The Retreat (2 page)

At the third tee, waiting for a foursome to proceed, she sat on a bench, crossed her tanned legs, and said that the Texan wanted her to become an American citizen. “It’s a wild place. They elect their presidents and then throw them out like garbage. I told him that. He said that freedom had its problems sometimes. Still, I’m thinking about it. He wants to go to Egypt for the honeymoon. Where the Pyramids are.”

Raymond said that he knew about the Pyramids.

“Of course you do. You’re not stupid.”

She four-putted the sixth green, letting loose a soft curse as she overran the hole on the second putt. When she was finished, Raymond replaced the flag and together they walked up to the seventh tee. She was shorter than him and he looked down at her. The whorl of her ear, sculpted marble.
Her small soft head. She lived alone in a large house on Coney Island. Her husband had given it to her after an amicable divorce. Her words. He sometimes came over in the evenings for sex. Her words. She had told Raymond this just after the divorce had gone through. She said, “I never thought that sex with my ex-husband would be so good.” She did not look at Raymond when she said these words. She looked past him, and so it seemed that she was talking to someone else, someone just beyond Raymond, someone who actually existed.

A week passed and he did not hear from Alice. He drove by her house one night but it was dark. He waited for her to phone him at the clubhouse, which was her habit, but no calls came. One evening he visited his grandmother and watched TV with her. Then they played crib and he let her win. On the wall behind his grandmother was a picture of Jesus bending to touch a man with a crippled leg. On a cabinet nearby there were graduation photos of Raymond’s brothers and sisters. The table they sat at was covered with an orange plastic cloth that was printed with green flowers set in brown pots. His grandmother’s hands rested on top of one of the pots. Her hands were dark and lined and the small left finger was crooked, the result of a broken bone years earlier that had never been properly fixed. His grandmother stood and went into the kitchen and came back with a grilled cheese sandwich on a pink plate and she handed him tea.

His sister Reenie and her four kids returned from the evangelistic crusade at the town arena. A preacher from Kansas
was in Kenora for the week and Reenie loved the music, the preaching, the plea for sinners to come forward, and inevitably she went forward because she considered herself a sinner. She loved the physical contact of the preacher laying hands on her. Lee, Reenie’s fourteen-year-old, walked in the door and sat down beside Raymond and put her head against his shoulder. “Uncle Ray,” she said.

Reenie went into the kitchen and came back with a peanut butter sandwich. She said that Pastor Rudy was the most amazing man. “He’s on a higher plane,” she said. “When he touched my shoulder, right here, it was like electricity was flowing from him to me.” She looked at her daughter and said she should have come forward too.

Lee shook her head.

“Nobody’s special,” Reenie said. “Shoulda come too, Ray. You could use some God talk. Look, I got a New Testament.”

The Bible was small and blue and Reenie’s large hand smothered it. She handed it to Lee. “It’s yours now,” Reenie said. Lee held it lightly, with some misgiving.

Reenie told Raymond that she’d gone up to look for him at the cabin about a week ago. He wasn’t there, but Alice Hart was. “She was sitting in her father’s car, pretending to be sure of herself, and when she saw me she asked about you. Where were you? As if because she was there, so should you. Her eyes are too close together. Don’t you think?”

Raymond took the New Testament from Lee and fanned the pages, smelled the newness. Handed it back and imagined Alice’s eyes. He felt an ache in his stomach.

Reenie said that any girl who drove a Cadillac at that age would expect far too much in life. “She got holda your pecker?” Reenie laughed. Lee giggled. In fall, Lee would be attending the school Raymond had just left, a monstrous building that swallowed children unformed and then spat them out again four years later, bigger and sadder and sometimes wiser. Lee was already wise. She held the New Testament with a degree of doubt. Raymond stood and went out to his pickup and drove up to his place. His windows were open and air blew in and above him the sky was vast and stars fell and it smelled of autumn.

The following evening Alice came up to the cabin in her father’s Cadillac and parked with her lights shining through his front door. At first he did not know who it was, and he might have shot out the headlights with his .22, but Alice’s voice floated through the darkness, calling his name. He went to her and leaned in through the driver’s window and put his hands like a loose necklace around her small neck. It rained that night, a heavy downpour accompanied by thunder and lightning, and out on Highway 17, when a streak of lightning swept from left to right, they saw a moose standing smack on the centre line. He did not speak of what had transpired with her uncle, even when she said, out of the blue, that her uncle Hart could be an asshole. The statement seemed an admission of something; approval perhaps, or the understanding that this was a secret and thrilling game. When she dropped him off he told her there would be mud on the tires and wheel wells, his mud, and she should wash the car down. And this is
what she did. Headed over to the wand wash, where she wiped the car clean, in and out, ridding the car of all proof of Raymond Seymour.

In October his brother Marcel stayed a night at the cabin on his way through from Vancouver to Montreal, where he was planning to work for a law firm that specialized in land claims. Marcel brought with him a twelve of beer and the brothers sat on the glider swing and drank while Marcel told him once again how his eight months in prison had informed his choice to go into law. “Better to get buggered on the outside,” he said. “At least there’s the possibility of escape.” He said that the odds were stacked against them. “I’m not whining here, but the fact is, Ray, you can choose to lie down and let the man drive back and forth over you, or you can do the driving. That’s what I’m doing, the driving.” He paused, opened another beer. “I met this girl in Vancouver, studied law together. Her father is a bigwig in the court system there. Lives in a large house overlooking the harbour, except the neighbour’s tree, a huge fucking cedar, was blocking the view, so he hired someone to poison the tree. His daughter, Naomi, my girlfriend for a while, told me this. She told it as if this were perfectly acceptable. Our problem, you know, is we’re too nice. You see. Too fucking nice. Most people when they want something, they go out and get it. There’s a lesson to be learned here.”

Marcel was wearing a dark blue suit jacket and the collar of his shirt was folded over the jacket’s collar. The shirt’s top
three buttons were open and he wore a gold chain with a fat pendant. His watch, quite expensive looking, moved back and forth over his wrist whenever he lifted his arm. He said that he loved coming home. “You should leave, Ray. Then you’d appreciate this more.”

“I’m fine,” Raymond said. “I don’t need to leave.”

“Tell you what. I’m twelve years older than you. You plan on doing something stupid, give me a call and I’ll talk you out of it.” He pointed at his chest. “I’m thirty. Lot of wisdom to impart to my baby brother. I’ll walk you through so you don’t end up before some asshole judge like Nottingham, who’d happily lock you up and swallow the key. Man is so fat it takes him years to shit it out. Know what he said to me? He says, ‘Mice deserve better than what you’re getting, Mr. Seymour.’ And then he bangs his gavel and goes for steak dinner.”

In the sky, stars fell. In bed, before sleeping, Raymond listened to his brother tossing on the nearby mattress. “Marcel?” he said.

Out of the darkness: “Hnnnh.”

“I could come up with you. To Montreal. I’d find work. Take care of your place, cook and clean. Stay out of your way.”

“You could be my wife, in other words.”

“Other words?”

“That’s what you’re saying.”

“I ain’t saying that. I’m just asking.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“I do. Most of the time.”

“Reenie said you’ve got a girl.”

“Reenie’s got a big mouth.”

“What’s her name?”

“Alice. Hart.”

There was a silence that extended and stretched and then fell into itself.

A grunt and then: “As in related to Hart the constable, his daughter?”

“Niece.”

“She’s the niece.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Oh, boy. Who do you think you are? Jesus, Ray. This isn’t heaven.”

“She likes me.”

A laugh, derisive and disbelieving.
“She likes me.
Whoop-dedo. Listen, little brother. Hart’s in Nottingham’s pocket and this Alice is in her father’s pocket, and even if it seems like she’s jumped out of her father’s pocket into your pocket, your pocket isn’t big enough to hold her. Or keep her. Or whatever it is you want. Maybe you want to marry her.”

“Forget it.”

Marcel laughed. A slight snort and then a bark and the sound moved around the room. When he spoke his voice was softer, cajoling, and maternal. “What would you cook?”

“Noodles. With cheese. Hamburgers.” Then he talked about Mrs. Kennedy and how she told him about the husband she used to have and the man she would soon be marrying and how she wore pink skirts just above her knee and he said that she smelled really good. “The wind comes from behind her and passes my way and I smell soap. She leaves me ten dollars every time.”

“She wants to marry you.”

“I said that?”

“You think that. You imagine it. It’s all pretend, Ray, like with Alice.”

“That’s not pretend.”

“Yeah?”

Quiet then. The plastic in the windows popped in and then out. Marcel said that clams and beer was fine. He could live on that. “You know how to prepare clams?” Then he said that a blow job was a good thing. “Nothing better in life.” He said that he hadn’t been laid in weeks.

Raymond said he spoke some French. He’d taken it in high school.

“Parlez-vous?
” Marcel said, and he laughed.

In the morning Marcel shaved outside by the pump. Then he washed his hair and under his arms and he towelled himself dry with a T-shirt. He stood and put on a clean shirt and buttoned it, looking out towards the sun in the east. He was wearing dark brown pants and black wing-tipped shoes. His duffle bag was in the back seat. His face was flat in the morning light. He punched Raymond on the chest and climbed into his car and drove away. The sun blinked off the top of the Monte Carlo just as it crested the hill. Then it was gone.

In late October, payday in his pocket, Raymond went to the Kenricia and sat at a back table and ordered a beer and a whisky straight-up. The whisky went down hard and hot and the beer followed slowly. His feet rested on the chair beside
him. He was wearing his best boots, the ones Alice liked, dark leather with yellow stitching. The warmth of everything good; work finished, the straw laid out across the greens, the clubs stored, “Closed for the Season” in the clubhouse window, a harsh wind coming off the lake, the anticipation of Alice and her thin arms. Leona brought another whisky. She set it on the coaster and Raymond flashed his bank, peeling off a bill and waving away the change. “Careful, big boy,” Leona said. She wiped the table. The sharp scent of her perfume, the whisper of a cue ball. Raymond was excellent at pool. He was gifted. Mr. Knight, his math teacher at Lakewood High, had told him that he was gifted. He could do whatever he wanted. “You can be a doctor,” Mr. Knight had said. For now, he was a greenskeeper. Still eighteen. Years to go.

Alice blew in. A short dark coat with double-breasted buttons, hair straight and long, cheeks red from the wind. She sat and took off her coat. She was wearing a tartan jumper, white shirt, black knee-highs, and short boots with fat heels. The straps of the jumper criss-crossed her back. She wrinkled her nose and lit a cigarette. “What you buying me?” She called out for the same, waggling her fingers at Leona, pointing at the table. She swivelled and aimed her cigarette at Raymond’s nose. “I’m at Jenny’s for the night, so you have to take care of me. Okay?” She crossed her legs. The black socks reached to the top of her calves. Her knees were bony and bare and dry.

They played a game of pool and Raymond let her win. At one point he stood behind her, his crotch against her bum, and he showed her the angle of the shot. “See?” She laughed and the vibration of her voice passed through her back into
his chest. A man with oily hair watched from the bar. “Hey, Chief,” he called. Raymond didn’t answer. The eight ball dropped, Alice squealed and gave him a hug. They went back to the table and drank.

“He worries,” Alice said. She was talking about her father. Raymond studied her bare arms. She liked to push her small breasts against his mouth. The pink of her nipples. Where he might be ashamed, she was proud. Laid out like the fallen branch of a birch, she peeled back the bark. Her lack of shame made him shy.

Leona came over and said that Ed Farber was drunk and he was making threatening noises and because she was alone tonight she didn’t want trouble and she’d appreciate it if Raymond and Alice left. Maybe they could take a six-pack to go. Okay?

Alice said she wanted another whisky, just one more, and that Farber could go fuck himself.

“I don’t think so. Anyway, Alice, you’re underage, and if trouble starts, I don’t want your father running in here, you see, so just pick yourselves up and walk out and I’ll take care of Farber.”

Raymond stood. He reached into his pocket but Leona waved him away. “It’ll be a long winter,” she said.

Alice put on her coat, picked up her cigarettes and purse, and then clacked in her fat heels towards the door. Raymond followed her, past a man and a woman playing pool and, beyond that, Farber’s wide face, and then through the door and into a hard sleet falling. They took shelter under an awning, where a pale yellow light reflected off the wet sidewalk. Alice
reached into her purse and took out a joint and lit up. She held out the joint. Raymond put his back to the wind and swayed and smoked. Alice slipped an arm into his, pushed her small face against his chest and said that her father’s float plane was down at the wharf and they could go hang out there, if he liked. At least it would be out of the wind. She tugged at him and he followed. The simplicity of being led, the pressure of her hand, the anticipation of her warmth, her voice at that moment announcing that Farber’s problem was he had a small dick, and this was why he went after Raymond. And then a sweep of light and a police car pulled up alongside them and together they halted.