Cadillac Cathedral (13 page)

“SHALL WE GATHER AT
the River” played itself repeatedly in Arvo’s head as though on some sort of loop. He didn’t know all the words but that did not prevent the song from going on without them — to circle back and start again, all those crowds of eager people racing down to the river, apparently ready to throw themselves into the rushing current. You had to believe that somewhere in the background there were folks digging in their heels and refusing to go anywhere near the “beautiful” damn river.

As he approached the old dance hall where Iris and her band would be playing on Saturday night, the song in his head was abruptly overridden by the repeated honking of a familiar horn. Peterson’s Henry J blew past with Lucy again in the passenger seat and Herbie
Brewer’s distressed face peering out the back window. He might as well have held up a
HELP ME
sign.

“Trouble,” Arvo warned himself.

Peterson slowed down and pulled over onto the gravel in front of a PetroCan station. By the time Arvo had stopped behind the Henry J, Lucy had jumped out and pulled the back of her seat forward for Herbie to climb out holding a black duffel bag to his chest. He stumbled briefly, but caught himself and hurried back towards Arvo.

Once Herbie had got in beside him, Arvo stepped out and placed a hand on the roof of the Henry J. “Does this mean you’re turning back? Or have you and Lucy decided on a second honeymoon somewhere?”

Peterson spoke through his open window. “We don’t need a second honeymoon. The first one never really ended. Wore me out is all, after a while.”

“It wore the rest of us out, too, listening to you complain about it.” Arvo bent his knees and sat on his heels. Bending to speak through Peterson’s window was a strain on a person’s back.

“But now we’ve had a sort of rest, we might try ’er again.”

“At the chicken ranch?”

“I’m all for moving her chickens up to my place but Lucy’s still mulling it over. Of course we could have a big one-time slaughter and be done with the lot.”

Lucy’s arm swung out and thumped hard against Peterson’s chest. He yelped, and then took a long slow noisy breath.

“Well, one way or the other,” Arvo said, “I guess we’re gonna miss you.”

“
Miss me when I’m gone
,” Iris sang.

“How d’you figure that?” Peterson said. “I’ll be just a mile or so down the road the same as always.”

“Maybe so, but will you be allowed out of the bedroom long enough to come up to my shed?”

Peterson grinned, apparently pleased, probably flattered.

“And what about Herbie? She didn’t like sharing the house with him the first time. Has she changed her mind? Have you changed your mind, Lucy?”

“Lucy says it’s someone else’s turn.”

“There is no someone else. Herbie’s got no other relatives, you know that.”

“He’s got friends.”

“He’s got acquaintances is all — from his road-crew days.”

“And you,” Peterson said.

Arvo paused, and looked down at the toes of his shoes, still shining from last night’s polish. “I’m trying to think of someone with more patience. Herbie’s never been inside my house.”

“Nobody’s been inside your house,” Peterson said. “Herbie’ll make a perfect boarder, grateful for everything.”

Arvo stood up and looked across to the gas pumps, trying hard to think. “You sure there isn’t someone you overlooked?”

Peterson’s only response was to rev the motor to suggest he was getting impatient with this conversation. Arvo reminded him not to forget that sign on his front. “You’re still my escort car.”

“All the way?”

All the way could be a little long without a break. “Well, we might be ready for a bit of lunch by the time we get to that, you know, minigolf and museum outfit with its own restaurant. Curly Hagen lives near. We could call up him and Maureen to join us. You think Lucy can put her spending-spree on hold long enough to eat?”

“So long as Herbie travels with you and not with us.”

As soon as Arvo pulled out to follow the Henry J through the brief
waterside village, Herbie hauled in a deep shuddering breath and began to complain: “Every time that Lucy’s around he throws me to the wolves. He don’t care what happens to me, I could’ve been killed.”

Arvo imagined Herbie fighting off a wolf pack. “You mean at the chicken ranch?”

“Look at these scratches.” Herbie held out both hands, turned them this way and that to show off his scarlet wounds. He pointed, too, to a long scratch on his neck. “How was I to know the rooster would spot the open gate when I went in to bring them water? I chased the sonofabitch all over the yard before I cornered him in the woodshed. I oughta wrung his neck! But I didn’t, I threw him back in the pen.”

“You said wolves.”

“You know what I meant. I might never speak to Bert again!”

“Let’s not think about Peterson. Let’s just think about Martin. It’s Martin who died. It’s Martin we’re on our way to collect, so we can throw him a decent funeral.”

Once the village was behind them, the highway turned inland to pass by an industrial park where mobile homes stood in various degrees of completion. Abandoned, maybe — there was no sign of any work going on. The chain-link fence suggested some sort of quarantine.

“I never voted for Martin,” Herbie said. He’d clenched both fists, Arvo noticed, as though ready to defend himself. “Bert told me to vote for him so I voted for that woman with the long hair down to her rear.”

“You voted for Coral Cleland?”

“Me and Bert had one of our fights! Fencing the hayfield. He didn’t like the way I handled the come-along. I wasn’t getting the barbed wire tight enough to suit him so he shouted at me and I threw the
damn come-along into the bush and quit.” Herbie hauled in a deep, trembling, and probably self-pitying sigh. “That was the morning of election day and I knew he’d be voting for Martin, so when we got to the polling station I decided to cancel him out. It was safer than clobbering him with the come-along, which is what I wanted to do.”

“I guess you wouldn’t be telling me this if Martin hadn’t won the election. How would you feel if he’d lost by a single vote?”

Herbie’s response was inaudible — muttered in the direction of the roadside ditch.

“So — you got any ideas what you’ll do if Peterson really does go back to Lucy?”

Another few moments of silence while they passed by a man and woman shouting at one another across the roof of a parked Toyota Corolla.

“Don’t worry,” Herbie said. “I won’t come banging on your door.”

Now Arvo felt a hot flush of shame. Herbie had been every bit as much a friend as Peterson, the two of them always welcome in his shop while he worked. It had never occurred to him to invite either of them into his house.

It was a terrible thing, he supposed, but he couldn’t imagine having Herbie live with him. A person would be a nervous wreck waiting for him to break something, or spill something on his mother’s starched white doilies — or even
move
something from where he’d got used to it being. Eventually Herbie would start to feel he had the right to change things. How could a person ever explain why this was impossible?

Herbie brought up his bag from the floor and settled it on his lap. “I hope you don’t mind swinging past my old friend Sandy Macgregor, down the road here a ways. I got something for him. Used to work together on the road crew. He moved down here when he retired.”

“We’re heading for a restaurant, Herbie. You want us to miss our lunch?”

“Down the side-road up ahead. It swings around and joins the highway again, close to that restaurant place.”

His stomach issued its warning twinges again! Not only would this slow them down, it could lead them off the beaten path where the chance of a break-down could be increased and the results disastrous.

“Turn-offs right up here a ways,” Herbie said. “Maybe you should slow down.”

“What about Bert? We’re supposed to be travelling together.”

“Don’t worry about him. I told him this would happen. He’ll be waiting for us up ahead. At the restaurant.”

So he and Peterson had agreed on this.

“I don’t like it, Herbie. You sure you don’t want to make this sidetrip on the way back?”

“Here it comes — you better slow down. Now watch, it’s right up here.”

“And you won’t hold us up, talking old times with your friend?”

“It’s right here. This here’s the road.
We just passed it!
”

“Shoot,” Arvo said. He pulled over onto the shoulder and waited for three angry drivers to pass by. He could see in Herbie’s face that there was no hope of persuading him to forget this demand. The Henry J was already far ahead, and about to disappear around a bend. He backed into a driveway, turned the hearse around, and drove back to the turn-off.

This narrow road travelled uphill into forest at an incline that was something of a test for this ancient vehicle. Arvo held his breath until they’d got to where the road levelled out, but then they entered a series of sharp turns, first in one direction and then another. You never knew what might be coming at you from beyond the next
corner. A dawdling ancient hearse was an impediment to those that followed on such a narrow road with little you could call a shoulder and a ditch so deep he did not want to risk getting close. Herbie leaned out his side to look back and report, with some excitement, that they’d already accumulated a truck and two cars. You’d think he believed this was some sort of accomplishment. He chuckled, and seemed not to care that the drivers — as Arvo could see in a quick glance — were shaking their fists, while shouting out their open windows.

In silence they crossed a canyon on a narrow bridge with a steel-grid deck through which they could see a river roaring below. The vibrations could be felt in Arvo’s teeth.

Soon they were driving through thick woods, mostly tall second-growth Douglas fir and a dense underbrush of huckleberry and salal and ocean spray in creamy bloom. To one side, narrow driveways disappeared into the trees, each with a battered mail box on a post. A road-side billboard advertised luxury suites in a lakeside resort —
coming soon
— along with pools, saunas, tennis courts, television, onsite health consultants, five-star restaurants, and spectacular views. It did not advertise promised improvements to the road.

Up the steep slope to their right, a truckload of logs appeared, raising a cloud of dust as it barrelled down a gravel road and, though barely slowing, swung out onto the pavement a hundred metres ahead of the hearse, heading in the same direction. When the dust cloud had caught up and engulfed them, Herbie pushed his face down inside his shirt in order to breathe.

Once the dust had begun to clear, they could see that none of the logs was anywhere near the size that used to come down out of the woods. In the early days some were large enough to need their own individual flatcar or truck-and-trailer. These were barely broad enough for telephone poles.

“They shoulda been left to grow,” Herbie said.

“Ah — but the share-holders down in California or over in China can’t wait that long. You could be cutting those toothpicks yourself if you were still working in the woods.”

Of course Herbie’s only job with the logging company had been with the road crew, but that had been reason enough for him to feel proud of the giant logs they’d sent out back in those days.

Now the woods were interrupted, suddenly, by a row of storage lockers sitting on a square of pavement. A chest of drawers had been set out beside the road with a FREE sign hanging from the top handle. A short distance farther on, a small sway-backed house stood up on short posts, its front wall collapsed in a heap of twisted lumber, leaving rooms and flower-papered walls exposed like the set of a stage play. A wood stove stood on dainty legs amidst a heap of bricks.

“You sure this is the road we want?” Arvo said. “We haven’t seen much in the way of population.”

“Just up here a ways,” Herbie said. “Keep goin’.”

For several minutes they passed through dense woods before another gap opened up into a clearing, this time for a corrugated metal shed, a gas tank up on legs, and a pair of dump-trucks with broken windshields.

There had been rain here recently. The rough pavement was wet, the roadside trees were dripping. Yet the only dark cloud in the sky was far off toward the mountains.

For the next hundred metres the forest on both sides of the road was so tall and crowded that driving was like passing down the bottom of a ravine. Then, suddenly, they came to another isolated patch cut out of the woods, this one occupied by a drab paint-peeled one-storey motel, probably long deserted. Limbs had fallen to the roof but not been removed. A metal gutter dangled. Weeds had grown tall across what must once have been a parking lot.

“Turn in here,” Herbie said.

Arvo did not mask his surprise. “Your friend lives
here
?”

“Manages it when the owner goes off to Hawaii, but he lives here all year round, does repairs.”

Apparently the friend did not believe that doing repairs included using a paint brush. “And this is what — his birthday? You got a surprise for him in your bag?”

Herbie did not respond to this. He waited for Arvo to stop the hearse and back up to the driveway entrance. Then, as soon as they’d pulled up in front of the motel office, he got out and headed for the glass doors carrying his bag.

The neon “Open/Closed” sign on the roof was not illuminated. If the motel had once had a name it had been removed. Apparently the friend did not consider looking after the yard to be a part of doing “repairs” any more than painting the outside walls. Weeds grew tall where a garden might once have been, along the front wall of the building. Curtains were pulled closed in one room but hung torn and lopsided in another.

Arvo assumed Herbie would have an explanation once he’d come out. While he waited, he took a little time to think of what he might say to Myrtle Birdsong when she answered her door later today — or, more likely now, tomorrow morning. He did not want to act as though he expected to be recognized immediately, or welcomed with open arms. He would have to think of something that would make a connection between the old fart at her door and the boy he’d once been. It might be best to remind her that they had run into one another just the once as adults in all the years since her father married her off to the Hungarian. She wouldn’t remember this as vividly as he did, of course, but she might recall the circumstances. She and her husband had come north with her father for the funeral of her father’s friend — a friend of Arvo’s father as well.