The Carpenter (2 page)

Lee watched all of this from the kitchen doorway, and then he turned back to Donna, who’d started the dishes.

—Should I go?

—You can stay for a bit, said Donna. They’re going to do their after-supper thing.

—What, do they play Monopoly?

—No. Barry does a bible study with them. After that I think he’s going to the church. He’ll give you a ride back into town.

Barry reappeared carrying a cloth-bound study bible. He sat on the couch in front of the boys. Peter was leaning against the wall. He saw Lee watching him and he shrugged.

—Tonight we’re going to talk about Jonah and the whale, said Barry.

Lee pulled a dishtowel off a hook above the oven. He started drying a plate. He saw Donna glance at him out of the corner of her eye.

—They do this every night?

—He’s a good dad, Lee.

—I never meant nothing. He’s been real good to me, sister. It was him who came to see me when I was in the city.

—I had the boys to look after. Mama too. It would of been pretty hard for me to go to the city.

—Look. I don’t mean nothing. Anyhow, it can’t hurt to learn about the Bible. I read it a couple times. I have questions about it, but you know me. The questions I have are probably for the experts.

He helped with the drying for a few minutes more. Then Pete was standing beside him.

—I can take over.

—I can do it, Peter, said Lee. Or do they call you Pete?

—Sure, I like that better, said Pete. Anyway, the dishes aren’t any trouble. Usually I dry them. It’s that or the bible study.

—You’d rather be in here?

—Yeah.

Lee handed him the dishtowel and moved over to the doorway. He looked at the boys and at Barry addressing them:

—It wouldn’t take long for you or me to get real uncomfortable in a whale’s belly. But not Brother Jonah. He just kept on praying and giving thanks. Saying his hallelujahs till the third day. So what does the Lord do? He tells that whale to let Jonah out of his belly. That’s not the end, either. Jonah goes on to Nineveh, just like he was supposed to. This time he isn’t afraid to preach the Word. He goes and tells those unbelievers what’s what. And this time? The people listen to him. So I want you to think about being a brave Christian. About going out to spread the good Word. That’s one of your jobs, boys. That’s something the Lord expects in exchange for all the great things He’s done for you.

By the time the lesson was done, Irene’s eyes were closed. Lee went over and took her hand. Barry smiled at him and said: Come on, Brother Lee. I have to swing by the church. I’ll drop you off at your new place.

Sometime after midnight, Lee woke from the same dream he’d been having for as long as he could remember. In the dream he was a boy again, venturing down into the basement of the boarding house in town where he and Donna grew up. The basement had brick walls and a dirt floor and towards the back was a coal furnace. A set of octopus pipes stretched up from the firebox and transmitted strange sounds through the house at night.

In Lee’s dream, none of the dimensions were quite right and it seemed as if he approached the furnace slowly, over a great distance. He’d hear a sound and turn to see a crippled caretaker, bearing a spadeshovel full of coal, taking shape out of the dark. The caretaker always looked like he was about to say something but he never did. Lee would try to run, but would find his feet fixed to the floor, and with the certainty of dreams he knew the spadeshovel was meant for him, to lift him whole or in pieces and carry him over to the furnace and load him onto the burning coals.

The dream had come frequently to Lee through much of his childhood, through his years in prison. It troubled him. It always had.

A little later, he gave up on the idea of sleep. He got up from the pullout couch and walked around the apartment. Eventually he put on his jeans and undershirt, and he went outside and stood on the sidewalk. The street was deserted. A stoplight blinked overhead. Nothing was quite believable yet.

J
udy Lacroix was dead inside a car, parked on the gravel patch where the drive-in cinema had burned down. When Stan Maitland found her, he had a feeling of all his long years as a cop dilating on him. He knew who Judy was. He knew her family. This was a particular burden he held entirely to himself. That it was he who should find the girl dead in the car was proof of what could not be outstripped by the passing of time alone.

Earlier that evening, Stan had been fishing with his granddaughter Louise. They’d taken Stan’s boat north across Lake Kissinaw to a shoal in one of the back bays. Stan had brought along a carton of earthworms. Louise sat on the skiff’s middle seat. Her rubber boots did not touch the floor.

They conferred between long stretches of affable quiet. He loved how she would ply him with questions as to the nature of things.

—Grandpa, what do the fish do when the ice comes?

—Different fish do different things under the ice. I don’t know all of them, but bass—I told you how to tell which ones are bass—slow down and don’t do much. They just kind of hang around till it gets warm again. Sometimes my friends and I used to ice-fish, and on a nicer day we might think we could catch bass, but we never could.

Over an hour and a half they caught two pickerel and a small-mouth bass. When it was time to go he pulled the stringer of catch up into the skiff. In his tackle box he had a hatchet-handle, which he used to crack each fish across the skull. Louise sat primly, studying his every motion. Stan laid the dead fish on the bottom of the boat and rinsed his hands in the lake water. He stood, feeling his back pop, and heaved the pull-cord on the motor.

It was two days past the new moon, and by the time they returned to Echo Point the dark had fully settled. He’d left a light on in the front window of the house.

A dark form appeared on the dock while Stan was tying up. It was Cassius coming to greet them. Stan pushed the old black dog’s muzzle away from the fish. Louise trailed her hand along Cassius’s back.

—Can I see you clean the fish?

—I have to take you home now. It’s getting on to bedtime.

—Grandpa …

He knelt down beside her.

—You’ll get Grandpa in trouble, said Stan. Come on, let’s get your things. You can ride in the middle seat.

Stan told Cassius to stay in the yard. Louise climbed up into the cab of Stan’s pickup and Stan got into the driver’s seat and drove them out along Echo Point Road.

They talked about Louise’s first day of grade three. She wanted to know if he remembered when he’d been in grade three. He told her it had been in a one-room schoolhouse. He’d had to light the woodstove in winter. The building was gone now, long gone. It had been on the edge of the piece of land where the town had put up a golf course fifteen years ago.

Stan drove them out of the bush and they passed through open country. Ahead of them dust rose in the headlights. Then they were coming up to the drive-in. A screen stood out against the horizon. The box office and the concession stand and one of the other screens had burned down the year before. Some people around town whispered about a collection on insurance. Stan had been able to see the glow of the fire from the second floor of his house. He’d gone in his truck. The town fire department and the volunteer firefighters had already had the burning screen and the concession stand cordoned off when he arrived, but he’d come ahead of the police. The cops, when they finally showed up, were young. He hadn’t recognized them and they didn’t know who he was.

Now, passing the drive-in with Louise beside him, Stan saw how the thin new moon shone on the windshield of a car. The
car was parked halfway to where the burned movie screen stood in deeper black against the stars. The car was dark. He thought about it and did not think about it.

Then the drive-in disappeared behind them.

Before long he merged onto the highway. The lights of town lay ahead. Louise put her head on Stan’s arm.

Mary and Frank Casey had a modern split-level house east of downtown. The windows were lit. Parked in the driveway were Mary’s Volvo and a provincial patrol car. Mary opened the front door as Stan came up the walk, carrying Louise, who had fallen asleep.

He took her upstairs and put her into her bed, and then he stood back and spent a moment looking at her. He wondered, vaguely, how many more years he would get to see her grow up.

He followed Mary back down to the living room.

—I hope I didn’t get her home too late.

—No, Dad, it’s fine. Thanks. She loves it.

Mary sat in the loveseat and Stan sat down on the couch. Next to it, against the wall, was a Clarendon upright piano. Stan put his hand out and dallied his fingers over the keys but did not press them. Frank came out of the kitchen. He was wearing a grey T-shirt and his uniform trousers.

—Thanks for taking Louise, Stan.

—It’s never any trouble. Where’s Emily?

Frank sat on the arm of the loveseat and said: She’s seventeen. You can guess where she’s at.

—A new boyfriend?

—A boy. I don’t know that I’d call him more than that. With her, it’s the stray cats.

—She has good sense, Frank, said Mary, putting her hand on his knee.

—How’s the detachment? said Stan.

—Labour Day is over. All the kids are back in school, let’s put it that way. That makes me happy.

—Fall was always a quiet time, said Stan. A lot of people were too busy on the farms to mess around.

—Well, if things didn’t change like they do, I wouldn’t need half the cops I have now, fall or not. But that’s how it goes.

—That’s how it goes, said Stan.

Stan was back on the road a short while later. He was only eight years retired from the local detachment, despite what it had meant for his pension. At one time he’d known every street in town. He turned off the highway and five minutes later he passed the drive-in again. His headlights caught the same car he’d seen earlier.

Stan drove by. Then he pulled off to the side of the road. Gravel snarled against the underside of his truck as he moved from the hardtop to the shoulder. He brought the vehicle to a stop and sat holding the steering wheel. Then he got out of the truck and took out a D-cell flashlight that he kept under the seat. He didn’t turn it on just yet. There was enough light from the stars and the moon to bring everything out in halftones. He walked into the drive-in lot.

The silhouette of the car resolved itself. Stan looked to see whether it was rocking and he listened for the creaking of springs. He sniffed the air for dope smoke. This would be better, he thought, if Cassius was with him.

He turned on the flashlight, at first pointing it at the ground. He waited for something to happen and when nothing did he brought the flashlight up and shone it on the windshield. He moved the light along the side of the car.

One of the back windows was rolled down a few inches. The space at the top had been stuffed with a towel. Stan could see a garden hose tucked through. The hose was looped down through
the wheel well and around to the rear of the car. He moved up.

The flashlight cast a yellow glow into the back seat. The girl’s face was slack, dismayed. Her eyes were marbled.

Stan stepped backward. He looked at the dark shapes of the drive-in, black against the stars and the frame of the old screen. When he looked again he knew who she was. Her name was Judy Lacroix. Recognition was a hand pulling at his shirt sleeve.

Not that he’d ever forgotten it, how it was his arrest and testimony that had hanged the dead girl’s uncle.

A
t six o’clock in the morning on Thursday, Lee went into a diner called the Owl Café, a block away from his apartment. He took a stool at the counter. He was wearing his new work boots, carrying his new tool belt. These he’d purchased the day before. He’d also purchased a measuring tape and a hammer and a retractable knife and a small collection of pencils, which he’d carefully sharpened. He put the tool belt on the stool beside him. There was a colour television behind the counter playing a morning news broadcast. The picture was coming in and out. A waitress passing the set reached up and adjusted the antenna before she came over to Lee. Her face was warm and the name
Helen
was embroidered on her shirt. Her hips and breasts were round and full.

—Morning, hon.

—Morning yourself, said Lee.

—Anything catch your eye?

—You mean on the menu?

She grinned: Come on. You just got here.

He ordered eggs and home fries and extra bacon. She brought him a cup of coffee and then she moved away and passed his order through a wicket into a steaming kitchen. Lee lit a cigarette. Seated around him were a few other patrons. He didn’t think
he recognized any of them. There were a couple of truckers and a nurse along the counter, and four old men in a booth. A man with long dark hair and sharp features, wearing a down-filled vest and sitting near the window, might have been studying Lee if he allowed himself to think so. Lee tapped his cigarette into an ashtray. He flexed his toes inside his new work boots.

Helen came with his breakfast and refilled his coffee.

—Enjoy, Brown Eyes.

He slathered ketchup on his food and he hunched forward and dug into his breakfast. He sensed that Helen was watching him, amused. He looked at her.

—I don’t know where you usually eat, said Helen, but nobody’s going to steal your food here.

Before Lee could reply, she went back down the counter to take someone else’s order. The man in the down-filled vest raised a hand at her, snapped his fingers, but Helen ignored him. It was a different waitress who went to refill the man’s coffee.

Lee finished his breakfast. He got up and collected his tool belt and went into the washroom. When he came out, he saw Pete in a small car outside. The long-haired man with the sharp features was gone. Helen came over and Lee asked what he owed. After he’d paid, Helen said she hoped he’d come again.

He left the diner, feeling good and loose-limbed. Pete popped the trunk open and Lee dropped his tool belt beside the spare tire. He closed the trunk and got into the car.