In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve been too scared to commit all the way,” Clayton said. “Do it now and you will have more money than you knew there was.”

  Daniel dipped low enough to snag the bundle of cash in his right hand. He whipped it back at Clayton but too hard and it flew wide and missed Clayton by feet. He turned casual after it passed to see where it ended up.

  “I ain’t like this psycho you dredged up,” Daniel said. “Hell, I ain’t even like Wallace.”

  “You are,” Clayton said. “I know better than anybody.”

  Wallace had taken to leaning against the wall near to the door. Daniel looked him up and down. Then he took hold of the door latch and pulled, standing so that he could still see both men in the office. Clayton had left his seat and came around and sat the edge of the table.

  “The money ain’t everything,” Daniel said, and started to leave the room.

  “That’s what Sarah said too,” Clayton said.

  Daniel stopped leaving.

  “What?”

  “When she came out to see me up at the house the other day,” Clayton said. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “How would you like to be dead?” Daniel said.

  Wallace took a step. Clayton held his hand out no.

  “Just think on the work,” Clayton said.

  “All I do is think on it.”

  Clayton pushed himself up and walked across the room to Daniel, put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel let him.

  “You quit on me now, you are not ever coming back,” Clayton said.

  Daniel waited for the hand to drop and then he cleared the threshhold and pulled the steel door shut. The main front room of the bar was barely lit and the gunmen Moreau and Armstrong were drinking slow on a benchseat at the wall, facing the back office and the barroom proper. They looked up at him at the same time. Daniel did not go by them. Instead he turned and walked a long corridor past the kitchen and the washrooms and left the place by the fire exit. A siren wailed for the few seconds it took him to clear the exit and shove the door back, carried down the village streets. It had gone cold outside and dew covered the Monte Carlo and he could smell it in the grasses. He got into the car and drove the empty streets fast toward home.

  SEVEN

  Sarah stood in front of the glass doors of the retirement home and read from her book under yellow spotlight. She’d blocked the entryway with a chair so that the inner door did not close properly and if she were buzzed or there were signals sounded at the front desk she’d still hear. Out in the lot were few vehicles. Daniel’s battered truck amongst them. Some belonged to residents but were never driven. Boats with paint that shone and low mileage and benchseats in the front. More than one of those cars were old enough they had to be retrofitted with seatbelts.

  The building and the parking lot was built on a rise and Sarah could see almost the entire length of the main road in either direction. In her half-hour out front she saw a total of three cars pass by in the street, two of them side by side and racing wild toward the bottom end of town. The grounds beside the nursing home were little more than mowed turf and withered flower gardens. Long run of wire fencework that made up the rear boundary line. Thereafter a descending hill of rock and weed and wildflowers. The grade fell steady for a half-mile before it levelled and gave way to highgrass marsh and then lakewater.

  Sarah heard crickets fiddling and the rustling of trees. She finished her chapter and pitched the book into a nearby ashtray-topped trashcan and there she left it as she pulled the chair free and went inside.

  She walked the halls and looked at her watch. Sung quiet to herself and where she ran out of words or songs she made up her own, notes left late to hang in the re-circulated air. She passed many closed doors with dim light or pure black in the gap below but often she passed open doors with whatever darkness or lampglow laid plain for her along with whistles, whimpers or snores from within. The difficult shifting of bodies. Sarah looked in on everyone and she listened for sounds that she knew and she listened harder for those that she might not have heard before.

  Sarah turned the corner and there she saw a rectangle of light bleeding out over the hallway carpet. She held up for a moment and then she walked across it and leaned against the doorframe with her hands in her scrub pockets. Inside the room an old man sat in an armchair with a bottle of beer in his hand. Small tablestand in front of him. Across the room the TV played but the sound had been turned down and the man had angled his chair toward his window, the curtains drawn and billowing soft by the cool night air. He sat in his slacks and his T-shirt with his heavy chest raising the cotton and white hair sticking out from his shirt-collar. He had thick, silver hair on his head and it had been combed and combed to keep a part but still would not behave. The man’s nose was large and run through with an old scar at the bridge, wide jaw below. Parts of him had gone softer with age but his frame was huge and his limbs long and the forearms thick and heavy with cordmuscle. The bottle was small in his great, knobbled fingers as he drank at it. The man paid no mind to the door, tiny speaker-buds in his ears and the wire running to a stereo on the tabletop beside him.

  “Hey there, Mr. Bradshaw,” Sarah called out.

  The man seemed not to hear her. She didn’t fret.

  “John,” she called. “The police are here. They say they got a warrant out on you.”

  The man sipped the beer again. He wiggled the earphone in his left ear and set his hand back down on the chair arm.

  “There’s a bunch of naked ladies come to see you,” Sarah said. “They say they just want your autograph.”

  The beer paused on its way up.

  “You’d better send them on in,” he said. Then he finished his drink before turning and setting the empty bottle on the bedside table and pushing a button on the stereo. He straightened up in the chair again and took the earphones out.

  “Hello,” John said.

  “Hey,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Well,” he said. “I was just takin’ the air.”

  “Okay.”

  The old man reached down and rummaged around in a trashcan. Ice rattled against the metals. His hand came up with two bottles pinched at the neck between his foreknuckles. He set the bottles down on the small table before him. There was an empty chair on the other side of the little tablestand and he waved at it.

  She stood in the doorway yet and leaned back to scout the long, dim corridor. She looked back into the room. The old man hadn’t moved nor changed his expression. She blew a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and then got up off the doorframe and went inside.

  “You know you ain’t supposed to bring beer in from the dining hall. Don’t you?”

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  “I think we might have gone over that rule before.”

  “First I ever heard of it.”

  Sarah settled hard in the chair. John took one of the bottles and his palm just passed over it for a moment but the cap had been twisted off and now sat somewhere in his cupped hand. He slid the bottle over to her across two feet of tabletop and then he uncapped his own and held it out. They clinked bottles across the table and drank. He pulled deep. Sarah took a long gulp of her own and rested and then sipped again.

  The old man studied her.

  “They workin’ you hard in here?”

  “It’s the same as ever.”

  “By the looks of you I would say that it’s a pretty rough beat.”

  “Thanks a lot,” she said.

  The old man took a swig and leaned back. He gripped the edge of his chair with his free hand. Sarah squinted her eyes at him as if she were trying to see something far away. Then she took another drink. She glanced over at the door. Nobody.

  “It’s as tough as you want it to be I guess,” s
he said. “Depending on what you put into it.”

  The old man nodded.

  “I figured as much. Some of these nurses don’t seem too hard done by at the end of their day.”

  “They’re not nurses,” Sarah said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said they’re not nurses.”

  “You’re a nurse aren’t ya?”

  “Not yet.”

  The old man grunted.

  “In that case I want a decrease in my rent.”

  Sarah smiled.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And don’t give me no shit about the beer either. Or say nothing to the bigwigs.”

  “Never do.”

  The old man paused.

  “I know,” he said.

  The big man put his bottle down empty. He reached into the trashcan and as he was pulling another he looked at Sarah and she showed her half-full bottle to him. The man brought the one bottle up and its cap had been twisted loose by the time it cleared the table. He took a swig and set the full bottle down beside the spent one.

  “What d’you do with the empties, John?” she said. “I never find them in here and I never heard any of the other girls chirp about it.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I just pitch ’em out the window. I imagine they roll clear to the water.”

  Sarah shook her head. She took another sip and stared out at the night through the thin curtain-cloth. Pale lamplight shone soft over the woodland grounds from lightpoles that had been sunk long years before Sarah was born.

  “It’s hard to look at you sometimes,” he said. “You know that?”

  “You’ve said it.”

  “She’d have got any older than she did I think she’d look like you.”

  Sarah tried to smile but had a hard time with it.

  “Don’t think you got all this time set aside for you later on. There’s nothin’ guaranteed,” John said.

  “Wouldn’t dare.”

  Sarah sat up and reached across the table. He was looking toward the woods again. His fingers let go of the chair arm and hung there and then grabbed it again. After a few seconds his hand came up and covered the all of Sarah’s hand.

  “Are you alright?” she said to him.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s nothing new. I got plenty to drink, and it’s a nice night. I got some good company.”

  He took his hand back but he’d not look at her again.

  “Nights like this I dream of being on the boat. Back east. About the whales where they run off the coast. I wake up I can still smell saltwater and gotta feel my face to see it ain’t chapped from the cold.”

  They were quiet for some minutes. John had not drunk at his beer since he’d brought it up and now Sarah reached over and stole it out of his hand and swigged. He smiled big before he took the bottle back. The old man drank and wiped the corners of his mouth with his forearm, settled with the beer in his lap.

  “So where are all the fuckin’ ladies you promised me?” he said.

  Sarah laughed and the more he waited calm for the answer the more she kept at it.

  In the small hours of morning Sarah sat alone at the attendant’s desk on the ground floor. She’d gotten very few calls throughout her shift and none were serious. Lost pills and trips to the bathroom. General confusion in the night. Sarah read from a new book until her eyelids started to drop and when her head nodded she kneaded her cheeks with her palms and then she got up and went to the little hallway kitchen to fetch more coffee. As she stood beside the percolator she felt strange and turned in time to see the tail of a nightgown passing the doorframe. She left the coffee dripping to the pot and went out.

  An old lady in her eighties stood near the outer door.

  “Hey, Mrs. Robitaille,” Sarah said.

  The woman kept at it.

  “What’s going on?” Sarah said. “It’s pretty late to be taking a walk.”

  The lady pressed her lips together hard. She would not quit the handle.

  “I’m following that man who left his room,” she said. “I woke up and I saw him and I started to follow him.”

  Sarah stared down at the hunchbacked woman. Thin white hair and creases of skin at her neck. Blue mapwork of veins on her wasted hands. Whatever else, the woman’s eyes were resolute. Sarah put her hand on Mrs. Robitaille’s shoulder.

  “Who was the man?” Sarah said.

  Through doorglass the old woman checked the outer lot. She gave the door one more shove and then looked up at Sarah.

  “It was that big man. He just up and went like nobody’s business. Not a hitch in his step. I think he must be feeling better.”

  Sarah stood up straight and likewise scoped the grounds. No one was out there. She tried to think if she’d dozed and lost time at the desk but the door buzzer would have woke her. It had never gone off and there were no blinking lights on the desktop panel.

  “It’s cold out there,” the old woman said. “And he didn’t even have his jacket.”

  Sarah watched the old woman put her head against the pillow and all but instantly fall back into sleep. She waited for a moment longer until she heard the woman’s lips whistle. She went out and shut the door soft. Let the doorhandle turn until the latch slid soundless into the strike. Sarah walked down the hall to the next room and saw the door open. Just slightly. Strip of flickering light through the gap. She put her hand on the door.

  The TV played silent and flashed shallow light against the far wall and over the length of the man’s bed. The room had gone very cool. Early morning chill that crept the open windows, tickled the curtains. Atop the bed lay a huge round of covers. The old man’s head rested low in the valley that its weight had made in the pillows. Sarah walked over to the far side of the bed and went to shut the windows. She stopped and turned.

  When she pressed her fingertips into the soft underside of his jaw the skin was cold. She pressed harder and then she leaned down and put her ear and cheek beside his part-open mouth. Sarah found his wrist under the blanket and grabbed it and soon she let it go. She took his face in her hands and rubbed at his bluing cheek with her thumb. She stepped away.

  Sarah sat beside him in the bed with her hands on her knees. She took deep breaths until she could stand up again. When she stood she couldn’t see and she sat back down. She wiped at her eyes and there she saw a lonely bottle neck-deep in the icewater of the metal trashcan. She pushed her hair back behind her ear and sniffled hard and then leant down and got hold of the bottle. She brought the beer up and let it wet her smock. Then she gripped the cap and turned it loose and took a long drink. She tried to look down at John but she couldn’t so she got up out of the bed and sat in the chair where he’d been some hours before.

  The wind came harder now and the thin drapes blew up against Sarah’s chair and goosepimples rose at her pale neck. She drank slow by the flickering of the television and soon she shut it off. Empty bottle in her hand. The room would not darken. Morning rose up over the outlying water and through the tree-columns. Birds spoke and half-naked branches shook their leaves.

  EIGHT

  The Monte Carlo backed out of the drive and cut into the road. Dust spun up in the lane and hung there. Daniel stood on the step with a beer in his hand and the cold in his bones. Murray had asked him nothing and he’d offered nothing. Light frost covered the grass but it had come late in the night and took but minutes to melt as the sun rose and spilled yellow through the far trees. He went inside with the bottle and sat on the couch. He finished the beer and got another and went down to the cellar.

  He heard her before he saw her. The boards speaking soft as she came down. Daniel wore just shorts and he had clothes soaking in the laundry sink beside an old washboard. Steam rising from the water.

  “Dad,” she said.

  He did not look up
again.

  “Are you alright?

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now go back to sleep.”

  He could hear the truck climbing the drive. The engine quit and the door opened and shut. Daniel’s pulse gained pace a little and he tried to settle it. Keys jangled and the doorknob turned. When Sarah saw him there on the couch she froze up. He sat in his gitch on the edge of the couch cushions. Bottles stood up empty all over the coffee table. He’d been watching a nature documentary about wolverines with the sound almost too low to hear.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hey, Sarah,” he said.

  “How is the kid?”

  “She’s fine,” he said.

  Sarah hooked up her keys in the entryway and went into the kitchen and set her purse on the table. A few seconds later she came back with two beers and sat beside her husband in her scrubs. She started to lean into him but then she stood up and pulled the scrub-top clear over her head with both hands and pulled at her wrinkled T-shirt by the hem. She tossed the garment into the middle of the floor and then took her pants down and tossed them as well and sat down again in her underwear. Daniel reached over to the end of the couch and picked up the blanket he’d left for Murray and he held it out to her. She bit at the nails of her left hand and looked at the blanket. Soon she took it from him and shook it out and laid it over his bare legs and feet and then over hers.

  “You’ve not slept a minute,” she said.

  Sarah grabbed up the beer bottles from the table one at a time. Uncapped the first and gave it to him and then opened her own. She put an arm around him, rubbed at the cold skin of his back.

  “I think Clayton got us into something we can’t get out of, no matter what the motherfucker thinks,” Daniel said.

  He told her the all of what happened and she listened with her heart beating hard against him. She drank the beer in gulps and set it down and put her head in her hands.

  “I should never have gone out there to talk to that son of a bitch,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference whether you went out there or not. He would’ve called me anyways.”