Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  I like driving — it lets me think. By then, I wasn’t really worrying about the police and the house. They’d leave a mess for sure, give me a list of anything they took, go away without finding whatever it was they were looking for. So I thought about the road instead, going too fast, liking the way the corners felt as the car leaned into them. The way you can feel the weight of the car pulling against the tread of the tires, like the only thing between you and a rollover down the bank was something as simple as that zigzag pattern cut into the rubber. It’s astounding how quickly we all trust in patterns. And how, miraculously, those patterns often end up working just fine.

  I drove out to the old provincial park at Red Head, five or six rivers past North Harbour. It’s a bit eerie now, the pea-gravel campsite pads still laid out there in the river valley, the sharp incline of Red Head rising up steep and somehow ominous behind them. The whole place, the whole floor of the valley, is filling up with alders, tough little interloping trees that inch their way in on the old road and the campsites more and more with every year.

  Down at the foot of the road, there was a big stone beach, a wall of loose stone thrown up by the swells and blocking most of the valley, standing maybe twenty-five feet high. Enough force in the waves that you could hear the fist-sized rocks clacking hard together every time the water swept ashore. Climbing up, my feet launched quick little landslides of rolling stones, vees of moving rock that start fast, then widen and slow, everything settling back into its own kind of equilibrium a few moments after you’re gone, like you’re some kind of passing irritation.

  I think of the police that way now, too — a small disturbance, a ripple of motion in the world that leaves a sharp and obvious mark but really doesn’t change the whole thing all that much.

  I wish they’d get me out of their minds, move on to something else, but I don’t really think that’s going to happen in a hurry.

  I think, because I keep to myself, people think I’m smug, and I know for sure that rubs the cops the wrong way. There are all kinds of stories, all the time, about cops picking out someone just because they seem odd — “This has to be our guy, because who plays the oboe?” or something like that.

  They even have a name for it — “tunnel vision.” Find a guy who strikes you funny, and look for all reasons that he must have done something.

  I hope you’re having fun at my house, I thought.

  I hope your hands are sweaty inside your rubber gloves, I hope you’re being thorough enough to burrow down through the dirty laundry piled up in the basket, I hope you’re going through the useless tasks of checking inside the toilet tank and in the basement boxes I haven’t opened in years.

  I took the papers out of my pocket then and read them, and it said right on the top that the search warrant was about Mary again, and that’s no surprise, so I crumpled them up and stuffed them back into my front pocket.

  By the time I got home, back to the house the police had borrowed for the day, the paper of the warrant was damp and the letters on the outside were starting to smudge. It didn’t matter: the words were still as legible as they needed to be, and I’ve got a box for the warrants now, too.

  I hoped that they’d had the decency to check that the door was locked before they piled into their cars and left. When I tried it, the screen door was closed, but it wasn’t locked and my front door wasn’t either.

  You can tell me it wasn’t meant as some kind of message, but I wouldn’t believe you. It was a message all right, a message that they’d been and gone. On their own terms.

  It was a message that they could, and would, come back any time they wanted to.

  Chapter 20

  Jan. 10 — I think I have a stalker. Maybe not a stalker. Just some guy. An older guy. I just think I keep seeing the same guy around, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to get caught staring at him or something. I mean, if he is watching me, I don’t want to make eye contact or anything. Daniel thinks I’m crazy — worse, really. He said he thinks I’m full of myself, like I’m imagining there’s someone following me because it makes me more important or something. That’s exactly what he said. Nice, right? But I’m sure there’s someone following me — it’s not just a feeling. Like that first time in November, but it’s harder to catch him at it now. It’s like there’s someone walking back there almost all the time, and it seems like — I’m sure it looks like — the same guy, walking far enough behind me that I can’t make out his face or anything, but if I slow down or stop, he turns around and heads the other way before I really get any kind of look at him, before I could really swear that he’s following me. It’s all so quick. Should I confront him? Shout at him? I don’t think so. If this keeps up, I think maybe I should go to the police or something. It’s creeping me out.

  Chapter 21

  Hamburger

  Buns

  Steaks

  Ketchup

  Mustard

  Hot dogs

  Liquor store

  Beer

  Tequila

  More beer

  She was almost in the middle of the road when I first saw her, halfway down the Salmonier Line, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, and it was pounding down rain. I’ll tell you, May isn’t always the friendliest month here, not even the last week of May when every other province has all the leaves out on the trees already. I was coming around a curve at the bottom of a long hill, coming fast the way you do when it’s a little after 7:30 on a dark spring morning, rain, and there’s nothing else in sight.

  You watch for moose at that hour of the day, not for blond-haired pixies in soaking wet Levi’s.

  And yet there she was, looking right at my car and waving her arms over her head in that frantic way that can mean anything from “Give me a lift to the store, would ya?” to “My parents’ car has gone over the embankment, and they’re trapped down there.”

  So I stopped, and she came around to the driver’s side window, a little slip of a thing like a drowned rat, and she struck her hip off the mirror, hard — I could see that in her face, the flash of pain, and then she put her left hand down and rubbed where she’d hit.

  “I’m trying to get back to the cabin,” she said.

  “What cabin?”

  “I don’t know. The cabin. I haven’t been out here before, so I’m not really sure. Can you give me a lift?”

  There are cabins not far from there, a fair number of them, and I can tell you just where the side roads go off, because I’ve driven by them more than a few times. I mean, even if you’re going somewhere else, sometimes you like to turn off the main drag and see how the other half lives — you know, the ones with houses and families and cottages and Jet Skis and the cold beer on a big deck next to the barbecue.

  But there weren’t cabins right where we were, just a few miles above where the road goes across the Salmonier River. We were close to the gas station, and I looked in the mirror before I stopped; there was nothing behind me but empty, wet road.

  It was pretty clear she was drunk, or at least had recently been drunk. There was a smell coming off her, a smell like plums or something, the smell that always tells me someone’s been drinking. I looked in the mirror again, hoping someone else would be coming, that maybe I could pass the buck, get moving, and let her take her chances with the next car. It was still pretty dark, and the spruce trees come right down to the road there, so it all looked like something out of Little Riding Hood. I was just waiting to see the wolf or something, and meanwhile, the girl was cold and wet enough that she had started to shiver.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s see what we can do.” And I reached across and unlocked the door on the passenger side.

  She walked around and I watched as she trailed her hand, the tips of her fingers, along the edge of the hood as if her balance depended on that thin, fine contact. She got in, falling into the front seat, really, her hair all
stringy and down around her face. I worried for a moment about the seat getting wet, pushed the thought away and looked straight at her. She had a small face, framed in by her hair, a snub nose but pretty, and she was right on that age line where her face was changing into what it would look like for the rest of her life. That spot where you lay down the laugh lines or crease your face into a permanent pout.

  Blue eyes that would be prettier if they could focus a little better.

  “Walt,” I said, and I stuck out my hand like we were being formally introduced somewhere. She just looked at it for a moment, as if it were a fish she wasn’t really interested in touching, and then she grabbed like she didn’t really have a choice. Getting it over with quick.

  “Lisa.”

  I’ll admit it’s not the brightest thing I ever did, telling her my real name or giving her a ride and everything.

  Or any of the rest of it — none of it was really bright. I know it’s always easier looking backwards, when you can pick any one of a hundred spots that could have made things different, where you could have said, “Well, that’s it then, have a nice day,” and just walk away.

  But that’s not the point.

  “I’ve been walking on this damn road for hours, and it hasn’t stopped raining once,” she said. It looked like she was telling the truth: she was soaked through, enough so that I could see the lines of her bra under her shirt, and on both sides of the road, all of the candles from the spruce trees were turned downward from the weight of the water on the branch tips.

  “Where were you going, anyway?” I asked.

  “I was up at the cabin, some friend of David’s. Over there.” She waved her hand over her shoulder. “All guys. All drunk. You can imagine where that was going.” She looked confused for a moment, as if she had lost her train of thought, and then her face cleared a bit. “So I started walking back to town. I think back to town.”

  “Town’s an hour’s drive away,” I said. “I don’t know how far it would be walking.”

  “Whatever. I guess I thought they were supposed to come looking for me, right?” She was looking out the window as rain poured down the glass. “And maybe they were going to apologize for being such dicks.”

  With her inside the car and the windows rolled up, the smell of booze was much stronger. It was the kind of smell that would get you into the backseat of an RCMP cruiser for a date with the Breathalyzer, if a cop pulled you over for speeding or no turn signal or something.

  She leaned against the window then, and rocked her shoulders against the seatback. It made it seem as though just reaching the front seat was the end of a long climb, and she was perfectly happy with staying put and thinking over how hard done by she was. Like she was more concerned about how she got into this jam than she was about how she was going to get out of where she was now.

  “I can’t run you back into town — I’ve got plans — but maybe you can go back to the cabin. Maybe they’re all sleeping it off by now.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Which way did you come from?”

  “Don’t know. It was dark. You’re right; they should be sleeping by now. We were doing tequila shots at four and Dave had already passed out when I left. I just stumbled out and kept walking.

  “I only found the highway ’cause a car went by and I saw the headlights.”

  She was right about the dark out there. People who stay all the time in the city, they don’t really know about dark. Out on a highway without streetlights, rain clouds covering the stars and any moon there might be, and you’re lucky if when you stop for a piss, you can still find your zipper. I tried to picture her making her way along the road, one foot on the pavement, the other on the gravel just to keep moving in a straight line. Lose your way just a bit in the black, and the next thing you know, you’re right in the middle of the road.

  I had my alternator go once, night-driving on the highway just up from Gambo, and when the battery went dead, it was like I’d gone blind or something. I reached for my cellphone — not to call anyone, not way out there, but to use the light on the display to get my stuff out of the trunk and wait for a car to come along.

  “Do you remember coming down a hill,” I asked her carefully, “or did you just walk along the flat?”

  “Down a hill, I think,” she said, and then she smiled a bit for the first time. A little lopsided, but it sure brightened up her face. In a nice way.

  “There are a couple of places — back at the Deer Park, or maybe the Colinet Road. Any of that sound familiar?”

  “No. The cabin’s brown, I think, and there’s a white pickup out front. Dave’s truck. Big truck.”

  I told her that we could take a look, that I’d drive her back up the hill and we could see if she recognized the place. By then, the rain was coming down in sheets again, and if anything, the sky was getting darker. Water was rushing downhill at us in the ruts on the pavement, and when we turned in the Deer Park, the trees were whipping around in the wind. We drove past a few cabins, then a few more, sometimes just driveways, and the puddles were hiding bigger and bigger potholes the farther back into the woods we got. I’d point to a place, and she’d look, shake her head, and rest the side of her face against the window — and every time, she seemed more and more resigned.

  “I’ve only been there once,” she said thickly. “If I see the truck, I’ll know it.”

  “Are you sure you came downhill?”

  “I think so. I dunno.”

  The air in the car was getting strong, and then the rain was slacking off again, so I opened the window and swung into a driveway to turn around.

  “We’ll try down on the Colinet Road,” I said, but she didn’t answer. I thought for a moment that she might have been sleeping.

  After that, the conversation got a little bit strained — well, her part of the conversation did. I kept talking, and every now and then she’d grunt or throw a word in somewhere. We had a twenty-minute drive or so in the other direction, and I told her about working at the store, about the lists, the whole thing. Easy enough when she wasn’t even answering. How you meet lots of people, but have to make your mind up about them really quickly, because you don’t get to spend much time with them before they’re gone again. Sometimes she’d rouse herself for a minute or two, enough once to tell me that she had finished school and had been working at everything from landscaping to home care, trying to find something that suited her. About her basement apartment, and how she wanted to get a car of her own.

  I think I told her about ten times as much as she told me, and that really wasn’t like me at all.

  By then she was really drifting — when she looked at me, it was like only one eye was focusing, the other one kind of drifting away as if it had lost the only line between boat and wharf. Not a pretty look for anyone. We passed more cabins, she shook her head, and we got to the end of the road. I got ready to turn around again, and was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to get her out of the car. She hadn’t seen anything familiar anywhere, not a landmark or a familiar sign or anything.

  Then, all at once, she was sound asleep.

  She was right out of it, and with the car stopped to turn, I got my first real chance to have a good look at her, curled up against the door with her two hands, palm to palm, tucked in under her cheek. I reached across and brushed the side of her face, her cheek, with the back of my right hand. And I swear, she nuzzled over, moved toward me and smiled with her eyes still closed, smiled like she liked the feel of it, as if she liked being there, as if she even liked me.

  Somehow it seemed as though she belonged there in the car — and sure, she was only in her twenties or so, and I was in my forties, so mathematically she could have been my kid, but you know, it’s not impossible.

  There’s a little shift that happens, and it happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. Like your eyes sudden
ly are working a different way, and you size everything up differently.

  That’s the way I felt, looking at her. Like it was the difference between someone you’ve just met and someone you know. Like I could know what she was thinking, and what she wanted, and maybe it was me. A long shot, but maybe it was me.

  Don’t get me wrong here.

  I mean, I know all about “no means no.” But she wasn’t saying no.

  She wasn’t saying anything.

  I started driving again but I kept looking over at her, at that little sort of half smile and the way her hair had dried all feathery in around her face. We were just driving back up the road by then, no point to it, really, the cabins going by on one side, and I knew that, soon enough I’d turn around, and the cabins would be going by again on the other side.

  Eventually I just turned the car up one of those narrow little forestry roads, the ones where you push through a tight little throat of spruce trees and then pop out on a full-sized logging road back along the edge of some clear-cut, green just starting to come up between the wet-black stumps. I stopped and put the car in park.

  The rain had stopped completely. We were up pretty high, the front of the car pointing out over toward the river, and mist was jumping up from the bottom of the valley. Jumping up, rising fast, coming out from under the trees all at once.

  It was an older clear-cut, the slash all knocked down by age, the sort of place where, even though it looks like a war zone, enough time has gone by that you know nature’s going to go ahead and take right over again, that it’s just been biding its time until it’s sure you’re gone. Fireweed first and quick-covering raspberries, then the opportunistic deciduous trees like alders and impatient birch.

  Lisa didn’t wake up when I turned the engine off. I could hear her breathing. I could almost feel the long, deep breaths. She was out of it, out cold, probably unconscious.