Caught (12 page)

Slaney said that if it were raining they’d be complaining about that. And the woman said he was right. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. And she turned around with a new cone held up like a beacon.

Slaney had no idea what could have happened to Jennifer over the last couple of months. She seemed so changed. When he tried to imagine her giving birth he only saw white enamel bowls of blood-soaked towels, a nursery with row upon row of babies.

There you go, my love, the woman said. You enjoy that ice cream.

Thank you, Jennifer said. You didn’t have to do that. Slaney handed the woman back the sopping dishrag.

I’ll tell you what, the woman said. There won’t be too many days like this. Mark my words.

Tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful too, Slaney said. He had looked straight into Jennifer’s eyes when he said it.

We’ll pay for it later, the woman said.

It’s dripping, Slaney said. And Jennifer’s tongue licked up the drip and she told Slaney to have some and she held out the cone and he put his hand over her hand to steady it and he licked it up the side.

She’d had a baby with somebody and she wasn’t saying the father. After a while nobody would bring up
who’s the father
. At least not in her presence. Even Slaney knew better than to ask.

I guess I’ll see you around, David, Jennifer said. She said it like she was going somewhere but she just stood there in the middle of Lar’s like she didn’t know where she was going.

That was the summer they had all the beautiful weather. She was on welfare and set up in public housing on the west end of Gower Street and he slept over every night but left through the back door because they had to watch out for the welfare cops.

She was still breast-feeding when Crystal was two and her breasts would squirt little threads of milk all over him when they made love. Oh God. God. God. God. God.

Now she was married to somebody else.

Don’t Call

Did you order
a sundae in a snack bar back in New Brunswick? Hearn asked. The phone had rung near Slaney’s head and he’d slapped around on the bedside table and knocked the receiver to the floor and pulled it up by the cord and said hello.

Somebody phoned the cops, Hearn said. It was in the papers. “Eyewitness Identifies Escaped Prisoner at Local Snack Bar.”

I was with a girl, Slaney said.

You were identified.

Slaney hauled himself out of bed to the window. Across the street at ground level a man was dressing a window with silver stars and mannequins in diaphanous evening gowns.

Every time the window dresser adjusted the fold of a gown or a dummy’s arm he stood back with his hands on his hips, taking in the effect.

Slaney’s room was empty but for the sink with rust stains flaring up from the drain and the red wool blanket over the bare striped mattress. There was a closet with a lone wire hanger and the doll Slaney had purchased the day before stood in her pink box on the only wooden chair. One drowsy eyelid had fallen down.

You don’t use your own name, Hearn said.

A girl picked me up hitchhiking. I went back to her place. What was it, three days ago.

We got to get you out of there, Hearn said. They’re on you, man. Somebody saw you. Called it in. So there’s been an adjustment to the plan. I’m going to tell you the plan and then I don’t want to hear from you.

You’re hurting my feelings, man.

Hearn said, Do me a favour.

I won’t call you, Slaney said.

Don’t call me.

I won’t, Slaney said.

You are underestimating, Hearn said. How much they want to get us. Don’t call. Don’t use your name.

I won’t.

You have to get a new name.

I’m on it.

They want to set an example.

I won’t even think about you.

You think I’m kidding? I’m telling you.

I was ordering fish and chips from a snack bar, Slaney said. I gave the woman my name and she called it out all over the parking lot. I was with a girl.

Why would you say your name?

I said Dave is what I said, Slaney told him. There are a lot of Daves. Plenty of Daves.

Somebody put two and two.

I’ll lie low, Slaney said.

Keep a low profile.

How are you?

How the hell are
you,
man?

I’m on my way.

You have to see the man, Hearn said. Lefevre is ready to see you.

Go there tonight, Hearn said. Around nine o’clock. And in the meantime.

I’ll stay out of the limelight, Slaney said.

You go see Lefevre and he’ll give you the backing. Then you get the hell out of Montreal. We got a cabin set up for you outside of town. You wait for a passport.

That’s at least five, six weeks for a passport, Slaney said.

A place called Mansonville.

Five
weeks
?

You wait for the passport. You go to this cabin, Slane, and you stay in it. You’ve been spotted now, we need to be careful. You don’t want to lead them here. You lie low, don’t go out except to get supplies.

Five weeks, what? Practising tai chi? Jesus, Hearn.

The boat leaves from here, takes six weeks, more or less, to get to Mexico. There’s a crew hired to sail her down with the owner. Beaver Noseworthy is going to sail her down, a few other guys. They’ll fly home from Mexico.

They’re looking for you in airports in the east now, Slaney. You get the passport, then you get the train out here. Five, six weeks, things have cooled down in the airports. We fly you to Mexico from here, you meet up with the boat, head on to Colombia, just you and the captain. You got to get the new passport.

There had been a lesson in New Brunswick, Slaney thought, and it was that he had no name. He had left his name behind or he had passed through it.

You got it, Slane?

I got it.

Did you get any? Hearn said.

Pardon me? Slaney said.

The girl, the girl. At the snack bar with the sundae. Were you getting some?

I’ll be seeing you, Hearn.

What did she look like?

Hearn, I’m not going to indulge.

Tits?

I’m hearing about feminism, Slaney said.

Don’t mind that, Hearn said.

Some of them aren’t shaving their underarms, Slaney said. They aren’t shaving their legs.

But they have their own rubbers, Hearn said. They’re sleeping with whomsoever they please.

I’m going to have to get a handle on it, Slaney said.

I Got Your Number

A young man
stood in a display window with a giant silver star held out before him. Mannequins crowded around him, glancing in different directions; one had an arm raised, as if to flag a taxi.

They’d put the tap on the phone in Slaney’s bedsit the day he arrived and they were waiting for Hearn to call. Once they’d located Hearn, Patterson would fly out to the coast and infiltrate the operation. He’d offer financing, get to know Hearn.

He turned on the car to give the wipers a flick. The rain hit the roof and the wind wrinkled the thick coat of water sluicing over the glass. Patterson gave the wipers a single sweep and the slurring world was put straight. He had hoped there’d be time to visit his brother on the way across the country. He wanted to sit with him in the sunny visitors’ lounge, or to walk in the gardens holding his hand.

Patterson had met his brother for the first time when they were both eight. A second family had shown up for Patterson’s father’s funeral, more than three decades ago, in the small town of Portage la Prairie.

They’d come to the service, a boy and his mother, by bus and then cab and they arrived late. The door of the church screeching open in the middle of the ceremony, the sound of the rain coming in with them. They’d taken seats in the last pew, causing everyone to crane their necks around when the boy yelled out, an ungovernable, eerie noise like weather, followed by a hard slap on the wrist that interrupted the priest’s homily. Everyone reached for the hymn books.

The church had filled with the rustling of pages so thin the print of both sides showed through them. The organ sent out a phlegmatic, vibrating wheeze. People began to sing, and above all the voices there was a new soprano.

A voice chilly and transparent, full of unapologetic power, precise in pitch.

Patterson’s mother had known nothing about the woman, whose name was Clarice Connors, and who worked as a charwoman. She was fifteen years younger than Patterson’s mother and she looked fast and drawn in a worn, wet coat with a fur collar, a hat with black netting over the brim.

What Patterson remembered most of Miss Connors on that day was the red, red lipstick, wet and dark. The lipstick set the woman apart from his mother in every way.

Patterson’s mother was earnest and finicky. She took offence easily and without outward sign. Her judgements were arrived at instantly, and once conceived, rarely altered.

Patterson had grown up in a house that was helplessly clean, where good taste was expressed in a showy lack of ornamentation. The silence in a room was guarded with a vigilance that caused them to cringe when their cutlery scraped the china. The rustle of a log burning in the wood stove made do for conversation.

The lipstick, Patterson knew, even at the age of eight, was fantastic. It meant that Clarice Connors did not care what other people thought of her.

He became aware that day, watching his mother under the trees with his father’s mistress, that people were motivated by two distinct and opposing forces. There was the desire for truth and there was the need to conceal it. Of course he couldn’t have put it into words when he was eight. But he came to know that if a truth were lying out in the open for anyone to trip over, there must be something at stake.

Alphonse was Clarice Connors’s only child, and he was Patterson’s age, almost to the day. The boy looked just like him except that everything soft in his half-brother was hard in Patterson.

Alphonse had Down’s syndrome and lived, now, in a home on the outskirts of Guelph for which Patterson paid exorbitant fees. He had received notice three months ago that his account was in arrears and the management had requested Patterson schedule a meeting to discuss the matter.

The facility had earned a reputation for its progressive treatment. The fees went up every year. Patterson had moved Alphonse into the facility when Clarice Connors died of lung cancer. The move had been traumatic. Patterson would not move him again, no matter what it cost. He needed that promotion.

The man in the display window leaned the giant star at the foot of a blond mannequin in an evening gown of filmy chartreuse. He flicked a light switch and the window flared with thousands of tiny white lights inside the stars that decorated the back wall.

Clarice Connors had been standing outside the church when it was time to leave for the graveyard.

Patterson’s mother settled him into the back seat of their family car. She leaned over him and did up his seat belt.

Fingers in, she said. She pressed the door shut behind her. Patterson watched as she strode across the parking lot in her old Hush Puppies with the tarnished pennies in the leather slots. She had worn them for as long as Patterson could remember.

The two women stood on a dry patch of earth under the branches of a spreading oak and Patterson’s mother was pointing at the ground in front of her. Stabbing at the ground with her finger, the way you might if you were telling a dog to come and sit at your feet. Her eyes remained downcast while she spoke because she could not force herself to look up.

Throughout Patterson’s mother’s speech Miss Connors had one hand wrapped around her elbow, and her other tilted out, palm up, with her cigarette, in a posture that seemed both casual and belonging to another era, perhaps one yet to come. She squinted her eyes in an effort to take in the rapid, soft-spoken stream of invective.

When Patterson’s mother had stopped talking, the younger woman took a draw on her cigarette and let the smoke come out her nostrils and the corners of her mouth like a dragon waking from a long slumber. She flicked open a clasp on her purse so the mouth of it yawned wide. She took out a sheaf of papers and gave it to Patterson’s mother. She had loved Patterson’s father, Patterson later came to understand, with a passion so beyond his mother’s emotional range that it would have been cruel to make reference to it.

Clarice Connors was not interested in discussing matters of the heart. She had a ratified will that proved to be more recent than the one Patterson’s mother had in the back of her stocking drawer.

Clarice Connors dropped her cigarette to the ground and twisted her high-heeled shoe over it. She would not take their house, she said. She was looking out for her child.

Patterson heard her call to her son. The eight-year-old Alphonse was spinning in circles, beyond the protection of the tree branches, where the asphalt had already darkened with rain. His arms out like wings.

You’ll make yourself sick, Miss Connors shouted. Patterson watched them with his nose pressed against the cold glass. The car must have looked empty before he moved, the shadows of the branches above the car concealing the interior. But when Patterson leaned forward, Alphonse noticed him. The strange boy’s sole-eyed face was instantly full of love and naked humour. It was an unconditional offer of friendship.

Alphonse skipped toward the car, his thumbs in his ears, his fingers wiggling, his tongue lolling. A lopsided saunter that broke into a run when his mother said his name again, a full-on, charging escape. When he reached the car he slapped both his hands against Patterson’s window. The suddenness of it made Patterson rear back and he had just a second or so to recover and slap his own hands over the boy’s before Miss Connors wrenched him away by the shirt collar.

The man in the display window had slipped through a hidden panel at the back and he was gone.

Patterson’s radio buzzed and crackled. They told him to call in to the detachment for a message.

He stepped out of the car into a stream of water that came up to his ankles. He ran with his jacket over his head to a pay phone on the corner. A glass box with red mullions and a folding door. He was standing in a puddle, a cigarette butt with a touch of lipstick floating near his shoe. He slotted in some change and phoned through to the detachment there in Montreal and asked for Staff-Sergeant Mercer.