Cherry Bites (15 page)

We were both covered in debris from the fire. She knocked a few black bits from my shoulders.

“No, you shouldn’t,” I said. “Do you think my dress is ruined?”

“Probably not; I think it’ll be okay.”

I watched two firefighters lift Murray’s hose contraption, carry it over to the oak tree and set it down.

“Good thing the hose wasn’t attached or it would have melted and caused quite a stink,” said one.

“Yes. Good,” I said.

“There’s Mr. Widener,” said Joanne. She motioned with her head toward the lane.

He walked over to us. Spike stopped shaking and growled. This was an enemy he understood.

“Hell of a thing,” Mr. Widener said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” I said, giving him what I hoped was a knowing stare.

I have had more than one run-in with Darius Widener because his dog barks non-stop in a high-pitched voice. It drives me insane at all hours of the day and night. I could hear the dog now.

“Mitzi wasn’t able to scare off the firebugs,” I said.

“What?”

“Mitzi. Her constant shrill barking.” My voice rose and Joanne put a hand on my arm.

“Can you not hear her?” I asked.

Mr. Widener listened carefully for a moment. No listening was necessary; Mitzi’s yelp was a constant backdrop to life on our street.

“Hmm, I guess something must have caught her attention,” he said.

I’m not against a dog barking. Spike barks sometimes, if he has a good reason. It’s not a pleasant sound, but it is nowhere near the eardrum-piercing shriek that comes out of Mitzi Widener for no reason other than that her master is an idiot.

Heaving a sigh, I walked out to the lane. There must have been fifty people gathered in groups at varying distances. All those who weren’t at the Castles’ party, I guessed. Each to his own. I wondered if the person who started the fire was among the watchers. I scanned the crowd for Pete’s face.

Spike and I lazed in bed the next morning. My body was heavy with unease. For some reason it was my swearing at Klaus, the human cannonball, that was at the forefront of my mind. I dragged myself downstairs for coffee, then crawled back into bed with the phone and little phone book.

First I called my insurance company and left a message. Then Quint, to apologize for my language in front of the visiting kids. He couldn’t believe I thought it even warranted a phone call. He’d heard about the fire and offered help if I should need it. When I hung up on Quint, someone from the insurance company phoned me back. It being a Sunday, I was amazed and grateful.

My poor old garage was a pile of rubble out back. Some stuff survived the fire, but I didn’t feel up to scrabbling through everything. My insurance would cover someone coming to clean up the whole mess, so I didn’t have to deal with it. They just had to wait for the say-so from the fire department. Because no one had been hurt in the fire it wouldn’t be a priority for the cops.

Next I called Henry and told him about the fire and about what I had decoded in Nora’s journal. He wanted to come over, but I was so tired I asked him not to. I planned on doing not much of anything and squeezing in a nap or two.

When Spike and I returned from a walk by the river that evening, we took the front street so I didn’t have to look at the garage. I found a note sticking out of my mailbox.

Cherry,

Let’s talk. I’m staying at the Norwood Hotel. Room 503. Anytime.

Your loving brother,

Pete

I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I wanted less than to talk to Pete after a lifetime of not talking to him.

Security lights turned on and off as I walked down the lane between Monck and Claremont. A bad feeling was firmly settled in my guts. Mitzi barked even though I was nowhere near. I wondered if other dogs, besides Spike, disliked her.

I cut through Coronation Park; it was quicker than walking around it, and I was less visible. At 11:30 at night the cops could stop me, figure they were doing me a favour by offering to drive me home.

Just going to see my brother at the Norwood Hotel, I would say. Sure, little lady. Hop in and we’ll save you from yourself. That’s how it would go.

When I slipped between the bowling alley and the once-magnificent house next door to it, I wondered who had lived there, way back when, and how they had felt when the bowling lanes had gone up and spoiled their view.

A small parking lot and then Horace Street. A broken Mateus bottle glinted in the scruffy grass next to someone’s garbage can. I wanted to use its neck to slice a throat. I boosted myself over the low fence behind the hotel parking lot. My hip hurt.

The night clerk didn’t look up when I made a beeline for the elevator. I knew I wasn’t doing anything blameworthy, but I felt furtive and on the wrong side of things. If I were a good and normal person I would be drifting off to sleep at home in my clean bed.

I knocked at room 503 and Pete answered immediately, before my knuckles left the door. It startled me and did nothing to rid me of my bad feeling.

He was not wearing a shirt. I found this distasteful. He was skinny and hairless and I knew he would be clammy to the touch. I couldn’t recall having ever been in contact with his bare skin, not since that day in1954. There were needle welts on the insides of his arms; one spot looked infected. He didn’t try to hide any of this from me.

“Cherry,” he said. “Come in.”

The place reeked of stale smoke and his body stank of old vegetable soup, dirty soup, like what you smell when you walk down the lane behind the Remand Centre on Kennedy Street. It blasts out of the exhaust pipes.

“You’re not dead,” I said.

Pete smirked. His hair was so greasy I couldn’t tell if it was still blond.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I found a glass, one that hadn’t been unwrapped yet. He poured a good amount of rye whiskey into it. There was another glass, one with orange lipstick on it, on the bedside table. I was not the only visitor he’d had. I’d never seen Eileen wear lipstick at all, let alone orange, so he must have been in touch with someone else. Or maybe he had hired a hooker. I had little understanding of Pete’s needs or desires.

“You’re not having one,” I said.

He smiled. His once beautiful white teeth had gone brown. A front one was chipped and there was a dark brown line down the middle of another. I could see that some were missing toward the back of his mouth. I wondered if he was conscious of how horrible he looked. Maybe he didn’t see what I saw when he looked in the mirror.

“Do you have any Coke or anything?” I asked. I like rye all right, but not by itself.

He didn’t respond.

I took a gulp and coughed.

“Why have you come back now?” I asked.

There must be a question he will answer, I thought.

He sat on the bed, facing a wall.

I moved to the window and looked out at the night. Nothing much happens on Marion Street on a Sunday. A cop car cruised by. Pasquale’s was closed and so was the pub downstairs. One straggler lurched across the street to his home in the seniors’ residence. He stopped to take a leak against the grey wall of the building.

“Someone told me you were happy,” Pete said.

A cool breath of air blew across my eyes. His words lodged in a place in my brain that had been resting quietly.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Someone I used to know.”

“Eileen?”

“Maybe not.”

His voice was flat, with no inflections. I didn’t remember it having been that way, with no rise or fall to it. Maybe it was heroin talk or prison talk or both.

“I’ve never been happy a day in my life,” I said. “You should know that.”

Pete twisted around on the bed till he faced me.

“How would I know that?”

My life was like a dusty old book to Pete, one that he’d never opened.

“Anyway, even if that was true,” he said, “I heard that things had changed for you.”

Three weeks ago Henry and I had sat on the patio at Carlos and Murphy’s, drinking Coronas and eating nachos. It was late in the evening and though it was still light out, the sun was low and hidden behind the trees. My chair faced Osborne Street and as we talked and laughed I watched Eileen walk by on her own.

Henry was saying something funny. It was a story about his son, Dougwell, who was at the University of Toronto last year. Doug phoned Henry at work while he was teaching a class and told the receptionist that it was an emergency, to please get his dad for him. So Henry raced down the hall to the phone, expecting a severed limb at the very least, and found that Dougwell needed his dad’s recipe for ribs. He was hoping to impress some friends on the weekend.

I hadn’t seen Eileen notice us.

So Pete knew that Henry was here, and that we’d taken up together again.

I didn’t mention Henry now; he didn’t belong in this mess. I felt Pete’s voice lodged in my own throat:
someone told me you were happy
. He couldn’t stand hearing that information, so he came back to change it.

The Norwood Hotel has windows that open. But Pete’s were all closed. I stood there for a couple of minutes, breathing the foul air, the filthy vegetable stench.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

I had no idea what he was capable of; I didn’t know him at all. Would it be a giant prank of some kind that would blow my life to smithereens?

He shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

I didn’t mention my burned-up garage. What if it hadn’t been him that lit the fire? Pete didn’t need any help from me coming up with ruinous ideas.

He didn’t look able enough to pull off anything of consequence.

The whiskey wasn’t going down well. I crossed the room and turned on the bathroom light. A hair dryer and an iron were attached to the wall. Everything in its place. I threw what was left of my drink down the sink.

There was nothing left to say. I paused at the door, considered begging Pete to leave me alone, and then thought better of it. When I closed the door behind me I wiped my hands on my cotton pants. I wished I had washed them.

The night was warm. I breathed heavily and my heart pounded in my ears. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I sat in the park by the monument. That was where I had learned to smoke, as a kid. A girl named Katy taught me. She showed me how to inhale and how to let go of the cigarette while it was in my mouth so I wouldn’t look like a nitwit.

Why had Pete invited me to come and see him? The visit hadn’t accomplished anything. Maybe I didn’t give him enough time to say what he wanted to say, but I had to get out of there.

What I had said to him about never being happy was a lie. There had been many happy moments in my life, even happy days. But I didn’t want him to know that. I wanted him to know he didn’t need to hurt me anymore. I’d had enough.

I read the words on the monument. The Korean War ended one year before I bit my brother on the cheek.

I spent the following afternoon with Henry. He wanted to go the hotel to see Pete, to try to reason with him. He thought we could bring him around. That’s how he put it.

“Bring him around to what?” I asked.

“To not doing anything more to scare you,” Henry said, “or hurt you. I can’t bear to think of you going there alone last night. You should have called me to go with you.”

“I have a feeling this thing, whatever it is, is just between the two of us,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be,” said Henry. “I can help.”

So we walked over to the hotel and knocked on the door of room 503. No one answered. We crossed the street to Pasquale’s where we shared a small pizza. Neither of us was hungry. I drank a glass of house red and Henry a glass of white. We sat outside on the upstairs patio so that I could smoke comfortably. Then we tried Pete’s room once more. Still no answer, so we checked with the woman at the front desk to make sure he was still registered and found that he wasn’t.

“Did he leave you any indication of where he might be going?” I asked.

“No, ma’am, he did not.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks.”

“Great,” said Henry.

“Maybe he’s gone away,” I said. “Maybe that was the last I’ll ever see of him.”

“I don’t think so,” said Henry.

We both knew he was right.

At ten o’clock the next morning, Tuesday, I was still in bed, but not asleep. I was stroking Spike’s tummy, having decided that I’d get up when he did, but then the front doorbell rang. I leapt up and poked my head out the bathroom window, which overlooked the front street. It was Frank Foote.

“I’ll be right down, Frank,” I called out and he looked up at me and smiled. It was a worried smile, one that left creases between his eyebrows, so I expected the worst. I threw on a summer robe and hurried downstairs to the front door. Spike dashed ahead of me.

“Come on in,” I said and we all went through to the kitchen.

I spilled some dry food into Spike’s dish and changed his water. He nibbled away in appreciation, although it was his canned food later in the day that his life was geared toward.

“Cherry, I have some unsettling news for you.”

“Yes.”

“It’s about Pete.”

“Yes.”

“A man has been found on the old Canada Packers grounds. He had Pete’s identification in his pocket.”

I sat down at the kitchen table.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“No. But he was unconscious when he was found.”

“So he’s okay?”

There was no denying my disappointment but I tried to keep it out of my voice.

“He’s going to be, yes.”

“Canada Packers?” I said. I pictured my brother lying there on the blood of long-dead cows.

“Yes.”

“What’s going on?”

“We don’t know yet. Not for sure, anyway.” Frank pulled out a chair and sat. “Apparently there was some evidence of drugs, so there’s talk of an overdose that didn’t quite do the job.”

I remembered the painful-looking mess on the inside of Pete’s arms.

“Also, there is a sizeable bump on his head.”

“Where is he?”

“At Victoria Hospital,” Frank said, “in intensive care.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. I’m going up there now. I could take you with me if you like, and bring you home again.”

“Yes, okay.”

I didn’t want Frank to know that I had no desire to see my brother again, that I wished the overdose had taken. I didn’t want him to think that I’m a terrible person. He makes me want to be good, like him.

Upstairs in the bathroom I washed my face and teeth, combed my hair, and put on my prettiest lipstick, Summer Berry. Then I dressed quickly in a pair of shorts that came down to my knees so there was no danger of anyone catching a glimpse of my thighs.

“Why Victoria Hospital?” I asked. “Why here?”

“They have space here.” Frank said. “St. Boniface is full.”

We were in a small room for ICU visitors. Frank talked briefly on a phone and then, after washing our hands at a sink near the door, we were allowed in to see my brother. With Frank being a policeman, I didn’t even have to mention that I was Pete’s sister. We approached the bed and I had the same experience I always have in hospitals. Every person in every bed looked very much like the person I’d come to see. Male, female, young, old—they all looked the same to me.

But there was no mistaking the man lying on his back with his eyes closed, tubes sticking out of him every which way, monitors beeping and flickering. There was a bruise on his arm, one bruise, on the sweet arm that my brother had tied off to inject his filthy west coast heroin.

“Henry,” I said. And then blackness covered my eyes and I felt myself being buffered in my fall to the floor.

I think I woke up almost as soon as I passed out. Everything seemed as though it was part of the same moment that I left. I was in a chair now, though, and Frank was handing me a glass of water.

“Cherry?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“It’s not Pete. It’s Henry.” I started to cry. “Henry Ferris.”

“Yes,” Frank said. “This is a real puzzler.”

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Pardon?”

I knew I had to do some talking but I wanted to find out about Henry first.

A nurse told us that he had been awake and that he was going to be fine. There would be no permanent damage from what had indeed been heroin injected into his arm. The needle had still been attached to him when a man out walking his dog found him at about 6:15 that morning. Also, he had suffered a concussion from a knock on the head.

Frank made a couple of phone calls.

Sure enough, Henry Ferris had been reported missing by his kids, so the whole identification mess got straightened out.

“It was strange that he only had one piece of ID in his pocket, no wallet or anything,” said Frank.

“A giant prank,” I said.

We headed out to the front lawn and found a grassy area where we sat. I told Frank about my visit with Pete at the Norwood Hotel. And I told him about Henry and me, how we’d rekindled our friendship after all these years.

“Yes, I figured that,” said Frank.

When I cried he comforted me with his strong arms and his huge white handkerchief and his fragrant shirtfront.

“I sure cry a lot lately,” I said.

“It’s okay.”

“Frank?”

“Yes?”

“When I asked Pete why he had come back now, he said it was because he had heard that I was happy.”

“Oh?”

“I think he tried to kill Henry.”

“Jesus, Cherry. His saying that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is a would-be murderer,” Frank said.

“I think it does.”

We sat for a while, watching the traffic come and go, watching the patients with their IV’s and oxygen tanks step outside for a smoke.

“Do we know when this was done to Henry?” I asked.

“Last night sometime.”

“Early? Late?”

“Late. After dark for sure.”

“So Henry wasn’t out there alone for too long.”

“I’m thinking it was in the wee hours of the morning,” said Frank. “And don’t forget, he wasn’t conscious.”

“Still. We don’t know that, do we…that he was unconscious the whole time?”

“I guess we don’t. We’ll have to wait and talk to him.”

“Henry and I went back to see Pete at the Norwood yesterday afternoon, but he had checked out.”

“Cherry…”

“I know it was him, Frank. His ID was in Henry’s pocket, for goodness’ sake. He would have known that would fool us for about eight seconds. He isn’t even trying for us not to know.”

Frank shifted his position so he was lying on his side with his head resting on his hand. He looked good on the ground, as though he belonged there. I figured he probably spent a lot of time frolicking with his kids on a nice green lawn.

“I hope whoever it was meant not to give Henry enough of the drug to kill him,” he said. “Making it more of a giant prank, as you said, than attempted murder.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe he’s not as bad as you think,” Frank said.

“I just don’t know.”

“Remember the way he used to be able to flip a coin across the tops of his fingers?” Frank said. “Just like a real magician.”

“Yeah.” I stood up, brushing little bits of grass from my knees. “Let’s go in and look at Henry again before we go.”

As we approached the waiting room I saw Dougwell and Gina Ferris sitting side by side on a couch. They were deep in conversation so they didn’t see me. I yanked Frank’s shirt and pulled him back out of sight.

“It’s Henry’s kids,” I said. “I don’t think we should interfere.”

So Frank and I slipped out and left them to visit with their dad. It wasn’t the time for me to burst upon the scene. I’d only met them a couple of times; they both seemed to like me well enough, but I was still a relatively new presence in their lives.

“Are the cops looking for Pete?” I asked as we cruised down Pembina Highway to Bishop Grandin Boulevard.

“I think we’ve pretty much decided to wait until Henry wakes up in a clearer state and then ask him about it.”

“Hmph!” I said.

“We need more to go on, Cherry, than the relationship between you and your brother.”

“And the ID in Henry’s pocket.”

“Yes. That’s a good point.”

I liked Frank, but once again, I found myself wondering if he wasn’t a bit dim.

“How did they get to the stockyards?” I asked. “Pete doesn’t have a car. Or maybe he does. I don’t even know.”

“Henry’s car was reported missing along with Henry,” said Frank.

I thought about this as we drove down St. Mary’s Road.

“Do you mind if I stop in at St. Leon Gardens?” Frank asked as he pulled into their parking lot.

“I guess Pete must have gone to call on Henry,” I said. “Taken a taxi maybe and then talked him into going for a ride.”

Frank was out of the car and heading for the corn on the cob. I hurried along behind him. He bought a dozen and a half.

“My kids are maniacs when it comes to corn,” Frank said. “Me too, actually.” He smiled.

“Has Henry’s car turned up?” I asked.

“No.” Frank flipped out his wallet to pay for the corn.

“I bet it’s somewhere in Norwood between the stockyards and my house,” I said.

Frank looked at me, handed me his bag of corn and made another phone call.

“They found it already,” he said when he hung up. “On Des Meurons, in the block just south of Marion. There was an iron on the front seat.”

“An iron?”

“Yeah. A small one. It might be what caused the bump on Henry’s head.”