front of the window and head for the trees. Automatically she started to go to the door to call him back, then saw Jamie looking at her in a silent plea. She sighed, acknowledging defeat.

  ‘Okay, okay. Go and bring him inside.’ She shook her head, then glancing at her watch said, ‘Jesus, look at the time,’ and hurried from the room.

  She was just finishing getting dressed when she glanced from her window. Jamie was outside facing a man standing at the edge of the trees. He was holding Bob by the collar. He wore jeans, with a fawn colored coat and had thick, fair hair. For a second she didn’t know who he was, but then she suddenly guessed and without stopping to think she ran for the door and down the stairs. When she burst out onto the front porch, both Jamie and the man she knew to be Michael Somers were taken by surprise. She faltered, suddenly uncertain.

  ‘I found your dog over at my place,’ Michael said gesturing to the trees. ‘At least I thought he was yours.’

  She didn’t respond, thinking about the stories going around about him and suddenly acutely aware of how isolated they were out there.