When he came out of the lake, he went back to the house and poured himself a cold lemonade, added ice and went to lie down in the porch. The porch had six windows at the front and one at each end. He’d found their screens in the garage, rinsed the dirt off them, and then put them in place. The windows lifted inward and had hooks that fitted into eyes screwed into the ceiling. Jessie had wallpapered the ceiling. Tom found it impossible to lie on his back and stare at it. It was a variegated green background with white dots. It was the same as the paper in her bedroom. When he’d mentioned the ceiling to Ben, Ben had said, “There must have been paper left over. She never wasted anything.”
The moon rose, a vast golden orb over the darkening water, and its beams filtered through the spruce trees in front of the house so that the porch was a tangle of light and shadow with bits and pieces of the cot and stacked chairs revealed. The shade on the trilight seemed to float above him in the darkness. The one eye of the wolf reflected faintly. The cot, with its wire springs and thin mattress that had been frozen and thawed for years on end, smelled musty, and he wondered if he should be sleeping on it. He should, he thought, take the mattress out and leave it in the sun.
From where he lay, he could see the ragged outlines of the trees. Gnarled. He had tried to think of the word, but it had escaped him. Now that he had it, he felt satisfied and fell into a fitful sleep with the trilight still on.
He woke up slowly to what he thought was a branch knocking against the screen beside his head. He lay there, his eyes shut, waiting for the soft coolness of a breeze, then realized there was no wind, just the oppressive heat. He was lying on his back with one arm over the edge of the cot, and he didn’t want to open his eyes. When he put his hand on his chest his skin was clammy.
He heard the knocking again, and then a barely audible girl’s voice say, “Mister, hey mister. Wake up. Mister.”
He grunted, sat up and saw pressed against the screen a halo of wild orange hair where the moonlight shone through it. With the moon behind her, he couldn’t tell what she looked like.
“You awake?” she asked eagerly.
He grunted.
“I want to go home.”
“Why tell me?” he groaned. Both their faces were close to the screen and he could smell peppermint on her breath. “What do you want?”
“You’re the police. You’ve got to help me.” Her voice sounded more desperate than petulant.
The moon was higher now. It shone down more intensely. He was wearing his shorts. His shirt lay on a chair. It sat there weighed down with shadow so that it looked like it would take more strength than he had to lift it.
“So go.” In the back of his head there was a headache waiting for an excuse to appear.
“The others,” she whispered, her mouth pressed against the screen. “You met Jason. He won’t let me. You came to talk to us. Jason makes all the decisions. He tells you who you’ll sleep with, how you’ll work. He organizes everything. You go to a store and create a disturbance while someone else steals.”
He wanted to be rude, to be brutal, to tell her to go sleep in the bed she had made, but then he thought about Myrna and Joel and he asked, “Are you afraid of him?”
“He’s the leader. He thinks God chose him. We have to do as he says because God tells him.”
He lifted his shirt off the chair and pulled it on. He thought he would turn on the porch light, then thought it was not a good idea and, instead, fumbled around on the window ledge for his small flashlight. When he shone the light onto the face on the other side of the screen, tears reflected the light. His visitor had a nose ring and an eyebrow ring.
“I need to hide. Let me stay with you so nobody can find me. The woman at the store, she said I could hide there and go with the guy who drives the truck. She said the back door would be open. That’s why I left. She forgot. It’s locked. I can’t go back. They’ll hear me and they’ll want to know where I’ve been. It’s okay. They won’t look here.”
He didn’t need this. Crazy adults; crazy children. Once, he’d been involved in breaking up a cult. They’d managed to get one adult put away for statutory rape. Even after the leader had been convicted and jailed, the members of the cult were supportive of him, or terrified, believing he channelled God, afraid of what the other members of the cult might do to them.
Home. Exhausted, he sat there thinking of home—for him it had been an apartment. Painted beige. They were lucky because they were three storeys up and had a corner unit. For the kid on the other side of the screen who wanted to go home, it was probably a split-level in the suburbs with a mom and dad both working to pay the mortgage. Maybe, though, there was no home; maybe if she got there, the door would be opened by a stranger.
When he moved out of his house, his and Sally’s house, it was not the loss of the money that distressed him the most. Instead, it was an old feeling that came back, a feeling he had from after his mother had left and his father was home less and less, when he’d sat in the silent apartment as the daylight turned to darkness. He’d read until he couldn’t see the print. The darkness when it first came weighed hardly anything, but after a while, it became heavier, threatened to smother him, and if he fell asleep, he’d often wake up with a start from dreams that he was out on the street with nowhere to go.
Sometimes, he fled to Anna’s, asking if there was anything she needed him to do. Occasionally, she had a job, but other times, even when there was no work, sensing his desperation, she’d invite him in and he’d sit in the bright light of her kitchen, talking to her, playing solitaire with her daughter, Tanya, watching television with them until the light and the conversation would take away his panic.
When he told Anna about his fears, she said, “Think of your blessings. Your father goes to work every day. Many fathers don’t. He pays the bills. You have a good place to stay, food, clothes, until you are ready to support yourself. Many others you see around here don’t have that. Use the time to get ready to take care of yourself.”
The ceiling was in darkness, but the moonlight gilded everything it touched, making it seem falsely valuable.
“Your name? What do they call you?” he asked without looking at her. His voice was thick with sleep and seemed detached from the rest of him. He’d asked this same set of questions many times before, called social workers, arranged safe passage.
“Morning Dawn,” she answered.
“Your real name, the one before you met these people.”
“Alice Smithers,” she said, as if she didn’t believe it, as if it was a name so far in the past that she’d nearly forgotten it.
“Where’s home?”
“Hamilton.”
“Do you remember the address, the phone number?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How long have you been away?”
“Twenty-three months.”
He sat up, searched the floor for his sandals, found them and slipped them on.
“Don’t turn on a light,” she pleaded. “They might see.”
He stood up and went to the screen door. She scurried sideways and stood expectantly on the bottom step. He could see her better now. She was a scrawny kid with a nose and ears that looked big because her body was so thin. She had dyed frizzy orange hair.
He was tempted to flip up the hook that held the door shut and let her in, but—the shadows, the impossibility of seeing all of her, as if she were a ghost child, her looking back over her shoulder at a frightful monster that would lunge at her from the darkness—something held him back, made him wary, and he felt guilty—so many times he’d imagined himself at a stranger’s doorway asking for help and hoping to be let inside.
Anna had told him over suppers of perogies and sour cream about the brutal treatment of the Ukrainian immigrants, of how they’d go from farm to farm in Alberta pleading for work, for milk for their children, and had been
driven away time and again by the farmers. He’d started reading accounts of their treatment, and when they’d discussed what he’d read, she’d often say, “Make yourself valuable so everyone wants what you have and opens the door.”
The trees now might have been made of iron, crudely wrought, black, rusting, their points meant for impaling people. Beneath them, all was darkness, and even those things he knew existed could not be seen. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight.
He pushed up the catch, but instead of inviting her inside, he leaned into the moonlight.
She had turned toward him, and now that they both stood in the full light of the moon, he could see that she was short, slightly built, wearing a short-sleeved dress. She reached up to grab his arm, but he pulled back, and she, rejected, seemed to shrivel.
“Jason decides how much we get to eat.” Her voice had a whine to it like that of a small abused child. “It depends on how useful we’ve been or how happy we’ve made him. We can’t hold anything back, nothing of ourselves. We have to give everything to him. We have truth sessions where we talk about what we are most afraid of. I said I was afraid of snakes and when we were in Alberta, he made me sleep in a tent with a snake. ‘Confront your fear,’ he says, ‘until no fear is left.’ I have nightmares.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked. She said yes and he went back into the porch and found an Oh Henry. He offered it to her and she said, “Jason says we can’t eat chocolate bars or any food like that. It is not pure. We should only eat pure food.”
“I’m not Jason,” he said. “Eat the chocolate bar.”
She ripped the paper off the bar and bit into it. When she’d finished it, she said, “Jason said I was always hiding a part of myself. I’d never completely let go of my ego and become part of the group.”
“Angel?” he asked. “The picture of the girl that I brought.” The question surprised her and she looked confused, the way she might if he’d asked her an impossible question like who were the tsars of Russia.
“Yes. No. Not with us. She just came twice.”
She let the chocolate wrapper fall to the ground, licked her lips as if to get the last speck of chocolate off them and looked, he thought, like nothing so much as a ferret ready to dart past him through the doorway. Instinctively, he shifted to make sure the door was completely blocked.
“She wanted to be a musician. She had a good voice. She sang with us and Jason got her to sing songs by herself. He accompanied her.”
“Did he give her drugs?”
“No drugs. That’s not allowed. We sold them to others, but no drugs for us. We had to keep our bodies pure. No liquor, no tobacco, just joints.”
“But that’s a drug.”
“It’s sanctified. Jason blesses it. It helps us reach another plane. It helps with sharing our bodies. We have rituals.”
“Did she smoke joints?”
“No. She just wanted to sing.”
“Sex?”
“She went away when the ritual around the fire began, when we began to get sky clad. She wasn’t One.”
“She was fifteen.”
Alice’s face went slack. She lifted one hand to her cheek and with her index finger wiped away the remains of a tear. She said, “I’m sixteen.”
Tom said she’d have to find a place to sleep and get a ride in the morning, but she started to become hysterical. With him standing on the top step and her on the ground, she fell to her knees and grabbed his leg. “No, no,” she said, her voice tight with fear, he’d have to hide her. They’d come searching for her, and if they found her, they’d make her come back, and they’d make her dig a hole, make her crouch in it and fill it with water until there was no room to breathe, or they’d tie a thick towel over her head and pour water over it so she was sure she was drowning. If she were caught trying to run away, when they started travelling again and they got to a truck stop, she’d be sold to a pimp and spend the rest of her life working in the back of a camper truck. Ten guys a day, no days off. She sounded like she already knew from experience what could happen.
As Tom stood there barring her from the house, he felt terrible guilt because of an incident that had occurred when he was fifteen. The relatives who occasionally turned up for tea and sherry were his parents’ age, but he guessed that there were younger members of the family in the city, younger members who occasionally made his mother go tsk, tsk and lecture him about behaving himself.
One Sunday, this was after his mother had left, the doorbell rang and he was surprised because no one ever came over without calling first. His father didn’t like being interrupted when he was tying dry flies, so Tom went to the door, fully expecting it to be Anna. Instead, it was a young woman carrying a baby.
At first, they stood there staring at each other. Tom’s father called, “Who is it?”
“Who are you?” Tom asked.
“Caroline. Your cousin.”
“Wait here,” Tom said and shut the door. He went into the living room to tell his father.
His father opened the door and the young woman was still standing there. She shifted the baby from her hip to her chest so that it seemed she might hand it to Tom’s father. “I’m Caroline Fairweather. You and my father are cousins.”
“And?” his father asked, annoyed and perplexed. “Does your father want anything?”
“No,” Caroline said. “It’s me. My boyfriend kicked me out of our apartment and I have no place to stay.”
“What does your boyfriend do?”
“Sells drugs. What does anyone do nowadays?”
His father was so taken aback by the straightforwardness of the answer that, for a time, he said nothing.
“You need to call the welfare. That’s what they are for. Tom, bring the phone book, a pen and a piece of paper.”
Caroline looked befuddled, as though her need and helplessness were compelling reasons for others to help her. She could not understand why she was being refused. His father wrote down the number, handed the scrap of paper to Caroline, whose face was a mixture of dismay and disbelief, and closed the door.
Torn by the look of the pale-faced baby and the bruise on Caroline’s cheek, Tom said, “Could I give her a couple of dollars?”
“And then what?” his father asked. “Give her money and she’ll come back for more. How much of that money you earn for your hard work are you prepared to give her? Some of it? All of it? She was stupid enough to live with a drug dealer. Stupid enough to get pregnant. Stupid enough not to have a plan for when she was kicked out. Do you think your two dollars or five dollars is going to do any good?”
In spite of his father’s argument, Tom had gone to his room and taken out five dollars. He put it in his pocket and thought if he saw Caroline outside, he’d give it to her, but when he went downstairs there was no sign of her. He didn’t see her for two years, and when he did, she was staggering down the street in the middle of the day. She had no child with her, and he wondered if it had been adopted into a good home or ended up in a Dumpster. He and his father had never discussed the intrusion, except for his father to say, “Your job is to take care of yourself and your family when you have one. Do that and it will be plenty.”
“Was Angel with you people the night she died?” Tom asked Morning Dawn. They’d been whispering, as if they were secret lovers, but with this question he’d raised his voice slightly.
She shook herself, as if he’d awakened her from a deep sleep. He repeated the question. “No. Not that night,” she answered.
That’s when he heard Bob’s semi start up. There was a roar, then a steady rumble, and Tom grabbed Morning Dawn’s hand, pulled her up and urgently said, “Come on, come on, hurry,” and dragged her with him into the darkness. Bob was putting food and drinks into the truck. Away from the headlights, Tom explained about Morning Dawn and asked him to take her to a place where she could
catch a bus.
Tom asked Morning Dawn if she had any money, and she said, “No, no money.”
“Which way are you going?” he asked Bob.
“Calgary.”
“I’m good for twenty. I’ll give it to your wife.”
“Maybe there’ll be a rig going east at one of the stops. I’ll get her a ride in Winnipeg if I can.”
Tom boosted her up into the cab and told her to get behind the seat onto the bed and stay out of sight, then he swung the door shut and Bob got up from the other side. Tom lifted his hand to Bob and the truck rolled away.
The next morning, while Tom was focused on re-glazing a window, a single drumbeat startled him and made him look through the trees. He could see that there was a group standing in front of the emporium. He closed the putty tin and wiped off his putty knife. When he walked out to the road he recognized the people from the beach plus a dozen or so others.
The men were dressed in baggy white trousers and white shirts and the women were dressed in coloured skirts and tops. They all stood facing the front porch of the store. Jason stood at the front of the group. He slowly raised his arms, and as he raised them, the group began to hum. The drummer began to beat steadily on his drum. The voices rose and fell in unison. The hum turned into a chant that intensified. A woman began to sing in a high, keening voice. He thought that the song sounded Russian, like what he had heard when he was posted to Castlegar and listened to a Doukhobor choir.
As the drum beat continued—demanding, insistent—customers were looking out the windows of the café. Others from the town and harbour had come to look. Gradually, a small crowd gathered.
Karla appeared in stages. First, she leaned out a window, then she stood in the front door and then she came out onto the porch. The singers paid her no attention.
“What do you want?” she yelled.
As if in answer to her question, one of the men took a reed flute from his voluminous top; another took out a whistle. Another took out South American panpipes. The rest of the women had joined the first. The men began to play, the music winding around them, weaving in and out of the chanting. The flute was deep and the whistle high, counterpointing each other. The drum beat steadily in the background. They started slowly but, gradually, began to play faster and faster.
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 20
