Grave Concern, page 23
“Oh! Need for speed, that it?”
“Yeah, I raced for a while. But I saw a couple bad accidents. That’s when I came up with the track manager idea. That way I could get out for a spin now and then, get it out of my system, come back intact.”
“You have way too much sense. Well, except for the noise of that thing.” Kate nodded toward the Harley. “Can’t they do something about that?”
Leonard bobbed his head, noncommittal. “They already did.”
“Come again?”
“Installed one of those aftermarket exhaust systems. Make it louder. The Big Growler, it’s called.”
“Can it be de-installed?” Kate asked.
Leonard laughed, “I guess.”
“Good,” said Kate. “Don’t get me wrong, Leonard. I love motorbikes in theory. But a sleek instrument such as that — ” she nodded at the bike, “ — should purr, not roar. Bring it back when it’s housetrained.”
Leonard looked surprised.
But Kate had already moved on in her mind. So he’d gone to university. How had that led to the racetrack? “So I’m guessing racetrack management wasn’t on your university application. What did you study, anyway?”
“Biochemistry.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. But my heart wasn’t really in it. It was okay, but mostly I just followed the marks. You know, please the parents. Asian, what can I say?”
What could you say? Kate just stared at him. Biochemistry major, film buff, electronics whiz, businessman, race car driver, motorbike licence holder — and what else? There was a whole lot more to Leonard than met the eye.
“So I spent a few years around the tracks. Then one morning — this was in Toronto — I woke up to a smog alert. It was pretty bad. All that day, for some reason, I kept hearing the phrase, ‘smoke and mirrors,’ playing in my head like a tape on a loop. ‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors,’ all day long. You know, like a song you can’t shake. I was even using it in conversation, shoehorning it in at the slightest excuse. By evening, driving home, I knew why. The racetrack thing had lost its magic, its appeal. It had gone stale, and this phrase was a sort of subconscious radio alarm. Wake up, Len, wake up! Move on! Anyway, also right around that time, my dad wrote me a letter on the QT, not telling Mom. He was worried about the business here. Customers weren’t coming in for videos as often, DVDs were getting more popular. And available at the grocery checkout. The latest electronics and all the digital stuff were getting way ahead of him. Not in so many words, but he was more or less begging me to come back and dig him out.”
“So you did.”
“How could I not? They slaved their whole lives for us. Risked everything to get us out of the old country on a ridiculous boat that could just as well have sunk.”
“Do you remember much of it?”
“Enough. I was five.”
“How did you end up here in Pine Rapids?”
“We started out in Montreal. We weren’t there very long and then moved to Toronto on the advice of some people we met on the boat. Deep down, though, my parents were country people, both brought to Saigon in their teens. You know, families looking for a better life. They got married, had us, decided they couldn’t stand the regime anymore. Got on the boat. Anyway, after getting a bit of stability in Toronto, they decided to try getting back to their rural roots. But when it came down to it, neither knew much about farming. So they settled for a small town. I remember my dad always hanging over the counter, scanning the classifieds. And then one day he saw this tiny, one-line ad in the Globe business section. They decided to ditch the Big Smoke. People warned them they’d be miserable. No Vietnamese community. No decent food. But they persisted. And here we are.”
“Wow. Must have been a shock, coming up here.”
Leonard didn’t respond to this directly. “Hey, I just had a brainwave,” he said. “How ’bout you come and meet them?”
“Your parents?”
“Yeah, come to dinner sometime. My mom will cook up her famous fish and chilis and force you to eat all kinds of weird stuff, and my dad, whenever my name comes up, will just say over and over, ‘Lenart never marry, never marry. Guht, guht boy.’ It’ll be a hoot.”
“What, they’re trying to marry you off?”
“Are you kidding? Thirty-six-year-old still living in the basement?”
“I see your point. However, I’m not agreeing to anything beyond dinner, and that most definitely includes marriage!”
Leonard laughed. “No, no. But come and meet them. Please. No obrigation. Moneybackguarantee.”
By midsummer, word was out. That is, word was officially out to those who’d been living under a rock wearing earplugs. Unofficially, everyone for miles around had known the scoop for weeks: a cougar, possibly one of a pair, was almost certainly lurking about. Fearing lawsuits, Land-o’-Pines Camp for Girls refunded camp fees pro rata and sent girls back to their homes, province-wide. The local campground was closed until further notice. Stern warnings were issued by the town’s own police force, and, for good measure, the Ontario Provincial Police, that children should be supervised at all times, even in the streets. And no one — but no one — should walk in the woods alone. Above an article on the topic in the local paper crouched a blurry “submitted” photo of indeterminate scale that, on closer examination, looked not unlike a generic house cat prowling a backyard.
If you asked Kate, it was all overkill. In little towns all over B.C., even her old city-on-the-Plains, cougars had a ball prowling around. People here just needed to “man up,” as the kids said. Take a Valium or something. Still, she relished the increased peace up at the cemetery. Even the staunchest family members rarely showed up these days. If nothing else, maybe Pine Rapid’s crisis would turn to opportunity. For Kate. She got busy with the website. She got herself on Twitter and more reluctantly on Facebook, which as far as Kate could see was populated by the delusionally optimistic. Perhaps she had joined their crowd. She twittered and chirped away like a madwoman, promoting the business, with scant faith in the power of social media to slow the alarming dwindling of her bank account.
By the Friday before the August long weekend, Kate was grumpy again. For a month of solid self-promotion, she’d reaped exactly twenty reply tweets from her old friend Gladys, all exactly the same: “@glad2noU Bereft beyond words. Return date?” Plus two work-related nibbles minus financial commitment. In the height of summer, the last thing on people’s minds was death or family obligation. And so at five o’clock, depressed by meagre and declining means and the state of penury and stasis these brought about, Kate closed up early.
The three short streets that comprised Pine Rapids’s “business section” might have been a movie set in storage, labelled Generic Town (Abandoned). Every other merchant, it seemed, had closed up and left town. Kate smiled to herself. Never mind. Let them go roam the nation in campers or head out to their secret lakes to fish. Let them take their fill of foreign culture in far-off lands. Ho Lam’s was always open: early, late, day and night. Kate had a pressing engagement. She had court to pay, and her court date had been postponed way too long. She would go see Leonard, suss out his plans for the weekend, and if it was all the same to him, ask him over for dinner, get them both drunk and with any luck, into her bed. Perhaps, at some point in the three coming days of dissipation, they’d take a spin through the valley on the Harley. Kate was smug. Kate was ready. Kate had plans.
Kate passed the Pussy Cat Palace, still open but closing in twenty minutes; Rory’s Books and Gifts, closed; Dollarama, closed; and the Beanery, technically open but on life support. At the fire hall, Vince Vaillancourt, one of the skeleton staff on duty, lackadaisically hosed down the spotless fire truck yet again. I.G.A. Foods, open but empty. Bursting with life, on the other hand, was the LCBO across the street. Almost there. Kate scooted past Flower Power as quickly as she could; as scarce as work was, the Friday before long weekend was no time for Gwyneth Waters to be getting ideas.
A hand-lettered sign on the door of Ho Lam Video and Electronic read simply,
What? The dog days of summer, and Leonard just ups and leaves? Leaving her, Kate, without recourse? While Mary, black-hearted Mary, was off visiting her father and others in Newfoundland? Kate’s joy was now despair. She pulled out her phone and texted: “Return to bitter West imminent. Anywhere better than here. Await further notice.” Kate sank onto Ho Lam’s front step, dropped her face in her hands.
If Kate’s mind was city centre, the suburbs now became noisy. A hubbub, some urgency, pricked the bounds of Kate’s consciousness. Roused at last from her small, inner world, Kate looked up. There sat Nicholas, alone in his shiny white pickup, honking like mad. At her.
He leaned out the window. “Kate! In the truck! Now!”
About a month before graduation, Foxy was about to host Chemistry Study Group for the last time. There was no dope to be had in the area, so Foxy got busy on booze duty. Part of the supply would be acquired through Tim’s older brother, Ray, who, having few friends, could generally be counted on to oblige. The kids would pool whatever money they could scrounge from parental purses and pockets, their own babysitting, and other work and hand it in a filthy bundle to Ray, with instructions on numbers of Labatt’s Blue, bottles of tequila and Baby Duck, and similar delights. Ray would then walk into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario outlet and do his best to get the whimsical desires of his underage “friends” right in petitioning the clerk. (The clerk would shout the order to unseen workers in the back who would pitch the requested bottles in a box and whiz the order to the front down a rolling metal chute.)
Using Ray as legal purchaser, however, had its limitations. You couldn’t really ask a lone person, even a fool, to purchase enough booze for several dozen teens at one go. And the LCBO store manager wasn’t stupid. What to do? Cunning Foxy hit on a solution that would, in the event, require some assistance.
The night before the final Chemistry Study Group was a Friday, the busiest night of the week up at King’s Hotel. Now it happened that, back in Grade 9, Foxy, unbeknownst to his peers, had had the nerve to ask out the much older Ariel Frank (whose on-and-off relationship with the unfortunate Kevin Farningham was then in an “off” phase). His date Ariel having reached legal drinking age, Foxy by association was accidentally admitted, well underage, to the tavern up at King’s. (The evening in question had come to an abrupt end when Foxy, having binged on tequila, was dragged out the door and around back of the tavern by his furious date, who held his head and pinched her nose as he puked.)
The evening, however, turned out not to be a total loss. Unbeknownst to anyone, Foxy gained some valuable insight into the ways of the wayward inn that night. Turning your insides out onto the ground is one thing. Anyone can do it. But not anyone can do what Foxy did, which is to observe the ground itself even as it disappears beneath your stomach’s effluent. In fact, Foxy had noticed the soil at his feet, how individual grains — black-glitter mica, clear quartz, pink granite, green gneiss — melded together in the miracle of sand. And something else Foxy observed: hinged at the base of the hotel wall beside which he was bringing up his guts was a wrought-iron door sporting decorative curlicues — a smallish door, to be sure, but big enough for a man to squeeze through.
Over the intervening four years, the knowledge of this door had frolicked freely in Foxy Raymond’s id, peeping out now and again into everyday ego-view. By the figurative eve of graduation, ego and id fused, and Foxy saw clearly how the knowledge gained that evening could benefit him and his friends.
Nick — honest, reliable — was enlisted as Foxy’s accomplice. And this is how on the Friday night before the last Chemistry Study Group meeting of his life, Nicholas found himself on a bicycle, following Foxy up the highway just as darkness was falling. When they got to King’s Hotel, they dismounted and stashed the bikes in the bush by the parking lot. Weaving quickly between cars, Foxy led Nicholas over to the place where he’d puked all those years before. Sure enough, there was the little door, just as he remembered it, only rustier.
“Look,” said Foxy. “It leads into the basement, and I know for sure that’s where they store most of the booze.”
“What is it?” said Nicholas. “What’s it for?”
“Coal chute. From the old days, before regular oil furnaces. Truck came along, dumped the coal straight down there. Then they’d shovel it into the furnace. I’m sure we can get in. We’ll have the run of the place.”
Nicholas looked doubtful. “Till someone comes around here and sees us, dickhead. And even if it works, how are we going to get out? You thought o’ that?”
Foxy sneered. “Never heard of chairs? Ladders? Boxes? There’s fuckin’ something down there we can use.”
“Famous last words, Foxy,” said Nicholas.
But Foxy was already worrying the bolt. Having no luck, he looked around till he found a large stone. Bang, bang.
“Shhhh!” said Nick. “Someone’ll hear us.”
“Over that?” The place was vibrating with bass. Whatever the music was sounded bad.
Foxy kept at the bolt — bash, bash, bash. He spat, and rubbed spit all around the bolt-holes. Bash, bash, bash. Nothing.
“Now what, Einstein?” asked Nicholas.
Foxy looked thoughtful, as though weighing a moral question. At last, he pulled something out of his back pocket. A condom.
“Oh, Foxy, you shouldn’t have,” Nicholas deadpanned.
“No, you homo nerd. Watch this.” Foxy opened the package and removed the contents.
“Stick out two fingers,” he commanded.
“Fuck off,” Nicholas said.
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“Jerkoff, to you,” said Nicholas. However, after looking right and left, he stuck out an index finger. Foxy placed the flattened condom on the fingertip. Cold.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Foxy said, unrolling the condom slowly down Nick’s finger. When it was fully unfurled, Foxy carefully removed it from the tip. The condom hung limp, jelly-like from Foxy’s hand. Grasping it firmly at either end, Foxy spun around and rubbed the condom all over the bolt and bolt-holes.
He turned and grinned. “Lubricated,” he said.
After a great deal of rubbing, Foxy held the bedraggled condom out to Nicholas, whose first instinct was to knock it away. But he took it and shoved it in his pocket rather than litter. Foxy kept at the bolt, wiggling, wiggling. Then — movement.
“Now, hold this like this,” Foxy said. As per instruction, Nicholas pressed hard against the door. Bit by bit, Foxy worked the bolt free. The door made a miniscule movement. The hinges were rusty but not beyond hope. Together, the boys put their backs into it. Inch by inch, they pulled the door wide.
6
The Visit
Though numerous retorts whirled through Kate’s head, none found its way to open air. Beneath the anger and self-pity, a part of Kate remained the soul of reason: in a pinch, thought she, even a yelling, honking, happily married former suitor in an F–150 could substitute for social life. She dusted herself off and, with studied nonchalance, sauntered over.
Shading her eyes, Kate looked up. “Can I help you at all, Nicholas?”
Whether from fury, embarrassment, sunburn or all three, Link’s face was positively crimson. “Kate! Get in! Something’s going on up Wycliffe Road!”
Nicholas leaned across the cab and pushed opened the door. “C’mon! The more the merrier!”
Kate climbed in.
“Not another dog-flattening, I hope.”
Nicholas looked blank.
“Never mind,” Kate said. “In-joke. Speaking of merry, you don’t seem very, Nicholas.”
“I’m not.” Nicholas glanced over his shoulder and pushed hard on the gas. They roared up Main toward the traffic light. “Okay, I’m going to tell you what I know, because you’re one of the few people I can trust.”
“I’m flattered,” said Kate.
“So I’ve planted a couple of cameras in the woods at likely spots. You know, to see if we can get evidence of cougar. Well, just a few minutes ago, I’m sitting here in my truck, half asleep, monitoring the video. I usually do it later, after work, but this time, I don’t know, I was doing it live. Bored, I guess.”
“I hear ya,” said Kate.
“So first I see something, fawn-coloured, big-headed, whip by. Could be cougar. So I’m excited. But Kate, I’m watching, watching, to see if it comes back.”
“And?”
“It didn’t, but guess what did?”
“I have no idea.”
“Bill Chambers’ legs. I’m sure it was him. Hunting knife in the thigh pocket. Those Friday night ‘meetings’ at the graveyard? Never came without the knife. Every time.”
“You think my landlord is hunting cougar?”
“Your landlord, eh? Lucky you. Well, what do you think?” Nicholas asked.
“Can this thing go any faster?” Kate replied.
Nicholas did his best. The pickup strained around corners and sprayed ditches with gravel.
To lighten the mood, Kate said, “How come you’re still here on the long weekend? Surely you don’t have to work every day of the year.”
“I was going to go home, but then I don’t know, I sensed this weekend could be a turning point. Partly the cameras, I guess. Finally getting them set up. Partly the quiet. Everyone’s off, out of town. Perfect time for a secretive beast to show itself. I really do want to get this thing over with.”
“Doesn’t Kathleen mind? I mean, with the kids and all.”
Nicholas said nothing for a few seconds. Steered melodramatically around a pothole. As he did so, he grimaced slightly, and Kate noticed the teeth. Ah yes, Link’s teeth had always made her think of the snow in the Christmas carol — deep and crisp and even. That was because Link’s father had been one of two dentists in town. Kate had envied Nicholas his teeth while simultaneously dreading the annual visits to Dr. Enderby for checkups that invariably ended in excruciating drilling and filling.
