Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  “Jesus! Don’t they teach you idiots how to drive?”

  “You could do better, McCurdy?”

  “Fuck you! Let me out before you kill me!”

  I heard him trying to open the door. But it doesn’t open. It’s a cop car, imbécile!

  The sky lit up with lightning, and the boom of thunder was almost instantaneous. The car skidded again and we were heading for a curve. “Câlisse!”

  Before I could say another word, the car left the road on the turn and started to spin. I tried to correct it and wrenched the steering wheel to the right. But there was a massive oak tree on our left and we were flying right into it. Time slowed down. The car and the tree were going to hit. McCurdy was yelling curses in the back seat. And I was thinking, So this is how it will end. And before I could formulate another thought, or a prayer, I heard what sounded like the blast of a bomb as two tons of metal crashed into the tree, and the driver’s side of my vehicle crumpled and smashed in on me. There was an explosion of pain in my head and my left leg and arm. And then, nothing.

  When I came to, all I was conscious of was the excruciating pain, and blood dripping down my face. I tried to move my leg and I cried out. I knew it was broken. At first I couldn’t even remember how it happened, then my head cleared and I pictured the accident as if the tree had been hurtling towards me. But why was I out here in the woods? There was somebody . . . an arrest. Somebody in the back seat. I tried to turn around, but I couldn’t. It was agony even reaching up for my rear view mirror, but I got it in my hand and adjusted it and looked into the back seat. Nobody there. Fucking Jeff McCurdy, that was it. The car was damaged and crumpled enough that he managed to escape. This was going to look brilliant back at the detachment: Maguire wrecked the car, let a suspect escape, busted his leg, and would be off work, just fucking great. I reached for the radio to call dispatch. The maudite radio was busted out, too. Nobody around, no houses, car off the road and out of sight. Nobody to help me. I faded out again.

  “Jésus-Christ!” What was that? How long was I out? What was happening?

  Somebody was opening my smashed door. Dougald! Through the rain I could see lights — there was an ambulance. A couple of paramedics. The woman I knew, Stacey, but didn’t know her partner. She called him Freddie. They were easing me out. I tried not to be a wuss about the pain. Gentle hands got me onto a board. I heard snatches of the paramedics’ low-key conversation. “Closed tibial fracture . . . deep laceration to his forearm . . . scalp wound . . . loss of blood . . . good thing he wasn’t out here by himself any longer . . .” You didn’t have to be Doctor Kildare to know what they meant. I could have died out there if they hadn’t found me. They shone a light in my eyes, and Stacey said something about the pupils. Then she asked me a bunch of questions, like what’s my name, what day is this, where are we, and so on. She appeared to like my answers, so I must have passed the test. I thanked them and raised my head a bit to look around. And who did I see but Jeff McCurdy! His hair dripping, his clothes plastered to his skin.

  “Let them look at your forehead, Jeff,” Dougald said.

  “I’m fine,” McCurdy replied.

  But the paramedics had a look at him, did the pupil test on him, too, and did some other stuff.

  Then I saw Dougald shaking McCurdy’s hand. “Thank you, Jeff.”

  Jeff didn’t say anything, just nodded. Then he sent a quick glance my way and asked the paramedics, “He gonna be all right?”

  “Broken leg, deep cuts on his head and left arm,” Stacey said, “but they’ll fix him up in Sydney. Doc will probably give him a note for some time off work.”

  I caught Dougald’s eye and turned my head slightly to indicate McCurdy. Dougald answered my unspoken question. “Jeff got out, tried to rouse you, and couldn’t. He knew it would be unwise to try and move you. He turned off the ignition to reduce the risk of fire. Then he hightailed it to the nearest house, which is nearly two miles away, pounded on the door, and asked to use their phone. Told them it was an emergency, that one of the Mounties had crashed his car. They brought Jeff in, and he made the call. Gave excellent directions. And here we are.”

  I looked at McCurdy. “Jeff, you may just have saved my life here. Je te remercie de tout mon coeur.”

  No smart remarks in reply. He just kind of shuffled his feet and looked at the ground. At that moment, I loved that kid almost as much as I did my own.

  After young McCurdy saved my life, I didn’t have the stomach to bust his ass for the break-in at Collie MacDonald’s. My take on it was that he broke into the house in a misguided effort to find something that would help him locate Bonnie or, more likely, something that would connect Collie to his daughter’s disappearance. It was still a serious criminal offence. Maximum sentence for an adult breaking into a dwelling house is life in prison. Nobody ever gets life, or anything close, but it’s there on the books. Maximum prison time on the books for McCurdy, as a young offender, would be three years.

  Anyway, I had a broken leg, and they fixed that. They put me in a cast that went above my knee. They stitched up the cuts in my head and arm. They told me I had a mild concussion. They kept me in the hospital Friday and Saturday night. I hobbled into the detachment Sunday morning on crutches and was told to go home because I was on the DL, the disabled list. I ignored them, and I phoned Collie and had a word with him. He came around to my way of thinking when he heard about my busted leg and Jeff’s actions after the crash. He figured, the way I did, that Jeff had been acting out of desperation when he committed the break-in, hoping to find out what happened to Bonnie.

  After a round of below-the-belt jibes about my below-the-knee break and below-standard skills as a driver of the force’s valuable vehicular assets, I escaped from the detachment and got into the car with Dougald. He was of the same mind about Jeff McCurdy.

  “Let’s go see him. But you won’t be able to hobble very far if his old man decides to run us off the property.”

  “I’ll lift my leg and whack him with it. So we have a plan of action. On y va!”

  “All right.” He started the motor, and we headed out for Kinlochiel.

  When we pulled the car in beside the McCurdys’ ramshackle brown house, the missus ran out to meet us.

  “Christ, she’s on her nerve, that one.”

  “You’d be on your nerve, too, Pierre, if your partner for life was Bonsai McCurdy.”

  “The only partner that vaurien should have is a cellmate in Dorchester.”

  “Fact that he isn’t in there means we haven’t been doing our jobs. But that’s for another day. For now, we’ll deal with the son.”

  Dougald got out of the car. It took me a little longer, but out I got and righted myself with my crutches.

  “What is it?” the woman practically shrieked at us.

  “Mrs. McCurdy,” Dougald began.

  But she blasted right over whatever he was going to say. “Did you find him?”

  What now? Don’t tell me the young fellow had run away. Just when we were about to give him a break.

  “What’s happened, Mrs. McCurdy?” I asked her.

  “He’s gone! I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him! What am I going to do? You guys have to find him!”

  “Take a minute and calm down and tell us.”

  “He just up and —”

  “You’re saying Jeff hasn’t come home?”

  “Jeff?” She looked and sounded as if she had no idea who Jeff was. As they say, we don’t choose our parents. “It’s not him. It’s my husband!”

  Good. Bonsai McCurdy out of the family home. How could that be bad news? But his wife was taking it hard. Difficult to say how the daughter was taking it. She came out of the house, and this time they had her tarted up in a pair of skinny white jeans and a tight black fake-leather vest. You expected to see a motorcycle gang’s patch on the back of it. Made me think the force shou
ld open a new division: the Royal Canadian Mounted Under-Age Fashion Police. My wife, Solange, would be the staff sergeant. The kid gave us a wary look and then said to her mother, “Is Pop gone?”

  And the mother answered, “He’s missing, hon! Maybe something’s happened to him!”

  “Oh, no,” said the little one. If I could characterize the expression on that thin little face at that moment, I’d call it one of hope. And I’d bet my badge that she wasn’t hoping Daddy would be coming home any time soon.

  The mother came up practically under our noses. And she didn’t smell like a rose. “Has he been arrested for something?”

  “What do you think he might have been arrested for, Mrs. McCurdy?”

  “Nothing! He didn’t do nothing.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But he’s gone.”

  “What makes you think he won’t be back sometime soon?”

  “He took a bunch of clothes. He packed up and left!”

  I put on my best Sergeant Renfrew voice and said, “Well, if he left of his own accord, ma’am, it’s not a matter for the police.”

  “Maybe he . . .”

  Maybe he hit the big time. Got picked to star in the latest kung fu movie. I wasn’t interested in the whereabouts of a guy we were all better off without. And then Jeff emerged from the house. And presented us with an opportunity we never thought we would ever have. The chance to build up young Jeff McCurdy in the eyes of his, well, his one remaining parent.

  “Good afternoon, Jeff.”

  “Hey.”

  “Mrs. McCurdy, did you know your son saved my life?”

  “What?” She whirled and looked at Jeff.

  “No,” he started to say, “I just . . .”

  “I crashed my car in the storm when Jeff was in the back. I hit a tree and mangled the car. I was injured and lost a lot of blood, and I blacked out. He could have taken off and left me there. But he didn’t. He looked me over and saw that I couldn’t be moved, so he turned off the ignition and went for help. He ran two miles in the pissing rain, got to a house, called in the accident, and led the ambulance back to the scene. If not for him, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

  I could see the young fellow trying to cover his pleasure at being praised for something. The young sister stared at him, wide-eyed. But his mother, well, that was another story. She said, “Really?” And I opened my mouth to pile on some more congratulations, but she returned to the only subject that was of interest to her. “But, about my husband? I need to get him back! I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  “Excuse us, ma’am. We’re here to see your son. Jeff?” I jerked my head in the direction of the car, and Jeff walked towards it.

  “You have to find him for me!”

  “You say your husband packed a bag and left on his own two feet, point.” And I don’t give a shit one way or the other. Jeff and Dougald got into the front of the car, and I got into the back.

  I told Jeff what was on my mind. “We don’t want to proceed against you on the house break, Jeff.”

  “Are you serious?” He twisted around to look at me. He didn’t even try to be nonchalant. Relief was written all over his face.

  “Collie’s fine with the idea, too. He knows you were upset about Bonnie. He swears to us ‘on the grave of his ancestors’ that he had nothing to do with her disappearance. We tend to believe him.”

  “Yeah, he’s not a bad guy. He doesn’t seem like the kind of father who would do something to his own kid. Or any kid. I just thought maybe he was on the booze one night and got wild and maybe did something to her by accident. Hit her or something. Him or Andy Campbell. It’s always somebody’s father or stepfather, right? But maybe not this time. Andy’s not a bad fella either. So it must be some psycho out there that nobody knows about.”

  “So, Jeff, were you and Bonnie dating or . . .”

  “Jesus, man, she’s only twelve. I’m fifteen. She was a friend of mine, that’s all. And okay, you found some books and stuff at that basement. My hideaway. I’m a smart guy, all right? Not the idiot everybody thinks I am. I did some stupid things. Got arrested. You know all that shit. But I’m not fucking stupid! Just never paid attention to stuff in school. You know? So I flunked some courses. English and French. I have a head for math; anyone can tell you that. But English and grammar and all those details? I never learned it right. And French, same thing. Bonnie noticed I couldn’t see very well, close up, you know, so she went and found me a pair of reading glasses. She gave them to me; that’s why I kept them. I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing them in public. But she isn’t the type to laugh at people. So, with the books and all that, she was . . .” Jeff twisted away from me and stared out the passenger side window of the car. We gave him all the time he needed. “She was helping me with some of my school work, so I could pass those courses and get on the right track in high school. She’s younger, sure, but she knows all that stuff. Grammar and French verbs, all that.

  “She should become a teacher. Or a writer. She reads poems and stuff, on her own time! But she doesn’t brag about it; she even laughed about getting a D in English last year. The teacher wrote everybody’s name on the board beside the names of these poets they had to write a paper on. Bonnie copied the guy’s name down wrong. It was supposed to be a guy called Keats. His name looked almost the same as the name of some other guy, and she went and studied the other guy instead. And she said she fell right in love with his poems, even though she didn’t understand a lot of what they said. So she went to the library and got a book about him to help her understand it all, and she wrote this really good essay and the teacher gave her a D because it was the wrong guy. But she didn’t care because she loved this other poet guy so much.”

  “Must have been Y-E-A-T-S,” Dougald said. “It looks as if it would rhyme with Keats but it doesn’t. It rhymes with ‘mates.’ I know he was Irish and Keats was English, but don’t ask me to quote anything they wrote!”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Oh, and the teacher caved in and changed her mark to an A because her paper was as good as what somebody in high school would do. And Bonnie printed out a bunch of the Yeats poems on sheets of paper. There was ‘blood-dimmed’ something, and something else was ‘as pitiless as the sun.’ Whatever that was about, she liked it. And there was one about a ‘terrible beauty.’ I didn’t get that. I figured the guy should have made up his mind and said the thing was either beautiful or terrible, not both. But these guys don’t think the way the rest of us do. And —” He looked spooked. “Holy Christ!”

  “What?”

  “There was another one she liked, and it was about a child being stolen!”

  We were all silent for a few minutes after that.

  Then Jeff spoke again. “I don’t remember the words to all those poems she had, but I remembered the book I needed for my final exam, and I remembered the grammar she explained to me. So, that’s what Bonnie is like. She was helping me out. I want to make something of myself, not just be an arsehole that everybody looks down on. Another one of the McCurdys with a criminal record and no job.”

  “You’ll do it, Jeff, I know you will.” I waited a beat and then, “So, if somebody saw you out with Bonnie at night . . .”

  “She would have snuck out so we could go to the Good Food cellar and do a whole lot of boring school work. We sure as fuck didn’t want anybody to know that! Try and live that down? I don’t think so.”

  “Sure enough. That was private.”

  “The old man saw us walking together one night, me carrying a bunch of school books and her beside me.”

  “Your father.”

  “Yeah, him. I was such a fucking jerk, I grabbed Bonnie in a clinch because that’s the only thing the old man understands. And that way I could hide the books in between me and her, so Bonsai wouldn’t be able to see them. He’d never let me hear the end of it. That’
s not what girls are for, in his opinion, not school work! He went by and made this really gross gesture over the back of her head at me. I felt like a shit. And then she went missing, after me treating her like that!”

  I could imagine how lousy the poor kid felt with that picture stuck in his mind.

  “But after your father passed by, you continued on with Bonnie, with the books, and did some work the way you usually did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She probably understood why you took hold of her.”

  “She must have. She’s heard all about life with Bonsai.”

  “Good to have a friend to talk to.”

  “True.”

  “So, what else did you and Bonnie talk about?”

  “Stuff. You know. She even wanted to teach me some music. To play the pipes or the whistle. I like music, and I like her family’s music, but no way in the wide world could I get up and play an instrument even if I wanted to!”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you crazy? Everyone would laugh their holes out at me. ‘Look at McCurdy up there, Bonsai McCurdy’s kid playing music. He sucks. What a loser.’ Yeah, as if I would be dumb enough to set myself up for that!”

  Listening to him, I couldn’t help wondering why somebody hadn’t taken him and his sister out of that home years ago. Government, social workers, somebody. Give them another chance in life. But that’s the last thing I would have said to him. Instead, I got back to Bonnie MacDonald. “Jeff, did she ever tell you about anybody she was having problems with? Some guy watching her? Anything like that?”

  He shook his head. “Not a word. If she had told me about any creep like that, I would have —”