Outside the window, the rock wall tapered. A thin fringe of pine trees rose in its stead, and beyond he could see red and blue lights flaring against a backdrop of smoke. The SUV slowed as it approached the police cruiser parked on the side of the road, blocking the entrance to a picnic park nestled on the banks of what a small green sign on the shoulder ahead informed him was the Moose River. There were two more cruisers parked on the near side of a figure eight that looped through the stand of pines and cedars. Beyond the screen of trees, he could make out three fire trucks, their headlights and hoses all trained on a vehicle of some sort parked in the far left-hand corner and billowing black smoke. Maybe a minivan.
Nothing worthy of his attention, and he turned back to the iPad, immediately finding a succour in the familiarity of the scene unfolding before him onscreen.
* * *
By the time the vehicle was turning left onto Hidden Cove Road, he’d watched it through to the end again.
The Tylenol 3s Dr. Coates had given him had long worn off and the veins running along his temples were pounding with a heartbeat of their own. He closed the flip cover over the iPad and stowed it in its carrying case and had just zipped that when the SUV turned left again. Habit had him craning to look between the seats just as the headlights glittered over the Wane family’s crest: two gold-embossed rams locked in mortal combat and welded to the wrought-iron fence that barred entry to their summer hideaway. A guard who Taylor had never seen before stuck his head out of the gatehouse and waved at The Reaper. A moment later, the gate slid open. As the SUV drove through, Taylor caught a glimpse of the guard picking up the phone, no doubt to call his boss to tell him that “The Package” had arrived.
The dim yellow glow from the rows of Victorian-era gas street lamps his grandfather had imported from Italy led the car on a winding trail amongst the property’s ten acres of lightly manicured forest. Between the trees he could just make out splashes of colour from the vehicles staggered along the circular drive. Metallic red that must have been Trevor’s BMW, the lime green of his sister’s Prius, and a spectrum of other hues conspiring to shatter any hope he had for a few days alone to lick his wounds and to think about what he might do next. He could hear the urgent throb of a bass line as the driveway looped away from the lake and he turned from the house and gazed forlorn at the boathouse just then passing by. He’d made the apartment above it into his own little warren ever since he was twelve, and now, he knew, it would come to serve as his own private cell.
The vehicle was then angling on a direct line for the cottage’s thirty-foot cathedral archway, the top half of which was a stained-glass depiction of their crest set against the jagged peak of a snow-topped mountain. Below it, two rams made of granite reared up on either side of a twenty-thousand-dollar set of double doors made of Bocote wood imported from northern Mexico and aged to look medieval. When he was a kid he used to swing from their horns while he was waiting on his mom to drive him to his golf and tennis lessons, and he could see that someone was now using them to similar effect.
His sister’s latest boyfriend—an actor named Marty or Max, he couldn’t remember which—was standing bent over at the edge of the marble steps leading to the front door, his arm draped around the horn rising from the ram on the right, swaying back and forth though it was hardly in the service of play. He was puking into his mother’s azaleas, using the horn to keep himself upright and not doing a very good job of that either. Sandra was bent over behind him, rubbing his back and offering him gentle words of comfort.
As the SUV pulled up to the house, she looked up, startled, into the headlights’ bright, her alarm shortly given way to a smile radiating from her lips, seeing that it was only her brother’s vehicle. She was the spitting image of their mother in her prime, who had then drawn an easy comparison to a young Kim Novak. The resemblance was made more so in that she was wearing the Chanel that Celia (then) Birch had worn the one time she’d been invited to the Oscars. It was a simple midnight-black affair with a neckline that plunged almost to her navel, the pair of matching stilettos that had once walked the red carpet making Sandra’s every step seem like a high-wire balancing act as she tottered down the stairs towards the driveway.
Taylor took his time getting out, keeping his back to her on the pretence of fishing for his duffel bag over the back seats.
“Bro,” she yelled, stretching the word like an elastic band about to snap, so that Taylor knew she was likely to be about as drunk as her boyfriend. “Weren’t you supposed to be leaving for Florida today? That Fight Club thingy.”
“There’s been a change of plans.”
He’d just got a hold of one of the duffel’s straps but hadn’t yet summoned the nerve to turn around.
“Won’t Monica be surprised.”
Hearing the name “Monica” was like a gong going off in his already battered head. He tempered his alarm by stowing the iPad case in the duffel and then searching about the side compartment, making sure he’d remembered his toothbrush (which he already knew he had).
“I thought she was in rehab.”
“She got out last week.”
“So what’s she doing here? She hates the outdoors.”
“She’s on a health kick. That’s what she says anyway, but I think she’s just using that as an excuse to kill me with tennis. Four hours yesterday and then she’s bang, bang, banging at my door at seven o’clock this morning for round two. But I’m trying to be supportive.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’m her friend. And that’s what friends do.”
“Do friends also try to run you over with their car?”
“That’s the old Monica. She’s changed. You’ll see.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Well, she’s dying to see you again. You’re practically all she’s talked about since she got here. I can only imagine how she’s going to try to kill you.”
Taylor cast her a smirk to show her what he thought of that. Sandra was grinning when he’d turned his head, but her mirth quickly turned to alarm, seeing the bulge over his left eye.
“Jesus, what happened to your face?”
“I forgot the golden rule.”
“What’s that again?”
“Don’t fuck with Dad.”
Her brow scrunched like she was trying to figure out what he meant.
“The video,” she finally said. “The fucking video. The video, fuck.”
And then she was spinning like a wobbly top back to the open door, puffing her chest out like she’d been taught in acting school when the scene called for her to project.
“Trevor!” she screamed. “Get the fuck out here! See what you’ve done to my brother!”
There was no reply from the house beyond a slight uptick in the music’s beat and she stormed off up the stairs, hollering through a drunken slur, “Trevor! TREVOR!” Her voice lost to the song’s drone as she disappeared into the house.
Fetching the bag from the seat, Taylor slung the duffel over his shoulder. When he turned back, Marty or Max was standing in front of him, adjusting his tie, trying to make a good impression, this being the first time he’d meet his new girlfriend’s older brother. All that he managed to achieve though was to smear the vomit running in dribbles down its silky sheen and curdle some of it over his hand. He didn’t seem to notice as he then held out his hand to Taylor.
His mouth opened but all he managed to utter was, “I’m—” before his chest gave a sudden buck.
Ten years on the mat had taught Taylor to expect the unexpected, and he was already dodging backwards when the geyser erupted from Max or Marty’s mouth—a thin gruel the colour of orange Kool-Aid. He avoided the main thrust but was unprepared for the reach of its splatter, now washing over his sneakers.
Taylor’s hands balled into fists and he was on the point of knocking the stupid right out of
that boy when he felt the sharp sanction of a steel grip clenching his arm. When he glanced backwards, The Reaper was scowling at him. It was the way he’d confronted each of his twelve opponents while they’d touched gloves and he’d peered down at all but the last of them sprawled out on the mat with the same. It had been a devastating blow to Taylor, watching that final match ringside with his dad, seeing one of his heroes not five feet away, his face pressed into the octagon’s mesh, his eyes looking like they were about to pop, his opponent on top of him, doing his best to rip his arm clean off.
And even though the memory now spoke to him not of The Reaper’s failure but of his own, recalling it provided a small measure of satisfaction. It wasn’t much, given the way his day had turned on him, but enough anyway that he was able to contort his features into the approximation of a boyish grin as he shrugged from the other’s grasp.
Marty or Max was gaping at him as Taylor turned his feet in the direction of the boathouse. There was a span of spittle from his chin to his tie and his top lip was trembling, like he was about to cry.
“I—” he was saying.
But Taylor was already pushing past, forcing his legs into the idle gait of a boy with only a carefree summer ahead even as he muttered under his breath, “Could this day possibly get any fucking worse.”
7
The night after he discovered George was writing again, Deacon returned to the barn just after dark.
He’d fallen asleep the night before, sitting against the barn’s wall, immersed in the thunderous clackety-clack that seemed to be striking the very bricks shouldering his back. He’d awoken into darkness sometime after one by the first drops of a spring shower that would see him soaked by the time he got home. Because of that and because it had been years since he’d read any of George’s Fictions, he thought he’d bring along a copy of The Stray to keep him awake.
Though it was George’s last book, all five times Deacon had read through his corpus he’d started with it and didn’t see any reason to change his ways now. With the clock on his bed stand reading 9:00, he slipped it from the bookshelf beside his bed. Looking down at its cover, the sight of a man carrying a woman out of a pool beneath a waterfall inspired in him the same flurry of anticipation and dread it had the first time he’d done so.
He’d been nine and even then he knew George to be the author of twelve novels, and also the editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, though he mostly thought of him as the old man who would drop by three or four times a year to go hunting with his father.
The Riises lived in a log house Deacon’s dad had built on the fifty acres he’d bought with his inheritance when he’d arrived from Denmark, some twenty years previous. Their driveway was a stone’s throw from where Falconbridge Road dead-ended at the marsh that swallowed half their property as if the loggers who, well over a century ago, had slaved to carve its ten kilometres out of the muskeg had finally given it up as a lost cause, seeing no end to the swamp’s reach. Being so far from town, they rarely had any visitors, so George’s arrival was greeted with great jubilation. He always had presents for Deacon and his younger brother, Abel—airplanes made out of balsam wood and whirligigs that spun into the air when you pulled a string, and once a wooden bow and a quiver full of arrows he said he’d made for his own son when he was young—and while their father went to fetch his rifles, Deacon and Abel would rush out to greet him, eager to find out what he’d brought for them this time.
He’d once been a tall man, over six foot four. Age had stooped him at the shoulders so that it had been years since he stood to his full height. To the boys, though, he seemed almost a giant, their own father barely five foot eight, he’d joke, on a windy day, and their mother shorter than him by a head. When they crowded around George, he’d hold whatever he’d brought above their grasping fingers, making them jump for it, their black lab, Trigger, barking and jumping along with them.
And after he finally relented, lowering it to within their reach, he’d say, “Go on, now, wake your father. It’s too nice a day to be sleeping it all away.”
“He ain’t asleep,” Deacon would protest.
“He isn’t? Then where the hell is he?”
“He’s fetching the rifles.”
“Well, he’s sure taking his sweet Mary time about it.”
He’d then turn to the house and catch sight of the boys’ mother, Rose, standing at the porch’s rail, using her hand to shield her eyes against the bright and maybe also against the unease she felt seeing the larceny in the old man’s gaze. She was thirty-two when she’d had Deacon but even then it would have been hard not to mistake her for a woman well into the change of life; her face, as it was, a record of the hard times she’d endured before she met Bergin Riis—one of her top front teeth missing, a mangled lip bearing testament to its abrupt removal, one scar amongst a checkerboard’s worth bearing the ragged stitch marks of a bathroom patch job, her nose broken and askew. Hardly anyone’s idea of a beauty queen, but still George would do a fair impression of a slide whistle on his way to saying, “On second thought, why don’t you just go on and let him sleep.”
He’d then make a great show of spitting in both palms. Using the sputum to slick back the thick wash of salt and pepper hair from his forehead, he’d bend to his reflection in the window of his black 1970 Ford Ranger XLT and run his fingers through the tangles of his long white beard though it was unlikely anything short of a pair of scissors could tame its wild.
“But I told you he weren’t,” Deacon would say. “Look, he’s coming down the stairs now.”
At that George would press his nose to the window, seeing through its twin that Bergin was just then stepping into the yard, carrying his ancient Lee-Enfield in one hand and his even older Martini in the other.
“Drat,” he’d curse, mussing up his hair again and frizzing his beard so that when he popped his head back up over the truck’s rooftop he’d look half-crazed.
“There you are,” he’d say as Bergin approached. “Your boy said you were asleep.”
“Too nice a day to be in bed.”
“That’s what I told him.”
Deacon’s father would set the Enfield on the hood of George’s truck along with a box of shells, and George would shake his head and scowl, “How come you never let me use the Martini?”
“I told you a hundred times,” Bergin would reply, “I’ll sell it to you and then you can use it any time you want.”
“Now what in the hell would I want with an old piece of shit like that?”
George would be grinning when he said it, and Bergin would be grinning back as he held out his hand.
“Good to see you, George,” he’d say, shaking, and George would let his eyes wander back to Rose.
“Good to see one of you anyway.”
In all the years he’d been dropping by, the routine had changed so little that when Deacon reflected upon them, his visits seemed to all blend into one. The only time there’d be any deviation beyond the negligible was when he visited in June or early July. Then, while he loaded the shells into the Enfield, he’d say, “So’d you hear . . .” filling in the dots by relating some dismal end met by one of the cottagers who, every year, flocked north seeking a refuge from the city.
When George was done, Deacon would look up at his father and comment, “It’s like they ain’t born with any sense south of the forty-five, eh, Pa?”
It was a line he’d copped from Bergin—the forty-five being the forty-fifth parallel, which the locals used to demarcate themselves from the city folk in the south. Hearing his son say it, so loud and proud, would bring a smile to his father’s lips.
“You got that right,” he’d answer. “They ain’t yet invented a telescope big enough to see an end to their folly.”
“It’s a terrible thing, really,” George would then say, shaking his head, his own mournful expression a sharp contrast to the others
’ amuse.
George had been on hand plenty of times when the members of the Tildon Police Services hauled another body out of the water, so maybe he was thinking about that or could have been the looks on the faces of the victim’s family who’d be waiting on shore, praying for some good news. Whatever was on his mind, the dark clouding his features would shortly depart and he’d look up. There’d be a trace of a smile pulling at the corners of his lips and he’d click his tongue against his teeth as he said, “But, then, you know what they say: summer hasn’t really begun until the first tourist’s died,” as if their sacrifice had been in the service of some greater good.
Deacon’s father would respond that it was looking to be a long summer then, or a short one, depending on the date, and George would say, “You’re right about that.”
Turning to Trigger, Bergin would whistle and the dog would bound ahead, racing for the path that led between the barn and the woodshed. Trigger’d stop just short of the old John Deere tractor Bergin had bought for five hundred dollars and ever since had sat where the previous owner had parked it after the money had changed hands, useless for anything but the nesting grounds for a pair of starlings that returned every spring and as a plaything for his two sons. The dog would bark and his master would hurry to catch up but George would linger a moment. He’d bend to Deacon and whisper into his ear, “There’s something for your mother in the front seat. Be a good lad, mind she gets it.”
“Come on, then,” Bergin would yell impatiently over his shoulder as he passed the tractor, “the day’s a-wastin’!”
George would ruffle his hand through Deacon’s hair and then stand, setting his navy blue Tilley hat on his head and tipping the brim of it towards Rose as he traversed the yard. In the truck’s passenger seat there’d be a bouquet of flowers and a gift-wrapped box of liquorice allsorts, which Rose had often said were her favourite. Deacon would snatch them up, and running towards the house, he’d cast barely a glimpse at George and his father disappearing behind the barn, eager as he was to share in his mother’s bounty.
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