Elizabeth and After (11 page)

Ned was standing at the bar with Billy Boyce, drinking a beer and with a pocketful of change thanks to the fifty his mother had given him. Then, he couldn’t believe, in came Carl McKelvey. Carl drained a quick Scotch, so nervous his hands trembled, and went to sit at Chrissy’s table.

Before Carl’s arrival Ned had been thinking of trying that table himself, trying to impress Chrissy with what a
reliable
person he was. Getting to Fred had become a project. Now Carl was sitting beside Chrissy and that was something Ned was sure Fred would be interested to know: that Carl McKelvey was back and was making up to Chrissy. They were practically in each other’s laps right in front of everyone.

Ned ordered another beer. Billy Boyce, missing everything, had gone off to play video games like the little kid he was. Ned wrapped his fingers around the moisture-beaded glass. This was like being a detective in a movie; no, a
real
detective because there was
real
danger, even though he knew Carl McKelvey couldn’t see him watching.

“Carl. I don’t want to talk about Carl,” Ellie Dean had said last night. The way she lingered on his name, the hurt in her voice like some wound he’d stumbled on from a war before his time—a war for which he’d been conscripted by coming into Ellie’s bed.

“What’d he do to you?” Ned asked, an eager soldier, but she just lowered her eyes and this modest withdrawal made Ned feel important in an entirely new way. He was on the inside, he
was
inside; he was Ellie’s man now, her protector, her army, her weapon against the scum on whom revenge needed to be taken, that unworthy pretender, Carl McKelvey.

The band was howling, the dance floor turning into a jostling mass—in its midst Chrissy and Carl were making a spectacle of themselves. Ned went to the pay telephone, searched through the book, called Fred’s number. After two rings he lost his nerve and hung up. He went back to the bar. Now there was a slow waltz and they were dancing like they were trying to make a baby.

Billy Boyce came back from his video games. Ned pointed out Carl and Chrissy. “Christ,” Billy said. Ned finished his beer and ordered another. When Carl and Chrissy left he followed them to the parking lot. From behind a van he watched them climb into Carl’s truck. He went back into Frostie’s to the telephone and punched the numbers so hard his fingers hurt. Fred answered right away, his voice low and threatening.

“It’s Ned Richardson,” Ned said.

“What can I do for you, Ned?” Just like that. No “hello” or “how are you?” All right. Let him have it.

“I was still thinking of coming to see you about that job,” Ned said.

“Thanks for letting me know.”

“There was something else I wanted you to know.”

Silence.

“I’m at Frostie’s and its dance night. Chrissy just took off from here with Carl McKelvey.”

More silence.

Ned plunged ahead. “I was going to do something about it.”

“Then do it.”

“I’ll see you next week,” Ned said. He hung up and returned to the bar. Billy was waiting for him.

“I’ll buy you another beer,” Ned offered.

“I already owe you.”

“This one is free. Then you can start working off the other.”

A plan was starting to come to him. He was thinking about a time he had watched Billy wriggle into the window of the school office.

“What have you got in mind?” Billy Boyce’s voice already sounded scared. “You going to give me back my plate?”

“First we do Fred a favour.”

Ned followed Billy’s Pinto out to the Balfer place. He parked his truck on the road while Billy walked into the yard. The outside light was on but the house was dark. Soon Ned could see the lights going on in the house as Billy worked his way from the back to the kitchen. Then the lights went off again and Billy was out the kitchen door. He started up his Pinto, waved at Ned as he shot past. Ned waited nervously
a few minutes before going through the door Billy had left open for him. He heard the faint sound of a cat meowing. He brushed the back of his hand where the cat had scratched him; the little ridges of scab had just started to peel off. The cat meowed again and it reminded him of the strangled sound that had got caught in his throat when Carl McKelvey had grabbed him. The cat was in the room with him now. Ned reached into his pocket for his switchblade.

When Carl got home he stood outside his truck for a moment, aware of the cool air touching his body in all the places Chrissy had warmed it. Even as he entered the house he noticed the smell. He resisted the urge to call out, instead turned on the light. In the kitchen the smell was dark and musky, an odour that hovered between perfume and garbage. He opened the refrigerator, expecting it to be broken, but the light went on and the beer was ice cold.

On the table was the note he’d watched Lizzie write to him:

Lately Lizzie had taken to writing notes when Chrissy called or when she wanted to remind Carl of something. She would sign herself
your daughter
and call Chrissy
your wife
. As though if everyone could just be reminded of their official positions—husband, wife, daughter—the family would glue itself together again. Beside the note was a bowl of apples. Reading a parents’ magazine at the doctor’s office, he’d got the idea that the house would seem more welcoming if there was always fruit on the table. He leaned over to see if the apples
had somehow gone bad without his noticing. They smelled just like apples.

The telephone started. He left the kitchen, noticing the smell again, turned on the living-room light and began crossing the floor towards the phone. Just before he would have tripped over it, he saw Lizzie’s cat lying in the centre of the carpet, its throat slit and bulging, blood pooled all around.

He buried the cat in the backyard, at the corner of what had been the garden. He used a clean part of the rug to wrap its body, then rolled the rest up tightly and put it by the garage to be taken to the dump on Monday. The amazing thing was how neat they had been. They had got in through the pantry window, pushing up the screen—the only trace.

He went through the house to see if anything had been taken, got a beer, sat down in the armchair and closed his eyes.

First picture: Chrissy on top of him, her eyes filled with moons—twigs and grass digging into his back while her face slowly froze into a mask he hardly recognized.

Second picture: Ned Richardson’s eyes filled with something bitter and resentful.

Third picture: Ned Richardson giving him the finger as he roared away in his truck.

Fourth picture: Ned Richardson’s truck passing him as he left Frostie’s, after dropping Chrissy off in the parking lot.

Ned Richardson’s truck was all black, everything dented and rusting except for the right front fender which was a dark red waiting to be painted. Carl lit a cigarette. It was one of those August mornings he’d always liked. A cool hollow sky with just a few clouds strung out and bobbing on the horizon like paper boats on a pond.

The lawn was neatly mowed and a flowerbed had been recently dug around the house. Two bushes, one on each side of the front steps, still wore plastic bracelets on their branches. Carl, standing in front of the screen door, tried to imagine Ellie Dean at the kind of place where they sold bushes with plastic bracelets.

“Long time no see,” Ellie said. She had come around the side of the house and Carl, turning to her, caught the sun in his eyes. “I heard you were back, living at the old Balfer place.”

“You’re looking good,” Carl said. His eyes were still adjusting from the sudden shock of light but Ellie Dean
was
looking good: slim as ever in ironed shorts that hung above her knees and polished white sandals.

“You want to come in?”

“I was looking for Ned.”

Her face contracted.

“It’s okay,” Carl said. “You still give out cookies with coffee or what?”

“You can have the cookies but I was thinking of getting choosy about the ‘or what.’ ”

The house had started off as an inexpensive cottage built a couple of rows back from the lake. Most of the original cottage was taken up by the kitchen—living room, which stretched right across the front. The rest was a hall leading to an even lower structure that had been tacked on the back, a bathroom and two bedrooms.

“I don’t want him slipping away on me,” Carl said, looking towards the bedrooms.

“No one’s going to run away from you, Carl.”

He was halfway down the hall when a bedroom door opened by itself and Ned Richardson stepped out. When he saw Carl he froze.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Carl said. Ned’s face jumped as though he had already been hit.

“What are you talking about?”

Carl swung his forearm towards Ned, who backed into the wall. “Come on.” He grabbed Ned around the bicep and marched him out of house and across the yard until they were standing beside his truck.

“What are you going to do?” Ned asked. His voice quavered. “Beat me up in front of Ellie? She’ll call the cops, you know.”

“Maybe I’ll call the cops,” Carl said. “You some kind of idiot or something? You know what you can get for break and enter?”

Ned was looking down at the ground.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Carl said.

“You got nothing on me.”

“You want me to make that phone call now?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“Billy dared me to. He said you were Ellie’s old sweetheart and that I should welcome you back to town.” A breeze had come up and Ned’s T-shirt was flapping against his ribs.

Carl looked at the boy shivering in the morning light. He was winding up, vibrating like crystal waiting to shatter. Strange to think a boy could be that tense, that vulnerable.

“What are you going to do?”

“How about beat the shit out of you?”

“Go ahead. Kill me if you want to. I don’t care.” Ned was trying to look defiant but his lower lip was trembling and his eyes had filled with tears.

“Ned, do you expect me to kill you at eight o’clock in the morning?” He took his arm again, this time gently. “You come
in the house with me and have some coffee. Then we’ll go over to my place and see if we can’t even things up.”

“What do you mean?”

Carl turned Ned to face the back of his pick-up. Lying amid the rust and dried leaves was a posthole digger.

“You ever hear the saying ‘Good fences make good neighbours’?”

“I hate those things.”

“What things do you hate, Ned?”

“Those diggers.”

“I’ll get you a pair of gloves so you’ll last longer. Think of yourself as being sentenced to community service. Only the good thing about this sentence is that your father doesn’t know. It just stays between you and me.” They were at the house now, and Carl, his arm around Ned’s shoulders, was ushering him in the front door. “I hired him,” Carl announced. “Slave labour.”

Ellie’s mouth worked uncertainly.

“I guess I’ll even pay you,” Carl said. “After your probation is over.” He smiled at Ned, who was still shaking, then took out a cigarette and tapped it on the table—the way, he suddenly remembered, his father used to signal that one chapter was over and another beginning.

Carl reached for his coffee, pushed a cup towards Ned.

“You better eat something before we go. I’m not much of a cook.”

Ned smiled weakly. Carl felt a wrench in his belly. He was still going to have to explain to Lizzie that the cat was gone. And he was still going to have to decide what he intended to do with the boy who had broken into his house and killed his daughter’s cat.

He left Ned with the posthole digger and a series of marks along the back of the garden where he was to make the holes.

“You be here when I get home this afternoon,” Carl said and Ned, terrified, nodded his head vigorously. “At lunch you can go in and make yourself a sandwich. I’ll leave the door unlocked; it’ll save you going through the window.” Just before leaving, he walked along the line where the fence was to be installed and pointed to one of the places Ned was to make a hole. It was away from the house behind a big beech tree and invisible from the road. “This would be a good spot for the gate,” Carl said. “You better make this hole a double one.”

But when he arrived home from work, Carl saw no sign of Ned Richardson. He inspected the garden. All the holes had been made as planned. The digger was lying beside the double hole at the back. In the morning it had been covered with rust but now the rust was worn away and bits of dirt clung to the handle. Carl lowered the digger to measure the depth of the gate hole, then gave it a few extra twists. The soil was heavy with clay, hard to move. Ned would be nursing a few blisters tonight. When Carl went into the house he found him half-asleep in front of the television set, a few of Lizzie’s comics spread out on the floor.

“Suppertime,” Carl said from the kitchen. He opened himself a beer and started a frying pan heating for steaks. On the shelf beside the stove were two brand new cookbooks he’d bought after Lizzie moved in. If Ned hadn’t killed Lizzie’s cat, Carl thought, this would have been the evening to read through them, marking out recipes he could try.

He put on a pot of water for the frozen vegetables, then set the table. Next he set the steaks in the frying pan. The slabs of meat made a loud sizzle as they hit the cast iron and
the kitchen filled with the smell. When Carl turned around Ned was standing in the doorway, watching him.

“I don’t eat bought meat, I should’ve told you.”

“I’ll leave it on extra.”

“My mother says it gives you hormones.”

“You could use some hormones.”

“I hope it doesn’t make me throw up.”

“Did you throw up when you slit that cat’s throat?”

Ned hesitated at the doorway.

“Let me see those blisters.” When Ned stepped forward Carl took his hands as though they were a child’s and looked at them closely. His fingers were long and thin, his nails bitten down to scabs. Carl felt a flash of pity for Ned, for the man he might become. He turned the boy’s hands over. Small circles of raw flesh glowed on the insides of his thumbs, along the tops of his palms. “Good thing you’re planning to work with your brains instead of your hands,” Carl said. He took a box of bandages from the cupboard over the stove and handed them to Ned.