Caught Page 13

  He always looked okay to me, Gord Horan?

  His chin.

  I always thought Horan looked okay.

  A weak chin, Slaney.

  You’re tormented by your good looks.

  Maybe Hamlet, they said.

  Hamlet is hard on the ladies. Self-absorbed.

  Hamlet is a prince, Slane. Goddamn prince.

  A flock of birds lifted all at once and flew in a fast dark ball over the angel on the gravestone, some scattering behind in a trail. Then the ball came apart and spread wide, the mass turning inside out, spilling across the grey sky and a greasy sun.

  Slaney’s footprints in the grass had startled the shit out of him. It struck him as funny but he would not be able to explain the humour.

  If he tried to explain, it would become unfunny. Things could go flat. He was very stoned now and the footprints looked canny and deliberate. He was following himself, just slightly out of sync with the present. There was a lag.

  Or it was the ghost of the dead man he was about to become.

  The birds drew together again and the dark ball dive-bombed the tree and the branches trembled and filled up with birds.

  He tucked the doll under his arm and he picked up the blue suitcase and left the graveyard. Slaney rode the bus back into town and went to a photography studio to get a passport photo.

  Slaney’s passport would have the name Douglas Walker Knight. He had jotted down the address of a local medical clinic and scrawled one of the doctor’s names as a guarantor. But it was Slaney’s picture. It would be Slaney’s shorn black hair, already starting to grow out of its prison regulation cut, and Slaney’s blue eyes.

  In the photograph his eyes were large and his mouth was full and the passport would state he was six feet and one hundred and fifty pounds. It would say he was twenty-seven years old.

  Slaney found a phone booth and started in with the Knights in the Montreal phonebook that hung from a steel cable under the phone. There were a page and a half. He called all the James Knights and the J. Knights and finally a woman answered who said her name was Mary Knight.

  Slaney said he was calling from Revenue Canada and there were a few things with her file he’d like to go over with her if she had a moment.

  My husband does all that, she said.

  Just a few questions, Slaney said. You are obligated by law to answer, Mrs. Knight.

  Oh, yes, she said. I’m just not sure.

  I’ll ask a few security questions, he said. Slaney went through it quickly; could she provide her date of birth and her correct mailing address. Marital status. What was her maiden name? The names of her dependants.

  He hadn’t expected the catch in her voice. He hadn’t thought it through. He suffered a slow-breaking understanding of the consequences. The catch, a small intake of breath; how she breathed out. Slaney felt like he’d punched her. Why hadn’t he thought? He should not have called her. What had he done? He wanted to hang up but he couldn’t hang up now. He had to let her go through it.

  We had a son, she said. An only child. She said her son had passed away.

  Slaney told her he was very sorry. Now that he looked at it, he said, her file seemed fine.

  You couldn’t hope to meet a finer young man, she said. Everybody loved him. He was good at sports, he had high marks, he was thinking about going into medicine. His girlfriend was lovely. I don’t only say this because I’m his mother. Anybody who knew him thought the same thing. A car accident took him.

  Anyway, she said. No dependants.

  Slaney said somebody had queried but he could see they were all wrong to question her file. He said it was a random check. He told her he was sorry for bothering her.

  That’s okay, she said. I wasn’t doing anything. You have a job to do.

  Thank you, he said. And he said goodbye. He went to a café and ordered a steak and fries and filled in the forms while he waited for his order. Slaney mailed the forms and returned to the city on the afternoon bus. He took a bed in a boarding house under the name of Knight and settled in for a week.

  Four days later Douglas Knight’s birth certificate arrived in the mail at the boarding house.

  He took the bus to a motor vehicle registration office and showed them the birth certificate and got himself a copy of Douglas Knight’s driver’s licence. These documents were sent to the passport office and he took off for the cabin Hearn had arranged in Mansonville.

  Cyclops

  Skills

  After four weeks and five days at the Mansonville cabin Slaney’s new passport was ready. He went to the office and picked it up, along with the driver’s licence and the birth certificate he’d mailed in, and then headed to the train station and bought a ticket.

  The formality of the photography studio and the blast of the flashbulb had rendered an unfamiliar look in his passport photo. It was an odd angle. Something, perhaps the false name, made Slaney feel like he was not himself.

  The large white umbrella in the studio had been set up to bounce light and there was the need to be unsmiling. There was a look of bafflement.

  Bafflement is a precursor to wisdom, was what the picture made him think. The picture looked like someone who would have to wise up. They were embarking on the next adventure. They were going to be rich. Look out, world. The guy in the photograph was him and was not him.

  The picture said, Look out.

  Or it said: Bon voyage.

  Slaney was leafing through a newspaper in the Montreal train station and he came across the obituaries. He never read the obits, but her name popped. Rowena Spracklin.

  The start he got. What a start. He could not connect the name to the idea of her being gone. He went cold all over. They’d had a session on his last day in prison. More than a month ago now.

  He’d gone to their last session and he didn’t say anything about the break. He didn’t hint. Now he read she had a sister in the States and there was mention of her dog and he started at the beginning and he read the whole thing again. They mentioned about her job.

  Slaney thought about the four years of work they had done together. She called it their work.

  Break a man and reconstitute him. That was the work.

  They had completed the breaking part of the procedure, as far as she was concerned. But he had news: he was not broken.

  Slaney had wrapped a splinter of himself in a kryptonite handkerchief that she couldn’t penetrate with her superhuman flames or X-ray vision. He’d dipped that part of himself in dragon’s blood. Nobody could touch it.

  She had close-clipped grey hair and her floral blouse was purple and mauve and yellow. She had a blouse that was striped. She had five different blouses. He had caught glimpses of a shiny bra, grey with washing, frayed. She wasn’t fat, but solidly built, and her hands were large.

  There was a tiny lucent skin tag on her cheek.

  These little things registered with him without his realizing it.

  Her eyes were dark brown and they turned hazel when she looked out the window. The light brought out flecks of amber.

  You got a view, he said. The first time they met.

  Nice view.

  She told him to make himself comfortable and he sat down with his legs sprawled. He’d made a parody of being comfortable with the lady psychotherapist in the prison setting, sprawling all over her chair.

  Then he sat up straight, one knee jiggling. The window was tinted the brown of a photographic negative and it made everything outside ashen and nostalgic. There was a duck pond, a giant white fire of sparks in a black field. You looked out her window and you thought the world had been bleached. A monochrome of bone and soot. The ducks moved together, a single black stain spreading over the white surface.

  I’m not big on talking, he said. Beyond the duck pond, the chain-link fence with spirals of barbed wire at the t
op. She raised an eyebrow and waited.

  Pot is good for you, he said.

  She had a grin/grimace. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed. It was a mask and he learned after a few months that she was often in pain.

  Ms. Spracklin always looked as if what she said ran through her from somewhere else. She clutched the arm of her chair with a strong, liver-spotted hand and the talk was drawn out of the wooden armrest, up through her hand to her heart.

  She had very personal queries and she eased the truth out of him. He came to know himself as the subject of her questions. Gradually, over the four years of his incarceration, he began to talk.

  Slaney spoke about Jennifer and the little girl. He put both his hands over his face.

  Take your time, Ms. Spracklin said. Slaney told her that Jennifer hadn’t answered his letters. He didn’t know where she was.

  Just take your time. But he didn’t say anything else. And that particular session was over.

  Ms. Spracklin was figuring out how he had gone wrong, she told him. They were paying lip service to the idea of a wrong path and what happens when you travel it. She spoke about metaphorical journeys. She thought of punishment as a gift.

  You can’t surprise me, Ms. Spracklin said. I’ve heard everything. Nothing you say will shock.

  He didn’t mention names and she didn’t ask. There were things that were out of bounds.

  How did you feel when he jumped bail? But she didn’t expect an answer. She used the word accomplice.

  Friend, he said.

  Your friend?

  My friend.

  How did you feel knowing your friend was free and you were not?

  Silence was her surgical tool and she was trying to excise the innermost thing.

  He found he didn’t want to bore her. She’d called him a natural storyteller. He loved to make her smile. If he could get her to laugh it made his day.

  Listen, she said. There are forks in the road.

  She was there to break him, but what if they had a few laughs along the way. They could both become stubborn and inert. Silence was the best tool for crushing him. Silence was the heavy equipment.

  He forgot, sometimes, how dangerous she was. But he also understood the ways in which she could be trusted.

  Ms. Spracklin would never betray a confidence; he was certain of that. Their conversations were locked up inside her, had not been committed to paper, though she took notes.

  He had to be careful of what he said because she would be stuck with it long after he was gone. In that way she was tender. She wanted him gone.

  Ten years from now, she said. She saw a path in the woods with birds flitting overhead.

  I’ve lost the long-term view, he said. She licked her thumb and flicked through some papers and gathered them loosely and knocked the edge of the pile against the oak desk. A test that would discern what kind of work he should pursue when he was released.

  It came up with dental hygienist. She was perplexed and then it made her giggle. A seizure of silent hiccuping laughter overcame her, a gulping for air. Tears came to the corners of her eyes. Finally she managed to wheeze out the words, Dental hygienist. Dental hygienist. He didn’t see what was so fucking funny.

  I’m sorry, she said. Phew. Oh my.

  He folded the newspaper along the edge of her obit and tore it as gently as he could along each fold. She’d had a photograph on her desk of a yellow Labrador retriever and they’d talked about the dog. He remembered the skin tag on her cheek, her stockings.

  He began to recognize when she was overcome with weakness. Whatever was wrong with her floated down over her face, a folding inward, and her concentration fled.

  Do you have a first name? Slaney asked. This was after two years of sessions, once a week, an hour each. Do you have a first name?

  He had not been broken.

  The times when she would go absolutely silent he’d feel a great urge to fill the void.

  He’d want to tell a story the way you’d gasp for breath if you were held underwater.

  She said her name was Rowena. She put up her hand to stop him and shut her eyes against the onslaught of mockery she expected.

  I will not put up with jokes about my name, she said. She blushed and it had been the only time she looked feminine. She was old enough to be his mother and that made her dangerous.

  She asked his strengths and weaknesses, his skills.

  Are you a good listener?

  He didn’t answer.

  I’m listening, he said. He said he believed he could be a good lover with the right person. She sat back and folded her arms.

  Don’t bother, she said. You cannot shock me.

  She was a former nun, he knew, because of her stockings. The stockings were waxy-looking, like sausage skin. He thought she suffered from chronic pain or insomnia. Something was killing her. He figured that out.

  I always see the person, he said. This is what he told her. He didn’t make judgements: ugly, fat, short, stupid, sick. He saw dignity, for lack of a better word.

  He had to lean forward to explain this to Rowena Spracklin. He had decided, out of boredom, or some belief in a connection, a spark of human decency they both had, a spontaneous and breaching love that wasn’t sexual or filial or romantic or anything he could put a name on, that he would tell her the truth about himself.

  What happened then? she kept asking. She didn’t care about feelings. They were transitory and unremarkable.

  Action mattered to her. She was interested in his character and how it had been shaped through the things he had done.

  He said that he knew how to look at people so they could be who they were, which basically meant he had a capacity for trust. He thought of trust, when he spoke to her, as a vestigial organ, near his liver, swollen, threatening to burst. Maybe it would poison him. But it was also his special skill. His strength.

  Slaney had a way of holding his body, a gesture or look that said, Tell me.

  And people told him.

  Yes, he was a good listener.

  There was a clot or some gathering of alien matter working through her veins toward her brain and the stockings slowed its travel.

  What do you believe? she asked.

  He wanted to tell her he had seen glimpses of dignity in everyone. He didn’t believe in self-denial. He thought there was nothing redemptive about guilt. He thought incarceration was the wrong thing to do to a human being. It could only warp and deform. He believed in figuring out the limits and then going further than that.

  She was good at her job but it was the wrong job. He thought she would have done well importing weed. He told her that. She had the same skills he had; they were matched.

  The clot had worked its way through and it had killed her.

  He folded the obituary and put it in the pocket of his shirt and stood at the edge of the train platform with his hand on the pocket.

  She had developed a technology of now you are not the man you were before.

  He hadn’t looked down on her, though she was trying with all her might to smash him to bits. She was looking for the button that would blow him sky high, but she couldn’t get at it.

  He once told her he would do it again if he got the chance.

  I’m shocked, she’d said.

  I see the whole picture, he said. But what he meant was they had not broken him. They could forget about breaking him. He didn’t judge people. That was what he had that they didn’t have.

  There’s something I’d like to ask, she said. What makes you believe you wouldn’t get caught again?

  Her earnestness nearly broke him. She was so sincere it almost made him doubt. He would have told her he believed and that was all there was to it.

  Believing is believing is believing is believing.

 
There’s no reason to it. It just is, he would have told her that. But they had run out of time.

  The Satellite

  They had the eye of God. The world was wrapped with an eye. A glance lay over it now and forever.

  Patterson looked at the giant screen in the front of the room and he saw nothing was impossible. They could follow movement all over the surface of the globe.

  There was a smattering of applause as it dawned on the little audience, the thirty-eight RCMP officers and undercover agents and bureaucrats who’d gathered for the unveiling.

  It turned out that the technology had always existed but lay in wait, wearing a camouflage of the not-yet-invented. That was what they were discovering in that high-rise office in Vancouver on July 2, 1978.

  It had rained the night before and the asphalt was a black satin ribbon between the sidewalks below and the buildings were reflecting cloud and window flash when the sun came out. There were splotches of lime green and dark green and blue green covering the city.

  It was the day that the yacht was scheduled to leave for Mexico.

  Fine sailing weather, O’Neill said, standing at the window with his back to the room, hands on his hips.

  It’s just a sophisticated tracking device, Patterson told himself. But he couldn’t help feeling proud. State-of-the-art technology; they were witnessing a leap.

  A dish, an eye, a cyborg or Cyclops, and perhaps Patterson was the only man in the room old enough, besides O’Neill, to wonder about the hubris.

  He’d gone to a party at Hearn’s and drunk until five in the morning and smoked up with the boys. Hearn was going by the alias John Barlow. Even his girlfriend called him John.

  Hearn had put on an evening in Patterson’s honour. They’d tucked linen napkins into their shirt collars and there were a couple of hammers in the centre of the table.

  Deep-fried cod tongues, lobster, scalloped potatoes. They smashed the shells and the lobsters squirted up at them and leaked.

  There was talk about Saigon and Shakespeare, Jimmy Carter and Patty Hearst. Hearn was doing a Ph.D. in modern literature. Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Hemingway and Faulkner.