“Call me back sometime when your head’s together. I’ve got to make open-pit coal miners indestructible. See you, pal.”
I threw the phone into the front seat.
“That’s right.” Svendsen set his glass down, smiling vaguely, and I almost liked him. “We doing our best for the big boss but in fact the big boss had something else in mind all along, and poof, you’re on the outs. Wash their hands of you.”
“I said no military applications. Basic stuff!”
We both shook our heads at the calculated injustice of it all, though as I looked out at two guys in suspenders shake hands in the parking lot and a broad-hipped woman strap a baby into a carseat, it suddenly seemed that whatever had upset me was intangible and even unimportant. Violence wasn’t the way to move the human race forward, and however they’d done it, the Congo war was over. Eventually those baboons would run out of ammunition.
“See, in the forces it was always clear as a bell.” Svendsen sat back with his hands out on the armrests, like the Lincoln Memorial, no slapping his gums, no jitters. Bourbon was medicine. “Before every mission there’d be the briefing, spell it out for you like winding a watch. No briefing? Then you do your chin-ups, you wait around. But, by God, when I tried to freelance afterward—I’ve got a pension but I want airfare to Patagonia, right? See how they grow their soybeans? So I talk to a gentleman on the phone, seems like a good man, sounds like there might be a little wetwork in it for me, as they say. So I have a little to drink, feeling loquacious, friend to the common man, maybe I say too much about the nature of the work to this Douglas Avery. And I realize I’ve mucked up! You know what I had to go and do?”
I was watching him with my mouth open. My orphan shoulder tingled.
“You had to run him down,” I said. I swallowed the trace of bourbon swirling behind my teeth. “That’s, uh, sure, that’s understandable.”
This topic took precedence over baboons.
“Sure it is! Nobody’d told me to do it, not so much, but this guy was a liability! If I didn’t do it, it’d be somebody else, so why not show the highers-up I’m willing, right? They never gave a briefing on it one way or the other!”
“Gosh.”
“That’s what working a job is like! Do one thing for the boss man, just like you, and all along the boss man wants another thing. A joke. So, how’d you lose the ears?”
He clacked his lips together, all bug-eyed intensity, then fell back and cradled his cheek in his hand, gazing at the floor.
“And you knew this Doug Avery’s wife?” I asked. “You recognized her?”
“I don’t know anyone in this town.” He shut his eyes. “Not a welcoming place.”
“But it must’ve dented the car up when you hit this guy, hey?”
“Oh!” He sat up like I’d finally called a briefing. “I had to get the hood hammered out! Told the garage I’d hit a seagull, they believed it. People are ignoramuses. Ignorami.”
He smacked his stubbly lips, trying to look me in the eye, it seemed, but not getting higher than the armless shoulder.
“Sure,” I said, “that’s professional, take the customer’s word for it. How big a car did you say?”
“That’s the thing, just a—just a little Cobra! Parked right over …”
He waved a finger beside his ear.
“A Cobra.” Had that even been on our list? “Let’s take a peek, buddy. I can’t quite picture how you did it.”
He started to climb past my knees, though the door wasn’t open yet, and his armpit in my face smelled of parmesan. I pulled the latch and slid out ahead of him. Asphalt heat climbed me like rising water. The parking lot was nearly empty, the kid in the war is over shirt climbing into a pickup.
“Hey!” I called, pushing my hair back. “Where’d you get the shirt?”
He grinned. “My dad made it!”
“Here, here,” Svendsen said behind me. “Down here by this dumpster.”
We strolled, his back straight as a flagpole, and now that he was upright I could see his distended belly. We rounded a motorhome with Arizona plates and the next five spots were empty until the yellow Cobra parked in the corner.
Colleen studied the front bumper, one hand in her purse. She eyed us for three or four seconds as we ambled toward her.
“This yours, sir? Nice car,” she called, her voice thin as glass. “Don’t see a lot of these Mustang Cobras. What is it, a 2000?”
“She’s a 2003,” Svendsen drawled affably. “It’s mostly the women who stop me about it, you know that? Must be the color—or might be it’s my abs.”
He couldn’t have been anticipating problems. He kept moving toward her.
“Of course, ’03.” Sounded like her throat could barely let air out. She wandered around to the back. “Brake lights right there in the spoiler.”
A chunk of gravel bounced away from under her silver dress shoe. Svendsen breathed on a handprint on his side window, then diligently rubbed it with his sleeve. This was a model of little yellow car I hadn’t seen in all our searching—only looked six or eight feet long, and the rest of the car was an afterthought behind its mass of front bumper, like it had been designed specifically for running people over. I realized Colleen was staring at me, still with her hand in the imitation-crocodile purse. I flicked my hair off my forehead and gave her what I intended to be a meaningful nod—here I was to help her. Not from the other side of the world but the other end of the car. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile, which disappeared just as quickly. The sun was an arc welder on the side of my face.
“You’ll have to pardon our manners, Miss,” I said. “We’ve had a little to drink.”
“Oh.” Svendsen resumed his flagpole posture. “Thought, thought you two knew each other.”
“Enjoy the ceremony?” I asked, still trying to prove our ignorance of one other.
“I guess there’s parties all over town now.” She tapped a knuckle on the spoiler. “You gents know of any? Bet you’re on your way someplace right now.”
“No.” Svendsen kept his gaze on her lower half. “This town’s not too friendly.”
Colleen looked at me stonily, then behind me, so I glanced back too and saw the parking lot was empty of people. She stepped forward and put a hand on Svendsen’s shoulder, her eyes artificially bright like a model’s in a catalogue.
“There’s one in my neighborhood we can go to,” she said softly. “You boys are ahead of me, though, I’ve just been eating Ritz crackers! But I’ve got some pot, do you want to smoke some pot? It’s been such a busy day.”
“Yeah?” Svendsen dropped a thick gob of spit between his shoes. “Lady, we’re the same kind of people. We are.”
Colleen turned on her silver shoe and led us between the pickup trucks toward that patch of woods beyond the parking lot. A dirt path cut between the weeds then up into the trees, and she stopped at the edge of the pavement to beckon us on like an usher at a wedding. She still kept her hand in her purse. I wasn’t thinking about whether I could get back to Picu in time for dinner or of Penzler’s shareholders around the big oak table, I was back in that morning when our house had been on fire, the desruction of all that for the kids and me, Deb had come to pick me up because I’d been covered in blood, when we hadn’t been in control of anything. Not like now.
Colleen stayed four steps behind us.
“Is she coming?” Svendsen asked out of the corner of his mouth.
I gave his thin shoulder a squeeze, and he went right on walking. The path ran up a slope and then across it, black bugs scattering from the undergrowth, and when I looked back toward the school all I saw was the trees. We’d come into another country.
I’d renounced violence; it was no way to move humanity forward.
We came to a campfire ring beside a trickle of water disappearing into a culvert. The circle of stones was littered with c
igarette butts and twisted ends of joints, so Colleen had known what she was talking about.
“Here’s a peaceful spot.” He talked in a higher voice, nodding. “This is the kind of thing I like.”
With his shoe he prodded the rotten orange cardboard of a Lucky Bucket case.
“Enjoy the view a minute,” she said behind us. “I’ll get us organized.”
Between the tree trunks we could see new red-roofed duplexes at the edge of town, a blue slide curving down beside a backyard pool, then the green corn beyond that and a plume of dust where someone was driving through the fields fifteen miles away. It wasn’t the same Nebraska we’d driven our ambulance through—now the world was fertile, openhearted.
“I do like this.” Svendsen shoved his hands into his pockets and walked forward with a strange tin-man gait. He’d have made a memorable grandpa for somebody.
Then motion. My brain translated what I saw in my peripheral vision as Charlie Chaplin twirling a bamboo cane—that motion was so distinctive—but of course it was Colleen, wet-eyed, showing her yellow bottom teeth and swinging her telescoped baton.
“Ah.” Svendsen put his hands on his hips. “It reminds—”
I set a leg behind his knees, pressed my hand against his chest. As he tensed I felt a sinewy strength, but all the same he tumbled back toward the cigarette butts, his two hands grasping air, gaze wide like he was a kid falling off the monkey bars. His eyes found mine but that one-third of a second wasn’t long enough to explain why we were doing this thing to him, to point out the beauty of such a just act, and that was too bad. At the midpoint of his descending arc Colleen brought the steel down on his head.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nicole Handford for her patience, resourcefulness and rare ability, as well as for her valuable feedback and belief in the project. Thanks to editors Barbara Berson, Anna Comfort O’Keeffe, Derek Fairbridge and Chris Labonte, who soak overnight in enthusiasm, savvy and skill.
Thanks to all students and colleagues at UBC Okanagan Creative Studies, both the hyperactive and low-key; to the Scotts, Purton-Schwarzes and Alex-Longs; and especially to my resilient mother-in-law, Carol Handford. Thanks to Rob MacDonald for Rob Aiken, and to Sgt. Gary Yeung for himself.
Thanks to all of my Advents, Collises, Handfords, MacArthurs, Schroeders and Suttons.
Photo credit: Nicole Handford
About the Author
Adam Schroeder is the author of three previous books: Kingdom of Monkeys (Raincoast Books, 2001), Empress of Asia (Raincoast Books, 2006) and In the Fabled East (Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), which was a finalist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Canada /Caribbean region, and chosen as one of Amazon.ca’s best books of the year. Schroeder currently lives in Penticton, BC, with his wife and two children. You can read more about him at: adamlewisschroeder.com.
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