Road Ends (13 page)

The main roads were still empty of traffic and he rumbled down them as fast as he dared, the new snow flying off the blade of the plough in a great soft arc. The roads were cleared in order of priority: access to the fire station, the police, the doctor’s office, the school, then Main Street and the major crossroads within the town, then the main road out as far as the New Liskeard turnoff, where the Department of Highways snowploughs took over, then the major roads on the school bus route and finally the minor side
roads, some of which might be snowed in for a week if there was a heavy and prolonged snowfall.

By the time he reached the side roads it was light enough to turn off the headlights but still he moved cautiously. Marcel hurtled down even the smallest roads at terrifying speed but he’d had twenty years to learn the difference between a snow-covered road and a snow-filled ditch and could tell at a hundred yards whether a snowdrift was really a snowdrift or a car in disguise. Though even Marcel made the occasional mistake. The previous week he’d ploughed up a dead moose out along the Harper Side Road.

“Made me feel not too good, I tell you,” he’d said to Tom afterwards. “Engine, she give a liddle grunt like she does, cab, she shake a liddle bit, den all at once d’ole damn snowdrif’ she shif’ ’bout tree feet an’ up come dese four legs, stickin’ straight up like candles on a cake. I tink, Whoa, Marcel, dem’s legs! What you doin’ ploughin’ up legs? But den I tink, well, leas’ dey don’t have boots on, dat would be worse.”

There had been worse. A couple of years back Marcel had unearthed a car containing a family of four, all dead. They’d pulled over to the side of the road to wait out a blizzard but it lasted two days and buried the car and they ran out of air.

The thought of it—coming across a car full of dead bodies—made Tom sweat. He’d wanted to ask Marcel what it had felt like when he cleared the snow away and saw the people inside. That moment of realization when they didn’t respond to his banging on the side window—what had that been like? He would have shouted encouragement to them and no heads would have turned. No one would have moved.

But probably he’d known they were dead earlier than that. There would have been something about the silence inside the car. Not an empty silence; something more final.

When he’d seen what appeared to be a heap of clothes at the foot of the cliff Tom had known instantly that it was not a heap of clothes. It had nothing to do with recognizing what Robert had been wearing, he never noticed what anyone wore. It was something else. He and Simon had reached the bottom of the ravine and come around the corner of the rock face, picking their way over the rubble of glistening boulders at the river’s edge, and he’d glanced up and seen the bundle lying there at the foot of the cliff, directly below where they’d been standing half an hour earlier, and he’d known at once.

The unforgivable thing was that, along with the icy wave of sick, cold horror, he had felt absolute outrage. His first thought had been, What kind of friend would do that to you? Would kill himself virtually in front of you, and with a stranger present?

The real question was, what kind of sick bastard would have that as his first thought on seeing the dead body of his closest friend. It was monstrous; he could hardly believe it of himself, but that was what he’d thought, what he’d felt. He’d felt as if the act were aimed at him, as if Robert had stepped off the cliff (and he had stepped, he hadn’t jumped or hurled himself, because if he had his body would be a few feet out from the cliff instead of right at the foot, almost touching the sheer rock face)—as if he had stepped off the cliff purely and simply to punish Tom, as if he were speaking directly to him, saying, You don’t seem to care what I’ve been going through, you and this new friend you’re having such a good time with, so I’m going to show you. Take a look at this.

He never thought about anything but death anymore. It was with him every waking moment and stalked his dreams at night. When he read the papers death leapt up at him. One single death or mass extinction, murder or genocide, war, famine, plague, disease: it called to him, drew him in. There had been four columns of death
notices in
The Globe and Mail
the previous morning and he’d been unable to stop himself from reading every one. It was as though his brain were scrabbling around like a rat in a cage trying to find a way to rationalize what had happened. Look at all these deaths, it was saying. Everybody dies, so what’s the big deal? Everybody dies; people are dying all the time, literally all the time, every second of the day or night. Some die old, some die young, but they all die and in the great scheme of things the fact that someone dies earlier than he otherwise might have doesn’t matter a bit. It doesn’t matter because nothing matters, in the great scheme of things.

In any case—this was another thing his brain constantly told itself with no effect at all—there was nothing he could have done.

The church was on the corner of Main and Cleveland Street. Turn down Cleveland and Reverend Thomas’s house was the first on the left. The car was a whale-shaped hump under three feet of snow; it hadn’t moved all winter. Kindly souls kept shovelling out the drive but some sense of delicacy seemed to prevent them from clearing the snow from the car itself. A narrow path from the road to the front door testified to the endless stream of ladies from the church bearing casseroles and pies.

Tom looked resolutely straight ahead as he drove past the house, just in case Reverend Thomas should happen to step outside onto his porch. According to gossip Tom had overheard in Harper’s, Mrs. Thomas had left him, which meant that Reverend Thomas had now lost not only his son and his faith, but his wife as well. Lost everything, in effect.

What do you say to someone who has lost everything? How do you meet his eye? If you were the last person to have seen his son alive, if you were with him for virtually the whole morning before he died but you were so busy having a good time you
didn’t even notice the state he was in. Or worse, you did sort of notice, but it merely irritated you because it was such a great day and you didn’t want anything to spoil it.

What do you say?

By the time he’d finished ploughing the side streets, people were up and about, shovelling out their drives or trudging along the edge of the road, hats pulled down, hoods up, shoulders hunched against the cold. They’d raise a hand to Tom as he went by and he’d raise his in return, grateful for the isolation of the small, freezing cab. One of the advantages of the job was that no one expected him to stop for a chat.

He knew most of them—had known most of them all his life, though none of his friends from school was still here. There had been five of them who hung around together, Miles Cooper, Wayne Patterson, Elliot Park, Robert and himself, though Robert was the only one he’d been really close to. After high school Miles and Wayne had both gone to the mining school in Haileybury, Elliot had joined Ontario Hydro and Tom and Robert had gone to U of T, Tom to study aeronautical engineering and Robert to study history. They’d roomed together in their undergraduate years and it had been a blast, but then on their first day back at the start of their postgraduate terms—Robert was doing an MA and Tom an MSc—Robert had announced casually that he’d decided to change courses and study theology. Tom thought he was joking and laughed, and then realized he was serious and was dumbfounded.
Robert
? Study
theology
?

It was true they’d never specifically talked about religion—in your teens there were things you didn’t talk about even with close friends (your parents, for example, whose very existence was too embarrassing for words), and religion was one of them. Maybe by the time they reached university they could have discussed it
the way they discussed the various new ideas they were coming into contact with—everything from philosophy to free love—if it hadn’t been that the subject of religion was inextricably bound up with the subject of Robert’s father, who in Tom’s opinion was an arrogant jerk. Not only that, but Robert had once said something that strongly suggested he thought so too. Which must be tricky for him, Tom thought. His own father was pretty much a dead loss as far as parenting went, but at least you could respect him. At least he didn’t humiliate you in public by standing up in front of the entire town and preaching at everyone with a patronizing smile on his face. He didn’t know how Robert stood the shame.

The thing Robert had said—the revelation of his feelings about his father—had come out when he was drunk, years back, when they were still in high school. It was a summer evening and they were down at the beach polishing off the remains of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that Robert had swiped from the back seat of a tourist’s car.

That was the summer Robert started drinking seriously. Legally you couldn’t drink until you were twenty-one and illicit booze was hard to come by, but that summer Robert devoted himself to the task of procuring it by any means possible, up to and including theft. He’d slip into people’s houses when they were watching television, raid tourists’ cabins, saunter into Fitzpatrick’s Hotel and lift something from behind the bar. It made Tom’s hair stand on end; the consequences if Robert were caught didn’t bear thinking about.

But he didn’t get caught. He was a very good thief. He’d spot an opportunity, seize it and be walking down the street with a bottle under his jacket before Tom even realized what was happening.

Tom didn’t know what was behind it. Robert had never been the hellraiser type. He was a quiet, reserved sort of guy, so it was
way out of character. But the “over twenty-one” law was ridiculous and deserved to be broken and anyway, the unspoken rules of friendship demanded unconditional support, no questions asked, so Tom said nothing. He didn’t take part in the stealing, though, and was glad Robert didn’t seem to expect him to. He’d have been a lousy thief. He’d have had guilt written all over him.

And though Tom shared in the spoils he didn’t overdo it; he was too wary of his father’s reaction to risk staggering into the house drunk. Whereas Rob seemed positively to relish the idea of his father finding out.

“My father advises me to lay off the hooch.”

That was what Robert had said that night on the beach—his opening statement. He’d said it as if they’d been talking about either his father or booze, which they hadn’t. They hadn’t been talking about anything much, they’d been having a stone-skipping contest, passing the Jack Daniel’s back and forth between them, thinking their own thoughts. It had been hot and humid all day but now there were storm clouds building up over to the east and the lake was so still it seemed to be holding its breath.

“He doesn’t forbid it,” Robert went on. “Nothing is ever forbidden. Everything is up to me. My decision entirely.” He’d had quite a skinful already, but no matter how drunk he got Rob never slurred his words. It was his coordination that went—that and control over his extremities.

Tom didn’t say anything. You couldn’t agree with someone that his father was a jerk. He continued turning over stones with his foot, looking for the perfect skipper.

“He’s very patient, very holy, when he explains things,” Robert said, in a patient, holy voice unnervingly like his father’s. “Explains them over and over again. Reasons why I shouldn’t
drink. The pain it causes my mother, the bad example I’m setting to those less fortunate than me.”

He bent down to pick up a stone, swaying slightly. He was holding the bottle but it remained magically upright as if his hand were a natural gyroscope.

“That’s the main one, actually,” he said straightening up and examining the stone. “They look up to me, apparently. Those less fortunate. They follow my example because of who I am. So if I drink they will too. So if they become drunken bums it will be my fault. Very logical. He’s very logical, my father.”

He threw his stone. It went more or less straight up in the air and landed with a plunk about three feet out from the shore.

“Tragic,” Tom said. “Minus five.”

His foot uncovered the stone to end all stones, flat as a pancake and almost perfectly round. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand for a minute to find the balance of it, leaned over, took aim and threw. The stone skittered off across the water in a long smooth curve, circled all the way back on itself and disappeared neatly into its own ripples.