Caught Page 12

  He jumped out of the chair but Lefevre held up his hand to keep him away. Finally he managed to gasp in a hard, rattling stream of air.

  They say with emphysema you just get worse and worse. There’s no light they can offer you. It’s all doom and gloom. I don’t give a good goddamn what they say. I’m healthy as a horse.

  You look good, Slaney said.

  It’s the wife’s cooking, Lefevre said. She’s trying to poison me. She thinks I don’t notice.

  I should get going, Slaney said.

  She brings home a brochure and wants me to consult a quack. This is a guy they heat rocks and lay them on your back under glass cups. I say to her, Monique, ease up on the arsenic.

  It was a pleasure to meet you, sir, Slaney said.

  That girl you were talking about.

  She’s gone, Slaney said.

  Take her out on the town.

  I wrote letters but I don’t think she got them.

  Take her out on the town.

  I will, sir, thank you.

  Spend a little money on her, Lefevre said.

  If we ever see each other again.

  Leave that bedsit tonight, son, Lefevre said. Don’t even go back.

  Thank you, sir.

  They left the tiny basement office and went back through the corridors of junk and up the staircase and through the dry cleaning outlet.

  Lefevre unlocked the plate-glass doors at the front of the building and made Slaney stand in the shadows while he stepped out onto the sidewalk to take a look up and down the parking lot. The old man’s shoulders shook for a moment with another, smaller fit of coughing. Then he came back inside and grabbed Slaney by the shoulders and kissed both of his cheeks.

  The next morning Slaney stopped at a department store and bought a pair of white evening gloves with five rhinestone buttons that went up to the elbow and had the girl in the store wrap them and she asked him to put his finger on the string while she tied the bow and the knot came down on his fingertip and she said, I’ve got you now.

  Back in the room Slaney ordered a taxi and then brought his mother’s suitcase and the doll in her pink box and the bag of money from Lefevre out into the hall. He heard the door lock behind him. All night he’d watched the passing headlights on the street below slide the shadows of the lace curtains across one wall. He was awake until dawn.

  Lefevre had made him paranoid.

  He knocked on the door across the hall before he left and the old woman opened it and he handed her the wrapped box with the gloves and told her it was a goodbye present. She held up a finger for him to wait and closed the door and slid the chain lock through the groove and let it dangle free. She invited him in and gave him a cup of tea and the stink of cat shit nearly knocked him out.

  She told him to wait at the table and she was gone a while and she came back with two cigarettes, a ribbon wrapped around them, and a French translation of Moby Dick.

  Truth and Knowledge

  Slaney had walked in on his parents in the gloom of the living room at the end of the day, cabbage boiling in the kitchen, salt beef, potatoes; he was twelve years old and there were his parents with an encyclopedia salesman.

  After school, after a game of baseball in the park, after he had lied about being safe.

  He said he had touched the base and then he allowed himself to believe it. He made it up or remade it. I touched the base. My foot was on the base. I was safe.

  Safe, he’d called out. He imagined his foot and then the smack of the ball. He reconfigured it. Changed the order between those events. And he had kicked up a cloud of dust sliding in. There was an argument, a bitter fight. Which he waited out.

  Hearn had taken his side is what happened.

  I saw it, Hearn said. Striding across the field, his body bolt-straight, stiff with the injustice. Hearn already a foot taller than everybody.

  I saw it.

  Hearn turning to take in all the kids on the field, they were boys and girls. The interminable, sluggish game mattered very much. The pock of the ball hitting the bat, the brief moment when it crossed the sun and was invisible and came back, black at first, visible again on its descent, and the slap in the glove, the yelling: everything mattered very much.

  You all saw it, Hearn said. Slaney touched base.

  What happened, Slaney supposed, was that Hearn convinced him. It was not so much that Slaney was lying, but that he’d succumbed to Hearn’s version of events. He believed it.

  Hearn with spit flying: You all saw it.

  They had a piece of cardboard for third base. And his father and mother, when he got home, and the salesman who had a too-small jacket — a smarmy jacket and a red tie with slanted silver stripes.

  The tie should have tipped off his parents but the guy was mentioning the merits of an education.

  The jacket was constraining. The fabric torqued at his shoulders. His socks on the carpet.

  And his eyes.

  They had forgotten, his parents, to turn on the lights in the living room and the man’s pale eyes lit up in the gloom. His toes in the navy socks were scrunched. He might have pounced on Slaney’s father and torn out some organ with his bare hands. He looked ready to eat them. But the jacket was holding him back. The jacket had him by the arms and he couldn’t move.

  Where was everybody else on that afternoon? Slaney was pretty sure his sisters had been in their rooms, the ones still living at home, getting dressed for an evening downtown. Or they were in the kitchen cooking supper. Slaney was the youngest and his older brothers had already left for the mainland. Three of them had married and already had kids. He had a sister studying to be a nurse. But the house was weirdly quiet. They hardly ever used the living room.

  They were like two children themselves, his parents, facing a scolding. They both wore funny looks; they were earnest and smarting. They looked as if they’d been told to be quiet. Whatever they had been told, Slaney was pretty sure it was new to them.

  Here’s my youngest son, his father said. Come in, David, and meet Mr. Corrigan. Slaney had been the subject of talk. The current of talk swished through, encircling. There was something bigger than usual in the room. His parents were appraising him. They were trying to decide if it could be true.

  They had been told that something depended on him. Perhaps everything.

  He would be the beneficiary of the encyclopedias; he would make things better. He was going to have a chance his brothers and sisters had missed out on, just because they’d arrived before him. That was why his parents had kept on having children, all thirteen of them. Because eventually something like this kind of opportunity would come along. Or they’d had Slaney and his brothers and sisters because they’d never questioned the idea of children. The rightness of it. But now they had been given to understand there was design and continuance in the decision.

  Good afternoon, Mr. Corrigan said. He stood up and put his hand out. Slaney had never been made to shake a man’s hand before. It was a rite, he saw now, and his parents had sprung it on him.

  We’ve been talking about your future, Mr. Corrigan said. It seemed that Mr. Corrigan had made his parents a promise of some kind. Whatever he was offering, it seemed to be something they couldn’t afford and couldn’t go on without.

  The Books of Knowledge. The salesman had unwedged a volume from the carton at his feet and let it fall open to a section of plastic overlays, the skeleton, the arteries, the organs, letting each clear plastic page float down, one after the other, to build a man from the inside out. The last page fell over the blood and guts, a quiet covering of beige skin. The man in the illustration was bald, his chin set, his head in profile, his arms held out on both sides.

  Hearn holding out his arms to everyone in the baseball field, a natural orator, commanding, We all saw it. Didn’t we? I saw it, and you saw it.

  Jennife
r Baker sauntered over to Slaney. The game was breaking up. The heat was too much and the tension. There wasn’t a cloud, her hips, the terry cloth halter top.

  You can trust me, Jennifer said. She was close enough to his face that he could smell the candy she was sucking, he could hear it clicking in her teeth when she moved it from one cheek to the other. A green barrel candy. Everything collapsed. The lie collapsed. Her face had a sheen of moisture, and a flush from the sun, or exertion, and her dark sweaty hair, and she was suddenly very close to him. He could feel her breath on his cheek and how conspiratorial.

  How exclusive their discussion was. The attention was a kind of ravishment. She had been looking at the ground, all the way across the field. He saw her coming. And then she was so near. Her eyes.

  She dug one end of the baseball bat into the ground and she was leaning on it. Her teeth and the mint scent from the barrel candy she held between her teeth for a moment, before drawing it back, the icy green of her breath, and her lips and her eyes; it broke him. So close to him and the word: trust. He had believed. Had she whispered? He thought she had.

  The encyclopedia guy snapped the outstretched book closed. They would have to pay for the Books of Knowledge.

  You can tell me, Jennifer said, I won’t tell them. Just between us. So, did you make it to the base or not?

  His mother stirred in the chair. The sound of her nylons, a shushing, as she shifted in the chair and it creaked.

  No.

  You didn’t?

  No. I didn’t make it to the base.

  Bill tagged you first?

  Bill tagged me first.

  Before you got to the base. Between us, okay? Just, I’m curious, he tagged you before you got to the base?

  Yes.

  Slaney’s mother wanted the Books of Knowledge. His father flipped the light. A lamp on the side table. The guy’s tie, the silver stripes of it, some kind of metallic fabric, leapt up.

  He cheated, screamed Jennifer Baker. Maybe he fell in love with her then: the vehemence. The truth. He had been found out. What a relief. The lie fell away. Everybody stopped in the field and turned to look.

  He cheated, he admitted it; he just admitted it. He told me himself.

  Graveyard

  Slaney took the last bus to a town called Hudson that he heard was mostly anglophone and it was a warm night so he slept under some trees on a park bench. In the morning he walked to the nearest graveyard with his suitcase and the doll under his arm. The bag of money hung by a strap over his shoulder. He saw the same grey angel, skin-pocked and sightless, on three different graves, a forefinger raised as if to get him to stay quiet.

  A bright blue tarp hung over an open grave and a yellow backhoe tilted on a hill of fresh topsoil.

  Slaney was looking for a man born in 1950 or so, somebody more or less his age. The trees were black against the light­ening sky and there were gravestones as far as he could see.

  After he had walked for a while Slaney could no longer see the street. He stopped at a grave with a bouquet of yellow plastic roses. The petals were sun-faded and the stems jammed into a milk bottle with the bottom smashed out of it.

  Douglas Walker Knight had been the beloved son of Mary and James Knight. It was hoped he would find Solace in Heaven with the Lord. The white marble was without ornamentation except for a carved wreath and two hands holding a chalice. Douglas Walker Knight was born in 1951 and had died in 1973.

  Slaney stood the doll up on the marble ledge of the grave and took a joint from the back pocket of his jeans. It was the last of the stash the girl in New Brunswick had given him for his birthday. He opened his jacket and felt for a book of matches.

  He struck a match and the burnt phosphorous hurt some nerve in the back of his nose. He lit the joint, hunching one shoulder over it. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke down in his lungs and then sighed.

  It was a different kind of heat away from the ocean. It was hot very early and kept getting hotter. He took a pen and notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote down the name and the date of Douglas Walker Knight’s birth. Then he flipped the notebook closed.

  He glanced over the graveyard and thought about Doug Knight growing up in Hudson, Quebec. Slaney wondered how Knight had died.

  Doug Knight, he said. He spoke out loud. He cleared his throat. Doug. Douglas. He said it in a conversational tone, then he said it a little softer than that. Hey, Doug. Doug, over here. Jesus, Doug.

  Slaney felt all the meaning uncleave from the word. The sacrilege of what he was doing. He was messing with something larger than himself. He tried to let the name be just a sound. Then all the meaning busted back.

  This was a dead man. A man his own age who had died before he had a chance to do the things Slaney was going to do.

  A dark blot, a rodent of some kind, moved liquidly over the ground in Slaney’s peripheral vision. The small body slipped soundlessly over root and stone, then it shot up a tree, disappearing in the branches. The rodent was an embodiment of some underworld demon, wet and red-eyed.

  It was a weasel or sewer rat, moving through the transubstantiating dawn.

  Then Slaney saw a set of bright green footprints in the dewy grey grass behind him and his heart leapt, thinking he had been followed. It was the dope; it took a second to recognize that the footprints were his own.

  He was going to go by the name of another man; and he had caught up with himself, passed through himself.

  Already the sky was much brighter. There was clarity of purpose from smoking weed and the other Doug Knight no longer existed. Slaney was Doug Knight now.

  A shiver ran through him.

  Somebody walking over his grave, his mother would have said.

  Somebody had said they had no respect for the law. A judge said, back in ’74, that they had exhibited no remorse. The same judge argued that if they were not punished he had every reason to believe they would do exactly the same thing again.

  Hearn said, Yes, sir, we’d do it again, all but the getting caught.

  It was just business. Back in ’74 they had been cutting out the middleman and nothing in their past allowed for that kind of audacity.

  They were stoned the whole time they were in Colombia, laughing in cafés and on the beaches; they slept outside, a small bonfire, the stars.

  Once a knife to the throat, an unlit alley outside a bar with the maracas and drums, those flutes they have, a punch to the kidneys that knocked Slaney’s soul up in his throat. The point of a rusty blade digging into the cartilage or whatever that is, his windpipe. Roughed up and bleeding. Face down in the gutter. But Slaney came to and patted himself all over, looking for wounds. He was unharmed.

  Wahoo.

  They’d been arrested when they got back to Newfoundland and the local papers had said Adventure on the High Seas. They were folk, it turned out. The university had just begun to offer courses in folklore and Newfoundlanders were their own subjects, their music and dances, the way they courted and the way they constructed their flakes for drying fish, and Slaney and Hearn were modern-day folk heroes.

  Meanwhile, the real folk, the simple fishermen of Capelin Cove, had turned them in.

  The law was a folktale that changed every time it was told.

  Slaney and Hearn had been altar boys together and knew every Latin word of the mass. The priest did not face the congregation because of a certain disdain the church felt for the people in the pews. The boys knew the moment when Christ entered the wafer of bread. It was held up by the priest, both arms raised, and one of the boys rang the brass bells.

  Their gowns, red and white, were made of polyester and the hems whispered around the cuffs of their jeans. Their faces were spit-cleaned by their mothers on the steps of the rectory.

  They walked down the aisle with the giant candle at Easter, careful to keep the flame lit. The light from the fl
ame seeped a third of the way down the thick, white cylinder of wax encrusted with golden swirls and made it glow from within.

  Everything was from within back then, Slaney thought. Every thought was within and unspoken, every rule was within, and the meaning of everything hid inside a wooden chair or a crocheted doily.

  The candle was the Holy Ghost.

  The Holy Ghost was a kind of middleman. Everything itself and something else at the same time.

  They’d gone to school dances to sell pot and sometimes they were beaten up. Sometimes they were short on cash and someone would be waiting with a two-by-four.

  Then they enrolled at Memorial University and sold dope in the Chem café and in the tunnels and Slaney did history and Hearn was doing E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence and Greek tragedy. He was reading Descartes.

  Take a piece of wax, Hearn said. How do we know it’s a piece of wax?

  Christ, Slaney said. Pass the joint.

  It’s got texture and it smells like wax and it’s hard. But what happens when we hold it to the fire?

  We?

  It loses those properties.

  That’s ivory tower shit. We’re reading Marx over in history. Class struggle and empire, colonialism, and you want to talk about how we know what we know. That’s a slippery ball of wax, my friend. Pass the joint.

  Before the trip, Hearn had been involved with a Newfoundland theatre troupe that did Shakespeare. Hearn had wanted to play Iago but they’d given the part to someone else.

  They said I’m too good-looking for Iago.

  They said that?

  They got Gord Horan.

  And you think Horan’s not right for the part, Slaney said.

  He fails to convince.

  He’s not the actor you are.

  Slaney, please.

  But you’re too good-looking.

  They mentioned my strong facial features.

  Iago is poor-looking? Where does it say that?

  Gord Horan’s face is funny.