“No, Ted,” he said, “we’ll decide now.”
The two ledger-men stopped their calculating and glanced first at each other and then across to the two men.
“I told you there’d be consequences.”
He would remember Ted’s face turn radish-red. He would remember a siren outside in the street. And he would wonder what it was that made him stay right where he was and say the things that he said. Perhaps it was Viola. Perhaps it was the sub-scratch round of golf. Or perhaps it was John Cassidy, the novice with the crooked nose and the packed bag in whose company he felt more fearless than he’d ever felt.
“Well, you can take those consequences and stick them up your pompous ass, Mr Mallender. Because if you think anyone feels anything other than loathing for you, then you’re badly mistaken. People despise you. People wince whenever your name is spoken, I’ve heard them. And at least I have a home to go to, at least my wife, as sick as she might be, wasn’t blowing the Venezuelan gardener every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”
He would remember not hanging around. He would remember his foot slamming into the vending machine, causing a minor coffee trickle, but beyond that, nothing. Not the three flights of stairs, not the look of the receptionist as he ran through the tiled foyer, nor anyone or anything he might’ve seen on his way to the car and on the drive home, not the twenty miles of cornfields and prairie, nor the clouds over Blessings Point stock-piling for an hour of rain. In fact, he would remember only walking into the blast-site of the kitchen, cleaning up both boys and floor and sitting down next to Viola, squeezing her gently, and saying, “There may be fall-out, honey.”
He would remember the phone-call from one of the ledger-men two days later, telling him how Vincent Clay had walked into the Agency, told Ted his backers had given him the go-ahead for the plans and how Ted, for all his business persona, all his handshakes and smiles, looked bereft while Vincent sat and signed the deeds and handed over the cheque for the land, the first of three.
At the corner table in Sizzlin’ Steve’s that same evening Vincent sat back in his seat, licked steak-juice lips and raised up his third bottle of Bud.
“To the completion of phase one,” he said, “the purchase of the rough terrain. You know, by the end, Lester, he was practically giving us the land. Plus,” He took another glug of the beer, “he’s interested in the plans.”
“What plans?”
“Exactly. The ones that don’t exist. The expansive ones. Those plans.”
“So, what’s next?” said Lester. Vincent paused. “What’s next,” he said, “is the timber mill.”
“You’re going to buy the timber mill?”
“That’s the plan. Or at least the land around it.”
“But how…?”
“Do you know what a sabot is, Lester?”
Lester frowned, shook his head.
“It’s a type of shoe, a clog. It’s French.”
Vincent always did that to him. Made him wonder. Made him think. Made a tingle go to his balls as to what might happen next.
“Are you following me here?”
“You need a clog?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You want me to find you a clog?”
Vincent leant forward. “I need the timber mill to become unsustainable,” he said. “I need it to close down, to be unable to function. Now, either we can wait for the company to have an economic epiphany and recognise the place as a sinking ship, or…there’s the clog. And what does the clog do? You put the clog in the machinery, and the machinery stops working, the machinery gets so fucked up it breaks. Are you there yet?”
Lester’s face resembled that of a man putting something edible in his mouth, finding it didn’t taste like he expected but it improved the longer it stayed there.
“So, not a real clog, you’re saying?”
“Correct.”
“Not a real shoe?”
“Brilliant.”
“The machinery doesn’t work, the mill closes down, and you buy the mill?”
“Lester, you’re exceeding yourself.”
“And you need a clog?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll find you a clog.”
“I know you will. Let’s drink to phase two.”
Lester savoured the taste in his mouth that got sweeter and sweeter.
John drove away from the roadside bar where he’d picked up all the latest from Doug, including the weekend with Viola, the sale of the rough terrain and, of course, the fearless speech that’d got longer and bolder by then. But, instead of heading back to Mission, he took the road out to Serpentine and then the long loop south-west just so, on that stretch of cinder-block housing beyond the farmland, he could go by the house where Lee Shaw lived, so he could see the damage to the car; the busted headlights, the mashed fender and the hood so buckled it wouldn’t close. As he slowed, he could make out the tarpaulin loose across the windshield and, over towards the house, past the foot-high wisps and stalks of grass, he could see Sophie Li in the window. He slowed enough to catch her looking out, not towards the road but down at the skewed Chevy on the track. The window was half-open. It was dusk, coal-dust and olive-green, and she was smoking, the same skinny shoulders drawn in, a ten-hour shift at the Serpentine meat factory behind her. She looked adrift, her hair loose and down.
He carried on, heading west across the flat lands with barely a border between earth and sky, picking up the road that ran north alongside the rail-tracks until it hit the Mission neighbourhoods of apartments and low-cost housing with patches of sub-standard lawn. He pulled over, squirted screen-wash over the dust of the windshield and watched as the fixed wiper swept it away. Down to the side of the car was the slow grade of the riverbank with its tubers and twines. The river ran at its narrowest there, took a course of checks and twists that straightened up and widened the closer to the town it got. He switched off the engine, and the headlights. From where he sat, slumped down in the seat, he could see the apartment block where Jake Massey leant out of his third-floor window to smoke. He called him on his phone, watched him reach into his pocket and answer. “D’you want to make some money?” he said.
Jake was having a hard time of things. He’d lost his job at the timber mill for one. He was drinking again. He’d spent a couple of nights back in the cells. He hardly saw Rita anymore, never saw Delilah. Plus, he’d done all that dirty work for Ted Mallender and got nothing in return. He was right where John wanted him.
“You there?”
A sigh, a smoker’s rattle.
“I’m asking whether you want to make some money.”
He watched him look out of the window and drag on the cigarette.
“Are you not hearing me, Jake?”
“I’m hearing you.”
“So?”
“What is it?”
John could smell the blankets that’d wrapped around his father. “Get yourself down to the coffee house. Mid-morning is best. There’s a guy in there looking for someone.”
“To do what?”
John paused, listened out to the glottal chokes of the river. “You can’t say a single thing.”
“I won’t. To do what?”
“Not to anyone.”
“I promise.”
“He’s looking for someone to torch the mill,” he said, in a lowered voice. “Could you do that? And make it look like an accident.”
He watched him light another cigarette from the embers of the lit one.
“After the way those people treated you. After what they did. They put you in the mire, Jake, without a second thought. And the foreman guy…”
“Dan Cruck.”
“Am I right he’s seeing Rita?”
“I don’t see her anymore.”
“He comes along and he takes her away. You don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re a human being, Jake, you have feelings. And what do you owe them?”
“Nothing.”
“They shut me out. They gave me nothing.”
“Exactly. So, are you in?”
He saw him spit, three storeys to the ground.
“Tell me what to do, I’ll do it.”
John rolled the window the whole way down. He could smell the life of the river, the permanent linger of wood that came from the town. He got the sand and the silt, the metal of the rail-tracks, the gasoline spills.
He drove on, past the tracks and the prairie fields. He took the long arc of the road that swept by the burial grounds rumour said would, if the land was ever disturbed, be woken angered. He went by the Mallender estate, past winter-bitten lawns, and the house where Ted, alone since Lily had, in the wake of Doug’s outburst packed up and gone before Ted had got home, laid flat, propped, laid flat again the photograph of her in Oklahoma.
As the broad base of Rupture Hill bulked in front of him, as its wooded belt only thickened in the dark and its crags stood rock-black on night-black, so the smell of his father grew, and when he sniffed up, past the chicane of the break and up to the bridge, he got not only the blankets that covered him, but the skin of his feet, the bowls of the clavicle, the fingers that scratched hair and the hair that pressed against the door when he slept. He got the woodsmoke, the half-eaten breakfasts, the myriad of linctuses, mixtures and drops. He got the flakes of his breath.
As soon as he got into the house, he put on the black suit and the white gloves and produced his hatpins, watches and coins, his face unreadable. He took out the soft black cloth and blindfolded himself and, barefoot, he got down on his hands and knees and rooted amongst the boxes, the squat shoe containers and the larger rectangular ones for the shirts. He put his head close to the floor and listened out for the thickness of the pages as he turned them and then, without once raising the blindfold, he crawled across the floor and down the cellar steps. He sat in the cool and dank, found and drank one of his father’s beers and rolled tins of fruits and meats across the stone, his ear twitching the moment they hit the wall or stopped so far short he could tell to the inch.
He went into the bedroom, still blindfolded, and came across the shirt box with the photographs inside, feeling them between his fingers like the playing cards Mario would produce from who knew where; from buttoned shirt pockets, on the soles of his shoes and once, ripped and re-assembled inside of his mouth. He imagined them as he brushed them with his thumb, his ancestors, his DNA, his people. He dropped one of them to the floor and found it in his blindness with the ridge of his toes, held it there, carried it across the room to the small wardrobe, leant inside of which, next to the tallest of the boxes, was his fathers’ shotgun.
He reached in and took it out, walked with it over to the table, the photograph since shaken loose with the face of Patrick Cassidy scowling out. He sat on one of the chairs, held the barrel of the gun between the white-gloved hands. He tilted it, rested it underneath the bow of his jawbone. A coyote cried out, in the dark, in the mangled, rough terrain of weed and scrub. He adjusted his finger around the curve of the trigger, tested a short, hardly detectable squeeze. He was wordless, again. He was in the various rooms he’d had as a child, with his packed bag and his winter boots. He was in the freight cars, in the beach houses on long, winter shorelines. He was behind the goofy faces of bears and ducks and mice.
If you looked in the box marked dinner shirts/non-white and the shoe-box black/formal there’d be some reference, particularly in Abe Masterson’s Mission: A true story, a hybrid of hearsay and fact, to the timber mill.
The bold outline was this: The mill was established in the first years of the twentieth century by a north-western family called the Wallbecks. Because of its location, it was served not by the great log-drives of the rivers that went to the sea but by the burgeoning reaches of the railroad, meaning the work was regional rather than export-based. You might say that the Wallbecks cut their timber accordingly and, being a family-run enterprise that moved from generation to generation and looked after its workforce, it ran at a regular, if moderate, profit for almost seventy years. Ironic then, according to the historian, that it should be felled not by global conflict, market forces or the severe immigration policies of the 1950s that decimated the workforce, but by ‘environmental do-gooders(sic)’ in whose view the mill ‘ransacked the natural resources of the earth’. Policies were revised, practices altered, regulations tightened and by the end, unable to sustain any profit, the mill had no choice but to close down.
But, as Abe so proudly cites in chapter 11 of his volume, Phoenix from the Ashes: The town of Mission does not easily lie down, and, following a few business moves and chest-beatings from a young Ted Mallender, the mill re-opened.
This time the buyer was a national company, initialled rather than named, who claimed in its literature to understand the ways of the north-west without once saying what those ways were or how that understanding might manifest itself. There was a fanfare. Officials from the company turned up. They ate in Sizzlin’ Steve’s, drank a few beers in Harry’s and inhaled that smell of perpetual wood that hadn’t had time to go away. But there were provisos. A down-sized workforce, for one, an obsession with waste minimisation for another, a prioritising of energy efficiency and, under contractual rules that came without a grain of consultation, most of the rights on working conditions, fought for so fiercely by the logging unions in the 1920s, were clawed back.
But ask those men that walked into and out of that mill when the siren howled what they thought of the place and they’d tell you, as they told Abe Masterson, that it was better to have it than not. Take it away, they said, and the heart and soul of the town would go with it.
The problem, though, was this; that the company had larger, more profitable concerns elsewhere and, over the years, the focus on the tiny mill in Mission diminished, as did any sign of investment so by the time they considered cutting their losses and moving out, the mill had become a burden too difficult to sell because of that lack of investment. Conditions worsened. Rumours of imminent closure became more or less permanent so that, every once in a while, the company sent over some lackey to ease over the cracks, to present a unified front in a company shirt and tie to a workforce who clocked in and out on what felt like borrowed time.
Dan Cruck was one of those lackeys. He was youthful enough. He looked smart. And, unfortunately for the company, he was conscientious to the point where he couldn’t let go of those concerns that came out in post-coital tirades to Rita, of antiquated machinery, substandard safety measures and, of course, the perennial nightmare of dust inhalation.
So, the history books would not remember Dan for the suits he wore, or the shirts he left elliptical sweat stains on, or the ties he fastened just like his father showed him, but for his nocturnal blabbering about the mill listened to, just, by Rita, and passed on to the fine-tuned ear of John Cassidy.
Lester blended himself in while Vincent stayed in the shadows. That was generally the way it worked. Lester was the sponge, the ordinary Joe in the bars, coffee shops and steak houses, waiting for fate to take its course. There was an everyman look about him, the extra poundage, the gait of someone moderately burdened, and those regular actions that had become his own; the rolling of the cigar between his fingers, the way he pressed at the bridge of his nose when he got tired, or the sudden jut of the chin if someone came near him.
And, on that mid-February morning with a serrated wind blowing in from the north-east, in the window seat at the coffee house, his jawline flinched when the argument between the surly waitress and the young man in the denim jacket spilled over in his direction.
“Jake, you have to pay. Period.”
“The money’s at home. I’ll bring it in. What’s the problem?”
“You’re the problem. This isn’t the first time, is it? And you don’t always bring it in.”
“That’s not true. I bring it in. How much is it?”
“Two dollars fifty.”
“Exactly.”
“Not the point, Jake. You pay up or you don’t come in again. I mean it.”
Jake looked sullen. He was no more than four feet from Lester.
“You see how they treat me?” he said.
Lester looked at the young, unshaven man.
The waitress tilted her head to one side, pursed lips, part-raised an eyebrow. “You want me to go and get the manager?”
Jake sighed, rubbed at his face. “No, I don’t want you to get the manager…You know I’m not working right now.”
“Not my fault, Jake. What do you want me to do?”
“Let me bring the money in. It’s two dollars.”
“Fifty.”
Jake sighed again, louder this time. He started to nod, to noticeably blink. The waitress stood straighter, put the tray she was holding on the table next to her and waited. One of the machines hissed out behind the counter.
“I’ll get it,” Lester said, “consider it done.”
The waitress studied Lester for as long as it would take to pour a regular coffee. She got the hairy ears first, then the veins and the folds of the neck.
“You sure?”
Lester nodded. The waitress looked across to Jake, nodded herself in affirmation, picked up the tray of empty cups and walked back to the counter. Jake stood, head slightly bowed. The nodding had stopped, so too the blinks.
“What can I say?”
Lester shook his head, waved it away.
“I’ll pay you back. Give me a couple of days. I’ll be right here. Same time. I promise,” he said, and turned to go.
He got to the door and turned up his collar against the chill. He stood a moment in the doorway, lit a cigarette in cupped hands and then stumbled forward across the street, taking the turn that led to the mill.
The coffee house fell back into its hisses and chinks. The manager appeared briefly. The surly waitress glared at the one with the ponytails for the tuft of spilled froth on the counter and the conversation found its regular volume on its regular subjects. No sooner had Jake turned the corner than Lester began to bask. He sat back and purred quietly to himself, his paws locked together under the knoll of his pendulous chin. That was the way it worked. Lester was the cat that brought his master mice.
Mission Page 13
