Algoma (9 page)

The thermometer remained constant at -11°C. He looked around the yard at what little he could see in the dark. The cedar hedges needed to be trimmed. He ran a hand through his own messy hair. He needed a cut, too. He’d have to wait until spring to prune the hedges, which were now over seven feet tall. When he and Algoma had first moved into the house, the hedges had been a series of thigh-high shrubs that stretched around the property in small puffs. Now they blocked the view of almost everything else. He found himself stranded on his own small green planet.

______________

10:13 p.m. -17°C. Wind NW, blustery.
Ice cube melting on the floor inside.

Algoma stood outside Club Rebar, her scarf wrapped around her head like a turban. She pulled Barry out of her purse. She felt bad that Gaetan couldn’t see her using it. It was the first thing he’d given her in a long time. She took a long drink of gin and coughed. The clear liquid burned her throat. Juniper berries. Like the bushes her father had asked her to stomp on when she was little, so that she could flush out the hares hiding beneath.

“Jump harder,” he had yelled, holding his shotgun loose in his hand, “they don’t even know you’re knocking yet!”

Out of breath, Algoma had jumped up and down on the springy bush like it was a trampoline until he’d said stop. By the end of her stomping session, her socks were threaded with tiny needles that tortured her ankles for the rest of the day. But it didn’t matter; she’d liked pleasing her father more than anything else. Every hare she’d flushed out had made her father love her more, she was sure of it, and would give her a leg up on Bay.

Algoma accidentally spilled some of the gin on her jacket. She’d only eaten a piece of toast earlier that day. Too tired to cook, she’d eaten whatever was easiest. Her brain felt gin-soaked—top-heavy—like she would tip over any minute. She leaned over and looked at her heavy winter boots and whispered, “Thank you.” If drinking worked for Gaetan, maybe it would work for her, too. He seemed numb all the time and that was beginning to appeal to Algoma.

Even though she was the only one outside amidst the cigarette butts, she tried to look sober, focused. Through the thin walls, she could hear music, an occasional laugh, a shriek.

Times when she found the empty house unbearable—Ferd staying with one of her sisters or a friend and Gaetan working—she went to the Club. She rarely spoke to Gaetan while he was working, but she enjoyed his presence. The mutual silence. She liked the bar, which was little more than a tool shed with a pool table and a battered dart board. Seated at the bar, she drank free glasses of ginger ale and ice; outside, she spiked her stomach with shots of alcohol that warmed her entire body.

“Where’s Ferd?” Gaetan asked. He poured a beer for a large man with a red beard and a matching red Mohawk, a skidder operator who found his way to the bar six days out of seven. While the skidder tipped poorly, he tipped on every drink, which was more than most did.

Algoma stirred her ginger ale with a yellow plastic sword. She pushed the ice cubes beneath the surface and then released them so they floated back up.

“He’s at Cen’s.”

Gaetan nodded. Algoma pushed her glass forward for a refill. She liked the hiss of the soda gun, how the ice cubes popped and fractured when he dropped them in the ginger ale.

Before the accident, Algoma sometimes asked one of her sisters to babysit the kids while she went to visit Gaetan at the Club. She’d enjoyed the women who leaned over the bar trying to seduce her husband, their heavy breasts sopping up old beer spill. She liked Gaetan’s deep laugh. How he would flirt for tips, with which he would buy her new old things. She liked how it felt like it was just the two of them, if only for a few hours.

The house was silent. Algoma shuffled across the floor in her socks, knocking into things as she passed. When she accidentally knocked over the spider plant that sat beside the phone, she knew she’d drunk more from Barry than she’d realized. The trouble with a flask was that it was impossible to tell how much you’d had to drink until it was empty. She stumbled into her bedroom and peeled off her shirt and tossed it on the floor.

Half-dressed, she turned out the lights, lay down on her bed, and closed her eyes. A moment later, she woke with a start. She hadn’t set her alarm for work. In the darkness, she reached over to turn on the alarm, instead upsetting the homemade humidifier—a soup bowl of water—that sat on her bedside table.

Algoma groaned and got out of bed to clean up the mess. She switched on the bedside lamp and grabbed the shirt she’d discarded earlier to sop up the water. When she moved the table to clean up what had spilled down the sides, she found another note. Two hundred and fifteen, she tallied in her head. She’d set bowls of water around the house to combat the dry winter air and to prevent the bloody noses she was prone to. Because of Ferd, the bowls had a new use. They were like small mailboxes stationed around the house and Algoma was the collector.

She tucked the note into the pocket of her robe that hung on the door and went back to bed. She’d read it in the morning. Ferd’s narrative was slowly growing inside her like a vine, almost convincing her at times that Leo was alive. Almost asleep, Algoma heard someone turn on the television in the living room. She tried to listen in, but couldn’t make out the voices or which show it was. Gaetan must have come home. He would be up half the night watching reruns until he fell asleep in his chair with his head slumped forward, legs spread wide open, melted slush pooling around his boots. She often found him still sleeping there in the morning, the television still on. He looked like a noble soldier asleep in his bunker. At least that’s how she tried to picture him, not as a husband minutes away from waking up to another hangover.

Unable to sleep, Algoma switched on the lamp again and dug through her bedside table drawer for a pen and paper. Maybe if she wrote a letter to Ferd from Leo the letters would stop. I’m fine, Leo would say. Happy. Not coming home. Miss you.

She wrote a few sentences, stopped, crumpled the paper, tossed it onto the floor, and tried again. There was nothing in the parenting books she’d read that could have prepared her for this. They’d covered imaginary friends, but not the undead. Maybe she would write her own book, she thought, if she ever figured out what to do. She threw her pen to the floor and lay back down. The world spun dizzily around her. A better idea would come. Tomorrow, she would know what to do.

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1:25 p.m. 23°C. Wind S, light.
A scattering of stones and eggs.

The killdeer shrieked and scuttled back and forth across the gravel. It let one wing drag and exposed a patch of dark orange feathers at its tail. An evolutionary trick. The bird was supposed to appear wounded to attract attention from predators. Leo touched the birthmark on his neck, wondered what it signaled to others. The bird’s antics, he knew, were a distraction to keep his interest away from the nest, which must have been nearby. He saw which direction the bird was heading and looked the other way. There, several feet behind him, hidden among the stones, a clutch of pyriform eggs.

Leo picked up one of the speckled eggs and held it in his hand. It rolled around in a tight circle in his palm, a clock gone mad. He carefully dropped the egg into his coat pocket and turned to look at the mother who was screeching even louder now, her wing dragging on the ground, the other flapping madly. Leo wanted to see the bright orange feathers on its tail close up. He raised the barrel of his pellet gun.

“What are you holding?” Ferd asked. He leaned against the door frame of the room he shared with his brother.

Leo tried to hide the bird behind his back. “Nothing,” he stuttered.

Ferd flushed red. Older by minutes, he felt he owned his brother. There were no secrets between them because he did not allow them, always crushing the spaces where they could hide.

“Show me,” Ferd said. He took a step closer to Leo.

“Leave me alone.” Leo held the dead bird tighter in his hand, pictured its feathers, the pattern beneath its wings. He could still picture it clearly in his mind.

Ferd launched into his brother, tackling Leo’s waist.

“No,” Leo cried out, his hand involuntarily releasing the bird. The killdeer’s soft body bounced on the floor, its glassy dead eye staring at both of them. Leo scrambled to grab it.

“No secrets,” Ferd said, his voice more of a growl. He grabbed at his brother’s leg, trying to pull him back.

The battle lasted only seconds, both boys reaching for the dead plover, before Ferd held up the bird and smirked.

“We can’t eat this shit,” he said. He tossed the bird back onto the floor, its neck now twisted at a painful angle. “Put it in the garbage now. Do it before Dad sees what you’re wasting shot on,” he said. “Do it before I tell him.”

Leo picked up the killdeer and ran to the basement. He pulled a cardboard shoebox out of the kindling bin and put the bird inside the box. A perfect fit. He ran his fingers along the bird’s feathers, the black bands on its neck. Gently, he pulled one of the wings back as far as it would go to mimic the bird’s last moments, the emergency. “Safe, safe, safe,” he whispered, placing the box on the floor. He opened the freezer door. Standing on top of an overturned milk crate, he moved frozen packs of meat around until he reached the bottom of the freezer. He made a space large enough for the box, which he carefully lowered down and buried beneath his family’s appetite.

Leo walked back upstairs and looked into his bedroom. Ferd was gone. He walked over and opened the second drawer of his dresser. The killdeer egg he’d stolen was tucked inside a nest he’d made out of an old T-shirt. He petted the egg lightly with his index finger and wondered how long it would be before he became a mother.

“Hungry?” Ferd asked when Leo walked into the house. Their parents were playing cards next door with the neighbours, spending a rare night together.

“Sure,” Leo said, surprised by his brother’s sudden generosity. He took off his coat and draped it over the banister.

“Eggs?” Ferd asked.

Leo nodded.

Ferd rummaged through the kitchen cupboards for his mother’s cast iron pan, the one seasoned with years of side pork, bacon, beans, and stews. With thin, winter-pale arms he hauled the pan up onto the stove and lighted the burner with a wooden match from the Redbird box. He turned the flame up high.

“Toast with your eggs?” he asked.

“Brown, please,” Leo said, glad his brother was trying to make up for their fight.

“Mom doesn’t buy white bread, idiot.” Ferd laughed.

“Lots of butter.”

“Whatever.”

“And salt.”

“You’ll have a heart attack and die.”

“Pepper, too.”

Leo sat at the kitchen table, a small round table that was used more for card playing than for eating. Ferd and Leo were allowed to sit at the card table so long as they understood that they would be treated the same as everyone else. A bad play would cost them a seat at the table, maybe even a quarter or two, but they would learn fast.

Ferd put two pieces of brown bread in the toaster and pressed the square black lever down until it clicked. He waited patiently until the butter in the pan started to sizzle before he cracked the egg open. Holding the egg high over the pan, he dug his grubby thumbs into the fissure he’d created and pulled the two halves apart. Leo could hear the hot sizzle of the egg bubbling and popping in the pan. His stomach grumbled.

“Watch the pan for a sec,” Ferd said, and he disappeared down the hall and into the washroom. “I just need to do something,” he called out from behind the door. A click. The lock turned.

After several minutes, he heard the scrape of his brother’s chair as he stood up. From the washroom where he sat on top of the closed toilet seat lid, Ferd could hear the sharp metal ting of the spatula hitting the floor and the sound of his brother’s bare feet running across the kitchen, the door slamming behind him. Windows rattled. He waited a few minutes before he slowly unlocked the bathroom door. When he was sure the coast was clear, he walked back into the kitchen and waved away the clouds of smoke and turned off the element.

The killdeer fetus was no longer clear as it had first been when he had cracked the small speckled egg open. Instead, it was now a charred lump in the middle of the pan, smoke rising in thin plumes to the ceiling. “No secrets,” he said.

______________

4:04 p.m. -22°C. Wind N, blustery.
Varnish flaking off the bar.

Gaetan walked into the Club and leaned up against the jukebox, which was affectionately nicknamed “the local band.” He looked around. At night, when the bar was low lit with blue and red lights (after nine o’clock), it was not impossible to pretend you were somewhere else. Somewhere more glamorous than Le Pin. Creative lighting hid the paint peeling off the cement floor, the ancient Goldilocks curls of fly tape suspended from the ceiling, the stained fabric on the chairs. In the afternoon, the white lighting, however low the wattage, illuminated every crease and crevice in furniture and patron.

Two regulars sat at the bar. When Gaetan arrived, they looked over their shoulders and nodded at the arrival of the next shift. Gaetan knew them as well as he did his coworkers, maybe better. In the far corner were a half dozen men that Gaetan recognized, but couldn’t place. It was like that every shift, a mix of predictable and unpredictable variables, never knowing what they’d result in: a quiet night, or calls to the cops.

Two hours into the shift, the argument began. The sound of fists coming down onto the table and raised voices made Gaetan look over, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sound of the music. Every twenty minutes, or so, the shortest of them, a sandy-haired man with a deep scar on his chin that split his beard in two, came up for a new pitcher of beer. With each round, the argument got louder.

On his fourth time up to the bar, the man said something to Gaetan other than his order.

“Sorry, what?” Gaetan asked, as he refilled the pitcher.

“I was asking if it was your kid that drowned in the Charles a while back.”