Lion's Head Revisited

by Jeffrey Round

  In the mirror, the road behind him lay in darkness. He backed up slowly, looking for signs of something in the tail lights. At last, he saw it.

  The deer lay in the centre of the road, its antlered head twisted backward as if it were looking over its shoulder to see what had happened. Dan stopped and got out. Dark streaks on the fender, the road disappearing in fog ahead and behind.

  For a moment, he couldn’t think straight. It had come out of nowhere, a shock to his system. One minute there was nothing then suddenly everything was happening at once. His brain hadn’t had time to catch up.

  The animal’s sides heaved. Young. Probably a yearling. Fear and agony reflected in its eyes.

  Dan knelt and put a hand on its flank. It quivered at his touch. Its legs were broken. A dark gash on its side showed entrails, the guts of its life force spilling out and staining the highway.

  A keening noise split the air. It reminded him of Jeremy Bentham’s animal cries. It shook him. There was no sense calling anyone, animal services, whatever. They would just come and haul the carcass away eventually. In the meantime, it would suffer.

  Dan was aware of his heart pounding. He’d been lucky. The collision had torn the deer apart, but he was intact. All around him was calm, the fog making everything hazy, the world unreal. As if time had stopped at the fulcrum. Only it had picked the wrong moment to stop.

  The deer’s cries grew louder. He was miles from nowhere. Soon another car or truck would come around that corner and spin out of control to avoid him.

  He looked down at his hands. They were all he had.

  He grasped it by the neck and felt around for a grip. Then he began to squeeze. The animal thumped once, twice, three times. It seemed as though it would go on forever before the shaking slowed then stopped. When he was sure it was over, Dan let go.

  He stayed there, crouching by its side. He felt as though he needed to stay with it a bit longer, to apologize for taking its life. After a minute he looked up, took a deep breath, and stood. He grabbed the hind legs and pulled. It resisted at first then slowly began to move till he’d dragged its bulk off the road.

  He went back to the car and opened his trunk, fumbling around till he found an old T-shirt to wipe his hands on. The blood had left greasy stains across his palms. He spat on them and rubbed again, but the stains remained. He tossed the rag off to the side of the road. No one had passed him in all that time. It wasn’t till he got back in his car that he realized he was shaking. Tears ran down his cheeks. He sat there for another five minutes till he was sure he could drive.

  That was one of the times he wished he could rely on someone else to be strong.

  The motel he’d stayed at the previous week was full, no sign of Sonny’s wife on her bike even, so he kept driving. The next two places had their NO VACANCY notices lit up. Things were not looking good. He kept going till he passed the giant wind machines marking the turnoff to Horace’s farm. Lion’s Head was just up ahead.

  He drove until he reached the town. It looked deserted, everything winding down for the night. He hadn’t expected much, and it seemed as though that was what he was going to get. His mind was already combing through the possibilities. It had been years since he’d slept on a park bench, not since he left his father’s house in Sudbury and arrived in Toronto as a homeless teenager. Back then he’d been foolish enough to think he could find a cheap place to sleep, but with little money in his pocket things hadn’t turned out that way. Once again, his lack of planning was having much the same results.

  He slowed the car and stopped. Tobermory was another half hour up the peninsula, but this was prime tourist season at the beginning of a weekend. If the places he’d passed were already full then Tobermory wasn’t going to have a spare room for him either.

  The choices were obvious: a park bench or the car. But Lion’s Head didn’t have many benches on offer. He reached for the lever and leaned back. By staying in the car he could keep the windows closed and the bugs out. That was the only benefit he could think of.

  Then it occurred to him. Right. Why not? At least he wouldn’t be woken by a police car making its rounds.

  Somehow he found his way in the darkness and fog, rumbling up the drive till his headlights swept the tumbledown cottage. Crooked beams, worn wood shingles, smashed window panes. A goblin’s house if ever there was one. Grimness surrounded it. If he wanted to, he could go inside and sleep, but it seemed safer to stay in the car. There were no nearby lights from neighbours. This was real country. Anyone hearing him drive up would assume he was lost. Why else come here in the middle of the night? No one would break into a place like this or, even if they did, they’d be kids who couldn’t do more damage than what had already been done. A car on the side of the road wasn’t going to rouse much suspicion from anyone. At least that’s what he was counting on. He pulled the lever and leaned back.

  In the morning, he woke with a stiff neck. For a moment he couldn’t think where he was. The sun was just coming up, filtering through the pines. He’d had a rough sleep, disturbed by unsettling dreams. It hearkened back to the days when he drank and woke disoriented in unfamiliar places. He looked out the windshield and saw the dilapidated wreck of a cottage, the cut-out sun and moon on the outhouse door. One day he’d probably laugh about it, but not today.

  He checked his face in the mirror. It wasn’t reassuring to think that eventually he’d look like that every morning, not just on the ones when he slept rough.

  He released his lock, swung the door wide, and stepped out. The air felt cool and smelled clean. He leaned down to pull his shoes on then walked over the rocky drive to a tree, turning aside from the cottage as he urinated. Modesty held sway even way out here in the middle of nowhere.

  He stretched thoroughly, feeling the sun’s rays reaching through the branches to touch his face. The only sounds were the songs of birds and insects just beginning to stir. A breeze came off the lake. If I lived here I could have this every morning, he thought, though it struck him he’d miss Nick and Ked and Kendra. And maybe even Donny and Prabin too, when Donny came to his senses again. If he came to his senses.

  He went back and examined the car. The right fender was dented and scuffed. A vision of the deer’s fear-glazed eyes came to him. Something — the hooves or antlers — had scraped off a strip of paint before being thrown free. No sense going to an auto-body shop here. It could wait till he got home.

  He turned to the cottage. It sat as though waiting for him, silent and dark, like a disapproving parent. It was almost as if it had known he’d be coming back. The outer stairs were rotting through. He climbed cautiously, taking care to step directly over the supports. The porch was even more treacherous. Nail heads stuck up every few inches, as though someone had tried to dismantle it but given up halfway.

  The door opened with a light shove. The lock was splintered around the edges. Kids, Dan thought. Inside, rain had warped the floor. The uneven planks gave it a corrugated feel. Light shone down in patches where the roof was worn through. The room seemed tilted, the way his backyard had looked after a violent storm one summer. Leaves and branches, pictures and furniture. Everything off-kilter. A mushroom-coloured carpet shrank from the baseboards. He couldn’t remember if it had been there on his last visit. What he remembered was the view of the water all the way down to the shore, with Lion’s Head in the distance and the clouds leading on to forever.

  He stepped across the threshold into the gloom of the kitchen. For a moment, it was as if nothing had changed. The table and chairs were still there. The cupboards were intact. It wasn’t till he got up close that he saw the age and decay. The paint, once a milky blue, was cracked and peeling. The vinyl floor curled up at the edges.

  There were a few cans on the shelves. The labels were faded, but he saw they had once been soup cans. A cracked jar sat in the cupboard over the stove. Honey had oozed out the sides and hardened. Even the ants had given up trying to transport it away.

  In the bedroom
, the linen was rotted through with mouse turds dotting a faded quilt. The windowsill was littered with dead flies. Something had burrowed through the insulation in the walls, pink and yellow tufts sprouting here and there.

  He looked out the window and had a sudden memory of being carried on his father’s shoulders down to the lake. Hadn’t that meant there was something between them? Except he’d been terrified, he recalled. No trust even then.

  It struck him that he was looking to find a piece of himself, a link leading directly through his memories to the past. Wasn’t that how it worked? You discovered who you were through your history — and the dead, whether quiet or unquiet.

  He already knew where his parents’ bodies were buried, but it seemed as though this was where their ghosts lingered long after they were gone, still searching among the debris of their lives for those few brief moments of joy they once found on a summer’s day now long forgotten by everyone but a permanently scarred son who never understood what they had been all about. As hard as it was to believe, he realized, they might actually have loved one another. Better not to judge them. Everyone fell short. Friends, family, loved ones. And falling short, they resented you for seeing it.

  He caught sight of himself in a mirror hanging crookedly on the wall. Mildew had scarred its surface. His face looked as though it belonged to someone else. A sad and lonely man he didn’t know.

  Not long before she died, his friend Domingo had told him everyone was born into the families that could teach them what they most needed to learn. She had become a convert to Buddhism, a believer in reincarnation. What would that be in my case? Dan asked, trying to hide his cynicism. Maybe how to be the parent you never had and the lover your parents tried to be to one another, she said softly. Dan thought it over. I can see that, he’d said.

  For a while on that last trip, his mother and father had seemed to get along. He recalled a supper ringing with laughter and singing, something joyous that held them together. He remembered thinking — hoping — that they had finally arrived at that magic place where everything would change. White lace and promises. They’d been so awed by their surroundings that they forgot the petty grievances and dissatisfactions poisoning their everyday lives. Maybe, if only for a moment, they finally saw how their actions and words had consequences, reaching much further and lasting much longer than the immediate sting and wounding of one another that had always seemed their aim. It was as though they’d suddenly found their faith and salvation in one another — their trust — however briefly.

  Dan looked from the mirror out the window to a stretch of pine trees. Stalwart, silent. He thought of Nick, the pillar he could lean on if he so chose.

  When his mother lay dying, his Aunt Marge had sent him in to say goodbye. The pneumonia had been brought on after she’d been locked out in the cold by his father following a night of drinking, though he hadn’t learned that till many years later, long after both of them were dead. He’d been four at the time. She lay there beneath the covers, her life force almost spent. He didn’t know what dying was. Didn’t know what goodbye meant.

  She cried and brushed the hair from her Danny’s forehead. There had been such urgency in her face and voice. But what did she need from him? Whatever it was he would have given it to her rather than see her sad. Her breath escaped in a long, drawn-out fury, like pebbles on a beach as the waves sucked them in and spat them out again with inexhaustible force.

  And then she was gone.

  First his dog, then his mother. He’d tried to bring Sandy back and failed. But he would try harder with his mother. For years afterward he had made pleas: Bring her back and I will be good. More promises. Because he knew from the way his father treated him that he wasn’t good. Only it hadn’t worked with his mother any more than it had with Sandy.

  The memory faded as he looked back at the mirror. How long had he been standing here? It seemed a lifetime.

  The first time he and Nick had argued, they didn’t speak to one another for a week, both too stubborn to reach out to the other. Finally, Nick called. Would you have called me eventually? No, Dan said. That’s not who I am.

  Nick sighed. Then you’re lucky it is who I am. I’ve never missed anyone like this before, except when my son died. There was a hole inside of me I couldn’t get past then. I thought, no, I never want to feel this much again. It tore me apart for years. The loss isn’t worth it. But for you, Dan, I would risk it all over again.

  Nick, at least, knew trust.

  Dan closed the cottage door behind him and staggered out into blinding sunshine, leaving his memories behind. Why would anyone willingly go back to such a place?

  As he headed to the car a curious zooming filled the air overhead, like the sound of thousands of insects, only there were no insects flying about. For just a moment, he thought he could smell burning marshmallows and hear the cry of a long-dead whippoorwill once again. As he looked around, he saw the fire pit his father had fallen into that evening, thirty-two long years ago, when Dan had rescued him with all the strength his eight-year-old self could muster then never spoke about it to anyone.

  Ashes to ashes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Prophets

  THERE WERE THREE UNANSWERED CALLS when Dan checked his phone. The first two were hang-ups. On the third he heard Eli sputtering, trying to formulate his thoughts.

  “I, uh … it’s Eli. I don’t know what’s going on. Elroy called yesterday. He sounded angry. I’m … I might be in trouble. I’ll call you back. Maybe you can help.”

  This was followed by a long silence, then a hang-up.

  Dan hit redial, but there was no answer. He left a message telling Eli to call anytime.

  He got in his car and headed south. His stomach was making grumbling noises. It sounded like a dog that had been neglected.

  He knew that if he drove up to Horace’s farm and knocked on the door he would be invited in to eat. But he felt hollowed out emotionally. It would be easier to eat alone. Besides, he wanted Horace to answer his questions, not cook for him.

  Lion’s Head was already bustling at that early hour, tourists on the way to the beach, hikers off to tackle the trails. He headed for the town centre and parked outside Lucy’s Diner. A Cottage for Rent notice hung in its window. Inside, red-and-white striped chairs, an old Coca-Cola sign, and a black-and-white photo of the Corner Convenience from the 1940s. In it, three men stood between two gas pumps that read PREMIUM, while a bicycle leaned against a wall off to the right. The place smelled of fried fish.

  Eating alone in a small town wasn’t the same as eating alone in the city, Dan knew. In the city, people tended to ignore you. You could be dangerous or desperate or lonely. That sort of entertainment was not at a premium. Most people would try to avoid it. In small towns, however, single diners were a source of curiosity. Everyone stopped to stare as he entered. Even the waitress gave him a hard look. He thought for a moment she was going to tell him she couldn’t serve him in the state he was in, but she simply cocked a head over to a window seat.

  Two couples, one aged and the other in their mid-twenties, took up booths at opposite ends of the room. They were like bookends: before-and-after snapshots of a life. A family of four ate noisily at a table near the back. Families tended to segregate themselves, Dan had noticed. Possibly to spare others the constant reminder of their presence or maybe to avoid the glares they received every time their kids squawked. Dan’s father had just used the back of his hand to cuff him whenever he’d got a little bit rowdy.

  He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he opened the menu. The food looked good and surprisingly health-conscious. Gluten-free everything, if you asked for it. If they could only manage calorie-free everything.

  The waitress came over holding a notepad. Her hair was scruffy and red. It reminded him of a Brillo pad. The dark lines beneath her eyes said she hadn’t slept well. She looked as if she hadn’t had a good day in twenty years. Thirty.

  A scream came from a kid as
the waitress took his order. She turned to the kitchen.

  “All right, Hazel! I’ll be there in a minute.” She gave him an apologetic smile. Kids, huh?

  Dan’s face felt stiff when he tried to smile back. He’d have to practise more.

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Anything to eat? I got two pieces of whitefish left. Fresh caught.”

  “Sounds good. And some scrambled eggs, please.”

  “Home fries?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Okay, no problem. It’ll be a few minutes. I’m doing all the cooking today too.”

  “I’m not in a rush,” Dan told her.

  “Oh, thanks.”

  A trucker, hair greased like a 1950s baseball player, sat across the room. His dark eyes glanced over at Dan. Heavy shadows on cheeks and upper lip. Nicely formed ears. The tight T and creased crotch put Dan on the alert. He thought of Nick and turned away. Where there was sex appeal there was always the potential for sex. Even if you thought you knew yourself.

  From the kitchen came the sizzle of a fryer, like the sound of thousands of little kisses, the clinging smell of vinegar in the air. The kid screamed again. The server looked harassed and unhappy when she emerged a few minutes later with his cup of coffee.

  The eggs were good, but nowhere near as fresh as Horace’s. Dan ate the fish and half the home fries before he felt full, downed his coffee and stood. He left her a $20 tip. She banged on the window once he was outside, holding up the bill. He turned and waved, saw the astonished smile. Hoped he could get the vinegary smell out of his clothes.

  Even way out here sex still smelled the same.

  “What brings you back so soon?” Horace called out as he opened the door.

  The dogs were on Dan in a flash. He ruffled their ears and petted them till they backed off, satisfied that he’d paid his dues and knew who really ran the place.