Cold Hands (2 page)

‘OK, see you boys tonight,’ Sammy said, straightening up. ‘Remember, we need that review by lunchtime.’

‘Yes, boss.’

She leaned in to peck me on the cheek and whispered close to my ear, ‘Check all the outbuildings and call the neighbours again, huh?’

I nodded and clapped my hands, turning to Walt. ‘Come on then, trooper. Front and centre right now or we’re gonna miss your bus.’

Looking back now, the sheer normality of that weekday morning – the three of us in the kitchen with our goodbyes, our last-minute instructions and half-eaten toast – seems utterly blissful.

WALT AND I
waved to Sammy’s anthracite Range Rover as it vanished around the grove of pine trees at the bottom of the drive before we turned and took the path that ran along the woods bordering the Franklin place; the short cut we always used to get down to the bus stop on Tamora. Our Caterpillar boots crump-crumped through the ankle-deep snow, our breath wreathing behind us, the air so crystalline that breathing it in pierced your lungs sharply. Walt’s hot little hand in mine, snowdrifts stretching out ahead of us to the horizon.

I’d drifted here too. Scotland, then England, then Toronto, then on to Saskatchewan. Heading further north and west, further, always further away from home. Huge and landlocked, a long, rectangular slab of prairie land covering over 200,000 square miles but with only a million or so inhabitants, Saskatchewan contained the population of Birmingham spread over an area more than twice the size of Great Britain. Head south from Regina or Moosejaw and you’re soon into America – Montana and North Dakota. To the north – the gleaming icescapes of the Northwest Territories, subarctic once you get much further north than Prince Albert, where
Canada’s coldest ever temperature was recorded: minus fifty-seven.

‘Land of Living Skies’ the licence plates say here. The skies didn’t seem to me to be living so much as endless. I felt tiny and irrelevant beneath them, like plankton, like krill in the fathomless Atlantic that now separated me from home. Sometimes, in the summers after I first moved here, before I met Sammy, I’d drive out of Regina into the country, heading north towards Saskatoon in the ancient Nissan I’d bought. I’d pull off the road, onto the dusty verge, and lie on the bonnet in the warm Chinook wind, surrounded by wheat fields or cattle, gazing up into those rolling clouds, knowing that if I kept going north for long enough the wheat fields and the cattle and the Chinook winds would all gradually disappear, giving way to the nothingness of the Northwest Territories. Beyond that, Greenland. The Arctic itself. The lemmings, musk ox and caribou. The North Pole. Permafrost. Oblivion.

I’d lie there with the thin car bonnet rippling and buckling beneath me, the metal warm through my shirt. I’d lie there and look north.

Later Sammy told me about the Inuit, the fearsome tribes of hunter-warriors who made their home in the tundra. They’d lived untroubled by the modern world until after the Second World War. Then we arrived, bringing the things we bring: the booze and the substances and the TV. Now much of what was left of the Inuit lived in housing projects in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, doing battle with depression and alcoholism and drug addiction.

Sammy said that the Inuit once believed that suicide purified the soul and made it ready for its journey to the
afterworld. That the elderly who had become a burden upon the tribe would often request permission to take their own lives. They had to ask three times and family members could try to dissuade them but, at the third time of asking, the request had to be complied with. They would turn their clothes inside out, bring their possessions to be destroyed, and hang themselves in public. I often wondered about that third conversation. About the look on someone’s face when their mother or father approached them and began it. Listening, head inclined, knowing that the request now had to be acceded to.

I became aware that Walt was tugging at my hand, expecting an answer to something. ‘Sorry, Walt?’

‘I said, are you going to say the movie was good, Dad?’

Walt had only recently started experimenting with ‘Dad’, with the shortened form, and I was shocked at how diminished I felt when he used it, how grown-up those three letters made him sound and how old they made me feel. The loss of innocence they represented. I missed ‘Daddy’. Mommy was still always ‘Mommy’.

‘Uh, yeah. I guess so.’

‘You really liked it?’ Walt was talking about the movie we’d watched the night before; a DVD release I had to review for the paper: a hundred-million-dollar riot of fight sequences, implausibility and wooden dialogue. He’d loved it, despite finding the climactic battle a bit traumatic.

‘No, Walt, not really.’

His brow furrowed, like his mother’s, as he thought about this contradiction. ‘How come?’

I thought about the film, about its garish, sickening riot of colour, about how every inch of the screen had been
filled to overloading. About its cardboard acting and howling exposition. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I guess I didn’t really like the characters.’ I remember putting an arm around Walt to guide him up a couple of icy steps, onto a higher plane of ground.
This was when you noticed it for the first time. Out of the corner of your left eye. The splash of colour. The hopping birds.

‘So,’ Walt said, still looking puzzled, ‘how come you’re going to say it was good?’

‘Well . . .’ How to explain the adult world of lies and compromise to an eight-year-old? The
Regina Advertiser
, the paper I wrote for and his mother edited, belonged to that branch of journalism that was basically an advertorial-cum-local-news service. The stories the paper ran were heavily regionally biased: the hockey teams, state political and financial affairs and human interest stories. (On the day Obama was elected the front-page leader was a story about a big government incentive for livestock farmers, with ‘NEW US PRESIDENT!’ crammed into a quarter-page box on the lower right.) How to tell him that the paper depended on the goodwill of the press offices of the studios who provided the review copies of the DVDs and the tickets to screenings and junkets in Calgary and Toronto? Who organised for me occasional phone interviews with B-list movie stars that would be buffed up into breathless ‘Star speaks exclusively to the
Advertiser
!’ features that shamelessly plugged whatever movie the star was selling. That, in short, the
Advertiser
was not the
New York Times
and I was not Pauline Kael at the peak of her powers.

‘Mommy’s paper doesn’t really print bad reviews of anything, Walt.’

He thought about this for a moment. ‘So you’re
lying
?’

‘It’s not a very big lie, Walt.’

‘Didn’t you like the bit where –’

Walt went on, watching his feet, talking to the snow, but I wasn’t listening any more.

There was a patch of red in the endless white, about twenty yards to my left, surrounded by three strutting crows, headmasterly in their black cloaks, wings like arms stiffly folded behind their backs.

‘And then the bit when they attack the –’

Walt hadn’t seen. I looked up ahead, we were nearly at the main road now, and saw Jan Franklin’s car parked there, the powder-blue BMW, Jan inside with her two boys, Ted and Andy, waiting for the bus, which was coming up Tamora, black and yellow against white.

‘Come on, Walt!’ I yelled suddenly. ‘There’s the bus!’ Playfully I scooped him up, turning him away from the slick of red, burying his face into my neck, Walt laughing as I ran the last stretch to the bus stop. The Franklin boys were getting out the car now, waving and shouting. I dropped him down and nuzzled a kiss as he ran to join his friends as the bus pulled up. Panting, hands on my hips, I waved to Jan as she pulled off. ‘See you later!’ I called after Walt and then he was gone, vanishing into the bus.

I waited a moment, waving, before I walked back, the crows flapping unhurriedly into the sky as I approached, settling down thirty or forty yards away to watch me.

I had to stuff a fist into my mouth to keep from yelling out. Herby lay on his back in a circle of blood; the blood had melted into the snow, turning it pink. He had been . . . eviscerated.

The dog’s hairless belly had been torn open from its
genitals to its chin and the wound seemed to have been prised open, his ribcage snapped apart, the bones jutting skywards like the pipes of some mad organ. Entrails had been torn loose from the belly cavity and ran away into the snow. My gloved hand still in my mouth, fighting tears and nausea, I moved around to the head. The sockets were black and empty, fringed with blood – the crows had taken his eyes – and his teeth were clamped shut in a ferocious, agonised snarl, the tongue hanging out between them by a sliver, like he’d bitten it off in agony. I stumbled and collapsed, falling to my knees in the snow, my legs gone, shaking.

Suddenly the dog moved – his back left leg juddering and kicking. I scrambled backwards in terror.

A rat’s head appeared out of the base of the great tear in the belly, just above the genitals, its whiskers slick with blood as it shook its head in the morning sun. Sick with rage I lashed a boot at it and it jumped clean out of Herby’s stomach and darted off, trailing gore behind it.

I rolled over and it all came up, the toast and coffee sour and burning in my throat, spurting through my nostrils, hot and melting through the snow, spots and stars dancing in my vision as I retched, the sensation of vomiting in the cold open air, the gore-spattered snow, reminding me of something from long ago.

WE’RE IN THE
clearing in the woods with the bucket full of frogs and toads, dozens of them, from the pond up at Foxes Gate, all squirming in the blue plastic bucket, writhing over each other, hopping up, trying to get out. Tiny little frogs no bigger than your thumb, bloated, oily toads the size of a grown-up’s fist. Tommy is throwing, kind of bowling, the frogs and toads to Banny, who stands there with a four-by-two cocked like a baseball player. He misses and misses, all three of us pissing ourselves as the bewildered creatures fly through the air, caught star-shaped, silhouetted with limbs spread out against the summer sky.

‘Fuck sake, man!’ Banny says. ‘Chuck them slower!’

And Tommy obliges, softly lobbing one of the biggest, fattest toads underarm. It floats up into Banny’s striking range and he’s already swinging the crude bat around hard. He connects and the toad
explodes
in a burst of viscera – showering me, my face streaked with its stinking blood and guts. Tommy and Banny are howling as, blinking, I fall to my knees and start vomiting chocolate and crisps into the warm earth.

Catching my breath I look up and see what is left of the
toad a few feet away. The head and front legs are still trying to crawl, trying to pull themselves along. I start retching again and in the background I can still hear them laughing, hear Tommy saying, ‘Fuck sake! Did ye see that, man?! He just started boaking his fucking guts up, man!’ And I can hear Banny saying, ‘Look at the state of ye! Ya fucking fanny, ye!’

‘Their early cruelties,’ a report would later say, ‘were practised upon animals.’

I SHOWERED AFTER
I’d cleaned up Herby’s remains: putting what was left of him into a green tarpaulin and dragging it round to the pool house, shovelling fresh snow over the gory mess so Walt wouldn’t see it when he came home later. I hung my head under the stinging needles and the thought ran over and over – What did that?

We often saw deer in the woods and I tried to imagine a stag ripping into Herby’s soft belly with sharp antlers. Ludicrous. A bear? But when had there last been a bear around here? Suddenly I latched onto the most likely explanation – wolves. Hadn’t Ben Dorian talked a couple of times about the grey wolves that raided the trash cans behind his bar now and then? The same wolves hunters sometimes said they saw running in packs in the high pines during deer season? Wolves. It had to be. I turned my face up into the spuming nozzle and let the water batter against my forehead, my temples, my neck.

After I’d dressed I tried Sammy’s office and was told she was in a meeting. I paced the house in jeans and T-shirt, damp and lightly sweating from the shower, and waited for her to call back.

Our house was built five years ago. It was designed by Lewis Foster, Canada’s leading contemporary architect, but built to Sammy’s exacting specifications: four and a half thousand square feet over two storeys. Upstairs, what is really ground level, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, my office and the kitchen family room are ranged around an enormous central living area. Downstairs, at basement level, there is a games room with a bar, antique pool table, jukebox and table-tennis table, laundry and utility rooms, a vast four-car garage and Sammy’s office. The construction is largely dark timber and glass, the glass (and there is lots of it – the glazier’s bill alone was well into six figures) with a bluish tint to it, to help combat the prism-bright sunlight that refracts off the snow for half the year.

Outside there is a heated swimming pool with a large poolhouse-cum-workshop and a tennis court. (Southern Saskatchewan’s winters are brutal, but its summers are warm and arid, often getting up into the high twenties for much of July and August, the time of pool parties and cookouts.) Several outbuildings remained from the old farmhouse we demolished to build the house; the stables, the old dairy, a potting shed.

We still had the apartment in Regina too: a two-bedroom condo in the redeveloped Warehouse District. The idea was that we’d use it for overnight stays when we went to the theatre, out to dinner, or to the odd Roughriders game. We didn’t do much of that stuff though. We turned into homebodies. Sam used the apartment occasionally if she had to work late when the paper went to bed, or if she had an early meeting.

All of this from sitting at home reviewing movies for the
local paper? I landed on my feet, you could say. Lucked out. Won the lottery. Whatever expression you want to use.

The phone trilled into life and I actually jumped. I picked up the nearest cordless, the LCD flashing ‘SAM OFFICE’.