Who by Fire (36 page)

“You were calling to tell me about Lance.”

“Well that, and about the funeral. He wanted you to be a pallbearer.”

“I’d be proud to.”

Another pause. “Lance and I had a lot of time to plan this. I had the funeral right away. It was three days ago.”

“Oh.”

“He wanted the young fellows he’d trained to carry him. Lance thought so highly of you, Billy. You were the first. That’s what he always said: ‘Billy was the first.’ And then there’s this letter.”

“I’m sorry, a letter?”

“Lance wrote you a letter. I was wanting to be sure of the address before I mailed it. I don’t know what’s in it but Lance was concerned that you get it soon after he died.”

Bill gave her his address.

“And you, Judy? Are you okay?”

“Oh. I don’t know. The kids were here. Ginny’s staying with me. Would you like to talk her?”

Ginny’s voice came on. “How are you, Bill?”

His eyes blurted tears. “I’m okay. And you?”

“Fine. Have you talked to the kids?”

“No, I haven’t. Are they okay?”

She laughed her slow laugh. “Martha’s fine. I don’t get to talk to Will long enough to know. He’s always busy. But you must be sad. I know how much Lance meant to you.”

“I’m okay. It’s nice to hear your voice.”

He sat in front of a VLT. Its theme was Australian. He imagined whiz kids in California inventing it with the help of Google and Wikipedia.
Is a wallaby a kangaroo or that thing that lives in a tree?

The casino was packed. The Australian machine was the only one available. He had played it before and did not like it. He remembered that a didgeridoo played when you won a certain amount, or was it when three Aborigines appeared on the same line? He hadn’t put money in, just sat there watching the display.

He flipped through the information screens, found out how the special worked. Something about cane toads on a highway. He could
not seem to concentrate. He had come here in flight from dead Lance, from lost Marie, from his lost job. There were a lot of things he needed not to think about, but his arms flopped on his thighs like sandbags.

He looked up and checked James Beaudry. They had seen each other when Bill came in. Bill had been trying to remember if he’d seen him here before. Nights here were not for remembering.

What did not matter was that Beaudry had ratted on him. Except for the probability of misunderstanding, he’d go right now and tell him that. But Marie’s ex-husband was in a headlock with his machine. If tapped on the shoulder, he might not feel it, or might yell and jump a foot. His body was as tightly wound as a bridge cable. He jerked every time he hit Play and lost. When he got a small win, he would gulp a breath, reach up and grip his neck. If he got something bigger, he paused to work his shoulders and roll his head around the stem of his neck. Bill watched to see if he was putting in bills or playing down credits. It was the latter: grinding away his winnings, bearing down on zero.

“You going to play that machine?”

A woman was standing close, almost touching him. She had a dirty white purse over one shoulder and a fistful of twenties resting where the purse clasped. Between the open sides of a puffy jacket, her belly pressed out like a harvest pumpkin.

“Well?”

Bill took out a twenty and slid it up the neon slope, heard the machine swallow. He felt along the dashboard for the Play button. No didgeridoo, but some Australian beast briefly yelped.

“That was stupid. You bet one credit on the middle line. You had four kangaroos on the diagonal.”

Bill didn’t look at the screen but at the woman. She wore a sea creature on a silver wire around her neck. He pushed the button again.

“Three surfboards, and you didn’t get that either.”

Bill pushed the button.

“I could make money on that machine. What a waste.” She turned away but didn’t go anywhere.

Bill finally looked at the screen. On his only pay line, three crocodiles sat in a row, their jaws munching. Crocodiles were worth more than other symbols, and he was money ahead. It gave him an idea how to treat this night. He would bet five lines, close his eyes, and spin. Wake up every ten minutes and see how he was doing. Let the machine tell him by going dead under his finger when he’d hit zero. It was no stupider than anything else that happened here.

Down the line a couple were fighting.

“I’m not giving you any more. You always lose on that one but you keep playing it. Here’s a ten. Now go away. Leave me alone. I’m doing good here.”

Bill closed his eyes and his mind floated.

“Sir? Sir?”

A short brown man was standing where the pregnant woman had been. He wore the green vest of an employee. His face was tight and his eyes dog-sad.

“We’re very full tonight, sir. If you’re not feeling like playing, I wonder if you would kindly cash out.”

It was true. Bill wasn’t playing. He had been imagining it without doing it. “You’d like me to leave.”

“Perhaps you might care for a bite to eat, or maybe a drink in our lounge. We have a fine entertainer. Miss Sally Lee Rivers of Nashville, Tennessee.”

“I’m fine here.”

“It’s just you haven’t been playing, sir, and some people who don’t have VLTs are complaining. If we weren’t so busy, there would be no problem.”

Bill pressed Cash Out.

“Are the tables full?” he asked the man. “Blackjack or roulette?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. The oil price went up today. And a new project has opened its hiring office.”

Bill was stiff in the back when he stood. His knees and hips felt in need of replacement.

“Thank you, sir. You are a gentleman.”

The woman sprang into the emptied chair, slid her twenties in one after another, as fast as the machine could swallow.

“Hello, Johnny.”

“Billy? How the hell are ya?”

“Wondering what you’re up to.”

“I bet you’re wanting me to come watch you drink. I’d love to, but I’m seven hours away.”

“Working?”

“I did a stupid thing. Decided to sell heat tapes. The kind that run along pipes and keep them from freezing?”

“So where are you?”

“On the prairie somewhere. I’m looking for a mini gas plant that’s plugged end to end with hydrates because my heat tapes didn’t work.”

“That’s too bad. I’ll let you go, then.”

“Billy, hold on. I don’t like how you sound. What you gotta do right now is head for family. Family has to take you. That’s the rule. You do that, okay?”

Donna lived in an old community north of Calgary’s river, in a brick townhouse with a white porch. She had purchased it with a woman named Adele and then bought out Adele’s share when they split.

Bill stood on the porch now, watching the last crust of snow melt through the cracks. The wood was black with mould and he
imagined replacing it. Beyond the steps, generations of cats had patterned the grass with their potent pee.

He rang the bell again. It was morning but not so early that she would be asleep. Her peephole had a metal eye patch, and he heard it
snick
. The door jerked open and Donna walked away down the hall: blue bathrobe, flapping slippers.

He went in and kicked off his boots, left them on the entry rug beside a row of his sister’s footwear. The closet was full so he flopped his coat over the half wall.

The kitchen was at the back. Morning light pooled there. Donna sat with her back to him at a table she’d rescued from the farm. It was cluttered with books and bills, and a half-eaten plate of ravioli. The ancient tomcat rose from its pillow on the far-side chair and stretched its back round.

There was a third chair but Bill could not make up his mind to remove the stack of newspapers and sit. Donna hadn’t said a word. It seemed possible to turn and go.

“I suppose Jeannie sent you. To look after your depressed sister.”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I could use a drink,” Bill said.

“It’s morning.”

“Germans drink in the morning. We’re half-German.”

“That logic’s airtight.”

He found a couple of glasses and reached for a pull above the fridge.

“If you think the booze is there, it means you haven’t been here for three years.”

“Where, then?”

“Cabinet in the living room.”

He found it and, in its interior, felt familiar square shoulders. “Gin all right?”

“Perfect.”

In the kitchen again, he decided Donna did not want mix or ice and poured her a splash. She took the glass, drank, and shuddered. “Adele has cancer,” she said. “She’s dying.”

Bill absorbed the news. “Did she call you?” He knew they were not normally in touch.

“A friend did.” Donna downed the gin and held the glass out for more. “Adele doesn’t want anything from me. She has all the love and support she needs, apparently.”

Bill moved the newspapers and sat.

“What does it mean,” Donna said, “if after that many years with somebody, she doesn’t want to see you, even in her dying days?”

She looked at him across the rim of her glass. The emotion in her eyes was frightening. “I’m in no mood for advice, sympathy, or any happy shit, okay? The only thing I want to hear is cold, hard truth. If you can’t deliver that, you should go.”

He sat quietly for a bit, then said, “I lost my job.”

“Jeannie told me. She said leave with pay.”

“They’ll fire me as soon as the story goes quiet.”

“What else is shining up your life?”

“Marie and I started something and it stopped.”

“Why? Because you’re unemployed?”

“Because I’m a gambling addict.”

“I thought maybe. Can’t you quit?”

“I might have already. If I tell her that, she won’t believe me. I wouldn’t either.”

“But you think you have?”

“Addicts always think that.”

“This is pretty good, Billy. I don’t usually believe you, but I’m believing you now. Got more?”

“Lance Evert is dead.”

“Oh shit.”

“Lance was a good guy.”

“In states of drunkenness, you’ve said otherwise.”

“I was full of shit. He was always a good guy.”

Donna stood up and took the ravioli to the garbage. She cleared off the rest of the table. The cat convulsed suddenly and threw up. It went on the newspapers, on the pillow and the floor. Donna began to cry, great gulping sobs.

“Fuck!” she yelled. When she caught her breath, she removed the cat to his basket. She gathered up the dirtied newspapers. The smell was terrible.

With the newspaper, she gestured toward the cat. “Elmer has cancer too. He’s scheduled to be put down next week. Everyone has cancer. I’m expecting mine any time.”

Bill stood to make room for the clean-up. She came into his wheelhouse and he put his arms around her. She cried against his chest.

“Somewhere in this hug is a lot of cat puke,” she said.

He held on until she pushed him away. She brushed at his sweater but there was nothing on it. She went out the back door to the trash can and came back smiling.

“Willbilly,” she said, “I have an idea and I won’t be denied. We need to go see Jeannie. You, me, and Elmer in his box. He always loved a road trip.”

Bill thought he was good to go but was hit by fatigue while Donna got ready. He said he had to sleep and took to the living room couch. The cat, no longer nauseated, snailed in his crotch.

He’d said he needed an hour, but Donna left him to it. By the time they were free of the city and had begun to weave through the high foothills, it was Charles Marion Russell time, pink, blue, and
threads of amethyst. When the sun was dropping into mountain cloud, they were well past the mansions, the thoroughbreds in New Zealand blankets. Ordinary horses and cows stood behind the wire of down-at-heel farms.

“You all right?” Donna asked, after he had been silent a long time.

“I’m fine,” he said and believed he was. Distracted and numb but fine. “You?”

“Elmer’s still sleeping,” she said.

It was a stretch of highway they had pounded since youth. At times, Bill felt he was in his ’64 Chev half-ton, with its cow dents and fenders rubbed raw. Shards of the invulnerability that had been normal for him then zipped through him now. He had hit many things with that truck, but the cab always held its shape, protective as a hockey helmet.

Donna turned on the overhead light and opened the console, flicked through his discs. “What strange taste you have.”

“Whatever was at the gas station when I felt desperate.”

“Here’s
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume II
. We’re saved.”

They listened awhile. “Do you ever wonder?” Donna said and stopped. The light was less by the time she spoke again. “If the three of us got wrecked?”

He gummed this but had no answer.

“That maybe we were wrecked before we left home? Even before puberty?” she added.

He waited longer. A song ended; another began.

“If you mean we were headed somewhere, and then the plant came, and we never got there, I think that every day.”

They reached the farm in the dark. A chinook was blowing seventy. The flare stack at the gas plant was belching fire. The door to the porch was unlocked, and when they entered the blackness, cat claws
panicked on the linoleum. For the first time since Calgary, Elmer woke in his box and yowled. Then the kitchen light came on and Jeannie stood in front of them in a flannel nightgown. She was holding her cat, and both of them stared with big eyes.

“Go to bed, both of you. I have work to do in the morning.”

Donna and Bill climbed the stairs, giggling, joking about how inhumanly steep the steps were. Bill was glad to be back under the old roof, having traced his sadness to its source.

Jeannie was behind a closed door doing mysterious internet work. Donna was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling. Both declined Bill’s invitation to walk.

In gumboots, he started up the rise behind the barn. The morning air was soft and still. Beads of dew in last year’s grass wet his jeans at the knee. After going up and coming down, he entered the coulee, jumped the creek, and walked a cow path across its cut face. The stream sluiced along below him, brown with its burdens.