Smoke (39 page)

“No,” whispers the old man. “Stop.”

“Let me help,” insists Buster. “You'll breathe better.”

“Leave it.” The doctor uses all of his remaining strength to resist.

“Keep your eyes open,” Buster pleads. “C'mon, look at me.” He shakes the doctor hard but he is fading. His lips are blue, almost purple. He is pigment, weight, limbs, cells and muscles, organs clunkering away like twin pistons in a race to the finish. Buster shakes harder the second time, opens the doctor's shirt, lifts his undershirt and tugs at the tight strips of gauze. He lies still, breathing shallowly as the boy struggles to unwrap him. A few of the blood-soaked bandages are loose, sagging away from his body, and the flesh beneath bulges out between the strips of gauze, stained brown. Buster lifts himself onto his knees, ready to pump the old man's chest. Tears fall like incomplete thoughts and pool in the hollow of the doctor's collarbone. Then he stops, recoils onto his boot heels, dizzy. What the hell? The doctor's chest is covered in red welts from the tight binding. Buster tugs off another bandage and sees two wrinkled, aged hills of flesh, as pale as milk, with darker centres. Breasts!? And gradually, as though placing a familiar face, his own skin shrivels and crawls away, disgusted. “Jesus!” He jerks back violently, reaches for his pistol with his free hand and waves it.

“What are you gonna do, shoot me?”

“Shut up!” Buster rocks back and forth. “Jesus Christ. For once shut your trap while I think.” Saliva fills his mouth and the back of his throat closes. A hollow gesture anyway, reaching for the gun, for what is there to protect against? He drops his hand and the gun falls to the ground. His head pounds machine-gun fire. What is he looking at? Who is Doc John? He stumbles backwards, every conversation they've had tearing through his skull in fiery flashes— Detroit, Fingers Fontana, Raymond Bernstein. Solly Levine. He searches for a clear explanation. How can this be? Was
everything
a lie? The trees all around rustle like blank pages.

“It's just me,” whispers the doctor. “You know me.”

“No I don't. I don't know anything. You're a freak. A fraud!”

Doc John gives a weak laugh. “Me, a fraud?” He coughs up more blood. “C'mon now.”

“This is impossible.” Buster can hardly make himself look at the doctor, and when he does, he cannot pry his eyes from the old man's chest. “Who would … how …
why?
”

The doctor is shivering now. Desperate. “Well, haven't you wanted to look like somebody else?”

“Sure but what does that—”

“If there was a way.” The doctor forces every word. “If there was a way to make your outside … match your inside again. Would you do it?”

“Course.”

The doctor wheezes. “Me too.”

Buster takes a deep breath and another peek at his friend lying upon the dusty side of the road. The motionless, half-naked body is not a man's, but what is it? It reminds him of tobacco after it's been topped—a clever weed manipulated into a whole new figure. Doc John has been a traveller in that traitorous home called skin. He has gone unseen though not invisible. What do you do when one of your own turns out to be a stranger? What about when that stranger is you? Buster glances over his shoulder and still no one is coming.

“You won't tell will you, son?”

Buster shakes his head. “But what do I do? I don't know what to do.”

The doctor chokes on blood and bile. He smells smoke and gasoline and wet clothes, inhales deeply. “Help me finish it. You're the only one who can.” Then, he closes his eyes and is still.

“No!” Buster hollers. “No please!” He falls to his knees, scrambles to replace the gauze strips. “See, it's okay. I'll cover you. No one will know.” He curtains the doctor with his wet, bloody shirt. “We'll pretend this never happened. I didn't see a thing. Just don't go.” But the doctor is already gone, across that last border, and Buster stares at his wrinkled face and weeps.

After a few moments he lifts his head, still feeling the doctor's tight and determined grip. He wipes his nose on his sleeve, thoughts scrambling. Soon the others will arrive. They will ask questions. Make judgments, and erase, erase, erase the doctor's life. They will see only ugliness and deceit, and want irrefutable facts. He mustn't allow it. He owes the doctor that much at least. Facts are dull dreary things, Buster thinks, dead things. He leans over the old man's body one final time to listen for a heartbeat and finding none, stands and clasps the matchbox tightly in his fist. The outside is nothing but kindling. The outside is all luck and chance and mad shadow tricks. Then, with fingertips cold and blue as if dipped in fresh ink, he slides the box open, lifts out one stick, shuts his eyes and strikes the match. It lights on the first try.

The quick, raspy sound of the match tip being dragged across the side of the oblong box is followed by the bright flicker of fire and all at once Buster spins backwards to the night of his accident. He trembles, that uncontrollable shaking again, only this time he doesn't refuse it. His throat closes as the scent of sulphur suffuses the air.

He opens one watery eye.

I made it.

And then the other eye.

I'm alive.

The lit match burns between his fingers. The doctor's lifeless form lies at his feet. He takes a deep breath and then he lets go.

He runs. He runs as far from the fire as he can and falls to the ground, scraping both knees through his good pants. He collapses in the middle of the road and turns to watch with unblinking eyes as the flicker of reds and oranges and blues snap in the breeze like clean sheets hung out to dry. A wave of heat rushes over him even from that good distance, and his throat is instantly parched, his skin tight. He covers his head as the car explodes, one small explosion and another larger, taking everything he thought he knew up into the sky with it and hurling it back down to earth. Glass shatters like diamonds and sharp rain. Pieces of debris fall like shrapnel. Chrome plate. Leather from the car seats, bits of tire and plastic, felt from the lining of his fedora, it all flies up and tumbles onto the dirt road, mixing with the stench of gasoline, oil, gauze and flesh burning. The searing heat dries his tears before they have a chance to fall.

He peers across to where the conflagration rages and out beyond it, squinting into the distance through the dense metallic fog as Donny's Chevy Bel Air races towards him, a faint blue flash against the bright green fields. The car is carrying Jelly Bean and Alice and closely behind follow a string of trucks. His father and mother with Lizzie. Walter and Hazel. Hank and Susan with George Walker. Len and Ivan Rombout. The parade of Miss Tobacco Queen contestants. Fire crackles and hisses and flames shoot off the Oldsmobile and blaze higher. A fine steel dust lines the inside of Buster's mouth and tastes of spoiled powdered milk. In this moment he realizes we are all confined first to our physical selves. Though not for good. Not forever. He reaches up with one hand and feels for the scars on his face. His skin is like wet twine, an engraved plaque. A badge of honour. His skin is the tobacco winding up from his father's fields like arms desperate to be received. Yes it's a hideous garment, because bodies are nothing if not read like books. He can see that now. But that is not all, and the rest he will just have to make up as he goes along.

Seconds later Tom shifts his Dodge into the highest gear and accelerates past Donny and the others, leaving them in his dusty wake. He slams on the brakes, skids his truck to a noisy stop, and is out of the cab before Isabel has time to gather Lizzie in her blanket, before any of the others have even parked. Tom's fear of losing Buster is unmistakable now, primal—a father who might not reach his son in time. He runs to Buster and tries to look him squarely in the eyes. “I'm here,” he says, catching his breath. “I'm here now.” Buster stares wordlessly through the thick wall of smoke, trying to make out Doc John's car, and Tom follows his son's gaze. His eyes sting. He places a rough hand on Buster's shoulder.

There is smoke everywhere, white, black, grey, curling and snaking up over the land. And there will be smoke long after this fire has burned down and the charred remnants have been cleared away. For Buster there will always be a twisting foggy mist in the sky, gold in the sunlight, silvery blue under the moon. It will be here when he has his next adventure and the next. Shrouding the village. Protecting. Calling them all home. Dark plumes converge overhead like a heavy, dead cloud, and with Doc John's last story guarded safely inside he steps out from under its shadow.

Meanwhile

A lean figure slips like a garter snake from the rear window of the Bank of Commerce. He lifts a potato sack full of crisp twenty-dollar bills from the ground where he dropped it, rises and saunters blithely out onto the sidewalk and through the crowd without attracting attention. He pulled it off. Easier than he thought. He advances along Main Street, passes the greengrocer and the hardware store and the throngs eating cotton candy and ice cream. He continues, without a backward glance, two miles west where he crosses a newly primed tobacco field. A radio, accidentally left on inside the farmhouse, plays loudly and a popular song by The Platters drifts out. As the stranger disappears into the woods behind the McFiddies' property, he slows to the pace of the ballad, smiles triumphantly and sings it to the sky.

Note to Readers

I did a great deal of research preceding the actual writing of
Smoke,
and this included county records as well as books and newspapers of the period. Among these various sources was
South of Sodom,
a history of South Norwich by The South Norwich Historical Society, which included this intriguing aside: “Dr. James Barry, Inspector-General of Hospitals in Upper and Lower Canada, had been found to be a woman as he/she was laid out for burial.”

Acknowledgments

This book was written with the support of the City of Toronto, through the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council's Writers' Reserve Program. St. Peter's Colony and the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild provided time and space to write, and Shelley Sopher helped to make that time bearable. I am grateful to everyone at Westwood Creative Artists, especially my agent, Hilary McMahon, for her never-ending enthusiasm and risk-taking. Also, I thank my publisher, David Davidar, at Penguin Canada, my patient and meticulous editor, Barbara Berson, and the entire Penguin team. The following people must be acknowledged for their assistance: Susan Charlotte Blanton, Erin Clarke, Sally Cooper, Mary Lou Crichton, George Davis, Mike Hicks, Maureen Hynes, Ruth and David Jackson, Alex Latoche, William Lenares, Judy Livingstone at the Delhi Museum and Cultural Board, John Miller, Andrea Németh, Isaac and Gretel Meyer-Odell, Shannon Olliffe, Kathleen and Pat Olmstead and The Ladies Bridge Group of Walkerton. Dr. Judith Perry. Linda Dawn, Joanne, Joyce, Marion, Hugh, Dorothy, and Sara Pettigrew. Laura Pettigrew D'Addario. Denise Phelps. Trish Salah for her course, Articulating Differences, Ron Smith, and Ralph Vuylsteke. A special thank you to Lee Pierssens for allowing this city girl to poke about on the family farm. Finally, I am indebted to the village of Otterville and surrounding region, for early and lasting inspiration.