Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery (28 page)

The singer sent the notes skyward with a particularly inventive phrasing to his rendition. “Go, Georgie!” some die-hard rock & roller called out, with Grace cheering him on. Made for each other, the pair was. She put her hand on the inside of his thigh, let it creep upwards with a raucous laugh, like it was an old joke they were sharing. The tune turned and he began to crow like a rooster, quenching thirst and drowning troubles as one. A covering of chartreuse over iodine: “The Green, Green Grass of Home” had never sounded so agonizingly verdant.

Dan reeled into his pocket and pulled out a mash of bills, peeled two off and slapped them onto the table. Maggie Smith came over and snapped them up, teeth stained chromium yellow like unpolished silverware.

Over by the door, a stain seemed to be trying to ooze into the shag without much success. Dan sidestepped it and staggered from the bar to stand breathing in the night air. That good clean Sudbury air, bought and paid for by the generosity of Inco.

Mist hissed from the sewer grates where shadows huddled against the cold, home to the unlucky and unloved. The cityscape faded into grey over the disembodied forms of a pair of unhappy wraiths. They glanced up at his passing. Purple hair and nose rings. Where did they get the money? Nifty hair and piercings didn’t come cheap.

Dan walked on, trying to imagine his life if he’d stayed. Where would he be now if he hadn’t taken that first step onto the tarmac of the 69, never lifted his thumb, opened the cab of the truck and said with stunning alacrity as though he’d done the same thing a million times before, “I’m heading for TO”? Stacking empties at the LCBO, probably, or driving a cab or even working as a clerk at the gleaming new taxation centre. Or maybe he would have died, one fistfight too many, the blinding flash of a brain hemorrhage followed by everlasting blackness. A line on a tombstone to indicate his whereabouts underground. But he would never, ever be
working
underground. Not for Inco. Not for Falconbridge Mines. Not for anybody.

Maybe he’d be the older man groping the teenaged striplings with their nervous eyes and taut tummies, jeans sloping down to reveal, pinked and toned, those smooth, muted buttocks, watching with quiet patience, one hand on his rod, while the trestle trembled and a boy timed his ejaculations to spew over his fist at the shriek of a train passing overhead in the dull monotony of a summer’s afternoon, as the brooding older man with the scar on his right temple tried to recollect the shape of the future.
His
future. While the dark, mutinous side of him tried, and failed, to imagine the rest of his life.

Dan shook off the image. Memory’s way was perilous.

He hadn’t gone a block before his bladder nagged him to stop and take care of business. He looked around and stepped inside a cul-de-sac, like ducking into a darkened church, standing a few feet out of sight from the road while he fumbled with his fly and relieved himself. He looked down and laughed:
You’re pretty sizeable
. He thought of the shocked look on the cyclist’s face as he pushed him against the fence. He sprayed a box labelled with a brand of tissue papers, the drops splattering back at him, managing to wet his fingers in the draw. This, he knew, was the prelude to sloppy drunk. He was halfway through his meditations when he heard the voices. He swayed toward the dark and hoped he’d finish before they appeared or else that they would pass quickly and not look into the alley’s dim depths and see him at prayer.

Shadows appeared over his shoulder, thrown long by the street lamps. From the sound of their footsteps he knew they’d turned down the entrance to the alley. He still had the presence of mind to feel embarrassed at being caught. He shook himself and zipped up before turning, ready to smile and laugh at his predicament.

At first he took them for an older couple. They looked burnt-out wisps of human beings. She appeared to be arguing, stumbling while leaning against him as they moved closer. Then he recognized them as the forms huddled on the sewer grates.

She looked him up and down, sizing him up for something. A coffin, maybe. “What are you doing, fuckhead? You fucking pissing in the street?”

A part of his brain considered this: not the nicest of greetings. Certainly not words to cheer you at two in the morning in a back alley. They continued toward him with their jerky, spastic walk, propping each other up like badly conjoined twins. Purple hair glinted in the moonlight. She wore a tight clingy skirt and leopard print leotards. The boy was in jeans with a black T. A tattooed dragon clawed its way up his throat and wrapped itself around his neck. Both had on pricey leather jackets. Between them they had enough piercings to fill a small jewellery box. Must’ve been hell getting through airport security.

“Did you hear me? I said what are you doing?” She snarled like a Ringwraith. There should have been smoke wreathing from her lips. “I want money, you cocksucker!” Her arm clutched a purse in a ridiculous parody of a woman. “How much you got, fuckin’ dickhead?”

“Yeah!” said the guy. “We want your money. How much you got?” He laughed and rattled a chain wrapped around his fist. They were close enough for Dan to see their faces. The flat-eyed, no-mind stare of heroin addicts doing their diddly dance. Sid and Nancy in
On The Town
.

“Scum,” Dan mumbled.

The chain quivered in quick junkie twitches. “You talkin’ to me?” the boy demanded. Make that Sid and Nancy in
Taxi Driver
. The perfect couple. She had a cunt for a mouth; he had an arsehole for a brain.

Behind him, a fire escape traced a route to the roof, but it was blocked above the first floor. The only way out of the alley lay behind this highly colourful odd couple. At least Sally would be impressed. Dan reasoned he could bluff his way out or, if it came to it, he could manage the two of them without much trouble. They weren’t big and they were addicts. They were probably used to rolling drunks who couldn’t put up much of a fight. Then again, he was drunk.

They moved faster than he expected. She swung the purse, clipping Dan on the bridge of the nose with a wallop. His hands went up to his face as his throat constricted in rage. The sky pitched, shrank, then resumed normal proportions above. The brick had found its mark.

Sid raised an arm to follow up with the chain. Fuelled by anger and pain, Dan booted him in the balls. The boy staggered and fell to the sidewalk, the slither of leather on concrete. Through his outraged howl, Dan heard the click. Something glinted. Metal. Longer and sharper than a piercing. Nancy came at him, blade in hand, suddenly looking more than capable as Sid writhed on the ground. She would have at him for her man. Adrenaline surged like lightning. With no time for niceties, Dan kicked her in the stomach and sent her and her purple hair reeling.

He watched, awed by the slow-motion trajectory as she flipped and rolled and landed against the curb. Her head hit, making an ugly, disturbing sound like the clack of false teeth. She lay still. Was she breathing? In that light, it was impossible to tell. If anyone came around the corner, they’d be calling him the assailant. The boy would claim he’d attacked them. That he’d been bigger and faster — maybe fast enough to kill a teenaged girl. Self-defence had brought out the knife.

Over by the curb. An arm moved. Reached up to feel the head. Thank. Fuck. He hadn’t killed her after all. For a moment he wanted to go over and help, but quickly thought better of it. The head looked around, fixing him with a hateful stare. Hands planted themselves in the dirt. The body twitched, inching upwards. She was like the Evil Dead, already coming after him again.

He flashed on the pub. Remembered he’d paid in cash. No paper trail. No one knew his name. Wasn’t a regular. And was very very grateful.

Time to go.

Twenty-One

Drink and Resurrection

Dan had never endangered anybody’s life — his own included — by mixing driving with alcohol. Even this latest zigzag life had thrown him wasn’t going to make him change that. There were some rules no amount of alcohol could waive, though if drinking encouraged a state in which you could convince yourself of almost anything, then that went a long way toward explaining why so many drinkers didn’t consider themselves subject to those rules. He sobered up long enough to patch his face, say goodbye to his aunt and cousin and get safely back down the 69.

Somewhere between Parry Sound and Mactier his mind got stuck in a loop as he imagined his mother returning home to find herself locked out in the snow, knocking without getting an answer. And always, just out of reach, himself as a four-year-old, listening to a strange scratching sound that came intermittently before fading out for good.
You wouldn’t remember — you were just a little kid, Daniel
. His aunt’s words. Try as he might, he couldn’t erase the memory’s sepia glow.

Despite what he’d learned about his mother’s death, Dan was determined not to fall apart over it. At least not any more than he had already. She’d been dead for more than thirty years. That wasn’t about to change. Knowledge stopped the hoping, he reminded himself, but it didn’t make things better.

In his mind there were two women who occupied his memory and vied for the title of mother: one was light and feathery, a rustle of flowers in the morning air, a woman who made Eskimo villages out of discarded half-shells of eggs upended on drifts of cotton batten snow. The other was slovenly, weepy-eyed, didn’t dress before three in the afternoon, and made promises she didn’t keep or remember. Neither of them seemed real, just illusions he’d invented to fill in the shadows where a mother was supposed to be. He’d always felt that if he could know which version was true — or neither — then he could stop trying to remember her, stop trying to piece her together after all these years.

Just outside Barrie he pulled over to the side of the highway and leaned his forehead into the steering wheel. A squadron of eighteen-wheelers roared past, rocking him like a child as he choked back his sobs, tears staining his pant-legs. The only thing that revived him was the thought of more drink waiting at home. Normally a draft or two would have stood him in good stead at a local pub, but the thought that he might not be able to stop there, coupled with the fear of getting stranded in Barrie, held sway. So there was hope, was how he saw it. If he still had priorities on where he would and would not allow himself to get pissed-drunk, there was still a little humanity left.

By the time he turned in his driveway, his mind had re-focused on Craig Killingworth’s disappearance. It was an excuse, he knew, to keep from thinking about his mother’s death. He dropped his bag in the hall and went upstairs to wash his face, marvelling at the yellow and purple stain spreading beneath the skin on the right side. In the kitchen, he cracked the ice tray against the counter, splashed a healthy hit of Scotch into a glass, filled a plastic bag with the rest of the ice, and went to the living room. There, holding the bag to his face, he spread the file and photos on the floor like a mad haberdasher’s shop. He had a case to finish.

The whiskey brought clarity to his thinking. It helped him concentrate as it dulled the ache in his head and the pain in his heart. As he drank, he contemplated the code that might or might not unlock the past: a missing bicycle, a ferry captain who said he saw Craig Killingworth crossing just one way. All this time Dan had imagined a clean break or, at worst, death by mishap somewhere down the highway. But the lost portion of the file and the missing bicycle had entwined in his mind. It seemed as though they’d been telling him something different. He just wished he knew what.

He picked up Craig Killingworth’s photograph, trying to read into its depths. No smiles were always the hardest to interpret. Sadness or just a lack of expression? Cheese or no cheese? There was a shot of Killingworth with his sons, the dolphin-like Thom, already beautiful, and the darker, thought-ravaged features of the slightly older Theodore. Ted. Even here, Craig Killingworth’s upturned mouth was hard to press into service as a smile. What lay hidden behind those eyes? What held back the joy he might have felt at being with his boys?

A final shot showed the interior of what looked a lot like the stables Dan had explored behind the summerhouse the day before the wedding. Killingworth’s trim figure was outfitted in jodhpurs and sport-shirt, collar turned up. He held a grooming brush in one hand; his other lay on the waxy brown flank of a gelding. Here, at last, he exhibited what looked like the ghost of a smile.

“Where did you go?” Dan spoke to the empty room. “And why does your family not want you found?”

A man had disappeared, leaving behind a wife and two sons. How had he not cared enough to come back? Suicide was one possible answer. For a moment, Dan pictured himself up on Lake on the Mountain. He saw himself grasping the oars as the rowboat slid over the surface of the lake.
It just plunges,
Thom had said. Whatever was below lay so deep it might never be found.

He moved the pictures and file memos around, rearranging the pieces of the puzzle to make them fit. They stubbornly resisted interpretation. He reached for the bottle — empty. There was another in the kitchen, but when he tried to pour from it, it flew from his hands, smashing on the tiles. He picked up the larger pieces, cutting his fingers. Blood trailed across the floor. He cursed the perversity of inanimate objects and wiped his bloodied hand on a dishtowel.

Did he really prefer being drunk? What a pathetic statement that made. More important, what to do about it? Why did despair always look so much better through the prism of a filled glass? Drink went into the body, through the mouth and down the throat, then on to the underbelly and, eventually, it left in a wash of fine yellow spray. And that was it for all that alcohol, pricey or not. Time to refill your glass and get on with your life. But the despair stayed, seeming to need no entry or exit, no replenishing, like mercury or some other poison that sickened without killing. Ingested by accident or by design, once in and never to leave. To rot your guts and muddle your mind till you were long past having a mind. What was it about the barrel’s bottom that looked so good from the inside? Because surely it was hell from the outside, judging by the looks others gave you when you were down there.

The expression on Ked’s face was pure disgust. His son turned and went into the kitchen without a word. Dan glanced around. It was morning, but still early by the feel of it. He lay stretched on the living room floor like a schoolboy after pulling an all-nighter, the contents of Craig Killingworth’s missing person report strewn around him. He sat up. His eyelids felt as though they’d been peeled back with a can opener. His reading glasses lay on the floor beneath him, road-kill written all over them. He coughed and gasped at the pain searing his lungs. Obviously it hadn’t been an easy landing.

Dan picked his way out to the kitchen where Ked had begun cleaning up. Glass glittered in the morning light. A bloodied tea towel lay in the middle of the floor. He might have believed the place had been broken into if he hadn’t recalled searching for the third bottle of Scotch in his upstairs office drawer.

“I would’ve cleaned up. I wasn’t expecting you home till later,” Dan offered.

“I live here too, you know.”

It wasn’t a question so much as a flat statement asserting some sort of right which Dan was having trouble figuring out at the moment.

“I know that. I’ve never questioned it.”

Ked turned, his eyes hard. “You’re always telling me how to behave and not to fuck up my life. Now it’s my turn.” He was trembling. “I don’t want a drunk for a father.”

Dan could see the fear in his son’s face. But he saw something else — something he recognized. He’d felt it himself enough times facing his own father in moments that had bordered on hatred. He saw determination hidden behind those disapproving eyes.

“Is that what you think I am?” Dan said slowly.

Ked nodded, taking quick breaths through his nose.

“I know I drink a lot,” Dan said. “But I’m not a drunk.”

“So you say.” Ked stood there staring at him. “So you say, Dad. But I’ve seen you passed out enough times to know you have a problem.”

“I like to drink. I don’t think I have a problem,” Dan said, trying to smile despite the pain. For a moment, he wondered if he really did have a problem.

“Then prove it.” Ked’s eyes challenged him. “I’m asking you not to have another drink for the next six months.”

Dan scratched behind one ear. “That’s pretty drastic.”

“Walk the talk, Dad. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? So walk the talk.”

Dan looked around at the mess on the floor then up at this son of his, half-grown, but maybe knowing better than he had at that age. He studied the features of the boy’s face. Somehow what was awkward in Dan had come out strong in Ked. He was becoming a handsome young man.

“Did something happen while you were away visiting Aunt Marge?”

Dan nodded slowly, calling to mind the conversation with his aunt as she lay in bed pulling on her oxygen. He moistened his lips. “Yeah. I guess it did.”

Ked wiped back a tear. “Is that what set you off drinking again?”

Dan hated the disapproval on his son’s face. “I don’t really feel up to discussing it, Ked. Maybe later.”

“Six months, Dad.”

Dan started to motion with his hands, but Ked cut him off. “If you don’t agree, I’m going to move out of here and go live with Mom.”

Dan paused to take stock of the situation. His son was a meltdown waiting to happen. “Is that what you want?” he said softly. “Do you want to live with your mother?”

“
No!
I want to live here with you!” he said. “But if you can’t … can’t just....” The tears started flowing, cutting off the sentence.

“All right,” Dan said quietly. “All right. I agree.”

Ked looked up and sniffled. “You agree not to drink for six months — starting today?”

“Yes. I agree not to drink for six months.”

Ked’s stance relaxed a little. “Okay.”

Dan wanted to say something to lighten the situation. “But your Uncle Donny’s going to kill me when I tell him I can’t even have a beer with him.…”

“No, he’s not.” Ked shook his head. “I already talked to him. He agrees with me. You’ve got to stop.”

Six months. Surely there would be any number of valid reasons not to keep the promise. Like right now, Dan thought. A drink would have gone a long way toward making his hangover just a little more bearable. How was he going to concentrate at work when it got really stressful? Sometimes things brooded on the horizon for hours waiting for a trigger, lying there inert then overtaking him all at once, unleashing their fury like a sudden storm. The searing, sizzling, electric dazzle of it. A desert rock, a splash of water, high noon. The pressure could build for hours, but all it took was one flashpoint to unleash his desire for a drink, and it all came crashing down. Leaving him exhausted, deflated, defeated. Disgusted with having lost control over himself once again.

Obviously he was going to have plenty to do to redeem himself in Ked’s eyes. How had the father-son equation got so turned around?

Dan went back out to the scramble of photographs and documents spread across his rug. He gathered up the pieces and left the file on the dining room table. He dialled Donny’s number. Better to confront the beast sooner than later. Donny picked up.

“Et tu, Brute?” Dan said.

“Then fall, Caesar.” Donny blew a well-considered breath across the line. “I’m sorry, but I agree with your son. Just be glad we spared you the video cameras and the weeping host and the public intervention on television. But if you’re thinking about not living up to your promise, I wouldn’t do it.”

“No?”

“You sure like to make ’em suffer, don’t you?”

Dan said nothing.

“Word of advice, Danny? Don’t disappoint your son. He’s very vulnerable right now. It’s bad enough you didn’t believe his stories about nicking junk at school, but this might do some permanent damage to your relationship if you’re not careful.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so. And that’s why I’m telling you myself.”

“I hear you. Thanks.”

Dan went upstairs to the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and stood in the shower under the cold water until it hurt. Whatever good it might do to punish himself for what had happened to his mother and whatever had or had not happened in his life, unlike his own father, Dan didn’t intend to hurt anyone else with it. Ked least of all. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and get on with things. If what he’d learned in Sudbury could give him anything, then it could give him that.