The Carpenter (14 page)

It was the kind of workday when the hours went by slowly but when Pete got home he would wonder where it had all gone. Once, when he was new, a customer had driven away from the
pumps with the gas nozzle still in the filler neck at the back of the car. The hose pulled off the pump and flapped like an obscene rubber tail. Gasoline sprayed everywhere. A woman walking by just stopped and stared. She was smoking a cigarette. It was an hour or two before the customer returned, whipped into a rage. He went on about how they all would be held financially liable for the damage to his car. Even then, new as he was, Pete guessed you couldn’t go long here before you were a veteran.

After he’d restocked the washer fluid, Pete went to change the trash bags in the washroom. He put on a pair of dish gloves they kept along with the other maintenance supplies. The gloves were pink and felt clammy inside. Pete was just stepping out with the bag of trash. He didn’t even see Billy.

—Hey, man.

—Jesus Christ, Billy, you scared the hell out of me.

Billy was leaning against the back wall of the store.

—What are you doing out this way? said Pete.

—I got my brother’s car. I kind of felt like driving around.

Billy spat out a little wad of saliva. He looked away at the bracken on the far side of the property: Emily, man. I don’t even know.

—What happened?

—Oh, what does it even matter.

Billy spat again. He kicked at the gravel. Pete felt an instinct to reach out, put a hand on the shoulder. He was halfway to doing this before he recalled that he was still wearing the pink dish gloves. Instead, he said: I’m sorry to hear that, Bill.

Even as he said it, he felt the lie for what it was. He was sorry that his friend was hurting, but he could not even pretend to feel bad that Emily had broken it off. He wondered what this meant, what this told him about himself. He cleared his throat and looked at the sky, looked anywhere but at Billy.

—Everything happens for a reason and all that other shit my brother’s wife always says, right? said Billy.

—I’m working tomorrow but not the next day. If you want we can get drunk.

—Yeah, maybe. You know what? Maybe when you skip town I’ll come with you. Fuck it.

—You bet.

N
o, Stanley, said Dick. Like I said before, this Gilmore, he’s not anybody at all. He told Len Gleber that the work he had was groundskeeping around EZ Acres down the highway. His story checked out fine. He told Gleber when it got cold he might head down to the city.

They were sitting in the front of the unmarked patrol car, rubbing the chill out of their hands in front of the heater. Stan’s truck stood alongside the unmarked car and both vehicles were parked outside of Western Autobody. A cold autumn storm was brewing.

Dick went on: As far as it looks, all this guy did wrong was have another gal on the go. I’m glad Eleanor talked to you. Not just because of her sister but because of all the rest of it. Aurel and the brothers.

—I’m glad she let me tell my side. I think she’s had a lot of sadness in her life.

Dick had a cup of coffee he’d brought with him from the garage. He tasted the coffee and then he cracked open the driver side door and poured it onto the wet pavement.

—One thing Eleanor said was how ordinary he was, said Stan. She said he didn’t look like he worked in an office or anything like that but otherwise he was just ordinary.

—Ordinary, said Dick.

—They never look like anyone in particular, not like in the movies.

—You remember back when Fran and me were living in the city, said Dick. I never loved it at that time and I don’t miss it one
goddamn bit. But you remember I was on the Metro force. I was doing prisoner transfers from the provincial courthouse downtown out to wherever those sons of bitches ended up. There’s not so much I care to remember, because when your job is to drive those kinds of men around, those men who rape or steal or harm children or kill for money, you’re best to not pay them much mind. They don’t deserve it. But I do remember one from all the men I transported, I remember one above all the others. Because he didn’t have none of that desperation about him. He was just ordinary.

—Who was this?

—I don’t have any memory of his name, though I suppose I read it a time or two on the paperwork or in the newspapers or on the radio, because his name was around for a little while. He was just a man with a plain face. We were taking him to Kingston. He’d worked in an Italian restaurant. He was a cook in the kitchen. He lived with his wife in the east part of the city. And one day this ordinary man, well, he goes into work, into the kitchen, and gets the biggest carving knife he can find and goes on into the manager’s office and he sticks that carving knife into the manager’s throat and cuts it wide open. Just like that, this manager sitting at his desk with his head, you know, hanging backwards just by the bones. Anyhow, the man went home on the streetcar and when he got home he got another carving knife from his own kitchen and tried to do the same to his wife. He would of, too, if he didn’t cut her arm open first. They said he slipped in her blood and hit his head on a chair when he went down. The gal got herself out of there. God knows what she must of thought of the turn of events. I never even heard him raise his voice, is what she said at the trial, and that was all the witness she ever beared against him. Anyhow when the city cops—boys I knew, some of them—got to the house, the man didn’t resist at all. They found him, they said, holding a towel full of ice to the back of his head. You know what he said on
trial? He said the manager just talked too much. He said the gal talked too much too. He said he couldn’t stand everybody talking all the time. On the day we moved him to Kingston, this cook, he just sat there quiet as you like and watched out the window. It was around Cobourg or so, and I remember we were slowed right to a stop with some roadwork. Bill Finley, the chap riding shotgun, was dead asleep. So I catch myself looking at the cook in the mirror, just how goddamn ordinary he was. I must of looked away for a minute and then I looked back again and the bugger was looking right at me. Right at me. He says what we’re doing is a good thing. I should of paid him no attention, but him looking at me, it caught me off guard, and I says to him, Why is that? And he smiles and he says because he’s not ever going to stop. He says there’s too much talk in the world and he’s not going to stop till he cuts every tongue out of every head he finds. Right around then, Finley waked up and he saw this man was talking so he slammed the cage with his hand and told him to keep his goddamn mouth shut. Which is what I should of done in the first place. Or just paid him no mind at all.

Dick was looking out over the dashboard. A leafless privet hedge was moving in the wind in front of them.

—I don’t believe there are too many of them out there, said Stan. Or at least I don’t want to believe it. I think like you say, most of them get rabid because of desperate times. Thirty-eight years and I don’t remember but maybe one or two times I dealt with a person that had it that way right down to the core. The couple times I did think I saw it in somebody I always came away thinking I didn’t have the real makings to do much about it. I was always afraid of that.

—The only time I thought I was looking it in the eye was that cook in the rear-view mirror. I shouldn’t of even paid him any heed at all.

—Listen to us. We’re a couple of miserable old bastards. Anyhow, the vet said he’d be done with Cassius at three.

—Hold up, old man. I’m not done with you yet. I can tell you one thing maybe you’ll find interesting. Len Gleber thought Judy’s boyfriend might be hard to track down. So Gleber went over to EZ Acres. The manager had to radio for him, walkie-talkie, but the boyfriend came after five or ten minutes. The boyfriend told Gleber he was real sorry about Judy but he thought she’d made more of it than he had. Said he hadn’t seen her in a couple weeks. He didn’t think he’d go to the funeral because he didn’t want to cause any more upset to Eleanor, but would Gleber pass on a couple words of sorry. They looked into him after that and they didn’t come up with anything. He’d been working at EZ Acres for about three months, according to the manager, mostly part time.

—You’re going to a lot of work to tell me what you’ve already told me, said Stan.

—Well, look here. Gleber happened to see the boyfriend getting into a car after he interviewed him. Gleber didn’t see the driver, and it wasn’t a minute before the car was gone, but Gleber had a rookie he was training and he thought he’d get the kid to run the plates. So the kid runs the plates on the car and what he gets for the registration is Alec Reynolds.

—Alec Reynolds, said Stan. I remember the name …

—He’s been in long-term care a few years. Dementia, all the rest of it.

—The car’s hot?

—No. Alec’s only living next-of-kin is a niece. Arlene Reynolds. The girl’s name was registered on the insurance. When I got Gleber to talk about it last week, and I had to be careful about how I was asking these questions, he mentioned this girl’s name. I did a bit of looking on my own. She lived in Montreal for most of the last ten years and came back here in the spring. But that’s all. She doesn’t have a record or anything. Maybe she’s the other girl Judy saw.

—Didn’t Alec Reynolds have a place on Indian Lake?

—The marina in the north end, said Dick. Far as I know the bank hasn’t foreclosed on it yet but that can’t be long off. The store’s been closed up for six years, easy, as long as Alec’s been in hospital.

—Eleanor talked about a place her sister had gone to try to track down the boyfriend. A motorhome was what she said.

—Motorhome—could be EZ Acres, where he was working.

—Could be.

—Goddammit, Stanley, what do you have in mind here?

—I don’t know. I suppose I just want to meet him. Have some words with him. I want to see what there is to see about him. Anyhow, Frank gave me a warning at Thanksgiving. I don’t want you to do anything to run foul of him.

—Oh, he suspects I’ve been poking around. But he hasn’t come right out and said anything.

—Still.

—What’s the worst he could do, fire me? I’d be away hunting moose so goddamn fast your head would spin off. I’ll give you a ring, Stanley. Fran says she’d like to have you over for supper.

—I’ll see you soon, Dick.

Stan got out of the unmarked car and the rain came down on him. He climbed into his truck and started the ignition and the heater. Nothing made his joints ache like cold rain. His knuckles, his hips. He sat cursing while the truck warmed up.

After Stan got up the next morning, he went down and did half a dozen rounds on the heavy-bag. It took some time to work the stiffness out of his joints. He’d spoken on the telephone to his sister in the evening after he’d brought Cassius home from the veterinarian. She was his only living sibling, seven years his senior. She lived out west and he’d last seen her when she came out for Edna’s funeral. They talked about the weather and health and grandchildren. She asked about the house and he told her he
thought Frank and Mary might buy it from him. They agreed it would be nice to keep it in the family.

After Stan had cleaned up from his exercises, he lifted up Cassius’s ears and put in the drops that the veterinarian had prescribed. Cassius bore the indignity without complaint. Stan got a chunk of cold steak out of the refrigerator and gave it to the dog.

He left Cassius at the house and ran some errands in town. By midafternoon he had parked his truck near a marshy inlet on the northwest side of Indian Lake. He got out and walked up onto a pressure-treated birdwatching platform framed over the cattails. He had with him a pair of Bushnell 10x42 field glasses. He steadied his elbows on the rail and looked through the field glasses, north, to the bay at the top of the lake.

A rocky shore. One or two cottages closed for the winter. If Stan was correct, Alec Reynolds’s property was marked by an eroded concrete pier at the base of a high feature. There’d been a gas pump up there. Stan could make out part of what had been a small store and restaurant behind where the pump had been. The windows were boarded over and much of the building was lost from sight by a growth of spruce. Where the land climbed up behind the building, Stan could just discern the roof of a storage shed or barn.

He got back in his truck and drove around the gravel township roads north of the lake. He kept driving until he saw what he thought was the same roof he’d seen from the lake, the storage shed or the barn. It was a hundred yards south of the road, with bush intervening. Stan drove slowly until he came to a possibly corresponding driveway. It wound out of sight through the trees. He stopped the truck for a moment’s consideration.

A short distance back the way he’d come, the township road passed over a culvert. There were no other driveways between there and the one he reckoned led to the marina. Just past the culvert, a small clearing had been cleft into the bush. It was a good enough place to park. He got out of his truck and walked
into the bush. Everything was still wet from yesterday’s rainfall but the trees were not as thick as they had looked from the road. Up ahead, a creek was curving tightly through the trees and beyond that was the abrupt face of a rocky rise. Stan made his way over the fallen leaves. He came to the creek, which was wider than it looked, but he managed to cross it without any trouble. He went up the rise and when he came to the top he was breathing hard and the stiffness was back in his hips. He leaned on a tree to get his breath.

At the top of the rise was a thin treeline. Beyond the treeline, fifty yards of open ground led to the building he’d been seeking. It looked like a large shed for wintering boats, and on the far side of the shed he could make out half of a camper. Farther down, the roof of the store was just visible where the high feature dropped back to the lake. Stan unslung the field glasses from his neck and scanned the property. Nothing moved.

At last he trekked into the open field. The uncut grass hissed as he came to the back of the storage shed. The wall was windowless. He moved to the corner and peered around. The driveway from the township road came out of the trees and into a widened terminus between the storage shed and not one but two campers. One camper was a thirty-foot silver Airstream. The other was a battered Prowler, no more than nineteen feet long. The windows in both campers were dark.