The Cast Stone (25 page)

It's too early, Monica thought, at the sight of a single faded orange leaf on the maple that a city worker had planted, gouged a hole and plopped into the boulevard in front of the new apartment block twenty-seven years ago. It's way too early for the leaves to change. But then she thought, well maybe because spring came so early they are just tired of it all, tired of the constant heat. Summer can become tiring, dust, daylight that comes way too early and wakes you, the buzz of flies, and that dry wind that keeps blowing up from the Arizona desert. Some days she thought she could smell cactus mixed with the grit. Maybe winter would be good this year, some snow, just a little, just enough to settle the dust and make the city look clean again.

Ben loved autumn, used to come back to the university after summer tanned a full shade darker, brought the wilderness with him into the classroom, brought energy and light. He used trees as metaphor to explain to the seminar class how an ecological society might function, how balsam and birch lived together, put thoughts in her head about how she might live. But Ben's utopian society only existed there, in her head, maybe in his; it was not here, on the concrete where grass grew through the cracks beneath her boots, here where the boulevard ended and the busy 23rd Street — a couple more blocks and they would be at the bus depot.

Rick hurt, this was a sick he had never experienced before. It was more than the sick that might be expected from six weeks of confinement in a basement without light, more than the sick that might be expected from the beatings, the kicks, the punches to the temple. Why did he always hit me there? What was the damage he hoped to inflict with punches to the side of the head? Brain damage? No, the brain was functioning perfectly well. He knew where he was, knew that the explosive taped to the small of his back was armed, knew the woman behind him held an old-fashioned garage door opener in the pocket of her floppy jacket, knew that if she pressed ‘open', the explosive would certainly smash his spine if it did not kill him. Rick's brain was fine. It was the rest of his body that was having problems, serious problems.

“Do not get on the bus until I say so.” Monica's voice behind him was indifferent; at first Rick confused it with kindness. Six weeks of anger can do that; make you believe that indifference is kindness. Sunshine and light can give you hope, keep you walking when your body wants to lay down, there on that bit of grass, or even here, right here on the concrete, just lay down for a moment. Rick kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, promised himself it would be okay once he was on the bus. Buses have reclining seats.

At the station, Rick tried to stand away from the other people waiting to board. If this was all just a set-up, if she pushed the button anyway, he did not want to be standing close to someone who had nothing to do with this. He looked at her, standing in the shade, watching people getting off the bus two lanes over. She nodded and he pushed himself the three steps to the door of the bus, handed the driver the white stiff paper ticket, used the handrail to climb the narrow stair, turned left past where the driver would sit, waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, and made his way to the very back of the bus where the man was signalling him. He would have preferred to sit anywhere closer.

“Here, lift your shirt.” He felt the rip of tape removed. “Anywhere else?”

“No. That's it.”

“Okay then, just sit tight and we go for a short ride.” The man sat back, turned away from Rick, toward the window where the light was better and disconnected the detonator from the explosive. “Everything is going to be okay now.”

Rick knew it wasn't. Knew that the man with the dirty blonde hair and hawk nose had poisoned him. That was why he stopped the punches and kicks, stood there and grinned while Rick ate cold canned beans that tasted of grit. No, it was not going to be okay.

“Everything is going to be okay now, Abe.” Monica put her arm around his waist and helped him to walk to the depot.

“No it isn't. Monica. I told them everything.”

“It's okay, Abe.” She squeezed him tighter, reassured. “We'll handle it. Let's just get you out of here. You're safe now.” Quickly through the station, past the ticket counter, out the street doors, into the taxi. “No, the other one.” She guided him to the third cab in the line, the one that Ed was driving.

“Where to?” Ed joked.

“You know fuckin' well where to.” Monica was not in the mood for jokes as she slammed the door behind her. “Are you wired?” She had her hands under Abe's shirt, feeling.

“No, nothing. They put me on the bus at Dundurn and told me not to get off.”

“Nobody rode with you?”

“Not that I know of. Monica, I talked. I told them everything.”

“It's all right, we'll handle it. You just take it easy.”

Abe wanted to talk, needed to talk. “I don't know what I said, I just started babbling. They gave me an injection, fire in my veins, I don't remember. I couldn't concentrate, confused. That needle, whatever it was, and I couldn't stop talking, babbling was more like it. It was like I was somewhere else listening to myself. It was like I was trying to put the fire out with words, trying to make the pain stop, anything to make the pain stop.”

“Bastards.” Monica sat back, let the taxi carry her, let herself go with it, wherever it was going. The resistance would continue and she was along for the ride, all the way. The taxi turned hard right, leaned her against Abe, shoulder to shoulder. She put her arm around him. “It's all right, Abe. Like I said, we'll handle it.”

Ed sped the taxi through the old warehouse area, the area that had once been converted to nightclubs, offices and restaurants, but was now deserted again. The once bright paint, the purples and oranges that had attracted people at the turn of the century now faded, peeling and empty.

Abe sat up straighter, his strength returning; he did not need sympathy, did not need Monica's arm around him. He relied upon his own strength.

“What did you tell them about me?” Monica needed to know.

“I don't think I did.” Abe turned slightly to look at her. “I rambled a lot. They wanted to know about the gathering on the farm, who was there, who said what, and the person that I kept talking about the most was that guy you brought, Ben Robe. Of everyone who spoke at the gathering, it was Ben Robe that stuck in my head, and it was Ben Robe that I gave to them. I don't know if it was the drugs or what, but I remembered everything he said. In my babbling I gave them his speech word for word. I've got to find him and tell him.”

“I'll take care of that.” Monica looked out the window, looked north.

The rifle kicked into Ben's shoulder. Not the slam of a hunting rifle, more a push than a hit. He lowered it, looked at it again. It was shaped like a rifle, barrel, forestock, trigger, scope. But it was as different as it was similar. Ben was more familiar with walnut and blue steel. This was flat black and plastic, electronic rather than mechanical action.

“It fires three rounds for each pull on the trigger,” Monica had bragged when she showed him his purchase. “Laserscope tuned to four-hundred metres, put the red dot where you want, squeeze the trigger, and one dead bastard.”

Ben looked back at his target, a plastic bottle hung by a string from a tree branch two-hundred metres distant. He did not need to check, he knew it had three holes in it, saw it jump when he squeezed the trigger. Easy enough, but could he shoot a human? Could he put the red dot on a man? Take a life?

“In self-defence,” he answered, but the words were not his, they were his father's:
“When a man takes a life, that man
takes that other man's life as his own. If you murder a man you
take that man's sins. That man they electrocuted there.” The old
man had pointed at the newspaper a young Ben was holding.
“They took all his sins onto themselves when they killed him.
The wrong that man did, they have to pay for it now — him, he
goes to the happy hunting ground.”

“The one that pulled the switch has to pay?”

“Not just him, all of them. All of them that decided to kill
this man, they take his sins. You watch, they keep doing this,
they keep electrocuting and hanging people, all of them are
going to pay. It's going to come back on their people.”

“They've been doing this for a long time.”

“And look at the suffering it brought them. They still have
murderers and rapists, lots of them. Just watch. It'll keep getting
worse.”

Ben put the rifle away. It did not hold any answers.

Rosie knelt, moved aside a branch to check the underside of the faded blueberry bush. There weren't any berries there either. Nothing. She felt tired, wore out, more from disappointment than from exertion. In a good blueberry-picking year she could stay out all day, walk with a pail for miles, happily filling it and spend her evening cleaning the berries, picking out the occasional unripe green one and the very rare unwanted leaf, packaging them up, and stocking her freezer. Blueberries were Rosie's staple. She depended upon them for the pies she baked over the winter, her famous pies that she could sell when she needed a little extra during the last days of the month when things were running low.

She had heard of years like this. Her mother had told her about the year they had a big snowstorm in June that killed all the young berries. But even that year her mother had found berries. The snow had come while her mother and father were travelling. They had stopped overnight, made a camp, the next morning when they started out they found the snow had come all around them but not the place they had camped. Her mother had gone back to that spot and sure enough there were berries there, not much, but enough.

Rosie wondered if she would be the first in her family's history to ever get skunked. She picked up her pail and started walking, looking for that one spot where the sun had not burned away the berries, where there might be some, enough. Maybe in the shade of poplars. Maybe there were saskatoon berries on the island at the north end of the lake. Maybe Ben would take her there in his boat. Maybe Elsie and Benji would come and they could take Rachel. There was a nice beach there, a little cove of sand and driftwood. They could have a picnic. It would be good to be on the lake, on the cool of the water.