When Boomers Go Bad

by Joan Boswell

  She’d been shaking her head in answer to all his questions, but by the end, her thoughts were on full alert. She tried again, more sharply. “Have you identified him?”

  “The investigation is ongoing,” he replied, which she took to mean no. “Had you seen the man before?”

  “I have no idea. I couldn’t tell from the...” Her voice faltered at the memory of the faceless flesh.

  His sharp, pig-like eyes met hers. “Then do you have any idea how your name came to be inscribed inside one of his books?”

  She gaped. “What book?”

  He didn’t reply, merely waited. She groped through her surprise for a benign explanation. “I have no idea. Maybe he bought it at a local used book store. MacIsaacs donate books all the time.”

  “Not MacIsaac, just Mila. With an affectionate inscription.”

  Her thoughts began a free fall. God, could it be true? How? Why! Why would he hide out under her nose for thirty-five years without so much as a hello? “How...how old was the book?”

  His lips parted slightly in a smile. “Curious you should ask that. The inscription was 1971.”

  Anger flared inside her, one strong emotion sparking another. “Look, you obviously think there is something suspicious about his death. I’d appreciate knowing what, since he died on my land, and I discovered him.”

  “The autopsy has raised certain questions. We are tying up loose ends, that’s all. He obviously knew you.”

  She hesitated. She had no wish to tell this hardass about an old love affair gone wrong, at least until she knew what was going on. But a man had died, and she needed answers more than she needed her pride.

  “You might check into the name Dean Fellows,” she muttered. “He’s a man I knew years ago.”

  Watts scribbled down the name, fired a few more questions, and hustled back to his car. Before the Malibu had even disappeared from sight, she was trying to get Roy from Oklahoma on the line. He was gone for the day.

  “What happened to no rush?” he asked when she reached him the next morning.

  “I got impatient.”

  He grunted. She could tell he wasn’t fooled. No doubt a police query on the licence plate had already reached him through official channels. “Lucky for you I got curious,” he said. “Your licence plate was registered to a Barry Mathers of Driftwood, Oklahoma. Beige ’67 Caprice.”

  Mila’s relief was so great that she barely noticed the last part. Belatedly she snatched at the shred of information. “Not a Volkswagen beetle?”

  “About twice the size, honey. They made them BIG in 1967. Your man never registered it again, by the way. Never registered anything else in the State of Oklahoma either.”

  She cast about for her next move. How the hell had the licence plate ended up on a purple VW? “Do you have any photo of him on file?”

  “I located one for you, but it’s way out of date. 1970. Shows some scrawny kid of eighteen, all teeth and Adam’s apple.”

  “Fax it to me anyway.”

  Roy agreed, no questions asked. What a sweetheart, she thought. Too bad he’s smoking his way to an early grave. While she waited for the fax, she puzzled over the two cars. Had Dean stolen the plates from Barry Mathers, or had the two of them done a swap? Why? And who the hell was Barry Mathers anyway? Where would their paths have crossed? On a whim, she keyed his name into the Immigration database. Nothing. She tapped her desk in frustration. Maybe the database didn’t go back far enough. Or maybe there was nothing there.

  As her fax machine began to hum, she phoned Roy back. “I know I’ve used more than my quota of diplomatic goodwill, but I wonder if you can check one last thing.”

  He chuckled that ominous, phlegmatic rumble. “Always happy to keep you one step ahead of your police.”

  “Was Barry Mathers a draft dodger?”

  “Draft resistor, honey. We like that better.”

  She paused to absorb this new aspect of kindly, helpful Roy. “Sorry, resistor. Do you have access to those records?”

  “Don’t ask,” he replied, and the next instant he was gone.

  It took him less than an hour to get back to her, and his voice seemed to have gained an octave. “I don’t know what you’ve all stumbled onto up there, honey, but this Barry Mathers dude was no draft resistor. He was a deserter. Did one tour in Vietnam in ’71, came home on medical leave, and went AWOL from the psych ward the very first night.”

  Afterwards, she picked up the photo Roy had faxed her and stared at it. The face rang a very faint bell. She scrabbled through her distant memory for a connection. Somewhere. Something. Out of the mists it emerged. July 1st weekend. Fireworks on a beach, a campfire, guitars, the ocean hissing over the sand. A kid talking to Dean, so young he barely had a beard. The kid had been standing in the surf, staring out over the Pacific. Breakers crumbled and swept over his feet, but he didn’t move.

  “That bozo’s too wasted for his own good,” Dean had said, and he got up from the circle and crossed the beach to talk to him. They’d walked along the shoreline a long time. Dean tried to draw him towards the fire, but the kid shook his head. He kept flinching and looking around, as if he saw things no one else did. Must be one hell of a trip, she’d thought at the time.

  Dean had stayed out all night, and in the morning she found him sprawled on the beach, fast asleep. Two empty bottles of rum and the crumpled remains of foil wrap—the last of their hash—lay beside him. When she’d shaken him awake, he’d looked around in bewilderment for the boy.

  “Man, that is one fucked-up kid,” he said.

  “What was he on?”

  “Nothing.” He snorted. “Just tripping on flashbacks. Seeing firebombs and Viet Cong ambushes all over the place.”

  His disdain shocked her. The old Dean would never have said that, in the days before booze, drugs and self-pity had eaten away at his core. As she contemplated him, slack-jawed and filthy amid the remains of his binge, she realized she’d reached the end.

  Leaving him there to sober up, she went in search of the boy. She found him huddled in the hollow in the rocks nearby, shivering against the wind from the Juan de Fuca Strait. He was rocking fitfully, his eyes pressed shut and his lips moving as if in silent prayer.

  She wrapped her jacket around his shoulders and gave him a hunk of bread. As he ate, he began to weep, the tears running down his cheeks onto her jacket. She reached for him and he snuggled in the crook of her arm like a small child. They didn’t speak, and gradually his tears stopped. But still he held on tight.

  “Are you Dean’s girl?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I never even kissed a girl. Never had a date, never even had a job. Then I went to Nam.”

  She hugged him, searching in vain for words strong enough to comfort him. A sudden shadow fell over them. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Dean was scowling down at them. They jumped apart, and Mila’s jacket slipped from his thin shoulders. The boy scrambled to his feet and backed away, scrubbing the last traces of tears from his cheeks.

  “Nothing. She brought me some food is all.”

  Dean stood in silence a moment, his hands on his hips. His glare gradually softened. “You should have gone to the camp, Barry. There’s plenty of food there. You’ll catch your death here.”

  “I already have,” Barry said in a small voice as he turned to clamber over the rocks, not towards the camp but away towards the empty highway.

  Dean didn’t speak to her, merely snatched up her jacket and strode away towards the campsite. It was that silence, that unspoken condemnation more than anything else, that made her decide to leave him. If it wasn’t about his needs and his suffering, then it wasn’t worth talking about.

  When she caught up with him at camp, he was rolling a joint. Not even down yet, and he was toking up again. “Dean, I can’t do this any more. I’m going home.”

  He paused only long enough to flick a glance in the direction Barry had disappeared. Fury boiled through her. Sh
e shoved her clothes into her knapsack, threw the keys to the Beetle at him, and stomped off towards the highway. When she risked a glance behind her, Dean was standing by the fire watching her. He didn’t even wave goodbye.

  That was the last time she saw either one of them. But Dean did write her once, sounding closer to the Dean she’d once loved. He apologized for failing her, then thanked her for forcing him to confront the pointless life he’d chosen. He’d also said something about coming for her someday. She tried to remember his exact words, but years of disappointment had blurred the memory.

  It took her two hours of rummaging through musty attic boxes to find her mementos of those hippie years. Packets of yellowed photos and notebooks held together with elastic bands—herself in fringed smocks and bell bottoms, Dean peeking out from behind his full beard and shoulder-length black hair. Snippets of poems and songs, all horribly bad and poignantly naive. And beneath all the photos and notebooks, at the very bottom of the box, as if she’d wanted to put it furthest from her sight, was Dean’s letter.

  She sat down on the bottom stair and unfolded the neatly written page. Dean had been educated in philosophy and the classics, both of which proved utterly useless in procuring a job, but had made for breath-taking prose. His words brought a rush of emotion. Nothing was as magic or as visceral as first love.

  July 10 1971.

  Dear Mila,

  The world is a master of disguise, donning cloaks of black, brilliant red, and shimmering, celestial white. I learned, too late, that love is the only lens that sees beyond the black. People hate each other in the abstract, but we can only love one on one. The statistic of six million boggles the mind, but Anne Frank makes us cry.

  So I have found a new path. To reach out wherever I find a single soul floundering. I’m a draft resistor. Let that resistance to slaughter stand for something more. Let it stand for peace and healing. I have already started, with the spirit of that lost soldier boy. Our country destroyed him, made him terrified of the killer within himself That morning on the beach, you showed him a glimpse of light through his visions of death, and he has never forgotten you. Neither have I. And when I feel I have earned the right, I will come east for you.

  Forever yours,

  Dean

  Mila reread the words carefully. Beneath the overblown prose and the metaphysics, Dean was referring to Barry. He had been helping Barry overcome the nightmare of his wartime experiences.

  As she thought about the obsession with violence in the hermit’s lair, a chill began to slither down her spine. Which man had been camping in her back woods? Was it Dean, who’d come back east as he’d promised but in the end lacked the courage to face her? Or could it have been Barry Mathers, a destroyed soul drawn to the only woman who’d ever held him in her arms?

  There was no police tape around the compound, so after tying Pavlov firmly to the picnic table, she headed straight for the hut.

  The police had left it in disarray; the fastidiously smooth sleeping bag was rumpled, and the books were scattered on the bed. She picked up the nearest and flipped to the front page. No inscription. The second and third, nothing. Then she spotted Dr. Zhivago, a book whose theme of love stood in stark contrast to the others. Tragic love, to be sure, but still a voice of hope amid the devastation of war. She opened the cover and there it was: June 20 1971. Happy quarter century, and may love bind us for eternity. Forever yours, Mila.

  She stared at the words. At the book, as memories flooded in. She had given it to Dean as an inspiration on this milestone in his life. He would have reached another milestone, sixty, last week. Had he celebrated it all alone, out here in his chosen home?

  She looked around the room for other evidence that the hermit was Dean. The pots and pans were probably salvaged from the dump, and the clothing was too filthy to be recognizable. But wedged deep into the dirt in the corner under the straw mattress, she found a small cookie tin which rattled when she picked it up. Inside she found the peace medallion Dean always wore, his Quebec driver’s licence, and a folded square of paper containing a hand-drawn map of Ontario. Her cottage was marked “target”.

  But beneath the map was a small note in a scrawl nothing like Dean’s elegant hand. “Thank you, Dean, for making the ultimate sacrifice to the cause of love”.

  Panic drove her outside into the afternoon sun. She sucked in the fresh air, trying to slow her pounding heart. Whose handwriting was that note? Barry’s? Had he stolen Dean’s ID, his medallion and his car? Why? And where was Dean? What was the ultimate sacrifice?

  So many questions, the answers unthinkable. She phoned Detective Watts the instant she got back to the cottage. Her mind clamoured with the enormity of her discoveries, but before she could even begin, he interrupted her.

  “Relax, Mrs. Hendricks,” he said in a surprisingly gentle tone. “We have established cause of death, and we are close to an ID.”

  “Who...? Is it...?”

  “We’re waiting on DNA, but we believe it’s Barry Mathers, a U.S. army deserter who fled the States during the Vietnam War. The crazy fuck still had his dogtags on.”

  She allowed herself a faint hope. “Not Dean Fellows then?”

  There was a pause on the phone, and Watts cleared his throat. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Dean Fellows died in Esquimalt on July 15, 1971.”

  Tears burned her eyes. Her throat closed and she sucked in a breath, unable to get the question out. The detective seemed to anticipate it. “Shot in the head. Case never solved.”

  Till now, she thought numbly. She groped to put the pieces together. “And this Barry Mathers...?”

  “His head wounds were consistent with a bullet fired at close range, and we found his gun in the brush three feet away. The coroner’s ruled it self-inflicted. Judging from insect activity, he’d been dead about a week.”

  She sank down into a chair as understanding began to dawn. She thought of the terrified young soldier she’d held in her arms. Of harmless Dead-eyed Dan who couldn’t kill a mouse if he was starving to death, but who had shot Dean in the grip of his private nightmare war.

  And who, on what would have been Dean’s sixtieth birthday, had splattered his own brains all over the leafy forest floor.

  Barbara Fradkin is a child psychologist with a fascination for how we turn out bad. Her gritty short stories haunt numerous magazines and anthologies, including the previous Ladies Killing Circle books. She is also the author of four detective novels featuring the quixotic Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, published by RendezVous Press, and is a four-time nominee for the Arthur Ellis Award. Fifth Son won the 2005 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel.

  Plenty of Time

  Melanie Fogel

  She sneezes, and now the pouches under her eyes are polka-dotted with mascara.

  She reaches for a piece of toilet paper to dab off the polka-dots, but her hand lands on a cardboard spool. She opens the cabinet under the bathroom sink for a new roll and finds only rumpled shrink wrap. Does she have any toilet paper?

  Never mind. She can use a Kleenex. She heads for the box on her night table, thinking she’ll have to pee before she leaves. She doesn’t like using Kleenex to wipe herself; it always itches afterwards. So where’s the toilet paper she bought on sale, not two or was it six weeks ago?

  AAADD. That’s what Stephen calls it. Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Some joke he read on the internet. How you know you’re middle-aged. Start to do one thing, and that task splits you off onto something else, and those two split and you end up getting nothing done. “Except with her it’s not age,” she can hear Stephen saying, laughing, to a customer. “She was born with it. That’s why she needs me to run the business.”

  Not any more, Stephen dear.

  Kleenex in hand, Donna tunes her clock-radio to the news station. She may not be able to fake shock when the police call or arrive at her door. This way, she can say she heard it on the radio when she woke up. She sets the alarm for half an hour earlier
than usual, giving herself plenty of time to hear the news, to prepare herself for the police.

  Take no chances whatsoever, she thinks, before blowing her nose and tossing the Kleenex into the wastebasket.

  Nearly an hour to go. She wishes the phone would ring. Even a telemarketer would divert her mind for a few minutes. Even Heather, who always calls when it’s inconvenient to ask where her “soon-to-be ex-” husband’s sleeping nowadays, and to bitch about what a bastard he is.

  Still, if Heather hadn’t thrown him out, Donna wouldn’t have this opportunity. She’d been warned, when she told people she was going into business with her best friend’s husband, that business was like a marriage, that she’d learn things about Stephen she didn’t want to know. But even Heather had thought it a good idea at the time. Neither of them thought him a bastard back then. Now they both hate his guts. Donna stares at the phone, willing it to ring.

  What if it rings when she’s out? But who would call after eleven? Unless it’s an emergency... I was in the shower, she could say. I was really tired and shut the ringer off before going to bed. But should she set the answering machine?

  Donna flicks the switch to on. Then off. Then on again. Then off, because she’s still home and will be for another hour. How to fill the time?

  She spreads the contents of her shoulder bag on the bed, to check it against her list which she will have to burn before she leaves: pepper spray, in case Stephen wakes up violent; gloves, hammer, keys, money but no wallet—no ID in case the cab gets into an accident and she wakes up in a hospital; toque, wig, wire cutters; gun. She marvels again at how easy it was to get the gun. Easier and scarier than imagining herself crushing Stephen’s skull with the hammer. The wig and makeup came in handy; even if they find the gun she’ll ditch in the shopping centre dumpster, even if they trace it back to the druggie who sold it to her, he’ll never connect the stylish, middle-aged, brunette boutique owner with the sleazy blonde tart.