The Matter of Sylvie (3 page)

On his second loop around town, Corporal Lloyd turns the RCMP cruiser a block west of Main, where the streets are rough gravel. Lloyd pulls into the parking lot of the darkened Legion, sometimes a gathering spot for the local teenagers, although not at 6:33 AM. He sees a shadow in the entranceway and trains his bright lights on the doorway. He gets out of his car. Christ, it's cold, minus seventeen Fahrenheit with the north wind blasting all around. He pulls his parka on and fishes his leather gloves out from the back seat, leaves the motor running and his driver door open as he walks across the lot.

“Jimmy?” he says.

The shadow doesn't move in the entranceway.

“It's all right, Jimmy. Come on out,” Corporal Lloyd says.

Jimmy Widman lies prostrate on the snow-covered ground. Lloyd goes over and bends down, peers into the man's upturned face.

“Jesus Christ, Jimmy. What the hell happened this time?”

Lloyd examines Jimmy's face in the cruiser's headlights. He takes off a glove and puts his hand up to Jimmy's mouth. Jimmy's breath is cold and shallow, reeks of Wild Turkey: his choice of bourbon because it's reasonably priced and, taken straight up, gets the job done swiftly. Also, it reminds Jimmy of his father's farmland out east where undomesticated turkeys run feral. His father long since dead, his mother, too, by gunshot, Jimmy told Lloyd once when he was lucid, leaving Corporal Lloyd to work out the gritty details of that. No siblings that Lloyd has heard of. The wildness is all Jimmy Widman has left, Lloyd suspects. At least he's breathing. His nose is permanently mashed to one side. And he's missing a couple front teeth. No surprise there. He's the resident punching bag for every disgruntled male in the town. His lips are swollen twice their size and cut. His right eye is not visible anymore and there's dried blood, no, not dried, frozen blood pooled around his left ear. Lloyd looks at Jimmy's hands. They are flat and stone cold but smooth-skinned as usual, not a scrape on them—unprovoked, defenceless. Another unfinished errand that Lloyd must attend to.

“The Fleck brothers?” Lloyd asks.

Jimmy smiles up at the dark and blows foul air out of his mouth like smoke rings.

“Godammit, Jimmy. Stay away from those a-holes. They're going to kill you one of these times.”

Jimmy tries to wink with his good eye, but his eye stays shut, a foretaste of the time when Lloyd knows he will find Jimmy not only stone drunk but also dead. Just a matter of time. His puts his finger on Jimmy's eyelid and lifts it. Jimmy's eyeball rolls around in its socket. Lloyd pulls the flimsy windbreaker around Jimmy. He retrieves a wool blanket from the trunk of the cruiser and rolls Jimmy onto it, then swaddles him like a newborn. He zips his own parka up against the wind. Thinks about his wife and children, his constables, the townspeople at home in their warm, safe beds. He knows he can't leave Jimmy here this time to sleep it off and eventually make his way back to the abandoned farmhouse thirty miles east of town. With the shape Jimmy in is, he'll freeze to death before he ever figures out where his feet are, let alone how to stand up on them.

“Come on, Jimmy. Let's get you up here.”

He lifts Jimmy under the shoulders, but Jimmy pulls a face and Lloyd suspects one of the Fleck brothers, has been trying out their steel-toed boots on his ribs. Probably broken. He'll send Constable Pete out later to the Fleck brothers, but right now he's going to need one of his constables to help him get Jimmy into the back of the cruiser. He slides one leather glove under Jimmy's distended cheek and lays his head back down on the frozen ground.

“Back in a minute, buddy,” Lloyd says.

He gets in the car, radios in, waits for a response from his detachment. All he hears is static and barely audible voices from some distant place on the same frequency, no one in particular, no answer from his own detachment. Someone must have turned the radio signal down. Perhaps his youngest, Clare, fiddling with the buttons and dials, fragmented voices, the amber, red, and green lights flickering on and off like a child's toy—despite the fact that Lloyd is a serious corporal, trying to run a stern detachment, still Jacqueline allows the children to play in the office.

He considers trying to raise St. Paul, but after yesterday's river visitor call, he can't very well raise them at this time in the morning and expect one of their constables to come out. He picks up his cigar butt from the ashtray and takes a puff, but the cigar is out. He pushes the lighter in on the dash. He could radio the ambulance, but the paramedics have had their fill of driving Jimmy out to the farmhouse only to have Jimmy show up three or nine hours later, however long it takes Jimmy to walk back into town. He doubts the paramedics would even come. No, he'll swing back to the hotel and see if he can get Neville to give him a hand. Not RCMP protocol by any means but Lloyd's small-town version of Maintiens le droit.

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When Lloyd comes back, he's got Neville in the cruiser and a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee for himself, some leftover bacon and eggs and toast with margarine that Neville hurriedly wrapped in tinfoil for Jimmy.

“Where did you say he was?” Neville asks as Corporal Lloyd pulls into the Legion parking lot.

The sun is up, but you wouldn't know it by the thick band of grey that makes up the sky. Ice crystals in the still, frigid air now that the wind has died. Lloyd stops the cruiser in front of the doorway.

“He's in there,” he tells Neville. “He must have rolled over or something.”

Lloyd and Neville get out of the car and walk to the entrance. Jimmy is gone. Lloyd glances across the lot, sees nothing, checks the perimeter of the low brick building. No Jimmy. He shakes his head at Neville. Neville gets back into the cruiser and lights a cigarette. He deals with Jimmy on a regular basis, lets him clear the snow out front of his hotel and the café in exchange for breakfast. Sometimes Jimmy shows up, sometimes not.

Where the hell could he have gone? Lloyd checks out the mountain of plowed snow on the other side of the lot. No one. He looks for telltale footprints, but the snow is hard and frozen; no help there. That frozen pool of blood on the cement pad where he left Jimmy lying and his leather glove is gone too. He looks up and down the empty street, then climbs back into the cruiser for warmth.

“I don't know how he managed it. He couldn't even keep his head off the ground.” Lloyd cranks the heat up. “His ribs are busted all to hell too. The guy must have steel balls or something,” he says, putting the cruiser into drive.

“Or wild turkeys.” Neville grins and stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray.

Lloyd doesn't say anything.

“Want this?” Neville holds the leftover eggs and bacon up as Lloyd drives through the streets peering into doorways, down alleys, behind garages.

Lloyd shakes his head. Neville opens the foil and pulls out a strip of fatty bacon and eats it.

“I'll come back later and have breakfast,” Lloyd says.

“I'd better get back to the hotel,” Neville says, looking at his watch.

Lloyd turns the corner and stops in front of the café. Some of the early bird farmers are at the front counter.

“Bring Jimmy round, tell him I'll make sausage and pancakes,” Neville says and gets out of the cruiser.

Lloyd heads down Main Street to the secondary highway to see if Jimmy's on his way home. But he's so busted up; Lloyd doesn't know how he could manage it. Maybe it's the cold or the alcohol or the combination of both that enables Jimmy to pick himself up time and time again to walk back out to his father's land when he's had his fill of the town and its shadowy hospitality. Why he keeps coming back Lloyd doesn't know. Neville says Jimmy's a lost soul, hence the alcohol, the walkabouts, the strange ramblings—that Jimmy is looking for something and when he finds it, he'll know and then he'll be done with it. But Lloyd doesn't think so. He's seen it before in his small, sweet Sylvie—that inner obscure world that only she understood, and so, too, does Jimmy. It's not the Wild Turkey; it's something else entirely. Lloyd knows that Jimmy's life depends on the something else.

Lesa struts through the Arrival doors, her rayon cape streaming/screaming out behind, exposing her athletic legs in black Spandex. She pushes back the white hair that clings to her face with the tenacity of an octopus, pulls the John out from her pleather boots and lights it. The business-class passengers veer around her, maintaining their distance, with the exception of the good-looking man in the blue suit, standing directly behind, whom she keeps in her periphery, and in return he matches her every nonchalant glance back. She takes a deep curative drag and blows the smoke out like a 1940s film star, looks around for her brother, Nate. He's nowhere in sight, likely late as usual. Good thing he's a genius at his job (he's a corporate lawyer), otherwise no one would put up with the constant waiting. Waiting for Nate, she titles him, Waiting for Godot. As for the blue-suit man, she simply titles him Waiting. Waiting for a sign from her, perhaps?

The passengers stand around the luggage carousel, checking their watches every four seconds to see if they'll make their nine o'clock meetings. Lesa wanders over to the closed money exchange kiosk, checks the current rate on the American dollar. The Canadian dollar is winning, good for her baby sister Clare, who is no longer a baby but lethal age, stunning in her looks and in Las Vegas at the moment with a pack of friends, no doubt lounging in stringed bikinis by some glittering swimming pool downing fresh lime margaritas before the sun even begins to hit its hot desert stride.

The baggage starts down the chute. Lesa drops her John Player onto the tiled floor and grinds it with the toe of her boot, leaves it there. She catches blue-suit man watching her. Yes, waiting, she thinks, based on the pleasantly charged look on his smooth face. He's also playing hide 'n' peek with the dark-skinned child from the airplane. The child looks out from behind her mother's legs and when she sees his smiling face retreats shyly back until she can work up the courage to steal another quick look. The man smiles at the exhausted-looking mother.

Nice teeth, Lesa thinks. Obviously kind. She likes that. The man is tall, affluently dressed, definitely ex-something: hockey player, coach, professional trainer. In the early morning light his face looks closer to forty, not the fifty she had speculated on the plane. She imagines that if she wanders down the relatively empty halls of Arrivals that he might follow, follow her into the unattended stairway leading up to Departures, or the women's washroom, anywhere reasonably private.

Though she'd much prefer the get-to-know-you interface over a posh dinner that serves as foreplay, three glasses of red wine from a bona fide glass bottle, not the cardboard boxes with the plastic spigots that she's used to from her boyfriend's art show openings. But good wholehearted wine that glides down her throat, warm and smooth and heady, clouding her normally sound judgment. She feels drunk just thinking about it.

She hasn't slept much the past few nights, the anticipation of returning home so long after her father's death, so long a dearth of mothers. She swivels her stiff neck, her stomach churning from too many cups of coffee, watches for her red-zippered suitcase that matches her red-zippered purse. The man reaches for his briefcase with those hands, those boyish hands touching his black leather Samsonite, the real thing, no pleather here. And that's part of it too, beyond the palpable attraction, his apparent benevolence toward Arabic-speaking mothers and shy children, is the expense/expanse of him, the possibility that someone could transport her from this Wednesday, someone so unlike her current partner.

She's had a few partners over the course of her thirty-one years, should probably get herself a flip calendar in order to keep track of them all—though singularly, one at a time, not the habitual overlay of extramartial women that her father had over the early course of his years with her mother. Who would put up with that? Certainly not her. Still she wonders about her sculptor boyfriend, his distraction, his preoccupation with art, the openings, the art critics who cream their pants over his every exhibition: a solitary silver door suspended on a brick red wall three floors up, a suit made up entirely of flank steak, his still-in-progress burnt toast exhibit. (What does it mean? What does it say about modern society?) The constant smash of enamoured art students lounging around his studio at Emily Carr, their apartment in the West End, with their jet-black rough-cropped hair, black-mascara eyes, multi-pierced ears, their fresh, unsullied skin and slim firm bodies, male and female alike. It's a lot to keep up with some days. Not that any of that would justify this pretty man in a blue suit retrieving a briefcase made up entirely of cow; he's an extravagance she's never had, never allowed herself.

The pretty man glances over, tries to make eye contact, but she's lost in his boy-hands. She feels them on her body, her not-so-fresh but warm skin, his hands soft, kind, searching, finding something she thought she lost a long time ago. By the increasing thrum buried deep in her groin and her rabbit-quick heart, if he has to retrieve one more piece of luggage she may not need him after all.

The woman from next door joins Jacqueline on the front step. She's older than Jacqueline by twelve or twenty years. It's difficult to guess by the woman's pallid, flat-cheeked face and honey-blond hair. Her husband is older too, although he's still a constable. Jacqueline's husband is writing his corporal exam next month, and with any luck they'll be transferred out to his own detachment. The woman is a foster mother, didn't or couldn't have any of her own. Jacqueline doesn't know, has never asked, but the woman always has two or more children who rotate on a regular basis. Jacqueline sees them every three or four months, and then they, like Charles the kitten, disappear. Right now her neighbour has a set of teenaged twins, a boy and a girl who go off to summer school each morning and don't usually come home until well after dark. Jacqueline says hello to them as she sits out on the front step after she's managed to get her children to bed, the red ember of her cigarette glowing in the spreading darkness; there's not much point in getting attached.