Come Back (7 page)

Owl’s voice, across Hal’s obsessive recall: “You’re lucky. That’s not who you’re looking for.”

“Lucky?” Hal could not comprehend the word.

“No chance, blond guy like that, a BMW.”

Hal bit into his cheese croissant—“somehow I’ve lost the means …”—ahhh, the taste was salt and warm, almost as good as the memory of bake-over. But when he swallowed, bile thudded in his gut.

“That’s not a joke, at my age.”

“She don’t mind us looking,” Owl was still trying to grin, “running around like that.”

“You know what I’m looking for.”

“Yeah.”

“Orange Downfill.”

“That jacket, yeah. Good for spring snow. I was on that southeast corner, I saw that orange crossing Whyte from the Double Cu—”

“You saw it—yes!”

“Yes. Going for that opposite corner, it went through them others fast, there.”

“But where did it go, after it crossed Whyte?”

“I never noticed nothing orange after, or on 104.”

“Okay, but were you looking for it?”

Owl’s black eyes, almost hidden in the folds of his brown face, were contemplating the air above him. The shop lights glinted in them like stars fixed in night sky.

“No,” he said. “But I’d know if it come toward me.”

“So it did go south?”

“Maybe … or maybe west, on that south sidewalk.”

Hal stared at his friend. The Orange Downfill had gone wherever, in every direction the city lay around them in mazes of repetition. And then with a lurch he realized that the long-legged heel woman could be Ailsa, now! The classic black hair and narrow nose, that perfect chin holding one cup on the other in the ultimate elegance of balanced coffees, it could be Ailsa … where was she? Whatever Yo and his implacable memories had been, they hadn’t seen Ailsa to remind them of anything since Grant—within two years after Gabriel—accepted that chair at the University of Victoria and silent distance could dry their tortured friendship into dust, none of them need ever meet to think about it. And Ailsa, she had married, years ago, wasn’t she at one time living in Vancouver, or was it Montreal? So long gone, so long to forget; but Joan did remember. Obviously: she had sent a beautiful card for Yo’s funeral. One of her brilliant abstract painting cards; there must have been an address on the envelope, if he could find it he
could write Joan and locate Ailsa, wherever she was, perhaps she
lived
here in Edmonton again! And finally have the guts to ask her what, what had she … What would he ask? The letter?

Owl said, “Maybe look different today.”

“What?”

“Maybe too warm today for downfill.”

“Okay …” Hal’s thoughts broke slowly, “okay okay, but, you’re around all winter, you see everything here, all the time, you ever see that jacket before?”

Owl looked into his eyes; the way no northern Dene Hal had ever met looked at anyone.

“No,” Owl said. “Not in fall, never in winter.” His glance shifted to the window. “But the way he moves, thin, strong, head high, the turns …” he grinned slightly. “Hunters have to know that stuff.”

“You’d know him?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You’ve seen him before?”

“Only yesterday.”

“All the thousands of people on Whyte …?”

“I think, yeah. I saw that orange crossing Whyte, with all them others, to the old bank corner, and I never … but then you run out there and I don’t notice it just then, it was you and all that—”

Hal followed Owl’s abrupt look out. The Double Cup sign was scrawled high and long across 104th Street and through the traffic streaming below it the warning blinkers of a white and imperial blue Edmonton Police car flickered. Parked already. One, two figures, official hats, bending down,
still inside. His eyesight was too sharp, he could read the small words along the seam of their front fender: “Dedicated to Protect—Proud to Serve.”

He clutched the arms of the chair and hauled himself up on his feet.

Owl did not move. He said flatly, “Always lots of people at The Coffee Shack, west on Whyte late afternoon. After four.”

Hal nodded as he turned. He got himself between the crowded Le Café chairs, hardly stumbling, not bumping into anyone too badly, then he was out the door and turning left toward 103rd, Gateway Boulevard. The air was brilliant, barely warm but tanged with melting snow and intermittent people strolled on the sidewalk, men in tight T-shirts, teenagers anchored arm in arm, two women pushing baby strollers side by side and everyone talking, talking. A swirl of pigeons—could they be doves?—whipped a bluish-grey arabesque over the street and up the face of the Strathcona Hotel—the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove—Hal walked as nonchalantly as he could, as fast.

It had to be done: face Gabriel’s writing. After years the complete diary again, 1984 words in blue pen forever unchangeable and waiting. And those heavy spiral notebooks with their practicing sentences, lists, letters juggled and edited and re-arranged and belaboured and never sent. Try and find the chronology—Yo would have placed it all in some order. The urtexts of that summer encounter in Europe of their two families—all of them except
Miriam preparing to trek her life into Spanish in South America that fall—intended as simply a few days of convivial travel together, it’s what friends do: enjoy a few days of Europe together if places and dates can coincide. Yo and Dennis and Hal after two weeks in a rented VW beyond the Iron Curtain Wall in East Germany, as the world was divided in 1984, grey East Berlin and Buchenwald and architecturally ruined Dresden and Prague and Tabór and
Deo gratias
out to stucco-restored Vienna; drive autobahns to join Gabe in Frankfurt just arrived to start his months, however many, of Europe travel and maybe North Africa; and meet Grant and Joan and their two kids there at the same time—why? Whose idea was that? It seemed so easy, a three-day West Germany intersection of Edmonton friends on holiday, foreign enjoyment with a share of home, it’s what friends do; it’s obvious with Dennis and Colin such great buddies born within two months of each other, fifteen, and Ailsa always tagging along … just turned thirteen.

Face that all again, after twenty-five years. A girl two months a teen. Unimaginably dangerous.

The bundle—bless you, Yo—of two daily planners, 1984 burgundy, 1985 black, and three tan spiral notebooks labelled by her pen 1, 2, 3. Hal held them tight, warm, such a heavy handful and his memory flickered into the night he first—no—nothing of that, just Gabriel writing, then—face it. He tugged the string open.

Everything was there in chronological order, as only Yo could arrange it: diaries and notebooks dated perfectly. All he had to do was lay them side by side, turn pages; dare to read.

What an irony: the university motto: “Whatsoever things are true”—so, finish Saint Paul’s sentence: “think on these things.” Yes. Today he would.

Blank. Week 49, November Monday 28, 1983 to Week 29, July Monday 16, 1984: every date was blank. Then:

July Sunday 22

‘why would I want to phone you’

July Tuesday
24

July Wednesday
25

And there it was. On pages obviously torn out of a spiral notebook but kept doubled in the diary. Gabriel kept everything so close, always like Yo of blessed memory in his innate order; even when he threw it away in “File of Discards.” But here two pages, four sides of words clawed, as seemed, off the ribs of Rilke’s First Elegy days before Gabriel ever glimpsed Duino Castle brooding grey and cornered on a kink of the Adriatic: “For beauty is nothing but terror’s beginning …” Tiny blue ballpoint letters gradually twisting themselves indecipherable: as he had lived them.