Cadillac Cathedral (7 page)

“Did she give a reason?”

“Well …” Kevin shrugged. ”I suppose any old Finn would do. She’d got it into her head that any Finn that isn’t a total drunk is hardworking, generous, and faithful — a sort of saint. For a while there I thought she was after you when she nearly drove me crazy asking the names for parts of a car. But then this other fellow showed up.”

Maybe she
had
been after him, for a while. This would explain why Marketta Williams — whenever they’d been in the Store at the same time — had pestered him with so many questions about what to look for when you were in the market for a new car. She was an attractive woman, a little flirtatious; she had a habit of putting a hand on your arm while she talked to you. Her interest in cars had eventually given him the courage to invite her to a movie in town. Four different movies, four Saturdays in a row — he could recall their titles if he had to. They’d stopped at the Arbutus Hotel each time for a
drink, and twice she’d invited him in to her house afterwards. But then she’d met “this other fellow” somewhere and, he imagined, had been swept right off her feet.

“This guy is a Swede,” Kevin said. “I guess she looked at a map and decided a Swede must be nearly the same as a Finn! Close call, eh? You should be relieved. My mother has a habit of outliving her husbands.”

Arvo left Kevin Williams gouging his little owl out of the block of yellow cedar, then passed by several home-made quilts to examine the prizes to be won in the draw: a weekend in Seattle or a collection of Marjorie McGowan’s jams. He helped himself to a coffee and took it to a table where Jenny Banks sat alone. He would drink the coffee and then go home to wait for Billy there.

“A good thing Picasso never glued car parts to his pictures,” Earl Boyd said, bringing his own mug of coffee to the table. “I seen you eyeing Billy-boy’s works of art. With you around, Picasso would never’ve got his painting to the galleries before you found some reason to hijack them for your workshop! The man would be a pauper to this day.”

“Picasso’s dead.” Jenny Banks said this across the top of her mug.

“So he’d be in a pauper’s grave,” Earl said. “Arvo’s fault.”

Arvo looked down at his own two open hands. “I wasn’t after Billy’s
art
.”

“Help yourself to one of these buns,” Jenny said, holding out a paper bag to Arvo. “You could be waiting awhile. Sometimes Billy has a little trouble living up to his promises. He told his mother he’d be back in South Carolina for her birthday but he hasn’t got around to it yet. After forty years. You willing to wait that long for Billy-boy’s tire?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t had a visit from the Big Car Manufacturers,”
Earl said, directing an obvious wink at the others. “Every wreck you bring back to life is another new car they don’t get to sell. You’re undermining the economy of Japan and the US, both. Ontario too.”

Arvo had heard this before. It was a harmless sort of joking, though you sensed a hint of something serious beneath it when it came from Earl Boyd.

He supposed he was a bit of a mystery to some. Few in Portuguese Creek were allowed to remain mysteries for long — it wasn’t neighbourly. Still, though he minded his own business, he tried to be friendly to all. Of course they probably believed that a man with his head under a raised engine hood had little real life of his own.

Rick Morrison walked his chair over from a neighbouring table and swung it around to face them. “Never mind the Big Car Manufacturers — what about the sales staff on our own car lots? Lowest number of sales gets his walking papers. You like putting people out of work?”

“Arvo’s a bit of an anarchist at heart.” Jenny said this as though she rather hoped it was true. Her father had been an outspoken member of the
IWW
when Arvo and Jenny were in elementary school together. At the time, Arvo had had only the vaguest idea of what the
IWW
was — something foreign in origin, frowned-upon, dangerous, vaguely communist. Jenny had come to school in faded cut-down cotton dresses. No socks in her shoes. Her father had been sent to jail for a while. She’d married young — a distant cousin in Alberta — but had come home a widow, and soon afterwards married Jerry Banks, the owner of the largest lumber company in town. She was a widow now again, living alone in a mansion she and Banks had built where her parents’ shack once stood. Recently she’d been elected president of the Community Association.

By the time Arvo had finished a second coffee, Billy-boy Harrison had returned. “Got ’er!” he said. “Easy!” He threw his arms out wide, waiting to be welcomed with praise and applause.

Earl Boyd applauded, slowly, with his big hands. Sarcastically, it seemed to Arvo.

“Your tire’s outside,” Billy-boy said. “I don’t know how much tread there is but you can see there’s some — which is more than I can say for most of the others.”

“What’s this for?” Alec Morrison turned to ask Arvo.

“Finding the tire was easier than I thought,” Billy-boy said. “So I spent a couple of minutes on the internet. I was curious to see what sort of vehicle it’s for.”

“And?” Earl said.

“Billy knows all business between us is confidential,” Arvo said.

Billy-boy shrugged. “Don’t worry. It’s nobody else’s business how much a person pays. And it’s nobody else’s business if that tire is meant for a logging truck, a Smart Car, or a big old Cadillac.”

“You’re finding abandoned logging trucks now?” Alex Morrison scowled at Arvo. “How the hell would you get a logging truck down out of the woods without anyone knowing?”

“Someone would have noticed,” Beryl Wood said. “The police are probably at your place this minute. Don’t expect us to vouch for you. We don’t know what you do when you’re alone.”

“Yes, we do,” said Earl. “He spends it tinkering like a kid with his Meccano set.”

“Do they still make Meccano sets?” Beryl asked. “They have Lego now.”

“It probably isn’t a logging truck,” Alex Morrison said.

“Well, it can’t be a Cadillac,” Beryl said. “Who would ditch a Cadillac out in the bush? Anyone who owns a Cadillac would trade it in for a new one — or maybe an Audi.”

“I don’t know if they even
make
Cadillacs any more,” Earl said. “Maybe they’re like Meccano sets, replaced by plastic Lego cars from Denmark.”

CHAPTER 5

HE TURNED ONE WAY
and then, within minutes, the other. The blankets made him too warm, and yet he had never been able to sleep without a cover. It was impossible to relax, knowing that the Cathedral hearse sat unguarded in his workshop while Matt Foreman across the road was probably awake and wondering how he could discover what his neighbour was hiding. No doubt he was waiting until he could be confident Arvo was asleep before sneaking over to pry open the doors. This would require no more than a half-decent crowbar.

Of course people here did not act like that. And anyway, a crowbar would cause nails to squeal loud enough to wake any number of households.

Maybe he should just take his blankets out and curl up on the driver’s seat of the hearse.

Not a good idea, somehow, to fall asleep in a hearse. Foreman and his crowbar would find him stiff and cold. He could imagine the local newspaper:
Man Dies In Hearse: friends claim he liked to make things easy for others
.

A sound from outside was probably a raccoon testing a garbage can lid, but just in case it was Foreman — or maybe Eleanor Robinson, a woman who seemed to think she had the right to know everyone’s business — he sat up and parted the curtains to check.

But he could see no unfamiliar shapes out there. No movement.

With his head on the pillow again, he remembered that Peter Sleggart had once admitted that he had a sleepwalking habit, and had wakened one night to find himself in Margaret Robinson’s bed. “What are you doing in my bed?” he was supposed to have said, indignantly, when he recognized Margaret asleep beside him. Margaret had laughed about it later, but her husband, once he’d returned from a business trip, was not amused. Sleggart could possibly use this same explanation if he were intercepted while leaning an extension ladder against the window wall of the workshop. “In my dream I decided to go up and clean out your eaves.”

Eventually he got up out of bed, put a mackinaw over his pyjamas, and went outside with a flashlight to check that the hearse was still where he’d left it.

Of course he knew he could be about to make a fool of himself, expecting Myrtle Birdsong to be grateful that he had rescued her father’s hearse. But it was important he find out at last whether he ought to have forgotten her long ago. How much had he missed in life by holding onto an adolescent crush?

He was still awake at 4:00 a.m.

Portuguese Creek was populated with any number of people who were used to having their curiosity satisfied by others willing to tell them all of their business. Arvo’s locked doors could be seen as a challenge, even an insult. There was bound to be someone who felt it his duty to satisfy everyone’s curiosity while teaching Arvo Saarikoski a lesson.

At 4:30, he decided that he was being childish to worry about a possible disappointment at the Birdsong doorstep, and a fool to think that others cared enough to see what was in his workshop to break in during the night. He checked that the alarm he’d set for 6:30 hadn’t changed its mind, and lowered his head to the pillow.

In sleep he revisited the city he hadn’t seen in forty years. In Helsinki’s harbour market, people turned from their buying and selling to claim him enthusiastically as one of their own. But before taking him home for
kahvi
and
jalkiruokia
they insisted he help them dredge up from the harbour floor the multitude of trucks and cars that had been driven off the pier by drunks and fools. But his protests were ignored, and he soon found himself drifting through a watery graveyard of vehicles with unfamiliar shapes, designed no doubt by Russians or Swedes. When he recognized Herbie, Bert Peterson, and Cynthia behind the windshield glass of a rusty Saab, his own horrified shout jolted him out of sleep.

Sitting up, with blankets spilled out around him onto the carpeted floor, he discovered he was alive and still breathing air. By pushing aside the window curtain he could see in the weak morning light the rough unpainted wall of his workshop, and, on the far side of the road, the dark side-window of the General Store.

Even so, something disagreeable was taking its time to rise from the dark sea of his memory. News of something cruel had recently arrived.

Martin Glass had died.

Martin had died and Arvo was about to bring him home.

By the time he’d eaten a quick breakfast at his kitchen table, dressed in his black denim jeans and a white washed-and-ironed shirt, and had gone outside to unlock the workshop, the Henry J had crossed the Old Highway from Stevenson Road and was pulling up in front of the double doors, a plywood sign with large red letters fastened to the front bumper:

!!SLOW HEARSE FOLLOWING!!

Peterson rolled down his window to explain in a stage whisper. “Herbie stayed up half the night to make it.”

Grinning, Herbie Brewer stepped out of the Henry J and held up a second sign. “This one’s for the back of the hearse.”

SORRY
WE’RE GOING
AS FAST AS WE CAN

Otherwise, Peterson said, they’d have to put up with a whole lot of cursing and honking from people who caught up behind them. “We don’t want them running you off the road.”

Peterson brought flats of potted plants from his trunk and opened the rear door of the hearse to slide them in. “Cynthia was waiting by her gate,” he said. “Told us she sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and decided we couldn’t go without flowers for Martin’s journey home.” Since it was not yet fully daylight, the flowers were closed up so tight it was impossible to guess what sort they might turn out to be. Arvo tried out a few names — gladiolus, dahlia, chrysanthemum, peony — but neither Peterson nor Herbie Brewer knew one flower from another. “So long as they aren’t those evil-smelling lilies you get
at funerals,” Arvo said. “Cynthia or no Cynthia, I’d throw the stinking things straight into the ditch.”

For the time being, these had no smell at all, and did not resemble anything that any of them had ever seen.

It was obvious now that he would not be making the journey alone. Both Peterson and Herbie were wearing striped shirts and sports jackets. Clearly the three of them were in this rescue mission together. “I’ll keep close to the side of the road,” he said, once he’d hung Herbie’s sign off the rear bumper. “You do the same up ahead. That way, the traffic can see when it’s safe to pass.”

He put his tool box on the seat beside him — his mother would have called it his
Sampo
, knowing that he had built it himself, like the legendary Ilmarinen, though this had been made from a length of oak rather than a plough blade heated in a forge. His good-luck charm. He climbed in behind the wheel again and started her up. Once he’d driven out of the shed, then closed and locked the door behind him, he said, “Let’s go! Martin may not be in any hurry but I’ve got things to get back to.” There was a ’49 Meteor out back that hadn’t counted on him going off on a trip.