Critical Injuries

by Joan Barfoot

  So it does. But still an easy drive to town, and then a long, slow expressway drive into the city, and work, and a different kind of whole different world.

  They turn left at the foot of the lane for the eight-minute trip into the town whose outskirts, which have been creeping in their direction, include a couple of car dealerships and strip plazas followed by a few streets’ worth of frame or stucco or aluminum-sided bungalows, some sliding into decrepitude, others tidy and trim. The core of the town, home and business, is brick, old and original and apparently permanent, in structure if not content. Stores fall vacant, change hands, houses also now and again, and there appears to be a diminishing interest in, or money for, upkeep and maintenance, for keeping things thriving-looking and bright. But Lyle and Isla do their part and shop in town just as much as they possibly can: for basic groceries, for the tools and nails and fertilizers that keep Lyle occupied. They are good citizens, not the kind of newcomers who take it upon themselves to complain about change. “We’re just commuters,” Lyle tells visitors. “It’s easy for us.”

  They do what they can to encourage local businesses, so in their journey for ice cream there’s no need to discuss where they’re going, which is of course to Goldie’s Dairy Bar.

  Goldie’s was a real dairy bar at some point in its history, and apparently there was even a Goldie attached to it a few decades ago. Now it carries cigarettes, newspapers, stamps, some staple household products and foods. It would be almost a mere variety store, if the original long transparent-topped ice-cream freezer didn’t still run along the front, glass-lidded, bulky and squat. The dairy is long gone, but the high school kids who staff Goldie’s on evenings and weekends still scoop single, double, and triple-dip cones from the deep vats of flavours, of which there are, according to the blackboard sign out on the sidewalk, thirty-four. Nice old-fashioned touches, the sign and the freezer, although the staff themselves are often enough pierced, dyed, and tattooed.

  Goldie’s is now owned by a widow named Doreen, about Isla’s age but otherwise not like Isla at all. She bought the place after losing her job in the window factory just outside town in the other direction from Isla and Lyle’s, using some of the proceeds of her husband Jack’s life insurance after he died of a heart attack leaning over a pool table — or, some said, reaching for a waitress’s rear end — in a bar down the block. “I was adrift,” Doreen likes to tell people. “I didn’t know what to do. Then I thought, ‘Ice cream,’ and it seemed like the answer.” It certainly was for Doreen, who has been transformed from the relative anonymity of factory work into an actual town character, brusque, entertaining, lively-tongued, a woman growing larger and larger, not in size but in presence, with each ice-cream season.

  Isla finds this progression appealing, because wouldn’t it be grand to grow vivid and large in the minds of others, not to mention one’s own mind! Isla might manage grandiosity in a pinch, but thinks she’s short of the swollen benevolence that’s required, the assumptions of good-heartedness underlying Doreen’s reputation.

  For all Isla knows, she is herself a town character. Most likely, though, she’s just a character drifting through town, an even later latecomer than Lyle, and attached in people’s minds mainly to him. When she began living with Lyle, so that people began to take her existence somewhat seriously, and they asked what she did, and she said she worked in an ad agency, attentions wandered and lapsed. It could have been worse, she could have admitted to being part owner and vice-president of an ad agency, facts they probably know by now, but even working at one was so irrelevant, so distant from any normal concerns, that eyes glazed, heads nodded, conversations moved on.

  Isla thinks, and not in any patronizing way, that this is exactly the correct attitude. She did not necessarily think that in the early days, but she does now.

  It’s been interesting, and no doubt salutary, to be an important person in one world — at least important in the sense of having power over a number of people and responsibility for a number of risky, big-price-tag ideas — and to be, here, not exactly a nonentity, but someone on whom nothing in particular rests. No one here, except perhaps Lyle, relies on her. She is generally liked, she thinks, at least certainly doesn’t seem to be disliked, but she could vanish to no particular notice.

  She considers it this way: if her funeral were held in the city where she works and where most of her life has been led, it would get a pretty good turnout, on grounds of etiquette or respect from some people, affection, she can hope, from most, a creepy curiosity, perhaps, from a few who still connect her with James. Here in town the turnout on any of those grounds would be meagre, and on that last one, non-existent. Here it would mainly be based on people’s respect for life, and moreover death, in general, not for attachments they know nothing, thank heavens, about, and not really for Isla herself.

  She rather envies Doreen, whose funeral would be huge and heartfelt. Lyle, when she mentions this, says, “My God, you have a morbid turn of mind sometimes. Funerals!”

  It’s hard sometimes to explain images, symbols, to a man, a lawyer, with a literal turn of mind. Then again, she depends on his literalness, his straightforwardness. “It’s only,” she tells him, “that funerals are so useful for making assessments. The last summing up.”

  “But have you noticed that the people who do the summing-up at funerals generally talk mostly about themselves? Like the dead person’s just been an incidental entry in their own lives?” True. But again it’s the funeral-as-metaphor she’s talking about, not real funerals.

  Anyway, the discussion takes them happily to town. Do other people run out of things to say? Well, yes. She and James did. Or they had done so much, and gathered up so much to say, that they went far beyond speech. But she can’t imagine she and Lyle can ever get to the end of chatting about this and that in the thirty-odd years they have, with luck, remaining to them. The reason for ice cream, and maybe how her mind comes to wander off in the direction of summations and funerals: this outing a celebration of renewed prospects for thirty-odd years. All those words, all those ideas, all those details!

  “You run in,” he says. “I’ll keep the truck running. Then if we’re quick we can go sit on the riverbank and eat before they melt.”

  “What kind of cone? And do you want single, double, or triple?”

  That sort of detail.

  “Triple, of course, I think I deserve a big one. Double-chocolate chip? Then if I still have some room, maybe we can come back for something fruitier. For dessert, as it were.”

  As it were. As it is, dressed in her blue linen suit, she will be juggling two cones, one triple, one double, in the truck for the two-minute ride to a riverbank bench. Easy. Suits can be cleaned; husbands, good ones anyway, can’t be replaced.

  As it is, she walks in on a robbery.

  As instantly as she sees this, it is instantly too late. Just through the door, waving back towards Lyle, turning then towards the checkout counter, the freezer, and the young man with the gun is already turning her way, already startled, already recognizable.

  Isla’s mouth falls open; perhaps she is preparing to say his name, which is Roddy. He is a nearly shaven-headed, fair-almost-red-haired youth, a resident of one of those stuccoed, less-than-trim houses a few blocks away. He can be seen sometimes on street corners, wandering on weekends with rough friends, apparently aimless, punching each other’s shoulders, speaking loudly. Ordinary high school kids, really. By Isla’s standards, if they are disaffected, they are disaffected in ordinary ways. So she has assumed until this moment when Roddy’s startled eyes meet her own shocked eyes, and the terrible thing happens.

  She turns, although there’s no point. His finger jerks on the trigger, although there’s no point in that, either.

  She thinks how instantly and thoroughly events become unreal. That this is like a movie, not like her own real life. She wonders what people did w
hen something unreal happened before there were such things as movies; how they identified unreality then.

  How did they regard the frame-by-frame unfolding of a sequence of movements, smooth but infinitesimal shifts of bodies through space and time, before they could possibly recognize and identify such a technique as slow motion?

  She has all the time in the world for these questions as her torso continues to twist, her right foot turns on a dime, her hips dodge slightly left, as her body recognizes reality, snaps to action, behaves in automatic defence of itself, making its own instant decision to flee; even as Roddy’s chin jerks up, his eyes widen — and what long lashes he has in the midst of otherwise unenchanting features — his spine straightens, his shoulders pull back, his knees give slightly so that he achieves the faintest hint of a crouch and his weight shifts to the balls of his feet, his arms extend up, and out, the sudden, rigid steadiness of shock making him detailed and large, someone new, huge, foreign, with barely a relationship to a soft-boned, soft-charactered adolescent, but someone instantly and surprisingly formed.

  Either of their bodies, Roddy’s or Isla’s, could topple, or trip, or stumble with their respective alterations in balance, weight, attention, direction. But neither does. Roddy does not smack forward onto his face as he moves onto the balls of his feet; Isla does not crumple leftwards, but continues her swing towards the door. She can see sunlight and concrete through the glass. She cannot see Lyle, or the truck, because they’re parked to the left of the entrance. She knows innocence lies just outside the door, out in the light, out where there is no young frightened man with a gun and she is not a panicking woman whose timing is off. A few seconds, a few minutes’ difference and this would not be happening. How does it work, that such a thing can happen because at some point earlier in the day she moved too quickly, or too slowly, and got here just too early, or too late? Roddy may be wondering similarly. Where is the clerk? What can Roddy want?

  It probably no longer matters what Roddy wanted, which would have to have been money, any more than it matters what Isla wanted, which was two ice-cream cones to eat down by the river with Lyle. Now Roddy’s and Isla’s original intentions are lost. They have new moments to endure. She sees quite clearly that this is as true for Roddy as for herself, and imagines this capacity to know about a number of people at once is another effect of the movies.

  She is very angry, very bitter. Not with Roddy so much as with Lyle. She has come to rely on him. He has made himself virtually indispensable. But when she truly needs him, in the instant she is in genuine, terrible trouble, he’s nowhere to be found. He’s sitting in a truck listening to music, or the news, or maybe waiting in silent anticipation of ice cream, at any rate something irrelevant and stupid, instead of being here, where she needs him to be, doing what she needs him to do, which is to save her. How could he, how dare he, pick her up, hold her up, and then let her fall this way, so hard and far?

  It’s a little late to remember Jamie and Alix, and when she does it’s with no particular impression in mind, neither anger nor, perhaps surprisingly, any dazzle of maternal love. In this moment they are simply irrelevant. She expects nothing of them. Not as she has, mistakenly it appears, come to assume salvation from Lyle.

  He didn’t even give her time to change her clothes. So now she’s spinning towards escape hampered by shoes that have heels, and a blue linen suit that hugs tight to her dodging hips.

  Roddy’s finger is tightening. She is turning, but she can see him as clearly as if she had eyes in the back of her head. “Don’t imagine you can get away with something just because you think I’m not looking,” her mother used to warn. “I have eyes in the back of my head.”

  Perhaps this is inherited.

  What has Roddy inherited? A willingness to risk? The sort of physical tension that, in the right circumstances, causes a finger to grow tight on a trigger? A pure, blind, dumb tendency towards anarchy, moral, emotional, physical?

  She doesn’t know the boy. She has nothing to say to him. It seems there’s plenty of time for a great many thoughts, but not a moment for speech.

  What if she cried out, “Don’t!” or “Please!” or “No!”

  But it’s too late. There’s only time for one sound after Isla’s gasp and Roddy’s sharp intake of breath, and it isn’t the sound of words.

  She thinks there ought to be a correlation between something important happening and the length of time it takes. Tiny, stupid things, like driving home from the city, can take forever. Mowing the lawns, weeding gardens, can consume an eternity. Even watching a video on a winter’s night, feet up on the coffee table, bowl of popcorn between her and Lyle, drinks in their hands, takes at least ninety minutes, sometimes a couple of hours.

  This, though — for a long moment the world is suspended, her body is adrift in mid-air, a little pinprick of darkness grows larger and larger until there’s only a sliver of light left, then even that sliver vanishes and there’s no distinguishing between darkness and silence, it all amounts, and diminishes, to the very same thing.

  Rewind

  Lyle’s version is different. Not necessarily less volatile or catastrophic than hers, but — he wasn’t there. His account has to be second-hand, third-hand, picked up from running from the truck into the disarrayed scene in Goldie’s, then from experts: ambulance attendants, cops, nurses, doctors. He is, it seems, doomed to observer status in the shocking events of his wives. Perhaps frustrating for him, maybe enraging. Possibly a guilty relief. In any case he now seems reduced, with his anxious eyes and fretful mouth: a recounter, a teller, not the actor, or the acted upon.

  Perhaps he’s just lucky.

  “You’d just gone in,” he says. “We thought it’d be quick, since for once there didn’t look to be anybody around, no bikes or cars in the lot. You were only out of the truck a few seconds. You kind of waved at me in that back-handed way and I heard the buzzer as you went through the door. I was thinking what a good life, sunshine, summer, off to eat ice cream by the river, good health, you, home — I guess those are moments you live off, sort of golden ones that carry you through.”

  He’d better hope it carries them through. Nice for him, having a golden moment while she’s getting shot.

  “Just for a second, I couldn’t figure out what the noise was. I thought something had maybe exploded. A propane tank? I don’t know. Close and loud, and not a car backfiring because it obviously came from inside Goldie’s. I jumped out of the truck, ran in. And, you know, there you were.”

  No, she doesn’t know. For a lawyer, he doesn’t tell a story very coherently.

  “I couldn’t believe it. I mean literally, I didn’t believe what I saw. I’ve heard clients say that before, and I thought I knew what they meant, but it turns out I didn’t. It’s like a whole different level of consciousness, where everything is all of a sudden stark and bright and totally silent. And still. And completely not real. That could have lasted forever, that moment. I didn’t know how to end it. I just wanted it not to be real, I wanted to rewind the day.”

  Maybe she manages some small sound of impatience; at any rate, he glances at her, says, “Sorry.”

  “You were lying on your side, at my feet, just inside the door. Your head was so close I could have tripped over it. There was blood. You’d think I’d have seen blood before, violent blood, but I haven’t. And even if I had, it wouldn’t have been the same. It wouldn’t’ve been yours.

  “There was a kid. Sort of freckled, and real short-cropped blondish-red hair, we’ve seen him around town. Just a kid, except he was holding a shotgun. Pointed at the floor, though. Or not so much pointed as just hanging off his fingers. He was staring at you. I don’t know if he even noticed me. He looked as if he was going to faint, not a drop of blood in his face.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking; maybe that if I didn’t move or say anything, it wouldn’t be real. Li
ke a nightmare, you know? Maybe it was the same for him. It sure didn’t look like anything he’d meant to do, or set out to do, and maybe he couldn’t believe it, either.

  “The cops asked me later how long it was before somebody called them, and I had no fucking clue. We could have been standing there looking at you for a few seconds or a few hours, for all the sense I had about time. But it could only have been seconds. Seems to me now the sound of the door buzzer was still in the air when the clerk’s head started poking up from behind the counter, and as soon as there was a movement, even that small one, the moment was broken. The clerk was just a kid, too, I’ve forgotten his name. I’ve forgotten everybody’s name, I think, except yours and mine. Except hang on, I remember him saying something like, ‘Shit, Roddy, what did you do?’ so that must be his name, Roddy. The big kid, the clerk, was shaking like crazy, but he came around the counter and reached out and took the shotgun away. Just like that. So he had more presence of mind than I did. And I guess he was brave. It’s a wonder the goddamn thing didn’t go off again, his hands were trembling so badly.

  “The other kid, Roddy or whatever, he didn’t even try to hold on to the gun, or do anything with it. When he’d let go of it, he doubled over and threw up. And then he ran. Turned around and bolted through the back, we heard the door slam behind him.

  “I didn’t care where the hell he’d gone, or what happened to him at that point. I got my voice back, and I yelled at the clerk to call the ambulance, the cops, the fire department, anybody, and I was on my knees checking you out, calling your name. I could see you were hurt, but while there was blood, there wasn’t really a whole lot of it, up close. I mean, not pools or anything. And you were alive, you were breathing. I couldn’t see what was damaged, but I knew to be careful not to go shifting you.”

  He himself shifts in his bedside chair. Lucky him, sitting up, leaning over. Moving. Being capable of discomfort.