Monstrous Affections (19 page)

Should I ever stray too far, one way or the other, there would be
Tevalier, waiting in the pit-head to nudge me back onto the artist’s
one true path. Did I understand the depth of my dependency? he
asked me through my blood. I felt his tongue on my neck, rough
like a cat’s. Then, with the care of a physician removing a long
hypodermic, he withdrew.

I thought again about the prospectors — thought about the
strange town they had built on the earth above, the mining
companies that had prospered in it, and the terrible bargain that
had founded it.

Did I understand the depth of my dependency?

Before he could withdraw completely, I swung the barrels of the
shotgun up, pressed them against the brittle flesh and bone that
covered the vampire’s heart.

“Je comprends,” I whispered, and pulled both triggers.

The hardest part of getting out of the minehead was the climb up the
rope, something I hadn’t expected. But the run up along the tunnel
had proven exhausting, and I was lightheaded already with the loss of
my blood. When I fired off the last two shells back into the tunnel,
the recoil nearly knocked me into the shaft. The buckshot did its job,
though, sending the two vampires that followed me screaming back
into the depths. I wanted to rest then, wanted the escape to be finished,
but of course I could not, and it was not. I had to ascend the rope.

I lost the shotgun, and nearly lost the flashlight on the way up.
Finally I did have to rest, so I tied myself off and dangled there in
the shaft, the timber creaking above me and my limbs feeling like
meat below; I had the feet of a hanged man.

From the depths, the vampires whispered a cacophony. I had removed their head with Tevalier, taken the one who had made them,
shown them their own line — evidently, they had much to discuss. When
I resumed my ascent, the whispers had grown quieter, and nearer.

It was near noon when I reached the top of the shaft, and that
may have been what saved me. Cobalt is too far north for the sun
to have shone straight down the open tower in November, but it
made a bright yellow square among the upper rafters, and the light
filtered down through the dust to make the pit-head brighter than
I’d ever seen it. Clutching at the numbness in my throat, I stumbled
to the door and out into the afternoon.

Only as the sun set, five hours later, was I able to calm Paul down
and convince him that we had to leave Cobalt before dark. And then,
I think it was only the screaming, hungry and subterranean as it
echoed from the dark of the pit-heads, that convinced him:

Tevalier was gone; and with him went the razor-line that
protected us, and gave us our art.

That summer, the Women’s Art League of Hailiebury disbanded,
after an early-June tragedy that made the national news reports and
forced a six-week coroner’s inquest. But throughout that inquest,
not one witness stepped forward to charge that the deaths of Elsie
LaFontaine and Betty-Ann Sale were the result of anything other
than stepping too close to the edge of the mine-shaft.

In 1978, the shanty-town houses of North Cobalt were destroyed
by a fire so huge it lit the sky for a hundred miles and kept them warm
in Quebec. The Ontario Fire Marshall’s office raised the possibility
of arson a number of times in the course of its inquiries. But never
was it remarked — at least not in public — how close some of the old
mine tunnels came to the surface in that section of town. The news
reports never dwelt upon the prevailing view in southern Cobalt —
that North Cobalt wasn’t so much burned, as it was cauterized.

Painting was good in that time. We took precautions, of course;
when he got back to his studio, Paul went down to the library in town
and came up with a whole list of them. Chains of garlic; Catholic-blessed Holy Water; crucifixes, one for each neck; and silver coins,
to cover the eyes. He put them together in a green strongbox, and
never came within a hundred miles of Cobalt without his Equipment.
I preferred the simpler approach, and as my painting career allowed
me to afford it, I expanded my arsenal to the very limits of the
prevailing Canadian gun laws.

When the vampires came to our camp outside the pit-heads, we
knew how to deal with them. We only allowed them enough blood to
complete the transaction: attempts to get any more were met with
garlic and holy water and buckshot. The razor’s edge remained, even
in Tevalier’s absence.

It paid off for us all over the years. Jim went professional in the
early 1980s and moved to New York in ’86. Paul abandoned oils and
embraced watercolour, and for five years made a fortune off royalties
from art books and calendars featuring reproductions of his hyperrealistic landscapes and naturalist paintings.

We nearly lost Harry in 1981, when he got too close to the edge
one night; after that he got spooked and stopped coming out. But
he’d produced some damned fine panels in the meantime, and I
know they’d pleased him.

And for myself, I did fine, I think; a lot of good work over those
years. The rise of my career was far from meteoric — I have yet to see
my work on postage stamps, the biggest interview I ever gave was to
the North Bay Nugget, and I’ve still never been able to afford a new
car. But groceries are never a question and I keep the furnace going
all winter long.

The mining companies finally surrendered in 1985, and tore
down every one of the pit-heads, capped the holes. In a way, I’m
surprised it took them as long as it did; for Paul and Jim and Harry
and me, adaptation was relatively easy — we were only up there two
or three weeks out of the year, and when we were there, we knew
how to behave. But the men who ran the companies in Cobalt didn’t
adapt so well; they didn’t even have enough sense to put a guardrail
around the edges of their shafts — let alone recast the bargains that
had made them wealthy in the early years.

It was a scary time for us, in the years after the pit-heads came
down. Paul stopped painting altogether, and has sat in an artistic
paralysis ever since. Jim traded on his reputation and actually made
the cover of
Esquire
after he hired a loyal coven of apprentices to do
the actual painting, while he busied himself with what his publicist
calls conceptualization, articulation. He’s done quite well for
himself, but I don’t think he’ll ever work again.

I, on the other hand, kept on painting. My work’s gotten repetitive
over the years, but I keep a couple of dealers in Toronto happy — if
nothing else, my pictures are a good match for the style of sofa-beds
and armchairs that well-heeled doctors and their wives favour as
they furnish their cottages in Muskoka.

Art is in the narrow line between life and death — Tevalier was
right on that score. I walked that line with Jim and Harry and Paul
for more than a decade, against all my better judgement; and I’ll
admit, it does offer its intoxication.

Now, the pit-heads are down, the pictures there are done. Cobalt
has been bled dry — of silver, of art, and of blood. The bargain,
whatever coin it was that sealed it, is finished.

But here’s the thing: in that bargain’s wake, the town of Cobalt
persists — a little quieter, maybe, hunched a bit around the scarred
land and flesh that Tevalier and the prospectors and the mining
companies that came after left behind. But the town accepts its
strange shape, acknowledges its new limitations. Within them all,
it persists.

I’ve been warped by Tevalier’s knowledge too, and bent again by
its absence. But when I wake up in the morning, after I’ve driven
away the nightmares with my coffee and an egg and seen to the other
mundane chores, I still pick up my brush and set to work. Because
when art is finished, the land remains.

And whatever may have transpired in the past — whatever
Tevalier’s grave-cold shade accuses, in the small, quiet hours of the
night — I don’t need a bargain with anyone to paint that land.

We were cuing up tape for another run at “Black Mountain Side”
when Steve set down his sticks, got up, answered the door-chime.
Cool lake air wafted in through the empty doorway and blew the
funk of weed and beer and slide lube from living room clear to
kitchen. Steve couldn’t see who was there. Then he knelt down, and
not looking back, reported:

“It’s a fish.”

Lake trout. About six pounds. Scales the same colour as the
clouds, which were just a shade lighter than the lake itself, which
was near black. There would be rain soon. Steve cocked his head,
nodded, and turned back to us.

“He wants us to keep it down.”

Water roared a dull crescendo into the old claw-footed tub in
the washroom, and that was the only sound until Vincent, the bass
player, clicked a long barbecue lighter alive and held it trembling to
the bowl of his bong.

“Fish don’t care for Jimmy?”

That from Dave, his guitar propped up by the trombone stand:
Jimmy being Page. Vincent coughed and squinted over his burbling
bong; Dave got up and came over to the door.

“Not saying.” Steve. The fish writhed on the little concrete stoop,
gills grasping at the air. “But it’s not unreasonable. We’ve been going
all day.”

Dave nodded. “Better put him back in the lake.” He reached down
nervously with thumb and forefinger, tried to snatch the flopping
tail once, and again. From the washroom, the trombonist objected.

Vincent motioned to the cracked-open door. “Tub’s almost full.”
Steve pushed Dave’s hand out of the way and grabbed the fish
around the middle. It was lake-slick, hard to hold at first, but being
off the stoop seemed to calm it and carrying got easier. We all
followed Steve and the trout to the bath, watched as he lowered the
fish to the surface of the water and let him slide in. Water splashed
onto the linoleum floor. Dave turned the faucet off, which the
trombonist had left to run.

“Fish will be okay.” Steve shook the water off his hands and wiped
them dry on his jeans. He went back to the drum kit, picked up his
sticks, remembered what the fish said, put them back. “Better keep
it down,” he said to us, and we agreed.

We sat back. Passed the bong around. Sounds of the bowed guitar
solo from “Dazed and Confused,” transcribed for trombone, wafted
in from the dock. Water splashed in the tub. Steve apologized, got
up to shut the door on the music, the view: golden slide on a middle-finger tilt to the clouds’ bulging black gut. Definitely rain.

“Have to talk about him.” Vincent. Thumb cocked to the doorway.
The dock.

The trombonist.

We all agreed that we did — opportunity not having arisen for
two days now: from the time Steve pulled the van into the mall
parking lot and we all waited as Dave found a spot in the trailer for
the trombone case . . . from then to the beer and grocery run on
arrival, the jam. Not a moment. So first order of business, now the
fish was safe away and the trombone stand empty, was to put it to
Steve:

“Where’d you meet him?”

“Back at the Rook?”

Steve shook his head. The Rook was a club downtown we played
at, from time to time, back in the day. Steve sometimes still hung
there. The Rook wasn’t it. “Met him the same time you all did. When
we pulled into the lot.”

“How’d you know to go there, then?”

“You seemed pretty sure of where you were going. You know he
was going to be there?”

That one left Steve short. Steve guessed he did know he was going
to be there, standing under the floodlit entrance at the south end of
mall, the hockey bag with his stuff propped next to the long black
trombone case, which stood upright on the bell. Question suggested
Steve had got a phone call or a note to set time and place, and Steve
couldn’t say that he had.

Finally: “Neither of you seemed surprised when the time came.
Dave, you helped him load up. Looked like you two were catching up
on old times.”

“Point, there. What’d you talk about, Dave?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“Quit fucking around. We don’t have a lot of time here.”

Dave hadn’t been fucking around. Mystery is what it was. “Talked
about a lot of things. Can’t say exactly.” Wasn’t good enough, and
Dave knew it. He frowned and thought a moment. “Asked him if
he was still using the valve trombone, or’d gone slide.” Which we
all knew was a strange thing to ask, given Dave had met him the
same time we did and had no idea what type horn he used to play.
“Slide, he said. Same as always. He asked me . . .” Bong went to Dave.
“Mmm. Asked me if I wanted it.”

“The trombone?”

“No. Something else. Didn’t say what. But something else.”

Bong went to Vincent, then Steve. Thunder came and went. Dave
got up, came back with beer. Took the bong. We thought about that
question: Did Dave want it? From that: Did we want it? Was it worth
having? Rain started up.

“So who is he?” Vincent. “We never had a trombone back in the
day. I remember
that
much.”

“Our music doesn’t lend itself to trombone.”

“You wouldn’t think.”

“And yet.”

We grew thoughtful. On the one hand, we remembered how it
was: band class and bands didn’t mix. Dave had made that clear
from Day One, as we hunched in the dull October light, greying
our grey cafeteria lunches further. Dave wouldn’t even tolerate a
lead singer — and if one of us pointed out Robert Plant by way of
argument, well we could just fuck off. Steve and his axe, Steve and
the microphone. Same thing. And for band class?

“Point of this is not formal training. Point is, you got to feel the
music — that’s how Jimmy does it. That’s how we do it.” Plenty of
trombonists in band class. And who needed them?

On the other hand . . .

“I helped him load his trombone into the trailer.” Dave, perplexed.
“I know.”

“What do you want?”

“What?”

“Far as what the trombonist asked if you wanted it. What,
exactly?”