At the window: staring through the crack between the curtains until the car was two red dots disappearing through the cherry trees, breathing for the first time since she’d slid out of bed. Then turning to leave, seeing the bullet holes in the wall around the chair, now running, fleeing back to the kitchen and through the still open door, her shoes still clutched in her hands so that when Angus Hurley, a retired fire chief on his way back from his weekly card game, saw her stumbling along the shoulder in her bare feet he knew something was wrong. He stopped, thinking that he’d never ignored a woman in distress and wasn’t going to start just because he’d had a few too many gin and tonics and shouldn’t be driving much less giving people rides. She accepted his offer of a lift without comment and sat quietly in the passenger seat with her shoes in her lap while Angus talked enough for both of them (and a caravan of gypsies besides). Somewhere in all that talk, mostly about his own daughter who’d moved to Calgary ten years ago and hadn’t been home for two Christmases, he invited her to spend the night at his house and apologized for being in no state to drive her to town.
Angela Hurley was asleep when they drove up the driveway of their old farmstead. She had left the kitchen light on and had unplugged the phone, not wanting to be woken up when they called to tell her that Angus was dead, having driven into a telephone pole or, God willing, head-on into someone just as stupid drunk as he was bound to be by the time his wallet was empty.
The kitchen was brightly lit, the house beyond it quiet, and Amy felt a sudden terror upon entering through the back door, an irrational fear spawned from too many horror movies and the abduction she’d just witnessed. Holding the door open while he finished the smoke he’d bummed from his brother’s boy to keep him awake on the drive home, Angus thought the perfectly stamped footprints leading to the kitchen table were made of mud. At the end of them Amy stood, looking like she didn’t know how she got there; drunk and scared, thinking it was a good bet she wouldn’t be leaving without a struggle.
After telling Amy to have a seat, Angus fetched the mop. He slopped it over the trail and it occurred to him that the mud looked awfully red but couldn’t reconcile its colour until he caught sight of the brighter variation staining the young woman’s toes.
(Twenty-four hours later he’d tell Dennis Marlowe, the man who’d replaced him as chief of the Lumsden Fire Department, “Her one foot looked like it’d been walking on broken glass.” This while the two of them watched Horace Milne’s ranch house burn to the ground, the current chief having picked up the former on his way to give it a look-see; the rest of his men, along with both pumper trucks, dispatched to the fires in Regina.
“You think she had anything to do with it?” Dennis would ask him.
“Couldn’t say. Only mention it now because it seems an odd coincidence.”
“She an Indian?”
“Didn’t strike me as one. ’Course she was drunk enough.”
Both men’d have a chuckle over this and I would hear the same chuckle two months later when I spoke with Dennis while investigating the fires for my report.)
Angus cleaned and dressed Amy’s foot with supplies from the first-aid kit he’d got as part of his retirement gift basket. He then directed her towards the couch, pleased that his wife had gone to the trouble of making it up for her (such was his state that it never occurred to him that the blanket and pillow were there for him, and that crawling into bed with his wife would result in a sharp elbow to the ribs and a night spent on the floor beside their bed). He awoke in the morning with only the mildest sense that something odd had happened the night before. Amy was gone, the blankets on the couch untouched, and Angela was in a right mood, he’d tell me when I followed the story from Dennis to its source, on account she’d walked in on a dirty mop leaning against the stove and a floor that looked like a pig had been killed on it. She had a pot of coffee on though and didn’t protest beyond clearing her throat when Angus poured himself a cup. It was sipping at the mug, his feet held dutifully off the ground until the floor beneath the table was dry, that he remembered the girl he’d picked up the night before; the one with the bloody foot who didn’t say a word and who, far as he could recall, was too far gone to have made it past the mailbox at the end of their driveway.
Amy did, however, not only make it to the end of the driveway but all the way to the second floor of the house she shared with two others in the Cathedral District, just east of downtown. There is no evidence to explain how she managed this so early on a Friday morning with the cut on her foot making it feel like she was walking on nails the whole time. Her two roommates, Philip, a slight, ginger-haired twentysomething musical director at a local theatre company called Out! On Stage, and, Julie, a pretty, dark-haired fourth-year film major, showed the usual signs of concern when she hobbled out of her room the next morning. All she would say by way of an explanation was, “There’s always a price.”
I spoke to both of them a few months later.
Me: What was her relationship, as far as you know, with Curtis Mays?
P: Who?
M: Come now.
(Sitting up straight, P. stared at me with a forcefulness that told me he thought I was a threat, if not to Amy then to himself and his very way of life.)
P: What does this have to do with Native gang violence? Isn’t that what you wanted to talk to us about?
M: She was there when they kidnapped Terrence Bell.
P: I don’t believe that.
M: There were multiple witnesses. She herself, in a sworn statement —
P: I mean, I don’t believe he was kidnapped by Natives.
M: Hmmm.
P: I think it was part of a —
M: A conspiracy?
P: No.
M: Then what?
(At this point P. folded his hands over his chest, his lips pressed shut.)
J: It’s interesting.
M: What?
J: In light of the events —
M: Yes?
J: She would have been his tragic flaw.
M: Sorry.
J: If this was a movie, I mean. It’s always a woman, right?
M: I don’t follow.
P: She’s just mad because Amy stiffed us for a month’s rent.
J: Two.
M: You were saying?
J: Curtis would be the hero, wouldn’t you say? Good looking —
P: If that’s your type.
J: — muscular —
P: Too angular for my taste.
J: — fresh from battle. A real mensch. He fits the archetype perfectly.
M: I see.
J: And what’s always the hero’s weakness?
P: Ask me, ask me!
J: It’s a girl. Unless …
M: Yes?
J: He had a secret. Did he?
P: He was gay, wasn’t he? I knew it.
J: Usually it’s the girl. He loved her?
P: Amy?
J: I’m talking hypothetically. You know, structurally speaking, he would have loved her.
P: Except she hated him.
M: The woman scorned?
(P. started to answer then clamped his mouth shut again.)
J: Exactly. Irony, the driving force behind modern cinema. Everyone adored him but the girl he loved.
M: So what would she do?
J: She’d seek to undermine him.
M: Betrayal?
J: Yes.
M: How?
J: She’d look for a chance to sell him out.
M: For money?
J: Or for personal reasons. Usually it’s for money.
M: So what happens to her?
J: At the end?
M: Right.
J: Depends on whether the hero forgives her. If he does, she gets away, if not …
Amy, a pec
uliar case, most certain. One that I’ve spent far too many hours trying to fit back into the story when maybe she’d played her part already: a minor character, that of a siren who sang her song only to prove the hero for what he was, now disappearing back into the depths, content that she would live to sing again.
But no, there was more to her than that. I go over it again. Take your time, I tell myself, pay attention. There’s got to be something. And then — after months of searching, of forgetting to eat, of drinking too much, of being short with my neighbours and various check-out girls who were just doing their jobs, of losing track of the days so that when I looked in the mirror I am suddenly an old man and can’t remember how I got that way — I find it: a date, written twice. Once in my notebook and once on the spine of one of Clive Winkle’s videotapes: August 26; the day that Julie told me Amy had left for Vancouver, stiffing her for last month’s rent and September’s as well.
M: And what time was this, approximately?
J: Sometime in the afternoon. She said she was going to lie down because her foot was hurting so bad. I went to wake her for dinner and she was gone.
M: So say, five?
J: Closer to four.
My handwriting poor by this point, my wrist aching from how much this dentist’s daughter talked, but the date clear anyway. The same date that Lester Mann came to visit Clive Winkle at The Hole. Written in black marker on the spine of a tape, the letters firm and bold, not at all like an old queer: Aug 26 — LM. Yes, there it is tucked in a box with all the others, so long after the events that the year is lost to me. I slip it from its case, amazed that I hadn’t noticed it before and watch it on my old friend, the TV in the corner, for once alone, Sergeant Drummond too busy with a sandwich to bother me with more than a wave of his hand.
I fast forward the bit of static and stop when I see Clive standing in the middle of the room, slipping the remote for the surveillance camera into his pocket. He’s waiting for someone, that’s obvious. Trying to look casual. His nervousness betrayed by the way he smoothes the pocket where he put the remote and by the way he walks quickly off-camera then returns again after an eleven count. His hands now swing casually at his side, no longer smoothing at the bump in his jacket so that I know he’s hidden the remote somewhere, in the kitchen or perhaps in the bedroom; the camera in there reserved for special guests and not the person now walking through the door, opening at the push of a button on another remote, this one kept in plain sight on the table, unadorned with flowers or his half-eaten lunch.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
The words are barely out of his mouth when Clayton Farber is on him, striding past his boss, his hand so quick to strike that I have to watch it in slow motion to tell that Clive didn’t fall backwards of his own accord. Clive now on the ground, gasping, a turtle upside down or a snake that bit off more than it could chew, writhing, the animal, a large toad or bullfrog perhaps, lodged between its jaws, starving it to death, this its last mouthful of food. Clayton plays along with the creature Clive has become by placing his boot on his chest. It’s made of black leather but beyond that I can’t say. Italian maybe, though I can’t see the cut and am just going by what I’d expect of a man like Clayton Farber, and movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read with characters like him, although they rarely do this sort of man justice. They call him mercenary or specialist or names they, the writers, have made up to make him seem more real or more exotic or more dangerous. He is plenty real, this Clayton Farber, and dangerous all by himself, and not at all exotic. A medium-sized man, exactly the height and breadth you’d expect of someone who didn’t want to be noticed on the sidewalk. He’s wearing a black suit with a black shirt underneath and no tie. The way he moves in it, I know it’s more comfortable than any suit I own, light and breezy on him as he pins Clive to the floor, not saying a word, nobody speaking at all. The only sound is Clive, choking for air.
Clayton Farber retrieves something from his pocket, no larger than a pack of cigarettes. He points it at Clive and I see that it has a nozzle and that a stream of liquid shoots from it. Clive closes his mouth against the stream and shuts his eyes. When Clayton is done with his face he sprays Clive’s body, draped in a leisure suit, velour maybe, just like you’d expect him to wear when he was lounging around at home, not expecting visitors, and certainly not visitors like this.
The bottle emptied, Clayton steps back and pops a lighter from his pocket. He flips the lid, spinning it in his hand like a shark does with a deck of cards, and holds the flame out to Lester Mann so that he can light the cigar in his mouth.
A cigar! I think.
Lester Mann’s long-awaited entrance as a living breathing person, no longer confined to the shadows of speculation, here on the screen, the man revealed, and his first act is to light a cigar and use it to threaten someone doused in lighter fluid. Such a startling lack of imagination, and I see, for the first time (the significance of this realization not lost on me, coinciding as it were with his first appearance here, in the telling) who, or rather what, he truly is: a thing so far removed from a person that it might as well be a ghost walking around in a dead man’s clothes. A pale reflection who can’t but speak in tired clichés, because what he has done, and will do, is beyond what any man could do if he were whole and real and not a spirit conjured to satisfy a moment of grief and rage that has already passed. I see it in the dreadful calm with which he speaks.
“We’re looking for a friend of yours.”
His tone immediately puts Clive at ease so that he stops wriggling, the tenor of his voice not that of someone about to burn a complete stranger for the crime of having loved another man, regardless of what that man might have done.
“I think you know who I’m talking about.”
Circling Clive now, giving him a wide berth as if he’s been infected (with queerness or gas or plain old death, who can tell) and wants to stay plenty clear. Clive, whom I respect more with each passing moment, refuses to be lured in, refuses to sputter, “You’re talking to the wrong man,” or “I’ll never tell,” or something as predictably scripted, and instead just lies still. The only concession he gives to his captor is the way he follows him with his eyes as he circles the room, now picking up a book from the shelf, flipping through the pages and setting it back down.
“We know he was here and we know he had company. Now you have two choices: Tell us where he is or you’re the main course while we have us a little barbecue.”
I expect him to punctuate it with a sharp kick to Clive’s ribs, but (shockingly) he doesn’t. Instead, he draws on his cigar and taps the ash on the floor, which maybe he thinks is just as effective. Clive, how I want him to mutter, “Fuck you,” or “I ain’t telling you shit” or maybe, if he still has hold of the wit he’s so well regarded for by his clientele, a quip about a particularly nice marinade he has chilling in the fridge. But he remains quiet and Lester Mann circles, circles, circles, spouting inane threat after inane threat, assuring him that no one will miss an old fag like him and peppering his speech with words like ‘poofter’ and ‘pedophile’ and even using the word ‘cunt’ a few times, though the connection strikes me as tenuous.
I fast forward and am amazed that it goes on for as long as it does, continuing uninterrupted until the cigar is a stub. Lester Mann then bends low to Clive, holding the ember inches from his cheek. Clive doesn’t pull away. He just lies there, certain that, it being lunch, a dozen people watched his guest come in and that, regardless of what he’s said, the police are paid to miss an old fag like him and that, beneath all the tired clichés, Lester Mann knows this too. True to form, he blows a last puff of smoke into Clive’s face then drops his cigar in the vase of flowers by the door on his way out, leaving Clive to think about what he has said.
Clive does, yes he surely does think about it, lying on the floor, the fumes making him lightheaded and dizzy. I can tell by the way his body convulses,
as if he’s having a seizure or a stroke, and how his laughter sounds like it will be the death of him.
twenty-five
All these years later, watching him, I think his laughter will never end, that he’s still laughing now; six feet under with only the worms and the bugs to hear him; laughing even after the maggots have had their way; laughter so deep it’s in the bone. But, as with all things, it begins to ebb, trickling out of him with the calm of a spring thaw. His body stilled, he does not get up. He remains on the floor, unmoving, and I think he must be asleep. I consider fast forwarding the tape to see what happens next — the remote is in my hand and my finger is on the button — but I don’t. I watch him sleeping on the floor. An hour passes and it’s as if I am lying beside him, wakeful but restive, trying to ease the weariness that I feel, being so old and yet too close to the end to stop now.
The time for endings has long passed, I tell myself, and I try to find sense in it but can’t. Then I realize I meant stopping, the time for stopping has long passed. I can’t take it back so it stands, making me think I was right and that it will never end. I think of the beginning, of Ruby Yee, and ache for one of her special black bean balls and more for a chance that our hands would touch when she passed me my change. I wonder why I haven’t been back for so long, a trick of the mind for even in this restive state where everything seems possible — this televised world of Clive’s on the screen in front of me — I know she abandoned her store years ago. Trying to forget this, I think of Angus Hurley sleeping on the floor beside his wife and wonder if there is a connection between him and me and Clive. I am certain of it, that there is meaning here, all of us lying on the floor and sleeping, separated by a few short pages, and years, even shorter, each of us drunk with age and worry and other things. Then there is a buzz, like an alarm, coming from the TV.
I jerk awake and remember that I’m sitting in a chair, and not lying on the floor at all, and I wonder what it means. Something inside me knows and I mutter, “You damn fool.”
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