Bandits
The day I turned eighteen we drank a keg of beer between the five of us and let out over the frozen bay in our sleds. Pa on the lead machine with a pump shotgun strapped to the seat, the barrel fitted with a full-choke. His two younger brothers trailing, whooping and swerving wild on the ice over six inches of snow that fell since early evening. My cousin Ronnie coasted wide on his older sled. He had turned twenty-one in the Hillcrest pen. Ronnie was twenty-five now and he was like my brother. Even more so because Pa would thump him silly on the front lawn when he mouthed off or otherwise goaded the big man enough to warrant some violence.
There was a storm coming from the north and you could see the black clouds rolling even against the lesser black of the moonlit sky. Thunder from the heavens and did it ever fucking boom. Next came bolts of white-blue lightning. Smell of electric all over. The snow came down heavy. It looked to me like the end of the world. We passed between two fishing huts and crossed to the other side of the bay, close to the big houses and cottages planted there. Most of them were empty for the season. They were summer homes for people from the city or second houses for the richest in town. Pa throttled down and so did we all. Crept up rumbling aside a fine cedarwood house with great bay windows, boathouse half as big as our actual house.
Pa turned and untethered the shotgun. Loaded it with double-aught buck and racked a round. He let fly like a marauder on horseback and blasted out two of the front windows. Loaded up again and pulled. Spitfire leapt from the barrel and siding from the west corner of the house blew out in a cloud of jagged timber. Pa gunned it and took off, shotgun held high over his head. He had pocketed his gloves to shoot, and from close by I could see the meatclub that he called his right hand, fingers around the scattergun stock, dark blue ridges of scar tissue and maroon gunk at his skin-split knuckles.
At four in the morning we were back at the house, the living room and kitchen in ruin. Pa kept it clean for the most part. It surprised the hell out of people when they came by, expecting a certain measure of filth and disarray. He’d not ever moved any of ma’s knick-knacks, pictures, the crosses up on the wall. All were polished and pretty. I didn’t have no mother because she died of a brain aneurysm in the middle of the public library, checking out books about eastern rattlesnakes for me for school. I was fourteen. You couldn’t set a beer bottle on the coffee table without a coaster or Pa would smash you upside the head with those hamhock mitts of his. You couldn’t until the weekend, or a night like this one. And then the place went fairly direct to the boundaries of manmade chaos. By the end of that night there were two of Pa’s brothers passed out in our living room. Funhouse versions of my Pa. Uncle Dan on a short couch, his long tree-trunk legs hooked over the end. Uncle Dougie in a chair that extended out with a footrest, spider limbs stretched long, littlest finger of his right hand but a stump. Me and Ronnie were still up, pickled as could be. Pa sat heavy on his armchair with a bottle of rye in his lap.
“I didn’ know you’ld get lightin’n a snowstore,” Ronnie said.
“Well you know it now, eh dipshit? Or you better ’cause you just seen it.”
Ronnie made a sour face and his head lolled. Dad leaned out of his seat and got hold of Ronnie by the shirt collar.
“I hear any of this gets back to your mother and I’ll beat the living shit out of you.”
“I never talk at her ’bout anythin’.”
Pa slapped him lightly across the cheek.
“Good,” he said. “Lord knows that woman’s been through enough. We gotta look after her.”
Monday morning the cops came by. Two cruisers rolled up the drive and parked. Constables took their time getting out. I was up eating cold fried chicken at the table and set it down to watch them think about how they were gonna come at the house. One of the cops wasn’t Ronnie’s age yet and he had his thumb on the clasp of his gun holster. An older cop from the first car turned and saw him. This was a man we knew, tall and thick and beer-bellied, gone grey a long time ago. He stared the young cop down. The young cop didn’t seem to know what he was doing.
“You wanna get your fuckin’ hand off that pistol,” the big cop told him.
So he did.
The big cop pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger, rubbed his eyes. He walked slow to the front steps. Hitch in his step where he’d taken buckshot to the knee as a younger man. The fresh cop followed. I could see the other two start to prowl around either side of the house.
“Don’t go far,” the big cop said. “I’m tellin’ yous.”
They came back.
The cop all but filled the doorframe, rapped his knuckles hard against the naked wood of our screen door.
“That you, Charlie?” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Is your dad around?”
“Who’s askin’.”
The cop took of his cap, scratched at his scalp.
“Just get him for me, will ya?”
I went down the hall and opened the door to the garage. Hollered for my Pa over some sixties metal he was blasting, the even louder whine of an industrial drill. I flicked the lights on and off and the high-pitched drill screech wound lower. The stereo shut off. Pa came out from behind the stripped out frame of an old Mercury coupe and walked over, all six-foot three inches and two hundred and forty pounds of him. He had brick dust in his beard and all over his shirtfront.
“One day you do that shit I’m gonna drill something I ain’t meant to drill. And you’ll be all the sorer for it.”
“Fuckin’ cops are here.”
He stared at me, took up a rag and wrung his hands. He nodded. Came up the short steps and into the house. We were eye to eye when he put his huge mitts on either of my shoulders and guided me outta the way. I had his height but by God he was the stronger man by far and I couldn’t catch up quick enough.
The cop waited at the end of the porch, leaning heavy against the deck rail. He heard us coming and said something to the other cops. Pa opened the screen door and stood there.
“Francis,” he said.
“Rick,” the cop said. “Long time.”
“Not long enough. What’s up?”
They stared at each other. I could see the big cop started to smirk a little.
“Somebody shot up the chief’s lakehouse. Banged holes in the place with double-aught buck. Probably lit it up from the ice.”
“Did they?”
“You know anybody that might do somethin’ like that?”
“I know all kinds of people that might.”
Later on we were on the way over to Ronnie’s place. His mom, my aunt Colette, was fixing us some dinner. We walked the broken-up tarmac of our road, tall firs on either side, pine needles all over the fringe where we trod. It had gone awful fucking cold all of a sudden and I hadn’t worn the coat for it. Pa stepped long over the drainage ditch at the roadside and started down a trail through the woods, snow in there flattened by sled runs.
“We shoulda drove,” I said. “It’s fuckin’ freezin’ out here.”
“It’s two minutes away by the path,” he said. “Quit your bitchin’.”
He had a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of wine in either hand, paper bags crushed and creased over the glass by his bare fingers. The cold didn’t seem to bother him ever.
“The cops gonna be a problem?” I asked him. “Them that came by?”
“Nope.”
“I went to school with the one of them, the pretty-boy, flat-top fucker by the cruiser. He was in his last year when I was in my first. Thinks he’s fuckin’ God’s gift.”
“Uh huh.”
“I was just gonna tell old Francis at the door to fuck off. Thought that’s what you might say, too.”
My Pa slowed but he didn’t stop. Through narrow breaks in the wood I could see the yellow porch light from my aunt’s house. A dog started barking. Clatter of its chain as it tried to get clear of the yard. We turned off the main trail and walked a narrow line toward the place.
“Don’t be stupid, son,” Pa said.
“How’s that?”
“I known that man for near forty years. Since you weren’t even a notion. He ain’t out there to be a cowboy. He’s reliable. Reliable in what he won’t do when he’s got nothin’ on you and reliable in what he will do if he does.”
“He just looks like some other cop to me.”
“That’s because you got shit for brains yet.”
“Hey.”
“They send cops all like your GI Joe high school buddy and somebody might get shot.”
“But not your pal, Francis?”
“He’s already been shot. Most men don’t get to say that.”
He wouldn’t talk to me no more after that. We cleared the woods and went through the side yard and that tethered up mutt came flying at us. Pa stopped it with a look and an outstretched hand, one sausage finger pointing at it from around the whiskey bottle. When we got up on the step he knocked and backhanded the other bottle into my guts. Looked over his shoulder at me.
“Guests bring a fuckin’ offerin’,” he said. “Make yourself useful.”
Near daybreak I woke up with a hangover and a wicked case of dry-mouth. Headache stirring behind my ears. My jeans were still on and I was shivering under my one blanket, the others all piled up on the floor. I went to the bathroom to piss, stepping light on the cold bathroom tiles. Then I walked down to the kitchen for some water and aspirin. When I passed my Pa’s room the door was open, the bed made. The old bastard wasn’t anywhere to be found.
When I woke up the second time morning was almost spent. I could smell fried-up bacon and coffee at brew. Pa was at the kitchen table with the radio on. He had a platter in front of him with toast crumbs and traces of egg yellow on it. They were playing out the end of a shitty country tune. He turned the volume up.
“There any breakfast for me?” I said.
“There is if you make it. Now quiet down.”
The local weatherman told the forecast in his bumpkin rasp. We’d hit minus thirty overnight and it was gonna stay cold through the week. Snow to follow heavy starting early Thursday evening. Pa clapped his hands loud.
“Get yourself a good’un, kid, and eat up. We all got work to do.”
We left out from the house at midnight Thursday. All five of us on our sleds. The two best of them, my Pa’s machine and the one his brother Dan rode, they were fitted up with custom tow trailers. Not much more than rude metal boxes with old sled skis welded to the bottom. There were blankets piled up in each and tarpaulin pinned there by rig winch-straps. Pa went first across the ice, led by a good distance and told us stay back a-ways. His rig was the heaviest, and were he to go through, he didn’t want us following him down in the deep.
At a point Pa signaled and his youngest brother, Doug, gunned it and took off. He passed the lead sled and kept on until his reflectors were small and then lost to the black. We were all dressed in heavy snow gear, facemasks under our visored helmets. The wind found its way through by nooks and crannies. Cold enough to shrink your sack and make you turn around. Nobody thought on it and if they did they would never have said so. We crossed the ice single file and gapped a good ways between. I couldn’t see shit and didn’t have a clue where we were at, but Pa did. He knew where the shoreline sat before his headlights showed it. He slowed up and so did we. His sled climbed up a rise and the trailer skittered behind. One by one we left the ice and started down a tree-bound sled trail. They were woods like ours but not all the way, being that we’d driven clear into the next township.
The liquor store sat in a clearing beside the single lane highway. We came at it from the other side, not a house or traveler met on the way. Pa led us slow to the edge of the site backlot and there we let the sleds idle. The store was really three trailers joined longways, rested on top of three-foot tall concrete supports. One rectangular floodlight shone pale from a fixture atop the middle section. It snowed steady now and the highway lanes beyond were rotten with white, but the plough hadn’t passed in hours by the looks of it. Pa whistled loud by his thumb and forefinger. Not two seconds later a flashlight sparked from beside the trailer. Twice more. Pa took his sled down the grade into the clearing, pulled up on the forest side of the trailer. Uncle Dougie came out from the shadow and went over to talk to the big man. After a couple of seconds Pa waved us down. He got up from the sled and unlatched part of the tow trailer tarp and reached in. Came out with a portable acetylene torch rig, cylinders fixed inside a metal bracket, the hoses and torch nozzle pinned to the side of it. I walked over and took it. He went back under the tarp.
My uncle Dan had gone out to watch the road, flashlight in hand. Ronnie was working the winch-straps loose and clearing the tarp from Dan’s sled tow.
“Get this fucker next,” Pa said to him, pointing at his own rig.
“Sure thing.”
Pa looked over at me.
“Come with me, son,” he said.
We walked around to the front of the place. Short stairwell leading to a metal security door, round knob on the right side with a deadbolt keyhole cylinder not far above it. There were windows in the front of the thing and they were aglow in the blues and reds of neon beer signs. The open sign was dark. Uncle Doug took his coat off and his snowpants, had a fire-proof jumpsuit on under his gear. He put a welding bucket on and gloved up. Pa stood there with a twelve-pound sledge dangling from his bearclaw by the handle. He looked back to the road and whistled again. The flashlight lit up and went dark twice.
“Get goin’,” he said. “Quick to it.”
Dougie went up the stairs with the torch rig and opened up the cylinder valves, oxygen first then the acetylene, opened up the acetylene control valve on the torch, lit it with the striker. Fierce yellow flame fired from the nozzle. He turned the oxygen valve on the torch handle and tempered that flame to a straight and even blue line. He started the cut high up around the deadbolt and doorknob. Then went to the hinges on the left of the thing. Sparks flew wild and lit tiny glow-fires in the wooden decking that Uncle Doug worked from. When he turned off the torch and cleared out there were angry red lines in the door.
“What d’ya think?” Pa said. “Will she go?”
Uncle Doug just took off the helmet and smiled at him.
“You and your fuckin’ cousin better bring those trailered sleds around front,” Pa said to me.
After that he stomped heavy up the stairs and wound up with the sledge, hit the door good and low. The whole thing shifted in from the framing and then started to topple outward.
The way back home was long and cold and seemed like to never end, no matter the adrenaline and the whiskey we’d slung back before setting out, saddled low with case upon case of cargo. We ran in one line again and farther apart yet than we’d come. Snow fell hard around us, lonely world of ice and narrow lamp beams. Ronnie tried to hoot and holler early on in the trip but it was lost on the wind. He was awful quiet by the time we saw the opposite shore. I tried to make out our earlier tracks but they were long gone and there would not be a trace of our night travels for anyone to see come morning. Even the bonfire that we lit later in our yard—fuelled with branded cardboard boxes, Styrofoam peanuts, plastic and packing tape—lay as but a volcano-holed mound when the sun came up to snowblind those poor working souls that rose with it.
By late winter we had gone as far as Parry Sound for new quarry, and we’d come back and hit two of the same liquor stores again. Pa listened to the radio day and night and was often out watching the skies and the stars like they would tell him something secret about when and where to go next. In times of thaw he worked long hours on the sleds and bikes and his old Mercury. So was his claim to a legitimate mechanics business.
We ate a lot of dinners at Aunt Colette’s and less and less did Ronnie provoke profanities out of my old man. Pa even took the guy out shooting and they brought home a ten-point buck with one side of its rack blown to pieces by Ronnie, a good deal of the meat ruined and lousy with buckshot. Pa cut what he could and sent it down the road to Aunt Colette. He would not let Ronnie keep the half-rack. He left it in my bed as a joke when he was drunk and I found it drunk and pitched it out into the woods while I was taking a piss off our back deck.
In the papers, they called us booze bandits. I had a chuckle at that and Pa never got tired of reading it. He would save me the clippings. After we robbed a trailer out in Port McCall, Pa had gone out for the paper bright and early and woke me up to read it. He’d drunk nearly all of a forty pounder of rye and hadn’t slept a wink.
“You see our friend the chief got a statement in the fuckin’ paper?”
“I do now,” I said.
“Says he’s lookin’ at leads. All kinds of fuckin’ leads he says.”
“Yeah?”
“Then he next says that they’re lookin’ for any information from citizens with any goddamn information.”
“Yeah?”
“You know what the means, Charlie, you little shit?”
“Not yet.”
“Means they ain’t got no fuckin’ goddamn leads.”
With spring we lost the ice on the lake and the trails in the woods and there went the business for the season. The sleds were stowed and stored and what little of the booze that hadn’t been sold or shipped far was wrapped and buried in a grown-over gravel pit way back in the barrens. I took a job drivin’ the delivery truck for the FoodTown, our one crap supermarket. Sometimes I took extra shifts stocking shelves. I had tried for a job in the next town over, with the golf courses and marinas, but that didn’t pan out. When they saw my name they’d stiffen up and ask who my folks were. So I told them. That was about as far as I got before their eyes glazed over.
I had a busted old pickup that Pa helped me get on the road. Bought from a local fella for three cases of good whiskey and the promise that if ever the origin of that whiskey was told to cops there’d be a house on fire in the foothills with the owner still inside. I drove that truck to work every morning and it looked like hell but ran like a champ. Hotter days settled in by June and I had to drive shirtless with the windows pinned down so as not to sweat through my work clothes before I got to the fucking supermarket.
By and by I met a girl who worked at the deli counter. Dirty blonde hair and blue eyes and an anklet tattoo. She still went to the high school I’d just come out of. She said I was once her peer tutor in biology, but I didn’t remember her as she would’ve been but fourteen and didn’t ever say a word back then. Her name was Claire. We got stuck working Saturday mornings sometimes and she looked prettier still for all her hangovers and ragged ponytails and tired eyes with no make up. One such morning I’d come in late and had to go out behind the back of the place and puke my guts out all over the fresh-laid asphalt in the back lot. I came in for a hose to wash it down and when I was done she watched me curious as I swiped a travel-size bottle of mouthwash and walked back through the store to the bathroom at back.
At my lunch break I lay half-awake in the driver’s seat of the truck, windshield blocked out by a cover that reflected the sunlight back out. It was still Goddamned hot. I’d found a warm bottle of beer underneath the seat and had it in my hand with a ball cap over top. I took a drink and then looked out the window to make sure there wasn’t anybody out there who’d dime me out. As I was scoping the place I heard the small shuffle of sneakers on the pavement but it didn’t register.
“Hey,” she said loud.
I near leapt out of my skin and grabbed hold of the wheel with my free hand. When I turned Claire was standing there in the passenger window, slender fingers on the window frame, pale blue eyes staring at me.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” I said.
“Rough one today, huh?”
I shuffled in the seat and waved the beer around like I might find somewhere to put it.
“Can I have a sip?” she said.
“Warm as piss,” I said.
“Lovely. But I’ll give it a go.”
Claire reached over and took the bottle from me and took a good pull. She didn’t look around to check if anyone saw her. She handed the bottle back and I rested it on my leg. She had faint sweat marks on her shirt where her collarbones met, little wisps of hair stuck flat below her ears.
“When you workin’ ’til?” she said.
“Three.”
“You think you could give me a lift home?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t you need to ask where I live?”
“Where d’you live?”
She smiled.
“Just on the south side of town. Near the grain elevators.”
“Alright.”
“You live out in the harbour, right? You sure it ain’t out of your way?”
“I’m not in no hurry to get back out there.”
Through that summer I drove Claire home every shift we worked together. Never straight there. We often drove out to the pier-head at the far end of town, where the fishing was bad from the factories and thick tree cover blocked you from the road. She kissed deep, fast-tongued. Sometimes so hard it hurt my top gums. I’d put my hand down her pants and try to work at an angle with the cab armrest in the way. Sometimes she’d let me figure things out myself by the way she moved and the sounds she made and how hard she took hold of my forearm when I got it right. Sometimes she’d tell me what to do and how and she wasn’t shy about it. And when she climbed over and sat straggle-legged on me, hair hanging down at my ears, warm breath at my forehead as we tried to get the necessary garments off, I could barely stop my heart from beating a hole through my chest. Whether you called that feeling love or not I could still live off it for a good long time.
Summer stretched long that year. Too hot and dry enough to nearly rout bumper crops on farms at town’s edge. Sunbaked soil under row upon row of stunted plant lines between concession roads. There was a fire ban on. Boats had their outboards torn out in shallowed channels around the bay. When fall came at last it stayed but weeks and then cold rain started to fall. Colder and colder and the first snowfall early in October. Snow banks two-feet high aside the town roads while kids trudged brave through the white on Halloween, ghouls and goblins in winter boots. I went to work at the FoodTown still, hammering the heater with my palm when it stalled out. The truck never took more than two turns of the key to fire the engine. When I left in the mornings now, Pa was not in the garage at his cars and he wasn’t in his bed sleeping it off. He was either down the road at Aunt Colette’s and Ronnie’s or he was at the kitchen table in his skivvies, listening to the radio.
Me and Ronnie were sent to the scrappers, deep in the backcountry. I had to put chains on my truck tires. It took the whole day but we made it back around suppertime with a bed full of parts. At the house the sun set red through gaps in the wood, lit the frozen roadway in weird colours. Thick wood smoke rose from the chimney cap, hanging like a fog. The garage door was open and Pa sat a deckchair at the head of the drive with a beer in his hand, the shop stereo spitting news and weather. He wore just his boots and coveralls, wool sweater underneath. Watched us come up like we were travelling salesmen.
“How’d we do?” he said.
“Got everythin’ you told us to.”
“Okay.”
“He would’ve took a case less for it, but Ronnie piped up.”
Pa’s bottom lip curled so that his beard covered all of his mouth. He turned to where Ronnie stood in the garage, already at the shop-fridge with his hand on a bottle of beer. Ronnie straightened up and his mouth opened a little.
“Good,” Pa said to Ronnie. “Good for you, son.”
Ronnie nodded and cracked the beer. He couldn’t help himself from smiling. I just shook my head. Pa turned to me.
“Why would ya pay a man less than he’s owed if he’s fair to trade with and a friend to fuckin’ boot?”
“I wasn’t tryin’ to stiff the guy. Just tryin’ to get us a better trade.”
“Well, next time just follow Ronnie’s lead and trade what yous are fuckin’ told to trade. All right?”
I was about to say something else but it just gave up halfway and came out as a puff of air over my lips. I went to the fridge and got a beer and Ronnie leaned up against the dropcloth of the Mercury. I thought he would catch a slap for that one but Pa barely bristled. I started for the garage stairs to the house and got as far as the first step.
“We got work to do startin’ early tomorrow,” Pa called to me over his shoulder.
“I’m at the FoodTown in the mornin’.”
“Nope. You are retired.”
“I can’t just fuckin’ not show up ever again.”
He sat up and turned.
“You go there tomorrow an’ I’ll come in bare-assed and knock the teeth out your manager’s head in front of all your buddies. And your pretty girl.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Now both of you pull up a chair here with the old man. We got plenty to discuss before the mornin’ comes.”
We hit the first store toward the end of that month. Three in the morning with a portable halogen lamp shining eerie light from the underside of the trailer. Uncle Doug cut through the wooden baseboards with a jigsaw and pulled the insulation matting clear. Cut through the actual flooring and climbed inside. I went in after. We lowered boxes down through the opening onto long sleighs made from the hood metal of old cars. They were pulled clear and emptied and slid back until the tow trailers were half-sunk to the ground. Before we let out, Dougie got back under the store with a pair of two-by-fours and set the flooring again, bolted it in. He shoveled the insulation back into the gap and wedged the sawed base panel back before shimmying away.
The next four liquor trailers went staggered, two local stores with a few weeks between them. Then two stores at a three-hour ride to the northeast and three-hour ride back, and those robberies done but three days apart. We had to lug fuel so that we wouldn’t have to stop. The cold near crippled us and some of the sleds struggled over the length. We did both of those jobs with Doug on the torch and when we got back from the second job he sat bone-chilled by our wood fire with his hands burnt and bruised. He had good whiskey and water in a tall glass and drank through a straw.
“Why in fuck did we do those two like that again?” he said.
Dad got out of his armchair and knelt by the fire. Took up his brother’s hands in his own and kneaded the joint muscles, careful by the little stump.
“Two jobs in a row with that kind of gear to haul makes it look local.”
“What?”
“Local to there, Dougie.”
On the next job me and Ronnie went through the roadside windows of a store in the next county with a sledge and fire-axe. Made a godawful mess of the place. Ronnie cleared the framing with the axe and boosted me in, handed up the sledge. The alarms squealed loud enough to blow your eardrums. I carried the hammer to the front door and swung near the knob. Blew the hasp clear out from the jamb and let the door swing and come back. Ronnie came in and split the alarm siren with the axe and it warbled low and quit. We worked double-quick to load the booze and fire up the sleds. Tore through the bush to our home county but a half-hour away.
Constable Francis came by the house the next afternoon. He carried his girth around back to where my Pa shoveled a blackened slush heap into a wheelbarrow for me to haul. We could see the big man coming by his gait but he wore only jeans and flannel, a ball cap on his huge head. Pa stared at him for a second and then kept on shoveling.
“I can’t remember when I last seen you outta your blues, Francis,” Pa said.
“Sometimes I change outta them. For church and the like.”
“It ain’t Sunday.”
“I hear Jesus saves any day of the goddamned week now.”
Pa smiled. He planted the shovelhead in the muck.
“What the fuck’s he doin’?” I said.
“Shut up,” said Pa.
Francis studied me calmly from across the yard.
“Heard you got a job at the FoodTown?” he said to me.
“I did.”
“You ain’t got work today?”
“I quit.”
“Oh?”
“He’s helping me round the shop,” Pa said.
Francis nodded.
“What is it you want exactly?” Pa said.
“I need to talk to ya, Rick.”
“As a cop or as a regular person?”
Francis stood up tall as he could get and eyeballed my dad.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said.
Pa stared at Francis a long time. Then he handed me the shovel and said he’d be back. They left out together in Francis’ car and they were gone for hours.
By nightfall the old man was back and full of whiskey, stink of bar-room sweat in his clothes. He sat heavy at the kitchen table and fumbled with the radio. Those massive digits gently turning the dials. He had not uttered more than a grunt.
“He knows, don’t he?” I said.
Pa grumbled, took a drink.
“The cops got nothin’. ‘Bewildered’ is how he put it. But they’re ready to start casting out in any direction just out of pure fuckin’ embarrassment.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You see any cars parked in the road of a night, you let me know.”
I picked Claire up from her house. She had her hair teased out and let down and wore jeans and a girl’s golf shirt. Little make-up to colour her pale cheeks, faintest eye-shadow. She hustled out to the truck and tried to put her jacket on as she went. When she got in she kissed me long and tasted like wine and bubblegum.
Aunt Colette had roast chicken and potatoes ready in the oven when we got there. I led Claire in through the side door where the yard-bound mutt licked at her hand. Colette peeked over from the stove when we came in. Red haired and tall with thick, strong arms. Slippered feet on the linoleum.
“Charlie, you are late,” she said.
“Sorry Aunt Col.”
She studied the both of us. Took a long look at Claire. She smiled and cocked a thumb toward the sitting room.
“Animals are in back,” she said, eyes on Claire yet. “Honey. You can stay here with me.”
Claire took to all of them like nothing. She talked to Aunt Colette about what it was like in the high schools now and she talked to Ronnie about her older sister, Karen. Ronnie said Karen probably wouldn’t remember him but Claire said she did. She talked to her last week. The sister lived out west now. Ronnie nodded solemn but he got a charge out of the whole thing. Pestered Claire throughout the meal. Pa said little until he was done eating. He waited for us all to finish and took all the plates to the kitchen. Came back with a good bottle of whiskey and set it by the wine on the table. Pa poured a glass and slid it down to Ronnie. Then he leaned in toward Claire.
“This here Irish wine is better than the girly stuff sittin’ there,” he said. “Don’t know if you got the taste for it.”
“I could have a small one,” Claire said.
Pa poured the glass quarter-full without looking at it. Claire took it and Colette squinted her eyes at the girl, looked down at her placemat for a second. Pa sent me a half-glass and poured his glass full to the brim.
“To Claire,” he said, raising the thing thimble-like between him thumb and forefinger. “May her luck with men improve by the day.”
Ronnie busted out laughing until I backhanded him at the shoulder. We all drank. Claire downed the stuff in one slow gulp and set the glass down. Not a twitch or shudder. Pa smiled a little.
“What’s your dad do for a livin’, Claire?” he said.
“He works at the TRW. Runs the floor for the morning shift.”
Dad nodded.
“What’d he say when you told him you were comin’ out for dinner?”
“Try to be back by midnight.”
“Yous aren’t from here, originally?” he said.
Claire shifted, ran her hair back behind her ear.
“Moved here when I was ten. Dad is from Rochester and my mom’s from Niagara Falls.”
My Pa poured himself another whiskey. Tipped another small one into Claire’s glass. He winked at her.
“She’s a good’un, son,” he said.
Claire helped Aunt Colette with the dishes for a few minutes until Col told her to grab me and get along. I got up from the couch and gave Ronnie the finger. He tried to swat it out of the air. Pa sat heavy in an armchair and he saluted lazily at me as I went. Barely did he look up. We left the house and my aunt watched us by the lamplight at the side door. Claire kept looking back and waving. My aunt held a hand up.
The truck rumbled heavy on snowed-over ruts in the forest lane. Pine branches whapped along the edges of the windshield and brushed the length of the truck. Out we came into a clearing, the ground under two feet of snow. Nothing there but the hoof prints of a wayward deer, twinned rabbit tracks. I pulled up crooked on a shield rock plateau that fell five feet to frozen water. To the right stood a set of falls that spilled yet and broke thin-formed slates of ice over and over. There was a six-pack of tallboys by Claire’s feet. She pulled one and popped the tab, took a drink. She saw that the armrest at the bench-middle had been taken out, moorings and all. Then she handed the can over to me and pulled her shirt up over her head.
Not too long afterward we lay there on the bench with the windows all afog. There was little room to move and I’d had to shift toward the dash, thighs pressed up against the steering wheel and my ass halfway off the seat-cushion. The heater had gone again but nobody noticed until our breath started to hang in the air. I bashed the console once with the underside of my fist and the fans whirred.
Claire shuffled her elbows along my chest until she had propped herself up there, eyes fixed on a fat collarbone scar I’d earned at five years old. I felt the curve of her back with the rough flat of my hand. Asked her what was the matter.
“We gotta be more careful,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m on the pill. But I’d rather be paranoid than barefoot and pregnant at seventeen.”
“I hear ya,” I said.
“You can never tell what might happen. Just look at your aunt.”
My mouth opened to talk and then it shut up. I started to breathe so hard that the girl rose and fell a good four inches atop me. Claire looked into my eyes and took hold of my head firm with both hands.
“My God, Charlie,” she said soft. “Didn’t you know it?”
Out in the yard I stood with a bottle of whiskey upended and fixed to my lips. I drank deep and near had to take a knee before drinking again. Then I pitched the bottle at the house. It glanced off the siding and emptied on the narrow back porch, spinning oddly. I went up the steps and put a barbeque lighter to the spilt booze but it wouldn’t take. I opened the back door and walked in.
Pa had settled into his armchair with a short glass in his hand and a few bottles of beer on the nearby side table. Otherwise, the house was immaculate. He looked up at me for just a second and then went back to watching the TV. I stooped down next to the fireplace, lifted a fifty-pound ceramic plant pot, soil and tree and all. I trod over and dropped it through the living room table. Dirt and shrapnel flew as the wooden tabletop slammed down to the carpet. Pa got to his feet like he was pulled by cables and I stepped over the mess and drove him back against the wall with my shoulder. We careened off the paneling and went over the chair and then we were rolling on the carpet. Scrambling to our feet in front of the TV. He had me by the collar and cuffed me hard with an open hand. The weight of it stung me but I was at him again until he pitched backward and took out an entire length of shelving with our old pictures and postcards and framed letters from wars past, pages yellowed.
In the centre of the room he stood tall, wheezing, hands half up. He could’ve killed me and we both knew it. I lunged and caught him on the jaw with an overhand right. Back and back he stepped, arms reaching while the walls came down around him. He did not fall. I saw him duck and bolt and then I was up by the ceiling fan, down on the floorboards with my guts afire and not a breath left in me. I swatted at his great and ugly face until he held my wrists.
“Calm down, son,” he said.
We could have been minutes like that, or hours.
Mild weather settled in through late winter. The roads were clear for many weeks and snow lay but sparse on lawns and farm fields. Unlucky fishermen had their huts founder and collapse on the ice, or they came by of a morning to see a jagged, slush-filled hole and no more. Pa spent his days at Aunt Colette’s and watched the round of her belly grow. He drank plenty and it never appeared that he’d slept. Ronnie didn’t seem to know how to talk to me but the sentiment I got from him was just goddamned overwhelming joy. Like if we weren’t brothers before I had no choice now. Dummy. Like we weren’t before.
At the tail end of March we got one good cold snap, an Alberta clipper they called it, minus thirties in the day and bone-chillers overnight. Pa and his brothers were in the garage late hours and I started waking to fry-ups in the kitchen. Two platters at our little, barewood table. The old man would watch out of the corner of his eye to see if I’d eat or not. I did.
One morning Pa quit eating and put his elbows on the tabletop, wrapped one busted hand with the other and looked at me.
“We’re gonna take another run.”
“Ice ain’t thick enough,” I said.
“This cold’ll last another week. After that, season’s up. We gotta go.”
“When?”
“Early Sunday mornin’.”
“The ice ain’t thick enough.
He just shrugged and went back to his breakfast. I wolfed what I could in the five minutes I could stand to sit there and then I cleaned the plate and set it by the sink. Got my coat and hat and went out the front door, down to the truck with my boots unlaced. I drove the length of our street with my teeth rattling in my head. I’d done laps of dirt road by the time the heat kicked in. I parked atop a rise just north of us and from there I could see clear to Aunt Colette’s house.
Of course I went with my Pa for that run in the bitter fucking cold. We set out to rob a trailer at county’s edge, a triple-jointed sucker again and we went in messy, no need for the torch or the industrial saws. It snowed light and stopped while we scooped out the cargo. I did not like that. Pa had planned for it. Ronnie helped breach the place and then he took off on Dan’s loaded-up cargo sled, following the shoreline as close as he could, where the ice was thicker by inches. At a paved launch near to the far shoreline a U-Haul sat with a box big enough to carry the two cargo sleds, a ramp that lowered to the ground. The other sleds would ride long trails and switchbacks and cut across lengths of county road, down dirt paths where the frozen clay pack would take no marks.
By the time we got the second tow trailer loaded Dan was already pegging it across the front lot, screaming bloody murder, but we couldn’t make it out. Before he made it over we could hear the sirens. Faint as a whistling breeze but getting louder by the second. Pa mounted his sled and rode up over the trailhead lip, careful until he made it onto the trail proper. All of the gear and booze went with him into the dark. Dan and Doug followed and I brought up the rear and stopped just inside the path, got off my sled and used a length of busted plywood to shovel over the snow at the trail gap. I threw it sidelong into the woods and hopped onto my sled. Gunned it for the bay.
I seen my uncles ahead like two cat’s eyes, my own headlamp shining at their back reflectors. They got bigger and bigger. I tried to look back to shore but I was going like a rocket and couldn’t bring myself to turn entire. The near naked ice played hell on the sled-skis and my arms were already bone-sore. I held the handlebars as hard as I could. Up ahead, the two lead sleds were bigger and bigger and then one of the shapes took a cut to the side and it was off the goddamn surface, swelling and narrowing in size and casting light like a flashlight thrown and spiraling. Then all I could see was the brake lights of the other sled and a round circle of shadow atop the ice that got bigger awful quick as I closed on it.
My Uncle Doug lay sideways on the ice with his arms pinned between his thighs, like he had to take a piss. His right leg had been turned at an impossible angle and was too long by inches. I got off the sled and slid over on my knees. His helmet had a nasty gouge out of it and the visor was gone. I shook him and could see his eyelids twitch by the headlamp light that spilled over us. Uncle Dan had wheeled around and now he pulled up and got off his sled. For a second he just stood there with his helmet in his hand. Then he dragged me up by my armpit, turned me to where we’d come from. Far out in the black there were lines of blue light shifting every which way.
“Go on, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll carry him. Tell your Pa what happened.”
Not a half-mile gone, I came upon my Pa, standing on the ice beside his idling sled. He held his hand up for me to stop, about twenty feet out. He had his helmet off and his facemask at his neck. Frost clung to his beard. His one arm hung low at his backside and I could see the shotgun steel behind the leg. When he saw it was only me he set the gun down on the seat of his sled and came over by long strides.
“Where’s the boys?” Pa said.
“Doug’s sled caught a rut in the ice, threw him.”
“Jesus.”
“He was out when I left ’em. Uncle Dan told me to go on. Said they’d be along directly.”
The big man turned and hustled to his sled. He came back with the shotgun and had me hold it while he fixed his mask and put his bucket on, opened the visor. He stared at me. Took the gun.
“Get up, son,” he said.
I cleared off of my machine.
“Head for the shore on my sled. When you get there don’t you wait on us. Ronnie’ll want to wait but you knock him out if you got to and drive on.”
“Dad.”
“Do not go home ’til I come for ya.”
He settled heavy on my sled and took off, circled wide and started back across the ice. The skies had cleared and a sliver of moon shone meagre above us. Tiny lamplight at either shore where people had cut their homes. Treetop shadows like thousands of bottom-row teeth. Pa but a scrap in the white as he sped away.
We waited as long as we could, but then we did go home. By the pale daybreak. On foot and frozen through to the bone, shuffling side by side through the thick of the wood. Ronnie couldn’t keep it up so we found the sled-trail and walked the old, ice-hardened tracks. At the back fringe of my yard we crouched behind trees and watched the sun come up, scouted the place and saw not a sign of life.
The fire would not burn high enough for Ronnie. He kept feeding it until the flames choked and all but died. I ran a near-hot bath and made him get in it. Told him to get used to it before filling it hotter. I gripped his hand like men do, thumb locked to thumb. Then I left him there with a half-bottle of whiskey, the base of it underwater and pinned to his middle with both hands. I sat in the living room armchair in my underpants with four layers of blankets over my chapped hide. Whiskey and beer at the side table. I had the house phone and a CB radio within arm’s reach.
No call ever came because my dad and his brothers went through the ice that Sunday in March, one brother perhaps dead already but we would never know for sure. They fell under the weight of their sleds and went down to the black and were not retrieved until late the next day, stropping the underside of a thin sheet of ice near the eastern shoreline. They had all bunched and froze together like mussels. Had to be chipped apart with a hammer and chisel in the hospital ambulance bay before they were brought to the morgue, so as not to unsettle the podunk doctors and orderlies. At least that’s how it’s told in town.
Further told as myth and legend are all the accounts of people who sat at the Anchor Tavern the day before Pa and his brothers were buried. Police Chief Donald Moreau had just come off a news show where he talked all about the outlaws he ran down and who sadly fell victim to their own hubris that cold fucking night. Way he told it was the cops tried to throw lines to the three men when the ice gave out. Could not save them. But the chief didn’t know, and nor did I, that Ronnie went to the site where my Pa and uncles fell in the black of night and he crawled to the hole belly-down. Found buckshot in the gnawed up brink, same gauge that might be fired from a standard police scattergun. And Ronnie had those pellets in his jacket pocket when he came into the Anchor, rancid from Pa’s wake, and blew a quarter of the police chief’s head off with a sawed off .22 rifle.
There are quiet days now. Calm days and I wake up most mornings cold in my bed. In a very clean house that has long been paid for and runs little hydro and commands next to nothing in property tax to the county. I don’t see many visitors. The old cop Francis came out once to tell me he wasn’t at the lake. That he was sorry about my Pa. I didn’t let him past the foot of the drive. I hear he’s since retired. I been trying my best to keep a real garage running out of the place and I oft set to work on the old Mercury coupe. Even ran it without plates or insurance through the backroads with a pretty young girl under my arm. Just the once, or twice. I spend as much time as I can at my Aunt Colette’s house, trying to help her when she’ll let me. Round as she is and fit to burst, she still won’t let me stay long. Claire goes there often and sometimes she stays late into the night, talking about possible futures. Colleges that could be. Babies that will be. Lonely homes with just one person in each, how to make them full.
If Claire comes over of a night from my aunt’s, we curl up and play house. I drink a lot and she drinks less and less. She always falls asleep before I do and that is when I miss my mother and father. Talk to them long in the thinnest hours of the night. Drunk and damned and waiting for the answers, a girl’s head by my heart that by God scares me more than the quiet.
