Knife Fight and Other Struggles (21 page)

We took it to the back deck and sat beside the barbecue, now hidden by a form-fitted cover I’d found in the garage. Scott drew a breath at the view of the woodlot, orange and red over a carpet of pale yellow and dark brown leaves that had fallen the past week, all set alight as the sun set over the rooftop of #37.

I poured wine into stemware, and sat beside him. He didn’t speak for a long time, and I didn’t prompt him. He finished his wine. I poured him another and topped up my own. As the light faded, so did the hard lines of his face, the slack flesh beneath his eyes. The shadow of 37 Ridgeway erased years. I watched them vanish, one by one, until finally he was ready.

“I used to know what to do,” he said in a voice that trembled, looking me with eyes that were wide and wet. “I used to be sure.”

I put my hand on his arm.

“Not now, though,” he said. “Now, I have no fucking idea. Whether I’m coming or going.”

We spent time deciding which of the houses to inhabit next. Scott Neeson had not put all the touches on Twilling Row’s elaborate rear deck; the plumbing and electrics for the hot tub installation were barely roughed-in, and the covering for the grill area was up but needed shingling. We talked about remaining there; the winter would not treat the unstained decking kindly, and he’d done so much work already, it seemed a shame to abandon it now. But he insisted he didn’t care anymore. He wanted to be away. So we tried a few nights at Ridgeway, and that worked well enough, at first. We slept curled together on the king-sized bed in the cavernous master bedroom; took turns cooking and clearing dishes in the bright kitchen; in the sitting room, we watched the classic western and noir and science fiction films that were shelved under the entertainment console.

But that didn’t last either. I woke up on more than one occasion suddenly shivering, alone in the bed, to find Scott, standing by the open bedroom window, naked, arms wrapped tight around himself as he looked north, up the gentle slope to Sandhurst, and wept. Or once, finally, in the bathroom, looking blankly at the open medicine cabinet—filled with razors and sleep-aid medications—hands on either side of the sink, muscles in his forearms tensing, as though he were readying himself to leap into it. That night, I went to him, put my arms on his shoulders, and gently, I hope, drew him back to the bed—thinking all the while of Marisse, and the bullet that Benoit said she had put through her eye.

And so in the end, with Stephan’s help, we found a new house: a genuinely new one this time, near the southern part of the subdivision—60 Wyatt End. So new the drywall in the family room was still unpainted. The basement bath was only roughed in. The tiling for the floor in the laundry was stacked neatly in boxes, waiting for a tradesman whose arrival was forever delayed by bankruptcy.

No one had lived there since the firm moved in. It was a blank slate.

At Christmas, we had a party there. I invited Stephan and Lynette and some others I’d met over the months; and Scott invited some of the others who worked with him—the Sandhurst Crew, they called themselves. They all brought bottles, and threw them in with Scott’s batch of home-brewed wine, and we carried on through the night.

I had too much to drink, I have to admit. Stephan and Scott had to help me up to bed. Early Christmas Day awakened by stale wine in my gut and off-key carolling a floor below, I found myself standing naked by the window, looking through thin snowfall to the few dim lights in the city many kilometres to the south.

Thinking of Larchmount.

Children. That’s what was missing.

Larchmount was the kind of street that was lousy with them: infants and toddlers and teenagers, sullen and giddy and beautiful and awkward; fat moms and dads, going to work and coming home again, where they chased diaper-clad little fatties from room to room, catching sleep in precious moments until they did it again. If Mr. Nu sat next door, in a chair beneath a lightbulb in a house nearly empty. . . .

Well, the people of Larchmount had other things to bother about.

There were no children on Wyatt, or Cathedral, or Twilling, or any of the others here. Nothing came from Stephan’s friendship with Lynette—nor, obviously, Scott’s and mine—nor any of the other half-dozen couples who’d coalesced around Sandhurst over the days . . . the months. . . .

The years.

Even without children, we got fat.

It happens. All you have to do is sit still for long enough. And that is what we did. Trips to the building supply store grew less frequent—a combination of its diminishing stocks, and our own waning interest, the growing complacency of our house-pride. Power wasn’t reliable enough to keep watching DVDs, but we enjoyed reading. Anything to sit still.

It’s not always a bad thing, fat. The roundness of it smoothed Scott’s skin, took the worry from his eyes, the knowledge from his mouth. Combined with his less-and-less-frequent visits to Sandhurst, it allowed a measure of innocence to return, or perhaps just emerge. He smiled so easily, and I envied him. I was the ugly fat man, a furtive grey toad that couldn’t even meet its own eye in the bathroom mirror.

But I don’t blame the fat.

We kept having parties. Smaller parties, but more of them.

Smaller, because of the subdivision’s shrinking complement. Early on, it was simple departures. The medical station in 4 Battleford Avenue lost a surgeon; Linguistics in 52 Burling Street lost their Russian and Farsi specialist—a serious blow, that one; and at least two cleaners. . . .

The flow was finally stemmed when Stephan announced that the firm had established a covert perimeter around the subdivision. He went in to no further detail about what that perimeter entailed, but enough understood the implied threat to need no further encouragement to stay put.

Yet still, we diminished. There were some suicides, three of them among Scott’s former teammates at Sandhurst. Some didn’t die, but locked themselves in their houses and refused to communicate or co-operate when Stephan sent in rescue and medical teams. They remained in flesh, but truly, were no longer present in the subdivision.

Smaller parties. But far more frequent.

Never properly sodded, our yard was soon taken over by tall wildflowers and thistles, vines that could tear flesh. So we limited our celebrations to the concrete-tiled back deck, where perhaps a dozen of us would sit on resin chairs, heads tilted back to look up at the froth of stars that gathered into prominence over the ever-diminishing glow from the city, a hundred more stars each year than the last. We would drink Scott’s wine and talk and stare at outer space.

Enough wine in me, I would bring myself to wonder—would tilt my head from the Heavens down, to the top of the subdivision’s hill, and Sandhurst.

One night, helping Scott up to our bed, I posed a question:

“Who is looking out for Mr. Nu now? Is he even still alive?”

“Nu.” Scott lowered himself to his bed, and let out a long, laboured sigh. We were both drunk—drunk, fat old men. “You asked me a question, a long time ago.”

“Okay.”

“When we first met. When we second met.”

“When we second met. In my yard. With that beer.”

“And steaks. What did I learn, you asked me.”

“And what did you learn?”

He looked at me in the dim candlelight of our bedroom, my happy old fat man.

“When you go into a dude’s house—make sure you’re invited,” he said. “Make sure dude knows you’re coming, and is cool with it, and has taken the steps. Steps not to show himself. And if he’s in the basement—” and in his slurry, drunk,
innocent
voice, Scott whispered:

“Leave him be.”

What did you learn?

The question doesn’t come easily. I don’t think it can come easily.

When I can’t sleep, I take out Marisse’s notepad, and look at that doodle she did in the meeting room in the Marriott, in her last debrief—a stack of cubes, either made sturdy like a pyramid, or impossible, precarious, boxes stacked on ceilings. Ball-point perspective makes both true. Both a lie.

And both a lousy answer to the question: why would you search every room but the one you knew that Mr. Nu was in? Lousy answers, but as it happened, the only answer forthcoming.

Not everybody puts a bullet through their eye, but everybody dies.