“What’s that?” Dylan asked.
“That he stopped writing.”
“You say so. But then you never had to live with him when he did.”
“What do you mean?”
Dylan had then fixed Deacon with the same stare that Adele had almost a decade before, and Deacon was certain that he wouldn’t say another word. But after reaching down for another beer and popping its cap, he said, “He was right mean when he was writing.”
That made Deacon flinch, same as if he’d been stung.
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked.
“My dad. The stories he told. Made him out to be a fucking monster.”
“When he was writing?”
“And most of the time in between too. Got so bad that Grams threatened to leave if he even thought about writing another book.”
“So he stopped writing, just like that?”
“For a couple or few years anyway. Then he started on another. She packed a bag the same morning. Stayed with her sister, she was gone for six months. I guess time enough for him to finish whatever he was working on.”
“Was it The Stray?”
“If that was his last.”
“It was.”
“Then it must have been.”
Deacon thought on that for a moment.
“So how’d he get her to come back?” he finally asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Dylan answered. “All I know is she did and except for the paper, he never wrote another word.”
Now, as Deacon wound through the stacks of books precariously balanced on either side of the narrow path leading towards the desk, the dusty light filtering through the window washed over the typewriter and a small blue bowl, the same kind that Deacon had once used for cereal. It was full to the brim with cigarette butts and beside the makeshift ashtray there were two stacks of paper, which hardly came as a surprise given what Adele had told him. The one on the left was maybe four hundred pages deep. The page on top read Chapter 10 and below that Deacon could see that half the lines were crossed out with crude slashes, George’s ragged scrawl filling the spaces between and spilling over into the margins, his handwriting becoming ever smaller as they drained towards the bottom of the page—obviously a rough draft. The one beside it was composed of only a hundred or so pages, upside down, what must have been George’s rewrite. It was towards this that Deacon was immediately drawn. There was the faint imprint of characters stencilled on the back of the top sheet and he ran the pad of his index finger over their mottled bumps as a blind man would while reading Braille. At the end of the line, he paused and looked back at the rough draft.
It must have taken him over a year to write all that.
A thought accompanied by an empty feeling hollowing out his gut, seeing in the twin stacks not so much evidence of George’s industry but of his own neglect. How else to explain how George could have managed such a thing and him none the wiser? Casting his thoughts then back over the past year.
Whole weeks passing by without you stopping in on George, hardly better than Edward or Louise.
Thinking then of the few times he had. Most often knocking at the front door and hearing his answer in a sharp bark from the backyard. Trixie would be wagging her tail in the barn’s open doorway when Deacon rounded the house and before he’d made it halfway across the lawn, George would be nudging her aside and locking the door behind him.
“Just catching up on some reading,” he’d offer by way of a greeting, and once right after his wife had died, “Adele sure was right about the rats taking over in there. It’s about time I cleaned things up.”
Both of which Deacon was now certain were lies. He was working on a new book, must have been. The thought that George had never seen fit to confide that in him had the hollow in his gut feel like it was filling up with cement.
A sharp yip startled him from his sudden malaise and spun him towards the door.
Trixie was standing in the threshold, wagging her tail, and a flicker of movement on his periphery turned Deacon towards the window. George was ambling past. And though he hadn’t really done anything wrong, it felt like he had and he set off in a mad flurry between the stacks. He intercepted George just outside the door. Deacon locked it behind him and when he turned around George was wearing a bemused grin as if he was keenly aware of why the young man seemed so flustered and was deriving endless delight, knowing he was the cause.
“What you got there?” he asked, as Deacon returned the barn door’s key to its place beneath a rock on the windowsill.
“Huh?”
“The book in your hand.”
He’d grabbed it from one of the piles on his way past, to use as a cover, and now held it up for George to see. He squinted, trying to read what it was.
“That’s a good one,” he finally said, and Deacon reached out and plucked the sprig from a raspberry bush that clung to the old man’s beard.
“So what was all that about?” Deacon asked, flicking the barbed stem into the yard where it was immediately swallowed up by the sea of dandelions drowning the lawn.
“Huh?”
“Edward and Louise.”
“Oh,” George said. “It was nothing.”
“Didn’t look like nothing.”
“Too old to put over my damn knee is all that was.”
George forced a smile and swatted the clutch of weeds he still had in his hand, warding off the deer fly circling his head. Then, tossing the clump after the raspberry sprig, he wheeled around and started back towards his garden.
“Helluva thing about Ronald Crane,” he said, glancing back at Deacon trailing after.
“You heard about that?”
“Dylan stopped by on his way home.”
“And he told you it was Ronald Crane killed last night?”
“He did.”
Deacon threw up his hands.
“Am I always the last person to hear about everything around here?”
“What, he didn’t tell you?”
“Name withheld pending notification of next of kin is all I could get out of him.”
“You should have given him a beer. Dylan’ll tell you anything once he gets a beer in his hand.”
“I’ll have to remember that.”
They’d reached the edge of the garden, and George stood surveying its tangle. After a moment, he shook his head as if thinking he might as well give it up as a lost cause.
“It’s a helluva thing, alright,” he finally said. “Ronald Crane dying like that.”
The way George scrunched his lips told Deacon that it was plainly gnawing at him, though why that’d be, he hadn’t a clue.
“They’re saying it was mob related,” Deacon said.
That seemed to catch George by surprise, and his head snapped on a sharp pivot towards Deacon.
“Who said that?”
“The Globe. Said he was involved in some sort of kickback scheme.”
George sucked on his teeth, which he often did when trying to sort something out.
“I guess they’d know better than me,” he finally said. Then, “You knew him, that right?”
“Not really. I just met him the once.”
“How was that again?”
Deacon told him, and when he was done George shook his head again and bit his lip.
“Long way from being chauffeured around in an Escalade,” he said, “to driving some piece of shit Caravan.”
“Struck me as odd too.”
“He had a cottage up on Brackenburg, I understand.”
“He’s been coming up here since he was a kid. Best times of his life, or so he said. It’s why he bought up Meeford Bay, so when he gets old—”
“But why do you think he was driving the Caravan?”
Deacon shrugged. “
Your guess is as good as mine.”
George scratched at his beard and looked skywards, as if maybe the answer was somewhere up there.
“It’s going to be a hot one today,” he said after a moment.
“Looks it.”
The sun had come out into a cloudless sky. George squinted against its glare and his shoulders sagged as if he couldn’t quite bear its weight. He’d always seemed to have the life force of two men half his age, but all of a sudden he looked old and tired and barely seemed to have the strength to stand.
You can fight it out with my lawyer after I’m gone.
It hadn’t been five minutes since he’d said that, and as George turned back towards him the memory had Deacon searching the old man’s eyes. Their twinkle was undiminished by the passage of time and they gave Deacon some encouragement that he’d be around for a few years yet.
“Grover get around to fixing the air conditioning?” George asked.
“He’s working on it.”
“You’d think there was a rattlesnake inside the drawer where he keeps his chequebook—”
“—he’s so afraid to open it.”
The two men exchanged a knowing smile and it seemed like the older was thinking of putting his hand on the younger’s shoulder, to offer him a small comfort. But then George’s gaze was wandering back to the garden, settling on the patch of overgrown weeds and raspberry brambles with a bitter sort of resignation.
“I best get back to it then.”
5
On his return trip to the office, Deacon picked up a sandwich at Mesaquakee Bean, the coffee shop a few doors down from the Chronicle. He ate as he sifted through the emails in his Next Week? folder, all the while trying to forget about the two sheaves of paper he’d seen on the desk. And when that didn’t work, he told himself, If he wanted you to know what he was working on, he’d have told you, that doing nothing at all to lift the weight in his belly.
You ought to just ask him.
Nodding to himself like it was as simple as that and telling himself that the least he could do was feel him out.
Maybe he’d drop by again when he’d finished work.
* * *
By four thirty he’d reduced the twenty-odd files in the Next Week? folder to five and called that a day. He stuck his head in the office across the hall from his on the way out and found Grover talking on the phone. Deacon waved him goodbye and Grover cupped his hand over the receiver.
“You heading up to Rainbow Ridge already?” he asked.
Rainbow Ridge was a retirement villa off the 118, just south of town. In the 1960s, it had been a family ski lodge and the poles that had once supported the T-bar still dotted the slope behind it, even though it was about as much a mountain as it was a molehill. Then in 1984, sensing a shift in demographics, the owners had converted it to a nursing home. In 1998, they’d sold it to a health-care conglomerate that had added fifty rooms, a billiard lounge, a swimming pool, and the ballroom where, Deacon now remembered, Bus and Edina Harcourt were celebrating their wedding anniversary. In a city paper, they would have called it a human interest story—a puff piece—and it’d have to have been a pretty slow week for it to get more than a few inches in the lifestyle section. But at the Chronicle, it’s what passed for hard news and it was an easy bet that, unless something dire happened over the next few days, “Tildon’s Oldest Couple Celebrates Their 70th” would be the headline gracing next week’s front page.
“Oh shoot,” Deacon said.
Grover was glaring at him with a pointed stare.
“You forgot.”
“No. I, uh— What time’s it start again?”
“Five thirty.”
“Perfect.”
Normally, Deacon would have handled such an assignment himself, but he’d been looking for an excuse to arrange a little alone time with Suzie Chalmers, their summer intern. It had been less than a month since Darlene Quint, the Chronicle’s office manager, had introduced Deacon to her niece, a second-year journalism student at McGill who was looking for some practical experience to give her a leg-up on the competition. She was petite and had milk-white skin, a perfect china doll’s face bracketed by the sharp corners of her blouse and a needle point of hair artfully arranged on either cheek. The way she lowered her head when she looked straight at him made his heart skip a beat, and ever since they met he’d been fighting a losing battle trying to convince himself that it would be best if they maintained a purely professional relationship.
He found her at her desk where she was supposed to be managing the paper’s social media accounts and instead was texting on her private phone, which was how she spent most of her days. He told her about the party, asking if she’d like to accompany him, and when she balked, he added that it would be the perfect opportunity to cut her teeth, “journalistically speaking.” After some delicate pleading, she finally relented on the conditions that he’d ask Grover to let her write that week’s editorial, something she’d been after him to do for some time, and also that they take her car. Deacon had agreed and she’d skipped off from work a few minutes early so she had time to get ready.
It was six thirty before she picked him up in front of the office in her late-model Mazda 3. She’d switched the white blouse and black skirt she’d worn at work for a light summer dress in a floral design and Deacon couldn’t have imagined an hour and a half better spent. The thought had just crested his mind that maybe he should have changed too when, reaching for the car’s door, he caught sight of a mustard splatter on the already ragged cuff of the corduroy jacket, two sizes too large, he’d copped from George’s closet when he was eighteen (and had worn almost every day since), that and the flop of long black hair undone over his unnaturally ruddy cheeks often giving Grover cause to remark that he looked like a teenager playing at being an old man. Slipping into the passenger seat, he strapped himself in and set his hands in his lap, concealing the offending stain, though he needn’t really have bothered. Suzie hadn’t passed so much as a glance his way.
“You know where we’re going?” he asked as Suzie turned onto the road.
She frowned at him by way of an answer and it would take him a couple of minutes before he’d summoned the nerve to speak again. She’d just turned onto the 118 and they were descending into what had once been a flood plain and, until the 1990s, also the best farmland in the county, its vale now filled with two grocery stores, a Canadian Tire, a Dollarama, a Best Western, and a half-dozen fast-food outlets.
“So how do you like Montreal?” he asked as she accelerated towards the strip mall.
Until that moment he thought he’d done a pretty good job of concealing his interest, keeping his glances in her direction fleeting, taking the utmost care not to inhale too deeply when she walked past—her scent slightly citric and altogether rapturous—and doing his best not to stiffen on the odd occasion that she placed her hand on his arm when she asked him for a favour (usually to tell Grover that she was leaving early that afternoon or might be in late the next morning).
He now saw that his efforts had been in vain and, more so, that Suzie appeared genuinely repulsed by the idea of something happening between them outside of work.
Witness how her hands clenched the wheel and how she snuck him a sideways glance to see if he might be inclined to press the point.
When the eager sheen to his gaze suggested he would, she asked, “Have you been?”
“No,” he answered. “I always wanted to though.” Then after a moment of awkward silence: “I’ve heard good things.”
She made a face that Deacon suspected wouldn’t have been much different if he’d asked her what her thoughts were on, say, double anal, and that was enough to keep his lips sealed until they were pulling into the retirement home’s parking lot.
The front doors led them into the original ski chalet’s A-frame and a sign in the lobby directed them do
wn the hall to the Stella Gardner Memorial Ballroom. Just about everyone in town over the age of sixty, it seemed, had shown up to pay their respects. The hall was a bubbling mass of well-wishers thronged around the happy couple sitting on two rocking chairs fashioned into makeshift thrones and set on a plywood riser in the middle of the room. The Harcourts’ daughter-in-law owned a Ukrainian catering company and she’d laid out a lavish buffet—eight kinds of something labelled varenyky, though they looked just like perogies, cabbage rolls called holubtsi, three steaming pots of borscht, and a variety of pastries for dessert.
Deacon joined the end of the line, as good a vantage as any to watch Suzie circulate amongst the well-wishers, taking pictures and soliciting quotes from the happy couple. After a while she looked like she might actually be enjoying herself, and Deacon set to the task of loading his plate with a little of everything. By the time he’d reached the end of the table, an elderly vet in his dress uniform was playing a lethargic version of “Moon River” on an accordion, and a crowd had gathered around Bus and Edina slow dancing, cheek to cheek.
Leaning against the wall, Deacon bided his time between bites, searching amongst the grey hairs for Suzie’s chestnut. He still hadn’t located it as he was wiping the last of the grease from his plate with a dinner roll, and he made a wager with himself that her car would be gone when he got out to the parking lot. But when he came through the front doors it was still where she’d left it. He turned back into the lobby and spotted her in the lounge beyond the front desk. There were two rainbow-striped vinyl couches arranged at angles in front of an electric fireplace and Suzie was sitting in the nearest beside a young man. He was leaning towards her with his hand on her shoulder and whispering something into her ear. Whatever he was saying must have been exactly what she wanted to hear because she was nodding her head vigorously.
Deacon had only been staring at them for a few seconds but it felt like a lifetime unravelling before him. The way the young man’s tan khakis and yellow polo shirt seemed to fit him like a second skin, the chiselled grace to his jawline, the widow’s peak of hair swept back from his face, his Romanesque nose, his sky-blue eyes, his everything telling Deacon that he’d have about as much luck with Suzie as he would have teaching a bear to thread a needle.
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