Given (24 page)

I turned around, letting out my breath, and saw Toop, in the distance, a new find, a shoe, in his mouth, running so fast his back foot overtook his front feet, chasing sandpipers up and down the sand. Further down the beach I could make out the metal frame of Hooker's red pickup lying on its side, half-sunk into the sand, already a permanent part of the landscape. “I'm going for a run,” I called to Hooker, “up to your truck and back.”

I ran, wishing I could make Angel return the way Rainy and Frenchy had come back from the dead, so that he would know how it felt to run against the wind, to hear the wild music of the world, to stumble from his dreams and hear the trees speaking in tongues, to taste rainwater on his tongue.

I was halfway to the wreck when I found the shoe. Dry, almost weightless, no longer than my lifeline, it fit in the palm of my hand. It was the same brand as all the others Toop had brought home, but unlike the ones heaped in front of Hooker's woodstove, this one had scarcely been damaged. It was small enough to have been spared, to have been cradled across the surface of the waves.

In this world there is an unending supply of sorrow, and the heart has always to make room for more.
I grasped the shoe to my body, trying to make it disappear the way I'd tried to make love disappear in the years I'd been separated from Angel. I'd always imagined that, given time, my love for my boy would lessen, so that the closer I got to the end of my life, the less I would remember it. I don't know what I expected love to do — maybe curl up and die the way I'd seen people do.

I looked back; I could see Hooker, his hair the same blue-black as the mussel shells he'd steamed open that morning; he had taken off his shirt and tied it around his waist. In his hands I could the blood-red strips he'd cut from the sea lion's bloated sides.

I felt the wind blowing through me, and a soft rain coming down as I started back, turning the shoe — left or right I couldn't tell which — in my hands, as if it were some hopeful relic the sea had coughed up, trusting I would find it, knowing it had come home. It was perfect in every way but one. The logo, which appeared to have been Boss Angeloss, had almost disappeared. All I could make out was the ghost of an impression, the word Angel, and I knew — a message had been sent to me, written by the wind.

I hardly remember the walk back up the beach and over the point to Hooker's cabin. I do know the rain stopped for a while and the sun peeked out and that I felt, once again, like a ghost inhabiting my own body. I watched Hooker stock his birdfeeder and we stood together in the doorway as the ravens descended one at a time, and then flew up with pieces of bright crimson meat in their beaks.

Toop flopped down beside the woodstove, licking the salt from the waterlogged runner between his paws. I buried the baby shoe deep in my jacket pocket and stretched out on the bed. Hooker woke me, later, with a cup of nettle tea and some fry-bread he'd made while I'd slept. I thought about the mussels he'd picked that morning, trussed together with hair-like bonds
,
and looking at Hooker, then, a thin layer of trust began to form, like a scab, over my heart. I wanted to tell him about my son, show him the shoe I'd found on the beach — a shoe the same size as the ceramic impression — the “cherished sole” footprint the
curandero's
assistant had made for me the day I'd left Desaguadero — as if it were further proof of my child's existence beyond the grave. But Hooker said back in a minute and left to go outside.

I sat on the floor by the open window, sipping my tea. I had no idea of the time — impossible to tell time when the sky loomed grey and vague — only that the tide had come up and started out again since we'd risen earlier in the day. When Hooker returned he said a storm was coming in.

He had begun to look edgy again, the way he'd looked the night before leaving the community hall, and after a while he came and crouched next to me, and asked if he could trust me, if I considered him a friend. I thought this an odd question, since we had just spent the night in the same bed, even if nothing had happened, in the traditional sense of the words
nothing
and
happened.

“Of course I'm your friend.”

“Can I
trust
you?” Hooker wasn't going to let me hedge on the wheel. “I'm not asking you to trust
me
. I'm asking if I can trust
you.
If you are that good a friend.

At the Facility we had a saying:
A friend helps you move; a good friend helps you move a body.

“It depends on how you define good,” I said.

Hooker said he had a favour to ask; he wanted me to drive him to Gracie's. I said I'd take him anywhere, though given a choice I would have opted to stay in his cabin, closing my eyes and practising opening them slowly to look at him lying half-naked on his bed. “When you fall in love you have to stupefy yourself and become blind otherwise love would never happen,” Vernal used to say, after I'd left him to live on my own. “When you wake up, and open your eyes, that's where love stops.”

But my desire for Hooker had almost transcended love. Almost. My desire now was to crawl inside his skin and live there, behind his eyes, to feel his heart beating away in the hot darkness.

Hooker kept glancing at the sky as we left the cabin and started up the trail followed by Toop with his pointy ears drooping as if he took the unsettled weather personally. By the time we reached the graveyard the clouds in the west had turned a lurid red. “Cloud gets that much blood in it, means we're going to have a real humdinger,” Hooker said, swatting at a fly that buzzed his face. There were flies everywhere. I knew what this meant.

Toop snapped at a bluebottle and gave me a puzzled look, as Rainy materialized, sitting on a decomposing nurse log that had become host to a colony of hemlock and spruce seedlings. Her twins, who had manifested themselves back into their fine red mist, and Frenchy, still wearing my shades, appeared beside her. The HE clung to his mother's leg. His face, I saw, had become one suppurating wound, and a breeding ground for maggots.

My friends had promised to stay at the farm, and I gave them a look to say as much.
You promise you be home this morning, yo own self
, Frenchy said.
We get tired of waitin
.

Rainy held her whole body clenched, even her eyes.
We figure we hitch a ride home in yo dead-wagon
, she said, as I opened the door on the driver's side. She and Frenchy pushed their way in, pulling their offspring after them. They draped themselves across the front seat; I told them, under my breath, they had to ride in the back.

Rainy took a hard look at Hooker, and whistled.
He be the lookingest guy I ever seen,
she said, her voice gone all congested.
He be a statue in a park, no one spray paint over him, best believe.

The HE had begun picking at the pieces of shrapnel trapped under his skin, going
glock-glock-glock
as he tried to clear his nose. Frenchy massaged her boy's shoulders and listed off sniper rifles:
Barret M82, Barret M90, Barret M95, Barret M99, Nechem NTW-20,
until his breathing returned to normal and he went limp in her arms.

Toop had to be picked up and lifted into the hearse, where he cowered low to the floor, trembling. Rainy perched between the rollers in the back, hissing like a cat, to further terrify him; I gave her an irritated
shhhhhh
as I took off my jacket and tossed it over her head.

“You talking to
lumaloos
now?” Hooker asked, as he got in the passenger's side. He glanced over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes. I remembered what he'd told me, about learning the secret of seeing into shadows, and wondered what he knew.

Talcum pole creep me out. Make my head stand on end
, Rainy said, as we drove past Lawlor Moon's memorial pole. Every time she spoke, Toop growled. “Something's spooking him,” Hooker said, as his dog jumped into his lap and sat up, ears pricked forward, as if he were trying to ignore what was going on behind him by concentrating on the road.

The hearse, the road, even the black clouds were awash in an ocean of cochineal. The sea itself, and the few boats left in the bay that hadn't headed for shelter looked as if they had been bathed in Al's tainted blood. As I drove I wanted to reach into my pocket to make sure the tiny fragile shoe was still there. I pictured slipping my child's foot into it, the way he would curl his turned-in toes and I'd have to tickle his sole to make him straighten them out again.

As I pulled in at Gracie's house, the sky opened up and let loose a downpour. Hooker told me to back up against the mudroom door, then got out, telling Toop to stay close.

I ordered Rainy and Frenchy to wait for me, and followed Hooker into the carving shed. He said, “right back
,”
then went into the house, and this time he kept his word, returning at once with garbage bags, a rope and a gas can. “I guess it's dark enough,” he said. “Let's do it.”

He led the way through the carving shed to a door that opened at the front of the house, facing the water, onto what Hooker called their appliance garden. The ghost of a bathtub overflowed with empty bottles, and a cook stove bloomed corrosively.

The refrigerator lay on its back, white, closed-coffin-like. I understood, in that instant, what Rainy meant when she said, “one door closes, another bangs shut.” Some part of me didn't want Hooker to open the fridge door because I knew it was going to close off, bang shut, a part of me, of us, of what Hooker and I might have become.

“I need your help,” Hooker said. Toop sniffed the air, panting, making excited yipping sounds. I sat down on a toilet that had mushrooms sprouting from the mossy bowl. “We need to get him out of here.”

For one naïve moment I thought he meant Toop, but then as he opened the fridge door I saw the hand, a human hand, poking out of the fridge. I remembered, then, what my son's father said to me in the big yard at Mountjoy, shortly before he was shot down in the botched escape attempt and the
contra-bandistas
flew me away to Tranquilandia: “It is much easier to kill a man than it is to make love to a woman. There's no risk in killing. Bang. He's dead. You go on living.”

Had I, I wondered, fallen into the sweet hands of a killer? Hooker hadn't looked to me like someone who would kill, but what does the kind of man who kills look like?

“What happened to him?” I asked, somewhat naïvely.

“Best part of him run down his old man's leg
.
” Hooker answered.

I could see the whole body now. From where I sat, a distance away in the near-darkness, I saw he was naked, except for a pair of running shoes that were too big for him and made him look clownish. I wondered if Al had been naked at his moment of death, if he'd stripped down to fix in the only useable vein he had left, or if Hooker had stripped him of any whiff of dignity he might have possessed.

Hooker sounded matter-of-fact. “Last night, when I left the hall. He'd OD'ed. I dragged him out here because I didn't want Gracie having to deal with it. Just because his life's over, doesn't mean hers has to be.”

Even when we harden, we each turn to stone in our separate ways. I had wanted to feel sorry for Al the first time we'd met, and now I found myself trying
not
to feel sorry for the cold skin-and-bones body of a man I'd never warmed to in life.

“I need your help,” Hooker repeated. I slid off the cold toilet and walked over to where he knelt, stuffing Al's head in a garbage bag and tying the rope around his throat. He took hold of Al's torso; I grabbed the ankles, recoiling, at once, at the feel of Al's skin.

“Keep hanging with me . . . you and me, we could go places,” he said.

“Like where? The electric chair?” Helping a friend move a body no doubt made me an accessory to murder. Hooker seemed irked when I hesitated, before taking Al's legs in my hands. I said what did he expect me to do, I'd never lifted a body out of a refrigerator before.