Читать книгу The Dells - Michael Blair - Страница 15

Saturday, August 5

Shoe was awakened by a spike of sunlight through the high window facing the foot of the bed. The bed was in the basement bedroom his father had built when Hal had turned twelve and had needed a room of his own. Shoe had inherited the bedroom when Hal had gone away to McGill University in Montreal to study business. His wristwatch, propped against the base of the lamp on the bedside table, read a few minutes to six. Still slightly jetlagged, he thought about closing the curtain so he could catch another hour of sleep, but he could hear the creak of floorboards and the quiet mutter of morning radio from upstairs. He got up, showered, dressed, then followed the smell of coffee up to the kitchen. Rachel, dressed in loose drawstring pants and a body-hugging tank top that complemented her compact muscularity, stood barefoot at the stove. She was laying strips of bacon in an ancient and blackened cast iron frying pan.

“I found your stash,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind, I made a pot.”

“Not at all,” he said. He poured a mug of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Should I do you some bacon?”

“No, thank you,” Shoe replied. He didn’t go out of his way to avoid fatty meats, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten bacon. It smelled good as it began to sizzle quietly in the pan. She put the package away in the fridge.

“In his letter, Mr. Cartwright wrote that he hoped Joey and I would patch things up,” Shoe said. “I wasn’t aware that Joey knew him.” Even though Joey had been his best and closest friend, he added to himself.

“Mr. Cartwright had a shelf full of chess trophies in his living room,” Rachel said, turning the bacon in the pan. “I remember Joey telling me that he gave demonstrations at the junior high school chess club. He’d play a dozen games at a time. When I asked Mr. Cartwright about it, he told me Joey was the only person who ever came close to beating him.”

“Joey was a good chess player,” Shoe agreed.

“You beat him, though, didn’t you?”

“Once in a while.”

“A lot, he said.”

Shoe shook his head. “Not true at all,” he said.

“Would you like to play a game or two while you’re here?” Rachel asked.

“I haven’t played in years,” Shoe said.

“Then maybe I’ll have a chance,” Rachel said.

“Maybe.”

When the bacon was crisp, Rachel put it into the toaster oven to keep warm, then broke two eggs into the pan. Hot grease popped and spit. Holding the pan at an angle, she basted the eggs with a spoon. The only cereal in the house was Cheerios, which to Shoe tasted like burnt cardboard. He got bread out of the fridge to make toast. Fortunately, it was whole wheat. And there was a jar of Robertson’s Scotch-style orange marmalade.

“Do you want toast with your cholesterol?” he asked Rachel.

She made a face. “Carbs? No, thanks.” She sat down and began to eat. When Shoe’s toast popped, he sat down facing her. “What do you think of the chances he’ll be at the homecoming?” Rachel asked.

“Joey? I’d be very surprised.”

She picked up a strip of bacon in her fingers, delicately bit off a piece and crunched it between her teeth. “So you haven’t seen him or spoken to him since … ” She hesitated.

“No,” Shoe said. She lifted a forkful of egg, dripping yellow yolk, to her mouth. “Have you?” he asked.

Swallowing, she said, “No. His mother died two years ago. I took Mum and Dad to her funeral. Joey wasn’t there. His father died eight or nine years ago. According to his sister, he wasn’t at his father’s funeral either.”

Shoe watched her swab the last of the grease and yolk from her plate with the edge of her thumb. She then stuck her thumb in her mouth, sucking noisily. Wiping her thumb off with a paper serviette, she grinned sheepishly at him.

“Pretty disgusting, eh?” Their parents had tried for years to break her of the habit of cleaning her plate with her thumb, obviously without success. “Can I ask you something?” she said. He waited. “What happened between you and Joey? Did you fight over Janey?”

Shoe hid his surprise behind his coffee mug. Janey Hallam had had nothing to do with his falling out with Joey. At least, not directly. He supposed, though, to an eleven-year-old Rachel, it might have appeared that way.

“We didn’t fight over Janey,” he said.

“What then? For ten years you and Joey were practically joined at the hip. What happened? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” she added.

“Good,” he said.

Her disappointment was evident, but she said, “Okay.”

“You’re all right with that?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

“Do you remember when he was in the hospital for a week? It was in early May of our last year of junior high school.”

“I think so,” Rachel said. “He had an accident on his bike, didn’t he?”

Shoe shook his head. “He was cutting through the Dells on his way to a chess club meeting at the junior high school when he was jumped by three boys, beaten up, stripped, and left naked and unconscious in the woods. Some kids found him and ran home to tell their parents, who called the police. Joey was hospitalized for a week with a concussion, a ruptured spleen, and a broken bone in his right hand. He never told the police who’d attacked him. Boys he didn’t know, he said.”

“Jesus, did he tell you?”

“No, but I knew.”

“Who?”

“Dougie Hallam … ”

“Of course,” Rachel said contemptuously.

“Ricky Marshall … ”

“Dougie’s little toady.”

“And Hal.”

Her eyes widened with astonishment. “You’re kidding. Hal didn’t like Joey much, but that doesn’t seem like him at all. What did you do?” The expression on his face must have been answer enough. “You beat him up, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Shoe said.

Hal had been avoiding Shoe since Joey’s attack, and when Shoe confronted him about it, he admitted he’d participated — reluctantly, he claimed. Although Hal was four years older than Shoe, and heavier, Shoe was slightly taller. He was also stronger, quicker, and in better condition. In a fair fight, Hal might have held his own, but Shoe had no intention of fighting fair. He sucker-punched Hal in the gut, growing soft even then, then proceeded to beat the stuffing out of him. He didn’t beat him half as badly as Joey had been beaten, drawing only a little blood and breaking no bones; Hal was his brother, after all.

“Did you beat up Dougie Hallam too?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” Shoe said again.

Dougie Hallam had been the neighbourhood bully for as long as Shoe could remember. According to gossip, his father and stepmother, Freddy and Nancy, were just trailer trash who’d made good. No one was quite sure how, but the general consensus was that it hadn’t been legal, a suspicion later strengthened by their ganglandstyle murders shortly before Shoe joined the police. Mrs. Hallam was a normally meek and mousy woman, but when she got a couple of drinks in her she became strident and sluttish. Freddy had beaten up more than one man who had become the unwilling focus of her attention. Rumour had it he beat her up regularly too. He was also virulently anti-Semitic.

Dougie Hallam was proof that apples seldom fall far from the trees; he was as loutish and bigoted as his father. At nineteen he was taller than Shoe was at fifteen, and more heavily muscled, with a reputation as a dirty fighter. On Sunday morning, the week after Joey’s attack, as Dougie was washing his customized ’57 Ford Fairlane convertible in the driveway of his parents’ house, Shoe walked up to him and, without a word of warning, punched him in the nose, breaking it and spraying blood across the white vinyl convertible top of the car. Dougie tried to fight back, but he was blinded by blood and pain and anger and didn’t have a chance. By the time his parents realized what was going on and came to the rescue, Dougie lay unconscious on the drive, a minor concussion to go with the broken nose, two missing teeth, and cracked rib.

“You didn’t beat up Ricky Marshall too, did you?” Rachel asked. “He wasn’t much bigger than Joey.”

“No, but I scared him pretty badly.”

After leaving Dougie bloodied on the driveway of his parents’ house, Shoe rode his bike to the drive-in restaurant where Ricky Marshall worked. Ricky saw him coming and ran. Shoe caught him at the edge of the parking lot. He was so frightened, he soiled himself. Shoe left him there, huddled in a miserable heap, and rode home to wait for the police. The police never came, but a week later Shoe’s father received a bill for Dougie’s dental work. He paid it, and Shoe reimbursed him out of the earnings from his weekend job at Dutton’s Hardware and Building Supplies.

“I take it Joey wasn’t grateful,” Rachel said.

“Far from it,” Shoe said. “When I told him what I’d done, he called me a muscle-headed moron and told me to ‘fuck the hell off’ and mind my own business.” Rachel’s eyes widened, unaccustomed to his use of profanity. “I was hurt and confused. I’d done what I thought was the right thing, but eventually I realized I’d only compounded his humiliation. By then it was too late.”

The following winter, two weeks after his sixteenth birthday, Joey dropped out of high school and got a job pumping gas at the Canadian Tire gas bar. Five months later he bought an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and took to the road. He hadn’t said goodbye.

“Well, you know what they say about good deeds, Joe,” Rachel said. “They rarely go unpunished.”