The Dead Are More Visible (11 page)

“You were talking to us?” The voice was deep but nasal, grating, unsuited to that face.

“I just said leave him alone.”

“It’s you we want to see anyway.” He looked up at her. After a moment his smooth brow crimped slightly, his eyes welled wider. He’d figured it out. He said nothing. It was the third one who said, “Is this, like, a
woman?
” He was short and concave, with a pocked face, and he seemed the drunkest or most stoned of the three.

“I don’t know,” the leader said. “Ask her yourself. Is there a lady in there?”

“Never fucking seen a
woman
doing a rink.”

“I seen her,” the tall one said. “Told me to get the fuck off the ice, last year.”

“I was hardly here last year,” she said.

“In that other park. Down Barrie.”

“Well, I guess the ice wasn’t ready,” she said. She took a hopeful glance at the crazy man. He wasn’t seeing any of this. She should retreat to the hut, call the police. Something stopped her. She was slow on her feet—hadn’t run a step in years. At least out here there was the hose and the wet ice between her and them.

“Looks ready now,” the third one said.

“What,
her?
” the tall one said with a stupid leer.

“The ice.”

“Check it and see, Zach,” said the leader. Zach, the short one, tried sliding onto the surface beyond the pooling water. His lead foot drove through crusted slush. He started to topple forward, waved his arms, slammed backward onto his elbows and ass. You could hear his bones on impact. He rolled over onto all fours—hands and knees—and stayed like that, head drooped.

“Okay, you can get up now,” she said. “You’re wrecking my work. You should be moving on.”

“We’d like to see your office first,” the leader said, ignoring his hurt friend.

“You’re not going to.”

“We already dropped in at the hut in that other park. Up in the Heights.”

“Sure,” she said.

“You think I’m lying?”

His face was pale. He seemed ready to pull out a scalp as proof. Walt Unger, a small, shyly talkative chain-smoker, would be flooding the rink in Rideau Heights.

Zach was back on his feet, rubbing his wet elbows with the opposite hands—a hurt little boy gesture. His wince was angry, yet he glanced timidly at the ice as if it were alive and likely to buck him off his feet if he moved. “
Bitch
,” he said, but it didn’t seem directed at her. That was good—she didn’t have to respond.

“Let’s go,” the leader said, and for a soaring moment she believed that he was addressing his friends, telling them they were moving on. Then she felt his cold eyes pushing deeper into her.

“Lead the way,” he said.

“If I go into that office, it’ll be to call the cops. And there’s nothing there. You think any of us bring money out here for a graveyard shift?”

He seemed to be giving this some thought. Then he said, “Your friend at the other rink did.”

“What?”

“Brought money.”

“I doubt that very much.”

He went even whiter. “You know what?” he said, frowning, as if he had just discovered something that surprised him very much. “You’re a goof.”

“What?”

“A
goof
.”

Zach let a single laugh ride the silence.
Goof
. Not the A-word, not the B-word, not the C-word. Gavin had never done time like others in his family—he’d run a series of video and corner stores, trying and failing to franchise them—but a few of his boyhood friends had done time, and so he, of course, had considered himself an expert on Inside. And goof, he’d told her, was the worst thing you could call another inmate. Fucker, loser, asshole, shithead—that whole repertoire could get you into big trouble, no question, but goof was the worst. Maybe because it felt so silly. So
dismissive
. A fucker, after all, might fuck you, or fuck you up, or fuck you over. A goof was just pathetic. Maybe handsome here had done time. Certainly he’d done time. He knew how to use the word. But the use of the word bothered,
enraged
her, for another reason altogether and now she jerked the control ring fully open and turned the hose on him, narrowing the mouth with her gloved thumb so it sprayed even harder.
Bitch
she would have preferred. A bitch at least was female. Fat bitch, even. Bull dyke. Anything in that line. This was worse than being invisible, worse than being looked through or past, which happened all the time, and so be it, she could take it, a small daily heartbreak—things could be far worse. She doused him from the knees up, briefly but thoroughly, finishing at the face—how she resented that sculpted, cocky face!—then aimed the hose over
at the tall one, but he and Zach were quickly shuffling backward off the ice.

The leader was rigid with the soaking—face twisted, shoulders hunched up, arms dangling. For a few moments his body stayed like that while his face slowly relaxed, refocused. He unzipped his jacket, reached in, pulled out a pair of red-handled ice picks, the sort snowmobilers use to pull themselves clear if they fall through the ice. One in each bare hand he came at her, his trainers stuttering over the wet ice. She turned the hose on him again. He kept coming, head lowered, squinting hard. The other two converged on her from either side with the same clumsy shuffle. She took her thumb off the outlet. The leader’s face was shiny, sopping, his narrowed eyes fixed not on her eyes but lower—maybe her mouth or throat. His eyes had glazed over, unreachable. He was quivering. There was no use trying to talk. She was backing into the darker area between the lamppost and the warming hut, her heart punching at her ribs. She gripped the spouting hose head like a club. He lunged, swiping the picks in front of her face, then slipped forward, off balance. She didn’t know whether to club or stab at him with the hose head but her body decided, thrusting at his face as it came up—the eyes wide—her full weight and strength behind it. Gavin’s advice again. Never be tentative with a first blow. Though it hadn’t helped Gavin in the end. He’d died three years back—four years after leaving her—in a confrontation on John Street, screaming in through
the window of somebody’s cube van until he dropped, his heart finally imploding with the decades of rage. He’d needed her after all, she realized. He relied on her outlook. To Ellen, anger was a rare detour, not a lifetime of highways.

She connected, but it was an odd feeling, blunted. Her attacker’s face jerked down. The hose seemed stuck. In a panic she yanked back and he was sagging to his knees, dropping the ice picks, reaching for his face. The other two men stopped and froze.

“Shane?” the tall one said, voice shrivelling. “What’d she do to you, man?”

He was making coarse, braying sounds. She crouched down, holding the once-more streaming hose, grabbed the ice picks, put them in her outside pocket, stood up.

“Shane?” said Zach.

“My eye,” he said. The words were muffled. He lowered his hands and turned his face up toward hers, his friends still behind him. She flinched and gasped—a ladylike sound—a lady in a film, about to faint.

She dropped the hose and knelt down. “Oh my God.”

“Get away,” he said.

“You,” she said to the tall one, who was closest to the hut, “go in, call 9-1-1.”

“9-1-1? Are you fucking joking, lady?”

Now she was a lady.

“We need an ambulance,” she said.

“No way, they’ll take us in.”

“Just ask for an ambulance!”

“He’ll be okay. Come on, Shane.”

“My eye!”

Zach started toward her and Shane.

“Don’t move!” she told him. “You might step on it.”

“You mean …?” His mouth was ajar, brows stitched together.

“We have to look for it. Call 9-1-1,” she told the tall one. “Step carefully!”

He glanced over at Zach. Zach said, “We could like, call, then run for it.”

“I need you both to help me look.”

“They always send a cop car too,” the tall one said.

“They can put it back in,” she said, “the eye.” She was pretty sure about this. She looked at the hut. She needed to turn off the water. It kept spewing from the hose lying at her knees, so water was lapping out around them, maybe carrying the eye further into the dark. But it couldn’t have gotten far. Shane was on his side on the wet ice, curled up, rocking and grunting, one hand over the socket with its dangling nerve as she searched around him, tearing off her four gloves, peering hard, easing her hand over the ice. There were only a few spots of blood. No eye.

“Please,” he whispered, “help me. I’m sorry.”

“We’ll find it,” she said. “Tell your friend to call an ambulance! The tall guy.”

“I need help, Gabe, call!”

Zach was shuffling around, hunched almost double, searching. “Pretty hard to see over this way,” he said
with the casual tone of a drunk looking for a dropped coin. Gabe picked his way toward the office door. Ellen was crawling over the puddled ice, tracing a circle around Shane. She would spiral outward in widening laps until she found the eye. She glanced over at the crazy man—still confronting the obelisk, oblivious. The door of the office swung open and light spilled onto the ice.

“That’s good!” she called. “Leave it open.”

“Hey, I think it’s … shit. No.” Zach was bent over, groping at something on the ice. As she watched, he toppled slowly forward.

Gabe was emerging from the office. In the doorway he stood silhouetted, panting as if he’d just run back from a distant payphone. Her new radio/CD player was in his hand. He shrugged, sheepish.

“I did call,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Sorry, man.”

She wasn’t sure who he meant by that. Pushing with one foot, sliding with the other like a curler, he skittered away to where the ice ended at the path leading onto Bay Street. As he hit the pavement he began sprinting, impressively fast for an intoxicated man with a large object in one hand.

Zach, now on his hands and knees like her, had stopped looking for the eye. He was watching Gabe disappear. She figured he would take off now too—but then he went on searching.

She said, “Zach?”

“I’m Sh-shane.” A whisper through jittering teeth.
The black leather of his jacket was frosting over.

“No, I mean your friend.”

“Me?” said Zach. His head turned vaguely.

“Come more over this way—I doubt it could have got over to the boards.”

“Be careful,” Shane breathed, “they can put them back in.”

She was moving away from Shane, outward in her circles. Then she thought she saw it. It had slid off a good twenty feet, to where the wet ice met the hard bank of snow shovelled to clear room for the rinks. It was in the shadow of that bank. She was sure now. She crawled toward it, trembling. The eye seemed to watch her with unnatural alertness, even a kind of indignation, as if she were too slow in coming to its aid. Closer still, it seemed to stare not at but through her, at something behind or beyond her.

“I think I see it!” Zach yelled. He must be watching where she was headed.

“Go into the hut,” she called back. “There are bags in there, plastic bags in a Kleenex box, by your feet on the right as you go in. Get one and fill it with snow and bring it here. No, just bring it here. There’s snow here.”

“Okay! Just a minute!”

“You found it,” Shane said behind her.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. She reached for the eye, then paused, wanting to put her rubber glove on. The glove was back on the ice beside Shane. She didn’t
touch the eye. She might damage it. It was hideous but riveting. Disembodied eyes made occasional appearances in horror novels, but those eyes were usually conscious, vigilant, a threat. This one was glassing over, as if losing interest in the world. Maybe starting to freeze. It didn’t look real. Porcelain with an iris of grey-blue glass, and too perfectly round to be real. If this were a film she would complain about the special effects. Like when the Twin Towers fell, soon after Gavin’s death—how it looked less real than the artificial disasters in films.

She wasn’t sure how soft an eye was—her impression was that the main material was more or less like pudding, though held firm by a membrane. She could imagine her fingerprint remaining on the eye, a pattern he would look through for the rest of his life. She would wait for the bag of snow and ease it in with a knuckle.

A far howl of sirens, the sound slowly mounting. She stayed on her knees, huddled low over the eye as if to shield it from the cold. She cupped it with her shivering hands without making contact. This way she didn’t have to see it. She glanced back. Zach had paused as he reached Shane on his way to the hut. He stood wobbling above his friend.

“You’re going to pull through, dude.”

“The hut!” she cried. “I need that bag!”

“Okay.” He staggered on, almost fell again. Then his head tilted with a drunk’s abrupt, temporary alertness. He’d heard the sirens. They were closing in. He ducked
into the hut and emerged briskly, as though instantly sober, and slid toward her across the ice. The whites of his eyes showed larger. She had her left hand out for the bag and he relayed it to her with his stretched right.

For a second he stood above her, captivated by the eye. He glanced back at Shane. “I got to get out of here,” he whispered loudly, then stepped up on the bank and tore away across the park—the opposite direction from Gabe—his shoulders pitching and his hood peeling back. He ran past the obelisk, the man there turning his head stiffly to watch him go. As the moaning of the sirens merged into a single scream, she stuffed a handful of snow into the bag—they were kept in the hut for picking up the dog turds that cluttered the park and sometimes the ice. With the knuckle of her index finger she nudged the eye over the lip of the bag. It rolled right in. Unsure whether to seal the bag or leave it open, she turned and crawled back toward Shane. She was afraid of standing—she might slip, drop the bag, even fall on it. She crawled on her knees and right hand, her left holding the bag clear.

Shane sat up as she approached. The back of the hand covering the empty socket was blue and unbloodied. His good eye was fixed on hers. He was seeing her now, really looking. One of those rare times. Sometimes life seemed little else than a struggle to win the attention, the gaze, of others. That was what Gavin had really been doing, she supposed, screaming into that van at the end.