Elizabeth and After (30 page)

He’s on his way out, then wheels to peek into Fred’s dresser. Its top drawer
is
underwear and he’s about to push it closed when he sees the dull metal glint of a gold bracelet—Fred’s watch, the one that’s always bulging on his wrist while he
stands impassively in front of Ned telling him to come back in two weeks or six months or never. Ned reaches for it, then his hand hits something else. A cassette which along with the watch, he adds to the underwear in his grocery bag. Thirty seconds later he’s in his truck again, backing out of the driveway, the bag stowed safely under his seat. Nothing more natural than for him to be here, dropping in for a visit, too bad they weren’t home but he’d forgotten about the baseball game, see you later.

And, in fact, Ned Richardson
did
see Fred later, twice. Once at the ball diamond where he scooted back to catch the rest of the game. Only an inning missed; if anyone had noticed his answer was that he’d gone to get cigarettes. And then a second time, unexpectedly, at about one in the morning. Normally at that time, Ned would have been at Ellie’s but this was the nurse’s night off and he had to watch Alvin.

By the time he got the old man to bed and all the soiled sheets and towels in the washer in the kitchen, it was after midnight. He took a beer from the refrigerator and watched Letterman for an hour, wondering what it must be like to be in the band and have to blow your guts out every time the man gave his stupid grin and waved his arms as if shooing geese. Then he brought in his spoils from the truck, spread them out on the couch.

Fred’s heavy gold watch hung loosely from his wrist so he pushed it up his arm and onto his bicep where it squeezed into place like one of those old-fashioned expansion bands pool sharks wear around their sleeves in movies. Chrissy’s underwear was another question. There were two pairs of white panties, both cotton with pictures of hearts around the crotch, and one delicately stitched pink mesh pair that must have been satin or silk. The brassieres—one white, one black—
were also mesh, and each had a small satin bow sewn to the low point of the cleavage. He had never before taken the time to examine a woman’s underwear, not his mother’s nor Lu-Ann’s nor Ellie’s. Now that he did, he was amazed at how white the white was, how pink the pink. No wonder they had all those detergent advertisements on television. There was a whole world of women out there worrying about how to keep their underwear pure. And those little satin bows! No guy would walk around with little bows or butterflies sewn to his jockeys. Or hearts next to his thing. Ned held the bra to his chest. Chrissy must be as thin as a little kid. He put a fist in one of the cups. Lu-Ann’s boobs had been big, too full for his hands to cover and even the cups of her brassiere had seemed enormous. Chrissy’s were smaller, like Ellie’s he supposed, though in trying to imagine Chrissy’s brassiere on Ellie’s chest, all he could get was a vision of Ellie asking him what the hell he was doing playing with Chrissy McKelvey’s underwear. Feeling guilty, he shoved it back in the bag, although he did have an answer: it had been a revenge against Fred. But now that he had the underwear he couldn’t think how to use it. Mail it back a piece at a time with Carl’s return address on the envelope? Tie a bra to his truck aerial? Put an ad in the Kingston Shoppers’ Lost & Found? Like most of his schemes, this underwear idea had been a waste of time. He took the bag to his bedroom and was hiding it under the mattress when he realized the cassette would make a lump.

He took the tape out and popped it into Lu-Ann’s VCR which he still had though her parents had called to ask him to return it, and suddenly there was Fred. Fred without his clothes, looking more like Fred-the-old-bald-bear in his catching outfit than any other Fred. Fred in what Fred must think to be Fred in all his glory. Then Fred and Chrissy. It wasn’t exactly
a movie, even a dirty movie. Just a bunch of screw scenes strung together. Sometimes it seemed Fred was handling the camera, other times the camera must have been set on the tripod. Every scene had the same basic plot line though with certain very unexpected variations including some with a very unhappy Chrissy. There was no doubt that living with Fred was even worse than having to chase him around asking for a job.

Ned watched the whole video, every frame, though there were at least a dozen times he paused it, checked on his uncle to make sure he hadn’t miraculously risen from his drugged sleep, and looked outside in case a posse of vengeful Freds was descending to rip away from him this unexpected item which he was very sure Fred Verghoers, would-be reeve, Allnew manager and midnight cowboy, would definitely prefer had not fallen into Ned Richardson’s hands.

T
WENTY-NINE
. I
T WAS SIX A.M. ON THE
first of October so he had been twenty-nine years old for exactly six hours, the “exactly” because, as his parents had often told him, after a long procrastination, much of it on the kitchen table, he’d popped out just after the cuckoo clock Elizabeth’s mother had given them for a wedding present began to signal midnight. He has always liked the timing of his birthday: “The way sunset is to the day, October is to the year,” his mother had told him once. “October is the magic month.” He had enjoyed that, the idea that his month was the magic one. The month with the dying light, Indian summer, heat in the afternoon, turning leaves, the increasingly heavy frosts, the first snow, even Hallowe’en, the party at the end.

October 1, six in the morning and still pitch black. Carl made coffee then started on the waffles. As a birthday treat from the birthday boy he had promised Lizzie that they could go to the beaver pond with the camcorder he’d started bringing home weekends so that when he started renting it out from
the store he’d be able to tell the customers how to use it. This new item was Luke’s idea of a way to perk up business: “We’ll have the whole township needing one every time there’s a birthday party.”

Two hours later Carl and Lizzie were lying on a soft fragrant mound of rust-coloured needles beneath the huge pine at the southern edge of the pond. As the mist came off the water’s surface Carl scanned the lake with the camera. Lizzie was curled into his side, asleep, her legs drawn up to her belly and her hands tucked between her knees. Carl aimed the camera for the beaver den, turned the zoom control on to bring it closer. The dark slick crown of a beaver’s head broke the surface; the water rippled as the beaver crossed the pond in their direction. Carl switched on the power and the camera emitted a high-pitched grating noise. Up came the beaver’s ears. Angry red triangles. Carl had them in the centre of his focus. Lizzie stirred against him. The beaver’s head rotated. Dark eyes glittered. Hoarse scare-the-enemy breathing rasped across the water. Then the beaver’s body convoluted, snapped forward; Carl had to jerk the camera to keep the creature in the field of vision as the broad tail slapped the water and the beaver submerged. “Got it,” Carl said but just as he spoke there was a crash in the underbrush, only twenty yards away, and before he could swing the camera around a summer-fattened buck leaped into the air, twisting, disappearing into the trees.

When they got home Lizzie took the cartridge out of its plastic case and loaded it into the VCR while Carl made hot chocolate to drink in front of the TV set. The tape began with images from the night before. Lizzie, familiar with a camcorder because Fred had one, had taken the camera on a tour of the outside of the house, starting with the front door, which had been nailed shut in some previous era and had no steps,
then walking around the back, the landscape bouncing as the camera jiggled in her hand. The camera climbed the back wall of the house, then whizzed up to Lizzie’s bedroom window. That was where she had tried to use the zoom feature. There was a good shot of white paint peeling away from the wood siding and of the geranium on Lizzie’s window ledge. Down the siding again, across the lawn to the garden. A brief duty tour of the small vegetable patch, most of it already levelled by the first frosts, then on to the real attraction for Lizzie: the wooden cross she’d spent hours making, then hammered into the earth over Marbles’ grave after Carl had finally decided it was better to inform her Marbles had been killed—in his story by a car—than to have her spend the whole summer searching. All this time the only sound had been that of her feet in the grass, a passing car, a few giggles. Now she spoke, her voice tinny and faltering: “Here lies the noble cat, run over by a brutal stranger. In this ground I sank this cross. But, brutal stranger, I would have driven a stake into your heart until your blood came out all over you. Yuck. Well, something anyway, I don’t know.” Meanwhile the camera lens had dropped so that the image was of Lizzie’s feet, shifting uncomfortably as she spoke, her shoes coming together as her voice trailed away. “I’m going to shut this thing off until I can find Ashes. He better not be dead.”

The tape started again in the kitchen. Carl was holding Ashes up to the camera. “I’m Carl,” Carl said. “This is Ashes. We’re in the kitchen here and we’re hungry. As soon as the oven gets hot we’re going to put the chocolate brownies in.” Carl’s face got bigger as he walked towards the camera. “Move it over there, honey. Let me hold it while you pour the brownie mix in the pan.”

“What if I spill it?”

“You won’t. But if you do, I can make a movie of you cleaning it up.” Suddenly Ashes’ head filled the whole frame so that it went dark briefly, followed by an image of the table with a big blur in the centre.

“She licked it,” Lizzie said.

First thing in the morning Carl had taken the camera to Lizzie’s room. Lizzie had her pillow locked in a bearhug. Ashes was curled up and lying on her back. Lizzie made Carl rerun the footage of the cat. She said, “Well, I love him, but not as much as Marbles. Marbles will always be my favourite cat.”

“Good thing Ashes doesn’t understand you,” Carl said.

“He knows about Marbles. But I promised to love him a lot, just the same.”

By the time they’d finished watching the video it was lunchtime. Carl went into the kitchen to make a salad to accompany the French toast Lizzie insisted on for her Sunday lunches, and when he went back into the living room she was sleeping, her face smooth and opaque. As he put a quilt over her she murmured, “Rub my back.” Ever since she was an infant he’d put her to sleep that way, rubbing her back in slow circles. His hand had covered her whole back and he’d barely touched it as he circled. Now her shoulder blades, once like stunted chicken wings, were sheathed and surrounded by the wiry muscles that propelled her along the monkey bars or sent her sprinting so fast that Carl had to strain to keep up. “More,” Lizzie said, and then started mumbling as she often did as she fell asleep, words from her dreamworld language, then she was gone.

That night Carl woke up. Or maybe he hadn’t yet slept. These days it was hard to tell. For a moment he lay still listening for Lizzie’s breathing. For the last week she’d had a cold and Carl
found himself checking her all through the night, the way he used to when she was a baby.

His bedroom was directly above the kitchen. He was still listening to Lizzie when the refrigerator went on. At first a smooth hum, then a gradual rocking that evolved into an insistent humping rhythm. The other night Ray had come to visit and they were playing cards in the kitchen when the refrigerator got so excited it actually started to travel across the floor. “Got the devil in it,” Ray had croaked. “One of these nights it’s going to get all worked up and blow its own motor.” “Me too,” Carl had said, and Ray had wheezed, “Me too too” as they started to laugh at the absurd spectacle of themselves, two aging West Gull boys whose big night out was playing cards and drinking beer in the kitchen of the old Balfer place.

Carl was lying on his back and slowly became aware that his skull was throbbing, a deep painful pulse that with every heartbeat pulled at his wound. He swung out of bed, gathered his clothes from the chair and went downstairs to the kitchen. Once on his feet, the pain drained away. He made himself coffee, had a piece of bread with jam which he ate standing up. Soon it would be time to wake Lizzie to get ready for school but right now the sky was still dark and through the kitchen window the only sign of the morning to come was a yellow October dawn that lay weakly across the horizon.

Dressed, Carl put on a pair of heavy socks and his boots. Then he took his hunting jacket from the hook beside the door and went outside.

The wooden steps creaked with frost as he stepped down to the driveway, but though the sky was clouded over, no snow had fallen overnight, and the ground and road were bare. Carl crossed the driveway to his truck. He had only intended to take his gloves from the front seat but now, opening the door and
seeing his keys in the ignition, he climbed in and sat behind the steering wheel. He turned on the motor and eased out of the driveway onto the blacktop.

Down the road a couple of miles there was a swamp. If the swamp froze hard before the snow, Carl was intending to take Lizzie there on weekends to teach her how to skate. Past the swamp he followed the sideroad that curved back towards the highway. Where the road climbed there was a sweep of sloped land facing southwest. Light shone from the barns of the fortunate farmers who worked these sun-powered fields; they had already started their milking and as the sun rose it turned their corn silos into giant silver obelisks. “All that money,” Carl said aloud. “Luke Richardson will find a way to screw you.” And as though at this iconic time of day it was necessary that every sentence uttered be a prophecy, Carl noticed as he came to the highway in front of the biggest and richest farm—one with three silos all to itself and a brick house adjoined by the ultimate local sign of wealth, a fence of green pressure-treated lumber surrounding an in-ground swimming pool—one of Luke Richardsons election signs was hammered into the centre of the expanse of lawn.

He turned onto the highway, possessed by a sudden unwanted vision of the sun coming up to greet Luke Richardsons stepping out of every single house in the township, all at once, big grins on their faces, hands outstretched and waving.