Caught (31 page)

Hearn, he said. Get yourself a plane ticket to St. John’s. There’s been a change of plans.

Rings within Rings

Eternal Return

Big white spots
spangled out blue auras and they were blinded. Slaney had a glowing orb hanging in the centre of whatever he looked at, and in the periphery the water sparkled with moonlight and the cliffs rose up to the sky.

They were off the coast of Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. Four vessels surrounded Carter’s sailboat and the cops yelled into bullhorns, baritones with echo and hiss. The cops said they had Slaney surrounded.

Come up on deck and stand with your hands over your heads.

There they were, Slaney and Ada and Cyril, and it was over. Everything was over. The army was waiting. They had brought out the army and the RCMP and there were boats with guns trained on them and the lights.

He saw Ada’s face, wet with tears, floating in his peripheral vision and that was the last he saw of her for a long time.

He could not believe he had returned to this. He had wanted to go home; this was not home. There was no returning. Or there was the opposite: an eternal return.

The ground rocked with a phantom sea swell and he wanted to lie down. Nothing was solid underfoot. It was so unlikely that existence should ever exist, but it did, and then it did again. They had been caught. And caught and caught and caught. Time was not linear: it looped, concentric rings within rings, and he had been surrounded.

A dog trotted up to him and sniffed at his jeans and panted and drooled and it was like the dog recognized him, knew who Slaney was. The dog dug in his front paws and growled and snapped his teeth and let off a volley of barks.

It was dark now and Slaney could see the cops rounding up the crew Hearn had put together to unload the cargo, but he couldn’t see who they were.

Flashlight beams sliced through the crowd and someone cuffed his hands behind his back and gave him a gentle shove forward. He searched the faces in the crowd on the hill for someone familiar. He half expected his mother. He was looking for Hearn.

Slaney and Carter were headed for one car and Ada was already in another.

Hearn shouted to him. A ragged yell. He called out: Hey. It was a shout that came from the guts and Hearn’s body was stiff as he yelled it, leaning into the call. He made a stumbling run toward Slaney but his hands were cuffed behind too and the cops held him back. Hey, Hearn yelled. Hey. Hey. He wasn’t saying Slaney’s name. Hey, Hey you. Hey. It was a berserk cry. And Slaney would think about it later, full of recognition and maybe love.

There was Hearn. They had Hearn. His orange hair like a fire in the red light that swung around on the roof of the cop car.

Then they pushed Hearn into a car and Slaney watched the car reverse up the gravel hill and it turned at the top and he watched the tail lights go down the road.

Brophy was there. He saw Brophy talking with an RCMP officer and he had a cup of coffee and Slaney called out to him.

Brophy looked up but Slaney noticed the delay. He hadn’t responded to the name right away. The name had taken a moment to register. Brophy smiled and waved at him. Lifted his Styrofoam cup in Slaney’s direction. A kind of toast.

Slaney realized he wouldn’t need the name Douglas Knight anymore.

Over the weeks that followed he came to understand about the satellite technology and that the boat had been followed all the way down. And that he had been followed across the country from the beginning.

The revelation was something of a relief. How could they have beat that sort of omniscience? He learned that they had even let him go from prison so that they could follow him to Hearn, and the humiliation blazed through him.

What he had felt as freedom had not been freedom at all. The wind and the water and the stars. None of that. He had not been free. Slaney had always been caught. He had never escaped. He’d just been on a long chain.

Brophy raised the white Styrofoam cup in his direction and drank a last sip and crushed the cup in his fist and Slaney knew they had his innermost thing. They had crushed it at last.

Slaney and Hearn were each charged with three counts: the conspiracy to import marijuana, importing marijuana, and possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking. Seven years for each count.

They were to be an example for the country.

Ada got off. Carter went to jail for eight months and when he got out he went back to his wife.

Hearn had been granted bail against all expectation because of a new appointment to the bench, a good Liberal who had practised tax law for twenty years and hadn’t seen the inside of a courtroom until he was sworn in. The judge liked the look of Hearn and decided not to consider the merit of the Crown’s case. “I’m not considering merit,” he said, and Hearn was out on bail. Not the case for Slaney. His judge decided that the Crown’s case had quite a bit of merit.

A few weeks later Hearn was at the restaurant in the Newfoundland Hotel, lunching with his lawyer.

The Mistakes

Patterson strolled out
over the snowy grounds with Alphonse beside him. They’d put on rubbers over their shoes and Alphonse was wearing a beaver fur hat that Delores had given him for Christmas and black leather gloves and a fine wool coat.

That’s a fine hat, Alphonse, Patterson said. You look spiffy.

I love you, Alphonse said. He took Patterson’s hand in his and he stuttered and the words burst out of him, finally, emphatic and true: You are my friend. Why were you gone so long?

I’m sorry about that, Patterson said.

I forgive you, Alphonse said.

They’d eaten turkey in the facility’s cafeteria for Christmas Eve. They’d worn paper party hats and a musician had been hired to play the piano and there were carols.

Alphonse didn’t want his cranberry sauce touching his potato. That had been the only bad moment. Alphonse began to raise his voice about it but Patterson calmed him down right away.

He took the cranberry sauce off Alphonse’s plate and put it on his own. And Alphonse clapped his hands with real joy when the pudding was set aflame.

After the meal they walked. There were big, delicate two-ply snowflakes, like in the ads for toilet paper. The black tree branches were rimmed in white. The case was over and filed.

Patterson thought of Hearn in the mouth of the cave where they had arrested him. A year later and he was still thinking of it. The white crests of the waves moonlit, the round beach stones chinking and tumbling as the waves withdrew.

Things are changing, Brophy, Hearn had hissed at him from the back seat of the squad car. You’re going to be left behind, man. Do you even know what I’m talking about? You’re going to be left behind, man. Everything is changing.

Patterson had heard about the development in Hearn’s case on the news last week. Hearn had got off on a technicality. They’d put a bug in a lamp on a restaurant table and the waitress had alerted Hearn’s lawyer.

She’d jotted a note on her menu pad and torn it off and put it on the table for the lawyer to read.

Hearn and the lawyer having lunch before court, both of them wearing suits.

The waitress put a note on the table and Hearn’s lawyer took out his glasses and perched them on his nose and read the note and put it in his shirt pocket.

Then he stood up, surprising even Hearn, and tore the lamp’s plug out of the socket and the wire snapped up like a whip, and with his other hand he turned the whole table over and they left the restaurant with the lamp.

The RCMP had violated solicitor–client privilege. It was an abuse of process. The judge felt the state had behaved egregiously. They revered the solicitor–client thing, these judges. Patterson knew that. They were always going on about it. A punk running drugs and the judge saying the cops were egregious.

Or justice will be denied to one and all, the judge said.

The judge on his high horse.

Case dismissed. The Crown knew it was serious shit, they didn’t even appeal. O’Neill had ordered the bug in the restaurant. O’Neill got the dressing-down.

Cyril Carter’s wife had done a television appearance the month before. She’d had a microphone clipped to her lapel. They had a glass of water on a table and an arrangement of flowers. They had an advertisement for Cream of the West Flour and they spun a wheel and the viewers could win something: a cookbook featuring recipes for flour.

I felt stirred up all over when I met him, Carter’s wife said. Patterson had watched the interview leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. Delores had set up the two folding TV trays and they’d eaten in the den so they could watch together.

The wife had been honest. She was asked a question, she answered. The cameras bore through her.

Forgive me if this is hard to believe, she said. But it was chemistry. That man looked at me and I was in love. All he had to do was look.

The wife had taken him back and nursed him through the subsequent breakdown.

The girl had called Patterson from Panama. Patterson had known right away what Carter had seen in her. What had turned his head. There was something trustworthy and feral in her. She had pulled through for him. The girl had said Slaney was going to change their course. They were going up the Caribbean coast, heading to Newfoundland. Patterson had to admit it was a bold move. He never would have found them if not for the girl.

Cyril is too fragile for prison, she’d said. Cyril won’t survive it. They’d let her go after the big arrest at the cove and she’d flown to Ontario. Ada Anderson had just begun work on a doctorate in musicology at the University of Toronto.

Patterson had turned the TV off before the interview was over. He and Delores watched the dot of light in the centre of the screen, the only thing left of the picture, fade away.

Twentieth Anniversary

You find yourself
standing like this, Ada said. She was holding the phone book at arm’s length. She had glasses hanging on a cord around her neck and she put them on. She had thought a pizza but he said he didn’t want it. She was flustered and blushing.

I’m not here for pizza, he said. She closed the book and let it hang by her side and put one hand on the bookshelf.

A snack, then, she said. She went into the kitchen. He heard the fridge.

Closer things, I’m fine, she said. She was taking jars out of the fridge and getting the cups and saucers. He moved without a sound to the door frame because he wanted to see how she was in the kitchen when she didn’t know she was being watched.

And things in the distance, she said. But the middle distance is blurry. Slaney said he had reading glasses too.

I don’t remember you much of a reader, she said. He had forgotten this about her; she could be callous. She was capable of saying anything. There were small wrinkles around her mouth and a slackness under the eyes, but she was the same. If he just focused on her mouth he forgot what she had looked like when she was young.

But when she broke out the smile. She smiled inappropriately. He had forgotten that about her too. He could never predict it. She could smile when she was sad and it wasn’t insincere. She was the sort of woman, he thought, everything she felt came at her from a great distance.

Any sudden change of expression, the age fell away from her face. Or the young face from twenty years ago was what fell away, and he involuntarily adjusted to this new, older face, and he couldn’t remember the younger one and it left the impression she hadn’t changed. Her body was not that much different, she looked slender. She was more or less the same. He told her so.

Oh my, she said. Her hands went up and touched her cheeks. He watched her hands, a hesitation before every gesture, then deft action.

She was working a metal bucket from a bread maker. Elbows jutting up, the metal handle wrapped with a pot cloth and she shook the loaf onto the counter. It came out with a
thunk
and the smell of fresh bread wafted around and she tried to remove a metal part in the bottom of the loaf and shook her fingers because she’d burned them. She turned toward him with her fingers in her mouth. She was sucking three of her fingertips. They were looking at each other like that and she turned her back on him.

Listen, he said. I don’t want anything to eat. His heart had been beating hard as he approached the front door and clapped the brass knocker, a lion with a loop through his jaws, but now he felt a lassitude. The low slanting sun lit up her hair, her white blouse; a tiny metal buckle on her sandal near the ankle burned white. She ran the water and put her fingers under.

I didn’t want you to go to any trouble, he said. She had written him in prison just before he was released. She had asked him to come. She wanted to talk about it, he’d thought. Or ask him what had happened in prison. They had shared something. Maybe she wanted to remind him of that.

I didn’t let it define me, she said.

Something in you, though, he said. She turned the water off but she was still holding the tap, as if whatever she had to say next could be turned on, flow out.

Or she had been arrested by the thought: it was a part of her, the audacity of what they had tried.

Yes, she said. Something in me. It was a wild adventure. Before it went sour. Nothing has compared to it. She took up the dishtowel and unwedged the metal skewer from the bottom of the bread and flipped the loaf upright and turned to him, unleashing the smile.

Fresh bread, she said. He sat down in the living room and she followed him with a tray, two mugs of tea. She had left the bread.

Twenty years, he said. This was how she had been living: a brass door knocker, the sunlight, a baby grand piano with an embroidered shawl draped over the top.

He had been deprived of everything for twenty years. The thought knocked but he shut it down. He had promised himself he would not let them have what was left. He would not allow the rest of it to be poisoned with bitterness. But sometimes it roared up like a sea monster.

What I found astonishing, she said. How easily people believe a lie. Isn’t it something?

I thought about you, he said.

There’s a beat and then you see they believe it, she said. Whatever it is. The truth starts to lose currency.