Skills

After four weeks and five days at the Mansonville cabin Slaney’s new passport was ready. He went to the office and picked it up, along with the driver’s licence and the birth certificate he’d mailed in, and then headed to the train station and bought a ticket.

The formality of the photography studio and the blast of the flashbulb had rendered an unfamiliar look in his passport photo. It was an odd angle. Something, perhaps the false name, made Slaney feel like he was not himself.

The large white umbrella in the studio had been set up to bounce light and there was the need to be unsmiling. There was a look of bafflement.

Bafflement is a precursor to wisdom, was what the picture made him think. The picture looked like someone who would have to wise up. They were embarking on the next adventure. They were going to be rich. Look out, world. The guy in the photograph was him and was not him.

The picture said, Look out.

Or it said: Bon voyage.

Slaney was leafing through a newspaper in the Montreal train station and he came across the obituaries. He never read the obits, but her name popped. Rowena Spracklin.

The start he got. What a start. He could not connect the name to the idea of her being gone. He went cold all over. They’d had a session on his last day in prison. More than a month ago now.

He’d gone to their last session and he didn’t say anything about the break. He didn’t hint. Now he read she had a sister in the States and there was mention of her dog and he started at the beginning and he read the whole thing again. They mentioned about her job.

Slaney thought about the four years of work they had done together. She called it their work.

Break a man and reconstitute him. That was the work.

They had completed the breaking part of the procedure, as far as she was concerned. But he had news: he was not broken.

Slaney had wrapped a splinter of himself in a kryptonite handkerchief that she couldn’t penetrate with her superhuman flames or X-ray vision. He’d dipped that part of himself in dragon’s blood. Nobody could touch it.

She had close-clipped grey hair and her floral blouse was purple and mauve and yellow. She had a blouse that was striped. She had five different blouses. He had caught glimpses of a shiny bra, grey with washing, frayed. She wasn’t fat, but solidly built, and her hands were large.

There was a tiny lucent skin tag on her cheek.

These little things registered with him without his realizing it.

Her eyes were dark brown and they turned hazel when she looked out the window. The light brought out flecks of amber.

You got a view, he said. The first time they met.

Nice view.

She told him to make himself comfortable and he sat down with his legs sprawled. He’d made a parody of being comfortable with the lady psychotherapist in the prison setting, sprawling all over her chair.

Then he sat up straight, one knee jiggling. The window was tinted the brown of a photographic negative and it made everything outside ashen and nostalgic. There was a duck pond, a giant white fire of sparks in a black field. You looked out her window and you thought the world had been bleached. A monochrome of bone and soot. The ducks moved together, a single black stain spreading over the white surface.

I’m not big on talking, he said. Beyond the duck pond, the chain-link fence with spirals of barbed wire at the top. She raised an eyebrow and waited.

Pot is good for you, he said.

She had a grin/grimace. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed. It was a mask and he learned after a few months that she was often in pain.

Ms. Spracklin always looked as if what she said ran through her from somewhere else. She clutched the arm of her chair with a strong, liver-spotted hand and the talk was drawn out of the wooden armrest, up through her hand to her heart.

She had very personal queries and she eased the truth out of him. He came to know himself as the subject of her questions. Gradually, over the four years of his incarceration, he began to talk.

Slaney spoke about Jennifer and the little girl. He put both his hands over his face.

Take your time, Ms. Spracklin said. Slaney told her that Jennifer hadn’t answered his letters. He didn’t know where she was.

Just take your time. But he didn’t say anything else. And that particular session was over.

Ms. Spracklin was figuring out how he had gone wrong, she told him. They were paying lip service to the idea of a wrong path and what happens when you travel it. She spoke about metaphorical journeys. She thought of punishment as a gift.

You can’t surprise me, Ms. Spracklin said. I’ve heard everything. Nothing you say will shock.

He didn’t mention names and she didn’t ask. There were things that were out of bounds.

How did you feel when he jumped bail? But she didn’t expect an answer. She used the word accomplice.

Friend, he said.

Your friend?

My friend.

How did you feel knowing your friend was free and you were not?

Silence was her surgical tool and she was trying to excise the innermost thing.

He found he didn’t want to bore her. She’d called him a natural storyteller. He loved to make her smile. If he could get her to laugh it made his day.

Listen, she said. There are forks in the road.

She was there to break him, but what if they had a few laughs along the way. They could both become stubborn and inert. Silence was the best tool for crushing him. Silence was the heavy equipment.

He forgot, sometimes, how dangerous she was. But he also understood the ways in which she could be trusted.

Ms. Spracklin would never betray a confidence; he was certain of that. Their conversations were locked up inside her, had not been committed to paper, though she took notes.

He had to be careful of what he said because she would be stuck with it long after he was gone. In that way she was tender. She wanted him gone.

Ten years from now, she said. She saw a path in the woods with birds flitting overhead.

I’ve lost the long-term view, he said. She licked her thumb and flicked through some papers and gathered them loosely and knocked the edge of the pile against the oak desk. A test that would discern what kind of work he should pursue when he was released.

It came up with dental hygienist. She was perplexed and then it made her giggle. A seizure of silent hiccuping laughter overcame her, a gulping for air. Tears came to the corners of her eyes. Finally she managed to wheeze out the words, Dental hygienist. Dental hygienist. He didn’t see what was so fucking funny.

I’m sorry, she said. Phew. Oh my.

He folded the newspaper along the edge of her obit and tore it as gently as he could along each fold. She’d had a photograph on her desk of a yellow Labrador retriever and they’d talked about the dog. He remembered the skin tag on her cheek, her stockings.

He began to recognize when she was overcome with weakness. Whatever was wrong with her floated down over her face, a folding inward, and her concentration fled.

Do you have a first name? Slaney asked. This was after two years of sessions, once a week, an hour each. Do you have a first name?

He had not been broken.

The times when she would go absolutely silent he’d feel a great urge to fill the void.

He’d want to tell a story the way you’d gasp for breath if you were held underwater.

She said her name was Rowena. She put up her hand to stop him and shut her eyes against the onslaught of mockery she expected.

I will not put up with jokes about my name, she said. She blushed and it had been the only time she looked feminine. She was old enough to be his mother and that made her dangerous.

She asked his strengths and weaknesses, his skills.

Are you a good listener?

He didn’t answer.

I’m listening, he said. He said he believed he could be a good lover with the right person. She sat back and folded her arms.

Don’t bother, she said. You cannot shock me.

She was a former nun, he knew, because of her stockings. The stockings were waxy-looking, like sausage skin. He thought she suffered from chronic pain or insomnia. Something was killing her. He figured that out.

I always see the person, he said. This is what he told her. He didn’t make judgements: ugly, fat, short, stupid, sick. He saw dignity, for lack of a better word.

He had to lean forward to explain this to Rowena Spracklin. He had decided, out of boredom, or some belief in a connection, a spark of human decency they both had, a spontaneous and breaching love that wasn’t sexual or filial or romantic or anything he could put a name on, that he would tell her the truth about himself.

What happened then? she kept asking. She didn’t care about feelings. They were transitory and unremarkable.

Action mattered to her. She was interested in his character and how it had been shaped through the things he had done.

He said that he knew how to look at people so they could be who they were, which basically meant he had a capacity for trust. He thought of trust, when he spoke to her, as a vestigial organ, near his liver, swollen, threatening to burst. Maybe it would poison him. But it was also his special skill. His strength.

Slaney had a way of holding his body, a gesture or look that said, Tell me.

And people told him.

Yes, he was a good listener.

There was a clot or some gathering of alien matter working through her veins toward her brain and the stockings slowed its travel.

What do you believe? she asked.

He wanted to tell her he had seen glimpses of dignity in everyone. He didn’t believe in self-denial. He thought there was nothing redemptive about guilt. He thought incarceration was the wrong thing to do to a human being. It could only warp and deform. He believed in figuring out the limits and then going further than that.

She was good at her job but it was the wrong job. He thought she would have done well importing weed. He told her that. She had the same skills he had; they were matched.

The clot had worked its way through and it had killed her.

He folded the obituary and put it in the pocket of his shirt and stood at the edge of the train platform with his hand on the pocket.

She had developed a technology of now you are not the man you were before.

He hadn’t looked down on her, though she was trying with all her might to smash him to bits. She was looking for the button that would blow him sky high, but she couldn’t get at it.

He once told her he would do it again if he got the chance.

I’m shocked, she’d said.

I see the whole picture, he said. But what he meant was they had not broken him. They could forget about breaking him. He didn’t judge people. That was what he had that they didn’t have.

There’s something I’d like to ask, she said. What makes you believe you wouldn’t get caught again?

Her earnestness nearly broke him. She was so sincere it almost made him doubt. He would have told her he believed and that was all there was to it.

Believing is believing is believing is believing.

There’s no reason to it. It just is, he would have told her that. But they had run out of time.

The Satellite

They had the eye of God. The world was wrapped with an eye. A glance lay over it now and forever.

Patterson looked at the giant screen in the front of the room and he saw nothing was impossible. They could follow movement all over the surface of the globe.

There was a smattering of applause as it dawned on the little audience, the thirty-eight RCMP officers and undercover agents and bureaucrats who’d gathered for the unveiling.

It turned out that the technology had always existed but lay in wait, wearing a camouflage of the not-yet-invented. That was what they were discovering in that high-rise office in Vancouver on July 2, 1978.

It had rained the night before and the asphalt was a black satin ribbon between the sidewalks below and the buildings were reflecting cloud and window flash when the sun came out. There were splotches of lime green and dark green and blue green covering the city.

It was the day that the yacht was scheduled to leave for Mexico.

Fine sailing weather, O’Neill said, standing at the window with his back to the room, hands on his hips.

It’s just a sophisticated tracking device, Patterson told himself. But he couldn’t help feeling proud. State-of-the-art technology; they were witnessing a leap.

A dish, an eye, a cyborg or Cyclops, and perhaps Patterson was the only man in the room old enough, besides O’Neill, to wonder about the hubris.

He’d gone to a party at Hearn’s and drunk until five in the morning and smoked up with the boys. Hearn was going by the alias John Barlow. Even his girlfriend called him John.

Hearn had put on an evening in Patterson’s honour. They’d tucked linen napkins into their shirt collars and there were a couple of hammers in the centre of the table.

Deep-fried cod tongues, lobster, scalloped potatoes. They smashed the shells and the lobsters squirted up at them and leaked.

There was talk about Saigon and Shakespeare, Jimmy Carter and Patty Hearst. Hearn was doing a Ph.D. in modern literature. Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Hemingway and Faulkner.

The girlfriend never took her big brown eyes off Hearn. She made Patterson so afraid for his own daughter he had to grip the edge of the table.

Two young guys from Newfoundland who were part of the crew for the Vancouver-to-Mexico leg of the journey. They were deckhands who would fly back.

The sailboat’s owner — Cyril Carter, also from Newfoundland — sat at the head of the table and the young girl named Ada who had run off with him. She had long fair hair and her eyes were large and sooty with eyeliner and mascara. But the colour: one of her eyes was blue and the other green and the whites showed at the bottom of the iris. Carter had left his wife and children for the girl and he kept her hand locked under his arm most of the night. She looked like a teenager.

Carter drank steadily and became more prudent with each drink. His eyes became gleaming slits and he hardly moved except to nudge his glass forward with a finger when it was empty.

The girl was quick to fill it for him. She poured to the rim.

They’d brought out the instruments after midnight. They played Dylan and Cohen and Pentangle and Hearn’s girl took the guitar from him and sang about times getting rough and hard and she looked up at her boyfriend and spoke the line: Why don’t you lay me down in the long grass and let me do my stuff. Patterson had to look away.

Hearn took the guitar back and sang an Irish folk song about a love lost at sea.

They got maudlin and bellowed out the chorus, nasal and off-key, like their lives depended on being honest when they sang. Hearn sitting on the straight-backed wooden chair: Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s.

His foot going. He finished with tears in his eyes, though Patterson was pretty sure the kid hadn’t fished off Cape St. Mary’s or anywhere else except maybe off the side of a luxury yacht.

At dawn, when the sun was rising, the young girl, Ada, wandered over to the piano in the corner and lifted the lid.

She slid across the bench and touched the keys without making any sound at all. Then she began to tinkle out a little melody and her backbone became straighter and she was frozen and alert. A tangerine light was creeping across the varnished hardwood floor and up her back. It lit up her blond hair and burned across the white shoulders of her peasant blouse.

Patterson had never heard a piano played that way. She was violent with it, as if there was something inside the wood and strings that she had to rescue or exorcise.

It was not what Patterson thought of as music. He didn’t know what it was. Her body jerked like she completed a circuit of high-voltage power; she was welded to it, couldn’t lift her fingers away from the keys, the way a person being electrocuted can’t let go of a live wire.

And when she stopped she was flushed and tigerish-looking.

Or maybe she was just stoned. Or he was just stoned. They had been smoking and drinking for hours. Maybe they had put something in his drink. He thought acid, maybe. He felt ravaged and elated. Whatever he experienced while she was playing, he doubted it as soon as it stopped.

Patterson thought she was going to expose him. That she knew everything. He half expected her to take off her clothes or set something on fire.

What the hell was that, Hearn said. His girlfriend got up from the table with a load of plates and let them clatter into the kitchen sink.

That was the piano, Hearn’s girlfriend said.

Ada swung her legs over the piano stool and sauntered across the room with the filmy scarf she’d worn around her neck in her hand, trailing it on the backs of the furniture. She dropped the scarf over Carter’s drunken face, a face set like marble, inert and puffy and desolate, and put her fingers on top of his bald pate.

Whatever had poured out of her fingers into the piano might pulse through the man’s skull and fry him on the spot, Patterson thought.

She flexed her fingers in a kind of gentle massage, the chiffon scarf wrinkling up, swishing over Carter’s nose and ears.

The girl told Carter it was time for bed. The sun had lost all of the orange flare by the time Patterson left the dinner party.

The next day he’d gone back with a terrific hangover and a briefcase. He handed Hearn twenty thousand dollars and Hearn gave him a tour of the boat, sixty feet, a big fishing rig in the back, mahogany and polish, a false floor under which they were going to store the cargo. The boat must have cost a fortune, even purchased, as it had been, in a foreclosure sale.

The satellite tracking system was installed that night by a couple of scuba divers, attached to the hull under Patterson’s instruction.

But Patterson hadn’t known the nature of the device they’d planted on the sailboat until now.

He knew, of course; it had been carefully explained. He’d read the dossier with its space-age jargon, the self-congratulatory bolstering. A military-led innovation, a dish in outer space that bounced signals, gave them a bead on anything that moved. But he hadn’t understood the nature of it.

They could trace the boat as it travelled down the coast. They would know exactly where the boys were at least three times a day. They would know when they’d collected the cargo, when they were heading back, when they entered Canadian waters.

It was imperative they make it back to Canadian waters.

The boys would be arrested in Canada.

O’Neill stood at a podium waiting for the room to fall quiet. He was going to give a speech with the snow of the screen playing over him, an electrified tweed of hiss, a knit of static and spark, glitch and random flicker.

The technicians in the booth were connecting cables, hitting switches. A feed of light and dark spewed over O’Neill’s face and hands.

He was thanking the scientist they had in from Ottawa to explain the technology, he was thanking the minister of defence, who wasn’t present, of course, and he was thanking Patterson for his hard work and dedication.

He told how Patterson was the guiding force behind the operation. How it was Patterson’s baby. There was applause and the guy next to Patterson clapped him on the shoulder.

O’Neill said that the RCMP in every province had been advised of the sting operation and they were behaving in accordance with the wishes of the Vancouver detachment. Mexico was on alert. Colombia was on alert. San Diego knew to keep an eye.

He made a joke about Patterson having to imbibe substances, both legal and illegal, while working undercover and how it must have been a hardship.

He said, Sometimes the job requires going the extra mile. Everyone chuckled.

We’re lucky to have him, O’Neill said. He glanced up from his papers then and took off his glasses and tucked them inside his suit jacket. He looked out at the audience for a moment.

We’re going to throw the book at these kids, he said. They won’t know what hit them.

O’Neill sat down and they all watched the screen. The new technology gave them the exact co-ordinates. It gave them a picture.

It took the sport out of it, Patterson thought. There was a pornographic element, the way they could watch without a break in the flow of time.

They looked on in silence, now, and they felt the hair on their arms stand up, the way you’re meant to feel in the presence of the supernatural.

Watching made them feel watched.

They knew they were next.

Everybody on earth was next. Perhaps they had always been watched. But now someone owned the eye.

They owned it.

This was the kind of eye: there was nothing to hide behind.

Patterson could not look away. He was glued. In the snow on the screen the yacht was a hard blur, a pulsing light on a grid. The yacht the boys would be taking to Colombia.

He had to admit a fondness. Hearn was well spoken and he had good manners. The kid thought the world of David Slaney; that much was clear.

Hearn believed one of them had to be on land waiting for the shipment. And it had to be Hearn because Slaney was too visible after the escape. Getting him out of the country would take off some of the heat. Hearn had worked hard, over the last four years, to establish his cover. He was serious about his studies; he seemed to be in love with his girl. Maybe he felt he owed Slaney the trip. The money would give David Slaney a fighting chance on the outside.

Hearn seemed to believe that working together, but from opposite ends of the trip, he and Slaney were invincible.

Is this unfolding? somebody said, pointing at the screen. The yacht was moving.

This is instantaneous, the scientist said. This is there’s no delay. It’s coming straight at you.

Somebody asked, It drops out of the heavens?

It’s bounced, the scientist said. The pictures are coming from outer space.

But there’s a delay, someone said. A woman. They had one woman on the team and she was at the back of the room. She was the one who said a delay. Because how could there be a picture without a delay, a picture bounced more than a thousand miles?

No delay, the scientist said.

It’s moving, all right, somebody said. Patterson looked at his watch.

They’re heading to Mexico, he said. Slaney’s going to fly down and meet them six weeks from now, then it’s on to Colombia.

Patterson didn’t say about losing Slaney in Montreal. He didn’t say the whole thing might blow up in their faces if Slaney didn’t show. There had been no sign of him once he’d checked out of the room they’d bugged. Hearn wouldn’t go on without him. Patterson was sure of that. Where was he this time?

We’ve got them, O’Neill said. He raised his fist in victory.

Bon voyage, somebody said.

You’re the One That I Want

Slaney gave the porter his ticket, found his seat, and set the doll up in the empty one next to him. He nudged the pink box a little until the doll’s eyelids dropped shut. Then he felt Montreal tug at itself, the clack of the rail ties, the slow, wrenching slide of smokestacks and concrete and sun-struck facades, a smooth emulsion streaming behind. He thought of her. Or she was just there. He was full of her. She was ultra-present, right there with him. Near him, or inside him.

Jennifer brayed like a donkey when something was funny. An honest to God donkey. She’d cross her legs to stop from peeing in her pants and beg him to shut up, holding one hand out. The laugh rocked her whole body and it was animal and mannish.

She’d felt ashamed about being on welfare. Her family had money. She had grown up with a charwoman but there was no trace of snobbery in her, except for the shame she felt cashing the welfare cheque.

She had a tab at the convenience store and she would go in and get smokes and bags of chips and wait, holding up the line, while the woman behind the counter wrote it all down. They conferred in quiet tones. They were like people in church when this transaction occurred, solemn and reverent about the vertiginous debt.

She smoked on the fire escape, sometimes, to watch the sun go down. If he had to pick a moment, it was her shoulders bent over a sewing machine with the smoke going in the ashtray.

Everything dropped away after she had cooked a meal and was having her evening smoke. She was five-foot-seven and bony and boyish. There was hardly anything to her. Her hair was long and thick and she coloured it a honey blond and her eyes were big and arresting. They narrowed and looked to the side when she had a problem to solve. When she was hurt or afraid she broke into a slow smile.

She made him butter her toast. Do things for me. That was the way she felt about him. Do things for me. She burnt everything she cooked. She had tried university and flunked out.

But she was full of patience for the child. The kid made her dopey with love. She had a way of being undiluted and present with Crystal; everything she was, she handed over to the kid.

Men fell in love with her and he watched her let them down easy. He watched as she gently, firmly destroyed several different men, and he was to remain unsuspecting about his own fate until she said: How do I put this.

She was funny. She did that thing of wrapping her arms around herself and turning her back on you, making kissing noises, and you could watch her hands groping at her own shoulder blades and waist with faux-passion. It was a raunchy parody and she’d glance back over her shoulder and ask if he were jealous.

She mimed a glass box, and the look on her face. She faked a fear of being trapped in the walls of glass that was pretty convincing.

Once he’d come home and she was in the oversized corduroy armchair with lumps of stuffing and exposed springs and she was crying over a book. The whole room was dark except for this light they had. A pole with five different lamps, each bubbled glass shade a different colour. Orange, blue, red, pink. He couldn’t remember what book.

But he remembered her blinking him into existence. Looking up from the book and blinking her wet eyelashes, touching the corners of her eyes with the side of her hand and the blue light on her cheek, blinking until she was out of the sad book and present with him in the hole of an apartment they shared. And it occurred to him that he only really felt like someone, like a whole being, when she was calling him to account.

She was please and thank you and outrageously selfish, except for the child.

Could you put butter on that? Not even looking up from the book. Ordering him around.

She was the only person he knew who ate real butter.

Slaney got off the train in Ottawa. He went into the airy station, all glass and girders and pigeons, and he looked up Fred Decker in the phone book, the guy she’d married, and he found the address. He was going to ask her to wait for him until he got back from the trip.

Slaney caught her hand just before it struck his face. That was in the hall when she opened the front door.

Crystal said, Who is it, Mommy? She was all changed, Jennifer’s little girl, she was so tall. The serious eyes and the pout. He squatted and held out the box with the doll. She hid her face, digging her forehead into her mother’s thigh.

I’m a friend of your mother’s, Slaney said.

Go ahead, honey, Jennifer said. Crystal had stepped out and taken the box in her hands and yelled suddenly, Guess what I got. Another one.

Jennifer let him in the apartment because of the neighbours.

I don’t need them mentioning this up and down the whole building, she said. There were two children having a tea party in the living room with Crystal. They were trying to get the new doll out of the cardboard box.

Slaney and Jennifer stood in the middle of the room because sitting down didn’t seem the right thing to do. She had her hand pressed to the side of her face. She was looking at the floor and she was rigid as a stone.

He told her he’d wanted to give her things, to build a life.

Don’t pin this on me, she said. Don’t you dare. He told her he was sorry.

Did you get my letters? he said.

Yes, I got them.

And you didn’t answer?

Social Services came by, she said. They had questions, David, about was I a fit mother with a drug smuggler hanging around. They interviewed Crystal without my permission. Took her down to the department for the afternoon. Imagine what that was like.

She said she could have lost Crystal to foster care. Had he thought about that? Then she told him she wanted him to leave.

We could have been a family, she said.

He asked her to forgive him.

Are you kidding me, she said. Why did you come here? I’m married now, David. I have a husband. That means something. Not a guy who’s going to take off on me. Not a guy who would abandon. A man, David. A good man who is honest with me.

Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. Do you, Jennifer? Do you love him? I don’t love him, no.

We are meant to be together, Jennifer, Slaney said. You know it. She spoke slowly then, almost stuttering. A quiet, deliberate tone that didn’t belong to her.

If you walk away from this, David, I will pack a bag. We can leave. I mean it. Tell me you’ll walk away from that racket and I’ll go with you right now. No looking back. Crystal and I will take a few things and get the hell out of here. If you walk away from it. Do you hear me? Say the word. David, just say the word. We’ll come with you right now. Start a new life together.

He took her hand away from her face and led her down the hall away from the children. He tried a door but it was a bedroom and he tried another and it was the bathroom and the last room was a laundry room and he took her in there and shut the door and lifted her up onto the washer which was going and they were on each other and he was inside her and the washer was rattling and rocking and it was not sexy it was fast and they were both crying right through it and it changed him the way no other sex had ever changed him and she said, Don’t get caught. That’s all. She was smoothing his hair out of his eyes.

Don’t get caught, she whispered. Then she was tugging up her jeans and pulling her ponytail tight with a vicious tug and she was crying a little and wiping her eyes. He said he wouldn’t get caught again and he was coming back for her. He didn’t care about her husband. He only cared about her and Crystal and he’d be back.

She said, How do I put this, David. I really loved you. I did. But I don’t want to see you again.

And he saw she meant it.

Audio, Girlfriend

Slaney was in love; Patterson could tell that. This was some kind of monumental love but it was already in ruins. Or maybe it wasn’t in ruins. Patterson forgot himself as he listened. The big padded earphones. They’d bugged the apartment.

The girlfriend had married somebody.

Do you love him? Patterson hit pause and let that sink in. He rewound and listened to her say it again: I’m married. I got married. I married a guy. Four years you were gone.

You knew I was on my way, Slaney said.

You lied to me, Dave. She didn’t curse or sound angry or cry.

Patterson hit pause. He thought of his own daughter. His own daughter had disappeared with a boy. They hadn’t heard from her. He hit play. And he hit pause. He had to take the tape in small doses. Every second of the audio uncovered a mystery and a revelation.

Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. You love him, do you? It’s none of your business, David. Not anymore.

Do you love him? Yes.

The little girl was saying she wanted cookies. We’re hungry. Mommy, we’re hungry.

She’s so big, he said. She grew. How do you like your doll?

I already got one just like it, the girl said.

You missed a lot, the girlfriend said.

The whole thing was unfolding with the children in the room. The little girl had a couple of friends over and he could hear them wrestle the new doll out of the cardboard box and they were excited and Slaney was saying she could walk.

And the girlfriend said, You could walk, David. And she started to beg him to walk away and Patterson hit pause. And he hit play.

If you love me, David. You will walk away from this now. Patterson was rapt. She asked Slaney to consider what she’d been through. She talked about the lying, over and over. She said about waving goodbye.

There I was on the sidewalk, she said. I believed you. I thought you were going to send for us to come to Alberta. Christ, what a fool. I lay awake at night.

Why were you lying awake, Mrs. Decker? That was one of the little kids visiting the daughter.

Play with your doll, girls, she said. Don’t pay any attention to us. This is just adult talk.

But you’re married, Slaney said. You got married.

I’ll pack a bag right now, she said. If you promise you won’t go back there. We could leave here tonight.

Patterson hit pause. He could not listen. He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed his whole face vigorously. He growled. He started to pace but he was attached to the reel-to-reel by the earphones and they were yanked off his head and slid over the tiles.

Patterson sank back down in the chair. He retrieved the headphones. He’d been called in to the Vancouver office to listen to the tape. Patterson had been waiting for Slaney to resurface and Slaney had gone to visit the ex-girlfriend. Even Hearn didn’t know, Patterson was sure. An unscheduled stop. Now Slaney was keeping things from Hearn. He must have known the dangers of stopping to see the girl. Maybe he was already gone. Maybe the girl had a hold.

He hit play.

She asked Slaney what he was going to do.

Come here, he said.

No, you tell me first, she said. You tell me what you are going to do. Will you walk away?

Jennifer, come here, Slaney said. Then they’d moved it to the laundry room and he couldn’t hear over the noise. The washer and dryer were going.

That was the audio. Whatever else they said, Patterson couldn’t hear it.

The kid was off course. And she was begging him to walk away. Hearn wouldn’t go ahead without Slaney.

Patterson thought of the lobster dinner with Hearn. He’d been surprised to see the books all over the house. Literature. The artful throws on the sofas. The sheepskin rug in front of the fire, a sailboat in a glass bottle on the mantel. Hearn was charismatic and fiercely smart, but he wouldn’t do it without David Slaney. Slaney was the raw courage and the will.

Patterson was alone in the office listening to the tape. He didn’t have a window. The trip would fall apart if Slaney walked.

Caught

There’s a kind of folk wisdom that has developed over the centuries and is passed down from father to son about how to get out of the fog but somehow it had not been passed down to Slaney or Hearn.

This is the story he told in prison after he’d been caught the first time.

They’d been swamped by fog a mile from shore. The boys had dug the caves and they would be waiting for them to help unload. The cargo was under tarps on deck. Dealers lined up all over the island.

Almost home, then the fog.

Drop a long rope and if it floats out straight behind the engine, you’re going in a straight line, but if it curves you’re going in circles. He would hear this advice much later in prison. How to find your way out of the fog.

As it was, a seagull flapped down on the rail. The gull was the same white as the fog but it was not dreamy like the fog. It was the opposite of a dream.

When Columbus approached Cuba he knew there was land because the water was full of coconuts. The seagull was Slaney’s coconut. He thought they weren’t more than half a mile offshore.

Slaney heard the trap skiff coming toward him before he saw it. He told Hearn to stay below deck.

The first thing Slaney saw was the dip and swerve of a fluorescent orange toque and then the prow of the skiff, white with green trim, and the engine clacked and chuckled and the boat pulled up alongside.

The pound of the trap skiff was full of fish. A cloud of blue smoke hung over their engine and the men were wearing sweaters and lumber jackets and rubber overalls.

I lost my bearings, Slaney said.

You’re lost? the older man said. He sat on the wooden seat. The man’s lips puckered tight around his mouth because he had no teeth. His nose hung low and shapeless and pitted. The nostrils full of grey hair and the same thick grey hair grew in his eyebrows, curling upward.

I got all turned around in the fog, Slaney said.

She’s some thick, the old man said. I said to young John here, you can’t see a hand in front of you. Didn’t I, John?

You can’t see a bloody thing, the younger man said. He appeared to be the old man’s grandson.

Slaney had time in prison to wonder why the old man had troubled himself to turn them in. He’d come to the conclusion that the man could not remember what it was like to be young.

You didn’t know where you were, the old man said.

I thought I knew, Slaney said. He’d glanced behind him, tried to see something through the fog. He’d had a conviction, for perhaps five minutes, that the shore was behind him.

A fish in one of the buckets on the old man’s boat wiggled violently. It bent itself double and bent back the other way and threw itself up in the air and landed on the gunwale. It lay there, startled and panting. All three men watched. The fish had flung itself up at least a couple of feet. It must have been dead and come back to life and it landed on the gunwale and was astonished and then it rolled over and fell into the water.

That one got away, the old man said. They could see it between the two boats, lying on its side on top of the lapping water. And then it wriggled and went under. Gone.

Jesus Christ, Slaney said. The younger man rubbed the back of his hand under his nose and stood looking down at the water where the fish had disappeared.

Then he hauled snot back up from his throat and nose and lungs and horked it over the side of the boat. He took off his orange toque and squeezed it in one fist and passed it from hand to hand and put it back on his head, settling the brim with his fingertips. He sat down and bowed his head and leaned forward to lay his hand on the side of the engine.

Every move the men made came back to Slaney in prison.

Some quiet, the older man said. He shook his head as if the quiet were regrettable.

The fish are gone cracked, the grandson said. He waved an arm over the buckets.

That’s the fog, makes everything quiet, the old man said. Isn’t it quiet? He had taken a cigarette from his breast pocket and he patted his chest and his hips with both his hands.

I’m lost, Slaney said. I admit it. He tossed the man a lighter. He had to throw it overhand and the lighter winked into the fog and clattered on the bottom of the wooden boat.

It was a silver lighter and the man picked it up and smoothed his thumb over the engraving and held it out in front of him to read it and then flicked the top back with his thumb and rolled the gauged wheel and the flame leapt up and did battle with the faint breeze. It was a transparent and weak flame, just a colourless crinkle of the air above the lighter, burning a clear hole through the dense fog that lasted only a few seconds.

The man lit his cigarette and tossed the lighter back and it went end over end between the boats in the fog and slapped into Slaney’s upheld hand.

Follow us in, the old man said.

Give me a minute here, Slaney said. He went below and spoke to Hearn and he was in favour.

Follow him in, Hearn said. We don’t have a choice.

The entire town had come out onto the wharf. There must have been three hundred people waiting. They stood in their overcoats and gaiters and the women had scarves on their heads tied under their chins and some had curlers under the scarves and there were two young girls came to the doorway of the fish and chips shop and they were wearing white aprons that seemed very white in the fog and the young children leaned into their mothers and some of them were coming down the hill in pairs and some of them were on bikes with banana seats and plastic streamers flying from the handlebars.

There were young girls in tight plaid bomber jackets and jeans, smoking cigarettes, and people had parked their cars on the shoulder of the road and left them idling and there were some men unloading their catches, paying no attention.

Slaney was upon them before he saw them because of the fog. The old guy was cute as a fox: all the Old Testament talk about being lost.

The crowd didn’t seem to be saying much. They looked different from the crowd in town, shabbier and more robust. They were intent, as they might have been in church, and some of them had crossed their arms over their chests, or they leaned in to talk to a neighbour, not taking their eyes off Slaney.

When they’d docked, the cops swarmed the boat and Hearn came up with his hands behind his head, elbows out.

Slaney was pretty certain the cops hadn’t said put your hands up but Hearn already saw the story of their capture as something worthy of telling and he wanted to look the part.

There was a stink of fish. The call of a gull. All of this came back while Slaney lay on his cot, hands behind his head, looking up at the mattress pressing through the slats of the bunk above him.

Name

Slaney headed back to the train station at dawn the next morning. The rain from the night before was steaming off the pavement. It was just a night; Hearn didn’t need to know about Ottawa.

He walked past the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall with graffiti scrawled across the sodden plywood covering the storefront windows. A child’s tricycle sat in a puddle under a street lamp.

Down a side street Slaney saw a man who looked like he was walking into a blizzard of snow. The front of his clothes and shoes and his face and even his eyelashes were pure white and it made his eyeballs look yellowish and blue-veined and watery and his lips wet and red, and his teeth were nicotine-stained. The man was standing behind a truck, smacking his arms against his sides, sending up little puffs of white dust. Another man in the back of the truck had been tossing him sacks of flour and one had broken when the guy caught it.

The train station was a fifteen-minute walk from the room Slaney had rented.

The man at the ticket booth asked for his identification. Slaney slid his passport under the glass and the man frowned at the picture and raised his droopy eyelids to look at Slaney and slid the passport back to him. Then he wrote out a ticket to Vancouver and slid that through too.

Slaney tried to call Hearn and the phone rang and rang. Hearn had probably gone to his classes. Slaney sat down to wait and got up at once and wandered out on the platform and paced a bit and sat down on a bench with the suitcase between his knees. The heat of the day was already building and some broken beer bottles between the rails glittered and shone.

He could not think of Jennifer. Her hands tightening her ponytail, the washer surging and rattling under them. She had held on tight to him, her legs crossed behind his back. They had hardly even undressed. His jeans around his knees, the change from his pocket spinning and bouncing on the floor. His mother’s engagement ring had fallen out with the change. When Jennifer turned to open the door he lifted the lid of the washer a little and dropped the ring into the churning water. He wanted her to have it. He wanted her to remember him.

He thought about what he had done to her. He’d left her, is what happened. How do I put this, David. That’s what she’d said. But she meant he had made the choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. He hadn’t taken her up on the offer. She meant: And now it really is over, there is no going back.

The trip was starting; it was really starting now. He was shocked by the desire he felt to meet up with Hearn, give him a couple of fake punches to the belly, pow-pow. Get stoned with him. Just be with him, carousing. Slaney wanted to carouse. He wanted to tell Hearn about his heart. His heart was hurting in his chest as if he’d run a great distance. They say a broken heart, but it felt more like a tear or puncture. It hurt when he breathed, or even when he was thinking about something else. The pain could well up out of nowhere and surprise him.

There was a couple making out farther down the platform. The girl had on a long crushed-velvet coat with fake fur trim and a red tube top and denim miniskirt. The coat was slipping off her shoulders and she was wearing white go-go boots and her leg was hooked over the guy’s hip and his hand was disappearing under the hem of her little skirt.

An elderly black man with a briefcase sat down beside Slaney. He was reading a library book and the plastic cover made a crinkling noise every time he turned the page.

Slaney took the passport out and flicked through it again.

Good book? Slaney asked. The man grunted in the affirmative without looking up.

Slaney beat out a tune on the edge of the suitcase. The black man with the book licked the side of his thumb and turned the page and then he looked into Slaney’s eyes and then very purposefully at Slaney’s drumming hands and Slaney stopped drumming. The man returned to his book.

There was a security guard who appeared to be snoozing on a chair in the meagre shade of a potted tree.

Then the train horn, a shrill hoot in the distance, and a deep, earthy rumbling. The amber lights in the station flashed on and off and the long, silver-sided blaze of train poured like a viscous liquid into the platform, the deafening squeal of brakes and engine hiss-huff, a steady clang of oiled metal and grind and the hoo-hooing.

Slaney tried to pretend he was not the name he had taken on but he had committed an act of black magic in that graveyard. He thought of the guy covered in flour, looking like he’d walked through his own private snowstorm, a narrow slice of winter gale in all the still morning heat. The name haunted Slaney. He was being possessed by it, overtaken.

He boarded the train and found his seat and they were maybe an hour out of the station when a man passed down the aisle to the bathrooms, moving with the sway and rattle, and Slaney thought familiar. But he could not place him. The guy went back and forth three times, and he took each opportunity to look Slaney up and down, lingering on the last trip.

Slaney turned his face into the crack of the armrest pretending to be asleep and at the next stop he grabbed his suitcase and jumped off the train.

He saw the guy in the window searching for him, his forehead a flat white spot where he rested it on the glass and the reflection of the rusted-out freight trains on the tracks opposite sliding all over him.

The guy saw him and waved frantically, gave him a thumbs-up.

Joe Murphy. He went to Gonzaga, a year behind Slaney. Geraldine Murphy’s brother. Geraldine Murphy played tennis. Slaney had kissed her a few times when he was thirteen, a game of spin-the-bottle, then he blew all his paper route money on her, a little red transistor radio. She never spoke to him again. Murphys from the South Side.

Joe Murphy was a math whiz everybody said was destined for the priesthood. A little touch of home. It pierced him through and through. Slaney’s stomach turned to water. He couldn’t go back to the train station a second time — somebody would notice. He picked up the suitcase and started walking for the highway.

Alberta

There was the endless drive through Ontario, all glittering lakes and foliage and bland sunshine, and the sudden baked flatness of the prairies.

The truck that picked him up outside Winnipeg was carrying a thousand chickens. The driver had pulled over and when Slaney got in, the man was holding a pair of glasses out at arm’s length, frowning at the lenses. Then he handed them to Slaney.

Slaney breathed on the lenses and rubbed them in his shirttail. They were bifocals. He could feel the ridge of thickened glass with his thumb. He held them up and saw the rows of harshly yellow canola on the opposite side of the road, crisp and straight in the top half of the lenses, and below the ridge, the same flowers were magnified so they became a wind-ruffled blur of colour. He passed the glasses back to the truck driver.

The driver put them on and his mouth was solemn and judging. He pressed the bridge of the glasses up his nose, and then he lifted his chin to glance out through the bottom half. He turned to examine Slaney.

The ridge of the bifocals fell exactly halfway across the man’s eyes, magnifying the bottom half; the brown irises were vulnerable and watery. There was a bright crimson dot in the left iris, just below the pupil. The pouches beneath the man’s eyes were veined with violet lines and pressed upon by the black frames; in the top hemisphere, above the ridge of thickened glass, the irises were sharp and calculating.

The two men looked at each other and then they became aware of looking at each other and both turned back to face the road, embarrassed.

The trucker stared forward then, as if memorizing what was out there, and he took off the glasses and put them back in the case and tossed the case out the open window.

Jesus things, the man said. They belonged to my mother.

There was a spill of 8-tracks at Slaney’s feet and the man waved at them.

Slaney picked up one and it turned out to be Johnny Cash. The machine pulled the tape slowly inside itself and the metal flap flopped down and it pushed the tape halfway out and then drew it back in. There was a dragging whir and hiss and then Johnny Cash sang about a burning ring of fire.

For a time the trucker sang along with the tape. He sang about flames as though he had come through them and he had an authority when it came to the subject.

You got some set of pipes, Slaney said.

You like that? the man asked, grinding down the gears.

They drove for an hour and all at once the sky got dark and the trucker cleared his throat. He said: I believe we’re in for some weather.

The darkness seemed to charge across the prairie toward them, deepening as it came.

The yellow of the canola drained away. The bottoms of clouds were charcoal and smoke gold and the rain lashed the grass.

Slaney was hungry and it was close in the cab with the pine-tree air freshener and this driver had on a cologne and Slaney wanted to crack the window.

There were, at first, only two splats, the size of quarters, on the giant windshield and they trembled like things with a consciousness, things trying to hold together against a terrible force of entropy, and then they ran sideways and a drumming began on the roof and the world.

The trucker said there was a bunk if Slaney wanted to sleep.

Why don’t you crawl in back there, the trucker said. Get yourself some shut-eye.

You don’t need the company? Slaney asked. To keep you awake?

I’m good until breakfast, the man said.

Slaney woke when the truck pulled into the parking lot of a diner.

The driver told him they were in Alberta. The sun was a red ball hovering over the lettering on the window that said BLACKFOOT CAFÉ.

They walked across the steaming lot and as they got closer Slaney could see the white blouse of the waitress passing through the reflection of the sun and the place was packed and noisy and warm when they got inside, smelling of bacon and burnt coffee.

The trucker found them a table and the waitress came over and asked what they wanted.

Bacon and eggs, the trucker said.

Will you have toast? she asked.

I want a stack yay-high, he said.

Coffee?

That coffee fresh? the trucker asked.

Fresh since yesterday, she said.

I’ll have some of that, he said. The waitress turned over the driver’s cup and it chinked against the saucer and she poured. She wore sneakers with white tennis socks, a cotton bobble on each heel, and her hair was grey and mashed down in a fine net.

The driver rubbed his hands together, picked up his butter knife, and for a brief second drew his top lip back from his gums, checking his teeth in the reflection of the blade.

The teeth dropped, all of a piece, and slid wetly away from his lips, hanging, detached and gleaming, out of his mouth. The driver, absent and alert, watched the collapse of his face in the knife blade, and there was a hiss of saliva and the bridge popped back as if nothing had happened. The waitress, digging her pad out of her apron pocket, had missed the trucker’s false teeth.

She turned over Slaney’s cup and asked him what he wanted to eat.

I’m not hungry, thank you, ma’am, Slaney said.

A growing boy, she said.

Just the coffee, thank you, Slaney said.

Call me Lorraine, the waitress said.

Bring him same as me, Lorraine, the trucker said.

Just coffee, Slaney said.

Same as me, Lorraine, the trucker said.

Over easy?

I sure hope something is easy around here, the trucker said. He was seized with a quaking spasm. One of his fists raised and jiggling near his chest, the other hand slapping the table three times.

Aren’t you the saucy one, she said.

Don’t be shy with the bacon, Lorraine.

A police car pulled up into the parking lot and the cop just sat inside it. Slaney looked for the back exits. There was a hallway with a sign over it that said NO ADMITTANCE. He wondered if there’d be a window or door back there.

After about five minutes another cop car pulled up alongside the first. Slaney watched as the cops got out of their cars, one of them leaning on his door. They both looked at the window of the diner and they spoke to each other at length.

When the cops came into the café the bell tinkled and the screen door hitched against the frame and jostled and then it clapped shut. They looked around the diner and then sat at the counter on the swivel stools and the waitress poured them each a coffee.

It’s getting hot out there already, the cop said.

We’re having a stretch of it, Lorraine said. She brought Slaney and the trucker fried eggs and bacon on thick white plates. Slaney cut the egg in half and folded it over and jabbed the fork into it. Then he took a triangle of toast and wiped it over the spilled yolk and folded that and ate it too.

The waitress came back with more coffee and the trucker told her about a hydraulic lift he had installed in front of his house going up the five steps to the porch.

Slaney kept his eye on the cops. He watched them and strained to hear what they were saying. They had walkie-­talkies on their belts that hissed white noise. But they hardly spoke to each other. They were intent on the meals they’d ordered. Slaney could understand the first cop, but why had the second one shown up?

He looked out the window. There was a thin bank of trees, mostly skinny birch, the white trunks like bones, and the leaves so green they seemed lit up and the branches were trembling hard with the breeze. Beyond, fields in every direction. He realized he had slept most of the drive and had no idea where he was, except that he was somewhere in Alberta, which seemed as vast and flat as the rest of the prairie, without so much as a shadow to hide under.

This was for Mother’s wheelchair, installed to the tune of several hundred dollars, the trucker was saying. It was installed only a couple of weeks and she had to be moved to an old age home. I couldn’t take care of her no more.

I’ve heard of them lifts, the waitress said.

Both the cops had swivelled around and they were surveying the dining room and they swivelled back and continued with their food.

We never used it no more than a few occasions.

I’d say she enjoyed the ride, Lorraine answered.

Happy as a clam, he said.

You can tell what a man is made of by the way he treats his mother.

She’s no more than a feather now, he said. Wheelchair and all. I could lift her up with one hand if she required it.

Gone away to nothing, Lorraine asked.

She’s not all there, either, the trucker said.

I’ve got one like that at the house, the waitress said.

When Slaney was done he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and scrunched it in his fist and dropped it onto the table and balanced on the two back legs of his chair, his hands linked behind his head. He nearly tipped over so he dropped back down.

Thank you, sir, he said.

You’re welcome, son, the man said. The trucker worked his fork and knife under his second egg and in a delicate manoeuvre he transferred the jiggling mass so that it hovered over Slaney’s empty plate and then slithered off and landed with a plop. He put the two pieces of toast he could not finish on Slaney’s plate and an extra piece of bacon.

You don’t need to do that, sir, Slaney said.

All I got to show for a lifetime of hard work is that truck out there, the man said.

It’s quite a rig, Slaney said.

I’ve got complaints, the man said. Heavy lifting. A man gets a certain age. No pension, no nothing. Eat your egg.

Thank you, sir.

I can’t eat it. I got half a stomach gone to cancer.

I’m sorry to hear that.

Just eat.

Thank you.

Eat the egg, son.

Sir, do you think the chickens will survive the heat? Slaney asked.

Those chickens are frozen solid, the trucker said. My rig is a refrigerator freezer.

I thought you had a cargo of live chickens back there, Slaney said.

Those are chicken legs. I don’t know where the rest of them is, the breasts and what-have-you. On somebody else’s truck.

I thought they were alive out there.

Dead as doornails, far as I know. Slaney and the trucker looked out at the lot together and they both lifted their coffee cups at the same time and sipped and put them back down.

I’m going to freshen up, Slaney said.

Powder your nose, the trucker said. Go ahead.

Slaney headed to the bathroom where he washed in the sink and crossed the parking lot and climbed up into the truck and shut the door as quietly as he could and he hunched low. After a moment or two the driver sauntered across the parking lot and climbed up into the cab and slammed the door. Slaney saw the driver had a toothpick. It wagged up and then down.

Then Slaney jerked with fright: a fist rapping the glass.

Son, those police officers have some questions, the driver said. Slaney rolled down the window.

Good morning, the officer said. Where you from, son?

Down east, Slaney said. The cop looked down the highway toward the east. He hooked his fingers into his belt loops and stood there for a long moment. He watched the horizon as though Slaney had yet to show up, as if he were still down east, living his life, breaking the law, getting caught, busting out of jail, and he might appear any minute on the horizon, heading west, heading toward this very truck stop.

Slaney glanced around for the other officer. He was leaning on the open door of the patrol car, still talking on the hand radio.

Mind if I ask you what you do for a living, son?

I’m a university student, Slaney said.

What’s your line of study?

I am hoping to become a dental hygienist.

Looking in people’s mouths, the cop said. He took out a notebook and pen and flipped to an empty page. He clicked the pen with his thumb and held it over the page and there was a pause.

It was a pen from Florida and the top half was clear glass filled with water and a dolphin swam up and down the pen against a background of a beach and blue sky. The cop moved his lips. His lips formed a word or two, but nothing came out. He gave up. Clicked the pen again.

I got a bad tooth myself, the cop said. I believe it’s rotting right out of my head. Sometimes I’d like to take a gun and shoot myself in the mouth. Just blow the damn thing right out of my face.

The cop moved his lower jaw from side to side and touched his fingers to it.

I’m not qualified yet, said Slaney. It was as though the cop had been rebuked. He seemed instantly angry.

I don’t see how someone could find fulfillment looking in people’s mouths. Turn your stomach. You’d want to be pretty hard up.

People are starting to take better care of their teeth, Slaney said. He wanted to move his hands up and down his thighs but he didn’t do it. He let his hands rest lightly on his knees. He kept them still.

There’s flossing daily, he said. Fluoride. Sometimes just removing the tooth.

Just yank it out, you’re saying, the cop asked.

Get a professional, Slaney said.

And you’re studying it?

I’ve done history courses so far, Slaney said. First you have to do general things. Before you can get into the school of dentistry.

Which you are going to do, the cop said.

Which I hope they’ll accept me, Slaney said. The cop winced as though he were uneasy with what he had to say next.

What’s your name, son? the cop asked.

Douglas Knight, Slaney said.

Do you have any identification on you, Doug, I could take a look-see?

Slaney took out the new passport and the cop turned the pages and he glanced at the picture and up at Slaney. Then he lifted his sunglasses and let them rest on his forehead. He brought the passport over to the other cop, who leafed through and then got in the car and spoke at length on the radio.

Slaney and the trucker waited in silence, looking forward. The trucker rolled down his window and tossed the toothpick. He put his hand on the gearshift and gave it a vicious shake as if he wanted to make sure they could move if they had to. The cop came back to Slaney’s side and handed up the passport.

Doug, I have to be honest, the cop said. I don’t like your personality. I don’t believe you are a dental hygienist or that you will ever become one. I don’t think you have it in you. It’s a distasteful job. But it requires discipline. You look like the kind of guy doesn’t get up in the morning. I don’t think you’re college material.

Slaney lifted his hip and fit the passport into his back pocket.

I don’t like the look of you, the cop said. Slaney looked straight ahead.

Get a haircut, Doug, the cop said. And he strolled away.

Something funny happened there, son, the trucker said.

I know, Slaney said.

Why didn’t they take you in? They made a phone call and they decided to let you go.

Moved by a whim, Slaney said. I don’t know.

It wasn’t a whim, the trucker said.

You had my back.

Something funny, the trucker said. I don’t know what the hell you done, but they sure as hell wanted you for something and then they let you go.

The trucker was watching in his side mirror as the cops pulled away from the parking lot. He started up the truck and let it idle.

I don’t have your back, the trucker said. Nobody has your back.

Party

Slaney could hear the party before he saw the house. He walked up a grassy lane and could feel the music thumping through the soles of his sneakers. He saw yellow ribbons of lit window through the black tree trunks and at the end of the path the stretching rectangles of light cast across the lawn.

The party had spilled into the garden and he could smell a barbecue and there were children running around playing spotlight, patio lanterns strung from the low branches and along the veranda railing. A Hula Hoop wheeled past him and hit a stone and fell into the tall grass at the end of the lawn. He wandered into the house and found Hearn in the kitchen.

Hearn opened his arms and Slaney walked into them. They stood there hugging without speaking a word. Music throbbed in the walls and there was the racket of conversation. The crowd so thick bodies stood close and people had to work a shoulder or elbow through to pass.

They just held each other. They stood locked in each other’s grip. They were hanging on tight. Slaney could feel Hearn’s heart. They stood like that for a long time and Slaney let the beat of Hearn’s heart enter him. Then they stepped apart and tried to take each other in.

Hearn’s freckles and a red bandana he had knotted around his throat. He was skinnier and more muscled and he’d let his fiery hair spring out in an afro. He looked high and a little haunted.

I’m sorry about your father, Slaney said. He had wanted to say that in person. Hearn put his hand to his forehead as if taking his own temperature.

I’m sorry you went to prison, Hearn said. He said it in a flat voice and his eyes gleamed with tears and everything that had gone on between them since they were kids seemed to be present in the room.

Hearn threw back his head and howled. An animal noise that came from somewhere deep. He stamped his foot three times to urge the whole weltering cry out of himself.

We’re going to show them, he said. We’re going to show those bastards.

Is there anything to eat here? Slaney asked.

Gutfounded, I suppose, Hearn said.

Eat the leg off the lamb of God, Slaney said.

Get this guy a plate of food, Hearn shouted.

Are you crying? Slaney asked. They had to raise their voices to be heard.

Yes, I’m crying, Hearn shouted. He grabbed Slaney in a headlock and dug his knuckles into his scalp.

Of course I’m crying, he growled.

Let go, Slaney said. He jabbed his elbow into Hearn’s ribs and broke free of the grip.

It is so good to see you, Hearn said. He folded his arms across his chest and shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he got Slaney a beer out of the old claw-foot bathtub full of ice someone had dragged into the kitchen. He knocked the cap off with a puck and smoky frost curled up. Slaney put the beer on his head and a few people hooted. He drank most of it in one long swig. Slaney found he was crying too.

A girl handed him a paper plate with a leg of barbecued chicken and potato salad and a salad of tinned pineapple and creamed corn. She dug around in the drawer for cutlery but she could only come up with a miniature spoon, an enamel oval in the handle with a portrait of the Queen.

Come meet some of the boys, Hearn said. Slaney put down the paper plate and followed him to the basement. The party pounded through the ceiling. There were five men sitting around a table in the corner playing cards. The room smelled yeasty, full of mould and concrete. A washer and dryer were going in the corner. There was a padded leather wet-bar and a lava lamp at least five feet high and shaped like a missile. They had a bottle of scotch on the table and poker chips. A collage of centrefolds covered an entire wall. Each man stood as he was introduced and sat back down.

Everybody, this is Doug Knight, Hearn said. He’s heading out of here tomorrow for sunny Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Doug, this is Roy Brophy. Roy came in at the last minute with some serious financial support.

Patterson stood and shook Slaney’s hand.

Roy is a contractor, Hearn said. And you know Geoff O’Driscoll.

Good to see you, man, Slaney said. He reached over the table and they high-fived. It was Frank Parsons. Going by the name of Geoff. Frank had gone through school with Hearn and Slaney.

Geoff is responsible for the cargo once it gets to shore. Geoff’s distribution.

Good to see you out, man, Frank said.

Good to be out, Slaney said.

These three guys, Hearn said, Harold Jesperson, Don Burn, Stan Summers, I think you know Stan.

Stan was Phil White, grew up on Slaney’s street. Played sax in the school band. Phil had seven sisters, two of the older ones were nuns in Monsefú. He was wearing a transparent green visor and a Doors T-shirt.

Long time no see, Phil said.

Your ticket to Mexico, Hearn said. He handed Slaney the plane ticket.

You land in Puerto Vallarta tomorrow. Go to the Hotel Luna and you’ll meet up with Dan Stone. You sail from there the next day for Colombia. We’re thinking six, seven days on the water. Load up and head back here. It’s going to take six to eight weeks to get back, you got the current against you, nearly five thousand miles; you give it to her, we’re talking six weeks. And we’re waiting for you.

Phil White was walking a poker chip over his knuckles as Hearn spoke. It flicked end over end and disappeared in his fist.

Men, let’s raise a toast, Hearn said. The men raised their glasses and clinked.

Godspeed, Hearn said. They drank down the drinks.

Now we party, Hearn said. We bring in the dawn.

Can I talk to you? Slaney said.

Sure.

Just a few words, Slaney said.

We’ll see you at the party, man, Phil White said. The men folded up their cards and dropped them on the table and the washer in the corner began to spin out and rattled and jittered on the concrete floor.

You got a screw or something corroded, Phil White said.

Something’s loose in that machine, Hearn said. I haven’t had a chance. The old lady is after me to fix it.

See you upstairs, man, Phil said. And the boys filed up the stairs and back into the party.

Hearn pulled the door shut behind them.

Dan Stone? Slaney said.

It’s Cyril Carter, Hearn said.

Jesus Christ, Slaney said. Hearn said Carter was their only option. A master mariner and he had the sailboat, custom designed, mahogany, brass fittings, two engines.

A real beaut, Hearn said. Carter also invested.

He spent six months in the Waterford, Slaney said. Jesus, Hearn.

Don’t call me that, Hearn said. I’m Barlow. John Barlow.

The fucking Waterford, Slaney said.

Six years ago, Hearn said. He was discharged with a clean bill of health.

The man’s unstable. He had a nervous breakdown.

He’s been dry ever since, Hearn said. I’m telling you, it wasn’t easy to raise interest. Carter was interested.

A nervous breakdown, Hearn, Slaney said.

Don’t say Hearn. Hearn doesn’t exist. I’m a different person. I sloughed off all the old cells of Hearn. He’s been replaced, cell by fucking cell. That guy dried up and blew away. I’m John Barlow. You have to become someone else out here. You are Doug Knight. I am Barlow; you are Knight. Slaney and Hearn don’t exist. We’re reinvented.

We have history, man, Slaney said.

Forget it, Doug.

Carter is insane, Barlow. A guy’s got to withstand pressure down there. Anything can happen. He’s got to hold up.

He’ll hold up.

He’s a drunk, Slaney said.

He’s a sailor. He knows the water. He knows the boat. Treats it like his baby. He’s not going to let anything happen to that boat, believe me. You’re with him six weeks. Tops. All he does is sail. He doesn’t meet anyone. He doesn’t talk to anyone. You do everything else.

Who’s that guy Roy Brophy?

He came in last minute.

Who is he?

Worry about your part of it, okay?

Where did he come from?

Old money.

Nobody said some guy I never heard of comes in at the last minute. Nobody said Carter.

Carter has a hundred grand on the boat to purchase the cargo.

Fresh from the loony bin.

You have to trust me. You don’t know what’s been going on out here.

You got that bloody well right.

You want to have this out?

But Slaney didn’t want to have anything out. He wanted to believe.

I have to ask. Okay? Be straight with me.

Absolutely, Hearn said.

The contact in Colombia, Slaney said.

Colonel Angelo Lopez, Hearn said. He’s a good guy.

Does Lopez know about the last trip? Slaney asked. That we owe?

Not a chance, Hearn said.

Because if that’s the scene, I’m out of here, Slaney said.

Things have changed down there, Doug, that’s what I’m telling you. They’ve never heard of us down there.

I want to know what I’m walking into.

Those people we dealt with four years ago are long gone. New management. Those old guys moved on.

I don’t know, man.

You want out, Slane? You want out? You can walk. One of the Playboy centrefolds looked down at Slaney over Hearn’s shoulder. The lava lamp gurgled and a fierce scarlet blob waggled up through the murky glass missile and when it reached the top it broke into a hundred balls and sank and reformed. A platinum blonde behind Hearn was laid out on a poolside, touching herself with long pink fingernails. Her mouth was a soft O. Astonished and mock innocent.

Wish I felt better.

Come on, man. Let’s get a drink.

In the middle of the evening there was an argument between them about Hearn’s keys. There was music and girls and beer and they’d had a disagreement.

Hearn couldn’t find his keys and he was certain Slaney must have taken them. They’d gone out together for more liquor and when they came back he’d lost the keys.

You came in, Slaney said.

I came in and I had the keys. They were yelling because of the music. Hearn was using the soused logic of: if I don’t have them, you must have them. And also: I gave them to you, I have a distinct memory.

Some girl jammed herself between them to get to the fridge. She was pressed against Hearn, writhing through, and he raised his arms in the air like it was a stick-up and gave a lascivious smirk and she knocked Slaney out of the way with her hip.

Did they fall out in the porch?

They’re not in the porch.

On the lawn maybe?

They’re not on the lawn.

You came in.

And I handed you the keys.

And you put the keys down next to the bag of booze.

I had the keys and I said, Here, put them in your pocket.

You put the bag down.

I put the bag down and I said, Here.

Let me ask you something, what would I want with your keys?

They all drank well into the morning. There were mushrooms, acid, pot, beer, and hard liquor of every sort. Slaney did not partake of the acid.

You’re abstaining? Hearn yelled.

Big day tomorrow, right, Slaney said. He had a beer stein full of an emerald drink.

Straight and narrow, I get your story, Hearn yelled. Slaney watched him put a tab of acid on his tongue. A teensy square of paper with a happy face printed on it. He darted his tongue in and out like a snake.

You have to drive me to the airport in a few hours, Slaney said. Hearn swallowed and screwed one eye shut and shivered all over.

What do you think of the place? Hearn asked him. My girlfriend did all the decor. Those lampshades. They’re antiques.

Where is she? Slaney asked.

In there, talking to Brophy. Slaney saw the contractor standing in the corner of the living room next to a potted banana tree and a girl in a rhinestone-studded halter top, a pair of bell-bottoms. She had her hand pressed flat against Brophy’s chest, as if to keep him from getting away. She had a bottle of vodka by the neck and she waved it in the air.

What did I say, Hearn asked.

Knockers.

I said ass.

Ass, yes. But also knockers.

Go talk to her.

I will.

Listen to her, man; she’s beautiful. Really smart.

I see that.

Got any smokes? Hearn said.

I don’t smoke, Slaney said.

Me neither. Thought I’d try one.

Slaney thought of the two cigarettes tied up with ribbon the old lady in Montreal had given him. One of her cats sitting on the kitchen table, licking a paw, fluffy tail in the sugar dish. The old lady had spoken to Slaney at length but he hadn’t understood a word.

She had become passionate, knocking her chest with her fist. She put on the kettle and talked while it came to a boil and Slaney stood until she waved at a chair for him to sit down. She poured him tea but he’d only had a couple of sips before she took the cup from him and waved him out of the kitchen.

The tone of her diatribe had changed. She’d become enraged. Perhaps she had told him her whole life story and was angry about where she found herself at the end.

Slaney had a sense that she’d pronounced on men in general and their ineffectuality and him in particular.

He was pretty sure she’d asked the question: Who will get my smokes for me now? He recognized the castigating tone but had only an intuition about the content. She shut the door on him and he heard the chain slide across again.

He saw himself backing out of her apartment with the suitcase and the doll in the pink box, trying to say thank you. Trying to say someone else would surely come along and buy her smokes.

Jennifer was lost to him.

She was gone.

He’d lost her for good. He swirled the stein in small circles, slopping sticky mint drink onto the floor.

Hearn was mouthing off about acting to a group of girls who were nodding along with everything he had to say.

Everything is in the fingers, Hearn said. Use the fingers. He began pinching at the air in front of him, as if grabbing butterflies. He was tripping.

Don’t push away, he said. Bring it in, bring it all in. Whatever you have is inside. Keep it there. Don’t emote. Hearn shut his eyes and waved his hand as if to wipe the idea of emoting off the face of the earth.

Do you see what I’m doing here, he asked. His eyes flew open again. Do you see what my fingers are doing? He was pinching and pinching.

I’m transforming, he said. I’m taking the character from the air in bits and pieces. I am becoming the character. The girls looked aroused and dumbstruck.

Slaney listened to Hearn and watched the dancing in the living room through the kitchen door. He felt a warmth spreading in his solar plexus: what he felt for Hearn was love. Eternal and thin, a steel cord from which he might end up dangling.

We are just skin, Hearn said. We act with our skin.

One of the girls gathered around Hearn was nodding in agreement and she had things she wanted to say and she kept opening her mouth to speak but Hearn would hold up a finger and she would clamp her mouth shut and just nod more vigorously.

They’d set up a black light in the living room and everything white out there was purplish and inner-lit and there were arms churning in the air and people grinding hips. It was all bright white teeth and a girl in phosphorescent hot pants doing the bump. Slaney wanted to dance with her.

Go for it, Hearn told him. Go get her, tiger.

Slaney raised his beer stein in the air before him and gestured in big circles to clear a path through the bodies. But nobody moved out of his way.

The girl beside him was talking about vegetarianism and he hung on the edge of the conversation. There was a story about a chimpanzee reaching out of its cage with a tree branch. Its shoulder wedged against the bars. Raking a peanut over the pavement with the branch.

Primitive tool use, somebody said.

Tell me that animal wasn’t communicating, the girl demanded. There was also a girl with a Spanish accent that made everything she said sound like a dare. Pass me a drink: that was a saucy taunt. Where’s the john: a provocation.

Another girl, near the sink, was dancing to some pulsing lull that had nothing to do with the music on the hi-fi, her beer bottle raised over her head, more swaying than dancing. Eyes closed.

Somebody put on Chilliwack.

And then her eyes flew open and she yelled, Eat nothing with a face.

What about plants? somebody asked. And somebody else asked: Do plants have a consciousness?

It was agreed, almost at once: nobody in the kitchen could get behind plants. It wasn’t that kind of gathering. Plants did not have primitive tool use.

Slaney stuck his arm out straight with the emerald stein in his fist and plowed his way out of the kitchen. He was making his way through the dance floor to Hearn’s girlfriend and Roy Brophy. A blue light from the stereo console lit up the knee of Brophy’s jeans. Hearn’s girl had backed Brophy into the leaves of a banana tree. He had taken a handkerchief from his back pocket and was wiping his face.

Hello, Roy, Slaney said. Having a chat, are you?

Shooting the shit, Roy said.

You’re Barlow’s girlfriend, Slaney said. Her eyes were brown and very big and he could see she was smart, like Hearn had told him.

What are you drinking, Doug? she asked.

Crème de menthe, he said. No matter what I pour into a glass, when the clock strikes two it turns into crème de menthe.

Like water into wine, she said.

Or peach schnapps.

Yeah, she said. Peach schnapps. I’ve had that happen at two in the morning.

Aftershave, Slaney said.

No, she said. And she slapped his arm and he saw she was more than a little drunk.

No, not really, he said. What were you and Roy here talking about?

Housing, she said. Development.

Roy, you’re a developer?

Subdivisions, Roy said. Apartment buildings.

We were talking about illicit love, she said. We were talking about when things turn around on you. Also a two-in-the-morning phenomenon, come to think of it.

Two is long gone, said Slaney. He was looking at the grandfather clock.

We were saying about first love, weren’t we, Roy.

You were saying, Brophy said.

Now, Roy, she said. Coy Roy. Roy fell in love with his father’s mistress.

Patterson touched the handkerchief to his brow. He had not meant to say it. Her eyes. The unabashed interrogation: she’d asked him what mattered to him. She’d asked about love.

She’d said, How old are you, Mr. Brophy? He found he liked the attention. Her hand on his chest, pushing him into the big tree behind him.

Tell me a secret, she’d said. Clarice had kissed him. His father’s mistress. Thirty years ago when he was sixteen.

Patterson had come into being then. A ravishment. The wind in the trees outside her house. It had been windy and he’d ridden there on his bike.

A bead of sweat hung off Patterson’s eyelash and the room became five distinct rooms arrayed on a wheel that slowly turned, the girl under the black light in the white hot pants, glowing like the moon, she was at the centre of each replicated floating crowd. Hearn’s girl kept him pinned with her hand, and her eyes became five sets of eyes and they floated around him too. And the sweat dropped and his vision focused again.

Patterson had ridden his bike over. Delivering the monthly cheque. Clarice Connors and his half-brother, Alphonse, in the house at the end of a long lane outside of town. She’d drawn his tongue into her mouth and afterwards in the bathroom he saw the red, red lipstick smeared all over his lips and chin: the wanton girlish abandon of it. The affair continued for almost a year. He had been devoured and changed and he’d learned things and just as suddenly as it had started, it was over.

Your father’s mistress, Slaney said.

Not really, said Patterson.

Yes, Hearn’s girlfriend said. Yes, Roy, you told me. He loved her. Didn’t you, Roy? After his father passed away. Have I got that right? Didn’t your father cheat on your mother with this woman? What do you think, Doug, is he for real?

I don’t know, Slaney said. Your boyfriend seems to think so.

It seemed likely to Slaney that Hearn’s girlfriend knew everything about the trip. He wondered how many people at the party knew. How many people had Hearn let in on it?

Later, Slaney found Hearn in a lineup for the bathroom. There were five people ahead of them and someone was making out in there. The girl at the front of the line was banging on the door with both fists.

Barlow, how are you, man, Slaney said.

He’s a better man than I’ll ever be, Hearn said.

Who? Slaney thought he meant Barlow.

My father, Hearn said. He had his head tilted back so he could watch the ceiling.

There’s a hole in the goddamn roof, Hearn said. I can see the cosmos. And the cosmos can see me.

Did you go upstairs? Slaney asked him. You probably left the keys up there.

I went upstairs, but I gave you the keys first. Or you took them.

Is that what you think? Slaney asked. He waited for Hearn’s awakening. Hearn stood there accusing, but the awakening was imminent. It would burst over him in fits of anguish and euphoria by turns due to the acid he had taken.

Hearn had jumped bail and gone to university and everybody called him John and it looked like he’d made friends. Theatre people and people from the literature department where Hearn was studying for a Ph.D. They were students and it seemed like a life Slaney would never be a part of.

Hearn had friends. Slaney felt jealous.

He didn’t think of Jennifer so much as she became present to him again. Once, they had been making out in his father’s car near the ocean and a butterfly flew in his window and out the passenger’s window, a yellow butterfly, and she hadn’t seen it because her eyes were closed. It paused on the steering wheel, opened and shut its wings. It lifted off, and up, down, up, down, out the other window and she had missed it.

Jennifer’s baby had come and her family had turned their backs.

It was astonishing to Slaney. His family was not capable of turning away. Imagine the resolve: to strike out on your own and give over everything to another person, a baby.

There had been pressure to give the child up for adoption and Jennifer had decided against it. That was resolve. That was what she wore, like a garment, and what had made him crazy horny and insane with love: the resolute independence that lit her up.

Because he felt certain he would never love like that again. They weren’t who they would become. They were too young.

They couldn’t have said, I am this or that. They had been making it up as they’d gone. They’d made it up together. But they also knew who they were better than they would ever know again.

In the morning he woke on the floor in Hearn’s living room and Hearn was making chicken sandwiches in the kitchen and he said they had to get to the airport. He tossed Slaney a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and a bottle of ginger ale.

Let’s roll, he said. Hearn got in the car and patted himself all over.

The keys, he said. They were in the ignition.