When the Saints (18 page)

A green light comes on above the furnace and Jackie opens the retort door.

“He’s gonezo.” Jackie pulls his head back out. “Must have cased the joint and escaped before they fired it up.”

“Funny,” Ma says, putting her coat on. “Let’s go. The police may be trying to call.”

The furnace man delicately tells her he still has to pulverize Daddy’s bone fragments and she rolls her eyes. Finally, we’re called into a backroom where the man pours the remains into a cardboard box and places it in Ma’s hands. She stares at it, then sticks it under one arm.

“That ain’t right,” Jackie says. “We can’t let him go home in that.”

“Those fancy vases are a rip-off,” Ma says, already walking out. “Your father don’t care. He’s dead.”

Back at the trailer, she sorts through a bag of his effects the hospital handed over and calculates how much she could pawn it all for. I watch her put Daddy up on the shelf next to her mother and stick her tongue out at him. Daddy hated Grandma Jean ever since she spiked his coffee with horse laxatives to stop him from taking off on Ma while she was pregnant with Poppy. He went anyway, drove off slurring curse words with shit running down one leg. The police told us later he ended up smashed up in the ditch with a deer in his passenger seat. He was taken to the hospital, but he snuck out, hitchhiked down to Maine, came back home a month later with a truck full of contraband cigarettes and a Newfoundlander named Ghoulie. The cops tried to get Ghoulie to rat Daddy out, but
the man had a bay accent so thick the judge couldn’t understand a word he said.

In the middle of the night, I awake and think I hear Ma crying. I wonder if she’s worrying about Swimmer or sad about Daddy, or both. I knock lightly on her door.

“You all right, Ma? Can I bring you anything?”

“Like what?”

“Tissue? Cigarette? Glass of water?” She doesn’t respond, so I keep going. “Valium? Tequila shot? Chocolate sundae?”

I rack my brain for things she used to like. I remember asking her once what she’d wish for if she had three magic wishes. I wanted her to wish us away from Daddy, but she wished for twenty minutes alone with Rod Stewart. I asked what her second wish would be and she said twenty more minutes with Rod Stewart, then twenty more for the third wish. I threw my hands up and asked her why the hell she didn’t just take an hour with him on her first wish, and she said she’d probably need breaks in between to keep up.

I knock again. “Rod Stewart?”

“Oh, yeah, right.” She loudly blows her nose. “I suppose he’s just standing out there in hot pants.”

I
’M NOT SURE
M
A’S CAR WILL MAKE IT ALL THE WAY TO
Solace River, so I convince Jackie to pick me up in the Tercel. It isn’t hard once I tell him why I’m going.

The days are warming up and the car has no air conditioning. Jackie undoes another shirt button every hour. He squirms in the heat and rolls his sleeves up.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing at the scab on his forearm.

Jackie turns his wrist so I can see the tattoo: WENDELL SAINT R.I.P.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

He shrugs and I want to reach over and slap him. I haven’t told him I went to see Lyle and I’m not going to. The fact that Lyle didn’t turn down my deal on the spot pretty much fingers Troy as Swimmer’s kidnapper. If I tell Jackie and he goes after Troy, he’ll mess the whole deal up.

“Answer me one question,” I say. “Why is Troy out to get you?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

“Oh, give me a break. I grew up in Raspberry. Everyone in there was innocent.”

“Fine.” He tightens his hands on the wheel. “I knocked up his cousin and said it was someone else. She was a goddamn liar, though. First she says she’s on the pill, then when I dump her she says she’s pregnant and wants an abortion. I didn’t believe her, so I wouldn’t give her the money to go to Halifax. She was asking for way too much. I know what those things cost. Anyways, she got one from some woman in Amherst and wound up with an infection.” He takes a big wad of chewing tobacco out of his jacket and sticks it under his lip. “I went to see her in the hospital. Troy was in there and starting shoving me right in the room. He pulled a knife and the doctors kicked us out. I tried phoning
to tell her I’d help out with money if she needed it, for losing work at the diner. I felt like shit, Tabby, I really did.”

“Good. You deserve to. She probably can’t have kids now.”

Jackie goes pale, like he hadn’t thought of that. “Troy went after Bird because I was expecting it and Bird wasn’t. He hates Bird anyway.”

“If jumping Bird was supposed to even things up, why did Troy take Swimmer?”

Jackie spits out the window. “I ratted out his brother for robbing vending machines and he did time.”

“Jesus Christ. You realize everybody’s fucked sideways, except for you and Troy? This is some game you’re playing.”

“Shut up, Tabby. You weren’t here and you don’t know shit.” He pauses. “I’m supposed to give a squirt about his brother after what he did to Poppy? She could have been the only one of us to go to college and do makeup on stiffs. Now she’s a ninety-pound junkie with half her teeth rotted out. You telling me anything I did compares to what those fucks did to Bird? I know it should have been me, all right?” He pulls over to the side of the road, drops his head to the steering wheel. His shoulders heave and he starts bawling like I haven’t seen since he was a little kid and Daddy would kick him for no reason. “You should have seen Bird after,” he manages. “They beat him with pipes and everything. Now they’re all shooting pool and fucking women and laughing at the retard in the halfway house that can’t even wipe his own ass. Bird ain’t even a person anymore. What kind of brother am I if I don’t do nothing?”

“But it’s done. You can’t change it.”

“When Josie was born, Bird said, ‘Jackie, I didn’t know I had it in me to love like this.’” Jackie wipes his eyes hard with the backs of his hands. “He ain’t never going to see those girls again.”

We sit in the thick heat. A log truck blows by and rocks the car side to side. Jackie leans his head back and lets out his breath in a shaky stream.

“How did this whole thing start?” I ask.

“Nobody wanted us in Jubilant, same as nobody wanted us in Solace. People were planning on running us out before we even got there.”

“Why? It was just Ma and you kids.”

“Because there ain’t a man or his dog that Daddy didn’t rip off between here and Charlottetown. I don’t even think we know the half of what he done. Ma was a mess. All she could talk about was the house, her kitchen, how she’d lived in Solace River her whole life.”

“What did you do?”

“We couldn’t let them make her run again.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I’m not proud of everything we done, but we had to start with Troy because that little inbred hick was getting all his punk friends together to—”

“What did you do?”

“Jesus, Tabby! Nothing! We got him piss loaded and took pictures of him passed out with some hobo’s hairy balls sitting on his face. We made photocopies at the library and put them up all over town. Then Bird started screwing Troy’s girlfriend all the time in public where everybody would see them. Nothing. Kid stuff.”

I sigh. “Sadly, the only part of that story I don’t buy is that you and Bird were ever in a library.”

Another truck flies past, honking at us for being so close to the pavement. Jackie starts the car and merges back onto the highway. He snaps on the radio, but I turn it back off.

“You have to get out of Jubilant. I’m working on us getting the old land in Solace River back.” I let that hit him with a smack. “And by the way, I can go to college if I want to.”

“What?”

“You said Poppy was the only one who could go to college.”

“I meant the only one of
us
.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Jackie sticks a fresh batch of tobacco under his lip instead of explaining, so I spark up a cigarette and blow the smoke over to his side. WELCOME TO SOLACE RIVER appears ahead and I remember Daddy bragging to me once that back when the sign was made of wood, Grandpa Jack shot two nipples onto the curvy
W
with his Remington. I bet Jackie would get a kick out of that, but I’m too pissed off to share.

Ten minutes later, we pull up in front of our old house. Jackie sits glaring at it while small birds chirp in the trees. He gets out and slams his door, but it only makes them sing louder, like the Whos down in Whoville.

We enter the house and wander through looking for anything worth salvaging. In the cellar, I find an old crate of Garnet’s Saint’s Elixir, but the contents of the bottles have evaporated.

Jackie takes a framed picture off the wall of Grandpa Jack and Daddy taken back when Daddy was a little boy. Both of
them are shirtless with the exact same scowl on their faces. The house is in the background, but the paint isn’t peeling yet and the grass is freshly mowed. Grandpa has tattoos all up and down his arms. Daddy’s got a pickaxe in one hand.

“I don’t get why Daddy named me Jack. Heard he never spoke a good word about the man till after he was gone.” Jackie sets the picture on a window ledge. “Did you hear there was a big party in town when the body washed up? I guess everybody knew he fell in the river, but the cops didn’t even drag it to find out. Jack was in there so long that when some farmer tried to pull him out by the ankles, the skin slid off his feet like a pair of socks.”

I cringe. “What do you think made him so hard?”

“The war, I guess. Daddy said Jack was afraid of the dark. He’d go hunting early in the morning and leave before the sun fell instead of staying out in that cabin. The other men used to rile him up about it until he broke a whisky glass on someone’s face. That shut them up.”

On the way upstairs, Jackie trips over a cat and it claws his leg. “Motherfucker!” he yells, trying to kick it. “Can we get the fuck out of here before we get fucking rabies?”

“Just a sec.”

I make him follow me to get Ma’s jewellery box. He pries it open, but there’s nothing inside except some cheap plastic bracelets. I slide her dress off the hanger, but it’s a mess. No point in taking it, but I do anyway. I grab one of Daddy’s shirts too. Jackie helps me over the holes in the floor, then we head downstairs and outside to the garage. A crow swoops down from the old power pole and caws for backup.

As we squeeze into the stuffy garage, my mind rewinds to the day I arrived. I wonder what might be different if I’d turned around and left town right then. Poppy would still be gone, which means Swimmer would still be safe at the trailer with Ma. I shiver in the sweltering air.

“Map.” Jackie snaps his fingers.

I take the paper Poppy gave me out of my purse and unfold it. Daddy made a grid of the dirt floor and drew a compass rose at the top to show direction. He marked an X then shaded in the old freezer right above it with a question mark. He told Poppy that if anyone had moved it, there should still be an indentation in the dirt where it used to sit. But we can tell it hasn’t been messed with. It’s full of old farm machinery parts that Daddy used to weigh it down, with more piled on top. It takes us forever to slide the thing to the other end of the garage.

“Five feet,” I read.

“Five feet? Christ. This better be worth it.”

Jackie goes out and grabs a metal shovel from the trunk of Jewell’s car. I find a rake to break up the dirt and use it to poke and claw around the bottom of the hole each time Jackie lifts his shovel. After forty-five minutes, we stop talking. Jackie tosses his shirt aside and I twist my hair up out of my face. I wish we had some water.

“Shit. I feel something.” Jackie drops the shovel.

I tunnel my hand into the dirt until I feel a plastic casing. I try to pull on it, but it’s stuck, so I trench all around it with my fingers. Jackie pushes me back, gets a hold of an edge and hauls it out of the dirt with the veins popping out of his neck. He drops
it at our feet and we stare at a clear industrial trash bag wrapped around something the size of a stone brick.

Jackie hoists himself out of the pit then jumps down again a minute later with an old fish knife. He tears into the plastic with the blade, dumps out all the debris that’s seeped inside and starts pulling out filthy stacks of bills tied with twine. He holds them in both hands, gauging their weight.

“Suffering Jesus.” His eyes meet mine. “That’s a fuckload of money.”

W
E WALK INTO THE
F
OUR
H
ORSES GRINNING LIKE JACK-
o’-lanterns.

“Whoa.” West puts down the newspaper. “Where’d you two come from?”

He asks us what we’re so happy about and I pull back a corner of the blanket in my arms to show him the money. He nods toward a couple of guys in the corner and Jackie takes the hint, grabs the bundle from me and shoves it down at his feet. We make small talk while the two men stare up at the TV trying to figure out who we are. Finally, they get bored, pay their tab and leave.

I tell West that Daddy died and he mixes the three of us a stiff drink he calls the Soulless River. I sneak a few glances at him while he’s pouring, wondering if he served those divorce papers yet.

“When’s the funeral?” he asks, pushing two glasses toward us.

“We’re not having one.”

“Your mother don’t want a service?”

“My mother played a Game Boy during the cremation.”

“It’s weird being in here,” Jackie says, looking around. “Nothing’s different.” He knocks his drink back without even making a face, pushes his cap back on his sweaty hairline and scans the old photographs of the tavern. He starts asking West all kinds of personal questions, like how much money the place rakes in now compared with when Clutch Kelly owned it.

“West’s from Cable,” I tell him. “He wouldn’t know.”

“How’d you wind up here?”

“I heard the Four Horses was for sale cheap,” West says. “I started out in the Labatt’s warehouse then worked my way up to the brewery. I learned a lot, and after a couple years I was sick of having a boss, started thinking about starting my own label. Anyhow, circumstances changed and I wound up with this dump instead.”