The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  After her first hour or so, flooding the shinny rink and the children’s oval, she would come back into the office to warm up while the ice set. She would unzip the front of her black snowmobile suit and slip her feet out of the big Sorels and prop back in the conference chair by the space heater, sipping coffee and reading. Tonight it was The Shell Seekers and she would read a good half of its 582 pages before dawn. Harlequins had bored her for some years. No substance, no surprise. They kept you company for an hour or so and then evaporated, leaving no trace. As for horror novels—these freezing nights, nobody around, were just made for them. She liked Thomas Harris and H.P. Lovecraft and lately she’d been rereading early Stephen King.

  Depending on the night’s coldness, after an hour or two of reading under the lone fluorescent tube she would turn the water back on and pull on her wool gloves and, over them, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, then go out for another round of flooding. Her third or fourth round, near dawn, would finish the night. It took at least three really cold nights to get the rinks up and running in each park, and then there was plenty of maintenance, night and day, after that. This park, unofficially Skeleton Park (it had been the city’s main cemetery through the 1800s), was her favourite. She liked its office, preferring the fire-like, toasting heat of the space heater to the electric baseboards in the other, larger offices. And this was pretty much the part of town where she’d grown up. It was changing, of course. Students and young professional types were moving in, renovating the old rental properties enclosing the park on four sides—the handsome Victorian redbricks that gave the park a sort of phony, respectable frame, since just beyond were hundreds of smaller places on narrow yardless streets, much aluminum siding, low apartment blocks of bile-yellow brick. She was raised in one of those smaller houses and had skated here as a child forty years ago.

  Technically she still had a boss, but out here she never had to deal with him. Not that he gave her a hard time. They got along. He was a short, fit, swaggery man of about thirty who once had a tryout with an NHL team, she could never remember which one. He treated her like one of the guys to the point of using “man”—while not exactly calling her “man”—when speaking to her. Sure thing, man. Man, I wish I could tell you. You want Skeleton Park this winter, man, it’s all yours. Maybe he preferred to think that anyone so much bigger than himself, and possibly stronger, must be a sort of man. Ellen was not only sturdy—her ex-husband’s backhanded compliment—but tall. She came from a side of town where most women thickened dramatically in their thirties and before long outweighed their men. The men thinned to sinew, their faces got a wrinkled, redly scoured look as if the skin had been worked with sandpaper, their eyes grew raw and haunted. Ellen had been spared the puffy moon face of her older sisters, only to see her features grow meaty and masculine while her body consolidated, almost doubling itself, like a hard-working farm wife of another era.

  Her husband had left, seven years ago. No children. Gavin had never wanted any and now she supposed, accepted, that it was too late. She was forty-six and she no longer registered on men. The many she worked with—almost all of the city’s outdoor and maintenance staff were men—were genial and respectful and she never felt so invisible as when they were around: robust, vital men, and they addressed her like a buddy. Or talked about women in her hearing. Maintaining the rink during the day, seeing the boys play shinny or smaller children chug around the oval in their wobbling circuits while the mothers sat watching, cheering—that could get to her too, of course. Being here at night was better, all in all.

  The last few nights she wasn’t even alone. On the far side of the low-boarded shinny rink, a man was standing motionless under a lamppost by the icy asphalt path. He’d been standing there for three nights. His back to the rink, he was facing the twenty-five-foot-high limestone obelisk that dominated this end of the park. He was not dressed for the activity. He wore a baseball cap and a short brown leather jacket, blue jeans, construction boots. It was about fifteen degrees below zero. He’d spoken to Ellen during the first night’s flooding, while she worked the northwest corner of the rink—close enough for them to talk with slightly raised voices. She’d been waving the hose head back and forth, layering water over deepening ice. Now and then he would take a step or two toward the obelisk, pause, then resume his stiff stance. He seemed to be sighting on the thing. Later, a few steps back, a step to the side. She watched out of the corner of her eye, not especially concerned. The park was known for odd spectacles. It was a sort of open-air hostel for addicts, parolees, halfway house residents, psych hospital outpatients, a shifting population of mainly harmless eccentrics.

  He’d veered his head and looked at her over his shoulder, fast, a pitcher checking a runner at first base. The visor of his cap kept his face in shadow but she could see his beard, light-coloured, neatly trimmed. He had good shoulders, a nice build.

  “Have you ever seen a miracle?” he asked.

  Here we go, she thought tolerantly. Then, in a cordial tone, more or less the tone she used to broach any conversation: “It all depends what you mean. You warm enough out here?”

  “It has to be moved,” he said. His voice was mild, reasonable.

  “What, the obelisk there?”

  “It’s a tombstone. They resent that it’s here. It weighs down the dead.”

  “You been talking to them?”

  His head tilted slyly. “Let’s just say that I have heard from them. There are twenty-four thousand of them.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” she said. “In a space this size. Thirty thousand was the figure I heard.”

  “The dead are more visible than we are. They have a legal right to this ground. There are twenty-four thousand of them. They resent that tombstone. It’s undemocratic.”

  She’d first read the plaque on the obelisk as a child, in the ’60s. Parishioners had built it with local limestone in 1826 to commemorate the loss of their minister, who had died “in the thirtieth year of his age.” In Ellen’s girlhood and teenage years the thing had been just another neighbourhood feature, something to throw snowballs at (two points if you hit the point of the top spire, one if you hit the stone orb below it), joke about (the more or less phallic shape, the word “erected” on the plaque), or climb on (every few years somebody fell off the upper pediment and broke an arm or got a concussion). Now she guessed she could see what the man was talking about—all the headstones were long gone, pulled from the earth like broken teeth over a century ago, while this monument to one man still towered over the park and its invisibly crammed, stacked dead.

  “I can move items with my mind,” the man said. “I do it at the kitchen table. If I stare hard enough, I can move this tombstone. I will need to get the angle correct. It’s weighing down the dead. Once I move it, I will then dissolve it. I dissolve items.”

  “Couldn’t you dissolve something else?” She amplified her tone of banter to get through to him. “The Revenue Canada building? Kingston Pen? This park takes a lot of hits.”

  His face was dark under the cap. “The dead want this tombstone moved and dissolved,” he said. “This is not what I would choose to do with my evening.”

  “Sure is a cold one,” she said.

  For some moments he stared at her.

  “Well, good luck to you,” she told him. “I mean, I can see your point. I’ll have to head across now. Stay warm now.” She tugged some slack into the hose and began to slide-step over to the far boards, skirting the freshly soaked places.

  “And I can tell,” he called out to her back, “if someone is a good person! I look at them and I know their life!”

  She turned to him with a grin—who could resist such an offer? If it was an offer.

  “So then, what am I?”

  She met his intent, eyeless stare. She’d never, even lonely or hurt, found it hard to meet a stare. She bore no guilt.

  “You are a good person.”

  She smiled again. “Thank you. You stay
warm.”

  Third night of flooding, two a.m. Plenty of work in the corners and along the boards, where the ice always grew rucked and pebbled. The middle of the shinny rink was still sunken and would take another thousand litres from the hose. But both rinks would be ready by morning.

  At first tonight the man hadn’t been there. Then, maybe a half-hour ago, he’d appeared. She had to guess the time because she hadn’t heard or seen him arrive. If this were one of her horror novels, he would be a ghost risen out of the earth of the old graveyard. She’d been easing the hose head back and forth, adrift in her night thoughts, which moved erratically, curving, burrowing, doubling back, unlike day thoughts, which had more practical places to get to, when she looked up and there he was, confronting the obelisk, closer to it tonight.… On the second night they’d exchanged hellos, nothing more. She’d sensed his deepening seriousness and concentration. Maybe he was getting frustrated, too. Or scared of failure. Did crazy men fear failure the way sane men did? Thinking of Gavin now. All his short-lived ventures. His departure had been a relief in some ways—making a driven man feel important was an unfinishable job—but she missed him, too. Nights she did. For some moments she dwelled on missing Gavin in the nights. Then she looked up: hoarse, drunken shouting. Three kids, it looked like, crossing Balaclava Street, coming up the path. She was glad the man wasn’t right on the path tonight. She’d lived here long enough to know trouble at a glance. They had the Grim Reaper look—slumpy, faceless, in layers of dark, baggy hooded sweatshirts. One of them had a biker jacket over his sweatshirt. Sure enough they came to a slouching halt on the path not far behind the man, who was facing away from them, apparently unaware. One of them, tall and skinny, was holding something like a crowbar. She shuffled out from behind the boards and stood in the open between the rinks, letting the water spray onto the patch of ice connecting them, keeping an eye on developments.

  The taunts began—too slurred and soft, at first, to make out. The man didn’t move or glance back. Maybe he was too deep inside his meditation, or felt he was on the verge of success. The kid in the biker jacket was edging up. “Hey, man. I’ve been hearing about you.” His voice was firmer, clearer than the others’: “Hey, stare at this, man.” He shoved the man in the back, not hard, and the man did turn slowly, pivoting from the waist up. After a moment his dark, visored face tilted like a puzzled dog’s.

  “Leave him alone,” she called.

  The hooded faces turned to her in cartoon unison. In other circumstances it would have been funny. The man swivelled back into his posture. The kid in the biker jacket started right toward her, hands in his jacket pockets. In her stomach a down-rush of fear. The others followed him with slack, messy movements—they would have trouble when they reached the ice. She turned to face them as they came on through the halflight between the lampposts. She gave the control ring on the hose a half turn to reduce the flow and let the stream pool outward on the ice in front of her. The hose head was a half-foot of steel tapered to a flanged hole an inch and a half in diameter.

  “He a friend of yours?” the leader called to her as he approached.

  Gavin had been a connoisseur of confrontations and often gave his views on the best way to manage them. You don’t get into a war of words, he used to say, addressing her as if she cared—actually just reassuring himself. You let your opponent work himself into a state and talk away his wind. You stay calm and quiet and hold his stare.

  “Guess you must be friends,” the leader called. “Neither of yous talk.”

  “What’s that?” the tall one said.

  “They’re friends,” the leader said. “The statue and the human Zamboni.”

  The sidekicks laughed, a crude, sloppy sound. They entered the perimeter of lamplight by the rinks and they were not kids. At a distance the baggy hooded shirts had made them look slighter, younger. They were in their twenties. It wasn’t a crowbar the tall one held, it was the wooden handle of a mallet or sledge. Still advancing, the leader brought his hands out of his pockets and drew back his hood, slowly, with a sort of wry formality. He was smiling, lips closed. For a moment his face took up all her view. He was shockingly handsome. A twitch of attraction plunged downward with another spasm of fear, down into her womb, twin shocks, fused and unanimous in effect. It was a cruel face, beautiful. Strong brows, high-planed cheekbones, hooded grey eyes, plump lips inside a ring of stubble. The dark hair was brush cut, the skull knobbed as if muscled. She kept waving the hose slowly in front of her. The three stopped at the edge of the wet ice, just short of where the stream of water swept back and forth. Beads of spray sequined their trainers and lower pant legs.

  “You were talking to us?” The voice was deep but nasal, grating, unsuited to that face.

  “I just said leave him alone.”

  “It’s you we want to see anyway.” He looked up at her. After a moment his smooth brow crimped slightly, his eyes welled wider. He’d figured it out. He said nothing. It was the third one who said, “Is this, like, a woman?” He was short and concave, with a pocked face, and he seemed the drunkest or most stoned of the three.

  “I don’t know,” the leader said. “Ask her yourself. Is there a lady in there?”

  “Never fucking seen a woman doing a rink.”

  “I seen her,” the tall one said. “Told me to get the fuck off the ice, last year.”

  “I was hardly here last year,” she said.

  “In that other park. Down Barrie.”

  “Well, I guess the ice wasn’t ready,” she said. She took a hopeful glance at the crazy man. He wasn’t seeing any of this. She should retreat to the hut, call the police. Something stopped her. She was slow on her feet—hadn’t run a step in years. At least out here there was the hose and the wet ice between her and them.

  “Looks ready now,” the third one said.

  “What, her?” the tall one said with a stupid leer.

  “The ice.”

  “Check it and see, Zach,” said the leader. Zach, the short one, tried sliding onto the surface beyond the pooling water. His lead foot drove through crusted slush. He started to topple forward, waved his arms, slammed backward onto his elbows and ass. You could hear his bones on impact. He rolled over onto all fours—hands and knees—and stayed like that, head drooped.

  “Okay, you can get up now,” she said. “You’re wrecking my work. You should be moving on.”

  “We’d like to see your office first,” the leader said, ignoring his hurt friend.

  “You’re not going to.”

  “We already dropped in at the hut in that other park. Up in the Heights.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “You think I’m lying?”

  His face was pale. He seemed ready to pull out a scalp as proof. Walt Unger, a small, shyly talkative chain-smoker, would be flooding the rink in Rideau Heights.

  Zach was back on his feet, rubbing his wet elbows with the opposite hands—a hurt little boy gesture. His wince was angry, yet he glanced timidly at the ice as if it were alive and likely to buck him off his feet if he moved. “Bitch,” he said, but it didn’t seem directed at her. That was good—she didn’t have to respond.

  “Let’s go,” the leader said, and for a soaring moment she believed that he was addressing his friends, telling them they were moving on. Then she felt his cold eyes pushing deeper into her.

  “Lead the way,” he said.

  “If I go into that office, it’ll be to call the cops. And there’s nothing there. You think any of us bring money out here for a graveyard shift?”

  He seemed to be giving this some thought. Then he said, “Your friend at the other rink did.”

  “What?”

  “Brought money.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  He went even whiter. “You know what?” he said, frowning, as if he had just discovered something that surprised him very much. “You’re a goof.”

  “What?”

  “A goof.”

  Za
ch let a single laugh ride the silence. Goof. Not the A-word, not the B-word, not the C-word. Gavin had never done time like others in his family—he’d run a series of video and corner stores, trying and failing to franchise them—but a few of his boyhood friends had done time, and so he, of course, had considered himself an expert on Inside. And goof, he’d told her, was the worst thing you could call another inmate. Fucker, loser, asshole, shithead—that whole repertoire could get you into big trouble, no question, but goof was the worst. Maybe because it felt so silly. So dismissive. A fucker, after all, might fuck you, or fuck you up, or fuck you over. A goof was just pathetic. Maybe handsome here had done time. Certainly he’d done time. He knew how to use the word. But the use of the word bothered, enraged her, for another reason altogether and now she jerked the control ring fully open and turned the hose on him, narrowing the mouth with her gloved thumb so it sprayed even harder. Bitch she would have preferred. A bitch at least was female. Fat bitch, even. Bull dyke. Anything in that line. This was worse than being invisible, worse than being looked through or past, which happened all the time, and so be it, she could take it, a small daily heartbreak—things could be far worse. She doused him from the knees up, briefly but thoroughly, finishing at the face—how she resented that sculpted, cocky face!—then aimed the hose over at the tall one, but he and Zach were quickly shuffling backward off the ice.

  The leader was rigid with the soaking—face twisted, shoulders hunched up, arms dangling. For a few moments his body stayed like that while his face slowly relaxed, refocused. He unzipped his jacket, reached in, pulled out a pair of red-handled ice picks, the sort snowmobilers use to pull themselves clear if they fall through the ice. One in each bare hand he came at her, his trainers stuttering over the wet ice. She turned the hose on him again. He kept coming, head lowered, squinting hard. The other two converged on her from either side with the same clumsy shuffle. She took her thumb off the outlet. The leader’s face was shiny, sopping, his narrowed eyes fixed not on her eyes but lower—maybe her mouth or throat. His eyes had glazed over, unreachable. He was quivering. There was no use trying to talk. She was backing into the darker area between the lamppost and the warming hut, her heart punching at her ribs. She gripped the spouting hose head like a club. He lunged, swiping the picks in front of her face, then slipped forward, off balance. She didn’t know whether to club or stab at him with the hose head but her body decided, thrusting at his face as it came up—the eyes wide—her full weight and strength behind it. Gavin’s advice again. Never be tentative with a first blow. Though it hadn’t helped Gavin in the end. He’d died three years back—four years after leaving her—in a confrontation on John Street, screaming in through the window of somebody’s cube van until he dropped, his heart finally imploding with the decades of rage. He’d needed her after all, she realized. He relied on her outlook. To Ellen, anger was a rare detour, not a lifetime of highways.