The Beggar's Garden (25 page)

Perhaps it was the bills in his pocket, or the impending reprimand, or the idea of another night on the top bunk, a pillow wrapped about his ears, the bass dispelling any peace he'd gained tonight, that rendered him incapable of leaving the Benz. He dropped it into gear and eased quietly from the curb.

After a string of deliberately unconsidered turns, Finch found himself on a dark freeway, a greenish sea of city light churning on the clouds in his rearview. He wasn't tired any longer. He felt sharpened and jittery and electric, like he would after emerging from an arcade or drinking a two-litre of discount pop. He supposed he was driving east—west was ocean, south was America—but wasn't sure. The sedan had a GPS that he didn't activate for fear it could locate him. Just a short trip, he told himself, luxuriating in the joys of freeway driving: the way speed slowed the landscape, the geometric perfection of banking corners, the cinematic sweep of headlights, the thought of a million engineered parts spinning in unfathomable synchrony.

It was mostly trucks on the road, towns passing like fallen constellations. The night went blacker and Finch bent closer to the wheel. A light appeared in the dash. It looked like a robot pointing a gun to its head. He puzzled over this until a beeping sound came. Something was wrong with the car, and he felt a boy's sob gather in his chest. Then the same suicidal robot flashed by outside on a sign that read “GAS” and he swerved into the turnoff, nearly throwing the Benz in a ditch.

He came upon a station—an island cut in the blackness by a punishing white light—and pulled in. He'd never kept a car long enough to require fuelling. He studied a man fill his half-ton, then hoisted the heavy nozzle from the pump, unscrewed the cap, inserted the nozzle, and squeezed. Nothing happened.

“Need a hand?” a woman said with a wrecked voice.

“This doesn't work.”

“You didn't select your grade,” she said, approaching the pump to smack a button. She gripped the handle and digits spun. She didn't have a uniform. She wore a filthy puffy jacket and a mountaineering backpack with plastic bags strapped to it. She was middle-aged, about as old as his father had been.

“Oh, hey,” she said, “you gotta kill the engine!”

Finch had never heard of this before. “I can't,” he said.

Her forehead gathered into ridges. “You can't?”

“No.”

She glanced around the station. Finch realized then that she was alone and didn't have a car.

“That's what they say, anyways,” she said. “Doesn't bother me.”

“What could happen?”

“Your car could explode!” she said in a voice like a pot bubbling over as she finished pumping. Finch knew that adults often said things they didn't mean, like how his father had always declared his love for his job at the airport, even though he used to be an engineer in Poland—not the kind that drove trains, but the kind that built them. He hoped what the woman had said was the same sort of thing.

Finch turned to the bright kiosk, the attendant already looking in their direction.

He extracted a brown bill from his track pants. “Can you pay?” he said, his ears turning hot.

“You bet,” she said.

She went in, stood at the counter, and returned with his change.

“Here, keep this,” he said, pushing back a twenty, which she took without thanks.

She paused for a moment. “Actually, I wouldn't hate a ride,” she said.

The attendant was outside now, inspecting pumps and scribbling on a clipboard. Finch itched to escape the brilliant scrutiny of the lot. He was old enough to know there was no respectable reason for a woman to be stranded at a freeway gas station, but in her face he caught the same desperation, the same doe-like vacancy, he had seen in the girls Jerzy's boys brought over, or the glitzy women his father shepherded home from clubs, and in this he took a strange comfort. He popped the trunk and she tossed her bags in with the golf clubs.

“Where you going?” he said, merging onto the freeway.

“Just to Merritt,” she said. “My kid—” then her breath cut off like a valve and she turned her face to the window.

Finch vowed off more questions and watched the gas needle's deliberate rise.

“This is a whole lot of vehicle you got here,” she said, eyeing the pillow beneath him.

“My brother's,” he said, checking his mirrors.

Then a quiet overtook them, and Jerzy loomed in Finch's mind. He was going to be furious, more so if he found out Finch had picked up a hitchhiker. Finch could see no boundary in his brother between anger and concern. Jerzy would either kick him out or further tighten his grip, neither of which seemed possible to endure. Finch just needed a little more time in the car, to think. He'd come up with a way to fix everything.

“You talk funny,” she said as though he'd just spoken.

“I have an accent,” he said, recalling for a second the blunt sweetness of his father's voice, when he did not raise it.

“I mean you whisper,” she said, unwrapping a new pack of cigarettes, lighting one with a barbecue lighter pulled from her coat.

“I don't like noise.”

“Makes sense, sweetie.”

She reached for the radio and a bright breeze of enveloping sound—a hive of guitars, organs, and voices—leapt from speakers hidden on every side. Soon she began twisting in her seat, throwing her head in odd ellipses, unwashed hair draping into her eyes.

Finch tried not to let her see him looking. He'd never before driven with a passenger, never with a real destination either. He liked her there beside him, this dancing woman. He knew the car would have exploded by now if it was going to. It was the
last sedan he would get, but they had three hundred dollars, a gas gauge that promised more than full, and he was taking her to Merritt, wherever that was.

As they shot through the dead-flat valley, with dawn lifting shadows from the weary shoulders of everything, the music reached out through the lightly tinted windows of the Benz, touched the signs and trucks and sulfurous lights and roadside buildings of no discernable purpose, enmeshed itself with this whipping landscape, enlivened it, and Finch was met by an unfamiliar and almost stupefying sense of beauty.

“I like this,” he yelled into the fury.

“Sure you do,” she yelled back. “It's a classic.”

S
am Prince lay awake, listening to a squad of raccoons loot his recycling. Since moving into the slumping structure behind his house—it backed onto the alley and was either a shed or a small garage, he'd never been sure—he'd taught himself to distinguish the noise of the raccoons licking his containers clean from the more orderly clanking of the men who came on trailered bikes to rummage his blue bins for anything they could return for deposit. There, in the interminable dark hours of recent weeks, Sam had come to the fearful knowledge that the alley doubled as a nocturnal highway where all valuable things were to be carted away.

The structure itself was a rickety assemblage of rotting boards with two barn-style doors that swung outward. Sam had never made good on the promise to both Anna and himself to undertake its renovation. It held their bikes, wicker garden chairs, rubberized bins of what remained of Cricket's childhood memorabilia, and an arsenal of tools he'd got when his father had
passed—tools his father hadn't much used either. Black mould speckled the exposed rafters above, where a coiled badminton net, Cricket's crutches from four years ago, and Sam's old hockey equipment had found permanent lodging. The garage had always been the storehouse for the scraps of their life together, and Sam considered it fitting that it was here he'd sought refuge.

Earlier that night, he'd discovered some freeze-dried meals they'd purchased for a kayaking expedition in the Yukon that had never got booked. He boiled chicken à la king in a foil bag over a camping stove and spooned it from a dented tin plate. While he ate he listened to hockey on the radio. The stream of the announcer's play-by-play kept his mind from betraying him, as it did without fail during any manner of silence. His power supply was an orange extension cord running to the side of his house—a four-bedroom built in 1912 that he and Anna had gutted and renovated at great cost. It had become a place Sam could not tolerate. Mostly, he did not care for the linger of his family's scent, in the towels, the carpet, even his own clothes, which served only to feed the dark ruminations that dredged his mind without mercy. The house had always felt much too large, and now, after he'd locked all its doors and dropped his house key down the manhole out front, it was tomblike, monolithic, laying a wide, grim shadow over his yard.

The ordeal had commenced benignly enough. Anna, a casting director who'd just wrapped a gruelling sci-fi film that had gone way over budget, had taken Cricket to her parents' in Calgary for spring break so they could ski at nearby Banff. Sam was to enjoy some “self-time,” as Anna would say. The visit was first extended by a few days when there was a heavy snowfall, then by a week because Anna's father had experienced another heart
arrhythmia. Sam filled most of this time by working late at the bank, spearheading a new fraud initiative involving digital fingerprinting that he knew would never get the funding to clear the boardroom. It wasn't until she'd called to inform him of her plan to stay another two weeks that Sam knew something was amiss.

“I thought you had that Jeep thing this month?” he said.

“The dollar the way it is, they're shooting it in Detroit. Oh, that reminds me, can you call Cricket's school? I lost the number.”

Sam said he would, then suggested he book a few days off and fly out for the weekend.

“Oh, don't bother, we're so busy here …,” she said, and when Sam insisted, her voice congealed. “Sam, this is hard to say, but I think I need you
there
right now.”

Sam fell silent. He could hear some electronic debris on the line, a distant titter, and he wondered whose provider was responsible.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but we've just been so
isolated
in Vancouver. And I suppose I've been reconnecting with my family. I do have a family, remember?”

“The same oppressive one you were trying to escape by dragging us out here? Or have they been swapped out?”

There was a moment of quiet, during which Sam fought to corral his breathing.

“Sam, I've begun to suspect that either you or I is horribly unhappy,” she said next, “and I'm afraid it may be both.”

“I
was
happy,” he said, feeling simultaneously witty and petty for the emphasis.

They'd been married eleven years, and Sam had long ago regretfully concluded they were a disagreeable species of person,
fundamentally speaking, a reality he'd resigned himself to and was willing to endure. The years had cruelly revealed in Sam and Anna the very qualities they'd so zealously sought to conceal with copious amounts of false self-advertisement on those pivotal first dates: she, controlling and anxious; he, over-critical and distant. But Sam had always secretly believed that the death of their embellished fictional selves was inevitable and, ultimately, forgivable. They were things built to dazzle, then to be shed and to fall away like the fuel tanks of a space shuttle.

So it had mustered in him an acute sense of betrayal when she disturbed this functional truce to declare their unhappinesses. Yet even during the spiteful salvoes he made on her memory nightly, he couldn't dissuade himself from admiring her bravery.

“Sam,” she said in a broken voice after a few hollow seconds, “it's simply that I … I've realized I've become someone that I think I may loathe.”

“Can you put Cricket on?” Sam said, circling the kitchen island with brisk strides.

When Anna informed Sam that Cricket was out crosscountry skiing with her cousins, Sam, more sternly than he'd have liked, took it upon himself to offer an itemized verbal summary of the errors she was right then committing in arriving at this decision. Though outwardly independent, she was at heart an impressionable woman, vulnerable to another's interpretation of her feelings, and Sam had always secretly feared it had been this ability of his to articulate how she felt, and what she needed to do to fix it, that had drawn her to him and kept her there. And for the bulk of that night, he lay in their bed reviewing his points, each of which was unquestionably true, then concluded that perhaps it
was their overwhelming cumulative effect that had caused her to hang up with a delicate, jaw-like click.

The raccoons must have moved on, because when Sam's clock radio went off it lifted him from a fitful sleep. It was a Monday. He rose with a lead weight in his body and stood at the small window that overlooked the garden. It already bore signs of her absence: weeds sprung amidst the vegetable beds; the rhododendron petals gone the nauseated hue of tobacco leaves; a defeated wither over everything. She'd always neglected to instruct Sam on the operation of the system of taps feeding the intricate vasculature of punctured hoses that wound about the yard. Despite the feminist outpost she dutifully occupied after the second bottle of wine at dinner parties, she was a woman who believed in household domains; she stalked the kitchen, laundry room, and garden like a wolverine and was determined to keep their secrets from him. Regardless, he'd begun to enjoy the garden's slow ruin and found himself compulsively checking forecasts on his phone.

He unplugged the clock radio from the extension cord, plugged in his shaver, and held the buzzing instrument to the wilds of his sleep-puffy face. He coughed down a few pieces of ragged multigrain bread, went out to his car, and pulled one of the dry-cleaner bags from the trunk. After moving out, he'd gone and bought five cheap suits, one for each day, the boxy polyester kind his father had worn. Relieved of the counterbalance of family, Sam's life had tipped wildly into the realm of his office. He was a director in the fraud department of a major bank, his
main responsibility being to oversee and ever-update a byzantine formula through which each transaction was run, designed to detect any manner of banking irregularity. He'd heard from the old-timers that his job used to entail tracking down real flesh-and-blood con artists, cheque kiters, and crooked tellers. Now nothing near detective work was involved; if the formula flagged any statistically anomalous event, a follow-up was made by call-centre employees from a contractor in New Brunswick. Ones that didn't check out, the card was cancelled and the money replaced; ones that did, the card was reactivated. In either case the formula was adjusted accordingly.