Cherry Bites (17 page)

I slept and dreamed that a Canada goose flew across the full moon. It seemed significant but I didn’t know why. Its wings made a creaking sound as they flapped their way across. First I thought it was real and then I lay awake till I knew that it wasn’t.

In the morning, I was up at first light. I wanted to take care of Pete before anyone walked down the lane and saw him. But I was afraid to look out the window, in case he was on fire or being eaten by wild dogs or worse.

I called Frank, not sure what to say.

“Pete is here.” I settled on vagueness.

“I’ll be right over,” said Frank. “Just give me a minute to straighten things out around here.”

“Okay.”

I waited on the front lawn, shivering in the morning chill. He showed up within ten minutes.

We walked through the front hall to the kitchen, down the steps to the landing and out the door to the back stoop. Frank led the way.

“Oh my God,” he said.

The first thing I saw was Pete’s empty chair. It didn’t seem possible to me that he could have freed himself. Then I remembered how he had put on magic shows in the neighbourhood. He could untie any knot anyone ever made. Pete was an escape artist, a magician. How could I have been so dull as to not think of that?

Then I saw a Green Guys truck parked in the lane with the engine running. A flash of anger darted through me as it always does when I see vehicles idling unnecessarily. Often they belong to the same people that won’t allow smoking within one hundred yards of their dead relatives.

I didn’t want to follow Frank’s gaze. I didn’t want to know why he had said, oh my God. But I looked and I saw an impossible embrace—green coveralls wrapped around and lifting up a limp scruffy body. The coveralls let go quickly as the man inside them realized what he was hanging on to.

The scarecrow was left to swing in the brittle wind.

It was made from the rubble of my garage and from armfuls of old vegetation, encased in bits of cloth. Glancing around my yard, I could see there was no shortage of junk to fashion this type of decoy. Pete could have built a family of scarecrows.

“I thought,” stuttered the Green Guy, “I’m sorry, I thought someone was…”

He blushed as though he had made an unforgivable mistake.

“No. Don’t worry,” Frank hurried down the steps and over to where the Green Guy stood. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t apologize. You did the right thing. I thought the same thing as you did when I saw it.”

I stepped down into the yard. “Here, sit,” I said, and offered him my camp chair.

He dropped into the chair. “I was driving down the lane and I seen someone hanging.”

“I understand,” I said.

He looked straight at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

It was the same Green Guy who had tried to trick me into having my lawn aerated. The same guy I had decided to hate for his underhandedness. I’ve made that kind of mistake before—despising someone who gave of himself in an entire kind of way. Misplaced hate. Hate with a shallow reason.

The scarecrow had a noose around its neck. When I looked closely I saw that Pete had made it out of the rope that I had bound him with. And he had used the hose and toppled Dougwell’s chair.

I realized that the creaking of the goose’s wings in my dream was the sound made by Murray’s hose winder.

Pete had fashioned a pocket on the scarecrow’s burlap shirt and attached a pen, the way both Murray and Dougwell used to do. The way Frank does. There was a piece of paper in the pocket, torn from a small ringed notebook, the kind Pete always used to carry for his haiku. I guess he still did. There were a few words written in my brother’s awkward hand:

four ewe
in morning light
only 4 u

That’s what he wrote: a fucked-up haiku.

I pocketed the poem without showing Frank. He saw me do it but didn’t ask. He knew it was between my brother and me.

The Green Guy left. Frank stuck around for a while, cut down the scarecrow. We talked some. I told him about my visit to Pete at the Chalet, our scuffle.

“He tried to bite me,” I said.

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

I told Frank about my brother’s admission that he had hurt Henry and that got him moving.

“He didn’t intend to kill him,” I called after Frank as he crossed my front yard.

That brought him to a stop and he turned around.

“He said so,” I said.

Frank nodded and continued down the block.

I made coffee and sat with the crumpled scarecrow as the dewy morning heated up.

Somehow, Pete knew that his repeated deaths were the best way to get to me. My life was a ghastly treasure hunt that I was on against my will. Pete’s dead body was the prize, but it was a booby prize; it was never real.

Frank called soon after to tell me that Pete was no longer registered at the Chalet. He asked if I had any other ideas. I gave him Eileen’s address. Not Myrna’s. I still didn’t believe what my heart knew was true.

By the time I got up to see Henry in the afternoon he had been moved to a private room on another ward. He had already told his story twice, once to a young cop in a uniform and once to Frank, who was there shortly before I was.

Henry was ghostly white underneath his tan and that made him look old, but he insisted that he felt okay.

“Just tired,” he said. “I can’t seem to get over wanting to roll over and go back to sleep.”

I didn’t want to push him, but I was desperate to hear what had happened.

“Pete came to see me,” he said. “I would have said last night, but apparently it was the night before. I lost a day in there.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Anyway, it was late. I was already in bed. So were Dougwell and Gina. They didn’t wake up, thank goodness.”

“Maybe it would have been good if they had,” I said.

“No.”

Of course not. Henry didn’t want his kids tainted by Pete Ring. Would we be able go on from here at any level? I wondered. The same blood runs through me as through the guy that could have killed Henry.

“He wasn’t trying to kill you,” I said. My brother’s advocate.

“I know. The doctor said it wasn’t enough to even hurt me. I guess I’m extra susceptible or something. I just slept an extremely deep sleep for a very long time.”

“How did Pete know where to find you?” I asked.

“He just looked me up in the phone book.”

I smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “You should have an unlisted number, Henry, being a teacher. Don’t you have students phoning you all the time?”

“No, not really. Sometimes. It’s never bothered me.”

“Okay, so what next?”

“He asked if we could go for a ride in the Volvo. He was a little wild-eyed, so I figured that would be better than inviting him in. I didn’t want the kids to see him.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Cherry? Are you okay?” Henry took my hand.

“Yes.”

His fingers were chilly and I rubbed them briskly and kissed them and put them down.

“Saying no to him didn’t seem to be an option,” Henry said, “so I got dressed while he stood outside in the yard. I was hoping he’d be gone by the time I got back, but he was there, all right. He had a jacket on, which I thought was unusual because it was a warm night. It didn’t occur to me that that’d be where he was hiding all his stuff: the iron, the fixings.”

“The iron.”

“Yeah. That’s what he hit me with.”

I pictured the small iron attached to the bathroom wall at the Norwood Hotel. Had he stolen it in order to use it on Henry? Or was there a similar iron situation at the Chalet? I hadn’t noticed. It didn’t matter.

“So we cruised around for a while. I drove. I thought he would talk, but he didn’t. And I couldn’t think of anything to say. There were things I was curious about: jail, being a drug addict, faking death. But they didn’t seem like appropriate topics.” Henry chuckled. “That sounds ridiculous, I know.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

“So, anyway, he finally told me to drive down Archibald to where Canada Packers used to be. He wanted me to pull right onto the site, which I did, by driving around to the back. There was a section where the fence had collapsed. By this time I was getting a little uneasy.”

Henry sipped water through a straw. I wondered why the straw was necessary. It made him seem so frail.

“Remember how the air in Norwood used to smell like… livestock sometimes,” he said, “if the wind blew in a certain way?”

“Yes. Dead livestock, I think.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I could smell it there. It was very unnerving. It probably would have seemed less so if there had been some conversation but he was so quiet. And every time I spoke my voice got higher and higher so I shut up. I parked where he told me to and then caught a glimpse of the iron when I turned toward him. That’s all I remember.”

Henry touched his head gently where he had been hit.

I thought about how knocks on the head sometimes killed people and I shuddered.

“Oh, Henry. No one deserves to be hit with an iron less than you do.”

He smiled and reached for my hand again.

“Pete’s ’s in terrible shape,.” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the next time he dies it might be for real.”

“Where is he, Cherry?”

“I don’t know. The cops are looking for him though. They’ll find him soon. He doesn’t try very hard to hide anything anymore.”

There would be time enough in the days to come to fill Henry in on all the things that Pete was no longer hiding.

“Frank said that a man out walking his dog found me. I guess Pete dragged me out of the car and left me there. They found the car on Des Meurons, so he must have driven it that far.”

“Yes.”

“I feel as though I’m going to drift off again,” said Henry. “I don’t want to. I keep dreaming about my heart.”

“Your heart?”

“Yeah. Like it’s burning up or frozen solid or melting or running away.”

Henry was asleep again.

“Is his heart okay” I asked a nurse who stopped in to check on him just as I stood up to leave.

“Whose heart?”

“Henry Ferris’ heart,” I said and pointed to him in the bed.

She assured me, after scanning all his paperwork and Henry himself, that yes, his heart was fine.

I hoped she wasn’t lying or mistaken.

After a dish of butterscotch pudding in the hospital cafeteria I checked on Henry again. He was still asleep, so I left him a note and caught a bus home.

It was 6:30 p.m. and I stared into the open fridge. There wasn’t much to choose from. Finally I chose a small can of beans from the pantry, put them in a pot and set them on the stove to heat.

The phone rang.

It was Myrna. I turned the heat off under the beans.

“Can you come over?” she whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” I asked.

“I think you’d better come over.”

“Why?”

“Pete’s here.”

Paranoia swept through me. Everyone knew more about my brother than I did. I couldn’t bear Myrna being in this picture.

“Cherry?”

“Yes.”

“Please come.”

“Is he dead?” I pictured him laid out on one of her slabs, waves of stink rising from the body.

“No. He’s not dead. Just come, will you? Take a taxi. I’ll pay for it.”

I dialled 775-0101 for a Duffy’s cab. Then I grabbed Frank’s phone numbers off the dining room table where he had left them. I tried his home phone first. He answered on the first ring.

No one ever goes to Myrna’s place voluntarily. Dead people live there.

She met me at the curb and paid the driver.

We didn’t go in the front door to the house. We walked around to the side and entered there, into a short hallway that smelled like the science lab at Nelson Mac on the day that we dissected frogs. I threw up that day. I had known it was coming and ran down the hall to the boys’ washroom. It was closer than the girls’. I made it to a sink before I spewed my guts. There was just one boy at a urinal. He was out of there before he had time to give his dick a shake.

Now we entered a large white room with four tables, four slabs: the room where Myrna does her work. There was a fridge, a freezer, two stainless steel sinks, water-glass fronted cupboards, spotless countertops. Three of the tables were empty. On the fourth there was a slight figure underneath a heavy sheet.

Pete stood at one end of that table. He had lifted the edge of the covering and he was looking at the dead body.

“Get away from there!” Myrna hissed.

Pete jumped back.

“What’s she doing here?” he asked.

“I called her,” Myrna said.

“What for?”

Myrna sighed. She was wearing orange lipstick. Like on the glass in Pete’s room at the Norwood.

I hate orange lipstick.

It was Myrna that Pete was in touch with all through the years, not Eileen. It was Myrna who told Pete I was happy.

“You knew he was alive,” I said. I wasn’t able to look at her. “All this time, you knew.”

“She and Eileen both knew,” said Pete. “So what?”

I turned to him. “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“No.”

“Or hurt me physically in any way?”

“No,” said Pete. “Of course not.” His gummy eyes wandered.

Of course not. My face was heating up, but I struggled to stay calm.

“Or Henry?” I asked

“No.” Pete snickered. “I’ve already done Henry. How is he, by the way?”

“None of your business.”

Pete had lost a front tooth since the night before. He was falling to pieces.

“What are you going to do next?” I asked.

He reached out for a straight wooden chair, dragged it noisily across the white tile floor and sat down.

“You talk like I have a master plan,” he said. “I’m just taking it minute by minute. Believe me.”

“Believe you?”

“Yeah. Why not?” He smirked.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me your best shot. Die every day if you want to. That seems to be what you do best. I can take it.”

There was a knock at the door and Myrna went to answer it. Frank came in and took Pete outside. I didn’t know if anyone but me realized how useless this all was. There was no way Henry would press charges against my brother. And he hadn’t really done much else, except steal an iron, drive Henry’s car a few blocks, use drugs and try to bite me. Would the cops be able to charge him without any input from Henry? I doubted it. There was possible arson; that was something. But they’d need proof. Maybe he would admit to it.

I followed them outside and Myrna came too.

“Cherry?”

I didn’t answer.

“Cherry, please,” she said.

I still didn’t answer.

She went back inside. I guess it was time to get started on the stiff.

Frank and Pete and I sat on the front lawn of the funeral home in the shade of a Manitoba maple. It was evening now and the sun was low. The days were getting shorter. Frank asked Pete why he had been given such a long sentence for his drug bust in British Columbia.

“Bad behaviour,” Pete said, like he did when I asked him.

“Did it have anything to do with the 1981 riots?” Frank asked.

“Yeah, some,” Pete said. “I was due to get out that summer. And then the riots happened. I got caught up.”

“What riots?” I asked.

“There were riots at Matsqui in June of ’81,” Frank said. “The place was in flames. It was all over the news at the time.”

It rang a faint bell.

“So when did you finally get out?” Frank asked.

“Not till early this year.” Pete grinned. “I just couldn’t seem to behave myself.”

He reached in his mouth and came out with a dark brown tooth. He tossed it at the trunk of the maple tree.

“After the riots I got into junk pretty heavily. It wasn’t hard to get fixed up inside. I would get caught up every now and then and the time just kept stretching out.”

“How could you and Nora have thought it was a better idea to pretend that you were dead than admit that you were in jail?” I asked.

Pete laughed and it turned into a cough. “How can you even ask that?” he said. “It was all about appearances for Nora. All. I couldn’t have given a flying fuck if Jane Fonda knew I was in jail, but Nora couldn’t handle it. It was just too shameful. She said, how could you do this to me? about eight thousand times.”

It was the most animated I had seen him since he came back. It took our goddamn mother to get a rise out of him.

“She wa-ay preferred my death.”

My eyes began to ache. How many times do I have to weep for my brother? I didn’t want to do it then, in front of him. I forced the tears back and the ache got worse.

Frank took Pete to the Remand Centre but he was out in a couple of days. He wouldn’t admit to the arson and Henry made it clear that he just wanted to forget about the whole thing.

His kids were furious. They wanted Pete strung up. Henry hadn’t told them that the maniac who had hurt him was my brother. He made up a name, Buzz Mantle, and a story about an old rivalry from the past. A rivalry for a history scholarship. It was the best he could do in his weakened state. He didn’t want them to associate anything bad with me.

I’m a little uncomfortable with this fabrication but I’m glad that Henry wants to protect me and what we have together, although I’m still not sure what that is.

Henry is not the love of my life, but I don’t think I’m going to have one of those.