Come Back (29 page)

Just go and unlock the door. Yes it was me, here I am, come in.

He looked at his wristwatch, 4:11:36. He could hear a mutter of talk, their heavy boots, but the backdoor chime did not clang again. The three tubes of the chimes hung on the wall before him crumpled on the stair, the longest swaying gently into motionlessness. They knew whom they needed to find, where he was, they even knew he always used his back door. But today he had come in the front—

Suddenly a pounding. The door was metal but the double lock flimsy enough for official fists:

“Mr. Wiens! Mr. Helmut ‘Hal’ Wiens!”

He waited. If they had a warrant would they break the
door? He’d have time to get out the front—the single chime clanged! again—double this time and stunningly louder.

Have mercy on me, a sinner.

4:15:12.

The boots trampled hard. The heavy shoulders and police ears, hats, were moving, down, off the porch, bending under the crabapple branches, they were so tall, huge. He craned farther around the wall, a full minute and the car started to ease away—City of Edmonton Police. Quickly he walked to the front side window: through the blind slats he saw the black and white car hesitate in the alley, then cross the sidewalk and turn south into the traffic on 104th Street.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the night gets in. Especially into a conscience.

By the sofa Gabriel’s blue worn Bible lay open on the footstool where he had left it. He had begun to tag the underlinings, here Deuteronomy 28:25:

The phone shrilled in the kitchen, he was there before the third ring, almost expecting the door chime to clang again as he lurched past but it didn’t and he saw call display: not Miriam nor Dennis thank God, John, good John, more friend than pastor, though that too—

He had to leave the house, quick. He grabbed the Celica keys out of the drawer, the phone stopped as it should at eight rings, and before his voice came on he was reaching to code in “Away” security beside the back door. In the kitchen his eight words ended, the answering machine clicked, and:

“Hey Hal, was at Double Cup Thursday, but you were nowhere, though I waited, and yesterday and again today and Becca says she hasn’t seen you in five days! What gives, friend? Call, or see—”

He was outside, the double-locked and coded door jerked tight and managed the porch steps carefully unhurried, kicked aside wrinkled winter crabapples still falling from the tree—police boots had splotched a few—unlocking, walking into his garage. Hal’s last Papaschase treaty discussion with John over coffee had splintered away into talking about evil, again, why all this endless heavy in-your-face violence and evil when the world is endlessly beautiful and every human being everywhere on earth—except maybe a few psychotics—people love to laugh, long to be happy and to give and receive goodness, why—the heft of the Bible in his left hand—and Jesus insists God the Creator is good to everyone and everything and some of the world’s most passionate god-lovers are often the most horrible haters. The black-butted car key in his hand sizzled like John’s alphabet game through his head—the word-reversal game they sometimes played and bumbled into tough ideas, two and three letter words were easy, “pin” and “nip,” or “god” and “dog,” but it got trickier with four letters or more: the first two-thirds of “evolve” was “love,” “diaper”
the mirror of “repaid,” “live” reversed was “evil”!—a mere accident of living in English, turn “evil” around and you get “live.” Therefore language logic implied evil = dead?

Not funny, but they both laughed aloud at that turn. Why had they ever left their ancestral Low German? It could only be spoken, spelled however you wished and thus avoid anything; everything.

Facts: the things already done, acts that could never be undone; especially not by silly game. Are we what we remember? The city of Edmonton sprawled over land filched from the Cree, a rich part of it now classy Southgate Mall and Ainlay High School and prestigious suburbs on a place stolen from Papaschase people by deceitful Whites and sold to … ugggh—as Gabe would write—he was a good one to dig for others’ blame, guilt … and the cemetery on the Two Hills—

Watch it! Traffic now, the more the better, his beloved ancient Celica faded grey and low and hard to see in traffic, stickshift quick as any rabbit. Anywhere but south, snort across 104th, left into Gateway Boulevard, right at Saskatchewan Drive, he had done evil running into the traffic on Whyte. Whatever the Orange Downfill was, the fact of his act injured innocent people and that guilt he would have to face, Saskatchewan Drive and immediately spin tight left full circle down into Queen Elizabeth Park Road, the burden of his thoughtless body reaction, he was swallowed in the triple stream of traffic crawling down the valley incline he and Owl had crossed and re-crossed down toward Walterdale Bridge: stay inside the moving stream, just get out of the city. He mainly drove the Camry, they
might not know the Celica—of course they had instantly found both registrations on their patrol computer, but a small car was harder to spot, if he was important enough to try to spot in five-o’clock traffic. How much evil had he done running into a red light on Whyte, he should at least have looked in the newspaper, was he a criminal? Nothing ultimate—nobody dead or seriously—surely not, the police were too slow finding him, but enough thoughtless disaster, injury to be sue—millions beyond insurance? Oh easy, money buried and forgot everything in today’s world, only pay and pay and you’re wiped clean, no need to be forgiven, no revenge necessary, money piled on money heals every pain completely. But how much did he have for all the healing? Relatively little—his monthly pension and the house, blessed be Yo who insisted they buy up Miriam’s and Dennis’s huge Vancouver and Toronto mortgages—“What’s the point of money in banks at 1.1 percent and the kids pay 5 on hundreds of thousands? Why wait till we’re dead? Let’s help each other now, especially about stupid money!”

Two mortgages of stupid money reduced their savings neatly—a third was never needed. Only a memorial niche in the Cemetery of the Two Hills. Overlooking the Papaschase theft.

It wasn’t as easy as money.

It was a fact: he
saw
that Orange Downfill pass on the sidewalk. His eye and motion memory could not lie. That flowing curly hair. That easy turn of head and long body unforgettable. Had that left arm been bare as it swung into the right “Walk” signal he would have seen a white
scar below the elbow: a touch of teen skin once opened, no extensor carpi radialis longus, no brachioradialis cut, a shallow flesh line only, but nonetheless more than horrible when ripped by a chainsaw in his two hands.

Careless or deliberate, it was evil.

Hal had been driving on instinct, very carefully, sixty years of experience, cooling a little and mind slowing as it completed its relentless repeating circle once again. He recognized the familiar route, no thought necessary: he was already past Stony Plain Road and headed south, needing now to round right off 170th Street into the shifty lanes west on Whitemud Drive. Just ahead, beyond the last of the green lights timed perfectly at speed limit, the freeway narrowed into hummocked Highway 628 bordering the Enoch Cree Nation. No evasions possible here, no road-allowance gravel south, only straight ahead lurch and potholes, overgrown ditches, rusted barbed wire. For minutes the Celica bumped alone on the gouged blacktop, nothing ahead or behind, such aspen forest and willowed fields of rural Alberta around him an evening white-tail might suddenly leap across—in the rear-view mirror a blue roof, a huge pickup, loomed out of the highway behind him. He slowed steadily to seventy and in seconds it was thudding past him, the mountain of Enoch garbage tires rising beyond the poplars slightly tinged with green as it roared by—RAM 3500 Heavy Duty Cast Iron Turbo Diesel 4×4, Quad Cab—good, marvellous Alberta, with any luck it would swing south at Highway 60 ahead of him.

But it was gone when Hal pulled into the STOP; blasting north. No super-male muscle to run interference for
him. Five klicks below speed through the Enoch townsite, Watch for Pedestrians.

Had he and Gabriel ever said … yes, of course they had. More. They had talked for hours, for days, all the years, son and father they had been together! If only he had more memory, he needed
re-memory
, wider memory recall of the memories he had already scrambled through thousands of time—where were they,
more
? Driving this highway to Aspen Creek with Gabe twelve years at least once, often twice a week: almost like commuting, so forever and he could find only tiny, bare scraps, here and there, splinters when he needed so much more. And sometimes, like now watching the trees pass, he had nowhere to believe his memory. Only the diary, the notebook scrawls … and the bandage, the Oldman river-hills and floodplains stories to re-member. A quarter of a century basically dis-membered. Was heaven a continuous ogle of total virtual recall,
complete to coughs and glares and twitches and all simultaneous thoughts and stubborn silences? Too much inane facticity, even for eternal God.

Orange Downfill. Ineradicable.

But this land always was; now; had been for the decades they passed through/over it, wherever they looked it always was here. Always again. With Highway 627 gradually bending its open fields into knolls and valley muskegs and tight copses of poplar shimmering faintly spring green at a distance, rocky and twisted. No open Leduc County loam here thick as black cream over swamps of oil. Abruptly he felt unburdened, felt as enormously safe as only he could in a car flying smooth between these remaining bluffs of parkland forest, calm. But the tiny white comfort at Brightbank Corner was gone, a county road bulldozed through the cliff where the church once stood, its gaunt spire and door and two arrow-peaked windows looking south, a beautifully tiny classic church that had delighted them all the moment they saw it, he remembered how Miriam had shouted “Look!” and then Yo, and he hit the brakes and wheeled their brown ‘72 Ford around on the gravel, as it was then, and drove back and up into the small yard where they could almost see the hitching rail wide enough for three teams of horses, maybe four. The church was gone, the high bluff now heaped with crashed and uncontrollable sprouting poplars.

Nevertheless the coming river hills: the long hills, climbing south up and up where the highway notched into the sky and then quickly folded down to the North Saskatchewan River with only grazing cattle to nuzzle
over them, Herefords and cross-breed Angus: distance spread between earth and cloudless evening with the sun down on the right edge of the sky, the world quiet like drinking a glass of warm milk your sister has just given you with almost a smile. Over the last long hill, sweeping up and there it loomed, the immense fortress of Genesee Power Plant—a plant indeed, relentlessly growing—on the southern horizon, its two giant chimneys half blazing in the level light and stuck against a sudden tower of thunder clouds, its steel power cables lines of light scooping into the valley and across the river. Beyond the highway incline in the far west he could see the smoke of Keephills Power chimneys, farther still the horizon glaze of Sundance Power. This magnificent land enduring everything human beings could do to it: millennia of gathering and hunting, a century of farming, now drilled for oil, torn open deep for coal. Suffering people.

Then he was across the river and up, curving long till the raw-ribbed ridges of open-pit coal were flying on either side: coal lay everywhere below Alberta like an invitation to hell and celebration. All you needed for electricity was enough oil to tear the coal out of the ground and crush it blazing into a furnace.

I heard a leaf fall when I died

Who said that?

And then it was

I could not see to see

When?

Straight snow-flecked gravel south to the notched Pigeon Lake Hills. Emmanuel Lobitski still cultivated the earth his great-grandfather from Bessarabia had homesteaded, and at the moment his fields were too close to Aspen Creek to be ripped open for the next human exploitation. Thirty years ago the Alberta Government had promised there would be no more strip-mining within two miles of running water; a promise that could be changed in a legal instant. Hal drove slowly, his lights off, past the farmhouse, past the seven oil donkeys pumping steadily on either side of the road allowance; Manny and Belinda and their children and cows and calves and hay and grain were long accustomed to that spin and sucking. And here at the T-intersection stood the No Through Traffic sign. Beside bare mottled trees which the Alberta Government declared were Hal and Yo’s—he had words on a piece of paper that declared it, the oil and coal companies believed it—the tips of the trees a shimmer of green. Patches of May snow on the forest floor. DEAD END.