The Retreat

by David Bergen

  Praise for

  David Bergen

  “David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that’s both erotic and hypnotic.”

  – Miriam Toews

  “Bergen’s storytelling style is spare, yet it’s unrelenting in its depiction of the big and small mistakes made and repeated as one generation inevitably lets down the one that follows.”

  – National Post

  “The writing of David Bergen … sometimes gets compared to that of Cormac McCarthy; taut, psychological fiction.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “With his thoughtful dialogue, Bergen makes his characters’ heartache seep off the page.”

  – Time

  “Bergen is a gifted writer….”

  – Toronto Sun

  “His spare and suggestive style draws comparisons to Raymond Carver…. His haunting, very human characters will live with you for a long time.”

  – NOW magazine

  “Bergen’s characters move and breathe, demonstrating the delicate balance between hope and despair, salvation and damnation.”

  – Toronto Star

  “Bergen’s novels are marvels of spare prose and weighty emotion.”

  – Saturday Night

  Books by David Bergen

  Sitting Opposite My Brother

  A Year of Lesser

  See the Child

  The Case of Lena S.

  The Time in Between

  The Retreat

  Copyright © 2008 by David Bergen

  Cloth edition published 2008

  Emblem edition published 2009

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bergen, David, 1957-

  The retreat / David Bergen.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-265-5

  1. Ojibwa Indians – Ontario – Kenora Region – Fiction.

  2. Kenora Region (Ont.)–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8553.E665R48 2009 C813′.54 C2008-907510-2

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  To Mary

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: The Island Chapter 1

  II: The Retreat Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  III: The Clearing Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  I

  The Island

  In early summer of 1973 he left his grandmother’s house and moved his belongings off the reserve to a small cabin near Bare Point where his existence was rigorous in its simplicity. The unpainted rooms, the coop that held the chickens, the furniture of castoffs from the dump, the evenings around the small table upon which several candles burned. He had just turned eighteen, had dropped out of high school the previous spring, and he liked the freedom of his sparse solitary life. He worked at the local golf course and in the evenings drove to town where he met Alice Hart, the daughter of a local businessman who owned the town lumberyard. At the Paramount on Second Street, beneath the marquee, Alice leaned against the wall and waited. She sucked mints and when she kissed him her mouth held the scent of his grandmother’s peppermint tea. Her tongue was quick. She told him to grow a moustache and what he produced was an uneven failure. Because her father had forbidden her to spend time with him, they usually drove the back roads outside Kenora, heading north and then circling back to his cabin where they played cards and drank and undressed each other and Alice promised him eternal love. “Ray,” she said. Her fingers were slight and the part in her hair revealed a white scalp. Her ears turned bright red after sex.

  He had an eighteen-foot aluminum Lund with a twenty-horse Johnson and one evening at dusk Raymond took Alice out onto the lake and they watched a thunderstorm approach from the west. The lightning was high and moved sideways across the sky and it was as if someone were striking matches and failing to light them. Alice wore an orange lifejacket. She was drinking beer and sitting looking back at Raymond and he saw his future and it did not include her. She smiled. Raised her beer and drank. The sky lit up behind her head.

  Earl Hart, one of the constables on the town police force and an uncle to Alice, paid Raymond a visit at the golf course on a Tuesday night, just at closing. He was parked beside Raymond’s pickup, and as Raymond approached, Hart rolled down his window and said, “Mr. Seymour.” Raymond nodded and opened the passenger side door to his pickup. He threw in his jacket and lunch bucket and then shut the door and looked at Hart, who said he should get in the cruiser.

  “I’d like a word.”

  Raymond looked out over the roof of the cruiser to the clubhouse. He put his hands in his pockets and then walked around to the passenger door and got in.

  “You golf?” Hart asked.

  Raymond said that he didn’t. He just looked after the course, cut the greens and the fairways. He did play basketball though, he said. Point guard. He offered the faintest grin.

  “Yeah? You good?”

  Raymond shrugged. He said it wasn’t up to him to know that. His coach, Roger, would be able to say.

  “So, you’re modest.”

  “Might be,” Raymond said.

  “You’re not sure.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Huh. He guesses he’s not sure. Jesus Christ.” He shifted and tapped the steering wheel with a thick finger. “And about golf, you know nothing. Funny. That’d be like me cleaning someone’s gun so’s they could use it, but me never having fired one.” He patted the gun at his right hip. “Don’t you think that’s odd?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he said that he used to golf, but he was a poor player, especially the long distances. “Give me a hundred yards and I’m fine. But off the tee I land out of bounds. Terrible thing to hit out of bounds, don’t you think? Lose a stroke, lose the ball, lose your pride. Big losses all around.” He chuckled, but it wasn’t truly a laugh, more the simulacrum of a laugh, as if he had spent much time as an unhappy man learning how to imitate happiness.

  He sa
id, “Alice Hart, my niece. She’s seventeen. You know her.”

  Raymond said that he did.

  “My brother, Alice’s father, he wanted to talk to you, but I suggested he let me handle it. You see, my brother is impulsive. He gets protective of Alice. She’s his only daughter. You know? Anyway, Alice is impulsive like her father, nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the simple fact is Alice isn’t going to see you any more. It’s finished. No more evenings and whatnot with Alice. As far as you’re concerned, she doesn’t exist. As far as she’s concerned, you don’t exist. Raymond Seymour no longer exists. Got it?”

  There were falcons nesting in the spruce trees just next to the clubhouse. They lifted and settled and one circled high in the air, a black dot barely visible against the darkening sky. A mother bear with her cubs had been spotted the day before, ranging the bush between the fifth and sixth fairway. A family of deer came and went on the ninth green; every morning he found their fine hoofprints on the soft green. This was the order of the world. No one had asked Raymond Seymour to chase these animals from their place. Raymond asked Hart if Alice agreed. Did she know that he no longer existed?

  Hart shifted and with his right hand cupped his crotch as if to signal the utter insolence of the question. He was a short man with a large stomach and his hand disappeared under his stomach and then reappeared. He said that Alice had no say in the matter. The girl was naive. “She will not be bait for a boy like you.” He lifted a hand and pointed a short finger into the air. “You’re an Indian. Stick with what you know. Rumour has it you’re smart. Prove it.” He waved his hand in dismissal and said, “Go.”

  Raymond climbed from the car and stood and watched Hart drive away. Darkness had fallen. The tail lights of the cruiser blinked and then disappeared. Raymond drove into town and bought a Coke at the Shell station and then parked near the Paramount. He went inside and asked for a ticket for the late show of Live and Let Die. The girl at the wicket said it had started an hour ago. He could just go in. He bought popcorn and went inside and sat near the back. The theatre was half full. A collection of couples, a few solitary heads outlined by the screen. He put his feet up against the seat in front of him and watched James Bond save the world. Later, he stood on the sidewalk beneath the marquee and waited for Alice to appear. He imagined that she would walk up in sandals and jeans and a flower-print sleeveless top and say his name and take his hand. She’d be wearing hoop earrings. He would take her to the Kenricia. They would eat steak. Then they’d go back to his house and drink a nightcap and crawl into bed and in the morning they’d sit across from each other and eat toast.

  Instead, Raymond drove up the 71 to his turnoff and then down the gravel road to his cabin where he lit candles and sat at his only table and ate ravioli from a tin can. Then he fed the chickens and he sat on the swing that he had rigged from the front seat of a Studebaker. Four chains and a steel frame. A mosquito landed on his forearm. He killed it. Lit a cigarette.

  In the morning, he washed and dressed for Mrs. Kennedy. Clean jeans, a button-down shirt. Nine holes at nine a.m. every Wednesday, Raymond as her caddy, though he knew little about golf and no other golfers used caddies. Still, the management wanted Lisa Kennedy happy, and she was happiest with Raymond at her side. She golfed alone. This morning she wore a pink pleated skirt that fell to her knees and a white short-sleeved blouse. A white sweater with the arms tied around her waist. Raymond carried her clubs and her coffee. She drove off the first tee neatly, though not getting much distance. They walked side by side, the bag of clubs banging against Raymond’s left leg. The morning sun had burned the dew off the grass. Mrs. Kennedy held out her hand for the coffee and Raymond passed it to her. She drank and walked and said that she was flying down to Texas the next day to meet a man who wanted to marry her. “He made his money in oil,” she said. “You have to wonder about a man who gets rich from pumping black stuff from the ground.” She asked for a three iron. Raymond slipped it from the bag and put it into her hand. She set up and took a practice swing, then turned to Raymond and asked if he planned on getting married some day. Raymond grinned and shrugged. “Don’t do it for money,” she said. “You’ll be unhappy. A couple can be happier if there aren’t the distractions of riches. Making it. Spending it. Keeping it.” She stopped talking, looked down at the ball, and swung.

  At the third tee, waiting for a foursome to proceed, she sat on a bench, crossed her tanned legs, and said that the Texan wanted her to become an American citizen. “It’s a wild place. They elect their presidents and then throw them out like garbage. I told him that. He said that freedom had its problems sometimes. Still, I’m thinking about it. He wants to go to Egypt for the honeymoon. Where the Pyramids are.”

  Raymond said that he knew about the Pyramids.

  “Of course you do. You’re not stupid.”

  She four-putted the sixth green, letting loose a soft curse as she overran the hole on the second putt. When she was finished, Raymond replaced the flag and together they walked up to the seventh tee. She was shorter than him and he looked down at her. The whorl of her ear, sculpted marble. Her small soft head. She lived alone in a large house on Coney Island. Her husband had given it to her after an amicable divorce. Her words. He sometimes came over in the evenings for sex. Her words. She had told Raymond this just after the divorce had gone through. She said, “I never thought that sex with my ex-husband would be so good.” She did not look at Raymond when she said these words. She looked past him, and so it seemed that she was talking to someone else, someone just beyond Raymond, someone who actually existed.

  A week passed and he did not hear from Alice. He drove by her house one night but it was dark. He waited for her to phone him at the clubhouse, which was her habit, but no calls came. One evening he visited his grandmother and watched TV with her. Then they played crib and he let her win. On the wall behind his grandmother was a picture of Jesus bending to touch a man with a crippled leg. On a cabinet nearby there were graduation photos of Raymond’s brothers and sisters. The table they sat at was covered with an orange plastic cloth that was printed with green flowers set in brown pots. His grandmother’s hands rested on top of one of the pots. Her hands were dark and lined and the small left finger was crooked, the result of a broken bone years earlier that had never been properly fixed. His grandmother stood and went into the kitchen and came back with a grilled cheese sandwich on a pink plate and she handed him tea.

  His sister Reenie and her four kids returned from the evangelistic crusade at the town arena. A preacher from Kansas was in Kenora for the week and Reenie loved the music, the preaching, the plea for sinners to come forward, and inevitably she went forward because she considered herself a sinner. She loved the physical contact of the preacher laying hands on her. Lee, Reenie’s fourteen-year-old, walked in the door and sat down beside Raymond and put her head against his shoulder. “Uncle Ray,” she said.

  Reenie went into the kitchen and came back with a peanut butter sandwich. She said that Pastor Rudy was the most amazing man. “He’s on a higher plane,” she said. “When he touched my shoulder, right here, it was like electricity was flowing from him to me.” She looked at her daughter and said she should have come forward too.

  Lee shook her head.

  “Nobody’s special,” Reenie said. “Shoulda come too, Ray. You could use some God talk. Look, I got a New Testament.”

  The Bible was small and blue and Reenie’s large hand smothered it. She handed it to Lee. “It’s yours now,” Reenie said. Lee held it lightly, with some misgiving.

  Reenie told Raymond that she’d gone up to look for him at the cabin about a week ago. He wasn’t there, but Alice Hart was. “She was sitting in her father’s car, pretending to be sure of herself, and when she saw me she asked about you. Where were you? As if because she was there, so should you. Her eyes are too close together. Don’t you think?”

  Raymond took the New Testament from Lee and fanned the pages, smelled the newness. Handed it b
ack and imagined Alice’s eyes. He felt an ache in his stomach.

  Reenie said that any girl who drove a Cadillac at that age would expect far too much in life. “She got holda your pecker?” Reenie laughed. Lee giggled. In fall, Lee would be attending the school Raymond had just left, a monstrous building that swallowed children unformed and then spat them out again four years later, bigger and sadder and sometimes wiser. Lee was already wise. She held the New Testament with a degree of doubt. Raymond stood and went out to his pickup and drove up to his place. His windows were open and air blew in and above him the sky was vast and stars fell and it smelled of autumn.

  The following evening Alice came up to the cabin in her father’s Cadillac and parked with her lights shining through his front door. At first he did not know who it was, and he might have shot out the headlights with his .22, but Alice’s voice floated through the darkness, calling his name. He went to her and leaned in through the driver’s window and put his hands like a loose necklace around her small neck. It rained that night, a heavy downpour accompanied by thunder and lightning, and out on Highway 17, when a streak of lightning swept from left to right, they saw a moose standing smack on the centre line. He did not speak of what had transpired with her uncle, even when she said, out of the blue, that her uncle Hart could be an asshole. The statement seemed an admission of something; approval perhaps, or the understanding that this was a secret and thrilling game. When she dropped him off he told her there would be mud on the tires and wheel wells, his mud, and she should wash the car down. And this is what she did. Headed over to the wand wash, where she wiped the car clean, in and out, ridding the car of all proof of Raymond Seymour.

  In October his brother Marcel stayed a night at the cabin on his way through from Vancouver to Montreal, where he was planning to work for a law firm that specialized in land claims. Marcel brought with him a twelve of beer and the brothers sat on the glider swing and drank while Marcel told him once again how his eight months in prison had informed his choice to go into law. “Better to get buggered on the outside,” he said. “At least there’s the possibility of escape.” He said that the odds were stacked against them. “I’m not whining here, but the fact is, Ray, you can choose to lie down and let the man drive back and forth over you, or you can do the driving. That’s what I’m doing, the driving.” He paused, opened another beer. “I met this girl in Vancouver, studied law together. Her father is a bigwig in the court system there. Lives in a large house overlooking the harbour, except the neighbour’s tree, a huge fucking cedar, was blocking the view, so he hired someone to poison the tree. His daughter, Naomi, my girlfriend for a while, told me this. She told it as if this were perfectly acceptable. Our problem, you know, is we’re too nice. You see. Too fucking nice. Most people when they want something, they go out and get it. There’s a lesson to be learned here.”