Cadillac Cathedral (10 page)

He’d wondered if the secretarial girls had been required to read the same books as he had. He’d imagined that he and Myrtle could have talked about Jim. She might have had less trouble keeping track of the last half of the book, or understanding why the young hero had more or less asked to be executed at the end. But someone had probably decided that boys learning to take cars apart and put them back together would enjoy a story of adventure on the high seas — however dense — more than they’d enjoy the books given to the secretarial girls to read.

Unfortunately, the next time he’d caught sight of her he’d been crossing the parking lot with a group of his classmates, and one of the boys had drawn admiring attention to the breasts in her white angora sweater. She’d heard, and turned to show her scorn.

Surely she would not be inclined to hold his friend’s crudity against Arvo even after all this time. When he’d later forced himself to
approach her, she was as gracious as he should have known she would be. She’d laughed about the incident, and waved it off, and had even suggested they meet the following week for lunch without their usual circles of friends. But he had learned of his father’s illness the following day, and had not been able to do anything but leave her a brief note before heading home. For good, it had later turned out to be.

The problem with being stalled and waiting like this was that it gave you time to think about this sort of thing. And, with time to think, there was a danger he might be tempted to reconsider this whole enterprise. He could easily convince himself that he was an old fool hoping to work some sort of magic that would revive a distant past that had barely existed in the first place. He could go home or go on alone, but hadn’t the heart for either. Instead, he got out and walked across the gravel to the store and bought himself an ice-cream cone — something he hadn’t done in years. He’d had no idea it was possible to choose from so many flavours, but chose strawberry out of — he supposed — nostalgia. A childhood favourite.

Instead of getting back behind the wheel, he removed his shoes and socks and parked them on the log in front of the hearse. Then he rolled his pant-legs up to just below his knees and walked carefully down through the beach gravel and waded into the salt-chuck. Up to his ankles was far enough. This water was cold.

He wasn’t sorry to be missing out on a visit to Lucy’s chicken ranch. He’d never been fond of chickens. He’d never been particularly fond of Lucy either. During her short time with Peterson he’d kept his distance. And Peterson had kept his distance from
him
. Whenever Peterson had come out of the Store with his mail or a bag of groceries, if Arvo had called a greeting from across the road, Peterson would wave but put his head down and head fast for home. Lucy had probably told him to stay away from Arvo’s workshop, where life would
only be wasted on pointless talk when there were plenty of chores to be done at home. Once the marriage had come apart, Peterson had apologized for keeping his distance.

Arvo was interested, now, to notice his own bare feet become large and white and foreign as they sank into the bed of colourful pebbles. He breathed in the clean salt smell of the ocean, though it was accompanied by a slight creosote scent off the little wharf behind the store. Two red canoes, roped to the short dock, rose and fell with every small wave sliding in to shore. He used the paper serviette to wipe melted ice-cream from his chin while he watched a sailboat, tilted dangerously low, go skimming past.

Several sharp honks behind him. When he turned, he was not entirely surprised to see the maroon Lexus cutting a wide semi-circle on the gravel and pulling up beside the hearse, its roof sign like a grotesque dorsal fin. The horn was honked twice more.

If the realtor had allowed himself to be carried away with the pleasure of leading a parade he must have been disappointed to discover the parade had disintegrated and disappeared from behind him so had turned back to find out why this had happened. He hailed Arvo cheerfully from the shore, then removed his shoes and socks and rolled up his pant-legs to wade in and stand beside him.

For some time neither of them spoke. Arvo decided to keep his mouth shut as long as possible. Gentle waves slapped at their four pale shins. Hairs on twenty toes stood up and waved.

From beyond the gleaming white heap of oyster shells to their right, a pale green fish boat appeared and took its time puttering past in a sort of northerly direction. On the far side of the Strait, the long chain of blue coastal mountains had gathered a woolly fringe of white cloud around their peaks. Arvo suspected that once the realtor decided to speak he would begin by saying “I will offer you all of this — the whole world — if you will only fall to your knees and worship
me. Or at least agree to sell me that hearse for my Open Houses.”

But the realtor did not offer Arvo the world, though it was rumoured that he owned, or at least controlled, more than his share of it. Instead, he admitted that this was the first time his naked feet had been in the ocean since he was a young boy. “Once they built a swimming pool I never went near the salt-chuck again.”

“You’re a swimmer?” Arvo asked. It seemed the polite thing to do.

“Never mind that. Before my goddam feet freeze off I want to make you an offer and I’m counting on you to agree to it.”

But then it seemed he didn’t necessarily want to
buy
the hearse after all, or make a trade. He offered a large sum of money if Arvo would agree to rent him the Cadillac Cathedral now and then, on the weekends of his Open Houses. “I’ll return it to you when it’s not in use.”

Martin would have rolled his eyes at this feeble attempt at negotiating. Arvo said nothing.

“Name a price and see what I got to say about it,” the realtor said. “Go on — give me a figure.”

“There
is
no figure,” Arvo said. “You can’t have it. I don’t want you to have it. I have someone else in mind for it.”

The realtor’s brow lowered, suspicious. “Who do you have in mind? Is this a goddam silent auction?” There was a note of panic in his voice. “Someone has offered you more than the value of my son’s car?”

“The someone else I have in mind is already the rightful owner.”

The realtor’s sigh was one of exasperation. “Why am I wasting my breath on you if it belongs to someone else? Tell me the owner’s name and I’ll get in touch myself. Maybe he’ll have the brains to recognize a generous offer when he hears one.”

“Sorry,” Arvo said. “I don’t give the names of my friends to strangers.”

The realtor’s face was now a dangerous red.

“I’m not a stranger, dammit. Everyone knows who I am.”

Arvo could not be tempted to give this man his wish. Once they’d brought Martin home, he would turn around and deliver the Cadillac to Myrtle — immediately, in case the family of loggers was unhappy with his reconditioned Fargo. They might even be foolish enough to go to the police out of spite, which could keep him and the hearse tied up in legal proceedings for years. This could be avoided only if the hearse was back in the possession of Charlie Birdsong’s daughter. Papers somewhere in some lawyer’s office could be unearthed. The imagined joy on that lovely remembered face would be much more “world” to inherit than anything the realtor could offer.

Now the wake created by the passing fish boat was sending in waves that swelled high enough to wet the realtor’s rolled-up pant-legs. He cursed Arvo for being even more stubborn than he was himself, and turned to wade ashore. “I don’t take failure lightly, Mr. Saarawhatzitt. You’ll be hearing from my men.” He said “my men” as though he saw himself as a fascist leader referring to his secret police.

Ashore, the realtor lost his balance twice, trying to pull his diamond socks up over one wet foot while standing wobbly on the other. Eventually he gave up and walked off with shoes and socks in his hands, and sat inside his car to pull them on. When he drove off, his tires squealed on the highway pavement. It was possible the man had experienced defeat so seldom he didn’t know how to deal with it.

Arvo had no intention of going ashore now that he had the ocean — or at least this beach — to himself. He breathed in the fresh salty smell, bent to scoop up a handful of water and let it leak through his fingers. Clouds had lifted from the peaks of the facing mountains, revealing patches of snow.

Martin had loved the ocean. He’d lived on the edge of it, swam in it daily even in winter, went out in his boat to fish as often as he could.
He’d loved the smell of it, the feel of it against his skin, its colour when he looked down into its depths. “I should’ve been a seal,” he’d said. He’d even looked a little like a seal, with his large brown eyes and pointed face.

It was being so far from the ocean in Ottawa that had made him realize it had been a mistake to allow himself to be elected to the House of Commons. “You’d think I didn’t remember where the Capital City
was
, for pity sake!” he’d told Arvo. “Every day I lived there, in my dinky apartment or my office, or even in my back-row seat in the House. I dreamt of buying myself a little one-man sailboat and setting off to explore the islands in the Strait. I’d tie up in Poet’s Cove for a couple of days, then move on to Salt Spring for a while — then up to Gabriola, Lasqueti, Quadra, even Cortes. I saw myself paddling up Desolation Sound accompanied by a pod of killer whales. I used to say the islands’ names to myself like some sort of prayer. More than once I caught people looking at me sort of strange, as though they thought I was losing my mind. Maybe I was.”

Martin hadn’t spent as much time as the others in Arvo’s machine shop. Though Peterson and Herbie Brewer, and sometimes Cynthia, would hang around watching him at work and gossiping until he had to suggest it was time they go home and let him make himself some supper, Martin had made it clear that he enjoyed the company — though he’d usually left as soon as the conversation circled back to start repeating itself, as it always eventually did.

Before going off to Ottawa, Martin had already been a widower for several years and the long-time owner of the weekly newspaper in town. Since he was nearly retirement age by the time he was elected, he’d sold the business within months, making — for some reason that was never discussed — an enemy of his son, who’d immediately set off for a new life of his own on the Prairies.

Now and then, Arvo had been invited to Martin’s place on his
own. Maybe the others had as well, he didn’t know. At Martin’s place you didn’t feel you needed to fill every minute with talk when you were sitting on a deck with a beer in your hand, listening to the low cello music from his sound system, and looking out across the Strait with all that sky and water and the facing mainland mountains every imaginable shade of blue. Families of ducks glided past, rising and falling with the waves. Human conversation drifted in from passing fish boats. It was much like having a friend take you to a movie where he provided you with something to drink and maybe to eat but didn’t expect you to talk until the show was over. At Martin’s you often stayed outside until dark, and even then you didn’t want to go in except when you began to shiver from the cold. When it was time to head for home, you settled inside for a while to warm up first.

“I didn’t buy this shack and start fixing her up to live in until I convinced myself that living on a boat would be a mistake. I would never want to go ashore, which would mean I’d never keep a job. I’d never stay in one place long enough to have friends. There’d be always one more bay I wanted to tie up in.” His house on the beach was his compromise: one foot on the land, one foot in the sea. “It isn’t a seal I ought to’ve been, it’s some sort of true amphibian, like the otter.”

“Well,” Arvo now said aloud to himself. “Damned if you haven’t gone and stopped me from doing something dumb.” They’d been planning to bury Martin in the ground — like just about everyone else they’d ever known who died — but he should have known that Martin wouldn’t like that much.

Arvo had never had anything to do with cremations. He didn’t like to think about one now. Turning people into cinders. But obviously Martin would have wanted to be set free on the waves, to mingle with the whales, and to travel back and forth like the otters as he’d done in life. There wasn’t any other way to accomplish this that
Arvo knew about. Because Martin had been a public servant for a brief while, it might be necessary to invite the newspaper and some town officials for a small ceremony, but there was no reason this couldn’t be held down on the beach below Martin’s house.

He hoped he wasn’t going to have to argue with the others about this. Peterson could be stubborn. Herbie Brewer could be slow to catch what you meant. When it came to making a hundred-eighty degree turn, both of them could be as slow as a steam locomotive on the Company turntable.

Cynthia would probably understand.

By the time Arvo had waded ashore, the Henry J was pulling in off the road. When it came to a stop beside the hearse, it appeared that Herbie was not inside. Instead of Herbie, Peterson’s former wife was sitting in the passenger seat. “You remember Luce,” Peterson said, getting out. “When I told her about the hearse she wanted to come for a look.”

Lucy Peterson was a tall woman with a chin that dared the world to refuse her anything she wanted and an eye that could nail you to the spot. She had been a famous hunter once, responsible for shooting enough venison to keep the whole community fed, and was not above turning both her rifle and her terrifying glare on anyone who dared to ask for a better cut of meat than the one she’d decided to give. Once she’d got out of the Henry J she narrowed her eyes to have a good skeptical examination of the hearse. She neither kicked nor cursed it. Without even looking at Arvo — and naturally without asking his permission — she slid in behind the wheel.

“If I remember Lucy right,” Arvo said, “she’s capable of driving off and leaving both of us behind.”

Peterson shrugged and made a “what could I do about it” face. “When I told her about Martin, she decided to come with us,” he said
apologetically. Or maybe it was defensively. “She liked Martin. Well, she used to like Martin a lot. Well, she had a bit of a
fling
with Martin is the truth of it — which is more or less why she’s my ex-wife now.”