The dying detective, p.29
The Dying Detective, page 29
A shortened version of the mouse and elephant joke would go like this:
Drought and fire have devastated the jungle, and when a foraging mouse returns to his nest he finds all gone. After a few days he feels a powerful urge to mate and goes searching for a female. He bumps into an elephant’s foot and, desperate, encouraged by the colour, climbs the leg and begins having his way with her. While she’s standing there snagging some spared leaves, a burnt coconut falls on the elephant’s head. She flinches: “Ow, ooo…” And the mouse groans, “Suffer, baby!”
Throughout the extended telling, Ali would be anxious as a kid at Christmas—“Wait, wait till you hear this part!”—then slapping his knee as though he hadn’t heard it a half-dozen times already. At the end he’d say, “Well, I guess that clinches the case for the defence—anthropocentric delusions of grandeur pure and simple!”
As if on cue, Kelly would re-enter the snug living room. “Have Cheech and Chong finished their routine?” She sits on the couch beside Ali, leaning forward with some difficulty and balancing the tray on her knees.
“To repeat, Ali: Dad’s joke is hardly an argument. The rain forests of the world have been torched, by us. And that’s apart from the gazillion tons of toxic shit we’re still pumping into the atmosphere, which of course those same forests had been hoovering up for us.” She holds up a traffic cop’s hand to her father: “Oh, I know, I know: it’s just a joke. Forget eco-responsibility. And what about the implication that males feel macho if they punish females sexually? Forget mother earth and metaphors of rape. Forget the cop-out that it is all a joke. Forget even…”
Leaning forward from his corner of the couch, Ali places his large right hand gently on her back, at once stopping her and propping her exasperated recline, the tray rattling. “Kel-lee, my love, enough with the prosecution already. It is only a joke for Jesus H. Christ’s sake! You’ll break your waters!”
“I wish.” She swings her head to the left and unloads the tray on Ali. “I see, sweetheart, that you’ve also adopted Dad’s way of saying our Saviour’s name—talk of pollution! Perhaps you’d have us all take a moment to pray for climate salvation, like the fucking Christ-Xers—ouch!” She places her right hand on her huge belly: “The future kicks back!”
Everyone laughs, except Ali. End of that day’s show.
It was fairly cold now, Christmas Day in Ottawa, though no snow had fallen or was expected. In fact, freezing rain was a threatened possibility. If realized it would spoil skating on the Rideau Canal’s miles of silvery surface like burnished steel.
“The world’s longest skating rink!” Kevin mocked. “And we—or some of us, eh, Kelly?—talk of the megalomaniacal Americans with their Great Breakwater and Great Wall of Mexico and Mighty Dike and—”
For once Abiki Ali cut in to chide Kevin: “Oh c’mon…Dad—it’s Christmas! Lighten up already.” As much as he admired his father-in-law, Ali did not like even the good stresses Kevin had been visiting on Kelly with the return of their lifelong debates.
But it was Christmas Day. And those words, which Kevin had been repeating to himself like a mantra, were working to buoy his spirits.
Why do your spirits sink?
Because, Cyn, Randome is still out there.
Every day he’d walked down Lundy’s Lane to the Rideau Canal, a short walk through invigorating air. Till today he’d only stood holding the black rail and looking out on the scene of skaters like a Brueghel painting. But after lunch on Christmas Day, he’d finally got his mouldy skates out from under the basement stairs. He’d put his nose in one and grinned till it hurt. The musty past can be a pleasant smell. Really feel the present. Remember the future. Jaken’s koan-ish instruction. …Jaken.
He reached the limit of his skate when both insteps were wailing in pain. His ass was cold and wet from sitting right on the ice to remove the skates (kids had whizzed round him cursing and laughing). He just managed to hobble unshod in his grey thermal socks that were frozen solid by the time he arrived back at the bench. He pulled off the cracking socks for a look: both big toes were pulping towards frostbite. He should have slung his shoes round his neck. How could he have been so stupid?
How could you have been so stupid?
Why was he being nagged by Cynthia? Randome-still-at-large notwithstanding, this last case—not his most recent case, his last—was as closed as a case could reasonably be expected to be. Closed as tightly as his tin of Panters: sealed, stamped, and delivered to Global Patrol, whose recognizance had confirmed the rumours of a coup in Haiti. Randome could be dead!
So Kevin admonished himself: Relax. Breathe deeply this miracle of oxygen to your larcenous lungs. Breathe and be, and let it be. Enjoy the joy you’ve earned. Hope for your toes’ salvation!
And he did.
Thanks to the Macro frenzy over bombed Madison Square Garden and Malachai’s death, in the weeks following New York there had been a litter of copycats at insignificant U.S. sites whose names nonetheless began with the letter o. All the perps had proven to be deranged Christ-Xers working alone, which had reversed Christ-X’s surge in popularity. None of the copycats had used a Lucifer, of course, simply high-powered “hunting rifles,” a number of defunct grenades that never reached a clinic—if with enough life in one instance to blow off the thrower’s arm—extremely degraded photon eggs no more powerful than fireworks, and other such online-ordered fizzlers.
Unlike the first couple of copycats back in California, no Malachai had returned to take them out, of course. LaPhoc’s teams had arrested most in their overheated or freezing rooms, even managing to minimize the publicity (LaPhoc had confided to Kevin that Global Patrol suspected a leak in its ranks, fairly high up, and close to LaPhoc, someone who’d sold his soul to the Macro; LaPhoc himself suspected one ambitious Corporal Faucher, whom he pointed out to Kevin in a vid of the New York security detail: a plump and balding guard, to whom no one else spoke, and who in close-up was sweating profusely, his eyes bloodshot and darting). Already the Mandrake’s Hall franchise was recuperating (procedures climbing).
Brigid Ertelle and her husband, Mike (cops never used “partner” but for professional relations), were regular visitors at Lundy’s Lane, with their children, Lester and Billy, frequently bedding down in an upstairs room. The living room was often the blazing heart of a house full of family; old friends of Kevin having heard that the legendary cop was home for the holidays came bearing gifts, such as Nora Goldstein with a dozen Montreal-style bagels (and the information that she and Morris Moyne were dear friends), and Frank Thu got up ridiculously like Santa Claus, with toys for the children and a pink mobile for the unborn child, and twenty-four Harp lager. Kevin’s heart would swell and he’d observe to himself: It is Christmas time. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting a little more help at this time, and I am weirdly happy. Any day now I’ll be a grandfather. I don’t deserve this. If only Jaken…and Randome…
As promised, Phil LaPhoc had visited Ottawa for a few days with his wife, Louise. Louise LaPhoc proved to be a big beautiful blonde of languorous movement and a playful sexuality, a good half-foot taller than her husband, easily seventy-five pounds heavier. But the potential for comedy in their asymmetrical pairing remained latent. She unsmilingly corrected those who said partner instead of wife: “We’re not both cops!” She and Phil held hands everywhere, neither of them able to speak when they all walked the canal to the sparkling Christmas show projected onto the Centre Block of Parliament Hill. No one remembered aloud the setting’s events from two years before. Or they stood silently after Louise cut Phil’s “In Times Square—” with a “Sh-sh…honey.”
Early the next morning they’d skated on the canal, first time ever skating for LaPhoc, which he did mostly on his ankles, clowning to encourage laughter. But Louise became more graceful, a shapely figure in accommodating space, stroking powerfully, turning smoothly and jumping, landing on toe pick and spinning away. Strangers gave room, stopped to watch, cheered and applauded.
She’d made a puzzled face when Kevin asked how long she’d taken lessons: “Lessons? But this is my first time.”
Ringing laughter had filled the echoing air, confusing Lester Ertelle and soon boring him.
Louise had shot off and Kevin, standing beside LaPhoc, had said quietly, “Phil, you are married to a poem! I once picked up this drunken little guy who mumbled that short on a man is like fat on a woman. If I met him again and he said it, I’d punch the little prick in the face.”
LaPhoc gazed after his poetry in motion, her high-riding white behind, and whatever he was thinking in response was kept for private recitation.
The last evening of Phil and Louise’s visit, Abiki Ali had steered the conversation to Kevin’s mouse and elephant joke. Kelly left the room, frowning as usual, if with an unusual intensification. When Kevin finished, bearded Mike Ertelle snorted, but only lightly, and Brigid pinched her lips, raised her eyebrows a touch and ticked her head at Kevin.
Kevin returned a puzzled face. Then he looked at the newest members of his audience, Phil and Louise, and understood LaPhoc’s dead stare at the floor. He shifted to Louise’s broad placid face, but was sinking so quickly he didn’t know what to say or what face to put on himself.
“Look, I—”
Louise was having none of it: “What do you think of Mr. Mouse and Ms. Elephant, honey?”
LaPhoc snapped out of it, growled, “Suffer, baby!”
In the raucous laughter, with Kevin’s exaggerated, Louise and Phil smiled at each other like faces to a fire. A spent log spat a sizeable ember onto the hearth. Another inch and it’d have scorched the green Celtic rug Cynthia Beldon had hooked during one of her crafty periods. In a flash Kevin knew he was in the presence of all the miracle humans are allowed, if lucky. Why worry? There was nothing he could do to touch Phil and Louise’s love, so no call for awkward apology. Enjoy the warmth.
The LaPhocs had been missed since heading home to New York for Christmas Day, promising to return for the Tulip Festival in the spring, whenever that might be!
Virtually alone now in the deep-cut trench of the Rideau Canal early Christmas afternoon, Kevin spoke aloud into air swarming with monstrous snowflakes fluffy as cotton candy, his big toes pulsing:
“I want to leave all this behind, Cyn. I want to return to Jaken in the new year. They’re sure he’s dying. I can’t believe it. We lost Michael Mender. In this life we can never know everything. At least I know that now. We have to learn to live in mystery. If not, we’re doomed to kill everything. …That’s what Jaken says.”
He hung his head and spoke quietly into his chest: “Help me, love. I just cannot find peace in my heart. Is there such a thing?”
Two giggling teenage girls unclasped mittened hands and parted to avoid him like a crevice in the ice. He thought them cute in their shaky balance with arms now outspread like poor tightrope-walkers and tight bums wiggling, till they reunited and said together, “Crazy old fuck!” And slapped a mittened high-five. Then he was sure they were cute.
He shook both fists into the swarm and shouted, “I can’t get Randome out of my fucking head!”
I have to leave you, love.
“What? Wait…”
Christ, he was crying. Old man. Sentimental fool. Crazy old fuck for sure. You’ll get what you deserve.
You will, I promise…
Within five minutes it felt warmer than for days. He’d not worked enough to account for the change, and there was no sun. In fact, black cloud-cover from out of nowhere had displaced the smoky grey of snowy sky, threatening to fulfill the forecast of freezing rain. Something flicked his cheekbone, like an angry snowflake. Before he got home, a fine freezing drizzle had made walkways treacherous.
When it begins, freezing rain looks little different from regular rain. But it takes only a short time to start accumulating as ice on everything. And when freezing rain doesn’t let up? When it won’t turn back to snow or become plain rain? Then comes to confused northern climes the equivalent of tropical hurricane: an ice storm.
Kevin called Point Conception and was informed by Jimmy that Jaken was still comatose; he could continue like that for weeks or he might not make it through the night, Dr. Grant had diagnosed. Kevin said he’d call again.
He was about to disconnect when Jimmy said, “But I can’t get close to Jaken anymore. No one can. Big Leo can be such a prick.”
“I’ll have a talk with Big Leo.”
“Then you’re coming ho— back to us, Kevin?”
“Of course, and soon. Please call me right away if there’s any change. Okay, Jimmy?”
But Jimmy wouldn’t say goodbye, and Kevin could envision him palming his still unfamiliar shaved head, fingering the acne like Braille along his cheekbone.
Jimmy said, “Before he lapsed, Jaken said that, uh, like maybe you would be a good teacher for me, Kevin.”
“Jaken said that? The old fakir. You have to watch Jaken, Jimmy. He’s full of compliments when he’s finished a bottle and looking for somebody to fetch another. Then he’s as full of shit as the next monk.”
Jimmy laughed, the first Kevin had heard from him, as he seemed to believe that a Buddhist monk should be sombre all the time. He said, “I’ll give Jaken your regards, uh, Beldon-san. Maybe he still hears.”
“If he’s alive he hears. If he’s dead he’s dead. Hearing is a living thing only.”
“Jaken said there’s always hope.”
“I hope too, Jimmy. You too. Remember, call right away if there’s any change. And give Jaken my love.”
Jaken said, Jimmy had said. Past tense from now on for Jaken’s sayings.
The Chieftains at low volume were playing throughout the main floor of the house, The Bells of Dublin, a Beldon family tradition for Christmas day. Kevin sat at the big brown-wood kitchen table with his feet in a pan of tepid water. Overdue Kelly was tearing assorted greens at the stainless steel sink, or as close to the sink as her belly allowed. She’d been obviously uncomfortable since Christmas Eve.
Kevin said to her, “Why do women have smaller feet than men?”
Her head wagged but she didn’t turn. “What?… Louise would put one of her skates up your ass for whatever you’re about to say, Dad.”
“C’mon, play along. Why?”
“Duh, I give up.”
“So they can stand closer to the sink.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Dad. …I dream of the day when I’ll be able to stand close to anything again!”
Abiki Ali was supposed to be setting the table, but the green-and-red-tissue-paper-wrapped favours were still sitting on the chair where Kelly had left them, because Ali wouldn’t leave Kelly alone long enough to do it. He moved close behind her again like he might have to catch her toppling. Soon he again had his hands on her sides and was nuzzling the nape of her neck as if that were where he drew his oxygen. She was always having to push him off, which today she’d been doing none too affectionately.
“Kevin,” he said, resting his forehead on Kelly’s nape, “don’t you agree that with this freezing rain we should take a hotel room near the Grace Hospital while we still can travel? How are we to drive should the waters break in the middle of an ice storm?”
Kelly paused in her preparations and shot back an elbow that made Ali back off. “I’m not saying it again, Ali. It’s perfectly normal for a woman my age with a first baby to go a week or two over. I’ll probably have to be induced, for Christ’s sake! So I am not spending Christmas in some halfway hotel for the overly anxious. Who wants a Christmas baby anyway! The poor kid would be robbed of her birthday.”
“Kevin?…”
Kevin bent to pat his feet with the towel. “Ali, don’t drag me into this. I don’t like the scenario you describe, but if Kelly doesn’t feel any stirrings, let alone contractions, let’s not add any unnecessary stress. And nobody’s said anything about an ice storm, it’s just a little freezing rain.”
“Thank you, Dad.” She turned her head and nodded at his feet: “How do they feel?”
“Like a firestorm, like constant reminders of an old man’s folly, like—”
“But that is my very point, Kevin: it is necessary that we—”
“Ali, I’m sure everything’s going to be fine. Ask Brigid and Mike how the roads are when they get here. Until I hear them and their kids arrive, I’ve got something needs doing. Sorry.”
Kelly smirked and sang, “My father the bard!” And returned to tearing an overgrown bunch of scallions.
“But Kevin…”
Long ago the adjacent dining room had been converted into Kevin’s study, which was Kelly’s now. He shut the door on the kitchen. Usually on a visit he’d have left that door ajar, but he didn’t want to intrude on Kelly and Ali’s routine. Instead he slid the pocket doors to the living room open a few feet, so he’d know immediately when Brigid and family arrived. He dropped into the chair at what had once been his old mahogany desk, which had never seen such childishly coloured paraphernalia for holding monitor wipes and chargers and the like. He placed his fingers and thumbs on the desk, leaned forward with bowed head, pressed down as though doing a push-up. He didn’t really miss his old life. Only Cyn…only the children when still children. And at Christmas? Christmas morning…The Bells of Dublin…He really missed all that, like a fading pleasant dream.
He opened his pale copybook and fiddled for a while with Death poem number five.
The heavy smell of crisping turkey filled the house with its meat-greasy warmth, and he raised his face from the page. The freezing rain pelted the window opposite his desk, pleasantly so, till he looked again and recognized the slow coating like frosted glass. Ice storm? Where were Brigid and Mike and their kids? They were supposed to be here by now. …He worried too much, he was worse than anxious Ali. It was Christmas. Relax.
Drought and fire have devastated the jungle, and when a foraging mouse returns to his nest he finds all gone. After a few days he feels a powerful urge to mate and goes searching for a female. He bumps into an elephant’s foot and, desperate, encouraged by the colour, climbs the leg and begins having his way with her. While she’s standing there snagging some spared leaves, a burnt coconut falls on the elephant’s head. She flinches: “Ow, ooo…” And the mouse groans, “Suffer, baby!”
Throughout the extended telling, Ali would be anxious as a kid at Christmas—“Wait, wait till you hear this part!”—then slapping his knee as though he hadn’t heard it a half-dozen times already. At the end he’d say, “Well, I guess that clinches the case for the defence—anthropocentric delusions of grandeur pure and simple!”
As if on cue, Kelly would re-enter the snug living room. “Have Cheech and Chong finished their routine?” She sits on the couch beside Ali, leaning forward with some difficulty and balancing the tray on her knees.
“To repeat, Ali: Dad’s joke is hardly an argument. The rain forests of the world have been torched, by us. And that’s apart from the gazillion tons of toxic shit we’re still pumping into the atmosphere, which of course those same forests had been hoovering up for us.” She holds up a traffic cop’s hand to her father: “Oh, I know, I know: it’s just a joke. Forget eco-responsibility. And what about the implication that males feel macho if they punish females sexually? Forget mother earth and metaphors of rape. Forget the cop-out that it is all a joke. Forget even…”
Leaning forward from his corner of the couch, Ali places his large right hand gently on her back, at once stopping her and propping her exasperated recline, the tray rattling. “Kel-lee, my love, enough with the prosecution already. It is only a joke for Jesus H. Christ’s sake! You’ll break your waters!”
“I wish.” She swings her head to the left and unloads the tray on Ali. “I see, sweetheart, that you’ve also adopted Dad’s way of saying our Saviour’s name—talk of pollution! Perhaps you’d have us all take a moment to pray for climate salvation, like the fucking Christ-Xers—ouch!” She places her right hand on her huge belly: “The future kicks back!”
Everyone laughs, except Ali. End of that day’s show.
It was fairly cold now, Christmas Day in Ottawa, though no snow had fallen or was expected. In fact, freezing rain was a threatened possibility. If realized it would spoil skating on the Rideau Canal’s miles of silvery surface like burnished steel.
“The world’s longest skating rink!” Kevin mocked. “And we—or some of us, eh, Kelly?—talk of the megalomaniacal Americans with their Great Breakwater and Great Wall of Mexico and Mighty Dike and—”
For once Abiki Ali cut in to chide Kevin: “Oh c’mon…Dad—it’s Christmas! Lighten up already.” As much as he admired his father-in-law, Ali did not like even the good stresses Kevin had been visiting on Kelly with the return of their lifelong debates.
But it was Christmas Day. And those words, which Kevin had been repeating to himself like a mantra, were working to buoy his spirits.
Why do your spirits sink?
Because, Cyn, Randome is still out there.
Every day he’d walked down Lundy’s Lane to the Rideau Canal, a short walk through invigorating air. Till today he’d only stood holding the black rail and looking out on the scene of skaters like a Brueghel painting. But after lunch on Christmas Day, he’d finally got his mouldy skates out from under the basement stairs. He’d put his nose in one and grinned till it hurt. The musty past can be a pleasant smell. Really feel the present. Remember the future. Jaken’s koan-ish instruction. …Jaken.
He reached the limit of his skate when both insteps were wailing in pain. His ass was cold and wet from sitting right on the ice to remove the skates (kids had whizzed round him cursing and laughing). He just managed to hobble unshod in his grey thermal socks that were frozen solid by the time he arrived back at the bench. He pulled off the cracking socks for a look: both big toes were pulping towards frostbite. He should have slung his shoes round his neck. How could he have been so stupid?
How could you have been so stupid?
Why was he being nagged by Cynthia? Randome-still-at-large notwithstanding, this last case—not his most recent case, his last—was as closed as a case could reasonably be expected to be. Closed as tightly as his tin of Panters: sealed, stamped, and delivered to Global Patrol, whose recognizance had confirmed the rumours of a coup in Haiti. Randome could be dead!
So Kevin admonished himself: Relax. Breathe deeply this miracle of oxygen to your larcenous lungs. Breathe and be, and let it be. Enjoy the joy you’ve earned. Hope for your toes’ salvation!
And he did.
Thanks to the Macro frenzy over bombed Madison Square Garden and Malachai’s death, in the weeks following New York there had been a litter of copycats at insignificant U.S. sites whose names nonetheless began with the letter o. All the perps had proven to be deranged Christ-Xers working alone, which had reversed Christ-X’s surge in popularity. None of the copycats had used a Lucifer, of course, simply high-powered “hunting rifles,” a number of defunct grenades that never reached a clinic—if with enough life in one instance to blow off the thrower’s arm—extremely degraded photon eggs no more powerful than fireworks, and other such online-ordered fizzlers.
Unlike the first couple of copycats back in California, no Malachai had returned to take them out, of course. LaPhoc’s teams had arrested most in their overheated or freezing rooms, even managing to minimize the publicity (LaPhoc had confided to Kevin that Global Patrol suspected a leak in its ranks, fairly high up, and close to LaPhoc, someone who’d sold his soul to the Macro; LaPhoc himself suspected one ambitious Corporal Faucher, whom he pointed out to Kevin in a vid of the New York security detail: a plump and balding guard, to whom no one else spoke, and who in close-up was sweating profusely, his eyes bloodshot and darting). Already the Mandrake’s Hall franchise was recuperating (procedures climbing).
Brigid Ertelle and her husband, Mike (cops never used “partner” but for professional relations), were regular visitors at Lundy’s Lane, with their children, Lester and Billy, frequently bedding down in an upstairs room. The living room was often the blazing heart of a house full of family; old friends of Kevin having heard that the legendary cop was home for the holidays came bearing gifts, such as Nora Goldstein with a dozen Montreal-style bagels (and the information that she and Morris Moyne were dear friends), and Frank Thu got up ridiculously like Santa Claus, with toys for the children and a pink mobile for the unborn child, and twenty-four Harp lager. Kevin’s heart would swell and he’d observe to himself: It is Christmas time. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting a little more help at this time, and I am weirdly happy. Any day now I’ll be a grandfather. I don’t deserve this. If only Jaken…and Randome…
As promised, Phil LaPhoc had visited Ottawa for a few days with his wife, Louise. Louise LaPhoc proved to be a big beautiful blonde of languorous movement and a playful sexuality, a good half-foot taller than her husband, easily seventy-five pounds heavier. But the potential for comedy in their asymmetrical pairing remained latent. She unsmilingly corrected those who said partner instead of wife: “We’re not both cops!” She and Phil held hands everywhere, neither of them able to speak when they all walked the canal to the sparkling Christmas show projected onto the Centre Block of Parliament Hill. No one remembered aloud the setting’s events from two years before. Or they stood silently after Louise cut Phil’s “In Times Square—” with a “Sh-sh…honey.”
Early the next morning they’d skated on the canal, first time ever skating for LaPhoc, which he did mostly on his ankles, clowning to encourage laughter. But Louise became more graceful, a shapely figure in accommodating space, stroking powerfully, turning smoothly and jumping, landing on toe pick and spinning away. Strangers gave room, stopped to watch, cheered and applauded.
She’d made a puzzled face when Kevin asked how long she’d taken lessons: “Lessons? But this is my first time.”
Ringing laughter had filled the echoing air, confusing Lester Ertelle and soon boring him.
Louise had shot off and Kevin, standing beside LaPhoc, had said quietly, “Phil, you are married to a poem! I once picked up this drunken little guy who mumbled that short on a man is like fat on a woman. If I met him again and he said it, I’d punch the little prick in the face.”
LaPhoc gazed after his poetry in motion, her high-riding white behind, and whatever he was thinking in response was kept for private recitation.
The last evening of Phil and Louise’s visit, Abiki Ali had steered the conversation to Kevin’s mouse and elephant joke. Kelly left the room, frowning as usual, if with an unusual intensification. When Kevin finished, bearded Mike Ertelle snorted, but only lightly, and Brigid pinched her lips, raised her eyebrows a touch and ticked her head at Kevin.
Kevin returned a puzzled face. Then he looked at the newest members of his audience, Phil and Louise, and understood LaPhoc’s dead stare at the floor. He shifted to Louise’s broad placid face, but was sinking so quickly he didn’t know what to say or what face to put on himself.
“Look, I—”
Louise was having none of it: “What do you think of Mr. Mouse and Ms. Elephant, honey?”
LaPhoc snapped out of it, growled, “Suffer, baby!”
In the raucous laughter, with Kevin’s exaggerated, Louise and Phil smiled at each other like faces to a fire. A spent log spat a sizeable ember onto the hearth. Another inch and it’d have scorched the green Celtic rug Cynthia Beldon had hooked during one of her crafty periods. In a flash Kevin knew he was in the presence of all the miracle humans are allowed, if lucky. Why worry? There was nothing he could do to touch Phil and Louise’s love, so no call for awkward apology. Enjoy the warmth.
The LaPhocs had been missed since heading home to New York for Christmas Day, promising to return for the Tulip Festival in the spring, whenever that might be!
Virtually alone now in the deep-cut trench of the Rideau Canal early Christmas afternoon, Kevin spoke aloud into air swarming with monstrous snowflakes fluffy as cotton candy, his big toes pulsing:
“I want to leave all this behind, Cyn. I want to return to Jaken in the new year. They’re sure he’s dying. I can’t believe it. We lost Michael Mender. In this life we can never know everything. At least I know that now. We have to learn to live in mystery. If not, we’re doomed to kill everything. …That’s what Jaken says.”
He hung his head and spoke quietly into his chest: “Help me, love. I just cannot find peace in my heart. Is there such a thing?”
Two giggling teenage girls unclasped mittened hands and parted to avoid him like a crevice in the ice. He thought them cute in their shaky balance with arms now outspread like poor tightrope-walkers and tight bums wiggling, till they reunited and said together, “Crazy old fuck!” And slapped a mittened high-five. Then he was sure they were cute.
He shook both fists into the swarm and shouted, “I can’t get Randome out of my fucking head!”
I have to leave you, love.
“What? Wait…”
Christ, he was crying. Old man. Sentimental fool. Crazy old fuck for sure. You’ll get what you deserve.
You will, I promise…
Within five minutes it felt warmer than for days. He’d not worked enough to account for the change, and there was no sun. In fact, black cloud-cover from out of nowhere had displaced the smoky grey of snowy sky, threatening to fulfill the forecast of freezing rain. Something flicked his cheekbone, like an angry snowflake. Before he got home, a fine freezing drizzle had made walkways treacherous.
When it begins, freezing rain looks little different from regular rain. But it takes only a short time to start accumulating as ice on everything. And when freezing rain doesn’t let up? When it won’t turn back to snow or become plain rain? Then comes to confused northern climes the equivalent of tropical hurricane: an ice storm.
Kevin called Point Conception and was informed by Jimmy that Jaken was still comatose; he could continue like that for weeks or he might not make it through the night, Dr. Grant had diagnosed. Kevin said he’d call again.
He was about to disconnect when Jimmy said, “But I can’t get close to Jaken anymore. No one can. Big Leo can be such a prick.”
“I’ll have a talk with Big Leo.”
“Then you’re coming ho— back to us, Kevin?”
“Of course, and soon. Please call me right away if there’s any change. Okay, Jimmy?”
But Jimmy wouldn’t say goodbye, and Kevin could envision him palming his still unfamiliar shaved head, fingering the acne like Braille along his cheekbone.
Jimmy said, “Before he lapsed, Jaken said that, uh, like maybe you would be a good teacher for me, Kevin.”
“Jaken said that? The old fakir. You have to watch Jaken, Jimmy. He’s full of compliments when he’s finished a bottle and looking for somebody to fetch another. Then he’s as full of shit as the next monk.”
Jimmy laughed, the first Kevin had heard from him, as he seemed to believe that a Buddhist monk should be sombre all the time. He said, “I’ll give Jaken your regards, uh, Beldon-san. Maybe he still hears.”
“If he’s alive he hears. If he’s dead he’s dead. Hearing is a living thing only.”
“Jaken said there’s always hope.”
“I hope too, Jimmy. You too. Remember, call right away if there’s any change. And give Jaken my love.”
Jaken said, Jimmy had said. Past tense from now on for Jaken’s sayings.
The Chieftains at low volume were playing throughout the main floor of the house, The Bells of Dublin, a Beldon family tradition for Christmas day. Kevin sat at the big brown-wood kitchen table with his feet in a pan of tepid water. Overdue Kelly was tearing assorted greens at the stainless steel sink, or as close to the sink as her belly allowed. She’d been obviously uncomfortable since Christmas Eve.
Kevin said to her, “Why do women have smaller feet than men?”
Her head wagged but she didn’t turn. “What?… Louise would put one of her skates up your ass for whatever you’re about to say, Dad.”
“C’mon, play along. Why?”
“Duh, I give up.”
“So they can stand closer to the sink.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Dad. …I dream of the day when I’ll be able to stand close to anything again!”
Abiki Ali was supposed to be setting the table, but the green-and-red-tissue-paper-wrapped favours were still sitting on the chair where Kelly had left them, because Ali wouldn’t leave Kelly alone long enough to do it. He moved close behind her again like he might have to catch her toppling. Soon he again had his hands on her sides and was nuzzling the nape of her neck as if that were where he drew his oxygen. She was always having to push him off, which today she’d been doing none too affectionately.
“Kevin,” he said, resting his forehead on Kelly’s nape, “don’t you agree that with this freezing rain we should take a hotel room near the Grace Hospital while we still can travel? How are we to drive should the waters break in the middle of an ice storm?”
Kelly paused in her preparations and shot back an elbow that made Ali back off. “I’m not saying it again, Ali. It’s perfectly normal for a woman my age with a first baby to go a week or two over. I’ll probably have to be induced, for Christ’s sake! So I am not spending Christmas in some halfway hotel for the overly anxious. Who wants a Christmas baby anyway! The poor kid would be robbed of her birthday.”
“Kevin?…”
Kevin bent to pat his feet with the towel. “Ali, don’t drag me into this. I don’t like the scenario you describe, but if Kelly doesn’t feel any stirrings, let alone contractions, let’s not add any unnecessary stress. And nobody’s said anything about an ice storm, it’s just a little freezing rain.”
“Thank you, Dad.” She turned her head and nodded at his feet: “How do they feel?”
“Like a firestorm, like constant reminders of an old man’s folly, like—”
“But that is my very point, Kevin: it is necessary that we—”
“Ali, I’m sure everything’s going to be fine. Ask Brigid and Mike how the roads are when they get here. Until I hear them and their kids arrive, I’ve got something needs doing. Sorry.”
Kelly smirked and sang, “My father the bard!” And returned to tearing an overgrown bunch of scallions.
“But Kevin…”
Long ago the adjacent dining room had been converted into Kevin’s study, which was Kelly’s now. He shut the door on the kitchen. Usually on a visit he’d have left that door ajar, but he didn’t want to intrude on Kelly and Ali’s routine. Instead he slid the pocket doors to the living room open a few feet, so he’d know immediately when Brigid and family arrived. He dropped into the chair at what had once been his old mahogany desk, which had never seen such childishly coloured paraphernalia for holding monitor wipes and chargers and the like. He placed his fingers and thumbs on the desk, leaned forward with bowed head, pressed down as though doing a push-up. He didn’t really miss his old life. Only Cyn…only the children when still children. And at Christmas? Christmas morning…The Bells of Dublin…He really missed all that, like a fading pleasant dream.
He opened his pale copybook and fiddled for a while with Death poem number five.
The heavy smell of crisping turkey filled the house with its meat-greasy warmth, and he raised his face from the page. The freezing rain pelted the window opposite his desk, pleasantly so, till he looked again and recognized the slow coating like frosted glass. Ice storm? Where were Brigid and Mike and their kids? They were supposed to be here by now. …He worried too much, he was worse than anxious Ali. It was Christmas. Relax.
