Cherry Bites (14 page)

It was the Saturday of the Castle party, two days after Pete’s reappearance. Quint Castle Jr. is the wealthiest man in the Norwood Flats, as his dad, Quint Sr., was before him. The old man made his money in the courier business, starting out on a bicycle delivering documents between offices in downtown Winnipeg. He saved enough to buy a car and then a van; the van became a fleet and now Castle Courier has its own hangar of planes at Winnipeg International Airport.

Quint Castle Sr. is dead now, but his only son, Quint, whom I’ve known forever, slid nicely into his father’s shoes as Norwood’s only mogul.

Every summer he and his wife, Virginie, have a party at their home by the river and invite everybody in the neighbourhood. I don’t know what they would do if everyone came. Cope, I guess. Usually fifty or so guests turn up. I think there were over a hundred one year; that was the record.

It was a tradition started by Quint Sr. and his wife. I remember times when Joanne and I were kids that we would give one another boosts up the rough wooden fence and peer at the revellers with their tanned bodies and their plinking ice cubes. They lounged around the sparkling pool and always there would be shrieks of hilarity as some jokester leapt in with his clothes on, or tossed in a woman whom the wine had made a little too free.

Nora and Murray, and later Dougwell, went on several occasions. It was right up my mother’s alley. She would have loved to live inside one of those tinkling ice cubes at the very centre of the party. She loved the attention of men and they swarmed her like galumphing bumblebees. In my constant prayers to the god of my childhood I asked that he would please never let my mother get into any real trouble. That he would hold at bay the jealous wives as their husbands made fools of themselves at my mother’s feet. I could picture some woman, Mrs. Castle, maybe, flying at my mother in a rage, punching her in the throat till the men hauled her off. As far as I know, there was never an incident.

Quint Jr., like Frank, is the same age as me. We were often in the same class at school, and for a couple of summers were pretty good friends. We played Robin Hood and Maid Marian, caught frogs and lit small fires at the river. It was before we were old enough to think about kissing each other.

I always go to the parties. I guess I have that much of Nora in me. The event is never as good as the idea of it, but I always make a point of standing back during the evening, back to the fence or the bushes by the river bank to see it as I saw it then, when all the summer in the world seemed to be right there before my eyes.

Joanne had to talk me into going with her this time. Her husband, Grant, never goes; it’s not his thing, he says.

I’d told Henry I wasn’t going. I didn’t feel up to it, with Pete’s resurrection so new. It would keep me from getting into the spirit of the thing.

But Joanne thought it was important for me to get out, to get away from my ghost.

“He’s not a ghost,” I said.

We were in my bedroom and she was rummaging through my closet for something I could wear.

“So you say.” She didn’t quite believe me.

I ran downstairs to get Nora’s journal and showed her the page where she had written in our secret code.

“Jesus,” Joanne said.

“Yeah.”

“So he’s been alive all this time.” She sat down in a pile of clothes. “God, no wonder you’re so weirded out.”

“Yeah.”

“Frank will help you, Cherry,” she said. “He was so nice to Greta during the rain barrel thing. She pretty much fell in love with him.”

“I’m not so sure. He doesn’t seem all that sharp to me,” I said. “Plus, I don’t think he wants to get involved.”

“He will though.”

“I don’t know. This summer has been really tough for him. The dead baby thing hit him really close to home. One of his kids was hurt.”

“Jesus. I didn’t know that.”

“No. They tried to keep it quiet.”

“Hurt how?”

“I don’t know.”

“Which kid?”

“The oldest one, Emma.”

“Is she okay?”

“I think so, but it’s been quite a summer for them.”

“Well, it’s turning out to be quite a summer for you too. And Frank’s a cop.”

Joanne found a dress and held it up against me.

“This is the one,” she said. “Cool, comfy and becoming.”

It was a dress I’d worn just twice. It fits me nicely but has no sleeves, so I worried about my arms, but they were brown and that night they looked okay. Maybe I’d lost weight over the past day.

Bare legs and sandals. Silk underwear. What was I saving it for?

“I told Henry I wasn’t going,” I said.

“You could phone him and tell him you changed your mind.”

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“Well, don’t then,” Joanne said. “You can blame me for making you go at the last minute.”

We had gin and tonics at my house before we left. We felt pretty good about how great we looked and we put Lucinda Williams on the
CD
player.

Joanne and I walked over to the huge house on Lyndale Drive.

“We can drink as much as we want tonight and not worry about driving home,” I said.

“Don’t overdo it, now,” Joanne said. “We don’t want you barfing in the bushes like you did that time.”

“That was in the eighties!”

“Yeah? So? You’re too old to be barfing from drinking.”

“It was in the eighties!”

“You were too old in the eighties, too.”

We walked through the gate to the backyard. There were people in the pool already, with bathing suits on. Some people had brought children. This had never happened before and I didn’t like it. It was supposed to be an adult affair.

Quint was talking to the bartender, who was slicing limes for people like me. We walked over and I plunked my Bombay Sapphire gin on the bar.

“You didn’t have to bring that,” Quint said and kissed me on the temple. “Hi, Jo,” he said. He didn’t kiss Joanne.

“Gin and tonic please,” I said to the young man.

“Comin’ up.”

“Amici’s?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Quint.

Amici’s is the wonderful restaurant that he and Virginie usually get to cater these affairs.

Joanne slipped away to talk to someone who had just arrived.

“Why are there kids here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Some people just brought them. I couldn’t very well tell them to go away. I don’t even know them.”

“Whose fault is that?” I asked. “Who sends invitations to everyone in the land?”

Quint grinned. “It’s okay. As long as they don’t stay too long. We want to be able to get loud and obnoxious.”

Virginie motioned to Quint from across the yard and he excused himself.

The bartender handed me my drink and I looked around for someone I knew. I didn’t like the feel of the party. It was dark in the shrubs by the river; there could have been a little boy in there too close to the water. He could have been taking sips from his mum’s Alabama Slammer. It wasn’t any good; it felt like the kind of party where someone would die.

Eileen was splayed out in a lawn chair talking to Virginie and Quint. When her dad had finally died she’d sold the tiny house on Lloyd Avenue and bought one on Pinedale. So she’s still around.

I didn’t want to talk to her. She’d been really good about not asking about Pete since I’d told her about his death, but she had acquired a smugness over the years that made me want to knock her down. What the hell did Eileen have to be smug about? I’d wondered it more than once over time but now as soon as I thought it, I knew the answer.

“No, Klaus, no!” A woman shouted.

And a stout man, in bright yellow swimming trunks, let out a holler and cannonballed into the deep end of the pool. He drenched my dress.

“You great fucking moron!” I shouted.

He didn’t hear me; he was under water. But two mothers did. They reached instinctively for their children and looked at me with shock on their faces. One mother covered her child’s ears with both hands. He shook her off.

Quint and Joanne both came over to run interference. They made an attractive couple. They had gone together for a time in high school, but they fought all the time. My theory was that Quint was too much like his dad: a head of the family type of guy who wanted the little woman at his side. Joanne didn’t fit the mould and fought when he tried to squeeze her into it. And as I mentioned earlier, Quint kissed like a dead man. He had gone off to university in Montreal where he met Virginie and brought her home. Maybe she’d had better luck than Joanne teaching him how to kiss.

“Do you want to go home and change your dress?” Joanne asked me now.

“No. It’s okay. It’ll dry fast in this heat.”

The mothers and Quint were talking, looking my way now and then. The children put their shoes on and they left soon after.

Klaus stood next to the woman who had shouted his name. She was gesturing and he looked puzzled as though to say, what’s the big deal? His jiggly stomach lopped over the waistband of his bathing suit and he rubbed it with one hand.

Quint came over to where Joanne and I were standing.

“Do you want to borrow something of Virginie’s to put on?” he asked.

“Cherry’s three times her size,” said Joanne. “You crazy idiot,” she added, quietly.

I chuckled. “You could divide me in three and I’d still be bigger than her.”

“What?” Quint said. He didn’t get it. I guess he thought all women were the same size.

“Nothing. No, I’m fine.”

“Cherry, Eileen has been telling us that Pete’s back,” Quint said and touched my arm.

The touch of his hand felt like a hot iron on my skin and I jerked my arm away. His words ricocheted around inside my brain: Pete’s back…Pete’s back…Pete’s back…The party grew quiet, or seemed to.

I looked over at Eileen and saw that her face was huge. And the smugness was permanent; the smugness was her life. My legs wobbled as the certainty seized me. Not only had Pete contacted Eileen in a real sense, not just scaring her by looming out of the night, but he had been in touch with her all along. She had always known that he was alive, at least, almost always. Her grief had been real enough the night I told her that he had died. But she knew soon after that he wasn’t dead. She’d been in contact with him all this time and had kept it from me. The smugness. Of course.

Joanne slipped her arm through mine.

“Yes,” I forced myself to speak. “Not only is he back. He’s alive.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off Eileen. I imagined my fist crashing into that mouthful of tiny teeth. With minimal trouble I could ruin her face.

“Let’s go,” Joanne said.

Quint was left gaping after us. He meant no harm; he didn’t know anything.

Once we hit the front yard I sat down on the grass and leaned against a giant rock of weathered granite someone must have hauled in from Lake Winnipeg.

“Joanne?”

“Yes?”

“Would you please go back and get the gin?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, I can’t.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five dollars.”

“I don’t want twenty-five dollars.”

“What if Eileen has a drink of our gin?”

There was an ill wind blowing through me. I think Joanne could probably feel it. She walked back around the side of the house and returned in a few moments with the blue bottle.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“I don’t think anyone noticed,” she said. From her other hand she produced a pack of Players King Size Extra Light that had barely been cracked. “Look what else I got,” she said.

We laughed and leaned against the rock long enough to finish two cigarettes apiece. We drank straight gin from the bottle, but not very much.

“Prick!” I said.

“Who?” asked Joanne.

“I don’t know. Pete. Eileen. Everybody, except us. Let’s do something fun,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Let’s climb the fence at the pool in the flood bowl and go for a swim.”

“What about bathing suits?” Joanne said.

“We’ll go in our underwear,” I said, “like Dory Preston and Janny Warren did in 1963.”

“Do you remember absolutely everything anyone ever did?”

“Almost.”

“I’ll do it if we go home and get our bathing suits,” said Joanne.

We never got to the pool.

The sirens were so close I felt them under my skin. We ran. I saw the smoke and as we got closer, the flames. Spike. My scalp separated from the slippery bone beneath it; I felt the wind on my skull.

My garage was on fire; my rickety old garage with the wooden door that moved sideways, with the hose winder-upper that Murray built.

I unlocked the front door of the house and looked for Spike. He was under the couch with just his little pointed nose poking out. When he knew it was me he leapt into my arms. He was quivering and crying. I tried to calm him. I had to go outside. He wouldn’t let me put him down so I carried him with me.

There was no saving the garage but the firefighters contained the blaze with no problems and there was no other damage.

It was a suspicious fire and it was obvious they were thinking in terms of hooligans. They did mention the number of flammable liquids in my garage, the repeated small explosions. I didn’t even know what was in some of those containers. They had been there since Dougwell and even Murray, in some cases, I’m sure.

The police arrived. They wanted to know if I had any idea how the fire might have started. I didn’t feel up to telling them about all my enemies: Pete, all the people I had interviewed over the years and their families and friends, Darius Widener, the mothers of the little boys I had sworn in front of that very night, Klaus, the Green Guy.

“No,” I said.

Joanne took me aside. “Wouldn’t this be a good time to mention Pete?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell the police about my own brother. And what would I tell them, anyway? My brother stood beside the birch tree in the front yard?”

“You told Frank.”

“Yeah, but he’s not like a real cop,” I said. “And Henry made me.”

“His being dead might be of interest to them,” Joanne said. “I should make you tell them about Pete.”