Debris (2 page)

She filled her cart and pushed it to the checkout line. When she rung through a young stockboy with a harelip asked her if she needed a hand getting out. Jenny told him thanks but she'd be okay. He smiled shyly and went on. She wheeled the cart out into the lot and found her parking spot. As she was loading the trunk she heard someone calling her name. Jenny turned to see a young woman hailing her from across the lot.

“Fuck,” she said.

 

 

On the way home she saw
a four-door pickup in her rear-view mirror and it stayed there. Monster tires and a heavy steel grillguard. Mud and muck on the hood and windshield. Jenny drove through town and took a turn that she didn't need to take and the truck kept on straight. She snaked home through the county roads and there on the last length of dirt lane the jacked-up truck stood idling at an intersection, not a half-mile from her house. It pulled into the lane behind her and followed close. She could see sunburnt forearms hanging thick on either side of the vehicle. There were at least four men, two in front and the rest in back. She nearly drove on past the house but cut a hard right at the last second and skittered onto the gravel driveway. The truck slowed but kept on. Four sets of eyes on the woman as she got out and studied the vehicle and the muddied British Columbia plates. A gun rack had been fixed in the back window of the truck and all the brackets were full.

 

 

Hoye pulled into the farm's frontlot
at dusk with two cruisers trailing him. He saw lamplight through the thin-curtained upper windows. Brighter lights in the kitchen. The sound of country music and raised voices travelling raucous from an open side door. There was no proper driveway, just a ruined patch of land in front of the house filled with vehicles. Battered pickups and rusted-out car frames on blocks and a gargantuan
RV
parked sidelong to the house, power cables running between the two like tentacles. A raised, extended-cab pickup with B.C.
plates. Hoye pulled in first and the other cars followed. Each cruiser rode two officers and they got out armed and armoured and Hoye took two of them toward that kitchen side-entry. Hoye was certain that there would be dogs to give them away early, but there were not.

When they walked in through the kitchen screen door it squealed on its springs. Four men sat at a massive oak-slab table with bottles of beer and whiskey staining the lumber. Two women were tending the stove. One middle-aged and greying, stout and square-jawed. The other young and dirty blonde and very pretty, a scattering of old pox-scars on her cheek and forehead. Hoye and his two constables came into the room and spread out, eyeballed the foreign men, hands on the heels of their pistols. A door shut somewhere in the back of the house and soon enough the three other constables filled the doorway at the other side of the kitchen. Hoye knocked a stack of papers from a nearby chair where it sat below a wallmounted rotary phone. He spun the chair to the table and sat. Across from him sat old man Marchuk and he tried to stare a hole through Hoye. Black, biblical hate in his eyes. Hoye just stared back.

“You know that there's warrants out for your cousins here, from B.C., and they're to be escorted to the border and placed in custody there.”

“That is a load of horseshit,” Marchuk said. “What for?”

“I've got ‘Fight Causing a Disturbance' for a Bretton Marchuk and ‘Cultivation of Marijuana' for Gary Myshaniuk and Mark Oulette. The rest can just go in for assisting wanted fugitives.”

“They're my guests and they aren't goin' anywheres. So you can go fuck yourself. You ain't got no warrant or cause to come into my house.”

“We don't need a warrant to seize the wanted men. But I'll be kind and give them a chance to drive their asses outta here to the border under escort. Or they could get shot instead in this fuckin' kitchen for all I care. Seems to be a way of life for you folks.”

Marchuk tried to get out of his chair and Hoye stood and sat him back down by the shoulder.

 

 

Old man Marchuk was taken
into custody and locked up in the station holding cell while his cousins were driven west, handed off from detachment to detachment until they were released to officers from Golden. Bretton Marchuk had a broken nose plugged with bloody tissue when he was put under arrest inside British Columbia. The other men were marked with facial lacerations and contusions along their forearm and shinbones. The elder woman, wife to the cousin Marchuk, spat at one of the B.C. constables and then watched her husband take a baton to both of his knees. She held her spit from then on. The constables released the younger, blonde woman alone, and let her take the truck back to their lands in the foothills.

Marchuk saw his bail rescinded and spent his days and nights in holding at the Red Deer Remand Centre. He got letters and visits from townsfolk. Few people would speak to Hoye or his wife, any of the other officers or their families, even those born in that township. Hoye did not mind. One day he found their lawn staked with dozens of “For Sale” signs. He pulled them and stacked them in the garage.

 

 

On shift near daysland, Constable
Hoye had his radio flare up and the dispatch told him that his wife had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Red Deer. Jenny Hoye had gone into labour nearly a full month early. The constable lit his sirens and drove those black nightroads with the gas pedal pinned. He pulled into the hospital lot just before midnight and found triage, took directions to the labour and delivery rooms.

Hoye wore scrubs over his uniform and they let him into delivery. Jenny gripped his hand hard. Her hair had gone dark with sweat and stuck to her forehead. She had taken no epidural and had just begun to crown. Hoye bent to better see her face. He wiped her brow with a wetcloth and tried to get the hair from her eyes.

“It's alright, Jenny,” he said.

“Oh, fuck this,” she said.

The doctors had her breathe and push. She hollered and swore and gritted her teeth. Again and again until the baby's shoulders cleared. The boy was born blue with the umbilical wound tight around his neck and upper arm. The doctors went to work unwinding the cord. Jenny had gone pale and stared at the little shut eyelids and the soft skin of his discoloured arms. Blood and mucous on her gown and at her inner thighs. Constable Hoye could barely stand and he waited cold by the hospital bed. It took four minutes for the baby to breathe and when he did he spoke in a wail and reached out with his tiny arms, cycled his feet in the air.

 

 

The constable watched his wife
and son through the night and spoke to the attending doctors. The boy had no ill effects from the tangled cord and he'd been born heavy for a premature baby, had a strong heart and lungs to cry with. Hoye left in the morning and he hadn't slept at all. He went to the house with a list and gathered things for his wife. He stood over the patch of kitchen floor where Jenny had been when her water broke. He didn't know whether to clean it or not. After passing it by a few times on his rounds Hoye filled a bucket with soapy water and bleach and started mopping the tile.

Jenny stayed with the baby in the maternal and newborn unit of the hospital for the better part of two weeks. Constable Hoye came every day between shifts or he had another constable cover while he left his watch for an hour or two. He spoke to his son in whispers while Jenny slept.

 

 

The Marchuk trial had been set for a
neutral, closed court in Calgary. It started on a Tuesday morning and did not look like it would last a week, so shoddy was the defense. Hoye gave testimony on the third day of the trial and when he came home he found his mailbox rent apart, pebbles of buckshot rattling around inside the deformed container when he pried it clear from the post. He flung it into the garage and drove to the hardware store in town.

The clerk limped slightly as he took Hoye down the shelf rows. A tall man of nearly seventy with a white moustache and short-cropped hair. He had no glasses but seemed to need some more than a little. He showed Hoye toward the mailboxes, most of them antiquated and covered in light dust. Hoye picked out the plainest one and followed the old man toward the buckets of screws and fasteners.

“Heard you had a boy,” the man said.

“We did.”

The clerk offered his hand. Hoye took it. Hoye was of the same height and wider by a foot but the old man's hand outsized his by far.

“You gonna raise him here?”

“Likely not,” Hoye said.

The clerk smiled a little and stood with his knuckles to his hips, picked a stray bolt from a bin and put it back where it belonged. They started back toward the register. Hoye held up.

“Hang on a minute,” he said.

Hoye went back to where he'd been shown the mailboxes and he came back to the counter with a second. The clerk had set the first on the woodtop beside the till. Hoye handed him the other and the man nodded and started to tally it all. He found a cardboard box behind the counter and filled it with the goods. Hoye paid him in cash.

“I suppose I don't have to tell you to be careful out there,” the clerk said.

“No. But I appreciate it.”

“It's not the whole town that's sided against you, young man, or even the half of it. But those that have are awful loud. If you know what I mean.”

Hoye nodded and shook the clerk's hand again.

“If you run through those two just come back and I'll get you another, on the house.”

Hoye laughed. Waved at the clerk as he went out the door. Wind chimes jangled where they hung from the lintel.

 

 

On a dry and sun-bleached
afternoon Constable Hoye pulled up to his homestead with his wife and newborn son. He'd been given a week's worth of leave. A cruiser waited at the roadside near the house. Hoye stopped to say hello and the constable in the other cruiser made faces at the baby in the back seat, the little boy in a safety chair beside his mother. The other constable shook Hoye's hand.

“How're you all handling it?” Hoye said.

“They got a fella from up near Viking that makes his rounds a little further south. He don't seem to mind. Shifts go long they're givin' us
OT
.”

“Well, thank 'em for me will ya?”

“Sure,” the constable said. “Keep your radio nearby. Anything comes up I'll squawk at ya.”

Hoye nodded and drove on, turned onto the width of gravel in front of the house. The cruiser crept out and took off down the county road. Hoye parked and came around the car to help Jenny. He wore her many bags and bundles on his arms like he were a clothes maiden. Jenny took the boy up in her arms and swaddled him to her chest and neck. She turned him slow so that he could stare out goggle-eyed at the fields and fencewires and hovering birds.

“We get a new mailbox?” she said.

Hoye stood there with the bags dangling. He nodded.

“Old one sort of blew in. So I got another, pegged it down a little sturdier.”

Jenny studied the box some more and then she kissed the baby on his pale and peach-fuzzed head and went down the walk to the house. Hoye kicked the car door shut with the toe of his shoe.

 

 

Hoye lay in the bed until they
both slept. When he got up he went quiet as he could, clicking sound in his knees and his left ankle joint. He turned at the door and saw the dent in the mattress where he rested his bones of a night, his tiny son but inches from it, curled up and pinned to his wife. It hurt his heart just to look at her there, wild-haired as she was in sleep, snoring lightly, so much bigger than their boy. It flooded hollows in him. Cold travelled along his spine and shortribs. He didn't want to leave but he did. He'd found cargo shorts in the laundry hamper and put them on, along with a clean undershirt. He went through the dark house and he knew it less by touch than he should have.

 

*

 

Out on the driveway he sat
, garage door open to a tiny nightlight and a fridge of cold beer. Crickets had gotten into the garage and they trilled from their hiding spots. He had an old poker table set up with cans of beer in every cup holder, a bottle of Irish whiskey standing quarter-empty on the felt. The Remington pump lay on a wooden crate beside his chair, five cartridges in the magazine. Chinook wind blew warm across the prairie, slowly spun a crooked weathervane that had been long ago fixed atop the high front gable of the house. Hoye had his Kevlar on over his cottons and the shirtcloth clung to his stomach and lower back. He heard distant reports of riflefire. High whine of small engines. Coyotes whooping at each other in a nearby field. Hoye sat there and watched either end of the long, country road. His portable
CB
radio sat on the table, silent except for sparse chatter between the dispatch and the constables as they roamed the territories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ROPE

 

 

H
e took the car over
buckled macadam and followed the forest lane until it was just clay and crabgrass. Sunlight got stuck in the treecover and played weird shapes through the windshield. Soon Matthew hit a clearing and across it sat the log bungalow with thin smoke spiralling heavenward by a metal chimney pipe. He crossed to a gravel lot and just sort of stopped crooked in the middle of it, called that his parking job and got out and stretched his lower back. He left the door open with his things on the seats and walked the clearing to the house.

She was out cold on the big chesterfield with her legs bent up and her hands pegged together between her knees. She snored soft and her left eye stayed open a little bit and stared blind to God knows where. Matthew crossed the cabin room. Clean as could be. Ghost of a bleaching not long past and it scented the air. Bookshelves and shelves of knickknacks all organized and orderly. He went into the kitchen and looked inside the fridge. Tupperware containers of food and very little of it. Orange juice. Meal replacement sludge. Cheeses and butter. He took up the juice and drank from the container, kept watch on her while he did.

He went over and put a blanket over his mother. He lowered it gentle, his one knee to the hardwood. There he leaned in close and inhaled by her part-open mouth. Stale beer in her breath. Matthew looked over his shoulder to the southernmost wall of the place. By the clock it was eleven twenty-one in the morning.

 

 

The moon river ran slow past
the cabin grounds, sparely fished by anyone. Matthew had untethered the cords that held tarpaulin to an old canoe rack aside the little house. He'd beat the canoe clear for spiders and snakes with an old broom and hauled it down to a sandied flat where he could launch it, three-foot-high rockshelves on either side. He left the bank with a huge wooden oar and a fishing rod he'd not touched in decades. The current helped him shuck the beachmud and carry out.

 

 

When he got back to the house
she'd woke and he could find none of his bags. They were stowed in the closet and his shirts and pants hung in with hers. He'd brought a bag of dirty clothes and they were gone. As he walked the place to the cellar stairs he could hear laundry being run and the washing machine rattling down there on its moorings. Maryanna met him on the stairs and turned him and he went back up into the kitchen.

“I was gonna do that,” he said.

“I've done it now,” she said.

She came up the stairs slow and he didn't like her bringing up the rear with her back to the wood steps and the dark and the concrete.

 

 

At morning she got him to stir
by turning the radio on. Matthew lay deep in a mattress pulled out of the living room chesterfield. He'd slept in his shorts and his T-shirt and usually he didn't sleep like that. Maryanna had been up for some time without waking him. The little house smelled like bacon grease but he couldn't hear it frying.

“I don't know that I'll have time for that,” Matthew said.

Maryanna started taking plates out of the oven. Then she lay his breakfast on the table. He came over with his hair stuck out to the side and sat down to eat.

 

 

They sat outside the courtroom
with
the townies and skids and some suited men who might have been counsel and might have been clients. When Matthew was in grade school that was a civic centre where he'd play pool and watch horror movies come Halloween with the youth workers that ran it. The waiting area had rows of blue, plastic chairs and side offices where duty counsel sat with those to be heard in the court. Cinder block walls painted pale. They'd settled by eight forty-five in the morning and saw a duty counsellor within the hour.

It was near two in the afternoon when the impaired driving charges were read aloud and plead to by Maryanna. She had a petition from her shrink to say that she suffered depression and anxiety and had some signs of psychosis. The shrink had put her ass on the line with that letter and asked for the charges to be made non-criminal, but there was nothing to be done. Maryanna took the weight of it but the judge at least didn't lecture her nor scold her for what she'd done. Still, he levied the fines. He had a round head and a neat, white beard and the look of a man who never slept. On the way out of the courtroom Maryanna handed the paperwork to Matthew and he carried it, loosed and pulled his tie clear before they'd left the building.

 

 

She got undressed with the door
open and it didn't seem to bother her. When she had her regular clothes on she came back through the house and sat at the kitchen table. She smoked there at the little table and Matthew sat across from her in his dress pants and undershirt.

“Okay, ma?” he said.

Maryanna nodded and smiled funny.

“How d'you feel now?”

“Not very good. Not very good at all.”

Matthew studied her long and he felt like getting up and walking the room but he didn't.

“You been havin' bad thoughts?”

“Sometimes.”

“Like what kind?”

“It's the stress of it all.”

She stubbed out and sat back with her hands in her lap.

“You don't got a plan, do you?” Matthew said.

“I've got a rope.”

“Where?”

“In the bedroom drawer.”

Matthew stayed still but his heart beat way up in his ears. He took heavy breaths and it was hard for him to keep them in check for he'd a bone-broken nose that let air in poorly by the one nostril.

Maryanna reached over and took his hand in the both of hers. She seemed to have woke up all of a sudden and she scooted her chair in close to him.

“Don't worry about me,” she said. “I'm not gonna do that.”

 

 

They went two towns over where
the shrink kept an office. Past foundered barns and creeks dried to runnels and mile upon mile of wire fencework. There were fields with showhorses in them, blankets over their backs. Matthew's mother frowned.

“You don't like the horses?” he said.

“I like them fine,” she said. “But this is just stupid.”

The shrink's office held the main floor of an old Victorian house outside of the town proper. When they pulled in and got out of the car there were banker's boxes stacked on the porch. Matthew followed his mother up the steps and lifted one of the lids as he passed. Full with documents and file folders.

“She ain't wastin' any time gettin' retired,” Matthew said.

His mother didn't say anything and she didn't turn.

 

 

He stayed on another day and
then left her with a stocked fridge and crates of non-alcoholic beer. He'd brought her book upon book and new movies and tubes of acrylics as she used to like painting and still had her easel and some canvasses. The keys for her truck were hung on a pegboard near the front door and he took them off. Matthew thought about taking them with him, but instead he hid them in a clay jar and slid that jar deep into a high cupboard. Front and centre on the fridge were the emergency contacts for the retiring shrink. Her personal mobile number. There were no contacts for her replacement because there wasn't one yet and no word on when there would be.

A week later Matthew came back to the house and the clearing was thick with leaves. Bright reds and yellows in with those begun to rot. It looked awful pretty. The sun shone hot from the west but there were great fir columns around the property and they threw shade. When Matthew pulled into the lot he could see her truck under its covers, bricks set on the hood and the roof to pin them down. He started for the house with his bags and then he stopped and set them down in the gravel. He went over to the covered truck and stood beside it and stared at it awhile. Not one leaf lay on those vinyls.

 

“You understand why you
can't drive no more, right?”

She'd not acknowledge him. She kept running lines in the kitchen floor with a dust mop. Matthew watched her move slow and use the mophandle to steady herself. She pushed on.

“What d'you expect me to do, son? Just sit out here an' rot?”

“I'm up here now for the month at work. The Bala site. I'm gonna stay here with ya.”

Maryanna stopped moving the mop and set it by against the counter. She seemed to be thinking on it and thinking on it. After a minute she came over to him and put her arms around his neck. He could feel her shoulderblades through the cloth of her shirt. She let him go and went back to the cleaning.

“You just stay busy here and I'll take you where you gotta go when I get home of a night.”

“Okay.”

“You won't drive that truck?”

“I won't.”

“Good,” he said. “They pinch you for that again, they'll bury you under the goddamn jail.”

 

 

He came home evenings
and sometimes she had already gone to bed. Often she would be there cooking and she'd put his dinner on the table and eat some of her own, move the rest around the plate. For days Maryanna would be fine and then she just wouldn't be. Matthew found clothes in the laundry with piss through them and once she'd soiled her pants and more than once he found blood dried maroon in the cloth. Weight came off her day by day.

Partway through his third week Matthew left the job site early and hustled back to the cabin. He couldn't find her and he couldn't find her. The truck wasn't moved nor had it been in days. He happened upon her in the woodshed and she was downing beer that she'd hidden in with the stacked cords. He started to give her shit for it and she watched him goggle-eyed and he couldn't go through with it. Later he put her to bed with the sun bright behind her bedroom shades and there she shuffled in the blankets and eventually snored.

He trekked the grounds and the near woods before sundown. She'd caches of beer all around the place. By the river he found a hollow where she'd sunk empty bottles and they stood underwater in the mud. He came back with a bag and pulled them one by one. A bottle that he raised had a minnow circling inside. He watched it awhile through the brown glass and then he tipped the bottle and bagged it.

 

 

Maryanna wouldn't get out of her
bed for more than a few hours at a time. She slept odd and the meds put her deep under. Matthew called the shrink's emergency number over and over and he left messages. He stared holes in the sheet and the shrink's handwriting while washing the dishes and sweeping dust and leaf particles out of the cabin. He took a rusted, riding mower over the clearing to mulch the detritus and ended up wearing most of it. When he tried to clean the little bathroom and the toilet he couldn't get it all the way clean as it usually was and that puzzled him.

the county hospital admitted
Maryanna and found her a bed. Her ferritin levels were at three thousand and she had welts on her forearms. Maryanna stayed the night under observation and shared a room with a lady of seventy who had a shattered hip. When Matthew picked her up the next day Maryanna had the other lady in the room laughing. She introduced him to the roommate.

“This is my boy,” Maryanna said. “He's the one who looks after me.”

Matthew shook the old lady's hand. He held it gentle but she had metal bones and squeezed hard enough that his palm hurt. He smiled.

By the weekend Maryanna had cleaned out and came around. She got up early and redid all of the things he'd tried around the house. Matthew ate a pile of breakfast and Maryanna ate well enough and she drank a lot of coffee.

“Shall we go to town today?” she said.

“How d'you feel?”

“I feel like we should go to town.”

She took his plates to the sink and Matthew waited a second and then he snagged her purse from where it sat on the near chair and found her wallet. He held it in his lap and got his own wallet out of the rear pocket of his jeans. Matthew looked at her back and waited a second. He pulled her bankcard from his wallet and slid it back into hers.

 

 

He stood right in front of the cabin
and poured an entire two-litre bottle of cider out into the bracken. Sickly smell of it as it went and some of the stuff got on the toe of his shoe and wet his sock. Maryanna watched him blankly and he'd rather have seen her spitting mad and breaking furniture.

“I suppose you think that's funny,” she said.

“I fucking well don't,” Matthew said.

She went inside and he sat out a long time and he was scared to go back into the house. Eventually he started to shake in his T-shirt with a westerly blowing cool across the near waters. He got up and went in through the screen door and there she was sitting plumb in the kitchen floor with another bottle upended to her mouth. Maryanna stood the cider bottle on the tile and there were but inches left in the bottom. She held the neck between her thumb and forefinger and danced the plastic around the flooring. Drank again. Matthew took his keys and left out.