Elizabeth and After (36 page)

“You can tell him I’m looking for him already. I’ll look a bit harder.”

“I will. Twenty minutes. Set your watch.” She hung up.

Ned was standing at the door, rigid, as though he was wrapped in some kind of invisible ice. Chrissy put the phone down. “Carl says he’s looking for you already. I think you’ve been pretty foolish, Ned. No matter who your father is, you shouldn’t come around threatening people. Now what you’d better do is go home, talk to your mom and dad, get things worked out and keep it quiet for a while. Do you understand me, Ned?”

“Yes’m.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Ned. Now why don’t you just get going?”

He was still hesitating at the door. His lips were parted and he was starting to pant. The smell of sweat filled the room. For the first time it occurred to Chrissy that she might have pushed too hard.

“I got something in the truck,” Ned said. Chrissy tapped her watch. “Go home, Ned.”

“I know something,” Ned said, “but I’m going to leave. I never wanted to hurt or threaten you. I was just trying to warn you. Next time I won’t do you the favour.”

He swung out the door and slammed it behind him, then started towards his truck.

“You smoking again?”

“I guess so,” Chrissy said. Except for when they were exchanging Lizzie, this was the first time she’d seen him since the dance. He looked good. Less hollow in the cheeks and under the eyes and more solid than when he’d arrived. Better without that moustache, though there was still a small ridged scar from Fred’s ring. “Things going well for you?”

“Not so bad,” Carl said. “It’s good to be seeing Lizzie. Good for both of us.”

“And living here, living here alone, is that good too?”

“It’s better than what I had.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind. I was the one who threw you out, remember? We were like one of those hurting songs. That’s all we could do, hurt each other.”

She wasn’t really looking at him but she caught that little flicker. So. Carl had heard about Fred, too. That’s how she thought about it—something about Freddy. She knew it was going to start getting around after she went to hospital. She truly hadn’t realized her ribs were broken. She just thought he’d given her some kind of heart attack. Fred had sure chosen his time to run for reeve. Even the way everyone hated Luke Richardson.

“What about you and Fred?” They were sitting at Carl’s kitchen table, across from each other. They each had their mug and there was the coffee pot between them. The way they used to sit at home just after they married and before Lizzie was
born. Carl had quit drinking to keep her company and they would spend the evenings across from each other like this, Carl smoking cigarettes and doing crosswords while she knitted all those crazy little pink clothes she’d started on when they were told it was going to be a girl.

“We hurt each other, too,” she finally said. She was looking down at her hands. It was strange how small they still were. Carl’s hands, Fred’s hands, even Ned’s hands were big and meaty with nasty swollen knuckles. Men’s hands. Her own were just her old little girl’s hands, stubby and rough despite the dozens of tubs of skin cream they’d absorbed. “We do it in different ways. Same idea though. But he takes care of me, too. Pays the bills. Always comes home. Doesn’t screw around.”

Pays the bills. Always comes home. Doesn’t screw around
. Three points about which Carl couldn’t have boasted.

“I’ve heard it’s pretty bad.”

“Ned Richardson’s talking it up because Fred won’t give him a job at the lumber yard.”

“Seems to me Fred’s getting a bit carried away.”

“I heard what happened to you.” Now she was looking straight at him. He was so vulnerable still. “I’m really sorry. It was my fault.”

Carl stood up and took the coffee pot to the stove. “All over now. We’re the best of friends. Luke is getting me to take them both hunting after the election, haven’t you heard?”

“Yeah. It made me laugh. I figure you’ll be crawling around trying to shoot each other.” She liked the feeling of his kitchen. Warm and cozy. And it was important for Lizzie to live here part of the time. Not always. Lizzie needed her mother. You just had to know Carl to see what could happen without one.

“So what are you going to do? You going to wait until he kills you?”

“Maybe I still love him. It’s not so bad. He’s not going to kill me. It’s just that he’s always been crazy jealous of you. Because of Lizzie. We tried to have another baby but he can’t. So it’s like you got something he didn’t. Then you came back and you got what he has.”

“You making excuses for him?”

“Maybe for myself.” She was looking at her hands again and her throat was choking up. Couldn’t Carl figure out that if she phoned the police Fred would do something to Lizzie? Did he think she was some kind of saint or punching bag or that her father had pulled her pants down when she was a little girl?

“I don’t like it,” Carl said.

“Neither do I.”

She folded up her cigarettes. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be throwing a tea party this afternoon for all of Fred’s lady canvassers. You wouldn’t believe what you have to go through to get elected reeve these days. And then there’s this television stuff—” She stopped. She couldn’t believe the sound of her own voice, how she was boasting about Fred like a mother boasting about her favourite son.

“Probably going to win,” Carl said. “They’ll put you on a throne or something. You can slip me a fiver for a bowl of soup.” They were both standing up and now, Chrissy thought, it was as though they hardly knew each other. As though she had only been here canvassing for Fred, just another cup of coffee, another vote to mark down on the chart.

She moved towards the door, Carl lagging at a good distance. “We’ll see you later,” he said. Then he winked.

That stopped her. “I never saw you wink before.”

He grinned. “Got a few new tricks.”

They were standing outside now and the gold late-morning light was shining straight into Carl’s face, making the silver hairs in his stubble glitter like bits of foil from a Christmas tree. She stood on her tiptoes, the way she used to, and kissed him, just once, just quickly, just enough to touch the strong coffee taste of his lips.

She saw him at the door watching as she drove away. Maybe she hadn’t told him what he hadn’t already heard but it was the first time she’d said anything at all to anyone. The weird thing was that even right now, even with the taste of Carl’s kiss on her mouth, she didn’t want to leave Fred. She had wanted to hurt him but she didn’t want to leave him. The night with Carl had been—well, it had to happen once.

Driving home she found herself counting campaign signs, the way she always did these days. The truth was, things were changing fast. Fred was gaining; sometimes, if you took the right roads, you’d hardly see a Luke Richardson sign, it was Freddy all the way.

Y
ou got something he didn’t. Then you came back and you also got what he has
. When she’d said this, Chrissy had been looking down at her fingers as they fooled around with a cigarette. But Carl had known what she meant; and he knew how having and not having Lizzie had eaten away at him for three years. How there was nothing that being cut off from Lizzie couldn’t make hollow and worthless.

It was three weeks since the signs had gone up. Meanwhile the rains had stopped and West Gull had settled into Indian summer. Carl, driving along, tried to imagine himself as Fred seeing a big blue
VERGHOERS FOR REEVE
sign floating across a field. Luke and Fred and their little games, tossing him back and forth between them like two dogs worrying a rabid fox, each hoping the other would get bitten.

Carl looked at his watch. One-fifteen. At noon the air in town had been smoky with October heat. Now the sky was already emptying out, leaving a gold-blue bruise at the horizon.
From behind the seat he pulled out the shotgun Luke Richardson had brought to the store. “I use it for deer,” he had said, pushing it across the counter.

Carl had set it down on the floor, out of sight. He’d almost had to laugh, as if where Luke wanted him to aim it was supposed to be a big mystery. “The weather’s so good,” Luke had said, “I thought you might like the day off. You could run up to the conservation area. See if you could scare something up.”

The campgrounds had been closed since Labour Day, the gate left open for the winter. Carl drove down the dirt road, then across the small field to the dam before he stopped the truck and got out.

Now he leaned against the fender, popped open a can of diet cola. Across from the dam was a ridge he’d once climbed with Chrissy. It was this time of year, October, during another Indian summer, the fallen leaves thick in the hollows between the roots. He’d buried Chrissy in maple leaves, just her nose, her toes, her nipples sticking out, then burrowed under to be with her. A cold earthy smell on her skin and breath. Wanting him over and over until they were both exhausted and crawled down to the lake, covered in leaves and bits of grass and sticks, two grubby earth animals emerging after a hibernation of sex, cigarettes, grunts and groans, a new way her face turned up and away from his as though he was in so deep her brain was burning up from it. And swimming he had been surprised to find himself wishing he knew what it was like to be a woman and feel things so deeply his brain burned up from all that feeling.

He walked slowly along that same ridge, his legs and back slowly relaxing. When he flushed a pair of grouse from beneath some junipers he didn’t even think of shooting. As their wings beat against the ground his heart hammered along. Then they
emerged, great brown stonebirds rising slowly into the air, gathering speed as they crashed their way clear to open space.

“Carl McKelvey without a gun,” Luke had said, shaking his head. It now seemed to Carl that Luke had been trying to get into his mind and possess it from the moment he walked into the Timberpost Restaurant his first day back.

“What else is new,” Carl said to himself. Then stopped.
This
was new. Having a man like Luke Richardson trying to do something to him was new. He thought again about Luke coming into the Timberpost, how Luke had stood over him as he ate, sizing him up. But if Luke Richardson was doing him, he wasn’t the only one getting done. When he said the words “Mr. Richardson” in the supermarket next door, no one flinched or giggled. Everyone walked around the name of Luke Richardson: Luke Richardson, the black Cadillac of Luke Richardson, even the thought of Luke Richardson was a big hole to be avoided. Luke Richardson and Fred might be toying with him together, but Luke, Luke with his “savvy” would figure he had both of them outmanoeuvred.

The sun angled through the trees. Ping ping ping. Little bursts of yellow-gold light, ripples of warm air, the slush-slushing of leaves underfoot. After he had circled the lake and started moving north along the old hydro slash, he took out his cigarette package and found the joint of homegrown Ray Johnson had given him the other night.

Hearing the sound of an airplane he moved from the open into the woods. By the time the airplane, a single-prop, was overhead, Carl was under the canopy of a large oak. As a child on the farm his favourite game had been to imagine that while he was asleep a war had started and everyone he knew had been captured or killed. The War Game, he called it. His job was to hide until he had a chance to rescue his mother. So
he had taught himself to move out of sight at the sound of motors, to always leave gaps in his conversation and even his thinking so he could hear everything around himself before he was heard.

Now he was hidden where neither Luke nor Fred could see him. One way of assessing his position: he was comfortably crouched in the centre of a sun-dappled thicket smoking marijuana, absolutely invulnerable to the Richardson-Verghoers single-prop spy network. Victory! Second assessment: Luke and Fred had succeeded in driving him to ground. He was hidden from them but they were likewise hidden from him. When he emerged—from these shadows, from this afternoon, from behind some tree he hadn’t yet seen or some door he hadn’t yet opened—Luke or Fred or both of them would finish him off. The way Fred had jumped him that night when he came out of the Movie Barn. The way he’d jumped Chrissy when she came home from the bar.

Carl was sweating. He made himself breathe out all the air in his lungs. Without his willing it a new map had grown into his mind. It was a rectangle of trees criss-crossed by old logging trails and hydro slashes. In one corner was a lake, in another a picture of a compass pointing north. In the centre of the map, surrounded by bush, was an X. X as in X marks the spot, X marks the scar, X marks Carl McKelvey, stoned and sun-dazed, just waking up to what was really going on. His only weapon was the shotgun Luke had given him, a small box of cartridges he’d bought at the hardware store. His only supplies: half a pack of cigarettes and some sugarless cinnamon gum that Lizzie had put in his pocket the day they took the video camera out.

Above him in the plane, or waiting out of sight near the truck or somewhere in the woods, was Luke Richardson. Carl
pushed back at his hair. This was crazy. He got a picture of himself pushing back at his hair in the centre of Luke Richardsons scope. The ultimate mindfuck: a bullet passing through his brain. He stripped the tinfoil off a stick of his gum and began to chew. The cinnamon reminded him of the smell of Saturday night toast the way his mother used to make it: butter, brown sugar, fresh-ground cinnamon. He could feel his brain pulsing in his skull, twitching like an overheated muscle.

He opened the shotgun, let the shells fall to the ground. Immediately he felt better. He lit a cigarette. Luke Richardson, he advised himself—if you can’t handle the Luke Richardsons of this world, you’re in trouble. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, his back against a thick beech, the collar of his denim jacket bunched around his neck.

The sun was starting to angle and the long grass of the hydro slash danced with its own shadows. He got to his knees, looked slowly around. He stood up. Walking slowly, silent as night, he edged back towards the lake. The woods. The ground. The ruts of glaciated earth. If he moved slowly now, the way his father had taught him, the way he’d always known, no one, not even Luke Richardson, would see him until he wanted to be seen. The War Game. It was the game he always won. Until, of course, instead of saving his mother he had killed her. What do you think of that? Carl asked himself. How long do you think it will be before, when you finally go calm inside yourself, your first thought isn’t that you killed your mother? For ever? So far it was ten years going on eleven. At least in that time it had become a thought he could allow himself to think without immediately needing to drown it. That was progress. And more: sometimes he could propose to himself that the accident had actually
been
an accident, not a manifestation of his personal evil but something that had
happened by chance.
Chance
. As if anyone could believe there was such a thing as a random throw of the dice.