Caught (3 page)

The door was held open a crack with a stone and it was very dark inside and stank of beer and cigarettes. Someone had been smoking weed. There was a yellow cone of light over the pool table at the far end of the room.

The bartender was a scrawny woman with long silver braids tied at the ends with red glass bobbles. Her skin was tanned dark and her eyes were pale blue. She wore bibbed overalls and had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the cuff of her white T-shirt. Two pairs of eyeglasses hung from chains around her neck. She was emptying ashtrays from the night before.

If you’re here for the dart tournament it was yesterday, she said.

Harold sent me, Slaney said. He said maybe there was a room I could crash.

Harold say anything about child support for his three youngsters by two different mothers? the woman asked.

He never mentioned, Slaney said. She reached under the bar and shoved some things around on a shelf and came back up with a key on a wooden fob. She sent it sliding down the bar toward him.

You got the room on the end, top of the stairs, left-hand side, she said. Someone called out to her from the back, asking about a delivery of potatoes.

The potatoes, she said to Slaney. Do I look like I give a good goddamn about the potatoes?

The upstairs hall was lit mostly by a red Exit sign over a back door. Slaney’s room turned out to be a whole apartment with a fire escape that went down the back of the building and there was a little hibachi out there and a dried-up geranium in a cracked terra-cotta pot.

Slaney found some hot dog wieners in the mini-fridge of the kitchenette.

A small white Styrofoam bowl sat next to the wieners with the word
small
written on the side in blue marker. There were some packets of ketchup and mustard and relish in the bowl.

Liquid dripped out of the foil package onto Slaney’s hand and he smelled the hot dogs and licked his fingers. The flesh tone of the wieners seemed off, and the best-before date was a week gone. He pulled a cord over the sink and a fluorescent tube hummed and flickered and came on. There were a hundred dead houseflies on the windowsill, but the hot dogs looked fine under the light.

Slaney took the wieners and the bowl of condiments out onto the fire escape. He tipped out the lumps of coal and a cloud of glittery black dust puffed up.

He squirted starter fluid onto the coals and let it soak in. Then he squirted some over his hands to get the sap off them from beating his way through the bushes the night before though it felt like one continuous night without definition or metre. His fingers were still sticking together.

Slaney went into the kitchen and used the Sunlight soap and turned the tap and put his hands under and then he tore off a few squares of paper towel and dried them. He hadn’t had access to white paper towel in four years. This stuff must have been the best grade going. Double-ply or Fluffy or Satin Finish, he didn’t know what. He saw there were things he had allowed himself to get used to, and he planned to get unused to them.

Slaney went into the bedroom and pulled back the quilted polyester bedspread. He’d seen the pattern of the spread somewhere before, mauve roses, but he couldn’t think where. The sheets beneath had been worn through in patches but smelled of fresh air.

He lay down and the world was snuffed out, a dreamless, suffocating sleep that turned out to be more exhausting than restful.

When he woke, hours later, it was as if he hadn’t slept at all. The evening sun shone through the tear-shaped windows in the door to the fire escape and left three orange drops of light on the tiles. The door was weather swollen and he had to tug it hard. It made a loud screech. The sun was setting, a boiling red. The sky was streaked pink and the white sheets on the old lady’s line were amber-tinged.

The flanks of the white horse were golden pink and Slaney was crying because even if he didn’t make it very far, even if they caught him tonight, this was worth it. The horse was worth it.

He was plagued by a premonition of being caught. As if his capture belonged to him, a responsibility he’d been born into, like a title or a crown.

Someone had mowed the grass and there was the smell of cut grass and gasoline from the lawn mower and mint hanging in the warm air. There must have been a patch of mint that got under the mower and this was worth it.

He thought of himself running through the woods and only then did he acknowledge how afraid he had been, of the dogs and the cops and going back to jail.

Slaney had lost four years to the deepest kind of solitude and sorrow and boredom. Of those three torments boredom was the worst. Four years had been taken from him and he would not get them back and he could hardly draw breath seeing what he had been missing.

He wanted a phone. He couldn’t call anybody yet, but he wanted a phone. Slaney wanted to call Jennifer is what he wanted.

Slaney wanted to touch her. See her face. He couldn’t believe how much he wanted that. He wanted her to rest her chin on his knuckle. Smooth his thumb over her cheek. Kiss her eyelids, her mouth.

He had wanted her all the while he was in jail but being on the fire escape with the sun and the horse — someone smashed a bottle downstairs — Slaney wanted her more. The meadows stretching as far as the eye could see cranked his senses open. All of who he was dilated. It hurt. He’d been so afraid that prison had stolen this for good, but it was coming back.

He gave himself a shake and horked over the railing. Then he hunched down near the barbecue and had to bounce a bit on the balls of his feet to unwedge the matches from the pocket of the tight new jeans and he struck a match and dropped it on the hibachi and the fire leapt up in tatters and lay flat and filmed over the coals, blue and green.

The flames pattered over each black glittery lump. He went back inside and turned the TV on with the sound down and dropped into the armchair and put his feet up on the humpty.

It was an old leather humpty with a pattern of embossed elephants parading around the side, each elephant holding the tail of the elephant before it in its trunk, a foreleg raised in anticipation of the next step. The stitching had given way and beneath the leather was a burlap sack and that had a tear in the side and golden sawdust spilled out onto the tiles, disembowelling one of the elephants.

Slaney slept in the chair and woke to a hard knocking on the door.

He leapt up and stood with his heart galloping in his chest. He had no idea where he was; the room had different dimensions than his cell. It was gaping and shapeless and gutted in the dark. He could not place the room and then knew exactly where he was. His insides turned to water and cramped and there was a great spilling inside him. A loss of balance and a fear so suffocating and profound he could not move.

Slaney was staring at the floor tiles; there was the tab of a pop can near the toe of his shoe. He looked at it but didn’t see it. He knew he wasn’t seeing it. What he saw was his body flung to the floor, a knee on his back, hands cuffed behind. There was a second round of knocking. Whoever it was kicked the door so it boomed.

He had been caught.

Or he had not been caught.

These were two truths that lived under shells in a shell game that was the filthy, unloved room above the bar where he had given in to sleep. Falling asleep had been a mistake. Sleep had overtaken him even while he was vigilant against the idea of succumbing to it.

Things had transpired while he slept and the roof had blown off his life and he’d missed it. The dormant houseflies on the kitchen windowsill had revived under the fluorescent light and he could hear them buzzing. Or the fluorescent light over the sink was buzzing. A low-watt buzz had begun in his sleep and infiltrated his dreams and now it was the roar of a chainsaw touching down on his skull, ripping through.

Slaney walked to the door soundlessly and touched his hand to it. He listened and heard a foot scuff on the tile outside the door. He had his ear straining toward the tiny sound. The knock came again and it made him jerk nearly out of his skin and then he opened the door.

Celeste and Annette

You got a
barbecue going? the girl asked.

I’m Annette and she’s Celeste, the other girl said. They were the exotic dancers from the bar.

Slaney had fallen asleep to the lewd whoops of the men in the audience downstairs. They’d started a chant that had infiltrated his dream; the clapping and stamping feet had been charging elephants, thunderclouds of dust.

Strippers, Slaney said. Come in.

Annette lifted the wine bottle she had in her hand as a kind of salute, wagging it back and forth by the neck. Then she sidled in past him.

Nice place you got here, she said. She snapped on a light and stood with her hands on her hips, kind of mock nodding as if she could see the decorating possibilities.

The test pattern was on the television. An Indian chief with feathered headgear, his profile of bone and forbearance. There was a bookshelf with miniature figurines of woodland animals, perhaps two hundred of them that had been collected from boxes of Red Rose tea. The figurines sat on the peeling vinyl skin of the pressboard shelf as if they were climbing hills and descending into valleys in a great exodus.

Celeste tilted her head.

That clock is right twice a day, she said. Next to the bookshelf was a sunburst clock with a bronze face and gold roman numerals and long pointy shafts of metal sticking out on all sides like rays of sunshine. It was stopped at three forty-five and below it was a hole in the wall the size of a fist.

Slaney had the wieners he’d taken from the fridge and the three of them sat out on the fire escape. The flames had died away and the coals were coated in thick pale ash, but they pulsed orange at their core when the breeze lifted. Slaney put his hand over the coals and felt a small wavering heat and put the wieners on, turning them with a plastic fork.

Annette took a joint from her purse and lit it up and they passed it along. Slaney said that he thought being right twice a day was a good average. He made up a theory that there were gradations of accuracy but wrongness was a tolling bell that came out of nowhere. Slaney had thought the girls were the cops and he had touched his hand to the door.

Gradations, Celeste said. She was frowning at the end of the joint. She licked her finger and touched a drop of spittle to the side of the paper.

You can be partway right, Slaney said. But wrong is wrong.

Like with a pregnancy test, Annette said. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.

She means no such thing as a false positive, Celeste said. But you can get a false negative.

This is very good dope, Slaney said. Colombian Gold, right? He was thinking the words
false negative
were achingly beautiful. He wished he could get his mind around them. He thought of his English teacher in grade seven. Miss Benson with her heels and the dress with big flowers and her cleavage and her mouth.

No such thing as a double negative either, he said. And he thought it meant things couldn’t go wrong twice.

Slaney had heard the knocking and he’d thought
caught
but instead they were having a kind of party, Slaney and two beautiful, very stoned, crazy strippers, while overlooking the fields of swishing grass.

I thought you were the cops, Slaney said. But you’re from the other end of the spectrum.

What spectrum, asked Celeste. Slaney had taken the joint from her and he’d held the smoke down in his lungs, letting it billow out as he spoke.

The spectrum that has cops on one end, Slaney said. He moved the orange tip of the joint in a curve through the dark to illustrate how far away they might be from all of that.

You opened the door and there we were, Celeste said. It occurred to him that for a long time, perhaps the rest of his life, a closed door would be a threat. It was why he needed to do the next trip right away, get it over with. He needed the money. He needed a new identity and money to live on. He needed to pay off what happened before.

The big payoff, Slaney said. He’d left the courtroom in shackles, flashbulbs bursting all around him, four years and three days ago. There had been phone calls and visits over those years and this night was part of a larger plan that was coming together on the outside.

Hearn was making things unfold. Slaney and Hearn were partners. The job required Hearn’s imagination and a faith that things would turn out.

The first trip had gone wrong because they had not trusted their intuition. Hearn was a great believer in a private, inborn wisdom. Ever since they were kids, when Hearn needed to make a decision, he would close his eyes and hold up a hand to stop all outside motion and sound, just for a brief moment, so he could listen to his own deepest thoughts.

Slaney stuck a fork into a hot dog that was burnt black on one side and rolled it over. Annette said she didn’t care how burnt it was. She said it looked good enough to eat.

Celeste went into the kitchen and they could hear her opening the drawers and cupboards and slamming them shut.

You got your eyeliner all smudged, Slaney said to Annette. It’s like someone gave you a couple of black eyes.

I was crying before, Annette said. They were leaning with their backs against the clapboard but she turned to him.

Fix it, she said. Slaney licked the side of his thumb and rubbed beneath her eye a couple of times until the smudge was gone. She had an iridescent peacock blue eyeshadow that went up to her eyebrows.

Stupid bastard in the front row, she said. She was glancing upward and her mouth was open and when he was done she blinked several times. Then he did the other eye.

Pretty good there now, he said. Celeste came back with the corkscrew and held the bottle between her knees. The cork made glassy squeaks and it popped and Celeste took a long swig and the bottle glugged and she tipped it back down and wiped the germs off with her hand. She ran the back of her hand across her mouth. Slaney handed around the condiments. They ate the wieners, still cold at the centre, off the plastic forks, looking up at the stars.