Enter, Night (22 page)

Was I asleep? Did I walk in my sleep? This isn’t where I was. Where the
fuck am I?

He stood up gingerly, testing the available height of the place in
which he found himself. He realized that he could just barely stand
without his head grazing the ceiling, or roof, of whatever this place was.
He leaned forward and shone the light in front of him, and realized where
he was.

He was in a mineshaft. He was underground, God knew how far, in
one of the network of abandoned mineshafts that crisscrossed beneath
Parr’s Landing.

Weal knew about them because he had read about them, about how
the Parr family had stripped this part of northern Ontario underground,
blasting tunnels beneath the earth where there had previously only
been caves, expanding the natural underground tunnels their mining
engineers had found with artificial ones, exploiting them, abandoning
them when the veins of gold had been drained dry.

He had walked in his sleep, or whatever state he’d been in, and had
fallen down a mineshaft. Weal’s chest tightened and he thought about
screaming—screaming louder than he had ever screamed. The sense of
being buried alive was instant and dreadful. He dropped the flashlight
and flung his arms out, expecting to find himself entombed, but his
fingers barely grazed the opposite walls. There was space, blessed space.
He took a deep breath and tried to slow his breathing. When he was
marginally calmer, he shook his head and tried to think.

If he had fallen down a mineshaft, his legs would be broken, he
reasoned, or there would be some other evidence of injury. There was
none, so he hadn’t fallen. Check. He could breathe, so there was oxygen.
Check. He had light, so he could see. Check. He’d felt something sharp
cut into his thigh when he’d leaned to pick up the flashlight. He patted
his pocket gingerly and felt the edge of one of his knives in his pocket,
blade cutting inwards against flesh where it had sliced through the lining.
The fabric there was sticky and wet, and he realized he was bleeding.

The knife had been in the hockey bag earlier that day, not his pocket.
Either he had placed it there himself without thinking, or someone had
placed it in his pocket while he’d been unconscious. Weal looked around
uneasily, but he knew he was alone—quite alone. Nothing human
could live down here in all this darkness, and if anyone were with him
down here, he’d have sensed it already. In fact, he would have sensed it
immediately.

Then he heard his friend’s voice again. But beneath the sweetness of
it this time, he sensed a new urgency and hunger. Weal knew where he
was and why he was there. He was protected. He was loved. And he was
needed.

Joyfully, Weal began to shuffle through the mineshaft, holding the
bobbing flashlight in front of him, feeling his way through the maze of
rotted beams and along the rock walls towards the prize waiting for him.

It was ten o’clock at night
and Elliot McKitrick was off duty and
minding his own business, flirting lazily with Donna Lemieux, the
overblown blonde bartender with whom he’d had a brief affair when he
was eighteen and she was thirty. He still carried a bit of a torch for Donna,
as young men sometimes did when they thought of past conquests, if not
loves. Donna realized this and was usually ambivalent, unless she was
bored or horny. Tonight, Elliot thought, he might have gotten lucky if
he’d wanted to, but he felt dead below the waist. He’d flirted by rote and
by habit this evening. She’d picked up on his disinterest and returned it
in kind. Nothing personal, as they both knew.

He was nursing his beer in the farthest corner of O’Toole’s when
Jeremy Parr walked in looking like crap twice warmed over. Elliot’s heart
sank at the sight of him.

Great,
Elliot thought.
This is the rosiest possible cherry on the shit
sundae that this day has been so far.

He lifted the bottle of O’Keefe to his lips and took a long, cold pull
of it, wishing he was invisible, wishing the beer was colder, and mostly
hating everything about his life at that exact moment. Elliot looked away,
vainly praying that Jeremy wouldn’t see him, but Jeremy did see him,
and he started to walk over to his table.

Elliot weighed several options, all of them calculated to salvage the
airtight security of the life and image he’d built for himself here in the
years Jeremy had been away.

He could get up and leave, which might look unduly abrupt and draw
attention. The other danger in getting up suddenly was the possibility of
leaving Jeremy in the bar alone, drunk, and rambling. God knows what
he’d tell Donna—or rather confirm, since everyone had heard rumours
about the two of them, but Elliot had spent the last fifteen years fucking,
brawling, and goal-scoring those rumours into oblivion. No, it was better
to sit still and act like he was greeting an old friend. Normalize, neutralize.
Maybe buy Jeremy a beer. Slap him on the back and bullshit about the
old days. Or at least make it seem that’s what they were doing. It could
work.

If it didn’t, Elliot was royally screwed.

Jeremy approached the table and, ludicrously, stuck out his hand to
shake as though they had seen each other last week. He said, “Hey, Elliot,
how’s it going? Long time no see.”

“Hi, Jem.” Elliot took Jeremy’s hand without getting up from his
own chair. The part of him that wanted to rise from his seat and take
Jeremy in his arms and hug him had been permanently crippled years
before, largely by Elliot himself. He kept that part of himself in its place
and he considered it dead and buried. “I heard you were back. What’re
you doing here?”

“Can I join you?” Jeremy didn’t wait for Elliot’s answer. He pulled
back the chair opposite Jeremy and sat down heavily. “So, here we are,”
he said. “How’ve you been?”

When Elliot didn’t reply, he continued. “You’re a cop now, I see. I
saw you in the cruiser today. Do you like being a cop?”

“What are you doing back in Parr’s Landing, Jeremy?” Elliot said
again. “There has to be a reason you’d come back to town. What has it
been, ten years?”

“Fifteen. You’re not happy to see me, are you?”

Elliot shrugged. “It’s a free world. You can go where you want. But
no, I’m not really happy to see you. I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”

“It’s all right,” Jeremy said “No one’s really happy to see me. My
mother just told me she wished I had been the one who died instead of
Jack.”

“I heard about Jack a while back. I’m sorry. Was that Chris I saw in
the car with you today?”

“So you did see me. I wasn’t sure if you had.”

“Yeah, I saw you,” Elliot said. “So, was that Chris? Did she come back
with you, too?”

“Yeah, and Morgan, as well.” Elliot looked at him blankly. “My niece,
Elliot—Jack’s daughter. Her name is Morgan. She’s fifteen. Jack didn’t
leave any insurance, and Chris is broke. I brought her back here. She had
nowhere else to go.”

Elliot looked over Jeremy’s head at Donna and held up two fingers.
She signalled back the OK sign and took two fresh bottles of O’Keefe out
of the beer fridge and carried them over to their table on a tray.

“Hey! Jeremy Parr!” Donna said, putting the beers down in front
of them. “Long time no see, Jer! I heard you were back in town.” When
Jeremy looked at her blankly, she said, “It’s me, Donna Lemieux.
Remember? You went to school with my cousin, Rob Archambault. You
remember Rob, right? I think he was a couple of years ahead of you.
Maybe your brother’s class?”

“Oh yeah,” Jeremy lied. “I sure do remember him. Good to see you,
Donna. How is Rob?”

Donna furrowed her brow. “He died. Ski-Doo accident, two years
ago. It was so sad. He had a wife and kids. You didn’t hear?”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been away. I’ve been living in Toronto.”

“Long way away,” she said. “And you ain’t been back that whole time?”

“No,” Jeremy replied. “I haven’t. Been busy.”

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Donna said. “I heard about him. We
all did. There was a thing about it in the paper. He was a good guy. I knew
him in school.”

“Thanks, Donna.” Jeremy forced a smile. “I appreciate it.”

“Thanks, honey,” Elliot said to Donna. What he wanted was for her
to go away back behind the bar, sooner rather than later. He winked,
dead sexy, something that usually opened doors for him with whichever
woman was the recipient of the wink.

Donna rolled her eyes. “You with the winks,” she said. “All talk, no
action.” But Donna smiled when she said it and she winked back, putting
a little extra sway in her hips when she turned around and walked back to
the bar. Under any other circumstances, Elliot would be looking forward
to getting laid tonight, but right now he just wanted her away from him
and Jeremy so he could neutralize this situation as quickly as possible.
Bedding Donna Lemieux was the last thing on his mind.

For his part, Jeremy couldn’t take his eyes off Elliot’s face.

Late at night when he was alone in his bed, he’d let his mind wander
back over the years. It was the only time he felt safe thinking about
Parr’s Landing and what his mother had done to him by sending him
away. He was able to safely scan the memories he had, sifting through
them, bypassing the cruellest ones and fingering the ones that contained
traces of love, or beauty, the way someone else might lovingly caress a
favourite photograph in an album. Over the years, Jeremy had found
that the easiest way to access those memories was to conjure Elliot’s face
and body. The memories weren’t
sexual,
necessarily, because that part
was so associated with the pain that came later at the hands of Adeline
and Dr. Gionet. But they
were
resolutely romantic memories nonetheless
fuelled by lovingly tended longing and desire.

Small things, flashes and mental snapshots; Elliot’s tanned neck
as he saw it from his desk a row behind and two seats to the left in
homeroom at Matthew Browning; Elliot’s dented red hockey helmet, and
the way his black hair looked, wet with sweat, when he took the helmet
off in the intermission between periods, his eyes never leaving the action
on the ice, during the Friday night hockey games at the old Mike Takacs
Memorial Arena out on Brandon Nixon Road, before the fire that shut it
down.

Mostly, though, he remembered Elliot’s smile which, however rare
(back then at least), lit up his entire face when it suddenly appeared. His
voice, his laugh. Elliot’s powerful butterfly stroke as he swam out to the
summer raft in Bradley Lake. The way the girls at Matthew Browning
stared at Elliot when he passed in the hallway, the way Jeremy hated
them for staring and knew that he hated them because he stared, too.
But they could do it openly while he had to stare surreptitiously.

And Jeremy was still staring surreptitiously now, fifteen years later.

The face and body sitting in the chair in front of him, the man
pretending that the two of them were just a couple of guys who had barely
known each other in high school, and had now met again in a bar fifteen
years later, was still Elliot’s. The body had hardened and thickened with
muscle, and the face had the natural bronzed look of a man who lived and
worked outdoors in a northern Ontario town.

But it was still somehow the same: the same thick pelt of black-brown
hair in a military crew cut, almost like mink, tapering into the barest
suggestion of a widow’s peak over a wide forehead; the dark eyebrows
against the olive skin of his face, arching up over eyes the colour of black
coffee; the strong nose and jaw, the aggressive five o’clock shadow, the
sensual mouth, the white, white teeth. Jeremy’s eyes reverenced Elliot’s
neck and throat, thick like the rest of him. More than anything at that
moment, he wanted Elliot to laugh, so he could hear that joyous growl of
pleasure he remembered better than any other part of Elliot. If he heard
that, Jeremy believed, the rest of what had happened that night would go
away, or at least not matter quite as much.

“So . . . are you still playing hockey?” He realized he was flailing for a
neutral topic that might prompt even a minor thaw in Elliot’s demeanour,
and that he sounded desperate and the question was idiotic.

Elliot shrugged. “Some. Why?”

“Elliot, aren’t we even still friends? Even just a bit? Even with
everything else that happened, couldn’t we just . . . I don’t know, talk?”
His eyes filled with tears again, and he hated himself even more for
allowing Elliot to see them.

“We
are
talking,” Elliot said, looking away. He took another pull of
beer from the bottle. “This
is
us, talking. Jem, this isn’t Toronto. People
remember things here, and what we did—well, it’s taken a long time for
me to make it OK here, to convince people that rumours about us . . . well,
you know. That they weren’t true.”

“Rumours,” Jeremy said. “Right, the ‘rumours.’ Jesus Christ.”

“You know what I mean, Jem,” Elliot said fiercely, keeping his voice
down. “Do you know what my dad did to me after your mother told him
about us? Do you know what your fucking mother ordered him to
do
? He
beat me with a fucking
whip
.”

“Well, my mother sent me away to be tortured for six months, Elliot,”
Jeremy said, matching Elliot’s tone. “What are we doing here, having a
contest to see who got it worse? Do you want to see the scars on my body
from the burns? I see them every day when I’m naked. Do you want to
see them?”

“
Keep your fucking voice down
.” Elliot looked around, but no one in
the bar appeared to have heard either of them. Behind the bar, Donna
was washing glasses.

Jeremy said again, softly, “Do you? Do you want to see them?”

He nudged his beer bottle almost imperceptibly across the surface of
the table between them until his knuckles grazed Elliot’s. Their eyes met.
Behind them, the jukebox played “Maggie May.” Elliot allowed Jeremy’s
fingers to linger there for a brief second, then jerked his hand away.