Harmless (27 page)

It sounded pretty good to Joseph.

Then again, it was easy to love a ruin.

He watched Alex limp toward the town’s church, taken aback again by such blatant enthusiasm. Vines clambered up the walls and spilled into the church’s broken front windows, but the steeple was intact, its highest point now a perch for a hawk scanning the ghost town for its breakfast. Alex propped the rifle stock on his shoulder and disappeared into the shadows beyond the gaping doorway, leaving no doubt that he expected Joseph to follow.

Joseph paused at a stone well that stood beside the church stairs, its mouth half-covered with rotting boards. He couldn’t see to the bottom, and when he bent over to get a better view, he imagined jumping into the well to hide from Alex. But that was ridiculous. The girls were safe, the phone retrieved, and, according to Alex, they were only a couple of miles from the farm. He took the stairs one at a time and entered the church.

Alex stood in the centre aisle near the altar, bathed in one of the nebulous shafts of light leaking through the roof. He looked different, lighter somehow, but Joseph couldn’t pin the change on anything tangible. Alex turned to face the side of the church, pulling back his head and shoulders, as though he were about to welcome a visiting dignitary. The wall was covered in a stylized spray-painting of a passenger train of the steam era, the graffiti artist’s work incorporating the church’s boarded windows, the furthest of which became the train conductor’s cabin, the controls
manned by a skeleton in a top hat and monocle. The other windows showed skeleton passengers in eerie silhouette, their smiling skulls attired in bowlers and extravagantly feathered hats.
The Midnight Train Rides Again
was written in Teutonic script in the steam billowing from the engine’s funnel, and though the painting was at least a decade old, no one had defaced it or added their own take on steampunk Victorianism, a minor miracle in these revisionist times. The artist had done something to the train’s outlines to give it a quasi–3-D appearance, as if the whole picture could be peeled off to reveal an older image underneath.

“It’s beautiful,” Joseph said. “Imagine the
work
. Carting out all that paint to the middle of nowhere.”

Alex beamed a quiet pride that made Joseph suspect him as the actual artist. But Alex couldn’t draw, and he’d never make such an obvious play for a compliment.

Franny would love the painting. She was always taking pictures of the graffiti sites in his neighbourhood, studying the esoteric cartoon murals and competing tags on her laptop. What was it she said about the giant, multicoloured tag behind his apartment?

It looks like a maze, with a cracked heart at the centre
.

Franny
—her image rushed to him in converging waves of love and panic. She was safe. He knew that now. But was he?

Alex was watching him, his expression now guarded. What were they
really
doing here? He tried to follow a line of speculation but it petered out in his hands.

Alex had left the rifle leaning against a broken pew in the back row. Joseph reached it in three steps. He lifted the rifle, his finger flaring with pain as he pumped a shell into
the chamber and held the barrel high enough to blow a hole in Alex’s chest.

The men stared at each other across the floor of rotting planks and ferns, Joseph straining against Alex’s superior will—and losing.

“I wish I could beat you in a fight,” Joseph said.

“Would it matter now?”

“It would to me.”

“And then what? You’d be a man?”

Just like the old days: Alex always one answer and two questions ahead of him. “We’re not talking about me,” Joseph said. “I’ve got the gun!”

Alex didn’t hide his grudging respect. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know. This has to end.” He’d shoot Alex if he kept pretending to play dumb.

“It
has
ended,” Alex said, without condescension in his voice. “You think I would have left the gun there if it hadn’t?”

A shudder went through Joseph. Even after all they’d been through together, he still couldn’t tell if Alex was lying.

“How can I know that?”

Alex shrugged. “You can’t. Not on paper. I thought we were past all that.”

“That’s not good enough for me!” He was already losing the conversation’s thread. The gun was gaining weight by the second in his hands. “When did you decide not to kill me?”

“The night we met.”

“You don’t mean that. Tonight—you were planning to kill me. You had a
plan
!”

Alex let the word hang in the air, as if pausing for the church’s invisible congregation to ponder its meaning. “A plan?” He started to laugh. “Let me guess: puritanical Alex gets revenge on Jane and her wild friends? You were
never
that wild.”

Joseph felt himself getting lighter, as if his clothing were being stripped off one piece at a time. He must be in shock—Alex too, their bodies numbed by clinical disassociation while their minds went on wild flights through the church rafters.

“What was
your
plan, Joseph?”

“I didn’t have one. I never have a plan.”

“Bullshit!” Alex’s voice chased a pair of doves through a hole in the roof. “You’ve always operated with a plan and you’ve always gotten exactly what you wanted. You’re just too much of a coward to admit it.” He leaned against the altar. The stained-glass window behind him showed a robed man who must be Jesus—the figure’s head was missing—leading sheep down a steep mountainside. “You got what you asked for. Now you want me to explain
why
you did what you did.”

“I must be such a disappointment after all that time you put into bettering me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You took care of one failed reclamation project tonight. You didn’t have to
kill
him.” Jesus—they’d made a girl fatherless. Never mind that her dad was an idiot, he was
her
idiot.

“Maybe I should have let him shoot you,” Alex said.

“I was cutting a deal with him, in language he understood.”

“Is that what you think—you were playing
him
? You’d cut a deal and call it even?” Alex shook his head. “You have no idea who you were dealing with. You’d have been paying him back for the rest of your life—and mine. Every time he needed a job done, we’d be dragged back into his bullshit outlaw life until we ended up dead or in jail. He’s already got a dozen people in town under his thumb.” Alex stepped away from the altar. He’d wrestled the conversation from Joseph. The rifle was next.

“Derek would have destroyed this community if I’d let him.”

This community?
For a few seconds he thought Alex was talking about the ghost town. Joseph couldn’t draw a full breath. The church felt smaller, darker, as though his and Alex’s combined weight had sunk the building deeper into the ground.

“Where’s the note from the girls?”

Alex snorted, as if he couldn’t believe Joseph still hadn’t figured it out. “It was stuck to the fridge door with a magnet. I slid it under the fridge. It’s just lying there, waiting to be found.” He blinked a few times, clearing his eyes for the impassive stare he directed at Joseph.

“It was
you
, wasn’t it?” Joseph shouted. “
You
saw us in the clearing. That’s why you wanted to kill me!”

A terrifying rage flared up in Alex’s face, and his upper body seemed to expand its contours, like the haunches of a cornered animal warning off a more powerful opponent. “Jane can never know that! Not a word, about
any
of this!”

So that’s what Alex wanted: a pact of silence. He wanted his old life back, and only Joseph could give it to him.

“Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?”

Alex lowered his eyes to study the rotting floorboards. When Joseph didn’t retract the question or lower the gun, Alex turned his attention to the mural. “I wanted to. I almost did.”

Joseph felt the rifle veer in his shaking hands—he’d blow apart a rickety pew if he fired it now. The mural had brightened in the morning light. Five skeletal picnickers dressed up for a jaunt to the countryside.

“You kept doing something to save yourself,” Alex said. “Those boys in the shack—I wish I’d seen the look on their faces.” His voice was warm, even protective, as if he was retelling a favourite anecdote.

“But you shot Derek.”

“He brought it on himself.”

Which meant, at least in Alex’s eyes, that Joseph hadn’t.
I don’t deserve to die
, he thought. Not much of a life manifesto, but not a bad start. He released the stale breath he’d been holding in.

“We hid Derek’s body well,” he said. “They’ll never find him.”

Alex nodded. “You’re right.”

Joseph could barely support the gun’s weight anymore. He let the rifle scrape along the floor as he walked out of the church, the sound of limping footsteps trailing him into the overgrown yard. He pulled a board free from the well and, as Alex took his place beside him, he held the rifle over the gap, ignoring the throbbing in his finger. The rifle still felt good in his hands, but he let it fall into the shadows, only lowering his arms when he heard a plopping splash.

“We both fell down a ravine,” Joseph said. “You dropped the rifle and couldn’t find it in the dark. I’d already lost my flashlight by that point.” He dropped his flashlight into the well and nodded at Alex’s.

“Mine broke in the fall.” Alex smashed the flashlight against the stone rim.

“You have the iPhone. Throw it in.”

Alex did.

“The fall knocked out my teeth,” Joseph said, “messed up my arm and leg. You twisted your knee. It was slippery as hell.”

“What about your finger?”

“I’ll come up with a good cover story. I have a lot of experience at that.”

Was that a hint of a smile on Alex’s lips?

“The cops won’t dispute our story,” Joseph said. “Neither will anyone else. We were trying to find our missing daughters, for God’s sake.” Never mind if it was all a misunderstanding: Franny would know what her father had done for her. “What about the bikers?”

“They’re good capitalists,” Alex said. “They want a quick profit with minimal effort. If there’s too many hassles, they’ll move on.” The confidence had returned to his voice. The grow-op and meth shack had temporarily escaped his wrath, but they would not survive the summer. What was one more fire in the woods?

Later, after they’d left the rail bed to take the last path back to the farm, Joseph asked Alex what it felt like to kill a man.

“I don’t know,” he said. The bags beneath his watery eyes were the size of a baby’s bottom lip. “Ask me again in a year.”

“I will. I mean it.”

“Me too.”

The time to process Joseph’s portion of the blame would come later, in the anxious nights and mornings, when Derek’s dead face appeared to him like a hologram on a ten-dollar bill held up to the light. Now was the time for the last push through the forest, through wet vegetation, along muddy paths, the men supporting each other’s weight through the worst of it.

“The story you told me about that crazy
C.O.
of yours,” Joseph said. “You stole that from a movie.”

Alex smiled. “It’s called
Dog Soldiers
. You dragged me to see it. You were always a sucker for melodrama.”

“At least it didn’t have fucking subtitles.”

Their laughter outraged a few robins hunting worms on the path. It felt good to be laughing. The trees around them slowly grew brighter, and then it was as if a curtain was lifted to reveal the pasture behind the farm. Their eyes strained in the light. Alex looked terrible. Joseph must look worse.

It didn’t matter. They staggered on, their limping steps comical as they half-raced for the back fence. Joseph heard the cock crow to greet the morning, a first for him and a beacon for his wild hopes as the farm came into sight through the light mist. Alex reached the fence first and leaned against the damp white boards. They could see the back porch, where Franny and Rebecca, wrapped in blankets, slept in lounge chairs with the surviving dog curled up between them.

Joseph felt the lump in his throat rise and then evaporate into tears when it reached his eyes. Franny had waited for him.

They watched their daughters sleep, and the scene, so without precedent in Joseph’s life, seemed strangely familiar, as if he’d imagined it many years ago: the tearful homecoming after a long odyssey through a dark wilderness; danger and tests of courage at every turn in the winding path. He must have worked over the details, honing them to satisfy his need for drama, even planning the soundtrack: an old Irish ballad; one of those tear-jerkers from Jane’s doo-wop albums; “Under Pressure,” by Bowie and Queen.

Joseph was romanticizing again. He’d let himself off the hook one last time.

This novel was a long time coming, with many people helping along the way. Thanks to my circle of readers for their advice and encouragement: Doug Dolan, Julie deCarufel, Darren Alexander, Ross McKie, Annie Bradley, Samantha Haywood, Nicholas Dinka, and the late Derek Weiler. Special thanks to Robert Wiersema, who read several incarnations of the novel and helped spark its conception. Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers’ Reserve program for a timely grant. To my agent, Chris Bucci: all the work, meetings, and guidance are much appreciated. My editor, Anita Chong, worked tirelessly on
Harmless
—it is a far better novel because of her insight and creativity. Finally, all my love to my children, Petra and Charlie, to
BNN
, and to my amazing wife, Laura, to whom this novel is dedicated.