Critical Injuries (8 page)

They were also sure there'd be a fair amount of money around, because this was the last day of a four-day trip by Doreen, who owns Goldie's, to visit her sister. “Everything just gets put in a cash box under the counter till she gets back,” Mike reported. “That's what happened last summer when she went away for a few days, because she said she likes checking it herself before she deposits it.” He shrugged. “Stupid. Tough luck.”

Roddy supposes Mike thought of the money as fair payment, since he considered his wages unfair. What did Roddy himself think? Not that he was owed it, exactly, of course not. But that Doreen hadn't earned it herself, hadn't even earned Goldie's since she bought it with insurance money when old Jack keeled over, so in a way money just sometimes fell into people's lives, and gave them something they wanted, that made them happy, and it could fall into his, too.

He guesses he saw it as some kind of evening up, although now can't think what imbalance he was setting out to correct.

Their plan, so honed, so fine, was simple.

Mike would go to work for his usual three o'clock shift. Everything would be normal. Customers would drift in and out. At five the day clerk would take off and Mike would be on his own. He would begin biding his time.

About the same time Mike was showing up for work, Roddy would be quietly moving his dad's shotgun from the basement cabinet where it was kept, and the ammunition from his dad's bedroom bureau drawer. At that hour, his dad was at work and his grandmother would either be out shopping and visiting, or in her own room having a nap. Roddy would take the shotgun and the ammunition to his room. A couple of hours later, Mike well into his shift, the whole town heading indoors to supper, Roddy would be leaning out his bedroom window, out over the low roof overhang, dropping the gun into the petunias below. His grandmother and dad would still be at the kitchen table, finishing their dessert. Roddy, eating fast, would have excused himself before they were done.

The ammunition would be in the back pocket of his jeans. He would go downstairs, out the front door, calling out, “See you later, I won't be long.”

Outside, he would go around back, retrieve the shotgun, and shove it down one leg of his jeans. He would walk, with whatever ungainly, stiff-legged but not especially noticeable gait was required, the three blocks to Goldie's.

The back door would be open. In the storeroom he would haul out the shotgun. He would load it. He would listen for voices. If he heard any, he would wait silently. If he didn't, he would give a little whistle: the first notes of the theme of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, an old flick he and Mike like to rent. If everything was ready to roll, Mike would whistle the next few notes back. Roddy would step into the main part of Goldie's. Mike would be behind the counter, like normal.

All this worked exactly as foreseen. Smooth as a dance. Even walking the three blocks to Goldie's with the shotgun under his jeans didn't feel too awkward or remarkable.

What was supposed to happen next was that Roddy would go almost right up to the counter and — this was the dicey part — let off one shot, into the shelves behind. Inevitably this would be loud. The thing was, Mike said, “There has to be a threat, some reason I'd hand over the money and let myself be tied up.” Because that was the other step. While Roddy was doing his thing with the gun, Mike, having already put the cash box into a plain shopping bag, would be binding his own mouth with a handkerchief and taping his own ankles together. He would be on the floor, all ready for Roddy to tape up his wrists.

They rehearsed and rehearsed this. They got it down, from shot to wrists, to twelve seconds.

Racing back to the storeroom, Roddy would stash the shotgun back down his jeans and take off home, with the grocery bag. In a matter of minutes, he'd have dodged his grandmother in the kitchen, his dad in the living room, and be in his own room. The money would go, uncounted and untouched and still in its box in the bag, under his bed. The shotgun also. Tomorrow, once his dad was at work and when his grandmother went out, Roddy would return it to its cabinet in the basement. Nobody would know. Nobody would even know to look. Who would dream?

Meanwhile, behind Goldie's counter, Mike would wait. When, eventually, somebody came through the door, making the buzzer go, he would scuffle his bound limbs and moan. He would be found and unbound. The cops would be called. Mike would be upset and dazed. He would say the robber wore a ski mask, and work boots, jeans, black T-shirt. He would describe him as being about six feet, big-shouldered, a paunch. “Maybe he should have a tattoo, or moles,” Roddy suggested. Not only to make the man more interesting and unique — there were times, discussing him, when this assailant grew real and almost visible to them — but also to keep somebody innocent, who roughly fit the description, from getting nailed.

“Good idea.” They gave him a dark green snake on his right forearm, and a black mole on the back of his left hand. His eyes, through the plain navy mask, would be dark blue, they decided.

Mike would be questioned over and over. He would tell the same story over and over. “Don't add details,” Roddy warned. “Keep it simple.” His folks would probably want to take him to the doctor, or even the hospital, to be checked over.

They each had interesting parts to play, Roddy beforehand and during, Mike during and afterwards. It was like two separate acts, as they rehearsed. Roddy took the roles of discovering customer, cops, parents, doctor, questioning Mike. There were different directions those conversations could conceivably go. They practised every one they could think of. They were smooth, and prepared. They saw it all perfectly.

Even at the first step, going down to the basement to get the gun, Roddy was struck by the difference between the words and the action. It's not that he thought of backing out. If nothing else, he couldn't back out on Mike, they had a commitment, and everything was inevitable now because of that. But still, it was a weird feeling, going down those stairs, going back up. Then all the rest, getting through the remaining afternoon hours, through supper like nothing was different, and finishing fast, and all the way to the storeroom.

Exactly how they had planned.

He got as far as the counter. He could see that Mike had the cash box in the bag, ready to go, the handkerchief to bind his own mouth in his hand, a roll of masking tape waiting to be whipped around his ankles and wrists. In Mike's eyes he saw the same scared, thrilled look of being in the middle of something big that Roddy imagined showed in his own eyes.

They didn't speak. Mike jerked his head towards the shelves behind him and off to one side, and Roddy began raising the gun. This was the trickiest part: having to move very fast afterwards because of the sound of the shot.

He saw Mike's eyes widen and grow bleak, looking over his shoulder, at the same time he heard the door shifting inwards, the buzzer. Mike's mouth started to open. Perhaps his own did as well. He was turning as he was still raising the gun. The woman in the tight wrinkled blue suit was turning, too, but not before he saw her eyes. Perfectly blank eyes. Whatever expression they might have had as she opened the door to Goldie's was wiped out and replaced by nothing at all. The sound of the buzzer was still in the air.

Why hadn't they thought:
Lock the door
?

His own body was rising onto its toes and then slightly crouching. He could feel every muscle: calves, thighs, stomach, shoulders. Finger, too, tightening. This took forever, and no time at all. There was no stopping it.

She whirled and whirled and then she was on the floor like the air had gone out of her. Something began turning red. There was a man in the doorway. This was too much, too much vision, too much to see. He heard Mike's voice, familiar and strange at the same time. “Shit, Roddy, what've you done?” He saw Mike's eyes. He felt Mike's hand removing the shotgun from his. He realized it was the gun that had been weighing him down, and without it, there was nothing to hold him. He leaned over and lost his early, fast supper all over the worn Goldie's floor. Then he was light and could fly. So he did. He flew, and flew, out the back door, through streets, over fences, across fields. He was the wind, he was a bird, he swept, for a little while, over the earth. For a little while he was frantic. Then finally he had those few happy moments that could have lasted forever, but didn't. This is not what he meant. It's not who he is. It's a long time since he's cried, but he could weep, just weep, for everything lost; so he does.

Mrs. Lot and Mrs. Job

Isla has been a woman with hankerings for lean men. Also a woman who leans towards words like
hankering
,
craving
, words with intensities ranging from hungry to ravenous and which apply to other things, too: to burying her face in her babies' marshmallow bellies; to hurtling her own hot skin into frigid lake water; to hanging from her dad's railwayman arms out into the space between speeding train cars, rushing air pinning her skin so hard and cold to her face that tears came.

To any extreme and happy sensation.

A most bitter loss, then.

She would, if she could, jump clear of this pale skin, leap free of these useless muscles and bones, these mute nerves. Veins and arteries, down to the narrowest of capillaries, must still be opening themselves to blood, but she can't feel it. Could she before? Before, she must have been paying insufficient attention. Now she would know better. Oh, she's learning at quite a clip, that's for sure. She is already exhausted by learning. There is too much to know.

Men begin for her with hankerings: seeing James stride out of university into his father's office supply store where she was a young girl working part-time; and many years and much experience later, tangling with Lyle, slapstick-style, at the revolving door of a hotel. With each of them, hankerings grew into cravings, blossomed, blew up, inclined themselves even towards addiction; then with James lapsed into inattention, then into — well, into loathing, although that is also, it seems, a passionate addiction of sorts.

Lyle is sturdier stuff. He sustains craving quite nicely.

It's reachable ribs that do the trick. Long thigh bones. Fine feet, an elegant turn of collarbones, shoulders with not only breadth, but discernible bone ridges just under the surface of skin. Her particular taste.

Taste is salty more than it's sweet. Taste is blue blocks of salt set out years ago for her dad's parents' cattle in summer, great thick rough tongues licking troughs into them, licking them patiently thin. Taste is jazzed-up french fries at fairs, it's sunshine washed off in a winter tub, a summer lake. Taste is her mother's sweat over the iron and the tangy perfume she wore going out for an evening, and it's her father's sweat as he wrenched pipes into place beneath a new sink, or tossed his discarded uniform in a pile for the laundry. Taste was, now to her horror, James's tongue on her, and vice versa. Taste is also her tongue on Lyle, and vice versa.

So the best taste is salty. The story of Lot's wife never made sense to her, and certainly didn't frighten her into learning what she took to be its instruction: don't look back, have no regrets, abandon familiar companions, forget customs and comforts, lose longings. Aim instead stalwartly and — most importantly — obediently forward.

Her sympathies were with Lot's wife.

Anyway, if the pillar of salt Lot's wife became were finally eroded and worn away by the elements, it's not as if that was a different fate than she would have endured if she had aimed stalwartly, obediently forward and never looked back. She would have been eroded and worn away by the elements anyway, by her husband Lot, and by her children, and by duties and hardships and chores, and by various joys, and by years.

If Lot's wife had kept her eyes forward on that long trek away from her home, what would the view have been but black rock, steep mountain, bleak desert, strange rough men, strange weary women? No wonder she looked back instead.

Of course she would have regrets, of course she would glance behind her with certain longings. Isla can regret that she ever met James. She regrets hopping into and out of Lyle's truck, swinging her happy way into Goldie's. Who would not?

Was Lot's wife angry at being transformed into a pillar of salt just for the sin of regret, for being human?

Isla is furious.

This is hardly the restful state of mind she's supposed to be in for encouraging a bullet fragment to release itself from a bone cranny, and gaining strength for surgery that's likely to be both tricky and critical and which will mean everything. On the other hand, rage feels very salty, not at all sweet. This might be exactly the right moment to be wheeled into surgery, on the theory that furious, she's as tough as she's ever likely to be. Except she also knows the roots of rage lie in grief, a weak, collapsing sort of emotion. “Pick your poison,” her dad used to say when her parents had company and he was mixing the drinks. Isla picks anger, every time, over sorrow.

Isla's mother Madeleine, despite a general opposition to gloom, now and then lapsed into it: mainly that she had wanted many children, an armful of small bodies to embrace, but something was wrong, or missing, in her or Isla's father, Isla was never clear which, and as a result, “you,” her mother said, “were a miracle.” This was a large and cherishable thing to be, of course; although it could also be hard, sustaining miraculousness.

Isla's father was a trainman, a conductor, often away, a man who came home with a rhythm in his walk, a certain way of planting his feet. His glamour lay in invisible adventures, racketing over the land, meeting strangers, taking care of them, listening to them. Sometimes when he got home he said he was tired not only of being on his feet, but of smiling. Often he brought home stories, which he could tell in different voices and tones and as if they were happening right in front of their eyes. His words seemed large to Isla because he knew things, good and bad, that occurred out in the world. Sometimes it was strange that he knew these things and these people while she and her mother did not, never would, and part of this strangeness was that he came home anyway to her and her mother, as if they might be the interesting ones, the real story.

There was a nice one about a woman giving birth on the train, and how a whole carful of people cheered, and disembarked laughing and happy about being in on the beginning of a surprising, unscheduled life. She remembers also that her mother was not smiling when he finished that story, and that her father didn't notice. It wasn't, Isla saw, that he didn't care about her mother's feelings, because he did, but that he just plain didn't know. How was that possible?

Awful stories came home with her father as well. Trains were so big, and people so small. They hit people walking alongside the tracks, amputating various limbs, sideswiping their lives. Cars and trucks stalled on tracks. Some people deliberately aimed their cars and trucks at the trains, pressing hard on accelerators for last screaming, hair-raising rides. “The sound,” he said, shaking his head as if that would shake it free of the sound. “It's something to hear.” Trains were so loud it didn't seem possible to Isla that much could be heard over their engines and wheels, but he said it was. He said you could hear metal and, if you listened carefully, flesh.

“Engineers are worst off, they see what's coming but can't do a thing about it. They say you don't get over that, ever, sliding into a crash.” Well, no. She had nightmares sometimes in which large objects rolled slowly but irredeemably into other large objects. Sometimes the sounds of her dreams woke her up.

When she was very little, her father swung Isla around by her arms until she hardly knew which way was up. He carried her on his shoulders when there were distances to walk. Her mother preferred holding hands, and at crowded places like a fair she held tight because there were so many strangers and Isla was her miracle. They all rode together on the Ferris wheel, but steered separate bump 'em cars, slamming wildly into each other. At beaches they swam and watched sunsets. Sometimes at night she heard her parents argue, but not very often. Often they hugged, or just touched.

Honest to God, that's what she thought families were like. No wonder she assumed that kind of happiness, took for granted that if there had to be endings they'd be tragic, wasting-away ones like her father's when he got lung cancer and died when she was sixteen. No wonder James was a shock. Followed by a series of other shocks, courtesy of her cherubs, her ballasts, her Jamie and Alix.

Now this.

The story of Job reflects even worse on God, in her view, than the tale of Lot's wife. No loving creator there, but a prideful, cruelly playful child. What really pissed her off even as a kid first hearing of Job was that although it was Job's faith being tested in the stupid wager between Satan and God, everyone around Job suffered too. His children. His wife. As if they meant nothing at all, were only abstract losses in a tug-of-war for Job's loyalty.

And that Job saw it more or less that way, too, except he didn't know about the bet, he didn't know all his losses were meaningless.

She had no sympathy for Job.

Still, she has seen lives go downhill. She certainly knows that that happens: one mistake, one surprise, and other mistakes and surprises start following until it seems nothing good is going to happen to a person again; that no matter what, any decision or shift or change is going to have bad results. She has not felt this happening to her, but it's possible the past happy eight years have been only a bump in a generally downhill trajectory.

No, she can't believe that. This is a hard situation, but not one she won't bounce out of.

Well okay, not bounce, exactly.

“Isla?” Lyle's face looms over her. Jesus, it's startling when people do that.

“The kids are on their way. You ready to see them?” What, he expects her to nod?

He means her kids, not his. His have no particular requirement to rush to her side; whereas hers do.

Poor Lyle, who not only has to deal with this new nightmare, but with her exceedingly trying children, who are not his fault and who should not be his problem. They would be quite different people, Jamie and Alix, if Lyle were their father — or maybe, too, if Sandy had been their mother, who knows? Lyle's own boys, Bill and Robert, those twins who were still young when their mother died, the same age Isla was when her father died, are now solid citizens. Bill is a physicist at a research institute, and Robert is pursuing a doctorate in the multi-layered relationships between various media and various aspects of politics. Isla can have interesting conversations with Robert. Talking to Bill is a lot like talking to Alix: a deep involvement in a mysterious and unfathomable subject, with its own mysterious and unfathomable language.

The point is, Lyle's boys didn't screw up. They are sturdy, not credulous. They do not expect quick returns, or something for nothing. They do not see something hard in front of them and look for an easy, soft-headed route around it. Their virtues must be difficult for Jamie and Alix to tolerate. They're a bit hard on Isla, as well.

“How do I look?” she whispers to Lyle. “Awful? Scary?”

“You look fine.” She'll have to speak to him again about lies. Lying is about the worst thing he can do, he knows that, and however kindly intended, this is no time to forget. She must still look like hell, particularly in this pitiless combination of fluorescence and daylight. Also, oh God — what grotesque, nasty system is in place to empty her body? Or for that matter to fill it. She loves food, it's surely strange not to be hungry. Or, maybe she is hungry. Just one of the multitude of things she can't feel.

Much to think about, a good deal to wonder. Did she leave behind enough clean sheets and towels for the kids she didn't know would be coming? Unfamiliar shoes will be kicked off inside the double-bolted front door, strange creams and shampoos will appear on bathroom shelves. Alix's thin Serenity Corps dresses will maybe be rinsed out and hung over an impromptu clothesline to dry. Lyle and Isla's beautiful house will be invaded by anxiety, crisis, confusion. He will mind that, too. He likes his sanctuary.

“Really,” Lyle says, “I wouldn't let the kids in if you looked upsetting. Trust me. You know, they're out in the hall now, they're waiting.”

Oh. Well then. That's a bit more abrupt than she expected, kind of a shock. Also she is sharply reminded that the small gesture she would make with her hand to say, never mind, go ahead, is no longer possible. All that silent, eloquent language is gone.

So how can she tell her children then that she loves them, and that no matter how she looks, they shouldn't be frightened? If she can't put her arms around Jamie, or stroke Alix's wild and brilliant red hair, so much like Isla's own at that age, how will they understand that everything is going to be fine, and this is only an interruption, terrible and upsetting and annoying but really only an interruption? No matter what, she has always embraced them, although for sure she has also shouted, argued, pleaded, slammed doors. But always, always she has tried to put her arms around them. Because even people with irregular lives need regularity. They need to know some things for sure.

She hardly knows what to expect. Her children are full of surprises. Other young people endure catastrophe without falling apart, why not hers? Jamie is twenty-five years old, and as old as the hills. His beautiful little-boy's face won't ever unline and uncrease itself back to innocence. The things he has done! The things that have been done to him!

And Alix — gullible, foolish Alix has pledged herself to serenity. Literally, she has pledged herself to something called the Serenity Corps, and obedience to, reverence for, a tubby middle-aged fellow with excessively blue eyes who calls himself Master Ambrose. Alix now calls herself Starglow, although outside the Serenity Corps no one bothers. Even taking all their upheavals into account, Isla can't think how she raised someone who would call herself Starglow.