Forty Words for Sorrow (13 page)

“Oh, hey, I wasn’t angling for a free room.”

“No, no. We realize that.”

“It’s so nice of you, I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to impose. Are you sure it’s all right? You’re not just being polite?”

“We’re not polite,” Eric said, staring into his beer. “We’re never polite.”

Edie said, “It’s easy to get into a rut up here, Keith. It would be interesting for us to have you. You’d be doing us a favour. It’s just so interesting to hear your views about the country.”

“Fascinating,” Eric agreed. “Refreshing, even.”

“You seem to have a special insight into people, Keith. Maybe because you’ve travelled so much. Or were you born that way?”

“Not born that way,” Keith said, and raised a professorial finger. Oh, boy, listen to that Molson’s talk. He gassed on, couldn’t help himself, about what an ignoramus he used to be—saying how it wasn’t travel so much, but his experience with girlfriends, with teachers, with his high school buddies, that was where he had learned so much about himself. Experience. And when you learn about yourself, he explained, you learn about everyone.

Eric suddenly leaned forward. It was a dramatic gesture after his stillness. “You have an artistic look about you,” he said. “I’m thinking you’re an artist of some kind.”

“Pretty close, Eric. I’m a musician—not professional, yet, but I’m not bad.”

“Musician. Of course. And I bet you play guitar, too.”

Keith paused with his glass in mid-air. He set it slowly back down on the table, as if it were an object of extreme fragility. “How could you know I play guitar?”

Eric poured more beer into Keith’s glass. “Your fingernails. They’re long on your right hand, short on your left.”

“Jesus, Edie. You’re married to Sherlock Holmes, here.” Were they married? He couldn’t remember if they’d told him they were married.

“It so happens I’ve got some recording equipment,” Eric said quietly. “If you’re as talented as I think you are, we could make a tape. Nothing elaborate. Just a four-track cassette.”

“Four tracks? Four tracks would be awesome. I’ve never done that.”

“We can put you and the guitar on two tracks, mix them down to one, and it would leave three for keyboard, bass, drums, whatever you want.”

“Fantastic. Have you done a lot of recording?”

“Some. I’m not a pro.”

“Well, me neither. But I’d love to do that. You’re not just making a joke, are you?”

“Joke?” Eric leaned back against his chair. “I don’t make jokes.”

“He’s very serious about it,” Edie said. “He’s got two machines—the cassette thing and a reel-to-reel outfit. When Eric makes a recording, it’s really something special.”

18

“I
F YOU WANT THEM TO DIE
slowly, shoot them in the stomach. Put one low down in the belly. Takes them hours to die that way. And they die in agony. They’ll put on a real show.”

Edie gripped the Luger the way he had showed her, one hand bracing the other, feet apart, poised in a slight crouch.
I feel like a little kid playing cops and robbers. But when the gun goes off there’s nothing like it
.

“Save your belly shot for special occasions, Edie. For now, just imagine he’s coming over that hill at you. He doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t want to arrest you. He has only one objective: your death. Your job? Stop the bastard cold. It’s your right and duty to make the bastard dead.”

His hands showing me the way to squeeze the trigger. Long bones rippling under the skin
.

“A head shot is always first choice, got that, Edie?”

“A head shot is always first choice.”

“You always try for a head shot, unless you’re more than twenty yards away. Then you go for the chest. Chest is second choice. Repeat.”

“The chest is second choice. Head is first choice. Second choice is chest.”

“Good. And you always empty the magazine. Don’t fire one off and hang around waiting to see how it turns out.

You empty your load. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”

I jumped a mile when he did that. I cried out, but he didn’t hear, so intense he gets, when he’s teaching me things. His spiky hair seems to bristle on his head. His eyes go absolutely black
.

“Edie girl, you give them everything you’ve got. Bulletproof vest? Doesn’t matter. Three of these will drop him flat—temporarily at least—giving you time to effect your escape.”

“My arms are killing me.”
He ignores me. He’s a marine. He’s a taskmaster. He’s a born teacher. I’m his born student. I’m weak, but he makes me strong
.

“Take a breath, Edie. You take a deep breath and hold it, just before you squeeze one off. On your own time.”

When Edie took too long, Eric said it again, “On your own time,” then added with irritation, “You’d be stone cold fucking
dead
by now.”

Edie squeezed the trigger and the bang was louder than she expected, it always was. “It’s got such a kick,” she said. “It’s making my arms tingle.”

“Don’t close your eyes, Edie. You’ll never hit anything that way.” Eric tromped away through the snow to examine the target. He came back wearing what Edie called his slab face, his stone face. “Beginner’s luck. One through the heart.”

“I killed him?”

“Purely by accident. He’d have shot your fucking head off an hour ago, you’re so slow. Take it again. Go for the chest. And for Christ’s bloody sake keep your eyes open.”

She took a while getting ready, and he repeated his earlier observation. “Of course, if you want them to die slowly, you shoot them in the stomach. You ever see a worm on a hook?”

“A long time ago. When I was little.”

“That’s how they squirm. Unhhhh!” Eric grabbed his stomach and fell to his knees, flopped onto his back and writhed horribly, making retching sounds. “That’s what they do,” he said from down on the snow. “Wriggle in pure agony for hours. Pure agony.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

“You don’t know what I’ve seen.” Eric’s voice had gone cold and dead. He got up, whacking snow from his jeans. “It’s none of your business what I’ve seen.”

Edie jerked the trigger, missing the target, missing the tree, and Eric immediately cheered up. He’d been in a good mood all morning; he always was when they had a guest. Having a guest set something free in him. He’d woken her up first thing this morning and proposed this jaunt in the woods, a shooting lesson, and she knew they would have a good day. He grabbed her from behind now, steadying her grip. “Never mind. If it was too easy, it wouldn’t be any fun.”

“Why don’t you show me? Let me watch you. That’ll help me get the hang of it.” The submissive act worked like a charm, it usually did.

“You want to watch the master at work? Okay, baby. Pay attention.”

Edie listened like a puppy with cocked head while Eric explained again the importance of the proper stance, demonstrating the grip, the crouch, the correct way to sight along the barrel. He was at his best when telling her things, lore he had picked up in Toronto or Kingston or Montreal. Except for a class trip to Toronto when she was in high school, Edie had never set foot outside Algonquin Bay. Twenty-seven years old, she had never lived on her own, and she had never met anyone like Eric. So totally self-sufficient. And so beautiful.

Edie’s diary, June 7, the previous year:
I don’t know why he has anything to do with a hideous thing like me. Me with my horrible face and flat as a board. He has no idea how gorgeous he is. So lean, with ropy muscles, and the way he walks—that slight crouch—just makes me weak in the knees
. She pictured his face with its fine bones, its clean lines, on a movie screen forty feet wide. You could sell tickets to anything he was in.

Like an artist, with those rings under his eyes, haunted by genius. I can see him on a cliff by the edge of the sea, with the wind blowing through his hair and a white scarf streaming out behind him
.

He had come to her counter at Pharma-City with some aftershave and some Kleenex and he’d asked her for some Double-A batteries and a little bottle of PowerUp.

I’m doomed
, she’d written in her diary that first day he’d shown up in the drugstore.
I’ve met the most powerful man in the universe. His name is Eric Fraser and he works at Troy Music Centre and he has a face that looks like God to me. What eyes!
She reread her diary from time to time, to remind herself of how empty her life had been, and then how full it had become since the arrival of Eric Fraser.
Even his
name
is beautiful
.

“Ever try this stuff?” he’d said to her. The cash register acted up and they were staring at each other while the manager fiddled with it.

“It’s like No-Doz, isn’t it? Caffeine pills?”

“Oh, they may
say
it’s just caffeine. They can
say
whatever they want, but take my word for it, you can do amazing things with PowerUp.”

“Stay awake all night, huh?”

But he’d given her a sly smile and shaken his head in pity. “Amazing things can be done.”

She could never have guessed how amazing.

He had been dressed all in black and was skinny as a knife, and when he put his dark glasses on, you could have sworn he was in some underground rock and roll band. It still amazed her that someone as handsome and smart and worldly-wise as Eric Fraser could be interested in her—a nothing, a no one, a loser like Edie Soames. Just three days before the first entry in her diary that mentioned Eric Fraser she had written:
I am nothing, my life is nothing, I amount to a big fat zero
.

Eric went to look at the target, his breath trailing behind him in feathery clouds. He made an incongruous figure all in black against the snow, with his spiky hair and his sunglasses. He came back clutching the paper target, holding it up like a trophy. “Excellent work. You’re beginning to show some consistency. It’s not just luck any more.”

They shoved the target in the back of Edie’s rusted Pinto and drove downhill to the highway, Eric slouched back in the seat like royalty. He had his own vehicle, a blue Windstar at least ten years old that he kept in perfect running condition, but Eric Fraser never drove unless he had to.

Edie made a left by the old drive-in theatre and drove the short distance to Trout Lake. She parked at the marina, under a sign that said,
Parking for marina customers only
. The lake was perfectly smooth, blinding white in the sunlight, except for the ice-fishing huts. Children were skating at the public beach, where a square of the lake had been cleared for a rink.

They dodged traffic on the highway and went tramping up the hill. Now and then a toboggan loaded with children shot past them. He loved his walks, Eric, loved the outdoors. Sometimes he walked for three or four hours, out to Four Mile Bay and back, or out past the airport. She would never have guessed this about him, he looked so, well, urban. But the long walks, the hills and snow and quiet, seemed to calm a restlessness in him. It was an honour to share these times with him.

They stepped over a chain-link fence that was bent practically to the ground and continued up the hill past the new pumphouse. Edie was huffing and puffing long before they got to the top and stood beside the frozen circle of the reservoir. A small plane with skis where its wheels should have been buzzed overhead and wafted down toward Trout Lake. They stood gripping the protective fence with its warnings against swimming in or skating on the reservoir. Edie could see the spot, two hundred yards downhill, where they had buried Billy LaBelle. She knew better than to mention it, though, unless Eric did.

“You know how to be quiet. I like that,” Eric had said to her once. He’d been in a sulk the whole day, and Edie had been terrified he was going to tell her he was tired of her, that he was finished with her and her fish face, but instead he had praised her. It was the first time anyone had praised her for anything, and she treasured his words like rubies. Now she could go for hours not saying anything. When sad thoughts came, or the bitter ache of hating her own face, she just put them aside and remembered his sweet words. Utterly silent, Edie could stand beside him staring at a circle of frozen water, and Eric seemed to like it just fine.

“I’m hungry,” he said eventually. “Maybe I’ll get something to eat before I drop over.”

“Do you want to come for supper?”

“I’ll get my own supper.” He didn’t like her to see him eating. It was one of his peculiarities.

“What if our guest wakes up?” Eric had taught her never to call the guest by name.

“After what you gave him? I don’t think so.”

Edie turned away from the reservoir and looked out over the hills, the subdivisions around Trout Lake. Smells of pine and woodsmoke hung in the air.

“I wish we didn’t have to earn a living,” she said. “I wish we could just spend all our time together. Walking places. Learning things.”

“Waste of time, most jobs are. And the people. Jesus, I hate them. I hate the bastards.”

“Alan, you mean.” Alan was his boss, always on Eric’s back about something, telling him to do things he’d already done, explaining things he already knew.

“Not just Alan. Carl, too. Fucking faggot. I hate them all. They think they’re so fucking perfect. And what they pay me—I’m forced to live in that pigsty.”

Edie was getting really cold standing there, but she didn’t say anything. When he started talking about people he hated, she knew what was coming. There would be a party—that was Eric’s word for it. They already had their guest of honour in safekeeping. A flutter started up in Edie’s chest, and suddenly she badly needed a bathroom. She pressed her lips together, holding her breath.

“I think we should move the schedule up a bit,” Eric said casually. “Have the party a little earlier than we’d planned. Don’t want our guest to get bored, do we.”

Edie soundlessly released her breath. Liquid spots swam in the corners of her vision. From far below on the toboggan run, the happy screams of children rose high into the air and echoed off the cold white hills.

Bump, bump, bump
. It made Edie want to scream. They’d just finished dinner half an hour ago; what could she want now?
Bump, bump, bump
. Like she’s rapping that cane on my skull. Never any peace. Work all day at a nothing job, in a nothing store, in a nothing town, and then come home to what?
Bump, bump, bump
.

“Edith! Edith, where are you? I need you!”

Edie turned from the sink with a wet plate in her hand and yelled toward the stairs, “I’m coming!” Then, in a normal voice, “You old bitch.”

The tree in the backyard swayed, scraping an icy finger on the window. How green and benign that same tree had looked just months ago. Eric had come into her life, and everything had turned into the greenest summer Edie had ever seen.

Bump, bump, bump
. She ignored the thump of Gram’s cane on the ceiling, willing the icy branch to turn green once more. The whole summer had been rich with colour, saturated with a million different shades of green and blue, drenched with the rapture of getting to know Eric. From boredom and nothingness, Eric had created passion. From emptiness, excitement. From misery, thrills.

I am a conquered country
, she had written in her diary.
I am Eric’s to rule as he sees fit. He has taken me by storm
. The words put her in mind of another storm, a stupendous blast of wind and rain that had come whipping across the iron grey of Lake Nipissing last September.

They’d killed the Indian kid. Well, Eric had killed her, technically speaking, but she’d been in on it, she’d helped him pick her up, she’d kept the kid in her house, she’d watched him do it.

“Do you see that look in her eyes?” he’d said. “There’s nothing like the look of fear. It’s the one look you can trust.”