Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 3

Howie’s got a backhoe, Howie dug a hole.

It’s big enough for Daisy

and he didn't tell a soul.

—Shepherd’s Pie

When one of George's goats dies, he just crams the corpse in a feed sack and takes it to the dump. It’s no problem as long as it’s a weekday when Spit Morton is working. Spit wouldn’t care if you dumped nuclear waste in the “wood only” pit as long as you were quiet about it.

Freddy, the other guy who works at the dump on weekends, is the one you have to watch out for. He comes up to your truck as soon as you drive in.

“What’cha got?” he’ll say. I guess you could lie if you wanted to, but Freddy has an instinct, like an OPP officer running a spot check. He would smell your lie and he is perfectly capable of wrenching the bags open with those big red hands of his and pawing through your shame. I would never lie to Freddy. Neither would George, which is why we saved the dead goat for Monday morning.

George is older than he looks, tall and spare with hair the colour of a larch in late autumn—a sort of yellowy-orange, which he wears long. He is my landlord, a Finn with charming manners and the strength of an ox. He farms a couple of hundred acres of northern Ontario soil, rocks mostly. Every spring a fresh crop of boulders heaved up by the frost pokes through the melting snow, ready to take the edge off the disc harrow. We collect them and haul them off to the edge of the hay field, where we will one day build a wall with them.

I am the hired hand. Three years ago, I came up here to Cedar Falls from Toronto to rent George’s old homestead cabin for the summer. I had put the word out that I needed a place to work, a quiet, out of the way hovel somewhere, and I heard about George’s place through my aunt Susan, who runs the feed store in Laingford.

She called me the day before the lease ran out on my awful little basement apartment on Broadview Avenue.

“Got a place for you,” was the first thing she said.

“Susan? That you?”

“No, it’s Jim Henson.” I’m a puppet-maker by trade, and the joke wasn’t funny. Henson created the muppets and was sort of a god to me. When he died, the world got a little bit darker.

“Har, har. Kermit is watching you, Susan. What kind of place?”

“A shack in the woods. Right up your alley. No plumbing. Rent’s cheap. Expect you on Friday.” She hung up. She’d always hated the phone and carried on a running battle with Ma Bell, refusing to pay the phone bill until the last possible moment, then writing out the cheque and leaving a few cents off the payable account, just to piss them off. Getting a phone call from her was something of a miracle. I borrowed a truck the same day and headed north.

Dweezil had died of asthma, George said. He was a breeding buck who had suffered through six winters of wheezing and coughing, dying slowly from a ridiculous, tragic allergy to hay.

As a child I had buried my fair share of gerbils, budgies and kittens, but although I was fond of Dweezil, I wasn’t about to build a cardboard headstone for him. Besides, he was way too big to put in a shoebox.

When we found Dweezil, stiff and silent in his pen, on Sunday evening, we simply shook our heads and bagged him, ready for the next morning when Spit Morton would be manning the dump. After the chores were done, we each went our separate ways, agreeing to meet at dawn to do the deed.

George’s old cabin, the original homestead building on his farm, is the perfect place for someone like me. I’m broke most of the time, and I’m a slob. Because of what I do for a living, I can’t afford much rent and I need lots of space. I do sell the puppets I make, occasionally. My specialty is marionettes, but I have been known to accept commissions for foamconstructed, muppety-things.

I had just completed a set of Audrey-the-Plant puppets for a Toronto production of Little Shop of Horrors when Susan called about the cabin, but I was up north for a week before the contact-cement headache went away.

The contrast between the Broadview basement apartment, crammed with foam rubber, Kraft dinner boxes and beer bottles, versus George’s airy cabin, my new home, was breathtaking.

The cabin was primitive, but there was a woodstove, an outhouse, a well and privacy. Everything that mattered. I wasn’t just escaping the city to work in solitude, actually. I was also on the run from an unwise affair with a narcissistic actor who had been pressuring me to move in with him. I didn’t leave a forwarding address, and he would never have followed me up here anyway because there is no television, no phone, and only one small mirror in the bedroom.

George didn’t like me at first. I have a feeling I was mildly obnoxious for the first few months—I wanted to do everything myself and I wasn’t very gracious about accepting help. Later, though, we found a balance. I started helping out with the goats and I let him teach me how to chop wood properly after I almost cut my foot off. Now we’re buddies, and I get to live on his land for free.

When we got to the dump on Monday morning we had poor old Dweezil wrapped up in his feed sack and buried discreetly under a stack of rotting timber in the back of George’s pickup.

Spit Morton was sitting asleep at the wheel of his hearse, in which he lives.

Nobody knows where Spit goes on weekends when Freddy’s working. Maybe he drives out onto a back road somewhere and parks, waiting for Monday. I have rarely seen him get out of the hearse, which is a two-tone pastel monster, like a bad pantsuit. It’s dented and rusted, but it still has the original sheer curtains masking the back windows.

Rumour has it that Spit’s Dad, Laingford’s undertaker, had groomed both his sons to take over the business when he died. At the funeral, Spit and his brother rolled dice to see who was going to be boss. Spit lost, so he decked his brother out cold on top of the casket and stole the hearse. Hunter Morton never tried to get it back.

I guess if you’re going to live in a vehicle, a hearse is a pretty good choice. There’s probably even a bed back there somewhere, although nobody I know has ever had the pleasure of finding out.

Spit chews tobacco, which slows down his conversation a bit. He doesn’t say much, until you get him going.

My first chat with him was in the early days when I thought he was like Freddy, requiring me to ask permission and perhaps pay him off before carting anything away. I had my eye on a dented but serviceable zinc tub in the “metal only” pile, right next to a stack of crushed bicycles and an old fridge. I was willing to pay a price for it.

“Hello there!” I said. He spat and looked at me from the cab of the hearse.

“Do you have any problem with me taking that old tub over there?”

He spat again and his eyes followed my pointing finger. The hearse was parked ten metres or so away from the metal pile. Without a word, he started up the engine, which purred with so little noise it was uncanny. I suppose that hearse manufacturers make that a specialty—you don’t want revving engines when you’re in mourning. He got into gear and whispered it over to the tub. I ran to catch up.

“What do you think?” I said, panting.

“Got a hole in it,” Spit said. His voice was thick and rough, like a mud creek running over gravel.

“I know. I figured I could patch it, though. It’s not a very big hole.”

“Nope.”

“Well?”

A stream of brown goo landed to the left of my foot. “Well what?” he said.

I replied slowly, distinctly. “Well, do you mind if I take it?”

“Why should I mind? It’s a dump, ain’t it?”

“Yes, but I thought you might… umm. Do you think it’s worth anything?”

He smiled broadly, showing the stumps of three sepia teeth.

“Might be, if I was Freddy.”

“I thought maybe five bucks.”

“On Saturday she would be worth five bucks, maybe,” Spit said and spat. Pause. “You want to wait till then, you can pay Freddy five bucks, I guess.”

“But…?”

“But lady, I don’t sell other people’s garbage. Ain’t mine to sell, though Freddy might believe ’tis.”

“Oh. I thought—well, I guess you don’t mind, then.”

“Nope. Take her away. Take it all. People throw too damn much out these days anyway.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said.

“Why just last week a fellow come in here with a couch—nothing wrong with it I could see. Freddy said he could sell it for ten bucks, easy. Just about shit when I give it to a youngster was getting married. What did you do that for? Freddy says. Went for me. Had to pull my gun on him. You seen my gun?” He reached into the back of the hearse and brought out a big old blunderbuss of a shotgun, which he showed off like it was a new baby. I gulped and stepped back.

“It’s all right. I ain’t aiming to shoot you. Use it to scare away the bears, mostly. And for protection. Got a lotta valuable things in this here automobile. Don’t want nobody sneaking up on me at night, eh?” He grinned again and spat before putting the hearse carefully into reverse and backing silently all the way up to where he had been parked before, near the dump hut. The hut was Freddy’s domain, and I wondered suddenly if Freddy also kept a gun on hand “for the bears”.

I took the tub, not willing to wait until the weekend, when it would cost me five bucks.

George drove slowly past the hearse which cradled the sleeping Spit. We didn’t want to wake him up. Spit probably wouldn’t care about Dweezil, but it is illegal to dump livestock (or deadstock, I suppose) at the landfill, and we wanted as few people to know as possible. Spit’s head was down on his arms, resting on the wheel.

“That can’t be very comfortable,” George muttered, as we headed for the “wood only” pit.

We put Dweezil in as gently as we could, out of respect perhaps, but also because a hoof sticking out would have given the game away. We threw the rotten lumber in on top of him, but George was a stickler for protocol, and the bag did look kind of obvious. I climbed in to move an old screen door on top as well. That’s when I found the body.

It was a man, about forty years old, definitely dead, with no feed sack to make him pretty. There was a tattered, meaty cavity where his torso had been, and the flies had found him. I gagged and called for George, scrambling up the steep sides of the pit as if the corpse might reach out and grab me.

I gabbled out the information, and George peered over the edge of the pit to have a look as I raced for Spit Morton and the hut phone.

Spit was unconscious—alive and breathing, but off somewhere in a place I could not pull him from. I tipped his head back and sniffed for signs of alcohol, which was a mistake, because Spit’s odour is ripe at the best of times. Then I noticed the lump on the back of his head, pushing up out of his matted hair like a turnip in a bed of moss. I probed it gingerly with my supporting hand. It was spongy.

Now, I am not a first-aid-y person, and he didn’t seem to be in any danger—that is to say, his breathing was regular and he wasn’t bleeding, externally anyway. I put his head gently back where I had found it and went to the hut to call 911.

Then I lit a cigarette and walked back to George. I suppose we were both in shock, because the first thing we did was to haul Dweezil up out of the pit and put him back in the truck. This, after all, was a police matter.