by Edward Riche
“I guess that’s for you to decide,” Sommerville said. “We’ve brought the situation, as we understand it, to your attention. We would like him to be left alone.”
“Does this have anything to do with the closure of the LSPU Hall Theatre?” asked Alessandra.
Sommerville looked to Purcell, who shook his head. “Unrelated,” Purcell said.
Sommerville rose, followed by Purcell.
“We are trying to do what’s best for everyone,” Sommerville said.
“He’s harming no one out there. He spooks easily, so scarcely anyone has even noticed him. He’s disappeared in the trees before they can get a good look at him,” Purcell said.
“So he’s shy,” said Matt.
“Skittish,” Purcell replied.
“People want a selfie with him,” said Sommerville. “Well meaning, I know, but inappropriate.”
They all shook hands and Sommerville and Purcell left.
Matt stood and crossed the office to his desk, pacing a circle in front of it.
“‘Did you hear that? ‘Trying to do what’s best.’ Heed that, it’s a warning sign, Councillor.”
“A warning of what?”
“A warning that busybodies are on the loose. A deer! Jaysus.”
“It is, on the face of it, it is silly but . . .”
“Don’t worry, Councillor Cappello, I’ve learned to be careful. Jumped through hoops for that transgendered dispatcher up at the city depot.”
“I don’t know about her.”
“No, him. Was her, now him. Bryce. Why anyone would go with ‘Bryce’ is a job to say.”
“Wasn’t there a transgendered constabulary officer?”
“That was a her — Trevor to Trudy,” said Matt. “Victim of her own success; nobody made a fuss until she started getting promoted. Former male colleagues resented that she was benefiting from affirmative action . . .”
“As would women on the force.”
“More so, they were livid. Kept catcalling her, pointing downstairs. What was it they said? … ‘Uterus.’ It got so uncomfortable for her at the cop shop that she quit. Works for some corporate security outfit down in the States. Arizona, I think. Wasn’t hard to look at.”
“Matt!”
“And in the uniform, hot as balls . . .”
“Stop!” Alessandra said. Matt made her laugh.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Nothing. I will let the security people call the police. A doctor will look at him and put him in the hospital; it’s right across the street from the park.”
“It’s so primitive, isn’t it? Health care for mental illness? They don’t even know what the mind is, let alone how to treat it. What will they do for this man, really?”
“They’ll try to help him. They do their best. I like to think they do.” Matt sat on the front edge of his desk. The problem seemed to have tired him out of all proportion. His ruined paws were gripping the desk with unwarranted vigour. Alessandra saw Matt trace her gaze back to his hands.
“Hockey.”
“I’m sorry . . . I’ve always worried you were in an accident. Was I staring?”
“Yes, you were staring. I’m used to it.” Matt smiled to tell Alessandra that he didn’t care if she looked. “Sticks and pucks had a way of finding this hand.” Matt let loose his left hand’s hold on the desk. “I was sort of a faceoff specialist so . . . . You know what a faceoff is?”
“No, I don’t,” said Alessandra.
Matt laughed and lit up, as if Alessandra’s ignorance of hockey was the best news he’d heard all day.
“It’s when they drop the puck, to start play?”
Alessandra nodded. This she knew.
“So I was always putting my hand in harm’s way,” said Matt, “sticking it into a thresher. Everybody has a target painted on them somewhere, right?”
Alessandra thought about this assertion. It wasn’t true. Was it? And if so, where was hers?
“And I permanently fucked — sorry, injured — the knuckle in a fight.”
“Right. There’s a lot of fighting in hockey.”
“It wasn’t my thing. Single racket my entire NHL career.”
“That’s where you broke your knuckle?” Alessandra winced to think of it.
“No. That was in Quebec Major Junior. It’s like a minor league that feeds into The Bigs. I fought there. Had to. It was part of the test.”
“So you didn’t enjoy it, fighting?”
“Not at all. Despite the game’s reputation, there aren’t many players who enjoy it. It’s a job for some, a chore. It’s part of the show. It’s foolish to even call it fighting, it’s mostly flailing.”
“Show?”
“Yeah, it’s entertainment, popular entertainment. At the professional level it’s about the commercials, about the beer and the pickup trucks. It’s a show.”
Alessandra watched Matt examine the old wound, recalling, she saw, the conflict, where and when and how it occurred.
“Yep, this joint gave way fracturing the ‘zygomatic process’ of a guy from Finland, a decent prospect named Rejo Avenen.” Making a loose fist, Matt put the knuckle against his own cheekbone to illustrate the blow to the Finn’s face. “He lost sight in the eye.”
“Oh my. For how long?”
“Forever. That was his last hockey game. With that eye gone he had no depth perception. And I lost the fight. Badly. Got shit-knocked. You don’t see the Finns fight a lot, but this Avenen was a savage. He was one of those few players who relished a racket and then, in the end . . .”
“Fighting is . . .” Alessandra couldn’t think what fighting was.
“That guy,” Matt looked toward the door. He was done talking about his past.
“Lloyd Purcell. What did you make of him?”
“Seemed . . . normal to me, certainly not hysterical. Seemed reasonable. Do you know his story?”
“Name is vaguely familiar. I’ll google it.”
“Did you notice his clothes?” asked Alessandra.
“You know, I did! And I usually don’t.”
“The jacket was definitely made . . . you know, by a tailor. And the shirt too; it had French seams.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“Stitching; it’s boring. Something that someone who knows clothes would ask for. We Italians . . . it matters to us more than it should.”
“He didn’t seem like someone who ‘knew clothes.’ He looked rocky to me.”
“Maybe a borrowed jacket?”
Matt shrugged. “I shop at Moores.”
“And you always look ” — Alessandra knew the word she was looking for — “sharp.”
“Thank you.”
“I should be going. My husband, Jules, he’s not well and it’s not safe to leave him alone too long.”
“Audrey told me he was ill, had to leave work. He’s a professor at the university, isn’t he? The big John Cabot expert?”
“That is he.”
“So, taking early retirement?”
“No. No, it’s not early.”
Eleven
Natalie Sommerville and Lloyd Purcell stepped from City Hall into a cloudless day.
“They are clearly hostile to the proposition,” Purcell said.
“They were not open to it, but they were not entirely closed. The mayor seemed interested,” said Natalie. “I’m hopeful.”
“I’ve been to a lot of pitches, Natalie, and you get a sense when people are not liking what they are hearing. The mayor, Olford, is a very backward guy” — Lloyd Purcell fished his pockets for something — “really conservative you know. Was a hockey player.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah, that’s how he got elected.” Purcell donned the sungla
sses he’d found, an act that calmed him. “Was on some big NHL team, out in Alberta, I think . . . and not an important player, but a Newfoundlander making good on the mainland, a local boy. Those are his only qualifications.”
“It’s her that worries me,” said Natalie.
“Cappello?”
“That’s her name, Cappello? Makes sense; they’re swarthy aren’t they, Italians.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She would do well to see an aesthetician.”
“I didn’t notice,” said Lloyd.
“You said that Harry’s transitioning was unrelated to him losing his job at the theatre?”
“Is there a connection?”
“I don’t know,” said Natalie.
“Okay, I should have said, ‘We don’t know.’”
“I’m going to the park to try and see him tomorrow,” she said. “Do you want to come along?”
“I would, but tomorrow I can’t. I have something to do for my brother in the morning and then a call to Los Angeles in the afternoon, business . . . it’s their morning.”
“Of course. I guess you couldn’t be farther away from Los Angeles, could you?”
“No, I couldn’t. You’re right about that. Are you going . . . ?” Lloyd Purcell gestured eastward, down Duckworth Street.
“Yes.”
“Then I shall leave you here. Post office,” he said. “Call me and tell me how it goes in the park.”
“I will.”
Natalie watched Lloyd cross the road, dodging traffic, and head south toward Water Street. They’d met at a bar downtown where she had gone to see a band she mistakenly assumed played Celtic music. It was, instead, a sort of jazz that flirted with howling lunacy. But the music clearly moved Lloyd and that openness to passion made him attractive to her. Most of the men with whom she’d been seemed to lose interest in life. She needed enthusiasm. And Lloyd was an interesting man. He was in the movie business for years, on a first-name basis with stars, and gave it all up to come home to Newfoundland.
Though from Toronto, Natalie thought she probably knew better than Lloyd himself what drew people back to this island. The place was enchanted. Locals, even those as sensitive as Lloyd, were inured to it, so long were they inside the mystery they could not see how it acted upon them.
Natalie came to St. John’s to organize local protests against the seal hunt, only to discover that the taking of the baby white coats had ceased many years earlier and that the remaining hunt, for older animals, was negligible. While visiting the university’s marine biology research station a few kilometres outside the town, Natalie had since seen, up close, adult harp and hood seals and found them repulsive. They were so much larger than she expected, monstrous almost, and given to surly, fishy flatulence. The seal’s was the reverse of man’s condition, of being so hideous in infancy and growing into beauty. Natalie thought human babies unspeakably ugly, no better than swollen, squirming spermatozoa with the unfortunate habit of suckling.
Natalie never used the return portion of her airline ticket. Since her decision to stay in Newfoundland, she had met some of the few natives who did perceive the magic of their land, who were open, who told her tales of those from “the shore” who’d been fairy-led, of children born with canine teeth and emerging from the womb singing in an unknown tongue. Fergus, whom she’d met at O’Leary’s on open-mic night, told the most amazing tales of banshees and boodarbies that lived “up the Horsechops,” of people hexed. Fergus was only last month arrested on trumped-up pederasty charges that his friends at the pub said were payback for his having figured out a way to game the Employment Insurance program. Under his system, Fergus merely got himself fired upon reporting for work on a shrimper to Greenland drunk and then collecting benefits for many months.
Natalie thought she herself might be picking up a hint of the local brogue.
Lloyd was wrong about the mayor having been elected because of his athletic fame. Natalie saw it was because he was gorgeous; the full, ungovernable chestnut hair, the wide mouth and sturdy jaw. His eyes were too dark to be called brown; they were black coffee. There was only a tiny scar to mar that face, a jag on his left cheek. His hands were not attractive; she’d almost call one of them, she couldn’t recall if it was his right or left, mangled. It looked like it belonged to an aged labourer with an injury that had not properly healed or set. Still, he was strikingly handsome and with the added charm of his not really caring that he was. The mayor’s good looks made Natalie warm to him. There was nothing for it; Natalie was a tall girl and liked a big man such as the mayor.
Through the space between two buildings piled into the hill she could see the harbour below, an unstained supply vessel from the offshore oil play seemingly drifting, sliding through the placid water with the grace of a whale, awaiting a berth perhaps, and then beyond it the South Side hills, steeper than the shore she was on and verdant, like a ruin wall claimed by climbing vines and moss. She was right, she was; they couldn’t see it, the locals, in the same way they failed to notice the mood-altering fog and ceaseless wind.
She stopped for an early lunch at The Sprout, a vegetarian restaurant. Staff waved to her as she took her regular seat. It was true what they said about Newfoundlanders being friendly. Their hearts were large. They were, even if they didn’t know it, liberal. Lloyd was wrong about Mayor Olford; the citizenry wouldn’t go in for someone who was “backward.” These Newfoundland people would be sympathetic to what Harry Davenant was going through, even if they didn’t understand it.
Natalie was going to be careful; she knew if she moved too quickly the idea would seem strange. Surely anyone who had a pet knew that other species were not unknowable solitudes. Natalie watched documentaries where animals of different species, raised together, cared for each other. Tigers and bears and lions could be siblings, lovingly grooming one another, frolicking together even. Natalie once heard an owl in Algonquin Park and picked her way through the forest to find it in a raggedy pine and when it looked down at her there was a mutual acknowledgement. There was. She’d told her sister, Martha, the story and was mocked for it.
She knew crows mourned their dead, crowded the perches above their fallen, their knowing and feeling souls setting them to nodding and a joining in a cacophony of keening. This was fact!
She envied Harry’s courage. She had never felt any deer-like stirrings, but maybe something canine. She’d looked a fox in the eye out at Cape Spear while feeding it (despite posted signs prohibiting her from doing so) and felt a connection as strong as she had to any person. Perhaps it was her native heritage. She’d recently discovered that her maternal great-grandmother might have been one part half-blood Tuskaweegee, a fact Natalie honoured with a tattoo on her lower back.
Lloyd said there was nothing remotely cervine (Lloyd knew that word; he was that sort of man) about Harry before he began his change. Lloyd said Harry was actually lead-footed and graceless for an actor and that’s why he’d ended up in the administration end of theatre. But Harry was deer-like now; there was no mistaking it when you saw him. She thought that Lloyd noticed Harry’s deer nature first, but Lloyd assured her it was she, and now, thinking back, she saw Lloyd was right.
Natalie looked at the menu. She wanted a Black-Bean Burrito but the last one she ate made her gassy. She decided instead on the Tempeh Tantrum, which was also delicious.
Twelve
Fiddler’s was a real bar, blessedly a mere thirty thirsty paces from the front doors of City Hall, yet far enough that Natalie was safely out of sight when Lloyd entered. A cold beer in the middle of the day in a proper drinking establishment — there was nothing like it. That one could no longer enjoy a cigarette at the same time would spoil the experience in a lesser place. Only a stone’s throw away was the block of yeast known as George Street; joints from the same faux-Celtic pub kit, “Mussels in the Corner” on an endless loop, cod-kissing rub
es from the mainland and soused locals looking to fuck or fight. Further east along Duckworth and Water Streets, noxious winey places were popping up like mushrooms to accommodate the young and dissipated of the oil boom. How could anyone aspire to be a yuppie after they’d seen that shit show in the ’80s? Thanks be to Jesus for Fiddler’s and the Sports Club up on Boncloddy Street.
Lloyd had told Natalie that he was going to the post office and here, next to him, belly to the bar, was an actual postman, in uniform, having a rum and Coke. That alone made it right. The proprietor fancied the place a sort of museum and filled it with Newfoundland bric-a-brac on that theme alone, without another governing principle — here a rusting two-handed crosscutter from the lumberwoods, there a harpoon, here a gaff for busting open the skulls of seals. It was beautiful.
Thirteen
“. . . I’m holding for Staff Inspector Leigh. It’s Inspector Gary Mackenzie of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. Yes . . . I was just . . . Royal. Newfoundland. Constabulary. But that’s not . . . hello? Staff Inspector Leigh? Yeah, sure, ‘Peter,’ gotcha. Hello, thanks for taking . . . Yeah. No, no not St. John, New Brunswick. St. John’s, Newfoundland. John’sssss. Pardon me? Yeah, I was with Toronto Police. For years. Long story. Riiiight. No, I did not know what I was thinking. So did you . . .? Okay, thanks. They were protesting stray cats and dogs being euthanized at the city’s shelter here, no, no not a big deal and nobody made trouble but I saw the name Natalie Sommerville on the list and it . . . it was familiar, yeah, rung a bell. So, yeah, my concern was animal rights, extreme you know, so ALF or ARM, but there’s nothing on any national database. No. Something twigged. Okay. Okay. Sommerville, two Ms, two Ls. Natalie Sommerville. I can call back. Okay, that’s great. Thanks. No . . . go ahead. G20? Right. No. Makes sense. Yeah. No, that’s good, we’re all good. Thanks, Peter.”
Gary Mackenzie hung up, recalling and worrying now — from the knowing look the Sommerville woman had given him, the way their eyes met, however briefly, across the small parking lot in front of the city pound — that she’d recognized him from his undercover work during the G20 protests back in 2010.
