Ernie spent July wandering in disgust among the ruins of his father’s life: the destroyed bits of forest, the hiding places under plastic. And the job: waiting for dogs to shit — a wait his father was now unable to endure. In the evening he couldn’t bear to be in the same house as the man, so he’d invent things he had to do at the church and then drive off in the car his father could barely understand. His nightly request for the keys was met with an uncomprehending stare and lips so dry that Ernie winced when they touched to speak.
Tonight, Helen will answer the phone and learn that someone has stolen one hundred and forty-six dollars from the church’s petty cash. In three days the police will call to tell her that they have apprehended Ernie Reardon. She spends these days comforting a poor husband who has long retreated into an uncaring silence. In the coming months, as his depression sinks into a lifelong organization, Les will never miss an opportunity to appear misunderstood and wounded. He feels himself domineering, emerging in his family for the first time, and he will twist forever in a kind of happiness that will never abandon him.
As they pull through Myrtle Station an
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car passes them and slows. Les looks at the baby drowsing peacefully on the seat, its small feet pressed against the barrel of a handgun and the bulk jar of Dilaudid sitting on the floor mat. The arrangement makes Les think of pieces gathered at the start square of a board game. He moves the handgun onto the floor and slides it with his foot under the seat. The lights on the
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cruiser fire off and Les pulls his stolen car onto the shoulder. The cop steps out onto the pavement of the highway and, before approaching Les’s vehicle, takes in the spot: the six cows gathered near the muddy back of a barn, the twenty odd birds strung like pointy teeth on a hydro wire. He calculates something, reading the fresh spring with a local’s discerning eye, and moves his hat forward to accept a message given. He stops halfway between the two cars and realizes that he’s approaching a stolen vehicle. He drops to a squat, withdraws his sidearm and, with his hands joined and fingers pointing along with the barrel, shouts from his elbows. Les lays his hand on the spot that has grown so comforting to him, his son’s warm belly, and decides, while there’s time, barely perhaps, to imagine yet another life for him and little Ern.
“Did Ernie take the Boy or the Girl for lunch?”
Helen hasn’t sat down all morning. She hovers over the kitchen sink: above it stretches a narrow shelf littered with Mommy’s drug things. A spoon with a soggy bit of filter; a lighter; three origami packets lined in some priority to the left; a thin razor blade. Helen pushes a long fingernail into the enveloped opening at the top of one of the packets.
“Les, honey.”
Les is seated at the kitchen table. A light sweat has broken out on his forehead.
“No, thank you dear.”
Helen stops twirling the plunger of a syringe in her spoon and looks over her shoulder at her husband.
“No? I mean, no. What do you mean? I didn’t get that.”
Les scratches his shoulders with crossed arms.
“I mean no, darling, I’m
OK
. I did some of the Girl after I did the Boy, so I’m alright — you just make yourself right, there, don’t worry about me.”
“
OK
,
OK
. I’m glad that you did the Girl already, that’s what I’m fixing here, but I asked whether Ernie went off with the Boy
and
the Girl. He never forgets the Boy, he thinks that’s all he needs, but he misses half his lessons, so I tell him if he takes some of the Girl, not too much y’know, but a little wake up, and he’ll do better at school. Makes the Boy a nice after-school
wind down. So I was asking, did Ernie take the Girl with him to school this morning?”
Les is doing his morning reading, an interview with Liv Tyler in
Details;
beside his right hand is a thawing cup of wheat grass juice.
“Oh honey, I don’t know. He left early.”
Helen walks across the kitchen floor with a syringe dangling and clinging to the crook of her arm. She stands in front of a large television. A
Breakfast Television
celebrity is watching a small man drag a comb through brown paint to create a fake wood grain. Helen observes the process, mindless of the unadministered drug laying like a broken branch from her arm. As the segment concludes, opening a replay box over the audience and a scroll of the next segment beneath them, Helen lifts the syringe away from her forearm and works it slowly, playing in her arm with its searching tip. She is obviously enjoying herself as she parries with the moment of injection. The moment comes and goes and Helen returns to the kitchen sink. She turns her back to it and leans long enough to push herself into a walk through the kitchen again. Her walking, not quite a pace, and not without some meaningful gestures, is what she concentrates on, experimenting with the pleasure of appearing not so crazy.
“I think … I think . . . Lester, I think Ernie is doing
really
well at school.”
Les is reading the advertisement for a hair-loss treatment on the page opposite the Liv Tyler interview. The interview continues seventy-five pages later, but Les thinks he may never return to this particular point
in the magazine again, so he’s taking his time before moving on. Helen has left the kitchen again, and she exits down the hallway. But she returns too soon to have actually left for any other reason than the opportunity to come back to the kitchen.
“He’s really good with math, y’know? He gets that from me, I think. I have a cousin who’s an architect. But he also gets it from you, you’re good with numbers.”
Helen disappears and returns again, this time having retrieved three notebooks from a room down the hall. She sits across from Les, who has moved on to the conclusion of the Liv Tyler interview. Helen stacks the books in front of her and opens the first with a formality that reminds her of her own mother.
“Look at this . . . Oh my god! . . . This is totally neat . . . He’s doing algebra … I knew it . . .”
Helen looks up, irritated. Les is flipping through the magazine now, comparing the icons that signify the conclusions of articles, wondering whether the feeling of conclusion is just an effect of their appearance on the pages.
“Oh, look, he does drawings here in the margins . . . That’s cool . . . He could draw for the comics . . .”
Les looks up, closing the magazine on a finger to mark his place.
“Do some of the Boy. I think I need some of the Boy — let’s split a tenth, honey.”
Helen closes the notebook and returns to her narrow shelf. “I wonder if he forgot those books this morning. He needs his notebooks.” She opens the lid of a packet
with a fingernail. “A student can’t take notes without a notebook. How come he left his notebooks here?” As she sets up a small blue jar of distilled water on the counter she flips two antiseptic swipes out of her pyjama pocket. “Maybe he has a locker. Maybe the books he uses at school are in his locker.”
Les is distracted. He’s looking at a large photograph of Lena Olin that fills a tall page in an old issue of
Interview.
A bar of sand clings to the side of her bare foot.
So wrinkled,
he thinks.
Not age, just . . .foot wrinkled.
“Sweety, I’ve only got a quarter left . . .”
Les rumples his nose with a loose fist; the skin of his face, now arid, folds and bends without resisting.
“Sweety, how … uh … how much do you have?”
Les scratches the back of his head with the vigour of a porch dog. He has been preparing to ignore this question long before it has occurred to Helen. Not that he won’t answer, and she won’t mind asking two or three times, it’s just a kind of protocol of married life.
“Hmmm … I thought I had at least a half. . . Well, let’s do a Tee anyway, right honey?”
Les is drawing bubbles on a photograph of a martini glass.
Mmmmm. Hmmm.
“
OK
, yes, a nice half-Tee, that’ll be nice for us. Uh . . . Les, how much do you have left?”
Les draws the stick of an umbrella leaning out of the martini.
“Sorry, sugar. What did you say?”
Helen snaps a blade through a pebble of heroin, pinning the halves on either side of the tiny knife with
her fingers. She asks again with a voice that is patient and refreshed.
“Oh, I was just wondering how much of the Boy you have left.”
Les pushes the magazine to the edge of the table, conscious of what it would take to send it sailing onto the floor.
“How much of the Girl is left there?”
Helen lifts her hands from what she’s doing and slides another packet into the area of her operation. She opens it without lifting it from the shelf.
“Two big grams.”
She looks over her shoulder at Les. She feels she deserves her answer now.
“Three-quarters. Second drawer. In the purple box. Pull it out.”
Les puts a flint of power in his mouth and it only allows him to use short sentences. When Helen puts the larger bindle on the table in front of Les, he covers it with one hand, watching her back while she loads two syringes.
“Here darling.”
They silently administer the heroin and listen, in the seconds that follow, for more comfortable breathing in each other. Helen smiles at Les and he returns the gesture. Her smile twists apologetically and she returns to the shelf.
The Girl again. Christ. Helen, you’re not in control of what you’re doing.
Les says nothing as he spins the packet towards himself and opens it.
“What the fuck is this?”
Helen jumps, dropping a new syringe into the sink.
“Fuck Les, fuck!”
“No. No. Really, Helen, what the fuck is this? There’s only a couple of Tees here.”
“No! Oh
no
! Fuck! Fuck! Are you sure? Lemme see!”
“There was almost a gram in here this morning! Where the fuck is it?”
“I don’t know, Les! I don’t fucking know. Oh God!”
Helen is screaming now. Crying and angry, she reaches across the table for the packet. Les makes quick fists, striking distance; to protect her he stomps his feet.
“Ernie! Fucking Ernie! He’s selling at school! The fucker!”
Helen whips open the top drawer and pulls out a handgun.
“
OK
you little fuck! I can’t fuckin’ believe him! I’ll kill him.”
“No you won’t.”
Helen looks up, confused, still crying, the rims of her eyes are flicking around her sockets.
“But keep the fucking gun out anyway.”
Helen places the gun on the table and with a gluey pull at her nose she returns to the shelf. Les stares at her back. She is struggling with the cocaine, messing up her fix and saying “Fuck!” every six or seven seconds. Les picks up the gun, checks the chamber for rounds, and lays it flat against the inside of his thigh.
“I can’t fucking take this. I need some music.”
Les looks down at his son before stepping out onto the highway. He takes the word Ernie away from his boy. He leaves the baby to scratch, nameless and alone, at the red patches that have risen on his wrists. The
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officer and Les stare at each other. Neither of them has a clear idea of what happens next. They are both expecting to die, though they have probably never been in safer company. In fact, they are both pretty much willing to die for each other. The officer makes the first move. Gracefully and delicately, he floats his right hand out and down.
Down. Lie down.
The gesture is so compelling that a shrub nearby bends several of its tiny white flowers toward the ditch it overhangs. It encourages Les to crouch against the road, to block out a place there. On his stomach, Les breathes out the weight of his back onto his lungs, blowing clear a patch of asphalt by his cheek.
This is the end of the line.
At the station house Les is put into custody. He is asked quietly for his rare possessions. The arresting officer is agreeable and polite. The superficial pleasure of the procedure baffles Les. It reminds him of a Latin exercise from school. He is a noun in declension — all the handcuffs, the five coils of smoke on his fingertips, the secretive case, the ablative justice of the peace and an entire world that will, except for him, run on a series of sentences that begin with the letter O.
Les is sitting in just such a circle. He has given his son up to the law. He has surrendered his illegal firearm. The controlled substance he shared with the baby. The stolen vehicle and its violent history. Murder. He has given the
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a murder.
Les sits in a chair in the small police station outside Caesarea not knowing that a growing number of people in Ontario are now also giving the
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murder. All across the province vicious gangs of cannibals are moving on the police, sweeping through like a system of weather, snatching up large parts of the population. Les fishes in his pocket for one of the Dilaudid that he had managed to scoop from the jar before his arrest and he pops it in his mouth. He has already begun to contemplate other forms of consuming the drug, and he anticipates, with an excitement that makes him chew the pill, a man he’ll meet in the shower who’ll slip a syringe into his hand and then drop his fingers against the side of his penis. The officer has left him sitting alone for over an hour to picture prison life. In an adjacent room Les hears the first yelp of a son who is stirring back up into cutting discomfort.
There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words
Helen, hello, help.
This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into diphthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie,
for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught by surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and the sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.