In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  He looked through the trees at the dirt road. It went west, then south, but where did it lead? To River Heights, to Tuxedo, with mansions and money? Or to the North End, Main and Higgins, weekend stairwell parties fuelled by cheap sherry, sniffing gas, sniffing antifreeze, sniffing Pam, anything to keep away the pain of not having a job, not having any money, not having everything you could see on TV? TV made life hard because it showed what life could be like but not how to get it. Extravagant houses, expensive cars, beautiful clothes, wonderful restaurants, famous friends. At least at one time people didn’t know about how the rich lived—unless of course they were the hired help and came to cook and wash and clean. Now, the world you couldn’t have came right into your crappy apartment on a rented TV.

  He kicked an empty coffee can lying on the ground beside his house, and water from past storms splashed up onto him. He wiped it off his clothes and face. His way out had been joining the Mounties. It was that or the army. A place to bring order from chaos, to have money guaranteed, to have structure but, most important, to have a place.

  Most of the time, his anger lay quiet, asleep, but when it woke up, and he felt rage, he did things he shouldn’t, said things he shouldn’t. He’d been warned. It wasn’t good for his career. Don’t make other people’s troubles your troubles. Don’t try to solve society’s problems. It’s not your fault the mentally ill are on the street.

  Tom put Angel’s picture back in his pocket. He glanced toward the dock. Although it was obscured by his spruce trees, he could see that there was a boat sitting on a trailer where he’d found Angel. The driver of the truck hauling it had run over the sticks and tape. They knew what their priority was. They weren’t going to let sticks and tape keep them from getting their boat in the water.

  Around him the ground was deeply littered with decaying spruce needles and moss, and a rich earthy smell rose up when his feet disturbed the ground. When he bent over to look under the house, he saw bits and pieces of lumber, old eavestroughing, sheets of tin and rusting cans of various sizes. By the time he pulled all of it out, raked up the yard, rebuilt parts of the house, he’d have truckloads of garbage to haul away.

  He felt as if everything was decaying, fragile, losing its integrity, the buildings, the people, disintegrating in a daily battle to hold back the forest that threatened to spread, once more, over everything, over the abandoned car with the tree growing through where the hood had been. He’d been to towns with no reason to exist, once the ore in the mine had run out or a new highway had been built miles away, and those buildings that couldn’t be moved were soon engulfed by weeds and decay and dust.

  The poor were always associated with dishonesty, but it was the poor who often turned in a lost wallet, because they knew how devastating it was to lose their grocery money. Were they not all angels when they were born, in places where kinship and community should protect them, hold them safe, where they weren’t lost among vast throngs of strangers, where every person should know their name and watch over them? He looked at Angel’s picture again, studied it, tried to peer into it, expecting her to speak to him, to reveal her secrets, but there was just glare of the light on the glass.

   Chapter 11

  Cookies and Cockroaches

  There was a single light bulb in the garage. Light filtered in from two windows. The window ledges held the dried corpses of flies, and dozens were trapped in spider webs that covered the panes. Empty wooden fish boxes and two old soft drink cases, their green and red letters faded, were stacked in one corner. Old books with yellowing pages were piled on unpainted shelves, and when he opened one, dust slid off the cover in a small avalanche. It was a medical book on naturopathy from the 1920s. A book created out of hope and ignorance because there were no real cures for anything. Tom inspected the ceiling. There were no water stains. The garage, he decided, was worth keeping.

  He went back outside to look at the storage shed under the spruce trees. No sun reached there. The roof was thick with moss that had eaten away shingles and boards, soft green moss, gentle to the touch but sucking the strength out of the wood underneath.

  He used the split end of a crowbar to grab onto the lock. The screws pulled loose. Whatever secrets the lock was supposed to protect were undone. He pulled the door open. An old washing machine, two oil drums, gasoline cans, boxes of nets, the frame and ends for a baby’s crib, rusted muskrat traps hanging on spikes driven into uprights, a beat-up silver outboard, boxes of outboard motor parts, two oars with oarlocks, wooden fish boxes.

  If the items in the shed held any secrets, they weren’t worth keeping, and they had long ago lost any value they might have had. The shed, as far as he could see, had nothing in it but junk. He carried everything outside and stacked it under a tree.

  He pulled off the door and threw it onto the ground, then systematically began pulling off the siding.

  As he worked, he couldn’t shake the image of Karla in her low-cut blouse. She always flirted with the male customers but was careful not to incite the wrath of any wives that were about. He’d seen one husband wave his hand dismissively and say to his wife, “Forget it. That’s just Karla.” Still, her behaviour was enough to resurrect his mother’s voice, ricocheting around inside his head, saying, “Mind you, you do what you think is right, but I think that it would be best if you didn’t waste time with that girl I saw you walking with today. You’ve got studying to do, and chores, and you said you wanted to work for Mrs. Kolababa. She’s got people moving out, and that apartment needs a thorough cleaning. If you want her to keep hiring you, and it’s because she’s friends with your father and me that she’s giving you these opportunities, there are lots of other young people who’d grab these opportunities in a moment, and then it will be money in their pocket, and your pocket will be empty, and then see how interested that girl will be in you.”

  His mother’s tirade had been because she had seen him walking past the grocery store with Sally, his first Sally, his high school crush Sally, whom he’d sat across from and snuck looks of desire and longing at, and had, in spite of his being painfully shy, made attempts to talk to. They’d just happened to be going the same way that day.

  Why, he wondered, was he thinking about this high school Sally after all these years, her tight white sweater, her swishy plaid skirt, her way of holding her books against her breasts, her brown hair?

  Maybe, he thought, it was because of this girl he’d had a crush on in high school that he’d been so quick to call Sally, his Sally, his used-to-be-his Sally, when she’d slipped him her phone number at the dentist’s. For when he thought about his Sally, the Sally he’d got pregnant, the Sally he’d married, he thought about the white sweater and the tartan skirt. Sorry, he said to himself, startled at the realization, sorry, sorry—it hadn’t occurred to him that a name could take his life into dangerous places.

  His parents had been correct—don’t want anything. Wanting leads to trouble, to disaster, to getting a girl pregnant and having two children and getting a divorce, wanting things he couldn’t have, wanting the Sally of math class. If he hadn’t wanted her, he wouldn’t have picked up the phone and called the other Sally.

  Sally thought it was amusing that he’d been a virgin. She wasn’t. “You get the benefit of experience,” she said, not that she was a tramp or anything, but she’d had boyfriends. On their first date, when they were parked, she’d undone his pants and said, “Get a condom out,” and when he said he didn’t have one, she’d slipped off the seat, knelt down and given him a blow job. When she got back onto the seat, she said, “Tomorrow go buy condoms, unless you want to be a daddy.” At first he’d used a condom, but she got a diaphragm so he could go naked.

  Not that he minded that she got pregnant. He just didn’t know what he was supposed to do as a father. He read books on being a father. He treated it like a math problem. Study it until you know it. When the kids came, he was surprised at how happy it made him t
o play with them, feed them, take them for walks. He pushed them on swings, rolled a ball with them. Sally suggested they get a dog, but he didn’t think so. Cleaning up after dogs that people had snuck into their apartments had been disgusting. He made up for it by taking the kids to the petting zoo. They got to pet sheep and hold rabbits.

  He tried not to be like his father, tried not to be withdrawn and silent as his father had been when he listened to music and tied flies. But there were silences, times that he lost his way, fell back into habits learned over his youth, withdrew, and Sally would say, “What’s the matter with you, why don’t you just act normal, why can’t you just relax? You know, relax, laugh, have a good time, dance, sing, have a drink, have ten.” She’d shout with frustration, “You’re a freak, and our kids are going to turn into freaks.”

  He wanted to teach them bridge and cribbage, chess. Sally said no, that was not normal for little kids. He could teach them those things when they were old enough to say no if they didn’t want to learn. She wasn’t going to have her kids being freaks. He wanted Sally to play whist with them, but after a couple of times she said it was a boring waste of time, so he and the kids played three-handed whist, like he had with his parents.

  They moved often, and after a while, Myrna would say, “What dumpy town are we going to live in now? Sure glad I didn’t bother making any friends in this dump.”

  The day he’d chased the druggie, he and Sally and Myrna had been in the kitchen yelling, everybody yelling except Joel. Joel just stood in the doorway, watching, shaking his head in disgust, and went to his room to play games on his computer. The argument hadn’t finished by the time Tom left for work. He was angry, furious. He’d been trying to be the peacemaker, but he’d never had a sister, didn’t know how to make peace between a mother and daughter, didn’t want his daughter having purple hair, wearing lipstick like it was war paint, never communicating except by screaming or crying. He thought of his life with his parents, his life with no emotions, no expressions of affection—he’d hated that, felt locked in ice at times, but this was too much like living in a fire.

  He was angry with them all, angry with the stupid teenage drug dealers, the shoplifters, the wife abusers, the drunks, and then a whacked-out OxyContin user dragged a young mother out of her car and drove it away with a baby in the back seat.

  He woke up in the hospital after they’d operated on him, stitching his leg together with metal pins, keeping him sedated for days, operating on his head and face, repairing his forehead and cheekbone, leaving him with a scar that ran straight down through his eyebrow. He didn’t remember anything, not for weeks, and when it came back, all he remembered was seeing the druggie dragging the mother out of the car and pushing her to the ground, then getting into the car and squealing away. He’d stopped beside the mother, was going to tell her it was just a car, the insurance company would pay for any damage, but she was hysterical—“My baby, my baby,” she kept screaming—and he’d jumped back in his patrol car and raced through the parking lot onto the road. It all stopped there. The rest was in the reports he read. Weaving in and out of traffic. Racing through red lights. Onto sidewalks. Driving so fast it was a miracle no pedestrians were killed. Then a semi pulled across the street in front of them. All he could say was, “I don’t remember.”

  He wished he couldn’t remember the mother’s agonized face streaming with tears, twisted with hysteria. He wished the accident had taken his memory completely away. He would wake up soaked in sweat, sit up straight in bed as if ready to fight, the mother’s face in front of him in the darkness. He tried not to think about the baby. Six months old. He studied pictures of the accident. There was hardly anything left of the stolen car. It had gone under the truck. He couldn’t make himself read the medical examiner’s report.

  He knew he must have jerked the wheel hard to the left. They said his car had slewed sideways, rolled, lost momentum. It was a write-off. They had to cut him out of it. When he’d gotten out of the hospital and was still using a cane, he went to see his patrol car. He wondered how he was still alive. He took a small fragment of the taillight and kept it in his pocket. The shattered plastic was sharp, and when he clenched it in his hand, he cut himself and then he sucked on his hand, tasting his blood.

  He pushed the images away, made them small, shrank them so he could lock them up and forced himself to think of the present, of his feelings and experiences in the present, but an image of Karla in her low-cut blouse and short skirt and her long slow looks rushed in, and he shut his eyes and said to himself, No more Sallys, no more Sallys.

  He’d keep his life simple, uncomplicated, quiet. He’d be like his parents, uninvolved. He’d read, he’d sit and think, he’d play chess by himself; maybe he could find someone to play with him, the kind of person willing to sit in silence for hours as they studied the moves. He swung the crowbar with one hand and a two-by-four broke loose from the shed. He caught it with the crook and jerked, and it came away and fell to the ground.

  “Beating up the world, are we?”

  He looked up. Sarah O’Hara was standing there, watching him. “Jaysus, it’s quare warm today, isn’t it? I thought you might have something cold in your refrigerator. I could do with a Guinness.”

  They went into the house and he got a jug of iced tea out of the slope-shouldered refrigerator. He went to the chest freezer on the back porch to see what baking Jessie had left. “No Guinness,” he said.

  “Never is unless I ask Ben to bring some.”

  “Cold tea is a bit thin, but it keeps me from passing out.”

  “You got a lot of work ahead of you,” Sarah said. “Oli was a good guy. He’d do you a favour if he could, but he wasn’t a cabinetmaker.”

  Tom moved things around in the freezer. Jessie had everything carefully labelled. There were numerous plastic containers marked peanut butter cookies. He found a container that said cinnamon buns, took it out and put it on the table. It was a hot day; they’d defrost quickly enough. “Do you know anyone who would like a year’s supply of peanut butter cookies?” he asked Sarah.

  “I can make my own,” she said. “You can bring them to events. People will gobble them up. I see you’ve been sleeping with windows out. Don’t the mosquitoes bother you?”

  He showed her the screened porch, and how he was able to seal it off from the rest of the house and let the breeze, when there was one, waft in from the lake.

  “Does it cool off enough for you to get a good night’s sleep?” she asked, and he thought of telling her that he never slept through the night anymore, that the figures in his dreams always woke him, their voices angry, accusatory. In his dreams there were the dead, the maimed, the arms and legs, the heads, the burned bodies. He managed it as well as any of his colleagues until the day when he responded to a motorcycle accident. A girl in leather was lying dead in a ditch. She looked so much like Myrna that he stood frozen, immobile, barely able to breathe. When he got home he frantically searched the neighbourhood until he found Myrna at the food court at the mall.

  “If I’d brought a tent, I’d sleep on the beach.”

  Sarah grunted. “Would you now? I remember that. Me and McAra, on the trapline. Sleeping in one of his shacks or in a tent. Forty below. We kept each other warm. In summer, the mosquitoes and blackflies were thick on the netting.”

  He tried to imagine what it had been like leaving Ireland and family, the warm familiarity of her father’s inn, and beginning a series of journeys away from civilization into the wilderness, where there was nothing but trees and water with the occasional cabin. They’d come to Valhalla in the spring, she’d told him, so they were able to live in a tent while McAra built a log cabin. He wondered if she’d had nights of terror when she’d woken up and thought about how far away she was from anything familiar.

  “I saw your picture from when you first arrived. Irish girl, prim and proper.”

  She waved he
r hands at the wall. “You got no family?” she asked. “I thought I’d see pictures. Kids, family, dogs.”

  “In a box.”

  He was waiting for her to tell him what she’d come to say. It was always like that, full of preliminary conversation, settling into the words, getting comfortable with each other. She was used to silences, not chatty, not having to fill up space with talk. He tried to imagine her forty years before, when she was around thirty-five, swinging her way through the bush on snowshoes, dead animals in her packsack or on a toboggan. Life in the bush had lined her face, shaped it. One day when he’d gone to the store, he’d seen her in her yard, splitting stove wood. No fooling around. She swung the splitter back over her head, brought it down, sending the halves of the block flying. “Off with his head,” he’d yelled at her and got a wave back in return.

  He waited, and the silence stretched out, became taut as she came nearer to what she was going to say. He put the now semi-frozen cinnamon buns on two plates with a worn palm tree pattern.

  She leaned closer and quietly said, “There’s rumours going around.”

  “About what?” he asked.

  “You and what happened to Angel. Lot of speculation.”

  “They haven’t sent a serious crimes unit out. They must think it was an accident.”

  “An accident? No drama in that. Nothing to talk about there. Young girl. Stranger in town. Single. Straight out of Hollywood.”

  He put his glass down, his body suddenly tense. He glanced over his shoulder to see if any of the people in his nightmares had silently gathered to accuse him. There was nothing but the furious sun shining in the windows, making the linoleum shine dully. Dust floated in the light.