A Murder of Crows (3 page)

“Because you rented a suite at the Bellagio.”

“I did?”

“You did—well, your credit card did. Can't have you staying in the Paris of the Desert all by your lonesome—too sad.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“So you're in Vegas?”

“Across the street, genius.”

Decker looked across Fremont, and there was Eddie, waving like he'd found a long-lost friend.

Taking his life in his hands, Decker crossed the six lanes of traffic to Eddie. “Which way?”

“To our hotel?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie pointed. Decker moved.

“We're going to walk? Nobody in Vegas walks.”

“I walk.”

“So I see,” Eddie said, catching up by using the strange hop/hobble he'd had to adopt since he snapped his Achilles tendon all those years ago on the Ledbury Park playing field.

“How'd you find me, Eddie?”

“Remember me? The one who sets up gigs for you?”

“Right. Were you followed, Eddie?”

“No.”

“How'd you manage that?”

“Same as you.”

“You left through the old steam tunnels?”

“First to the generator station, then a cab to Hamilton Airport—nobody serious watches Hamilton Airport. Used my new passport.”

“Who are you this time?”

“Roberto Clemente, humanitarian, Hall of Famer—”

“And dead—and Puerto Rican.”

“Really?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Do tell.”

Despite himself, Decker smiled and said, “Welcome to Las Vegas.”

“Thanks—this is my kind of town,” Eddie said, pulling out a pair of wraparound yellow sunglasses as he tipped his hat to two young women—clearly hookers. “And a very fine day to you too, ladies.” The women ignored Eddie. “You know it's raining in the Junction.”

“No kidding.”

“It's sunny here, you may have noticed.”

“It's always sunny in Las Vegas.”

“Now why's that?”

“Cause God has a weird sense of humour.”

“Why do you hate Las Vegas?”

“I don't—hate it, that is.”

“But you don't like it.”

“Well I don't like Dupont Avenue either, but—”

“Nah, nah, nah there's something here that annoys you. Let me guess—the relentless pursuit of money, the greed—”

“No. I actually like the energy those things give this place.”

“The lack of class, then. Fat ladies in shorts, smoking as they plug the one-armed bandits while their half-naked no-neck monsters terrorize the help?”

“The visual is none too pleasing, but that's not it.”

“Well, what pray tell is it?”

Decker thought for a second then said, “It's wildness without restraint to give it form.”

Eddie stopped and turned Decker to him. “Run that by me again.”

“Well come on, Eddie, you sense the wildness here.”

“For sure.”

“It's unleashed—money and greed have unleashed it.”

“But that's not what pisses you off about Las Vegas? The wildness?”

“No, it's not. It's the lost potential. There's no sternness here forcing that wildness into any form.”

“You already said that, but I still don't see what you're getting at.”

“Do you remember
Fanny and Alexander
?”

“
Fanny and Alexander;
in Swedish;
Fanny och Alexander
, 1982, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Originally conceived as a four-part miniseries for TV. A one-hundred-eighty-eight-minute version was released as a movie. The TV version has since been released as a film; both the long and the short version have been shown in theatres around the mundo. Supposedly Bergman's last film, but it wasn't.”

“Plot, Eddie—do you remember the plot?”

“Boy wants to be a writer. His father dies. His mother marries a prick of a pastor who makes the kid's life hell. Mother finally leaves the pastor and marries kindly merchant. Very Dickens that—who else believes that merchants are kindly, I mean really?”

“Eddie—the plot.”

“Right. Once at the merchant's place the boy begins to write, roll credits,
finita la musica
.”

“Good, Eddie, but you missed something.”

“Me, the great raconteur, missed something? Enlighten me.”

“At the end of the film the boy finally sits down to write, but he feels a cold gust of wind. He turns and sees—”

“The mean pastor.”

“And what does the mean pastor say to him?”

“ ‘Never forget me—you must never forget me.' ”

“And the pastor's right, Eddie. The freedom—the wildness—that boy feels living with the kindly merchant doesn't make art. It—the wildness— makes art only when constrained by the pastor's sternness.”

“Art? You think Las Vegas should be about art?”

Then Decker found himself laughing—the absurdity of it simply overtook him. Talking art philosophy on the streets of Las Vegas—what was he thinking! He dug into his pocket and pulled out the USB key that had the data from his casino truth-telling session and held it out to Eddie. “Take it and hide it for me, Eddie, and don't tell me where you hid it.”

“Another dangerous one?”

“Yeah—a lover betrayed.”

“Yikes.”

“If Seth weren't so sick I'd have walked out of that thing on the second question, the cash be damned. But Seth might need the money—right, Eddie? Seth might need it, right?”

Eddie looked away then back to Decker. “Okay. Ask.”

“About my son? You'll answer questions about Seth?”

“He swore me to secrecy but he's sick now, so ask away.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

Decker knew that even if he wanted to “truth-tell” Eddie, it wouldn't work. He cared about Eddie. It never worked on people he cared about.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly, Decker, he never told me and when I'd ask he'd duck the question.”

“Did he cash the twenty-thousand-dollar bank draft I gave you for him?”

“Not yet.”

“But he got it.”

“Yes, Canada Post did a fine job getting it to him.”

“So you do know an address, dammit, Eddie.”

“I don't. He gave me a generic Victoria, BC, postbox.”

“When did you hear from him last?”

“A while after you tried to find him out there.”

“And?”

“Not sure you want to hear this, Decker.”

“Fuck, tell me!”

“He said to tell you to keep away from him. That bad things happen to people you get close to. Then something about a dead boy in ice that he said you'd understand.”

SETH WAS FLYING IN HIS DREAM.

He saw the huge glass structure in the far distance and turned toward it. The faster he flew the farther away it seemed to get. But it was always there, beckoning him onward to go deeper into the dream. It was his favourite dream, and he was urging himself forward when suddenly he felt himself falling and crashed into waking as the vomit lurched from his mouth and splattered on the rocky Vancouver Island beach.

He'd had his BCG treatment less than an hour ago. Usually it took longer for him to get sick. His urologist had lowered the dosage when Seth told him of his reaction to the treatment for his bladder cancer, but he also warned Seth that they couldn't lower it much more or it wouldn't have any protective effect. Then he'd said the words that Seth had dreaded hearing since he first began to pee blood just over two years ago: “We may be near the end of the benefits that BCG can offer you.”

“If that's so, what's next?” he'd asked.

The doctor hesitated then said, “Surgery.”

“Remove my bladder?”

“Yes . . . and your prostate.”

“I'm only twenty-one years old.”

“You have cancer, Seth, cancer.”

He retched again, just missing his boot.

“Thanks, Dad. Thanks a lot.” He swore as he wiped his mouth
with his sleeve then shouted at the surf, “Stop feeling fucking sorry for yourself and fucking do something. Do something!”

When he began his research, references to a Wellness Dream Clinic kept popping up on the sidebar of his Gmail account. And almost every time he opened a bladder cancer site there was a link to that clinic prominently displayed.

Five full days of research on the Web and phone calls and time in the reference library and he'd called Eddie.

“Twenty thousand dollars—that's a lot of money, Seth.”

“Yeah,” he'd said.

“Gonna tell me why all of a sudden you need so much money?”

“No, Eddie, I'm not going to tell you.”

After a moment Eddie said, “I'll get it for you.”

“Thanks, Eddie,” he'd said, then asked, “How're you doing?”

“Great.”

Seth cared about Eddie, and despite the fact that he couldn't see him he knew, beyond knowing, without closing his eyes, that Eddie had not told him the truth.

He walked down to the water's edge. The surfers in their thick wet suits waited on their boards for a wave—something to carry them. They rose and fell with the swell.
Like a heartbeat,
Seth thought.
No,
he corrected himself,
like a dream.

He knelt and plunged his hands into the freezing cold Pacific and tossed the salty water into his mouth. Better the bitterness of the ocean than the taste of death—his inheritance from his dad for his “gift.”

And there he stayed for more than an hour, as the tide slowly crept around his feet, then his knees.

Then he saw them, darting in the shallows—crimson torpedoes, salmon, salmon heading toward the mouth of the river.

He marvelled at the power of life in the fish, returning—after years at sea returning home. He got to his feet and ran to his car, gunned it back up the logging road, then took the first fork north and ground to a stop. He threw open the door and plunged into the bush. Ignoring the branches tearing at his pants and face and arms
he forced his way through the brush until he got to the river . . . and there they were—hundreds and hundreds of them fighting the fierce current, moving, no, fighting upstream toward the making of new life and the giving up of their own.

He made his way upstream watching the fish battling to gain every inch, leaping over rock dams and fallen trees, moving, always moving upstream toward the completion of their dream.

Four or five hundred yards farther upstream he saw the first of the carcasses floating back downstream. Around the bend there were hundreds more on the sandy shore—those who didn't make it, those not chosen to complete the dream.
Chosen,
he thought.
Some are chosen
.

A fish jumped high out of the water in a vain effort to leap a log, the fading sunlight glistening off its back, and Seth thought for a moment that the creature had turned toward him as if pleading for help. But there was no help here. There was the challenge and the dream—that was all.

Three fish jumped in unison; one cleared a fallen tree branch while the two others slapped back into the water. One then began to float back down the stream.

On the far bank Seth saw the bush in motion and knew there would be bears. Shortly two females and a cub emerged and waded into the river, quickly emerging with wriggling fish in their mouths. Those not chosen were a God-given banquet for these black bears and the grizzlies who were yet to come.

Seth watched, then felt the weakness come upon him again. Vomit flew from his mouth and splatted in the fast-moving water.

Then he was falling, his knees weak, his world in motion. And before he blacked out from the pain there was a single thought in his head:
The black bears eat those not chosen—but the chosen move on. The chosen, those who could enter the dream.

Then his own dream took hold of him and he was once again flying, soaring to worlds unknown, to beauty beyond comprehension. As the vision ebbed and left him cold and shivering in the shallow water he begged to dream again, and again, and again.

THE GRADUATION TENT ROSE SLOWLY FROM THE GROUND WITH
each pull on the dozens of ropes attached to the tall poles. From a tarplike cover that hid the rented plank flooring and the raised platform stage for the professors, it lifted like a huge, slowly waking white albatross and took the assigned form dictated by the twenty stanchions.

Tears clouded Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz's eyes as he watched the tent assume its predestined form. He would graduate in three weeks and have to leave Ancaster College—a place he thought of as home—a place of science for scientists like him.

He loved Ancaster College.

As the south end of the tent began to obscure the college's famous eighteenth-century church steeple, Grover Cleveland worked out the algorithm that would have permitted the tent to encompass the beautiful symmetry of the steeple in its midst.

While Grover was busy with his mathematical twitterings, Professor Neil Frost watched the damned thing take shape, and all he could think of was that it was going to be hotter than hell in there but if he didn't attend the ceremony he'd be docked his final paycheck. Just more bullshit from this bullshit place.

Even more bullshit than usual. And moving on—always moving on and leaving him behind. Every year the students seemed to get younger while he felt five years older. These ungrateful, self-satisfied, spoiled . . . but not for long, not for long.

A crowd had gathered and cheered as the thing rose.

But in the crowd there was someone who was not concerned about the tent rising. No. He was concerned that as it rose it didn't reveal two carefully chosen hiding spots.