Given (25 page)

Al was heavier than I'd imagined a dead body to be (I'd always wondered why it took six pallbearers to carry a coffin to its grave) and one of his shoes came off as we carried him through the doorway into the carving shed. I dropped the legs to the ground again. Hooker said “not much further to go,” and stooped to retrieve the shoe.

He pushed the mudroom door open with his foot, then unlatched the back of the hearse so we could slide Al in.
What you going to do now, dumpster his dead ass
? Frenchy asked?

Rainy told the twins they'd better not touch or she'd hold their hands flat on a hot stove element with an egg lifter until they learned some respect. Frenchy admonished her.
Threatenin your kids wid a good burnin, that be way-killer not cool.

Al's other shoe fell off as we set him down between the rollers. Toop swooped it up and limped off into the bushes, his ears sticking straight out on either side of his head, as if he were about to lift off above the trees.

“There's something unnormal about that dog,” Hooker said.

Vernal had a client once who hunted down a renowned Nazi war criminal and, when he found him, put a bullet between his eyes. “There is no evil in reducing life to other, more enduring forms,” Vernal said, in his most famous address to a jury. “Homicide, in this case, was not a sin. It was, I submit, a necessary resistance against an ossified form of existence.”

He stole those lines from another book, of course, but he said no one ever went to prison for failing to be original. I got Toop back in the car, using Al's other shoe as a lure. Hooker seemed to relax once we were on our way and had left the village behind. He even joked that we ought to stick the “On Appointment” sign in the window. I wasn't in the mood.

I didn't speak or take my eyes off the road after that. Hooker made small talk, about the sea lion and other creatures washing up dead on the beach, “an albatross, couple of eagles, a ton of seals,” and wondered if it had anything to do with the eerie weather conditions. The only dead thing Hooker didn't seem concerned with was the body in the back.

We flew by the Yaka Wind Honour Site. The cloud cover had lifted and when we passed the first of the roadside shrines, the wreaths jumped out in our headlights.

The sky stayed clear for a while longer, even as we got to the top of Garbage Dump Hill, as if the moon, the stars, and the planets had all conspired with Hooker to give him light in darkness. He told me to pull over when we got to the lay-by. I killed the motor, and sat staring straight out over the ocean. Hooker was quiet for a while, then asked me if I knew how to tell the planets from stars: I said “no idea”, my mind elsewhere, on more urgent matters, like not getting arrested. “By their reflections in the water,” Hooker said. “A planet makes a straight line. A star's reflection dances. See, up there? Take a look.”

It wasn't the moment for an astronomy lesson. Hooker reached over and put his good hand on my arm, in a motion halfway on its journey to being a caress. “All the shit we're made of? It comes from those dying stars. We're made out of stars, you and me.”

When I didn't respond he turned his head towards the side window and looked out over the water again. “Something bugging you?”

I stared at my hands and began picking at the little bits of skin coming away around my nails. Hooker let out a deep breath. Toop looked at me, the worried ‘W' between his eyes, and then over at Hooker, as if trying to decide which of us needed him most. “Go on, out you get,” I said, looking at Hooker and nudging Toop out the door.

Hooker asked for my help again, getting the body out and hauling it as far as the “Keep Our Dump Clean” sign. He went back for the gas can. “Don't worry, I always clean up after myself,” he said.

I left him by the side of the road, stooped over Al's body like one of the dark birds at his feeder.

Rainy and Frenchy climbed onto the front seat beside me. Rainy curled up with her head in my lap, and Frenchy rolled down her window so she could stick her head outside.

Them stars up there?
she said, pointing out over the sea where Hooker had shown me the dancing reflections.
They be in the sky same night I be born?
Frenchy, I knew, had been born in a mental hospital, where you couldn't see any stars. They'd loosened her mother's straightjacket to help her bear down.

“Same stars, same sky,” I said.

How come you figure there be so many stars up there?
she continued.

Rainy made a hissing noise between her teeth.
God figure he put them there so we have light out after dark.

Frenchy said she'd always wondered why God created light in the first place, before he made anything that had eyes.

“Don't start,” I said. I could hear the helplessness in my voice.

Why you don't drop us by the side of the ditch and we bail ourselves on home . . .
Rainy said, her voice trailing pitifully off. By this time we were pulling into our driveway.

Too late to bail, girl,
Frenchy said.
We be in Paradise now. Ain't nowhere left to go.

Paradise be a whole lot more like paradise, it got TV,
said Rainy.

Frenchy had never cared much about TV.
I don't miss it,
she said as I manoeuvred the hearse into the barn.
You ever seen a baby spit up on TV?

What that stupposed to mean?
Rainy asked.

You ever see a fat black girl win a beauty contest on TV?

Rainy blinked and wiped away part of her face.
Nobody be fat on TV.

What I sayin. No one on TV be actual. They got a problem, they solve it by talkin, not by smackin or shootin each other in the head.

I told them I needed to be left alone, but privacy wasn't a concept either Rainy or Frenchy understood; they had begun to view our friendship as a kind of medicine they couldn't live without. They followed me into the house, then upstairs, sticking to me like peanut butter to the gums, refusing to be quiet, and interpreting my need for silence as evidence of a troubled mind. I sat on the bed without taking my coat off, reached into my pocket and felt around for the shoe I'd found on the beach. It brought me closer to Angel, present always in his absence, teetering on the unseen edge of every moment.

I drew a bath and sat soaking, my thoughts returning, also, to the night I'd spent with Hooker Moon, our trek up the beach this morning, and Al's body, naked except for a pair of shoes. I thought of this, too: the foot that had fit the baby shoe meant for an angel — that foot would grow to one day fit a shoe the size Al had lost.

Rainy came and sat beside me while I soaked in the tepid water.
Shoe fit, we find another one just like it,
she said, eventually.

PART SIX

To discover the true enemy, the holy war, the good fight,
shift your eyes.
— Sam Keen,
Face of the Enemy

T
HE WIND RAGED ALL NIGHT AND THE
rain blew in torrents across the land. I woke in the morning with the same sense of vertigo I'd experienced in the airport the day of my escape, and again waking in Hooker's cabin on Kliminawhit.

In my dream I'd been driving down a highway in an unfamiliar country. I turned at a sign saying, “Dead End Road Please D i e Slowly”, (the ‘r' and the ‘v' in Drive whited out), and lured by VACANCY flashing on and off in blue neon, checked in for the night at the Cause of Death Motel.

The manager, wearing a three-piece pinstriped suit with an incongruous tie — blood red with dollar signs, dice and martini glasses splashed all over it — asked if I would care to join him in a bowl of vodka soup and said he didn't mind smoking in the room “long as you don't burn the house down.” The hands on his watch ticked counter-clockwise. I could feel his smile on the back of my head. A six-pack of beer, Death Lite, sat on the counter next to a stack of invoices stamped “Overdue.”

“Help me,” I tried to whisper.

The manager lit a cigarette, and sucked the smoke in through teeth that were stained as yellow as his moustache. I pushed the smoke away with my hand, and tried to communicate, by using sign language, that I needed a place to hide.

“Everybody wants help, usually when it's too late,” the manager said. He preferred doing business with the dead because with them there were no obligations, even though they could be a joyless lot. “A corpse can shed tears for hours after death, but most can't manage a smile.”

He looked at me again, to see if I smiled, but my face stayed closed like a fist. “You just visiting?” he said.

I said I didn't know anymore. I hated that circumstances could take away your life without even killing you.

Beneath the warm and mannered smile, his eyes seemed to ask, “What about your death is going to be memorable?” “People want most what they pretend to hate,” he said, with a dreamy lack of emphasis. He poked out his cigarette on the back of his hand, then passed me a leaflet that he said might help me make up my mind. “There's this to think about,” he said. “During your lifetime you take 500 million breaths. Where would you most like to be when you breathe your last?” He reached for a bottle of beer opened it with his teeth, and poured it into a champagne flute. When I took it from him, his fingers were colder than the chilled stem of the glass.

“To the dead and the undead,” he said. “Our unholy alliance.”

I drank the flat, tasteless beer, and glanced over the pamphlet. I could choose the Black Room if I wanted privacy, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom being stocked with every kind of narcotic, measured out in lethal doses, or the Green Room where a chair had been placed in the centre of the floor in front of a TV screen, and a rope, with a noose at one end, dangled from a beam. In the Red Room it got messier.

I left the leaflet on the counter and walked down what seemed like an endless hall with a door at the end of it. The door was ajar. In my dream I started spinning as I entered the White Room, where Angel lay strapped to a mortuary slab. A circular saw hung from the ceiling. Each time I took a breath, the saw that sounded like the cry of a peacock was lowered, so slowly it would take a lifetime — 500 million breaths — before it would sever the spine of my beloved who had, only moments ago, been born. I don't remember how I got there, but I found myself back outside, sitting in the hearse, On Appointment in the window. Above the sign “Cause of Death Motel”, the word SORRY had replaced the neon VACANCY. I opened one eye and saw Rainy standing over me, chewing the ends of her dead hair.
Time warp fast when you having fun,
she said, trying to blink. She caught one eyeball mid-cheek, and popped it back in its socket.

I lay without moving until the dizziness passed. Frenchy insisted on serving me breakfast in bed: a limp salad, a diet Pepsi, and a dill pickle. I tried to eat the pickle until Frenchy complained the crunching hurt her ears and she'd run out of vampire's tea-bags (her name for the tampons) to block out the noise.

Over the next few days the storm showed no sign of abating. The house swayed and creaked in the wind and the rain drove at the windows, blinding them. Whenever a gust shook the house, the twins began wailing in surround sound and the HE made the
rat-tat-tat
sound of a machine gun followed by the pinging of bullets hitting rocks. When he couldn't get Frenchy's attention he buried himself in his coffin, going
glock-glock-glock
, until she scooped up her damaged boy and rocked him in her arms, soothing him with her inexhaustible stock of sniper rifles. Rainy tried to drown out the wind by reciting nursery rhymes:

Yo! Yo! Ebony sheep

Got me some wool?

Yo muhfo, you muhfo . . .

Muh,
one of the twins bleated, as Rainy stopped to take a breath and the wind whipped the roof so hard a row of shakes was torn loose, bouncing off our windows on their way to the ground.

She just say what I think she say?
Frenchy asked, letting the HE fall from her arms onto the floor.
She just say her first half word!