Living with the hawk (14 page)

“You're s'posed to stay here,” said Blake.

“I'm just gonna wade a bit. Up to my ankles.”

The water wasn't even cold. The bottom was all sand under my feet, not a rock anywhere, the sand in lines of little ridges where the waves washed it in. You could scratch them with your toes or stomp them with your heels, and the water got all fuzzy with sand.

There was a kid on a yellow sea-horse, a little kid, not much bigger than me, it was bucking in the waves and he kept falling off and grabbing it, climbing on to ride again, but I knew that it would get away from him, pretty soon it would, and then I'd have my chance, I'd grab it and show him how to ride. He was off again, a big wave lifting it, heaving it away, and now I was gonna show him, but my feet went down.

The bottom wasn't there.

Somehow the water got on top of me.

I could just see that yellow sea-horse up above, rolling up above, but I couldn't get to it, and I was rolling too. I tried to yell, but there was water in my mouth, I was coughing, spitting and coughing, more water coming in. Something underneath my arms, lifting, my mouth was in the air, coughing, choking, it was Blake had a hold of me, only he was going down, and so was I, but I had a mouth full of air, and he was right beside me, I could see him in a blur of water shaking, splashing, bubbles streaming from his nose, and I needed up again, I got my hands on his shoulders, tried to push myself up, if I could only get my head above the water. . .

My father's face like a fish before me, a few strands of hair streaming off his head, seaweed in the current, and he had me around the waist, lifting, and my head was out of the water, I was breathing air, and Blake was right beside me, he'd be breathing too, our father dragging both of us back toward the beach, setting us down on the sand, kneeling in front of us while we gasped and coughed.

I'd expected him to give me heck, to turn me over his knee and nail me with the spanking I deserved, but he never even yelled. His voice was just a whisper when he spoke. “Blair,” he said, “Blair, you could have drowned.” When I was through coughing, he put a hand on either side of my face and held me still, his head lowered to my own. “Listen now. You must never go in the water unless I'm there, or your mother is. Right there. You understand?” His grip on my face was so tight I could barely nod my head. “Good. That's important. I hate to think what would have happened here if it wasn't for your brother.” He let me go then and turned to Blake, but I could still feel his fingers on my cheekbones.

“Blake, I know you were trying to help, going in after him like that. But you can't swim, it could've been the end of you too. You were very brave, son, but you should have called an adult.” He said some more, his voice quiet, still surprisingly calm, I guess, but I was crying by then and didn't hear the rest. Blake was crying too.

I found myself rubbing my eyes, and all around me kids were snickering. I scrunched down in my seat, but it was okay, they were laughing at the play. A sheriff had walked into the cookshack and called the stranger Windy. “Windy!” someone exclaimed, and the kids reading at the front were all trying to look horrified.

He was my brother, and he used to be a good guy. How was I going to turn him in? If he hadn't been drinking, this never would've happened — I knew that was the truth. It was the beer, it had to be.

Yeah, but it did happen. Anna was dead. They'd already shipped her body back to the reserve at Wood Mountain, and there was going to be a big funeral early next week. I wanted to go, but I wasn't sure my parents would let me out of school. When the funeral was out of town like that — not in Wood Mountain, but in Assiniboia, which was almost as far away — hardly anybody from school would be there, well, maybe the girls' volleyball team and a few close friends, and somebody sent to represent the student council. She deserved more than that.

Uh-huh, she deserved justice. But for her it was too late for that. The guys who did it to her, though, they needed to see how justice worked. It would have been easy, too, if it was just Jordan Phelps, Jordan and Vaughn Foster, sure, and Todd Branton, but this was Blake, my brother, I wasn't sure that I could do it. Except I knew it was the right thing to do.

“This kid at school,” my father had said, sounding almost as though he knew who the kid was, “has a pretty good idea of right and wrong. I think he already knows what to do.” And maybe he did figure out that I was the kid. Because then he had to go and quote the Bible: “Let your heart take courage.”

As if that was going to help me.

And this Windy fellow was yapping on about the time he sailed around Cape Horn and he was sleeping in a hammock while the ship ploughed through huge waves, and the kids playing parts and the others in their desks, they were all listening to him just as if his name wasn't Windy and he wasn't full of crap.

I knew I'd be late for practice after school that day. The telephone was in the hall by the gym where kids were always using it to phone home for rides after games and practices. Kids like me who didn't have cell phones. Some days you'd look down there and there'd be such a line-up, sheesh, you'd think the school had a bloody ban on cell phones. The halls would take a while to clear after the bell at 3:30, and I sure as heck didn't want anyone hearing what I had to say. I stayed at my desk, working on the questions we'd been assigned in English class, but they didn't make much sense because I'd been in such a haze throughout the reading of the play. At 3:45 I gave it up, dumped my books into my locker and headed for the gym.

The hall was empty except for one guy, Al Richardson, and he was on the phone. One of the debate team, he was the kind of person who hated silence as much as any deejay blathering between programmed selections on the radio. I walked past him, into the lounge and got myself a coke from the drink machine.

Moment of panic. I plunged my finger back into the coin pocket on my jeans. No, it was okay, I still had money for the phone.

I pulled a chair over to where I could watch Richardson and went to work on my coke. One hand held the phone beside his ear, of course, but the other hand, his right one, was slicing patterns in the air, beating out the rhythm of his words. Man, all I'd have to do is tie down that hand and he'd totally lose his ability to speak — he'd have to hang up the phone. Come on, I thought, get it over with. He paused once for what must have been a full minute, his right hand hanging lifeless at his side. He was leaning against the wall now, turning back and forth, almost writhing, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line, the pain of keeping silent too much for him. Twice I saw his mouth open, then fall shut again, disappointment like a mask on his face. Another second and he made his move, lips flapping, his right hand back in action. Yeah, he came off that wall like a player coming off the bench when the coach sends him into the game with a trick play they know is going to mean their last chance to win.

I dropped my empty can into the bin and ambled down toward him. Maybe if I hung around beside the phone he'd take the hint.

I was almost upon him when his eyes seemed to focus on me, as if he suddenly realized this object coming towards him wasn't just a piece of moving furniture, and he turned away from me, hunching over, shielding the phone with his shoulder. Probably trying to impress some girl, I thought. The jerk likes himself almost as much as Jordan Phelps. I walked past him so he couldn't pretend I wasn't there, and leaned against the wall a few yards from him. He immediately turned the other way, cupping his right hand over his mouth and the phone to cut down any chance that I might hear whatever line he was using. Hey, maybe that would do the trick. He was going to have trouble keeping up his share of the dialogue with his hand motionless beside his mouth.

I pulled out a quarter, began to flip it into the air and catch it. After another minute he glanced over his shoulder.

“You gonna be long?” I asked.

“I paid my money,” he said. “Don't rush me.” But his voice was quiet on the phone, his hand still, the animation gone from his chatter. I had him now. It was just a matter of time.

After yet another minute, I heard him say, “I got to go now. There's some creep here keeps trying to listen in.” When he hung up the phone, he stuck his nose in the air and walked past me without another word. Yeah, but if he'd been Jordan Phelps, he would've body-checked me into the wall. I waited until he had gone all the way down the hall and disappeared toward the outside door.

I couldn't just phone 9-1-1, could I? This wasn't exactly an emergency, not now it wasn't, and back on Saturday night, when someone might have saved Anna, nobody was phoning the police to help her. I grabbed the directory from where it was chained in the rack beneath the phone. “Crime Stoppers,” that was what they said on T.V. They were always doing robbery reenactments on the suppertime news, guys wearing ski masks sidling toward cash registers in convenience stores, pulling knives, threatening clerks, running outside with handfuls of cash, a policeman in full close-up abruptly commandeering the screen to tell us about the importance of phoning Crime Stoppers if we had any information that might in any way be useful. Oh man, I could tell him what he needed to know.

My hands unsteady, I flipped through the yellow pages. “CRESTS,” “CRISIS CENTRES,” but no headings between them. Jeez, you had to be a sleuth just to find the damned phone number. I tried the white pages, some names in huge bold print and highlighted in yellow, some in smaller bold print, “CRESTVIEW ROOFING LTD” leaping out at me, and “CROCKER DAVID CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT” and nothing but small print between them. Didn't these guys want your tips?

But there it was, in the small print, “Crime Stoppers (Saskatchewan)” and an 800 number (Call No Charge). I checked both ways down the hall. Not another person anywhere in sight. No charge — did that mean for pay phones or long distance? I dropped my quarter in the slot just in case and pressed the numbers: 1-800-222-8477, and almost dropped the phone when a girl was immediately on the line, not a single ring at her end, but there she was, talking to me: “Thank you for calling the Crime Stoppers Tip Line.” Just a recording, I thought, she isn't really there, this might be okay. “Your help is appreciated, and we want to assure you that at no time will your call be monitored or traced. To reach Palliser Crime Stoppers, press One. To reach Saskatchewan Crime Stoppers — “

I pressed one.

This was it then; I was going to do it.
Brnnng . . . Brnnng . . .
Brnnng
. . . four . . . five . . . six rings — they didn't give a damn — seven rings, and someone was picking up the phone. “Hello. Crime Stoppers.” A woman's voice. “How can we help you?” This was a real woman on the other end of the line, I could hear her breathing, she was waiting for me to talk. “Can I help you?” An edge to her tone.

“Yes.” Damn, my voice like a squeak, but I could lower it. I took a deep breath. “I want to report a crime.” No, that wasn't right. They knew about the crime. “Report
on
a crime. This girl from school, Anna Big Sky, she was killed. The cops — ” no, they wouldn't like me saying ‘cops' “ — the police, they already know that, but I can tell them who did it.” I'd hardly said a thing, yet I was out of breath, almost gasping.

“I'm going to give you a number, sir.” She was all politeness now. “It will protect your identity, but you'll still be eligible — ”

“I don't want a bloody number.”

“Go ahead, then.” She was still trying for politeness, but her voice was curt. “If you can give me names, that would be helpful.”

I could still hang up.

Just drop the phone on the cradle and walk away from here, hustle down to the locker room and get dressed for practice, everything would be okay, nobody would guess what I'd nearly done. Blake would never know.

Yeah, but I had a pretty good idea of right and wrong — my father knew that much, didn't he? — and what they'd done was wrong.

“Jordan Phelps,” I said. “He'd be the one who got them started. Todd Branton, you can bet that he was there, and . . . Vaughn Foster — probably him too. Those guys — they do everything Phelps says.” The light above my head was flickering. I looked up, one fluorescent tube going on and off and on again, as if it couldn't make up its mind about what it ought to do. “I don't know how many were involved all together, but those three, they're the guys to check. Have the police talk to them.”

And one other guy, I thought, Blake Russell, but oh no, I couldn't say his name. Did it matter though? The rest of them would be quick to turn him in.

She read the three names back to me and added, “Now, you're sure about this information?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I wish I wasn't,” and I hung up the phone.

I thought I'd feel better after I made the call, but somehow I felt worse.