Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  “Pardon me?”

  “Isn’t he rich?”

  “Uh, yes, I suppose, but he’s local.”

  “He’s local and rich, very well connected, an elite, and a politician.” I paused. “Don’t you think maybe that’s how he solved your problem?”

  “He is not a politician. He is adamant about that. He is just a guy from around here who cares about real people.”

  I let the “real people” comment pass and jumped on the other ridiculous thing he had said.

  “I thought he was running for election? If he says he is not a politician, then it seems to me that he is lying to you. If I’m a mechanic and I say I’m not really a mechanic, I’m actually your buddy, in order to get you to pay me to fix your car, then I’m lying to you. So let’s see what we have here: a rich, privileged guy who is ‘against the elites,’ and a liar. I think that about sums him up.”

  There was absolute silence in the room. Mom and Dad both had their mouths open and they were eating. It was not a pretty sight.

  “What’s so bad about being elite at something anyway?” I continued. “I like watching elite hockey players and I want an elite teacher to teach me in school, an elite doctor to keep me healthy. Don’t you?”

  “We don’t watch hockey,” said Bonnie in a very quiet voice. I guess it was the only thing she could come up with. Sometimes she looked a little embarrassed at the things her husband said.

  “I think he is answering his own phone,” I continued, on a roll, “to get you to think he cares. To get his butt into power so he can put forward whatever plans he has, and he’s sucking you in. Think about who this guy is, Bill.” I hadn’t referred to our esteemed host by his first name yet, but at this point, I didn’t care. “Who are his parents, what’s he ever done for a living?”

  “His father was…was a businessman, in real estate, quite successful,” said Bill.

  “Ah, yes, a man of the people. How successful?”

  “Very. Grew up here, was here for a long time.”

  “Was? Not here anymore?”

  “He…he owns some hotels in Halifax now.”

  “So, Jim’s dad has become a foreigner. When did he move away? I thought Jim has always been a local guy?”

  “Well, he was born here, and then went to Halifax with his family. He has come back recently. Has some business ventures in the area, got on city council, as I told you. His father ran for office apparently, too, way back when. In Ottawa for a while, then lost, I’ve heard.”

  “Wow, so our Jim is not only a politician who says he isn’t a politician, but he is the son of a politician—one who held high office for a while!”

  “Dylan, have you tried the fried tomatoes?” asked Mom, who was giving me a really ugly look.

  “So,” I continued, “I understand why Jim Fiat, the politician who isn’t a politician, the elite who is against the elites, might be big on all sorts of local issues, but why does he talk so much about immigration? We studied the levels of government and their powers in school last year and immigration is a federal issue, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and he is running for federal office,” said Bill, looking really peeved now, saying this as if I were a moron.

  “I understand that. It’s just that I wonder why it is such a big deal to him, focused as he says he is on local things, on the ‘little guy’ around here?”

  “It is part of his whole brand,” said Bill.

  “Brand?”

  “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t put it that way. It is simply part of who he is and what he believes in. He is a family man. You know,” added Bill, glancing at Dad, “you see him all the time on the street and on the beach, shaking hands with average people, talking to the fishermen.”

  “Does he have kids?”

  “No, but—”

  “Does he plan to? Will he spend all his free time with them…or with his dream of being a big-shot in Ottawa?”

  “Dylan, that’s enough,” said Dad.

  I was not in the mood, though, not at all. Not after all Antonine and I had been through, not after Bill barely spoke to her, not after hearing about how her dad was treated in this town.

  “I think he—” began Bill.

  “Why does Jim care about who comes into this country? Millions of people in the world can barely survive. I’m a kid and I know that. Shouldn’t we open our arms to them? Especially given how privileged we are here...how privileged he is.”

  “If you will let me finish,” said Bill testily. He paused. “Jim Fiat believes in family values, local values, whether you accept that or not. He is not ‘against immigration,’ as you put it. I would not give a man with that sort of racist policy a second of my time. But he believes we have to be smart about who enters Canada. He believes in the ‘Canadian Way’ and, young man, I do as well. We want people coming here who at least share some of our values. You will understand when you get older.”

  Ah, yes, that old chestnut.

  “Have you ever thought about the possibility that, in some cases, some of the people coming here might have better values than some of us?”

  Silence again. Then I excused myself. I left the room and went out to the beach without looking back, like a jet fighter who had just strafed the enemy and then flown back up into the sky. Even the dogs didn’t seem to want to look at me. That confrontation actually made me feel good, though. It made me feel like I, little old Dylan Maples, had values, and I had stood up for them. The only thing I wasn’t feeling very good about was what it was going to be like when I came back to the house later. I quickly stopped myself from worrying about that, though, and put my head into a “live for the moment” kind of mood. It was Saturday, too, perfect for school kids to head to the beach. We were going home on Monday, but I was pretty sure I would find Antonine on the beach at Youghall that very morning.

  I almost ran there, thinking about the details I had gone over in my head in bed last night, about she and her father seeing a figure slashing around in the water, and him reaching into the bay and pulling something out.

  It was a warm morning and, just as I predicted, there were lots of people on the beach, adults and kids. Young couples were walking around holding hands or tanning together on towels, and little ones were screaming as they ran in and out of the waves. Antonine, however, was not hard to spot. I saw her from a mile away. There was a bonus, too: she was wearing a bathing suit. A black bikini. Man, she looked great.

  “Hi!” she called out with a big grin, waving from far away.

  She was alone again. I had noticed she had never come to the beach with friends…kind of like the way I was operating these days back home.

  “Where’s your bathing suit?” she asked, and I wondered, for a second, if she was even more like me than I imagined.

  I didn’t say anything about the things that were occupying my mind last night. We just goofed around. I rolled up my pant legs and walked with her to the water. We kept doing the same things over and over without getting tired of them. She would splash me, she would move toward a wave, and then it would engulf her and she would scream and come running back out, sometimes grabbing my hand when she did. I think I was happier than I had been in years.

  But I needed to talk to her.

  Finally, we lay down on her big beach towel.

  “You know I have to go in a couple of days, right?” I said. “Not even two full ones.”

  “I know.” She said it quietly, almost sadly, which kind of made me feel good.

  “So, if you want to figure out anything more about the ghost ship, about what your father saw, then we need to do that now.”

  “What else can we figure out? It’s like we’re at a dead end with it, just like everyone else who has investigated it. People see it all the time, and in numbers, so there’s a moving fire out there, there’s no question…but there is absolutely n
o explanation for it.”

  I was thinking about what Florence Green had said, about “something in between.”

  “What my dad saw, though,” continued Antonine, “was weird. Weirder than all the rest, and embarrassing. I think we should just leave it alone.”

  “Not me.”

  “What?” She looked over at me.

  “I think we have to go with the idea that there really is some sort of actual ship out there, even treat the details of what your dad saw—and what I kind of saw—as real.”

  “You do?”

  “Let’s consider it all to be absolutely factual from now on. You and your father glimpsed someone in the water near the ship, didn’t you? Someone on fire?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I remember, anyway. But maybe I’m making it up.”

  “Don’t say that. Treat it as real, and examine it again in your memory. You said your dad just left the scene...but that isn’t true, is it? He did something.”

  Antonine paused for a moment. “He pulled something out of the water,” she said after a while, her voice quiet, as if she were seeing her father reaching into the bay long ago.

  “Yes.”

  “But maybe I made that up, too.”

  “No, these are facts, nothing less. Did you see what he had in his hands?”

  “Not really. I just remember him pulling it out.”

  “What did he do with it after that?”

  “He put it in our boat, I think. I remember not wanting to look at it. I was terrified.”

  I had to ask her.

  “Was it a body?”

  Antonine thought about it for a while.

  “I don’t think so. Dad would have done something about that. He would have told the authorities. I was with him a lot over the next few days, I remember that, and he wasn’t away much or doing anything suspicious. I think, even as a kid I would have sensed that. You know, him slipping away to…bury something.” I could see her swallow.

  “So, whatever he had, he may have kept close by.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she nodded. “Anybody else would have rushed to the local paper with it too, but not Dad. Like I keep telling you, he was worried about his reputation and would not have wanted to seem like he was in any way unstable.”

  “Where would he put something—not a body—that he wanted to keep close by so no one else could find it?

  Antonine thought for a moment again. Then her eyes widened.

  “He…he had one place where he kept things, where no one else went. I told you about it.” She looked out toward the water. “I…I remember, when he was dying, he said to me: ‘little one, you know where I keep my treasures, don’t you?’ I forget exactly what he was talking about, but I recall that he gave me a longing look, as if he wanted to say more. Treasures! That’s what he called the tools and other things he kept in his shed in the backyard.”

  I remembered seeing that little building, sitting there on their lawn like an off-limits shrine.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  14

  Treasure

  We didn’t walk back into Bathurst, we ran. At least, we started out that way. Man, Antonine could motor. She must have been on the track team or something because I not only found it hard to keep up with her, but I was sucking air in about five minutes and Antonine looked like she was barely breathing. I guess that’s what happens when you give up hockey.

  At the end of Youghall Drive where it meets busy St. Peter Avenue, which brings you into town, we caught a bus and took it almost to the end of her street. Then, we realized we had a problem: her mom was home, the little car parked in the driveway. We cut across the neighbour’s lawn in order to keep out of view and then sneaked around to the rear of the house. Antonine and I got onto our hands and knees and scurried across the backyard, hiding in the playground equipment, until we got to the shed.

  “I don’t think anyone has been in here for a long time,” she whispered.

  It actually didn’t make any sense to be that quiet since her mom wouldn’t be able to hear us from inside the house if we just spoke in normal voices. Antonine reached up, turned the doorknob, and we went inside.

  There was a large work table at the far end of the shed with a vice grip and a power saw on it, and some tools arranged neatly on top. Other tools were hanging from hooks on the walls, and there were stacks of lumber piled up on the floor. It had the fragrance of wood and work.

  Antonine breathed deeply. “It smells like Dad,” she said.

  “He used the word ‘treasure,’” I said, “could that mean something other than just his tools?”

  As I said it, my eyes rested on a big wooden chest, like a container for a pirate’s stash, on the floor in the corner next to the table. When I turned to Antonine, I noticed she was looking at it too.

  “In there!” she said.

  There was a lock on it, though, a thick one. I looked around the room and found a pair of huge bolt cutters hanging from the wall. I retrieved them and applied them to the lock, squeezing as hard as I could. I couldn’t even make a dent. Then I felt Antonine pressing herself up against me and gripping the handles on the bolt cutters too. We squeezed together and the business ends of the big tool started making a mark, then cut through a bit, then a bit more…and finally the lock snapped off!

  We both just stared at it for a minute.

  “You do it,” I finally said.

  We dropped the cutters to the floor and she knelt down in front of the chest. She hesitated, and then pulled off the lock. I noticed her hands were shaking.

  Then she opened the lid.

  There was just a bunch of wood inside. Disappointing. Antonine started going through it, almost as if she had nothing better to do at this point, lifting out sticks and planks, dropping them on the floor. Then she stopped.

  “What’s this?”

  It was big, stretching almost the full length of the two-metre-long chest, and about half a metre across, left there at the bottom, hidden under the other pieces of wood. That wasn’t the only thing that was unusual about it. Three quarters of it was black.

  Antonine reached down and picked it out. Some of the black came off on her hands.

  “It’s been burned,” I said.

  “A burned piece of timber hidden in a treasure chest,” said Antonine.

  We looked at each other.

  “This wood isn’t from around here,” she said, running her hands along the unburned part to feel the grain. There was still some bark on the sides, unusual-looking, grey with ridges in it.

  “How would you know that?”

  “My Dad taught me all about wood, about the grains, the way it looks after it is sawed, and about different barks. Even though he was American, he took a great deal of pride in the forests we have around New Brunswick, and the lumber we produce. He and I used to walk in the woods and he would point things out and make me identify trees.” She looked down at the plank. “I have never seen anything like this before.”

  “What does this mean?”

  There was a noise in the backyard. Someone was approaching. Thankfully Antonine had closed the shed door. The sound of footsteps striding through the grass drew closer. Then we saw the doorknob turn. Antonine dropped the burned piece of wood into the chest and slammed down the lid.

  “Antonine?”

  The door opened and someone entered. It was Eve.

  “I thought I heard someone in here. What are you doing, no one ever—” Then she noticed me, standing very close to her daughter. “Oh,” she said and a little smile grew on her face.

  “No,” said Antonine, “no, it isn’t what you think.”

  “And what do I think?”

  “Uh…you know…it…it isn’t that.”

  “Then what is it, mademoiselle?”

  “Uh…” I said, “I’m
interested in woodwork. Antonine said she would show me around Mr. Clay’s shed. It…it’s amazing!”

  “‘Show you around?’” asked Eve. “This gigantic room? How long does the tour take?”

  Two people stretching their arms out together could almost touch opposing walls. Eve smiled again.

  “Why don’t you two come in and have something to eat? I’ve baked cranberry muffins and I’ll make some hot chocolate.”

  She was very nice about it. Once we were inside, she didn’t ask us a single uncomfortable question, though I did notice that she concentrated on me quite a bit and inquired about my upbringing and if I had any thoughts yet about what I’d like to do for a living.

  I knew exactly what Antonine was thinking because I was thinking the same thing. And it had nothing to do with her mother’s questions. Was the burned piece of wood from the ghost ship? Was it hold-in-your-hand evidence that this legendary phantom ship actually existed?

  Eve kept us at the table for a long time, which I didn’t really mind, since the cranberry muffins were insanely delicious and I had about twelve of them, well, not twelve but maybe…seven. Eve looked at me as if I were a Martian as she saw the muffins disappearing down my gullet by the boatload, but she kept offering them to me so what was I supposed to do? Refuse?

  Antonine looked ticked off. I think it was because I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying myself at this point. We were onto something and we needed to discuss it.

  “Dylan needs to go,” she finally said. “Your mom said you were to be back by six.”

  I had just snagged another muffin and almost had it in my mouth. My lips were basically reaching out for it when she spoke. It was just inches away.

  “She did?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Antonine. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Uh…” I said and gazed at the muffin.

  “You can eat that one,” said Eve, reassuringly.

  I popped half of it into my mouth. It gave me time to chew, and think.

  “Yes,” I finally said, after my second swallow, “I remember now. Yes, six o’clock.” I looked up at their big kitchen clock. “My, it is getting late.”