Caught Read online

  Sorry to bother you, ma’am, one of the cops said. She shut the door and leaned her forehead against it. Slaney came out of the bathroom.

  You’re set there now, he said. The zipper.

  It’s too bad we can’t open a few windows, she said. There’d be such a lovely breeze. The room is so damn hot.

  It is hot, Slaney said.

  Or is it me?

  You’re hot, Slaney said. There was a loud slosh of water from the room on the other side of the wall. Whoever was over there had got back in the bath. The two of them were almost whispering. He was struggling not to kiss her, he realized. He thought a chaste kiss, and then he thought forget chaste. But he also knew she wasn’t looking for a kiss.

  Do you think it will rain? she asked.

  They are calling for it, he said.

  I know that, she said.

  I should probably go, he said.

  Paul is being honourable, the bride said. Doing the honourable thing. I guess you don’t even know Paul. I thought you were a cousin.

  I’m hitchhiking across the country, Slaney said.

  You sort of look like them, she said. I thought for sure you were one of the cousins. Removed or something.

  I’m heading out in the morning, Slaney said.

  You’re leaving? she said. He guessed her to be about eighteen.

  Have you got something old? Slaney asked. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

  I’m old, she said. I’m something old. I’m old and I’m blue. I’m something, anyway.

  She arched an eyebrow at him. It flew up and the other one stayed still. He thought she would never get any older. She had probably been born with all the wisdom she had now and it was a sizable amount.

  Maybe there is a moment in everyone’s life when something altering occurs, and maybe you don’t get any older after that. The bride would probably be eighteen forever.

  And whatever happened to him on this trip would be his reckoning. Prison had introduced him to the notion of a consequence for every action, and he understood that freedom was the opposite of all that. He was pretty sure the bride had come across the same revelation.

  Can I give you a present for your wedding? Slaney asked. He reached up behind his neck with both hands and undid a chain and then he held his fist over her open hand and the chain with a religious medal dropped out the bottom of his fist. The water was draining out of the bath in the next room, gurgling and being sucked down, and it was a hollow noise.

  St. Christopher, he said. My mother made me wear it.

  Hopeless causes? she asked.

  Travel, he said.

  You need that, she said. I’m not going anywhere.

  I’d like you to have it, he said. He realized it was true. She had gone back to plain-looking.

  I’m pretty well ready, then, she said. She was putting on the chain. She pulled the medal out from her neck and looked at it, and then she dropped it inside the dress and pressed her hand over the spot where it hung.

  There, she said. She asked if he was the fellow who had been in the papers. And he said he was.

  She wished him luck in a very formal way that touched him.

  That night it rained hard. He watched the guests coming back from the wedding, cars crawling into the circular driveway, grinding to a stop in front of hotel entrance. The women poking their umbrellas out the doors of the cars, the wind popping the umbrellas inside out.

  The Papers

  The next morning Slaney could hear the bride and groom through the wall. The rhythm of their conversation had a stilted formality. They sounded forlorn and stoic. Slaney realized he didn’t ever want to sound that way to somebody on the other side of a hotel wall.

  On the golf course, across from his window, a man was about to take a swing. He raised the club and brought it down fast, jerking to a stop before it touched the golf ball, a white, white egg on the grass at his feet.

  Slaney pulled the phone onto his lap. He lifted the receiver and pressed it to his chest. His mother had been ashamed the first time he was caught.

  Such expectations, David, she’d said then. I trusted you.

  He put the receiver back in the cradle. Slaney wanted to talk to her but they had probably tapped her phone.

  He had to get the hell out of the Maritimes. They were closing in.

  His mother never wore jewellery, except her wedding band and the engagement ring, a replacement for the original that had been lost in the hospital when she’d had a hysterectomy.

  They all thought the ring had been stolen from her bedside table after the operation. Slaney’s father got an identical one at Birks in the Avalon Mall because she’d been inconsolable.

  Slaney’s mother could not be felled by a lie. Her trust was a magnetic force field. She used it like a weapon; she shot a beam of trust into the dark from the centre of her forehead and it blinded whatever glanced that way.

  Slaney was tossing the ring and catching it in his fist; he wanted to hear her voice. He thought of the phone in her house in St. John’s, on the hall table next to all the framed school photos. His sisters, year after year, with their sausage curls, white shirts, navy tunics. The boys in striped ties. They had a look, his brothers and sisters. Missing front teeth, mussed hair. The tamped-down grins busting out despite the desired expression: deadpan boredom. A thousand watts of joy and badness.

  Someone had drawn a ballpoint-pen moustache on Slaney’s grade three picture and put it back in the frame. Lonny had a shiner in grade nine.

  The phone would ring and his mother would bustle out from the kitchen, a dish towel on her shoulder. The apron with the embroidered butterfly. Her hand fluttering up to her throat.

  Slaney wanted to tell her he was free. But freedom required a constant watch. His vision was twenty-twenty, he wanted to tell her.

  The world was saturated with colour and it was making his eyeballs itch. The sky was something. Even if they caught him he’d had that night on a fire escape with the sky. He wanted her to trust him. He’d never be trustworthy without her trust.

  Such expectations, David.

  The papers, four years ago, had nearly destroyed her.

  Slaney had recognized the dates and facts that appeared in the newspapers back then, when they’d been caught, but the story about him didn’t fit. There were glimpses of the adventure and the guts it took, the long days of wind and sun on the water, the tokes and rough seas, the devastation when they were brought into port.

  The biggest bust in Canadian history, the papers had said. Some of the bales were hefted into the courtroom on the shoulders of the clerks. There was a front-page picture of that.

  There were flashes of what had happened, sparks of what was true.

  The newspapers definitely had a shadow of the story.

  But it wasn’t Slaney.

  It wasn’t Hearn, either.

  My ring, Jim, his mother had wept when she woke from the hysterectomy. Her engagement ring. She was overwhelmed with pain and disbelief.

  Slaney’s mother could not believe a person would steal someone’s engagement ring.

  She had failed whoever had taken the ring.

  I left it lying around.

  Some poor fellow was tempted.

  Slaney and his father had gone straight to Birks. All the glass cabinets lit up. The rings in blue velvet boxes with cream linings and lids that snapped down. His father bought one and they pretended he’d found it under the hospital bed.

  How foolish was I, Slaney’s mother said then. Thinking somebody would steal the ring off your finger. She was ashamed about her loss of faith. It made her blush.

  But the ring had been in the lining of the blue suitcase all along. She had been wrong to stop believing.

  The golfer raised the club again, the iron turning into a fla
ring needle of sunlight in his hands. He sent the white ball sailing through the sky.

  And Slaney thought of Hearn with his pickled eggs. They had walked home together, the two of them, every day after school, stopping at O’Brien’s store on the way.

  Hearn would buy a pickled egg from the jar on the counter near the cash register.

  Every afternoon Mrs. O’Brien parted the bead curtain that hung between the store and the rest of her house with her hands pressed together like a swimmer about to do the breaststroke. She scudded forward in her black orthopedic shoes, spreading her arms wide open, and the strings of blue glass beads swung and clacked behind her.

  When Mrs. O’Brien saw Hearn and Slaney she’d take out the two-pronged fork with the long handle she kept under the register and place it on the counter.

  She’d pull the oversized jar of pickled eggs to her chest and grip the lid with her chafed, shiny, eczema-crackled hands and try to unscrew it.

  Hearn had known that her pride depended on them letting her give it a shot.

  The store was filthy and dim. People said rats and they said that Mrs. O’Brien was richer than Dan Ryan. Money in the mattress, the pages of the books, crammed into socks.

  But the lid, rusty and stuck, was too much for her and she’d set the jar down on the counter and push it toward Hearn.

  The picture in the Evening Telegram on the first day of their trial: Slaney and Hearn, and behind them their lawyers, walking along Duckworth Street toward the courthouse.

  The long curly hair out over the necks of the boys’ wide collars, the suits hanging off them because the suits had come out of their fathers’ closets. They’d had a particular gait, Slaney and Hearn. They were sure they’d be back on the streets later that afternoon.

  The gait said surety. They were folk heroes in the making. They were the new thing, as it had manifested in St. John’s in 1974, where they had stood trial for importing two tons of pot. They’d been searched for weapons on the courthouse steps, the first time in the history of the St. John’s courthouse anyone had been patted down before a trial. Hearn had revelled in it, his arms raised, as if addressing a crowd.

  Now, now, he’d said to the cop patting his leg, don’t get fresh.

  Come on, fellas, it’s only pot.

  Michael Tucker, Hearn’s lawyer, is caught in mid-step in the photograph. One foot off the ground, hands digging in the pockets of his suit. Tucker was a good lawyer and Hearn’s father had liquidated his business, got a second mortgage on his home. Put up everything he had for Hearn’s bail.

  Hearn got out and took off. His father lost the business and the house that had been in their family for three generations.

  A couple of months later, Hearn’s father, driving his sister’s big two-tone Cadillac, lost control. His arm went funny. His fingers like wood. He had to lift his arm into his lap with his other hand. And the deadening spread throughout his body in a matter of minutes.

  They told Hearn on the phone when he finally made contact and they used the word massive.

  They say massive and they mean a chunk of the brain gives out without warning. A massive stroke had left Hearn’s father unable to move. A clot or misfiring of synapse, a vein opens, a mystery, but everybody said Hearn was the cause. His father lost in a prison of his own body while Hearn crossed the country free as bird.

  Hearn had destroyed his father and he couldn’t come home to visit.

  Joseph Callahan had been Slaney’s lawyer. He’s in the picture too, strolling along behind Slaney, black-rimmed glasses, swinging a leather briefcase. They are purposeful men, the four of them, about to enter the courthouse on a sunny day.

  Two boys smuggling pot, what a lark! Hey man, everything’s copasetic. Chill out. Deadly.

  And their confident, liberal young lawyers. The suit jackets flapping back, the long strides.

  You’re seen as a risk for bail, Callahan had said. Slaney was sure it was because Hearn had taken off.

  Nothing whatsoever to do with Hearn, Callahan said. The law doesn’t work that way.

  They had been aware of the cameras on the courthouse steps but had not been beholden to them.

  Somebody said dashing.

  A court case was just something to win.

  Hearn unscrewing the lid of the pickle jar and laying it on the counter.

  You loosened it up for me, Mrs. O’Brien.

  The old lady dipping the fork into the jar and the eggs tiptoeing and plunging in the murky brine until she stabbed one and the silver bubbles wobbling up with a sulphurous waft of vinegar and dill.

  The golfer outside Slaney’s hotel window had been strolling across the green and he stopped in front of the final hole, the club resting on his shoulder. He looked out over the emerald expanse. Took in the clear weather. He was just an inch away from the end. Then he brought the club down and hunched over it, as still as stone.

  They’d thought a million dollars back in 1974. The ambition revved in their chests. They had motorcycle engines for hearts.

  Then they said shag it, a million and a half. They got stoned and keeled over, giggling like girls, and Hearn held up a finger for silence. And then he said, Fuck it, two million.

  O’Brien’s store had been demolished and the field behind it that had been Gardner’s cow farm — where Slaney and Hearn had ridden on their dirt bikes across gold and brown and rust-red acres of furrowed land divided by low stone walls and, now and then, traces of a foundation, a threshold and a hearth, a piece of cracked china or an old blue medicine bottle — had been sold for subdivisions.

  The boys driving their dirt bikes for as long as they could and then they’d stop and pick magic mushrooms and once they’d eaten up to a hundred each and they’d both died of heart failure.

  Their hearts stopping. And stopping. And stopped. They were buried and wept for their own deaths and disappeared into a black hole that was not a void (the golf club moves half an inch, ding, the ball sinks) but full of pressurized experience.

  Life coming at them through a fire hose; jackhammering them with Technicolor everything and they both understood that the paisley pattern on Hearn’s shirt, each gorgeous swirl vibrating a neon crimson, was a link in an infinite chain that telescoped through wormholes of time and they realized that time is simultaneously in motion and inert and the engine of it all seemed to be Hearn’s heart pulsing, calm and sure, under the paisley and they spoke about the wonder of it, and became morose and weeping because the swirling pattern was teeming with life, each paisley curl a sperm charging through the universe, hell-bent on the eggs out there, the big bang, and Hearn and Slaney were a part of everything and not apart from it, as they had supposed, and they were left, at dawn, when they woke, empty shells, newly innocent and spilled out.

  The egg was stabbed with the two-pronged fork and drawn up through the cloudy yellowish fluid, nudging the other eggs and breaking the surface, and Mrs. O’Brien held it up, dripping, over a paper napkin. It glowed white in the weak winter light from the store’s window.

  Rebellion

  Slaney left the hotel and got a ride right away with a girl driving home from her class at a community college. It was already dark and she brought him back to her house for supper.

  The girl lived in a bungalow with a cracking concrete foundation not far from Quebec. The front door was high up on the house and there were no stairs leading to it. The house had an apron of crushed gravel around it and somebody had started to lay a lawn and had given up halfway through. There were rolls of yellowed sod in a pyramid at the end of the driveway. What had been laid down was covered in dandelion clocks. There were three newer houses on the opposite side of the road, each freshly painted, with dark green lawns and For Sale signs.

  She took him around the back and they went up a set of stairs and took their shoes off in a small porch and left them on a rubber mat that said Home Sweet H
ome.

  The girl’s grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table, smoothing out the clear plastic cloth with wide sweeps, catching the crumbs in his cupped hand.

  I was waiting for you, he said.

  I told you I had a night class, the girl said.

  I wondered to myself, Where in the world could she be at this late hour?

  Persuasive Speaking and Managerial Communication, I told you that, she said.

  I looked at the clock and I said to myself, She’s usually here by now.

  I’m sorry, Pops, she said. The old man stood up with great effort, pressing his fist hard against the table, and he started across the kitchen. There was an extra swivel in his gait, an almost lewd skewing of bone and pain and he was bent forward. One hip rode up too high and hitched on the way down. Or the left knee gave out at the last minute. The old man had a faith in the knee that he lost and regained with each step.

  He turned to Slaney when he reached the counter and looked him over. He seemed to take a measure of his worth.

  Who’s this? the old man said.

  This is Dave, the girl said. He’s come in for a visit and a little bite. Slaney saw the old guy had a facial tic, his eyes blinked three times, hard blinks, every minute or so.

  I never heard tell of a Dave, the old man said.

  You’re hearing tell of him now, the girl said. I just met him myself. This is my Pops. Pops, this is Dave.

  Nice to meet you, sir, Slaney said.

  I was in Korea, the old man said. I saw an arm on the ground. Just the arm. Not attached to nothing. Just lying there in the leaves.

  Pops is decorated, the girl said. He got a few medals in there he could show you sometime.

  We were marching, he said. I just saw this arm. It was lying on the dirt. Wet leaves stuck on it. That was one thing I saw. I saw a lot of things. You’ve done some travelling, have you?

  Yes sir, Slaney said.

  You got the look of someone with miles behind him, the old man said. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink and reached in with his fist and let the crumbs fall into the garbage and he brushed his hand against his jeans. He was so thin it seemed the new jeans were holding him upright. He wore a tucked-in black shirt buttoned to the neck and Slaney saw cufflinks. The old man was nothing but bones.