Ragged Company (28 page)

It
is
like blue, you know. The blue of that evening sky and the blue of the eyes I haven’t seen in forever. Haunting. Eternal. Blue.

M
ANITOU NODIN
. The Spirit Wind. That’s what the Old Ones say blows across Creation when a great truth is revealed. Maybe not so much the big mystical kind of truths, because they are only shown once in a great long while, but the simple heart truths of simple men and women leading simple lives, the kind of truths that are told in darkness, in quiet rooms, or on verandas in the dusk. That’s when Manitou Nodin comes. That’s when the energy of life is released and the breath of Creation blows across the face of everything. It’s a giving-back wind. Giving back the breath of life to chests tightened through the years. Giving back the flow, the spiral of energy that connects everything, to a life lived in slow motion or none at all. Giving back relief, salvation, some say. Grace, the Ojibway call it. You can hear it if you listen hard enough. It starts with the heaving of a sigh, the push that delivers truth to the world, and continues through the rattle of speech along the vocal cords—moving the air, pushing it, becoming the breeze—and changes suddenly, becoming the wind in the branches, the soft swish of clothes on a line, a sound carried from miles away. It becomes alive in the world.

When Timber finished his story, I heard it. More a hint than anything, but I heard it. Manitou Nodin. The Spirit Wind delivered in the voice of this great, sad, haunted man. This friend I had been with for years but never really known until now.

“Thank you,” was all I said.

He turned and looked to the sky again, toward that impossible blue that hung there like a promise. None of us knew what to say. I didn’t. We sat there in a silence that was like that summer
night itself, all fat and self-contained, waiting for Timber to tell us how to breathe again. He just looked at that sky, his hands gripping and releasing the railing, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing. Finally, he turned and looked at us, filled his cheeks with air and released it slowly.

“She should have stood up,” he said, and then he turned and walked down the steps toward the street.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

He stopped. Without turning around he sighed and said, “I don’t know. Walking, I suppose. Just walking.”

And he walked along the front of our house and disappeared.

Manitou Nodin. The Spirit Wind. It doesn’t always blow from the direction you’d choose.

H
E DIDN’T MAKE IT BACK
that night. He didn’t make it back the next day. Digger and Dick went to the downtown core twice to look around but didn’t see him anywhere. James filed a missing-person notice with the police and we waited for word. The house was quiet. The silence was pervasive, sepulchral, unnerving. As evening approached again, we made a small supper together, listened to some music, and bided our time, hoping that we’d hear his step on the veranda and he’d return in good form, tired but safe. Sunset called us out to the veranda again and we sat, each of us looking down the stretch of Indian Road, waiting for the familiar shape of our friend to emerge from the depths of the city.

“The hard part is that he could go anywhere now,” James said. “With the money at his disposal, he doesn’t need to stick to the usual places. He could be anywhere.”

“That’s true,” Margo said. “He’s hurting and he’s somewhere trying to take care of his wounds.”

“Damn,” I said. “I never thought. I never considered. I thought I was renting a charming romance. A tearjerker, yes, but not one that held such a trigger.”

“You didn’t know,” Margo said. “You couldn’t have known. Amelia didn’t know and she’s been with Jonas for years.”

“Me neither, Rock,” Digger said. “It ain’t your doing.”

“I suppose that’s true. A part of me accepts that, but there’s another part that knows how movies approximate life and how those approximations sometimes ignite things in you, make what you’d prefer not to recall suddenly real again, illuminated, cast in front of you on the screen. It’s rough when that happens unbeknownst to you. That unexpected confrontation with self is dramatic when your whole intention is escape.”

“That sounds awfully autobiographical, Granite,” James said.

“Yes,” Margo said. “Does it happen a lot for you, Granite?”

I looked at all the houses down Indian Road. I could have told them the names of each of the stones used in their masonry, could have spoken of their qualities, their essential perfection for the task or the enhancement at hand, could have talked of the quarrying necessary to make them available. It was all background information in a larger, more complicated story, the flotsam and jetsam of a life, the details of the construction and demolition of the structure that contained them, the truth of me.

“It happens a lot,” I said, finally. “And the truth is, I don’t know why I go back. The movies were supposed to be escape. They were supposed to be a seat in the darkness, a darkness I pulled around me like a cloak to keep the world away. The trouble is that they are the stuff of the world, the stuff of life, all the great internal stuff, all the hurt, grief, joy, turbulence, pathos, tragedy, displacement, rage, tenderness, and love. They are all of that. At least, the good ones are. The sum of our experience. The only escape is to avoid them and I can’t do that. I can’t do that because I love them too much. Love them because they do remind me, love them because they do take me back, love them because they do allow me to relive, to touch again, to hold again all the things I thought I didn’t need anymore.”

And we sat on the veranda and I told them my story. I told them everything. I spoke across all the years and all the hurt, all the departures, all of the dying and all of the living, the fading of
the light, the drawing of the shades, the closing of the doors to that great stone house and the silence it fell into, total and complete, like it had become to me. I told them of my own leaving, the coda, the great thematic echo, the dwindling note of Granite Harvey in all he had been.

“Wow,” Digger said when I finished. “You’re as friggin’ homeless as I was.”

W
E TALKED
all through that night. When it got too chilly on the veranda we went inside, lit a nice fire, and sat around it on pillows. Six of us brought together by worry and joined by words from another great, sad, haunted man. As that fire burned, I told them my story and I told them about the shadowed ones who had brought me each of my boys and, in the end, Granite himself.

“So they’re not ghosts?” Margo asked.

“No. Not really,” I said. “I think when some great sad thing happens in some place with some people, we leave a part of ourselves there, a part that wanted or needed things to come out different, a part that got separated from itself, a shadow of ourselves. If we never get right with it and we’re asked to move to the Spirit World, that shadow stays here, revisiting those places and those people, hoping maybe that it can reclaim the part that got lost.”

“Can it?” James asked.

“Yes.”

“How?” Margo asked.

“By watching us,” I said. “By watching the living ones. By watching us learn to deal with our hurt, our losses, and reach out to life again. It tells them that we’re okay. That they don’t need to patrol, revisit, or haunt those places anymore. That they can take their place in the Spirit World and prepare for the other part of the journey.”

“What other part?” Granite asked.

“Returning.”

“Returning? Coming back?”

“Yes. Returning.”

“You mean we all come back here? We all get a chance to live again?”

“No,” I said softly. “That’s not the returning I’m speaking of.”

“Well, what then?”

“The other part of the journey is a returning to yourself. Reconnecting. Getting whole again. That’s what the Spirit World is for. Getting whole again and preparing to continue the journey.”

“There’s more?” Dick asked. “After? There’s more?”

“Always,” I said.

“Geez,” he said and looked into the fire. “Do you think Timber’s gettin’ whole?”

None of us had anything to say.

G
OT KNIFED
one time. Knifed pretty good in the friggin’ leg. Hurt like a son of a bitch and I knew going to the hospital was only gonna bring me heat. They’d wanna know who shivved me and there was no way I wanted any friggin’ interference on me handling the outcome. So I laid up. Got me a few crocks, some rubbing alcohol, some bandages, and a lay-up away from my usual and waited until the leg was good enough to walk on again. Days. I spent days there waiting to heal. But I still had to make a move or two. Still had to hobble down for a fresh crock, score some smokes, or grab a bite to eat somewhere. Had to. Had to because it wasn’t about the dying, it was about the getting it together one more time. I could only hope Timber was getting it together. I didn’t want to think about the other possibility.

If he was using the money to hole up somewhere different I was fucked. Man, I had no idea how a guy’d use all that cash to put himself away from people. But he was still a friggin’ rounder and I depended on that when I sent the boys out to look for him.
Cost me a few bucks over the next three days, but I figured it was worth it.

Nothing. No sight of him. No word. No hint of where he might be. When the cops had nothing to say to us, I had to kinda let go a little. I guess if the friggin’ bulls can’t figure out where the hell you went there was no one gonna know. I only hoped they wouldn’t bring a body back. That was my big fear. That he’d bought it. That the movie touched something in him that wasn’t supposed to be touched again and he took the desperate route. But I still drove around and around and a-friggin’-round. I saw more of them streets than I wanted to over those three days. Saw more of the way people lived, how they stumbled, lurched, fell, puked, and hunted for the next whatever that’d make their blood move again. Saw them lined up for the handout food. Saw them laid out in parks or leaning out the windows of welfare digs, looking out over the street like they’re waiting for something to move along it that’ll change everything. There ain’t nothing that big. I coulda told them that. Nothing that big that’d change everything. Even money. All the loot we had still couldn’t make it any easier to live. Not for Timber. Not for the ones with woe. The shadowed ones. Haunting the world while they’re still in it. What a fucking bummer.

I
SAW THEM
from the living room. I watched them talk. Watched them move closer together as they spoke, leaning inward, hoarding each sound like a private treasure. I watched them watch each other and I watched them kiss. They held it. Held it like a cup to parched lips, and I smiled. I remembered. Remembered my Ben’s kisses in the soft orange glow of neon so long ago and how they soothed me, how they made me feel alive on the inside of my skin, how they lifted me up and made me more, how they filled me. I was happy to see it. Happy that Granite had found a light beyond the movies, found a story that was real, found a heartbeat to echo
against his own. I didn’t let them know that I was there. I crossed to the other side of the room and sat in my favourite chair to drink tea and send my thoughts to Timber, alone in his pain.

The telephone rang. I stared at it, didn’t want to answer. All I could do was stand up and stare at it. Granite and Margo hurried into the room followed by Digger and Dick, who ran down the stairs from watching a movie in Dick’s room. No one moved to the phone. It rang and rang before Margo finally reached over and picked it up.

“It’s James,” she said.

We waited while she listened. We could hear his voice from where we stood: excited, fast, hurried. Margo pursed her lips into a tight line while she listened, nodding her head and tapping at her belt with the fingers of her free hand. “Okay,” she said finally, “I’ll tell everyone. Is that it? There’s no more?”

There was a final burst of reply.

“Okay. We’ll wait here for you.”

She hung up the telephone and plopped down into an armchair. We all moved a little closer.