The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  “Without a dream in my heart,

  Without a love of my own…”

  I sent Scott after him, the biggest orderly we have, and Scott likes to tussle. When he’s off shift with us, he works downtown as a bouncer, and I’ve seen his hands after some weekends, the knuckles ripped up and scabbed over. I told Scott that Miller had a knife, told him to get the cops. I felt under my ear, but there wasn’t any bleeding.

  When Scott came back, he just shook his head. There had been a trail of footprints in the fresh snow, he thought, but only until he’d reached a busier street.

  “Sorry, doc,” he said. I noticed Scott’s hair was full of loose and perfect snow flakes. “No sign of him.”

  No sign at all.

  Dealing with Determinism

  HELEN SAID SHE WOULDN’T GO – AND SHE didn’t.

  “No way,” she said, not even looking up from her book. “It’s just a bunch of drunks I don’t know, and all their cigarette smoke and noise. I can’t think of a worse way to spend an evening.” She was in their bedroom, a blanket over her legs, knees drawn up into a small but stubborn mountain range.

  “I’ve got to go,” Kevin said, standing at the foot of the bed. “It’s the Christmas party. I’m expected.”

  “You’re expected? It’s your office. Go ahead then. It doesn’t mean I’m expected.”

  “Fine.”

  It was, he thought, an argument they used to find time to have. But now they just walked away, positions entrenched. They had reached a point, Kevin thought, where arguments were over before they began. It was the flash point that wasn’t – it was, he thought, surrendering, giving up, letting go.

  Outside, there was wet snow already. The spruce trees were heavy with it, and there was enough down on the road that the occasional cars left tire tracks that lasted only moments before they started to fill in. Pulling out of the driveway, before the tires bit down to the pavement, Kevin stepped on the gas and the back end of the truck gave a sudden shuddering lurch to one side, and for one small moment, he thought about backing up and just pulling back into the driveway. But the thought made him set his jaw, and he drove away.

  Later, it would occur to him that somehow it was all her fault, just because she wouldn’t go, that it would have been different if she had. And what an easy way out that was: it was his first excuse.

  But he had others.

  “There aren’t good guys or bad guys,” he liked to say afterwards to anyone willing to listen to him talk about it. “Nothing is as simple as that. Nothing is black and white.” Just saying it wasn’t his fault, that there were other things involved, that none of it would have happened if things had been going better between them.

  “You don’t just go out and sleep with someone else,” he’d say, defensively, as if it were some kind of legitimate explanation, as if it wasn’t exactly what he had done.

  Sure, he would think sometimes, sure it was sordid and tawdry and everything else. Thinking about the way a girl named Pat from customer service at the office had put her hand on his leg under the table, and that it wasn’t an accident, and that her hand had moved slowly up his thigh while he had tried to keep talking, his mind spinning while his body responded urgently to her touch. Pat Connolly, small and blond, packed into a short black formal dress: he had seen her coming up the stairs to the second floor of the bar, Pat and Denise Mouland and the new girl from the front counter, the quiet, skinny one with the big, hollow eyes. Kevin couldn’t remember her name.

  The group had settled onto the bench on Kevin’s side of the table, with Pat pushing down against him because there wasn’t quite enough room.

  It could have been innocent enough at first, he reasoned, because they had all been laughing, and her hand fell on his shoulder first. Collegial, even though her hand felt charged against his back. They all had free drink tickets, numbered tickets unwound from the same big red coil, and the table – a long pine table with heavy benches on both sides – was covered with empty beer bottles by then. The bar was on two levels, and downstairs half the office was dancing on the small dance floor, laughing as they picked out ’70s music to dance to – right then, Dire Straits and the Sultans of Swing. Kevin could see that all together, they virtually filled the Rabbit’s Foot, the small, dark bar the company had rented for the evening – that had been an office joke for weeks, he remembered, who was “going to get lucky at the Rabbit’s Foot.”

  It was a better spread than some years: this time, big trays of broccoli and celery and carrots with sour cream dip, cold cuts and finger food – a small crowd developed every time another tray of hot wings was brought out.

  Everyone was talking at once, and as it got louder and louder, Kevin felt as if he could disappear into the sound, drown in it, as if it would fill the room and overflow.

  Except for her hand on his leg, and the fire that seemed to be burning in his thigh, and in two spots he could feel glowing high on his cheekbones. He found it hard to comprehend that she would even be interested in him; a mid-level newspaper manager with a paunch just starting to swell over his belt, a man who stood in the shower every morning, inspected the handfuls of shampoo foam and rinsed his hands of the bunches of loose hair that departed with every wash.

  The conversation at the table had deteriorated into pocket philosophy, into the fuzzy world of beer debate. The argument was a simple one: whether people choose their own direction, or whether events and upbringing make the choice for them.

  “In the end, it’s your choice,” an editor named Pinsent was arguing, yelling over the rest of the room. “Whatever you do, you do.”

  Kevin shook his head firmly. “You don’t always get to pick,” he said.

  And then he was downstairs in a hallway near the coats, no cognitive decision about it, and her skirt was rucked up over her hips, his hands on her ass. Nothing subtle about that. The bar around them was like an exhaled, smoky breath, and all the coats smelled like wool from the heavy wet snow outside. Remembering it later, critical pieces seemed to be missing: he could remember the exquisite feeling of her fingers on his arm, but he could not remember walking down the stairs to the coats.

  Sometimes, he would decide that the rest of it had been a horrible mistake – and then, mere seconds later, that none of it was a mistake at all. One thing he thought he knew for sure was that, if the evening had all been cued up again like an unrolling spool of film, everything would have happened in exactly the same order – with exactly the same result. Gears will turn true, and clocks will tick ever forwards. And there’s not a minute that can ever change the length of its period.

  Then Julie and David came down the hall, leaving the party – Julie from accounting, and her boyfriend David, who had worked for a few years in the front office. They were finding their coats, pulling them down from the hangers sharply so that the wooden hangers rattled back against the wall. Both of them studiously keeping their eyes high, fixing their stares above Kevin’s flushed face, avoiding both his eyes and the sight of Pat still standing tight against him.

  “Leaving already?” Kevin asked. Julie was tall and slim, her mouth pursed small. She was, Kevin thought, too young to have fashioned her face into such a deliberate knot of disapproval.

  “Yes,” she said, and Kevin had never heard a single word said so coldly.

  At the same time, having the couple come down the hall to the coatroom was an easy break – nothing had really happened yet, Kevin thought, nothing that couldn’t be explained by too much beer. Because David and Julie had stopped – well, Kevin wasn’t really sure what they had stopped, couldn’t decide exactly what would have happened next.

  It was a chance to get away, even if he wasn’t looking to escape. There was just this thin warning in his head that if there was ever an opportunity to pull back, this was it, and that the chance would not come again. Decisions made of small moments that look like instant choices, but really aren’t that at all, he thought. The decisions are made much earlier – it just is
n’t obvious when or how they are made.

  Pat was fixing her lipstick and pulling her skirt back down over her hips, first one side, then the other.

  “Give me a drive home, would ya?” she said, grabbing him by the wrist. He tried hard not to pull away, the sudden possessiveness in her grip unnerving him.

  “No, I can’t,” he said, the possibilities and dangers whirling through his head all at the same time.

  And then he did anyway.

  While he drove, Kevin tried to work it out rationally: he tried to think about chaos theory, wanted to consider just plain inescapable original sin. But the words rattled around in his head, empty, meaningless. The snow battering against the windshield, for a moment an image of Helen sleeping with the book face down on the blanket, the whirling feeling you get when you dance too fast… Then Pat’s hand on his thigh again. Kevin putting on the turn signal, pulling the truck off the side of the road into deeper snow. Philosophy meaning very little in the instant.

  The gearshift was in the way and they wrestled for a few moments with stubborn and uncooperative clothing: later he remembered seeing, over his shoulder her bare foot on the dashboard in the orange of the streetlight. Jarring, moving memories – cars flicking by on the road, the snow starting to pile up on the glass with fat wet flakes, Pat’s breathing. And the disconcerting feeling that he was somehow watching everything from a distance, an observer, rather than a participant.

  They didn’t speak while they drove the last few blocks to Pat’s driveway: a small suburban house, her apartment in the basement with only a few windows that could even catch light. The two windows on the front were lit yellow from the lights inside, but the snow was filling the windows in.

  “Want to come in?” Pat asked.

  “No,” Kevin said quietly. “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “All right then. That was nice,” Pat said, out of the truck quickly and slamming the door, heading up towards the house. She waved over her shoulder without looking back. Kevin put the truck in reverse, and backed away.

  DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW, the flakes catching in the headlights and then rushing eagerly towards the front of the truck, the evening came back to him in a visceral rush that he could feel right through the centre of his body. He could still taste the smoke on Pat’s lips, still feel the fluid curve of her hips arcing against his own. It felt to him that he had been painted, all over, with a special sort of paint that you couldn’t help but see. And he tried to look back and convince himself that it had been wrong – but it was a difficult equation to work through, without coming up with exactly the same answer, the same action.

  No matter how he put it together, he ended up in the same place, feeling her fingers spread and gripping his back – knowing that he shouldn’t have done it, but that he would have done it again, without a moment’s extra thought.

  You get what you build, he thought, and I’ve built this. Watching the snowflakes fall, each one’s staggering tumble explainable, even if the calculation is so incredibly complex as to render it unprovable.

  He pulled into his own driveway, turned off the headlights and the engine, and sat there. Listening to the engine tick as it cooled, watching the snowflakes at first melting on the windshield, and then starting their slushy climb up the glass.

  Inside, in bed, Helen is sleeping, Kevin thought. She’s sleeping, and for her, absolutely nothing has changed. The world is still spinning true, and will stay that way, axis near to vertical, for hours, maybe even for days. He walked up from the truck, turned the key in the lock slowly, keenly aware of the wobble that his world had developed.

  He walked around the dark kitchen, picking things up and putting them back down again. No real order to his choices: a pepper mill, a wooden spoon, the hem of a dishcloth hanging from the handle of the oven. Walking through the living room, still touching things as if trying to convince himself that they, at least, were solid and familiar. And they were familiar: even though he felt as if they should all be changed under his touch, every single thing was where it should be. Then he climbed the stairs, his hand loose on the railing.

  He could hear Helen breathing in the darkened room, steady, long breaths that ended in a half-snore he had always loved teasing her about. The light from outside, leaking from the edges of the curtains, lit up pieces of the room: a bed table here, the edge of the comforter at the foot of the bed.

  For a moment, he wasn’t sure what to do next. He could feel his hand tight around the key ring in his pants’ pocket, the truck key large and sharp-edged and ready.

  Instead, he undid his belt, took off his pants and shirt, and, naked, slid into bed, still distracted by the reality that the sheets felt exactly the way they had when he had gotten up that morning.

  Then, almost of its own accord, his right hand reached for her, cupping the dome of her right shoulder. She was sleeping on her left side, her back to him.

  Helen murmured in her sleep, and nestled her back in against his stomach, against his groin.

  He wanted to say wait, this is not what I thought … but the thought was a fleeting one. She was naked and warm, and Helen. He felt himself getting aroused, and at the same time, horrified.

  She rolled onto her stomach, and arched towards him again, both familiar and eager.

  He suddenly realized, his hand resting flat on the middle of her back, the skin there soft and sleeping-warm, that he was trying to say with his body what he couldn’t say out loud. He thought of it as a warning, like yelling for help without ever speaking – and also, strangely, an attempt to make things right again.

  Desperate and determined, trying to prove he was exactly the person he always had been, yet frantic about whether or not he would be able to pull it off. It was, in the end, a rivetting combination. When it was over, he shuddered violently and fell back against the bed.

  For a moment, the room was almost silent, only the sound of their competing breathing in the dark.

  Then, fully awake, Helen finally spoke. Even, slow words, each one shaped carefully, each one dropped like a pebble.

  “Now,” pulling the sheet back up over her breasts, “what exactly is it that you’re trying to tell me?”

  Bowling Night

  HE TOOK THE BOWLING BALL, AND LET THE car burn.

  His hand was already sweaty around the handle of the bag. The ditch beside the road was full of clover and bees. Long, even rows of apple trees ran down the hill, the fruit heavy and reddening and pulling the branches down, and behind him, his car wasn’t only smoking. It was well alight now, the windows gone, red-orange flames boiling out and the oily black smoke standing straight up in the sky in an ever-widening column.

  Ray had felt, more than heard, the windows blow out, scattering safety-glass diamonds into the grown-over road gravel and out onto the hot, late-August road. He hadn’t looked back as the sound rolled over him, hadn’t turned around once, just kept walking awkwardly down the long incline towards New Minas, shifting the bag from one hand to the other every hundred feet or so. He wasn’t used to walking any more, just like he wasn’t used to putting on a coat in the depths of winter because the car was next to the house, his keys familiar in his hand. Walking along the side of the highway, he could feel his thighs rubbing together with each step, and his legs already felt damp and sweaty inside his jeans.

  The tires had lit by then, and each one exploded with a muffled thump. When the police came and ran the burned, ridged numbers of the licence plate through their computer, it told them that the registered owner was Ray Hennessey, General Delivery, Gaspereaux, Nova Scotia. And Ray was far away already, walking. As he walked, he looked at the long runs of escaped foxglove and lupin running down below the shoulder of the road, and he wondered how long it had been since he had actually smelled the full, sweet scent that blew off the flowers.

  It had all started with a fight with Jenine – everything started with a fight now. Or ended with one. And it was almost impossible to reconcile this Jenine with
that other Jenine, the Jenine who had been so quiet, sitting with a small knot of her friends in the club at Evangeline Beach.

  Then, the club had been a regular summer hangout, and teenagers had driven from Kentville and New Minas, from Windsor and Hantsport and Wolfville, to dances in the close, muggy airless club – thick with the smell of chewing gum and beer and sweaty bodies – the only break from the heat coming when the piled-cloud thunderstorms rolled up the length of the valley from Digby and brought a short few hours of respite. Then, the curtains beside the open windows would breathe in and out with the short, sharp breaths of cool, post-rain air.

  Now, what had been the long, open dance floor was crowded with pinball machines and video games, and there was a tired shop counter where you could buy charcoal and potato chips, hotdog buns and almost-cold soft drinks. The building sagged, broken-backed at some point along its sills, settling into the contour of the ground. A desultory and thinly-attended mini-golf course sat by the back door, eighteen holes dressed in frayed green outdoor carpet. Battered putters lay forgotten under a dusty grey layer, a thin skin of oxidation from the salt air. Around the back, a small forest of camper-trailers had grown up, permanent residents who parked their campers high on cinder blocks, planted gardens and built brick barbecues. They came out every weekend to shout greetings to the same familiar neighbours. Not a journey, just a simple change of backdrop for actors in the same play.

  The high brown tides of Minas Basin were chewing away at the promontory where the club sat, and each year, the owners had truckloads of boulders and the remains of road work dumped there to hold back the sea – flat black oozing plates of asphalt, squares of concrete sidewalks, busted-up pieces of curbs and gutters. But the winter storms chewed all of that away, sucking the pavement slabs out into the mud and scattering them deep in the bay.