The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “Turn in here,” Marty said, pointing left to a threestory apartment building with a restaurant, a health food store, and a bank on the ground floor. “I live over the bank,” she said. He parked in front of the bank, but she made no move to get out of the car.

  “Would you like me to come up?” he asked. “Just to make sure everything’s all right?”

  “No, I’ll be okay.” She paused. He waited. Finally, she said, “This may sound funny,” she said. “But I want to hire you.”

  “Hire me?”

  “You’re some kind of private detective, aren’t you?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Rae told me.”

  “I’m not that kind of detective, Marty.”

  “But you used to be a cop.”

  “A long time ago, Marty.” He paused. “What is it you want to hire me to do?”

  “Help prove that Joey didn’t kill Mr. Cartwright. We get along pretty good, him and me. I think he might be ready to settle down. I dunno, maybe we could have a life together.” She looked at Shoe. “He’s a pretty good motorcycle mechanic — he’s good at a lot of things, actually — and I’ve got a good job too. Tim says he couldn’t get along without me, and maybe that’s true, but, well, even if it doesn’t work out, I know the business and his isn’t the only building supply company in town. Anyway, I’ve got a little money put away,” she concluded hopefully. “I could pay you.”

  “Keep your money,” he said.

  “You’ll — you’ll do it?”

  “I’ll do what I can. But what if it turns out he did kill Cartwright?”

  “I’ll have to take that chance, won’t I?” She leaned across the centre console. “Thank you,” she said, and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. She pulled back, blushing. “Sorry.”

  “No problem at all,” he said.

  chapter twenty-four

  For her fourteenth birthday, which fell on St. Valentine’s Day, Shoe had bought Janey a ring. It had cost him two month’s earnings from working part-time in the lumberyard at Dutton’s Hardware and Building Supplies. When he gave it to her, in his parents’ basement family room, she looked at first as though she were going to cry, then she laughed. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You don’t have to wear it all the time,” he said. “Just when we’re together.”

  “Why would I want to wear it at all?”

  He wanted to tell her that he loved her — he had the naive notion that it made a difference — but he knew it would just make her angry. He desperately wanted to say something, anything, but he sat there, looking at her, his world crumbling.

  “God, you’re so dumb,” she said. She stood up. “Don’t call me anymore.” She left.

  Shoe spent a miserable week, again wondering what he’d done wrong. On Friday, after school, he was in his room doing his homework when his mother called him to the telephone in the kitchen. “It’s Janey,” she said.

  Shoe took the handset and looked at his mother. She smiled, hung the dishtowel through the handle of the refrigerator door, and left the room.

  “Hello,” Shoe said into the telephone.

  “How come you haven’t called me?” Janey said.

  “You told me not to.”

  “Do you always do what you’re told?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Do you still have it?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The ring.”

  “No. I gave it to Sandy Dykstra.”

  “You did not.” A pause: “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I won’t wear it all the time, you know,” she said. “I’ll only wear it when we’re together.”

  They started seeing each other again, and when they were together, she wore the ring. She insisted he keep it when they were apart, but she never missed asking him for it when they met.

  Joey Noseworthy quit school in March, two weeks after his sixteenth birthday. Shoe and Joey hadn’t spoken for almost a year, but Shoe had seen Janey talking to him outside the movie theatre in Yorkdale mall, where she refused to go with him for fear that her friends might see them together. They seemed to be arguing. A few days later, while they were walking in the Dells, Shoe asked her what she and Joey had been arguing about.

  “Are you spying on me?” she demanded.

  “No, I — ”

  She yanked the ring off her finger. “Take your stupid ring.”

  She threw it at him. It bounced off his chest and fell to the ground. She scuffed at the leaves and twigs and rotting branches where it had fallen and ran off. He started after her, but she had always been able to outrun him. He went back and tried to find the ring. He looked for it for almost an hour before giving up. The next day he went back again. Janey was on her hands and knees on the ground, grubbing through the decomposing leaves, and crying.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “I found it and took it back to the store.”

  “No you didn’t. I watched you. Help me find it.”

  He got down on his knees and together they looked for it. They didn’t find it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, helping her to her feet. The knees of their jeans were wet and muddy.

  She took him to her cave. There were still patches of snow on the north-facing slope, where the sun didn’t reach. The spring runoff hadn’t been kind to Janey’s cave, and Shoe thought that one of the boulders had shifted slightly, but the air mattress and sleeping bag were relatively dry.

  They made love. Shoe had recently been introduced to the mysteries of the female orgasm from reading a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover he’d found in Hal’s bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” Janey asked.

  “I’m trying to make you come,” Shoe said.

  “Girls don’t come. Only boys. Stop it.”

  “I thought you liked this,” he said. “Maybe I’m not doing it right.”

  “I said, stop it!” she said angrily, and pushed him away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s okay.” She reached for him.

  He took her wrist, so slim it was like a child’s in his large hand. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t know how to answer.

  “How do you know girls come?” she said.

  “I read about it.”

  “You read too much. Okay,” she said, shifting around in the small space. “Let’s do it to each other.”

  He’d read about that too; the reality was more interesting. Did Janey have an orgasm? He didn’t know. She didn’t say and he wasn’t sure what to look for. And it was difficult to concentrate. She never stopped him again, though.

  Things started looking up. He wanted to buy her another ring. She said, no, she didn’t need a ring. She was his girl, she said, no matter what anyone thought, but it still had to be their secret.

  Shoe obtained his driving permit in April and, with it, use of the family car — at least when his mother, father, or older brother weren’t using it. Naturally, Janey wouldn’t let him pick her up at her house; she didn’t want her stepfather or stepbrother to know she and Shoe were seeing each other. Shoe thought it was unlikely that Dougie didn’t already know, but he knew it was useless to argue with her. She wouldn’t let him take her to the local drive-in restaurant, where there was too great a risk of being seen with Shoe by someone she knew, or park in the Dells at first, for the same reason, but she eventually relented on the latter.

  Shoe bought gasoline at the Canadian Tire station where Joey worked. Five or six dollars, about what he earned in an afternoon at Mr. Dutton’s store, would fill the tank. Joey refused to serve him, always getting someone else to do it. Unless Janey was with him. Then Joey would fill the tank, check the oil, clean the windshield, and take Shoe’s money, all without a speaking a word to him. Shoe tried to engage him in conversation a few times, to no avail.

  “Why do you keep buyin
g gas there?” Janey asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Shoe said.

  Late one Sunday afternoon in July, after a drive in the countryside north of the city, Shoe dropped Janey off near her house, then drove to the gas station. As he pulled up in front of the pumps, he saw Joey in the next lane, sitting astride a rumbling Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Their eyes locked, and for that brief moment, Shoe thought Joey was going to say something to him. He didn’t. He gunned the bike, dropped it into gear, and roared away. That was the last time Shoe saw him.

  On a warm and wet Saturday night, a month after Joey had left, Shoe and Janey were parked in the Dells. It was about eleven o’clock, before there were gates at the park entrance. They’d been to a movie — she still wouldn’t let him take her to the theatre at Yorkdale — after which they had driven to the Dells to park and make out. They were snuggled together in the front seat, occasionally talking, but mostly just content to be together. Lights washed over the rain-spotted windows as another car arrived or departed. The Dells was a popular spot. Suddenly, the dome light came on as the passenger side door burst open. A man hauled Janey out, almost literally by the scruff of her neck. Shoe surged out of the car, to be confronted by Dougie Hallam and his stepfather, Freddy. Freddy handed Janey to Dougie. He held her by the arm. She squirmed helplessly in his grasp.

  “You fucking my little girl, punk,” Freddy Hallam said to Shoe. He was slightly shorter than Shoe, but thick and powerful and aggressive. Shoe smelled alcohol on his breath.

  “Sure they’re doin’ it, Pop,” Dougie said. “I can smell it on them.”

  “Shut up,” Freddy Hallam snapped. “Kid,” he said to Shoe, stabbing him in the chest with a hard stubby finger. “You’re lucky there’s other cars here, ’cause if we were alone I’d put some serious hurt on you for what you’re doin’ with my little girl. You come sniffin’ around her again, I’ll for sure kill you. Understand me? Your own mother won’t recognize your corpse.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Shoe said, with more bravado than good sense. Engines roared to life and headlights came on as cars began to head for the exit.

  Freddy Hallam laughed. “You oughta be. Maybe you’re tough enough to take my boy here — ”

  “I told you, Pop,” Dougie said. “He took me by surprise.”

  “Shut up. He still took you.” He rounded on Shoe again. “Believe me, kid, you ain’t tough enough by half to take me. You wanna find out right now, go ahead. Take your best shot.”

  “Shoe, don’t,” Janey cried.

  “Buck buck b-buck,” Dougie Hallam crowed.

  “Shut up,” Freddy Hallam snapped.

  He took Janey and held her by the arm as Dougie got behind the wheel of the car. With a feeling of complete helplessness, Shoe watched as Janey’s stepfather threw her into the backseat of the car and slammed the door.

  “Stay away from her,” he said again as he got into the car and pulled the door closed.

  The car fishtailed as Dougie accelerated away in a spray of gravel that spattered like hailstones against the side of Shoe’s father’s car. Shoe waited a few minutes, until his heart stopped pounding and his hands stopped shaking, then got into the car and drove home.

  Shoe didn’t see Janey for more than three weeks. She didn’t return to her summer job in the stockroom at Dutton’s. Hoping to at least catch a glimpse of her, he walked or drove or rode his bike by her house two or three times a day, or watched from the woods. He never once saw her. He tried leaving notes in the cave, but it seemed she’d abandoned it; a family of raccoons had moved in. On Saturday afternoon of the Labour Day weekend, he was sitting disconsolately on the old tree that had fallen across the creek, trying to compose another letter to her, when he heard someone slipping and sliding down the steep path from the top of the ridge. A moment later Janey emerged from the underbrush. She was not alone.

  His name was Will. He was older than Shoe by a year or two. He rode a motorcycle and had a job driving a Pepsi-Cola delivery truck. After Will came Tony, and after him, Don, then Jimmy, Steve, Jack, and so on. None of them lasted more than a week or two, a month at most. All were older, most had full-time menial jobs, and rode motorcycles or drove souped-up cars or pickups. It took a while, but Shoe eventually gave up hope that he and Janey would ever get back together, even temporarily. They remained friends, though, of a sort, until she graduated from high school with the second highest average in the history of the school. The last time he saw her was the day she told him she’d taken the job with the airline.

  chapter twenty-five

  It was almost eight o’clock. Sunset was still forty minutes away, and the sky was tinted a strange shade of pink-tinged saffron. In Hal’s absence, Shoe had been conscripted to man the barbecue. “Girls don’t grill,” Rachel had told him. “These girls, anyway.” She and Maureen sat at the picnic table, an almost empty bottle of Chilean Merlot on the table between them. Shoe’s parents sat next to each other in lawn chairs, Shoe’s father with a bottle of beer, his mother with a glass of Rachel’s single malt whisky and plenty of water. Shoe had a bottle of beer, which he’d barely tasted, on the end of the picnic table next to the barbecue. Shoe had turned the flame to low, and had started moving the hamburger patties to the back of the grill, when he heard the clatter of a motorcycle engine in the driveway. The bike shut down with a rattle, and a moment later, Marty Elias came round the corner of the garage. She was wearing a slightly too big black leather motorcycle jacket and carrying a full-face helmet. Her inky black hair was flattened to the shape of her skull.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling uncertainly, running the fingers of her free hand through her hair.

  “Marty,” Rachel said, with a smile. She got up. “I’m so glad you decided to join us. Sit. Would you like a glass of wine or a beer?”

  “Um, well,” Marty said. She looked at Shoe, an expression close to panic on her face.

  “What’s wrong, Marty?”

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Of course,” Shoe said.

  “In private?” she added apologetically.

  Shoe handed the barbecue tongs to Rachel and followed Marty to the front of the house. A road-weary, two-cylinder Triumph motorcycle stood in the drive. The bike smelled of old oil and dried gasoline and the paint was chipped and peeling from the dented fenders and fuel tank. The tires looked new and the bike was equipped with oversized saddlebags. Marty laid her helmet on the cracked leather of the saddle and unzipped the jacket. The front of her T-shirt was sweat-stained below her breasts.

  “Joey called me,” she said. “He wants me to meet him, bring him my bike. Do you think — I mean, could you maybe come with me?”

  “I could,” Shoe said. “If you’re sure that’s what you want to do.”

  Marty lifted the motorcycle helmet off the saddle, held it for a moment, as if she were going to put it in, then put it down again. “I know Sergeant Lewis told me I should call the police if I heard from him, but I — I can’t do that. I was thinking, maybe you could talk him into turning himself in.”

  “I could try.”

  “He didn’t do it, y’know.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Uh, no, but he got real mad when I asked him. ‘What do you think?’ he said. I told him I didn’t think he did it. He said, ‘Well, there you go.’”

  Not exactly a vigorous denial, Shoe thought. “Where does he want to meet?” he asked.

  “At Downsview Park,” Marty said.

  Downsview Park was a former Canadian Forces base east of Keele Street. Decommissioned in the early 1990s, the huge area included a film production centre, an aerospace assembly plant, a municipal airport, and a vast public park. In 2003, the Rolling Stones had performed in the park for half a million people, along with AC/DC, the Guess Who, Blue Rodeo, and a number of other bands, as part of a daylong open-air benefit concert to reassure the world that Toronto was still safe following the SARS outbreak. Pope John Paul II had performed
there for even more people on World Youth Day in 2002.

  “The police may have been watching you,” Shoe said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I took a couple of detours getting here a car couldn’t follow.”

  Shoe didn’t think it would take much imagination on the part of the police to guess she might be coming to see him.

  Marty zipped up the motorcycle jacket, donned the helmet, and threw her leg over the Triumph. “You shouldn’t have any trouble following me.” Her voice was muffled by the face shield of the helmet. “Just watch for the smoke.”

  Shoe asked her to wait a moment. He made his excuses to the others, without going into detail, then got his wallet and car keys from the house and went out to the car. Marty flipped the start lever out with her foot, stood on it, and bounced. The Triumph coughed and emitted a thin cloud of blue smoke, but with a little coaxing, started on the first kick.

  He didn’t have any trouble following her. The Triumph did indeed burn oil, but Marty also took it easy, staying well within the speed limits, coming to a full rest at stop signs, and respecting yellow lights. She was a cautious rider, or a considerate one, or both, and Shoe was still right behind her when they turned into the main entrance to the big park. They followed the winding access road to the large — and apparently full — parking lot, where Marty stopped and gestured for Shoe to pull alongside her. She raised the face shield of her helmet.

  “He said to meet him behind the bandstand,” she said.

  She pointed in the direction of a tall structure on the far side of a large open area that thronged with people, half of which seemed to be children. Many people stood, swaying to the beat of Celtic dance music produced by the dozen or so musicians fiddling and jigging on the stage. Far more people sprawled on the grass or sat in folding chairs. Hawkers moved through the crowd selling soft drinks, bottled water, and snacks. The sun was a dark, burnt orange, huge and low over the western suburban skyline.