Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  I pulled into the lot, half-thinking that I’d check out the new Camrys and see if they were unobtrusive enough for work, and half-thinking that I didn’t want to sit in the Country Cabin Motel any longer than necessary. I contemplated checking out and sleeping in the van, parking along the side of the road and reclining the chair. Or not even bother checking out, just leaving. I had my suitcase in the back of the van. All I’d be out were a few appliances.

  I strolled the aisles of the small but densely packed lot. The new Camry looked fine, but I knew I’d end up buying a used one with low mileage. In TV shows PIs always drive Mustangs or Porsches. Try tailing a deadbeat husband in a bright yellow 911 slope-nose through industrial Vancouver. Even so, it would be nice to drive something with flair.

  The big lights snapped off. I looked towards the office. A woman in heels was dragging the security cage around the inside of the showroom. She locked it into place behind the windows and locked the front door. She was walking to her car when she noticed me. Her smile was warm, but she grasped the strap of her handbag tight as she got closer.

  “Were you still looking?” she asked. She was my height, around fifty, wearing a leather skirt and a frilly purple blouse with a plunging neckline. A big faceless watch on a platinum band.

  “Just browsing,” I said. “Sorry to startle you.”

  “Was there a car you wanted to look at? I can open up and get the keys, it’s no trouble.”

  “No,” I said. “It’ll be a while till the settlement comes in.”

  Her Nissan was parked next to the van. As she beeped the doors open I asked, “Do you sell a lot of blue sports utility vehicles?”

  She raised one eyebrow, no mean feat considering the amount of work that face had been put through. “Why blue?”

  I held up a business card for her to read. “I’m trying to find someone. All I know is he drives a blue SUV.”

  “No year, no make, no model?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re sure he bought it in town?”

  “I’m not sure it has anything to do with anything,” I said. “Just a longshot.”

  “Well if he bought it in town within the last eight years, chances are he bought it from us.” She pointed off towards the residential area. “I own the GM dealership, too.”

  “You keep records? A database of who you sold to?”

  Bemused, she shook her head and smiled. “If you have to ask that, evidently you don’t know much about the car business.”

  “Next to nothing,” I said. “I used to help my grandfather buy cars at police auctions, but that was pre-onboard computers. Now, something goes wrong under the hood, I’m completely clueless.”

  “What’s this for?”

  “I’m trying to find a kid.”

  “A runaway?”

  “Somewhere between that and an abduction. The motive is still fuzzy.”

  She nodded, looked at the office, at her watch, her Nissan and back at me. “Two hundred.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You were leading up to asking me if you could check the database, weren’t you?”

  “I was hoping you’d offer to help out of pity.”

  “Not in this economy, kiddo.”

  The dealer’s name was Alessandra Bock. We quickly found that it was easier for her to compile the search results. I stared over her shoulder, inhaling hairspray and Chanel, as she narrowed the list by make and colour and gender of purchaser.

  “You’d be surprised how many women buy SUVs,” she said.

  After an hour she had it down to twelve names. I waited as she pulled the files.

  “None of these leave the office,” she said. She set the stack of files on the desk. She lit a cigarette in the small inner office and opened the window while I read.

  The problem was, I didn’t know what I was looking for. Twelve names, twelve SUVs. Irvin Singer, Rob Hargrove, Gerald Barton, Bud Schmidt. I looked over Singer’s profile carefully, thinking that Dominique La Chanteuse might be an in-joke. But Singer had bought his Escalade in late September of this year, and Perry had seen Dawn in August.

  “I could use a coffee,” Alessandra volunteered.

  While she readied the packet of instant, I read through Singer’s paperwork again. Perhaps he’d driven an SUV before — but no, he’d traded in a four-cylinder Mazda towards the Escalade. I flipped to the end and stared at the photocopy of his driver’s license. Singer was a harmless-looking seventy-year-old.

  I flipped through Hargrove’s and Barton’s and the others. Something clicked. I went back through them slower.

  Gerald Barton had bought his Grand Cherokee two years ago. No trade-in, no lease, payment in full secured by a loan from the local credit union. His business and home address were the same. Same phone number. Under the occupation space on the application he’d put self-employed. I knew from experience that that was never a point in one’s favor when securing credit.

  Alessandra put a mug of coffee in front of me and sat down at the desk. “So are you married?”

  “No. You?”

  “Not at the moment. Seeing someone?”

  “Sort of.” My attention was on the files.

  “What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

  I looked up. She was regarding me over the brim of her mug, which said Proud Parent of a Bill Reid Secondary Honour Student.

  No sense in lying to her. I said, “It means we had sex once and now she’s in Iceland.”

  Alessandra took a moment to process this and decided it was funny.

  “Scared her off the continent, did you?”

  Barton’s driver’s license photo showed a forty-year-old white man, average height, and slender build. I almost didn’t recognize him without his glasses. Gerald Barton. Jerry Barton. The Ostrich Man.

  I woke up Mira Das, had her repeat to me what she’d found out about Dawn Meeker from Zak Atero. Raised in a foster home. Brother missing. Was there any way to check if two people with different surnames had grown up with the same foster parent? Not at night, Mira said.

  I wished Gavin or Mira had been with me, or Katherine or Ben. Someone who had my back and would speak up if what I was doing was reckless. But all my friends were other places.

  I left Alessandra and the dealership with Barton’s address in my pocket. My exit had been abrupt. It was late, and I knew where Barton would be.

  The Palatial’s parking lot was around back. The lot was half-full and poorly lit. No one milled about for a smoke or a private chat. I found the Cherokee. I peered inside. A large cage sat on the back bench. The cage was empty. Nothing but feathers on the seats.

  I stabbed my knife into the front right tire, working it around. I did the same to the back right. As I extracted it the blade snapped. Taiwanese craftsmanship for you. Crouching, I moved back to the street and looked through the window. I couldn’t see him inside, but I saw Shoshona and Di, mucking it up with a trio of bikers. I left before they saw me.

  Barton’s address was 622 Mason Lane. 400 Block and 800 block showed up on the road map. I used my cellphone’s GPS to plot a course that I could follow in the dark. And it was dark. I drove down the same unnamed logging road, past the Rusk home, down to the crossroads and left of Mason. 400. 500. At 600 I killed the headlights and pulled onto the shoulder, stuck a hastily-scrawled GONE FOR GAS note under the wiper blades. My grandmother was right. It was too cold for just a shirt and coat. I felt my gun in my pocket.

  Most of the addresses were attached to undeveloped tracts or farmsteads, their true size hidden from the street by thick second-growth forest. Driveways were long ribbons of hard-packed dirt or gravel. The addresses were marked on mailboxes or on boulders set by the driveways, almost impossible to see in the dark. Barton’s drive had no indicator of address, not even on the rusty mailbox. I checked the GPS, then followed the driveway until the house came in sight. I cut east through the trees so that as I inched closer I was hidden from both the house and anyone coming down the drive after me. />
  The lights were off in the house save for a porch light, a naked incandescent bulb at midpoint over the stoop of fresh cedar along the front of the house. A white two-person rocking chair sat still beneath the bulb, burdened with coils of Christmas lights. A mosquito zapper hung beneath the eaves.

  I followed the treeline to the side of the house. A stack of firewood beneath a moss-covered lean-to, blackberry bushes encroaching. A path of old car mats had been laid over the mud, leading to the rear of the house. The property rivaled Yates Manor in size, the difference being that here, nature had been beaten back instead of manicured and tamed.

  The backyard was dirt, clumps of grass, and blackberry brambles; vegetation grew up through the old pens that formed a grid of posts and wire mesh. Half a chicken coop, gutted by fire. Behind the property was a knoll, steep and dotted with young pines. The moon reflected in the water-logged crevices and ditches of the property.

  I knocked, entered, and turned on the lights. A kitchen, microwave door open, orange grease on the range hood, smell of pork in the air but not from tonight. A line of empty Grolsch bottles on the windowsill, an empty jam jar holding twist ties and feathers. Formica table, vinyl-upholstered chairs, and a booth done in naugahyde. A pack of cards and a cribbage board left out. A scratch pad, the logo of Duncan Perry Realty across the top. The page was divided into two columns, a scorecard, the initials F and D underlined at the top. Django/Dawn/Dominique/Dad/Duncan/Di. And F — whose name started with F? Father?

  The microwave clock read twelve past three. I moved room by room, turning on lights as I went. Living room, hallway, broom closet, bedrooms, all nondescript, showing signs of regular use. A coat rack by the front door, his, hers, and junior’s rain slickers and galoshes arranged with military precision. Apple box full of old newsprint.

  Wrong house, maybe. The basement door was locked but only with the kind of knob that prevents a person from walking into an occupied bathroom. Enough pressure and it snapped open without damage. The lights in the basement were already burning and it was warmer than the rest of the house. The smell of birds told me why. Down the stairs I saw cages everywhere, orange-light incubators for chicks. Some finches and some chickadees and another half-dozen green-winged conures whose beaks followed my hand as I waved it in front of them. More exotic-looking species in hand-built ventilated crates, stuffed with straw and heaters. No ostriches, though. Sacks of feed leaned against a mini-fridge which held Tupperware cartons of grubs and other wriggling things.

  The Ostrich Man actually raised birds. Imagine.

  I phoned the RCMP and talked to a Constable Snyder. She seemed reluctant to speak candidly over the phone. I dropped Delgado’s name, and Fisk’s, and when that didn’t convince her I rattled off my old badge number and told her as a fellow law enforcer I expected her to extend the same courtesy to me she’d expect in my place, and not a bunch of god-damned rigamarole at quarter to four in the fucking morning. She actually apologized to me while she checked Barton on CPIC.

  “Nothing but a disturbing the Peace complaint against Mr. Barton,” Snyder said, “and that’s seventeen years old.”

  “Worth a try,” I said. “You know Barton?”

  “By sight, not to speak to.”

  “He seems a bit standoffish.”

  “Well put, sir.”

  “’Preciate the candor. Sorry to gripe. Have a safe shift.”

  I’d been wrong before and was happy to be so again. For Christmas this year Jerry Barton would receive a pair of all-weather radials from an anonymous benefactor. As for breaking into his house and violating his privacy, chalk it up to caution and concern.

  I almost missed the second door. The basement was painted beige and the stairs had been drywalled and painted the same colour. The door was behind the staircase, handle and hinges painted over, easy to overlook in the shadows cast by the orange light.

  The door opened onto another staircase. Another basement. I remembered a Stephen King story, rat-catchers descending into basement after basement, each leading to bigger and more ferocious vermin.

  Probably a salt cellar. Probably nothing. I pulled my gun just in case.

  Down, down.

  XXVI

  Django

  You go far enough, descend enough stairs, and you come out where you started. At the bottom of the staircase, propped upside down on newspaper with the wheels in the air, was a blue Schwinn Stingray. Someone was in the process of replacing the inner tube of the back tire.

  I expected horror or emptiness in this hidden basement with its low ceilings and painted brick walls. I didn’t expect another home, but that’s what I found. When the lights were on I saw a small kitchen and a study and a dining room with a hand-carved oak table and three chairs. Saran-wrapped leftovers in the fridge, stack of vinyl placemats and a lazy Susan. Dishes and crock pot drying in a rack by the sink. No Django, though.

  The living room had no television, only a furnace and two bookshelves stuffed with primers and Dr. Seuss books, Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias with yearbooks up to 1994. On the top shelf behind a glass case was a row of elegantly bound notebooks, Moleskines or the like, each with a date chalked on its spine. Games on the lower shelves, backgammon and chess. A child’s wind-up record player. No dust on anything.

  I was drawn to the notebooks, but first the door. Like the other it was built beneath the staircase. The light switch was nearby, but flicking it did nothing as the bulb had been removed. The door was unlocked. I pulled out my cell and used the screen’s backlight for illumination. A captain’s bed, neatly made and tucked in, glow-in-the-dark moons on the comforter. A chemical toilet and basin next to the bed. And in the corner a great cage stretching to the ceiling, a bed of newspaper inside that spilled out through the grille to the surrounding floor.

  The phone’s backlight flicked off ominously. I hit random buttons to keep it lit as I examined the cage. On the floor were two dishes, water and brown hard spheres. I recognized the smell of dry kibble.

  Once I was sure I was alone, I moved back into the living room. I slid open the glass case and took down the first notebook. I flipped through. In legible block printing, the title page read:

  REDEEMING THE FAMILY

  By

  G.V. Barton

  A dedication: To James and Dawn.

  An epigraph from Tolstoy.

  At a distance, evolution seems linear. Birds from winged reptiles, homo sapiens from apes. We think this way about society, too, as if we move through the generations from ignorance to enlightenment, from evil to good, towards perfection. These are but convenient fictions. In truth, society grows misshapen and deformed. The family, our social heart, has stopped beating. Not only have we not protested this erosion-from-within, we have applauded it. We think technology and wealth will fill the void. Like flightless birds, we have lost our most valuable gift.

  There is no progress without the family. By this I don’t mean the ‘nuclear family,’ that creation of a century’s worth of advertising and propaganda. I mean a unit of people concerned with the welfare of each other, nurturing a spirit of community and love. All my life I pursued wealth and autonomy and excellence: I see now that all of this is fleeting and inconsequential without a family to share my blessings with, and to transmit my knowledge to.

  I know my sister Dawn shares these feelings, even though we’ve never spoken of them. We have seen the horror of an empty and broken family, and we know that the only way to rectify things is to create our own.

  As children I often held her at night in our shared bed, kissing her cheeks still slick with our foster father’s semen. To reassure her I promised her that it wouldn’t always be like this, that one day the old man would be gone and we’d have a proper family. Since arriving back in town, Dawn seems healthier than she has in years. Much of this is due to her young friend, James, who I presume has run away from similar horrors. How fitting that the three of us would find each other now.

  What followed were dates an
d entries, some tending to the scientific, others journal-like.

  Today I pitched my idea to the other women. Dawn remained characteristically silent. Barbara seemed reluctant to let Dawn and I adopt the boy, in part I think because she believes there is money in withholding her approval. Deirdre has bowed out, wanting nothing to do with us. She doesn’t seem the type to betray her friends. I think she is eager to see her animals again. I can relate.

  This morning Deirdre left and Barbara moved back into town. Dawn and James are sullen. I handed Barbara seven thousand dollars in exchange for “keeping her big yap shut,” as she put it. A small price to pay to start a family.

  I’d hoped it wasn’t true, but it is: the missing child on television is unquestionably our James. He is quiet and often sullen, but I believe he is happy here. He wouldn’t try to contact his birth parents, even if we did have a phone in the house. In any case, I can’t risk our family on the whims of a child. Tomorrow I will clean the sub-basement and furnish it for him. This shouldn’t be hard, as the sub-basement is well-provisioned and built to withstand the end of the world. Our foster father was many things, God forgive him, but he was not unprepared.

  Starting on June 6th, the tone of the journals shifted and the handwriting became sloppy, lapsing into bursts of cursive.

  The lock on the sub-basement was broken. He was hiding beneath the sacks of feed, as if I wouldn’t notice a different configuration of sacks. I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t believe in parental violence, having been on its receiving end. I will be lenient this time. We will see what develops. Maybe his “escape attempts” are simply part of a developmental phase.

  He was in the backyard, having snared his leg in wire from the ostrich pen. Thank God Dawn and I found him in time. That settles it. I cannot raise a beast like a human. I will put the old cage in his room, so that it is visible from the bed, and vice versa. He will have a choice.