Caught Page 15

  You lied to me, Dave. She didn’t curse or sound angry or cry.

  Patterson hit pause. He thought of his own daughter. His own daughter had disappeared with a boy. They hadn’t heard from her. He hit play. And he hit pause. He had to take the tape in small doses. Every second of the audio uncovered a mystery and a revelation.

  Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. You love him, do you? It’s none of your business, David. Not anymore.

  Do you love him? Yes.

  The little girl was saying she wanted cookies. We’re hungry. Mommy, we’re hungry.

  She’s so big, he said. She grew. How do you like your doll?

  I already got one just like it, the girl said.

  You missed a lot, the girlfriend said.

  The whole thing was unfolding with the children in the room. The little girl had a couple of friends over and he could hear them wrestle the new doll out of the cardboard box and they were excited and Slaney was saying she could walk.

  And the girlfriend said, You could walk, David. And she started to beg him to walk away and Patterson hit pause. And he hit play.

  If you love me, David. You will walk away from this now. Patterson was rapt. She asked Slaney to consider what she’d been through. She talked about the lying, over and over. She said about waving goodbye.

  There I was on the sidewalk, she said. I believed you. I thought you were going to send for us to come to Alberta. Christ, what a fool. I lay awake at night.

  Why were you lying awake, Mrs. Decker? That was one of the little kids visiting the daughter.

  Play with your doll, girls, she said. Don’t pay any attention to us. This is just adult talk.

  But you’re married, Slaney said. You got married.

  I’ll pack a bag right now, she said. If you promise you won’t go back there. We could leave here tonight.

  Patterson hit pause. He could not listen. He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed his whole face vigorously. He growled. He started to pace but he was attached to the reel-to-reel by the earphones and they were yanked off his head and slid over the tiles.

  Patterson sank back down in the chair. He retrieved the headphones. He’d been called in to the Vancouver office to listen to the tape. Patterson had been waiting for Slaney to resurface and Slaney had gone to visit the ex-girlfriend. Even Hearn didn’t know, Patterson was sure. An unscheduled stop. Now Slaney was keeping things from Hearn. He must have known the dangers of stopping to see the girl. Maybe he was already gone. Maybe the girl had a hold.

  He hit play.

  She asked Slaney what he was going to do.

  Come here, he said.

  No, you tell me first, she said. You tell me what you are going to do. Will you walk away?

  Jennifer, come here, Slaney said. Then they’d moved it to the laundry room and he couldn’t hear over the noise. The washer and dryer were going.

  That was the audio. Whatever else they said, Patterson couldn’t hear it.

  The kid was off course. And she was begging him to walk away. Hearn wouldn’t go ahead without Slaney.

  Patterson thought of the lobster dinner with Hearn. He’d been surprised to see the books all over the house. Literature. The artful throws on the sofas. The sheepskin rug in front of the fire, a sailboat in a glass bottle on the mantel. Hearn was charismatic and fiercely smart, but he wouldn’t do it without David Slaney. Slaney was the raw courage and the will.

  Patterson was alone in the office listening to the tape. He didn’t have a window. The trip would fall apart if Slaney walked.

  Caught

  There’s a kind of folk wisdom that has developed over the centuries and is passed down from father to son about how to get out of the fog but somehow it had not been passed down to Slaney or Hearn.

  This is the story he told in prison after he’d been caught the first time.

  They’d been swamped by fog a mile from shore. The boys had dug the caves and they would be waiting for them to help unload. The cargo was under tarps on deck. Dealers lined up all over the island.

  Almost home, then the fog.

  Drop a long rope and if it floats out straight behind the engine, you’re going in a straight line, but if it curves you’re going in circles. He would hear this advice much later in prison. How to find your way out of the fog.

  As it was, a seagull flapped down on the rail. The gull was the same white as the fog but it was not dreamy like the fog. It was the opposite of a dream.

  When Columbus approached Cuba he knew there was land because the water was full of coconuts. The seagull was Slaney’s coconut. He thought they weren’t more than half a mile offshore.

  Slaney heard the trap skiff coming toward him before he saw it. He told Hearn to stay below deck.

  The first thing Slaney saw was the dip and swerve of a fluorescent orange toque and then the prow of the skiff, white with green trim, and the engine clacked and chuckled and the boat pulled up alongside.

  The pound of the trap skiff was full of fish. A cloud of blue smoke hung over their engine and the men were wearing sweaters and lumber jackets and rubber overalls.

  I lost my bearings, Slaney said.

  You’re lost? the older man said. He sat on the wooden seat. The man’s lips puckered tight around his mouth because he had no teeth. His nose hung low and shapeless and pitted. The nostrils full of grey hair and the same thick grey hair grew in his eyebrows, curling upward.

  I got all turned around in the fog, Slaney said.

  She’s some thick, the old man said. I said to young John here, you can’t see a hand in front of you. Didn’t I, John?

  You can’t see a bloody thing, the younger man said. He appeared to be the old man’s grandson.

  Slaney had time in prison to wonder why the old man had troubled himself to turn them in. He’d come to the conclusion that the man could not remember what it was like to be young.

  You didn’t know where you were, the old man said.

  I thought I knew, Slaney said. He’d glanced behind him, tried to see something through the fog. He’d had a conviction, for perhaps five minutes, that the shore was behind him.

  A fish in one of the buckets on the old man’s boat wiggled violently. It bent itself double and bent back the other way and threw itself up in the air and landed on the gunwale. It lay there, startled and panting. All three men watched. The fish had flung itself up at least a couple of feet. It must have been dead and come back to life and it landed on the gunwale and was astonished and then it rolled over and fell into the water.

  That one got away, the old man said. They could see it between the two boats, lying on its side on top of the lapping water. And then it wriggled and went under. Gone.

  Jesus Christ, Slaney said. The younger man rubbed the back of his hand under his nose and stood looking down at the water where the fish had disappeared.

  Then he hauled snot back up from his throat and nose and lungs and horked it over the side of the boat. He took off his orange toque and squeezed it in one fist and passed it from hand to hand and put it back on his head, settling the brim with his fingertips. He sat down and bowed his head and leaned forward to lay his hand on the side of the engine.

  Every move the men made came back to Slaney in prison.

  Some quiet, the older man said. He shook his head as if the quiet were regrettable.

  The fish are gone cracked, the grandson said. He waved an arm over the buckets.

  That’s the fog, makes everything quiet, the old man said. Isn’t it quiet? He had taken a cigarette from his breast pocket and he patted his chest and his hips with both his hands.

  I’m lost, Slaney said. I admit it. He tossed the man a lighter. He had to throw it overhand and the lighter winked into the fog and clattered on the bottom of the wooden boat.

  It was a silver lighter and the man picked it
up and smoothed his thumb over the engraving and held it out in front of him to read it and then flicked the top back with his thumb and rolled the gauged wheel and the flame leapt up and did battle with the faint breeze. It was a transparent and weak flame, just a colourless crinkle of the air above the lighter, burning a clear hole through the dense fog that lasted only a few seconds.

  The man lit his cigarette and tossed the lighter back and it went end over end between the boats in the fog and slapped into Slaney’s upheld hand.

  Follow us in, the old man said.

  Give me a minute here, Slaney said. He went below and spoke to Hearn and he was in favour.

  Follow him in, Hearn said. We don’t have a choice.

  The entire town had come out onto the wharf. There must have been three hundred people waiting. They stood in their overcoats and gaiters and the women had scarves on their heads tied under their chins and some had curlers under the scarves and there were two young girls came to the doorway of the fish and chips shop and they were wearing white aprons that seemed very white in the fog and the young children leaned into their mothers and some of them were coming down the hill in pairs and some of them were on bikes with banana seats and plastic streamers flying from the handlebars.

  There were young girls in tight plaid bomber jackets and jeans, smoking cigarettes, and people had parked their cars on the shoulder of the road and left them idling and there were some men unloading their catches, paying no attention.

  Slaney was upon them before he saw them because of the fog. The old guy was cute as a fox: all the Old Testament talk about being lost.

  The crowd didn’t seem to be saying much. They looked different from the crowd in town, shabbier and more robust. They were intent, as they might have been in church, and some of them had crossed their arms over their chests, or they leaned in to talk to a neighbour, not taking their eyes off Slaney.

  When they’d docked, the cops swarmed the boat and Hearn came up with his hands behind his head, elbows out.

  Slaney was pretty certain the cops hadn’t said put your hands up but Hearn already saw the story of their capture as something worthy of telling and he wanted to look the part.

  There was a stink of fish. The call of a gull. All of this came back while Slaney lay on his cot, hands behind his head, looking up at the mattress pressing through the slats of the bunk above him.

  Name

  Slaney headed back to the train station at dawn the next morning. The rain from the night before was steaming off the pavement. It was just a night; Hearn didn’t need to know about Ottawa.

  He walked past the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall with graffiti scrawled across the sodden plywood covering the storefront windows. A child’s tricycle sat in a puddle under a street lamp.

  Down a side street Slaney saw a man who looked like he was walking into a blizzard of snow. The front of his clothes and shoes and his face and even his eyelashes were pure white and it made his eyeballs look yellowish and blue-veined and watery and his lips wet and red, and his teeth were nicotine-stained. The man was standing behind a truck, smacking his arms against his sides, sending up little puffs of white dust. Another man in the back of the truck had been tossing him sacks of flour and one had broken when the guy caught it.

  The train station was a fifteen-minute walk from the room Slaney had rented.

  The man at the ticket booth asked for his identification. Slaney slid his passport under the glass and the man frowned at the picture and raised his droopy eyelids to look at Slaney and slid the passport back to him. Then he wrote out a ticket to Vancouver and slid that through too.

  Slaney tried to call Hearn and the phone rang and rang. Hearn had probably gone to his classes. Slaney sat down to wait and got up at once and wandered out on the platform and paced a bit and sat down on a bench with the suitcase between his knees. The heat of the day was already building and some broken beer bottles between the rails glittered and shone.

  He could not think of Jennifer. Her hands tightening her ponytail, the washer surging and rattling under them. She had held on tight to him, her legs crossed behind his back. They had hardly even undressed. His jeans around his knees, the change from his pocket spinning and bouncing on the floor. His mother’s engagement ring had fallen out with the change. When Jennifer turned to open the door he lifted the lid of the washer a little and dropped the ring into the churning water. He wanted her to have it. He wanted her to remember him.

  He thought about what he had done to her. He’d left her, is what happened. How do I put this, David. That’s what she’d said. But she meant he had made the choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. He hadn’t taken her up on the offer. She meant: And now it really is over, there is no going back.

  The trip was starting; it was really starting now. He was shocked by the desire he felt to meet up with Hearn, give him a couple of fake punches to the belly, pow-pow. Get stoned with him. Just be with him, carousing. Slaney wanted to carouse. He wanted to tell Hearn about his heart. His heart was hurting in his chest as if he’d run a great distance. They say a broken heart, but it felt more like a tear or puncture. It hurt when he breathed, or even when he was thinking about something else. The pain could well up out of nowhere and surprise him.

  There was a couple making out farther down the platform. The girl had on a long crushed-velvet coat with fake fur trim and a red tube top and denim miniskirt. The coat was slipping off her shoulders and she was wearing white go-go boots and her leg was hooked over the guy’s hip and his hand was disappearing under the hem of her little skirt.

  An elderly black man with a briefcase sat down beside Slaney. He was reading a library book and the plastic cover made a crinkling noise every time he turned the page.

  Slaney took the passport out and flicked through it again.

  Good book? Slaney asked. The man grunted in the affirmative without looking up.

  Slaney beat out a tune on the edge of the suitcase. The black man with the book licked the side of his thumb and turned the page and then he looked into Slaney’s eyes and then very purposefully at Slaney’s drumming hands and Slaney stopped drumming. The man returned to his book.

  There was a security guard who appeared to be snoozing on a chair in the meagre shade of a potted tree.

  Then the train horn, a shrill hoot in the distance, and a deep, earthy rumbling. The amber lights in the station flashed on and off and the long, silver-sided blaze of train poured like a viscous liquid into the platform, the deafening squeal of brakes and engine hiss-huff, a steady clang of oiled metal and grind and the hoo-hooing.

  Slaney tried to pretend he was not the name he had taken on but he had committed an act of black magic in that graveyard. He thought of the guy covered in flour, looking like he’d walked through his own private snowstorm, a narrow slice of winter gale in all the still morning heat. The name haunted Slaney. He was being possessed by it, overtaken.

  He boarded the train and found his seat and they were maybe an hour out of the station when a man passed down the aisle to the bathrooms, moving with the sway and rattle, and Slaney thought familiar. But he could not place him. The guy went back and forth three times, and he took each opportunity to look Slaney up and down, lingering on the last trip.

  Slaney turned his face into the crack of the armrest pretending to be asleep and at the next stop he grabbed his suitcase and jumped off the train.

  He saw the guy in the window searching for him, his forehead a flat white spot where he rested it on the glass and the reflection of the rusted-out freight trains on the tracks opposite sliding all over him.

  The guy saw him and waved frantically, gave him a thumbs-up.

  Joe Murphy. He went to Gonzaga, a year behind Slaney. Geraldine Murphy’s brother. Geraldine Murphy played tennis. Slaney had kissed her a few times when he was thirteen, a game of spin-the-bottle, then he blew all his paper route money on her
, a little red transistor radio. She never spoke to him again. Murphys from the South Side.

  Joe Murphy was a math whiz everybody said was destined for the priesthood. A little touch of home. It pierced him through and through. Slaney’s stomach turned to water. He couldn’t go back to the train station a second time — somebody would notice. He picked up the suitcase and started walking for the highway.

  Alberta

  There was the endless drive through Ontario, all glittering lakes and foliage and bland sunshine, and the sudden baked flatness of the prairies.

  The truck that picked him up outside Winnipeg was carrying a thousand chickens. The driver had pulled over and when Slaney got in, the man was holding a pair of glasses out at arm’s length, frowning at the lenses. Then he handed them to Slaney.

  Slaney breathed on the lenses and rubbed them in his shirttail. They were bifocals. He could feel the ridge of thickened glass with his thumb. He held them up and saw the rows of harshly yellow canola on the opposite side of the road, crisp and straight in the top half of the lenses, and below the ridge, the same flowers were magnified so they became a wind-ruffled blur of colour. He passed the glasses back to the truck driver.

  The driver put them on and his mouth was solemn and judging. He pressed the bridge of the glasses up his nose, and then he lifted his chin to glance out through the bottom half. He turned to examine Slaney.

  The ridge of the bifocals fell exactly halfway across the man’s eyes, magnifying the bottom half; the brown irises were vulnerable and watery. There was a bright crimson dot in the left iris, just below the pupil. The pouches beneath the man’s eyes were veined with violet lines and pressed upon by the black frames; in the top hemisphere, above the ridge of thickened glass, the irises were sharp and calculating.

  The two men looked at each other and then they became aware of looking at each other and both turned back to face the road, embarrassed.

  The trucker stared forward then, as if memorizing what was out there, and he took off the glasses and put them back in the case and tossed the case out the open window.