Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (33 page)

But every time Lauchlin managed to lay out his actions rationally, to contain them with common sense, his imagination overwhelmed
them, it was all too close to the heart, too vivid, too ambiguous. Why had he been so slow to react, to question? Yes, there
had
been something about the man,
some thing,
that reminded him of…who? Cooper? Or was that later? It was so hard to pick through the tangled thorns of his memory. Tena was there at his shoulder, and he could see Clement’s dark blood, his cap in the grass, more horrible somehow than had his body itself been lying there.

He pulled a bottle of rum from a drawer and took a long drink from it, then another. He set it beneath the gooseneck lamp. Then he got up and punched the bag hard, jolting it backward. He moved in close and met its return, pummelling it blindly with both fists, crowding it, shoving it with his shoulders, butting it. He kept swinging until his breath was harsh, a kind of moan coming out of him, and then the light went out. He froze his fists and stepped back, breathing hard, daring his heart to fail him, listening to the bag’s chain creak slowly as it swung near and away. That bicycle’s chain…My God, grinding all that distance? Drive a man insane…but he was mad already, and still out there. Where were the lights? Lightning had struck somewhere. His ungloved knuckles felt raw and he ran his tongue along them, tasting blood. He’d wanted only to get blind drunk but the darkness drained that away. Tena was beyond his touch. What was rising now from the dark corners of her mind? He ached to think of her, what had happened to her life. Had he let it happen? No, no, but he’d been her protector—not her lover, even though she had yielded willingly some part of herself, and he had tried to take it in his hands.

“
MORAG
?
PEG
?”

“I wasn’t asleep, so don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t. I like waking you up. What are you doing there now?”

“There’s lightning over the sea. It’s spectacular.”

“You’re not scared, all alone there?”

“Of what? Big noises?”

“Clement MacTavish, he’s dead. Murdered, just down the road. I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean by that, Lauchlin?”

“He was killed behind his own house, Morag. Shot through the eye. His wife, she’s blind, she…”

“But what
can
you do? I don’t understand. It’s horrible, yes, I heard they found him. I didn’t know how he died.”

“Nobody knows the ugly goddamn details of it.”

“His wife is Tena, the woman…?”

“She can’t even stay in her house, for God’s sake. The bastard who killed him is on the loose somewhere…”

“There, in St. Aubin?”

“He’d have been…seen. Miles away now probably. If I could, I’d drive up to see
you.
Jesus, I would.”

“It’s a mean night for that, about to get worse.”

“Couldn’t be meaner than here.”

“Why can’t you then? You been drinking?”

“You’re fresh back from that man you’re to marry, aren’t you?”

“That would stop you? Since when, Lauchlin.”

“Anyway, it’s all a bit crazy here, Morag, I’m here in the dark, with Clement and everything. And what’s to become of Tena, I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you a bit.”

“That’s what you’re doing, Lauch. Like you’ve always done—tell me a little and I have to figure out the rest.”

“That bad, am I?”

“Oh! Sea lightning! Brighter than day. Can you hear that thunder? Have you heard from your brother?”

“Yes. I should’ve gone with him.”

“You wouldn’t be in the middle of all this.”

“But I am, you see. I am.”

The store’s single fluorescent stuttered into life overhead. The wall clock’s sweep second hand shuddered between two and three, the motor chattered, that’s where the seconds were lost, shaved away, they accumulated somewhere unclaimed, let them go. Lauchlin was staring where the streetlamp had come on, yellowy-green above the road, like thin stagelight, casting shadows in the ditch, behind the trees. That’s how he was beginning to remember the bicycle and its alien rider, emerging out of the fog in slow motion, Lauchlin watching with amazement as he passed soundlessly before him and into the dark wings.

“Are you still there, Lauchlin? So much static.”

“Remember the old phone lines? That’s what my mind feels like, all the receivers are off the hook. Any minute somebody’s going to cut in, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Are you okay?”

“No, dear. I’m not. I’d like to come up to see you, I will, I hope soon, just a visit. I want to bring you a present, for your engagement and all that.”

“You can bring me a present anytime, anyway. But not tonight, I guess.”

“I’ve things to do. Stay away from the windows, dear Morag. This storm isn’t over. We don’t want to lose you.”

“We?”

“Me.”

I
N
the car he had borrowed from Malcolm, Lauchlin waited across the street from the big, grey-shingled house, a Victorian relic of North Sydney’s boom times. “Goodspeed Funeral Services.” Tena was inside with Rita, the blue Honda parked out front, and he was determined to see her, however briefly. He’d learned that last night she had talked Rita into taking her back to St. Aubin to retrieve a few belongings, and while they were in the house, the blackout hit, scaring them both badly, they phoned the Mounties and two constables showed up. And Lauchlin had been up the road all the time, unaware, thinking where Cooper might be.

Sitting in the car heated with city sun, his head ached from last night’s rum. He’d slept little. He lay back on the headrest.
I just want to tell you, Lauch, about a little roofless stone church, chapel, Teampull, in Gaelic, before I go from here. I wandered out in the late evening light toward the Chaipaval, passed the little girl’s red bicycle lying in a yard, she’d be sleeping then. Rabbits were on the machair, skitters of dark fur. Enjoy that grass, my friends, the gas is coming. The Teampull, no bigger than a modest cabin, sits humbly on a promontory above the sea, solitary, a piece of landscape. I’d like to think monks used it, and that I could get some of what they had, if I went there to it, in it. Asceticism, discipline, cold dawns, hunger.
This is as close to monkhood as I am likely to get, St. Columba’s territory. The saint side of his life, that’s the easy part to grasp, the myths, the miracles. What’s harder to see is him as a man who acted badly earlier in his life, subject to the same flaws and foolishness as you and me. He’d killed a man and had to flee Ireland. It seems you have to sin like hell first, rack up a lot to atone for, and then come to God and the religious life. Are we ready yet?

Not yet, Frank.

A car passed, honking at someone. He wouldn’t go into the funeral home. Clement’s body had not been released yet, but Goodspeed would work his embalmer’s arts upon him, stitching up the rags of autopsy, restoring his eye, closing his lids, composing his face. Lauchlin knew Simon Goodspeed, wizened and bent, he’d buried relatives, but he had changed so little for so long, thin under his dark suits, his long capable hands clasping yours with a soft deftness you barely noticed, his blue eyes pale with sympathy, his movements always economical, the flourish of efficiency about them, it seemed as if he would be directing funerals forever, that, for our necessity, his own aging had ceased so he could attend to the deaths of others, dependably and at a reasonable price. No, Lauchlin would have to talk if he went inside, someone would want to know what he could tell them about this awful murder in St. Aubin. Not much. The search for Cooper continued, no sightings of him anywhere, though in Lauchlin’s mind he appeared again and again.

Nor was Lauchlin in any mood for Goodspeed’s wife, younger than Simon, still an attractive blonde, cool and withholding, with a superior sense of herself. She’d been aloof with Lauchlin whenever he’d seen her, something about him put her off. Ex-boxer? Poor teacher? Yet for the moment he dwelled on the banal desire Lydia Goodspeed could arouse in him because it seemed normal, direct, readily accounted for next to what had been weighing on him relentlessly—that some motive he hadn’t understood had clouded his vision three nights ago and compromised his actions since. Had he, at some
subconscious level, really suspected that the cyclist was Clement’s partner, and deep inside him lay some perverse notion that he wanted to see what might happen, like leaving a smouldering campfire in a dry woods, a fleeting sense that adventure lay in that strange sight, that something would change, had to change in his life if this man on a bicycle continued his journey through the dark? If he had somehow perceived that this man might be Cooper, had he then thought—could you call it thought at all?—such danger might leave more room for him in Tena’s life?
Could
he have held an incoherent wish like that inside himself? He could not believe he did, no, and it made no sense—it would have ignored the danger to Tena as well, though it seemed clear Cooper had no designs on her or how easily could he have carried them through. But if Lauchlin had harboured some subconscious wish for the unpredictable, was not such a buried desire irrational anyway, blinding, fragmentary, barely apprehended, unavailable, streaking through the mind at light speed? And
had
he somehow recognized this grain of evil hope, could he have acted against it, would there have been time to piece together a sequence of events? He could have had no idea of Cooper’s plan, and even if some vague suspicions had slowly coalesced into curiosity and he had pursued the cyclist, Cooper would have hidden himself in the woods or the barn by the time he reached Clement’s house. But still, still…what course of thought was your mind capable of, and you unconscious of it? Was it a sequence at all, or rather a scattering of desire, possibility, dashed hope unrestrained by any moral dimension? If he had not been conscious of such thoughts, did that not mean that he had rejected them? They were never uttered, never acted upon. And yet, in
not
acting…

There was Tena at the front door, Rita beside her, Goodspeed holding her at the elbow ever so lightly as he talked, her head inclined toward him. Lauchlin remembered his subtle footwork, the man
could slide so smoothly among a gathering of mourners he should have been a boxer, you hardly knew he’d moved on. Goodspeed withdrew his empathetic hand as Tena took up her cane, watching the women until they reached the sidewalk before he vanished.

Lauchlin called to Tena, then crossed the street to Rita’s car. They both stopped at the passenger door and Tena turned toward him.

“I’m sorry, I’ve tried to get hold of you, Tena,” he said. “I talked to Carrie on the phone and she told me you were here. Hello, Rita.”

“Lauchlin. Better late than never, we could’ve used you last night. You’re looking a little pale, boy. We’re going to my house now so Tena can rest.”

“Rita, I don’t need to rest. I’d like to talk to Lauchlin alone. Do you mind waiting a bit?”

“Well, no, dear. You go right ahead then. I’ll have a cigarette.”

Lauchlin led her across to Malcolm’s car and they sat inside. Her eyes seemed to have lost their former light, their colour, as if she’d given up any appearance of sight. She moved them listlessly from the window to his voice.

“She’s dying to listen in,” Lauchlin said. Rita was smoking furiously and glancing over at them, the afternoon wind ruffling her dark brown curls. “I’d like to drive us somewhere else, Tena.”

“Point Aconi maybe, where you talked about death? I wonder what it’s like today, there where your friend died.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Oh, probably you couldn’t take me to that place, Lauchlin. Nobody could.” Her voice sounded tired and husky. “Anyway, the police might get uneasy, after what happened yesterday, the blackout and all.” She reached for his hand and held it. Her fingers felt cool. “It shook us up.”

“I didn’t know you were at the house, Tena. Jesus, I’d have come down in a second. You shouldn’t have been there anyway, just the two of you.”

“I wanted something of him, of his, to have it with me. And I wasn’t going to be kept from my own house either—that was our
life.
But, oh God, when the lights went out, so did my bravery. I yelled out the first number that came in my head—yours, at the store. It’s busy, Rita said.”

“I was there, I was on the line with somebody…I’ve wanted to talk to you, tell you how sorry I am about Clement, I wanted to say it in person, Tena, not on Rita’s phone. It makes no sense. How could we know this would happen? He was a good man.”

“Yes, he was.” She let go his hand and turned her face toward the street. “I didn’t have to look at him. At least there’s that, isn’t there? Mr. Goodspeed will do him up fine, I’m sure, no one will know what he looked like, shot the way he was. His eyes will be peacefully closed, all the horror hidden.” She pressed her fingers to her temples, held them there. “The house, you know, went black in one stroke, and worse for me because Rita yelled out, Oh God, Tena, the lights are out! It’s him! He’s come back to get us! She thought Cooper had sneaked back and cut the wires, and for a little she had me believing it. He came back once, he could again. After a man kills, he has those powers, doesn’t he, to get in your head that way? We’d been packing a few things, Rita and me, just chatting, domestic talk, it calms you, it covers the pain. But when it went dark like that and she had to
tell
me, I snapped, all the sudden I was like bare wire, sparking. I was exhausted, wild. You see, I’d had no proper time to grieve, no peace, he’d been shot dead, for God’s sake, in our own yard. I wanted a chance to mourn, that’s all, that’s why I cried out so, that his killer could do this to me, not leave me alone until my husband was waked and buried. Then we got Lorna on the line and she said, It’s just a blackout, dear, all along the road.”

“No, it wasn’t just that, was it.”

“I needed a place of my own to weep, that’s all. I think I’m past that, for the time being.” She opened and shut the clasp of her handbag.
“The fish van was jammed up in the woods where that creature left it, did you know?”

“He’s somewhere on the Island. Working his way west toward the causeway, some think. How, I don’t know.”

“Easy to hide in Cape Breton, God knows, but not easy to live where you’re hiding. He’ll never last, he isn’t clever, creeping around, keeping himself alive like an animal. People ask me, Aren’t you afraid, Tena, him loose somewhere? No, I’m not. I don’t care. He had his chance. What can he do to me now?” She shook her head as if to clear it. “It was him that came back, you know,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “Him, in the fish van. Me in bed, listening.”

Lauchlin felt a choking hatred for the man. He had not been there when she needed him last night, and Cooper, in his awfulness, had seized her imagination. “We’ll get him, it won’t be long.” Threadbare phrases, barely true in any case so far as he knew, his voice no different from anyone else’s trying to lift her spirits, a hopeless spectator, ignorant and powerless, as he had been that night on the road. Why couldn’t he say, I’ll find that man, I know the country? “They’re closing in on him.”

“Are they?”

“Like you said, he’s not clever. I’ve got some notions of my own where he could be.”

“You’re not looking on your own, are you?”

“I might, if they don’t come up with him soon. Clement’s hard on my mind, you know.”

She touched his hand. “I know that…your knuckles feel rough.”

“I pounded the bag. No gloves.”

“I thought a boxer’s hands would be toughened, wouldn’t they?”

“It’s labour that toughens hands, hard work. Like Clement did, in the woods and that.”

“Oh, God, if he’d only stayed away from the woods…”

Across the street Rita was doing a hunched little dance as if the air were freezing.

“Looks like Rita’s getting antsy,” he said.

“I should be going.”

“I’d like to see you if I could.”

“I’m still at Rita’s.”

“They behaving themselves, the girls?”

“They’re trying. Sometimes I just don’t want to talk, I don’t want to
hear
it.”

“You’re in the wrong house, girl.”

“Later I might take a motel room, just to get away for a little. After the funeral. After they find him.”

“The police can’t search everywhere. Probably a local will turn him up.”

He studied her, her weary eyes, the soft line of her lips, pale, parted to speak. He wanted to brush from her face the strands of hair she had not captured when she tied it back.

“People are on the lookout, aren’t they?” she said.

“All of us.”
Could
he have stopped him, that night, that morning? “I’d like to come see you, Tena, take you for a drive, give you a break from your company.”

“I don’t quite know what’s happened to me yet. I feel like a bird, tiring, tiring, afraid to land anywhere.” She felt for the door handle. “I didn’t hear that thrush in the woods at all, just before Clement was killed. Every evening he sang gorgeously, then he stopped.”