Caught (17 page)

Yes, I got them.

And you didn’t answer?

Social Services came by, she said. They had questions, David, about was I a fit mother with a drug smuggler hanging around. They interviewed Crystal without my permission. Took her down to the department for the afternoon. Imagine what that was like.

She said she could have lost Crystal to foster care. Had he thought about that? Then she told him she wanted him to leave.

We could have been a family, she said.

He asked her to forgive him.

Are you kidding me, she said. Why did you come here? I’m married now, David. I have a husband. That means something. Not a guy who’s going to take off on me. Not a guy who would abandon. A man, David. A good man who is honest with me.

Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. Do you, Jennifer? Do you love him? I don’t love him, no.

We are meant to be together, Jennifer, Slaney said. You know it. She spoke slowly then, almost stuttering. A quiet, deliberate tone that didn’t belong to her.

If you walk away from this, David, I will pack a bag. We can leave. I mean it. Tell me you’ll walk away from that racket and I’ll go with you right now. No looking back. Crystal and I will take a few things and get the hell out of here. If you walk away from it. Do you hear me? Say the word. David, just say the word. We’ll come with you right now. Start a new life together.

He took her hand away from her face and led her down the hall away from the children. He tried a door but it was a bedroom and he tried another and it was the bathroom and the last room was a laundry room and he took her in there and shut the door and lifted her up onto the washer which was going and they were on each other and he was inside her and the washer was rattling and rocking and it was not sexy it was fast and they were both crying right through it and it changed him the way no other sex had ever changed him and she said, Don’t get caught. That’s all. She was smoothing his hair out of his eyes.

Don’t get caught, she whispered. Then she was tugging up her jeans and pulling her ponytail tight with a vicious tug and she was crying a little and wiping her eyes. He said he wouldn’t get caught again and he was coming back for her. He didn’t care about her husband. He only cared about her and Crystal and he’d be back.

She said, How do I put this, David. I really loved you. I did. But I don’t want to see you again.

And he saw she meant it.

Audio, Girlfriend

Slaney was in
love;
Patterson could tell that. This was some kind of monumental love but it was already in ruins. Or maybe it wasn’t in ruins. Patterson forgot himself as he listened. The big padded earphones. They’d bugged the apartment.

The girlfriend had married somebody.

Do you love him? Patterson hit pause and let that sink in. He rewound and listened to her say it again: I’m married. I got married. I married a guy. Four years you were gone.

You knew I was on my way, Slaney said.

You lied to me, Dave. She didn’t curse or sound angry or cry.

Patterson hit pause. He thought of his own daughter. His own daughter had disappeared with a boy. They hadn’t heard from her. He hit play. And he hit pause. He had to take the tape in small doses. Every second of the audio uncovered a mystery and a revelation.

Do you love him? Yes. Do you love him? Yes. You love him, do you? It’s none of your business, David. Not anymore.

Do you love him? Yes.

The little girl was saying she wanted cookies. We’re hungry. Mommy, we’re hungry.

She’s so big, he said. She grew. How do you like your doll?

I already got one just like it, the girl said.

You missed a lot, the girlfriend said.

The whole thing was unfolding with the children in the room. The little girl had a couple of friends over and he could hear them wrestle the new doll out of the cardboard box and they were excited and Slaney was saying she could walk.

And the girlfriend said,
You
could walk, David. And she started to beg him to walk away and Patterson hit pause. And he hit play.

If you love me, David. You will walk away from this now. Patterson was rapt. She asked Slaney to consider what she’d been through. She talked about the lying, over and over. She said about waving goodbye.

There I was on the sidewalk, she said. I believed you. I thought you were going to send for us to come to Alberta. Christ, what a fool. I lay awake at night.

Why were you lying awake, Mrs. Decker? That was one of the little kids visiting the daughter.

Play with your doll, girls, she said. Don’t pay any attention to us. This is just adult talk.

But you’re married, Slaney said. You got married.

I’ll pack a bag right now, she said. If you promise you won’t go back there. We could leave here tonight.

Patterson hit pause. He could not listen. He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed his whole face vigorously. He growled. He started to pace but he was attached to the reel-to-reel by the earphones and they were yanked off his head and slid over the tiles.

Patterson sank back down in the chair. He retrieved the headphones. He’d been called in to the Vancouver office to listen to the tape. Patterson had been waiting for Slaney to resurface and Slaney had gone to visit the ex-girlfriend. Even Hearn didn’t know, Patterson was sure. An unscheduled stop. Now Slaney was keeping things from Hearn. He must have known the dangers of stopping to see the girl. Maybe he was already gone. Maybe the girl had a hold.

He hit play.

She asked Slaney what he was going to do.

Come here, he said.

No, you tell me first, she said. You tell me what you are going to do. Will you walk away?

Jennifer, come here, Slaney said. Then they’d moved it to the laundry room and he couldn’t hear over the noise. The washer and dryer were going.

That was the audio. Whatever else they said, Patterson couldn’t hear it.

The kid was off course. And she was begging him to walk away. Hearn wouldn’t go ahead without Slaney.

Patterson thought of the lobster dinner with Hearn. He’d been surprised to see the books all over the house. Literature. The artful throws on the sofas. The sheepskin rug in front of the fire, a sailboat in a glass bottle on the mantel. Hearn was charismatic and fiercely smart, but he wouldn’t do it without David Slaney. Slaney was the raw courage and the will.

Patterson was alone in the office listening to the tape. He didn’t have a window. The trip would fall apart if Slaney walked.

Caught

There’s a kind
of folk wisdom that has developed over the centuries and is passed down from father to son about how to get out of the fog but somehow it had not been passed down to Slaney or Hearn.

This is the story he told in prison after he’d been caught the first time.

They’d been swamped by fog a mile from shore. The boys had dug the caves and they would be waiting for them to help unload. The cargo was under tarps on deck. Dealers lined up all over the island.

Almost home, then the fog.

Drop a long rope and if it floats out straight behind the engine, you’re going in a straight line, but if it curves you’re going in circles. He would hear this advice much later in prison. How to find your way out of the fog.

As it was, a seagull flapped down on the rail. The gull was the same white as the fog but it was not dreamy like the fog. It was the opposite of a dream.

When Columbus approached Cuba he knew there was land because the water was full of coconuts. The seagull was Slaney’s coconut. He thought they weren’t more than half a mile offshore.

Slaney heard the trap skiff coming toward him before he saw it. He told Hearn to stay below deck.

The first thing Slaney saw was the dip and swerve of a fluorescent orange toque and then the prow of the skiff, white with green trim, and the engine clacked and chuckled and the boat pulled up alongside.

The pound of the trap skiff was full of fish. A cloud of blue smoke hung over their engine and the men were wearing sweaters and lumber jackets and rubber overalls.

I lost my bearings, Slaney said.

You’re lost? the older man said. He sat on the wooden seat. The man’s lips puckered tight around his mouth because he had no teeth. His nose hung low and shapeless and pitted. The nostrils full of grey hair and the same thick grey hair grew in his eyebrows, curling upward.

I got all turned around in the fog, Slaney said.

She’s some thick, the old man said. I said to young John here, you can’t see a hand in front of you. Didn’t I, John?

You can’t see a bloody thing, the younger man said. He appeared to be the old man’s grandson.

Slaney had time in prison to wonder why the old man had troubled himself to turn them in. He’d come to the conclusion that the man could not remember what it was like to be young.

You didn’t know where you were, the old man said.

I thought I knew, Slaney said. He’d glanced behind him, tried to see something through the fog. He’d had a conviction, for perhaps five minutes, that the shore was behind him.

A fish in one of the buckets on the old man’s boat wiggled violently. It bent itself double and bent back the other way and threw itself up in the air and landed on the gunwale. It lay there, startled and panting. All three men watched. The fish had flung itself up at least a couple of feet. It must have been dead and come back to life and it landed on the gunwale and was astonished and then it rolled over and fell into the water.

That one got away, the old man said. They could see it between the two boats, lying on its side on top of the lapping water. And then it wriggled and went under. Gone.

Jesus Christ, Slaney said. The younger man rubbed the back of his hand under his nose and stood looking down at the water where the fish had disappeared.

Then he hauled snot back up from his throat and nose and lungs and horked it over the side of the boat. He took off his orange toque and squeezed it in one fist and passed it from hand to hand and put it back on his head, settling the brim with his fingertips. He sat down and bowed his head and leaned forward to lay his hand on the side of the engine.

Every move the men made came back to Slaney in prison.

Some quiet, the older man said. He shook his head as if the quiet were regrettable.

The fish are gone cracked, the grandson said. He waved an arm over the buckets.

That’s the fog, makes everything quiet, the old man said. Isn’t it quiet? He had taken a cigarette from his breast pocket and he patted his chest and his hips with both his hands.

I’m lost, Slaney said. I admit it. He tossed the man a lighter. He had to throw it overhand and the lighter winked into the fog and clattered on the bottom of the wooden boat.

It was a silver lighter and the man picked it up and smoothed his thumb over the engraving and held it out in front of him to read it and then flicked the top back with his thumb and rolled the gauged wheel and the flame leapt up and did battle with the faint breeze. It was a transparent and weak flame, just a colourless crinkle of the air above the lighter, burning a clear hole through the dense fog that lasted only a few seconds.

The man lit his cigarette and tossed the lighter back and it went end over end between the boats in the fog and slapped into Slaney’s upheld hand.

Follow us in, the old man said.

Give me a minute here, Slaney said. He went below and spoke to Hearn and he was in favour.

Follow him in, Hearn said. We don’t have a choice.

The entire town had come out onto the wharf. There must have been three hundred people waiting. They stood in their overcoats and gaiters and the women had scarves on their heads tied under their chins and some had curlers under the scarves and there were two young girls came to the doorway of the fish and chips shop and they were wearing white aprons that seemed very white in the fog and the young children leaned into their mothers and some of them were coming down the hill in pairs and some of them were on bikes with banana seats and plastic streamers flying from the handlebars.

There were young girls in tight plaid bomber jackets and jeans, smoking cigarettes, and people had parked their cars on the shoulder of the road and left them idling and there were some men unloading their catches, paying no attention.

Slaney was upon them before he saw them because of the fog. The old guy was cute as a fox: all the Old Testament talk about being lost.

The crowd didn’t seem to be saying much. They looked different from the crowd in town, shabbier and more robust. They were intent, as they might have been in church, and some of them had crossed their arms over their chests, or they leaned in to talk to a neighbour, not taking their eyes off Slaney.

When they’d docked, the cops swarmed the boat and Hearn came up with his hands behind his head, elbows out.

Slaney was pretty certain the cops hadn’t said put your hands up but Hearn already saw the story of their capture as something worthy of telling and he wanted to look the part.

There was a stink of fish. The call of a gull. All of this came back while Slaney lay on his cot, hands behind his head, looking up at the mattress pressing through the slats of the bunk above him.

Name

Slaney headed back
to the train station at dawn the next morning. The rain from the night before was steaming off the pavement. It was just a night; Hearn didn’t need to know about Ottawa.

He walked past the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall with graffiti scrawled across the sodden plywood covering the storefront windows. A child’s tricycle sat in a puddle under a street lamp.

Down a side street Slaney saw a man who looked like he was walking into a blizzard of snow. The front of his clothes and shoes and his face and even his eyelashes were pure white and it made his eyeballs look yellowish and blue-veined and watery and his lips wet and red, and his teeth were nicotine-stained. The man was standing behind a truck, smacking his arms against his sides, sending up little puffs of white dust. Another man in the back of the truck had been tossing him sacks of flour and one had broken when the guy caught it.