Beach Strip (3 page)

I
don’t know how long it took the officer to drive me to the morgue, or the route he took to get there, or even what he looked like. I just made myself as small as possible against the corner of the back seat of the cruiser and kept my eyes closed, wishing at times that someone was with me and wishing at other times that I would see no one for days.

The car pulled to a stop and the officer driving it said, “We’re here.” Through the windshield I saw a small, frosted door with
morgue
stencilled across the glass, and I followed the cop inside.

We entered a room that looked like the reception area of my dentist’s office. Clean, antiseptic and grey. Chrome and vinyl chairs. Dated magazines spread across a low table. I steadied myself against a wall while the officer disappeared through a metal door and emerged a few minutes later with a woman dressed in a green top and trousers who said I should wait for a few minutes and that she could bring me coffee or water. I think I said, “Just bring me my husband,” and sat alone on one of the vinyl chairs.

I waited ten minutes. I know because I looked at a clock on the wall and was surprised to find it was three minutes after midnight. At thirteen minutes after midnight the woman returned and asked me to follow her, please, and I did, down a corridor and into a room that was all stainless steel, like the inside of a dishwasher, and there was Gabe, on a stainless steel table. Someone had laid a white towel across his groin. Another towel covered
his head above his eyebrows, where the wound would show. His hands were wrapped in plastic bags. A man in a white coat stood with his back to me, preparing something on a counter, and the woman in green took my arm and held it, and I think she said she was sorry as we walked to the table.

I took Gabe’s arm in my hands, and it was my turn to say I was sorry, over and over again, telling Gabe while the woman stood at my elbow watching and the man in the white coat fussed over his instruments, his tools of dissection.

I have no idea how long I stood speaking to Gabe. I know I looked up to see the man in the white coat, an older, sweet-faced man who looked as though he mourned for every person he encountered on the slabs, watching me over the top of his glasses. I saw him flick his eyes from mine to the woman beside me and felt a slight tug on my arm. It was time to go. I pulled away from her long enough to lean over Gabe and kiss him lightly on the lips, whispered goodbye, and walked away.

The officer who had driven me to the morgue was waiting in the reception area, talking with Mel Holiday, and as I emerged from the morgue the two men separated. Mel asked me to sit down, took a chair beside me, and asked if he could get me anything. All I could do was stare at the floor and shake my head.

“Walter wants to get things started,” Mel said, “do the tests as soon as possible, get the autopsy results, get a report issued, and wrap everything up.” When I said nothing, he added as though I had asked why there was such a rush, “When this happens to an officer, people speculate, they talk, the media makes it a big deal, you know that. The longer it takes to settle things, to get the official word out, the more they talk.”

I remained silent.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked, bending to look at me.

“No,” I said. “I’m not okay. But I will be eventually. I hope.”

“You shouldn’t be alone tonight,” he said. “Who can you stay with?”

I shook my head. Wherever I was, I would not sleep.

“The woman who was talking to you, she and her husband,” Mel said. “Your neighbours, next door. They say you can stay with them, or the woman, she’ll come in and stay with you. It’s late, but we could call her. She’s waiting for us to call her.”

“The Blairs. Tell them no. Tell them thanks, but no.”

“You can’t stay alone. I can have a female officer sent over.”

I had been the emotionally crippled victim long enough. I no longer felt emotionally crippled. I began to feel anger at what had been done to Gabe, what had been done to me, what had been done to us. “Lovely,” I said to Mel. “We’ll sit and do embroidery together.”

“Damn it, Josie!” Mel snapped. He looked around. The uniformed officer had left to wait for me in the police cruiser, and the woman in green had returned to be with Gabe and the sweet old man with the knives and saws. “Gabe’s dead. I’ll miss him too. We worked together nearly a year. You know how close we were. And all you can do is come up with smart-ass comments?”

“No!” I shouted loud enough for anyone to hear. “No, I can’t keep playing the broken-hearted widow, because I don’t know how, Mel. Do you have something that will tell me how to behave? Is it in the police procedures manual? Do I dress in black and wear prayer beads? The hell I will. Take all your compassion and crap about sending female cops to sit with the grieving wife and shove it. I don’t need them. I need Gabe.”

I sat with my head in my hands and felt my rage dissolve. I heard Mel walk outside and speak to someone. When he returned, he stood in the middle of the room and said, “There will be two officers at your house all night, keeping things secure.”

I looked up to see him standing with his hands in his pockets, his eyes avoiding mine.

“We’ll have more forensics people there in the morning, when the light’s better,” he added. “If you need something, just ask the officers.”

“Tell them to stay outside,” I said. “Tell them I don’t want them knocking on my door, checking up on me or wanting to use the john.”

“The constable outside will take you home. You should stay with somebody tonight, but it’s your choice. I’ll be back at my place in a couple of hours.” Mel walked to the door and stood with his hand on the knob. “Call, just to talk or whatever, all right?”

“Mel?”

He looked back.

“Why did Walter Freeman want to know if Gabe had bought me any expensive gifts recently?”

Mel looked puzzled. “He asked you that?”

“Yes.”

“He must have something on his mind. I’ll find out.” Mel glanced out the window in the back door, then walked toward me. “Did he, Josie?”

“Did he what?”

“Buy you something expensive lately? Between you and me, so that when Walter explains why he asked you …”

I shook my head.

“Okay.” Mel told me to call whenever I wanted. He did not tell me his telephone number. He didn’t need to.

THE OFFICER DROVE ME HOME
in the same silence as before. A handful of police and forensics people milled about the caragana bushes under intense lights. I permitted the constable to walk me to the door, thanked him, and entered the house, where I sat alone in the darkness, on a living-room chair, facing the window that looked west, away from the lake and toward the bay.

I watched the sky to the west, above the steel companies along the shore of the bay, begin to glow with the colour of peaches that changed to a redness like roses or perhaps of blood, and I began to relax at the sight, familiar from my childhood.

Those explosions of light had appeared in the night sky above my parents’ house, the one my father would pay for with his life, when I was a child. Their radiance would flood the room I shared with my sister, making the walls blush with a strange, roiling redness. I had no word for that colour, but I thought it might be the same shade of red as blood on the floor of an abattoir.

My grandfather had worked in an abattoir. For thirty-three years, five days a week, he slit the throats of cattle and hogs, calves and lambs and suckling pigs, sometimes a hundred or more each day. What does that do to a person? What does it say about his view of life. Or, more important, of death?

My grandfather did not die in the manner that the animals died. He died asleep on New Year’s Eve. In his own bed, totally sober. On the morning of the first day of 1967, my grandmother awoke and my grandfather didn’t. There was no slitting of throats, no rope of red blood shooting from the carotid arteries, no gasping realization. Just a dream that ended with his death.

Dad showed me his father’s killing knife, which represented most of my father’s inheritance. I remember the scimitar blade, worn with years of honing and stained with blood, like rust. It was all I knew of my grandfather, that knife and the job he held for all those years. Did he not want another job? Was he not qualified to do something besides killing? This bothers me. It did not bother my father, my mother, or my sister. But it bothers me, and I will never know the answer.

When I see the glow blossoming into the night sky from my house on the beach strip, the sight is comforting in the way that snapshots of old friends and lovers can be comforting. The friends have changed with time, and so has the light. It appears less frequently
now, and is weaker. Like the people in the snapshots.

My father told me the red light in the sky was caused by molten slag pouring from the blast furnaces of the steel companies along the shore of the bay. Slag, he explained, was liquid stone as hot as the sun. The glow of the molten rock reflected off clouds of steam billowing from the coke ovens nearby. “Hot as lava, the slag is,” he said, “pouring from the blast furnaces like water when you open the tap in the bathtub. Melted limestone and other stuff they don’t want in the steel, all running into pits where it cools. And right next door are the coke ovens, where coal is heated to a thousand, two thousand degrees in sealed ovens, and it turns into coke. That’s what they use to fire the blast furnaces. Sometimes they open the coke ovens at the same time as they tap the slag, and they spray the hot coke with water … see, there it goes now.”

It was a cold day, and I was ten years old, I suppose. Not much older, because my father died on my twelfth birthday. As he spoke, a white cloud ascended into a faded blue sky to the north of our house, along the shore of the bay.

“They spray water on the hot coke so that it won’t burn up when it hits the air, y’see.” He was pointing at a rising white cloud that seemed to be powered from within, rolling as it climbed into the air. “That’s what makes the steam, the water they spray on the coke. That cloud’ll go up maybe a thousand, two thousand feet, and when it gets high like that at night, and they tap the slag in the blast furnace at the same time, it’s the firelight from the hot slag that bounces off the cloud and lights up this whole end of town.” He nodded his head and placed a cigarette in his mouth, watching the cloud of steam. “That’s what wakes you up at night sometimes. That’s the light that shines through your window, all right?” He looked down at me, patting his pockets, searching for his lighter. “All right? So there’s no reason to be scared when you see that light.”

He was wrong. The light never frightened me. It frightened my
sister, Tina, but merely annoyed me because it reminded me of where we lived, amid the soot and the noise of the furnaces and mills that made the steel for the factories that were our neighbours. The crimson colour that shone in the night sky fascinated me because when he was a boy my father had visited the killing floor where my grandfather worked each day, standing ankle-deep in blood and water. My father had seen the liquid floor and described it to me, saying it was red, but not as red as blood itself because so much else was mixed with it from the animals that hung by their hind legs and writhed while dying. The image of the writhing, dying animals frightened me. My grandfather’s killing knife frightened me too. But not the hellish glow in the night sky above our house.

Few things frighten me today.

Which is not to say I am brave.

So maybe I’m a coward.

Men fear being labelled cowards in the same way they fear growing impotent, and I suppose Sigmund Freud would say “Precisely!” as though it should be obvious. It has never been obvious to me.

Women escape that particular silliness. Call me a redhead or call me a coward, what does it matter? So it is not difficult for me to use the word, and I felt no shame at my cowardice.

I had not wanted to meet Gabe on the blanket within the shrubs, the ones growing between the water’s edge and the boardwalk behind our home, because I feared what I had promised myself I would do that evening.

I had promised I would confess to Gabe that I had made love to Mel Holiday. That I could count the times and identify the locations and describe the positions, if that was what he wished to hear. That I had been more than foolish, I had been stupid and selfish. That I was sorry, more sorry than I could ever explain. That I promised I would never do it again because I loved Gabe
and I would always love him, and I had never stopped loving him. That I wanted to tell him because I could no longer stand the guilt I felt each time we made love, or the fear I felt when Gabe looked at me in a certain way, as though he suspected the truth. I had told myself to deny, deny, deny if he asked, but every denial, I knew, would be another betrayal. Lately, every day that passed without telling him felt like a betrayal.

The truth is, I was still being selfish. I couldn’t stand the pain of guilt anymore, so I would pass it on to Gabe by confessing.

I would never have said it in that manner, in those words. I would have confessed through tears. I would also have confirmed suspicions that I feared Gabe already harboured. He had wanted, I knew, to dissolve those suspicions in the adolescent act of making love in the summer night air, smothering our giggles to avoid alerting passersby, drinking wine, and watching the moonlight and our hands pass over each other’s skin.

Would I have told him as soon as I arrived, there among the shrubs, me in my pants and T-shirt and him naked? It was unthinkable; it would have been unbearable. I wanted him dressed and sitting with me in our living room. I wanted him to see my face and understand how sorry I was, and how much I needed his forgiveness. I wanted to tell him that I would understand if he left me, but I did not want him to leave me. I never wanted him to leave me. So I had delayed returning, hoping he would decide I wasn’t coming to meet him on the blanket and he would wrap himself within it and return to the house and get dressed, and I would arrive home to tell him.

I believed Gabe would forgive me, and I had almost looked forward to the anger, the tears, the shouts, and the cleansing of confession.