Beach Strip (16 page)

“With a lot of influence.” Mel looked away, then down at his watch and frowned. “They said they couldn’t find him, this guy who showed up at your door? That’s what they said?”

“You’re saying they did.”

“Figure it out for yourself. I have to go.” He started his car.

“I’ll walk back,” I said, opening the car door. “I think better when I’m walking.”

He drove away and I headed for the beach strip, trying to put everything together in my mind, especially the idea that Walter Freeman might have killed Gabe and made it look like a suicide because Gabe learned something that the internal affairs crew suspected. Kill a man and make it look like a suicide? That was something a guy like Walter Freeman could do. But was he capable of it? How damned corrupt could the police be?

I worked out all the pieces and tried putting them together. I couldn’t. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men …

The only thing that could work, that might work, would be for Mel and I to keep working things out together. Perhaps I could find things that Mel didn’t know. And Mel, I knew, would work with me because … well, because, damn it, we shared the same memories from the last few weeks, and his weren’t weakened by guilt.

W
hat do men dream about? An endless supply of insatiable women? An endless supply of money and liquor to attract insatiable women?

Did my father have those dreams? Maybe, once. Maybe he fantasized about women or money or a cabin on a quiet lake somewhere, but those weren’t his dreams. The difference between dreams and fantasies is that dreams attract us and fantasies disturb us. Everyone wants their dreams to come true. Most of us are not so sure about realizing our fantasies.

My father had only one dream I knew about, and he died trying to make it true. I had a fantasy, and maybe Gabe died in part because I made it a reality.

My father’s dream was simple and attainable: he wanted to pay the mortgage on our house before he turned fifty and live the rest of his life working for pleasure instead of working for the bank. He was a victim of limited ambition. Instead of wanting to own his home free and clear, he should have aimed higher. Not president of the steel company. Too high. Maybe something in the executive suite. Plant manager. Head of blast furnaces and washrooms. Or flying to the moon. That’s a reasonable dream, isn’t it? Why not dream of flying to the moon? You could die in bed knowing you had tried to be an astronaut or an executive or a song and dance man, like Gabe wanted to be. You could swing back and forth between dream and fantasy, imagining how you might achieve your dream and fantasizing about what it would be like.

My father’s dream was to burn the mortgage on our house while he was still young enough to enjoy the freedom from payments. Then he would quit working at the steel company and do other things. Perhaps make furniture for disabled people. He liked that idea. He had drawn plans for chairs that were easy for disabled people to rise from, and tables with adjustable sides to accommodate people with wheelchairs. Or maybe he would buy a fishing camp on some remote lake up north. He liked that best of all. He described it to me once, how it would feel to wake up every morning to the sound of wind through pines and fall asleep every night while loons sang across calm water. My father was a dreamer. Some days I honestly believe the world needs more dreamers and fewer doers.

To realize his dream, my father worked double shifts whenever they were offered, or filled in for other men whose jobs were below his abilities. Like directing trains that carried steel and coal and whatever else was needed within the sprawling steel company. Just so he could make his simple dream come true for him and for us.

My father died before he could realize his dream or any of his fantasies. He did not die in bed imagining them. He died watching the back end of a train move toward him while he screamed for it to stop because he couldn’t move out of the way. He had been walking backwards, leading the locomotive to a string of railway cars loaded with steel coils, and he walked back into an automatic railroad switch just as it closed on his boot and held him like a mouse in a trap, on the side of the tracks where the engineer couldn’t see him unless he looked into his rear-view mirror or turned around, but he didn’t, and oh god,
Oh God!
, it has always been too horrible for me to imagine, and yet I do from time to time.

Some men who worked with my father ran toward the locomotive, waving their arms and screaming for the engineer to stop,
while my father waved his arms and tried to pull his foot away from the rails that held him, but the engineer was looking the other way or down at the floor or up his own ass, I don’t know. He stopped the locomotive six feet too late, with my father’s body, or what was left of it, jammed under the wheels of a railroad car. My father suffered a lifetime of horror in the ten seconds between the moment the steel rails clamped on to his boot and the instant that the rear of the locomotive sent him backwards and cleaved his body. That’s how the coroner described it. “It cleaved his body.” Cleaver. Noun. A steel chopping instrument used to break apart carcasses.

The doctors said Mother’s stroke had nothing to do with imagining my father’s terror through the last seconds of his life when he knew what was going to happen and how, because my father’s death had occurred so many years earlier. I say my mother held back for years that knife-edge hemorrhage that prevents her from speaking, purely with the force of her will, and when she grew too old and too weary to keep holding it back, it sliced an artery in her brain like a microscopic cleaver.

Do we need a new definition of irony? Here’s one: my father screamed until his throat bled, and my mother cannot make a sound louder than a sigh. God needs a new comedy writer.

THE BEACH STRIP IS UNIQUE IN MANY WAYS,
and one is the strange way the weather unfurls here. The silly weather boy on the local TV evening news called it a microclimate. A beach strip microclimate. Temperatures, wind, sky, all of it can be the same for miles around, and utterly different along the beach strip. The climate here is like one of those tulips you plant in the fall that are all supposed to be red, and a stupid white one shows up in the middle of the flower bed when spring arrives. Weather on the beach strip is the tulip nobody expects.

It had been cool and blustery beneath the highway bridges over the canal, but on the beach strip it was warm and benign. Walkers, skaters, and joggers herded themselves along the boardwalk like shoppers in search of bargains, which is what they were. This late in the year, every warm day is a clear-out, an end-of-season event. Get it while it’s hot and cheap.

While walking back to my house, I thought about my father and how horribly he had died nearly thirty years earlier. I entered the garden from the boardwalk on the beach strip. The garden shed door looked secure, the impatiens blooms were orgiastic, the grasses in the sand along the fenceline were harvest brown and no longer reaching for the sun. Everything had that melancholy feeling you recognize as a schoolkid when you realize summer vacation is over, and the feeling remains with us as adults.

At the wire fence separating the Blairs’ house from the laneway, Jock Blair stood puffing on his pipe, his head a mobile jack-o’-lantern, round and pink above a plaid shirt and dung-coloured trousers held up by red suspenders. His face bloomed into extra creases with his smile, and when he saw me he ducked his head and said, “Good day, good day,” repeating it like a shorebird’s call.

I smiled back, raising his blush level higher, just as Maude Blair rose from behind a large plastic garbage pail into which she had been dropping cuttings from a dogwood bush. She waved and began tottering toward me on hockey stick legs that ended in canvas sneakers, holding one arm up and calling, “Josephine! Josephine!” in a burr that always brought me visions of wool tartans.

Brushing her husband aside, she reached to grip my sleeve and pull me away from the boardwalk, looking around as though searching for something lost. “There’s a man been in your garden,” she hissed. “Jock saw him, didn’t he?”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He’d a bushy beard, dressed like a poor soul come outta the
gutter, Jock tells me. And wild-eyed. Frightened the jeepers out of Jock, he did. He’s gone now. Jock said he watched him leave, tottering like a Glasgow drunk toward the canal. You didn’t see him, did you?”

I told her no, I had not seen anyone like that. I knew who she meant, of course.

She leaned closer to my ear. “Jock, he’s worried about you, lass. I can tell. All the tragedy you’ve been through, and Jock and me, we don’t want anything bad happening to you now.”

I wanted to wrap her in a hug for her concern, but I didn’t. I simply thanked her and smiled over her shoulder at Jock, who remained at the fence, his face glowing in deeper shades of crimson like a setting sun.

“Will you be needing more marmalade?” Maude called out as I began walking along the boardwalk again. “I’ll send some over with Jock.”

I didn’t need the marmalade, and I didn’t want to enter the house yet. I thanked her and joined the other people in the sun, hearing Maude’s voice, her nagging softened by the highland burr, telling Jock he should put the cover back on the rose spray, asking, “An’ were ye born in a barn? Because ye never close anythin’, never.” I smiled at the things that both bond and destroy marriages, the imperfectness that challenges romantic illusions. It reminded me of Gabe and me. It reminded me that neither of us achieved the perfection in reality that dominated our image of each other. If I was imperfect enough to cheat on Gabe, could he be imperfect enough to kill me for it? And himself as well? Did the alcohol in his blood confuse him so much that he decided to do himself first when I was late arriving?

I had been having these thoughts, and variations on them, since Gabe’s death. They invaded my mind like musical ear-worms, those old songs you don’t even like that keep playing in an endless loop within your mind. Thoughts about what might
have happened that night had become my own personal earworm. I would have preferred something by Captain & Tennille.

THE BOARDWALK WAS FILLED WITH JUST ENOUGH PEOPLE
to make me feel secure, and the sun’s last rays actually appeared to grow warmer as the day began dying. I walked toward Tuffy’s, past the house with the helicopter on the front porch and past Hans and Trudy’s castle.

The bodies moving ahead of me were a chaos of speed and rhythm, earthbound gliders on in-line skates and stuttering strollers with canes, and amid them I saw the bird’s-nest hair of the silently screaming woman. She crossed the boardwalk on a path leading from the lake back to Beach Boulevard, vanishing between stands of high grass on the shore. I stepped toward the beach through the nearest break in the grass onto a section of the shoreline that had rocky outcroppings, a thin strand unattractive to bathers. A man ahead of me was tossing a stick into the water for his Labrador to retrieve, over and over. Three stubborn pines, their limbs twisted like the arms of spastic dancers, marked the edge of the grass line. I stood among them, waiting for her.

She emerged from the grass, head down, arms folded within a pink cotton cardigan over straight and bony shoulders that appeared like the last rung of a short ladder, legs clad in plaid slacks. She walked with her eyes fastened three steps ahead of her, measuring her world that way, and approached the pines. When she was a step away, I spoke aloud to her. “Hello.”

She stopped in front of me, startled but not prepared to flee, as I had expected she might. Instead, she stood frowning as though I had delivered a mild insult, and I realized she was trying to place me, trying to identify me.

“Are you Mrs. Dalgetty?” I asked.

She nodded dumbly. I saw ancient beauty amid the lines of
her face and around a mouth shaped like an inverted crescent. She could not have been more than a few years older than me, but the currency of those years had been spent differently. In that moment, I thought of my own concerns about aging, of how reluctant I was to let go of those parts of myself that I had treasured when I was young, to leave them for the passage of time to raze and finally level. First we ripen, then we rot. Mrs. Dalgetty was outpacing me in the rotting stage.

“You live over the upholstery shop.”

She nodded again, and her mouth actually formed a semblance of a smile. Someone knew who she was. Someone could confirm she existed. “That’s me,” she said.

I offered a hand. “My name is Josie Marshall,” I said.

She pulled away as though ducking a blow, and I reached to grab her arm.

“Why do you stand behind my house and stare at it?” I asked.

She shook her head, and I realized she was unafraid of me, but she continued to look around, confirming that no one was eavesdropping.

“Talk to me, please. My husband is dead, and …” My mouth tasted like sand and I had to start over. “I’m sure someone killed him. I just wondered if you could help me. Can you help me? Because the police say he committed suicide, and I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that.”

Her head kept moving as she spoke, twisting from side to side, looking up and across the strand in a motion that I thought at first was spastic, then realized was driven by fear. “He killed Dougal,” she said. “He killed him, Dougal, my husband.”

“No,” I said. “Gabe did not kill anyone. Not your husband, not himself. Gabe would never do that.”

“That’s what I heard,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”

“Who? Who told you that?”

She pulled away, dismissing me with a wave of her hand.

“Tell me about this man they call Grizz.”

She looked back at me, then at the sand near her feet. “Who?”

“Grizz. Your husband worked for him. Is he one of Mike Pilato’s men? Where is he? Where can I find him?”

She looked directly at me for the first time. “I never heard of no Grizz,” she said. “Don’t go sayin’ that I know anybody named Grizz, ‘cause I don’t, you hear me?”

“Someone keeps looking for him, at my house,” I said. “The police can’t find him. Have they asked you? Have they talked to you about this person?”

She shook her head, turned, and walked quickly away, with her arms folded across her chest and her head down.