Caught Page 4

  The man had done the indoor-outdoor carpeting and now switched appendages on the nozzle and did the dance floor and the stage. He pulled out chairs and turned them upside down on the tables and then put them back on the floor when he was done.

  He finally touched the button on the Electrolux with his foot and the machine went off. Slaney had just finished his second beer and he stood and got out his money and put a bill down on the bar.

  That includes a tip, Slaney said.

  Big spender, Sue Ellen said. She picked up the bill and stuck it in a tin can without the label next to the register. Then she unplugged the vacuum and gave the cord a sharp tug and let go and the plug snaked over the bar and across the floor and snapped tightly back into the belly of the machine.

  Your wife is going to be none too pleased she finds that gone, the waitress said. Now get home and put that back in the closet before she goes looking for it.

  Pretend I never took it, the man said.

  Put it back.

  I lost a fortune, he said. They took me for all I was worth.

  You can’t undo what you done, Sue Ellen said. She was tapping the pencil end over end on the bar, considering the man with a hard eye.

  People want to turn back the clock, she said. Bloody bastards took advantage of you, Gerald, when you were fresh out of the hospital.

  I lost the couch, Sue Ellen, he said. Now I come home from work I got nothing to sit down on.

  Gerald’s a custodian at the mall, aren’t you, Gerald, Sue Ellen said.

  I applied, he said. That’s the position I landed.

  But he’s good with engines too, she said. I can’t tell you the number of cars he’s fixed for nothing around here. He’ll work for a bloody song. I couldn’t get my car started there, last winter, was it, Gerald?

  Spark plug, the man said.

  Worst kind of weather, Harold’s sister said.

  Replaced the spark plug, he said.

  Good as gold when you’re feeling well, Sue Ellen said. You’re just lucky you still have that vacuum cleaner.

  Put it back where I got it, Gerald said. Sue Ellen turned the newspaper over and counted more blocks with the tip of a pencil.

  That’s right, she said. The man gathered up the vacuum and the appendages that went with it and left through the door that clicked shut behind him.

  Ten Reasons To Go On

  Slaney hit the road after the beer at the bar and this time he was heading west. He’d had two rides and then nothing came or went for more than an hour.

  He thought about walking away.

  Reviewed his options.

  This was the advice of his prison psychotherapist. Review and calculate. Employ reason. Adjust your position.

  Why didn’t he walk away? The idea of going back to prison made the elastic give out in his socks. His socks were loose and rubbed and his guts were like his worn-out socks when he gave thought to it. He could walk away and work under the table and live a quiet life under a false name and be forgotten. The law would forget him.

  But there were reasons to go on:

  1. They’d be millionaires inside a couple of months, him and Hearn.

  2. He wanted to be on the water. The wide-open openness of that. The exultation and dolphins and flying fish. The swashbuckling glamour of fucking going for it. The wind on the water and beaches and not knowing if they’d make it. Adrenalin and heat.

  3. If he quit, it would mean they’d broken him.

  4. He would not betray the innermost thing. He didn’t know exactly what the innermost thing was, except it hadn’t been touched in the four years of incarceration. Come and get me. They couldn’t get him. It fluttered in and out of view, the innermost thing, consequential and delicate.

  5. He wanted to believe he couldn’t be broken.

  6. They had a modicum of luck. Whatever unit of measurement they employ to quantify luck. They had more of it than before. An iota more luck, and it might be enough to get them through. They had experience. What he’d learned could fill a book.

  7. He wanted Jennifer to fall in love with him again. He wanted to experience an ordinary moment. A room in a house full of TV murmur and sigh, leafy shadow and the whir of laundry in the dryer. Copper pots hung over the range, pink-orange and faux antique.

  He wanted to be half awake in the kitchen of a new house with Jennifer. He practised the phrase: Let me show you around the property.

  Saturday morning, a little hungover and horny.

  Jennifer in his plaid flannel housecoat, her hair mussed up from bed, pressing half an orange down on the glass juicer she had, twisting it back and forth so the juice ran over the fluted glass dome into the lip beneath and the seeds slipped out. The intent, becalmed look she wore making breakfast.

  8. The little glass of orange juice.

  9. Her ass as she bent over the toaster to light a smoke. She had candles all over the place. You could be having a conversation and she’d slink off the chair to the floor and start doing yoga. She’d be on her hands and knees, focused and lost, and her legs would straighten out and her ass up in the air and she’d keep on talking.

  He wanted her spaghetti.

  Nobody could stop him once he got on the water, heading back to Colombia.

  If he could hear Hearn’s voice, he’d feel better. Four years, maybe Hearn had changed.

  Slaney needed someone who knew him from before, a human X-ray machine that could get through bone and scar tissue and say: not malignant, not morphed, not monstrous. You are the same, Slaney, as you were before. Only better. An iota of luck lodged like a splinter.

  10. There’s a butterfly under your rib cage: the innermost thing.

  A butterfly or comet or silver bullet. Something untouched, inviolate, capable of velocity, flight. He was willing to put it to the test. Take it out for a spin.

  He sat on a lichen-scabbed boulder with his head in his hands and he tried to resummon a brotherly trust for Hearn.

  The Betrayals

  It was almost dusk by the time a pickup pulled over and Slaney leapt off the boulder and he tossed his mother’s blue suitcase in the back and opened the door. There was a guy about Slaney’s age and an English setter in the passenger seat.

  The dog was mostly white and had lit-up brown eyes and shiny black ears and it began to quiver all over. It stood when Slaney opened the door and turned a tight circle, though it didn’t make a sound.

  Don’t mind him, the guy said. There’s plenty of room. The dog sank down on its haunches and draped its front paws over Slaney’s legs. Its white coat was run through with black speckles, and there was a black patch over each eye and a frayed yellow rope with a slipknot around its neck.

  Slaney said, Who’s a good boy? The dog lolled out a long tongue and licked Slaney’s lips. The driver looked and looked again.

  You got a kiss, he said.

  Jesus, Slaney said. The guy had a wood chipper in the back of the truck and he said he had a farm and grew flowers that he sold to hotels and restaurants in the area. He had bees, he said, which were an experiment.

  Then he told Slaney to open the glovebox.

  There in front of you, he said. Open her up.

  There was the torn corner of an old Shreddies cereal box with part of a honeycomb sitting on it. Each tiny, perfectly formed cave of wax oozed thick, sticky honey. The dog’s nose lifted with a paroxysm of tiny huffs, craning toward the dampened cardboard, but Slaney elbowed him to the side and then trapped the dog’s snout under his arm. The dog went still and then wrestled hard.

  Try it out, the guy said. Slaney took up some of the honey on his fingers and tasted it. He’d never had honey that hadn’t come from a squeeze bottle before. It tasted musky and mineral, a grass-gold sweetness.

  The guy said he bred setters, and made a few dollars off it. He had a kennel full of them an
d his dogs did not bark because he didn’t put up with it.

  I don’t like the noise, he said.

  Slaney licked the stickiness off his fingers and he touched the glovebox closed and rubbed the little latch with the cuff of his shirt. He’d been thinking about fingerprints since he got out.

  He didn’t think; he was aware.

  The dog had settled down and his chin was resting on Slaney’s leg.

  Not a sound out of him, the man said. You notice that? Not a peep, sir.

  Here, fella, Slaney said. What do you call this guy?

  The wife calls him Handsome, the man said. People always think she’s calling out for me.

  Hello, Handsome, Slaney said, taking the dog by both ears and resting his forehead against the dog’s nose.

  Hello, handsome fella.

  A guy can’t be calling that out in the woods, the man said.

  Here, Handsome, Slaney sang out. Then the man told Slaney he’d had to put down a dog last week. He’d had the dog for twelve years and it was the saddest thing he’d ever had to do and he was only now starting to feel like himself again.

  Brought him in to the vet, he said. And he shook his head at the thought of it.

  I’m sorry to hear it, Slaney said.

  Ever done anything like that? he asked.

  Slaney said he hadn’t.

  Put something down?

  No, Slaney said.

  Looking up at me, the man said. My hand was on his heart when it stopped. I felt it stop. No sooner do they put that needle in than it’s over. The body fell against me and he was gone. That dog went everywhere with me. Slept on my bed. You get used to a dog. Becomes a part of you. I don’t know if I’m over it yet.

  There was nothing on the side of the road but dusty trees, for miles and miles, with just a few houses, here and there, buried in the woods. It was beginning to get dark.

  You don’t want them to suffer, the man said. He wiped viciously at the corner of his eye with his shirtsleeve and drew snot back up into his nose with one long haul of snagging breath. He’d begun to cry about the dead dog and it made Slaney feel afraid. The situation seemed volatile and unhinged.

  I asked the vet, could you close his eyes, he said. You can’t close their eyes. The eyes stay open. Isn’t that something? There’s nothing in them. People say it’s like turning off a light. It isn’t a light. I’m telling you. Whatever left him came out through those eyes. I saw it go. You never seen it?

  Slaney said he’d never seen anything die up close except fish and once a rat in a trap.

  You got any kids? the man asked. Speaking of traps. Slaney said his girlfriend had a daughter.

  I got twins, the guy said. He reached over and snapped down Slaney’s sun visor and there was a picture of two infants in the arms of a department store Santa.

  They were a surprise, he said. Slaney asked if they were identical.

  Identical enough.

  Identical there’s supposed to be some kind of connection, Slaney said.

  Just as one falls asleep, the other one starts bawling, the guy said. That’s the connection. Goes on all night without let-up. People talk about syncing up their naps. I’ve yet to see them with their eyes closed at the same time. We are trying to make a go of it but their mother never worked a day in her life. I come home and she’s mail-ordered half the Avon catalogue.

  Slaney patted the dog and he took a silky black ear in his hand and let it slide through his loose fist several times and the dog’s eyes opened partway and for a brief instant they were lit a mercurial green, an alien animal glow deep in the dog’s eyes, a possession that came and went in a blink, and Slaney thought that nothing was as it seemed, not ever, and it was better to be on the alert.

  Trust was just another form of laziness and he would not give in to it. He would do what Hearn told him to do for now because he had no choice. But he would not call it trust. He would stay alert to the parallel universes of dark paths and wrong turns. He would calculate if this then that a thousand times a day. Take into account the weakness in every man’s character that could make him swerve or sidestep.

  The dog’s eyes closed again and it nuzzled its head against its owner’s fist.

  You should see him go, the guy said. When he gets in the woods. I get afraid he won’t come back.

  He asked Slaney where he was heading. Slaney told him Alberta.

  Mecca, the guy said. Then he slowed down and pulled over to the side of the empty road and got out of the truck, leaving his door open. He stood in the centre of the road and clapped his hands twice.

  The dog made attempts to jump down from the truck but couldn’t. It was shivering all over. Slaney gave it a little shove and the dog toppled down to the ground with a froggy waggle and shot off to the edge of the road. The driver closed the door of the truck.

  The dog stood absolutely still, lifted its hind leg, and pissed solemnly, its tail out straight and its head lowered as though he understood the ignominy of having been domesticated hundreds of years ago.

  The guy stood at the edge of the road next to his dog with his back to Slaney and pissed along with the dog and shifted, getting himself back together, and he walked into the ditch. He picked up a stick and tossed it into the woods and the dog was gone.

  Then the man stepped into the bushes after the dog. The branches swished and flopped to let him in and closed behind him.

  Just as Slaney realized the man was gone another vehicle came toward the truck, moving at a crawl. It came out of nowhere.

  The last bit of sun flared across the other car’s windshield and Slaney tingled all over with a prescient knowledge that the car would stop a couple of yards away from the truck. It stopped exactly where Slaney had known it would.

  The engine idled and the car didn’t move. Slaney thought of the talk about death and the trapped rat and the man crying without real cause. Even the sharp metal tang in the honey under all the sweetness seemed full of foreboding now.

  Slaney couldn’t see who was driving, or how many there were in the car or even the make. The headlights were white with pink and blue coronas splintering up in the dark and showing the slanting moisture in the air. The darkness clamped around the two yellow aureoles like a vise.

  Slaney had a sense that three or four men would get out with baseball bats and bludgeon him to death.

  What a feeling: to be duped. There’s no mistaking it once the aftermath is upon you. Always a trap of this magnitude is something you step toward. There’s an element of will and submission. But you can’t see it coming. A series of steps that eat each other up like the steps of an escalator, churning forwards and backwards at the same time.

  He glanced behind and there was nothing for miles. The tree branches joined over the dirt road to form a tunnel of brown, granular light.

  Slaney knew at once that he would rather die than go back to jail. That’s what came to him.

  He checked the ignition and saw that the guy had taken the keys. Between the driver’s seat and the emergency brake he noticed a newspaper. He worked it out and flopped it open and there was his own picture taking up half the front page. The flash had made his eyes look black and empty.

  The headline read Escaped Convict David Slaney on the Run.

  Going on about the bloody dead dog, Slaney said to himself. Crying about the dog. He was talking to himself now, speaking out loud without knowing he was doing it.

  Slaney grabbed at the door handle.

  If I were honest with myself, he said. He had known they’d been travelling toward a reckoning ever since he got in the truck.

  This is it, he said. And he said, I’ll never see her. That’s a shame. That’s a goddamn shame. These were all things he said without knowing he had spoken out loud. He was ready to take off and run as hard as he could but he also found he couldn’t move.


  They would beat him to death, kicking in his skull with their steel-toed boots, they’d smash his kidneys with their fists, or they would bring him back to prison or they’d kill him and put his head on a stick. Of these possibilities he hoped the latter would unfold. Anything but prison.

  If something was going to happen he wanted it to happen right away.

  Then the man broke out of the trees and strode up from the roadside ditch to the window of the waiting vehicle. He leaned in and spoke for a long time to whoever was in there.

  Slaney could make out the man’s silhouette against the graininess of the forest beyond. The guy rested one arm against the roof of the car and his forehead against the arm. He was leaning into the window to speak. He stepped back and held his hands out, offering everything or weighing the odds. Then he leaned in again. It was some kind of argument.

  Finally the man patted the hood over the idling engine. The car lurched forward, spitting gravel, and Slaney saw the driver was a young woman in a white blouse. She didn’t so much as glance his way as she drove past. She looked relieved or maligned.

  The man stood out there in the middle of the road with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, bathed in her tail lights.

  When the car was long gone the man whistled. The sound blasted out over the trees. The guy got back in the truck and turned it on and touched the horn twice.

  After a wait, the dog rustled through the underbrush and trotted in front of the idling truck and the guy opened the door and the dog scrambled over his lap, stinking of something so vile and strong it made them crank the windows down fast.

  Jesus Christ, the man said. What the hell?

  Must have rolled in something dead, Slaney said. There were nettles tangled in the silk of its ears and belly. The guy shoved the dog away from the gearshift and gunned her. The sharp stink came and went and Slaney realized they’d got used to it in a matter of minutes.