The Dells (13 page)

“Hey, Shoe,” she said.

“Hello,” he replied. It was his day for not recognizing people he knew he should recognize.

The woman's smile did not falter. “I don't know whether to be pissed or pleased that you don't remember me. I've changed in thirty years, but I didn't think I'd changed that much. You haven't. I'm Janey. Janey Hallam.”

“I haven't forgotten you, Janey. I didn't recognize you. You have changed. A lot.”

“For the better, I hope.”

“I'd say so,” he said.

“No more baby fat,” she said, placing both hands on her trim waist. He didn't remember that she'd had any excess fat, baby or otherwise. “And I got my teeth straightened. Otherwise, all natural. Lots of exercise and clean living. Well, not too much clean living,” she added with a mischievous grin. “How's life treating you?”

“As well as can be expected,” he said. “How are you, Janey?”

“I'm good. Keeping busy, at least. I teach marketing a couple of nights a week, do a little music management on the side, and give fitness classes at a gym in the Jane and Finch mall.” She looked him up and down. “I'd suggest you come by, but you don't look like you need to work out more than you already do. Or are you just one of the lucky ones?”

“A little of both,” he said.

“You want to go get a beer or something? Get caught up?”

“I was just on my way back to my parents' house to check on them,” he said. “Rain check?”

“Sure. I'll be around. Come find me later.”

She waggled her fingers and smiled coyly over her shoulder as she walked away, taut backside twitching. In some ways, Shoe thought, it appeared Janey Hallam hadn't changed at all.

Shoe didn't remember precisely when the Hallam family had moved into the neighbourhood, but his memory of his first encounter with Janey Hallam was still vivid after nearly forty years. He and Joey Noseworthy had been twelve. They were shooting marbles in the schoolyard when Shoe became aware they were being watched by a scruffy, tomboyish girl of nine or ten. She
had raggedy dark blonde hair, slightly crooked teeth, and scabbed knobbly knees.

“Hi,” she said. “I'm Janey. Can I play?”

“Sure,” Shoe said. “Where're your marbles?”

“I don't have any.”

“Well, stupid, you can't play then, can you?” Joey said. “Go 'way.”

“I'm not stupid,” she said. “I have a quarter. I can buy some marbles.”

“So go buy some,” Joey said dismissively.

“I mean from you.”

Shoe was trying to work out how many marbles he'd be willing to sell her for a quarter, and which ones, when Joey stood up. He looked Janey in the eye, and said, “I'm not going to sell you any marbles, and neither is he, so why don't you just go
away
.” He put his hand on her chest and pushed.

Janey staggered back a step or two, face clouding and eyes smouldering. Shoe saw it coming, but before he could warn him, Janey stepped up and slugged Joey, a roundhouse right to the cheek that knocked him onto the tarmac. She then grabbed his blue Crown Royal bag of marbles and ran. She didn't get far. One of the teachers monitoring recess had witnessed the altercation and cut off her escape. The teacher returned Joey's marbles to him, then dragged all three of them to the principal's office.

“He should've just sold me some marbles,” Janey later said to Shoe. He agreed.

It was the beginning of a triangle that challenged Shoe's loyalties more than once. Joey was his best and oldest friend, but the better he got to know Janey, the more he liked her, despite the two-year difference in their ages. She was smart and feisty and tough. The first time Shoe heard the term “take no prisoners” used to describe a personality trait, he thought it applied perfectly to
Janey. She called him Shoe from the first day he told her his last name. Needless to say, Janey and Joey did not get on at all, and as often as not, Shoe was caught in the middle.

If Dougie Hallam was his father's son, Janey was, albeit to a much lesser degree, her mother's daughter. She did well in school, though, and somehow managed to avoid inheriting the worst of her parents' trailer trash attitudes. By the time she turned thirteen, she'd discarded most of her tomboy ways. Not quite pretty, she was sexually mature for her age, and attracted boys like bees to clover. She seemed to enjoy the attention, and it wasn't long before she acquired a reputation as easy.

While his friendship with Joey lasted, Shoe relegated his feelings for Janey to the back burner, where they simmered quietly, intensifying slowly but inexorably. Despite her reputation, the extent of their physical relationship was holding hands while watching television in Shoe's parents' basement. Sometimes she would let him put his arm around her in the movie theatre, but only after the lights went down, so they wouldn't be seen by her friends. She ran with the “tough” crowd, girls in tight clothing, high school boys who wore leather jackets with the collars turned up and who rode Japanese motorcycles or drove old cars. But after Shoe and Joey's falling out, things began to change. Janey started holding his hand when they went walking in the woods. One evening, as they sat on the swings in the park across the street from his parents' house, she leaned over and kissed him. He needed a little coaching — he had kissed girls before, but never one that put her tongue in his mouth — but he caught on quickly. A week or so later, while they kissed in the dark on a bench the same park, she took his hand and placed it on her breast. A week or so after that, in his parents' basement, she unhooked her bra and guided his hand under her sweater to her bare breast. He
was astonished at the warmth and softness of her flesh, the feel of her nipple in the palm of his hand. He ached for her to touch him, but he was terrified to ask, lest she refuse or, worse, be offended.

Daphne McKinnon was raped a few weeks after Joey was released from the hospital. Janey spent a lot of time in the Dells and Shoe was concerned for her safety, but when he called her, she would not come to the phone. He tried talking to her in the hall between classes or in the schoolyard after school, but she told him to leave her alone. He left notes in her locker, and even wrote her a letter; all went unanswered. Desperate to learn what he'd done wrong, he even went so far as to wait outside her parents' house one morning, hoping to catch her on her way to school, but her father came out and threatened to set the dogs on him if he didn't go away.

In mid-June, Claudia Hahn was raped as she walked in the Dells during her lunch break, almost within sight of the school. Two weeks later, Marty Elias was attacked, but she managed to get away from her attacker before she was raped. Then the park worker was raped and strangled to death by the big tree that had fallen across the creek years earlier to form a natural bridge. The neighbourhood was frantic. Parents kept their daughters — and their sons — home, forbidding them to go into the woods. On Saturday afternoon, three weeks after the park worker's murder, Shoe's father knocked on Shoe's bedroom door.

“Janey's here to see you. She's downstairs.”

Shoe almost knocked his father down in his rush to get to her before she got away. She wasn't in the basement. His brother was sitting on the sofa.

“Where's Janey?” Shoe asked.

“Outside,” Hal said. His voice was strained and he was red in the face.

“What's wrong with you?” Shoe asked.

“Nothing,” Hal replied curtly.

Shoe went into the backyard. Janey was sitting on the picnic table, feet on the bench seat.

“Let's go for a walk,” she said.

Before he could reply, she got up and headed into the woods. He thought about telling her he had better things to do, that he was through being jerked around, but went after her instead. He hadn't been in the woods since Miss Hahn's rape.

“Aren't you afraid to be in the woods?” he said when he caught up with her.

“Not when I've got you to protect me,” she said. “You'll protect me, won't you?”

“Sure,” he said, even though the idea of encountering the monster the newspapers and TV called the Black Creek Rapist frightened him. “I won't let anything happen to you.” They descended into a narrow ravine, then began to climb the high, wooded ridge that overlooked the big ravine through which Black Creek ran. “Where are we going?”

“You'll see.”

She took his hand as they began to descend the steep north side of the ridge toward the creek. It was as if they'd never been apart, as if the preceding two months had never happened. He wanted to ask her what he'd done to make her so angry with him, but he didn't. He was just grateful that she'd apparently forgiven him.

Two large boulders, one roughly the size and shape of an automobile, the other only slightly smaller, were embedded in the hillside, hanging thirty feet above the creek, deposited millennia before by a retreating glacier and partly exposed over the centuries by erosion. The larger boulder lay almost horizontal atop the smaller one. Someday both would tumble into the creek. Janey stepped onto the top of the large boulder and walked to the end overlooking the creek. A dead tree leaned at
a steep angle beside the car-sized boulder, about three feet away. Leaning out, Janey took hold of the stub of a branch, swung out, and clambered lithely down the tree, disappearing out of sight beneath the boulder. Shoe followed more clumsily.

A shallow cave had formed under the large boulder, behind the supporting pillar of the smaller boulder. The entrance was hidden by brush and brambles. In his explorations of the Dells, Shoe had never discovered the cave. He wondered how Janey had found it. She had enlarged it, digging deeper into the hillside. It smelled of earth and old leaves, but it was dry, despite the recent rain. It had an old canvas tarpaulin for a door, another on the floor.

A kitchen match flared as Janey lit a candle. She'd outfitted the little cave with an orange crate larder, stocked with canned soup, baked beans, and Irish stew, along with bottled water and soft drinks, and a singleburner camp stove. There was also an air mattress and a sleeping bag. It was cramped; Shoe could not stand up straight.

“When did you find this place?” he asked.

“Last year,” Janey said.

“Where do you go to the bathroom?” he asked, ever practical.

She laughed. “A little farther down toward the creek.”

It was there, on the musty sleeping bag, that Janey relieved him of the burden of his virginity. Given her reputation, and certain physiological evidence about which he'd only read, he wasn't under any illusion that it was the first time for her. Nevertheless, he assumed that it meant they were boyfriend and girlfriend. She quickly dispelled that misconception.

“I like you,” she told him afterward. “You're the only boy who doesn't treat me like a tramp. But don't
think this means we're going steady or anything like that. In fact, if you tell anyone we did this, I'll call you a liar and it'll never happen again. Understand?”

“I think so,” he said, but he didn't really.

“Good,” she'd said, rolling over and straddling him. “Now let me show you something girls really like. And it won't get them pregnant. I think you'll like it too.” She was right. Then she returned the favour.

Later, when they were dressed, she said, “I want you to do something for me.”

“We just got dressed.” He still had the taste of her on his lips, the scent of her in his nostrils.

“Not that. I want you to help me break into Marvin the Martian's house.”

Two weeks earlier, an ambulance had taken Marvin Cartwright's mother away for the last time. A few days later, a moving company had cleared out his house. There was a For Sale sign on the lawn.

“What for? There's nothing there. The moving company took everything away.”

“Maybe not everything. Will you do it?”

“What if we get caught?”

“We won't get caught. Not if we're careful. I'll — I'll make it worth your while.”

He knew what she meant, and it made his heart beat faster and the heat flow in his loins, but he said, “You don't have to do that. I — I love you.”

“Don't say that,” she said angrily. “You don't love me. You just fucked me, that's all. Look, will you help me or won't you?”

That night they broke into Marvin Cartwright's house through a basement window, but the house was as empty as the day it had been built. She never told him what she was looking for. She never mentioned Marvin Cartwright again.

Shoe never again told her that he loved her. Janey
reverted to her previous behaviour, refusing to publicly acknowledge their relationship, treating him in front of her friends, and his, as though he were a complete stranger.

It didn't matter. All that mattered to him was the time they spent together.

Shoe's parents sat in the shade of a garden umbrella in the backyard. His father was reading the Saturday paper aloud, dramatizing and adding the occasional wry editorial aside. The lawns were looking more ragged than ever. Shoe got his father's old power mower out of the garage. When he was done mowing the front lawn, his shirt was soaked and sticking to his back. His father had finished reading the paper, so Shoe took off his shirt and mowed the back lawn. In spite of the thin yellow haze of pollution, he could feel the mid-afternoon sun baking the skin of his shoulders. His one-eighth Native ancestry made him almost impervious to sunburn, but he didn't suppose it afforded any protection from skin cancer.

Lawns cut, clippings added to the compost heap by the edge of the woods, and the mower hosed off and put away, he took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, made a phone call in the kitchen, then walked across the street to the park to look for Janey Hallam. He found her behind the stage in the large tent. She was drinking
beer from a can in a brown paper bag with the members of the band.