Caught Page 8

  The girl got a tin of soup from the cupboard and she fitted the tin into the electric can opener and pressed the lever down and the can turned in small jerks. The whir of the can opener brought two miniature poodles running down the hall.

  The girl lifted a chrome lever and detached the tin, poked one end of the lid down, and daintily lifted out the end that stood up. She held the lid between a finger and thumb and her pinkie curled up. Then she crouched down with the lid coated with tomato soup and held it near her ankle.

  Little guys, she said. Little fellas.

  I said to the dogs, Where is she, the grandfather said.

  I’m here now, Pops, the girl said. I’m right here.

  I was in watching the news, the grandfather said. Before you got home. There’s a fugitive from the law on the loose. A young fellow named David Slaney.

  The poodles knocked each other out of the way and slid on the linoleum in their hurry and piled into each other and licked the lid clean. The girl had a cooing voice when she spoke to the dogs, urging them to enjoy it. Slaney was transfixed by the girl’s ladylike pinkie and the dogs’ pink tongues and he was also thinking about how to get the hell out of there.

  I heard it on the radio, she said. Just some guy smuggling pot is all. No big deal.

  Well, there you go, the old man said.

  There you go, the girl said. She was still speaking to the dogs, a little singsong voice. There you go. Isn’t it nice to have a visitor? We don’t get visitors very often, do we?

  The dogs were shaved so close their skin showed through the film of fur and there were pompoms on the ends of their tails and on top of their heads and they whimpered, a building whine that crescendoed in a series of yaps.

  It was nice to meet you both, Slaney said. But I should get going. I don’t want to take advantage of your hospitality.

  Slaney and the girl had talked about themselves on the drive home in the roomy Buick. They were accounting for who they were in small increments. It was clear they would be sleeping together from the minute he got in the car. Now he saw that nothing is ever as clear as it might seem.

  They were the same age, twenty-five, and the girl was doing accounting, she told Slaney, and had a line on a job in the financial department of the local supermarket. The management was just waiting for her to present her certificate. She had mentioned the grandfather and it was implicit in these small statements that the girl planned to take care of the grandfather for the rest of the old man’s life, but there would need to be, in return, the chance for her to be wild in other ways.

  They say I’ll rise up, the girl had said. Slaney thought she meant a rebellion. But she was talking about supermarket management and Slaney saw the girl’s selfless side. The grandfather would hang on, Slaney thought. But it wasn’t a bad situation. She was capable of loving the dogs and the old grandfather in a way that afforded her intense pleasure — he could see this now, in the kitchen, when she lifted the black poodle and touched her chin against the fluffy crown of its head.

  Slaney had told her, in the car, that he’d just had a birthday and that he had plans to travel. Seeing the world was important to him, he’d said, because you could see yourself from the outside.

  The heat makes you behave like another person, he’d told her. He said he saw himself as something that could change. The radio had been on when he got in the car and they’d talked over the music and then there was the news and he heard about himself breaking out of prison and they gave a physical description.

  The girl had switched off the radio and the car was very silent. Then the girl brought up going to Toronto sometime and how she’d like to live in a skyscraper. She said she liked the look of them, but she’d only seen them in pictures. She’d never been inside one. She liked the idea of a big wall of glass and a nice view way up high.

  He’s a nice boy, isn’t he, the girl said to the poodles. She was flapping the ears of the black poodle as she spoke, leaning against the sink. She made it look as if the poodle had an opinion and was answering yes or no with his ears.

  We like him a lot, don’t we? We really do, yes we do, yes we do. Oh we really, really like this boy.

  People begin to lose their minds, the grandfather said.

  What’s that, Pops? the girl said. She put the dog down and stood with her hand on her hip surveying the room as if she’d forgotten where she was or what she had to do. Then she tipped the tin of soup into a saucepan and turned the stove on high.

  When they get to be my age, the old man said. The girl looked instantly fierce.

  That won’t happen to you, she said. We don’t have any of that in our family.

  It begins by you forget somebody’s name, the old man said. You forget a birthday. You can’t find things. You lose words.

  We lose lots of things, the girl said. But we don’t lose our minds.

  The smell of Campbell’s tomato soup filled up the whole kitchen. The girl reached up on tiptoe for a box of soda crackers. Her blouse rode up and Slaney saw the dimples in the small of her back above her jeans and he ran his hands down his thighs. The soup was boiling and spitting. He could smell it starting to burn. He wondered how long it would be before his jailbreak got to be old news. He had a brief insight: what the hell did he think he was doing? But it passed. He couldn’t keep the insight in the front of his forehead where it probably belonged.

  After the old man was asleep the girl got out a bottle of scotch and two Mason jars for glasses. She slid open a tiny window above the sink and the cool air rushed in. She took an ice tray from the freezer and twisted it and the cubes hopped up and she dropped some in each jar. The fridge emitted an insistent buzzing. They talked and talked. She pushed two fingers deep into the sugar bowl and swished around, spilling sugar over the side. She pulled out a little bag of dope and dropped it on the table and put her two fingers in her mouth and licked off the sugar. Then she rolled a joint and they smoked it and she gave him the rest of the dope as a birthday present.

  After a while she got a package of pressed chicken from the fridge and they each took out a slice and rolled it up. The meat was salty and white and blotched with an opalescent sheen.

  They drank a good part of a forty-ouncer without getting drunk and at the same time they were very drunk. She asked him about the escape and he told her. He told her about Colombia and the pleasure of sailing, how much he loved being on the water, and he talked about Hearn. They’d gone down there together the last time and that had been a mistake. This time Hearn would manage things at home, make sure they landed the cargo without any difficulty.

  He said that Hearn had been his friend all his life practically and he loved him. He said he had never told anybody that before, not even Hearn.

  Slaney started to tell her about Jennifer but she held up her hand for him to stop and turned her head to the side and shut her eyes as if she were walking into a strong wind and so he didn’t say any more on that subject.

  He told her, instead, about the pot they’d brought back and how he ended up in jail. And she nodded as if she could see it. As if she had been along for the ride.

  I never hurt a soul, he said.

  I can believe that, she said. He wanted to tell her all about the new trip. He didn’t see how he could have sex with her if he didn’t trust her. And he found, all at once, that he trusted her completely. Either he trusted her, or he had come to the understanding that he might be able to have sex with her whether he trusted her or not. He thought it was worth a try.

  They were cold sober and loaded out of their minds and before he could tell her anything she brought out a game of checkers. Every syllable they said to each other was clipped and careful. They were each enunciating with the precision of a speaker new to the language.

  There was the final click-click-click as she jumped him, wiping him off the board, and then the room was knocked sideways. They were o
ssified. The girl was all over him.

  She was kissing him on his face and eyelids and hair and every kiss lasted. She opened his shirt and circled her tongue over his nipples, first one, then the other, and the light was still on.

  They were lit up, Slaney thought. Her mouth was cold from the ice she had chewed. It felt like her tongue had been dipped in fluorescent light. He had that impression. He heard her hand slap the wall behind him and then the heavy click of the light switch and it was black in the kitchen and his eyes adjusted and he could see the shapes of the counter and stove and fridge in the moonlight. White enamel shapes, soft-edged, drawing themselves out of the dark.

  She was wearing a checked shirt with pearl snaps and he tugged it apart with one go. He couldn’t get the bra undone fast enough so he lowered the straps and pulled it down to her waist and her elbows were pinned to her sides by the sleeves of the blouse and by whatever way the bra straps were tangled. She had to work her elbows out of it, and she looked like a bird breaking out of an egg, shaking out a wing. He kissed her breasts and sucked her nipples and she climbed off him and stood swaying, trying to take him in. She closed her eyes, as if she could scrutinize him better if she were blind, and touched her fingers to her forehead.

  The girl was deciding about him. The bra and shirt hung around her waist and she had beautiful breasts and he felt like he couldn’t believe his luck.

  She held out a finger and he hooked her finger with his and she tugged him up out of the chair and down the dark hallway. They tried very hard not to bang into the walls, but the walls were banging into them.

  She swept a pile of laundry off the bed and sat down on the edge and he had her jeans undone but she tried to wriggle out of them without taking off her platform sandals and her foot was stuck and she struggled and kicked and he got down on his knees between her legs and tugged them off and then he was on her, kissing and licking. She had her hands wrapped around his head, holding him there.

  She made sounds like a bird call, a loon or a pigeon, shivered and throaty.

  Though he was very drunk there was a blundering elegance to every move he made with her, and he took his time and when he closed his eyes the room turned like a carousel and he held her by the hips so he would not fall out of the room and down into forever.

  He woke to bright sunlight with the girl at the foot of the bed in a supermarket uniform of brown and white polyester. She wanted him to leave through the bedroom window, she told him. What she didn’t want was the next-door neighbour flapping her gums. She said she’d meet him after work at Mel’s snack bar near the beach and drive him to the highway.

  You can hide out in the woods until then, she said.

  Slaney was sitting at a picnic table on the edge of the crowded parking lot belonging to a snack bar and convenience store, in the early evening, when the girl showed up. He’d bought himself a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap and put them on and felt conspicuous in them and took them off again. He knew he should be on the move but he figured it was safer to wait for the girl and get a ride as far as he could with her.

  Every few minutes a woman would stick her head out of the snack bar window and bawl a name and someone would get out of one of the cars and pick up his order. Finally, Slaney saw the Buick pull onto the dirt lot, waves of roiling dust curling up behind it.

  The girl was still wearing a hairnet and she had on a brown polyester apron that looped around her neck and tied at the waist.

  He’d ordered them a large fish and chips to share and the woman stuck her head out the snack bar window and she yelled for him and he got up and paid her and brought the plate back to the table.

  The girl said she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want any but she was picking out a french fry and dipping it in ketchup even as she said it.

  She talked on in one long, breathy rush as if she didn’t want him to leave and she could keep him there if she didn’t stop talking.

  Sometimes she pointed a french fry at him, stabbing the air to make a point.

  She told him that her parents had died in a Ski-Doo accident. They had gone through the ice and when they were pulled out of the water they were frozen together, her mother’s arms around her father’s waist.

  You saw that? Slaney asked.

  I heard, she said. People drunk said the story while I was in earshot. I was eleven. People don’t care what they say in front of a youngster. As she spoke she reached up with both hands and removed pins from the net in her hair.

  She said her grandfather was all she had in the world besides the two dogs. Eventually, when her Pops died, she would move to Toronto and make a lot of money.

  You better believe I will, she said. She took off the hairnet and set it on the picnic table and it glistened like a spiderweb and she shook her hair free.

  She was starting off in a supermarket chain, but there were skills she was picking up that could apply elsewhere.

  Management is management, she said. Basically you tell other people what to do. I’m good at it.

  She took up his cup of soda and rattled the ice around and sucked on the straw and made a loud noise.

  Then the woman in the snack bar called out for him and he went up for the chocolate sundae.

  A crow dropped down from the branches and cocked its head. It eyed a maraschino cherry somebody had tossed on the ground. The bird was blinking, stern and quick. The glazed cherry was an unnatural red. The bird snatched it up and flew into the trees.

  They drove for a while and held hands in her car before he got out and they said goodbye. The girl’s blue eyes went a brilliant aquamarine and there was a limpid film over them and her crying had little hiccups in it.

  Powder Blue

  There’s just the two of us, the woman serving at the snack bar window told Patterson. She said her name was Luanne Johnson.

  Eleanor’s in the back all the time and didn’t see anything.

  I can hear what’s going on, though, Eleanor called out from the back. Luanne closed her eyes for a moment while Eleanor’s piping voice swept through her.

  She thinks she can hear, Luanne said. She can’t hear a bloody thing.

  I can hear, Eleanor called back.

  So it’s the two of you, Patterson said.

  Just us two. We had quite a rush this afternoon, didn’t we, Eleanor? I’m just telling the officer we were busy. She can’t hear over the deep fryers.

  It was very busy, Eleanor said.

  You’re sure it was the man in the paper? Patterson asked. He held the folded newspaper up so she could see Slaney’s picture.

  He’s the one. He was over at that picnic table with a young lady. Had an order of fish and chips and a sundae. Gave me his name, Dave, so I could call out when the food was ready.

  So you took his order, Patterson said.

  And I called out over the lot when it was ready, she said.

  What about his appearance? Patterson said. The woman said that he had been wearing a powder blue shirt and a pair of jeans.

  A child came up beside Patterson and asked for a custard cone. The boy was wrapped in a sand-caked towel and his lips were blue. He was shivering and Patterson could hear his teeth.

  The woman took a cone down from a dispenser attached to the wall and flicked a handle on the custard machine but kept on talking over the noise with her head turned to the side. The machine shuddered and growled. A thick column of ice cream spewed out and the woman lifted the handle and the machine clanked and she turned with the cone. She gave it to the boy through the window and took his change.

  He was a good-looking young fellow, she said. Dark hair, and the eyes on him, blue like the shirt. The shirt brought out the colour. I would say handsome, definitely. He looked like that picture in the paper you got there. Few freckles.

  What would you say was his height, Patterson asked.

  He was tall.
He rested his elbow on this window ledge here giving his order, and he had to hunch over, crick his neck to the side. He had a sense of humour.

  What did he say funny?

  Oh, I don’t remember exactly, she said. And she smoothed her hair with both hands.

  He gave me a compliment about this funny old paper hat I have on.

  He was bent over talking to you at this window, Patterson said.

  He took his order over to the table, they sat in the shade, a young lady was with him, like I said, drove a maroon Buick, and after a time he came back up and got his sundae, which he asked for two spoons.

  How long ago?

  You just missed him.

  Did you happen to see which way they were going? Patterson asked.

  They were at that picnic table, next thing they were gone. I’d say — what, Eleanor? Twenty minutes? Half hour? It looked like they might be heading up toward Quebec.

  Thank you for your help, ma’am.

  That’s all I can tell you, Officer.

  Patterson thanked her again and used the pay phone in the convenience store to call in the Buick. Then they sent out the three ghost cars and Patterson went back to his hotel to wait.

  The late show that night was How to Marry a Millionaire. Patterson laughed when Marilyn Monroe took off her glasses at her vanity table and walked right into the wall and bounced back and without delay tried again for the door.

  He had a shower and came out into the bedroom with a white towel wrapped around his waist. He ran his fingers over the muscles in his arms and chest. He’d lost another pound.

  The phone startled him when it rang. Sergeant Farrell, with the New Brunswick detachment, said they’d located Slaney. One of the ghost cars had picked him up hitchhiking and offered him a ride to Montreal.