“You look nice in that dress, Ma. It suits you.” At least he was not the only one who’d seen Cooper riding, and made nothing of it.
She touched a lapel. “I’ll go back up now. I wanted the air.”
Lauchlin listened to her close the front door behind her. His mind was roiling, but he sat there trying to lay it all out, the sequence that brought Cooper and himself to the same point on the same night. Not a train of thought even, just shunts and sidings. If Cooper had started on the other side of the mountain where he lived, he’d have to have followed the Trans-Canada for a few miles before he could turn off toward Little Harbour, where he’d pick up the western end of the Slios road. On the Trans-Canada even at that hour of a summer night there’d have been a car here and there and a big rig or two, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have looked like a bicycle tourist, no gear or packs or anything like that, just that silly helmet. But they gave him probably no more than a cursory look, far less even than Lauchlin’s. And why would they care anyway who he was or where he was headed? A country eccentric, a character. Once off the Trans-Can, there’d be hardly a soul on Little Harbour Road, dead-ending at the old ferry wharf. Then up the mountain road east, toward the Slios. Not bad going for the first couple miles, decent road, a house here and there, but when, higher, he hit the dirt and gravel it would all be his, unseen, and one hell of a way beyond. By bicycle. Lord. Easy to take a tumble on one of those high stretches, a bike light too feeble anyway to show what kind of road was jarring him, and he’d have been damned tired by then, pedalling up that grade from the west. He had to be tight as a cat, if you thought about what he was planning to do, his heart had to be going like blazes, gritting his teeth over a stony road, even when it levelled out and took him to the highway and he turned toward the bridge to St. Aubin. He might’ve come off the bike once or twice, skinned himself, cursing in the dark, he had no bike light when he passed Lauchlin a long while later. His raked skin would have burned, but if he’d been flagging a little with doubt, if fatigue had been wearing on him, it would’ve flashed away in pain, pain could do that, keep you going, goad you, in the ring or in that dark, that fog, until the awful pedalling was over. And when he pumped past Lauchlin later that night, his mission was still driving him, his breathing was ragged but still he had a rhythm to him, him and the bike, and it had lulled Lauchlin somehow so that he failed to notice the long, narrow object tied along the handlebars, which could have been anything, least of all a rifle.
A slow, grey dusk had entered the room. He stood at the back window. Light dimmed out along the mountain ridge. Down its stolid, anonymous slopes subtle greens darkened to black, took into themselves all features, textures, turned blank and depthless. Yes, you could hide in a mountain like that, for a while, and there were other mountains beyond that one. Could he find him? God, if he had any chance, he’d be heading there right now. If Granny’s house were still standing, he could shut himself away over there, no phone, no radio, just the light of an old kerosene lamp, he’d tune himself to those woods again and set out to hunt for him. He saw her house so clearly in his mind, he could get down on the floor and tell you what the nailheads looked like, the texture of the dark varnish on the front door, the smell of a cupboard, the clatter of a doorknob, the tiny pane of amaranthine glass in the border of a front window.
Faint lightning far off, then soft rumbles of thunder. He could not think of one thing about that queer duck on the bicycle that said he was Cooper, the last man you’d put on a bike. However murder might come to St. Aubin, who would guess by bicycle anyway, who? You wouldn’t guess by anything really, a terrible deed like that, back here in a corner of Cape Breton, Clement known and liked, killed the way he was. But yet, Lauchlin had seen the man that night on the Ferry Road. Why would he have made any more of him than the trailer park folks? It’s no crime to look foolish on a bicycle in the middle of the night. And Lauchlin did not see him, not Cooper, but just a figure, a stranger, you could say that, could you not? No one could blame him for that. He wasn’t clairvoyant. He didn’t possess the taiseacht like his grandfather had, the second sight that might have forewarned him. And how could he have known anyway that Cooper held such hatred for Clement, lit a flame and cupped it inside himself like a candle in the wind and carried it for days while it burned, bore it fifteen hard miles, on a bicycle, for Christ’s sake, over an old road so beat-up nobody would believe it or suspect. That flame never went out, it didn’t even flicker, not even when he came out of his hiding place behind the house while Clement was changing the tire that early morning, Tena innocent in bed, content, there was not a wind big enough to extinguish that cold bit of fire, blue and steady.
But every time Lauchlin managed to lay out his actions rationally, to contain them with common sense, his imagination overwhelmed them, it was all too close to the heart, too vivid, too ambiguous. Why had he been so slow to react, to question? Yes, there had been something about the man, some thing, that reminded him of…who? Cooper? Or was that later? It was so hard to pick through the tangled thorns of his memory. Tena was there at his shoulder, and he could see Clement’s dark blood, his cap in the grass, more horrible somehow than had his body itself been lying there.
He pulled a bottle of rum from a drawer and took a long drink from it, then another. He set it beneath the gooseneck lamp. Then he got up and punched the bag hard, jolting it backward. He moved in close and met its return, pummelling it blindly with both fists, crowding it, shoving it with his shoulders, butting it. He kept swinging until his breath was harsh, a kind of moan coming out of him, and then the light went out. He froze his fists and stepped back, breathing hard, daring his heart to fail him, listening to the bag’s chain creak slowly as it swung near and away. That bicycle’s chain…My God, grinding all that distance? Drive a man insane…but he was mad already, and still out there. Where were the lights? Lightning had struck somewhere. His ungloved knuckles felt raw and he ran his tongue along them, tasting blood. He’d wanted only to get blind drunk but the darkness drained that away. Tena was beyond his touch. What was rising now from the dark corners of her mind? He ached to think of her, what had happened to her life. Had he let it happen? No, no, but he’d been her protector—not her lover, even though she had yielded willingly some part of herself, and he had tried to take it in his hands.
“MORAG? PEG?”
“I wasn’t asleep, so don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t. I like waking you up. What are you doing there now?”
“There’s lightning over the sea. It’s spectacular.”
“You’re not scared, all alone there?”
“Of what? Big noises?”
“Clement MacTavish, he’s dead. Murdered, just down the road. I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean by that, Lauchlin?”
“He was killed behind his own house, Morag. Shot through the eye. His wife, she’s blind, she…”
“But what can you do? I don’t understand. It’s horrible, yes, I heard they found him. I didn’t know how he died.”
“Nobody knows the ugly goddamn details of it.”
“His wife is Tena, the woman…?”
“She can’t even stay in her house, for God’s sake. The bastard who killed him is on the loose somewhere…”
“There, in St. Aubin?”
“He’d have been…seen. Miles away now probably. If I could, I’d drive up to see you. Jesus, I would.”
“It’s a mean night for that, about to get worse.”
“Couldn’t be meaner than here.”
“Why can’t you then? You been drinking?”
“You’re fresh back from that man you’re to marry, aren’t you?”
“That would stop you? Since when, Lauchlin.”
“Anyway, it’s all a bit crazy here, Morag, I’m here in the dark, with Clement and everything. And what’s to become of Tena, I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you a bit.”
“That’s what you’re doing, Lauch. Like you�
�ve always done—tell me a little and I have to figure out the rest.”
“That bad, am I?”
“Oh! Sea lightning! Brighter than day. Can you hear that thunder? Have you heard from your brother?”
“Yes. I should’ve gone with him.”
“You wouldn’t be in the middle of all this.”
“But I am, you see. I am.”
The store’s single fluorescent stuttered into life overhead. The wall clock’s sweep second hand shuddered between two and three, the motor chattered, that’s where the seconds were lost, shaved away, they accumulated somewhere unclaimed, let them go. Lauchlin was staring where the streetlamp had come on, yellowy-green above the road, like thin stagelight, casting shadows in the ditch, behind the trees. That’s how he was beginning to remember the bicycle and its alien rider, emerging out of the fog in slow motion, Lauchlin watching with amazement as he passed soundlessly before him and into the dark wings.
“Are you still there, Lauchlin? So much static.”
“Remember the old phone lines? That’s what my mind feels like, all the receivers are off the hook. Any minute somebody’s going to cut in, tell me what’s wrong.”
“Are you okay?”
“No, dear. I’m not. I’d like to come up to see you, I will, I hope soon, just a visit. I want to bring you a present, for your engagement and all that.”
“You can bring me a present anytime, anyway. But not tonight, I guess.”
“I’ve things to do. Stay away from the windows, dear Morag. This storm isn’t over. We don’t want to lose you.”
“We?”
“Me.”
NINETEEN
IN the car he had borrowed from Malcolm, Lauchlin waited across the street from the big, grey-shingled house, a Victorian relic of North Sydney’s boom times. “Goodspeed Funeral Services.” Tena was inside with Rita, the blue Honda parked out front, and he was determined to see her, however briefly. He’d learned that last night she had talked Rita into taking her back to St. Aubin to retrieve a few belongings, and while they were in the house, the blackout hit, scaring them both badly, they phoned the Mounties and two constables showed up. And Lauchlin had been up the road all the time, unaware, thinking where Cooper might be.
Sitting in the car heated with city sun, his head ached from last night’s rum. He’d slept little. He lay back on the headrest. I just want to tell you, Lauch, about a little roofless stone church, chapel, Teampull, in Gaelic, before I go from here. I wandered out in the late evening light toward the Chaipaval, passed the little girl’s red bicycle lying in a yard, she’d be sleeping then. Rabbits were on the machair, skitters of dark fur. Enjoy that grass, my friends, the gas is coming. The Teampull, no bigger than a modest cabin, sits humbly on a promontory above the sea, solitary, a piece of landscape. I’d like to think monks used it, and that I could get some of what they had, if I went there to it, in it. Asceticism, discipline, cold dawns, hunger. This is as close to monkhood as I am likely to get, St. Columba’s territory. The saint side of his life, that’s the easy part to grasp, the myths, the miracles. What’s harder to see is him as a man who acted badly earlier in his life, subject to the same flaws and foolishness as you and me. He’d killed a man and had to flee Ireland. It seems you have to sin like hell first, rack up a lot to atone for, and then come to God and the religious life. Are we ready yet?
Not yet, Frank.
A car passed, honking at someone. He wouldn’t go into the funeral home. Clement’s body had not been released yet, but Goodspeed would work his embalmer’s arts upon him, stitching up the rags of autopsy, restoring his eye, closing his lids, composing his face. Lauchlin knew Simon Goodspeed, wizened and bent, he’d buried relatives, but he had changed so little for so long, thin under his dark suits, his long capable hands clasping yours with a soft deftness you barely noticed, his blue eyes pale with sympathy, his movements always economical, the flourish of efficiency about them, it seemed as if he would be directing funerals forever, that, for our necessity, his own aging had ceased so he could attend to the deaths of others, dependably and at a reasonable price. No, Lauchlin would have to talk if he went inside, someone would want to know what he could tell them about this awful murder in St. Aubin. Not much. The search for Cooper continued, no sightings of him anywhere, though in Lauchlin’s mind he appeared again and again.
Nor was Lauchlin in any mood for Goodspeed’s wife, younger than Simon, still an attractive blonde, cool and withholding, with a superior sense of herself. She’d been aloof with Lauchlin whenever he’d seen her, something about him put her off. Ex-boxer? Poor teacher? Yet for the moment he dwelled on the banal desire Lydia Goodspeed could arouse in him because it seemed normal, direct, readily accounted for next to what had been weighing on him relentlessly—that some motive he hadn’t understood had clouded his vision three nights ago and compromised his actions since. Had he, at some subconscious level, really suspected that the cyclist was Clement’s partner, and deep inside him lay some perverse notion that he wanted to see what might happen, like leaving a smouldering campfire in a dry woods, a fleeting sense that adventure lay in that strange sight, that something would change, had to change in his life if this man on a bicycle continued his journey through the dark? If he had somehow perceived that this man might be Cooper, had he then thought—could you call it thought at all?—such danger might leave more room for him in Tena’s life? Could he have held an incoherent wish like that inside himself? He could not believe he did, no, and it made no sense—it would have ignored the danger to Tena as well, though it seemed clear Cooper had no designs on her or how easily could he have carried them through. But if Lauchlin had harboured some subconscious wish for the unpredictable, was not such a buried desire irrational anyway, blinding, fragmentary, barely apprehended, unavailable, streaking through the mind at light speed? And had he somehow recognized this grain of evil hope, could he have acted against it, would there have been time to piece together a sequence of events? He could have had no idea of Cooper’s plan, and even if some vague suspicions had slowly coalesced into curiosity and he had pursued the cyclist, Cooper would have hidden himself in the woods or the barn by the time he reached Clement’s house. But still, still…what course of thought was your mind capable of, and you unconscious of it? Was it a sequence at all, or rather a scattering of desire, possibility, dashed hope unrestrained by any moral dimension? If he had not been conscious of such thoughts, did that not mean that he had rejected them? They were never uttered, never acted upon. And yet, in not acting…
There was Tena at the front door, Rita beside her, Goodspeed holding her at the elbow ever so lightly as he talked, her head inclined toward him. Lauchlin remembered his subtle footwork, the man could slide so smoothly among a gathering of mourners he should have been a boxer, you hardly knew he’d moved on. Goodspeed withdrew his empathetic hand as Tena took up her cane, watching the women until they reached the sidewalk before he vanished.
Lauchlin called to Tena, then crossed the street to Rita’s car. They both stopped at the passenger door and Tena turned toward him.
“I’m sorry, I’ve tried to get hold of you, Tena,” he said. “I talked to Carrie on the phone and she told me you were here. Hello, Rita.”
“Lauchlin. Better late than never, we could’ve used you last night. You’re looking a little pale, boy. We’re going to my house now so Tena can rest.”
“Rita, I don’t need to rest. I’d like to talk to Lauchlin alone. Do you mind waiting a bit?”
“Well, no, dear. You go right ahead then. I’ll have a cigarette.”
Lauchlin led her across to Malcolm’s car and they sat inside. Her eyes seemed to have lost their former light, their colour, as if she’d given up any appearance of sight. She moved them listlessly from the window to his voice.
“She’s dying to listen in,” Lauchlin said. Rita was smoking furiously and glancing over at them, the afternoon wind ruffling her dark brown curls. “I’d like to drive us somewhere else, Ten
a.”
“Point Aconi maybe, where you talked about death? I wonder what it’s like today, there where your friend died.”
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Oh, probably you couldn’t take me to that place, Lauchlin. Nobody could.” Her voice sounded tired and husky. “Anyway, the police might get uneasy, after what happened yesterday, the blackout and all.” She reached for his hand and held it. Her fingers felt cool. “It shook us up.”
“I didn’t know you were at the house, Tena. Jesus, I’d have come down in a second. You shouldn’t have been there anyway, just the two of you.”
“I wanted something of him, of his, to have it with me. And I wasn’t going to be kept from my own house either—that was our life. But, oh God, when the lights went out, so did my bravery. I yelled out the first number that came in my head—yours, at the store. It’s busy, Rita said.”
“I was there, I was on the line with somebody…I’ve wanted to talk to you, tell you how sorry I am about Clement, I wanted to say it in person, Tena, not on Rita’s phone. It makes no sense. How could we know this would happen? He was a good man.”
“Yes, he was.” She let go his hand and turned her face toward the street. “I didn’t have to look at him. At least there’s that, isn’t there? Mr. Goodspeed will do him up fine, I’m sure, no one will know what he looked like, shot the way he was. His eyes will be peacefully closed, all the horror hidden.” She pressed her fingers to her temples, held them there. “The house, you know, went black in one stroke, and worse for me because Rita yelled out, Oh God, Tena, the lights are out! It’s him! He’s come back to get us! She thought Cooper had sneaked back and cut the wires, and for a little she had me believing it. He came back once, he could again. After a man kills, he has those powers, doesn’t he, to get in your head that way? We’d been packing a few things, Rita and me, just chatting, domestic talk, it calms you, it covers the pain. But when it went dark like that and she had to tell me, I snapped, all the sudden I was like bare wire, sparking. I was exhausted, wild. You see, I’d had no proper time to grieve, no peace, he’d been shot dead, for God’s sake, in our own yard. I wanted a chance to mourn, that’s all, that’s why I cried out so, that his killer could do this to me, not leave me alone until my husband was waked and buried. Then we got Lorna on the line and she said, It’s just a blackout, dear, all along the road.”
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Page 32
