by David Bergen
Jonesy rested a boot on the steps. “Any idea how it started?”
“Well, horses don’t start fires.”
“Perhaps electrical,” Jonesy said.
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t think so.”
“No. I don’t.”
“I doubt it too.” Jonesy went inside and came back out with a coffee. “You have enemies?”
“The bank?”
Jonesy lifted an eyebrow.
The insurance man showed up the following day. He’d dragged along a fire inspector from Calgary and the two of them spent the afternoon going through the rubble. Bev watched them from the kitchen window as they walked in rubber boots around the remnants of the barn. A neighbour five miles east had rounded up his horses and delivered them. He’d put them out to pasture where they were now, standing with their rumps against a cold wind. He made coffee, poured two mugs, and carried them out to the men.
“Don’t know if you take cream or sugar,” he said.
“Black’s fine,” said the fire inspector. The insurance man, a thin fellow who when he spoke sounded as if he had stones in his mouth, said that he didn’t drink coffee any which way, thanks. And so Bev, who wasn’t given to waste, took it for himself.
According to the inspector the fire was the result of arson. “Scorch marks indicate an accelerant was used.” When he spoke he looked at the sky, and because this was so, Bev felt that he was guilty of something.
The insurance man said it would take a while to process the claim. “Police and such will have to be involved,” he said past the stones. Unlike the fire inspector, he looked directly at Bev as he spoke. Bev didn’t turn away.
“How’d you get the horses out in time?” the insurance man asked.
“Dog woke me.”
“Yeah? I didn’t see a dog.”
“She’s a runner. Belongs to a woman I know. She happened to show up last night and went all apeshit. Doesn’t like the smell of smoke.”
“Lucky then,” the insurance man said. He had a name, but Bev had forgotten it. “Fact is, it all seems terribly convenient, you with money troubles and all.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“My business to know.”
Bev said, “If it’d been me set that fire I’d have burned the house down.”
The fire inspector thought this was humorous. The insurance man didn’t. Truth was, Bev hadn’t intended to be funny. He was being honest.
He was eager to get his hands on Jack Collicutt, and in his earlier days, when he had been impetuous and full of rage, he would have paid him a visit at his high-school office and threatened him with a branding. Or worse. As it was, he stayed put. He rode Blue bareback out along the south pasture. Vs of geese flew overhead. A great horned owl sat a fence post.
In the early evening she called. “I heard,” she said.
“That’s quite a dog you have.”
“Isn’t she?”
“And quite a man you were married to.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Well, you didn’t burn the barn down.”
“You in trouble?”
“Might be.” It was quiet, then he said, “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You like being a loner, don’t you?”
“A lot less trouble.”
“Yeah, people are no fun, are they.”
“Most.”
“I can help out. It’d please me.”
“Wouldn’t please me,” he said.
“’Course not. You’re a big proud rancher. If it helps, you can pay me back. Or count it as a reward for finding Keller. Who’s still out there somewheres.”
“Engel, and everybody else, they’d see me as your whore.”
“That’s pure mean,” she said.
“Where can this go? Your ex-husband’s a madman, your dog’s out of control, and I’ve got these two by tens in the bed of my pickup reminding me you won’t be around much longer.”
“‘Course I’ll die. Maybe be dead next year. But right now I’m here. Here I am.”
“You lookin’ to get married?”
“For sure not. Marriage kills your sex life.”
“What do you want then?”
“Nothing, Bev. Might surprise you, but I want nothing. I’m happy. You gotta figure out what you’re afraid of.”
He sat on the couch before a black TV screen and saw there the faintest reflection of himself. He’d known outright physical terror and fear before and he knew the feeling it evoked, but this was different. This fear was like a heavy ache, and yet there were moments when if he turned his thoughts a certain way, the fear became a peaceful happiness and he was full of a bright light. It was like flipping a coin that offered two extremes.
And what would Janice say to this? Garbage.
He slept poorly. Kept waking, thinking he could hear her scratching at the door. And he rose to check the night, standing naked on the porch in the cold, looking over at the black carcass of the barn. A few times he called out, thinking she might be out there, but she didn’t come.
In the morning, in the first pink light, she was waiting for him on the porch.
Saved
1.
The lieutenant’s office was dimly lit. There was a glass of water on the desk and a large seashell that was an ashtray, and a telephone and one pencil, perfectly sharp. The lieutenant walked around the room, smoking, touching the desk as he passed by it. Once, he lifted the pencil and then put it down again and he began to talk about the girl. He said that the death of a foreigner was never a good thing for him. He said that the error of her death might lie with the girl herself, with her own foolishness. Perhaps she did not know how to swim, or perhaps she wanted to die—this sometimes happened. The lieutenant said that the girl’s death was a mystery, and he did not like mysteries. He liked to know the truth. He paused, lit another cigarette, and said, “You know this girl.”
The boy shook his head.
“You went to her house.”
“Not yet.”
The lieutenant stepped forward quickly and struck the boy with an open hand to his head. To an onlooker it might have appeared that the lieutenant was striking the dust from a cushion. The boy did not react, though his head moved slightly.
“How many times did you go to her house?” the lieutenant asked.
“Once. She fed me.”
“She fed me.” The lieutenant repeated the words as if some meaning could be gleaned from them. He said, “You did not know her, yet she fed you.”
The boy was frightened but he did not show it. He knew that because he was sitting in this lieutenant’s office, and because a man who had much power was questioning him, for these reasons he was in trouble. He understood that he might not ever leave the building. He understood that his own death might be imminent. Even so, knowing all of this, he showed no fear. He said that the girl had had friends and the friends had invited him to eat because he was hungry.
“What did you eat?”
“I don’t remember.”
The lieutenant said that he would give the boy time to remember.
The boy thought about this and then he said, “Bread. And cheese.”
The lieutenant said that he did not like cheese and those people who ate cheese smelled like goats. “Do you like cheese?” he asked. And then, not waiting for an answer, he went to his desk and picked up the pencil, opened a drawer, took a pad of paper, and began to write. He wrote with his left hand. He leaned on the desk and wrote carefully for a long time. When he straightened, he said, “On Tuesday you saw her.”
The boy said no.
The lieutenant said, “You saw her and together you rode up to Monkey Mountain and then went down to the beach and she took off her clothes and she had on a bathing suit. What colour was
the bathing suit?”
The boy said that he did not know the colour. “I was not there,” he said.
The lieutenant put down the pencil and walked over to the boy and he took the boy’s neck in his left hand and he squeezed and leaned forward and whispered, “The bathing suit was blue.”
The boy saw pain. It entered the back of his head, passed by the backs of his eyes, and came out of his mouth.
The lieutenant stepped back. He said that the boy should not think he was an equal. Neither to the lieutenant, nor to the girl. “She was beautiful,” he said. Even when she was dead. “Did you touch her?” he asked.
The boy stared at the floor. He did not answer. He saw the lieutenant’s boots. The toes were round and scuffed. They needed polishing. The boy was good at polishing shoes. When he was younger, seven or eight, he had worked the corner near the post office on Bach Dang. Perhaps he had even polished this lieutenant’s shoes.
The lieutenant began to speak again. He said that there were many unfortunate things in the world and one of these was the death of a nineteen-year-old American girl in his city, here in this country. And another was that a fifteen-year-old boy, who claimed to know nothing and who would be missed by no one should he disappear for some reason, might think that he could hold in his hands the sun, the moon and the stars.
The lieutenant spat.
He pulled up a chair and faced the boy. The boy did not look at him. The lieutenant said, “There was a bump.” He touched the back of the boy’s head. “Here.” The hand came away and the lieutenant leaned backwards and raised his hands. “Where did this bump come from? Do we think that it grew there on its own? Like an onion would grow in the ground?” He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
It was quiet. Outside, beyond the closed window, the boy heard the faint sound of motorcycles on the street. He thought about the street and the light that fell from above and how he might not see that light again.
“Her name,” the lieutenant said.
The boy looked up. He looked past the lieutenant’s face and he said, “That day, when I ate cheese, on that day she was called Marcie.”
The lieutenant nodded. “On that day,” he said. Then he sighed and said that the girl’s friends had gone back to America. They had taken the girl’s body with them. So now, there was nothing more.
The lieutenant sat up straight and said, “They talked too much.” He said they should have kept their god in their own country. “They believed they were better,” he said. He made a little noise in his throat and told the boy that it was dangerous to think this way. He said that too much self-belief could come back to injure you.
“Did she pray?” he asked the boy.
The boy said that he did not understand.
The lieutenant smiled, and he did not stop smiling. He said, “Trust me.”
Then he asked if the girl could swim. Because if she couldn’t swim, then she must have drowned.
The boy said he didn’t know about this, if the girl could swim or not.
The lieutenant ignored the boy. He said that the ocean was dangerous at that place. A week earlier a fisherman had drowned there. He stood and lit another cigarette and closed his eyes and then opened them. Then he sat down at his desk and wrote on the paper and then he looked up and he saw the boy sitting there. He said that he could go.
The boy raised his head and for the first time he looked at the lieutenant’s face, which was calm and appeared to hold no malice. The lieutenant repeated again what he had said the first time. “You can go.”
The boy stood and dipped his head slightly and he began to back out of the office, but before he reached the door he turned and slipped sideways between the door and the jamb and he went down the hallway, expecting to be called back, or to be caught, but by the time he had reached the main doors which led out onto the street, he knew that, against all odds and contrary to the truth and facts of the case, he was free.
2.
On that day, he had been standing in the doorway of a jewellry shop on Quang Trung Street when the girl passed by on her bicycle. He had not seen her since the Sunday when she sat beside him in the small room and he repeated the words that had flowed so easily from her mouth. And then, she had whispered that he was saved. “Oh,” she said, “That’s wonderful.” He had not known, at that moment, what was wonderful, but he was pleased that she was pleased and he had loved the calm of that moment, the stillness, the closed space in which the two of them sat, side by side. At that point he had been carried away and he imagined that it was she who had saved him.
But the stillness had passed and what he experienced in the days that followed was confusion. And shame. Though he did not know it was shame. And so, when the girl passed by on her bicycle he thought of calling out, but he didn’t, and instead he took his own bicycle and he followed her. She rode across the bridge and towards the mountain and then up the hill to the trail that led down to Monkey Beach. She locked her bike at the top of the hill and then disappeared. The boy set his bike in a grove of trees and he walked to the edge of the hill and looked down onto the beach. The girl was alone. She wore black shorts and she took these off to reveal a dark blue bathing suit bottom and white legs, and then she removed her top and under that was another part of the bathing suit, and this part covered her breasts. Her stomach was bare. She lay down on her back in the sand and stretched out her arms.
She lay like that and did not move. The boy descended the hill and walked through the sand towards the girl. It was a windy day and the ocean threw itself against the shore. There was a white bird out over the water and it dropped and then rose quickly.
She saw the boy before he spoke. She was surprised and she sat up quickly and covered her chest with an arm and said, “Oh,” and then she looked around and back at the boy and asked how he had found her. What was he doing there?
“You rode by,” he said. “Very quickly. And I followed you.” Then he said it was not safe to be here. It was a lonely beach.
The girl looked about. She said that she had been here before.
The boy nodded and then he said that he wanted to sit beside her. Was that okay?
She shook her head. She wanted to be alone. Then, she reached out and touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry.”
On her wrist was a watch with a black strap and this made her skin look very white. The sun was high above them and it was hot and the boy felt the heat against his head. He said that he did not know what was happening. He had done what she wanted. He did not understand her.
The girl said, “No, no. What are you talking about?” Then she laughed, but it was not a happy laugh. She seemed frightened and the boy wanted to tell her that there was no need to be frightened. He was not dangerous.
The girl’s arm swung out to take in the sky and the air and the trees behind them and the sand and the sea. When she spoke he did not recognize her voice. It was too high and she spoke too quickly. She said, “All of this. Do you see it? Do you understand that all of this was created by Him?”
The boy said that he understood. “And you,” he said. “You too.” His hand slid along an imaginary line that ran from her feet to her head. He held his palm near her face and then he touched her jaw and said, “You are very beautiful.”
“No,” she said and she pushed him away and stood quickly. Brushed sand from the backs of her shoulders. She picked up her bag and her black shorts and shirt and began to walk away. The sun was high in the sky and very bright and very hot and she disappeared into the sun and then reappeared, her hands holding her clothes and her bare back still streaked with sand.
He followed her. He wanted to stop her, to explain that he was a good person, and that his goodness had come from her. He called out and she began to run and so, in order to stop her, he hit her. He picked up a rock the size of a mango and he caught up to her and hit her on the back of the head with the rock.
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br /> When she fell, her bag spilled out onto the sand and her right arm twisted upwards behind her back and she lay with one cheek against the sand. He waited for her to stand but she didn’t move. He called her name but she just lay there. He heard the sound of the surf and he looked up the hill towards the bicycles and then he looked back down the beach. They were alone. He wondered if the girl was pretending to be hurt, if she was waiting for him to walk away and then she would rise. He knelt and took her hand and said her name again. There was blood on her head and it ran down into the sand. Not much, just a small line of red. Her skin was the colour of the sand and in the glare of the sun it seemed that she and the sand were one and the same.
The boy stood up. He walked away from the girl towards the base of the hill, and then he turned and walked back. There was her purse and beside it was a brush and a tube of lipstick and an unopened letter and some Vietnamese money. The boy picked up these things and put them into the purse and carried them, along with the jeans and shirt, to the spot where the girl had been sitting. Then he went back to the girl. He held her wrist. His own hands were shaking and he could not tell if she was alive. He put his hand up against her mouth in order to feel her breath. He felt nothing. He sat for a long time beside the girl. He did not worry about being seen. He studied the curve of her back to see if it would rise and fall with her breathing. He saw nothing and knew then that the girl was dead. At some point he began to say sorry, and he said this over and over again, as if it were some chant that could raise the girl from the sand. He said it in his own language and he said it in the girl’s language. He said it loudly at first and then he only whispered it, until his voice faded away.
Much later, a warm rain began to fall. It started slowly and then grew stronger and came in sideways off the ocean. The boy stood and he took the girl by the wrists and he pulled her towards the water. The rain had soaked the girl and her wet hair covered her face. The boy dragged the body out into the water. He dropped the wrists and pushed the girl out. She floated away and then rolled back. The boy pushed her out farther and attempted to hold her under, but she was stubborn and wouldn’t sink. For a long time he stood in water up to his chest and held her down and finally, just as the rain let up, she sank.
