The Retreat (30 page)

“Hey,” he said. “You hungry?” He felt for the bag and he found a piece of bread and he broke it and offered it to Bull, who did not want it, and so he put a piece in his own mouth and held it there. Chewed slowly. When Bull scratched to be let out, he lifted the lid and let the cat escape.

At night, a group of teenagers arrived and set up their vans and cars along the entrance to the dump. They opened their van doors and played music that floated down into the dump to where Nelson lay. Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and Aerosmith. Nelson heard the songs and imagined that he was back in Lesser at a bush party where boys swam in the river and then stood shirtless by the fire. He lifted the lid of his freezer and peered out into the night. Kids appeared as stick people cavorting before a mammoth fire that lit up their faces and the sides of the vehicles. They seemed apparitions floating across the dark sky. They drank beer and threw the bottles down into the dump, several bottles landing within reach of
Nelson’s spot. Girls laughed and swore and a boy called out for someone to show her tits. Voices, soft and irregular, came down into the pit and seemed to walk past Nelson’s hiding place. He heard the voices but he could not make out what was said. A girl and a boy. And then the voices were above him and the freezer rocked slightly. One of them, perhaps the girl, was sitting on the freezer lid. Murmurings and then silence and then the girl said, “Okay. Okay, Main?” Nelson understood that Main was about to fuck this girl on the lid of the freezer. The girl’s voice was ambiguous, clamouring. The boy was silent. “Okay,” the girl said again and then she said, “Oh,” and again she said this and then she called out, “Main, a cat,” and the freezer moved abruptly and the girl said, “A fucking cat. Fuck, Main, it scared me.”

“Aww, come here,” Main said.

“It was black. A black fucking cat.” Her voice fell away and fell away some more and then it was gone. Main was still there. He was sitting on the lid of the freezer. He was smoking and kicking with his booted heels at the side of the freezer. And then he called out, “Nicole,” and he called again, and then the freezer shifted and Main was gone, and the din of the party returned.

For a long time Nelson lay and listened and he wondered if Bull was safe. He fell asleep and woke to silence and he lifted the lid and found himself at the edge of another day, the third or fourth in the freezer, he did not know for sure. The kids had left. Their fire burned dimly by the fence. He tried to imagine leaving this place. He pictured climbing up out of the dump and walking down to the road and finding a
ride north. The possibility of not being caught was farfetched and so he imagined building himself a house in the bush. Passing the winter. And then the summer. And the winter after that. At some point he would be found. He had not meant to hurt the man. The man had meant to hurt him. And he had accidentally hurt the man. Perhaps Raymond would suggest this. Perhaps he already had.

His jars of water were empty and his food was gone. He thought that he might manage to crawl out and find some source of water. He tried to climb from the freezer and fell back with the pain and passed out. He woke to a terrible smell and realized he had shit himself. He lay in his own urine and shit and he wept. He was cold. The temperature had dropped and the cold had entered the freezer and crept up around his feet and legs and then to his torso. There was the stench of his own excrement and urine and at some point he realized the wound on his chest was infected and was giving off the smell of rotten meat. He attempted to pour more whisky on it but he was too weak and he spilled the alcohol onto the floor of the freezer, where it pooled at his hips.

A brief and violent thunderstorm passed overhead and he lifted the lid of the freezer and held out the empty sealer jar to the sky. The effort required was immense, and when he drew the jar back inside, it held only a small amount of water and he drank this. He imagined, in his feverish state, that he would be drowned. He slept for long stretches and once, when he woke, he lifted the lid and saw that night had fallen once more. He slept again and he dreamed and in his dreams he quoted whole passages from Ephesians and the Psalms. He
saw Raymond as a young boy standing alone in an empty space. He woke and opened his eyes and his mouth was moving and he was reciting a verse from Isaiah, something he had learned at the age of twelve, at the dining-room table, before he went off to bed. “My help cometh from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth.”

He heard a vehicle arrive at the edge of the dump and a door opened and the sound of whistling fell down onto his ears. And at the same time the cat came to him, meowing and scratching on the roof of his house. He imagined that the cat would attract the attention of the person whistling, and so he attempted to draw the cat into the freezer with him. But the cat thought it was a game and stuck her paw into the tiny crack and evaded his hand, scratching him lightly.

His vision blurred and he pulled at the cat’s paw. He knew, if he caught her, he would break her neck, but she escaped. She left and came back and scratched and meowed. Nelson fell back against the plastic mattress and cursed the cat. He understood that if he was going to survive, he had to leave this place. Later, after he heard the vehicle pull away, he gathered the strength to climb and fall out of the freezer. He landed on a piece of iron, grunted, and then he stood uncertainly. The light of day blinded him. He shielded his eyes and surveyed his land; the sunlight reflected off his possessions and the cat appeared. She slipped sideways, up towards the fence, and Nelson tumbled after her. He could not walk, so he pulled himself up the hill on hands and knees, up into a world in which sacrifice and providence had already occurred. Up he crawled, past a spokeless bicycle wheel, an endless
length of rubber hose, broken stained-glass windows, half a pulpit, empty tar barrels, insulation, plaster and lath, cereal boxes, carved wooden beams, a library of tattered and burned books, and finally a pair of boots. The boots were well-worn but they were still in fine shape, and when he touched one of them, the boot moved and he touched it again. He found the boot to be solid with a foot inside and his eye travelled upwards and he saw a leg and a torso and above that was a head of an old man and the man gazed down at him and Nelson lowered his head and began to tremble.

The old man spoke. “You forsaken son of a bitch,” he said. Then he crouched beside Nelson and he held Nelson’s jaw and looked into his eyes and he said, “Should be dead.” They pondered each other as if they were meeting on the path to hell. The old man said, “Seymour, I guess.” He stood and looked about and then he squatted again and said, “You wanna stay here, in this situation? ’Cause if you do, you’ll die. Christ, you’re already dead. Look at you.” He had very few teeth. He rocked on his haunches and lit a cigarette. Nelson was on his back and from his perspective the old man’s method of extracting and lighting the cigarette was convoluted, all upside down, but rather miraculous. The exhaled smoke appeared to descend rather than ascend. When he had finished his cigarette, the man punched the butt into the dirt near his feet and he told Nelson that he could help him, or he could leave him. The man frowned, or perhaps he smiled, because the sound he offered was one of high spirits.

“You smell like shit,” the old man said, and this appeared to decide things. He leaned forward and said, “Come.” He
lifted him up and put his hands under Nelson’s arms and stood him upright, like a tree that had been cut down and was about to be replanted, and they faltered at the bottom of the pit, and then the old man led Nelson up towards a purple truck that seemed impossibly old, just as the man seemed impossibly old, a mere spectre.

T
hursday morning, Lizzy woke early from a dream in which Thibault was asking her to remove her clothes; she had stripped naked and when she looked up Raymond was standing before her. She lay in bed and thought of the interview, and how she had answered Thibault’s questions so willingly, and she felt worried that she had been too free with her answers. She believed that Raymond would have been asked some of the same questions and she wondered how he would have responded.

The night before, late, she had gone to her father’s cabin and found him sitting in a chair by the window. When she entered, he looked up and for a moment he appeared surprised, as if he had been expecting someone else. Lizzy had stood by the door, and when her father spoke, she came and sat near him.

“You can’t sleep,” he said. “What’s going on?”

She said that she was worried about Raymond in prison. She had heard from Harris that the occupation was still going on, so maybe some people from there would help him. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. “Don’t you think about Mum all the time?”

“She wrote a letter,” her father said. “It came the other day. She hasn’t forgotten you.”

“Yeah?”

Her father said that her mother had decided it would be best if she didn’t come back to the Retreat. She would meet them back in Calgary.

“Did she say that, ‘I’ll meet you back in Calgary,’ or are you just hoping?”

“Not those exact words, Lizzy. But she will. Of course.” He paused, and then his voice slid away, and for a time Lizzy did not hear his words, just the sound of his voice. And then he said something about her missing her mother, and Lizzy turned to him. He said that when two people who love each other share a room, and then one person leaves, that person is missed. He said that this is what had happened with her mother. “Her smell, her voice, the air that you shared. All of this is gone. And it makes you terribly sad.” He paused, and Lizzy waited, wishing for more, but he had nothing more to say.

Mid-morning, the sky grew dark and a thunderstorm passed overhead, pummelling the Retreat. From the shelter of her cabin, Lizzy watched the trees bend as the rain obscured the clearing, and then the storm passed as quickly as it had arrived. Everett had left earlier by bicycle and had still not returned and she wondered if he had managed to find shelter.

Vernon came to the Retreat at noon to see Lizzy, and when word arrived that he was waiting for her in the Hall,
she at first refused to see him, but then her father convinced her to talk to him. He said that this Vernon had some news about Raymond. She found Vernon and walked with him to the other side of the clearing. The grass was damp and the leaves were still dripping water, but the sun had come out and the air was humid and hot. Lizzy faced Vernon and asked him to take off his sunglasses, she hated talking to someone when she couldn’t see his eyes. He removed the glasses and held them slightly aloft, as if this was only a temporary thing. His freckles appeared paler and smaller and his nose lifted as if sniffing her. He pulled at his ear. “Raymond ran,” he said. “He took off and I’m wondering if he’s shown up here. I suppose he will. He doesn’t have many places to go and I don’t think you want to be harbouring a criminal. Has he been here?”

Lizzy imagined Raymond running down a road and then into the bush. “No. He hasn’t been here. Look around.” She lifted a hand, offering him the whole area.

Vernon grimaced and shifted his weight and as he did so his face appeared helpless and lost. “I trusted him, and the stupid shit just took off.”

Lizzy was aware of biting her lower lip. She hated Vernon at that moment. “Don’t call him names,” she said.
“You
let him run.”

Vernon watched her carefully, or this seemed to be the case, because his glasses were on again and Lizzy could not see his eyes. He said that the other day, at his house, he had not meant to frighten her. “That wasn’t my intention.” Then he nodded and turned and left.

Later that afternoon, she and her brothers and Harris went to the pond. Everett, who had come back wet and bedraggled just after lunch, pushed Harris in his wheelchair. William, in order to hide the bare spot on his head, had taken to wearing a baseball cap, and looking down at him now Lizzy was conscious of his vulnerability. When Fish had asked Lizzy, the day before, what time their mother was coming back, William had looked up quickly, bewilderment on his face. Lizzy had said that their mother would meet them back home in Calgary, and William had looked away and his eyes had closed and then opened, as if he believed that Lizzy was making this up.

At the pond, the water was cold and William and Fish came up from their swim, shivering, lips blue. Lizzy wrapped them in towels and held them to her chest, one under each arm, until she too felt the chill of their bodies. Everett sat off to the side, pushing sand up onto his bare feet. The sun ascended and it grew warmer. Harris fell asleep, his chin resting on his chest. Lizzy imagined that Raymond might eventually come to her, and she did not know what she would say and do when he did.

She turned to Fish and held his head in her hands, pulled him close, and pressed her mouth to his small, cool ear and whispered that she loved him. She rolled back towards William and did the same to him, but he stiffened and pushed her away. Still, he’d heard her words. She lifted her head and listened to the sweeping of the leaves in the warm wind, which sounded to her like the distant cry of an animal, slack-jawed, hunting at the edge of the clearing.