The Devil You Know: A Novel (32 page)

You’ve never slept with David before? My mother leaned hard over the green felt table. Really? All this time?

I’ve known him too long, I said.

And he’s hung around. She shook her head like she couldn’t believe David’s incredible resilience.

On the wall next to our rack of cues there was an oil painting of dark men wearing hats, playing cards around a table. There was a dog on the floor with a long tongue hanging out and one of the card players had his foot on the dog’s back. The walls were all covered in these paintings. The owner’s son, an
artiste
. It was Friday night. We were the only women there.

I said: I can be quite nice, you know.

My mother laid her cue out across the table, measuring the angle between the white ball and yellow-stripe number 9.

Off the seven, she said. The white smacked her target smartly
and spun back, leaving me boxed in a sea of stripes. She stood up straight with her cue planted next to her like a hiker’s pole. So what now?

I’m trapped. I pointed at the table. You trapped me.

What now with David. You think this is what you do now?

I don’t know.

What does he think?

He’s a guy.

What does he think, Evie.

We were drunk, I said.

I hadn’t said anything to David about the man at the window. There were branches down in the yard and in the light of day the crack in the glass seemed barely noticeable. Had it always been there? In the morning David dusted the spilled coffee grounds off the counter into his hand and practiced a little Michael Jackson spin to throw them into the sink. He whistled and I watched him. I’d gone to sleep thinking how much I loved this new Evie, an Evie who didn’t let anxiety rule her life. We made coffee on the gas flame and I didn’t mention that I’d seen the man out there, watching us.

By mid-morning I had a banger of a headache and a nail hole of guilt and fear in my stomach. What if he’d come through the window? What about tonight, or the night after? If I’m there alone, if I’m not in the mood to put on a show?

I wasn’t home alone now. I was out shooting pool with my mother. I’d come with the idea that I’d confess about the man outside the window, his heavy fist against the glass.

I also had the drug bust photo in my shoulder bag—so, make that two things I was too nervous to talk about. For better or for worse, she couldn’t seem to get beyond David.

He stayed, I said. He kissed my forehead this morning.

David would sort your dirty laundry if you’d let him, my mother said. He’d drink your bathwater.

I looked down at the table, the white ball cornered by stripes. My own solids tragically shut off.

I can’t get out of that.

The leave, see? my mother said. The leave always beats the play.

O
n our way down the stairs her feet went out from under her and she flew. The steps were covered in the kind of used-up carpet that slides and too many wet boots had been up and down them over the course of the night. I grabbed her elbow and her shoulder slammed against the rail. My mother rubbed her arm and laughed. Outside it was pelting freezing rain and we pulled our jackets up over our heads and looked for a cab but nothing came.

Go one more? she said.

We ducked into a place two doors down with a picture of burning charcoal in the window. The owner brought us a couple of shots of ouzo before we’d had a chance to get our wet coats off. She was small and squat with dyed auburn hair tied back in an elaborate swirl and she clacked over in a pair of violently colored burgundy heels. The veins and little bones of her feet bulged out the sides of the shoes. Her husband had a thick mustache and sat behind the bar reading the Greek newspaper.

Weather makes for bad business, she said. You want eat?

Nice to see you, nice to see you. This was the husband, but he didn’t look up from the paper when he spoke. He waved a vague hand in our direction.

My mother stacked the menus neatly at the corner of the table.

Here’s something, I said. I pulled out the photo of the house on Brunswick from where it was buried under my wallet and a couple of books in my shoulder bag. It had a vintage look now, folded over and generally dragged around. I showed it to Dad already, I said. He said to ask you.

Where did you find this? my mother said. She’d put back her shot all at once and her cheeks glowed pink. I ordered two more.

It’s you, I said. Her eyes lifted. The wife clattered back and forth in her swollen shoes.

This is a long time ago, my mother said. I don’t know if I’d even met your father yet. She peered down at the picture. This is me. Here. She pointed at the blond girl on the porch, straight hair hanging down below her shoulders. This one, she said.

Who are the other people? I said. Who’s this. I pointed at one of the other girls, a tall brunette with a little more curve to her body.

Mary Bramer. She was from Saskatchewan. And this here, this is Ted Fanning. He was fine. He was a sweetheart. He smoked too much pot and it made him stupid, but besides. She drew a line around Ted’s face with a fingernail.

Which one is Arthur Sawchuk?

She looked at me, sharp, but also slow.

The caption only lists a few names, I said. It lists the guys who were arrested and the guy who owned the house.

Art Sawchuk didn’t own the house, my mother said. He had the line on the place and we all paid him. But he didn’t own it.

It says the house is registered to Arthur Lewis Sawchuk.

Sawchuk. My mother shrugged. He used a lot of different names. He ran drugs through the house, drugs and some other stuff. He had a bunch of names. He got away with it. In those days it was easier. I don’t know who owned the place. She took a sip off the top of her second ouzo. It was a squat, she said. There were always fifteen kids living there. When Mary didn’t have the rent he’d make her give blow jobs to all his friends. He’d hold her by the hair.

My mother grabbed at the back of her own head and pulled back hard.

That’s the kind of place it was. You’d have to watch that. I always had the money, she said. And I got out. I would have been next.

How’d you know him?

I knew Ted Fanning, she said. That’s who brought me in. I knew him from home, his brother was my sister’s boyfriend. The one that went through the ice.

But Ted didn’t live there, I said.

No. My mother ran a hand back through her hair and a few drops of rainwater came off the tips and hit the table.

What other names did he use? I said. Your landlord Art.

I don’t know. Art Sawchuk, I don’t remember what else. She passed the photo back to me across the table. He wasn’t from here. He was an American.

She said Art Sawchuk had been all through the Southwest before coming up to Canada and who knows what he’d done down there. He told stories but maybe they were lies and maybe they were true. He liked to scare you, she said.

Scare you how?

She took a long breath. He had a mean streak, I guess. He’d tell all kinds of lies. Ted told me he’d driven up from California, or hitchhiked, and walked over the border somewhere in Manitoba. He’d slept a lot of places. He’d sleep in barns or out in fields. One time he told me he’d sleep out in a barn and any animals out there with him, he’d cut their throats in the morning. Sawchuk told me that himself. So the farmer would come in and just find his lambs and calves slashed and bleeding and not know what happened. He liked to terrorize you, she said. Mary was scared of him and she got it the worst.

You weren’t.

I wasn’t what.

You weren’t scared.

I stayed away, my mother said. I put Mary and any other girls in the room with me and locked the door. Her shot glass was empty now and she flipped it upside down and banged it on the table. That’s not true, she said. Sometimes I let her take it. We were all fucking terrified.

We sat there a moment. I finished my shot and set the glass quietly upside down to match hers.

He said a lot of things, you have to keep that in mind. He told me he was a personal friend of Charles Manson, she said. He’d met him in jail. Later on, hitching through the desert, he’d ended up
at Spahn Ranch, where they all lived, for a night or two. Sheer accident. He called them a bunch of dirty hippies. She leaned toward me. When I knew Art Sawchuk, Manson had just been arrested for killing a house full of strangers. Two houses. A pregnant woman. In the most horrible ways. So it was very much a threat, you understand. I know it doesn’t mean much to you now.

Actually, I find that connection pretty interesting, I said.

The owner came over with another set of shots and my mother turned and said, Light these on fire, would you?

She turned back to me: We’re talking ’69, ’70. It’s not like it is now. It wasn’t flowers and peace signs. Hippies were more like drifters. The bikers were crime, they were gunrunners and murderers. That’s why regular people were afraid. It wasn’t about long hair. It was about morality and power. There was this awful heavy tide turning down in the States but now we only think of the fun parts, she said. Or we think about the anti-war stuff, whatever pieces of it were good and nice.

The heels clacked back to us with a green BIC lighter. Her thumb flicked. There wasn’t much lighter fluid left and her thumb flicked and flicked. The two shots flamed up.

Let it burn, my mother said. We’re already drunk.

So you and Charles Manson, I said. Two degrees of separation.

My mother held her hands high in the air like a preacher.

You have to hand it to Manson, he got them all believing in the end of the world. That was Sawchuk’s thinking. He said no one else had soldiers like that. Tex Watson, he said. Now that was a soldier! She boomed this out. The Greek husband looked at us over the top of his newspaper as if we were regulars arguing about the soccer game.

And all of them wearing dresses, my mother said. Sawchuk said that, too. Because of those robes they wore. She leaned forward and blew out the flame on her shot.

That’s what he wanted for your house, then. I pointed down to the photograph again. My mother’s eyes in that photo.

No, she said. I don’t think so. He didn’t want to convince you. He was very secretive or else he was bragging, all the time. Two modes. She stopped short and looked at me. I don’t know, she said. A few months after I moved out, there were all these photographs in the paper, Manson’s girls heading to testify.

Linda Kasabian, I said. Remember I bought that book about it? At the Flea. She was the star of the show.

Yeah, with her little pigtails. She slept with all of them, that was her role. I saw her picture and I thought, Mary Bramer. That was Mary’s role in our house, that’s what she was for. My mother fingered the dark-haired girl in the picture again. She tapped a finger on the girl’s face. By that time I was living out with your father.

You left clean.

I left owing some money. She looked up at me. It seemed like a good time for me to disappear. Down in the States, that trial was revving up. Sawchuk was worried about getting caught, I think. He was ready to split. Everyone down there was naming names. Worst mistake Manson ever made was taking on Linda Kasabian. That’s what Sawchuk used to say, she sold them all out. He followed the whole story in the papers. Every day he’d go out and buy three papers,
Toronto, New York
,
LA Times
. He sat in the back kitchen smoking and he’d read the A-section of all three of them, one after the other. He couldn’t get enough.

He was afraid, then?

Of Manson?

Of you.

You think? Maybe. Or else it was part of the act, I don’t know. He hated women. In June of ’70 your dad got a job offer in Orillia and I was rotted that he wouldn’t take it. I wanted to get away. Sawchuk never let a debt die, she said.

What about Graham Patton? I said.

My mother jerked back slightly.

You’re in full-on reporter mode here, aren’t you?

His name comes up on this photo, I said. I don’t know if I’d recognize him.

Who?

Graham Patton. David’s father, right?

My mother pulled out her wallet.

That’s a common name, Evie. Who knows?

Did you know him?

Back then? She looked down at the bill and counted through her money. I met David when you did.

Is it possible that Art Sawchuk also went by that name? Graham Patton?

No. My mother laid the money down and smoothed it with her hand. No, I don’t think so. And don’t go saying that out loud again.

Robert Cameron also went by the name Arthur Sawchuk, I said. And Cameron was in jail with Charles Manson, too. I found a list.

I thought you were working on this Bernardo thing.

I’m finding out a lot of things, I said. Some of this is for work. Some of it I’m doing on my own.

You’re working too hard.

Cameron was American.

My mother closed her eyes and when she opened them again her face had relaxed.

I knew Graham back then, she said. Before I knew your father. You can’t imagine. We were a bunch of kids in over our heads, she said. You all done?