The Ravine

by Paul Quarrington

  “What?”

  “We like ran away. The thing of it is, her parents don’t like me, so we had to run away. If you call the cops …”

  “Listen, none of that is my fucking problem. My fucking problem is that my daughter, my child, is in that car, and your girlfriend—”

  “I can help. I can find Selma. I know exactly how her mind works.”

  “I thought you said you and she were completely different. Remember?”

  Jonathon took a deep breath. “Look. Let’s get in my truck, we’ll go after them. We’ll find them. Trust me.”

  So there you have it. Trust me.

  I guess it comes down to this: I don’t trust people. I may have once upon a time. At least, I suspect I trusted my mother, and continued to do so until she died (unreasonably early in life, fifty-three years of age). But since the incident, the encounter with twisted teenaged fuckwhips, I haven’t trusted a soul. Same deal with Jay, I guess. He was unable to trust any of his wives. He’d marry them, then accuse them of infidelity on the actual honeymoon. And so we ascended from the ravine, our fates sealed, our souls fated. Having discovered that human beings were bad, I decided to be worse, so that we all might look better by comparison. Having failed to do the right thing—having done the wrong thing—doing the wrong thing was staying the course. The tendency could thereby be seen as somehow congenital, not a moral failure.

  But these things were mere symptoms, red spots that distracted attention from the more profound contagion. Which is to say, I didn’t trust people, and accordingly made no real connections. I chose a career that allowed me to control people, to put words in their mouths, to script their actions, so that there could be no nasty surprises. Now I was being asked to trust a young man who’d been on a bit of a toot. Judging from the stench in the service centre washroom, he’d been digging up graves and devouring corpses. Or I could (as Currer kept urging me, at increasingly louder volumes) call the cops. But (aside from the fact that I didn’t trust cops either) I decided I had a small chance to teach my older daughter something, some small thing, and she might go on to have a better life than I. So I looked at Jonathon and demanded, “Where is your truck?”

  In a matter of minutes we were on the highway again. Jonathon’s pickup had a spacious cab; still, Currer and Jay were squished in behind the two big captain’s chairs. Jonathon drove with care and concentration, working the big gear lever, squinting to see into the new night. “How much gas did you have?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “In your car. How much gas?”

  “Jay?”

  “What?”

  “How much gas did we have?”

  “Little more than half a tank.”

  “Okay. So she’ll stop for gas when it’s at a quarter. She’s funny that way.”

  “Why is she running away?” demanded Jay. “Do you beat her?”

  Jonathon tried to find Jay in the rear-view. He did, and the two men locked eyes. “Naw, I don’t beat her. She just is like that. She just takes off when the going gets hairy.”

  Jay made one of those huffy sounds, indicating he wasn’t buying any of it.

  Currer was crying in the back seat. Trying not to, but crying just the same.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said. “This girl, this Selma, she needed a car. For whatever reason. And she didn’t see Ellis sleeping in the back seat, I guess. As soon as Ellis wakes up, Selma will see what went wrong and then she’ll … I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  “Well, she won’t do anything whack,” said Jonathon defensively. “She’s a good person.”

  “So you two eloped?”

  “Huh?”

  “You eloped. You ran off. Her parents don’t like you.”

  “It’s a fucking rock-and-roll song,” said Jay.

  “Hey. Your brother is getting on my tits.”

  “All we did was pull into a service centre. Two men, two little girls. There were leaks to be taken. That falls soundly into the category of minding our own fucking business. This is shit we didn’t ask for, and it’s shit we sure don’t need.”

  “Well, you know, shit happens.”

  “Ah. A philosopher.”

  “Jay, just leave it.”

  “Yeah, right. Just go along with it. Just, you know, fucking go along with it.”

  “What is that all about?”

  “Hey, Philly Four-Eyes. Figure it fucking out.”

  I don’t have to figure it out, of course. I know, although he’s referring to a memory from the sludgy muck that covers the bottom of my soul, so I can’t really get hold of it. It slips through my fingers and leaves behind only stain and stench. But, hey, I’m a novelist now, and as I near the end of these pages I realize that I’ve learned a thing or two. Dramatization, imaginative reconstruction, literary licence, stinking lies, call it what you will, it’s what we writers are meant to do. So here goes…

  Ted and Terry were doing whatever they did to Norman Kitchen. (What did they do to Norman?) I was blinded, because Terry had flicked the spectacles away from my face for no good reason. He wasn’t trying to limit my utility as a police witness or anything. That would have been halfway intelligent, and Terry wasn’t. (Maybe Ted was, I don’t know; at some point in my life it will stop being important.) Terry flicked my glasses off as a kind of invidious grace note, a small evil embellishment. I was as blind and hopeless as poor Henry Bemis, the meek bibliophile. So I was doing what I could with my other senses, and by that I mean that I was trying not to hear what I was hearing. One of the things that pounded on my ears was the sound of Jay’s grunting as he tried, in vain, to pull the ropes away from his skinny wrists. And that’s when I said—in a stage whisper that Ted and Terry could surely hear, but were too occupied to care about—“Just go along with it, Jay. Just go along with it!”

  “Hey!”

  “What?”

  “That was the Super Bee!”

  “What was the Super Bee?”

  “What just went by on the other side of the highway!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Because I have been watching. Unlike you, totally zoned out. Not to mention the fact that you wouldn’t recognize the Super Bee if it ran you over. You can recognize a Volkswagen Beetle, that’s as far as your automotive knowledge goes.”

  “You know, for brothers you guys bicker a lot.”

  “Jonathon, your job is driving.”

  “And turning around! I told you, they’re heading south.”

  Jonathon processed and nodded. “Makes sense. The kid must have woken up and now Selma’s trying to find you guys—”

  The highway was divided by a swale, a shallow ditch covered by patches of grey snow and even greyer grass. It was mid-November, and those of us from Southern Ontario felt that winter was yet to come. So where did that old snow come from? Was it possible that it lasted all the year round? That certainly made me feel sad and desolate, but I had only a moment to feel so, because Jonathon cranked the wheel sharply to the left and the pickup pounced into the swale.

  It became mired immediately.

  “What,” said Jay, with ponderous gravity, “the fuck?”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Jonathon, pulling at the gear lever and pressing down the accelerator. There was a high-pitched wail, and muck rained everywhere.

  “Oh-oh.” A heartbreakingly meek sound from Currer.

  “You idiot!” said Jay.

  “Look, man,” said Jonathon, with as much patience as he could muster, “if I had of waited for the next exit to turn around we would be on this highway for hours. This is north of Superior, baby. This is the moon!”

  “So you decided to go off-road. Idiot.”

  “You’re not being helpful.”

  “Helpful? How the fuck can I be helpful?”

  “Ever hear of pushing?”

  Jay and I stumbled out into the quagmire. So did Currer, although I told her to get back into the pickup. But she insisted that she wanted to help
, and I’d learned not to press issues once she started insisting. Currer’s got a stubborn streak, something she inherited from her mother. Jonathon rolled down the window so that he could holler instructions, even though the concept was rather easy to grasp. “Put your shoulders into it,” he called, “and push!”

  My brother and I placed our shoulders against the tailgate. A high-pitched whining sound came as the tires spun uselessly. There was a freshet of muck in the night. “Harder!” demanded Jonathon, but it was impossible to get purchase; our feet kept sliding backwards. “We need,” said Jay, “blocks of wood, or rocks or something.”

  We went off through the darkness in various directions and reconvened a couple of minutes later. Currer had a handful of stones and a twig, which made me want to weep. I had two good-sized rocks. Jay had a boulder tucked under each arm, reminding me that dung beetles can haul twenty times their own weight in shit. He threw these boulders down by our feet. They sank into the muck and then we stood atop them, reapplying our shoulders to the pickup. “Give ’er!” shouted Jonathon, and the truck started to scream as the tires turned, and there was briefly a downpour of mud, and then the pickup popped out onto the highway. A transport had to veer sharply around it. The driver sounded his horn, and the countryside rang with annoyance. My brother and I were face down in the quagmire, having fallen with resounding splats when the pickup truck instantaneously relocated itself. “All right,” Jonathon called, “let’s get going!”

  “Look,” said Currer, pointing to the northbound lanes. Headlights were approaching. The Dodge Super Bee pulled over onto the soft shoulder and rolled to a sedate stop. A young woman stepped out, dirty blonde hair, blue jeans, an old blue pea jacket. She had her hands rammed into the pockets and shivered pretty much uncontrollably. “Sorry about the fuck-up,” she said quietly. Ellis came around to join her.

  Despite the bitter night, Ellis was sucking calmly on a Popsicle. “Told you,” she said to me. “Told you the universe was a friendly place.”

  Well, maybe she didn’t say that, exactly, but that was the lesson she was trying to teach me. You may well be asking yourself now, was that the lesson I learned?

  I will try to hurry now to the end of these pages…

  We rented rooms at the Prince Albert, a stately old hulking hotel that sat right on the shore of Lake Superior. Through our window, illuminated by the moon and made hazy by a fall snow squall, we could see the Sleeping Giant, the long, low island that the natives had decided looked like someone lying on his back, hands folded neatly across his chest.

  While I stared at the Sleeping Giant, my kids watched television and bounced from one bed to the other. In the room next door, I could hear my brother’s muffled murmur. He was making phone calls, he was conducting his investigation, locating coordinates. In the morning, after breakfast in the restaurant downstairs, we climbed into the Dodge Super Bee and headed for the outskirts of town. Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It’s actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It’s understandable that we got lost, and being as our municipal map had done double duty that morning as a placemat (the landmarks were huge and cartoonish, all but the dozen or so most important thoroughfares done away with), it was almost noon before we arrived at our destination, which was a United church. Jay made inquiries at the office and then ushered us through a back door and into a small graveyard.

  It was a small cemetery, crowded although not crammed. Most of the local population is of Finnish descent, followed in numbers by the dour Scottish Presbyterians—the muted Anglicanism of the Canadian United Church is not a going concern in here. The stones in the graveyard were mostly old, green with tiny but tenacious lichen.

  Jay had told me none of what he’d found out, saying that I needed more surprises in my life. So I stared at the orderly cenotaphs and asked, “Is he dead?”

  Before Jay could answer, a man rose from behind one of the stone markers. There was first a blinding glint of light as the sun bounced off his bald head—it took a moment or two for my eyes to clear. By then he was standing up, wiping dirt from his hands onto a brown gardener’s apron. He noticed us, looked first at my brother, then at me.

  “Jay? Phil?”

  Jay spoke first. “Hi, Norman.”

  Yes, gone were the golden tresses. All that remained was a band of curly white hair that embraced both of his ears. Otherwise Norman Kitchen seemed unchanged. His eyes were still half-hidden behind dark folds of skin, his lips were still pale and puckered. Oddly, his body had not run to fat. As a boy Norman had been quite plump, but as a man he was lean, even a bit muscular. And he was tall, too, well over six feet.

  He lifted his heavy eyelids, nodded in our direction. “And these are…?”

  “Oh,” I answered, “these are my daughters. Currer and Ellis.”

  “Did you just bury a dead guy?”

  “No, no. I was just looking after the site. The man resting here has no family, except his wife, and she’s very ill. So.” Norman looked at us all, for a long moment, obviously trying to decide what to do. He arrived at a decision. “Let’s eat!”

  Norman’s wife—Norman’s wife!!—was a lovely woman named Elspeth. Elspeth had the kind of lean, hardened body that I associate with long-distance running, although it was easy enough to surmise whence she derived her exercise. There were no fewer than five Kitchen offspring, and although three were out of the house (two sons at the local high school, the eldest daughter at university in the Maritimes), the two who had come home from school for lunch were more than workout enough. The girl, Catherine, was eleven, and she kept her mother hopping by having a life so complicated that it made my mind whirl. Over lunch, much had to be organized: her participation in a soccer match, her costuming for the school Christmas pageant, her attendance at a party honouring the tenth birthday of one of her friends.

  As for the youngest, a boy, Elspeth said, “Hamish, stop that.” A lot. And Hamish never did stop that, whatever it was.

  He was nine years old, and I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that he was devil spawn. Well, maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But honestly, you have never seen the like. It’s not that he was hyper-kinetic, he wasn’t—there was even a deceptive languor to Hamish. There was this deep smouldering energy source, which reminded me of the fierce heat that lies at the heart of compost. The kind of thing he was constantly being told to stop doing was, say, picking up a spoon and banging it against the side of a cup, banging it with a relentless stateliness, as though he were counting cadence for a funeral march. “Stop that, Hamish.” Another example: by doing something with his tongue and inner cheek, Hamish could produce a high-pitched, bubbly little whistle. It sounded like a miniature teakettle boiling. Or, more to the point, it sounded like a young greaser squeezing the life out of that thing many years ago, the small monster that was neither tadpole nor frog.

  The most interesting thing about Hamish, to me, was that he looked exactly as his father had at nine. He had the nose that angled out like a snowman’s carrot, he had the mouth that pursed as though some unseen being were trying to force-feed him manure. And yes, he had the hair, the bangs, curls and locks. Hamish had made some concessions to his times—he already wore an earring, for example, and there were tints of odd colours in his hair—but that didn’t prevent him looking (as his daddy had) like Little Lord Ponce. So I’m writing this as kind of an argument for nature, because I suppose what my brother, Norman and I are about to discuss involves the nature/nurture argument.

  What we are about to discuss is the nature of evil.

  We left the manse (my daughters were enthralled with Catherine and under constant attack from Hamish, so I knew they would be occupied for at least an hour) and wandered into the church proper. We sat in the rearmost pew. A shaft of light drove through a stained-glass window, but missed us by a few feet.

  “What did those boys do to you?” Jay asks.

  “Oh. Yes. Those boys.”


  “So you know what we’re talking about?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Phil didn’t remember squat about it until he was in his twenties.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Not really. Phil squelches and squashes.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s how he deals with emotional shit. Sits his big fat ass down on it, that’s the last daylight that particular feeling is ever going to see.”

  “Father Norman, I keep sensing this anger coming from my brother.”

  “Is that so?” snaps Jay angrily. “Well then, you better get to squelching and squashing.”

  “What happened to make you remember it in your twenties, Phil?”

  “Jay reminded me.”

  “Point of clarification. I made a reference to the event, which is something I had been doing on a regular basis for many, many years. In this particular case, Phil was drunk and momentarily let down his defences. By the way, we’re both alcoholics.”

  “I see.”

  “But I have to admit,” continues Jay, “even I can’t remember exactly what happened. I mean, we worked out mostly what happened, together we can sort of piece it together. We tried to escape, they chased us, they tied us to trees. Oh, and by the way, thanks a mill, Phil.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  “What knot did you use on Norman? An Irish Sheepshank. What knot did you use on me?”

  I ignore my brother. “Norman—?”

  “What knot did you use on me?”

  “Norman, what did they do to you?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t? Why the fuck not? Sorry, Father Kitchen.”

  “It’s all right, Jay. You may speak however you wish to speak. The walls of the church are not going to come tumbling down. And guys, it’s not Father Kitchen. You could call me Reverend Kitchen if you really felt like it, but you can always just call me Norm like you used to.”

  “But…”

  “Yes?”

  “We never called you Norm, Norman.”