Cadillac Cathedral (23 page)

“I’ll leave directions at the motel desk if I check out before you’re back from your spree. Cynthia’s Honda will have to be my Escort Car going home.”

Cynthia decided to ride back to the motel with him in the hearse. To Arvo she said, “I want you to show me your old neighbourhood.” There was something in her voice that made him wonder how much
she’d guessed of his reason for coming here. She’d been a teacher after all, with that teacher’s talent for reading your mind.

Once she’d got in to sit beside him he could sense without looking that she was smiling up at him, so he turned to see if she was serious about a tour. She was, though her bright clever eyes shone with some other sort of mischief. “Take us past your house. Show me your school. Point out where you held hands with Myrtle for the first time — since I can’t believe that you didn’t. She must have been very beautiful.”

“Good grief!” This had escaped before he could stop it. Did she have no idea that he felt like a bloody fool right now?

Still, he started the hearse and drove out to the first major street and turned in the direction that would take them through his old neighbourhood. “I didn’t mean to shout,” he said. “All that back there was hard.”

“Maybe you should go back later,” Cynthia suggested. “After the guests have gone.”

Arvo stared straight ahead. What had she noticed? Or, what did she think she’d noticed? It was stupid, of course, but he could imagine the people in Myrtle’s living room having a chuckle at his expense. To Myrtle it must have seemed that he’d behaved like a teen-aged boy trying to impress the class beauty.

Cynthia had asked where he’d first held Myrtle’s hand. Was it true that he never really held her hand? It seemed improbable now, but yes, he supposed there was the once. “Of course it was an accident,” he said. “Taking her hand, I mean. And it didn’t last very long. Everybody knew her father would nail you up in a coffin if you paid too much attention to his daughter. If you were caught.”

“So you were careful not to hold hands near her house.”

“We were careful not to hold hands at all after that first time. They said that if the old man ever let you out of the coffin it would be only so he could take a butcher knife to your … you know.”

“Oh dear.” Cynthia shuddered dramatically. “And there was no mother to show him what a fool he was?”

He would make her tour a quick one. He was in no mood to be a tour guide. At the moment he could imagine himself as a tourist-attraction.
This here is a statue of an old man who made a fool of himself trying to impress the girl he’d been sort of in love with more than sixty years in the past. It is now a local tradition to throw eggs, aiming especially for the face
.

An alley took them directly from Myrtle’s neighbourhood to the street where his family home had once stood. A furniture warehouse took up the whole block now — all houses demolished, or moved away. Strange that this didn’t bother him. It was almost as though he was glad this had happened. Something that belonged entirely in your past might as well disappear altogether once you were no longer part of it. Otherwise, things could get confusing.

Egg on his face. At least Peterson knew nothing about all this. He
hoped
Peterson hadn’t heard about any of it. If Peterson knew, he wasn’t likely to keep quiet about it. And if he did keep quiet it would be from pity — which would be almost as bad as mockery, or gossip.

The school in the next block had not disappeared but it had been renovated so extensively there was nothing left he could recognize. “This cemetery up ahead could be the only thing that hadn’t changed in this part of the city. The residents could not be bribed to move on.”

A stone wall bordered the road as far as the entrance, which was barred by an ironwork gate. Leafy trees and tall stone monuments were all that could be seen beyond it. “We used to play cops and robbers in there. Cowboys and Indians. Hide and Seek. Whatever we wanted.”

“They’re an unfriendly selfish bunch, the dead,” Cynthia said. “Keeping this lovely property to themselves. I’m glad you brought a little life to it for a while.”

The road carried them past the field where Arvo had played football. “I was pretty good at it. Soccer they call it now.” Then it curved to join a road that followed the coastline. Directly below was the sandy cove where he sometimes swam, or sometimes just turned over rocks to study the strange colourful life of the startled sea creatures beneath. “Myrtle was not allowed anywhere near this.” A little farther along, in a field of grass between road and cliff-edge, was the pond where he’d once sailed his miniature boats. “She did join me here — just once — but reached too far out and fell in. Went home drenched.”

“You went with her, to help her face the music.”

“She wouldn’t let me. In her old man’s eyes I would’ve been worse news than a drowning. Growing up without a mother must be tough.”

Of course none of these places had any magic in them now. He’d stayed clear of this in all the years since, suspecting they would only disappoint.

He was no longer sure he knew what he wanted for himself. Throughout the whole process of rescuing the hearse, preparing it for the journey, driving it south, and delivering it to her doorstep, he had had his doubts but had never seriously believed she might not want it back. He must have been wearing some sort of blinkers, like the horses that pulled funeral carriages in the old days.

Well, he did know he was pleased to have seen her. Seeing her again was what he had wanted, after all — though his foolish imagination had insisted on hoping for more.

When they came to a small coffee shop perched above the water’s edge, a white cruise ship several storeys high and the length of two city blocks was slowly nudging its way into place alongside a long concrete dock. Cynthia put a hand on his arm and asked him to stop. “The world has come to our doorstep,” she said.

He pulled in to the curb where it was possible to see the full length of the ship, including the blunt front end that made it look more like a five-storey floating hotel than an old-time pointed-nose ocean liner.

“I’ve always wanted to sail off on one of those,” Cynthia said. “To Hawaii or maybe New Zealand. But I suspect it will never happen. Right now I just want to watch the lucky ones get off. I don’t suppose you want me to go in and bring us out some coffee.”

“No more coffee!” Arvo said.

They sat in silence to watch the activity around the cruise ship.

Of course he couldn’t help but relive his last few minutes with Myrtle. “I suppose I made a damn fool of myself this morning,” he eventually said. “After making this whole stupid trip.”

“Well maybe.” Cynthia sounded rather cheerful about this. “But frankly, it was about time. I was beginning to believe you’d live to a hundred and still be the only person in the world who hasn’t made a fool of himself at least once.”

There wasn’t much he could say to that, beyond a sort of growl. He knew there were some who believed he made a fool of himself every day he spent in his workshop, while everyone else his age was flying off to lie on Hawaiian beaches or climb the Italian Alps.

“Well I was wrong,” Cynthia added. “There was the once.”

He knew what she meant. “The woman from Thunder Bay?”

“Though frankly I thought you handled it rather well in the end. Henry said he would have shot her if he’d been you.” She waited a moment before adding “Of course I don’t imagine he meant it.”

Cynthia’s husband had said a lot of things he didn’t mean — in order to raise a few eyebrows or just get a laugh.

“You think pushing a kicking screaming woman onto the bus was handling it well?”

“It was a lot more civilized than what I would have done.”

It wasn’t long before people began to pour out of the cruise ship
— an apparently endless swarm spilling out from some discreetly tucked-away exit in the hull, many of them rushing immediately out across the pavement towards the waiting buses and taxis. Still, a good number of them seemed to be content to stand around and take in their new location: the coastline, the harbour, the city centre at the head of the harbour.

“Those people pouring out of that boat remind me of a book I read,” Arvo said. “A long time ago now. Only it was the reverse — sentence after sentence describing hordes of pilgrims pouring down out of the world to get onto the rusty old ship that they didn’t know would later start to sink and threaten to drown them. I still have my copy somewhere.”

“Joseph Conrad,” Cynthia said. “I read it too, but long ago. That parade of doomed pilgrims is the one thing that stuck in my mind.”

“My old man came to this country working on a rusty freighter expecting every minute to be told they were sinking. I told him he ought to read the book, but of course he never did, he just asked me for a quick report.”

“A good story,” Cynthia the former teacher said. “But with very long sentences.”

“I was tempted to read it aloud so maybe when I got to the end of each sentence I might have a chance of remembering how it started.”

“Well,” Cynthia said — cheerfully, he thought — “I hope it wasn’t the only book you read in your whole long life.”

He said nothing to this. Of course she had to be aware of the James Lee Burke novels on his workbench. She would not have recommended Burke to her high-school English students — or to him either, if she’d known that in every one of them the likeable detective was faced with the most vicious brand of murderers a human mind could possibly dream up.

Some of the tourists had come up onto the roadside pavement on foot, apparently not interested in the tour buses that would have taken them to shops where they could part with their money. Soon it was clear that a crowd had begun to gather around the hearse: Asian faces, though Arvo couldn’t guess what country they may have been from. It was also impossible to know what they were saying to one another — a language unlike any he had ever heard. Maybe they were trying to decide if they were looking at the usual form of transportation in this country. Maybe they believed this was one of the “tourist attractions” they’d been promised. Were they looking for someone to sell them tickets for a ride?

“Hearse!” Arvo said, getting out to stand beside his open door. “For funerals!”

The nearest man, grinning, rushed forward to take hold of his hand and pump it enthusiastically a few times, but his words might have been lines from some foreign opera. The others, frowning, watched this. Wondering, maybe, if they were expected to shake his hand as well.

He had no other words to explain this vehicle to them, but Cynthia got out and took up the challenge. “For the dead!” she shouted, tapping at the nearest window — presumably to draw attention to the coffin inside. She closed her eyes, let her tongue hang out one corner of her mouth, crossed her arms against her breast, and let her head drop to the side like someone shot.

“Awwwwww!” Some of the tourists nodded solemnly, though others appeared even more puzzled than before. Then, suddenly, all of them turned away to see what other wonders might be found in this foreign place. Some of the couples walked down the trail towards the coffee shop.

“Well!” Arvo said, once Cynthia had got in again beside him. “For
a minute there I thought you were going to crawl in the back and play dead for them!”

“It crossed my mind. But I was afraid you’d drive off and make me ride in there all the way to the motel!”

“It would serve you right.”

“Of course you wouldn’t get away with it, because I’d push my face against the glass and hammer my fists and scream for help from the people out on the sidewalks! You’d end up explaining yourself to police.”

After a few moments of silence she added: “Well now, before we return to Real Life, I’d be very interested in meeting some of those tourists who went inside. What do you think? Do you have room for another coffee, or a piece of pie? I’ve always wondered what it would be like to travel the world on a ship.”

“I suppose I could watch you drink a coffee but I won’t have any myself. I don’t want to stop for a pee every hour the whole way home.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. This contraption goes slow enough. You could jump off, leaving it to putter on ahead, find a tree to pee behind, and catch up before it’s gone more than a dozen metres up the road.”

“You give me too much credit,” he said. “Some things just aren’t as fast as they used to be.” Then, in case she misunderstood. “I meant, these legs aren’t too keen on running.”

Cynthia laughed. “I notice most of those tourists are getting on in age, so I imagine the cruise ships have plenty of restrooms. You wouldn’t have to run very far.”

“I didn’t say anything about taking a cruise,” Arvo said.

“Not yet,” she said. “But we still haven’t talked to any of those folks who could tell us what it’s like. Now that we’ve pried you this
far out of your workshop there’s no telling how much farther you might be tempted. Myself, I’d rather like to see Peru. Or maybe the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.”

“Ha!” Arvo said. “I wanted to see Australia once but I was told it’s dangerous to go there past a certain age — it would only make you depressed you aren’t still thirty so you could start your life all over again down there.”

“Haven’t you noticed?” Cynthia said. “We start life over again every day. All of us. Even a man who hides in his workshop with grease up to his elbows. I bet the tour-bus drivers in Peru would be grateful to have you aboard when we break down halfway up one of their terrible mountains.”

CHAPTER 14