Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  Cody climbed out and drained his beer. He kicked the rock, as if to rub our victory in its face.

  “Any chance of some water?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said. “When you’re done.”

  Some hours later, with the sun still in the sky, I stood over an oddly shaped but feasible grave.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  Cody stood drinking out of an Evian bottle, still holding the gun on me. He drank it down to the dregs and backwashed a little and tossed it to me, watching with amusement as I gulped it down.

  Freddie came out with a bag of cold convenience-store burritos. He tossed one to me the way you’d toss a mackerel to a seal. I peeled it in a frenzy. Nothing from the Gotham Steakhouse ever tasted so good.

  They dropped the wrappers into the hole. I did the same. They instructed me to roll Everett’s corpse into the hole. I did, stooping down to fold his hands over his chest and straighten out his legs. I made sure his eyes were closed. Not that any of that mattered. I remembered he was Catholic, or had been. I crossed myself with my closed fist the way I’d seen him do before every fight.

  I started covering him over with dirt. Cody kicked the water bottle in to join him.

  When it was done I felt worn out and clammy from the dried and redried sweat. I had blisters on my hand and could taste only dirt. I sank down onto the log to rest.

  “Now the second one,” Cody said.

  35

  “WHY YOURS, EBENEZER!” cried the Ghost of Christmas Future. Black Pete in the Disney version. I remembered renting that tape when I’d babysat River one year while my mother went Christmas shopping. I remembered how River squawked as the spirit flung Scrooge into the grave, and how my mother had chosen just that moment to return home.

  I dug the second hole more carefully, yet faster. I ached. My broken hand was filthy. I wondered who else was buried out there among the evergreens.

  I’d thought the diary was keeping me alive. Rhodes would guess that I’d probably stashed it somewhere only I would be able to retrieve it. I’d thought that was why I hadn’t been mutilated.

  But no, he didn’t care about the diary. This was his method of slow execution.

  This grave was easier going. Fewer rocks. I managed to keep the sides somewhat square.

  It grew dark. Cody and Freddie set a mosquito lamp near the edge of the hole.

  My shovel chuffed. I thought I’d struck another rock. I bent over to wipe away the dirt.

  It was a shard of bone that had been splintered or shaped into a spear end. Shorter than the breadth of my hand, and as I felt it, deliberately tooled.

  I pocketed it as Cody walked to the edge of the hole to investigate the break in shovelling rhythm.

  “Climb on out,” he said.

  “I’m not finished.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “It’s not as deep as the other one.”

  “It’ll do,” he said.

  I climbed out. He was standing away from the light, holding a different, short-barrelled gun at hip level.

  “Go tell ’em it’s done, Freddie,” Cody said. Freddie folded the lawn chair and took it with him.

  “Strip,” Cody said to me.

  “All the way?”

  “That’s what ‘strip’ means.”

  I took off the flannel, the T-shirt, unbuckled my pants. I stepped out of my shoes, rolled down my boxer briefs.

  He gestured with his leg to kick the clothes into the hole. I bent down and threw them in, palming the spear tip, taking the smallest of satisfactions from the planed and chipped surface of the bone.

  “Socks, too?” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He pointed the gun. I felt a cold stream of water hit my face. The shock of it made me drop the spear tip. The shock wore off and it felt good, and I managed to get some of it down my throat.

  Once I’d scrubbed myself, Cody let the gun fall to the ground, which turned out to be the nozzle of a garden hose. He led me back toward the cabin.

  I heard footsteps and whimpering. From the cabin to my left emerged two figures, walking the way we’d come. The four of us passed. I recognized one of the figures as Charles Gains. He had a knife in his hand, tapping the blade against his leg as he walked. In front of him, with his hands bound, was Skeet, Everett’s partner. He was blubbering.

  As we passed he looked over at me. “Please,” he said.

  Gains didn’t look at us at all.

  I was shoved onto the basement stairs and the door locked behind me. I sat on the bottom stair and rubbed my shoulders for warmth.

  Four long shrill screams rang out amidst the soft noise of the forest. A little while later I heard a coyote echo them.

  I collapsed on my bed of leaves and felt the temperature fall.

  —

  Nothing happened the next day. When I needed to shit I banged on the door. No one answered. I dumped in a corner behind the stairs and covered it over with handfuls of dry grey dirt.

  The temperature rose, though not by much, and then fell along with the light. My feet were numb. I huddled and kept watch on the door, wanting and not wanting it to open. It didn’t.

  The next morning I banged on the door again to no avail. I paced around the room to keep my circulation up. I examined the floor and walls for secret passageways and structural faults and found none.

  It was past noon when Gains came down. He was wearing black sweatpants and a prune-coloured sweatshirt. He tossed something at me that skittered across the concrete. The pieces of the spear tip, which he’d broken and dulled. They looked like alien teeth.

  He held the door and gestured for me to walk through it. I did. He stopped me and locked the basement door and then shoved me out of the cabin.

  “I’m not going to beg,” I told him.

  Gains’s expression remained neutral, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  Outside an Econoline van had pulled into the space between cabins. Freddie and Cody stood nearby. I caught sight of myself in the van’s mirrored windows, caked with leaves and cement dust, hair wild, like Edgar in a production of Lear.

  “In you go,” Cody said. He unlatched the back door and beckoned me to climb inside. No seatbelts, no seats, just two steel benches facing each other.

  Terry Rhodes sat on one bench, looking like his face had been pieced together by a surgeon’s assistant’s son. He regarded me with an expression dulled by painkillers.

  I climbed in and sat opposite Rhodes. On the floor between us was a carry-on bag that looked very similar to the one I’d taken to Winnipeg.

  Gains climbed in, shut the doors and sat next to me. Rhodes rapped on the cage that separated the driver from his cargo. The van started moving.

  “Last time we spoke,” Rhodes said, “you were about to give me the diary.”

  “Was that where we left off?”

  “This guy,” Rhodes said to his bodyguard, “is the genuine article. He’s not giving up anything. You were right, Charley, we should’ve nabbed the mother. My fault for being old school.”

  “Yeah, it’s your ethics that are the problem,” I said.

  He sighed and smiled in that combination that can mean only true exasperation. I seem to bring everyone there, given time.

  Rhodes said, “If I were as bad as you think I am, you’d be in pieces now.”

  “I assume that comes after you get what you want.”

  He shook his head. “This is what I want.”

  He grabbed my hand and crunched it. It hurt like hell. Gains clamped down on my other arm to prevent reprisal. The pain brought tears to my eyes and I bit through my own lip.

  “What I want,” Rhodes said, tightening his grip for emphasis, “takes a back seat to what makes me money. You’re going to make me money or I get to watch my friend Charley pop your eyeball out and feed it to you.”

  He let go of my hand. Gains didn’t let go of my arm.

  “Now,” Rhodes said brightly, “there’s a time to prove to
the world you’re not a sissy, and there’s a time to value your body parts and the pleasure they bring you. You got”—he looked out the cage and the windshield at the flat township we were moving through—“four blocks to make that call.”

  “Tell me who’s paying you to retrieve the diary,” I said.

  “No. No more questions from you. Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?”

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  “It?”

  “The diary. I’ll get Chelsea Loam’s diary for you.”

  “Yes, you will,” Rhodes said.

  The driver made a right into a small crescent-shaped strip mall, the buildings done up with log cabin facades. There was a coffee shop and a Home Hardware, a Mac’s and an animal hospital. We went around back. The driver had a time manœuvring the van so its back end was close to flush with the back doors of the clinic.

  “You should ask him about the apartment,” Gains said to his boss.

  “What about the apartment?” I asked.

  “We sent some guys to your place,” Rhodes said, “thinking maybe the diary was there.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I fucking know that,” he snapped. “The boys told me the place looked like someone had already gone through it. A lot of stuff’s gone—TV, computer. I gather you probably had some sort of stereo system.”

  “Records?” I asked.

  “They said everything that wasn’t gone had been smashed.”

  The driver opened the back doors. I didn’t recognize him. Another beefy tattooed cracker who thought aviator shades and a goatee made him as cool as Robert De Niro in Heat. He looked more like a professional wrestler with a policeman gimmick.

  Shay wouldn’t even have had to break in, I thought. She had the key. And you can always find someone willing to help you cart away someone else’s stuff.

  “This means one of two things,” Rhodes said. “Either this is a robbery with no connection to our business, or this is some other crew after what’s mine, and they took your shit to make it look like a robbery. If that’s the case, and they got the book, you tell us. We’ll tool up and find them. Maybe even get some of your shit back.”

  It’s not related, I almost said, thinking that if someone said that to me I’d suspect the opposite was true. They’d tear Shay’s world apart looking for something she didn’t have, and they’d find her eventually.

  I pulled on a pair of pants from the carry-on bag, slid into fresh socks. I said, “It doesn’t matter either way. You’ll have the diary in three to five days and it won’t matter.”

  “Three to five days?” Rhodes said. “You’re grabbing it for me after we’re done here.”

  “Can’t today,” I said. “I can make the arrangements if you have a phone for me, but it’ll take as long as it takes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Washington State.”

  We went through the back part of the clinic, past cages of yipping, baying animals, into an examination room with a high bench wrapped in tissue paper.

  “We’ll go across the border,” Rhodes said. “You me and Charley. Half the time they don’t even check.”

  “Two career criminals and a guy who’s been missing for days? That won’t draw suspicion?”

  “There are other people I can send.”

  “Or you can be patient. Get everything you want with no one the wiser. What’s five days?”

  “You’re trying to stay alive, you’re better off giving me what I want now.”

  “No I’m not,” I said.

  Rhodes had a reluctant grin. “You should be working for me,” he said. He looked over at Gains. “Kind of crook you think Davey Boy would make, Charley?”

  Gains said nothing.

  “Charley’s reserving judgment on you,” Rhodes said. “Okay, run it down for me.”

  I told him I’d need to phone to have the book mailed. It would take standard delivery time, coming across the border. Customs would inspect and deem it unimportant, as every authority figure had deemed every part of Chelsea Loam’s life unimportant. I would retrieve it, hand it to Rhodes, and we’d go our separate ways.

  “You don’t have it delivered to your apartment?” Rhodes said.

  “Not with my neighbours.”

  “That book’s either in my hand or destroyed on that fifth day.”

  “Or sooner,” I said.

  He nodded. “Let him use your cell, Charley.”

  I had to dial the operator to get a number for the mail service in Blaine. When I was patched through, I asked the clerk if my package had arrived.

  “Sure has,” she said. “Most people have stuff mailed here from the rest of the States, then schlep it back to Canada. You’re doing things bass ackwards.”

  “Don’t I know it. Could you mail that package back to the return address?”

  “I guess,” she said. “What class?”

  “Standard.”

  “First,” Rhodes said to me.

  “That’ll draw attention and it won’t be any faster.”

  “First.”

  “First,” I said into the phone.

  “Right. Insurance?”

  “None.”

  “Your gamble. I’ll need a credit card.”

  Rhodes instructed Gains to give me his American Express.

  “It’ll take three to five,” the clerk said when I’d finished giving her the number. Gains snatched his card back.

  “I can wait,” I said.

  Once I hung up, Rhodes told me I’d be staying at the cabin until it arrived. I told him I’d live with that. He said I’d have to.

  The veterinarian came in, a short native woman in scrubs and an immaculate smock. She gave Rhodes a detailed explanation of the damage done to his dog. She called it Holly. She said Holly was sedated, and the Euthasol injection was at hand.

  “Let’s do this,” Rhodes said. His expression was maudlin. That and the bruises made him look almost pitiable.

  “I’m the first thing they see when they come out of their mother’s cunt,” he told me, “and I’m the last thing they see when the light fades.”

  “That would make you—”

  “A god to them.” He smiled. “It’s a special kind of fear and awe and love. Can’t beat that into them. Wish to God I could do the same with women.”

  I contemplated that. Rhodes left and another vet came in. She looked like the mother of the last one, and none too pleased to have us roaming her clinic. She took me through the stations of disinfecting, X-raying and finally setting my hand. The cast was crude, the plaster coarse.

  “Sorry I don’t have any painkillers for humans,” she said, handing me a small vial of pills. Gains confiscated them. She stalked off, shaking her head.

  Gains tipped the pills onto the paper-covered seat.

  “You will,” he said to me.

  “Pardon?”

  “Beg,” he said. “You’ll beg. I can tell the ones who’ll beg and you’ll beg.”

  “Because of the pills?”

  He held up his left forearm, displaying a long pale scar. “I broke my arm. The bone stuck right out of the skin. I was fourteen. I didn’t make a sound.”

  I picked up the pills and dry-swallowed one. “And it’s been a steady ascent from that point on, huh?”

  He hit me in the stomach and I fell backward, retching. The pills rolled across the floor. Gains crushed one with the toe of his steel-toed boot.

  “I want you to try and escape,” he said.

  36

  THEY DROVE ME BACK TO THE CABINS, Rhodes sitting in the front seat with his shades on, saying nothing. He and the Big Boss Man drove off in the van, leaving me with Cody and Freddie and Gains.

  I didn’t see Gains for three days. Cody and Freddie alternated watching me. When I knocked on the basement door it was usually Cody who answered.

  I saw more of the property in those days. For lunch they’d let me up to the kitchen and sit me down
at a Formica table. I had gas station burritos and egg salad sandwiches and all the dirty tap water I could stomach.

  Twice a day they’d lead me out and shackle my arms and ankles with zap straps and let me wander around the property. The straps impeded swift movement, and the enterprise allowed me all the dignity of a cat tethered to a clothesline. But I got a look at the trails that led around the property, that wound up toward the summit or neared the escarpment.

  Leaning close to the edge in the second before Cody ordered me to waddle back toward them, I saw down to where the gravel met the main road, kilometres below us. Below that, the edge of a town.

  They brought down a plastic wash basin and a bottle of hand sanitizer. I was allowed to keep the clothes and the carry-on bag. They even found a square of thick foam and a ratty blanket for a bedroll.

  For toilet matters I’d knock on the door. Freddie would tie my ankles and lead me out to an aluminum storage shed. Between the empty rows of shelves was a genuine flushing toilet, the floor around it covered in rubber car mats. Freddie would slit my wrist straps, I’d do my business. When I was finished I’d present my arms to him to be rebound. They made sure there was nothing in the outhouse of use, nothing sharp.

  When I asked for reading material they gave me the owner’s manual from a Dodge Dakota.

  I listened to Freddie and Cody during my exercise break. The rules of incarceration were familiar to them. They got a kick from being on the other side. Freddie had been a paramedic at some point, and had worked on a farm. He laughed when he was nervous or confused. Cody griped about his pay, his status in Rhodes’s organization. He griped that Gains had been left to oversee them, and he griped that Gains didn’t talk to him.

  “He’s just spooky,” Cody said. “I think he’s sittin’ in that nice house, cross-legged, waitin’ for Terry to call. Why’s he need the nice house to do that? Meantime I’m shittin’ in a hut.”

  “Why’on’t you ask him to switch with us?” Freddie said.

  “Right,” Cody said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him show interest in a girl?”

  “Maybe he’s gay,” Freddie said, and tittered.

  “Terry’d never hire a homo.” Cody picked up a pine cone and launched it over the escarpment. “There’s just something not right about him, isn’t there?”