Cold Hands

by John Niven

  ‘So,’ Walt said, still looking puzzled, ‘how come you’re going to say it was good?’

  ‘Well . . .’ How to explain the adult world of lies and compromise to an eight-year-old? The Regina Advertiser, the paper I wrote for and his mother edited, belonged to that branch of journalism that was basically an advertorial-cum-local-news service. The stories the paper ran were heavily regionally biased: the hockey teams, state political and financial affairs and human interest stories. (On the day Obama was elected the front-page leader was a story about a big government incentive for livestock farmers, with ‘NEW US PRESIDENT!’ crammed into a quarter-page box on the lower right.) How to tell him that the paper depended on the goodwill of the press offices of the studios who provided the review copies of the DVDs and the tickets to screenings and junkets in Calgary and Toronto? Who organised for me occasional phone interviews with B-list movie stars that would be buffed up into breathless ‘Star speaks exclusively to the Advertiser!’ features that shamelessly plugged whatever movie the star was selling. That, in short, the Advertiser was not the New York Times and I was not Pauline Kael at the peak of her powers.

  ‘Mommy’s paper doesn’t really print bad reviews of anything, Walt.’

  He thought about this for a moment. ‘So you’re lying?’

  ‘It’s not a very big lie, Walt.’

  ‘Didn’t you like the bit where –’

  Walt went on, watching his feet, talking to the snow, but I wasn’t listening any more.

  There was a patch of red in the endless white, about twenty yards to my left, surrounded by three strutting crows, headmasterly in their black cloaks, wings like arms stiffly folded behind their backs.

  ‘And then the bit when they attack the –’

  Walt hadn’t seen. I looked up ahead, we were nearly at the main road now, and saw Jan Franklin’s car parked there, the powder-blue BMW, Jan inside with her two boys, Ted and Andy, waiting for the bus, which was coming up Tamora, black and yellow against white.

  ‘Come on, Walt!’ I yelled suddenly. ‘There’s the bus!’ Playfully I scooped him up, turning him away from the slick of red, burying his face into my neck, Walt laughing as I ran the last stretch to the bus stop. The Franklin boys were getting out the car now, waving and shouting. I dropped him down and nuzzled a kiss as he ran to join his friends as the bus pulled up. Panting, hands on my hips, I waved to Jan as she pulled off. ‘See you later!’ I called after Walt and then he was gone, vanishing into the bus.

  I waited a moment, waving, before I walked back, the crows flapping unhurriedly into the sky as I approached, settling down thirty or forty yards away to watch me.

  I had to stuff a fist into my mouth to keep from yelling out. Herby lay on his back in a circle of blood; the blood had melted into the snow, turning it pink. He had been . . . eviscerated.

  The dog’s hairless belly had been torn open from its genitals to its chin and the wound seemed to have been prised open, his ribcage snapped apart, the bones jutting skywards like the pipes of some mad organ. Entrails had been torn loose from the belly cavity and ran away into the snow. My gloved hand still in my mouth, fighting tears and nausea, I moved around to the head. The sockets were black and empty, fringed with blood – the crows had taken his eyes – and his teeth were clamped shut in a ferocious, agonised snarl, the tongue hanging out between them by a sliver, like he’d bitten it off in agony. I stumbled and collapsed, falling to my knees in the snow, my legs gone, shaking.

  Suddenly the dog moved – his back left leg juddering and kicking. I scrambled backwards in terror.

  A rat’s head appeared out of the base of the great tear in the belly, just above the genitals, its whiskers slick with blood as it shook its head in the morning sun. Sick with rage I lashed a boot at it and it jumped clean out of Herby’s stomach and darted off, trailing gore behind it.

  I rolled over and it all came up, the toast and coffee sour and burning in my throat, spurting through my nostrils, hot and melting through the snow, spots and stars dancing in my vision as I retched, the sensation of vomiting in the cold open air, the gore-spattered snow, reminding me of something from long ago.

  3

  WE’RE IN THE clearing in the woods with the bucket full of frogs and toads, dozens of them, from the pond up at Foxes Gate, all squirming in the blue plastic bucket, writhing over each other, hopping up, trying to get out. Tiny little frogs no bigger than your thumb, bloated, oily toads the size of a grown-up’s fist. Tommy is throwing, kind of bowling, the frogs and toads to Banny, who stands there with a four-by-two cocked like a baseball player. He misses and misses, all three of us pissing ourselves as the bewildered creatures fly through the air, caught star-shaped, silhouetted with limbs spread out against the summer sky.

  ‘Fuck sake, man!’ Banny says. ‘Chuck them slower!’

  And Tommy obliges, softly lobbing one of the biggest, fattest toads underarm. It floats up into Banny’s striking range and he’s already swinging the crude bat around hard. He connects and the toad explodes in a burst of viscera – showering me, my face streaked with its stinking blood and guts. Tommy and Banny are howling as, blinking, I fall to my knees and start vomiting chocolate and crisps into the warm earth.

  Catching my breath I look up and see what is left of the toad a few feet away. The head and front legs are still trying to crawl, trying to pull themselves along. I start retching again and in the background I can still hear them laughing, hear Tommy saying, ‘Fuck sake! Did ye see that, man?! He just started boaking his fucking guts up, man!’ And I can hear Banny saying, ‘Look at the state of ye! Ya fucking fanny, ye!’

  ‘Their early cruelties,’ a report would later say, ‘were practised upon animals.’

  4

  I SHOWERED AFTER I’d cleaned up Herby’s remains: putting what was left of him into a green tarpaulin and dragging it round to the pool house, shovelling fresh snow over the gory mess so Walt wouldn’t see it when he came home later. I hung my head under the stinging needles and the thought ran over and over – What did that?

  We often saw deer in the woods and I tried to imagine a stag ripping into Herby’s soft belly with sharp antlers. Ludicrous. A bear? But when had there last been a bear around here? Suddenly I latched onto the most likely explanation – wolves. Hadn’t Ben Dorian talked a couple of times about the grey wolves that raided the trash cans behind his bar now and then? The same wolves hunters sometimes said they saw running in packs in the high pines during deer season? Wolves. It had to be. I turned my face up into the spuming nozzle and let the water batter against my forehead, my temples, my neck.

  After I’d dressed I tried Sammy’s office and was told she was in a meeting. I paced the house in jeans and T-shirt, damp and lightly sweating from the shower, and waited for her to call back.

  Our house was built five years ago. It was designed by Lewis Foster, Canada’s leading contemporary architect, but built to Sammy’s exacting specifications: four and a half thousand square feet over two storeys. Upstairs, what is really ground level, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, my office and the kitchen family room are ranged around an enormous central living area. Downstairs, at basement level, there is a games room with a bar, antique pool table, jukebox and table-tennis table, laundry and utility rooms, a vast four-car garage and Sammy’s office. The construction is largely dark timber and glass, the glass (and there is lots of it – the glazier’s bill alone was well into six figures) with a bluish tint to it, to help combat the prism-bright sunlight that refracts off the snow for half the year.

  Outside there is a heated swimming pool with a large poolhouse-cum-workshop and a tennis court. (Southern Saskatchewan’s winters are brutal, but its summers are warm and arid, often getting up into the high twenties for much of July and August, the time of pool parties and cookouts.) Several outbuildings remained from the old farmhouse we demolished to build the house; the stables, the old dairy, a potting shed.

  We still had the apartment in Regina too: a two-bedroom c
ondo in the redeveloped Warehouse District. The idea was that we’d use it for overnight stays when we went to the theatre, out to dinner, or to the odd Roughriders game. We didn’t do much of that stuff though. We turned into homebodies. Sam used the apartment occasionally if she had to work late when the paper went to bed, or if she had an early meeting.

  All of this from sitting at home reviewing movies for the local paper? I landed on my feet, you could say. Lucked out. Won the lottery. Whatever expression you want to use.

  The phone trilled into life and I actually jumped. I picked up the nearest cordless, the LCD flashing ‘SAM OFFICE’.

  ‘So?’ Sammy said briskly, in work mode. ‘Herby’s dead.’

  A pause. ‘Oh no. Oh shit. Shit.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I found him down by the path, near the bus stop –’

  ‘Fuck, did Walt –’

  ‘No. I managed to distract him. It’s . . . something must have attacked him. A wolf or something.’

  ‘A wolf? When did you ever see a wolf near the house?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what else could have . . . it, it was pretty bad, Sam.’

  Another long pause. ‘What are we going to tell Walt?’

  ‘Christ knows.’

  ‘What did you do with him?’

  ‘I wrapped him up, most of him, in a tarp and put him out in the pool house.’

  ‘Most of him?’

  ‘Like I said, it was pretty bad, Sammy.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Donnie. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Just . . . poor dog. You know?’

  ‘Look, you’d better call the police.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yeah. If there’s a wolf attacking animals on people’s properties they’ll need to know about it. The Franklin boys play down there all the time. You better tell them. And Irene.’

  ‘Right, I . . . I’ll call them now.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, and I could hear the catch in her voice. ‘I’m gonna go and have a little cry now.’

  ‘I’ll see you tonight. I love you.’

  We hung up and I stood there looking out of those blue-tinted windows at the white beyond, thinking about what we were going to tell Walt. As I scanned the treeline fringing our property, I felt a growing sense of unease, as though I could feel the cold grey eyes of a predator still lurking out there, moving silently with sloped shoulders and panting tongue between the icy, dripping branches, its breath smoking in the winter air, blood staining its lips, flecks of meat between its teeth.

  I reached for the phone. They say that a child can progressively understand the death of a pet, a grandparent and, finally, a parent. ‘Yeah?’ I said aloud to the empty house as I thumbed the button for information, for the number for the police station in Alarbus. ‘Who the fuck are “they” anyway?’

  5

  ‘HECKOFA NICE DAY, huh?’ Officer Robertson said as we walked down the path towards where I found the dog. He’d asked to see that first.

  ‘Yeah, it sure is.’ Even after so long out here I still register mild surprise when I hear these Americanisms, Canadianisms, seeping into my speech, when I hear myself asking, say, where the ‘washroom’ is, rather than the toilet. I still have the accent though, a thick Ayrshire brogue that can get guttural when I am excited or angry. I tried to lose it, I tried very hard to lose it at one point, but it was impossible. It just refused to go.

  Robertson was young, early twenties, nearly half my age, with bushy gingery hair spilling from under his peaked cap, his belt heavy with nightstick, flashlight, cuffs and pistol as he negotiated the snowy path. It took him just twenty minutes to get out here. Slow day at Alarbus PD I figured, picturing the three or four cops who worked at the small station fighting to take the call, to ride out here and break up the day. Alarbus was an affluent suburb of Regina; a pet-slaying probably ranked high in the excitement stakes. I used the twenty minutes it took Robertson to get here to write half of my DVD review. (‘This FX-drenched blockbuster that’s a thrill ride for all the family.’ It’s not a very big lie, Walt . . .)

  ‘OK,’ I said as we came up over the rise. ‘Right here is where I found him.’

  There was still the imprint of Herby’s body in the snow, the ring of pink blood.

  ‘Right,’ Robertson said, pushing his cap back, sweat on his forehead and his hands on hips as he looked around, gauging the distance from here to the treeline that bordered the Franklins’ place. ‘Pretty close to the woods. Could be a wolf, like you say. Mind you –’ he looked back towards the main road, the bus stop – ‘he might have been hit by a vehicle, crawled over here and then, you know, a lot of the injuries would be post-mortem. Birds and rats and what have you.’

  ‘Really?’ I thought of Herby’s body, about that giant tear up the belly.

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Do you get many cases of wolves doing this kind of stuff?’

  ‘Now and then. More in summer though. This time of year they tend to stay up in the mountains. There was a fella killed by one north of here, about, ooh, three or four years ago? A hunter. Up toward Saskatoon. But it’s . . . you know, it’s pretty rare.’ Robertson bent down, looking at something. He got a pocketknife out and dug in the snow, spearing something. He held up one of the dog’s kidneys.

  ‘Oh Jeez,’ I said.

  ‘Shame,’ he said, straightening back up, letting the kidney fall back into the snow. ‘Well, I guess we’d better go take a look at the animal, huh?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s out back in the workshop. We can go through the house. Would you like some coffee, Officer?’

  ‘I’d love some coffee.’

  We started the trudge back through the snow. ‘I have to say,’ Robertson said, ‘heckofa nice place you got here, Mr Miller. Heckofa nice.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And your wife’s the newspaper editor?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Here it comes . . .

  ‘Which would make Sam Myers your father-in-law?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  Robertson gave a low whistle that contained awe, admiration and a definite undercurrent of ‘you poor bastard’.

  ‘Yep,’ I said again and we both laughed.

  Old Sam. About the only man with balls enough to name his daughter after him. There weren’t many people in the province who hadn’t heard of Sam Myers.

  My father-in-law was the textbook self-made man. A real working-class hero. Born dirt poor he’d made his first few million in construction back in the late 1970s. His seed money had helped build Regina’s first retail mall on the outskirts of town. Then another. A decade or so later, when the city centre was dying on the vine because all the retail business had followed Old Sam’s money out to the suburbs, he started buying up cheap property downtown, which he redeveloped into condominiums like our apartment in the Warehouse District. He got rich at both ends. In the meantime he got into local media, buying up the Advertiser in the late eighties, right about the time Sammy graduated with her journalism degree.

  She didn’t want to work for the old man at first. Went off and cut her teeth doing crime reporting on the Calgary Star. She was good too. But in the end the old man begged her, offered her crazy money and the chance to become editor by the time she was thirty. Sammy made a real go of the job though, overcoming the prejudices of a lot of hard-nosed subs and section editors in the process. She upped the circulation by 20 per cent over five years and dragged the paper out of the eighties and into the new technology of the nineties, hiring and firing quite a bit in the process.

  I met Sammy at the college in Regina, back in 1998, where I was a mature student on the journalism programme. I’d been in Canada maybe five years then, Toronto first, then out here in Saskatchewan. Sammy came to talk to my class. Even though she was only a few years older than me she seemed impossibly sophisticated and assured, a real journalist, someone living the life I was aspiring to. She talked about the realities
of writing for a local daily paper, about what makes a good story, about the role of the subs and the editor. She was good too; funny and self-deprecating.

  After her talk, during the coffee and biscuits meet and greet, I’d awkwardly, embarrassedly, asked if I could maybe send her a sample of my work. (She told you months later, in bed, that she’d liked you right away because you were so unpushy, you didn’t seem to think you were the reincarnation of Tom Wolfe like so many other students she’d met.) She gave me her email address and was patient with my overwritten, adjective-spattered copy. Soon we were both inserting little jokes and did-you-read this? did you see that? things into the emails. Pretty soon we were emailing each other the gags without any copy attached. She started me on the review section; books, DVDs, records.

  The first kiss – in the bar across from the office.

  Meeting the parents. ‘Christ,’ I said as we came up the drive in Sammy’s car that night. Coming up that drive seemed to take a very long time. Lakeview, the Myers family home, was a fourteen-bedroom Edwardian mansion, hidden behind a grove of elm trees. The only buildings of similar proportions I’d ever visited had been hotels or colleges. ‘Don’t be intimidated,’ Sammy said, pecking my cheek as she rang the doorbell.

  It had been hard not to be. The four of us ate in an oak-panelled dining room, sitting around one end of a table that would comfortably have seated ten more people. The maid brought in the courses and I tried to appear worldly and relaxed amid the flickering candles, the leaded crystal and the heavy flatware.

  But Old Sam had been charm personified during dinner, even more so later, when we sat by the fire in his study with the decanter of single malt. (‘A Scotsman should appreciate this,’ he’d said, handing me a tumbler that must have weighed two pounds. I could have washed my hands in it.) He’d grilled me lightly about my background, my family back home, what had brought me to Toronto, then to Saskatchewan. He’d even asked my 29-year-old advice about a radio station he was thinking of buying. It felt pleasant and convivial enough, it didn’t feel like what it really was: an interrogation.