The Dead Are More Visible (15 page)

“We have to get out now!” The voice from his mask was minuscule, shaky. I couldn’t make out the face under the headlamp. The little voice commanded, “
Leave
the goddamned snake! These floors could go any time!”

“I’m not leaving it, sir,” I said. It helped that his face was hidden. It helped that my voice, a bellow inside my mask, now dwarfed his. “And I’ll come back for the other if the floors hold.” I trudged toward him, to get past. What else could I do? It’s not like I was suddenly fearless. Not at all. There was the fire, there was Steiger, there was a huge tropical constrictor coiled a few inches from my throat. But where I draw the line now is nowhere. Alive is alive. Why let a thing die for being what it can never help but be?

Steiger moved aside. I made for the stairs, my eyes scalded with sweat. A low, immense, steady moaning
welled up from beneath us, as if the building were giving up the ghost—the sound of a fire that has found maximum sustenance and will no longer be deterred. From behind me I heard, “You’re finished now, Decker, you know that?” I started downstairs, thinking he must be close behind. At the second-floor landing I glanced up the hallway, flame visible through the smoke. At the final turn in the stairwell there was a fast crashing of steps behind me as if the captain were staggering, or being shoved downward, and as I glanced back I saw why—he had the other bagged snake over his shoulder, gripping it with just one hand. “You’re
finished
,” he panted, and his voice seemed smaller than ever.

[ HEART & ARROW ]

In his thirties now, Merrick spends little time at bars, but as he tells his big sister, Laurel, near the end of her fortieth birthday bash, at ten he was a genuine regular.

“What do you mean a
regular?
” Her shrewd blue eyes squint at him through the beige-rimmed glasses he still isn’t used to seeing her wear. He looks down, rubbing the blond stubble of a beard that Sheila, his girlfriend back in Toronto, has urged him to grow so he’ll look older, more hireable.

“Downstairs,” he says. “At Mom and Dad’s.”

“Well, I don’t remember going there. And in high school, believe me, I did the full tour.”

“I mean the bar in our basement, Laurel. Our own bar.”

“
Oh
—you mean Mom and
Dad’s
.”

“That’s the place.”

She lowers her face—puffy, a bit lined, beautiful—and studies him over the top of her glasses, faint red eyebrows arched, the way their mother used to when she was sober, serious. “Merr. You’re not telling me
you
—look, does Sheila know this?—you drank their booze when you were little? You?”

“Hey, that’s what I’m telling you.” Merrick clinks his glass of rye against her spritzer and forges a coy wink, and his whole manner, he can’t help seeing, is lifted from somewhere else—maybe one of those noisy, strobe-lit TV beer ads where a scrum of college jocks flex and guzzle and crack wise along a bar. He can’t be sure. But he does know how much he hates the note of glibness that keeps breezing into his voice—the keynote of so much that he reads these days and almost every party he endures. A note he sometimes picks up and sings in tune with, vaguely ashamed the whole time.

Yet at one time his only shame was solitude, exclusion. A time when he’d have given the hand he earns his bread with, marks with—he’s a physics teacher now—to sing along with the crowd, to be allowed to, to be let in. But not just any crowd. Contemptuous of his grade-school peers, it was Laurel’s tough herd he aspired to, and, somewhere beyond them—through them, really—the grown-up world of his parents’ parties.

Guests are shambling out now, halting and awkward, stooping over to embrace Laurel as if she can’t get up herself, as if she has aged thirty years with the birthday.
And—it’s unsaid but hangs smoke-like in the lamp-lit den—the breakup last month. “Call us if we can do something,” a friend says. “I know it’ll be fine.” After all, it was Laurel’s choice and she and Kevin really might “link up again,” the boys, in their mid-teens, are pretty stable for their age, and her career in the civil service is going better than she could have planned.

“The black sheep that made good,” Merrick toasts her—then, out of character, he kills his rye in one go. Trouble of his own these days. He’s broke and even part-time teaching is impossible to find. Funny how things turn out—when they were children it was Merrick who showed all the promise, at least in school.

And now he reminds her of that ironic reversal, to encourage her, he thinks, to cheer her up. Or is it to punish her instead? And what is it that’s pushing him to guide her back down that long-demolished stairway into their childhood rec room, the basement bar where he first tried to drown his childhood self and play the hardened, hard-drinking grown-up, while she already seemed set to inherit the only earth that mattered then: a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high. Stoners, they were called, nobody sure if that honorific referred to the state they were always said to be in or to the flooded limestone quarry where they hung out and smoked up and chugged beer and threw themselves naked off the cliffs.

Merrick knows he can’t hold back, he has to talk his sister down that basement stairway, and on a particular day. He starts to speak in his best teacher’s voice—low, soft, even, implacable—and pours them another round.

That afternoon as usual he had been sitting at one of the high ladderback stools that faced the bar: a kidney-shaped counter of faux marble with a brown buttoned vinyl fronting, set at the head of a low, half-finished rec room. Their father had worked episodically two summers before to finish the basement and then, after a brief bender of late-summer use, both parents had drifted back upstairs, where they had wintered and entertained their friends at the larger bar in the fire-warmed family room. No surprise they’d never returned—the baseboard heaters that Dad installed never quite worked, his light fixtures were few and ill-placed, and even in June the light leaking down through the leaf-choked window wells was dull and sullen, the air stagnant, dank. A Bogart poster and a faded Group of Seven print did little to primp up the cheap panelling behind the bar; in the dimness and stillness the print—of a full moon and stars reflected in a northern lake—had a sombre, ominous quality, as if the water had just smoothed out over a violent drowning. Merrick tried not to look at it. Like Bogart in the poster he brooded into his glass or slouched, cue in hand, at the pool table, where the coloured balls glowed in strange, static constellations, like the solar system in Mr. Leung’s model at school.

Merrick liked the muffled gloom of the rec room, especially after school, where the sunlight of the playground and the classroom’s crisp lighting always brought into high relief the smallness, the weakness of those in his grade. And himself. Alone at recess he would claw his way up a drainpipe onto the school’s flat gravelled roof and stand visoring his eyes, squinting over the subdivision and past the limestone quarry until his gaze was snagged and drawn downward by a fluttering toy-fort flag, a tall smokestack and a soaring, spindly aerial like a high ladder reaching nowhere. Laurel’s school. And out beyond it the switchblade glinting of the river, the scarred and furrowed hills.

Laurel was not there, in school. She was hidden away in other, darker basements, doing things that made her parents and her principal and teachers “grey with worry.” Without a thought for her family. Unaware, it seemed, of the little brother who still worshipped her and whom she’d happily played with a few years before. (All the toys they had shared were buried in the crawl space under the basement stairs and sometimes during a “binge” in the rec room Merrick would make for that space, lurching and weaving with fierce concentration, and he would take out their old toys and sit playing with them by the light of a bare bulb—a freakish silhouette with his small shoulders dwarfed by his father’s fedora.)

He did not get drunk, not very. He did go through the dark cabinets under the sink behind the bar and he
shook into jade lacquer bowls the stale, exotic snacks abandoned there—peanuts mummified in mysterious coatings, soggy shrimp wafers, candied ginger. Then, playing bartender, he would set up on the bar a clique of bottles and pour doses of gin or white rum or vodka into shot glasses that gleamed icily in the underground light, as exotic and imposing in their way as the tubes and beakers in Mr. Leung’s spotless lab, or the implements and whole rite of Anglican Eucharist, which he had begun taking with his parents each Sunday. Laurel now spurned the sacrament, so he was caught between idols, the adult and the teen, not knowing which to follow, which to betray.

On his first visits to the bar he did not use any mixes, because a man should always take his drink the way his parents did, straight up, but once he became a regular he began groping under the sink for the sticky old bottles of mix forgotten there. He dug out a few half-empty specimens of Pepsi and 7-Up and Canada Dry ginger ale, but they were too flat and anyway they were for kids. The piña colada mix, its gluey cap sporting a skirt of bark shavings, had gone off. But the lime cordial was still good, and dashed with water and a drop of Beefeater gin it made a drink that tasted like lemonade a few days too long in the fridge. Drinkable, barely. His Bloody Marys were better—a jigger of white rum and water diluted with enough grenadine to tint the flooded quarry, he imagined, a bloodshot pink. A spoonful of sugar. He could easily kill two, slumped and rumpled
as Bogart at the bar, his father’s massive Ray-Bans held on with a pipe cleaner tied around the back.

His parents would not be impressed, he knew. In his gut he knew it and he was always afraid, hearing them up in the family room as suppertime neared, the murmur and slur of their voices strained down through the ceiling—especially his mother’s voice, rising with that blurred, abruptly outraged inflection he had come to associate with her second hour of drink. His father’s footsteps growing louder, choppier, each time he rose to replenish their glasses. To Merrick it always seemed—especially after his second Bloody Mary, when his guts and small fists unclamped and his veins flooded with sluggish warmth and he thought of himself as “gloriously drunk”—that those footsteps splashed huge shadows across the ceiling, down the panelled walls, over the rec room’s fawn linoleum floor. Red shadows. He knew that was ridiculous. He knew that Mr. Leung, who liked and encouraged him in science class, would be disappointed he could think such childish things.

The afternoon Laurel came down to the rec room, Merrick was slouching on the corner stool at the bar. He had on his father’s shades and red Shiner’s fez and was sucking on an unlit, desiccated cigar, drinking hard, he told himself, to forget. It had been a long day at school and he had picked a fight and lost it and then picked another and won but had not much cared and even Mr. Leung had been curt with him, impatient, it seemed, with his suave familiarities, the way he answered
questions as if smoothly responding to the engaging, if imperfect, lecture of a colleague. Shouting now, a crashing of footsteps from close above and big shadows seeming to lunge over the dark walls and ceiling, as had happened before when Laurel came home after staying out all night without calling—but this time she had been gone two nights and the shouting was louder. Hearing feet on the basement stairway instead of the usual shootout of slammed doors, Merrick leapt off the stool and over the bar—the great fez sliding down over his brows—and groped for the bottles he’d lined up, shoving them under the sink with his rancid snacks. And his glass. A Bloody Mary. His third one, for the first time ever a third round, and it had made him awkward and dizzy and he knew he was making too much noise, like that time when another intruder had come down—his mother, her slippers spatting and weaving down the stairs and over the tiles by the crawl space and on into the rec room toward the bar. She hadn’t heard any noise Merrick made. With her clumsy movements and her weeping—standing in front of the bar, as if waiting to be served, then shuffling back toward the stairs—she was making too much of her own.

Some day, Merrick hoped, she and Dad would join him at the bar for a round. It would be good to see more of them. But not now. These footfalls were lighter, faster. For a long time he had hoped this would happen, that Laurel would stray down and surprise him in the romantic, reckless, manly act of drinking alone. Hurting
himself in private, hurting himself by the glass. And taking it.
Laurel
, he’d wanted to say,
come down to the rec room and I’ll fix you a drink—you don’t need to stay out late with those friends of yours
. But he’d been afraid she might laugh at him, or disbelieve him, or even turn him in to their parents. But if she just
happened
on him, how different things would seem.
Merry, I had no idea you were so cool … shit, you don’t have to sit here all alone if you don’t want
.

But he’d hidden himself and the bottles and it was too late to present the unforgettable image he’d pictured. Time only for this: grip the last of his Bloody Mary and leap up behind the bar to toast her, let her see him as he was, a man. He caught a glimpse of her and froze. He ducked down. Like their mother she was crying but in a different way—with a terrifying, sobbing urgency, her red curls shaking over her freckled face, eyes bruised with smeared mascara.

She turned and walked stiffly toward the crawl space and Merrick had to crane his head around the edge of the bar to watch her open the low door, kneel down, squeeze in. He couldn’t guess what she might want in there among the jumbled remnants of their childhood, dolls and stuffed animals and board games and science kits and hockey cards and Lego. He drained his drink. The pounding in his head seemed to come from elsewhere, as if his parents, drunk again, were stumbling around upstairs in search of the drinks they had set down somewhere and forgotten. Laurel crawled backward out
of the dark space and punched the door shut, her old pink skipping rope clenched in her fist.