The Journey Prize Stories 24 (7 page)

“I could break your neck,” he said one night, and she nodded. Then he said, “Do you really pray? Like really really?” and she nodded again. His hand was loose on her neck, as if he’d forgotten it was there.

The Grade 12 summer retreat was the last thing they ever did with the John Huss youth group. While the others canoed or waterskied, Lewin and Micah flopped luxuriously on worn armchairs, watching
From Here to Eternity
. They talked about Montgomery Clift and how no one had appreciated him and how he drank himself to death. They would have appreciated him. They couldn’t room together, but they met in the dining hall after everyone else was asleep. The first night, Micah had to wait in the dark, sitting on the stage with the huge antlers and dead fireplace behind her head like a dark sun. The next night, Lewin got there first and she saw him from the hallway, one eye painted over in the gloom and one shining wetly, waiting.

They sat beside each other, facing forward. His eyes were always watering, his eyelids inflamed from the pills, along with the rest of his face. If he had dark eyes it wouldn’t have looked as bad. He accused her of being late, of not wanting to come. Lewin smacked his palm against the pitted wood of the stage and the sound was like a gunshot. They both jumped. Lewin’s
mother had moved Uncle Don and his daughter into the house. Lewin put his head down between his knees and Micah stroked the back of his head. The hair was soft, slightly flyaway, charged with static.

On the last day of the retreat the youth minister told them to pray with a friend, to join hands. Micah sat crossed-legged looking at her own hands, limp in her lap. Lewin came across the floor, which had an orange carpet with a red swirl so bright it felt like someone snapping their fingers in Micah’s face. Lewin took her hands out of her lap and sat in front of her, his face passive, dark spots on his lips where he’d bitten them.

They’d only been apart overnight, but she’d forgotten how tall he was. She closed her eyes. He breathed out and it was ragged, uneven. He said, “God, let us stay friends.” Micah opened her eyes and looked at him. She felt like her throat was made of wood and someone was knocking from the inside. After a minute or two, Lewin dropped her hands and stood up.

She found him later, standing in shallow water down near the dock. The neatly folded cuffs of his shorts were wet.

“What kind of car do you think we’ll get when we’re married?” she asked. She stood back from him. “There are so many good ones.”

He said, “Remember that wine, at the funeral?” In the sunlight, his skin didn’t look as bad. “I heard the caterer yelling at a girl about it. About the missing bottle. The one we took.”

Micah nodded. She didn’t say, “What do you mean ‘we’?”

Lewin asked, “Do you think we would have won Bible Challenge if we hadn’t quit?” And then, “When you pray, is it inside you or outside or both?”

Lewin turned away again, looking out over the water. Micah slipped off her sandals and walked in beside him, studying the back of his head, the face that wasn’t there. She could feel her own head float upward, her neck popping, and she wanted to leap forward with an answer for him.

H
is daughter was dead, he told me, drowned in the river. Claimed by the taupe clay and fouled cattle in the cattle wire of the Red Deer River basin, she would never surface. Come Monday morning her classroom desk would be empty and a pair of ballet shoes would hang unclaimed in the cupboard and no one would help. How can you turn down a plea like that? How can you say no to a man crying on your front step with his cuffs turned up as if he never made it past the third grade?

“You’d better come in.”

“She was wearing a bright pink sweater and rubber boots.” He came in and there were reeds on his feet and they stuck to my floor. “I told her not to go along the river. But she did anyway. She’s got a set of brass bells around her wrist that tinkle like Christmas toys so we can’t miss her.”

“Where is your wife?”

“She’s retarded.” He threaded the rim of his hat through his hands and tossed it aside. “She’s retarded and she doesn’t understand. Not tonight, anyway.”

“Haven’t you told her?”

“She’s off her meds.”

She was simple, I knew that. I knew a little. She came to a few of my parties. She had problems with the complicated things in life – area codes, traffic circles, and long grocery lists – but I wouldn’t have called her retarded. So I let him in. He sat on the couch. He was cold and he had on a scarlet vest and hip waders from the Salvation Army, but I let him in anyway.

He didn’t like my place much. I am a bachelor. I live alone. I live with the petrified skeletons of ancient Badland creatures that I put together for a hobby, and that sort of thing is against his religion. Fossils are popular here. They’re not a bad hobby. They don’t mean you’re derelict or anti-social or have disregard for other people’s beliefs, but he sat between the calcified bones and his eyes flitted from femur to cranium and tried to pretend they didn’t exist.

I handed him a glass of brandy although I felt a little bad for it. He’s a religious man who has lost his daughter and all I did was give him liquor. But he rolled down the brandy in one shot and didn’t even wince. Maybe there were things I didn’t know. The more time goes on, the more I realize I do not know, like the production of pins or the evolution of Mesozoic flowers.

“Have you told the police?” I asked.

“Why?”

“So they can help us look for her.”

“They won’t.”

“What do you mean they won’t? That’s their job.”

“She has to be gone twenty-four hours.”

“No. That’s not right. How old is she?”

“She’s seven.” He nodded. He shut his eyes and counted the years. Maybe he was counting something else, too. “No, wait. She’s eight.”

“Eight? Then they don’t wait a whole day to go looking for an eight-year-old who’s missing in the river.”

“They will with her.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “She’s done it before.”

“That is ridiculous. Call them now. I know one of the sergeants.”

“Do you have a phone?”

I didn’t. I do not like things electronic. They are scabbied. They are horsehair. They get in the way of the real things in life. Real things are bones. Real things are beasts. Real things are proving the past and rye, and drinking with women late into the night and then having them naked on top of you, braids up and down, growling. People spend all day long on cellphones, Blackberries, and computers and don’t even know what the insides of their kitchens look like, so I don’t bother with them.

“Even we have a phone,” he said.

“Let’s walk down to the station.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“They have all the proper tools for a search. They have ropes. They have maps and infrared. They’ll make it easier.”

“You have lights and ropes,” he said.

That was true enough. Outside, the sun died orange and sent a long shadow across my workbench just to prove his point.

“Besides,” he said, “we’ve been through this before with them. They’ll want to look in the house first. They’ll want photographs. They’ll want to ask my wife questions.”

“So let them.”

“No. She’ll screw things up. There’s always an excuse. They’ll never look in the right places.”

“What are the right places?”

He did not answer. He sat between a spilled glass of wine and a discarded pair of women’s nylons from a weekend party and stared into my vacant living room. There are a few other things you should know about my living room. It is large. It is has high ceilings. Only one couch and one chair. No television. Hardwood floors and no carpet. Along with the fossils there are also remnants of gatherings that happened too near in the past to be fossils. Stains. Smudges. Stilettos. A calendar girl with a blue bikini, a singles magazine soaked with merlot, and a leather-bound address book with many names. He stared out across this smear of a house and the stubble on his chin grew dull.

“Why do you do all this?” he said.

“I like to imagine how those creatures used to be. I know, your religion, you don’t believe in evolution.”

“I’m not talking about the fossils,” he said.

And then he put his head in his hands and he howled. He howled so loud his voice went down into my basement and rattled the jars of preserved plums and the tiny skeleton of a bird encased in formaldehyde trembled, too.

“Don’t make me go out there by myself,” he said. “I know you don’t have children so you can’t understand, but please help me find the only thing I’ve ever loved.”

“All right,” I said and made my way to the workbench where all the tools of the trade were kept. “I’ll help you find her.”

Was this a bad thing? Was this a pernicious thing? Did I say yes because I just wanted to shut him up? Maybe I deferred
because his wife was promiscuous. She went to parties, that much I knew. She didn’t connect well at soirees but it was obvious what she wanted. It was obvious what she wasn’t getting at home although I never went there. She would stand there in the corner of a kitchen with a wool skirt hiked up to her knees and a single malt clenched against her ribs. I think her nose was pierced.

We went down to the Red Deer River in the dark. Let me tell you something about the Red Deer River at night. The water is slow and sullen and hides things in the filigreed shadows of cottonwood. It hides alabaster larvae and cardamom condoms; stories of pioneers starving on the banks, of soldiers who went away to distant European wars and never came back. Today, there are stories of automated farming accidents and postmodern suicides because it’s such a melancholy place, the pastel grey Badlands sunk below the prairie with spent oil rigs and abandoned wheat kings. But sometimes people just kill themselves because economic times are bad or they have nowhere else to go. They could have done it in Calgary or Vancouver, but this is a better place for it.

I had the flashlights attached to the brim of our helmets. The kind spelunkers used. You could fall in the river with them and the bulbs would still work. Still find the clutches of ancient Pteranodons and the tangle of teeth in the late night sediment. I ran my hand across a layer of prehistoric rock that vanished into the water. Lacerated by the glaciers, the ridges coughed up Cretaceous spines and amber wings.

“Forget about those,” he said. “Give me one of those lights and turn them on.”

“Why are we looking here?”

“This is the way she always comes.”

Laid waste in the mud was the axle of a combine, a weasel skull, and what could have been a free-base pipe.

“Isn’t it dangerous this way?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Then why do you let her do it?”

“Children are like that,” he said. “You tell them not to do something, but they go ahead and do it anyway.”

His face was dirty. He looked like a miner with my headlamp on. His breath came out in a white cloud then hung around in a bundle.

“Maybe we should retrace her steps,” I said. “What school did she come from?”

“School?”

“Yes, what grade school?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How can you not be sure?”

“You bring your dates here, don’t you?” was all he said.

There was a kite hung up in the willow. An orange kite with red poppies and a crepe tail like a child would have. In the dark sky between the branches there were other things, too. Underwear and plastic bags, lottery tickets and soiled rags. Beer boxes and plastic ashtrays, relics from unhappy cupboards. Anything that wasn’t wanted elsewhere wound up here.

Then in the soft mud by some caragana roots he spotted a set of footprints with the chevron pattern still stamped into the silt. The trail came out of the aspen grove and then meandered along the water, left by a small person who was not at all in a hurry.

“Those are hers,” he said. “Those are her boots. I know them.
I put them on her this morning. There’s a chunk of heel missing.”

I got down on my knees. The harsh light fell across the track and on the right foot, and sure enough, the back half of the heel was gone, the rubber cracked and ragged. The trail of boot prints wandered through a cluster of reeds and with each step, they changed a little. The toes sharpened, the chevrons became scaly and the heels narrowed into claws. By the irrigation flue, the tracks were clustered in panic like a child hopelessly lost and knowing so and then they entered the river and were gone.

“What do you see?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“A sign that says phosphates must not exceed ten parts per million.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re an expert on tracks. What do they say?”

“These tracks aren’t new. They’re ancient.”

“Stop that. I’m tired of hearing about your non-existent fossils. She’s been taken into the water right here,” he said. He waded into the river and ran back and forth like a dog that couldn’t decide where to cross.

“She hasn’t gone into the water,” I said.

By the mouth of an oxbow pond where the silt lay deep, a coil of barbwire ran from an old cattle fence and was fouled at mid-current. Trapped beneath the surface, a knot of hunchback clothes bobbled up and down, and because the fabric was pink, I pulled on the wire. The weight sank back. Not like a fighting fish. Not like a salmon or even the dead pull of a codfish, but a fiction that belonged on the river bottom forever. I remember once, as a boy, I went fishing in our boat with my
father and uncle. We were out on the deep saltwater and the rod bent down in an arc. My father and my uncle spent an hour reeling the cargo in, and then a bloated dark coil welled up to the surface and just as the limb touched the stern of the boat my father said, “Go inside.”

Now my father and uncle are gone and this is a river, not the ocean. But out of the back eddy rose the drowned tangle of soaked wool and rubber boots. The body was small and childish, the limbs knotted in reeds, and the blonde hair strewn with petroleum from the very centre of the earth. Mutilated by the cattle wire, the skull had been stretched into a wedge and around the wrist there was still a string of brass bells.