The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  There had been, for years, a long point of land there, stretching above the ruler-flat beach. On hot nights, when ice melted in your glass faster than you could drink, you could stand under a string of coloured lights at the end of the point and look out over the dark bay – wherever the tide was, whether you were looking over bare mud flats and shingle beach or over the flat, waveless surface of the bay, it gave the same inky black impression: it was a necessary opposite, the negative to the flat silver of the day. The red-brown sandstone was eaten away in layers on the outcrop, each thin sliver, each ragged step in the stone a collection of hardened centuries melting away.

  When the moon rose full over the long ridge of Blomidon to the south, you could lean on the railing and watch the swifts and swallows scoop up swamp mosquitoes and midges just as the last of the light failed.

  He had met Jenine out there. She had been standing near the rail, waving a hand uselessly at the cloud of insects. The swallows wheeled in, dark shapes with their wings folded flat against their bodies like darts, gathering flies from just above their heads.

  And they were awkward together then, an awkwardness that would punctuate their relationship until it finally became a constant, barely-recognized background note.

  He was on a road crew that summer, holding a sign for ten hours a day, and his skin was tanned to the colour of leather, at least to the line marked by the sleeves and collar of his t-shirt. Later, seeing himself in the mirror in the half-light of the bedroom, Ray would think that it looked as if he was always wearing a white t-shirt, the difference in colour between his arms and shoulders so abrupt that he could have been parts of two different people awkwardly joined above the elbow and at the neck. It made him feel that taking off his clothes was particularly revealing, and that Jenine was the only person who ever really saw him.

  Eventually, they had a loose, comfortable offhandedness that suited them both well; they walked in the evenings on the long dykes that held back the Bay of Fundy from the low fields behind, tracing the spine of the dykes when the evening was calm, taking the gravel road below the dykes when there was wind, watching the grasshoppers panic and careen away in long arcs from their footsteps. Sometimes, when they were walking along the top of the dyke, small touches of wind would run across the green wheat below, turning the heads of the wheat and leaving long silver fingerprints that vanished as the plants straightened up again when the wind moved away.

  And even the small house in Gaspereaux didn’t change that ease, a tiny house, built for generations of smaller people, with low ceilings and shallow closets and walls that the wind seemed to whisper right through. In the winter, broad feathers of frost spread across the windows, and some mornings the outdoors looked as if you were staring at the day through the warble of bottle glass. The drafts spun around their ankles and the only warmth was deep in bed.

  They got the car then, so that they could drive into Wolfville for groceries, a big, flat-nosed boat of a car, a gold and white LeMans, rusting along the bottoms of the doors but with a great wide bench of a seat, a long car loose in the turns, especially when the road was icy. It drank gasoline by the gallon and sometimes smoked, but when they were driving, Jenine would unclasp her seatbelt and move over close to him, their legs touching, and put her hand on the inside of his thigh. With the windows rolled up and the radio on, they drove folded into each other, protected from the world outside.

  It became a difficult car when the children were born – the doors heavy and long, making it hard to maneuver two little boys into their backseat car seats – but it was what they had, so it was as simple as that.

  At first, it was enough – making do was enough, now that he was driving dump truck instead of just holding signs, and the cheques were better, the work more steady, even if there was a span in the early spring when the plowing was finished, the roadwork hadn’t started and money was tight.

  But everything he thought couldn’t change, did.

  Maybe, he thought, it was the children, turning Jenine almost imperceptibly at first, bending the compass away from north like a magnet set too close. And it wasn’t that he didn’t love both of them – he did desperately, breathlessly at times, especially when they lay sleeping, their arms soft against the sheets in the half-light. But Jenine loved them more – Ray would admit that to himself sometimes, quietly, like when he caught her putting their pyjamas in the wash, holding the small shirts to her face as if trying desperately to find their scent deep in the flannelette. And it occurred to him that she had only so much love to share, and that his portion was now necessarily smaller.

  But he hadn’t changed, he thought. He hadn’t.

  Jenine had learned a bitter smile, he noticed, a fixed and hard smile he had never seen before.

  It was like driving at night, like being forced down the tunnel of your headlights, able to see what was coming but unable to avoid smashing into it. Like falling, but with the benefit of knowing exactly where the fall was leading, and knowing at the same time that he was powerless to change any of it.

  “You could at least try for the foreman’s job,” she said, her back to him while she stood at the sink, the words bouncing back off the window glass. “You could try, if you had any initiative at all.”

  A vindictive tone in her voice, a brassy satisfaction like she was daring him to say something else. And he would try to fight back – he could have told her the job was already Mike’s, because Mike was dating the owner’s daughter – but his heart wasn’t in it. And somehow that was even worse.

  An argument would build between them like a storm rolling down the valley, but before it burst into the open, he would be distracted by a hard-shelled flying bug tapping the kitchen light bulb, or the awkward flutter of the curtains caused by someone opening a door somewhere else in the house.

  He would lose his train of thought and, that thread lost, he would find himself unable to argue any more.

  And Ray began to notice things that he had never seen before; how the jagged-edge alder leaves on the bank behind the house were so much darker, their green much duller, than the other trees. How the catkins on those same alders stayed hard and green, virtually until the single day when they all at once turned brown and broke open, scattering the near-invisible seeds to the wind. How the fairy-ring mushrooms – light brown with torn, embattled, soft-rotting black edges – formed a ragged circle in the same place in the yard, every year, acting out the organic memory of a tree he had long ago forgotten.

  How the baking cherries turned colour from green to flesh, and then the dark green leaves were punctuated all over with bright red round dots.

  The months clicked over like numbers on the odometer, steadily marching, white on black.

  And then, when the fights started, the fights he could never win because he didn’t even know how to properly begin, he would just pick up the bowling ball and leave, heading for New Minas, leaving the front door open on the white house and hearing the shouted words chasing him down the driveway – “Tell me what you’re thinking. Just say what it is you’re thinking” – and he’d wonder who was yelling as he yanked the shift into reverse and backed down the drive.

  He was, by now, a big man, used to greasy spoon lunches and eating on the fly, and when he moved quickly, sweat would sprout in unexpected places. But at the bowling lanes on Wednesdays, he had a strange poise. He held the ball high and moved to the line with small steps, almost mincing, something close to a heavy man’s ballet while his stomach preceded him. And his arm would whip back and then flow forwards in one motion, and he would release the ball in a spinning shallow curve, angling towards the ten-pin from a direction it never seemed to expect.

  Holiday Lanes in New Minas had just ten lanes, ten pins each, one hundred soldiers standing in formation. It was small and noisy and battered, but strangely self-contained, a whole small world of clatter and order. Knock all the pins down, and magically their formation would reappear.

  Ray was on a team with three o
f the other dump drivers, and they hadn’t ever won the league trophy, but they often came close.

  And the other drivers would talk about teen conquests, spectacular wrecks, and whether John Andrews had really cracked Helen Devries on a picnic table at the beach on prom night, the way he always boasted he had – twenty years had passed but it was still the subject of great debate – and Ray would sit quietly, turning the big ball in his hands, waiting for his turn.

  He was the best player on the team, his aim constant, his score always high, and Ray sometimes felt as if he could simply will the ball to curve, so sharply did it bite against the slick lane and turn for the headpin. Then, his turn over, he’d sit again, feeling the ball under his hands as smooth as glass.

  They’d drink too many beers to drive, and then drive anyway, counting on their experience and occasionally veering wildly onto the shoulder, throwing gravel. And when the cops saw them, the police would pull their cruisers into the first available driveway, turn around, and drive the other way.

  When they ripped up the sidewalks in Wolfville that summer, Ray’s truck – a big red tandem-wheeled dump with jake brakes and a persistent, constant exhaust leak into the cab that left his tongue oily with diesel smoke at the end of each day – was one of the dump trucks that hauled the used gravel and broken pavement out to Evangeline Beach, dumping it down the long slope in front of the threatened club. And even Ray could see that it was a war they were losing, could see it more clearly with each load. He could see that the strong tides started moving the heaviest of the pavement squares in only a few days, the fine silty mud and sand shifting and undercutting the slabs, and the tide worrying the cliff like a dog at a dead rabbit. It was obvious that the club had only a few more winters. If that.

  At the end of each day he’d wait in Wolfville where they parked the trucks in sight of the night watchman, a reedy man who smoked constantly, his cigarette a small scarlet lighthouse signalling warning amid the shoals of a craggy and deeply lined face. And every day, Ray’s head pounded from the exhaust and the heat, from the dust and the blatting roar of the downhill brakes, and he’d wait until Jenine picked him up to angrily drive him over the hill to home.

  By August, the pile in front of the club was broad and fanning out, but every morning, Ray could see another few pavement slabs that had skimmed away down the flat beach on the receding tongue of the tide.

  When the sidewalks were done, they took down DeWolfe’s apple warehouse, because the trains had stopped and the apples went away by truck as soon as they were picked. They took the roof down first and saved the big beams, but when the roof was gone, the company brought in a crane with a wrecking ball and smashed the high walls down in a single afternoon, because it was the only safe thing to do. The collapsing walls raised clouds of dust that caught in Ray’s nose. An excavator filled his truck, and Ray drove the scraps of warehouse away.

  They took down every single thing except the building’s chimney, three storeys high and unused for years, and they only kept that because, on summer evenings, hundreds of chimney swifts would return at dusk and boil backwards down the chimney like a huge cloud of smoke travelling in reverse.

  Ray painted the house that year with another coat of white paint, old oil paint from the shed, heavy and glutinous and pulling back at the brush with almost as much force as he could muster to pull it forward. And one Wednesday evening, when he had finished hating window trim about as much as he believed he could hate any single thing, he pounded the paint cans shut in the dark and slab-sided shed, knowing at the same time that he would have to paint it all again the next summer.

  And perhaps the fight started because he had gotten so much trim paint on the glass. It didn’t matter. Ray forgot almost everything about the fight quickly, distracted by a bumblebee that had found its way into the kitchen, flying slowly and angrily and butting its head against the windowpanes, unable to find its way out. He could see the bristly yellow-and-black, the fat summer pods of pollen on the bee’s front legs like saddlebags, the way the bee used its feet to scrabble futilely against the glass for a few moments after every single collision. He remembered standing by the window, pushing the window up and letting the bee out, watching the gooey strands of white paint stretching and breaking between the window and the sill. He remembered the shape of the door, the feel of the doorknob in his hand. But he couldn’t remember Jenine’s face or even the sound of her voice.

  Then he was in the car, driving on the highway. The engine warning light came on, orange, and then the red oil light, but Ray drove without moving his head, his face planed calm and staring, the radio talking loosely to someone else, turned too low to be heard. The engine started knocking hard as the car climbed the first long ridge of the highway, crossing the big iron bridge over the Gasperaux. The big bridge the highways department would sandblast clean and repaint every summer, and every year, the fat-knuckled boils of rust would reappear by spring.

  At the top of the hill, the dials on the dashboard went wild, and the car stopped, lurching once onto the shoulder, and smoke started to curl out from under the hood. He sat there watching, futilely turning the key over and over again. Nothing. In the middle of the hood, the paint started to blister and peel back all by itself, leaving a widening, blackening circle, more smoke coming out from the edges of the hood all the time. He sat, listening to hisses and crackles as the radio stopped, and thin wisps of smoke rose from around his feet. Then he took the key out of the ignition, lifted his bowling ball off the seat, locked the doors, and started walking away down the long inclined plane of the Five-Mile Hill towards New Minas. Soon, there were sirens coming up from Wolfville, but he kept walking.

  A firefighter standing next to the burning car saw Hennessey just before he disappeared from sight, just before his body sank below the hill and his head and neck were wobbly from the heat-shimmer off the pavement. And the firefighter pointed him out to the police – by then only the dome of Ray’s head and his white shirt visible, the distance robbing him of arms – while the big pump on the fire engine was still thrumming and the water hitting the LeMans made the hot metal ping and snap. The fill-line to the gas tank had burned off, and a large puddle of gasoline was burning on the pavement.

  The police car crept up behind Ray slowly, its right-side tires crackling on the gravel shoulder, but he still didn’t turn around.

  Not until a policeman touched him gently on the shoulder.

  Then Ray swung the bowling ball desperately in its handled bag, and another, more cautious policeman edged in behind him and broke the bone at the point of Ray’s elbow with a sharp rap of his night-stick, a motion as easy and gentle as a caress, the practiced, slow motion of a cook breaking the first egg on the edge of a pan.

  And even after Ray dropped the bowling ball, it took four policemen to put him in the back of their car. Down in the ditch, the bees took turns marching into the garish funnels of the foxgloves, and the clover bobbed and nodded its silent approval.

  The Latitude of Walls

  “SHE’S SCREAMING.”

  “She always screams.”

  It was cotton-dark on the stairs, cotton-dark and gripping, the kind of dark that fills corners, fills the corners and rests there, waiting.

  And the sound of the screaming seeped through the wall, muffled like wool, shadowed and thin, the edges planed, the tops and bottoms all lost. Without tympani or piccolo, but screaming nonetheless. Words indistinct, but tone definite.

  Cold on the stairs, the draft falling off the big window halfway up, air falling down between the gaps in the stair treads, running away into cracks in the floor, meeting crumbs and dust and spiders, toppling into the crawl space beneath. And even after the scream stopped, he could hear it, echoing, thin and whispered, known, tattooed as much as remembered. It was the sort of sound, the kind of harmonic that sets up its own place, that rings in a way that lets it hang in memory like a finger, held chin-high and in front of you, pointing outwards. The kind of sound that, once
heard, is never forgotten. And the night pressed too close, the wind up outside and shaking. The night gloved and fingered and touching, the trees rattling branches like bare finger bones. Outside, a fine-footed cat walking tightrope, one careful foot in front of another, intent and distant, lone-walking, fursleeking, far away and into the garbage behind the fence. And then, after a moment, the screaming again, low, guttural and feral.

  “I’m telling you, she’s screaming,” Kevin Hennessey said. He was only new there, recently separated from his wife, living in a friend’s narrow house like a transient in an alley, caught in between so tightly that he could reach out and touch the walls that hemmed him in. New enough that he could still feel the shape and style of his previous life around him like furniture, placed and unmoving, feet settled into the carpet, making dimples.

  He had always expected that he would stay: leaving home had seemed like a long, virtually impossible hill, something that maybe could be climbed, but only if you could ever find the energy. It was always there, always something just on the edge of the possible as the desperation built, until one day he found himself wildly throwing shirts and underwear into a duffel bag.

  By then, neither he nor his wife were sleeping more than three hours a night, the rest of the darkness torn apart with tears and quiet, bitter fights. Exhaustion took as much of a toll as anything else: days were a hopeless tangle of confusion and the blank stare left over from sleeplessness. Leaving became necessity; the rest of his world had been out of his control, taken over by the Coriolis effect, spinning quick and clockwise, straight down the drain. Sometimes, that’s exactly what Kevin blamed it all on: Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, the nineteenth-century scientist whose examination of Newton’s laws of motion of bodies explained both cyclones and the spinning whirlpool disappearance of bathwater. Pull the plug, watch it all go, watch a fine and curling twister rise up from the drain, the whirlpool column in the water silver-sided in the light – fragile, and yet cruelly constant. Often, that was as close to a reason as he could find: that he had taken a wrong step, and physics had inevitably intervened. It was that, or accept a personal blame he didn’t really understand, or – more to the point – wasn’t willing to put his finger on.