In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “That’s crazy,” Tom said. “Crazy as in dangerous. We need a war, a place where we can send people like this. Cannon fodder. They could be killed-in-action heroes.”

  “It didn’t happen all at once. Just a little at a time. Siggi didn’t set out to be a dealer. He did a friend a favour by bringing him a bottle of whisky. His friend gave him a few dollars in appreciation. Then if you’re bringing a few bottles, it’s as easy to bring a lot of bottles. And then if a friend wants a little weed, it doesn’t take up any space, but you’ve got to get an introduction to have a regular supplier. Like it keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

  “You married him.”

  “You married your ex.”

  “You split and got his house.”

  “No,” she said. “It was more complicated than that. I didn’t tell you all of it. He was bringing booze in for the local reserve. It’s supposed to be dry. He’d bring it and transfer it to a guy who lived on the reserve. Thomas Moose. Moose would sell it and give the money to Siggi when they met for the next swap. Siggi would send the money to Winnipeg to pay his suppliers. It was a lot of money. His suppliers would pay their suppliers across the border. One time, Moose didn’t have the money, but Siggi let him have the next load on credit. It was too dangerous to take the stuff back. Besides, Moose didn’t have it anymore. He’d distributed it. Moose didn’t turn up for their next meeting, and Siggi went looking for him. He went for Siggi with a skinning knife. Siggi beat him up and left him outside. He froze to death. Siggi didn’t intend to kill him.

  “The Mounties were sniffing around Siggi, so his suppliers demanded their money. He thought he’d lose his house—that it would be considered proceeds from crime. So he turned it over to me. I borrowed against it and took out a big loan against my line of credit as well. He was to pay me back right away, like in a couple of months. He paid off part of his debts to his suppliers. He still owes lots. He still owes me. That’s all I had. Now, I’ve got no savings and a house mortgaged to the hilt. These guys charge huge interest.”

  She hesitated, and he could see that she was unsure of what else to say but then burst out, “Look, he’s an idiot. But he’s our idiot. This is a small place. Nobody is a stranger. Siggi’s not very good at what he does. He’s not organized enough. He’s not ruthless enough. He gets distracted. He loses his temper and does dumb things, and then regrets it. He started dealing drugs as a sideline. He wasn’t looking for business. Helgi would say this was demand driven. People started putting in orders. ‘Hey man, I hear you’re bringing weed. Bring me an ounce.’ The whole thing got out of hand. Then this Freemen on the Land stuff started. He needed them for protection. Or thinks he does. He just needs to get his bills paid, go back to working in the oil fields, driving his big truck, partying and being dumb on a normal scale.”

  “Oh,” Tom said. He put his hand on his forehead. As long as he didn’t make a sudden move, the throbbing faded into the background. “Life was too boring. You needed to add a little excitement.”

  “I didn’t know. I’d been away. I came back. Siggi and I went to school together. He was a couple of grades ahead of me. He was the school’s top athlete.”

  “How long were you seeing each other?”

  “Three months. Maybe a bit more. He courted me. Assiduously. He paid a bush pilot to fly us to Winnipeg for Rock on the Range. Then we were married for nine months. We split close to two years ago.”

  “Would he have involved Angel? Would he have used her as a mule?”

  “No.” Freyja’s voice was certain. “Ben would have gone berserk.”

  “Her brother deals.”

  “He lives with Wanda in the city. He only comes back on business. Angel lived mostly with Ben and Betty until she started grade nine. Siggi listens to Ben, at least now and again. Ben was good to Siggi when Siggi was a kid. Young girls like going to parties at the embassy. They don’t have to kidnap anyone. Girls like a good time. Free food. All you can drink. Lots to smoke. Music. Dancing. Siggi’s big on pinball machines. He’s got three old ones. Everybody loves to play them.”

  Tom handed Freyja his plate and cup and eased himself forward. Outside, the sun had already burned the sky white.

  “Nobody objects to these parties?” he said, aggravated.

  “Do you think it would matter? Do your kids jump when you bark?”

  His head was too fragile for an argument. He could feel his brain inside his skull. It was like a delicate glass ball that could shatter at any moment.

  Freyja was standing in front of him holding the plate and cup, and he realized she was wearing green nail polish. Fortunately, she wasn’t wearing green lipstick to go with it. If it were Myrna, she’d have green lipstick, green eyeliner, green hair. Myrna liked colour coordination.

  “You need to get rid of this stuff,” Freyja said. She was staring into the glassy eye of the wolf. A patch of fur was missing from his head. The porch was piled high with furniture that Jessie hadn’t wanted to throw out. “Some things become antiques but most are junk.”

  Jessie had stacked the eight extra chairs in the corner. They needed cleaning, but they were early American maple. He pressed his hand to his head. “I’ve promised Arlene Sigurdsson that I’d look at two rooms that need drywall. I’d better get over there.”

  Freyja was amused. “You aren’t a drinker,” she said. “You don’t have to struggle with it. My father had to struggle with it. You’re lucky.”

  “I’m just taking measurements. Thank God I don’t have to hammer nails.”

  By the time he got to the Sigurdssons’, the pounding in his head was down to a dull throb.

  Vidar and Arlene’s house was purple with white trim and the yard was a conflict zone, with flower beds made from large tires painted white, a patch of mowed lawn, a sidewalk lined with ceramic animals that guarded the house from an aluminum boat, a Bombardier, a Ski-Doo, and piled-up plastic fish tubs. A foot-high fence of black plastic edging guarded the grass.

  Vidar opened the door but didn’t step aside.

  “Come in, come in,” Arlene called from inside the house. “Vidar, get out of the way and let the man get inside out of the sun.”

  Vidar reluctantly backed up. Arlene was standing at the far end of the hallway with her shoulders hunched forward and a grim look on her face like she was ready for a brawl, but once Tom was inside, she turned and went to one of the rooms that needed to be finished.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the rooms the way they are. The kids don’t mind,” Vidar said defensively.

  The rooms had bare insulation between the studs. Tom wondered how long they’d been like that. “We added on because the kids were getting bigger and wanted their own rooms,” Arlene explained. “Boy and girl. Hard to keep them from fighting. They wanted different things.”

  “You want me to put up drywall?” Tom asked.

  Arlene was standing in the middle of the room. Vidar stayed at the doorway. “And mud it and sand it and paint it.” From the tone of her voice, she wasn’t going to put up with an argument.

  “I can paint it,” Vidar objected, but it was an argument he’d already lost, and his voice sounded like he knew it.

  “He paints it,” Arlene said. “The kids will be grown up and moved out before you get around to it.”

  Vidar shook his head and sighed. “I heard you tied one on with Helgi.”

  “Yes,” Tom admitted. He wasn’t sure if it should be a mark of shame or pride.

  “He’s a genius,” Vidar declared. “He was a genius in school. Spent his whole life in school. Read every book he could get his hands on. Went to university. Knows all this stuff, but he can’t keep a job. He’s always getting a new job, but then he drinks, and when he drinks he writes letters. He can’t stop writing letters.” Vidar stood on the hallway side of the bedroom and leaned into the room but didn’t cross the threshold. He made Tom think of a scolded dog.

  “Letters?” Tom said. He was measuring the room and writing down the dimensi
ons. Whoever had added on the rooms hadn’t got them quite square. He’d have to do a bit of filling.

  “Letters,” Vidar said. “He gets a job teaching and after he’s there for a while, he gets depressed because nobody is doing their job perfectly right. He’s an idealist. He writes letters describing what they’re doing wrong and how to change it. A lot of people don’t take it well. Being criticized. He was teaching at a university, and he wrote to the president’s wife saying that she needed to see that her husband was better dressed in public.”

  “He’s a cousin,” Arlene said. “He was going to do big things. We figured he’d become prime minister or an ambassador.” Arlene was a tall woman with long arms and legs and a determined set to her jaw. She kept shifting her eyes between Tom and her husband, trying to catch them in a male conspiracy against her plans. At the same time, she tugged at the bedcovers to straighten them out. Tom assumed they were in the son’s room because there was a poster of Sidney Crosby in action.

  “He’s fine when he’s not drinking,” Vidar added. “It’s when he gets depressed by life and drinks. If he writes to you, remember that. It’s nothing personal.”

  “He needs a wife,” Arlene interjected and gave the quilt such a hard tug that it went askew on the bed and revealed a magazine with a picture of a large-breasted naked woman on the cover. Arlene snatched it, rolled it up and glared at Vidar.

  “Too smart,” Vidar said, then clarified what he meant. “You can’t be that smart and be a fisherman. You’ve got to be willing to take what the Lord provides and not complain.”

  “When can you start?” Arlene asked.

  “As soon as Ben brings the drywall and the screws. If he can bring the mud and the tape at the same time, it would be good. What colour do you want?” It was just a job, but he felt like he was agreeing to an anti-husband conspiracy.

  “Blue for the boy’s room. Pink for the girl’s,” Vidar said. “That way they’ll grow up knowing what they are. No confusion.”

  As he was leaving, Tom told Vidar that he needed a screw jack to lift the corner of his house. Vidar didn’t have one, but he said Johnny Armstrong had a few. According to Vidar, no one else had them. It wasn’t the sort of thing that most people kept around. Johnny was good at moving buildings or lifting them so you could put a foundation underneath. He also did excavating and could dynamite.

  Tom got directions to Johnny Armstrong’s and walked over. The yard was obviously more of a parking lot being used for business. There were a couple of trucks, a flatbed, a large Cat, a pile of tires of various sizes, stacks of old railway ties.

  When Tom arrived, Johnny Armstrong was hooking his tractor onto a small flatbed trailer.

  He was tall, wiry and slightly stooped. His hands were covered with oil. He wiped them on a rag hanging from his pants pocket. He said nothing, but his eyes travelled up and down Tom, assessing him the way he might a wild animal that had unexpectedly appeared from the swamp.

  “I heard you’ve got a screw jack,” Tom said. Making a deal, Tom realized, might be difficult, because of the way Johnny stood, his knees slightly bent, his arms tensed, his body ready to spring forward or back across the hard-packed gravel.

  “Could be,” Johnny said, giving nothing away.

  “I need to lift the southeast corner of my house. It’s down a bit. You know what it looks like. I think Jessie had asked you about raising it.”

  Johnny ran his tongue over his upper lip. The tension in his body eased and he lifted his shoulders a bit. “You willing to pay a couple of dollars for it?”

  “How much?” They were in a standoff, Tom realized, even though there was little at stake. The blasted, destroyed ground where nothing grew anymore and the accumulation of vehicles that looked prehistoric were all part of some small desperate kingdom. He had learned early in his career that the closer to the edge a person lived, the more dangerous to them was any threat or opportunity, for the one could bring a devastating loss and the other a lost possibility.

  Beside Johnny, the tractor gave a steady beat, but every so often it coughed and sounded for a moment like it might stop. The sun bore down on them, staining their shirts with sweat. The air smelled bitter with the tar from the piles of used railway ties and the old rubber stink of the mountain of tires. Tom’s mouth was dry, and he was so thirsty he kept wishing he had a bottle of water with him. He just wanted to get the negotiation over with and get a drink.

  “Would you pay five dollars a day?”

  “Seems steep, but okay.”

  “Would you pay seven?”

  “That’s not neighbourly.” It was an old trap and he’d fallen into it, a clever little pawn move before he knew he was even playing the game. His stomach muscles tightened and he clenched his left hand. It was the game of the used car salesman, of the smart-alecky huckster and, once in a while, to their discredit, of the landlord assessing how desperate their prospective tenant might be.

  “It’s just business. I’ve got it. You want it. Besides, I heard you don’t quibble over prices.”

  “Ben sets a fair price. He doesn’t try to gouge me.”

  “It’s a long trip to Winnipeg, then you’d have to buy one. It wouldn’t pay to rent it.” Johnny smiled the way he would if he’d caught an animal in a trap, a slight turning up of his lips. It was the attitude of a long-time resident to an outsider, Tom realized, to a newcomer not yet connected to the intricate web of having lived for decades in the small community where there was a sense of mutual obligations and past favours. He and Sally had lived in places like that. His paycheque had been nibbled away by people who saw an opportunity to charge more to an outsider who wasn’t going to be around permanently anyway.

  Tom shifted his weight off his bad leg. When he stood too long, it began to hurt. Walking was fine, but standing could become agony. “You’ve been here a long time,” Tom said, “but you’ve still got an accent. What kind is it?”

  “Nothing really.” The shift in subject had caught Johnny by surprise, and he jerked back slightly, puzzled. A raven flew overhead and they both looked up, for it was the only moving thing above the trees. They watched until it settled at the top of a large spruce. From there, it could observe them in their gravel arena.

  “I had a friend who sort of sounded like that. He grew up in Boston.” Pawn to pawn, Tom thought, now that he knew what game they were playing. He hadn’t chosen to set out the board or to move the first man, but he wasn’t going to lose the game. It was games like this that were going to determine how the community saw him.

  Johnny had on a well-worn Stetson that had once been white. The brim was down all around except in front of his face where it was turned up. He reached up and tugged at the brim to settle it more tightly on his head.

  “I grew up in Saskatchewan. Moose Jaw. Went to high school there.” The words had come quickly, practised. They were part of an old story, but Johnny’s feet had started to move, and the gravel made a soft crunching sound. The liar’s small dance, Tom thought. He’d seen it lots of times, at the side of the road, in back alleys, in parking lots, in houses where women were supposed to have accidently fallen down the stairs.

  “What years were those? I was stationed there for a while. Maybe we have mutual friends.”

  “Why do you want to know? What business is it of yours?” The superior tone had gone out of Johnny’s voice; the words were sharp-edged. He turned toward the hitch to assure himself that it was still there and to let Tom know that his question and answer were of no importance, but his voice and his eyes had already betrayed him.

  “None. None at all. Just being friendly. It’s nice to get to know my neighbours. Most people don’t mind talking about where they come from. I come from Winnipeg.”

  “I wouldn’t brag about that.”

  “Most Americans up here are running from their past. I heard it mentioned that you had a thing going with Ben’s daughter at one time.”

  “So did lots of guys.”

  “Any chan
ce you’re Angel’s dad?”

  “No,” he said. “Look, we all make mistakes. We all do dumb things when we’re young. Okay. I’m married. I’ve got two kids. I don’t need this.”

  “I heard that Wanda hits you up for money now and again.”

  “That was a long time ago. She’s wasn’t doing well and she asked for a couple of small loans. That fucking Sarah. She can’t keep her mouth shut.”

  “Not Angel?” Tom said. “How about Derk? Does she hit you up for the occasional loan because of Derk?”

  Johnny’s feet moved more quickly for a moment, and his eyes darted away, then darted back. “Where are you going to take this?”

  “No place. Just you and me. I want to know about Angel. Do you like young girls? Mother and daughter? A hat trick?”

  “I never did anything with Angel. Let this drop before you do real harm. I came up here during the Vietnam War. Guys were being killed every day. They were dead fifteen minutes after getting off a plane. We thought we were going to be sent to invade the north. We were cannon fodder. I split. I got a new name. I got a new life. I work and I take care of my family. Christ, leave me alone. My wife’s got cancer.”

  The sun was merciless. Tom pulled off his hat and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. He put his hat back on. The top of the spruce tree was bent over under the weight of the raven. They stood awkwardly, no longer quite facing each other, as Johnny had shifted slightly to one side to see what was moving in the bush on the other side of the road. The raven suddenly launched itself, its wings spread, unmoving except for the tips of its feathers, dropped into the ditch but didn’t land. It rose up with a frog in its talons. When they both looked back, Tom said, “I heard you were saying I might have been responsible for Angel’s death.”

  “We were just talking. Speculating. It doesn’t mean anything. A couple of beers and we flip our lips.”