Elizabeth and After (3 page)

The motor growled and roared. The wheels spun and whined. Shooting up from under the car came a powerful curtain of mud. The car sank even lower. Underneath all that mud were some rocks McKelvey remembered dumping into place on a rainy October afternoon the year his father died. McKelvey opened his door, now level with the mud, keeping the pedal to the floor.

From beneath the hood a thick black cloud of rubber-scented smoke began rising into the swamp’s green canopy of leaves. The oversized muscle-bound super-tread tires clawed down to those rocks from long ago. The car jerked upward, then fell back briefly before blasting out of the mud as if kicked in the ass by a 450-horsepower hoof. Spinning and careening, it shot down the trail, mud spraying everywhere. McKelvey’s door slammed against a birch tree. When the car came to a forgotten hump, its exhaust system sheared off with a loud explosion.

McKelvey had been trying to lift his foot from the accelerator but the new-born howl of the unmuffled engine frightened him so much that his knee locked again, jamming the pedal to the floor. McKelvey could only hang on to the steering wheel while the car cleared itself a trail through the woods, picking up speed as it fought through the saplings and underbrush. When it reached the beach it shot forward with a roar, the speedometer needle swinging wildly until the car reached an unfamiliar cedar dock which moaned and splintered under the car’s weight as it became the runway for McKelvey’s bid for outer space.

He screamed. Unconsoled by the whipped-cream comfort of his bucket seat, he clutched the white leather steering wheel and listened to the sound of his own terrified bellow. Ahead of him were the blue sky and jagged pine horizon, beneath him
a terrible series of thuds and clunks. With a splash and an ear-splitting sizzle, the white bomb hit the water. Even as it sank, it struggled to take off again, the tires churning up great sprays of water and sand. Then with a fizzle and a hiccup the engine conked out and the car came to rest—a thin film of water lapping over the hood. At some point the windshield wipers had activated themselves. They cleared away the mud and debris to offer McKelvey a view of the centre of Dead Swede Lake. A few hundred feet away a rowboat turned towards him. McKelvey waved at the familiar blocky figure, and went to work on his knee. When he got it loose he rolled down the window, then used his good leg to try to push open the door. He’d always imagined it would be impossible to open a door underwater. In movies people were always having to escape out their windows. But now, maybe because the water wasn’t very deep, the door began to move. Just as well because he didn’t need a ruler to figure there’d be no wriggling out through the narrow window.

By the time he’d got to shore, emptied his shoes and squeezed out his pantcuffs, the rowboat had drawn up beside the car.

“How’s the fishing?” McKelvey asked.

“Slow.” The occupant of the rowboat, Gerald Boyce, was short but very wide and though his hair was spun a thick and snowy white, his round baby face was smooth.

“Fucking car,” McKelvey said. He stepped closer to the rowboat and peered at Gerald as though he hadn’t recognized him before.

“You like a ride?”

“Wouldn’t mind.”

He picked up his shoes and socks and put them in his vest pockets. Then he walked his bare feet along the remains of the
hot sun-warmed dock until he was positioned to step into the boat.

While Gerald was rowing towards the middle of the lake, McKelvey took a package of makings from the pocket of Gerald’s workshirt and rolled himself a cigarette. He still had his own lighter at least. Dr. Knight hadn’t said anything about pregnant women not being allowed to start fires.

By the time McKelvey got his smoke set and going, Gerald was near the centre of Dead Swede Lake. A stringer hung from one oarlock. McKelvey pulled it up. A few small bass wiggled enthusiastically, then started trying to swim as he lowered them into the water.

“We could go home and eat them,” Gerald said. “You think you can work a fillet knife without slitting yourself?”

McKelvey undid the top buttons of his shirt to let in the sun and air. He would go back to Gerald Boyce’s. They would fry the fish and sit on Gerald’s broken-down front porch and look out at the orchard of hybrid trees and freak apples that surrounded Gerald’s house. He would pick the bones from the charred fish flesh, smoke Gerald’s cigarettes, drink his boiled coffee and listen to stories about how Gerald’s dead brother Vernon, had tried to save the township from developers and cable television. Every now and then he or Gerald would go into that black hole of a kitchen, the way they used to, and kick the refrigerator to make sure the beer didn’t freeze.

The sky was a deep endless blue, the kind of blue McKelvey had always loved as a boy, the kind of blue that promised to turn into a heart-grabbing purple when evening came.

“Sure,” McKelvey said. “Fry those fish. Ruin that coffee.”

Gerald raised his eyebrows. They were two white furry patches on his smooth and deeply tanned forehead. Beneath them, his eyes: bovine spheres of a rich chocolate brown so
full of mute compassion that McKelvey felt his own eyes fill with tears at the thought of how fate had taken his life, shrunk it, dried it out, thrown it so far from its sources that until this moment—suddenly and inexplicably back in the midst of everything that nourished him—he hadn’t even noticed.

At this distance the white bomb was just a curving sheet of wet white metal. It could have been anything. Moby Dick. A creamy mermaid haunch. The bulging remnant of a white kitchen fallen from the sky.

“Nice car,” Gerald finally said. “Hope you didn’t pay cash.”

Gerald Boyce was one of three: there had been Vernon, the deceased and sainted reeve; there continued to be Vernon’s twin brother, Roydon, an upright stick of a man who’d been West Gull’s doctor until he migrated south to be a rich old geezer doing plastic surgery on movie stars and socialites in an Arizona clinic; finally there was Gerald, the forgettable recluse who, aside from digging the occasional winter grave with his fancy front-end loader, had squandered his share of the family money by playing mad-scientist with old television sets, breeding so-called organic fruits and vegetables and using his big cow eyes to draw various local widows and other helpless women into his dubious lair like trusting minnows to a shark’s gullet.

Early on the Sunday morning he witnessed the amazing re-appearance of William McKelvey, he had been woken up by the piercing squeak of his rusted mailbox hinges. He lay still, letting his dizziness settle, then went into the kitchen and looked down to the end of his driveway. The mailbox was turned. He slid his feet into the shapeless deer moccasins Vernon’s wife, MaryLou, had given him a few Christmases ago and started towards the road. At the mailbox he found a square
white envelope that looked like it should be holding a Christmas card or a wedding invitation. His name was hand-printed on the outside. Inside was a single piece of paper that read:

Gerald Boyce looked up. He saw only that the dark blue stain of dawn had yielded to a yellow shimmer announcing the sun.

“Idiot,” he said.

At intervals that ranged from weeks to years and at unpredictable hours of the day and night but always when he wasn’t looking, someone deposited these bizarre messages in his box, each time in a different kind of envelope, perhaps to trick him into opening it, which he always did.
MY WAY IS YOURS
had been the previous message. What was that supposed to mean? Was it sponsored by some kind of hitch-hikers’ association? He’d put it in his truck and later, while in town, slid it under a windshield wiper at the supermarket parking lot.

He stuffed
LOOK UP AND YE SHALL SEE HIM
into his pocket and went back to the house for breakfast. He boiled his coffee camp-style just for the strong bitter taste of it. Walking with a slight forward bend to keep his mug from spilling, he set off on his morning rounds: first the chicken coop, the sour-smelling domicile of four sinewy hens long past stewing and a rooster whose feathers had fallen out when Gerald called it a useless tit—he later apologized but the damage was done; next the glass-and-plastic greenhouse now empty except for its raised trays of manicured earth; lastly the garden—long hummocked hay mounds divided by rows of vegetables he brought twice a week to the West Gull supermarket for their local produce section which the locals carefully
avoided while tourists clustered round it like vampires at a blood bank. There had been a time when he spent whole days weeding. Now mulch, a Rototiller and laziness had made his life easier, which meant that after he had returned to the house for a second cup of coffee, he got his tackle box and headed towards the lake.

By the time he reached the shore the sun was already above the trees. Hawks squawked and thrummed. Bugs buzzed and bugged. Gerald pushed off and started rowing, the sun clanging against the metallic surface of the water, hammering at him the way it had done all summer.

He was starting to doze in the boat when he heard the sound of a car at the old McKelvey place. After it died away, he rolled himself a cigarette, stroked towards shore and began to fish. He was bringing in his fourth bass when the car started again. For the first time in more years than he could recall, he heard a motor coming from the barns towards the lake. The barely audible hum grew louder, deepened. Then there was the high whine of a stuck car trying to free itself and another silence that was broken by a new roaring—this one wild and ever louder as whatever machine it was bore through the bush towards him. Gerald remembered
LOOK UP AND YE SHALL SEE HIM
.

He looked up and he saw
it
—wreathed in a black shroud of smoke, accelerating along the dock until for a brief crazy moment it was airborne, a shining white wingless Armageddon beast launched to avenge the world’s sins. It hung suspended while its windshield wipers suddenly went into action, the furiously blinking eyes of a demented monster, after which, with a huge slapping splash followed by a great hissing of steam and rising of vapours, it fell into the water. Gerald Boyce applauded long and loud. He was just about to
call for an encore when the car door opened and a thick body pitched into the lake.

He took McKelvey into the boat and rowed him across the lake. He could hardly believe how McKelvey’s face had changed: it looked like puffed pale pudding and hung off the bones as though he’d just stepped out of his own coffin—except the coffin had been one of Luke Richardson’s fancy cars and was now parked up to its gills in what some incredible wit had christened Dead Swede Lake because more than a century ago, local legend had it, a landless and love-tormented Swedish labourer had swum out into the middle of the lake, yodelled out his heart-struck swan song, then drowned.

Once at the shore McKelvey, pasty face and all, showed a little of the old muscle and threw the boat halfway up the hill in his eagerness to get to the house and have a forkful of fish in one hand, a bottle of beer in the other.

Eventually the fish and the beer were all gone and McKelvey lay sleeping where he had often enough slept before: on the old couch surrounded by a couple of dozen black-and-white TV sets that Gerald had bought cheap forty years ago with the intention of fixing and re-selling them. That idea would have made a lot of money had some idiot not invented colour television just as he was getting down to work.

Gerald was out on his porch reviewing his life’s lost opportunities, when Luke Richardson’s sleek black Cadillac turned into the drive and came creeping towards him, pale headlights glowing like albino snake eyes. Some people you faced directly; others you just sensed until they broke through the surface like a huge boulder appearing in the middle of your best field. Luke Richardson, after the obligatory pause, got out of his car, closed the door deferentially as though Mammon
himself was smoking a cigar in the back seat, and drew himself straight, patting at his trousers and shirt. He was a tall man, Luke Richardson, the kind who liked to get close and look down on you until you backed away. These days he was doing a lot of that: getting close to people, looking down on them, requesting their support for his run at the reeveship. Never said anything bad about Vernon, of course, but everyone knew how he’d tried to screw MaryLou after Vernon died. Also how MaryLou had managed to screw him in return and how Luke Richardson was now running for reeve to get back on top. Luke took off his sunglasses and carefully inserted them in the pocket of his shirt, grinning that big politician grin that made his eyes crinkle up like a shopping centre Santa Claus.

Gerald looked at Richardson’s boots. They were dry and shiny, which meant that Luke hadn’t yet located his stray lamb. He shook the big hand, soft and ripe, then watched how well Luke kept that smile on his face while he worked his mouth around the sad story of his missing car.

T
HE SUMMER
C
ARL DISCOVERED THE
old Motorola radio suspended beneath the dashboard of his father’s truck, he would lie on his back on the bench seat, his feet hooked under the yellowish imitation-antler plastic steering wheel, and listen to country music while watching the clouds drift by the dust-spattered windshield. This strange activity made his heart pound uncomfortably; to allay the sensation he would unfold his baseball glove into a giant butterfly and place it across his chest. The glove converted the sound of his heartbeat into the slow throb of a deep bass drum which he’d join to the music, his eyebrows pinched together in concentration.

More than twenty years later, he was hearing that same deep throb and wearing that same look of pinched concentration as Chrissy—his X, as he sometimes thought of her, as in X marks the scar—told Carl of his father’s latest escapade. There was a twist of amusement in her tone but for Carl, as always, news of his father came down heavy and unwanted.

“Drove it right into the lake,” Chrissy said. “Gerald Boyce picked him out. They drank for six days, then Gerry wrapped him in a blanket and loaded him unconscious into the back of his tow truck. Delivered him to the R&R like that. Told them he hadn’t wanted to embarrass his old friend by calling an ambulance.”