So we helped them. The landowners. We bought land from those families, bought it at fair prices and hired on managers. We turned it into a real big operation, automated and made it streamlined. It was an investment, abso-tively, it was.
But the ground, Tom. The ground. It was all wrung out by now. This is up past the old power station, you know about that?
Well, you should. It was the first of its kind. Well, one of the first. But I think it maybe gave some heartache to the land. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that. We hired scientists to come and do some tests and they said nothing would grow up that way, not for a long time. Nothing but ravaged plants. Tomatoes with arms and eggplants with the seeds on the outside.
It was a bust. Nothing we could do. So we thought—Christopher this is—we needed to recoup our investment. So we sold that land, sold it to a consortium of experts in energy. They were interested in getting the old power plant up and running again. Or, if it wasn’t feasible, then rebuilding parts of it. We sold that land for pennies on the dollar you see, took a huge loss to help the people of this island. Every last one of them will see prosperity from the likes of us good people, us Banatynes.
So we were tapped. Abso-tively tapped. We’d made a bad deal but we were going to cover it off because when we re-sold the farmland it was going to be used as part of this power deal and we took shares in the newly formed company. It was the centre of this power plan. And all we needed was some construction contracts signed, some more seed money and government certification.
Christopher, he’s so hardworking y’know. He took a real hands-on role—he always does, I love him so so much—and I focused on keeping our other investments on track. Ocean View and a few other things.
So here’s Christopher. It must have been late March, he puts on his new yellow hard hat, his best suit and he heads up there with members of the entire consortium. They do this big series of inspections with the experts they’ve hired. It’s the tail end of a feasibility study. They have it all worked out, right?
Only Christopher comes home feeling like some kind of sinus cold has kicked his ass to heaven and back. He complains of a headache and feeling faint and maybe even, he says, he needs a puke bucket beside the bed. I just thought he ate a bad tuna sandwich up there on a lunch break, that he had exactly what you and me and the rest of the guests had this week.
But he ends up in bed for the week. The new town doctor—not this dear old man you just met—but the new guy, he comes by and he has a look and he says that’s it: just a bad, bad case of food poisoning. Maybe coupled with an allergic reaction to some of the weeds and things up in the wild middling parts of the island. The Banatynes have never been country folk. With the exception of that awful ex-wife of Christopher’s, we’ve all been very cosmopolitan. It’s quite possible he could have gone his whole life without ever running into some purple field grass that gives him a rash and a sinus headache. But he’s a man’s man. And he’s a smart man, with an entrepreneurial spirit—abso-tively—and he went out there to make us our millions back.
April and May came and went.
And he had the most delirious delusional dreams. He said the oddest things.
Do you know what he told me? He told me that, at a quarter past ten, on the day of the inspection, he was buzzed by a swarm of the largest black flies you’ve seen in your life. As big as his fist is what he said. And he took two big bites from them, he said. As deep and as painful as any needle in the dentist’s chair is what he told me. One bit him on the neck and one took a chunk right from his belly.
And in a matter of days after he tells me this, those big tumors—or whatever they are— they start growing. Right in those two spots. Well, I thought his infection or his reaction or whatever it was had just touched his brain a bit. He had pain in those two spots so his delirious mind concocted an explanation for it. That was all.
They turned puffy first, those two spots. Then dark red. And then they started to fill like two blisters, small at first. Then gaining size each day. And Christopher, he was fine otherwise now. He even went back to work, overseeing some projects, keeping the finances fit as fiddles.
But he came at me one afternoon, Tom. He came at me with a kitchen knife after I got home from Ocean View and I saw this look in his eyes. Not in all our years of marriage did I ever see that look before. But there it was. This look of... what... vacant anger?
And I got him down. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. In all his days lying in bed watching The Price Is Right and Let’s Make a Deal, he’d lost muscle and fat. He’d gone down fifty pounds, at least, and he was weak. I got him pinned to the kitchen floor and in a panic—self-preservation, I guess—I got that knife knocked right out of his hand and I got my knee up on his wind-pipe. I got him out, down for the count.
It was the worst feeling in the world. Not just to see my husband, my partner, in that state, but to be the one to get him down and out like that. I cried that day. Tough bird like me, that’s right, I cried.
But I got down to business. As I’ve always done in my life, I did what I had to do.
I fed him some crushed-up benzies in apple sauce and smooshed banana. I got that in him while he lay there, semi-conscious. And then I got him hauled up to bed.
I had Zeke bring over the restraint bed and put that upstairs. I knew Christopher would want this. Not to be held like this, but if it meant keeping our business interests afloat, he’d be all for it. If he was in his right mind, that was. Which he wasn’t. No sir. Abso-tively not.
And with this deal for the power plant so close, I knew that if anyone caught a whiff of this strange sickness he had, we’d be sunk.
We had everything into it, y’see. Everything. More dollars than you’ll see in your whole life. And if the world thought—for even a second—that some sort of sickness came from Christopher visiting the power compound, then we’d never get our certification and the whole thing would be a bust.
And besides, I knew Christopher would be okay. He has a strong heart. He has a strong mind. That’s why I married him.
Those folks you bought the submarines from? Yeah, those benzies some call them? I’m connected, Tom. I tell you, I’m connected to everyone in the country in some form or another. Well, friends of those ones who get me the benzies, they got me in touch with some specialists. I had an herbalist and an oncologist and three or four other kinds of experts. All expenses paid, I brought them to the island and I had them treat Christopher. For a while, he got so much better again. It was a good thing.
We were talking about the business, planning a winter holiday...
But then it got bad again. So bad I had to take him down into the basement. He was howling and foaming at the mouth. I had him restrained down there. He cussed me out and said the most foul things. I’ve never heard such horrific things come out of anyone’s mouth, let alone my own husband’s.
It broke my heart. I cried myself dry and hoarse.
And, finally, I took him to our place up past the bridge. That was another investment that went south. We were going to be land moguls, Tom. Like a realty company. Purchase, subdivide, lease, sell, mortgage. And when the mines and power plant needed workers, they’d all have a place to stay. Only, the influx hasn’t started. And with all those damn immigrants — canna speak a dee English—we might never see the boom.
24
Karen had lit another cigarette while she spoke. Now she held it as it curled a calm tendril up past her unblinking eyes and looked longingly through the sheer drape at the moving shapes of her houseguests. Little Smitty looked like he was in his swim trunks now and was running bow-legged through the water sprinkler shouting football plays. Ingy was with him squealing and at this distance, behind the drape, they could be mistaken for playing children.
It made Tom stop a second before he asked Karen the inevitable question.
“So,” he said. “You want me to stay quiet on Mr. Banatyne to keep your deal alive.” He took a breath. She didn’t me
et his eyes, only thumbed the cigarette which slowly turned to ash in her crossed fingers. “In return, you’ll what? Keep me out of the press for this Mary thing?”
Karen sighed as if she was exasperated with every last living creature on this earth. To her, they were all stupid, stupid, stupid and none of them understood a single bit of common sense.
“Not exactly,” she said, still not looking at him. “I’ll hush-hush the Mary thing and you can leave the island end of this week as you planned. You can go back to school and the world never need know what you did to her. You’ll keep quiet about my husband, sure you will. Or I’ll find you and you won’t like it when I do.” She looked at him and took a long drag, making the long black stick glow with red-orange.
“But I need you to take care of it first,” she said. “I need you to euthanize him.”
25
The living room wore carpet. Wall to wall stuff. Fancy, fancy, Zeke had told his daddy when daddy sprang for it in the sixties sometime. He remembered laying on it, rubbing it, watching TV on it at the foot of his daddy’s big recliner as if he was a six year old boy watching fifteen more minutes before bedtime.
Now in his muddy boots, underwear and nothing else, he trod on the carpet and came up on the back end of the leather recliner, the one where Daddy watched the evening news, the World Series and where he usually snoozed in the hot afternoons.
As he got close, he cleaved the axe silently into the air, suspending it over his head. Below him, a rounded mound of spotted flesh. It was his Daddy’s head, with even less hair than his idiot son, Zeke. The sound of his snoring fought with the static on the TV set.
Daddy was below him, sleeping in that chair. New sweat sprang out on Zeke’s skin. It mixed with tears and one drip hung from the tip of his nose.
Zeke’s arms strained. The old rusted axe quivered in the air.
26
“Ingy fell! Ingy fell!”
It was Smitty, shouting like the house was afire. Tom was out the door and into the bleating sunshine of the day before he could come to terms with what was being said, who was saying it or what was said only a moment before. Euthanize. Euthanize.
That word rang in his head and he rushed to Ingy. She lay in the green grass crying, her face pinched up at the sky and burning hot pink. She looked like a baby screaming for milk.
She clutched her leg. By her feet was a big stump from a tree that had been taken down a long time before Tom had arrived. The wood was grey and the rings wore the weather of who knew how many seasons.
One freshened chip was taken from the corner of the stump and when Tom crouched in the grass to get a look at Ingy’s wound, he found a stick of it shot into her lower calf like a tranquilizer dart.
Tom knew that trying to get Ingy calmed down and then yanking this chunk of wood from her leg would be a useless exercise so he reached, he pulled, and produced the red piece of stump in one swift movement. The volume went up and a fresh gush of red poured from her into the lawn. Tom lay his hand across the skin and felt a flap of warm, wet skin.
Behind him, Smitty kept shouting, “Ingy fell! Ingy’s bleeding!”
Another figure crouched with Tom. He saw fingers fumbling with the latch on a steel white first aid kit, one of those with the big red cross on the front. They weren’t Karen’s fingers. No polish, not red, not pink, just regular feminine fingers.
When Tom leaned up and stared into the glaring sun, he half expected to find Farrah With No Last Name, the high school girl he’d sort of befriended, sitting there with him. But it wasn’t her.
It was a stranger. Older than Farrah, but pretty. Thin and dressed in whites like Karen.
“This is Anne,” Karen said from behind them all. She stood over the mess of them with her hands on her hips like the Green Giant from those frozen pea commercials. “She has first aid training, Tom. You don’t. So step aside.”
Tom pulled his dripping hand off Ingy’s leg with reluctance. Her howling had slowed. Anne pressed a thick wad of something down on her leg and got it taped. She said, “We’ll do a proper dressing in the house and get this leg up in the air.” She gave a weak smile to Tom under hair that fell down her face in wisps.
Tom got up and retreated. Smitty was banging himself in the forehead with tight fists. “It’s okay,” Tom said to him and grabbed his fists, forcing him to stop.
“Ingy fell,” he said again, this time in a quiet tone, like he was talking to himself. “She’s bleeding. She can balance. On dat stump. But den she fell. Ingy’s bleeding—”
“It’s okay,” Tom said again, holding his fists, but letting them go when he was sure Smitty wouldn’t hit himself again. Tom looked around. The bright green yard looked placid despite the chaos. A few feet away, with the backdrop of the big house behind her, Mary stood in uncharacteristic silence. She had her hand on her mouth like she did when she hid her smile. Only this time, she looked like she was silencing a secret. Her eyes glazed and Tom thought of the two or three subs she was taking each morning.
In an angry gesture, Tom swung around at Nurse Karen, who seemed pleased that someone other than him had this certainly minor situation in hand.
“Come here,” he said at Karen, his teeth gritted.
Karen’s eyebrow lifted. Only a hint of her crying and sputtering in the dining room remained: puffy eyes, pink cheeks. The rest of her looked as made-up and perfectly in place as always.
“Fine,” she said, as placid as the yard around her.
They moved off to a distance. Zeke’s municipal truck pulled up in the back alley and came to a squeak with tired brakes. He got out and moved through the yard, surveying the group with a look that said he understood at only a glance what had happened. He went to Mary immediately and took her in his arms like a man of much maturity.
“See?” Tom said, shooting a finger out at Zeke and Mary holding each other like newlyweds. “See? It’s not me. If Mary’s got a bun in there, it’s not mine.”
“I don’t much care,” Karen said. “Makes no difference to me. But she can’t stay here with a kid and that means I lose one-fifth of my revenue. Besides, no one else is gonna believe it was the town retard. They’ll pin it on the horny teenager I mistakenly hired to look after all these dullards. And that’s you, kid.”
She smoothed her skirt and looked down at herself, as if to confirm that nothing really could be out of place. If it didn’t suit her and if she didn’t give her permission, the sun simply wouldn’t rise in the east. That’s what her look said.
“But you’ll take care of that,” he said, not a question but a disgusted confirmation of what they were agreeing to here.
“Only if you take care of Christopher.” Her look broke for a fraction of a second. “I can’t do it. I’d be the first the chief would think of. The wives are always the first they look at. And more importantly, I can’t. I love the man with all my heart. Don’t you see that? He’s my everything, my rock and my centre of gravity. But he’s sick. He’s not going to make it. I can’t see him like this anymore. It breaks me, Tom, do you understand that?”
Karen’s eyes were clouding with tears. She and Tom stood too far away from the rest for anyone to hear or care. They stood together watching Anne take Ingrid into the house on one foot like it was an episode of TV that Smitty often watched.
“I can’t do it. But he can’t suffer,” she said, one tear leaking down her face. She smeared it with the heel of her hand and blinked hard on more that might chase it. “I can’t have him suffer more.”
“Well, then,” Tom said. “We call the police. We get an ambulance up there—does this place even have one? We get Mr. Banatyne some help.”
“Oh, child,” she said. “You don’t look like you were born yesterday. It’s far too late for that. Whatever this is, it has him. He’s not himself. There’s only a shadow of my Christopher in there. And it’s not like any kind of illness I’ve ever heard of. Remember, Tom. I had those specialists come. Every last one said the same thing. Game over,
nothing to be done. And I paid them plenty. I offered so much more for them to roll up their sleeves and try something, anything. And they did. But there’s nothing left to do. They all weighed in on this. Independently, mind you. They told me, they said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Banatyne, you have to understand, I’m so sorry to break this to you. But your husband, he’s a dead man walking.’ Only he’s not, Tom. He’s not walking, he’s not talking, sometimes he’s not breathing for minutes at a time. He’s not doing anything anymore. He’s just waiting to die. Wasting away while it eats him up. His suffering needs to end. Do you understand that? Do you? You give him that—you give me that—and I’ll let you walk away from this island with your reputation. You can live your whole life and never look back.”
Tom shifted on his feet. This talk made him nervous as hell. What did she think he was going to do? Walk in and knife her old man for her? Make this investment deal in some power company he knew nothing about materialize so she could get back everything she lost?
“I know just how to do it,” she said sideways at him and at a low volume—not that any of the others would hear her anyway. “You mush up those benzies in apple sauce and bananas. Twenty or twenty-five ought to be enough. Christopher has scribbled enough nonsense on his paperwork the last months, I won’t have any trouble convincing Police Chief Birkhead that he’d gone a bit nuts. He has family history, you know. And that’s it. Done. No suspicion.”
Tom felt his face flush. He said nothing, only watched the tribe disappear into the kitchen screen door at the back of the house. Ingy hobbled on one foot with a wince of pain held steady on her face. She had an arm around this new Anne person—Tom’s replacement, no doubt. In a fugue, Mary followed them in. But Zeke stayed. He started over to Karen and Tom, his gait like a man in his thirties and not the old, round-middled simpleton Tom had known him to be.
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