Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a dark lump of metal. It was now totally useless as a Flasher trigger, but it had travelled across the decades more than once.

  He hadn’t even recognized it for what it was, hadn’t put together this last strange puzzle, until he’d begun dismantling the Flasher in preparation for the court case. Basil thought that the poor little thing deserved a reward, or at least a frequent flyer time traveller’s points card.

  If he allowed for the warping that the intense process of Flashing imprinted on the trigger, he could see where it still fit in the console. He put it away, carefully wrapping it back in its evidence bag and tucking it into his coverall pockets, then turned his eyes to the other evidence inside the ship.

  The mysterious music deck was still hooked haphazardly into the console system, held together with duct tape and wire clamps and something Basil vaguely recognized as bubblegum. He resisted the urge to tear it out and throw it to the ground and smash it repeatedly with the flat of his shovel.

  This — this — was why his lover was dead, his son had never been born, his whole life had gotten so crappy. This stupid deck in a stupid ship, and stupid Raquel Winkelaar.

  Instead he took a hundred photos on his digital camera of the deck rigged into the cockpit sound system from all angles, then lifted it gingerly with gloved fingertips, wrapped a plastic bag around it, and set it securely on the cockpit seat. There would be fingerprints on that deck, and those fingerprints would condemn the people who had almost taken the last precious thing from Basil’s life. They would prove that the pilot had been Agent Aitken.

  The woman who had almost killed Gwennie. Gwen.

  Everything inside sorted and secured, Mark hooked a chain up to the winch in the inside of the truck’s box, and the other end to the nose of the ship. Along with the help of the truck’s fold-out ramp, they got the ship safely secured in the wooden crate. An ungodly amount of foam peanuts and bungee cords later, Basil was fairly sure that if the ship didn’t make it back to the UK in one piece, it was because the plane it had been in would have been bombed.

  He shuddered at the careless thought.

  A few months ago, someone out there would have given anything for the opportunity to take out both Gwen and Basil so easily, in one fell stroke. There would have been no regard for the other passengers, of course, and that’s what scared Basil most.

  That other people — like Kalp — would be killed and just regarded as collateral damage.

  Other people with lovers and children and…

  No.

  But it was over; over forever, he hoped.

  And this was the last winding string, the loose end. With the ship as evidence, the whole lot of the wankers who had killed so many innocent people would be sent up the river for life. For the first time, Basil almost regretted that the U.N. had rallied the nations of the world together to ban capital punishment across the globe.

  The Institute had demanded that its own special ops and clean up teams do the retrieval, once Director Addison had revealed what Gwen and Basil were going to do, but Gwen had insisted on going alone. She had withheld the location until they gave in. Basil was sure they’d been followed via satellite GPS the whole time. Her parents’ address had to be on file somewhere, so no doubt the clean team was already en route, but Gwen’s desire had been partially fulfilled already: private time with her parents to patch and pack up the last of a hurtful and terrifying past.

  There would be all of today: the rest of the afternoon, talk at the dinner table with the French wine Basil had smuggled into his luggage, conversations late into the night and breakfast in the morning to ward off hangovers.

  There would be time.

  The revelation smacked Basil in the forehead and he stood and stared up at the sky, blue and deep and forever. Gwen had almost died, and then she had not. Basil still had her. If he had lost everything else, he still had her. Basil still had time.

  The first bang of a hammer slamming against a nail brought him out of his stupor and he went into the box of the truck to help Mark nail the crate shut. When it was done, they came out and watched as Evvie brushed the back of her hand over her sweating forehead, pushing aside the raucous humidity-induced curls. Gwen echoed the gesture unconsciously, hand in similar curls, and Basil swallowed heavily.

  “I was standing right here,” Evvie said. “Right here, by the raspberries, when it happened.”

  Gwen folded her hands over the top of the shovel and rested her chin on them.

  Evvie pointed up, sketching hope and memory in the air with the movements of her fingers, outlining the remembered hulls of the first of the ships that broke through the light, early evening cloud cover that not-so-long-ago night.

  “‘Look, Mark,’” she said. “That’s what I told him. Just like you said. Look.”

  ***

  The Piersons had a wall-mounted HDTV, so the television stand sitting abandoned and bare under it was a bit ridiculous all alone, collecting dust and age-yellowed television guides, left over pennies and elastic bands, and a dollar-store basket full of curled take-out food receipts.

  Basil stopped at the foot of the stairs, sock toes on the edge of a carpet that could have once, reasonably, been called cream. It wasn’t that the basement was dirty. It was just that it was thirty-odd years old, padding the memories of a family home.

  Basil could imagine little Gwennie there, easy as anything, even though he’d never actually seen her in this particular room. He could imagine the first steps, the first tears, the first fights. He bet Gwennie had learned to walk on this carpet. She’d probably also learned to projectile vomit on this carpet, too. She’d yelled at him in this room. He’d yelled at her. She’d probably had equally loud fights with her parents, standing in the exact same spot, hands on her hips and the curl of weave under her toes. They’d probably had fights over allowance, car keys, clothing choices, school and boys.

  And one memorable, haunting twenty-four hours when everything went terribly wrong, and then terribly right. His eyes traced the old, worn black scuff on the wall where a toolbox had once been kicked against it.

  The Betamax was staring at him, lying in wait on the top of the television stand; waiting for the moment he walked into the basement.

  “Oh, come on,” Basil said, throwing up his hands but turning to smile at Gwen’s father. Mark Pierson stood at the top of the stairs, hands on his hips, dirt under his nails, and a smile curling one side of his mouth.

  There was more of Mark than when Basil had last seen him: decades of nightly beer had rounded out his belly above the jeans, but still left him with knobby skinny-man legs. There was also less: Mark’s once-thick mop of careless brown hair had started its steady, silvery retreat backwards, particularly thin in a band where a ball cap had been rubbing against his scalp for the last thirty years, and his forehead was now higher than Basil’s.

  Basil took a sort of perverse pleasure in that.

  The last time he’d seen Mark, Basil had been almost a decade his senior, which had been all kinds of odd. Now their roles were reversed and Mark was the one who was a decade (or more) older, and Basil decided — in light of this thing with the Betamax — that he was going to remind Mark of that age gap mercilessly, and at every opportunity.

  “You promised me a new one,” Mark said.

  “I did not,” Basil protested. “Your memory is faulty.”

  Mark grinned wider. “You said you’d pay me back. I remember that clear enough. With interest.”

  “Bollocks,” Basil cussed under his breath. He felt his cheeks start to splotch. He didn’t blush often, but when he did, he knew it wasn’t with Gwen’s even, attractive flush. It was mottled and painfully bright.

  “Okay, fine,” he conceded and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. Now that they had discarded the coveralls, streaked with dirt and sweat from digging up the past, he was in much-loved jeans with a faded wallet-mark on the back pocket, and a w
ash-faded brown tee-shirt that said Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, All my base are belong to you.

  “How much?” Basil asked, fumbling past his pound notes to the Canadian tender. He pulled out a violently purple bill. “Is this a ten or a one?”

  “Ones’re coins, just like where you come from,” Mark said, shaking his head again. “An’ I don’t want yer money.”

  Basil frowned, one corner of his perpetually crooked mouth pulling down. “Well, I guess I can fix the Betamax, but what you would play in it, I’ve no idea.”

  “No, I still want you to pay me back.”

  “So then — ?”

  “Gitcher boots on.” Mark smiled fit to put the devil ill at ease. Basil, being only human, was understandably discomfited.

  “Oh, no,” Basil said, presenting shovel-blistered palms in supplication. “I’ve done my heavy lifting for the day. Can’t I just pay you? S’okay, innit?”

  “No,” Mark said, and the no fun that way was unspoken but no less present.

  “But,” Basil tried, grasping for an excuse and knowing that he was cornered all the same. “I really am not the rough trade, here.”

  “Are now.”

  Basil swallowed once. “What if I break your tractor?”

  “You’ll know how to fix it, I reckon.”

  “What if I kill a cow!”

  “You’ll learn to butcher it.”

  “What if — ”

  “Boots, Specialist Doctor.”

  Basil sighed and shoved his wallet back into his pocket. He walked up the stairs into the kitchen, when Gwen and Evvie were sharing a pot of tea in awkward, freshly reunited silence.

  There was an old yellowed piece of paper on the table between then, with time-faded brown squiggles that might have once been writing, and a hotel receipt with HILTON LONDON written across the top in black sharpie. There was also a plane ticket stub for a round trip, used, obviously. And Evvie’s name was on it.

  Basil wanted to pause, to read what the papers said, to decipher the puzzle of Gwen’s stunned expression. Her eyes were round and wet, and she looked faintly shocky. Basil wanted to stop to ask what the matter was. But Mark shook his head once, mouthed “not now,” and tugged him into the mud room. Mark didn’t pause, just slipped on a pair of wellies and ambled down the concrete stairs and across the lawn, so whatever it was, Basil thought that Evvie and Gwen probably needed to work it out on their own.

  Basil followed him out the back door, feeling nothing so much as like a man going to the gallows.

  ***

  “So, you want to marry my daughter.”

  Basil felt all the colour slide off of his face. Mark reached into a cabinet just inside of the barn’s wide front doors. “Oh, God,” Basil blurted before he could get the brain-mouth disconnect under control. “You…this is the part where you threaten me with the shotgun, isn’t it? You’re going to — to blast me full of grapeshot for taking your daughter’s virtue!”

  Mark paused, one hand on the knob of the cabinet, the other arm hidden up to the elbow by the angle of the door.

  “Did you take her virtue?” Mark asked, the wicked gleam back in his eyes.

  “What? No!”

  Another lazy smile tugged at the side of Mark’s mouth. “Didn’t think so — Gwennie had a pretty handsy boyfriend in grade ten.”

  Basil clapped his hands against his ears. “La la la! I’m not hearing this! If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me, but don’t torture me first!”

  Mark grinned harder and shook his head a little and withdrew his arm. In his hand were two pairs of heavy, worn-in work gloves. Basil dropped his own hands back to his sides, feeling suddenly ridiculous.

  “Not going to shoot me then,” he said.

  Mark raised an expressive eyebrow. “Disappointed?”

  “Not as such, no.”

  Mark dropped one pair of the gloves into Basil’s hands, and clapped his shoulder manfully. Basil had never quite understood the masculine urge to beat the crap out of one another for fun or camaraderie, but suffered gamely.

  “C’mon, Bay-zil,” Mark said, still pronouncing his name with the rural drawl, “I’ve known you’d end up with my daughter since before she could say ‘Papa.’”

  “And that doesn’t make you want to shoot me?” Basil asked uncertainly. He had been picked on by enough people like Mark in grammar school to have left him with a healthy self-preservation instinct and an aversion to jocks and soldiers. Farmers didn’t quite fit the type, but they were close enough to make Basil twitchy.

  Mark tugged on his gloves. “Don’t push it.”

  “Yessir,” Basil replied, using a more formal address partially out of fear, partially out of respect for the man who had raised Gwen, and partially because, well, this was also a man who had known for twenty-nine years exactly what the future held, and it hadn’t driven him crazy. Moreover, now Mark and his wife Evvie had no clue what came after. After the return, the hasty phone call, the quiet desperation of reaching across an ocean to patch up a family, after a humid day of digging. And that wasn’t driving Mark nuts, either.

  It took a strong person to know the unknown and live with it. It took an even stronger one to suddenly come to a point where nothing replaces everything, and the once-sure future suddenly becomes chaotic chance.

  “None of that ‘yessir’ crap,” Mark said, turning towards a heavy door at the far end of the barn and gesturing Basil to follow. “I ain’t my father. ‘Mark’ is just fine for my Gwennie’s…” His voice faltered on the honourific, “her Ag-lu-nated.”

  Basil couldn’t help the sharp hot welling at the back of his eyes but he blinked rapidly to push it back. He smiled sadly. “Just ‘husband’ is fine. We…we’re not an Aglunate anymore. Not without…”

  Mark acknowledged the rest of the sentence with a grunt, sparing Basil having to vocalize it. When they reached the door on the far end of the cavernous grand barn — Basil’s nose was tickling from the hay already — they stood in a shaft of dust-mote speckled sunshine for a brief moment as Mark yanked up the ancient iron handle.

  “No ring, though,” Mark said, pointing over his shoulder at Basil’s hand. Then he pulled back the door and began to walk down the revealed stairs to a lower level. He half vanished into the darkness, and Basil couldn’t help the flash of apprehension, the memory of one too many horror movies that featured dark stairs and empty barns and crazed cannibals.

  He was so wrapped up in his own illusions that it took Basil a second to realize they were still talking about marriage.

  He was going to answer, but the earthy and overpowering scent of cows and their crap buffeted Basil in the face and he held in a cough instead. It would only make him suck in more of the stench. He rubbed the bare skin of his left ring finger. Then he decided in for a penny and all that, and yanked on the slightly loose gloves. Holding his breath, he descended into the dim cattle hold after Mark.

  Basil’s hands gripped desperately to the natural timber railing of the narrow, gapped stairs, hoping fervently that there were no splinters lying in wait. It was absurd, an absurd fear — the rail had grown smooth from thousands of such journeys, and he was wearing gloves, but Basil was a consummate worrier. He had accepted it years ago.

  “No, no rings,” Basil confirmed, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu. He’d already had the rings conversation with Evvie two weeks — and twenty-nine years — ago. “We never bothered. K-Kalp couldn’t wear one,” he admitted and was surprised that his tongue still tripped over his lover’s name.

  “So it wasn’t a real wedding then,” Mark said, coming to a stop at the bottom of the stairs and flicking on hanging overhead lights. The cows didn’t react to the sudden brighter-than-day-light. Basil bit back a wince and narrowly avoided scrubbing his eyes with the hay-covered, manure perfumed gloves.

  “It was a real wedding, just not an Earth one, and stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop trying
to wind me up!” He pointed a finger at the back of Mark’s head. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  Mark turned around, face carefully, suspiciously expressionless. “What am I trying to do, Bay-zil?”

  Exasperation pressing at the back of his tongue, Basil flapped his hands in the air, feeling ridiculously ungraceful as the oversized gloves made an embarrasing flap flap sound as a result. “You want to get me mad so you have an excuse to get in a fight with me!”

  “Fight with you?”

  “Yes! You know, throw a punch, knock out my teeth, all that manly crap that you jocks like to do to prove that you’re bigger and scarier than me, innit! That’s what all this ‘gitcher boots on and come to the barn of allergy-ridden cow death’ is all about, innit? So you can intimidate me into never hurting precious Gwen, but I tell you, I’ve been trained to be a combat engineer and I could turn a milking machine into a compressed air explosive before you could manage to find a pitchfork and — ”

  A flash of something positively stormy passed over Mark’s face. Basil broke off his tirade and gulped. Then Mark’s expression smoothed out, carefully blank and slightly harmless looking. Back to the innocent man-of-the-land, everybody’s-buddy farmer. It was even more terrifying than the devil smile.

  “If you ever hurt precious Gwennie,” Mark said, voice deceptively light and cheerful, which made Basil’s short hairs jump up, “I won’t have to find an excuse to throw a punch or knock out your teeth or all that manly crap. I won’t need to prove anything and I won’t use a pitchfork. They will not find your body.”

  Then he smiled, wide and sharkish, and Basil considered himself warned. And pretty lucky that it had ended there.

  He also felt a sudden ringing pity for the handsy grade-ten boyfriend.

  “Right,” Basil said, rubbing the back of his neck and then regretting it. He had just gotten clean, too, taken a relieving warm shower to wash off the garden mud, and the hair at the nape of his neck was still a bit damp. Prickly barn dust smeared along the moisture there, coating his skin with gritty grime. And now he smelled of cow. God, he hoped Gwen didn’t find that a turn on, or he might have to dump her. After everything they’d been through together, that would be a shame. “So, ah, about the milk machine thing, I didn’t mean — ”