Daniel stood up from his breakfast and then, as if to check something, he turned the paper back to the front page. Crystal had already read the news of the world with an earlier coffee, before Daniel came down. She’d already seen it. Gun control and broken cease-fires, distant massacres and well-funded wars, and in the midst of it all a one-column piece on another young man, this one pale and gaunt, who had been charged in a Milwaukee courtroom with sixteen counts of murder. She’d read the headline and then, unable to read the sentences in sequence, as the writer intended, her eyes had fallen chaotically down through the paragraphs to the end. She’d stopped at some of the worst of the words and then returned again to the beginning to reconfirm what she could not comprehend. The activity, carried out in some anonymous apartment, had gone unnoticed. His victims were young men, gay or black, or both. His car, if he had one, did not merit mention. And while Tyson proclaimed innocence, this man was quoted as saying yes, I did that, and yes, that, too, he was willing, perhaps anxious, to tell exactly what he did, using ordinary human verbs to describe his subhuman activity. He had taken pictures, Polaroids, Crystal hoped; she refused to imagine such pictures being developed anywhere. She assumed the pictures would help his prosecutors.
Crystal could see that Daniel was reading what she had read, although he’d start at the beginning and move through the piece as intended. “That’s totally gross,” he said, partway through. “Puke city.”
She told him that this man would either go to jail for a long time or he’d go to a hospital for an indeterminate time.
Daniel said indeterminate means nobody knows how long, right, and then he asked which did she think it should be? She told him some of each, the hospital, but for a long time, for eternity. He nodded, not necessarily in agreement but simply to show that he understood what she was saying. Then he asked, “What about Tyson?” Crystal told him if they could prove he did it, she’d bet on two years in a really nice cell, with a wide-screen TV and a fax machine and weights to lift and maybe an extra bunk set up for his trainer, because Tyson’s people couldn’t afford to let all that educated power just sit there and rot. For this she got a look. While Daniel may be impressed with the potential of his own disdain, he doesn’t like it if Crystal succumbs. He expects better.
She gathered the breakfast dishes and carried them over to the sink, watched the hot water fill the bowls. Daniel left to do his teeth and hair and then came back because he’d forgotten to get his lunch out of the fridge. He wandered around the kitchen, checked his watch, opened the fridge again to take a slug of orange juice from the bottle. He folded the Globe and Mail and dropped it on the pile for recycling in the corner by the phone, grabbed his satchel and then leaned over to talk to Pal, who long ago mastered the skill of following his every move without tripping him. When he walked by for the last time, he threw his arm heavily over Crystal’s shoulder and then around her neck in a cumbersome hug, half affection, half attack.
And now he’s gone, his young head crammed with sports stats and an ordinary Tuesday morning’s news. Pal is curled up on his mat by the back door, although he’s not dumb enough to sit there all day. He’ll come to her soon, ready to make do until his life picks up again.
Crystal pours a coffee and lifts the Globe from the top of the recycling pile. She sits at the counter again and turns to the comics to see if Pogo has any wisdom to offer this morning, but she is thinking about Daniel. He will be cruising down the back lane on his way to school, likely snarling at some of the neighbourhood cats as they do their garbage rounds, veering toward them with his bike. She has asked him to stop and he said okay, but she doesn’t know if he has, he might still be doing it on the sly. He says he does this for Pal, who cannot, according to a city by-law, join the cats on the outside unless he’s on a leash. His sisters report that Daniel “emits noxious fumes” loudly and deliberately whenever Crystal is out of the house, just to make them crazy. She gives him some slack, tells them she’d bet the mortgage that many a decent man has, in his misspent youth, farted for fun. When she tells this, Daniel laughs a little secret laugh and the girls hoot in disgusted disbelief. She knows he taunts his sisters, sometimes with cracks about their make-up or about their friends, who could soon be his friends if he’d just watch himself, sometimes with lurid descriptions of his imminent armpit hair, telling them that he’ll never ever have to shave it, ha, ha, ha, ha. Usually they just groan him out, but she wonders if this could be a mistake; he’s starting to play to the groans. A couple of times, when she was tired, or in the middle of something, she laughed at him, mocked him, cruelly. She has had to remind herself that some of this behaviour should be attributed to the hormone soup sloshing through his new body. She is confident of eventual improvement, hints of which are evident if you know where to look, how to listen, what to listen for.
Pal nudges her bare foot with his damp nose. He needs to go outside again. He’s been doing this more and more lately. Unable to relieve himself fully the first time, he has to ask to go again. He’s old. “Okay, boy,” she says. She quickly gets another coffee and takes him out the back door. Pal has always been Daniel’s dog. Once, when Daniel was only three or four, a visiting playmate had smashed his favourite old truck to smithereens with a sturdy little toy hammer and Daniel had stood up and kicked the other child. When Crystal pulled him by the arm to separate him from the other boy, he yelled a loud surprising yell, and Pal arrived from nowhere, skidding on the hardwood floor as he took the corner. He barked once and made his decision, taking her ankle firmly in his jaws. And he meant business. It wasn’t play. Her husband, who was still with them then, heard her call his name and came running into the room and grabbed Pal, carried him yelping to the garage to discipline him somehow, and that was the last real bite, but the loyalty was set.
She sits down on the edge of the deck and leans back to look up at the sky while Pal sniffs and rolls and romps arthritically around his yard. There are no clouds at all, it’s a wide open prairie blue. The birds in the elms are loud, well fed. Pal stretches out in his usual far corner of the grass under the sun, calmly watching the sparrows fly from one elm to another, giving restrained attention to the cats as they roam the lane on the free side of the fence, occasionally checking on her. When he gets up and walks toward her she can see that the list he’s developed is getting worse. He means to walk straight to her but he can’t do it; he has to fight his own corrupted muscles just to cross the yard. He’s come for a quick bit of assurance that he’s still a real dog, and she takes his silky ears in both hands and scratches hard, saying yes, yes, yes, and oh, he’s a good dog, he’s a fine dog, our Pal. He growls his odd, contented growl and Crystal nods at him as if he’s said something she can agree with, and then, as she watches him struggle back across the grass to his corner of the universe, she thinks, for the first time in maybe twenty years, about the dogfights.
One of the three blacktops leaving her town was only eight miles long. When you came to the stop sign at the end of it, you either had to turn around and drive back home or turn onto the main highway that led west to the States or east to London and Toronto. People called the road the Eight Mile. When strangers who had cut over to take a drive along the shore of Lake Huron somehow got themselves turned around and had to stop in the town to ask for directions, slowing their cars, leaning out their open windows, they were told, sincerely, just take the Eight Mile, uptown at the stop sign.
At the junction where the Eight Mile met the big highway there was a truck stop and, set back a few hundred yards beside a cornfield, an old barn. Most of the barns along the road had been repaired and painted bright red by the Dutch farmers who were moving in and buying up farmland, but the Eight Mile barn had never been painted and it wasn’t used to house implements or livestock or crops. It was used for dogfights.
The owner of the truck stop had installed big floodlights to guide the semis in, and if you were driving out there late at night you could see the trucks from miles back, parked in front
or pulling in or out onto the highway. Sometimes, if you looked off to the left a little, just beyond the dome of light around the truck stop, you could see the dark shapes of cars and pick-ups parked back near the barn.
The truck stop did a good business. It was renowned far and wide for its hot beef sandwiches and for the fresh pies prepared by stocky women who held that food should be good, should be a reflection on themselves, who religiously and suspiciously inspected pork and fish and corn and bananas and cream for taints or bruises or what they called uninvited livestock.
Sometimes, to keep the night going, Crystal and her friends would drive out to the truck stop after a Saturday night dance at the arena. They would sit in a booth near the back and share hamburgers or cream pie and smoke a few illicit cigarettes, and each of them would tell the others exactly what kind of night she’d really had. The truckers who had pulled in for gas and oil and pie and strong black coffee, men from distant places, took notice of the girls if they were on their own. They would grin and banter back and forth among themselves, their comments quick and quiet, cracks about lipstick or crinolines or spike heels, which the girls pretended to ignore but accepted wholeheartedly as either flattery or ridicule, depending on the wildly fluctuating state of their self-confidence. If some of the guys from the dance had decided to follow them out to the truck stop, if the dance had turned into an extended party, the truckers didn’t say as much. Sometimes they’d nod toward the booth but there was no bantering. It was as if they’d seen different girls the last time.
She doesn’t remember how she first learned about the fights in the barn and the betting, or from whom. Perhaps it was from her father, who must have known about them, although not firsthand. You had to know someone who knew someone and it’s not likely that her father did. He was a local businessman, a conservative Christian capitalist. He would not have been welcome at a dogfight.
Although he did break the law sometimes. Whenever Carl Bressette came in from the reserve to sell his illegal fish at their back door, the law was broken. Her mother would open the screen door so Carl could step in, she was a firm believer in seasonal food and she wanted the fish all right, it was the best whitefish available anywhere, but she wouldn’t take part in the transaction. She’d call Crystal’s father to do it. Carl would talk to her father for a bit about the weather, they’d use brief phrases like, not a bad day, or, that was some storm Tuesday, and then he’d say, I’ve got some whitefish here for you, John, caught this morning, and he’d hand over a long cool package wrapped in newspaper, secured with twine. Her father would say, Thank you, thank you for remembering us, and Carl would zip up his jacket again and say, No trouble, and then he’d open the screen door as if to go, as if the exchange was finished. But he’d turn back just as her father was pulling his billfold from his back pocket and say, Could you by any chance lend me five bucks, John? I’m a little short. And her father would answer, Yes, I can spare five dollars, Carl. And finally, wanting to stay on Carl’s shortlist, he would repeat, I appreciate your remembering us.
Perhaps she’d learned about the dogfights from recess talk on the dusty playground. In the noisy expanse between the school’s narrow back doors and the distant eight-foot playground fence, exotic chunks of information, at once random and relevant, were often exchanged by young minds bored with the countries of South America, the invention of penicillin. Although how much of this information was reliable and how much sheer invention, gruesome new stories created only to showcase gruesome but treasured words like pus and screamed and guts, was anyone’s guess.
Certainly no one she knew talked about taking a drive out the Eight Mile to maybe make a bit of money on the dogs. The fights were not advertised in the weekly paper. There were no announcements stapled to the telephone poles uptown. Crystal could have spent a lot of time trying to get someone to talk about those evenings in the barn but she knew even then she wouldn’t have learned much. The OPP might have known about the fights and about the betting, but she didn’t ever hear about any raids. It could have been seen as just a bit of quiet fun.
She remembers an after-supper drive out the Eight Mile in a brand-new bottle green Buick, the youngest of her older brothers intent at the wheel, pushing it, seeing what it would do. He hadn’t invited her, she’d simply said she’d like to go when he asked their father for the keys, making herself part of the deal. Her presence in the car was intended to slow him down but it didn’t, and she didn’t want it to. It was late fall and she can remember the just harvested cornfields and the low wire fences flying by and the night air coming in through the open power windows, her hair wild in the wind, her face cold. She can remember the darkness inside and out and the yellow iridescence from the circle gauges on the dash. She had an oblivious confidence in the bottle green Buick and in her brother, more perhaps, she thinks now, than he had in himself. It didn’t occur to her that their behaviour was dangerously stupid. She measured nothing, judged little.
When they got to the end of the Eight Mile her brother said they might as well grab a Coke, and he pulled into the truck stop lot and parked the new Buick beside a hulking semi. Walking in, she noticed activity over at the barn and she nudged him to look, asked if he knew about the fights. He just shrugged and said, “Doesn’t everybody?” When she pushed him for details, about the dogs, about the men, he looked down at her with an impatience she was quite used to and asked how in hell would he know.
She never dreamed of getting into the barn, although it might have been possible, she’d got into lots of other places where she had no business. And she never tried to imagine what the dogs might look like fighting, or to put faces on the men standing around the ring watching. All she knew was that sometimes there were dogfights and betting in the barn at the end of the Eight Mile. You could call it a childhood mystery.
Now, in middle age, she finds it possible to imagine the fights, although they can only be imagined, she has neither sought nor gained any accurate information. She just makes the details up, pulls them from the air. She’s never been in an empty barn, but the picture she gets is of moonlight seeping in through cracks and knotholes in the weathered walls, sturdy grey posts supporting heavy cross beams and maybe some frayed rope left behind on the cement floor, maybe a shovel or two. Any sound would be intermittent, from mice and swallows, or bats floating in the shadows under the high-pitched roof.
When the fights were on, there would have been a ring squared off somehow in the middle of the floor. There would have been a kerosene lantern or two, and they might have laid a few planks across some empty wood crates to serve as makeshift bleachers. And there was likely a central table of sorts for the rye and the Coke and the cups so the bettors could help themselves as they paid each other off. Initially, the dogs would be kept separate, in different corners of the barn, their leashes firmly gripped by those who had trained them, their excitement held in check until they could be set free.
When she closes in on two dogs going at it in the ring, she can see a white dog and a dark dog, not obviously matched in size or age or strength. As the dogs move, the light thrown by the lanterns is filled with their moving shadows. The cement floor is wet and slippery, maybe permanently stained. And the noise is monstrous. The white dog is very clean, he is small and afraid but smart and quick, tenacious, his eyes remain locked on the larger dog’s throat. Where the white dog leaps, the dark dog broods, moves with more deliberation, and more force. In the dim light, the blood soaking through his thick dark coat has an almost purple sheen.
She wonders how the dogs were destroyed, the ones that lost. Likely just a trip out the side door with a burlap bag and a shotgun, maybe by the end of the night some truck bed was half full of blood-soaked burlap bags. But she thinks the dogs could have healed with time and might have fought again. Surely losing would give a dog an edge, make him a more deadly fighter. A better bet.
Still looking into the broad blue prairie sky, Crystal laughs aloud, the sound low and private, blunted. She h
as cast the dogs as David and Goliath, underdog and top dog. She has enriched the colours, directed the movement, dramatized the light, heard specific sounds which were not necessarily heard by anyone in attendance. She has imposed the grid of good and evil, invoked the most simpleminded of metaphors when she knows full well they were only terrified dogs, trained to rip into each other for the pleasure of those who cheered them on. She has almost obliterated the real words: foul, familiar, barbaric, not at all unique to the Eight Mile barn. She wonders why this is so natural to do, so irresistible.
She knows this morning’s news isn’t really news to Daniel: a one-time champion up for sexual assault, a decapitated head waiting in a fridge. He could tell you other things. He’s got at his fingertips all the hideous specifics she once thought she wanted and couldn’t quite get her hands on, all those and more, the barns thrown open now, the lights on full. There is no distance to travel, no darkness to see through.
She wants to call the Globe and Mail, collect, ask to talk to an editor. She thinks she could try to make it clear to him that she is sane. She could try to make it clear to him that she is not over some edge, that all she wants to do is convince him that he should make room in the midst of his other news, one page would seem generous, for a full-colour Saturday spread on Daniel’s Ontario uncles, who are nothing more than grown-up, dependable, funny, complicated, sorrowful, good men. Grown-up, dependable, funny, complicated, sorrowful, good men who don’t lay money on bleeding dogs in dark barns, or pound other men’s skulls, or dream in madness.
He could use that picture of them sitting on the side deck in their cottage T-shirts listening to the Jays game, stretching their winter-white legs in the sun, wearing their stupidest hats to save the pink flesh on their skulls from exposure. It’s a good clear shot. It would reproduce.
She thinks she could find and enlarge and frame the picture of Daniel on his absent father’s knee, when he was just weeks old. In the picture you can see the newspaper thrown down beside them on the couch, you can see one large hand cupping Daniel’s chin, supporting his head as they both wait patiently for the burp, their faces calm and hopeful. The other hand, hidden from the camera, rubs his small back with a steady, measured force which, somewhere in his bones, he should remember.
Casino and Other Stories Page 2
