“You can bug any room with a window in it, children,” he said wearily. “And that dressing room, of course, has always been bugged. Oh, look, dammit.”
He held up a VidCaset Mailer pack with broken seals, and at last they both started forward involuntarily toward it, and as he cleared the dressing room doorway Zack finally caught on, and he reached behind him and an incredible thing happened.
It must be borne in mind that both Zack and Jill had, as they had earlier recognized, been steadily raising the truth level between them for over a month, unconsciously attempting to soften the blow of their first TWT experience. The Tennessee preacher earlier noted had once said publicly that all people are born potentially telepathic—but that if we’re ever going to get any message-traffic capacity, we must first shovel the shit out of the Communications Room. This room, he said, was called by some the subconscious mind. Zack and Jill had almost certainly been exposed to at least threshold contamination with TWT, and they were, as it happens, the first subjects to be a couple and very much in love. They had lived together through a month that could have killed them at any time, and they were already beginning to display minor telepathic rapport.
Whatever the reasons, for one fractionated instant their hands touched, glancingly, and—Jill who had seen none of Finnegan’s winking and almost nothing of his urgent gestures—knew all at once exactly what was about to happen and what to do, and Zack knew that she knew and that he didn’t have to worry about her. Sziller was close behind them; there was no time even for one last flickerglance at each other. They grinned and winked together at Finnegan and Zack dove left and Jill dove right and Sziller came into the doorway with the Colt extended, wondering why Finnegan hadn’t fired already, and there was just time for his face to register of course, he has no silencer before Finnegan shot him.
A .357 Magnum throwing a 120-grain Supervel hollow-point can kill you if it hits you in the foot, from hydrostatic shock to the brain. Sziller took it in the solar plexus and slammed back into the dressing room to land with a wet, meaty thud.
The echoes roared and crackled away like the treble thunder that comes sometimes with heat lightning.
“I’m kind of more than your garden variety narc,” Finnegan said calmly. “Maybe you guessed.”
“Yes,” Jill said for both of them. “A few seconds ago. To arrange that many convincingly bungled hits, you’ve got to be big. But you took a big chance with that cab driver.”
“Hell, he wasn’t mine. The guy just happened to flip—happens all the time.”
“I believe you,” she said, again for the two of them.
“People will have heard that shot,” Zack suggested diffidently.
“Nobody who wasn’t expecting it, son,” Finnegan said, and sighed. “Nobody who wasn’t expecting it.”
Zack nodded. “Question?”
“Sure.”
“How come you’re still holding that gun out?”
“Because both of you still have yours,” the government man said softly.
No one moved for a long frozen moment. Zack was caught with his right hand under him; in attempting to conceal the gun he had lost the use of it. Jill’s was behind a crouching leg, but she left it there.
“We don’t figure you, Ed,” she said softly. “That’s all. You see that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “So lighten up on the iron and by and by we’ll all go get ham and eggs at my place. I’ll teach you that song about Bad-Eye Bill and the Eskimo gal.”
“You’re not relaxing us worth a shit, Finnegan,” Zack grated. “Talk. How big are you?”
Finnegan pursed his lips, blew a tiny bubble between them. “Big. Bigger than narcotics. Bifederality leaves a lot of gaps. I guess you could say I’m The Man, Zaccur old son. For our purposes, anyway. Oh, I have superiors, including the President and the Prime Minister. I’m so clever and nimble none of them is even afraid of me. I think the PM rather likes me. It’s important that you know how heavy I am—it’ll help you believe the rest.”
He paused there, and Zack said “Try us,” in a gentler tone of voice.
Finnegan looked around him at the darkened music room, at shadowy formica-toadstool tables bristling with chair legs, at the great hovering-buzzard blot that was the high spotlight, at a stage full of amplifiers and a piano like stolid dwarves and a troll come to sit in judgment on him, at the mocking red glow of the sign over the door that claimed it was an exit. He took a deep breath, and spoke very carefully.
“Did you ever wonder why a man takes on a job like mine?” He wet his lips. “He takes it on because it’s a job that someone has to do, and he sees that the man doing it is a bloody bungling butcher playing James Bond with the fate of the world. Can you see that? I hated his job as much as I hated him, but I understood that in a world like this one, somebody has to do that job. Somebody just plain has to do that job, and I decided that no one in sight could do a better job than me. So I forced him to retire and I took his job. It is a filthy pig fucker of a job, and it has damaged me to do it—but somebody had to. Look, I have done things that horrify me, things that diminish me, but I did good things, too, and I have been striving every minute toward a world in which my job didn’t exist, in which nobody had to shoulder that load. I’ve been working to put myself out of a job, without the faintest shred of hope, for over ten years—and now it’s Christmas and I’m free, I’m fucking FREE. That makes me so happy that I could go down to the cemetery and dig up Wes and kiss him on the mouldy lips, so happy I’ll feel just terrible if I can’t talk you two out of killing me.
“My job is finished, now—nobody knows it but you and me, but it’s all over but the shouting. And in gratitude to you and Wes I intend to use my last gasp of power and influence to try and keep you two alive when the shit hits the fan.”
“Huh?”
“I kind of liked your idea, so I let your VidCaset packs go through. But first I erased ’em and rerecorded. Audio only, voice out of a voder, nothing identifying you two. That won’t fool a computer for long, they’re all friends of yours, but it buys us time.”
“For what?” Jill asked.
“Time to get you two underground, of course. How would you like to be, oh, say, a writer and her husband in Colorado for six months or so? You’d look good as a blond.”
“Finnegan,” Zack said with great weariness, “this all has a certain compelling inner consistency to it, but you surely understand our position. Unless you can prove any of this, we’re going to have to shoot it out.”
“Why you damned fools,” Finnegan blazed, “what’re you wasting time for? You’ve got some of the stuff with you—give me a taste.”
There was a pause while the pair thought that over. “How do we do this?” Jill asked at last.
“Put your guns on me,” Finnegan said.
They stared.
“Come on, dammit. For now that’s the only way we can trust each other. Just like the world out there—guns at each other’s heads because we fear lies and treachery, the sneak attack. Put your fucking guns on me, and in an hour that world will be on its way out. Come on!” he roared.
Hesitantly, the two brought up their guns, until all three weapons threatened life. Jill’s other hand brought a tiny stoppered vial from her pants. Slowly, carefully, she advanced toward Finnegan, holding out the truth, and when she was three feet away she saw Finnegan grin and heard Zack chuckle, and then she was giggling helplessly at the thought of three solemn faces above pistol sights, and all at once all three of them were convulsed with great racking whoops of laughter at themselves, and they threw away their guns as one. They held their sides and roared and roared with laughter until all three had fallen to the floor, and then they pounded weakly on the floor and laughed some more.
There was a pause for panting and catching of breath and a few tapering giggles, and then Jill unstoppered the vial and upended it against each proffered fingertip and her own. Each licked their finger eagerly, and from about
that time on everything began to be all right. Literally.
An ending is the beginning of something, always.
No Renewal
No Renewal
Douglas Bent Jr. sits in his kitchen, waiting for his tea to heat. It is May twelfth, his birthday, and he has prepared wintergreen tea. Douglas allows himself this extravagance because he knows he will receive no birthday present from anyone but himself. By a trick of Time and timing, he has outlived all his friends, all his relatives. The concept of neighbourliness, too, has predeceased him; not because he has none, but because he has too many.
His may be, for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia, and it is bordered on three sides by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot. On the remaining perimeter is an apartment-hive, packed with antlike swarms of people. Douglas knows none of them as individuals; at times, he doubts the trick is possible.
Once Douglas’s family owned hundreds of acres along what was then called simply the Shore Road; once the Bent spread ran from the Bay of Fundy itself back over the peak of the great North Mountain, included a sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland; once the Bents were one of the best-known families from Annapolis Royal to Bridgetown, their livestock the envy of the entire Annapolis Valley.
Then the petrochemical industry died of thirst. With it, of course, went the plastics industry. Clay suddenly became an essential substitute—and the Annapolis Valley is mostly clay.
Now the Shore Road is the Fundy Trail, six lanes of high-speed traffic; the Bent spread is fourteen acres on the most inaccessible part of the Mountain; the sawmill has been replaced by the industrial park that ate the clay; the pasture and the streams and the farmland have been disemboweled or paved over; all the Bents save Douglas Jr. are dead or moved to the cities; and perhaps no one now living in the Valley has ever seen a live cow, pig, duck, goat or chicken, let alone eaten them. Agribusiness has destroyed agriculture, and synthoprotein feeds (some of) the world. Douglas grows only what crops replenish themselves, feeds only himself.
He sits waiting for the water to boil, curses for the millionth time the solar-powered electric stove that supplanted the family’s woodburner when firewood became impossible to obtain. Electric stoves take too long to heat, call for no tending, perform their task with impersonal callousness. They do not warm a room.
Douglas’s gnarled fingers idly sort through the wintergreen he picked this morning, spurn the jar of sugar that stands nearby. All his life Douglas has made wintergreen tea from fresh maple sap, which requires no sweetening. But this spring he journeyed with drill and hammer and tap and bucket to his only remaining maple tree, and found it dead. He has bought maple-flavoured sugar for his birthday tea, but he knows it will not be the same. Then again, next spring he may find no wintergreen.
So many old familiar friends have failed to reappear in their season lately—the deer moss has gone wherever the hell the deer went to, crows no longer raid the compost heap, even the lupens have decreased in number and brilliance. The soil, perhaps made self-conscious by its conspicuous isolation, no longer bursts with life.
Douglas realizes that his own sap no longer runs in the spring, that the walls of his house ring with no voice save his own. If a farm surrounded by wasteland cannot survive, how then shall a man? It is my birthday, he thinks, how old am I today?
He cannot remember.
He looks up at the goddamelectricclock (the family’s two-hundred-year-old cuckoo clock, being wood, did not survive the Panic Winter of ’94), reads the date from its face (there are no longer trees to spare for fripperies like paper calendars), sits back with a grunt. 2049, like I thought, but when was I born?
So many things have changed in Douglas’s lifetime, so many of Life’s familiar immutable aspects gone forever. The Danielses to the east died childless: their land now holds a sewage treatment plant. On the west the creeping border of Annapolis Royal has eaten the land up, excreting concrete and steel and far too many people as it went: Annapolis is now as choked as New York City was in Douglas’s father’s day. Economic helplessness has driven Douglas back up the North Mountain, step by inexorable step, and the profits (he winces at the word) that he reaped from selling off his land parcel by parcel (as, in his youth, he bought it from his ancestors) have been eaten away by the rising cost of living. Here, on his last fourteen acres, in the two-story house he built with his own hands and by Jesus wood, Douglas Bent Jr. has made his last stand.
He questions his body as his father taught him to do, is told in reply that he has at least ten or twenty more years of life left. How old am I? he wonders again, forty-five? Fifty? More? He has simply lost track, for the years do not mean what they did. It matters little; though he may have vitality for twenty years more, he has money for no more than five. Less, if the new tax laws penalizing old age are pushed through in Halifax.
The water has begun to boil. Douglas places wintergreen and sugar in the earthenware mug his mother made (back when clay was dug out of the backyard with a shovel), moves the pot from the stove, and pours. His nostrils test the aroma: to his dismay, the fake smells genuine. Sighing from his belly, he moves to the rocking chair by the kitchen window, places the mug on the sill, and sits down to watch another sunset. From here Douglas can see the Bay, when the wind is right and the smoke from the industrial park does not come between. Even then he can no longer see the far shores of New Brunswick, for the air is thicker than when Douglas was a child.
The goddamclock hums, the mug steams. The winds are from the north—a cold night is coming, and tomorrow may be one of the improbable “bay-streamer” days with which Nova Scotia salts its spring. It does not matter to Douglas: his solar heating is far too efficient. His gaze wanders down the access road which leads to the highway; it curves downhill and left and disappears behind the birch and alders and pine that line it for a half mile from the house. If Douglas looks at the road right, he can sometimes convince himself that around the bend are not strip-mining shells and brick apartment-hives but arable land, waving grain and the world he once knew. Fields and yaller dogs and grazing goats and spring mud and tractors and barns and goat berries like stockpiles of B-B shot…
Douglas’s mind wanders a lot these days. It has been a long time since he enjoyed thinking, and so he has lost the habit. It has been a long time since he had anyone with whom to share his thoughts, and so he has lost the inclination. It has been a long time since he understood the world well enough to think about it, and so he has lost the ability.
Douglas sits and rocks and sips his tea, spilling it down the front of his beard and failing to notice. How old am I? he thinks for the third time, and summons enough will to try and find out. Rising from the rocker with an effort, he walks on weary wiry legs to the living room, climbs the stairs to the attic, pausing halfway to rest.
My father was sixty-one he recalls as he sits, wheezing, on the stair when he accepted euthanasia. Surely I’m not that old. What keeps me alive?
He has no answer.
When he reaches the attic, Douglas spends fifteen minutes in locating the ancient trunk in which Bent family records are kept. They are minutes well spent: Douglas is cheered by many of the antiques he must shift to get at the trunk. Here is the potter’s wheel his mother worked; there the head of the axe with which he once took off his right big toe; over in the corner a battered peavey from the long-gone sawmill days. They remind him of a childhood when life still made sense, and bring a smile to his grizzled features. It does not stay long.
Opening the trunk presents difficulties—it is locked and Douglas cannot remember where he put the key. He has not seen it for many years, or the trunk for that matter. Finally he gives up, smashes the old lock with the peavey, and levers up the lid (the Bents have always learned leverage as they got old, working efficiently long after strength has gone). It o
pens with a shriek, hinges protesting their shattered sleep.
The past leaps out at him like the woes of the world from Pandora’s Box. On top of the pile is a picture of Douglas’s parents, Douglas Sr. and Sarah, smiling on their wedding day, Grandfather Lester behind them near an enormous barn, grazing cattle visible in the background.
Beneath the picture he finds a collection of receipts for paid grain bills, remembers the days when food was cheap enough to feed animals, and there were animals to be fed. Digging deeper, he comes across canceled cheques, insurance policies, tax records, a collection of report cards and letters wrapped in ribbon. Douglas pulls up short at the hand-made rosary he gave his mother for her fifteenth anniversary, and wonders if either of them still believed in God even then. Again, it is hard to remember.
At last he locates his birth certificate. He stands, groaning with the ache in his calves and knees, and threads his way through the crowded attic to the west window, where the light from the setting sun is sufficient to read the fading document. He seats himself on the shell of a television that has not worked since he was a boy, holds the paper close to his face and squints.
“May twelfth, 1989,” reads the date on the top.
Why, I’m sixty years old he tells himself in wonderment. Sixty. I’ll be damned.
There is something about that number that rings a bell in Douglas’s tired old mind, something he can’t quite recall about what it means to be sixty years old. He squints at the birth certificate again.
And there on the last line, he sees it, sees what he had almost forgotten, and realizes that he was wrong—he will be getting a birthday present today after all.
For the bottom line of his birth certificate says, simply and blessedly, “…Expiry Date: May twelfth, 2049.”
Downstairs, for the first time in years, there is a knock at the door.
In the Olden Days
In the Olden Days
Melancholy Elephants Page 13
